4
Until you gauge the mood of your first staff meeting, it’s best just to keep your mouth closed and your head down.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
My third day of work was momentous, not because my team managed to outline a programming proposal to submit to the regional director or because I saw Nik again but because I took part in one of the scariest freaking staff meetings in the history of employment.
Around nine p.m., just as we’d hit our stride workwise, frumpy, prematurely gray Margaret Coggins appeared in our office and informed us that our presence was required in the conference room, immediately. But she didn’t tell us why, which was ominous and super-unhelpful.
Margaret was a human clerical worker who served as Ophelia’s assistant. She dressed like my fourth-grade Sunday-school teacher and seemed to have no measurable sense of humor. That made her exactly like my fourth-grade Sunday-school teacher. So far, our interactions with Margaret had been limited to her delivery of Ophelia’s “best wishes” and various signed employment forms, nondisclosure reminders, and parking validations. Since she didn’t mention my “little problem” in the parking lot—and my coworkers didn’t seem to know about it—I supposed part of Ophelia’s best wishes included the discretion she’d promised the night of the incident. I found that comforting.
Jordan was reluctant to leave work while the code was flowing, so Aaron threatened to delete all of the Gaslight Anthem from her playlists and then lured her away from her desk with a trail of Twizzlers.
“I don’t like things that make me uncomfortable!” she cried plaintively, as Aaron dragged her into the hallway.
Marty shook his head at their antics while I grabbed a notebook. I wasn’t sure what sort of information session or potential massacre we were being summoned to, but surely someone should be taking notes.
While we expected to be shown into the grim, windowless conference room of our orientation, we ended up falling in step with the herd of office drones past that door to a subfloor we hadn’t explored during the orientation. We entered a sort of shallow amphitheater, large enough to seat the sixty or so people shuffling about awkwardly, but not so spacious that you couldn’t make direct eye contact with the people standing on the dais at the front of the room. And those people happened to include Nik, who was standing behind Ophelia, a silent, expressionless tower of Russian, like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV.
While Nik’s face remained impassive, I froze at the sight of him, stopping short so that Marty bumped into my back.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, as Marty grabbed my elbows to keep both of us from toppling over. “Sorry, Marty.”
“This seems to happen a lot,” Marty said, laughing as we dropped into our seats, just a few rows away from Nik and Ophelia.
Nik’s lip drew back in the slightest of snarls, his eyes flitting toward Marty and me.
“I’m a hazard to myself and others,” I confessed, giving Marty an awkward little smile, while not quite breaking eye contact with Nik.
Aaron and Jordan were already sitting with their heads bent together, whispering, speculating about the subject of the meeting.
Nik’s narrowed amber eyes stared a hole through Marty, who was blissfully oblivious.
When all of the employees, humans and vampires alike, were seated, the lights dimmed, and Ophelia cleared her throat pointedly. I couldn’t imagine what had prompted her change from her usual “innocent teenage extra who wandered off the set of Mad Men” wardrobe choices, but she was wearing a tight black silk blouse and black leather pants tailored so close I could have counted the change in her pockets—if she’d had pockets or bothered carrying cash, which she did not. With her hair slicked back in a high ponytail, she looked like a really classy dominatrix.
The employees’ murmuring came to an abrupt halt as Ophelia crossed her arms and tapped the toe of her knee-high black leather boot. I glanced at Nik, whose eyes rolled ever so slightly toward the ceiling at Ophelia’s dramatics.
“Good evening. I’m so sorry to have disrupted your work to call you here,” Ophelia announced, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all. “Especially since our summer employees are just now finding their footing in our little family. But it seems that some of our staff are not as appreciative of our trust and generosity as I hoped they would be.”
Marty and I shared a confused side-eye. It was natural, I supposed, to wonder whether your boss was talking about you in a situation like this. I tried to remember anything I might have done in the last two days of employment that might have provoked this response. But all I’d done was stab someone in the parking lot. No, wait, I had also looked into server folders that I wasn’t supposed to—which was definitely a violation of the Council’s trust—on my first full day of work. But surely all the Council officials knew about was the stabbing.
No, wait, that sounded bad, too.
I squirmed in my seat as Ophelia announced dramatically, “Someone in this room abused the resources of the Council. Someone here used his or her position to steal from us. One of the people sitting in this room is a thief.”
I relaxed ever so slightly. Of stabbing and snooping I was guilty, but I definitely wasn’t a thief. I would worry about my shaky morality scale later.
