Chapter 1 #2
She wasn’t quite sure why she’d stayed so late.
It wasn’t that she was passionate about stalking HR executives across social media.
But the look that Kelly had given her when she’d asked about her quota?
Somehow it set off the same queasy feeling her mother was so good at eliciting.
She was never going to be her mother, and if she was honest with herself she was never going to be Kelly, either, but the second one seemed more achievable.
So she stuck to her knock-off Aeron chair, grimly poking through the fetid wastelands of LinkedIn, until even Ronaldo went home.
The demolition team upstairs had long ago packed it in.
She wrote witty cold email after witty cold email, working her way through her assigned contacts list. For each one, she tried to weave in some personal detail from the person’s social media, trying for thoughtful personalization without stalkerific threat.
Catch their attention so she could schedule enough demo calls to meet her quota for the week.
There was a weird satisfaction to continuing, and continuing, and continuing, ignoring thirst and the dull headache that had started to blossom behind her increasingly gritty eyeballs.
She even spent a little time poking around the profiles of some of their competitors’ sales team; GreenField UnLtd.
’s Head of Sales had an outrageous number of connections.
He went by the name of Hawk and had a profile pic that looked like a K-drama star, and posted three times a day.
Smarmy but a lot more charismatic than Ronaldo.
She made sure Kelly saw her still diligently working away when the Head of Sales left for yet another fabulous party with her no-doubt equally glamorous fiancée.
(She’d never met Kelly’s fiancée; for all Morgan knew, the woman rocked a super-butch undercut and flannel.
But Kelly’s accessories were all always so magazine-perfect that Morgan couldn’t picture her with a partner who didn’t match.
The rock on Kelly’s finger certainly implied she’d chosen someone with money.)
Morgan didn’t have anyone to go to glamorous parties with, even if she’d been invited to glamorous parties.
The folks from the magical community regarded her with something too close to pity to ever be sexy, and the idea of trying to explain her mother or her life to someone mundane gave her hives.
There had been some flings in college that fizzled out quickly, but Kelly’s engagement ring seemed about as attainable as Kelly’s VP title. Maybe less.
Moooorgan. The ice cream is going to melt
Morgan smiled at Gisele’s text.
Why did you take it out of the freezer dumbass?
I mean, I didn’t, then it would have actually melted.
This is figurative melting. Because it’s Thursday
and it’s almost 8:30
and I made the prettiest infographic today
and I’m ready to kick back and celebrate
but you haven’t left the office and we have
hot hot plans you’re messing up
We’re watching SyFy channel originals from
the early 2000s, that’s hardly hot hot plans
Are you kidding? They’re the BEST plans
but I can’t start the movie because you’re not here
and how am I ever going to find out whether the
ancient artifacts that are secretly buried under
Stonehenge will summon aliens like the tablet says
I’m going to eat the ice cream
all of it
All the Lactaid in the world will not help you
if you eat a pint of ice cream all by yourself
There will be REPERCUSSIONS
And you will suffer those with me
so you better get up here
Ok ok I’m leaving don’t destroy the bathroom
Morgan stretched, her neck cracking. She hadn’t realized how badly aligned it was. No one else was left, not from Zabloom nor any of the other three startups that shared this floor of the tech incubator with them. Brad the CEO’s office was dark, but he’d been at some conference all week anyway.
She hadn’t seen Tim, her other half-boss.
Officially, he was her actual boss and Kelly was only a dotted line, but that had changed three times in the four months she had been at Zabloom.
No one could ever quite decide whether she was supposed to be part of Sales or Marketing for longer than a couple of weeks in a row.
But since she was supposed to be part of Marketing this week, she wanted to make sure she got credit for the extra-long day.
It wasn’t like she had buy-ready HR executives to offer, but at least she could demonstrate diligence.
As CMO, Tim had a tiny glass-walled office like the other C-suiters, which he usually fled whenever possible to the slightly more private phone room tucked back near the fire exit.
If she had to be on display like she was in a fishbowl, she probably would have fled, too.
So she’d wave goodnight to Tim and then go home for ice cream and terrible movies.
It wasn’t an awful life, really. Not a good one, but it could be so much worse.
She could still be at the call center she’d worked in during college.
Or shoveling chupacabra shit. Or living in her parents’ basement, while either working in a call center or shoveling chupacabra shit.
Making cold calls to cranky executives was still better than any of that.
She stopped by the shared kitchen to stick her mug in the dishwasher, which was noticeably empty despite the pile of abandoned dishes in the sink, as she tried to figure out why she felt so off today.
It wasn’t only her mother’s text. Something felt wrong.
And had been feeling increasingly so, she realized.
Was it the fluorescent lights? Sometimes, when the bulb was about to go, there was kind of a buzzy sound that made her teeth vibrate.
No, the lights seemed fine. The back of her neck itched.
Maybe she ate something? An allergy? No, it was more like the outside of her neck: the fine hairs were standing up along the nape.
She rubbed under her collar as she walked down the little hallway.
“I’m heading out,” she called. “Have a good night!”
“Excuse me?” called an unfamiliar voice. A sexy voice. A voice that promised things that Hayley from HR absolutely would disapprove of happening in the office.
She looked in and immediately wished that she had not.
Tim, Chief Marketing Officer of Zabloom and devoted fan of no-longer-cool jam bands, was face down on the desk.
One hand had managed to claw his sweat-stained button-down away from his neck, although not enough to slow whatever had stopped his heart.
His eyes bugged out, unblinking, from a slightly purple face.
The poor guy still clutched his phone with his other hand.
The second occupant of the office stood in the middle of a circle of white powder.
Could be flour or sugar or cocaine, but Morgan knew without tasting it that it was salt.
Because she recognized the glyphs that had been drawn in Sharpie on the Post-It notes stuck to the carpet circling the ring.
Not well enough to write them herself—you weren’t taught those until high school, and the high school she’d ended up at didn’t have Latin, let alone Enochian—but they were familiar enough from her father’s work.
They were what brought the occupant of the circle here, while the circle itself was what kept him from deciding to stay.
Which was good, because standing inside the circle was a demon.