It sounded pretty similar to the way this battle had started, with a brilliant and eccentric young wizard named Kane Morgan who was fired from MSI when he and his wife began using dark magic no other wizard dared to tap into. It sounded far worse than today’s magical mischief. The book said that the Council had discussed restoring Merlin, but before they had a chance, the Morgans tried to seize power, and it was another young MSI wizard, one Ivor Ramsay, who saved the day by defeating the bad guys in a surprise attack.
“Yeah, that would get you a fast promotion,” I muttered to myself. And it would explain the hero worship, as well as Owen’s resistance to my suspicions. It was like I’d accused Luke Skywalker of being Darth Vader, even after he’d destroyed the Death Star. I could even see why they might have jumped the gun on bringing Merlin back for something relatively minor this time around. They were afraid of taking too many chances.
There wasn’t much more about Ramsay, aside from him being promoted to company president about twenty years ago and being chairman of the Council for a couple of terms. As Owen said, he’d had just about all the power anyone could want. He didn’t need to concoct an elaborate scheme to take over when he was already there.
But still, there was something about Ramsay that just bugged me, and if he was behind this, then that meant he had something far more nefarious than normal power in mind.
The part about Merlin’s return was still sketchy, like it was a placeholder article that would be fleshed out when enough time had passed to lend historical perspective. Not only did this book get added to, it expanded along the way. I could have sworn some of the information about that last crisis hadn’t been there the last time I read this book.
I put the books back where I’d found them, made sure the folders on top of them were back in place, and then left Owen’s office, still deep in thought. I went home early because there wasn’t much I could do with everyone else gone, and my to-do list of things I needed from other people was haunting me. The subway was emptier than normal—even accounting for non-rush-hour ridership. And then it occurred to me that there were no obviously magical people on board. Not a single pair of wings, no pointed ears, no gnomes, and no one was causing magical mischief. It was as though the entire magical population of Manhattan had vanished.
As soon as I got home, I called Marcia at work. “Is your office still flu-free?” I asked.
“So far, knock on wood.”
“My company has been pretty much wiped out.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m going to play Florence Nightingale for Rod after work. He’s such a big baby. Do we need to quarantine you?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know if there is such a thing, but this looks like some kind of magic flu. The only people I know who are sick are magical people, and I don’t know of anyone nonmagical who’s sick. Owen’s sick, too, and I’ll be going over there. I’ll leave a note for Gemma.”
“Keep me posted,” she said. “You have my cell number and Rod’s number, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you know what I find out.”
If there was a magical flu, I’d need Owen’s help to figure out what we could do, even if he was sick. In case I needed to do like Marcia and play nursemaid, I threw some overnight things into a tote bag. On my way to Owen’s place I bought a container of hot-and-sour soup from the Chinese restaurant next door to my building and a jug of orange juice from the corner grocery.
Normally, Owen’s door just opened for me when I showed up, since his weird brand of ESP told him I was coming, but the plague must have knocked out his magical senses—or else he was mad at me. I had to hit the buzzer, and I hoped I wasn’t waking him from a nap. After a long pause, a scratchy voice said, “Yeah?” over the intercom.
“Owen, it’s Katie. I need to talk to you. I’ve got soup.”
He didn’t respond, and I held my breath. Then the door opened, and I went inside and ran up the stairs. His front door had already opened for me. I found him sprawled on the sofa, his cat staring at him warily from her perch on the sofa arm at his feet.
I couldn’t blame her for her wariness. He looked like hell, worse than I’d ever seen him, and I’d seen him after he’d been practically ripped to shreds by a harpy. The circles under his eyes were nearly as dark as his hair, he had a day’s growth of stubble on his jaw, which made his cheeks look even more hollow, and he was pale enough to almost be gray.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he croaked, squinting at me. His glasses lay on the coffee table, and I doubted he’d bothered with contact lenses in the state he was in. “I don’t want to give this to you.”
