Cosmic Balances Inc.

by Kristine Grayson

  Binky Innis aka Bruiser aka that Mean SOB had died in the last few hours of March 17.

  St. Patrick’s Day.

  Grint’s hands were shaking. He took the image of the woman, froze the frame and printed the image. Then he put the image in his scanner (for reasons he didn’t understand, his re-run imager and his computer were not networked), and scanned it into his computer.

  Then he ran the face recognition software, asking for a special concentration on leprechauns.

  She showed up after only fifteen seconds — a full facial shot without the hat. Her name was Erinna Gobra. Her eyes were that green and amazingly large, even in the DMV photo (although Grint wasn’t sure why a leprechaun needed a driver’s license). Her hair really was that black, and her skin that pale. She had thick red lips and a hint of mischief around the eyes.

  Triple threat: A real blessing, accepted, on a saint’s day, from someone who spoke for the saint. On St. Patrick’s Day, a leprechaun’s curse damned, and a leprechaun’s blessing blessed fivefold.

  But, according to the computer calculations, a fivefold blessing still shouldn’t have negated all those curses that B/B had received (and deserved!) throughout his weasly little life.

  Grint’s hands were shaking. He got up and went to the Pearly Gate’s streaming video that fed into the wallscreen near the door, and looked once again for B/B. There he was, pulling on the pigtail of a little girl who’d leapt in front of a truck to save an old man she didn’t know. The little girl was sobbing — not because she was dead, but because B/B was tormenting her.

  The line had gotten very short. Grint’s time was almost up.

  And he still didn’t know what to do. B/B shouldn’t be in that line, and yet there he was, shouting obscenities at the Mother Teresa clone a few yards behind him.

  Grint stomped back to his own desk. He studied the leprechaun’s photo, then asked the system for more information on her.

  She was a known troublemaker, out to break the CBI system. The CBI system was a sign of corporate greed, she’d said on more than one occasion, reducing the human equation to a series of numbers that had little meaning when someone found himself face to face with his destiny.

  She had given that blessing deliberately to a room full of drunks, because she knew someone had probably (sincerely) cursed them recently. She was trying to negate previous curses, and she went from place to place doing so — in and out of prisons, touching the heads of serial killers and child molesters, blessing them as if they had souls; going to hospitals and cursing newborns, just to throw the system out of whack (most of those birth day curses had been caught and negated, thank heavens); and doing crowd-pleasing blessings on important holidays, like Christmas, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, and of course, her personal favorite, St. Patrick’s Day.

  She’d been flagged, though. If Grint had had more time, he would have found her and been able to negate the blessing or at least reduce its power.

  But even with the flagging, he’d missed her, and he shouldn’t have.

  The computer had frozen at the moment of B/B’s death, right?

  Right?

  Grint grabbed his paper, and looked at it again. Then scratched his head and frowned.

  He was bad at dates. He’d always been bad at dates and times. He’d even been bad at them when he was (theoretically) alive. He didn’t celebrate many holidays, and even if he had celebrated a few, Sherry wouldn’t have let him go out last night because it was a drinker’s holiday.

  Last night.

  St. Patrick’s Day.

  First of all, this should’ve been someone else’s case. And secondly, this was March 18th. The day after. Hell, he’d gotten the download the afternoon after.

  And that was wrong.

  He was about to run through the file again when a chill ran through him.

  That brogue echoed in his imagination: May you be in Heaven a half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.

  B/B hadn’t gotten to Heaven yet. He was just in line. The Devil wouldn’t be involved until later in the day — and Grint didn’t want to see that temper tantrum.

  He’d seen St. Peter get mad at Stazy for the elderly lady thing. That was bad enough. But the Devil was known for his temper. St. Peter was known for being … well … temperate.

  Grint’s stomach rolled. He was about to punch the button for his supervisor when a puff of green smoke appeared in the remaining pieces of pizza. Erinna Gobra, the leprechaun, stood on top of a piece of pepperoni. She raised her arms and the piece of pepperoni flew toward Grint as if it were a magic carpet.

  The pepperoni landed on his shoulder, staining his white shirt with tomato sauce.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, and flicked her off. He’d worked all evening to prevent a stain, and there she was, the unwanted leprechaun, ruining everything from his day to his clothing.

  Erinna tumbled backwards and landed in the cheese. She got up, dusted herself off, and grinned. But the grin had a malevolent edge.

  “I don’t think we’re starting off on the right foot,” she said in that brogue. Only it sounded fake since she was so small and her voice so tiny.

  “I’ll say.” Grint had dipped one of the napkins in water, and was dabbing at the tomato-y spot on his shoulder.

  “You could’ve killed me,” Erinna said.

  “And then where would you’ve ended up, hmmm?” he asked. “Someone at CBI would be balancing your blessings and curses, and if you keep pushing me, I’m going to curse you with all my middle-management anger and power.”

  “Oooooo,” she said, stepping out of the cheese onto the pizza box. “Such threats.”

  “Or I’ll just squash you.” He picked up the nearest keyboard and raised it.

  She snapped her fingers and grew to cat-size, sitting on the edge of his desk. Her legs looked fine even at one-tenth power.

