Damsel Under Stress (21 page)

We managed to run a few more yards and even out of the chamber before the dragon brought its stick back to us. This time, Owen sent several of the railroad ties flying in different directions. That gave us a little extra time, as the dragons all collided while they ran after their sticks. We were just through the doorway out of the next chamber and into a narrower passageway when the dragons happily brought their sticks back to Owen, dropping them just inside the doorway.

The passageway was too small for the dragons to enter, so we were safe. The last thing I expected to hear as we escaped, though, was a mournful whimper. The sound was so sad it brought Owen up short. He turned around. “Stay. Be good,” he told the dragons, who were shoving one another out of the way so they could each see him through the doorway. They settled down, resting their heads on their forearms and looking very much like Arawn had when he lay at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Owen to come down. “We’ll play again some other time,” Owen told the dragons, looking rather guilty.

“You really do have a way with pets, don’t you?” I said as we hurried back to the tunnel that would take us into the train station. “But I bet you won’t feed those guys from the dinner table.”

“Loony might get jealous, and I’d give her pretty good odds against them.”

“You’re not really going to go back and play with them, are you?”

“I might. I feel bad taming them that way and then leaving them lonely. Besides, you never know when a nest of friendly dragons might come in handy.”

“I wonder if you could break any of them to a saddle so you could fly on them,” I said, remembering a book I’d once read about people who rode dragons as a form of transportation. I’d always thought that sounded kind of cool.

“I imagine we’d first have to teach them to fly. These dragons seem to have never left the underground. Their wings might even be atrophied.” When we reached the train platform—with no trains on either track, thank goodness—he said, “Don’t worry, we’re invisible again, and I think we’d better stay that way until we get home, considering the way we look.” In the brighter light, I could see that his face and clothes were streaked with black soot. I probably didn’t look much better. Neither of us smelled all that fresh, between the sweat, the soot, the dust from the tunnels, and the dragons’ sulfur scent. In the New York subway system, our odor would probably blend in with all the other smells.

We slipped through the terminal, leaving traces of sooty footprints behind us, then made our way into the subway station to catch a downtown train. Nobody seemed to notice the turnstiles that turned on their own as we passed invisibly through them. I wasn’t sure if the invisibility spell covered talking or not, so I didn’t try to make conversation with Owen. He nodded at me and got up one station before Union Square. I guessed that meant we were going to his place to clean up.

Sure enough, once we’d made our way to a nearly empty sidewalk near Gramercy Park, he said, “I assume you’ll want to clean up a bit before going home.”

“Very good idea. I can’t think of a single reasonable explanation for looking—and smelling—like this.”

When we entered Owen’s home, Loony took one whiff of him, then arched her back and hissed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve been cheating on you with other pets,” he said wearily. Then he turned to me and said, “By this time, you know the drill. Your usual emergency clothes are in the guest room, and you’re welcome to use the shower there. I have a washer and dryer, so we can take care of your clothes before you go home, and I know a few cleaning spells that may help your coat. And I just realized, we never got around to having lunch. Want to order Chinese or a pizza or something?”

“Anything that’s not a flambé,” I said, shuddering.

As I rinsed the sulfurous soot out of my hair in Owen’s guest bathroom shower, I realized that at least I’d broken my usual pattern. Instead of ending up at Owen’s place cold and wet, I was hot and sooty. That wasn’t much of an improvement. I wondered if there would ever be a time when I was at Owen’s home just because he wanted me there with him and not in the aftermath of a disaster. Of course, that would mean having time with Owen without any disasters popping up, and the chances of that ever happening were beginning to look infinitesimal as long as we were in our current jobs.

The one thing missing in Owen’s well-equipped guest bathroom was a blow dryer, but I made do by toweling my hair thoroughly, then combing it and toweling it again. I’d lathered, rinsed, and repeated enough times to get the sulfurous smell out of my hair, and I’d scrubbed a layer of skin off my face trying to get the soot off. Then I dressed in that same old sweat suit that Owen seemed to have designated as mine. In most relationships, keeping clothes at your boyfriend’s place meant things were getting serious, and it might even be a first step toward moving in. In this relationship, it would mean giving myself a better-fitting option for the next time I found myself recovering from a disaster.

