Much Ado About Magic

by Shanna Swendson

  I groaned as we resumed walking down the stairs. “Maybe I should go back to Texas.”

  “Only if I can come with you.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to use much magic there.”

  He held the stairwell door open for me. “Right now, I don’t care. I’d find something else to do. I’ve got money, and I’m good with the stock market.” His voice took on a dreamy quality, as though this was something he was seriously contemplating.

  “But could you really leave everyone here to deal with all this? And that’s if you could even get away without it following you. Remember, I tried that, and it didn’t work.”

  He sighed. “Of course not. It was just a thought. So I guess I’d better get back to work. We need to develop our own protective charms so it at least looks like we’re addressing the situation.”

  “And we’ll need something to demonstrate or announce at the conference.”

  He came to a dead stop in the middle of the hallway. “What?”

  “The centerpiece of an event like that is usually a big announcement of something the company is launching, so there’s at least one thing everyone will be talking about. Do you have anything up your sleeve?”

  His forehead creased as he thought. “Well, there’s a stain remover spell. I guess you could have some fun demonstrating that.”

  “Only if you want to look like a magical laundry commercial. That’s it?”

  “Some recipes using conjured ingredients, a few upgrades of earlier spells, adjusted to use less power or to last longer.”

  “How about your dragon-taming spell?”

  “Most people don’t have much use for that.”

  “There are dragons living under the city, so you never know when it might be necessary,” I reminded him. “You could announce the threat—you know those legends about alligators in the sewer system? They’re not alligators! And then you announce the solution to it.”

  “Those dragons aren’t really a threat.”

  “Yeah, because you tamed them. You’re still checking on them and playing with them, aren’t you?”

  He turned red enough that I was sure I could feel the heat radiating from his face. “I feel responsible for them. I’ve been researching dragon refuges to find a good home for them. I’d feel bad about using them for something like this.”

  “Well, if you can’t give me something splashy, I might make you give a speech.”

  All the color drained from his face. “I’ll see what I can come up with,” he said a moment later, his voice faint. “And that means I really have work to do.”

  *

  I had plenty of my own work, which would have been easier if I worked in a department that believed in work. Even when there weren’t official departmental parties, everyone went up and down the halls, visiting with each other. I knew you had to be somewhat outgoing to be good at sales, but this was ridiculous. I resorted to having Perdita veil me and tell people I was out when they wandered by to chat.

  Life gradually settled down into something that passed for normal, relatively speaking. Though, the way things were going lately, it wasn’t that much weirder inside the walls of the magical corporation than it was outside. City officials were having press conferences and talking about task forces to look into the unusual crime wave. Those of us in on the secret didn’t feel like we had much of an advantage.

  I was used to being targeted by the bad guys, but now I was in less danger than the average person because those awful influence spells didn’t work on me. While I had the occasional scary moment, I was never forced to commit a crime. All I had to do was get out of the way the moment I felt magic at work and hope that someone with a Spellworks protection charm was nearby. Even some of the MSI employees had started carrying those charms.

  Owen’s workload and obsessive tendencies meant he was working crazy hours, and I didn’t even see him going to and from work anymore. The times I ran into him at work, he looked tired, distracted, and more rumpled than he usually let himself be in a business setting. Given the current crisis, I was afraid I’d sound petty and selfish if I insisted on him paying attention to me. When your boyfriend’s trying to save the world, it’s no time to whine, “But what about us? What about me?” no matter how much you miss him.

  A week after I’d come back to work, I got a phone call at the office from him. “So, you’re still alive,” I quipped, trying to keep my voice from sounding too bitterly sarcastic. Supportive, not snarky, I reminded myself.

  “Sorry, I’ve been busy.”

  “I know. But I miss you.”

  “Then maybe you’ll want to see me now. Can you come by? I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  “It wouldn’t involve something splashy with dragons, would it?”

  “Dragons in the office? Even I’m not that crazy. But I can show you something that will give you the picture.”

  “I can’t wait. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  I was heading down the hallway toward the department exit when Hartwell stepped out of the conference room and shouted in a magically amplified voice that rang throughout the entire department, “All hands! Conference room! Now!” I sprinted toward the exit, hoping to avoid yet another party. I got caught by a burst of streamers flying from the conference room, but nobody called me back.

  When I got to Owen’s lab, Owen and his assistant, Jake, were leaning over something on the lab table. Owen looked frazzled enough that I felt bad for resenting his recent distance. He pulled a metallic green streamer out of my hair. “Let me guess, another sales department party?”

  “Yeah, but I narrowly escaped.” I gestured toward the streamer he held. “They only winged me.”

  “How come we don’t get parties?” Jake asked.

  Owen looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “Can you imagine this department at a party?”

  Jake nodded knowingly. “Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess it would be a bunch of people lined up along the walls, looking uncomfortable. But I think they’d like it if you showed movies. They wouldn’t be forced to talk to each other.”

  “I’ll consider it, if we ever get to a point when we’re not so busy. We can celebrate once we’ve beaten the bad guys.” Then he turned to me and said, “And you’re not here to talk about parties.”

