3
You are not Norma Rae. Sometimes standing up for what you believe in should take a backseat to survival.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
I would like to say that Cal, Iris, and I bade our trapped guests good evening and had a mature, thoughtful discussion about my options before forming a coherent plan for how to handle the Nik situation.
But instead, they sent me to my room.
This was what I got for not renting my own apartment for the summer.
The next morning, the whole hit-by-a-truck feeling still lingered. Because I couldn’t explain what the hell had happened the night before or how it was going to affect me in the long term, I decided to just continue as if it hadn’t. I restocked my purse with antivampire weapons, packed my own lunch, and drove to work early. Oh, and I downgraded to a business-casual outfit of a pair of khakis and a dark blue cardigan, because I would never wear poly-blend again.
I didn’t know how to process all of the truth explosions lobbed at me in the parlor. There were so many elements to be upset over. Cal sending Nik to my college campus to threaten the mouth-breather from my history class. The fact that Nik couldn’t remember coming to my college campus to threaten said mouth-breather. Nik taking this as an invitation to follow me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. The fact that he couldn’t remember following me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. Nik attacking me in the parking lot. The fact that he couldn’t remember attacking me in the parking lot. And he forgot the kissing. I couldn’t seem to get past that.
This was not normal vampire behavior. What with their immortality and superhuman eye for detail, vampires had awesome memories. So why did Nik have a big blank spot when it came to me? I’d assigned all this meaning and excitement to my interactions with him, and he couldn’t even recall anything beyond Hey, I think your face is familiar-ish. Was I really so unmemorable?
In the most basic terms, I was hurt and sad, and I felt very foolish. I’d used those few seconds with Nik, that first kiss of all kisses, the silly whirlwind romance of it all, to assure myself that breaking it off with Ben hadn’t been a mistake. I’d told myself, See? You’re going to be OK. Mysterious hunky vampires dig you. To find out that it was all some bizarre possible setup by my brother-in-law that resulted in a memory fugue state was, well, disappointing.
On top of that, I was not used to fighting with Iris, so my internal level was way off-bubble. Between the age difference and losing our parents at such an early age, Iris had always been more of a mother to me than a sibling. After a disastrous attempt to try to blend me into her life in the big city, Iris had given up college and the career she’d planned to bring me back to Half-Moon Hollow and live in our parents’ old house. She’d even started Beeline, a “daytime concierge service” and event-planning business for vampires so her schedule would be flexible enough to work with mine.
I knew exactly how hard Iris worked to keep our parents’ house, pay the bills, and make me feel I had some sort of normal life. There were times when seeing the dark circles under her eyes and the worry on her face made me feel so guilty I wanted to run away just to relieve her of the burden of me. And then I resented her, for making me feel that way, for taking our parents’ place so readily. And then I realized what a stupid reaction that was, and I went through the whole guilt cycle again.
Tripping over Cal while dropping off a service contract at his house had seemed like some sort of karmic reward for her suffering. Cal, an investigator who occasionally worked for the Council, made her happy. She didn’t have to prove herself to him. She didn’t have to do anything for him. She just loved him, and that was enough.
My love for Iris and my gratitude to Cal helped keep us on the same wavelength through my teenage years. We rarely disagreed, and when we did, we’d always been able to work through it with lighthearted teasing and minor threats of Tasering.
I knew they had to be worried if they were acting so flipping loony. Now that Iris had leveled up to her vampire state, she hated the idea of me being out in the world without superpowers to defend myself. Every day that I walked around as my weak human beta version made them both twitchy, but Iris was still holding out the hope that I could have some sort of normal life, with kids and the white picket fence.
I didn’t have a lot of experience, romantically speaking, but it seemed weird to be so focused on Nik. Was it because I’d suddenly made contact with him again after building up such an epic imaginary relationship in my head? Or because I’d been alone since breaking up with Ben and needed to latch on to any man who’d shown the slightest interest in me, even if it was lunge-y, bite-y zombie interest?
Was one option better than the other?
Defying Iris by continuing at my job wasn’t like me at all. I hoped that at some level, it communicated to her how important this was to me. And the fact that I was still thinking about Nik at all was a sign either of my own desperate, self-destructive loneliness or that I could possibly be feeling the first twinges of grown-up emotions toward a completely unsuitable man.
