by Molly Harper
Over tea, I explained my brief history with Nik, his spotty memory and occasional bite-y states, plus the various developments she’d missed over Christmas. Nola sipped her peppermint tea and quietly absorbed the information, while Jed looked at Nik with more and more hostility. Oh, goody.
Nola poured another cup of the jasmine green tea I favored and pressed it into my hands. “That doesn’t sound like normal vampire behavior.”
“Tell me about it.” I snorted.
“Why are we telling her about it?” Nik asked, eyeing Jed warily. He hadn’t touched the warmed bottled blood Nola had served him, as if he suspected that the land shark might have snuck into the kitchen to tamper with it somehow. “This seems like an odd conversation to have when we should be worrying about the approaching sunrise and the fact that they could report us to Cal and your sister for violating the unofficial no-contact order.”
“Nola wouldn’t do that. It would violate her ethics as a nurse. And as a medical empath. Medical empaths have ethics, right?” I asked. Nola shrugged. “Anyway, ethical quandaries aside, Nola can sense a medical problem just by standing near someone. Jane couldn’t sense anything wrong with your brain; maybe Nola can sense something going on with you medically, or magically.”
“It’s hard for me to get a read on vampires,” Nola said. “Different systems.”
“So maybe you can sense some sort of evil whammy,” I said. “This whole situation reeks of misused mojo. And if you can sense what sort of mojo, maybe we can undo it.”
“I’ve told you, there is no magical control-Z.”
“Everything’s negotiable,” I told her.
“I’m a little uncomfortable with this, Geeg,” Nola said. “If Iris doesn’t want you spending time with this guy, maybe you should do as she asks. No offense, Nik.”
Nik waved off her concern. “I am getting used to it.”
“Please, Nola, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” I said. Then I amended, “If Nik wasn’t really important to me. And as much as I respect Iris’s opinion, who I see is my business. What would you have done if someone had told you that you shouldn’t be with Jed because he could shift into a porcupine creature in the middle of the night?”
“That’s not really the same thing!” Jed protested. “I couldn’t hurt Nola. My claws and quills aren’t real. They’re projections. His fangs are very real and right in front of my face.”
“OK, what if your family told you not to live with Nola because she could turn you into a toad?”
“Actually, he did have an aunt who told him that,” Nola noted.
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Like turning her into a toad,” Nola muttered.
“OK, so get with the empathing!” I cried. “The sooner we figure out what’s going on, the sooner we can fix it, and the sooner I can stop acting like the tragic, put-upon teen waif in a reimagined Shakespearean rom-com!”
“Did you understand that one?” Jed asked Nik, who shook his head.
Nola looked to Jed, who shrugged his shoulders. She sighed, though she was warming up her hands, clearly intent on examining Nik. “Fine, but we’re doing this now, before I change my mind.”
“Doing what?” Nik asked, sounding more than a little alarmed as Nola crouched in front of him. “What is she going to do?”
“Relax,” Nola said. “This isn’t going to hurt in the slightest. But if Iris asks, I dug through his aura like a Roto-Rooter.”
“Roto what?” Nik’s indignant grunt was cut off as Nola placed her hands on his and closed her eyes. She winced but seemed to push through whatever discomfort she felt, blowing out a low breath. She stayed still and silent for a long while, so long I worried about Nik being caught in the rapidly approaching sunrise.
Nola’s eyes snapped open. There was this strange moment when I felt as if I was waiting at the doctor’s office to find out whether my husband had a serious disease. She shuddered and gave Nik’s hands a squeeze. “Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you’ve been cursed. There is a pall hanging over your energy, like a cancer, eating away at your intentions, your memories. It’s like little gray moths surrounding your head, blinking in and out of focus.”
“How is that the good news?” I asked, as Nola pulled a black medical bag from her end table and prepared what looked like a syringe and a vacu-tube.
“Because the curse means that he’s not a psycho who slips into altered states to give him an excuse to brutally drain you?” she suggested, swiping at his inner elbow with an alcohol pad.
“That is good news,” I agreed.
“I think that hurts my feelings,” Nik said, wincing when Nola inserted a needle into his arm. “On several levels.”
“The additional good news is that if it’s a curse, there has to be a way to break it. Those are the rules.” Nola attached a test tube to the needle and drew an alarming amount of Nik’s blood with quiet competency. The fact that I didn’t want to look directly at the needle slipping into Nik’s skin was yet another sign that I’d made the right choice in not going into nursing.
“Who makes up the magical rules?” I asked.
“We have a big meeting every year at a Hyatt in Jersey City.”
“I’m going to assume you’re kidding but accept that you might not be.” I watched Nola fill one tube and then another with Nik’s blood sample and asked, “OK, Nik’s cursed. What do we do about it?”
“Well, that’s the bad news. I don’t know what kind of curse it is. While you’re setting off a very strong ping on my magical radar, Nik, you’re not giving off any particular magical signature, which is rather clever on the caster’s part. Unless I was with you and the caster at the same time, I probably wouldn’t pick up on him or her as the originator of the spell. There may be a way to pick up on the caster’s energy without Nik or me being present, but I’ll have to look into it, give my cousins a call and see if they have any ideas. And I’ll test his blood, see if I can spot any abnormalities or poisons. It would help if I had Iris’s cooperation on that front, considering that she quite literally wrote the book on vampires and organic poisons.”
