Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
The offices of Budget Base Insurance were downtown, tucked away out of sight of the main streets and the swankier, more expensive suites, occupying three stories in a skyscraper, sandwiched between an old, crusty law firm, a co-op of financial planners, and a property management agency.
I power-walked into the lobby—a stark, gleaming black marble tribute to the late eighties—and nodded to Bert and Luis on the desk as I strode towards the security gates. “Morning, gentlemen!”
“Heya, Susan. How are you doing on this fine day?” Luis was the only guard who ever replied to me; he was a cheerful, soft-spoken man, always happy to shoot the breeze whenever I came in.
Bert, his giant craggy-faced security guard partner, was apparently from Yugoslavia, but you wouldn’t know it, because he never said a word.
In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen him blink.
“I’m great, thanks, Luis. How’s the baby?”
“Mios Dio, that girl, she’s got some lungs on her!” Luis wiped his brow. “We be up all night, trying to get her to calm down.” His eyes widened dramatically. “But she’s loud. I’m thinking she got my mother-in-law’s powers. That woman and her sisters are banshees. Always screamin’ about somethin’.”
I smiled back, trying to force my face to relax. My hallucinations all agreed to weave glamor spells around themselves so they could follow me into the office, unseen. I sold it to them as a security measure, but I was hoping it would be easier to ignore them if I couldn’t see them.
While they were working on their spells, I showered in my new fantasy ensuite bathroom—under a sparkling waterfall in a fairytale cavern, with spongy moss-covered rocks beneath my feet—and went to my dressing room to change.
Cecil picked out my outfit, obviously also a hallucination, since it appeared to be a brand-new Lierna Couture pencil skirt and matching double-breasted jacket.
Cress and Donovan spent a good amount of time creating green sparks and knitting them into a fabric-like sheet, then molding them into cloaks that they could drape around themselves. Now, they waited behind me, flanking me on either side. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them.
Especially Donovan. He was too close, both white-hot and freezing cold at the same time. He leaned down and murmured in my ear. “Who is this man, Chosen? And why does he lie? Humans cannot breed directly with banshees. That is unheard of.”
For a second, I lingered by the security desk, smiling at Luis, my pulse beating fast. Do you see them, Luis? Did you hear him, just then? Donovan’s voice had been loud enough for the sound to carry. Am I really crazy?
But Luis was still grinning, shaking his head. “I don’t think I’ve had more than three hours sleep in the past week and a half, Sue. My daughter is a monster.”
“Of course she is a monster,” Donovan rumbled behind me. “She is a half breed banshee-human abomination.”
I exhaled, and a little tension left my body. I really was nuts. “She’s only a month old, Luis. She’ll get used to this life and settle down. Make sure you let Gloria take her naps, okay?”
“Oh, yes ma’am, I will. I don’t want to poke the beast.”
“What manner of beast is she? If her mother is a banshee?”
Ignoring Donovan, I tapped my card on the reader and walked through the gate, quickly slipping into the bathroom to change my tennis shoes into what appeared to be a brand-new pair of black patent red-bottom kitten heels I’d found in my new closet.
Luis didn’t comment on anything weird, so hopefully I was actually wearing my normal business casual white-shirt-and-trouser combo, and not my flannel pajamas.
Before I left the bathroom, I checked myself in the full-length mirror.
The pencil skirt was the perfect length to show off my legs without being too provocative; the black raw-silk fabric looked terribly luxurious and expensive, and my blood-red shirt was pressed to perfection.
It didn’t matter that I was the only person that could see it. I looked great, and I felt amazing.
Go with it, my father's voice echoed in my ear.
For the first time in two years, I sashayed out of the bathroom with a hint of my former confidence. The twin spots of icy-cold heat drifted behind me again, and together, we walked up to the elevator bank. I pressed a button.
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.
“Wait,” Donovan rumbled in my ear. “We must inspect the space for enemies.”
I hesitated. It was still early. I was alone. “Be my guest.”
I felt him move past me on one side. Cress, a less blisteringly hot spot, moved forward on the other side. “Your workspace is ludicrously small,” she called out.