“I would like to introduce you to my associate, Nikolai Dragomirov,” Ophelia continued, gesturing to Nik with a flourish. “Mr. Dragomirov is here as a consultant to help us find the thief. And trust me when I say there will be no lying to Mr. Dragomirov. He will find you out, so it would be better for you to just come forward now in hopes of a lesser chastisement.”
Nik nodded, back to “gorgeous Russian statue man” mode. Somehow I didn’t think Ophelia’s idea of a chastisement would be a rap on the knuckles with a wooden spoon and a scolding. What exactly was this “thief” supposed to have stolen from the Council? The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead had considerable resources, but I didn’t think much of the vampires’ vast worldwide fortune was being stored here in Half-Moon Hollow. Then again, this complex had about ten subfloors that we weren’t even allowed to talk about, so I supposed a Smaug-style treasure room wasn’t out of the question.
And how exactly was Nik supposed to help ferret out the thief? Cal had mentioned that Nik was an old friend, and Cal had served as an investigator for the Council for years. Did Nik do actual police-type investigative work? Or did he have some sort of special vampire power? Was he a mind-reader, like Jane? Considering the thoughts I’d had around him, I sincerely hoped not.
Suddenly, Nik glanced toward me, as if he could hear me thinking about him.
My eyes went the size of a venti lid.
Damn it.
“I need Sandra Matthews, Elliot Reyes, Su Tran, and Joseph McNichol to come up to the dais, please,” Ophelia said.
Slowly but surely, four Council employees made their way down the aisles to the stage. Sandra Matthews and Elliot Reyes were humans. But Su Tran and Joseph McNichol had the pallor and sharp features of the undead. McNichol, in fact, seemed paler than the usual vampire, but I supposed that could be an illusion caused by his pale blond hair and eerily gray eyes.
All four wore the same suspicious expression and ID badges that marked them as members of the “operations” department. They were in charge of ordering supplies, processing the center’s mail, and keeping us all in creature comforts such as fresh magazines in the waiting room.
“In the past four months, someone has stolen more than nine thousand dollars in copier paper, thumbtacks, and other office supplies from this office and sold them on eBay for a deeply discounted price. Imagine our shock and disappointment when the Web site’s fraud-management unit traced the account user’s IP address back to a computer in the operations department.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. All this fuss over copier paper? From the way Ophelia was carrying on, I thought someone had stolen the crown jewels. Nik eyed me and gave me the slightest shake of his head. I hid my giggles with a cough. If Nik was concerned, this was the time to engage my little-used discretion function.
“And since all four of you have access to that computer, we decided to be egalitarian about this process.” Ophelia held up a small parcel and opened it, fishing out a large box of binder clips. “We ordered this gross of binder clips through the unscrupulous user’s account and had it shipped to a local post-office box. This shameless, greedy thief thought nothing of using the Council’s own shipping supplies to mail the package across town!
“Mr. Dragomirov will be able to identify the person who handled it—” Ophelia broke off as McNichol bolted from the stage, vaulted over the end of the first row at vampire speed, and tried to escape through the back exit. Unfortunately for him, Peter Crown was waiting at the top of the amphitheater. Crown caught him by the throat and slammed him to the ground.
I shuddered. I did not like Mr. Crown. Turned in his mid-forties, during an age when young people shut up and did what they were told, he was by far the crankiest member of the local Council. He reminded me of every math teacher I’d had in high school. And I definitely didn’t envy poor Joseph, whose throat was now under Mr. Crown’s shiny, stylish shoe.
“I do so hate to be interrupted.” Ophelia sighed. “Well, since Mr. McNichol seems to have confessed by cowardice, I suppose the rest of you are dismissed. Unless, of course, you were accomplices in Mr. McNichol’s scheme.” She looked to Nik, who shook his head. Ophelia rolled her eyes. “Sit down.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Crown had dragged Joseph to the dais. Nik took a step back, separating himself from the spectacle now that his role seemed obsolete. Crown dropped a cowering Joseph at Ophelia’s feet. I glanced around the room. While the other interns seemed as confused as I was, the long-term employees were restless, uncomfortable, unwilling to look at the stage. What the hell was going on?
“Joseph McNichol, you are six hundred and forty-two years old,” Ophelia hissed, as Crown grabbed Joseph’s fair hair and yanked his head back. “Old enough to know better than to steal from the Council. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I wouldn’t see you taking what was mine from under my very nose? I see everything. Nothing escapes my notice. You would do well to remember that.”
Ophelia produced a pair of flat-nose pliers from her boot, a perfectly ordinary-looking household tool. But Joseph started thrashing around in Mr. Crown’s grip, howling when Crown gripped his jaw and forced his mouth open. Crown took a vial of red liquid—blood—from his pocket and waved it in front of Joseph’s face. His fangs popped out with a snick.