Despite myself, I smiled proudly at the mention of Iris’s book, which she wrote after her experience with Cal and got published through a small academic press. Bitten Botanicals hadn’t exactly set the bestseller lists on fire, but the profits were enough to allow Iris to pay her own way through finishing a vampire-friendly PhD program, something she’d always regretted abandoning.
“Could you ask her on behalf of a troubled but unnamed neighbor?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “And I won’t tell you to stay away from each other, because I think you should be the one to make that call.”
“Thank you, Nola, that means a lot.”
“Also, because I know you wouldn’t listen either way,” she noted, pulling the syringe out of Nik’s arm with a practiced air. Nik rubbed absently at the wound, which was already closed up.
“You’re probably right,” I conceded. “Nola, could a human cast a curse on a vampire?” I asked.
Nola shrugged. “A magical human or a regular human?”
“Regular.”
“Probably not. She could hire a witch to do it for her. But a nonwitch couldn’t pull this kind of power.”
“And is there a way to figure out whether someone’s a witch? Since you’re magical, can you tell just by looking at her?”
She shook her head. “No, she would have to do magic somewhere near me. You could have Jane listen to her brain, but that won’t work if she’s handy with a mental shield.”
“Can’t I just do some sort of forensic test, like swab her for magical residue?”
“On the next episode of CSI: Half-Moon Hollow?”
“Come on, there has to be something,” I wheedled.
“I’ll lo
ok into it.”
“It is possible that someone in my life is behind this phenomenon,” Nik said uneasily. “When you do the work that I do for the Council, you make enemies. If someone sensed that Gigi was important to me, they could have placed this curse on me.”
“Can you think of anyone specific?” I asked, even as the chill of dread crept up my spine.
“It would take a while to make a list,” Nik said. “A very long while.”
“Well, for now, let’s focus on the field that’s not so wide it terrifies me, OK?” I suggested.
“I am sorry, my Gigi,” he said quietly. “For a long time, I have lived without a thought to how it might hurt the people closest to me. I have not had people close to me. I am sorry you are caught in the crossfire. I can change.”
“I wouldn’t want you to change,” I told him. “Much.”
Nola slapped a Hello Kitty bandage on Nik’s arm, which was completely unnecessary, and pronounced him “all done.”
“Is it not customary to get a lollipop after you have been poked and prodded?” Nik muttered.
Nola ruffled his blond hair, which Nik did not appreciate. “Do they make blood-flavored lollipops?”
Nik blanched. “If there is any justice in the world, no.”
She smiled sweetly. “Then, no.”
8
There will be days when you will be tempted to pull a stunt of unbelievable incompetence to escape your vampire employer and collect unemployment benefits. Do not pull this stunt.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
The Linoge file was missing.
Missing. Absent. Mislaid. Gone.
I will admit that over the last couple of days, my desk had gotten a little messy, but I didn’t make a habit of losing incredibly important super-secret files that could potentially incriminate my employer. Someone had gone into my desk, moved my box of tampons, and taken the file I rightfully stole! I felt so violated.
My options for recovering it were limited. I looked around and under my desk. I very discreetly asked Jordan and Aaron if they’d seen a red folder marked “Linoge” lying around, but they said no. I waited for Ophelia to bust into my office and kneecap me for hoarding inappropriate information, which didn’t happen. And so, since I couldn’t exactly go into the archives and steal the file back, I pretended the whole thing had never happened. (Because wondering who’d rifled through my desk and found the file would eventually drive me mad.)
And that theory worked for almost a week. I kept my head down. I did my work. I tried to find a way to discuss Marty’s competency issues that didn’t sound like I was accusing him of being incompetent . . . which was difficult. I did nothing to draw attention to myself. And since I was not, in fact, fired or kneecapped in that week, it helped justify my decision when I noticed that Waco Marchand’s office was still empty. Mr. Marchand had been killed a few years before, and he had never been replaced. Of course, he’d been killed by Cal after he attempted a nationwide vampire poisoning in order to make a fortune providing the antidote for said poison, tried to kill Cal in order to prevent Cal from investigating the poisoning, tried to kill Iris for helping Cal, and tried to kill me because I happened to be there. I chose to believe that the vampires didn’t want to replace him because they were afraid they would get another like him. But it was more likely that the paperwork had gotten held up because some thousand-year-old vampire administrator refused to learn to fax.
I even wore black slacks and a black eyelet blouse to add an extra layer of un-noticeability while I committed my office cat burglary. With my colleagues occupied, I made an excuse to visit Sammy, sneaking down the hall to Mr. Marchand’s empty office. I shut the door behind me and didn’t bother with the light. I had some illumination from the streetlight outside, just enough to creep around Mr. Marchand’s dark, baroque furnishings.
