“Let’s hold off on that until we’re sure,” I said, worried that I might have unleashed a monster. “Just keep your eyes and ears open and let me know if you see or hear anything odd. We may be the only people in a position to do something who aren’t affected by him, but we’ll have to be careful because the rest of the company may be under the spell.”
She drained her coffee cup and picked up her purse. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him win.”
*
After another day of silence, I caved and sent Owen an e-mail, a chatty “how’s it going?” message, but I got no response. Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have been at all alarmed, since he had a habit of falling into his work, neglecting his in-box, and losing all track of time, but because he’d actually snapped at me the last time we’d spoken, I was starting to worry. A weekend without a word from Owen made me want to call police stations and hospitals. I decided it would be saner to call him, but I got no answer at his home or office.
I got to my office on Monday morning to find Perdita sneezing her head off. With each sneeze, strange things appeared in her office—soap bubbles, flower petals, white feathers. “Sorry about that, Katie,” she said, dabbing her nose with a lace handkerchief and waving the bubbles, petals, and feathers away with her other hand. “I don’t know what got into me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I may be coming down with something,” she said with a sniffle, which she followed with a cough.
“Do you always sneeze up bubbles and flowers?”
She sneezed some glittery confetti and groaned. “Yes. It’s so embarrassing. It’s like I totally lose control of my magic when I sneeze. I never know what will appear.”
“Why don’t you go home and get some rest?” I suggested. I liked having her there to veil me from the overly friendly sales staff, but she looked utterly miserable, and I was worried about what she might sneeze up next.
It was a sign of just how awful she felt that she didn’t argue with me. She just sneezed again, creating another cluster of bubbles, coughed, then said in a raspy voice, “I think maybe I will, if you don’t mind.”
I braced myself for a stream of constant interruptions, but was left in relative peace. In fact, every call I made went straight to voice mail. That afternoon, the subway was reasonably peaceful, compared to the chaos of the last few weeks. The crime wave seemed to have broken. A number of people were sneezing and sniffling, which made me wonder if a cold was going around or if there was some allergen affecting a lot of people.
I felt fine the next morning, but there was still a fair amount of wheezing and coughing on the subway. I got to the office to find a note saying that Perdita was out sick. I wasn’t surprised because she really had been in bad shape the day before.
Although I’d had many a moment when Perdita tried my patience and when I’d wondered if not having an assistant would be easier or safer, when she wasn’t in the office, I realized how much I needed her. For one thing, her absence meant I had to find another source for coffee. In any other business, there would have been a break room with a coffeepot, or even one of those vending machines that drops a paper cup before shooting out a stream of coffee that doesn’t quite hit the cup. There might even be a Starbucks in the lobby. But at MSI, where most of the employees could conjure whatever they wanted to drink with a flick of their wrists, there weren’t a lot of places where a nonmagical person could find caffeine. The only coffeepot I knew of in the entire building was in the verification department, and as I recalled from my brief stint there, that didn’t exactly qualify as coffee.
I left my office and went in search of anyone who could conjure me some coffee. By the time I reached the end of the hallway and hadn’t found anyone present who wasn’t making alarming hacking and coughing sounds, I wasn’t even hoping for one of Perdita’s lovely concoctions. I’d have been happy with a cup of instant, as long as it was hot and contained caffeine.
I headed up to Rod’s office because Isabel did good coffee, and she might also know how widespread the flu was. “He’s not seeing anyone,” she whispered when I stepped into her office.
“He has it, too?”
She nodded sadly. “And he’s being a big baby about it.”
Just then, a hoarse shout of, “Isabel!” came from the inner office. “I need more tea!”
“Hold on a second, Katie,” Isabel whispered before raising her voice to say, “With honey and lemon again?”
“Yes, please.”
Isabel raised her hand and flicked her wrist, then Rod coughed and said, “Thank you!”
“You should go home,” she said.
“I’m too—” he went into a coughing fit “—busy.”
“Men, they’re such babies when they’re sick,” she whispered to me. “Was there something you needed?”
