Nina and I work together at the Underworld Detection Agency—the UDA for those in the know. And very few people are in the know. Our branch is located thirty-seven floors below the San Francisco Police Department, but we have physical and satellite offices nationwide—word is the Savannah office gets the most ghosts but has the best food. The Manhattan office gets the best crossovers (curious humans wandering down) and the good ol’ San Francisco office is famous for our unruly hordes of the magnificent undead, mostly dead, and back from the dead. However, we’re rapidly becoming infamous for a management breakdown that tends to make incidents like the fairy stuck to the corkboard barely worth mentioning. Some demons blame the breakdown of Underworld morals. I blame the fact that my boss and former head of the UDA, Pete Sampson, disappeared last year and has yet to be replaced. Thus, we’ve been privy to a semipermanent parade of interim management made up of everything from werewolves and vampires to goblins and one (mercifully short) stint with a screaming banshee.
So am I a demon? Nope. I’m a plain, one hundred percent first-life, air breathing, magic-free human being. I don’t have fangs, wings, or hooves. I’m five-foot-two on a good day, topped with a ridiculous mess of curly red hair on a bad day, and my eyes are the exact hue of lime Jell-O. My super powers are that I can consume a whole pizza in twelve minutes flat and sing the fifty states in alphabetical order. And that I’m alive. Which makes me a weird, freakish anomaly in an Underworld office that keeps blood in the office fridge and offers life insurance that you can collect should you get the opportunity to come back to life.
“There you both are!”
My head swung to the open doorway where Lorraine stood, eyebrows raised and arched, her blue-green eyes narrowed. Lorraine is a Gestault witch of the green order, which means that her magiks are in kind with nature and are deeply humane. Usually.
Her honey-blond hair hangs past her waist and her fluttery, earth-toned wardrobe reflects her solidarity with natural harmony.
Unless you got on her bad side, which, today, I was.
Lorraine glared at my slip. “Can you wrap up your little lingerie fashion show and meet me in my office, please? And you”—Lorraine swung her head toward Nina, who was holding my damp dress under the hand dryer—“can you please break up Vlad’s empowerment meeting and get out to the main floor? Vlad’s got nine vamps singing “We Shall Overcome” in the lunch room and I’ve got sixteen minotaurs in the overflow waiting room.”
I looked at Nina. “Vlad is still into the Vampire Empowerment Movement?”
Nina gave me her patented “Don’t even start” look, punched her fist in the air, and bellowed “Viva la reva-lución! ” while slipping out the bathroom door.
I pulled my dress over my head under Lorraine’s annoyed stare, and then worked quickly to rearrange my hair. When Lorraine sighed—loudly—I wadded my curls into a bun and secured them with a binder clip, then followed her down the hall.
“Okay,” I told her as I tried to keep pace with her. “What’s up?”
Lorraine didn’t miss a step. She pushed a manila file folder in my hand with the blue tag—Wizards—sticking out.
“Nicholias Rayburn,” I read as I scanned the thick file.
“Ring a bell?”
I frowned. “No. Should it?”
“How about ‘Three Headed Dog Ravages Noe Valley Neighborhood’?”
I felt myself pale. “Mr. Rayburn did that?”
“No,” Lorraine said flatly. “You did.”
I raised my eyebrows and Lorraine let out another annoyed sigh. “Nicholias Rayburn was here last week. Old guy, blue robe, pointy hat?”
I cocked my head. “Oh yeah. Now I remember him.”
“You should, because you allowed him to renew his magiks license.”
My stomach started to sink.
“Yeah. With his three-inch-thick cataracts and mild senility. You were supposed to withdraw his license and strip him of his magiks, but you didn’t, and he walked home, thought a fire hydrant was following him, and unleashed the hound of Hell on the land of the soccer mom. Not exactly great for our reputation.”
I felt my usually pale skin flush. “Whoops.”
Lorraine stopped walking and faced me, the hard line of her lips softening. “Look, Sophie, I know you’ve had a hard time. I understand that with all you’ve been through you’re going to make some mistakes, but you’ve got to be more aware.”
The events of the last year of my life flooded over me, and I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the imminent rush of tears.
It had been rough.
While I had gone for more than thirty-three years with nothing so much as an overdue library book to raise any eyebrows, in the last twelve months I had become involved in a gory murder investigation, been kidnapped, attacked, hung by my ankles as someone attempted to bleed me dry—