When I got downstairs, Owen was already showered and dressed. He was on the phone ordering Chinese food—in Chinese. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As many languages as he could translate, it made sense he might speak a few. I sat on the sofa and allowed myself to admire him. Even with wet hair that looked like it had been toweled halfheartedly but not combed and with his glasses on, he was still gorgeous. I waited for that usual jolt of insecurity to hit me and make me wonder what a guy who looked like that who could tame dragons and then order in Chinese would want with someone like me, but it didn’t come. He’d given me no reason to think he wanted anyone but me. Now, whether or not we could make things work was another story.

“I’m impressed,” I said when he got off the phone.

As I expected, he turned a fetching shade of pink. He leaned against the edge of his desk like he was trying to look casual. “Oh, yeah, well, I do speak a little, and it was easier than making sure I was understood in English.”

“You’re full of surprises. Like whatever that was today with the dragons.”

He brushed his damp hair out of his eyes, then frowned at the moisture left on his hand as if just noticing that his hair was still wet. “Remember when you first came to work at MSI, Rod gave you the grand tour, and when you were in my lab Jake came in with his pants shredded?”

I nodded. I was surprised he remembered it that vividly, considering it was just a vague recollection to me. “Yeah. He was testing a spell, wasn’t he? Something to do with dogs?”

“The spell was supposed to soothe wild animals, only it obviously didn’t work when Jake tried it on the dog that came at him. I’ve been tinkering with it since then to see how it really worked. I’m pretty sure it was a mistranslation on Jake’s part, or maybe he left something out, because it seems to have worked for me.”

“And on something much, much bigger than a stray dog. Do they even make Milk Bones that big? Or does Purina have a Dragon Chow? I know they make just about every other kind of chow because we sold it in our store back home.”

It wasn’t a great joke, but I’d hoped for at least a hint of a smile from him. Instead, he pounded his fist on his desk. “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to walk into that trap.”

“Trap?”

“Ari’s trap. You don’t think we accidentally stumbled on a nest of dragons while we were following her, do you?” He stood up and started pacing, the energy that usually bubbled just beneath his calm exterior now all at the surface. “I should have known better. What made me think that after our entire security force has spent more than a week combing the city for her, she’d happen to cross our path? And then I was dumb enough to fall for it and let her lead us into danger.”

“I don’t know that we could have seen that coming.”

He stopped pacing and looked at me. “But you did, didn’t you? I was the one who had to go into that tunnel. You wanted to go the other way. She had me totally fooled. I should know to always listen to you. I bet she sent an illusion for me to follow, right into her trap.”

“I wasn’t totally sure which way she went. I’d lost sight of her. I don’t think either of us could have known, and we couldn’t have risked missing the chance to follow her to their hideout. For all we know, the hideout could have been on the other side of the dragons, and they’re using the dragons as watchdogs.”

That calmed him somewhat. “True. I guess we’ll never really know.”

“Unless we want to do a little more exploring in that area and see if we can find what she might have been heading to, in case it wasn’t a deliberate trap. You already have the dragons eating out of your hand. What other danger are you likely to stumble on down there?” The look on his face made me say, “Okay, scratch that. I don’t want to know. But surely it can’t be anything a pet dragon couldn’t scare away for you. You know, we could have just made a wrong turn and stumbled into the dragons on our own,” I added. “There is such a thing as coincidence.”

He looked lost in thought while he pondered that, but before he could say anything the buzzer from the downstairs door sounded. “That’ll be lunch. I’ll be back in a second,” he said, heading for the front door. He was back not long afterward with a giant paper bag.

“What army were you planning on feeding?” I asked.

“I like to plan on leftovers,” he said. “And I like to make sure I have a couple of favorites I know I’ll like, plus one new thing to try.”

We went back to the kitchen table, where we barely had room for a couple of plates among all the take-out containers. “I may even be hungry enough to eat all of this,” I said as I served myself. “Being attacked by dragons works up an appetite.”

