“Follow my lead and do as I say,” Roger said as we entered the lobby. His friendly smile never faded, but his eyes were cold and hard and his voice had a grim edge to it. He approached the receptionist. “I need to see Mr. Bartles immediately,” he said.
“May I ask who you are?” she said, raising the phone to her ear.
“He’ll know,” Roger said. He stood looming over her while she relayed the message to her boss.
“He’ll be right with you,” she said, hanging up the phone.
A man I assumed was Mr. Bartles came rushing into the lobby before she even finished speaking. He was pale, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. The poor man looked utterly terrified. Although I’d noticed the hint of danger in Roger’s eyes, I still found it hard to reconcile this reaction to him with the man I had to admit was probably the best boss I’d ever had. Roger was mostly so very nice. He wasn’t at all the image of the leg-breaking thug.
“Roger, I was meaning to call you,” Bartles said, wringing his hands. Either he had an unusually high-pitched voice for a man or he was so strained that his voice shot up an octave. He cleared his throat and added in something closer to the tone I expected, “Please, come to my office so we can talk.”
Roger followed him without a word, and I went along with them. Roger gestured for me to sit in the guest chair while he remained standing. Bartles headed toward his own desk chair, but hesitated and ended up standing, facing Roger. “I was meaning to call you,” he said, his voice straining to a higher pitch again.
“I understand you met with MSI,” Roger said sternly.
“Yes, they got in touch with me. We’re a valuable customer, so you can’t imagine they’d let me go without an effort.”
“You could have told them you weren’t going to change your mind.”
Bartles clenched his hands and glanced around, as though looking for help. “I felt I owed it to them, and they did point out some, er, irregularities in the contract you offered me.”
Roger raised an eyebrow. “Irregularities, you say?”
“Well, yes. Their verifier spotted some veiled clauses.”
“You let their verifier look at our contract? And then you believed what they said?”
“I, um, well, you see…”
I was utterly terrified that Roger was going to make me look at the contract and swear that it was all aboveboard. I didn’t think I could do that, not even to save an undercover operation. At least if things went wrong here, I could flee on foot to MSI. I might lose my purse and house keys and anything else locked in my changing room, but I’d be away.
While I was eyeing the distance to the room’s exit, Bartles surprised me by finding his inner fortitude. He stopped stammering, pulled himself up straight, and said, “Yes, I did believe them. They’ve never lied to me. You had hidden language that would have allowed you to gradually take over my company, and you’d enchanted the document to make it utterly binding—on me, but not on you. You could have broken the contract at any time. That’s not how the people I want to do business with behave.”
Roger’s smile seemed genuine. I thought for a moment that he was going to be reasonable about this, but then he waved his hand, and Bartles disappeared. In his place sat a small frog.
I managed to swallow my scream of shock. I’d seen someone turned from a frog back into a human, but this was my first time to see it go the other way around. Roger bent and very gently scooped the frog up and put him in his pocket, then rifled through the papers on Bartles’s desk, found what was apparently the Collegium’s contract, waved his hand at it, and a signature appeared on the bottom.
“There, that’s settled,” he said with a satisfied nod. “Come, Katie, back to the office.”
I followed him, wondering the whole time whether I should just jump ship, here and now. I couldn’t be a part of this. I didn’t know exactly why he’d brought me, whether he’d have made me fake a verification if Bartles had been amenable or if he was testing me, showing me what they did and watching my reaction. Maybe both.
I felt like I had a few seconds in the walk from the building to the car when I might have been able to make a run for it, but I reminded myself that the whole point of this operation was to stop things like this from happening for good. Quitting because I was queasy about being involved with one incident wouldn’t help anyone. Besides, if I wanted to quit, it would be far easier, if less dramatic, to simply not show up for work the next day, when I had all my stuff with me. I got into the back of the limo with Roger and the frog.
I didn’t know where to look, whether I should make eye contact with Roger or stare into space. Unfortunately, looking out the window wasn’t an option. “I imagine that was a little unsettling,” Roger said after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence. His voice sounded warm and gentle.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to hold back the “no duh” tone in my voice.
“I assure you that it was necessary, and he will be treated humanely. I’ll show you.”
“What did he do to deserve that?”
“He went against his word. This merely holds him to the terms of our agreement, and I’m sure he’ll eventually see it our way.”
