Chapter 1 #2
So much for progress. He can’t tell if this is high-frequency anxiety or if Topher’s one of those guys who freaks at other guys in eyeliner. Whichever it is, it’s annoying.
Once Topher reemerges from the back, the bright yellow shirt untucked over his pale gray jeans and his hair slightly tamed, Mateo launches into training mode. “Okay, so, work history. Ever use a register before?”
Topher’s head shakes.
“What about customer service? Helping people on the floor?”
Another head shake, his gray eyes getting wider.
“Receiving?”
Topher’s eyes go wider still, and he mouths the word no.
What the actual hell? Doris wouldn’t hire someone with zero experience, right? Except, she would because she’s cheap. Probably paying him below minimum wage. He doesn’t want to ask but needs to understand how bad the day ahead will be. “Have you ever had a job before?”
Now those gray eyes are saucers, near-perfect circles of alarm, like he’s the shocked one.
Fucking. Hell.
“Okay. Okay. Oh. Kay.” Maybe he has other skills. Quick learner. Innate ability to color-match that will prove invaluable. “Everyone starts somewhere,” Mateo says, impressed that he sounds amiable and not like he wants to walk into traffic. “Let’s talk through some stuff.”
It takes one hour for Mateo to confirm that Topher is functionally useless.
Register? Frantic button mashing locks the machine up three times while the slightly inconvenienced customers become hostile.
Taking orders? Fails to write down obviously critical information on the easy-to-understand form.
Six. Times. Not even a name on the last one.
Making copies? Machine spits out solid black pages and makes the place stink like burnt hair.
That last one’s not actually Topher’s fault, but by this point, Mateo’s prepared to blame him for homelessness and corporate tax loopholes.
“How about you straighten up front?” Mateo says in the inflectionless tones of the forsaken, crouching in front of the copier. “Just make things look pretty. If anyone comes in and looks confused, ask if you can help and bring them over to me.”
Topher bobbles his empty head in agreement, looking as if he’s just survived a war zone when it’s Mateo surviving active crimes against humanity. Mateo does a lot of pulling out and sticking back in of parts. Thumb to the print button, the machine whirs to life.
He keeps an eye on Topher haunting the front as he prints orders. Topher’s doing a lot of picking up and putting back down in the same spot. Like he has no idea how to straighten up.
Holy shit.
Topher has no idea how to straighten up. It’s not even a convincing fake of it.
Screaming won’t fix this, so Mateo crams the bad feelings into a tight little ball so as to more easily ignore them and finishes orders.
As he powers on the large-format printer, his attention snags on Topher stumbling to put distance between himself and a homemade-cookies-looking elderly woman. It’s as far from asking if she needs help as possible. Anti-help.
He can think of precisely one reason Doris would hire this guy, and it’s obvious now. Topher’s the kid of someone she knows. Another Shitty Brian. And like Shitty Brian, this guy’s going to be not just useless but extra work.
Mateo waves the old lady over and helps her before returning to orders.
He needs their soothing, robotic simplicity.
Printing, cutting, and laminating is the only therapy he can afford, but he can’t shake Topher’s nervous energy.
It isn’t until the old lady exits, door slamming against the stopper, that he realizes the jittery sensation has morphed into an actual headache.
Pulse picking up, he automatically runs his tongue over his teeth to check for sharpness, which he finds, but he’s not angry, so it explains nothing.
What the hell is happening? He puts both hands on his forehead, like he expects to find a gaping wound to explain the strange ache.
Not just strange. Unprecedented. In his twenty-three years of life, he’s never once had a headache.
One of the benefits to Mateo’s affliction is that he’s incredibly resilient. His body can’t hold on to discomfort or injury. Never had a cold. Doesn’t worry about flu season. Even a broken bone will mend in about an hour.
This has nothing to do with his novice magic and everything to do with the fact that his mother turned him into the clandestine vessel for an ancient evil.
And no, he doesn’t know why. She never wanted to talk about it, and she isn’t the kind of person who you ask things twice.
His infant body must have been the only human-shaped receptacle on hand.
Not that he’s got a whole complex about it or anything.
Which means this sudden headache is amazingly alarming.
It’s gotta be a magic attack. Probably. Like, ninety percent sure.
It’d be weird if he started getting normal-people headaches out of the blue, wouldn’t it?
Unless the headache is a new symptom of his degrading human body losing out against the thing inside of him—like the dreams, the fugue states, and the shadows in mirrors and at the corners of his vision.
This thought’s too real, so he focuses on the magic-attack angle again.
Maybe someone’s found him. Maybe he’s been sloppy in his warding and someone picked up his demonic scent.
But the shop’s empty except for Topher, who’s staring dimly into the bin of poster tubes like he can’t work out their function.
Topher.
Mateo’s mom used to tell him there were demon hunters out there—to get him to do the dishes. Maybe Topher’s a demon-hating wizard and this is his magic headache attack.
But why the hell would a demon hunter get a job here?
Not that Mateo can talk.
The headache is very real, though. Something is happening, and the backs of his eyes are throbbing in a way he’s never experienced. If this is somehow Topher causing it, then he’s way worse than Shitty Brian.