Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted Inc #2) (6 page)

But she was also a little on the flighty side—and not just because of the wings. I couldn’t imagine her being driven enough to care about corporate espionage. Work to her was a way to earn money for going out and having a good time. She lacked the motivation and determination for spying. The only way I could imagine her breaking into Owen’s office was if she was looking for personal information or blackmail material to force him to ask her out. I couldn’t eliminate her entirely as a suspect, but she wasn’t high on my list.

Isabel was at the same time the perfect spy and the worst possible spy. She knew everyone in the company and everything that happened there, but she also couldn’t resist telling everyone everything she knew. If she’d been the spy, she’d have already let it slip to at least one person that she’d been in Owen’s office because she’d have to tell all about anything else interesting she found while she was spying. She was also the size of a pro-football linebacker, so she wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

As Isabel zapped the remaining food wrappers and cups out of existence, I reflected that musing wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I had to find a reason to get out and about within the company to figure out what was going on, or my suspicions were likely to be based strictly on my personal feelings.

I’d barely made it back to my desk when Rod Gwaltney, the head of Personnel and Owen’s lifelong best friend, stepped off the escalator and approached the desk, a stack of papers in his arms. “Hi!” I greeted him. “You’re a few minutes early, but I can see if he’s ready.”

He flopped into the chair in front of Trix’s desk and draped one leg casually over the arm. “I don’t mind waiting. It gives us a chance to chat.”

“Chat about what?”

“Just wanted to see if you’d heard anything interesting. Word has it that Owen’s desk was broken into over the weekend.”

Seriously, the CIA should have been recruiting at MSI. Finding one spy in a company full of them was going to be nearly impossible. Guiltily, I tried to measure Rod as a suspect. Deception was a way of life for him, given that he constantly wore an illusion that made him look outrageously handsome to those who were affected by magic while he put no effort into his real appearance. I generally considered that a harmless quirk, though. He might know everyone in the company, but he didn’t have full access. Then again, that lack of access often irked him, and he’d shown signs of being jealous of Owen.

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked casually, with what I hoped was the right hint of curiosity. Whether or not he was a suspect, he was a good source of company information.

He waved a hand. “Oh, around.”

“Did they steal anything?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.” He gave me a grin that made him look appealing in spite of his greasy hair, bad skin, and unfortunate features. If he’d do something about his hair and skin and smile like that more often, he might be even more successful with women with his real face than he was with the handsome illusion and attraction spells he used. Or maybe not. He averaged about three dates per weekend; it would be hard to top that. I knew I’d find him more appealing without the façade, even if I only saw the real Rod no matter what he did. As long as I knew he was hiding himself, I had a hard time taking him seriously as a man. His spectacular social life was a sign that I was one of very few women who remained immune to his magic.

“Why would I know anything about someone breaking into Owen’s office?” I asked with my own attempt at an innocence illusion. Since I didn’t have access to magic, I suspected it wasn’t very convincing.

“Because I heard he came to talk to the boss about it, which means he’d have talked to you.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have anything to tell you. Maybe you should ask him.”

He laughed. “We are talking about the same Owen here, right? You can’t get anything out of him that he doesn’t want to give. He only clams up tighter. I’ve known him since he was four, and he’s always been like that. All I know is that he’s put some even stronger wards around his office. Nobody gets in there without being cleared. Next thing you know, he’ll be taking DNA samples from anyone who enters.”

“Seems like a reasonable precaution for these times.”

He leaned forward, putting his elbows on Trix’s desk and giving me a puppy-dog-eye kind of look that I was sure was particularly effective when combined with his favorite attraction spell. “Come on, Katie, surely you know something. Owen sometimes even talks to you, which is more than anyone else gets from him.”

Fortunately for me and unfortunately for him, I was immune to both the spell and the puppy-dog eyes. “Sorry,” I said with a shrug.

He turned off the charm like it came with a switch. “Oh well, I thought it was worth a shot.”

“Why are you so worried about this?” I asked him.