“You know the punishment for stealing from the Council,” Ophelia intoned. In all this commotion, Nik didn’t move a muscle, either to help Joseph or to help Mr. Crown contain the office-supply thief. He didn’t seem at all bothered by what was about to play out just a few feet away from him. What had he seen over the course of his life that this didn’t give him the slightest pause? Hell, my teeth were perfectly safe, and I still had my jaw clenched in sympathy for Joseph.
“Noo!” Joseph shouted. “N—”
But Ophelia stopped his protest, gripping his left fang in the pliers. I’d expected her to yank the canine out of his mouth by force, but instead, she squeezed the handle brutally, crushing the tooth into powder. Almost everyone in the room seemed to wince at once, ducking away, covering their mouths with their hands. Joseph howled in pain, screaming as Ophelia took the other fang in hand and smashed it, too.
“Why not just pull it out?” Jordan said quietly.
I shook my head. “Later,” I murmured. Jordan nodded and leaned back in her seat, keeping her mouth clamped shut.
Thanks to a youth misspent around vampires, I knew exactly why Ophelia didn’t yank the fang. Crushing it was more painful. The nerve ending in the root would remain, but since fangs were the one part of the vampire that didn’t regenerate, the tooth would never grow back. The exposed nerve would remain raw and alive, flaring painfully with every brush or bump. And when he was hungry or stimulated, his “phantom” fangs would extend, which would be even more excruciating. Unless it was capped—which I was sure Ophelia wouldn’t allow—it would go on for years, an eternity of relentless, throbbing pain.
Over copy paper.
My new boss was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.
“That will be all, Mr. McNichol. You will be continuing your employment, without pay, for the next six months. At the end of the six-month period, we will review your performance. If it is considered subpar, you will be terminated.”
“Somehow, I don’t think she means ‘fired,’ ” Marty whispered sotto voce. I shushed him, patting his arm. When I looked up, Nik was frowning again.
Mr. Crown dragged a groaning Joseph from the dais. Ophelia turned a relatively pleasant smile on the audience, and all of the summer employees practically recoiled in their seats. “Now, just a reminder, please respect the assigned parking spaces. If you do not have an assigned space, there’s a reason. If you don’t like the situation, work harder. Do not touch items in the office refrigerators that do not belong to you. If it’s not your blood, don’t drink it. Friday is College Shirt Day. You will be permitted to wear a T-shirt or sweatshirt advertising your alma mater, and blue jeans, which is an exception to our usual dress code. I know you will all gladly participate in this frivolity. That will be all. Please have a pleasant, productive evening.”
The auditorium was completely silent. None of us dared move, afraid it would draw Ophelia’s attention.
“Get back to work!” she barked. “Now.”
Suddenly invigorated, we rose from our seats and scrambled over one another to get back to our offices.
“Well, I guess I should take that red stapler out of my messenger bag, huh?” Marty joked.
I jostled his arm. “Shh, Marty, now’s not the time for snark. The creatures with the superhearing will not appreciate your special brand of coping humor.”
“What did we just see?” Aaron whispered fiercely. “What the hell was that?”
I pressed my finger to my lips again and shook my head, because discretion was necessary and because I just didn’t know. Why the spectacle over stolen office supplies? Why not just handle Joseph’s theft in a less humiliating fashion? Was it some sort of demonstration for the summer kids? Was Ophelia trying to show us what happened to Council employees who stepped out of line? Or was this more personal? Ophelia had mentioned over and over what happened to “people who take from me.” Was she referring to Jamie in a none-too-subtle way? Was she planning to crush my teeth with pliers for helping her boyfriend fill out college applications?
That seemed like an overreaction.
I glanced over my shoulder down the hall, to where Nik stood, watching as I herded my teammates into our office. His expression was the very definition of inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or intrigued or trying to figure out a way to jump me again. Either way, I shut my office door in his face, which was probably rude, but I was team leader. I felt an obligation to protect my underlings and their canine teeth.
Marty seemed completely unmoved by the display in the amphitheater. He plopped down in his office chair and slipped on his headphones as if nothing had happened. Aaron and Jordan, on the other hand, were shaky and pale. Jordan leaned against her desk, arms crossed, chewing nervously on her thumbnail.
“Is it wrong that I’m on the verge of freaking the hell out and walking away?” Aaron asked. “I mean, what the hell was that? We joke around about vampires, ‘Haha, they’ll kill you if your parallel parking offends them.’ Because for years, that was supposed to be how they solved their problems—violence, violence, violence. But that was . . . over office supplies? That just seems petty and weird.”
