by Molly Harper
Aaron whipped his messenger bag over his head and dropped it onto his desk. “Oh, you know that they’re going to eventually ask us to elect a project leader. And by virtue of being early and working before our first day of real work starts, you are hereby elected. Jordan, any arguments?”
Jordan shook her rainbow head as she set up a mini-TARDIS play set next to her phone. “Nope.”
“Majority rules!” Aaron crowed.
“What if Marty wants to vote?” I asked.
“Trust me, Marty will vote for you,” Jordan muttered.
“I’ll vote for what?” Marty asked.
“To make Gigi project leader,” Aaron said. “To start off our time at the Council right, I think we should be proactive in shunting responsibility off on one of our own.”
“Oh.” Marty gave me a shy smile. “Sure. I think Gladiola would do a great job.”
I caught sight of Jordan rolling her eyes behind Marty’s back.
I laughed. “OK, well, as your dubiously elected leader, I say everybody should sit down and get to work. The Council wants a beta version of the program by the end of next year. If we want our portion to be ready by the end of next summer, we’re going to have to get cracking.”
“Wow, give a girl a little authority, and she goes straight for the dictatorship,” Aaron muttered.
“Shut it,” I said, smacking his shoulder with my files. “Now, if you guys want to look at the basic sketch I saved on the server and let me know what you think, I’d appreciate it. Make suggestions. Make changes. Make up your own, and we’ll let them fight it out cage-match style. But according to this scary timeline tacked up on the wall, we need to have something to show the regional supervisor in weeks.”
“Workplace violence!” Aaron cried, rubbing at his shoulder. But he turned toward his monitor and logged in. Jordan shrugged and did the same. Marty gave me one last big smile and set about organizing his desk. He was the last to get to work, but eventually he started tapping away at his keyboard.
I was cautiously proud of myself. Project leader for less than an hour, and my team was already on track. Maybe it was some sort of great karmic repayment for everything in my personal life falling to crud.
To test out how the information would be sorted, I needed to enter data from one of the hundreds of genealogical files the archivists were so eager to off-load into the corner of our office. I ran my fingertips over the madly tilted stack of manila folders. Opening any one of them could open my brain up to secrets that some vampire could decide were worth killing me over. It felt as if Pandora’s box had been reduced to office debris. Determined to choose at random, I shoved my hand into the pile—and promptly knocked half of the stack onto the floor.
“Let me help you with that!” Marty sprang to his feet and dashed over to help me gather the displaced files from the carpet. In fact, he was so eager to rescue me from my clutter that his knee knocked my feet out from under me. Only quick reflexes and a well-placed hand against the broad side of my cubicle kept me from taking a dive.
Marty winced. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK. You were just trying to help.” I sighed, pushing up from the floor. “Thanks.”
“Are you sure we’re ready for data entry?” Marty asked, eyeing the mess I’d made.
“Oh, no, I just wanted a random family file to scan,” I said. “And I managed to create a file avalanche.”
“It could happen to anybody,” he told me, giving me a lopsided grin.
“I’ll stack the rest of these. You go do your thing.”
“You sure?”
I nodded while balancing the last few files on top of the stack. “I think I can be trusted not to destroy the rest of the records.”
Marty laughed and sauntered back to his desk. I carefully patted the folder edges back into place, noting a bold flash of color among all that beige. I pulled the red folder from the stack, careful not to cause another collapse. The folder tab was marked “Linoge.”
That seemed random enough.
I dropped back into my chair and cued up some Lorde on the music system, sliding my headphones into place. I opened the folder and found that most of the paper inside had been carefully blacked out with marker. This was not a genealogical archive folder. This was a disciplinary file. A really old disciplinary file. The paperwork inside was a photocopy, but the original had been old wrinkly parchment. What little text remained on the first page described a Pierre Linoge, a vampire who’d briefly lived in northern France in the eighteenth century but had been permanently disciplined by an earlier incarnation of the Council when his violent feeding frenzies threatened to expose the region’s vampire population. And while the names of his descendants had been redacted, the good news was that the heavy editing left only the barest facts visible, making it easy to pick out the vampire’s basic information that I needed to enter into the biographic program. I could at least give the index a test run.
