Chapter 20
Luke returned late that night, bleary-eyed, and fell into Morgan’s arms.
“That bad?”
He nodded, unable to speak.
“You couldn’t mind-whammy them into sending you home?” she joked.
“Brad was cunning enough to ban me interfering with him right from the get-go,” Luke said, rubbing his face. He was trembling a little. “The other two are immune somehow. Felt like a counterspell.”
If you were an immortal business firm deeply aware of magical possibilities, it made sense to hire a mage to protect your employees from magical manipulation.
“Did they hurt you?” A worse thought occurred to her. “If they hurt you, would you even be able to tell me?”
“Not if they told me not to,” he said into her shoulder. When she tensed, he looked up. “They caused me no physical harm.”
That wasn’t an answer, but she couldn’t think of how to press without hurting him more. She soothed him instead with her hands, trying to erase a hundred small indignities. Eventually, they slept.
The next few days felt like a reprieve, or at least a temporary lull.
She tried to savor each moment as they built a comforting little routine in the margins.
They wove around each other, preparing for each workday, smiling over Gisele’s bleary-eyed incoherence as their roommate took longer to stumble into wakefulness.
They rarely got seats on the subway, but that only meant that she had the excuse to lean into him every time the train went around a bend, Rix crouched illegally between them.
They were careful to separate before they got off, taking turns at who arrived at the office first. She’d spend the day occasionally contriving to brush her hand against his, still in disbelief that anyone so gorgeous and magical want to touch her, the illicitness of the contact only adding to the thrill.
She wasn’t stupid enough to do more. If forced to choose, Brad would keep Luke over her without even thinking about it.
But she got a blissful lazy weekend with him, strolling hand-in-hand along the High Line and dodging fake monks scamming tourists.
Picnicking in the shadow of the Cloisters’ medieval castle while Gisele taught Rix how to fetch a Zabloom-branded frisbee.
Letting him draw lazy patterns on her sweat-slicked skin as he marveled at the tiny hairs along the nape of her neck.
If only it weren’t temporary.
If Lucareoth had been human, or at least native to her plane, she wouldn’t have been thinking about the long term yet.
But the knowledge that he (and Rix) could be discovered at any moment kept her awake at night even after Luke had drifted off.
She wasn’t ready to declare she wanted forever yet, but she wanted to be the one to make that decision.
Or rather, she or Luke. Not the Shadow Council.
Not House Berith. Certainly not her mother.
Occasionally, when she had the flash of wanting him to stay, he’d glance at her, stricken, but look away as soon as she opened her mouth.
Talking about it made it too real. He flinched even more from Brad’s messages, and she wondered again what had happened that night with Ravenfell.
He’d find a way to tell her when he was ready. It was too soon to press.
Sleeping, he looked so peaceful in the early morning light, glittering scales against her mattress.
Although, as she watched, his brow furrowed.
He twitched, lost in a dream. An unpleasant dream.
The muscles in his shoulders bunched and under the covers, his tail slipped away from her thigh to press itself between his legs. He whimpered.
“Lucareoth?” She touched his cheek gently. “It’s just a dream. Wake up.”
He came away with a gasp, scrambling away only to fall out of the bed.
“Are you OK?” She lunged over to find him lying on his back, a little stunned.
“Yeah,” he said after a pause. He took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“It was just a dream,” she repeated.
He shook his head. “Bad memory.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
For a moment, it looked like he might. Then he shook his head. “It’s a bad place. But I’m here now.”
His bracelet flared and he stiffened.
“What is it?” she asked as he scanned the message.
He was breathing too fast, in shallow gasps.
She stroked his shoulder hesitantly. Was he having a panic attack?
What were you supposed to do for people having panic attacks?
She tried really hard not to think about how much she didn’t want him to be having a panic attack, since she was pretty sure making him feel like he was failing for not panicking would make him panic even more.
“It’s OK,” she said, unsure if that were true. “I’m here. Just breathe.”
She slid down next to him and eased an arm around his shoulder.
He twisted so he could get both arms around her, clinging to her like a she was a cliff’s edge and he was dangling over a river of lava.
He was trembling faintly. She whispered shushing nonsense into his ear, supporting him, hoping she was helping and wishing she could do more.
