Damsel Under Stress (26 page)

Late in the afternoon, Owen came around the corner to my office, looking grave. “Are you ready to test your immunity?” he asked.

“I suppose it’s too late to change my mind, huh?”

“This was your idea in the first place. I argued against it.”

“Yeah, and I keep kicking myself. Well, let’s see how effective your potion was.”

He held out his left hand, palm open. Then he waved his right hand over it and a coin appeared in his palm. “What do you see?”

I leaned over to get a better look. “A quarter. You’re not doing one of your stage magic tricks, are you?”

He passed his right hand over his left again, and that time I could feel the tingle of magic in use. If I’d been wearing the locket, it would have given me a jolt. “Okay, now what do you see?” he asked.

“A quarter,” I replied with a shrug.

“That’s all? Are you sure?”

“Sorry. It’s one of the special state quarters, if that helps.” I started to turn away, then saw something colorful out of the corner of my eye. I blinked and turned back slowly, but the image faded when I looked at it head-on. “Okay, wait a second, I saw something in my peripheral vision, but it’s fading in and out.”

“It looks like you need another dose. I don’t know if it will have taken full effect by this evening, though.”

I followed him back out into the main lab, where he mixed up the potion and handed me a glass. “If the magic thing doesn’t work out for you, you’ve got a future as a bartender,” I quipped before I drank the potion, which was tea-flavored again.

He looked worried as he watched me drink. “I hope I got the dosage right. I may have underestimated your body weight.”

“Don’t ever apologize to a woman for that.”

He grinned. “I know. And notice that I was smart enough not to ask. I’m not entirely ignorant where women are concerned.” He checked his watch. “Let’s give that dose another hour to work, and then we’ll test you again.” I went back to my desk and tried to work, even though I was nervous about really losing my magical immunity. Part of me couldn’t help hoping that the potion didn’t work, after all, and it would turn out that I was no longer capable of being rendered susceptible to magic.

When Owen came back to my desk an hour later, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. “Here we go again,” I said. “Give me your best shot, O great and powerful Oz.”

“Oz wasn’t a real wizard. I am,” he said with his typical straightforwardness. This time, he didn’t bother playing magic tricks. He simply held out the hand with a quarter in his palm, said a few words under his breath, and then asked, “Now what do you see?”

“A Sacagawea dollar?”

“What?”

“Just kidding. I see a quarter. Sorry.” But then I caught another one of those glimpses out of the corner of my eye. If I squinted just right as I turned my head, I could keep that image in place instead of it fading back to a quarter. “It’s one of those rainbow-colored bouncy balls, like you get in a gumball machine.”

“That’s it. But you can’t see it without squinting like that?”

“Not really. I can’t quite keep the image in focus. But it’s better than the last time when I could only see it out of the corner of my eye.”

“You’re being a difficult case, you know.”

“I had to pick some area in life to be high-maintenance. Maybe the drugs lose their potency on you after a while. Or maybe it’s harder to lose your immunity each time.” That could also mean it would take longer to get the immunity back. I didn’t like the idea of essentially losing a sense for very long while we had enemies out to get us.

“Do you still want to give things a try tonight, or would it be a waste of time?”

I looked up at his worried blue eyes and remembered the feeling I got the first time I met him, when he’d been almost too shy to speak to me at all. “Being with you is never a waste of time,” I said as butterflies formed in my stomach. “That is, if you don’t care how much work gets done tonight.”

He pinkened slightly, but he held my gaze instead of looking bashfully at the floor. “It’s all just a ruse to get you alone with me, anyway. Anything we might accomplish is a bonus. The way I see it, if we’re in my very heavily warded house, that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to put us in danger or tinker with our plans and we might actually be able to spend time together without too many distractions.”

“So, we’re both on the same page, then. That’s good.” Even better, if things went more smoothly for us this evening than on any of the occasions in which Ethelinda had interfered, then I’d know she was wrong about us not being suited for each other.