  “You wouldn’t want to do that,” she said with that malevolent smile.

  “What do you have against us, anyway?” he asked.

  “You?” she said. “I have nothing against you. I don’t like CBI.”

  Neither did he, but he couldn’t say that. He had a hunch he was on review at this job already.

  “CBI and its ilk are so impersonal,” she said. “In my day, blessings and curses were the province of magical beings.”

  “They still are,” he said.

  “The magical beings who were in charge of their own patch of woods. Or bit of river, or whatever plot of land they’d been assigned.”

  He was making the stain worse, so he quit dabbing at it. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long,” she said. “And it was a better system.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t do anything about it.”

  “I know.” She wrapped her hands around her knee. “All you can do is write me up. And I’ll keep messing up your systems, until—”

  Systems! She was talking to him so that the clock would tick down, and B/B would be in Heaven, and that half hour was critical. If B/B was in Heaven for a half-hour, he was more-or-less grandfathered in, and it would take an act of the Demon/Angel Board to toss him out.

  “Excuse me,” Grint said, and sprinted away from his cubicle. He was running for the night supervisor. As he hurried, he realized that a pizza box was coming at him at full clip. Erinna was riding it, just like she had that piece of pepperoni.

  He waited until she was close, and then he knocked her out of the air.

  Then he dove into the supervisor’s office, slammed the door closed, and stood there, plucking nervously at the napkin still tucked into his NASCAR belt, while he explained the twisted circumstances that had gotten a nasty piece of work like Binky Innis that close to the Pearly Gates.

  “Good work, Mr. Grint,” Charity said when he finished explaining. She pressed a few buttons on her system. Behind her, a screen lit up and, as he watched, the line near the Gates appeared. B/B was only three people from St. Peter when a hole in the cloud appeared, and B/B fell back to
Earth.

  “Isn’t he going to Hell?” Grint asked.

  “We have to reset a few systems,” Charity said. “That’s one powerful blessing your friend created.”

  “She’s not my friend,” Grint said.

  “Then why is she sitting on your shoulder?”

  He looked. She was sitting in the tomato stain. He resisted the urge to flick her off.

  “Get down!” he snapped.

  Erinna grinned at him. Those green eyes twinkled in a way that made him nervous. Sherry could probably sense the flirtation from miles away.

  “We’ve been looking for you, Ms. Gobra,” Charity said. “You realize that you’ll have to serve fifteen years in CBI’s review wing just to make up for this one offense.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Erinna said.

  “We have to. You know the rules.”

  “I hate the rules,” she said. Then she raised her hand and disappeared in a puff of green smoke.

  The smoke smelled faintly of mint. Grint coughed, and waved it away. “I could’ve caught her,” he said.

  “I know,” Charity said.

  “Why didn’t you let me?”

  She grinned. “Do you realize how automated this system would be without people like her? “

  “You mean you let her mess up as a check on the system?” Grint felt anger build. He’d wasted an entire afternoon and one favorite shirt because of this woman.

  “Her and some of her little friends,” Charity said. “Be grateful, Mr. Grint. Without people like her, you wouldn’t have a job at all.”

  He almost said he didn’t want the stupid job. Almost. And then he remembered his other choices.

  Besides, someone had just noticed him. A leprechaun had spilled tomato sauce on him and used him in her nefarious plan. Nothing that exciting had ever happened to him before.

  He cleared his throat, and resisted the urge to wipe at the stain again. “You’re going to take care of B/B?”

  “I will,” Charity said. “And congratulations.”

  “Huh?” Grint said.

  “You’ve been promoted.” She didn’t sound particularly pleased about it. “You’ve been reassigned to the Little People Division. Leprechauns, nymphs, nyads, brownies, and anything else that’s tiny and angry at their loss of personal power now falls under your purview.”

  “But I don’t know anything about these creatures,” he said. “I was surprised to learn that demons existed.”

  Not to mention minions and angels and God Himself. But Grint knew better than to say that. He’d said it once, and nearly got bounced to Hell just for having the temerity to say what was on his mind.

  “And look how well you’ve coped,” Charity said. “Now that you’ve discovered how wonderful and manipulative the little beasts are, you can start working on stopping them. Unless you like all that computer work…?”

  She said that last as if she knew he hated it. Could she read his thoughts?

  He shook that idea out of his mind. There would be nothing worse than a night supervisor who knew what all her little minions were thinking.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, wondering how working in an area he’d never heard of with creatures he hadn’t believed in was in any real way a promotion. “You know, though, I’d be willing to settle for just cleaning the offices.”

  Charity crossed her arms. “Settle. Settle’s a word we don’t like around here, Mr. Grint.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” she said. “And let me remind you that this is a corporation. We follow the Peter Principle here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, stumbling out of the office. He was tired and he wanted to go home and he wasn’t sure how he’d make it through the promotion. Did he have to finish the work from his previous job? He was too scared to ask.

  He made it all the way back to his messy desk when he realized that she hadn’t said St. Peter’s Principle. He actually had to tap into the Internet for it. The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Well, he was already at his own level of incompetence. He supposed he had just moved into a whole new realm.

