He shoved himself away from the door and collapsed into the chair in front of my desk. “Who do you think?”
“Our friend Idris?”
Owen ran his hands through his hair, leaving bits of it standing on end. “That was too easy.”
“How did he earn your wrath? I mean, this time.”
“He’s decided that he won’t talk to anyone but me. I’m a researcher, not an interrogator, but we need whatever information he has, so I’m stuck with the job. And you’ll like this part—he wants to talk to you, too.”
“How did he even know I was back?”
“I think he’s trying to avoid talking by making what he thinks are impossible demands.”
I made a show of moving paper around on my desk, like I was terribly, terribly busy. Never mind that most of the paper was blank. “Well, we can’t always get what we want, can we? He’ll just have to learn to live with the disappointment.”
He chuckled bitterly. “I wish I could pass on that message. Unfortunately, we need him to talk, and he won’t talk unless you’re in the room.” With an attempt at sounding upbeat, he added, “It could be fun to shock him if he thinks you’re not even in town.”
“But I have a job to do! You heard what I have to pull together in less than two months. I don’t have time to spend chitchatting with annoying, mildly evil people.”
“It’s all work toward the same goal, isn’t it?” he said with a weary shrug. “We want to stop the bad guys. We might not even need your event if we can get Idris to tell us who he’s working for so we can deal with him directly and shut him down. And I’m guessing from the way you looked this morning that you know how important this is.”
“Yeah, I got caught in a Spellworks special.”
“What was it this time?”
“Influence spell, used to make someone steal a wallet and hand it over and then used to start a fight. A bystander stopped it with a Spellworks charm. I bet it was a setup—a form of guerilla advertising.”
“You’re okay, though?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I may have to wear turtlenecks in May to cover the bruises I’m sure to have, but no serious harm was done.”
He leaned forward and touched my cheek, a worried frown creasing his forehead. “Does it hurt?”
I’d almost forgotten about it, but his touch brought up a whole new range of sensations that were anything but painful. “It’s just a scratch,” I said, trying not to swoon.
“Maybe I’d better go back to escorting you to and from work.”
Was that a purely practical suggestion, or did he have ulterior motives? “If you think that’s necessary,” I said, aiming for a mildly flirtatious tone.
“I don’t know if
you’re
in danger, but with all those influence spells, I may need you to slap some sense into me.” His eyes twinkled with humor and a hint of mischief.
“Well, if you insist, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Do you think you’re up to dealing with Idris now?”
“This may be the
best
time. It’ll be nice to take it out on the person who deserves it.”
“Maybe you can terrify him into talking, and then we can get all this over with and go home.”
I got up and followed him out of my office. Perdita jumped when she saw us. “Sorry about that, Miss—Katie, I mean. I tried not to let him through, since you were working, but he just barged in.”
I silently counted to three and reminded myself that she had no way of knowing that Owen had an all-access pass. She acted like she didn’t even know who Owen was. “That’s okay, Perdita. This is Owen Palmer, from Research and Development. His department creates the spells we market, so I’ll need to talk to him often. You can let him in at any time, and you should always put his calls through.” I knew that was safe to say, since with Owen’s funny knack for knowing things, chances were he wouldn’t ever show up at a bad time.
She gasped an “Oops!” and put a hand up to cover her mouth. “Oh, sorry about that. And sorry, Mr. Palmer. I didn’t know.” As she turned to him to apologize, she got a good look at him, and then her eyes got a funny glint to them. Owen had that effect on women. He really was quite gorgeous, with his dark hair, blue eyes, and a face worthy of a sculpture.
I cleared my throat to get her attention back to me. “And now I have to go deal with something urgent. I hope it won’t take too long, but I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
As we headed down the hallway from my office, Owen said, “So, that’s your new assistant.”
“Yeah. I’m really moving up in the world. But apparently not up far enough to avoid being assigned a space case.” He smirked at that, but then his face quickly went back to neutral. “It’s not funny,” I insisted. “I’ll have to spend all day with her, every day. And if you laugh, I’ll call you down for meetings twice a day.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad.” I was still trying to decide how to interpret that when we reached the dungeons.