“I don’t think you
can
give it to me. Not that I plan to kiss you right now, regardless.” However, I did have an urge to give him a hug. When he looked like this, he brought out all my latent maternal instincts. I cleared a spot among the books and papers on the coffee table and set down my bags. I opened the soup, stuck a spoon in it and handed it to him. “Here, this should open your head and give you some energy. You can eat while I talk.”
He pulled himself to a sitting position and swung his feet around to the floor. I sat beside him, waited for him to eat a few bites, then asked, “Is there such a thing as an illness that strikes only magical people?”
He swallowed, coughed, and said, “I don’t know. I haven’t heard of one.”
“I noticed that it’s only the magical people who seem to be sick. The immunes at work are the ones still going, and Marcia said nobody is out at her office. So either there’s an illness that only affects magical people or there’s some massive spell being cast all over Manhattan that makes magical people sick.”
Owen groaned and leaned back against the sofa, like the effort of eating a few spoonfuls of soup and listening to me had utterly exhausted him. I reached over and took the soup from him before he spilled it on himself. “I really don’t need this right now,” he said.
“I suspect that’s the point. We won’t get anything done while all our people are sick.”
“But whatever they’re doing is probably making them sick, too.”
“Unless they have a way to block it from particular people. It might be interesting to see exactly who is still up and around right now.” I started to say that Ramsay hadn’t shown up at the office, but then I wasn’t sure what that proved. It meant either that he was sick or that he wasn’t sick and didn’t want anyone to see that. Either way, this wasn’t the time to stir up that particular argument.
Owen rubbed his temples wearily. “If only I could think,” he muttered.
“I wonder how far-reaching this is—is it only Manhattan, or does it affect all magical people everywhere?”
He fluttered a hand vaguely in the direction of his desk in the front corner of the room. “Could you bring me the phone?”
I got up and brought the cordless to him. “I should make you talk,” he muttered as he dialed. “She’ll know something’s wrong with me, and I’ll never hear the end of it.” Then he cleared his throat and forced himself to sound normal as he said, “Gloria, it’s Owen. I wanted to see how you’re doing.” He winced as he listened, then said, “Yes, I am a little under the weather, but are you and James okay? What about anyone else? Yes, that was what Katie suspected. Okay, thanks, let me know.” He disconnected and handed the phone back to me. “They’re feeling, as Gloria put it, ‘a bit peakish,’ which probably means they’re barely getting out of bed. They have heard from neighbors who work in the city that they feel sick at work, but get a lot better when they get home. Oh, and she said you were very clever. That’s about the highest compliment she can give.”
“If we want to see just how widespread this is, I could call Dean or my grandmother.” My family has an odd genetic quirk that left most of us either immune to magic or magical, though we’d only just discovered that. My brother Dean was the wizard in the family, and we seemed to have inherited this trait through my grandmother.
“Call them,” he said, picking up the soup again.
I called the family store. Dean’s wife, Sherri, answered the phone on the second ring. “Chandler Agricultural Supply,” she sang out cheerfully.
“Hi, Sherri, it’s Katie. Is Dean around?”
“He’s out on a delivery. Can I take a message?”
“No, don’t worry about it. Is he doing okay?”
“Sure is.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“And how are things in New York?”
Of all times for my sister-in-law to decide to have a conversation with me
, I groaned inwardly. “Just great. I’m having a blast.”
“I’ll tell Dean you called. Want me to have him call you back?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll send an e-mail.”
I managed to get off the phone after another minute of chitchat, then told Owen, “The magical plague doesn’t seem to have reached Texas. And Sherri says hi.”
He shivered and pulled a knitted afghan off the back of the sofa to wrap around himself. I reached over and put a hand against his forehead. “You’re burning up. And I don’t know what to do about it if this is magical. Something tells me that your average cold-and-flu medicine won’t help.”
“It doesn’t,” he croaked. “Believe me. I’ve tried them all.”
“It seems to me that what we need to do is get you far enough away from the city that you’ll be able to think, and then we can come up with a solution.”
“I’m all for that, believe me. We probably ought to bring the boss, as well.” He pulled the afghan tighter around his shoulders and shivered again.
