Once Upon Stilettos (Enchanted, Inc. 2)

“You’re blocking me out now?” Jake was the very picture of aggrieved innocence. He looked like what would happen if Jimmy Olsen from the Superman comics joined a punk band, and I still had a hard time imagining him betraying his boss, but it seemed like Owen hadn’t cleared him.

“I’m blocking everyone. If I’m in here, I’ll let you in. If I’m not, it can wait. Now, what did you need?”

While they talked business, I put my shoes back on and looked around for anything else that didn’t belong. In Owen’s cluttered office that was a challenge. I’d only spotted the camera because it was too high-tech for its surroundings. If it had been hidden inside a book, I never would have seen it.

Owen sent Jake off to correct something in the spell he was working on. Then he took his overcoat from the hook on the back of his office door and held it out for me. “Here, this way you won’t have to go back to your office.”

I shrugged into the oversize coat while he put on his suit coat. “You’re going to freeze,” I said. The wind cutting across the island was icy.

“I’ll be fine, trust me. I have my own resources, remember.”

Oh yeah, that. I knew what he was capable of, but he was so matter-of-fact in the rare times I saw him do magic that it was easy to forget what he was.

As we passed Sam, who was still working on the security device, Owen said, “Don’t let anyone from outside the department in while I’m gone.”

“With luck, I’ll have this thing fixed before you get back to get in my way,” Sam growled, shooing Owen away with one wing.

When we were out of the building, Owen said, “Talk first, then lunch? I doubt we want to discuss this at a restaurant.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

He led the way to the park at City Hall Plaza, where we sat on a bench near the fountain. “This should be safe enough from eavesdroppers. The sound of the fountain muffles conversation.”

Obviously, he’d put a lot of thought into this. Maybe he should have been in charge of this investigation. He knew a lot more about spying than I did. He looked at me expectantly, and I remembered that I’d been the one to ask for this meeting. I wrapped his coat tighter around my legs and asked, “What, exactly, did you do when you discovered that someone had been in your desk and looking at your notes?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, word got out pretty fast that there was a spy. I know you didn’t tell anyone other than Merlin and me. So either someone saw you react and made an assumption—”

“—or it was the spy who spread the rumor,” he finished. He worried his lower lip in his teeth as he thought. “I don’t think I reacted all that visibly,” he said after a while. “Not where anyone could see me. There may have been certain, um, well, words used in the privacy of my office.” A stain of red that I suspected had nothing to do with the cold spread across his cheeks. I had a hard time imagining him cursing. He probably did it in some arcane language. “But after that I don’t think I looked too different from any other time I think of something I need to talk to Mr. Mervyn about. Did I look all that different to you when I got to your office?”

“I could tell something was up because you didn’t bother with the usual niceties before saying you needed to see the boss.”

“Oh.” He winced. “Sorry about that.”

“But even that wouldn’t have been enough for me to assume it meant we had a spy in our midst. That’s a pretty big leap to take. To come to that conclusion, someone would almost have to have known why you were upset.”

“So you think our spy was the one who started rumors about us having a spy?”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t likely to find a more receptive audience, so I plunged forward. “In fact, I have this theory that the spy isn’t really spying at all. Yeah, if they find something, I’m sure they’d pass it on to Idris. But what would really help him is if we can’t pull together right now, if we’re so busy suspecting each other and worrying about who the spy is that we aren’t actually getting any work done. How have you spent your time for the last couple of days?”

He closed his eyes and groaned. “I’ve been checking our security. If you’re right, I totally fell for it.”

“The security panel in R and D and the camera in your office could be more red herrings, or they could be proof that I don’t know what I’m doing. We do know that someone tampered with the departmental security, got into your office, planted and veiled a camera, got into your desk, and looked at your notes. We don’t know how much of that was really part of their mission and how much was just giving us something to talk about.”

“The camera may have been to watch my reaction so they’d know when to start the rumors. They’d have looked stupid if they started spreading rumors before I noticed that anything was wrong.”

“Before I found the camera, I was pretty sure I’d narrowed our spy down to R and D because they’d be the ones who would have seen you react, but now it could be anyone, as long as at some point they had a chance to plant that camera. It seems like every time I close in on a theory, something happens to make me doubt it. When we get back to the office, what do you want to bet that something important will be missing, or a bomb planted, or worse?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m trying to track the rumor to its source, but that’s turning out to be a real challenge. I’m used to dealing with gossip, but not with technologically and magically assisted gossip.”

“I’m sure there’s a way to set a trap. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“From your spy books?”

He blushed adorably. “You can learn a lot from Robert Ludlum.”