That’s mainly what we do here—file paperwork, keep demons in line, keep tabs on anyone and anything just passing through. But before you think we work in a dark, dank cave and wield stakes and swords to vanquish and behead, I should tell you that the UDA office pretty much mirrors the humanoid DMV, and the only thing I’ve wielded down here are Swingline staplers and Scotch tape notes. I vanquished a fallen angel with a trident once, but that was strictly on private time.
The old-school maroon velvet line dividers were up and the waiting room was teeming with all manner of demon and demon offspring, half-breeds, the dead, the undead and the . . . other. The line was zombie heavy again today and I narrowed my eyes at a grayish newbie standing far too close to the announcements board, what remained of her jaw moving in a steady arc as she ate a notice about a missing dog. I considering interrupting, but it was fairly useless with zombies. Once they were chewing they followed through until the item was gone or their teeth fell out. Or both. We lost a lot of pushpins and other clients that way. I just shrugged and made a mental note to update my zombie apocalypse survival kit.
The waiting room hummed and ticked and although the clientele kept our waiting room at a chilly sixty degrees or so, I felt the sweat starting at my hairline, felt the undeniable anxious heat of keeping information under wraps start to prick at my skin. I felt like everyone was staring at me, taunting me, waiting for me to spill. Suddenly, my body was wracked with those unstoppable titter giggles that blink like an I’VE GOT A SECRET neon sign.
I focused hard on the carpet and cut through the waiting room as quickly as I dared, when I heard Kale yip, “Hey, Sophie!” as I edged my way past the equine part of a centaur.
I smiled genuinely when I saw Kale—it was her third day back after a stint in the hospital from a hit-and-run that I still felt partly responsible for.
“Hey, Kale—you look great.”
Kale grinned and then her eyebrows shot up. “Oh! I almost forgot!” She dipped under the front desk. “I brought your jacket back.”
She shoved it over to me and bit her bottom lip. “Lorraine tried to get the tire tread out of it.”
I gingerly took the coat, unable to look at it. The last time I had seen the thing, it was wrapped around Kale’s crushed body, out of place and sadly limp in an intersection while tires screeched away. Just the memory made my stomach ache. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Kale gave me a “no big” shoulder shrug. I tucked the jacket under my arm and tried to step around her, but she stayed rooted in front of me, her Manic Monday lips a brilliant shade of purple and pushed up in a smile that went to her eyebrows.
“Is there something else?” I asked her.
Kale’s eyes zipped to the vase full of blood-red blooms on her desk and then back to me, expectantly.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Those are gorgeous.”
Kale beamed, but didn’t move. “Ask who they’re from,” she whispered.
I moved my speed-bump coat to my hip and played along. “And who might these be from?”
“Vlad!” His name practically burst through every pore in her tiny Gestalt witch body; her hair shook and the wattage of her smile could’ve lit homes from here to Tampa. “Can you believe it? He sent me flowers! Again! Almost for no reason this time!”
“Almost for no reason?”
Kale flapped her hand. “Well, you know, I got hit by the car and all. But look—they’re beautiful, right?”
Ah, young love.
I would never understand it.
I zipped into the back office, doing my best to project an air of nonchalant confidence and supreme normalcy. Which isn’t easy to do when the path to your office is lined with a team of angry pixies, a steaming hole in the ground from a wizard who blew himself up (seriously, when was someone going to fix that?), and a new succubus intern who made me want to take my pants off at every turn.
It was business as usual for them. They were the norm. I was not.
As usual, there was a small congregation of fairies at the water cooler. Their melodic chatter stopped cold as I approached and they turned, glittery wings scraping the linoleum floor as they glared at me. It wasn’t me they were mad at—it’s just that fairies are notoriously private. And mean. Thanks to Walt Disney, fairies are depicted as pixie-nosed, spirited sprites that smell of sugar cookies and long to be liked by lithe human boys. Down here, there are no facades: fairies are the Mean Girls of the Underworld. Best to avert your eyes and leave them alone. And I was doing just that when I ran smack into Louis “Vlad” LaShay.
I thunked back from Vlad’s hard marble chest and he looked down his nose at me. “Soph.”
I narrowed my eyes, mirroring his sneer. “Vlad.”
Vlad is Nina’s sixteen-year-old nephew and our permanent couch surfer. He’s surly, cranky, and pathologically unable to throw away an empty blood bag or clean up after himself. But, because he’s chronologically well over a hundred years old and the new head of the UDA has a thing for vampire nepotism, Vlad is also my boss.