By the time I left the office, the butterflies in my stomach had spawned offshoot flocks that had taken up residence in my heart, my head, and my knees. I wasn’t sure what had me so keyed up, facing the thought of being magically blind or looking forward to what might happen with Owen without any major disasters to mess things up—or to break the ice (in a figurative way this time, I hoped).

Owen walked me through the building corridors toward the exit with a protective hand at the small of my back. You’d have thought I’d been stricken suddenly ill or frail, the way he was acting. As much as I’d meant what I said to Ethelinda about not liking it when I needed to be rescued all the time, I rather enjoyed this protectiveness. Come to think of it, what I was really enjoying was his proximity. He wasn’t a touchy person, so I was up for anything that gave him a reason to touch me.

On the stairs to the building lobby, we ran into Rod—or rather, the handsome man I’d learned to see as Rod the last time I’d lost my magical immunity. The fact that I now saw his illusion instead of his real face was a good sign that the potion had finally kicked in. “Hey, I’m glad I caught you two,” Rod said. “I take it you’ll be at the party?”

Owen glanced ever so slightly at me before replying, “Yeah, we’ll be there. But you aren’t serious about costumes, are you?”

“If you want to be boring, you can wear evening clothes and a mask, but I’d hope you have more imagination than that.”

“I told my roommates, and they’re excited about it,” I said. “And don’t worry, I’ll see to it that he comes up with some kind of costume.” That was awfully big talk coming from me when I had no idea what I was going to wear, but dressing me was Gemma’s mission in life, and I figured I’d leave it to her.

“I can’t wait to see what you come up with,” Rod said with a laugh. “I should warn you, though, that you’re dealing with the kid who wore the same Robin Hood costume for Halloween every year until he outgrew it. Getting him into a costume will be a real challenge.”

When we’d said good-bye to him and continued on our way to the lobby, I couldn’t resist asking, “Robin Hood?”

“I liked the movie.”

“The one with Errol Flynn?”

“The Disney one, where Robin Hood’s a fox. Gloria questioned the moral lesson of robbery ever being good, regardless of who was being robbed, but she thought the cartoon presentation was benign enough in its anthropomorphizing of the animal characters, as long as I also learned the true history of King Richard and Prince John.” Then he gave a crooked, rueful grin. “I just wanted to be able to shoot a bow and arrow.”

“I liked that one, too,” I admitted. “I went as Maid Marian for Halloween one year, but nobody knew who I was supposed to be and I got very frustrated. And by the way, the immunity is gone. I saw Rod’s illusion, full-strength.” Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t noticed the usual effects of his attraction spell. Either he hadn’t wasted the effort of using it on me, or Owen’s nonmagical spell on me was too strong for me to notice anyone else when he was around.

“That’s good to know. I think.” He stopped just inside the main entrance and said, “If you’ve got the necklace with you, maybe you should put it on now.” I fished it out of my purse, and he took it from me to fasten around my neck while I held my hair up out of the way. It seemed to take him forever to get it fastened, and I couldn’t tell if he was fumbling with the clasp or deliberately torturing me by touching me lightly on the back of my neck over and over again. When we left the building, he had a protective arm around my waist. I’d seen what he could do and knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t allow anything to happen to me.

We got on the subway and staked out a pole, standing face-to-face on either side of it. As the train lurched forward, he looked over the top of my head at the ads that ran the length of the car, just under the ceiling, then he bent to speak directly into my ear. “Tell me what you see.”

I looked up and straight into his eyes, close enough to see the slight color variations throughout the midnight blue. If I wasn’t mistaken, there were flecks of silver in there. But I didn’t think that was what he was talking about. “You mean the ads?” I forced myself to look away from his eyes and at the ads. “They’re just the usual ‘get your degree and have a better life’ ads in Spanish.”

“You read Spanish?”

“You’re not the only one who knows other languages. I’m from Texas. We have to learn Spanish in school.”

“And that’s all you see?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your necklace doing?”

I’d barely noticed its steady thrum against my neck when my body was tingling so much from all the physical proximity to Owen. “It’s not going berserk, but it feels like there’s a low level of steady activity. Let me guess, this car is full of those ads.”

