Kiss and Spell (Enchanted, Inc.) (26 page)

But then where was he?

“I’d better track down Owen,” I said to Earl, fighting to keep my voice from squeaking with tension. “You go see to any people you have around here.”

“You don’t want me to come with you?”

“Not now. I’m sure everything’s fine. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”

Forcing down a rising tide of panic, I headed to Owen’s office. He wasn’t there. He also wasn’t at the checkout or at any of the other places I could usually find him. I ran up the stairs to the coffee shop, in case he’d gone looking for me while Earl and I were hiding in the stockroom, but I didn’t see him there. Oh no, what if they’d taken him prisoner? They might have assumed he was the resistance leader, based on his notoriety in the real world.

Florence was at the counter, and she still looked a little tense, though not as jittery as before. “How’d the meeting go?” she asked.

“I didn’t find him. He hasn’t come up here looking for me, has he?”

“Nope. Are you sure he’s in yet?”

I went over to the windows and saw him playing chess with Mac. My sigh of relief was probably audible on the store’s lower level. “I bet he lost the last game and couldn’t leave before a rematch,” I said. Forcing a smile, I added, “One of the benefits of being the boss is that no one can yell at you for being late to work.”

“Maybe you’d better go remind him that he has a store to run,” Florence said. Although she seemed to be trying to smile, her voice sounded quite stern. I felt certain now that even if she was working for Sylvester, she was secretly on my side. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have all but suggested that I go break the spell on Owen.

Forcing myself to sound like I didn’t have anything bigger to deal with than an errant boss, I said, “If you’re okay up here, I’ll go drag him back to the store and see what he wants us to do to get started for the day.”

“I’m fine,” she said with a careless flap of her hand. “Business is really slow today. Makes you wonder what’s going on, huh?”

I was afraid I knew all too well what was going on—and she did, too. But all I said was, “Be back in a sec.”

I collected Earl on my way out, in case I needed backup. I checked my pockets for my written memories, then, in a moment of paranoia, before I left the store I got out a ballpoint pen and wrote on my palm, “Check your pockets.”

“You’re worried,” Earl noted.

“I’m not taking any chances.”

When we reached the park, I paused to observe for a moment. There was none of the understated tension I was used to seeing between Owen and the Council men. Even though Mac was generally more reasonable, he had a way of keeping a constant eye on Owen. All of that was gone now. They just seemed like a group of men hanging out together in the park on a nice fall day. Owen looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in months. I almost hated to ruin it, but I knew that if he looked that relaxed, something was very wrong. I couldn’t imagine what spell would make Owen want to sit in a park and play chess all day. What if they’d wiped him completely and given him a different identity for this world, not just reset him to the guy who’d bought a bookstore to make bookstores cool again? I might not be able to break that spell with a memory or a kiss.

Gesturing for Earl to stay back, I approached their table. “Oh, there you are!” I said. I was aiming for casual, but my voice sounded high and strained. “I know they say that when the cat’s away, the mice will play, but what happens when the cat is the one away playing?”

Owen looked up at me, and for a moment I could barely breathe when his face seemed strangely blank, like he didn’t even know me. Then he smiled and blushed guiltily as his eyes focused on me. “Oh, I guess it is late. The store’s not burning down, or anything like that?”

“No, but people are wondering where you are.”

“I somehow doubt you’re running rudderless without me.”

“We might survive for a few more minutes, but after that, anarchy is a real possibility.”

He grinned. “Okay, I’ll finish this game if you’ll keep the masses from rioting in my absence.” He sounded like Owen, but then he’d sounded like Owen when he was under the spell before, only I didn’t know it then because I didn’t know who I really was. Now, though, I couldn’t be sure. He seemed to recognize me, and there’d been enough familiarity in his tone to indicate that there was some personal relationship there. But was he putting on an act for anyone who might be watching, or had he forgotten who he really was?

Whatever his status was, I wasn’t about to leave him alone. “Mind if I watch?” I asked, not waiting for his response to sit next to him on the bench.