  “In a sense, I am. A really, really big party. What have you got for me?”

  “You said you wanted dragons.”

  “I said I wanted something splashy to show off.”

  “And what’s splashier than dragons? Wait right here.” Grinning ear-to-ear, he ran into his office.

  I turned to Jake. “What’s he up to?”

  Jake, also grinning, said, “Just wait. You have to see this.”

  I wasn’t sure quite what I expected Owen to come back with—maybe a giant old magical tome, or perhaps a miniature dragon. Instead, he held a small white cat with a spattering of big, black spots on her body. It was his cat, Eluned, who’d been dubbed Loony by Rod.

  “I didn’t realize it was Take Your Cat to Work Day,” I said.

  “I’m using Loony to demonstrate proof of concept. She’s a lot smaller and a lot less messy than a dragon. You see, that spell I used to tame the dragons could be used in a modified form for pet obedience training. You could end indoor accidents and keep Fido from chewing your favorite shoes.”

  “I could see where that might be popular.”

  “Allow me to demonstrate. You know how notoriously untrainable cats are—there’s a reason we refer to wrangling a bunch of people who all want to do their own thing as herding cats. But with the right touch of magic, that all changes.” He handed Loony—who looked utterly bored by these proceedings—over to Jake. Jake took her to the opposite side of the room and put her down. She immediately yawned and stretched, then began grooming herself. Owen said some magic words and did a few complicated hand gestures, then called, “Loony, come here!”

  The cat interrupted her grooming to shoot across th
e floor and hurl herself at Owen’s legs, where she purred and gazed adoringly up at him.

  “Ta da!” Jake said with a flourish.

  Owen knelt to scratch behind Loony’s ears. “Making a cat obey is actually quite impressive on a conceptual level, even harder than dragons, really. However, cats aren’t big enough to demonstrate to a large crowd. But we can demonstrate it with the dragons, which looks a lot more impressive than making a dog sit, fetch, and roll over. You can do that even without magic.”

  “But you’ve been training your cat like a dog her whole life. She obeys without magic,” I said. To demonstrate, I knelt and said, “Hey, Loony! Come here, sweetie!” She came straight to me and rubbed her face against my ankles.

  “She likes you,” Owen said. “That doesn’t mean the magic doesn’t work. You saw what happened with those dragons—one minute they were trying to roast us, and after I did the spell they wanted to play. Now they even do tricks. I did that spell in a panic, with probably a bit too much power behind it. Since then, I’ve analyzed what I did and figured out a way to control it better. If the spell works on dragons, it should work on household pets that don’t breathe fire. Is that what you wanted?”

  “It should get their attention,” I said.

  “We have a few other things to announce, but I’m working on ways to make them look more spectacular.”

  “Keep this up, and you’ll turn into P. T. Barnum in no time. I take it that’s why you’ve been so scarce lately.”

  “No, not really. This was just taking a break. There wasn’t much work to do on this spell. But coming up with protective charms that work against the influence spells is killing me. The whole department’s on it, and we can’t make anything work consistently, not even when we reverse engineer the Spellworks charms.” He called Loony back, scooped her up into his arms, and stood up. “And now I’d better get back to work.” I waited for him to say something else, like maybe making plans to see each other. My birthday was the next day, and I’d have thought he’d make time for me then, no matter how busy he was. Surely he’d know. After all, he had ESP and his best friend ran the personnel office. I reminded myself that the current crisis trumped my birthday and forced myself to give him a big smile. “Thank you for coming up with something splashy for me.”

  He was already back at work before I left the lab.

  *

  I got to work the next morning to find that Rod must have put out a memo on me. Perdita had decorated my office with birthday balloons. She’d gone a bit overboard, as there was barely room for me to squeeze in, and I had the strongest feeling I would suffocate. Once I got rid of a few of the balloons, I found a vase full of long-stem red roses on my desk, alongside a giant box of Godiva truffles. The card with the flowers and candy said “Happy Birthday” with a P.S. saying, “Don’t even think about sharing the chocolate. It’s all yours.” It wasn’t signed, but I recognized Owen’s handwriting, since he was the only person I knew in my generation whose writing looked like something out of a Victorian penmanship primer. My eyes grew suspiciously watery as I realized he hadn’t forgotten, after all. I chose a favorite truffle, then put the box in my bottom desk drawer, under a layer of empty file folders.

  Late that afternoon, there was a light rap on the frame of my office door. I looked up to see Mr. Hartwell. “Can I borrow you for a second?” he asked.

  I didn’t think that he needed to borrow me if I reported to him, but what I said was, “Sure.” I got up and followed him down the hallway.

  He talked the whole time about the upcoming conference and some people in the department he thought might be helpful, and I wished he’d let me know before he scheduled a meeting so I could have been more prepared. Then he opened the conference room door, and there was a loud shout of “Surprise!”

  A Mexican-style fiesta was in full swing in the conference room. The banner hanging from the ceiling wished me a happy birthday, and a mariachi band made up of self-playing instruments played the birthday song, to which the entire sales department staff, along with Merlin, Trix, Owen, Rod and his assistant Isabel, and a few other friends from the rest of the company, sang along, mostly off-key. When the song ended, confetti and streamers materialized in midair and descended on us.