There was one strange footnote at the bottom of Linoge’s report. It was just a few lines of text: “Linoge’s feeding excesses are described as contrary to his character by other vampires of good reputation. His friends note that the attacks started after he parted company with [redacted], a human known for practicing magicks both light and dark. It is possible his indiscretion was due to her influence.”
“Oh, sure, blame the girlfriend,” I muttered, tapping the keys.
Something about the file bothered me. Why the hell would they give us a file full of information on a dead vampire? In general, the “living” vampires were the only ones interested in tracking their descendants. And why bother giving us a file with so much information missing? Hell, the descendant information was redacted. What was the point? Maybe it was just thrown into the archive pile by mistake? It seemed unlikely, since the Council had put so much emphasis on securing the genealogical information.
“Is it working?”
Marty appeared at my elbow, making me jump, knocking a binder on top of the file. Marty was oblivious to my clumsiness, staring at me intently. I shoved the file into the binder and slid the binder into my bottom desk drawer.
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
“Great job!” he exclaimed. “Guys, we made the right choice for team leader!”
Aaron and Jordan had their headphones in place and their hands on their keyboards. We probably wouldn’t hear from them again until they ran out of Twizzlers.
“I’m sure they’re very proud,” I assured Marty.
Slowly but surely, I was coming to realize that having a grown-up job mostly meant saying things I didn’t mean.
4
Until you gauge the mood of your first staff meeting, it’s best just to keep your mouth closed and your head down.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
My third day of work was momentous, not because my team managed to outline a programming proposal to submit to the regional director or because I saw Nik again but because I took part in one of the scariest freaking staff meetings in the history of employment.
Around nine p.m., just as we’d hit our stride workwise, frumpy, prematurely gray Margaret Coggins appeared in our office and informed us that our presence was required in the conference room, immediately. But she didn’t tell us why, which was ominous and super-unhelpful.
Margaret was a human clerical worker who served as Ophelia’s assistant. She dressed like my fourth-grade Sunday-school teacher and seemed to have no measurable sense of humor. That made her exactly like my fourth-grade Sunday-school teacher. So far, our interactions with Margaret had been limited to her delivery of Ophelia’s “best wishes” and various signed employment forms, nondisclosure reminders, and parking validations. Since she didn’t mention my “little problem” in the parking lot—and my coworkers didn’t seem to know about it—I supposed part of Ophelia’s best
wishes included the discretion she’d promised the night of the incident. I found that comforting.
Jordan was reluctant to leave work while the code was flowing, so Aaron threatened to delete all of the Gaslight Anthem from her playlists and then lured her away from her desk with a trail of Twizzlers.
“I don’t like things that make me uncomfortable!” she cried plaintively, as Aaron dragged her into the hallway.
Marty shook his head at their antics while I grabbed a notebook. I wasn’t sure what sort of information session or potential massacre we were being summoned to, but surely someone should be taking notes.
While we expected to be shown into the grim, windowless conference room of our orientation, we ended up falling in step with the herd of office drones past that door to a subfloor we hadn’t explored during the orientation. We entered a sort of shallow amphitheater, large enough to seat the sixty or so people shuffling about awkwardly, but not so spacious that you couldn’t make direct eye contact with the people standing on the dais at the front of the room. And those people happened to include Nik, who was standing behind Ophelia, a silent, expressionless tower of Russian, like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV.
While Nik’s face remained impassive, I froze at the sight of him, stopping short so that Marty bumped into my back.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, as Marty grabbed my elbows to keep both of us from toppling over. “Sorry, Marty.”
“This seems to happen a lot,” Marty said, laughing as we dropped into our seats, just a few rows away from Nik and Ophelia.
