Chapter 7
She was trying very hard not to be annoyed with Luke, but it wasn’t easy.
The weekend hadn’t been that bad; they’d done a crash course on basic human office etiquette and spent some time thrifting a few much-needed personal possessions.
But Monday had been rough—she had been listening to the demon work his way through their combined list with his distractingly seductive voice while she tried to make sense of Tim’s left-behind files.
She managed to find the contact info for both the ad agency and the PR agency and emailed them a bland version of events, receiving shocked emails and meeting appointments for the following week in return.
She began the process of reclaiming the social media accounts.
Mostly she started lists of all the systems she didn’t have access to yet and people she didn’t have contact information for yet and the questions she didn’t have answers to yet and wasn’t sure if she ever would.
All the while listening to Luke call and call and call, clearly choosing to have exactly enough success to blow her numbers out of the water while not being completely implausible.
He didn’t even seem to be doing it to spite her, just from the sheer joy of feeling competent.
It wasn’t his fault, she knew, that she was jealous.
He was just so much better at her job than she had ever been.
Kelly even smiled at him. She wanted Kelly to smile at her.
When the never-ending construction on the floor above them began, he put in earbuds she suspected him of magicking into noise cancellation, continuing his calls without a flinch while she jumped every time the crew upstairs dropped what sounded like bowling balls above their head until they could finally go home and then start all over again the next morning.
It wouldn’t have stung so much to be shown up if she’d been having any success at the marketing angle.
Ronaldo had asked her with great confidence for a list of the leads who had shown interest on the website.
It seemed like a creepy-but-plausible ask; she knew in the foggiest way that the whole theory of digital advertising involved basically stalking people.
If she bought a toaster, she would get toaster ads in every sidebar for weeks as if she were some kind of toaster deviant looking to build a toaster collection.
She could find plenty of thought pieces that implied it was possible to put resources on your website to entice visitors and convert them to leads; she could find references to tracking information in some older version of Google’s analytics.
But she could not figure out how to get the data herself.
She dreaded admitting she didn’t know what she was doing, yet the best information she could find was from endless vague blog posts, none of which solved her problem.
A problem she would never have had if a certain demon hadn’t decided to “help” her.
“—could do that for you, of course. All I’d need is a signature.”
She suddenly became aware of what Luke was saying. Her head shot up. “Are you trying to cut a Deal with one of our prospects?” she demanded, outraged.
He wouldn’t meet her eye. “Eminently affordable! All it costs is your soul.”
“Luke!” She grabbed for his earbuds.
But he was already staring at it. “He hung up on me!”
“Of course he hung up on you, you sound like a prank caller,” she snapped.
“You seem so worried about not talking about magic, I didn’t realize how few people believed in magic,” he complained, still glaring at his screen.
“Yes, because we don’t talk about magic!” She stabbed his mousepad with her finger, closing the dialer screen. “This is serious. You cannot do this.”
“Yes, I know it’s serious,” he snapped back. “Do you? Because you’re sure not acting like it.”
“I’m sticking my neck out here for you. You’ve already put my job at risk by forcing me into this.”
“I just gave you what you wanted!”
“There’s a difference between saying you want something hypothetically and actually wanting someone to do it for you. And I don’t even want to think about what the Shadow Council will do to me if they find out I’m hiding you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are they going to eat you?”
That pulled her up short. Because no, they weren’t. She might lose her job. She might lose her apartment. She might lose her memory to a Council charm, and certainly her welcome home at Thanksgiving. But her life wasn’t on the line.
“Are you joining us for yoga?” Hayley stuck her head in the door. She’d changed from her pencil skirt into Lululemon leggings. Floofums eyed Morgan’s bag speculatively, ready to steal anything that looked edible.
“I’ve got a little too much to get done today,” Morgan said tightly.
Even on a normal day, she never had time to take advantage of the yoga instructor Hayley hired in place of a decent health insurance plan.
They had yoga and foosball and mini-packets of keto-friendly snacks, because that’s what you did when you were a tech startup.