  Owen came up to me. “Sorry about this,” he whispered. “I wondered if I should have warned you.”

  “It’s okay. In fact, it’s kind of nice.” I smiled at him and added, “I like surprises. Especially surprises involving flowers and chocolate. Thank you.” He blushed adorably.

  Perdita walked over with exaggerated care and handed me a frozen margarita. “See, I didn’t spill a drop,” she said proudly, and then she accidentally tilted her paper plate, sending a pile of nachos to the floor. A quick-thinking Owen made them vanish into thin air before they hit the ground. “You’ll have to teach me that spell,” Perdita said, batting her eyelashes at him. “I could get a lot of use out of it.”

  Although I had grown weary of the near-daily parties, I was impressed with the attention to detail. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to do all this. Even if it required only a snap of fingers to make it happen, there was still thought and planning. “Do you know who put this together?” I asked Owen.

  “No idea. Perdita called and told me to be here and to invite anyone else you were friends with.”

  “Oh. Can you excuse me a second?” I meandered over to Melisande Rogers, who, from what I could tell from my previous experiences with this department, involved herself in everything. “This is a great party,” I said to her. “Do you know who does all this?”

  “Hartwell’s admin, Rina,” she said with a twitch of her head in the general direction of the woman in question. “She lives for this stuff.” She dropped her voice. “To be totally honest, it’s driving us all stark raving insane. We can barely get our work done with Hartwell wandering the halls the way he does. Throw in a daily party, and it’s a miracle we accomplish anything.”

  “If she can do this, then what’s she doing working as an administrative assistant?” I asked. “Don’t you have caterers and party planners in the magical world?”

  She shrugged. “Beats me. We smile, say thanks, and go along with it because it keeps her happy.”

  That explained a lot. I noticed people gradually drifting away and realized I wasn’t the only one who’d been trying to escape the constant parties. Then, as I sipped my margarita, I got an idea that would probably benefit all of us. Rina was the perfect person to put in charge of a theme, decorations, and food for the conference, and that should keep her busy enough not to plague the rest of us with daily parties.

  Unfortunately, most of my friends left the party before I had a chance to talk to them. That was a downer. They couldn’t even stick around to talk to me at my birthday party? “Where’d everyone go?” I asked Owen.

  “They had places to be. We should probably get going, too.”

  “Going where?”

  “It is your birthday. Don’t you want to go out to dinner?”

  “I didn’t know we had anything planned.”

  He looked a little sheepish. “I was afraid to make plans. With us, making plans is like tempting fate. Just making a reservation is asking for disaster. Who knows what might happen?”

  I grabbed his arms in mock panic. “Don’t even think it. If we get attacked by a roving gang of wild monkeys in the middle of a restaurant, it’ll be your fault for having said anything.”

  We both laughed, but the scary thing was that in our dating history, the wild monkey scenario actually wasn’t that far-fetched. We’d already had dates involving a magical restaurant fire, a mysteriously appearing hole in an ice rink, dragons, and a celebrity fight in an upscale restaurant. Wild monkeys would be business as usual for us. “Then forget I said anything,” he said.

  Once we’d left the office building and were in the subway station, Owen went on the alert, as though he was watching for an incident and ready to step in if necessary. “How many of the
se guys have you busted so far?” I asked him while we waited for a train.

  “About one every other day, I think. Mostly, I counter whatever they’re doing and hold them until the enforcers show up. I hate to admit it, but those charms do seem to be helping. They don’t stop the actions, but they keep things from getting out of control.”

  We got off at our usual stop, and he led me in the direction of his house. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out when we get there.”

  “Am I dressed okay?”

  “You’ll be fine. Can you imagine me choosing to go somewhere too fancy for what you’re wearing now?”

  He did have a point. He was wealthy and classy, but too much fuss usually made him intensely uncomfortable. Before I could respond to him, there was a loud bang nearby, something that sounded like gunfire.

  Chapter Six

  Owen shoved me against the nearest brick wall and shielded me with his body. We both held our breath as we waited for the next shot. Then he laughed when the noise turned out to be a delivery van backfiring. “Maybe I’m a little jumpy after seeing all these magical incidents,” he said with a crooked grin and a flush spreading across his cheekbones.

  “If you think the threat’s magical, maybe you should let me shield you,” I reminded him. “They can’t hurt me that way. But I do appreciate the chivalrous thought.”

  “I wasn’t sure if it was magical or not. It could have been someone influencing someone with a gun to shoot,” he said, then added, somewhat defensively, “I put up a shielding spell.”

  “Well, okay then, as long as you were thinking.”

  “I never stop thinking,” he said with a wry roll of his eyes. “That’s my problem.”

  I looked up into his eyes, which were just inches away from mine. He gave me a roguish grin that was somewhat out of character for such a nice boy, then bent and gave me a thorough kiss that a moment later was disturbed by a hooting call from nearby.