Apparently it was, because I still hadn’t heard from him. With Owen, that wasn’t all that unusual. I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately not talking to me or just being his workaholic self. Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer and trudged upstairs to the executive suite. Trix wasn’t at her desk, so I went to the small office off to the side that used to be mine.
“What are you doing here?” a voice behind me screeched. The owner of the voice whipped around to block me from going further into the office.
I had to swallow a couple of times before I could speak because just thinking these words put a bad taste in my mouth. “I need your help.”
She snorted in disdain. “That conference is your job. If you can’t handle it, don’t ask me to clean up after you.”
“This isn’t about the conference. I just need some information.” I decided to try flattery, much as it pained me to do so. “You’ve worked here a lot longer than I have, so I thought you’d have some perspective on company history.”
Putting one hand on her hip, she sneered and asked, “Don’t you have your boyfriend for that?”
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to take a few deep breaths. She seemed determined to make this as difficult as possible for me. “I actually need a nonmagical perspective—an immune perspective.” That surprised her enough that when I stepped forward into her office, she didn’t block me. I shut the door and asked softly, “What do you think about Ivor Ramsay?”
I never thought I’d see Kim go speechless, but she did. Her mouth hung open, and she lost her usual haughty air. With a furtive glance at the closed door behind me, she whispered, “Please tell me I’m not the only one who can’t stand that man.”
“I think we need to talk,” I said.
“Want to go get coffee?” she asked, suddenly sounding so perky that I was afraid the body snatchers had invaded again.
“Sure! Let’s go!” I replied, matching her in perkiness and hoping that the invitation was about talking away from the office rather than a plan to kill me and dump my body in the Hudson River.
We went to a coffee shop around the corner from the office building. I didn’t even have to ask a question to get Kim started. “He’s driving me crazy!” she said as soon as we got our drinks and sat at a table in the corner. “He just shows up, with no appointment, and Trix lets him in without even checking with the boss. But the boss doesn’t complain, either, and it messes up the schedule for the whole day. I’m the one who then has to rearrange everything.”
“That must be annoying,” I said, grateful for once that I didn’t have my old job back. “Does he show up often?”
“Practically every day.”
“And how long has that been going on?”
“It started just before you got back—before the boss went to Texas.” She frowned suddenly. “Why do you want to know all this?”
“He’s getting the boss to agree to things I never would have expected.”
She glanced around the room, then leaned forward and dropped her voice into a whisper that barely carried across the table, even though we were both carefully avoiding using names. “Do you think it’s a spell that makes people do what he wants?”
“Maybe. Did you know him earlier, when he was in charge?”
“I didn’t work closely with him, but I was often asked to provide verification at his meetings.” Most magical immunes at the company worked as verifiers who made sure that magic wasn’t used to hide or change things in business interactions. She sat up straighter and gave me a haughty look that reassured me that this was still the same old Kim. “He asked for me by name.”
“What kind of president was he?”
“He was hands-on—he did a lot of walking around the company, checking in on every department, even Verification. But in a friendly way, not micromanaging. He really did seem to know everyone, all the way up from the mailroom.”
My suspicious mind thought that was a good way to conduct industrial espionage on his own company in preparation for a long-term scheme he was developing, but even I thought that sounded a little far-fetched. “What about after the boss was brought in?”
“He stayed on for a few months until the boss figured out the language and had a sense of what was going on with the company, and then he retired. I know they were both in many of the meetings I went to for a while, but the boss didn’t say much then.”
“Was the idea always to turn things over to the boss?”