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His eyelids fluttered, and he stirred. His hand tightened around mine, and I said, “Owen?”
He opened his eyes and looked up at me blearily. “I guess I came out okay, huh?”
“It was a close one,” Rod said, coming back over to us. “And you’re just in time for dinner. The pizza will be here soon. You’d better drink some water. I’ll go get you a glass.”
While Rod headed to the kitchen, Owen struggled to sit up, then lay back wearily. “Yeah, that can wait. How bad was it?”
“I don’t know how many spells were on you, but it was a lot.”
He winced. “And I said some awful things to you. I’m so sorry. You know I didn’t mean them.”
“Actually, that was one of the clues that something was wrong. I didn’t think you’d suddenly gone Mr. Hyde on me. I mean, we’ve disagreed about things before, but you’re never nasty or personal about it.”
“I just don’t know how I didn’t notice she was enchanting me.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” Rod said, returning with a glass of water. “She did at least some of it right under my nose.” He helped Owen sit up so he could drink, and after downing half the glass, Owen was strong enough to sit up on his own. I got up so he could swing his legs around and sit normally on the sofa.
“I suspect the first spell had something to do with making me not notice the rest,” he said, frowning. “I got to the restaurant late, and there was already a water glass on the table. She might have put a potion in it to make me less aware. It wouldn’t have taken much.”
“Now that I think about it, it was weird how much you let her touch you,” Rod said, nodding in thought. “You don’t normally go in for someone who keeps tapping on your hand while they talk.”
“I hate that,” Owen said. “She did that to me?”
“Yeah, like she wanted to make sure she kept your attention. And I can’t believe I didn’t notice it at all. We should have checked you for enchantments after that meeting. Katie, maybe you’d better talk to Sam about making that a policy. If you meet with an informant or anyone we don’t entirely trust, you get scanned for spells. Heck, maybe we should just scan employees on the regular.”
“We have a lot of employees who use spells on themselves on an ongoing basis,” I reminded him. He was one of them.
“Well, we could scan people for spells done by other people.”
“I don’t think it’ll come up very often,” Owen said after taking another sip of water. “Doing magic like that violates a number of codes.”
“Yeah, and so does doing magic in public, which is what their whole scheme is about,” I said. I gasped. “But that gives us something we’ve got on her, doesn’t it? Her doing those spells on Owen means she broke the rules, and we can get her for that, like using tax evasion to get Al Capone. We do have some kind of evidence, don’t we?”
“We could get her for that, I guess,” Rod said. “But I don’t think it’ll stop the big-picture plans. It’ll just warn them that we know.” Turning to Owen, he said, “Speaking of which, we were going to leave this up to you. How do you want to deal with Matilda? If you go near her, she’ll know the spells have been undone, which means she’ll know we’re on to her. But if you avoid her, she may also realize we figured it out.”
“I think I could create an aura that mimics the sense of the spells,” Owen said.
“Or you could just stay away from her,” I chimed in. “You’ve got good excuses. She knows your bachelor party is this weekend, so she’ll know you’re busy, and she has to know that if she used magic to compel you to skip something like that to meet with her, we’d know something was up.”
“Good point,” Owen said. “We can worry about that later.”
“And since we know you’re not under any spells, you have zero excuses for anything that happens at your bachelor party,” I teased.
“We’re going to a baseball game. What kind of trouble can I get into?” Owen asked.
“You’re going to a baseball game with me,” Rod said with a wicked grin.
The way I figured, this meant I had maybe four days to bust Matilda before I had to worry about Owen walking into the lion’s den. I was afraid I’d exhausted most of my options, and I still didn’t have enough proof to go on. There was one last thing I could try, and I knew no one magical would like it, but I figured they wouldn’t know until I’d already done it and either succeeded or failed.
The next morning, I called the TV station, crossing my fingers in hopes that Carmen would be there. I thought it was a good omen when she was. “Hi, it’s Kathleen, from all those crazy events,” I said. Fortunately, she didn’t hang up immediately.
“Yeah?” she said, her voice sounding guarded.
“There’s something I need to show you that I think you’ll find interesting. It’s not a story, just something that might make everything make more sense.”
“Like what?”
“I really can’t tell you. I have to show you. In person.”
