“What about Marcia?” I asked, my heart already hammering in my chest before I even heard what happened. People tended not to look or sound like he did when they had good news.
Rod paced in front of the fireplace, talking as he walked. “I called her at the office this afternoon to ask her out. Her receptionist said she wasn’t in, and they didn’t know where she was or when she’d be back. She’d gone out to lunch and hadn’t returned. Then I tried her at your place, but there was no answer, and I tried her cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. I called your place again a little while ago, and your other roommate said she wasn’t home yet. She sounded worried. I take it this is uncharacteristic of Marcia?”
“It’s certainly uncharacteristic of you,” Owen muttered. “You didn’t just move on to the next candidate?”
Rod scowled at him. “I like her, okay? I want to go out with her, not with the next person on my list. Not that there is anyone else on the list right now.”
“Yes, it is uncharacteristic of her,” I said, stepping in before they could start squabbling. They weren’t kidding when they said they were like brothers. “She’s obsessive about keeping us posted on where she is and when she’ll be somewhere, and if you leave her a message, she’ll return your call the moment she gets it. Do you think she’s been caught up in all this?”
Rod shrugged. He looked utterly miserable. “I don’t know, but isn’t it suspicious that she disappeared while we’ve got Ari?” It seemed like word of what was going on had already spread within the company.
A horrible thought struck me. “It may not have anything to do with Ari. Philip and Ethan were supposed to have a meeting with Sylvia Meredith today, and that was when they were going to tell her that Philip planned to press his claim to get his company back. She may have found out that Philip was dating one of my roommates—Ari knew that, which means Idris might have known—but they got the wrong roommate.”
“I’ll call Ethan,” Owen said, heading over to his desk.
Before long, it seemed like we had half the magical people I knew gathered in Owen’s dining room, which made Owen visibly uncomfortable. He’d spent the time after he made the necessary phone calls frantically moving his piles of junk around. I wasn’t sure whether he was cleaning up for company or making sure people wouldn’t accidentally rearrange anything.
Merlin, Philip, Ethan, Rod, Owen, and I gathered around Owen’s unusually bare dining table over Chinese food to strategize. In spite of the food piled in front of us, none of us felt much like eating. Philip’s lips were pressed into a thin, white line. Rod had lost even the pretense of cool. Owen paced the room, and even Merlin looked unusually tense. Ethan was the only one who seemed relatively at ease. The possibility of excitement was probably revving his engine.
“I realize that you value your friend,” Merlin said to me once the situation had been outlined, “but we cannot allow Mr. Vandermeer to give up his claim. That appears to be the primary funding source for the Spellworks operation, so we must have it in less dangerous hands.”
“Which is why they grabbed her in the first place,” Ethan said. “It’s an ironclad case. If it weren’t for the frog factor, I bet I could even get a ruling in our favor from a regular judge. In a magical court, she doesn’t stand a chance. She panicked, and then she resorted to kidnapping.”
“You’re not going to let them kill Marcia,” Rod said, his voice cracking with emotion. He really must have liked her, I realized. Maybe he had finally met his match. I felt bad that I wasn’t the one arguing for saving my friend, but I knew as well as anyone did what was at stake.
But then I realized something. “Wait a second—we’ve got our own hostage.” They all turned to me, looking blank. I tapped my forehead. “Remember my fairy parasite? We’ve got something we can exchange.”
“But do they care enough about Ari to be willing to exchange her?” Philip asked.
“They sprang her from our custody in the first place,” I reminded them all, “and it didn’t even seem like Idris knew about it, so his bosses must have done it, probably to keep her from talking. They must still be worried about what she might know and blab about, and if they aren’t willing to free her, you know she’ll be angry enough to talk.”
Owen stopped pacing and leaned forward, resting his arms against the back of a dining chair. “She might also be good bait to help us catch someone who would be a valuable hostage for the higher-ups.”
I knew exactly where he was going with that. “Yeah, Idris cares about her on some level, I think. We might be able to catch him by letting him know we have Ari, and then we can use him to free Marcia. If Ari knows enough to do damage, imagine what Idris could do, and he is their front man in all this. If they lost him, they’d at least have to make new ads.”
“He is most likely the weak link in the chain,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “We may not be able to determine who is ultimately directing this endeavor, but if we have Mr. Idris, we might be able to get information, or we could force them to make a trade if they worry he’ll give information.”
“Okay, it looks like we’re agreed that we’ll use Ari as leverage to eventually get Marcia back without Philip having to give up his claim,” Ethan said. “But we’ll need to find a few more ways to stack the deck in our favor.”
“Meeting them in the right place could help,” Owen said. “There are some abandoned railway tunnels under Grand Central that should be ideal. It’s possible that they have some base of operations near there, so they’ll think it’s their territory, but we have other advantages.”
Again, I was sure I knew where he was going. Being able to read him wasn’t always reassuring, I was learning. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Not that. Are you sure that’s a good idea? It might not still be safe.”
“It’s safe.” He didn’t quite look me in the eye when he said it.
“You’ve gone back to check on them, haven’t you?”
He turned red. “I felt bad about leaving them tame and then abandoning them.”
“Owen, they’ll find a way to follow you home someday, and your neighbors won’t be happy about that.”
“Would you mind filling the rest of us in?” Ethan asked.
“Dragons,” I said. “We found a nest in those tunnels, and the dragon whisperer here seems to have made pets out of them.”
“He’s always been that way,” Rod said. “You should have seen the things that followed him home when he was a kid.”
“I don’t exactly have them tamed,” Owen said, still blushing, “but I think they will do what I ask, and I can make sure nobody gets away from there without my say-so. It gives us some benefit having an extra force on our side.”