I felt a pang of guilt when I saw the antique painting of Mr. Marchand’s family in front of their Civil War–era mansion. With his resemblance to Colonel Sanders and his chivalrous ways, Iris had once considered him the epitome of genteel vampire manners. And then, of course, he tried to murder us. So while I felt sort of bad for breaking into his office, he had been kind of a dick.
By some miracle of poorly supervised office equipment, Mr. Marchand’s computer was sitting on his desk, untouched since the last time he’d used it, if the accumulated dust was any indication. The administration’s solution to keeping us out of “forbidden” areas of the server was to limit our access through our user names. As IT drones, we were granted more access than most, including enough authority to create user names without linking them to our work stations. I checked the employee handbook for some sort of ironic punishment for taking advantage of this counterintuitive loophole but found nothing.
The computer roared to life, blowing out a bit of burned dust as the tower’s fans started up. But the monitor showed updated programs from the office server, so I clicked on the ADMIN logo and created a user name for Dominic Purcell, the actor who played Dracula in Blade: Trinity. Because it would take them years to catch on to that one. Using the dummy user name, I searched for files that included the word “Linoge.”
A big red “RESTRICTED” message flashed across my screen, demanding a password.
“Bitch, please.” I snorted, tapping a few keys that allowed me around the restriction.
One file folder popped up under a directory labeled “Watch List.” That seemed promising. The folder was labeled “Renart.” I opened it and found a list of names and birth/death dates and locations. All women with the last name Renart, starting with a woman named Marie Renart, who lived near Rouen until her move to America just before the Louisiana Purchase.
The Renarts were not a particularly fecund bunch. Once they landed in Louisiana, the family tree was more of a bush, sticking with one or two kids in every generation, and not all of those kids carried on the family name. But the list abruptly stopped in 1968, which wasn’t super-helpful. Also, I didn’t see the Linoge name anywhere in the document. Anywhere. When I opened the metadata for the file, there it was in the keyword section, which, again, not helpful. Curiouser and curiouser, but ultimately, I’d learned . . . not that much.
I was missing something. All of the pieces were right there. I just couldn’t make them fit.
Wait. The Renart line started near Rouen, which was in the north of France. Linoge was executed for rampaging across the north of France. Could Marie Renart be the girlfriend whose bad magical influence the early Council blamed for Linoge’s feeding issues? Was that why they’d tracked the family over the years, because they were afraid the Renarts would mess with more vampires?
I took out my phone and took several shots of the screen. Logging off the server, I cleared the computer’s history and shut it down.
I listened at the door for anyone walking down the hall outside the office, then stuck my head out to check for passersby. I hustled down the hallway, careful to avoid the range of the security cameras mounted near the ceiling. And I managed to snag a mocha from Sammy on my way back to our office, so I wouldn’t look completely suspicious . . . to the empty office I found upon my return.
Well, I could at least succeed at not getting caught.
• • •
“Gladiola?”
I jumped in my seat. Honestly, I needed to keep a mirror on top of my monitor so people would stop sneaking up on me.
I turned to see Marty leaning against the wall near my desk, car keys in hand. “I was thinking I should walk you out to your car. Our shift ended a few minutes ago.”
I sat back in my desk chair and tried not to let my annoyance show at his use of “Gladiola.” Aaron and Jordan had left just a few minutes earlier, in keeping with their barely-there punctuality. And I couldn’t help but notice Aaron’s hand slipping into Jordan’s as they walked
into the hall. Aw, nerd love.
Even though I was ready to jet home, I needed to stay late and check Marty’s work from that day one more time, just in case he’d gone back to fix his multitude of errors. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I stuck with “Marty, I’ve told you, I prefer to be called Gigi. I don’t go by Gladiola.”
“Well, Gladiola is a much more mature name than Gigi,” Marty said, a faint expression of distaste wrinkling his mouth. “So I’m going to call you Gladiola. Besides, I like that I’m the only one who calls you Gladiola. It’s like I have my own cute little nickname for you.”
“Yes, a nickname that belongs on the door of a nursing-home suite,” I muttered, refraining from pointing out that as his superior, however technically, I could file a disciplinary action for insubordination for his use of a too-familiar and embarrassing birth name. But I figured that would be an abuse of power.
“Now, can I walk you to your car?”
“No, thank you, Marty,” I said. “I’m not ready to leave just yet.”
“Oh, I can wait,” Marty assured me, dropping his messenger bag next to my chair.
“No, really,” I insisted. “You go on home. I have paperwork I have to finish, all part of the project leader thing.”
There, a very subtle reminder that I was higher on the office food chain. And if he continued to call me Gladiola, the reminders would become less subtle.
“Are you sure?” Marty said, placing a hand on the back of my chair. “I don’t mind.”
“No, please, go on home,” I said, waving him away. “I need time to come up with the correct wording for my own job description. I think Ophelia wants to double-check that I understand what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“I can stay to help,” he offered.
“Go home, Marty,” I said, just a little sterner than I should have been, because Marty pulled this wounded-puppy expression that made me feel like a jerk.
