7. Josh
That woman was infuriating. She looked at me with those big, gorgeous green eyes and flat out lied about taking my stuff. Unless it was all in my head, and it wasn’t her who’d done it. But I knew it was her. I so knew it.
I almost caught her when I asked about Michelle and the Thai restaurant. I knew damn well Annie had been standing there in my wings listening to the conversation. I’d felt her. Or rather, I’d felt the Cupid magic. And I knew it the second she’d darted poor Stuart. All beginning Cupids tried too hard in the beginning and blew harder than they should. Then Michelle had rubbed her arm and the two of them got all twitterpated.
Total amateur Cupid.
Short of kidnapping Annie and demanding my stuff back, I didn’t know what to do. Plus, there was that tiny, tiny chance that it wasn’t Annie. Kidnapping an innocent woman wasn’t the best way to keep the police out of all this.
That left me with one course of action. I’d have to go back to the office and admit what had happened.
I’d been walking at a brisk pace out of anger, but once I arrived at the most logical solution, my steps slowed. There was no telling what Ellen would say. She might call Aphrodite herself and who knows what she’d want to do about it.
I might as well get used to the idea of the Underworld.
But it was my own damn fault. I knew not to leave my equipment out in the open. I may not like my job, but I shouldn’t have been so careless. It was a wonder something like this hadn’t happened sooner. It was time to stop acting like a kid and take some responsibility for a change, no matter what the consequences were.
I’d screwed up, and I needed help.
My feet dragged the rest of the way to the car. Might as well get it over with as soon as possible. I wasn’t going to relax until my sentence was passed.
The car ride was depressingly short. Twenty minutes to the other side of the city to an abandoned church. I parked the car and climbed in through a window. When I straightened, I was in the vast, domed lobby of the Mt. Olympus Employment Agency.
No one paid attention to a Cupid on death row. I was nobody special. I trudged across the lobby and into the elevator, rode it to my floor, then exited into the hallway.
At the door to my office, I realized I needed to pull myself together. I’d given up before I’d even started. With my chin up and my shoulders back, I went in, passed the busy Cupids at their desks, and knocked on Ellen’s door.
“It’s open.”
The door swung open with a touch of my fingers.
Ellen sat behind her desk studying paperwork. She saw me standing in her doorway and held up her hand. “No. Uh uh. You are not finished with your job. I have not received confirmation that true love has been saved.”
I folded my hands in front of me and waited for her to finish. When she ran out of steam, I took a deep breath and let it out. “I made a mistake.”
She pointed to the seat across her desk. “Sit. What did you do?”
I folded myself into the uncomfortable chair, feeling like a delinquent in the principal’s office. I’d have gladly taken a whole week of detention rather than face whatever was about to happen to me.
My hands were sweaty, so I rubbed them on my jeans while I gathered my thoughts. “The thing is, I was having a really bad morning yesterday.”
She leaned back in her chair with her pen still tucked between her fingers. Her facial expression indicated she was, so far, not impressed. “Okay.”
“First, the wings got stuck on me, and the elastic snapped off one side.” I figured, I might as well lead with this to maybe get a little sympathy.
Her expression was unchanged. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”
“This made me angrier—no, not angry. Upset. It upset me even more, so I threw them into the backseat of the rental car and drove back to the hotel.”
One eyebrow went up. “And?”
“And I was still upset when I got there, so I sort of forgot to grab them out of the car.”
“Oh, Joshua.” She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. “Tell me you didn’t lose them.”
I bent my head and stared at my hands. If there ever was a good time to be invisible, now would have been it. Too bad I didn’t have any wings. “They were stolen from my car.”
She let out a loud, disappointed sigh. “Joshua, what am I going to do with you?”
I lifted my head. “There’s more.”
“Of course there is.”
“She also stole my blowgun.” I held up one hand before she could berate me further. “That was in my room. I’m pretty sure I know who did it. She had a key.”
Ellen sat staring at my face for a good long time before her facial expression softened and she spoke. “You like her.”
“What? No. Don’t be ridiculous.” I paused. “She does have beautiful eyes. And she’s sweet when she isn’t angry at me.” I scrubbed my face with my palms. “That has nothing to do with anything. She won’t admit she took my tools, and I can’t prove it was her. Hell, maybe it wasn’t.” I dropped my hands in my lap. “Ellen, I don’t know what to do.”