“Exactly. And quite frankly, I’m disappointed. I’d have hoped for more creativity in veiling them.”

“It looks like he just stuck with whatever was there before he put his ads up,” I agreed. “I hope he does better with the TV ads and doesn’t mask them with something boring like ads for a mattress store. If he’s got ads for Pepsi in Times Square, I’ll know he’s really lacking in imagination. He loses even more points if it’s the latest celebrity campaign.”

The silver flecks in his dark eyes sparkled as he grinned and asked, “What would you have had him do?”

“Hmm, I’ll have to think about that. Something ironic, maybe? All kinds of companies use magic as a description for their products—like magically clean or magically delicious. He should have used something like that, where the veiling ad talked about magic while covering a real ad about real magic.” It felt weird to talk like this on the subway, but we were close together and speaking almost directly into each other’s ears, so I doubted anyone else could overhear us even if they weren’t all plugged into iPods.

“That’s good,” he said, nodding. “You should be working in advertising.”

“What, and give up saving the world?”

We reached our station, and he kept his arm around me until we got to the exit turnstiles, then he got his arm back around me as soon as we were both clear. The attention seemed so sudden after all those times I’d hoped for the slightest bit of physical contact from him.

“You know, I don’t think anything’s lurking in the bushes to jump out and grab me,” I said.

“I’ve got you inside a protective field that shields me, too. I had this weird feeling…”

I shivered, knowing the way his weird feelings went. No wonder he was hustling me toward his house at full speed. “Does what you see always come true, or can you do something to stop it?”

“I usually just see the presence of danger, not the results. So all I know tonight is that there might be something dangerous that could affect us, not whether it will actually attack or harm us. And if you don’t mind, we can order takeout instead of stopping to pick something up. After the last time, I’m afraid to take the chance.”

“That doesn’t mean we won’t end up with oysters Rockefeller when we try to order burgers.”

“We can always feed those to Loony, if we have to,” he said with a mischievous smile.

His sense of relief once we were inside the front door of his town house was almost palpable. Whatever he’d sensed must have been a doozy. When we were inside, he turned on lights with a careless wave of his hand while picking up his loudly meowing cat. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I need to feed her before she drives us insane, and then we can get something for ourselves.”

I took off my coat and draped it over the banister, then wandered after him into the kitchen, where he was opening a can of food for Loony as she practically danced in anticipation. “If you actually fed her every day, she wouldn’t be quite that desperate,” I remarked.

He looked up at me with a grin after he put the dish in front of her. “Yeah, you can tell she’s deprived. You should have seen the poor, orphaned kitty look she gave me when I got home on Christmas. If I hadn’t seen the empty cans, I might have thought Rod forgot to feed her. Now for us. You mentioned burgers. Does that sound good to you? Ever since the other night, that’s what I’ve been hungry for—but the real thing, this time.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

He searched the take-out menus hung on the refrigerator by magnets, then took one and handed it to me. “Their burgers are pretty good. Let me know what you want.” When I’d made my selection, he called the order in and we retreated to the living room, leaving Loony alone with her dinner. As we entered the room, he waved a hand at the fireplace and a fire sprang to life. “I refuse to feel guilty about that particular shortcut now that I know Gloria has a brownie,” he said, settling down on the sofa. “Besides, I tend to burn myself when doing that the hard way.”

I joined him on the sofa, trying to fight off the surge of self-consciousness I suddenly felt. He was acting far more relaxed than usual, and I was determined not to let this devolve into awkwardness. We really did need to get over the mutual bashfulness that tended to strike us in the rare situations when we weren’t in danger or we’d never get beyond kissing. I tended to move slowly on the physical side of relationships, but one would hope sex would be on the menu eventually. Like, while we were still young enough to enjoy it and have any kind of stamina. “I won’t tell on you,” I said. “If I could light a fire by waving a hand, I totally would. It seems a waste to have that kind of power and not use it at all.”

“I think she was mostly teaching me not to become so dependent on magic that I never learned how to do things the normal way. She also didn’t want me to get in the habit of taking shortcuts or the easy way out, in general.”