Chapter 23
How did you stop a catastrophe when the enemy controlled the person you most needed to help you?
“Where are the scissors?” They’d been sitting right on the table, and now they weren’t.
Morgan had to cut the last two shipping labels apart.
The smart thing to do would have been to have all the brochures shipped straight from the printers to the advance warehouse, since she’d had to destroy the original, now-obsolete order and replace them with a slapped-together overnight print job.
But Brad didn’t want to risk anyone finding out about the latest pivot.
Never mind that the union guys at the Javits Center surely had better things to do than open and read a bunch of boxes of brochures from a random tech company.
Brad had insisted everything be stored in the office.
Now it all had to be hand-carried this afternoon, according to the convention center’s arcane rules, which meant that she’d had to swap every label by hand.
She kept coming back to the mundane problems because every attempt to think about the magical ones left her in despair.
“I packed them so you’d have them at the show,” Vijay said slowly, looking pleased with his own cleverness.
Also a little stoned. He’d stopped bothering to even pretend he cared now that they were apparently a consumer appliances company.
She was pretty sure she’d caught the tail end of an interview in the phone room the day before.
She wasn’t sure why Brad hadn’t laid off the developers yet, although it was possible he hadn’t remembered he had developers.
Josh and Justin seemed to be tiptoeing around the office lately in an effort not to catch his attention.
Yet the daily agile stand-up meeting continued to happen, a zombie sprint towards goals that no one had removed.
“Vijay,” she said, trying to sound more patient than she felt. “I still need the scissors.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Sorry.”
“Vijay,” she continued. “If the scissors are in the taped-up box, how are we going to get the box open?”
“Oh.” He blinked again. “Huh.”
She resisted the urge to rub her eyes. “Vijay, can you please work on getting the scissors back out of the box?”
He shrugged. He probably literally didn’t have anything more productive to do at the moment. “OK.”
She turned to go and he caught her sleeve.
“Morgan,” he said, looking into her eyes with an intensity that sober people generally did not command.
She didn’t have time for this. “Is whatever it is urgent?”
“You know you don’t have to be who they tell you to be.”
“Who is the ‘who’ in that statement, Vijay?”
He shrugged. “Your parents. Your boss. The man. Whoever. They don’t own you.”
Except they did. “And that’s the key to happiness, is it?”
“I don’t think there’s any key to happiness,” he said. “Except maybe tacos. And vindaloo. Do they make vindaloo tacos? Because that would be sweet. But you’re not happy.”
“And how would you know?” She really did not have time for this.
Vijay raised his eyebrows. “Because I’m not, like, blind?
Also, you stopped baking. You were happy whenever you baked.
Anyway, I know we all gotta, like, work for the man and all.
My parents said I should go be a programmer and so I went and became a programmer, but once you give them a little to get them off your back, you gotta, like, do something for your own soul.
Like, I started doing those monster make-up tutorials your dude Luke likes.
You can’t just think outside the box, you gotta live outside the box when they try to put you in the box. ”
She rubbed the heels of her hands into the hollows behind her eyeballs and tried not to look like her throat was tightening up. “Well, right now, we gotta think about getting the scissors out of the box.”
She looked around for Luke, unsure if she wanted to see him.
He’d apologized, repeatedly, for keeping her in the dark.
Like she’d guessed, Brad had forbidden him to reveal the soul-securitization scheme he’d concocted with Ravenfell.
She knew Luke had tried to warn her. She knew she’d been obtuse.
She wondered what else she’d been obtuse about.
She nearly bumped into Ronaldo when she turned around. But she needed him, too. “Did the restaurant get back to you with the happy hour menu for tomorrow night?”
Ronaldo had not been at all pleased to be drafted into helping her plan the networking party Brad had insisted they needed.
Kelly had looked at Morgan’s to-do list and had volunteered Ronaldo’s help as a party planner.
He’d been willing enough to pick signature drinks, which was the only part of the process Morgan had been looking forward to and resented giving up.
But since the endless game of phone tag with the restaurant events manager wasn’t getting him a commission, he’d been dragging his feet.