What could I say to that? Roger might be friendly and pleasant and great to work for, but I was starting to suspect that the man was a sociopath. The rest of the ride felt awkward to me, a sensation that wasn’t helped by the constant croaking coming from Roger’s pocket.
When we arrived at our building, instead of going straight to our office suite, Roger took me from the entrance lobby to the floor of that atrium our offices opened onto. A garden filled the floor, with plants, trees, and a small stream flowing into a pond. It looked like a frog’s dream habitat, and most of the lily pads had frogs sitting on them. Roger removed the frog from his pocket and gently placed it on one of the lily pads.
“It would be cruel to let them out into the wild at this time of year,” he said. I bit my tongue to keep myself from telling him that turning people into frogs was already pretty cruel. “They wouldn’t be able to hibernate properly, and it takes time for the frog instincts to take over, so they wouldn’t even know what to do. We’ll release some of them in springtime.”
I looked around at all the frogs in the atrium garden. Were these just the people turned into frogs since the first freeze, or whenever it was that frogs would have gone into hibernation? I counted at least twenty. This likely explained where the missing people had gone. Was one of them Sylvia?
Now I knew that what I was doing was worthwhile. I had to bring down the Collegium so I could save these people and keep anyone else from sharing their fate. Not that I’d been very successful so far. In fact, one of these people was here because I’d tried to help. If I hadn’t shared that list with MSI, maybe they wouldn’t have intervened, and then Mr. Bartles would have only lost his business without the indignity of being turned into a frog.
But it would only drive me crazy if I thought that way. Maybe MSI would have talked to him again, anyway, and now I had proof of what they were up to. I’d have to remind myself of that as I continued this operation.
I couldn’t be sure if it had anything to do with what I’d just witnessed, but that same afternoon, Evelyn sent me an e-mail with links to listings for available company apartments for me to look at. Had I won my way into the company by not running screaming from Roger, or was this his way of sucking me further into the company, now that I knew too much?
Much to my relief, they were real apartments with actual addresses, not units in this crazy office building, so I wasn’t being completely warehoused away from the rest of the world. All of them were well beyond what I’d normally be able to afford—the kind of dream apartments the young singles lived in on television sitcoms. There was a midtown high-rise flat, a SoHo loft, a cozy West Village studio, and an Upper West Side basement apartment in a brownstone. None of them were close to where I currently lived, so they’d separate me from my friends—which might have been the point.
The West Village apartment was smallest, but it was closer to my current stomping grounds, and I’d always liked that neighborhood. It had almost a small-town feel, with its twisty streets and more human-scaled buildings. I might not feel quite so alone in a smaller place. I replied to Evelyn that I would like to see that one, and she responded with an appointment that afternoon.
For this trip away from the office, I had to go through the usual leaving-work routine of changing clothes, since I’d be going straight home from the apartment. The drive there seemed to take about as long as any other drive home from work, but I couldn’t be sure if that meant anything. For all I knew, the office building could have been on Union Square, blocks from my apartment, and we just drove around in circles on the way there.
A woman in the requisite black Collegium uniform met me outside the apartment. I sent the driver on, saying I could make my own way home from there. I couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when he agreed without protest. At least they weren’t trying to control absolutely every aspect of my life. The apartment was as cute as it had looked on the listing, and it was furnished in a way that was almost exactly my taste. I wasn’t sure if they had somehow done that just for me, based on what they’d learned about me, or if it merely went with the apartment, and the apartment was my kind of place.
It was small, with one main room serving as living room, bedroom, and dining room. The sofa folded out into a bed, and the coffee table was at a height that made it work as a low dining table, with ottomans that could be pulled up around it. The bathroom had been updated, so it had modern fixtures, and the kitchen was almost as large as the one in my current apartment. There were French doors and a small balcony overlooking the narrow, tree-lined brick street.
“I’ll take it,” I said without hesitation. In fact, I was rather worried that I wouldn’t want to go back to my old place when this operation was over. Then again, I’d be marrying Owen very soon, and his place was far bigger and much nicer than this. I wasn’t sure why I kept forgetting about that—maybe it was just too painful to dwell on it when I was separated from him.
The woman handed me a set of keys. “Here you are, then,” she said.
I blinked, startled. “You mean, it’s mine, now?”
“Whenever you like. You can take your time moving in, but we’d really like you to be living here full-time starting next week.”