“Coffee, please. I think everyone in my department is out sick. I’m desperate, Isabel.”
She waved her hand, and a cup appeared on her desk. I picked it up and practically inhaled the brew. “Oh, you’re a lifesaver. Thank you.”
“Most of the company is either sick or coming down with something. Germs spread as fast as gossip around here. You should have seen this place in January. The few people who were still standing practically came to work in hazmat gear. You’d better watch yourself.”
“Don’t worry, I will. But don’t you have an anti-illness spell? You’d think a place like this could fight the flu.”
“You’d think, but no, we sometimes even get weirder varieties that the flu shot doesn’t help with, since our bugs get filtered through the other races, like the fairies and gnomes.” I’d always been curious about her lineage, since she was far larger than the average person, but I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask if she counted herself among the other races. Instead, I just said, “I may be back for a refill.”
Before I made it to the door, I paused. Isabel was the best source for company gossip and information, since working in Personnel meant she knew all the comings and goings within the company. She might know something that could help me, if I could ask without sounding suspicious. I turned back to face her. “One good thing about this flu is that I haven’t had to deal with Idris in a couple of days.”
She laughed. “I can imagine that’s a relief. He always got on my nerves.”
Yes! She’d taken my opening. “Did you know him well when he worked here?”
“He and Ari were off and on, and since Ari was a friend, that meant I had to put up with him.”
“The more time I spend with him, the harder it is to imagine anyone feeling like he was a danger worthy of bringing Merlin back. Was he really that big a threat?”
“I don’t think they knew exactly who was causing trouble at the time, so they couldn’t tell how bad things might get. After the last time, I guess they weren’t taking any chances.”
“What last time?”
“I was just a kid, but it was pretty bad, from what I’ve heard.”
I remembered reading something about an earlier attempt to seize power magically. It was in a reference book Owen had let me borrow so I could get the quick-immersion Magic 101 primer right after I joined the company. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember the details, and I didn’t think I could ask Owen for that book under the current circumstances.
I grinned at Isabel. “Well, he’s not a threat now, and while the flu is going around, he’s not even an annoyance.” I headed back to my office, trying to think of another way to find out about the last threat.
*
The next day, the absentee rate was even worse. I was getting hundreds of responses to our conference invitation, so there would be people at the conference, but I was starting to wonder if there would be a conference for them to attend. That was the downside of doing everything magically—I was entirely dependent on other people being able to do magic. I didn’t think I’d be able to find a circus to rent tents from and get them set up in Central Park without anyone noticing. There was no nonmagical Plan B.
Considering that the subway that evening sounded like a tuberculosis sanitarium, I expected to get home and find my roommates lying on the sofa with boxes of tissues. Instead, they were in perfect health. “Are y’all dealing with the plague at work?” I asked as we ate dinner.
“Are you talking about whatever Rod has?” Marcia asked.
“Yeah, it’s going through the company like wildfire. Is that happening at your offices?”
They looked at each other. “A couple of the designers have been out sick,” Gemma said.
“At my firm, people come to work when they’re clinically dead,” Marcia said with a sigh. “And that means we all catch whatever they’ve got, so then we have to drag ourselves off our deathbeds to go to work.” She glared at me. “You’d better not catch your office plague and bring it home to us.”
“So far, I don’t have so much as a sniffle,” I reassured them.
The subway was practically sedate and much less crowded than usual the next morning. The people struck down by the flu must have all stayed home. “Hey, you made it!” Sam said in greeting as I approached the office building. “It’s a good thing you look healthy. You may end up running the place.”
“Is it that bad?”
“When Palmer calls in sick, that generally means we need to send the coroner out to his place, and anyone weaker has already fallen.”
Perdita was still out, and the sales department was like a ghost town. Rina was out, as well, so I didn’t know where she was on handling the party side of the event. I went through my checklist for the conference, but nobody I needed was in the office, so I created a new checklist to see what had already been done and what needed doing. Most of it would come down to the last minute in conjuring tents and protective barriers, food, and decorations. That meant I was sunk if people weren’t well within a week. I reminded myself that the worst flu I’d ever had lasted a week. I was weak for a while after that, but I was functional.