Since the MSI building looked like a castle I expected a real dungeon—a dark, dank place in the basement, with iron bars and chains and maybe even some really scary guards. The MSI detention facility turned out to be in the middle of the building, two floors below my office. Instead of having slimy stone walls, the place looked more like a laboratory or hospital. The floors and walls were stark, sterile white.
“What, no basement dungeon?” I quipped to Owen as he waved his hand across a blank wall.
“It’s too easy to escape through a basement. Here, anyone trying to rescue him would have to get through a good portion of the building, no matter which way they come, and he’d have to go back through much of the building to get out.” A doorway opened in the wall, and Owen guided me into an observation room.
A long window showed Idris seated at a table in a brightly lit interrogation chamber. His hands were chained in front of him, and the chain looped through a bracket on the table. He fidgeted and glanced constantly around the room, but then he yawned, so I decided he was more bored than nervous.
Two security gargoyles stood watch next to an area of blank wall that I assumed must be another magical doorway. A tall, thin man dressed in black turned from the window to face us. “Ah, there you are,” he said in a voice too deep for a body that thin. “The magical dampening field is in place, so remember that neither you nor the prisoner will be able to use magic,” he told Owen. “I will observe and will send the guards if anything untoward happens.” He gave a thin-lipped smile that made goosebumps appear on my arms, then waved a hand to reopen the doorway. Owen and I exchanged a look, then he nodded and we stepped forward into the interrogation room.
When he saw me, Idris’s jaw dropped in shock at first, but then his face lit up with a huge grin. “Katie!” he called out. “I hope you didn’t come all this way just because I asked.” His grin faded when I got close enough for him to see my injuries. “Ouch. That looks like it hurts. Maybe you should see one of the healers. Oh, but I guess they wouldn’t be able to heal that cut, since magic doesn’t work on you, huh?”
Owen ignored him, pulling out a chair across the table from Idris and seating me before taking his own seat. He then fixed Idris with a stern, steely gaze.
Idris squirmed, but with him, you could never tell if he was uncomfortable or just fidgety. After a long silence he blurted, “It’s not my fault, you know.”
“What’s not your fault?” Owen asked, his voice calm and almost casual.
“Whatever happened to Katie. Look, I know I’ve set some things on her that were not so nice, but she was never really hurt. I only wanted to scare her. I was having a little fun, seeing what she could do, you know? But I’ve been in here all this time, so I couldn’t have made anyone attack her.” He broke away from Owen’s stare and turned to me with wide, pleading eyes. “You know that, right, Katie?”
I had a feeling his concern was more for the trouble that he was in than for anything he’d done to me. With my best shot at a stern glare, I said, “Actually, it
was
your fault.”
He shook his head. “No, no, no, no. It wasn’t me.”
“But it was someone using one of your spells that caused the incident. And the guy who choked me”—I pointed to the red welts on my neck—“was under the influence of a spell you sold. So, yeah, it was your fault. This is what’s happening because of your business.”
He stared openmouthed at me. Then he shook his head. “But that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what
did
you mean?” Owen asked. “What did you expect would happen when you made spells like that widely available?”
Idris looked at him for a moment, then blinked and turned his attention back to me. “What was it like?” he asked. “What happened?”
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” I said. “What we need to know is who set you up to do all this. You may not have thought it through, but I’m betting that whoever’s behind this did.”
Idris leaned back in his chair and attempted to cross his legs, but was hampered by the chains on his ankles. He bent over to investigate and fell out of his chair. The chains on his wrists that were bolted to the table kept him suspended, hanging at an odd angle. He twisted to try to pull himself back into his chair and somehow got the chains tangled up. I wasn’t sure how he managed to get into that pretzel-like position. It took real talent to be that inept.
“Uh, guys, a little help here,” he called from under the table. “Wow, Katie, you really ripped your stockings. And did you know you were bleeding? Well, not anymore. It’s dried. But there’s a scab on your leg where your stockings are torn.”