When she was gone, I sat on the sofa, trying to get a feel for the place, but then I was too antsy to just sit there. I searched for bugs in the obvious places where they always were on TV—lamps, picture frames, vases of flowers—and looked for anything that might be a camera. Then I realized that if there was surveillance equipment, my search wouldn’t look good. But what did they expect me to think, given their paranoid security? Surely anyone in my situation would have checked, whether or not they were undercover operatives.
I walked a few blocks to catch an L train across town to my old place. On my way into the station, I noticed a man walking beside me. We had to part at the turnstiles, but then he matched me almost stride-for-stride on the stairs. I glanced over and did a double take, nearly stumbling, when I recognized Owen. He caught my elbow to steady me and hissed, “Don’t act like you know me.”
I assumed that meant he was in some kind of magical disguise. Even without a disguise, he was bundled up in a coat with an upturned collar and hat pulled low so I could barely see his face. “Thanks,” I said, the way I might have to any stranger who’d helped.
“Don’t mention it. Are you okay?” He hadn’t yet released my arm, like he was reluctant to let go. Only when we were at the bottom of the stairs did he move slightly aside, but then when the train arrived, he got on the same car. The evening rush crowd pouring into the car gave us an excuse to stand close together, our shoulders touching.
In fact, we were close enough that I could lean slightly and whisper in his ear. “They got Mr. Bartles,” I said. “You may have persuaded him to stay, but they went and turned him into a frog and magically forged his signature. They’ve got an atrium full of frogs.”
He looked at me, the alarm evident in his eyes. “You need to get out of there,” he whispered.
“I can’t, not when I’m finally getting something. They gave me my apartment today, so I must be in. I may start learning more.”
“That’s what you were doing in the Village? Sam gave me the heads-up that he’d spotted you.”
“Oh, so I’m being watched?”
“As much as we can. We’ve been trying to follow that car on your way to work, but we lose you every time.”
“Even the gargoyles can’t keep up?”
He shook his head slightly. “No. I think there’s some kind of obscuring spell.”
“It’s too bad you don’t have magically immune gargoyles, though I guess that would be impossible.”
The train slowed as it neared Union Station. “I’ll get off here, since it’s more crowded and confusing,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”
“You, too,” I whispered, but he was already gone, melting into the mob shoving their way off the train. As he passed me, he gently patted the small of my back, and I tried to etch the sensation into my memory to get me through the coming days.
*
The apartment came furnished with high-end linens and cookware, so there wasn’t much I needed to move other than books, clothes, and personal items, but I still brought my pillow with me, along with a suitcase full of clothes and other necessities, when I went to work the next morning. I figured it would be easier to move by limo than by subway or cab. I could stash stuff in my changing room and then have the car take me to the new place after work.
The apartment must have meant that I’d made it to whatever the next step was because when I was called to Roger’s office for a meeting, Trish was there, but there was no sign of Bex. Roger, as genial as ever, gave us a warm smile and said, “Congratulations, you’ve both demonstrated the kind of ability and drive that I’m looking for, so you’ll be continuing in consideration for the position as my personal assistant. The assignments in the coming days may be more challenging, but you’ll also have more autonomy and more privileges.”
I resisted the urge to glance at Trish and see how she was taking this. Since it wasn’t safe to talk about such things, I wasn’t sure how much she knew about this place now. Had she watched someone be turned into a frog? Was she on board with that sort of thing and eagerly seeking the job? We weren’t close, but we had become work friends. I hoped things didn’t get more cutthroat from this point on.
I was also worried about Bex. Since she was a magical immune, I doubted that she was down in the frog pond, but what had happened to her? Had she seen the frog thing and decided she was out, or had she not made the cut? Did they let people quit? We never learned anyone’s last name, which made it difficult, if not impossible, to have someone look her up for me and make sure she was okay.
As Trish and I left Roger’s office, I chanced a sidelong glance at her and caught her doing the same to me. Both of us turned our attention ahead. What did you say in this sort of circumstance? “Well, may the best woman win!” I said, perhaps a bit too cheerfully, when we reached my office.
“Yeah,” she said, but not with much enthusiasm. There was a slight crease between her eyes and a tension in the way she held her shoulders, but I couldn’t tell if she wasn’t keen on wishing me well or if she was ambivalent about moving ahead in the company. I was barely to my desk when she returned to my office. “Look, I know this place is weird, but I think it would be a good idea if we could find each other away from work. If I disappear, look me up, and if you do, I’ll do the same. My last name is Douglas, and I live on Eleventh. I’m in the book.”