Sometimes Morgan wondered if there was a licensing board who barred you from Series A funding if you didn’t have free sriracha-flavored dehydrated chickpeas.
“Mindful exercise is the key to preventing burnout!” Hayley chirped.
Giving people achievable quantities of work and adequate pay was the key to preventing burnout. Right now, her burnout had less to do with work and more to do with her unwanted roommate. “Maybe next week.”
”Is yoga not cool enough? Should I have gotten a Pilates instructor instead?” Hayley looked disappointed. “Oh! I know—what if I got goat yoga?”
“I need to set up this thing for Ronaldo,” Morgan said, grateful when Hayley finally took the hint.
“What’s yoga, and why are we supposed to be doing it now?” The “instead of finding a way to get me home” remained unspoken.
“It’s performative self-torture in eco-unfriendly and unflattering spandex,” Morgan said reflexively.
He cocked his head and studied her. “But you want to do it anyway.”
Now that wasn’t fair. She’d spent a lifetime perfecting her poker face and now she was stuck with someone it didn’t work on. “It’s fine.”
“I appreciate that my problem is not the only thing you’re avoiding, but if you want to do the spandex torture, why are you insulting it so much?” He stared straight into her eyes, leaving her nowhere to hide.
“You’re not going to let me give you a non-answer, are you?
” He shook his head. She tried to figure out how to explain something she tried to not spend very much time thinking about.
“It’s just… if you don’t participate in office activities, HR thinks you’re not a team player.
But if you take the time out of the day to participate in office activities, you can’t finish your work and then you’re an underperformer. There’s no way to win.”
“So you’re making fun of it so you don’t feel bad you can’t do it,” he said slowly.
“It’s a human thing, I guess.”
“What happens if you’re an underperformer, or not a team player?”
“If they decide it’s bad enough, they kick you out and you have to find a new job?”
“That’s it?” He looked offended.
“I… don’t want to know, do I.”
“Where I’m from, if you want something that management doesn’t want you to want, they don’t ask you to leave, they just…”
“Eat you,” she finished automatically. And then she thought it through. “And they can all tell.”
“Yes, they can all tell all the time. So it’s very important to train yourself not to want things.”
She thought of what corporate America would be like if they could tell whenever a desire beyond “make the company money” crossed your mind. No wonder he couldn’t even decide what kind of ice cream he wanted.
“Do you have any idea how much freedom you have in your own skull? Or outside it. You could do the spandex torture and no one would even bite you a little. You’re tying yourself up in knots trying not to let people know you want things when you could just want them,” he said, sighing.
“It’s not just that you mostly want to not do things, you also want not to want the things you do want. ”
“Thanks for that.” She had always wished someone—her parents, her professors, her bosses—would see the real her. Now someone did. Turned out she didn’t like the her that he saw.
“What do you want to want?”
“You can’t tell?”
“I can only get surface impressions, remember? Unless you want a Deal.”
“I don’t want a Deal,” she said, feeling weirdly disappointed.
Some part of her had been hoping he’d tell her that she had some deep passion she’d been missing.
Her parents had deep passions. Kelly’s eyes gleamed with the thrill of the hunt.
Brad the CEO was brimming with passion, although she sometimes wondered if he was passionate about being passionate about tech rather than tech itself.
Gisele, as much as she bitched about her clients, loved graphic design.
Morgan had taken an aptitude test in high school with the rest of the mundane kids and it had suggested that she might want to grow up to be either a greeting card store owner or a geographer, which seemed like the aptitude test equivalent of a Magic 8 Ball’s Reply hazy, try again.
She supposed they weren’t really calibrated for people who by destiny should have been wielding fireballs and were instead struggling to catch up on Algebra II.
He was frowning at her. “You’re currently really interested in something called marketing attribution? That’s the deep desire of your heart?”
“Well, it would certainly make my day better,” she said. She could feel a tension headache coming on, and tried rubbing the sore spot right under her eyebrows.
“What’s stopping you? We can skip the part where I point out that I could make that happen.”
“You’re not offering to help, you’re offering to eat my soul.”
“Buy your soul. I’m not going to eat it.”