Damsel Under Stress

As I dropped the locket into my jacket pocket, I felt a gust of cold air and thought for a second that it was an aftereffect of her vanishing spell, but then I realized the door had opened. I looked up and saw Owen entering the coffee shop. I wasn’t the only one gazing at him. He looked like a celebrity heartthrob, he was so ridiculously handsome. I could practically hear the other patrons trying to remember what movie they’d seen him in as he spotted me and hurried across the room to fall into the seat Ethelinda had just vacated.



On this particular morning, he looked like something out of a paparazzi photo of a celebrity in his off-hours. His nearly black hair was still slightly damp, as if from a shower, and it curled up a little around his ears and at the back of his neck. There was a faint shadow on his strong jaw, and his dark blue eyes were hidden behind wire-rimmed glasses.



I might have been put out that he hadn’t made at least some effort on our first official date if he hadn’t appeared so flustered. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, slightly out of breath. “There’s been a bit of a crisis.”



“What is it?” I asked, immediately concerned.



A paper cup bearing the shop’s logo appeared between his hands, and he picked it up and took a long sip. I noticed then that a similar cup had appeared in front of me, so I got a little caffeine into my system while I waited for him to answer. Cups appearing out of nowhere were practically normal in my life, especially around Owen, so I’d long since gotten used to it.



“Ari got away last night,” he said at last, sounding like he’d finally caught his breath and settled down some. Ari was the wicked fairy—and my ex-friend—who’d been helping our company’s enemy by spying and sabotaging from within Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., the company where both Owen and I worked. We’d exposed her at the company party the night before, and she’d been taken into custody by the company security forces.



“How’d she escape?” I asked.



“I don’t know. But I’m going to have to go to the office and see if I can detect any remnant traces of spells that might have been used. I’m sorry to have to bail on you like this.”



“Don’t worry about it,” I insisted. I’d never been the type to stamp my feet and demand that a man make me his number-one priority in life, so I certainly wasn’t going to start now when my date’s other priority happened to be saving the world from bad magic.



“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised. Then he tilted his head and gave me a smile that would have made me agreeable even if I had been throwing a hissy fit about his priorities. “Care to walk me to the subway?”



“Sure.” I picked up my paper coffee cup. “Good thing we got these to-go, huh?”



His cheeks went pink. “I usually wouldn’t do that, but I didn’t have time to wait in line.” We took our cups and headed to the exit, then went up the steps to the street level.



Away from the crowded coffee shop, we could talk more freely about Ari and Phelan Idris, the guy who had to be behind all this. “I guess Idris’s calm exit last night should have been a sign he had something up his sleeve,” I said. “He usually wouldn’t give up that easily.”



“Maybe. But he’s never struck me as the type to care all that much about a damsel in distress. He’d be more likely to forget about her and move on to the next person he thinks he can use.”



“Unless she knows too much about what he’s up to, and if she was willing to betray us to him, it stands to reason she could be persuaded to tell us about him.”



“Oh, I’m pretty sure that was the case. And I’m not sure ‘persuasion’ is the right word.” He sounded so cool about it, practically icy, that it sent shivers down my spine.



“You weren’t going to torture her, were you?” I asked.



He choked on the sip of coffee he’d just taken, and I had to pat him on the back until he caught his breath. “Torture? No! You didn’t think we’d do that, did you? But there are other methods for getting information out of people.”



“Good. I’m mad at her, but I wouldn’t want to go that far. If she got away, does that mean someone else in the company is working for Idris?”



“That’s what I’ll have to find out. Did he pull this from the outside, or was it an inside job?”



“Our work is never done, is it?”



“My work is never done. I don’t think you’ll have to worry much about this one—at least, not yet. We’ve got some immunes doing verification work on the security force, and they’ll be helping with this initial sweep.”