And Nik was just that, a man. Ben was sweet and kind and an awesome boyfriend, but he was a boy. Even though John, the evil teenage vampire con man who’d duped me into helping him hurt Iris and Cal, had been a teenager for hundreds of years, he’d never matured past the petulant egomaniac stage. But here was Nik, a man, not a guy, not a boy, a man, with all of the power and appeal that implied. He’d been around long enough to see the world several times over. He’d been a witness to history.
And for a split second—well, two of them, actually—this man found me interesting enough to kiss me, and while I knew that I was, in general terms, pretty awesome, I just didn’t understand why. Then again, he was interested in me in a sporadic fashion that he didn’t even seem to remember, so . . .
OK, yeah, the universe made sense again.
I used my shiny new employee pass to get past several levels of security beyond the Council office’s employee entrance. I felt very official and grown-up, flashing my little plastic badge around to get to the inner sanctum of vampire archival information. I sat at my bare, personality-free desk and took a deep breath.
“Focus on work,” I told myself. “Just focus on doing a good job, and everything else will work itself out.”
It occurred to me that my new life philosophy matched that of the super-tense Michael Bolton character in Office Space.
I logged into my department’s server and opened my first window. Cracking my knuckles, I tried to picture the end result of what would be months, if not years, of work by myself and my coworkers, the largest, most comprehensive archive of vampires’ living descendants in the history of the world.
No pressure.
Vampires had been dragged out of the coffin in 1999 by a cranky undead accountant named Arnie Frink. Recently turned and not quite comfortable with his daytime hours, Arnie requested evening hours so he could continue his job at the firm of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz. But the evil HR lady, as ignorant as the rest of the world about the existence of the undead at the time, insisted that Arnie keep banker’s hours, because she had concerns about him messing with the copy machine.
Arnie countered with a diagnosis of porphyria, a painful allergy to sunlight, which would make him burn and peel and generally be unpleasant to work around, but the HR lady insisted that he could just wear a hat or something. So Arnie responded by suing the absolute hell out of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz.
When the allergy-discrimination argument failed to impress a judge, a sunblock-slathered Arnie flipped his proverbial feces in court, stood up, and yelled that he was a vampire, with a medical condition that rendered him unable to work during the day, thereby making him subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
After several lengthy appeals, not to mention a lot of testing by mental-health professionals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a settlement, evening hours, and his own Internet following. When the furor died down, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. Blood was easier to get when you could just ask someone for it, without the drama of stalking and body disposal.
An elected contingent of ancient vampires officially asked the world’s governments to recognize them as legitimate, nonmythical beings, asking for special leniency in areas such as, say, income taxes that hadn’t been paid in two hundred years. I don’t remember much of that first year. I was too young to understand much beyond the snippets of stories I picked up before Mom rushed to turn off the evening news for being too scary. Iris called it a dark chapter in human history. Mobs of people dragged vampires out into the sunlight or set them on fire for no reason other than that they just didn’t understand the new world they were living in. All I knew was that my classmates’ mothers were feeding them garlic supplements with every meal, and all of my junior league soccer games got canceled because the government said we weren’t allowed to leave the house after dark.
The same international contingent of vampires, who called themselves the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, appealed to the human governments for help. In exchange for providing certain census information, the Council was allowed to establish smaller, local bodies within regions of each state in every country. The Council was charged with keeping watch over newer vampires to make sure that they were safely acclimated to unlife, settling squabbles within the community, and investigating “accidents” that befell vampires. We were fortunate enough to have one of these offices in our backyard, a coincidence that Iris took full advantage of when she started her vampire concierge business.
This familiarity was what made Iris nervous about my working for the Council. She’d witnessed the vampire officials’ by-any-means-necessary style of management firsthand and the intimidation, cover-ups, and otherwise dirty dealings it involved. Well, she hadn’t actually witnessed the dirty dealings—that was how you disappeared. But she’d seen enough that she didn’t want her baby sister on the Council payroll, which, when you think about it, is a little hypocritical.