Slowly, he managed to get his breathing back under control.
Should she ask? She didn’t want to send him spiraling again.
“It’s the next quarter,” he said when he finally managed to breathe properly. “And I have a new quota.”
“But—” Oh no. She had been so focused on the original numbers—one soul for his quota, one soul for her debt.
They’d fulfilled his quota, so the next soul would have been for her debt, and the only deadline on that was managing to find someone before she died.
But that wasn’t the way quotas worked, was it?
It didn’t matter how you did last quarter.
Every time, you started again from scratch.
“We’re going to be OK.” She thought longingly of the brunch the three of them had gone to that weekend, Gisele ponying up for bottomless mimosas to celebrate an award for a campaign she’d contributed to. It had always been too good to last.
“I don’t know what to do,” he mumbled into her hair.
“We’ll figure it out together,” she promised without any idea of how to deliver on that. She couldn’t send him back. Not like this. She’d set aside her claim, she decided. The next one was his. Surely, she could avoid dying for a quarter. But now she needed to find a third soul.
They came into the office together for once, since she’d made another batch of cookies and needed help carrying things.
It let her hold his hand right up to the door.
But she regretted it as soon as Kelly saw them.
Her boss’s lips compressed. The worst part was that Kelly was right.
Morgan was fooling around with either the intern or the illegal immigrant dependent on her to hide from the local authorities.
Either way, it was ethically bankrupt. She gulped.
“I’d come over to give you your Q3 quotas in person,” Kelly said. “But can I see you for a moment when you’ve dropped all that off?”
Luke glanced back and forth between them as he reshuffled their respective bags so he had their laptops and Morgan had the cookies.
“I need to put these in the kitchen,” Morgan said, knowing how immature it was to put off an inevitable conversation by a few seconds and doing it anyway.
Luke frowned. Then, as Kelly turned to follow Morgan, his eyes flared orange.
What had he tried to convince Kelly of? She walked through the rest of the desks, Kelly trailing behind.
She knew he couldn’t mind-whammy her into a Deal.
Which was unfortunate, since Kelly had just jumped to the top of Morgan’s personal list, even as she knew that any chance of convincing the sales head had probably vanished.
Kelly wouldn’t believe her; the Deal would sound like bullshit from a panicking employee making things up to avoid being fired.
Besides, while Kelly was passing down quotas because she had her own Q3 targets to hit, Morgan had trouble picturing the polished professional ever being desperate enough to sign away her soul.
Morgan set the cookies down on the counter with a jaunty little sign listing ingredients and allergens. She turned to face the music, trying desperately to figure out a way to derail the lecture. What about greed? Was there any chance Kelly was greedy enough to be tempted?
Kelly opened her mouth and then paused, her eyes unfocusing for a moment. She’d forgotten why she’d come in, Morgan realized. She wasn’t sure how much of Kelly’s memory Luke had scrambled; hopefully not very much.
“I wanted to grab you about the baking thing,” Kelly said slowly, her brain filling in a justification for her desire to talk to Morgan.
“Don’t worry, I don’t plan to quit to open a bakery.” Morgan forced a laugh.
“I’d hope not, terrible ROI and from what I hear, you have to get up at 3am,” Kelly said, waving a hand to dismiss the very idea. “Look, I appreciate the goodies and you’re very good at it.”
“Well, I don’t really want to eat them all myself, but I like making them,” Morgan said, continuing to keep a smile pasted on her face.
“I understand the issue.” Kelly’s lips quirked. “But would you like some advice, from a woman farther along in her career?”
“Sure?” Morgan said, uncertain where this was going if it were not going to be a lecture on sexual harassment.
“Don’t be the homemaker,” Kelly said, leaning against the doorframe, crossing her arms over her tasteful silk blouse.
“Don’t remind people of a homemaker. Don’t bring in baked goods, don’t volunteer to clean out the fridge, don’t fetch tea, don’t plan the holiday party.
If you’re a woman in tech and it’s not explicitly part of your job, don’t do anything that makes people think of you like the office assistant or their wife or their mom.
Because once you’re in their head as the baker of cookies, you’ll never be the person they think of to lead the department. ”
“I guess I never thought of it that way,” Morgan faltered.