Under the Gun (3 page)

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.

Even if he does dress like Bela Lugosi.

At home I’ve come to love him like my own obnoxious little brother. On occasion I
even helped make a protest sign or two for the organization Vlad championed, the Vampire
Empowerment and Restoration Movement. It was a group of like-minded vampires who protested
the sparkly, soft-fanged portrayals of vampires in the media, and incited all of the
organization’s adherents to bring the modern vampire back to the glory days of graveyard
dirt and frilly ascots. They were wholly against vampire/demon mixing and sought to
restore ultimate power back to the vampire. Adherents were expected to dress in the
classic garb (more Nosferatu, less Edward Cullen) and do vampy things like brood and
pace. While their up-with-fangs agenda might sound fearsome, the whole movement was
basically the equivalent of an orthodontically gifted group of Dungeons & Dragons
players.

And I was having a hard time getting used to Dungeon Master Count Chocula facilitating
my yearly reviews.

“Nice weather we’re having, huh?” I said with a wide, eager grin.

Vlad quirked an eyebrow. “I prefer the fog.”

“Fog’s nice, too. Anyway—” I stepped back and poked at my wrist. “Time is money and
my boss is a slave driver. Heh.” Before Vlad had the opportunity to break into my
babble, I was in my office, seated at my desk, my heart doing a spastic patter. I
grabbed a felt-tipped marker and scrawled the word
VACATION-slash-HEART ATTACK
over the entire next month in my calendar. Some days working with a Small World collection
of the mythical, mystical, and undead is a wonderful, stimulating experience. Sometimes
it’s a huge pain in the ass.

 

 

I was eventually able to calm myself down with three cups of Splenda-laced herbal
tea and one and a half apple fritters, but every time someone passed by my office
door or my phone rang, I was challenging my kegel muscles and trying to keep my heart
from exploding through my chest. I hunkered down at my desk, and smiled at my clients,
doing my best to avoid letting on that I knew anything more than anyone else in the
world—like that the hunted, haunted, and left-for-dead werewolf Pete Sampson was currently
at my house, stretched out on my hand-me-down chintz couch.

But every time a client cocked his head at me, or looked at me with a questioning
eye (or three), I found myself doused in paranoia and re-convinced that someone was
reading my mind, or was monitoring my spastic heartbeat, or had found out in some
other way that I was hiding one hell of a hairy secret.

Even when I wasn’t saying anything, I couldn’t help but feel like my lies exuded out
of my every pore. So when I ran into Lorraine in the bathroom, I tried my best to
seem nonchalant and unaffected.

“Hey, Soph,” she said, strolling in.

I forced myself to smile, and the image reflected in the bank of mirrors was me, grinning
like an idiot. “Hi, Lorraine. How are things? What are you doing? Is everything good?”

Some people have tells when they lie—tiny eye twitches, averted eyes, a blank expression.
I went for babbling idiot.

“Nothing’s going on with me. Just washing my hands.”

Lorraine nodded slowly, her amber-colored eyes studying me. “Are you okay?”

My mind raced and I forced myself to clear it—or to focus on something banal. The
last four episodes of
Lost
flashed in my mind.

Among Lorraine’s many talents—general witchcraft, home Tupperware saleslady of the
month (although I don’t think it’s entirely kosher to threaten to turn non-buyers
into squid), and finance—was also mind dipping. It was an art that not many witches
were able to master—Kale, Lorraine’s protégé, was still trying, though I think her
issue is the mind she most often tried to dip into was focused wholly on video games
and vampire porn (Vlad—the flowers, remember?). Theoretically, her mind dipping can’t
be used on me. Besides being the breathing, blood-filled darling of the Underworld
Detection Agency’s Fallen Angel Division and one hundred percent magic free, I am
also impervious to other people’s magic. Theoretically. Or . . . generally.

I may have the preternatural ability to walk amongst the demon Underworld, to easily
see through the veil that keeps the breather population blissfully unaware of the
demon one, and to recite all fifty states in alphabetical order, but the one thing
I didn’t have, was grace.

