Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted Inc #2)

by Shanna Swendson

  “Now I’m even more glad I got out of Verification. And it would explain the number of calls I got from within R and D. Any other big spats?”

  “This is between us, right? You’re not going to be telling who told you what?” She looked intensely uncomfortable, an effect the usual company gossip didn’t tend to have on her.

  “It’s between us. I can’t use gossip as evidence. Right now, I just need to be pointed in the right direction.”

  She leaned forward across her desk and dropped her voice. “I’m not saying this to be mean, but Ari has dated almost every straight, single male in the company—and even some not so single, if you get my drift. To hear her talk, it was all their fault it didn’t work out. The ones she hasn’t dated probably rejected her. I love her to death, but anyone she reported, you can dismiss outright.”

  “I don’t think she’s reported anyone.”

  Isabel looked relieved. “She must be growing up.”

  I was dying to ask where Owen fell on Ari’s list, but to a gossip like Isabel, that was like adding my name to the day’s hotsheet, proving I was interested in him.

  “Corporate Sales and Outside Sales have a grudge match going on, but it’s mostly friendly competition. This situation is hurting both of them, so I don’t see either group getting caught up in it.”

  “How did word get outside the company?”

  She shrugged. “Wives talk to husbands, husbands talk to wives. People talk to friends and lovers. Word gets out. You can’t keep a lid on something like this.”

  That was exactly the opening I’d been trying to get. I hadn’t lost my touch since the days when the drill team needed me to help find out which cheerleader had been spreading rumors about what they were up to and with whom under the bleachers after football games. “How did you hear about it in the first place? You and Ari were asking me about it while it was still supposedly a secret.”

  “I heard it from Ari.”

  “And where did she hear about it?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “You’d have to ask her to be sure, but I assumed she was close enough to see firsthand how Owen reacted when he figured out that someone had been into his notes. Or I guess she might have heard it from someone else who was nearby. All those labs have windows into the hallway, so you can see what’s going on, and I doubt there’s a woman in the department who doesn’t have Owen on her scope.”

  “How did people hear about the security tampering? That word got out really fast.”

  “I heard it from Rod. I’m not sure where he heard about it. I think he knew Owen was getting Sam to look into things.”

  That narrowed it down to someone in R&D, it would appear. I got out of the overstuffed chair that I would have loved to lounge in all afternoon. “Do you think you could call down to R and D and tell someone I’m coming so they’ll let me in?”

  “Honey, I’m sure Owen knew you were coming before you decided to go there.”

  From the way Owen had described his occasional bursts of precognition, I didn’t think he was quite that on the ball, and I was sure he had better things to do than keep an eye on my whereabouts.

  It turned out that I didn’t have anything to worry about. Owen himself was at the front door to the department, working with Sam on the security panel. I paused to admire the sight before making my presence felt. While Owen was a vision dressed up for work in a nice suit, there was something about the way he looked with his sleeves rolled up, his dark hair mussed and falling across his forehead, and his tie loosened that I found particularly appealing. Maybe it made him look a little less perfect, a little more attainable.

  “Hey, dollface,” Sam greeted me.

  Owen jumped slightly, as if startled, then jumped again when he apparently hit something he shouldn’t have. He sucked his index finger, then shook his hand vigorously, all while turning several intriguing shades of red.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” I said.

  “Sam startled me.”

  “Can I help it if you’re so high-strung?” the gargoyle said.

  “I’m high-strung because I’m working with both magic and electricity to try to fix the device that’s supposed to keep this department secured,” Owen snapped back. I’d never seen him this testy before. I’d seen him angry, but that was more of an icy-calm state that was scarier than any snarling. This was just normal human frustration. Then he sighed. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to snap.” He looked up at me. “Is there something you need, Katie?”

  “I need to talk to you when you have a moment. And not here. Somewhere private.”

  He glanced at Sam, who said, “I’d probably get more work done with you out of my way.”

  Owen stood and absently brushed his hair off his face. “I’d feel better talking somewhere other than in this building, if you don’t mind. Let me get a coat out of my office, then we can go outside. I could use some fresh air. We can get lunch while we’re at it.”

  I followed him back to his office, which was a cozy den full of old books. He gestured for me to enter first, then paused like he was watching to see what would happen as I crossed the threshold. Nothing did happen. He frowned and came through the doorway.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “I’m testing something. I still don’t have it right. I can block anyone magical, but an immune can get past the wards. It may take a physical barrier to deal with that.”

  “You suspect an immune?”

  “Right now, I suspect almost anyone.”

  While he took his suit coat off the back of his chair, something up near the ceiling in a corner of the office caught my eye. “What is that?” I asked.

  He followed my gaze, then shook his head. “What’s what?”

  “Did you have a verifier go over your office while you were doing your security sweep?”

  He turned red. “I didn’t think of it.”

  I kicked off my shoes and climbed up onto the armchair in that corner of the office. “It looks like one of those webcam things.”

