They all turned to me, and I wished I hadn't spoken. "Katie, do you have any ideas?"
Merlin asked.
I shook my head. "Sorry, but I can't think of anything right now. It seems like our real differentiator is that our spells can't be used to do harm. The people who don't want to do harm or use other people won't be interested anyway, and nothing we say will influence the people who do want to use others. 'Just say no' wasn't very effective for Nancy Reagan, and I doubt it will help us much."
I was sure I saw disappointment in Merlin's eyes, and I felt bad for letting him down.
I'd let myself get a big head from my earlier successes and had managed to forget that I was a small-town girl with a business degree and a year working as a marketing assistant. "I'm sorry," I said after a while. "I'll have to think about it."
"Please do," Merlin said, and I fought to blink back tears. I turned away from Merlin to see Owen looking at me with compassion in his eyes. I realized he was in pretty much the same boat I was, where all his previous successes meant next to nothing now.
"How long until you have an effective counterspell that will render this one meaningless?" Merlin asked him.
"I don't know. I'm not sure we ever will. As I said, this was the spell he was working on when he left, and we've been looking for ways to counter it ever since then, yet we still haven't come up with anything. I've been over all of his source material. I've taken that spell apart and looked at it inside out and upside down. I'm afraid it's airtight."
"No spell is perfect. You can find a weakness." This was a whole new side to Merlin that I hadn't seen before. Until now, although I knew intellectually that this was the Merlin, it hadn't really sunk in that this was the man who had put Arthur on the throne, who had been instrumental in all those great deeds they still told stories about. I could see that legend in the man who sat at the head of the table now, and it was rather intimidating.
Owen flinched, a flush spreading upward from his collar, and he nodded. "I'll keep at it."
"Minerva?"
She shrugged. "Still nothing. I'm not getting any portents, one way or another, which means the situation is still in flux. We can influence the outcome."
"We'll get the sales force out on the streets, with verifiers to see where and how this stuff is selling," Mr. Hartwell said. "I can even call in some old debts and get customer names, so we know who to track." He must not have wanted Merlin coming down on him, so he was being proactive with the information.
"Good," Merlin said curtly. "If he succeeds here, then we know he'll continue trying.
We can notallow this to succeed. We had these problems in my time, and it nearly tore Britain apart. I've read enough of the history I've missed to know the same thing has happened here, and fairly recently." That caught my attention. Had there been other magical wars the rest of the world didn't know about? Then maybe this situation wasn't as dire as I'd feared, since we'd all clearly survived. I made a mental note to go back to reading those books Owen had loaned me.
"But this is the first challenge we've faced that's come in business form," Merlin continued. "That gives it the slightest aura of legitimacy, which makes it appealing to those who might be wavering between light and dark. Few of those would sign up for the side of evil in a magical war, but give them a legitimate-looking product, and they'll be tempted. Corrupt them a little bit, and it's easy to corrupt them further. We must stop this now." I felt a surge of magical charge at his words and shivered.
Okay, so maybe the situation was as dire as I feared.
I racked my brain for a way I could help, but I was getting nothing. I couldn't see a
"Don't do bad magic" campaign going over too well. But what else could we do if we couldn't imply that the competition had shoddy spells? As I'd said, the people who'd be into this sort of thing already knew this was bad and didn't care.
I rewound the meeting to that point in my brain, searching for anything I might be able to use. Something Owen had said triggered a vague memory of something recent that hadn't been important or meaningful enough to think about at the time.
But now it just might do the trick.
I was almost afraid to bring it up. What if they'd already considered, and then rejected, this idea long ago? Or worse, what if they'd considered and tried it, and it hadn't worked? It was so obvious, but I'd learned that what was obvious to me wasn't always obvious to people who for all intents and purposes lived in an entirely different world.
Oh hell, it was worth a shot. I cleared my throat. "I might have an idea."
sixteen
Every head in the room turned to stare at me, and for a second I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. "You may have already thought of this, but I haven't heard anyone bring it up yet." I licked my lips and wished I had a glass of water handy for wetting my suddenly dry throat. "My world has its own powers, you know. And like magic, some of them can be used for good or for evil. For example, lawyers."
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn't going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. "What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?" Mr. Hartwell asked.
"Lawyers can stop just about anything. Tie it up in court, and nobody gets anywhere for ages. That could buy you the time you need to come up with a better way of fighting this. I'm no expert, but you might have an intellectual property case."
"What's that?" Owen asked. The flicker of hope in his eyes gave me the courage to keep going.
"Anything an employee develops while working here belongs to the company, not to the employee. Surely you have some language to that effect in employment agreements."
Owen nodded. "Especially in R and D."
"The point of that is to keep an employee from developing something on company time, using company resources, then selling it himself. And that seems to be what Idris is doing. He's taking something he developed here and using it to create his own products. You might be able to make him stop that."
"How do we do that?" Merlin asked.
"I'm not sure, but I may know someone who would know. I'll have to check. It could take a couple of days." I was going out on a limb here, basing my grand idea for saving the world on a blind date my roommate had once had, but this situation sounded exactly like the one he'd described in his dinner table conversation.
"Please do check, then report as soon as possible."
The meeting broke up, and we all went back to our respective offices with our individual tasks. I'd felt exhilarated before, when my proposal for a marketing plan had been accepted, but now I was scared. What if it didn't work? These were awfully big stakes to hinge on something so vague.
I decided to wait until I got home to talk to Marcia. The three of us sat around the dinner table that night, still talking about the results of my Friday night date. "I don't know what you did to him, Katie, but he wouldn't even look at me today," Gemma said with a laugh.
"Oh, he's just worried she'll be hurt if she hears he doesn't want to call her again,"
Marcia said.
"Sorry that one didn't work out for you, hon. We'll have to try again," Gemma said, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder. "Maybe Philip has a friend."
Philip's friends were probably starting to hibernate—or whatever it is frogs do—for the winter. Or else they were all in retirement homes, if they dated from his prefrog days. "Actually, I may have an idea," I said, figuring this was as good an opening as I was likely to get. "Marce, you aren't going to call that Ethan guy you were matched up with a while back, are you?"
She frowned. "Which one was he?"
"Intellectual property attorney, tall, glasses, brainy. It was the night all of us went out with Connie and Jim."