I pressed my lips together.
“I was under the impression that you were the leader of a team of workers. There is no ‘team’ in here for you to manage.”
“Well, I always make a point to be the first to arrive,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Your underlings must be miniscule creatures.” Cress’s voice was filled with disgust. “There is no space for me to even swing my sword in here. Why do you not commandeer some of that cavernous space out front for you to conduct your business? Perhaps next to the banshee’s husband? Or beside the troll?”
“This tiny cubicle is totally unsatisfactory.” I heard a knock on the elevator wall; Donovan was tapping it, trying to see if he could magically widen it. “How could you work in such conditions? It is an insult, even to the likes of you—”
The doors began to slide close.
“Chosen!”
The doors snapped shut. I giggled like a schoolgirl, watching the buttons light up as the elevator ascended, first floor, second floor, third floor…
Silence. Blessed silence. My head was clear; there were no mythical creatures surrounding me.
I took a deep breath, pushed the button again, got into a different elevator, and hit the button for the thirty-third floor.
The lift didn’t stop on any other floors; the building was probably still mostly deserted.
I always came to work early. It was a power move I’d learned in my broker days.
If you came to work a little early, you got the jump on the day before anyone else had the chance to throw back their double-mocha Frappuccino and shamble inside the office.
I didn’t come too early, though. I was a workaholic, not a psychopath.
Well, I was also a psychopath, apparently. But this time, I hadn’t hurt anyone.
Not yet, anyway.
The call center of Base Budget Insurance occupied a full level of the thirty-third floor of the building.
Just above us, on the thirty-fourth floor, was the product team, compliance, accounts, and human resources, and above that, the executive offices and board room.
The technical team, for some reason, were in the basement of the building, level minus zero-one—something to do with the servers needing to be close to the ground to stay cool.
Occasionally, one of the pale, dead-eyed wraiths from the tech team would stumble out of an elevator on the thirty-third floor, float through the call center with dead, empty eyes, lurch over to whatever poor idiot had summoned them, and wordlessly switch their desktop off and back on again.
The lights of the call center automatically flicked on as I walked through, illuminating the whole floor and highlighting the soul-sucking worn gray carpet, the concrete-colored cubicle dividers, and the pee-yellow walls.
Four small glass offices in each corner of the open-plan floor were the only redeeming feature of the place; three were department manager’s offices, one, a large meeting room.
I had my eye on the one on the far side—the Client Experience and Support Senior Manager’s office. That was the next rung on the corporate ladder, one step up from where I was as Client Experience and Support Team Leader. I’d get there if it killed me.
Only two years ago, I used to have a private office suite, with Judy, my scary-as-hell executive assistant, in a vestibule outside my door. Now, I coveted one of the tiny glass fishbowl offices in the corner of an open-plan office hell. How the mighty had fallen.
Swallowing my grief, I straightened my shoulders and marched over to my desk.
The other team leaders had been confused when I pulled my designated double-wide cubicle away from the wall, removed the partitions, and put my seat on the other side, creating more of an open space—a desk in front of the window instead of a pokey box to hide in.
But, thanks to a careful arrangement of my team in their cubicles into a square U shape in front of me, I cut the rest of the call center off and provided myself with a tiny bit of privacy.
Unlike the other team leaders, I wanted to be seen, and I put myself in the perfect Feng Shui power position where nobody could approach me without running the gauntlet through my team’s cubicles first. It was the little things that made all the difference.
I sat down, switched on my desktop, and logged in.
A billion new emails lay in bold font at the top of my inbox.
I scanned them all quickly, deleted the pointless ones, filed the ones I didn't need to respond to, and started working my way through the endless drudgery of customer complaints, staff requests, petty squabbles over budget allocations, over-excited declarations from the social committee…
This meeting could have been an email. This email could have been a cage fight.
Slowly, some of my team began to drift in.
Once called “call center operators,” then “customer service officers,” then, briefly, “client relationship development and liaison partners,” the twelve Client Experience and Support Representatives in my team could be roughly divided into two distinct camps.
Ironically enough, in my head, I’d always called them the sprites and the dragons.