Owen jumped out of his seat and went around the table to help Idris. I tensed, suspecting a ruse or a trap, but Idris really was stuck. Owen untangled the chains, then pulled him back into his chair.
Owen rolled his eyes at me as he came back to his own seat. “Now, as we were asking,” he said with a sigh of waning patience, “who was behind this scheme to put you in business?”
Still giggling, Idris said, “You two are so great together! And I can’t believe you haven’t thanked me yet.”
Owen and I glanced at each other. He looked as confused as I felt. “Thanked you for what?” I asked Idris.
“For getting you two back together. If I hadn’t been teaching Katie’s brother magic—and I didn’t know he was your brother until you told me—then Owen wouldn’t have had to go to Texas, and you two wouldn’t have worked things out.”
The tips of Owen’s ears turned red, not in the adorable bashful way, but more in a “Mount Vesuvius is about to erupt” way. Owen tended to focus on a single thing to the exclusion of everything else—including food and sleep—if there was something he wanted to accomplish. That made Idris, who couldn’t sustain a single thought for more than a minute, very frustrating for Owen to deal with. “Who. Are. You. Working. For?” he asked through clenched teeth. If it hadn’t been for the magical dampening field, I had a feeling that the room would have been vibrating with barely controlled magic. As it was, I still detected a slight magical tingle.
Idris flinched. “I told you, I don’t know. I dealt with the money lady. She’s the one who might know who the boss is.”
We knew who “the money lady” was. The trick was finding a way to capture and question her. She was a highly respected magical banker—not someone you could drag off the street and throw into the backseat of a car. She knew how to work both the magical and mundane systems.
“Do you know why they set you up in business?” I asked.
“To make money. Duh.”
“But have you made money?” Owen asked. “You’ve had a lot of expenses, setting up those retail locations and buying actual advertising space instead of just using illusion. What were sales like?”
“Those ads were really cool, weren’t they? And they all have my picture, so I’m famous!”
Before Owen could blow a gasket at yet another digression, I hurried to ask, “But did they work? Did you have a lot of customers?”
Idris shrugged. “I don’t know. I just developed the spells.” He turned to Owen. “I mean, do you know how much money each of the spells you come up with makes?”
“I keep spreadsheets,” Owen said dryly. “I also think about what might happen if people actually use the spells.”
“Back to the why question,” I said, “there has to be a reason for Spellworks beyond the money. If it was just money, it wouldn’t have been this secretive.”
“I was just trying to come up with spells that MSI didn’t have, and that leaves a pretty limited range, let me tell you,” Idris said with a weary sigh. “I was stuck with the things you aren’t willing to do, and I figured there had to be someone who’d want something like that, but couldn’t find it. And, generally, the people who want something like that aren’t smart enough to come up with it on their own.”
That almost made sense—which was a change for Idris. It sounded like he didn’t know Spellworks had changed its focus to protective spells. I took another approach. “Surely you’ve tried to guess who was behind it all,” I said, leaning forward and dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I mean, someone as clever as you are must have some idea, even if you don’t know for sure.”
I expected him to puff his chest out with pride, sit up straighter, or otherwise react to my compliment, but instead he went deathly pale and shrank into his chair. “No, no, I have no idea,” he muttered, shaking his head back and forth.
“Not even a teeny little guess?”
“No!” he shouted.
I glanced at Owen and saw that a little crease had formed between his eyes. He chewed his lower lip for a moment, then said softly, “We can’t protect you from him if we don’t know who it is.” Idris just sat and shuddered. “Or I suppose we could turn you loose since you don’t seem to know anything,” Owen added with a shrug.
Idris came halfway out of his chair. “No! Not that! I’ve failed. And I don’t think they need me anymore. They’ve got the spells already, and I don’t think it’s about the spells.”
Owen and I exchanged a glance of triumph. Finally, a slip.
“What is it about, then?” Owen asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it.”
“What are you so afraid of?” I asked. “And why did you agree to work for someone who scared you that badly?”