“You might be terribly distracting,” he teased. That was a good sign. If they’d reset him, they’d kept his relationship with me.

“Then maybe I should flutter my eyelashes at Mac,” I said. Mac gave a slight smile but kept his attention focused on the game. I thought Owen might have pulled off the acting job, since we’d been pretending we were under the spell whenever we were in public, but this Mac was way too different from the way he was with self-awareness. They’d definitely zapped him.

It may have been the longest chess game ever played—at least, it felt like it. All the while, I searched for signs of who Owen might be right now. Was he my Owen, doing an excellent job of playing along, or was he the romantic comedy world’s Owen, who had no idea he was a wizard trapped in an elven prison?

Finally, Owen won, and the easy laughter from McClusky and Mac at his victory proved to me that they weren’t themselves. I wondered if I should try to revive them, too, but decided to save it for later. We were probably safest if the elves thought their reset had worked, and undoing it immediately would be a dead giveaway.

Owen said his good-byes to his chess buddies and cheerfully came with me toward the store. Earl stayed just out of sight, so it wasn’t obvious that he was with me. We were just about to cross the street when I looked both ways, as I’d been taught in kindergarten, and I found myself looking one of the gray guys right in the eye.

There was no doubt that he knew I’d seen him. He reacted, then he moved toward me. I grabbed Owen’s hand and dashed across the street, dodging traffic. When Earl turned to see what was wrong, he, too, couldn’t help but react to the gray guy chasing us.

They knew we knew, and they weren’t going to stop until they’d made sure we were back under their thrall. I wasn’t about to stand for that. “Run!” I shouted to Earl as I took off, dragging a protesting Owen behind me.

Chapter Seventeen

My only plan was to not get caught. That wasn’t a great plan, but I figured I had nothing to lose. The results were likely to be the same, either way, but if I ran, I had a slightly better chance of not being caught and reset. If I didn’t run, it was inevitable.

“What’s going on? Why are we running?” Owen asked, but to his credit, he didn’t stop running. My urgency must have been contagious.

“I’ll explain later,” I said, panting.

With his much longer legs, Earl loped easily ahead of us, clearing a path down the sidewalk. We needed enough distance from our pursuers for us to duck inside a building and hide before they noticed where we’d gone.

A glance over my shoulder told me that I didn’t have nearly enough room to maneuver. They were closing fast, and I was sure others would arrive soon. I needed to act now.

We reached a greengrocer’s, and I got an idea. This was a foot chase in a world out of a movie. So, like in the movies, I should tip things over in my pursuer’s path. The way ahead of me seemed to have been
designed
for such a move.

I kicked the front legs out from under a bin of oranges, sending them crashing to the sidewalk, then knocked over the adjacent bin of apples. For a moment, I felt bad about messing up the shop like that, but then I remembered that this place wasn’t real. The fruit was probably an illusion. I just hoped it was real enough to slow down the gray guys.

I didn’t take the time to look, though. After knocking over a rack to block the sidewalk entirely, I dragged Owen toward a nearby sidewalk café and turned a table onto its side so that its umbrella not only blocked the sidewalk but also obscured the view of what happened beyond it. Then we darted around the next corner.

The gray guys came around the corner, and now they weren’t just chasing us. They sent magic at us. I felt its approach but wasn’t sure what the spell was supposed to do. I instinctively used the protection spell Rod and Owen had taught me to block it.

When their spell didn’t work, our pursuers kept up the chase. “Earl!” I warned, but he didn’t seem too worried. He merely turned back, waved his free hand, and there was a huge burst of light. He then shouted, “This way!” and pulled us into a narrow passage between buildings. We ran down a set of stairs leading to a basement door and huddled at the foot of the stairwell.

“What’s going on here?” Owen asked, looking truly alarmed.

“I’ll explain in a moment, when we’re safe,” I said.

He reached for the handle of the basement door. “Wouldn’t it be better to hide inside?”

Earl slapped his hand away. “Not now.”