“I know that guy was a thief, but I felt so bad for him,” Jordan said. “I don’t know if I feel safe here now. What if I accidentally eat someone’s Hot Pocket? They might waterboard me.”
“Look, you two, I understand that you’re shaken up. That’s normal, expected, evidence that you have a soul—which, as someone who shares a very small office space with you, I find very comforting. But this, this imbalanced, paranoid thing, this is exactly why Ophelia pulled that stunt. She wants you to worry, to overanalyze every decision you make for fear of stepping the tiniest bit out of line. She wants to scare you into being a model employee. You know how they say that on the first day of prison, you should find the biggest guy in the room and kick his ass, for intimidation’s sake? Well, this is like prison. We are working in a version of Oz with no full-frontal Christopher Meloni but better AV equipment. You just have to decide if that’s something you can tolerate.”
“How are you so calm about this?” Aaron asked.
“I’ve lived with a vampire for the past couple of years. Some of my best friends—and family—are vampires. I’m used to their tendency toward violent hyperbole. I don’t necessarily like it, but I’ve learned to deal with it, because, overall, vampires are people just like us. And while some of them are card-carrying psychos, some of them are pretty awesome. You just have to tread carefully around them until you figure out which type you’re dealing with. But you have to decide for yourselves what you’re willing to accept. If you have any questions or concerns, I’m here for you. At least, I will be, after I go and get you some morale-building caffeine.”
“You’re getting us coffee?” Jordan asked.
“Yeah, my treat. There’s a good place across the street, far superior to the swill they serve in the break room,” I said, grabbing my purse from my desk drawer. I’d become quite familiar with the Perk-U-Later, the little independent coffee shop adjacent to the Council office. After she’d started Beeline, Iris had parked me there on the rare occasion she had to stop by the office while I was with her. She didn’t want teenage me anywhere near the vampire hierarchy.
Which, of course, turned out to be pointless, because I was sort of a pain in the ass, in terms of little sisters.
“We face a moral crisis, and she’s getting us free coffee?” Aaron muttered.
“We definitely picked the right team leader,” Jordan whispered back.
• • •
Balancing a purse on one arm and four not-cheap coffee drinks in a flimsy foam carrier with the other wasn’t as easy as it sounded. As I made my way across the darkened downtown street, I was convinced that the weight of Jordan’s drink, which was more than half sugar, was throwing off my equilibrium. I’d almost made it to the staff entrance when a voice sounded from a startlingly close distance behind me. “Miss Scanlon.”
I jumped, dropping the coffee carrier. Nik’s hands shot out with lightning speed and caught it without spilling a drop. He grinned down at me, his stupid perfect white teeth lighting up his whole stupid perfect face. And I felt all of those reasonable, nonsuicidal instincts melt like the now nonexistent whipped cream on my coworkers’ coffees. He was towering over me, trapping me between his body and the grimy brick wall opposite the staff entrance. He wore a blinding-white button-up shirt that perfectly framed the hollow of his throat. It had been easy to stay somewhat emotionally neutral when he was up on the dais, but now, up close . . . I felt badass for not swooning.
I wondered if it would send the wrong message to trace a near-stranger’s throat-hollow with my tongue.
Probably.
More than likely.
These lattes were never going to make it to my coworkers.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I told him in the sternest tone I could muster.
“Do you always do what you are supposed to do?”
“When advice involves warnings like ‘Stay away from the guy who assaulted you in a parking lot,’ I give it a courtesy listen. Particularly after I see you standing in as Ophelia’s guard dog at the world’s scariest staff meeting.”
“I am no one’s dog,” he said, his voice a low purr.
“You’re right. Dogs are loyal, guileless creatures. You strike me as more of a cat person,” I retorted.
“I do not know how to interpret that.”
“Good. After all the messed-up, potentially scarring things I’ve seen today, I think leaving you confused and off-balance is the only thing that has the potential to make me happy.”
“You are prickly when you are flustered, are you not?”
I stared at him, wondering whether I could get to my hairbrush stake before he realized why I was digging around in my purse. And yes, I recognized that this was a wide swing of the pendulum from wanting to lick his Adam’s apple. I blamed hormones and mild dental PTSD.
“So what are we going to do?” he asked. “With you barred from speaking to me and me unable to remember you?” When he saw my eyebrows shoot up, he hastily added, “To my overwhelming regret.”
I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t trust him. Obviously, I found Nik interesting. I wanted to know more about him, without having to break Council computer-use policies. So I was willing to spend more time around him, as long as I was heavily armed.