“I guess it’s old instincts kicking in. I always tried to look after Owen when we were kids, and I’m still doing it even though he’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself. To be honest, he was when he was a kid, too. Bigger kids only messed with him once.”

“I think these days we all need to look after each other.”

“You’re probably right about that. You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”

I couldn’t promise that without breaking my word to Merlin. “I’ll keep you posted,” I said instead, hoping that was vague enough for my conscience. I hated having to keep secrets from people, but I was getting better and better at it. If you can keep the secret about magic from the rest of the world, hiding a few things from your coworkers isn’t that hard.

Merlin came out of his office. “Oh, good, Mr. Gwaltney, you’re here. Please come in.” Rod gathered his stack of papers, gave me a wink, then headed into Merlin’s office. As I watched the door shut behind him, I considered the preposterous idea of Merlin as a suspect. He might have said he wasn’t above suspicion, but the idea of him teaming up with Idris was beyond my comprehension. I wouldn’t worry about him unless there was evidence.

On the other hand, his response to the situation was to assign a novice to investigate, and he probably had more access to the headquarters than anyone. He also lived in an apartment in the office building, so he was there all the time, even over the weekend when Owen’s desk had been broken into. I shook my head. No, there was no way Merlin could be in on this. Idris had little respect for him, and quite frankly, I doubted Idris was a good enough actor to fake that. If I couldn’t trust Merlin, I might as well quit my job and practice saying, “Do you want fries with that?”

Merlin’s office door opened, and he and Rod emerged, Rod still carrying that stack of papers. “I’ll get these distributed immediately, sir,” Rod said.

Merlin nodded, then blinked and looked at me. A light sparked in his eyes, then he turned to Rod and said, “I believe I’ll have Miss Chandler take care of the distribution. The message will have more authority coming directly from my office.”

“Distribute what?” I asked.

“It’s a document for the various department and division heads,” Rod explained, “outlining company policy on intellectual property and the like—so we can avoid future Idris-like incidents. We enchanted it so that signing it is binding, which means it has to be distributed in person.”

Right away, I knew what Merlin was up to. He was giving me an excuse to snoop around the company. “I’d be glad to help,” I said, giving them both my perkiest smile. “Do I need to get someone to cover the desk here?”

“I don’t anticipate your brief absence causing any problems,” Merlin said, looking satisfied with himself.

Rod handed the stack of documents over to me and said, “Thanks for the help, Katie. I owe you one.” And I owed Merlin one for setting that up so neatly. Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d apparently been quite good with the scheming back in his day.

I hadn’t had to hand-deliver a memo since the dark days when I worked for Mimi, my evil boss at my old, nonmagical job. I hadn’t minded it much then, for it gave me a chance to escape from my desk for a while. This particular mission was something else entirely. I felt almost dirty and dishonest, going around the company under false pretenses with the intent of scoping everything out. I had to remind myself that catching the spy was important and that honest people had nothing to hide.

I decided to start at the lowest level and work my way to the top. The design department was in the basement, but it was empty at the moment, not that I expected the company’s designer to leave his video games long enough to spy on anyone. On the ground level, I dropped the memo off in the security office to the side of the foyer. Sam was probably outside in his guard position, but I couldn’t make myself consider him a suspect. He was too busy moonlighting as a security guard at various churches around town to have time for corporate espionage. He was also intensely protective of the company. There would have to be a literal smoking gun to make me suspect him.

Next, I headed up to my old department, Verification. Just approaching that doorway made my stomach knot up. I hadn’t been back since I’d been promoted to my current job, and I doubted anyone there would be happy to see me. I had good reason to look for suspects there, too, for a magical immune would be able to get past any wards. Gritting my teeth, I pushed the door open. “Gregor! I have a memo for you from the boss!” I said, heading straight for the department head’s desk.