In the years since the Great Coming Out, a lot of vampires had taken on “reverse genealogy” as a hobby. Instead of searching for their ancestors, they searched for the children and grandchildren they’d never met. In many cases, they wanted to share the wealth they’d accumulated over the years or pass on heirlooms. Or they simply wanted to assure themselves that their loved ones had fared well without them. Personally, I think they just wanted to assure themselves that they had been human once, that they’d once lived in the daylight.
Dick Cheney did his own version of this when he lingered around the Hollow to keep an eye on the family started by his “youthful dalliance” with a laundress. He posed as a helpful but secretive uncle, providing discreet help with rent, food, and even college tuition when his several-times-great-grandson, Gilbert Wainwright, became the first of his family to even consider higher education. Oddly enough, Jane ended up working for Mr. Wainwright at his bookstore, Specialty Books, and continued to run it after Mr. Wainwright died. The undead circles in the Hollow ran like a really small social Venn diagram.
The Council wanted to limit the criminal activity that inevitably popped up whenever vampires started trending, so they’d started an international movement to establish a user-friendly private search engine of vampires across the country, allowing the undead—and only the undead—to track their living descendants. It would work like ancestry.com but with more shadowy vampire connections and not-quite-legal documents than would be available to nice, law-abiding humans.
That was where teams of programmers like myself came in, organizing the information and building the engine from the ground up. To keep too much sensitive information from being stored in the same location, we were working out of Council offices all over the country. Each team handled a different piece of the puzzle, working for a regional team supervisor, who answered to a big, scary board of national vampire officials.
The coding would be only half the job. Some teams worked on the security angle, making it difficult for unapproved users to access the records. Others set up the registration features or did graphic design. (We called them the “lame teams.”) Our portion of the puzzle involved finding the best way to link genealogical documents and make them easily searchable, and then, because we were interns and our eyesight was considered expendable, scanning, keynoting, and cross-referencing the aforementioned shadowy documents provided by vampire volunteers was an additional “side duty” for our team. Other materials would have to be culled from public records. And then, of course, the engine would have to be tested, launched, updated, and maintained over the years, which, for the right people, could be long-term, lucrative employment. And as someone who would like to move out of her sister’s home in the near future, I considered long-term lucrative employment very important.
Yes, very important. And yet . . . instead of, say, opening the programming application and poking around a bit to get settled in, I was opening the server shared by the entire office complex—and opening employee records. Because the IT department, whose members weren’t nearly as up-to-date on security measures as they thought they were, hadn’t assigned us login credentials yet, my entire department was working under the group “new employee” ID, which meant that opening employee histories in the personnel server couldn’t be traced to a specific person. A terminal, yes, but not a person.
Nikolai Dragomirov’s folder was listed in the “Specialized” directory, right next to Cal’s. I tapped my finger against the mouse, mulling over what I was about to do. This was probably a bad idea. I was breaking several policies already, some of which could get me severely disciplined, and it was my second day. And reading Nik’s files behind his back was definitely a violation of his trust . . . which I assumed I had. OK, not really; I barely knew the guy.
And that was the point, really. I knew nothing about Nik, and what Cal knew, he wasn’t telling. Given the circumstances, looking through Nik’s employment records was the responsible thing to do, right?
Right?
“Argh,” I groaned, batting at my mouse. I clenched both eyes shut, clicking randomly, hoping that maybe fate would open the folder for me without my having to aim for it. I opened my eyes.
No dice.
“Fine.” I grunted, opening one eye while opening the folder.
Nik’s file was empty.
No work history, no sire/turning history, no case files, nothing to indicate that he’d ever stepped inside a Council building, much less worked for the agency for years. Part of me was relieved, because it kept me from learning anything disturbing. But at the same time, what the hell? According to Cal, Nik had been working for the Council since before it was officially formed. Why wouldn’t they have any information on him?
What the hell was going on here?
I flopped back into my desk chair, contemplating what Nik’s blank personnel folder could mean. Was it that his history was just so secretive and badass that it wasn’t meant to be recorded, like a vampire James Bond? Or had someone—namely, Nik—erased his file knowing that he would come under scrutiny as the newest freelance investigator to work under Ophelia? (She did seem to go through a lot of them.) Was there a master hard copy I could find somewhere? Contacting the Council’s international archives to request such a file would probably be difficult to overlook, right? Like checking his Facebook message folder but exponentially increased to the power of eleventy?