Could I trust her? My gut told me I could. “My last name’s Chandler, but the phone at my place—well, my old place—is in Gemma Stewart’s name.”
She raised an eyebrow. “They’re giving you an apartment? I guess you got the job.”
“I have roommates who have some ties to MSI. I think they wanted me out of that situation.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But she didn’t look too convinced.
*
I soon saw that making it up a step was going to mean a real change. Roger asked me to stay late one night, and after everyone else had left for the evening, he asked me to go to the archives to find a particular ledger that had been lost. “I think it might have been hidden under a spell,” he said. “You should be able to see it, if that’s the case.” I got the impression that he didn’t want anyone else to see what he had me looking for, and thus the nighttime work.
He sent me off on my own, with directions and an access card. It was my first time to go anywhere other than between the changing room and the office or the office and the cafeteria without an escort. I was beginning to suspect that this building didn’t entirely exist in any one place but maybe was a mix of buildings in far-flung locations connected by portals. There were a lot of tall buildings in Manhattan, but none this tall and this big devoted solely to one company. That’s the kind of thing people would notice. They might or might not notice gargoyles that weren’t always where they were supposed to be or people with fairy wings, but they’d notice a giant building.
I found myself living that moment in the Beauty and the Beast film when the Beast gives Belle the giant library when I stepped into the archives. It was yet another space that shouldn’t have fit into any building I knew of in the city. The rows of shelves went up nearly as high as the atrium, with winding ramps connecting the levels.
Unfortunately, these weren’t fun books. They were records. I could probably have found evidence for all the Collegium’s bad deeds in this room, but I reminded myself that I wasn’t trying to find evidence to take them to court. I was trying to find out what they planned next. That meant I had to figure out what Roger wanted, why, and what he planned to do with the information.
He’d given me a general area where I was likely to find what he needed, which was good because otherwise I’d never be able to leave the archive. I was on the lowest level, where I thought I saw a couple of stone tablets carved with runes. As I climbed the ramp, I saw a shelf of cubbyholes, each filled with a scroll. On the next level I passed were giant leather-bound books. I climbed higher and higher, pausing every so often so I didn’t get dizzy, and at each level the books looked newer.
I was looking for the turn of the century—that is, the nineteenth century to twentieth century. These books were mass-produced ledgers and ordinary-looking cloth-bound books. Roger had narrowed it down to a single floor, but there were still a lot of books to look at.
I glanced at the note he’d given me. The book was supposed to be marked with a series of letters and numbers. I scanned the spines and saw that the books were in order. If the book was missing, it likely wasn’t where it should have been, but I thought it wise to check there first. A magically veiled book could be in the right place and still be missing.
I stood with my hands on my hips and surveyed the shelves around me. It might have helped if I had any idea of who had hidden the book, and why. Was it merely misplaced, or was it actually veiled? If it was veiled, then that was meant to hide it from most people, but surely if it was still in the archives, they’d have wanted someone to find it eventually. Otherwise, wouldn’t it have been destroyed?
I thought about how I would hide something like that and tried reversing the numbers on the label. I didn’t find anything in that location. I stared at the call numbers awhile longer, then had an idea. If I correlated each letter to a number, and each number to a letter, then reversed the letter and number sections to make it look like the other call numbers, then…
Wishing I’d brought a pencil with me, I did the decoding in my head, trying to keep it straight, and went to the right spot on the shelf. And there it was!
Since I was all alone, I let myself punch the air and whoop in triumph. The code was blindingly simple, when you thought about it, but combined with magical veiling that would keep any wizard from being able to read the proper label, it must have served its purpose.
I reached for the book, and sparks flew, making me jump backward with a squeak of shock. The sparks hadn’t hurt me, but there must have been a protection spell that would have kept anyone susceptible to magic from being able to touch it. I tried again, forcing myself to ignore the sparks. “Just what about you is so secret?” I mused, using the kind of tone I might employ to calm a distressed animal. Then I realized I was actually petting the book.
Whether the spell had dissipated once I took the book off the shelf or whether the soothing really had worked, the book stopped spewing sparks. I knew I should probably take the book straight to Roger, but he hadn’t said not to look at it, so I opened the front cover. It gave off one last spark, then settled down with something that was almost a sigh.