Nik’s lip drew back in the slightest of snarls, his eyes flitting toward Marty and me.
“I’m a hazard to myself and others,” I confessed, giving Marty an awkward little smile, while not quite breaking eye contact with Nik.
Aaron and Jordan were already sitting with their heads bent together, whispering, speculating about the subject of the meeting.
Nik’s narrowed amber eyes stared a hole through Marty, who was blissfully oblivious.
When all of the employees, humans and vampires alike, were seated, the lights dimmed, and Ophelia cleared her throat pointedly. I couldn’t imagine what had prompted her change from her usual “innocent teenage extra who wandered off the set of Mad Men” wardrobe choices, but she was wearing a tight black silk blouse and black leather pants tailored so close I could have counted the change in her pockets—if she’d had pockets or bothered carrying cash, which she did not. With her hair slicked back in a high ponytail, she looked like a really classy dominatrix.
The employees’ murmuring came to an abrupt halt as Ophelia crossed her arms and tapped the toe of her knee-high black leather boot. I glanced at Nik, whose eyes rolled ever so slightly toward the ceiling at Ophelia’s dramatics.
“Good evening. I’m so sorry to have disrupted your work to call you here,” Ophelia announced, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all. “Especially since our summer employees are just now finding their footing in our little family. But it seems that some of our staff are not as appreciative of our trust and generosity as I hoped they would be.”
Marty and I shared a confused side-eye. It was natural, I supposed, to wonder whether your boss was talking about you in a situation like this. I tried to remember anything I might have done in the last two days of employment that might have provoked this response. But all I’d done was stab someone in the parking lot. No, wait, I had also looked into server folders that I wasn’t supposed to—which was definitely a violation of the Council’s trust—on my first full day of work. But surely all the Council officials knew about was the stabbing.
No, wait, that sounded bad, too.
I squirmed in my seat as Ophelia announced dramatically, “Someone in this room abused the resources of the Council. Someone here used his or her position to steal from us. One of the people sitting in this room is a thief.”
I relaxed ever so slightly. Of stabbing and snooping I was guilty, but I definitely wasn’t a thief. I would worry about my shaky morality scale later.
“I would like to introduce you to my associate, Nikolai Dragomirov,” Ophelia continued, gesturing to Nik with a flourish. “Mr. Dragomirov is here as a consultant to help us find the thief. And trust me when I say there will be no lying to Mr. Dragomirov. He will find you out, so it would be better for you to just come forward now in hopes of a lesser chastisement.”
Nik nodded, back to “gorgeous Russian statue man” mode. Somehow I didn’t think Ophelia’s idea of a chastisement would be a rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon and a scolding. What exactly was this “thief” supposed to have stolen from the Council? The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead had considerable resources, but I didn’t think much of the vampires’ vast worldwide fortune was being stored here in Half-Moon Hollow. Then again, this complex had about ten subfloors that we weren’t even allowed to talk about, so I supposed a Smaug-style treasure room wasn’t out of the question.
And how exactly was Nik supposed to help ferret out the thief? Cal had mentioned that Nik was an old friend, and Cal had served as an investigator for the Council for years. Did Nik do actual police-type investigative work? Or did he have some sort of special vampire power? Was he a mind-reader, like Jane? Considering the thoughts I’d had around him, I sincerely hoped not.
Suddenly, Nik glanced toward me, as if he could hear me thinking about him.
My eyes went the size of a venti lid.
Damn it.
“I need Sandra Matthews, Elliot Reyes, Su Tran, and Joseph McNichol to come up to the dais, please,” Ophelia said.
Slowly but surely, four Council employees made their way down the aisles to the stage. Sandra Matthews and Elliot Reyes were humans. But Su Tran and Joseph McNichol had the pallor and sharp features of the undead. McNichol, in fact, seemed paler than the usual vampire, but I supposed that could be an illusion caused by his pale blond hair and eerily gray eyes.
