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“It wouldn’t involve something splashy with dragons, would it?”
“Dragons in the office? Even I’m not that crazy. But I can show you something that will give you the picture.”
“I can’t wait. I’ll be there in a moment.”
I was heading down the hallway toward the department exit when Hartwell stepped out of the conference room and shouted in a magically amplified voice that rang throughout the entire department, “All hands! Conference room! Now!” I sprinted toward the exit, hoping to avoid yet another party. I got caught by a burst of streamers flying from the conference room, but nobody called me back.
When I got to Owen’s lab, Owen and his assistant, Jake, were leaning over something on the lab table. Owen looked frazzled enough that I felt bad for resenting his recent distance. He pulled a metallic green streamer out of my hair. “Let me guess, another sales department party?”
“Yeah, but I narrowly escaped.” I gestured toward the streamer he held. “They only winged me.”
“How come we don’t get parties?” Jake asked.
Owen looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “Can you imagine this department at a party?”
Jake nodded knowingly. “Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess it would be a bunch of people lined up along the walls, looking uncomfortable. But I think they’d like it if you showed movies. They wouldn’t be forced to talk to each other.”
“I’ll consider it, if we ever get to a point when we’re not so busy. We can celebrate once we’ve beaten the bad guys.” Then he turned to me and said, “And you’re not here to talk about parties.”
“In a sense, I am. A really, really big party. What have you got for me?”
“You said you wanted dragons.”
“I said I wanted something splashy to show off.”
“And what’s splashier than dragons? Wait right here.” Grinning ear-to-ear, he ran into his office.
I turned to Jake. “What’s he up to?”
Jake, also grinning, said, “Just wait. You have to see this.”
I wasn’t sure quite what I expected Owen to come back with—maybe a giant old magical tome, or perhaps a miniature dragon. Instead, he held a small white cat with a spattering of big, black spots on her body. It was his cat, Eluned, who’d been dubbed Loony by Rod.
“I didn’t realize it was Take Your Cat to Work Day,” I said.
“I’m using Loony to demonstrate proof of concept. She’s a lot smaller and a lot less messy than a dragon. You see, that spell I used to tame the dragons could be used in a modified form for pet obedience training. You could end indoor accidents and keep Fido from chewing your favorite shoes.”
“I could see where that might be popular.”
“Allow me to demonstrate. You know how notoriously untrainable cats are—there’s a reason we refer to wrangling a bunch of people who all want to do their own thing as herding cats. But with the right touch of magic, that all changes.” He handed Loony—who looked utterly bored by these proceedings—over to Jake. Jake took her to the opposite side of the room and put her down. She immediately yawned and stretched, then began grooming herself. Owen said some magic words and did a few complicated hand gestures, then called, “Loony, come here!”
The cat interrupted her grooming to shoot across the floor and hurl herself at Owen’s legs, where she purred and gazed adoringly up at him.
“Ta da!” Jake said with a flourish.
Owen knelt to scratch behind Loony’s ears. “Making a cat obey is actually quite impressive on a conceptual level, even harder than dragons, really. However, cats aren’t big enough to demonstrate to a large crowd. But we can demonstrate it with the dragons, which looks a lot more impressive than making a dog sit, fetch, and roll over. You can do that even without magic.”
“But you’ve been training your cat like a dog her whole life. She obeys without magic,” I said. To demonstrate, I knelt and said, “Hey, Loony! Come here, sweetie!” She came straight to me and rubbed her face against my ankles.
“She likes you,” Owen said. “That doesn’t mean the magic doesn’t work. You saw what happened with those dragons—one minute they were trying to roast us, and after I did the spell they wanted to play. Now they even do tricks. I did that spell in a panic, with probably a bit too much power behind it. Since then, I’ve analyzed what I did and figured out a way to control it better. If the spell works on dragons, it should work on household pets that don’t breathe fire. Is that what you wanted?”
“It should get their attention,” I said.
“We have a few other things to announce, but I’m working on ways to make them look more spectacular.”
“Keep this up, and you’ll turn into P. T. Barnum in no time. I take it that’s why you’ve been so scarce lately.”
“No, not really. This was just taking a break. There wasn’t much work to do on this spell. But coming up with protective charms that work against the influence spells is killing me. The whole department’s on it, and we can’t make anything work consistently, not even when we reverse engineer the Spellworks charms.” He called Loony back, scooped her up into his arms, and stood up. “And now I’d better get back to work.” I waited for him to say something else, like maybe making plans to see each other. My birthday was the next day, and I’d have thought he’d make time for me then, no matter how busy he was. Surely he’d know. After all, he had ESP and his best friend ran the personnel office. I reminded myself that the current crisis trumped my birthday and forced myself to give him a big smile. “Thank you for coming up with something splashy for me.”