Of course, with my luck, everyone else would be well by then, and I’d succumb to the illness the day before the conference. Then we’d be left in Perdita’s capable hands.
And then we’d be doomed.
I found some hand sanitizer in my tote bag and rubbed it on my hands, then popped a vitamin C lozenge in my mouth. I wondered if putting on a surgical mask would be overkill.
When I still hadn’t heard from anyone by lunchtime, I ventured out into the corridors. It was like something out of a science fiction movie, with me as the only survivor of a terrible plague, left alone in the ruins of civilization.
With a growing sense of worry, I hurried up to the executive suite. Kim sat at Trix’s desk, looking reasonably healthy. “The boss is sick,” she said. “He’s not seeing anyone.”
Flu was supposed to be particularly dangerous for the elderly, and they didn’t get much more elderly than Merlin. My stomach did a flip. “Have the healers seen him?”
“They’re keeping an eye on him, but he insists he’s got a potion that will cure anything.” She gave a sneaky glance around the office suite, then gestured me forward and whispered, “I haven’t seen you know who in days. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
I wondered if that was how I sounded to Owen and understood why he’d snapped at me. “Maybe he’s sick like everyone else,” I suggested.
“Maybe. But he could be going to all the meetings that the boss is missing.”
“Is he missing a lot?”
“Not really,” she admitted sheepishly. “Most people are canceling because they’re sick.”
“You and I must be the last ones standing.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the gleam that came into her eyes. “We’ll be running the company soon.” I’d have bet money that she’d be sitting at Merlin’s desk by the end of the day.
I was on the way back to my office when it occurred to me that with Owen out, this was the perfect chance to look at his reference books. I could find out what really happened the last time, what Ramsay had done then, and if history might be repeating itself.
Chapter Nine
When I got to the R&D department, I was stymied. That department was secured. Owen usually anticipated my arrival and opened the door for me, but the point of this visit was that Owen
wasn’t
there, so that wouldn’t work.
I settled for the tried-and-true strategy of hanging around and waiting for someone else to either come or go and open the door. Anyone who worked in that department would have seen me around often enough to be willing to let me in. After all, I rationalized, if I told Merlin I needed to get something from Owen’s office, he’d surely give me access. I just didn’t want to disturb Merlin when he was sick or get him involved in this yet.
I didn’t have to wait too long. Soon, the door opened and someone in a lab coat came out, carrying a couple of shopping bags. He stopped to sneeze halfway through the doorway, and I jumped to catch the door for him while he groped for a handkerchief. “Thanks,” he croaked.
“Bless you,” I said, meaning it quite sincerely. Once he left, I headed into the department and hurried to Owen’s lab. The lights were out, and there was no sign of Jake, so he must have been sick, too. There were bookcases in the lab, but a quick skim of the titles I could read told me that these were all books about magic itself, not magical society.
Owen kept his office warded, so I felt a slight tingle as I passed through the doorway, but nothing held me back because the wards didn’t work on me. I was sure I’d recognize the books I needed when I saw them, but I didn’t see them on the bookshelves. That left the desk, which would be a challenge to search because it was so cluttered and because, in spite of the clutter, Owen knew exactly where everything was. Move one thing, and he’d know someone had been in there.
I remembered giving the books back to Owen not long after I’d joined the company. I visualized the scene—he’d taken the books from me, said I was welcome to borrow them at any time, and placed them…
there
, on the corner of his desk. I went around the desk, sat in his chair, and gingerly lifted a few file folders to find the books exactly where he’d put them, all those months ago.
Taking mental note of the books’ position, how they were placed, and the order in which they were stacked, I pulled out the one I recalled having the most information on the recent history of the magical world. I flipped straight to the back, where there were blank pages, although there were fewer blank pages than I recalled. The book had updated itself to include events that happened since I’d last read it. I glanced over the article about the growth of Spellworks, out of curiosity, then flipped a few pages back to the story about the last serious threat to the magical world.