After we ate, we washed my clothes so I’d have something to go home in and continued discussing what we thought Ari might have been up to, Idris’s new scheme, and what our next move might be. I’d given up on any non-work-related conversation. It wasn’t like I could expect him to spend the day whispering sweet nothings into my ear when he was convinced our enemies had just tried to kill us.

By the time I made it home, my roommates were convinced my evil boss must have made me work all day. “Even Mimi, ex-boss from hell, didn’t make you come in for a whole day on a holiday,” Marcia said as I hung up my coat, which still smelled faintly of sulfur despite Owen’s best efforts to clean it magically.

“I haven’t been at work all day,” I said, wishing I could summon one of Owen’s blushes on command. I was too tired to pull off the bashful maiden routine at the moment. “I went out to lunch with Owen after work, and the day got away from us.”

They both hooted, and I finally felt my face warming properly. At this point, I didn’t care what they thought I’d been doing because that had to be preferable to the truth. “Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?” Gemma said.

“Yeah, it definitely does.”

“Speaking of fun,” Marcia said, “what do we have planned for New Year’s Eve? Since we were apart at Christmas, we should all do something together.”

“I’m barely recovering from the last holiday,” I said. “I can’t think that far ahead.” For all I knew, I’d be engaged in a major magical battle that night. When you’re part of the team trying to stop a rogue wizard, it’s hard to make advance plans.

“Can you think as far ahead as dinner tonight?” Marcia asked. “I’m starving.”

I wouldn’t have thought I could eat anything after all that Chinese food I’d wolfed down that afternoon, but my stomach rumbled as soon as Marcia mentioned food. “I could eat something.”

Gemma stretched lazily on the sofa. “I’ll buy yours if you’ll go to that sandwich shop down the street and pick something up. That’s what I’m hungry for, and they don’t deliver.”

I collected orders and money, then got my coat and headed downstairs. Only after I was a block away from our building did it dawn on me that going out and about on my own might not have been the brightest idea. I did have enemies, after all. Or was I beneath Idris’s notice now that he’d launched his company and, for all he knew, I couldn’t do him much harm? At any rate, I made sure to keep my eyes open for anything that looked out of place.

I was still pondering angles we might be able to take against Idris as I left the sandwich shop with our dinner. I’d just rounded the corner onto our street when someone jumped out at me, shouting, “Wasn’t that exciting?”

Thirteen

I
had to juggle for a few seconds to keep from dropping my take-out bags. Only when I was absolutely certain Gemma’s roast beef and brie sandwich wasn’t going to go splat on the pavement did I look up and recognize Ethelinda. “Would you stop that?” I shouted. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Sorry,” she said with a giggle. She still wore that hideous reject prom dress, with bits of the fur from her Mrs. Claus outfit peeking out around the neckline. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“When you don’t mean to startle someone, you don’t appear out of thin air right in front of them. And what did you think was so exciting? I was just getting sandwiches.”

She waved her wand in a dismissive gesture. “I wasn’t referring to the sandwiches. I was talking about the dragons.”

“You knew about the dragons?”

“I hear about things. There’s very little that happens to you that I don’t find out about.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I was crazy about that idea. There were reasons why I’d never auditioned to be on reality TV. I didn’t like the idea of being watched. “Well, ‘exciting’ isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe the dragons.”

“Yes, but surviving an encounter with dragons and being rescued by such a brave young man must have been exciting.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But trust me, it doesn’t work out that way in real life.” It occurred to me then that Owen might have been right about the dragons being a trap. Ethelinda herself might have set it, not to put us in danger but because a hero rescuing a damsel in distress from a dragon was such a staple of romantic fantasy sagas. But surely she couldn’t be that stupid. If she knew my entire relationship history and all that stuff about our destiny, she had to know what our work entailed and that dragons were pretty darn dangerous. It would be awfully hard to play matchmaker to a couple of piles of cinders. “You wouldn’t have happened to arrange our meeting with the dragons, would you?” I asked.