He passed his right hand over his left again, and that time I could feel the tingle of magic in use. If I’d been wearing the locket, it would have given me a jolt. “Okay, now what do you see?” he asked.
“A quarter,” I replied with a shrug.
“That’s all? Are you sure?”
“Sorry. It’s one of the special state quarters, if that helps.” I started to turn away, then saw something colorful out of the corner of my eye. I blinked and turned back slowly, but the image faded when I looked at it head-on. “Okay, wait a second, I saw something in my peripheral vision, but it’s fading in and out.”
“It looks like you need another dose. I don’t know if it will have taken full effect by this evening, though.”
I followed him back out into the main lab, where he mixed up the potion and handed me a glass. “If the magic thing doesn’t work out for you, you’ve got a future as a bartender,” I quipped before I drank the potion, which was tea-flavored again.
He looked worried as he watched me drink. “I hope I got the dosage right. I may have underestimated your body weight.”
“Don’t ever apologize to a woman for that.”
He grinned. “I know. And notice that I was smart enough not to ask. I’m not entirely ignorant where women are concerned.” He checked his watch. “Let’s give that dose another hour to work, and then we’ll test you again.” I went back to my desk and tried to work, even though I was nervous about really losing my magical immunity. Part of me couldn’t help hoping that the potion didn’t work, after all, and it would turn out that I was no longer capable of being rendered susceptible to magic.
When Owen came back to my desk an hour later, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. “Here we go again,” I said. “Give me your best shot, O great and powerful Oz.”
“Oz wasn’t a real wizard. I am,” he said with his typical straightforwardness. This time, he didn’t bother playing magic tricks. He simply held out the hand with a quarter in his palm, said a few words under his breath, and then asked, “Now what do you see?”
“A Sacagawea dollar?”
“What?”
“Just kidding. I see a quarter. Sorry.” But then I caught another one of those glimpses out of the corner of my eye. If I squinted just right as I turned my head, I could keep that image in place instead of it fading back to a quarter. “It’s one of those rainbow-colored bouncy balls, like you get in a gumball machine.”
“That’s it. But you can’t see it without squinting like that?”
“Not really. I can’t quite keep the image in focus. But it’s better than the last time when I could only see it out of the corner of my eye.”
“You’re being a difficult case, you know.”
“I had to pick some area in life to be high-maintenance. Maybe the drugs lose their potency on you after a while. Or maybe it’s harder to lose your immunity each time.” That could also mean it would take longer to get the immunity back. I didn’t like the idea of essentially losing a sense for very long while we had enemies out to get us.
“Do you still want to give things a try tonight, or would it be a waste of time?”
I looked up at his worried blue eyes and remembered the feeling I got the first time I met him, when he’d been almost too shy to speak to me at all. “Being with you is never a waste of time,” I said as butterflies formed in my stomach. “That is, if you don’t care how much work gets done tonight.”
He pinkened slightly, but he held my gaze instead of looking bashfully at the floor. “It’s all just a ruse to get you alone with me, anyway. Anything we might accomplish is a bonus. The way I see it, if we’re in my very heavily warded house, that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to put us in danger or tinker with our plans and we might actually be able to spend time together without too many distractions.”
“So, we’re both on the same page, then. That’s good.” Even better, if things went more smoothly for us this evening than on any of the occasions in which Ethelinda had interfered, then I’d know she was wrong about us not being suited for each other.
By the time I left the office, the butterflies in my stomach had spawned offshoot flocks that had taken up residence in my heart, my head, and my knees. I wasn’t sure what had me so keyed up, facing the thought of being magically blind or looking forward to what might happen with Owen without any major disasters to mess things up—or to break the ice (in a figurative way this time, I hoped).
Owen walked me through the building corridors toward the exit with a protective hand at the small of my back. You’d have thought I’d been stricken suddenly ill or frail, the way he was acting. As much as I’d meant what I said to Ethelinda about not liking it when I needed to be rescued all the time, I rather enjoyed this protectiveness. Come to think of it, what I was really enjoying was his proximity. He wasn’t a touchy person, so I was up for anything that gave him a reason to touch me.
On the stairs to the building lobby, we ran into Rod—or rather, the handsome man I’d learned to see as Rod the last time I’d lost my magical immunity. The fact that I now saw his illusion instead of his real face was a good sign that the potion had finally kicked in. “Hey, I’m glad I caught you two,” Rod said. “I take it you’ll be at the party?”
Owen glanced ever so slightly at me before replying, “Yeah, we’ll be there. But you aren’t serious about costumes, are you?”
“If you want to be boring, you can wear evening clothes and a mask, but I’d hope you have more imagination than that.”
“I told my roommates, and they’re excited about it,” I said. “And don’t worry, I’ll see to it that he comes up with some kind of costume.” That was awfully big talk coming from me when I had no idea what I was going to wear, but dressing me was Gemma’s mission in life, and I figured I’d leave it to her.
“I can’t wait to see what you come up with,” Rod said with a laugh. “I should warn you, though, that you’re dealing with the kid who wore the same Robin Hood costume for Halloween every year until he outgrew it. Getting him into a costume will be a real challenge.”
When we’d said good-bye to him and continued on our way to the lobby, I couldn’t resist asking, “Robin Hood?”