“I’ve sometimes thought that would be where I ended up if I screwed up another job, and then I’d be even worse at being a waitress than I was at anything else. And I was worried that if the elves and the wizards stopped dealing with each other, I’d lose my job.”

“Well, that’s apparently where your subconscious placed you in this world. The elves are up to something, but here, all the prisoners are on the same team, wizard or elf. For now, though, you have to go on like nothing is different. Assume everyone around you is in on it until we know more and can come up with a plan. Can you do that?”

“There are so many people here that I know!”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured, and we’ll take care of them when we know more. But just go on for now, okay?”

She took a few deep breaths, then nodded. “Okay. I can do this.”

I patted her on the shoulder. “I know you can. Now, are you ready to go back inside?”

“I guess. Your breakfast is probably ready.”

Back in the diner, the floor had been cleaned and the other waitress had put our meals on the table. “You okay?” she asked Perdita.

“Yeah. I don’t know what came over me.” She grinned and added, “Maybe all the grease I’ve inhaled in here just came out of my pores and made that coffeepot slip out of my hand. Sorry about that, Katie, Owen.”

“No problem,” Owen said with a thin smile.

When the diner staff had left us to our meals, he whispered, “How did it go?”

“She’s freaked out, but I gave her the scoop. Now I just guess we’ll have to see if she can pull it off.”

“Maybe I should enchant her,” he mused.

“Let’s see what she does. She does know a lot of people and could be helpful for passing messages here. I don’t see any of the gray guys.” I groaned. “And I forgot to warn her about them.”

“If you warned her, she’d pay more attention to them.”

“Good point. And now we know just how tenuous that spell can be. All it took for her was seeing us together.”

Perdita seemed to be pulling off the deception as we finished breakfast. She didn’t do any obviously amateur stuff like winking at us. Her persona here was close enough to her real self that there weren’t any obvious differences. If she could just remember not to use magic, I thought she’d be okay.

And if not, she’d blow the whole thing wide open.

Chapter Thirteen

Mac and McClusky were at their usual spot in the park when we arrived at the store. Owen winced and said, “I’d better report on what we found and what’s happened.”

“Do you have to?”

“I don’t want to give them anything they might take as a danger sign, like withholding information, and I don’t know how much McClusky saw. Maybe if what I say matches what he saw, he’ll relax a little.” He ambled over, with me in tow, to watch the game in progress. McClusky’s suspicious glare told me he still wasn’t convinced about Owen.

“We may have found the way into the elven realms last night,” Owen said softly.

Both Mac and McClusky looked up sharply. “Instead of there being barriers, the neighborhood loops back on itself,” Owen explained, “but we followed one of the gray guys to a park at the boundary, and it was bigger than the boundaries. There were a lot of those gray elves gathered there.”

“But you didn’t find the portal itself?” McClusky asked, nudging one of his pieces onto a different square.

“I thought the chances were slim that we’d be able to get anywhere near it, you know, with all those guards present.” A little bitter sarcasm slipped through in his tone, but I still thought Owen was showing admirable restraint in not ratting McClusky out for following us—or in not socking him in the jaw.

“Owen’s right, I can’t imagine that they don’t have the portal heavily guarded and warded. I doubt we’d be able to just get away that way,” Mac said. “But I’m thinking there’s more of us in here than of them. They’re counting on us not fighting back or trying to escape. If we get enough people snapped out of the spell and working together, we might be able to overwhelm them and force them to let us go. Start reviving people, but keep it quiet, and make sure they keep it quiet. We’ll operate as cells for now. Each person should only know those he revived, not anything beyond that. Unless you broke the spell on someone, assume in all interactions that the person is still bewitched.”