“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 these 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.
“Hey, you two, get a room!”
Owen immediately pulled away from me while turning bright red. I looked up to see a gargoyle perched on a shop awning.
“Oh, hi, Rocky,” I said, feeling my own face grow warm. “What are you doing here?”
“On patrol. This is my sector.”
“Has it been busy?” Owen asked.
The gargoyle shrugged. “Eh, not so much today. Things seem to be taperin’ off. But I’d better get back on the beat. You two be careful. Save the canoodlin’ for when you’re safe at home.” He flew back to his post.
We headed in the general direction of Owen’s house, but before we got to his place, he opened the door to the neighborhood’s historic tavern. The hostess directed us up the stairs at the back, and as soon as we reached the top of the staircase, a cry of “Surprise!” rang out. This had to be a record, two surprise birthday parties in one day.
“Don’t hate me,” Owen whispered in my ear as my friends came toward us. “I didn’t know until the last minute that they were doing anything at work, and this was all Gemma’s idea.”
Gemma greeted me with a hug and put a glass of wine in my hand. “You looked like you were really surprised,” she said. “He must have done his job without spilling the beans.”
“And one day I may even forgive him for that.” But I laughed and kissed him on the cheek to show that there was nothing to forgive, even though I wouldn’t have minded spending some time alone with him. That was a precious commodity these days, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.
*
I barely saw Owen during the week since both of us were so busy, so I was looking forward to our move on Saturday because it meant I’d actually get to see him. “Are you sure we don’t need to pack?” Marcia asked on Saturday morning as we waited for the guys.
“That’s what Owen said,” I told her reassuringly. “He and Rod have something planned.”
Owen showed up first with a satchel slung over his shoulder, from which he took a folded booklet that I recognized as a retail version of an MSI spell. “Wait, you’re actually using a spell?” I asked.
“I always use spells. I just usually don’t need the instructions because I’m one of the people who developed them in the first place. But this one is from before my time—a real classic—and it’s not one I use often enough to have memorized.”
Gemma pulled the booklet out of his hands and flipped through it. “This is what a spell looks like? It’s not what I was expecting.”
“The big leather tomes with parchment pages are inconvenient to carry around,” Owen said dryly, taking his booklet back from her. “And scrolls tend to get squashed.”
Rod arrived next. “Oh good, you got the spell,” he said to Owen. “Do you have all the other stuff?”
Owen patted his bag. “Right here. When Philip gets here, we can start. It’ll go faster if we combine power.”
“This all sounds so exciting,” Marcia said. “We’ll get to see some real magic being done.”
“It’s not as exciting as you’d think,” Rod said.
“Maybe not for you, but, hello! It’s magic! That’s exciting for me.”
When Philip arrived, he greeted us all with a bow, then kissed Gemma’s hand. “I presume you’re providing leadership in this endeavor,” he said to Owen. “I will be happy to provide power, but it has been a long time since I have worked magic of this nature.”
“Yes, I’ll guide the spell and draw on you two,” Owen said. After a quick tour of the new place, he took a large sheet of paper out of his bag and sketched out a floor plan of that apartment, then made notes as he asked us where we wanted things to go. We went back upstairs, where he took several vials out of the bag and handed them to me, along with a sheet he tore from a notepad. “I’ve written which colors go with which rooms,” he said. “I need you to go down there and sprinkle the right color of powder around the perimeter of each room.” When I got back upstairs after carrying out my task, the guys were using a similar powder to color code the items to be moved.
When they were done, the three wizards went over to the corner where Owen had his floor plan laid out. Owen dabbed colored powder on the floor plan, with the colors corresponding to the way I’d sprinkled the powder downstairs. The three guys joined hands, Owen murmured foreign words, then I felt the surge of power. The powder on the floor plan glowed and rose to hover above the paper, then the powder on or around the furniture began glowing. Owen said something else and gave a wave of his hand, and then there was a loud pop. We all blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, everything was gone.
“That’s it?” Marcia asked, blinking furiously.
“You wanted it to be more difficult?” Rod asked.
“I put a bandanna around my hair and wore my old clothes,” she said. “I thought it might be easier than usual, but I thought it might still be a little like moving.”
“I can bring something back up if you want to carry it down for yourself,” Rod offered.
I was about to suggest that I treat Owen to lunch when his cell phone rang. After a short conversation, he said, “I hate to run out on you just as the real work is starting, but I’ve got to go. There’s been an incident involving a spell I haven’t countered yet, and they can’t get in and do anything about it until they get the spell stopped.”
“This is more of that weird stuff that’s been going on?” Gemma asked.
“Yeah, more of the same.”