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“Yes, please.”
Isabel raised her hand and flicked her wrist, then Rod coughed and said, “Thank you!”
“You should go home,” she said.
“I’m too—” he went into a coughing fit “—busy.”
“Men, they’re such babies when they’re sick,” she whispered to me. “Was there something you needed?”
“Coffee, please. I think everyone in my department is out sick. I’m desperate, Isabel.”
She waved her hand, and a cup appeared on her desk. I picked it up and practically inhaled the brew. “Oh, you’re a lifesaver. Thank you.”
“Most of the company is either sick or coming down with something. Germs spread as fast as gossip around here. You should have seen this place in January. The few people who were still standing practically came to work in hazmat gear. You’d better watch yourself.”
“Don’t worry, I will. But don’t you have an anti-illness spell? You’d think a place like this could fight the flu.”
“You’d think, but no, we sometimes even get weirder varieties that the flu shot doesn’t help with, since our bugs get filtered through the other races, like the fairies and gnomes.” I’d always been curious about her lineage, since she was far larger than the average person, but I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask if she counted herself among the other races. Instead, I just said, “I may be back for a refill.”
Before I made it to the door, I paused. Isabel was the best source for company gossip and information, since working in Personnel meant she knew all the comings and goings within the company. She might know something that could help me, if I could ask without sounding suspicious. I turned back to face her. “One good thing about this flu is that I haven’t had to deal with Idris in a couple of days.”
She laughed. “I can imagine that’s a relief. He always got on my nerves.”
Yes! She’d taken my opening. “Did you know him well when he worked here?”
“He and Ari were off and on, and since Ari was a friend, that meant I had to put up with him.”
“The more time I spend with him, the harder it is to imagine anyone feeling like he was a danger worthy of bringing Merlin back. Was he really that big a threat?”
“I don’t think they knew exactly who was causing trouble at the time, so they couldn’t tell how bad things might get. After the last time, I guess they weren’t taking any chances.”
“What last time?”
“I was just a kid, but it was pretty bad, from what I’ve heard.”
I remembered reading something about an earlier attempt to seize power magically. It was in a reference book Owen had let me borrow so I could get the quick-immersion Magic 101 primer right after I joined the company. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember the details, and I didn’t think I could ask Owen for that book under the current circumstances.
I grinned at Isabel. “Well, he’s not a threat now, and while the flu is going around, he’s not even an annoyance.” I headed back to my office, trying to think of another way to find out about the last threat.
*
The next day, the absentee rate was even worse. I was getting hundreds of responses to our conference invitation, so there would be people at the conference, but I was starting to wonder if there would be a conference for them to attend. That was the downside of doing everything magically—I was entirely dependent on other people being able to do magic. I didn’t think I’d be able to find a circus to rent tents from and get them set up in Central Park without anyone noticing. There was no nonmagical Plan B.
Considering that the subway that evening sounded like a tuberculosis sanitarium, I expected to get home and find my roommates lying on the sofa with boxes of tissues. Instead, they were in perfect health. “Are y’all dealing with the plague at work?” I asked as we ate dinner.
“Are you talking about whatever Rod has?” Marcia asked.
“Yeah, it’s going through the company like wildfire. Is that happening at your offices?”
They looked at each other. “A couple of the designers have been out sick,” Gemma said.
“At my firm, people come to work when they’re clinically dead,” Marcia said with a sigh. “And that means we all catch whatever they’ve got, so then we have to drag ourselves off our deathbeds to go to work.” She glared at me. “You’d better not catch your office plague and bring it home to us.”
“So far, I don’t have so much as a sniffle,” I reassured them.
The subway was practically sedate and much less crowded than usual the next morning. The people struck down by the flu must have all stayed home. “Hey, you made it!” Sam said in greeting as I approached the office building. “It’s a good thing you look healthy. You may end up running the place.”
“Is it that bad?”