Even though he was in charge of the verification department, where most of the company’s immunes worked, Gregor was magical. He was definitely on my list of suspects because he had a known grudge against Owen. He used to have Owen’s job until an accident turned him into an ogre. He still tended to turn green and grow horns when his anger got out of control. That proved he had motive and a history of tinkering with questionable magic.

He barely looked up as he took the memo from me. “Do you need a response right away?” he asked.

“No, just sign it and return it when you get a chance. You will note that it is binding.”

He groaned. “Of course it is.” He put the memo aside on his desk. “Is there anything else?”

“No, not really. I was just wondering how things are going.”

“Same as usual,” he grunted. There were fewer verifiers working in the department than there had been a couple of months ago. They’d been scattered throughout the company to better spot any magical irregularities. That also meant they weren’t too carefully supervised. Even so, I could probably eliminate most of them as suspects because spying was too much like real work for their tastes. They had a cushy gig and they knew it, so I doubted they’d do anything to upset that.

There was only one verifier I was suspicious about, and fortunately, she wasn’t in the office. When I worked in Verification, Kim had been overly ambitious, taking far too many notes about what was going on in the company and showing far too much interest in company happenings. Her goal had been to get the job as Merlin’s assistant, and she’d never gotten over me being appointed to that post. I’d been dreading running into her ever since I got the job she’d been scheming for.

As luck would have it, she came into the office just as I was leaving. “Kim!” I greeted her. If I acted friendly, maybe she wouldn’t claw my eyes out, I hoped.

She gave me a look so frosty it made me wish I’d brought a coat on my errand. “What brings you back here?”

I waved my stack of memos. “Just delivering memos for the boss. At least I didn’t have to type them this time.” I hoped making the job sound like menial secretarial work would leave her a little less bitter. Her eyes narrowed and I waited for her to say something cutting, but she just headed over to Gregor’s desk. Relieved, I left the office before she changed her mind and started a catfight.

Next, I headed to R&D. If my steps were lighter and my spirits boosted, it had nothing at all to do with seeing Owen. He must have known I was coming, in that uncanny way he had, for the usually locked door opened easily for me. I didn’t know the head of the R&D department or even where his office was, but Owen was head of the theoretical magic section of R&D, so he was sure to be able to point me in the right direction.

Both Owen and his assistant, Jake, were at work in the theoretical magic lab. They had a giant book open on the table and a much-erased series of words on a nearby whiteboard. Owen said a few words that sounded like nonsense to me, there was a tingle of power in the air, then Jake yelped and dropped his clipboard.

Owen winced. “Sorry about that. And it looks like that one didn’t work.” He erased some of the words on the whiteboard, then bent over to look at the book again. “Hmm, maybe they spelled it wrong, and this is what they meant.” He wrote a different series of foreign words on the whiteboard while Jake, still shaking his right hand, bent to retrieve his clipboard.

Jake was probably the one person other than Owen who stood a chance of getting into Owen’s office without looking suspicious. He’d struck me as fairly loyal to his boss, but that could have been an act. On the other hand, he’d been the one to find the first commercial spell Idris had produced and had brought it to Owen for testing. Would he have helped like that if he’d been working for Idris? But that also meant he tended to frequent places where dark spells were sold. I left him in the “possible” column. His proximity to Owen made it too dangerous to write him off so soon.

I cleared my throat. “Before you zap Jake again, I need your help with something.”

“Of course. What is it?” Owen asked, re-capping his dry erase marker and looking over at me with a welcoming smile that made my knees feel a little watery.

“Memo for the department head, from the boss. I don’t think I know where his office is.”

“I’ll get it to him.”

“It’s no problem. I can deliver it myself if I know where to go.”

“Let me take a look at it.” His tone had gone from casual to the least bit commanding, so I handed over the memo. As he read it, I tried to contemplate the unthinkable. Owen had been the victim in this situation, and he was the one who’d reported the crime. That would generally leave him above suspicion. Then again, that sort of thing happened on TV all the time, where the killer was the one who “found” the body and reported the crime. Maybe he’d reported this so he could go on spying and we wouldn’t suspect him.