  “Interesting.” He climbed up beside me and waved one hand in the general direction of the camera. “Ah, there it is.” The camera flew into his hand. He waved his other hand over it, then blinked. “Oh, I see what you mean.” I assumed he’d magically removed whatever veil had kept it hidden from him. He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “It looks like someone’s spying on me.”

  I tried to be as cool about it as he was even though my theory about the suspect being in R&D had been shot to hell. “Huh. Imagine that. Who’d have guessed it?”

  He waved his hand over the device again, then it floated back up to its position. “Now it’ll tell them what I want it to tell them. I’ll track down where it goes later. First, lunch and talk.”

  Just then, Jake came rushing toward the office. “Hey, boss, glad I caught you before you went to lunch,” he said, then cried out as he tried to cross the threshold. “Hey! What was that about?”

  Owen’s ears turned pink as he waved a hand and Jake took a tentative step through the doorway. “Sorry about that. I’ve been tinkering with the wards.”

  “You’re blocking me out now?” Jake was the very picture of aggrieved innocence. He looked like what would happen if Jimmy Olsen from the Superman comics joined a punk band, and I still had a hard time imagining him betraying his boss, but it seemed like Owen hadn’t cleared him.

  “I’m blocking everyone. If I’m in here, I’ll let you in. If I’m not, it can wait. Now, what did you need?”

  While they talked business, I put my shoes back on and looked around for anything else that didn’t belong. In Owen’s cluttered office that was a challenge. I’d only spotted the camera because it was too high-tech for its surroundings. If it had been hidden inside a book, I never would have seen it.

  Owen sent Jake off to correct something in the spell he was working on. Then he took his overcoat from the hook on the back of his office door and held it out for me. “Here, this way you
won’t have to go back to your office.”

  I shrugged into the oversize coat while he put on his suit coat. “You’re going to freeze,” I said. The wind cutting across the island was icy.

  “I’ll be fine, trust me. I have my own resources, remember.”

  Oh yeah, that. I knew what he was capable of, but he was so matter-of-fact in the rare times I saw him do magic that it was easy to forget what he was.

  As we passed Sam, who was still working on the security device, Owen said, “Don’t let anyone from outside the department in while I’m gone.”

  “With luck, I’ll have this thing fixed before you get back to get in my way,” Sam growled, shooing Owen away with one wing.

  When we were out of the building, Owen said, “Talk first, then lunch? I doubt we want to discuss this at a restaurant.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  He led the way to the park at City Hall Plaza, where we sat on a bench near the fountain. “This should be safe enough from eavesdroppers. The sound of the fountain muffles conversation.”

  Obviously, he’d put a lot of thought into this. Maybe he should have been in charge of this investigation. He knew a lot more about spying than I did. He looked at me expectantly, and I remembered that I’d been the one to ask for this meeting. I wrapped his coat tighter around my legs and asked, “What, exactly, did you do when you discovered that someone had been in your desk and looking at your notes?”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, word got out pretty fast that there was a spy. I know you didn’t tell anyone other than Merlin and me. So either someone saw you react and made an assumption—”

  “—or it was the spy who spread the rumor,” he finished. He worried his lower lip in his teeth as he thought. “I don’t think I reacted all that visibly,” he said after a while. “Not where anyone could see me. There may have been certain, um, well, words used in the privacy of my office.” A stain of red that I suspected had nothing to do with the cold spread across his cheeks. I had a hard time imagining him cursing. He probably did it in some arcane language. “But after that I don’t think I looked too different from any other time I think of something I need to talk to Mr. Mervyn about. Did I look all that different to you when I got to your office?”

  “I could tell something was up because you didn’t bother with the usual niceties before saying you needed to see the boss.”

  “Oh.” He winced. “Sorry about that.”

  “But even that wouldn’t have been enough for me to assume it meant we had a spy in our midst. That’s a pretty big leap to take. To come to that conclusion, someone would almost have to have known why you were upset.”

  “So you think our spy was the one who started rumors about us having a spy?”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t likely to find a more receptive audience, so I plunged forward. “In fact, I have this theory that the spy isn’t really spying at all. Yeah, if they find something, I’m sure they’d pass it on to Idris. But what would really help him is if we can’t pull together right now, if we’re so busy suspecting each other and worrying about who the spy is that we aren’t actually getting any work done. How have you spent your time for the last couple of days?”

  He closed his eyes and groaned. “I’ve been checking our security. If you’re right, I totally fell for it.”

  “The security panel in R and D and the camera in your office could be more red herrings, or they could be proof that I don’t know what I’m doing. We do know that someone tampered with the departmental security, got into your office, planted and veiled a camera, got into your desk, and looked at your notes. We don’t know how much of that was really part of their mission and how much was just giving us something to talk about.”

  “The camera may have been to watch my reaction so they’d know when to start the rumors. They’d have looked stupid if they started spreading rumors before I noticed that anything was wrong.”

