Damsel Under Stress

“I wasn’t planning to dump you.” He got a look in his eye that on anyone else would have looked almost roguish, but he couldn’t quite carry off even the hint of naughtiness. His furious blush counteracted the glint in his eye. “I actually found some of your suggestions rather intriguing.”



I noticed, though, that he didn’t move any closer to me.



Loony joined us, hissing at me in passing, then curled up against Owen’s leg and glared at me as if to warn me away from him. That was the last straw. Ari had tried to sabotage me with my roommates, the entire company, and with Owen, but making animals dislike me was too much, in spite of what I’d said earlier about understanding it. I wished for a moment that I could give Loony a good reason for hating me.



A split second later, she jumped up with a sharp yowl, took a flying leap off the sofa, and darted out of the room. “There goes psycho cat,” Owen said, watching the doorway where she’d disappeared. “Sometimes I think this house is haunted, the way she reacts to things even I don’t sense or see.”



“Oh, cats do that kind of thing, for no good reason,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I was not going to admit to Owen that I’d just zapped his cat. It looked like I still had access to magical powers, and I could see where having that kind of power offered some unpleasant temptations.



We passed the rest of the day without much interaction. He dug back into his magic books while I stared at my laptop screen and pretended to work on a report. I was just starting to think it might be late enough for me to get away with going to bed when Owen’s doorbell rang. He got up and returned a moment later with Rod.



Rod looked stricken. There was no other way to describe the mingling of horror and worry on his face. “What is it?” I asked him.



“It’s Marcia,” he said.



Twenty



“What about Marcia?” I asked, my heart already hammering in my chest before I even heard what happened. People tended not to look or sound like he did when they had good news.



Rod paced in front of the fireplace, talking as he walked. “I called her at the office this afternoon to ask her out. Her receptionist said she wasn’t in, and they didn’t know where she was or when she’d be back. She’d gone out to lunch and hadn’t returned. Then I tried her at your place, but there was no answer, and I tried her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. I called your place again a little while ago, and your other roommate said she wasn’t home yet. She sounded worried. I take it this is uncharacteristic of Marcia?”



“It’s certainly uncharacteristic of you,” Owen muttered. “You didn’t just move on to the next candidate?”



Rod scowled at him. “I like her, okay? I want to go out with her, not with the next person on my list. Not that there is anyone else on the list right now.”



“Yes, it is uncharacteristic of her,” I said, stepping in before they could start squabbling. They weren’t kidding when they said they were like brothers. “She’s obsessive about keeping us posted on where she is and when she’ll be somewhere, and if you leave her a message, she’ll return your call the moment she gets it. Do you think she’s been caught up in all this?”



Rod shrugged. He looked utterly miserable. “I don’t know, but isn’t it suspicious that she disappeared while we’ve got Ari?” It seemed like word of what was going on had already spread within the company.



A horrible thought struck me. “It may not have anything to do with Ari. Philip and Ethan were supposed to have a meeting with Sylvia Meredith today, and that was when they were going to tell her that Philip planned to press his claim to get his company back. She may have found out that Philip was dating one of my roommates—Ari knew that, which means Idris might have known—but they got the wrong roommate.”



“I’ll call Ethan,” Owen said, heading over to his desk.



Before long, it seemed like we had half the magical people I knew gathered in Owen’s dining room, which made Owen visibly uncomfortable. He’d spent the time after he made the necessary phone calls frantically moving his piles of junk around. I wasn’t sure whether he was cleaning up for company or making sure people wouldn’t accidentally rearrange anything.



Merlin, Philip, Ethan, Rod, Owen, and I gathered around Owen’s unusually bare dining table over Chinese food to strategize. In spite of the food piled in front of us, none of us felt much like eating. Philip’s lips were pressed into a thin, white line. Rod had lost even the pretense of cool. Owen paced the room, and even Merlin looked unusually tense. Ethan was the only one who seemed relatively at ease. The possibility of excitement was probably revving his engine.