All four wore the same suspicious expression and ID badges that marked them as members of the “operations” department. They were in charge of ordering supplies, processing the center’s mail, and keeping us all in creature comforts such as fresh magazines in the waiting room.
“In the past four months, someone has stolen more than nine thousand dollars in copier paper, thumbtacks, and other office supplies from this office and sold them on eBay for a deeply discounted price. Imagine our shock and disappointment when the Web site’s fraud-management unit traced the account user’s IP address back to a computer in the operations department.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. All this fuss over copier paper? From the way Ophelia was carrying on, I thought someone had stolen the crown jewels. Nik eyed me and gave me the slightest shake of his head. I hid my giggles with a cough. If Nik was concerned, this was the time to engage my little-used discretion function.
“And since all four of you have access to that computer, we decided to be egalitarian about this process.” Ophelia held up a small parcel and opened it, fishing out a large box of binder clips. “We ordered this gross of binder clips through the unscrupulous user’s account and had it shipped to a local post-office box. This shameless, greedy thief thought nothing of using the Council’s own shipping supplies to mail the package across town!
“Mr. Dragomirov will be able to identify the person who handled it—” Ophelia broke off as McNichol bolted from the stage, vaulted over the end of the first row at vampire speed, and tried to escape through the back exit. Unfortunately for him, Peter Crown was waiting at the top of the amphitheater. Crown caught him by the throat and slammed him to the ground.
I shuddered. I did not like Mr. Crown. Turned in his mid-forties, during an age when young people shut up and did what they were told, he was by far the crankiest member of the local Council. He reminded me of every math teacher I’d had in high school. And I definitely didn’t envy poor Joseph, whose throat wa
s now under Mr. Crown’s shiny, stylish shoe.
“I do so hate to be interrupted.” Ophelia sighed. “Well, since Mr. McNichol seems to have confessed by cowardice, I suppose the rest of you are dismissed. Unless, of course, you were accomplices in Mr. McNichol’s scheme.” She looked to Nik, who shook his head. Ophelia rolled her eyes. “Sit down.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Crown had dragged Joseph to the dais. Nik took a step back, separating himself from the spectacle now that his role seemed obsolete. Crown dropped a cowering Joseph at Ophelia’s feet. I glanced around the room. While the other interns seemed as confused as I was, the long-term employees were restless, uncomfortable, unwilling to look at the stage. What the hell was going on?
“Joseph McNichol, you are six hundred and forty-two years old,” Ophelia hissed, as Crown grabbed Joseph’s fair hair and yanked his head back. “Old enough to know better than to steal from the Council. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I wouldn’t see you taking what was mine from under my very nose? I see everything. Nothing escapes my notice. You would do well to remember that.”
Ophelia produced a pair of flat-nose pliers from her boot, a perfectly ordinary-looking household tool. But Joseph started thrashing around in Mr. Crown’s grip, howling when Crown gripped his jaw and forced his mouth open. Crown took a vial of red liquid—blood—from his pocket and waved it in front of Joseph’s face. His fangs popped out with a snick.
“You know the punishment for stealing from the Council,” Ophelia intoned. In all this commotion, Nik didn’t move a muscle, either to help Joseph or to help Mr. Crown contain the office-supply thief. He didn’t seem at all bothered by what was about to play out just a few feet away from him. What had he seen over the course of his life that this didn’t give him the slightest pause? Hell, my teeth were perfectly safe, and I still had my jaw clenched in sympathy for Joseph.
“Noo!” Joseph shouted. “N—”
But Ophelia stopped his protest, gripping his left fang in the pliers. I’d expected her to yank the canine out of his mouth by force, but instead, she squeezed the handle brutally, crushing the tooth into powder. Almost everyone in the room seemed to wince at once, ducking away, covering their mouths with their hands. Joseph howled in pain, screaming as Ophelia took the other fang in hand and smashed it, too.