  “Before I found the camera, I was pretty sure I’d narrowed our spy down to R and D because they’d be the ones who would have seen you react, but now it could be anyone, as long as at some point they had a chance to plant that camera. It seems like every time I close in on a theory, something happens to make me doubt it. When we get back to the office, what do you want to bet that something important will be missing, or a bomb planted, or worse?”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’m trying to track the rumor to its source, but that’s turning out to be a real challenge. I’m used to dealing with gossip, but not with technologically and magically assisted gossip.”

  “I’m sure there’s a way to set a trap. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “From your spy books?”

  He blushed adorably. “You can learn a lot from Robert Ludlum.”

  I added to my mental list of the very few things I knew about him and said, “So, lunch? I’m freezing and I’m starving.”

  We found a nearby deli and had a quick lunch punctuated by small talk. He insisted on paying, which was good because my purse was still in my office. He said since we’d been talking business he could expense it, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t. It was another one of those non-dates that was as good as any date I’d been on, and it was with great reluctance that I gave his coat back to him in the lobby and headed up to my own office.

  “You can go to lunch now if you want me to cover for you,” I said to Trix when I returned.

  “No thanks.” She made a face. “I still don’t have much of an appetite.”

  “So you haven’t made up with Pippin yet?”

  She shook her head, and her wings seemed to wilt a little bit. “Ari talked me out of it. He sent me flowers, though.”

  “Forget about Ari. You know how bitter she is about men. If you want to be with him, talk to him. Don’t punish him if you care about him.”

  “You’re probably right, Katie. Thanks.”

  I went back to my office wondering what the world was coming to if I was giving dating advice.

  Friday couldn’t have come fast enough for me. The spate of complaints and tips died down, and no new obvious acts of espionage came to light. I hoped that our mole had done his or her job by making us all suspicious of each other, but I knew that sooner or later, something else was bound to happen. They weren’t going to let us get entirely back to normal.

  I had to admit that I was also looking forward to my date with Ethan. His kiss had left me intrigued, and by late Friday afternoon when I touched up my hair and makeup before I left to meet him, my nerves were tingling with anticipation.

  I’d expected to meet him in the lobby or on the sidewalk in front of the office building, but when I stepped out the front door, a silver Mercedes was waiting on the street. I recognized Ethan’s car. He got out, ran around, and opened the door for me. “Your chariot, milady,” he said with a sweeping bow and a flirtatious grin.

  With a grin of my own, I got inside. When he got back into the driver’s seat and set the car in motion, I said, “I take it we’re not going anywhere in Manhattan. If we are, you may have just lost the last available parking space.”

  “I thought it would be fun to get away from the city for a change of pace. I know you’re not a native city girl, so you probably need to see green stuff every so often.”

  “Green is good,” I agreed. “I’ve even been a little homesick lately, probably because my parents are coming next week.” I noticed that we’d joined the line of cars entering the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

  “Really? When are they coming in?”

  “Monday evening. I’ve made hotel reservations. Now I probably need to hire a car service so I can pick them up from the airport.”

  “I can drive you. Which airport?”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Come on, if I don’t use the car when it’s truly helpful, there’s not much point to having one in Manhattan. I’d be glad to play airport limo.”

  �
��You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I should probably warn you about my parents.”

  “Why? They’re not going to start planning the wedding when they see you with me, are they?”

  “That is a possibility. They may also be here just to try to make me go back to Texas.”

  “And I should try to stop that if they do?”

  “Please.”

  We inched forward toward the tunnel. At the rate we were going, we might make it out of Manhattan before midnight. I reminded myself that Ethan tended to be as obsessively organized and prepared as I was, so I was sure he’d factored rush hour into his travel plans. I settled back against the leather seat, preparing for a long ride.

  Ethan was as calm and unruffled about facing Manhattan traffic as he was about everything else. He even made Owen look excitable, though I supposed it was Owen’s air of carefully suppressed intensity that made him seem less calm than Ethan. And why was I thinking about Owen when I was out with somebody else?

  I deliberately faced Ethan and asked, “How was your week?”

  “Not nearly as interesting as yours, from what I’ve heard. How goes the investigation?”

  “Nowhere. I have some theories, but tracking them down may prove difficult. I’m hoping the Thanksgiving holidays cool down some of the paranoia. Right now, the atmosphere feels like we’re not too far from tarring and feathering.”

  “Sounds like the Salem witch trials.” Then he winced. “And that was probably in bad taste, considering who we’re dealing with.”

  “Those weren’t real witches, and the kind of magic we deal with has nothing to do with witchcraft. But yeah, similar atmosphere.”

  We finally made it into the tunnel and I almost had to hold my breath until we came out the other side. I didn’t like dark, enclosed spaces. Plus, I’d seen too many movies with car chases taking place in that tunnel.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” I asked, trying to keep my mind off the thought of all the water overhead.