Maybe this was standard procedure for the Council’s operatives? Maybe Cal’s folder was empty, too? I hovered the cursor over his folder, flexing my index finger. Then again, there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my beloved brother-in-law. And I didn’t need to know most of them if I wanted to make eye contact with him over the dinner table.
“Nope, nope, nope.” I closed out the folder while flailing my free hand. I would remain in my protective little bubble of ignorance, thank you.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, willing my brain to empty of all concerns about vampire attacks and sisters who may or may not show up at my workplace and attempt to drag me out of my office by my hair. I would not do this to myself. I would not lose my job because of my adolescent crush on an inscrutable vampire. I clicked on the sample programming text issued by the regional supervisor and began building an index. Slowly but surely, my brain relaxed into the task, and I felt more like myself than I had in days.
Everybody had a calling. This was mine. And I’d almost missed out on it. I’d started off majoring in nursing at University of Kentucky, inspired by the hospital staff who had treated Iris after Waco Marchand’s henchman (also known as my ex-boyfriend, Creepy John) nearly turned her into a person pretzel. And as much as I wanted to succeed, it turned out that anatomy and exposure to actual internal parts were a bit beyond me. Computer science? That clicked for me. I discovered the aptitude in an Intro to Computers class that I’d only taken because Ben needed it for his major and it was the one time slot I had open on my schedule for a shared class. (It was either that or get him to join my women’s self-defense class.)
The professor had us type command prompts, and it just made sense. All of the seemingly random numbers and letters weren’t so random. I could see what they were supposed to be. It was as if the codes had always been tucked away in my bloodstream, and putting my fingers on the keyboard set them free to create and build. So the girl who had trouble loading music onto her iPod without violent cursing was suddenly able to write her own programs. It was enough to make me wonder what I could have accomplished in high school if I’d actually applied myself to my classes instead of coasting by while flinging myself around the volleyball court.
So I was now heading into my senior year, majoring in computer science, with a 3.8 grade-point average and the support of almost every professor who mattered in my department. I’d already written several programs and apps of my own. They were nothing worth selling but enough to keep my roommate—who believed every “You have won!” pop-up ad she saw—from destroying my hard drive with inadvertently downloaded viruses.
In an hour, I had a basic “sketch” of what I thought the records index should look like, when Jordan and Aaron marched into our windowless corral. They were arriving at exactly 1:56, just minutes before their shifts started. They stopped in their tracks when they saw me already clacking away at my keyboard.
“You’re already here,” Jordan said, lifting an eyebrow. “And you’ve been working.”
“I just wanted to get started early,” I told them, carefully avoiding motives involving uncomfortable conversations with overprotective vampire siblings.
“Project leader!” Aaron declared.
My head popped up. “Wait. What?”
Aaron whipped his messenger bag over his head and dropped it onto his desk. “Oh, you know that they’re going to eventually ask us to elect a project leader. And by virtue of being early and working before our first day of real work starts, you are hereby elected. Jordan, any arguments?”
Jordan shook her rainbow head as she set up a mini-TARDIS play set next to her phone. “Nope.”
“Majority rules!” Aaron crowed.
“What if Marty wants to vote?” I asked.
“Trust me, Marty will vote for you,” Jordan muttered.
“I’ll vote for what?” Marty asked.
“To make Gigi project leader,” Aaron said. “To start off our time at the Council right, I think we should be proactive in shunting responsibility off on one of our own.”
“Oh.” Marty gave me a shy smile. “Sure. I think Gladiola would do a great job.”
I caught sight of Jordan rolling her eyes behind Marty’s back.
I laughed. “OK, well, as your dubiously elected leader, I say everybody should sit down and get to work. The Council wants a beta version of the program by the end of next year. If we want our portion to be ready by the end of next summer, we’re going to have to get cracking.”
“Wow, give a girl a little authority, and she goes straight for the dictatorship,” Aaron muttered.