I couldn’t tell that there was anything special about it. It just looked like an accounting ledger to me, with columns of names and numbers. Why would anyone go to great lengths to hide this? I supposed perhaps that this could have been someone’s second set of books, or maybe this was a list of people the Collegium was leaning on for kickbacks. Make that had leaned on, since this had all happened about a hundred years ago.
I flipped the page, and on this one, it wasn’t just names and numbers, but rather a whole page of writing. The handwriting was difficult to read, but it looked like a list of events, with paragraphs of explanations. I couldn’t tell if it was a plan for future activity or a record of past activity.
Before I could get too far into it, I heard footsteps approaching. Hastily, I slammed the book shut and gave a satisfied nod. “Yep, that’s the one I was looking for.” I smiled as I passed the approaching person and walked like I was a woman on a mission. I had to resist the urge to look back to see where the woman went. What was someone else doing here at this time?
I was itching to read more of the book, but I could hardly do that while I walked through the hallways, and there was no way I’d get away with taking it to my office first before handing it over to Roger. I still couldn’t figure out what he wanted with a hundred-year-old record book, why finding it was a secret mission, or why this book had been magically hidden.
Reluctantly, I brought it straight to Roger’s office. “Here you go!” I said. “I think this is the one you were looking for.”
He looked up at me, and his eyebrows rose. “Already?”
“It was in a pretty logical place, once I cracked the code.”
His smile looked hungry. If he’d been in a cartoon, drool would have trickled from his lips. “You don’t realize how long I’ve wanted to find this book,” he said, his voice husky. If he’d sounded like that when talking to me, I’d have said he was trying to seduce me. As it was, I thought I should probably give him and the book some alone time. He shook himself out of his lustful daze and said, “I’m impressed. I should have sent you in earlier. You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Well, here you go,” I said, stepping forward to hand the book to him.
He reached out for it, and the moment his fingers came in contact with it, a burst of light blew him backward, tipping over his chair. I didn’t feel anything, even though the explosion happened right in my face.
I immediately dropped the book on the desk and rushed to check on Roger. He’d been thrown out of his chair onto the floor. There was a trickle of blood on his forehead, and he wasn’t moving. I guessed that he’d hit his head on the corner of the filing cabinet behind his desk.
At this time of night, I wasn’t sure if there would be emergency personnel on hand, and since he was doing this at night without wanting anyone to know what we were up to, I figured he wouldn’t want me to call for help. But what if he really had been badly hurt?
I knelt beside him and gently shook his shoulder. “Roger? Roger?” I asked.
Much to my relief, his eyelashes fluttered, and soon he groaned. “What happened?” he mumbled.
“That book seems to have some kind of ‘keep out’ spell on it,” I explained, “it created a blast that knocked you backward when you touched it, and then it looks like you hit your head. Do you have medics we could call?”
He sat up straight, then had to squeeze his eyes shut for a second. “No, I’ll be fine. Don’t call anyone.” He gave me a shaky grin. “It looks like you’ll have to handle this book for me.”
“It must be really valuable if it’s that well-protected,” I said. “Though that kind of security does kind of render it useless.”
“Unless you’ve got the right people on board. It belonged to the last person to rise unnaturally rapidly in the company, and no one knew quite how he brought in that kind of money. I’m hoping it will reveal some of his secrets. But perhaps we’d better tackle that in the morning.”
*
Sure enough, I’d barely made it to the office the next day before he called for me. When I reached his office, he reminded me of a child on Christmas morning whose parents slept late. He was so antsy with anticipation that he could barely stand still. “Come in. Please, sit down,” he said eagerly, gesturing for me to take his chair at his desk.
I sat down and pulled the book toward me. “So, what do you want me to read? The whole thing?”
“Let’s start at the beginning and see what’s there.”
He leaned over my shoulder so he could read as I turned pages. While he read silently, I skimmed the page. My eyes caught on the name “Meredith,” which was Sylvia’s family. The page detailed what her great-grandfather had done to Philip Vandermeer—on the orders of this book’s author—to secure funding for other operations.
“Yes, that should do nicely to start,” Roger said. “Vandermeer was released, but now I can get that company for myself.”
I tried not to gulp audibly. I had to warn Philip. But how?