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Every head in the room turned to stare at me, and for a second I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. "You may have already thought of this, but I haven't heard anyone bring it up yet." I licked my lips and wished I had a glass of water handy for wetting my suddenly dry throat. "My world has its own powers, you know. And like magic, some of them can be used for good or for evil. For example, lawyers."
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn't going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. "What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?" Mr. Hartwell asked.
"Lawyers can stop just about anything. Tie it up in court, and nobody gets anywhere for ages. That could buy you the time you need to come up with a better way of fighting this. I'm no expert, but you might have an intellectual property case."
"What's that?" Owen asked. The flicker of hope in his eyes gave me the courage to keep going.
"Anything an employee develops while working here belongs to the company, not to the employee. Surely you have some language to that effect in employment agreements."
Owen nodded. "Especially in R and D."
"The point of that is to keep an employee from developing something on company time, using company resources, then selling it himself. And that seems to be what Idris is doing. He's taking something he developed here and using it to create his own products. You might be able to make him stop that."
"How do we do that?" Merlin asked.
"I'm not sure, but I may know someone who would know. I'll have to check. It could take a couple of days." I was going out on a limb here, basing my grand idea for saving the world on a blind date my roommate had once had, but this situation sounded exactly like the one he'd described in his dinner table conversation.
"Please do check, then report as soon as possible."
The meeting broke up, and we all went back to our respective offices with our individual tasks. I'd felt exhilarated before, when my proposal for a marketing plan had been accepted, but now I was scared. What if it didn't work? These were awfully big stakes to hinge on something so vague.
I decided to wait until I got home to talk to Marcia. The three of us sat around the dinner table that night, still talking about the results of my Friday night date. "I don't know what you did to him, Katie, but he wouldn't even look at me today," Gemma said with a laugh.
"Oh, he's just worried she'll be hurt if she hears he doesn't want to call her again,"
Marcia said.
"Sorry that one didn't work out for you, hon. We'll have to try again," Gemma said, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder. "Maybe Philip has a friend."
Philip's friends were probably starting to hibernate—or whatever it is frogs do—for the winter. Or else they were all in retirement homes, if they dated from his prefrog days. "Actually, I may have an idea," I said, figuring this was as good an opening as I was likely to get. "Marce, you aren't going to call that Ethan guy you were matched up with a while back, are you?"
She frowned. "Which one was he?"
"Intellectual property attorney, tall, glasses, brainy. It was the night all of us went out with Connie and Jim."
She made a face. "Him? You want to go out with him?"
"I take that to mean that you wouldn't mind if I did."
"He's all yours, honey."
Gemma beamed. "So, you want me to call Jim and have him tell Ethan to call you if he's interested?"
"Yes, please. He seemed nice." This was too tenuous for my comfort. What would happen if he couldn't remember who I was, or if he didn't want to see me? The fate of the magical world—and maybe even of the nonmagical world, too—might rest on this date. I wasn't sure where I'd find an intellectual property attorney anywhere else, not one I could get to talk to me without me having to explain the situation up front and pay a hefty retainer. They'd think I was insane. I bit my tongue to keep from telling Gemma to tell him to hurry and call me because I didn't have a lot of time.
That might be a subtle clue that I was after something other than a boyfriend.
The next afternoon I was surfing the Web in search of information on marketing campaigns for challenging situations when I got an e-mail from Gemma. "Jim said Ethan remembered you, thought you were cute. Jim gave him your number, and Ethan said he'd call sometime." That was good news, but I was worried about the
"sometime" part of the equation. This was no time to deal with the typical male definition of the statement "I'll call you," which generally means "sometime before I die, if I think about it."
I felt as if I was back in high school, rushing home to check the answering machine to see if he had called, leaping for the phone whenever it rang, calling the machine several times throughout the day to check messages. My roommates must have thought I'd gone stark raving nuts. "I had no idea you were so taken with Ethan,"
Gemma remarked at one point. "You should have said something sooner."
He finally called on Thursday night. For once Gemma got to the phone before I could—by now Philip had learned to use a telephone, so there were two of us waiting for calls. Her face lit up when she answered, then she put her hand over the receiver and singsonged, "It's for you! Guess who!"
Still feeling like I'd reverted to my teens, I grabbed the cordless from her and retreated into the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. "Hi, Ethan," I said, fighting to keep my voice from shaking.
