“Yeah, I’m right there with you.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You do know what our priority is, right? Keep that brooch safe and under your control, no matter what. Don’t worry about me. Guard the brooch.”
“I seem to recall that we’ve had a similar conversation before.”
“And I was right then, too. You saved the day by focusing on the mission.”
“Yay, me,” I said weakly. “But you know that leaving you behind almost killed me. I don’t want to ever be in a situation like that again.”
“I’m not saying that I want to be left behind and attacked so the mission can be completed. But I think it’s best if you have the brooch, and that means you’ve got to get the job done. And that reminds me, this is as good a place as any for that talk we’ve been needing to have.”
“What talk?” I said, trying to play innocent.
“The one you’ve been avoiding. So, come on, Katie, tell me, what’s wrong? You’ve obviously been unhappy about something.”
“It’s not you, not at all.”
“Okay, then, what is it? Because if you don’t tell me, then I’ll assume it really is me, and then you know me, I’ll mope. I might even clean my house.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Oh, no, we can’t have that!” I sighed, then said, “Okay, if you want to know, I think I kind of hate my job. It’s so trivial with all that’s happened to you and now this whole Eye business, but there you have it. I’m so bored I could scream. Not now, obviously, but this isn’t part of my regular job. It’s been sheer torture coming to work every day for the last few months, ever since we beat the last round of bad guys.”
“Why haven’t you said anything?”
“Like I said, it seems so trivial. And besides, I’m on at least my third assignment since coming to work for MSI, and I haven’t even worked there a whole year.”
“What is it that you hate, aside from the boredom?”
I had to think about that. The boredom was so mind-numbing that it was hard to get beyond it to see anything else. “Mostly, I don’t think I’m getting to use my abilities. You recruited me because I’m immune to magic, and that has nothing to do with my current job. Anyone of any level of magical or nonmagical ability could do my job. I have the skills for it because the only job I could find when I moved to New York was as an administrative assistant in a marketing department. It’s like, oh, I don’t know, say that they put you to work just setting wards. That’s something you’re good at that you’ve had a lot of practice with, but it wastes your real skill, which is translating ancient texts and ferreting out the parts of the old spells that might be useful.”
“I see your point. You are being wasted. Maybe you should talk to Sam about something in security. A magical immune might come in handy, and you definitely have experience in dealing with bad guys and solving crimes.”
“Security? Really? I’m not really the security type, am I?”
“Let’s see, in the time you’ve been with the company, you’ve caught intruders, revealed a spy, and helped bring down the bad guys while evading the opposition. Sounds like security work to me.”
“That could actually be kind of cool,” I said thoughtfully. “But you don’t think I’ll seem ungrateful to reject a job Merlin created for me?”
“The needs of the company keep changing.” I felt his shoulder shrug where my head rested on it. We were both quiet for a moment, listening to make sure our enemies hadn’t found us. Then he said, “I have to say I’m relieved. I thought you were unhappy that we weren’t spending enough time together. I know I can get obsessive when I’m working on a project.”
I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him. “Yes, I know you can get obsessive, which is why I try to find ways of working around it, like sneaking in early in the morning to bring you breakfast. If you weren’t obsessive, you wouldn’t be you, and I happen to like you a lot.”
“We will take that vacation, I swear,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” But I was smiling when he kissed me. A tunnel under a Central Park bridge late in the evening wasn’t a bad place for a makeout session—that is, if there weren’t multiple factions out to get us. As if to remind us that we probably ought to be a little more focused on our surroundings, Owen’s phone rang before things could get too heated.