I hardly dared breathe while we waited for discovery. I thought I heard footsteps. Had they followed us into the passage? Finally, Earl cautiously raised himself enough to peer out of the stairwell. When he was satisfied that the gray guys were gone, he opened the basement door and gestured for us to enter.

Earl had formed a magical light after the door closed behind us. Owen jumped back from the light, startled, then asked, “What is that? And why didn’t we open the door earlier?”

“I didn’t know how long my blast would obscure their vision. They wouldn’t see us in the stairwell from the street, but they might have noticed the door opening.”

“There was no one there,” Owen protested. Then he looked around the empty shell of the basement. “What is this place? And what’s going on?” He sounded less alarmed than most people might under the circumstances, but more alarmed than I was used to hearing from Owen.

It would have been pleasant if I could have snapped him out of it with a kiss, but that hadn’t worked on me the last time, and I doubted either of us were really in a kissing mood at the moment. I also wasn’t in the mood for trying to explain anything. “Check your pockets,” I said. I suspected that under the circumstances, he’d be more willing to believe himself than me.

“What do my pockets have to do with this?”

“Just check. Please.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded square of paper. I held my breath while he unfolded it and read it. If it didn’t work, I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a lot of memories of him, but picking the one that was a surefire hit would be a challenge. As he read, he blinked, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.

Because I couldn’t bear to wait for the outcome and I couldn’t risk not restoring him, I said shakily, “On our first real date, the restaurant caught fire. Then there was the time I fell through the ice in the Central Park rink. Oh, and you had pet dragons.” That had to either jolt him back to himself or convince him I was insane.

He gave me a funny look, then his eyes focused and I could tell he was my Owen again. He swayed, and I rushed forward to catch him.

He fell into my arms, but more out of relief than because he was fainting from shock. “Oh, thank you,” he breathed in my ear as he held me.

“You’re you again?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Yeah, wizard and all. What happened?”

“Something must have gone wrong with last night’s operation,” Earl said. “Maybe they sensed the illusion our spy used. It seems like they’ve gone around resetting all the prisoners.”

“We’re now fugitives. We’ve entered the lurking in basements and attics phase of the resistance movement,” I added. “I was afraid they might do something more drastic than just resetting me again if they caught me, since they thought they’d already got me once.”

“How did you avoid it?” Owen asked.

“I think it was a mix of my magic being weak and me shielding it slightly.”

“Good work! So, now what, boss?”

My legs were shaking from our desperate escape, so I sank to sit on the floor, and the two guys joined me. “I guess we’ll have to start all over again, waking people up, and we’ll need a new plan,” I said. “That will be more complicated while we’re fugitives.”

“I’m not sure we should wake everyone,” Owen said.

“I take it you’re not going to revive Mac right away?”

“I’m not going to revive
anyone
right away. We need to lie low.”

“I just wish we could find a way to get word back home. We don’t seem to be able to get to their portal. It’s too bad we can’t make one of our own.”

“Maybe we could,” Owen said.

“Between worlds?” Earl asked, his eyebrows rising.

“Not big enough to send us, but a message, maybe. If I can aim it properly, we could send it where we’re sure our people would find it. It’ll take a lot of power, so we’ll need to revive enough people.”

“You know how to do that?” Earl asked.

“I’ve never tried it, but I know the theory.” Owen didn’t sound confident enough to reassure me.

“If the illusion was enough to get their attention, wouldn’t that kind of power be noticeable?” I asked.

“It depends,” Earl said. “There’s a lot of magic going on here all the time, just keeping this place running. What they noticed was magic they didn’t expect to be there. If we can hide among their magic, we might get away with it.”

The two of them looked at me, and I realized they were waiting for a decision from their leader. “Do you have any other ideas?” I asked.

“I don’t think Mac’s prison riot would help much,” Owen said.

“And it doesn’t look like we can get through a portal, ourselves. Sending out a message may be our only hope, and we don’t have a lot of time to waste.” I took a deep breath, then said as forcefully as I could manage, “Let’s do it. How many people do you think you’ll need?”

“At least five. More if we can swing it.”

I turned to Earl. “Do you think you can get that many without being noticed?”