“Shut it,” I said, smacking his shoulder with my files. “Now, if you guys want to look at the basic sketch I saved on the server and let me know what you think, I’d appreciate it. Make suggestions. Make changes. Make up your own, and we’ll let them fight it out cage-match style. But according to this scary timeline tacked up on the wall, we need to have something to show the regional supervisor in weeks.”
“Workplace violence!” Aaron cried, rubbing at his shoulder. But he turned toward his monitor and logged in. Jordan shrugged and did the same. Marty gave me one last big smile and set about organizing his desk. He was the last to get to work, but eventually he started tapping away at his keyboard.
I was cautiously proud of myself. Project leader for less than an hour, and my team was already on track. Maybe it was some sort of great karmic repayment for everything in my personal life falling to crud.
To test out how the information would be sorted, I needed to enter data from one of the hundreds of genealogical files the archivists were so eager to off-load into the corner of our office. I ran my fingertips over the madly tilted stack of manila folders. Opening any one of them could open my brain up to secrets that some vampire could decide were worth killing me over. It felt as if Pandora’s box had been reduced to office debris. Determined to choose at random, I shoved my hand into the pile—and promptly knocked half of the stack onto the floor.
“Let me help you with that!” Marty sprang to his feet and dashed over to help me gather the displaced files from the carpet. In fact, he was so eager to rescue me from my clutter that his knee knocked my feet out from under me. Only quick reflexes and a well-placed hand against the broad side of my cubicle kept me from taking a dive.
Marty winced. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK. You were just trying to help.” I sighed, pushing up from the floor. “Thanks.”
“Are you sure we’re ready for data entry?” Marty asked, eyeing the mess I’d made.
“Oh, no, I just wanted a random family file to scan,” I said. “And I managed to create a file avalanche.”
“It could happen to anybody,” he told me, giving me a lopsided grin.
“I’ll stack the rest of these. You go do your thing.”
“You sure?”
I nodded while balancing the last few files on top of the stack. “I think I can be trusted not to destroy the rest of the records.”
Marty laughed and sauntered back to his desk. I carefully patted the folder edges back into place, noting a bold flash of color among all that beige. I pulled the red folder from the stack, careful not to cause another collapse. The folder tab was marked “Linoge.”
That seemed random enough.
I dropped back into my chair and cued up some Lorde on the music system, sliding my headphones into place. I opened the folder and found that most of the paper inside had been carefully blacked out with marker. This was not a genealogical archive folder. This was a disciplinary file. A really old disciplinary file. The paperwork inside was a photocopy, but the original had been old wrinkly parchment. What little text remained on the first page described a Pierre Linoge, a vampire who’d briefly lived in northern France in the eighteenth century but had been permanently disciplined by an earlier incarnation of the Council when his violent feeding frenzies threatened to expose the region’s vampire population. And while the names of his descendants had been redacted, the good news was that the heavy editing left only the barest facts visible, making it easy to pick out the vampire’s basic information that I needed to enter into the biographic program. I could at least give the index a test run.
There was one strange footnote at the bottom of Linoge’s report. It was just a few lines of text: “Linoge’s feeding excesses are described as contrary to his character by other vampires of good reputation. His friends note that the attacks started after he parted company with [redacted], a human known for practicing magicks both light and dark. It is possible his indiscretion was due to her influence.”
“Oh, sure, blame the girlfriend,” I muttered, tapping the keys.
Something about the file bothered me. Why the hell would they give us a file full of information on a dead vampire? In general, the “living” vampires were the only ones interested in tracking their descendants. And why bother giving us a file with so much information missing? Hell, the descendant information was redacted. What was the point? Maybe it was just thrown into the archive pile by mistake? It seemed unlikely, since the Council had put so much emphasis on securing the genealogical information.
“Is it working?”
Marty appeared at my elbow, making me jump, knocking a binder on top of the file. Marty was oblivious to my clumsiness, staring at me intently. I shoved the file into the binder and slid the binder into my bottom desk drawer.
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
“Great job!” he exclaimed. “Guys, we made the right choice for team leader!”
Aaron and Jordan had their headphones in place and their hands on their keyboards. We probably wouldn’t hear from them again until they ran out of Twizzlers.
“I’m sure they’re very proud,” I assured Marty.
Slowly but surely, I was coming to realize that having a grown-up job mostly meant saying things I didn’t mean.