“I realize that you value your friend,” Merlin said to me once the situation had been outlined, “but we cannot allow Mr. Vandermeer to give up his claim. That appears to be the primary funding source for the Spellworks operation, so we must have it in less dangerous hands.”
“Which is why they grabbed her in the first place,” Ethan said. “It’s an ironclad case. If it weren’t for the frog factor, I bet I could even get a ruling in our favor from a regular judge. In a magical court, she doesn’t stand a chance. She panicked, and then she resorted to kidnapping.”
“You’re not going to let them kill Marcia,” Rod said, his voice cracking with emotion. He really must have liked her, I realized. Maybe he had finally met his match. I felt bad that I wasn’t the one arguing for saving my friend, but I knew as well as anyone did what was at stake.
But then I realized something. “Wait a second—we’ve got our own hostage.” They all turned to me, looking blank. I tapped my forehead. “Remember my fairy parasite? We’ve got something we can exchange.”
“But do they care enough about Ari to be willing to exchange her?” Philip asked.
“They sprang her from our custody in the first place,” I reminded them all, “and it didn’t even seem like Idris knew about it, so his bosses must have done it, probably to keep her from talking. They must still be worried about what she might know and blab about, and if they aren’t willing to free her, you know she’ll be angry enough to talk.”
Owen stopped pacing and leaned forward, resting his arms against the back of a dining chair. “She might also be good bait to help us catch someone who would be a valuable hostage for the higher-ups.”
I knew exactly where he was going with that. “Yeah, Idris cares about her on some level, I think. We might be able to catch him by letting him know we have Ari, and then we can use him to free Marcia. If Ari knows enough to do damage, imagine what Idris could do, and he is their front man in all this. If they lost him, they’d at least have to make new ads.”
“He is most likely the weak link in the chain,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “We may not be able to determine who is ultimately directing this endeavor, but if we have Mr. Idris, we might be able to get information, or we could force them to make a trade if they worry he’ll give information.”
“Okay, it looks like we’re agreed that we’ll use Ari as leverage to eventually get Marcia back without Philip having to give up his claim,” Ethan said. “But we’ll need to find a few more ways to stack the deck in our favor.”
“Meeting them in the right place could help,” Owen said. “There are some abandoned railway tunnels under Grand Central that should be ideal. It’s possible that they have some base of operations near there, so they’ll think it’s their territory, but we have other advantages.”
Again, I was sure I knew where he was going. Being able to read him wasn’t always reassuring, I was learning. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Not that. Are you sure that’s a good idea? It might not still be safe.”
“It’s safe.” He didn’t quite look me in the eye when he said it.
“You’ve gone back to check on them, haven’t you?”
He turned red. “I felt bad about leaving them tame and then abandoning them.”
“Owen, they’ll find a way to follow you home someday, and your neighbors won’t be happy about that.”
“Would you mind filling the rest of us in?” Ethan asked.
“Dragons,” I said. “We found a nest in those tunnels, and the dragon whisperer here seems to have made pets out of them.”
“He’s always been that way,” Rod said. “You should have seen the things that followed him home when he was a kid.”
“I don’t exactly have them tamed,” Owen said, still blushing, “but I think they will do what I ask, and I can make sure nobody gets away from there without my say-so. It gives us some benefit having an extra force on our side.”
“Okay,” Ethan said with a nod. “Now, how do we want to do the exchanges, in what order? Choreographing this thing should be interesting.”
“We do them both at the same time,” Owen said. “But they don’t have to know they’re all there. Rod, you’re our master of illusion. You can keep them from seeing each other until we’re all ready.”
They went on strategizing, but my ever-increasing headache made it hard for me to concentrate. It sounded like my main role in all this was to stay out of the way with Ari in my brain until they absolutely needed me to prove we had her. I picked at the food on my plate, but it had gone cold. Then I remembered that I could temporarily do magic, so I concentrated on reheating my dinner. When I put a forkful of food in my mouth, it scorched my tongue. It seemed that there was a lot to learn in order to have the precise control Owen and the others had.