Chapter 3 #4
“. . . but let’s get to it. I know you’re all on the edge of your seats.
” Daniel rubbed his palms together and grinned like a cartoon villain.
“I know, I know—this isn’t the usual way we announce promotions, but we all felt like tonight needed a little bit more impact than an email.
Dana Crossly and Evan Williams have been this city’s greatest champions.
They’ve founded shelters, constructed low-cost clinics, and continue to shine a bright light on the injustices we here are all too privileged to experience firsthand.
The associate who works with Ms. Crossly and Mr. Williams will have a direct hand in helping the people who need it most.
“So you all can understand why this announcement needs excitement! Pizazz!” Daniel punched the air.
Pippa hadn’t ever thought a promotion should be treated in the same way as a film award, but maybe that was why she was only an assistant.
Daniel paused, looked around the room, and grinned again.
Across the table, Maxim’s calm facade was believable except for the twitch in his jaw and the flex of his fingers, like they wanted nothing more than to fidget. He’d worried his lips so much they appeared rouged and slightly plumper than usual.
In one bright moment of empathy, Pippa could imagine how he must feel. She wasn’t sure why it had taken her this long to realize what such a position would mean to him and to all of the other associates who had put themselves forth for consideration.
For Pippa, working at the firm had always been a way to pay bills.
When she applied to Ivanov, Barry, and Cruz, she’d already had her sense of purpose, and if it involved a few more beheadings than board meetings—well, not everyone had the benefit of going home clean at the end of the night.
But she knew her place in the world, what she had to do, and how she had to do it.
Maybe Maxim did deserve the title. Maybe it might make him a little more human, a little more bearable. A little happier.
Daniel Barry spread his hands and bent his knees as if bracing himself for a large wave. “We are thrilled to announce that our newest senior associate and header to the Crossly-Williams account will be . . .”
Roughly half of the people at the table held their breath.
“Reggie Cavatappi!”
Applause filled the room, along with a few whistles and cheers.
Reggie’s smile seemed fit to break his face. He stood to accept another round of applause and began to shake hands with whoever stood nearby.
“Well,” Jules said under her breath. “That was a letdown.”
“Reggie’s nice, isn’t he?” Pippa said.
“But he’s so boring.”
Pippa turned to her friend. “You have a very strange set of ideals you admire in other people.” Her palms were beginning to sting, but no one seemed interested in ceasing their clapping.
“I like ‘em interesting. How is that a strange set of ideals?”
“Am I interesting?”
“Oh Pippin, my dearest sugar muffin of chaos. Of course you are.”
At last, the eternal round of applause faded and was replaced by the constant murmur of congratulations and well-wishes and people rising from their chairs to congregate around him.
Someone started shouting, “Speech!” to which Reggie shook his head and then gestured in an “Oh, why not, I’ve actually been wanting to do this for months” sort of way.
It was then Pippa noticed Maxim’s seat was empty. Thinking back, she didn’t remember when he had left, but he certainly had not been in the line of other associates who gamely shook hands and accepted their defeat, like any reasonable adult would do.
She couldn’t remember if she had ever gained a begrudging respect for someone only to lose it completely in such a short span of time.
“Do you think he’ll ever make a speech, or will he just be swarmed by suck-ups and handshakes?” Jules said.
“I’ll bet—” Pippa’s chair started to vibrate, and after a very confusing second, she realized it must be her phone. Whoever it was could wait. She continued, “I’ll bet you twenty bucks he ends up making the speech tomorrow in the office.”
Jules wrinkled her nose. “Before or after nine?”
“Oh, before. Definitely befo—” She broke off as her chair vibrated again. A repeat caller, which, on Pippa’s phone, wasn’t typically benign. She fished her phone from her purse and unlocked it to two unread texts, two missed calls, and a voicemail from “Mamma B.”
“Shit, I need to take this,” she said as she scrambled out of her seat and tapped her mother’s contact bubble.
“You’re so rude right now!” Jules’s conspiratorial grin lessened the chastisement.
Thankfully, the dinner had turned into a general milling about with Reggie Cavatappi looking disheartened that the whole “speech” shout had been taken more as a joke than a suggestion. Pippa dodged easily between chattering people.