My tiny blonde manager leaned her five-foot frame toward me, looking every bit as intimidating as a mob boss. “You screwed up, Joshua. You did exactly what I told you not to do, and now you’re neck-deep in trouble. I’m not even sure I should help you. This is a mess of your own making.” She tapped a series of keys on the keyboard and studied her monitor. “Here’s the problem—a mortal has Mt. Olympus equipment when mortals aren’t supposed to know we exist. What’s worse is, she’s running all over town making matches at her own discretion with zero training or magically implanted instincts.”
I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. “So what should I do?”
She scowled at the results on the screen. “In addition, she has better instincts than you do. Unfortunately, not all her decisions are the right ones, so you’ll have to undo some of what she’s done. In particular, there’s a widow and widower living across the hallway from each other who will kill each other if left with the match intact.”
“So, you know for sure it’s Annie doing it?”
“Oh, sure. It’s definitely her. But you’ll have to get the stuff from her willingly. She imprinted on it.”
I frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Equipment gets ‘borrowed’ from nearly all the departments here. Mostly, no harm comes of it, and the gods look the other way. But once in a great while, a person who has no affiliation with a department runs off with equipment that’s so well suited to them, it can’t be taken away.” She chuckled. “I used to know a girl who dated a guy who stole winged sneakers from the Messenger department. He had to leave his job in Human Resources after that. Now, he’s a manager in the parcel delivery section in Messenger.”
“So, you’re saying Annie should be working here?”
“I couldn’t say.” She shrugged. “She’ll have to be tested for divine DNA to determine her fate.”
I felt the blood leave my face. “What if she fails the test?”
“They’ll wipe her and relocate her, probably. I don’t know. Either way, you’ll have to bring her in. With the equipment.” She glared at me for emphasis, then pulled a tiny pink box from her drawer. “Take this.” She pushed it toward me.
I opened the box and found a small gold pin shaped like a pair of wings. They reminded me of the wings pilots used to give to little kids on airline flights. “What’s this for?”
“These are mine.” Her face was serious. “I’m trusting you not to take them off. I don’t care how you do it, you don’t even take them off in the shower. Got it?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“While you wear them, you can see folks who are invisible. They won’t know unless you react to them. Got it?”
“Sure.” I tried to hide my disappointment. I thought they’d do something more. “They won’t make me invisible, too?”
“Nope. And you tell no one about them for as long as you live. It’s how management monitors their staff. If people knew we could see them, it would ruin our ability to keep an eye on things.”
I pinned the wings to my shirt and peered around the room. No invisible people hid behind the potted plant. “Thank you, Ellen. I’ll straighten all this out. I promise.”
“Yes, you will.” She gave me a fierce scowl. “And you have forty-eight hours to do it in. If you’re not back here with her in two days with all the matches corrected, I’ll have to call Aphrodite and tell her everything. And that will probably have all three of us—you, me, and your Annie—spending the next century mucking out the Aegean stables in the Underworld.”
Forty-eight hours. That wasn’t so bad.
All I had to do was not screw up.
~*~
On the way back to the hotel, I thought about the best way to approach Annie. I didn’t want to scare her, but I didn’t want her—or me—to end up in the Underworld doing serious time. Maybe the direct approach was the best one.
I didn’t recognize the man behind the counter when I entered the hotel lobby. I approached him while looking over his shoulder for Annie. I didn’t see her.
He smiled. “Welcome to the River Rock. How can I help you?” His blond hair was pulled back in a high bun showing off the shaved sides of his head.
“Can you tell me where Annie went?” I felt silly asking, like I was back in sixth grade and people might start teasing me for liking a girl.
“Oh, I sent her home. Today was supposed to be her day off. She’ll be back tomorrow evening. Would you like to leave a message for her, or is there something I can do?” His upper lip was covered in peach fuzz, and the center of his chin had about five sparse hairs growing out. I thought it might be an attempt at a beard, but it might have been a spot he missed while shaving. Probably the second thing.
“No. That’s fine.” Dammit. Now I didn’t know where to find her. Waiting until tomorrow evening to make contact was cutting my time to fix all this in half. “Thanks anyway.”
I dragged my feet across the lobby, reluctant to head up to my room when so much rode on my finding her. If only I had the ability to be invisible. Then I could go into their office and find her address.
I punched the up button and waited. The elevator dinged and the doors rolled open as a thought occurred to me. I didn’t need her address. I had an address already. Whether she lived there or not, I’d already seen her there.
Ignoring the elevator, I pulled my assignment out of my wallet and looked at the address I’d already visited. That was the answer. I’d go there and see if they knew where to find her.
How I’d get that information out of two strangers was beyond me. I’d figure it out when I got there.