Damsel Under Stress (Enchanted, Inc. 3)

“Do you want to go?”

“It might be fun. If your estimate is right, I should still be slightly affected by the immunity loss, so I would see some of what my friends are seeing, which might help avoid any real weirdness.”

“I should warn you, Rod’s parties are rather notorious. They usually get a little wild for my taste, but it is certainly something you should experience at least once.”

I wondered for a second if he’d made other plans for us. A quiet evening at home with the two of us sounded more like his idea of a celebration, but I did also want to be with my friends. This party would be the best of both worlds—ringing in the New Year with him and with my friends. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go,” I said. “I haven’t ever been to a big New Year’s Eve party. I promise to keep my roommates from bothering you.”

He smiled and nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll go.” He didn’t sound too disappointed, so if he had thought about what he’d rather be doing, he didn’t seem like he’d planned in detail. If I knew Owen, he might even have forgotten that New Year’s tended to follow Christmas, he was so caught up in his work. “And if you like, we could have dinner tonight and talk about costumes. Maybe it’ll be our lucky night, and we can have a normal dinner.”

As much as I liked him, I didn’t think I could face another one of our attempted dates. I didn’t have the physical or emotional energy to deal with yet another disaster without having a total meltdown. “Can I take a rain check?” I asked. “I suspect we’ll need to get together tomorrow night anyway so we can scope out Idris’s ads and you can tell me what you see so we can compare.”

“Oh, right. Good point. Tomorrow night, then?” If I hadn’t come to know him as well as I had, I wouldn’t have been able to see the disappointment in his eyes.

That night I told my roommates about the party, and they were both so enthusiastic that they spent most of the evening digging around in the closet to come up with costume ideas. “A masked ball for New Year’s is genius,” Gemma said, holding a red pashmina around her head, Little Red Riding Hood style. “You can try out being someone else as the calendar changes. There’s all kinds of symbolism there.”

“This is that really hot guy you know who’s hosting it, right?” Marcia asked.

“Yeah, he’s Owen’s best friend.”

“And what’s his job again?”

“He’s head of Personnel.”

“Oh.” There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder if she was going to bother passing the invitation on to her boyfriend, Jeff.

The next morning, I put on Owen’s necklace as I got dressed. I might have to take it off once I got to the office, but if there was any chance my immunity might be dimmed, I wanted to be sure to know that magic was in use around me. Owen met me on the sidewalk in front of my building with a cup of take-out coffee. “Let me guess, this is your own special blend,” I said as I took the cup from him.

“A very special blend, indeed. You’re wearing the locket.”

“Yes. I thought it might come in handy.”

“That’s not the purpose I intended it for, but it works, I suppose.”

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like plain old coffee to me, the way I took it with cream and sugar. I couldn’t detect whatever drug or potion he’d put in it. “So, this is the dose that’s really going to do it, huh?” I asked.

“You probably won’t notice the effects until late today. We’ll give it a test this afternoon, then I’ll give you a final dose before we leave work. Tonight I thought you could take a look at the subway ads, and then we could have dinner at my place and watch for TV ads. That is, if you don’t have other plans?”

“No, nothing else planned.”

“Great. Then tomorrow we can visit Times Square and run by the store.”

My neck began to tingle from the necklace as we boarded the subway, and sure enough, there were the Spellworks ads. I still saw them the same way I had all week, so I must have been fully immune. Although I knew we needed me to do this, I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I still had my immunity. It had been a scary, helpless feeling the last time. Maybe it wasn’t too late to tell Owen I’d changed my mind. He’d be all for stopping the potion and coming up with a plan B, since he’d been opposed to this in the first place. But I knew it was important. We needed all the information we could get, and this was the quickest and easiest way to go about getting it.

When we approached the MSI office building, the necklace began to vibrate. I realized I wouldn’t be able to wear it at work at all. By the time I decided to take it off, it was almost painful. I was ready to grab it and break the chain, just to get it off my neck, but Owen stepped in and unfastened it for me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I may need to rethink this. There may be a better approach. But for now, it would probably be best if you avoid wearing it around the office. Power is so amplified in this building that it will drive you crazy.” He handed it to me, and I could still feel it buzzing in my hand, so I quickly dropped it into my purse.

We got to Owen’s lab and then both of us stopped short. One of the largest bouquets of flowers I’d ever seen sat in the middle of one of the lab tables, the piles of papers shoved aside.

“I wonder if those are for you or for me,” Owen said.

Fifteen

I stepped forward and dug through the foliage to find a card. There was one with my name on it, but the inside said merely, “Thank you for everything, with my deepest devotion.” It wasn’t signed.

“They’re apparently for me,” I said, “but it looks like I have a secret admirer. I don’t know who sent them.” I gave Owen a sidelong glance to gauge his reaction, but he just frowned. I knew he was physically incapable of playing it cool in a situation like this, so that was a good sign he hadn’t sent the flowers. If he’d been involved at all, he’d have been blushing furiously and unable to look at me.

He half closed his eyes and walked around the table, holding his hands out. Then he shook his head. “There’s no magic here. The flowers themselves aren’t magical in origin, and I don’t detect any hidden spells.” He sneezed violently. “However, there does appear to be some pollen.”

My eyes watered at the strong, sickeningly sweet scent of the stargazer lilies in the arrangement. I tended to think of those as funeral flowers. “Yeah, the lilies are going to make me queasy if we keep them in here. Maybe that was the dastardly plan of whoever sent them.”