“Yeah, here,” Ronaldo said with ill grace, shoving a printout into her hands.
She scanned it. “Every single one of these dishes involves sausage.”
Ronaldo smirked. “Hey, everyone likes a good theme.”
“Sausagefest is not a theme,” Morgan said firmly. Panic improved her ability to be firm. “Please go back and switch half of these to something that vegetarians can eat, and make sure there’s at least one substantial vegan option.”
“It’s a beer hall, they don’t serve rabbit food,” Ronaldo said.
“They do serve pretzels,” she answered, rolling her eyes. She shoved the printout back at him and he at least took it.
She came back to the root of her problem. Could she trust Luke? He couldn’t lie to her. But he was so effective at concealing the truth.
“I had an idea.” Hayley came bustling up. “Instead of the popcorn machine, I could offer Reiki sessions.”
No one was going to want a Reiki session in the middle of an exhibition hall. But instead, Morgan said politely, “I didn’t know you were a Reiki practitioner.”
“I’ve been watching these YouTube tutorials,” Hayley started.
“Thanks so much for the offer,” Kelly said as she passed by. “But I think we’re going to need you back at the office to coordinate any calls. It’s very important.”
Hayley wilted a bit, but perked up at the “important.” Morgan disguised her sigh of relief.
“Oh,” Hayley added as she headed to the kitchen, “does anyone know why there are vampires wandering around the elevator bank?”
Ravenfell was here? That couldn’t be good.
Unless they’d figured out that the scheme couldn’t work?
Maybe they had realized that no one would be stupid enough to sell their soul for a smoothie, that the marketing campaign would fall flat and they’d all be laughed out of town.
No, she wouldn’t be that lucky. Hope warred with dread as she made her way to the elevator bank.
Surely it would just be Renata. Or would she be worse?
Auberon Vesper was the kind of powerful mixed with stupid that was fuel for Brad’s fire.
But when she got there, she saw two people she’d never seen before, grinning with plastic fangs and decked in velvet capes that had probably cost a fortune on Etsy.
“Ooh, it is immersive,” cooed the one who had thought a red brocade corset would be appropriate daytime wear. “It looks just like a soulless corporate office. You can feel the waves of cynical desperation. I wonder if they mix green in with the pancake make-up to get that unhealthy pallor.”
“A little too true to life for my tastes,” sniffed her companion, who had paired a top hat with an early-2000s Blackberry. “The TikTok gave more of an abandoned renovation vibe. Whoever did this overhead lighting should be fired for killing the ambience.”
Morgan boggled, and then realized. “If you’re looking for the theater, it’s one floor up.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
The woman tugged on his sleeve. “Wait, maybe this is part of the show. Like an escape room puzzle. We need to convince her to let us past.” She leaned in and waggled her fingers in Morgan’s eyes.
“Weak-willed human, join us. We have sold our souls for eternal life, and you too can find solace and purpose in the Embrace.”
“Wait, the whole premise of the show is that you’ve already sold your souls?”
“And you can join us.” She flicked a fake fang with the tip of her tongue. “We’ve got dental.”
Morgan looked around. Most of the other workers’ heads were down, loathe to attract the weirdos’ attention, but she could tell people were snickering. “What about ‘show up on a random weekday and pretend to be damned office workers’ sounded like a good time to you?”
“Because it’s a lot sexier than just accepting normal life,” said the man with the top hat, gesturing. “Your souls are all already dead anyway. Also, your shoes are boring. Come on, Drusilla, this is the wrong floor for eternal damnation. It’s just real-life corporate drones.”
Morgan examined her sensible, boring shoes and admitted to herself that humanity would, in fact, sell their souls for a smoothie.
As the elevator doors closed, Drusilla waved her hypnosis fingers in one last attempt to roleplay. “Tell no one of what you have seen!”
She could tell the Shadow Council. About Brad’s plan, not about people pretending to be vampires upstairs.
It would be humiliating to admit to her mother, but her life was just a series of humiliations.
It came back to the question of what they would do to Luke.
And he’d tried. He’d tried so hard. She couldn’t risk him.