Once Upon Stilettos

They didn’t take the hint. They all came to a stop to stare at the company logo on the shield by the door. “What does MSI stand for?” Dad asked.



I shrugged. “I’m not sure it stands for anything, or if it ever did, it doesn’t anymore. It’s like IBM—does anyone really know what that stands for?”



“International Business Machines,” Dad said without missing a beat.



“Oh. Well, they left that part out of the company orientation, so I guess they just consider it a name these days. I suspect that it’s maybe the names of the founders, or something like that.” That was a pretty good fib, if I said so myself. I mentally filed it away for future use.



“What did you say they do?” Dad asked.



I hadn’t, actually. “It’s kind of like software. To be honest, I don’t understand a lot of it. I just do administrative work.” Which was true, sort of. Spells were like the software of the magical world, I didn’t understand how it all worked, and I did do administrative work. I started walking again, hoping they’d follow me. “There’s a subway station across the park. We can get home and have some more pie.” The mention of pie did the trick. Gemma and Marcia were soon right behind me, and my parents had no choice but to follow.



We reached Park Row and crossed the street to the park, where we all paused to flip coins into the fountain. “See the gaslights,” I pointed out, relieved to be showing off normal touristy stuff once more. Now that my parents had seen my office building and hadn’t had a complete freak-out, it looked like the worst was truly over.



As we approached the subway station, a handsome man in his early thirties crossed the street toward us. Gemma and Marcia’s heads turned in unison to watch him, and I couldn’t help but take a gander myself. He really was gorgeous, in a slightly dangerous bad-boy way. He wasn’t the sort of man I usually went for, but he looked like he might be fun for a fling. He also looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place him. You’d think that if I’d met him before, I’d have remembered. I glanced at Mom, who didn’t look quite as impressed. She was probably afraid of the bad-boy thing. He wasn’t the kind of man she’d choose for her little girl. It was just as well that Mom would be gone in a couple of days.



He flashed us all a big smile as he approached. I twirled my hair with one finger and smiled back at him. Gemma stepped up to my side, gave him a come-hither look, and elbowed me in the ribs. “Hey, isn’t that the guy who recruited you for your job?” she hissed. “You did say you weren’t interested, right?”



Before I could remind her that she had a boyfriend, so she could get out of my way, he directed a grin right at me and said, “Hi, Katie, what brings you down here on a Saturday?”



I froze. It was Rod’s voice. And then I remembered where I’d seen him before. It was Rod’s illusion, the face he showed to the rest of the world. I’d seen it only once, reflected in an image checker mirror. Otherwise, I couldn’t see what others saw because an illusion was a spell cast on other people to make them see what the caster wanted them to see. That meant it didn’t work on me, and I always saw the real thing.



But I was seeing the illusion now. That could mean only one thing.



I’d lost my magical immunity.



In that moment, I felt my world turn upside down. If I was no longer immune, that meant I couldn’t count on anything my senses showed me. I didn’t know how it could have happened or why, and I could only begin to wonder how long it had been going on. I tried to think of the last magical thing I’d seen. I’d seen the gargoyle briefly the day before, but it had been appearing and disappearing. I hadn’t been affected by Idris’s spell in the deli, but it had made my toes tap, now that I thought about it. Since then, I couldn’t recall a thing. All that time I’d been relieved not to see anything weird I’d need to explain to Mom, and maybe I’d really been no longer capable of seeing anything weird. There was no telling what she might have seen that I didn’t.



But I didn’t have time to process it all at the moment. I was there with my parents and roommates, and I had to respond to Rod. “Hi!” I greeted him, hoping that only a second or two had passed instead of the hours it felt like. “I was showing my parents where I work.” I turned to my parents. “Mom, Dad, this is Rod Gwaltney. He’s the one who recruited me for my new job. Rod, these are my parents, Lois and Frank Chandler. And you remember Gemma and Marcia, of course.”



“Hi, Rod,” Gemma and Marcia chorused in unison, a lustful sigh in their voices. Hey, didn’t they have boyfriends? What were they doing coming on to him like that? I flipped my hair back over my shoulder and fluttered my eyelashes at him, then remembered that I had a boyfriend, too. Oops.