“Oh, now you pick up,” her mother said.
“I’m at a dinner. For work.”
“Really? They do those? Are you going to have time to go out later—”
“Mom,” Pippa snapped. “Please just tell me what’s so important that you called. Twice.” She trotted down a hallway, heading for a windowless door beneath a glowing exit sign.
“Oh. Right,” Mary Beverly said. “The demon from last night. One of the ladies in my book group has a cousin from Portland, and she said a group of Tro’graths left there for the Northeast . . .”
Pippa emerged into a narrow alley. The sun had dipped behind the buildings across the street and cast the alley into dusky shadow. An overflowing dumpster sat along one wall, and wooden crates were stacked beside it.
“. . . and she said . . .”
Movement in one corner sent Pippa’s heart into her throat. Someone was sitting on a crate, their elbows on their knees and their hands scraping through their hair. She looked closer, recognized the hands and the hair and the person, and her alarm morphed into bitterness.
“Mom, I have to go.”
“Pippa! I’m not done. She said that the jewels in the head—”
“I’ll call you later.”
“They mean that—”
Pippa hung up and started for Maxim Sheppard.
He glanced up at the sound of her approach. He’d unbuttoned his suit jacket and loosened his tie.
“Really?” she said. The venom filled her voice easily. “Reggie Cavatappi is a nice person. He has been nothing but kind to every single one of us in the office, from janitor to partner, and wishing him well was the absolute least you could have done. You couldn’t shake his hand once?”
Maxim’s laugh emerged sharp and bitter. “Why do you give a fuck?”
It was so unexpectedly vicious that Pippa was lost for a rebuttal. “I—” she managed before she let the rest of her sentence break apart in her shock.
His lips pressed together and he exhaled hard through his nose. “You don’t care about this job. This firm. You don’t care about anything we’re doing, so why do you care how I react to utter, gut-punching disappointment?”
Maxim must have seen something in her expression. Bafflement, probably, and a bit of hurt from being cursed at in a restaurant alley. Leaning forward, he scrubbed at his head with both hands. His blond hair stuck up in a way that brought him a step away from rakish.
“Do you know what it’s like to want to make a difference?” he said, more to the ground than to her. “To feel like if you could only get this one position, this one fucking job, you would find purpose. Fulfillment. And then it . . .” Another sharp sigh puffed into the crisp evening air.
“Yes.” She said it again with more emphasis. “I know exactly what that’s like.”
Without realizing she had been walking toward him, she found herself close enough to see that his eyes were green, and as the setting sun filtered through a gap in the buildings across the street, the dying beam settled across his face and turned that green into a color so light they almost seemed golden.
How had she never noticed? Could office fluorescent lighting be that manipulative?
And the new softness in his features, had lighting hidden that as well? She swore the lack of tension in his brow and the absence of any jaw clenching was something previously undiscovered.
Maxim’s lips parted around the beginning of a question—she could see it in the upward cant of his eyebrows—and Pippa found herself holding her breath.
Then his gaze slid off her to something at the opening of the alley, and the peaceful moment shattered. He surged to his feet and pulled Pippa behind him before she could utter a peep of protest.
“Stay behind me,” he said in a display of unnecessary chivalry that had her rolling her eyes.
She thought about saying that she was more dangerous than any mugger that might try and accost them, but it was pompous and a bit douchey, and when she looked past his shoulder, she realized it wasn’t at all correct.
The figure crouched in the alley’s entrance was not a mugger.
Not a human, either. It was the arms that really gave it away, since there were two extra.
The face was wrong as well, with large, blinking eyes on either side of its head that were as red and shiny as marbles, and a vertical snapping mouth ringed with hooked teeth.
The creature was garbed in a pair of loose cargo shorts and a basketball jersey with “Hell’s Outcasts” stamped in bright lettering. Additional holes had been cut into the fabric beneath the armpits for the extra arms. A pocketed bandolier lay across its narrow chest.
“What the fuck?” Maxim breathed.
Pippa could agree, for once.
“The shit, Charles?” she called out from behind Maxim.