“Then we’ll need a car.” I knew of one person who had wheels and who might be in any shape to drive: Ethan Wainwright, the magical immune who was our corporate attorney, and whom I’d briefly dated just before getting together with Owen. I found my little address book in my purse and dialed his cell number.
As I expected, he was game—he was always up for a magical adventure. “It’ll be like old times!” he said. “It may be a few hours before I can get there, though. I’ve got a couple of things to wrap up before I can leave the office, and then I’ll have to swing by and get Merlin. I should be there around seven.”
While I was talking to Ethan, Owen had fallen asleep. I felt his forehead again and found that the fever was even higher. I wasn’t sure what to do for him. Would a magically induced fever really hurt him, or did I need to try to bring it down?
I decided that too hot was too hot, no matter what caused it, and the last thing we needed was Owen’s brain melting. I got a washcloth in the bathroom under the stairs, soaked it in cool water, then brought it back and placed it over his forehead. He moaned and stirred a little in his sleep, then caught my hand and held it, but didn’t wake.
I sat by him for the next couple of hours, rewetting the cloth when it dried or warmed up. I had a whole new appreciation for what my mom must have gone through when we were kids. As I held his hand and watched him sleep, I realized just how much I’d missed him lately. He hadn’t acted like he was angry with me when I came over, but he was probably too sick to fight. I knew I didn’t want us to be fighting. I liked him too much—maybe even loved him. I gave his hand a squeeze and whispered, “You’d best not abandon me, in any way, shape, or form.”
When he woke around six-thirty, he seemed surprised at first to see me there, but then I saw the memory return to his eyes. “Is it almost time to go?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Just about.”
He forced himself upright and said, “Then I guess I’d better pack. I might need help with the stairs.” He leaned heavily on me as we walked up the stairs to his bedroom, then I went back downstairs and put out some food for the cat.
He didn’t come back down, so after a while I went up to look for him and found him asleep on his bed, but at least his bag appeared to be packed. I nudged him awake and helped him back downstairs, where he lay on the sofa and told me which reference books to bring.
When I saw Ethan’s silver Mercedes pull up on the street below, I hooked our overnight bags and Owen’s bag of books over one shoulder and half carried Owen down the stairs. He was looking worse and worse, and Ethan would need to turn the car’s air conditioner to “arctic” to keep Owen from overheating the car with his mere presence.
Ethan already had Merlin in the front seat, not looking quite as bad as Owen did, but almost looking his age, for once. Ethan got out of the car and took the bags from me while I maneuvered Owen into the backseat. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was pretty heavy when he was practically deadweight. Once we were all settled in the car, Ethan asked, “Which way do you want to head?”
“I don’t know.”
“West,” Owen rasped. “Into the mountains. That might block whatever’s coming from the city.”
“Okay, then, west into mountains,” Ethan confirmed. Owen was sound asleep on my shoulder before the car reached the end of the block.
When we’d been driving a couple of hours, I thought Owen’s temperature had dropped, and his color looked better. Merlin stirred in the front seat, showing signs of life. “It seems to be working,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
By the time we pulled into a roadside motel that wasn’t the least bit scenic or picturesque, which probably explained why it was the first we came across that didn’t have the “no vacancy” sign lit, both our patients looked more human. Ethan went into the office to get rooms for us and came out with a deeply uncomfortable look on his face, just as the “no” in the “no vacancy” neon sign over his head lit up.
“There was only one room left,” he said. “I went ahead and took it because I don’t think we’ll find anything else in the Poconos on a summer weekend, and I don’t think we want to keep driving this late.”
“We’re not here for sleep and comfort,” I said. “We just need a place to work.”
“That’s what I figured.” He began turning pink in a blush worthy of Owen. “And one more thing—it’s a honeymoon suite. I don’t know if you know anything about the Poconos, but it’s a big honeymoon destination, and the honeymoon resorts are known for their excess of what some might call kitsch. Others would call it tacky. I guess this place is the low-budget equivalent of that. Anyway, they think I’m here on my honeymoon, so we’ll probably want to keep our other guests out of sight.”