So when Lorraine cocked her head, her eyes unfocused and unblinking, a zing of heat
ran up my spine and bloomed red in my cheeks. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

I kicked open the nearest stall door and dry heaved, staring at the toilet water through
misty eyes.

“Oh,” I heard Lorraine say, “Sophie, I’m so sorry.”

I heaved again and heard Lorraine turn on the faucet. She stuck her arm into my stall
and waved a damp paper towel at me. “I would stay and help you, but I’m a sympathetic
vomiter.”

I nodded and opened my mouth, growling as though I were birthing a dinosaur. “That’s
okay, Lorraine,” I choked. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”

Once Lorraine hightailed it out of the bathroom I turned around, sitting on the toilet,
head in hands.

Keeping this secret was going to be harder than I thought.

“Sophie! Soph, are you okay?” Nina pushed in through the bathroom door next and I
groaned.

“Can’t a woman get a little privacy?”

Nina crossed her arms in front of her chest, jutting out one hip and taking me in.
“Not if you’re going to keep the door open while you sit on the toilet. What’s going
on? Lorraine said you had the plague.”

I looked over Nina’s shoulder and grimaced at my red-rimmed eyes, the banana-pudding
hue of my face. Strands of hair were already starting to shoot out around my head
like intelligence-seeking antennae, and I frowned at my best friend, my eyes scanning
her.

“Sounds about right,” I said, trying in earnest to make my wrinkled, pilling twinset
look passable.

In addition to using the immense years of her afterlife to brush up on history, name-calling,
and general trivia, Nina had also spent her time collecting an incredible array of
vintage couture to support her massive fashion habit. She stood before me today in
a corset I know she nabbed from a French noblewoman (premaking her a tasty tidbit),
a great little blazer, and a pair of jeans so skinny I had mistaken them for a scarf
and worn them around my neck all last winter. I had long ago given up the contention
that my fashion habits only paled in comparison to
hers
, as she spun in a drop-dead pair of sparkling silver Louboutins; I knew that my Target
shoes and my surprising-as-mushroom-soup wardrobe never stood a chance.

“So,” Nina said, dark eyes raking over me, “should I call in the dead collectors?”

I blew out a sigh and stood up, turning on the tap and splashing cold water onto my
burning cheeks. “No. I’m not really sick. I faked it.”

“That’s usually my line.”

I rolled my eyes. “My problem, remember?”

“Right.” Nina leaned against the sink and checked out her impeccable manicure. “So,
what exactly is your problem today?”

“Don’t say it like that. I don’t have a problem every day!”

Nina raised her eyebrows and I was out of supporting information. “It’s Sampson,”
I said, my voice hushed. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to keep his coming
back a secret. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep a lid on everything until
it all gets sorted out.”

“First of all, as he’s lying on our couch, he’s
our
problem. And second of all, it’s not a problem we’re going to have for very long.”

I patted my face with a paper towel. “Why do you say that?”

Nina leaned in conspiratorially. “Well, he needs to no longer be hunted, right? You
know, all returned to glory and stuff?”

I wasn’t sure I knew where she was going. “I’m hoping to find out who’s after him
so he can stop running.”

“Potato, po-tah-to. You know who the werewolf hunter is. It’s that Fang, right?”

“Feng.”

“That’s what I said.” Nina bared hers in the mirror. “So, you just go to this Fang
person and let her know that you’ve got everything under control. That she can call
off the attack of this particular werewolf.”

Nina looked supremely proud of her plan, and even as I remembered the warm and friendly
way Feng had welcomed me into her office the first time I met her—by closing her fingers
around my neck—it was hard not to be infected by Nina’s grinning self-assurance.

“I guess I could do that. But”—I frowned—“the Du family’s whole existence is based
on werewolf hunting. I don’t think she’s going to let one go just because I ask her
to. She doesn’t exactly seem the favor-granting type.”

Nina shrugged and whipped a lipstick out of her bra. She puckered her lips. “It’s
worth a shot, isn’t it? Besides, Sampson’s been here a whole night and it’s not like
the city has gone to rabid dog hell.”