  He’d finally gotten his wish. He’d been noticed.

  And he wondered if that meant someone had cursed him. Hadn’t Sherry said to him just the other day, Be careful what you wish for?

  Hadn’t she?

  Or had he said it to her?

  He supposed he could look it up on his rerun screen. But he didn’t.

  Instead he started in on the files that had built up while he’d been saving Heaven from Binky Innis.

  Grint wouldn’t be coming home tonight either. He supposed that would be the last straw for Sherry. And that clinched it. Someone had cursed him…

  …and he was getting everything he wished for, and finding, just like the old saying said, that none of it was what he really wanted.

  “Cosmic Balances Inc.” by Kristine Grayson was first published in Wizards, Inc, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman, Daw Books, November 2007.

  Following is the complete bonus story, “The Last Vampire.”

  The Last Vampire

  Kristine Grayson

  The last real vampire in the world sat behind the desk in his New York apartment, “apartment” being an awfully grand word for the 8’ by 8’ square room that didn’t even have a proper window. The only window, proper or not, was in the bathroom, and had access to the fire escape—which he appreciated, given his penchant for traveling via roof—and a view of the brick wall next door—which he did not appreciate, given his voyeuristic tendencies. But what was a poor—literally poor—vampire to do?

  He didn’t have a lot of furniture, not that he would have had room for much: a ratty overstuffed chair that he’d stolen from someone’s garbage, the essential television set with every cable channel possible, and his circular desk, with its five computers, three of which were hooked up to the internet—one on a DSL line (which cost a fortune), one on a cable modem (which he buggered off the neighbor’s system—just like his cable t.v.), and one on an old-fashioned phone line, in case of emergency.

  He was bent over the corner of his desk, the only spot without a computer, or a modem, or a mouse. He had the fingernail clippers in his left hand and was slowly, methodically, chopping off his lovely yellow nails—so perfectly groomed that one human (just before her untimely yet glorious death) had compared them to talons.

  No one appreciated talons any more. Plus it was hard to work with them. He’d been trying for the past fifteen minutes to put four AAA batteries into the time machine he’d bought down in the East Village (and yes, he knew the machine was hot; it wasn’t like he cared—who was going to arrest him after all?), but he couldn’t fit the batteries into their tiny space and get his nails in there too.

  The modern era was proving too frustrating for words.

  Which was why he’d bought the infernal machine. The twenty-first century had become too much for him.

  Women carried guns and knives and mace in their purses. Plus, these no-longer-fragile-flowers had also learned karate kicks and eye-pokes, and Adam’s Apple chops, things that hurt even the most experienced vampires.

  Men weren’t slacking either. They hit first, asked questions later. And more than one guy had figured out the vampire-thing too quickly. They’d looked for any sharp object, aiming for the heart, but willing to chop off the head if necessary.

  The last real vampire in the world had actually run away from his last so-called kill, screaming at the top of his undead lungs, while the so-called kill chased him with a pool cue, broken so that the ends formed a might impressive stake.

  Ever since, the last real vampire in the world had been stuck dining off of rats and stray cats.

  It wasn’t easy being a traditionalist any more.

  One of the AAAs fell off the desk, and rolled across the floor, finally stopping against the two-dimensional foot of Sarah Michelle Gellar in her Buf
fy the Vampire Slayer mode. The cut-out, which he’d stolen from the trash of a nearby video store, was only one of several reminders he had stashed around the apartment.

  He’d been keeping them for years: the original Nosferatu poster, now tattered and worn; a series of stills from the 1960s vampire flicks; Bela Legosi’s face, remarkably lifelike (deathlike?), hands raised, his ridiculous cape flaring out behind him. The last real vampire in the world even had a first edition copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with a stake which he had driven through its heart. (An act he now regretted, of course. He could have dined off – or, to be more accurate, rented off – it for nearly a decade.)

  Still, he needed these things, reminders of the problem—the thing that had actually caused the death of his kind.

  He felt like Richard Nixon, blaming the media for the way his life had come out, but in this case, it was accurate: if the vampire stories hadn’t gained an undeath of their own, vampires would have been able to conquer the world in peace.

  He wouldn’t be the last real example of his kind, chasing a battery across the floor of a darkened room, hoping against hope he had enough juice in this little awkward machine to change the entire world.

  ***

  Okay. So here was the thing: he could have gone the way of his contemporaries. He wasn’t the last vampire in the world. He knew that. There were dozens of others. But he was the last real one, the last true believer.

  The rest of these guys had sold out. They had become heroes—he spit even thinking of the word—basing their lives on the works of P.N Elrod or Laurell K. Hamilton. Or they’d become anti-heroes, basing their lives on the works of Anne Rice. Or, worst of all, they’d become tortured heroes, the Heathcliffs of the vampire world, made mainstream and cliched by those wimpy Buffy spin-offs: Angel and the misnamed Spike.

  Whatever these sell-outs did, they spent most of their time posing romantically in Village cafes, reading poetry, and taking an occasional bite from a besotted Goth groupie.