The demon bobbed his head. “Hey, Pippa.” It came out as more of a clicking chatter than any sort of normal speech, but that was mostly because of the teeth.
Occasionally, she’d get information from Charles about any new residents causing havoc or gossip of potential threats to the populace. The demon had straddled the line between ally and enemy, never drifting too far to either side.
Charles also never went out in public, and never in daylight. Being seen by humans was a fantastic way to get killed by an Ash Coven member. Or an Ash Coven hopeful. Something wasn’t right here.
Pippa wriggled around Maxim, dodging his grip and ignoring his hissed, “What are you doing?”
“You’re not supposed to be above ground this time of day,” she said to the demon.
“Yea-a-h, about that.” Charles tapped a set of stubby, curved claws on a bandolier. “Got a job I couldn’t refuse.”
A chill tickled Pippa’s spine. “To do . . . what?”
“Someone wants you gone.” He shrugged one pair of knobby shoulders. “Nothing personal.”
“Yeah? Who paid you so well, then?” Magic hovered at her fingertips, ready to be channeled.
Charles shook his head. “Sorry, can’t say. Signed a contract in blood. Some of that ‘Say our name and your brain’ll leak out of your nose or wherever’ stuff.”
“So they were rich.”
“Rich enough.”
“And there’s no way I can talk you out of this.”
If a face like Charles’s could appear incredulous, it would have done so now. He shoved a hand into one of the bandolier’s pockets. When he withdrew his claws, red powder was pinched between them. “I mean, I’ll feel a little sad. You’re not bad, for a witch. But you’re still a witch.”
Sharp teeth chattered in impatience. “Anyway. Burn, bitch.”
With a clacking shout, the demon threw the powder into the air. It exploded into flames that shot toward Pippa like they’d come out of an ignited gas line.
Pippa forced magic out of her hands and battered the stream of fire, directing it upward, where it fizzled against the purpled sky.
More powder flew into the air, more flames engulfed the alley. Pippa kept them at bay with either redirection or scraps of conjured shield. The alley was growing hotter, and several small fires burned in the dumpsters and frolicked within the wooden crates.
Pippa had just gathered the power into herself, intending to use it to blast Charles across the street, when the demon threw three handfuls of purple powder out of the leather bandolier.
Three long, whiplike tendrils lashed out at Pippa.
She sent them flying with a quick series of magical punches, though one passed her face close enough to see the striations of power binding the powder and giving it substance.
If anyone inside heard the noise in the alley, they would surely come out to see. Couldn’t have that; couldn’t let anyone know.
For some reason, this thought set off a series of alarms in Pippa’s head. She was forgetting about something in this alley, something that would—
The quick snap of a magical whip and the ensuing pain in her forearm broke the thread of that reflection, and she diverted all of her concentration to the demon before her.
Charles had a handful of the red powder, the same sort that he had thrown into the air to conjure fire.
“Do you think you’ll taste good?” Charles said.
“Excuse me?” Pippa spat.
“Charred like this. Barbecued witch. Never tried it, myself.” He reached his other three hands into the pockets and pulled out more powder, all of it red and shimmering like sand.
Pippa thought of shields and barriers, and an idea came upon her so suddenly that she almost staggered.
“That’s disgusting, Charles,” she said. She felt the magic around the demon quiver in anticipation of what she planned to do.
“Isn’t that what you’re good for? Why else would someone want to burn witches?” The demon flung out all four arms to engulf the alley in flame.
Right as Charles moved, Pippa tugged the surrounding simmering magic into a shield and enclosed the demon within a dome of it.
Flames arced around the inside of the dome like an apocalyptic snow globe, roaring and vile.
After the flames faded, she let the shield dissolve. A dark plume of smoke puffed skyward. When it cleared, Charles was nothing more than a charred pile on the concrete.
Pippa walked up to the body gingerly. It didn’t move when she nudged it with the toe of her flat. Another pull on magic dusted the remains and scattered them into the street.
There was still that prickling sensation in her brain, of something forgotten that she really should not have let slip.
From behind her, there came a clatter and a low groan. Pippa whirled about, hands raised and ready to defend herself.
Oh.
Shit.
She had forgotten about Maxim Sheppard.