“Have you had episodes like this before? Memory loss, blackouts, random fits of violence against an unsuspecting and undeserving target?”
“No.”
“Do you think you’re sick? Or brain-damaged?”
“You know, in five hundred years, you are the first human to ask me that,” he growled, his voice gravelly and low.
“Oh, don’t try to pull the hostile-vampire routine now,” I told him. “Once I stab you, it sort of takes away your mystique.”
“I doubt I am brain-damaged,” he deadpanned. “But it is not as if I can get a diagnostic scan. My brain does not run on the same electrical impulses as yours. Besides, this whole situation stinks of the supernatural. So where does that leave us?”
“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head. “This is a situation that defies even your twisty vampire logic.”
He smirked. “True. I do not know how it is possible that I do not remember being sent to your college campus to, er, intervene on Cal’s behalf. But I read back over my letters and found—”
“Wait, did you say letters?”
“Yes, letters. Correspondence. It is what people have used to stay in contact for centuries.”
“Yes, but now they have this thing called the Internet, and we use it to send the electronic version of letters. They’re called e-mails. They work faster and kill fewer trees.”
“I know about e-mails.” He sniffed. “I do not trust them. You never know if they have arrived, and they are too easy to access by hacksters.”
“Hackers,” I corrected.
“I have adjusted to modern conveniences enough to buy a cell phone. That is enough.”
“So you haul around a huge briefcase full of letters with you.” I snorted. “That makes way more sense. Let me guess, you run Netscape Navigator on your laptop, huh?”
Nik frowned.
“You don’t have a laptop?” I cried. “Even Cal has a laptop! What are you, a Luddite?”
“My work requires more hands-on involvement. I manage my professional and personal life with less fuss and fewer means to track me. We are wandering away from the point,” he reminded me. “According to my letters, Cal requested that I visit your campus, and there is a reply from me, promising that I would, so I must have done it. I would not have broken my word to Cal.”
“So you don’t remember anything about me?”
“I do not remember anything about the month of December,” he said. “Nothing. And that is not normal. Usually, I spend Christmas tucked away at some remote cabin with a . . .”
There went my eyebrow again. “Yes?”
“A carefully selected, special lady friend,” he said, clearing his throat. “But I do not remember that. I do not remember anything around that time. I do not know what is happening to me. But I think you are the key to finding out.”
“So that’s why you want to spend time with me? So you can figure out your Swiss-cheese memory? That’s flattering.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he was looking at my earrings, the little flowers made of moonstone, the same earrings I’d admired in a shop window right before my forgotten kiss with Nik. The same earrings that mysteriously showed up on our front porch on Christmas, right after my forgotten kiss with Nik. The same earrings I’d worn almost every day since, because I thought they meant something. His brow furrowed, as if he was concentrating on them. “Those are pretty baubles. Were they a gift?”
“You don’t remember them?”
He frowned. “No, should I?”
My heart sank. “No.”
I’d assumed that he’d given me the earrings. But what if it had been someone else? What if it was Cal or Jane, and I just hadn’t thanked them? Now I felt foolish and rude.
“Why does that make you so sad?” he asked. “I hate that I could be the one putting that heartbreaking expression on your face.”
“It would be really hard to explain,” I told him. “And it would cost me a lot.”
“How?”
“In terms of my dignity?” I laughed. “How would you like it if you’d had this knee-trembling, paradigm-shifting kiss with someone, and they didn’t even remember it?”
“In my defense, you know nothing of my life, my history. And I doubt very much that Cal has told you anything of interest.”
I nodded. “I know that you enjoy biting people, and your name sounds Russian.”
He smirked. “Maybe that is all you need to know.”
“That wasn’t an answer.” When he gave me a blithe, maddeningly confident smile, I poked him in the ribs—really hard.
He yowled. “And you complain about my fits of violence?” But he grinned—a real, amused expression of joy—and his face looked vaguely human.
“How about, for everything you tell me about yourself, I will grant you information.” Said smile became downright filthy, so I added, “Nothing dirty. And just one question, because I have to get back to work.”
“Who was that boy you were sitting with at the meeting?”
“That’s the one you went with?” I asked, leaning closer to him, not entirely unaware that it made the dip in my camisole fall open just a little bit, exposing a hint of cleavage. “Of all of the depths you could have plumbed, of all of the dark secrets you could have asked me to share, you picked ‘Who was that boy?’ ”
“Well, now that you mention it.” His tongue swept over his bottom lip as if he was reconsidering, and then he added quickly, “Yes, that is what I want to know.”
We engaged in a facial-expression standoff, in which I squinted at him and he did not appear to be affected by my scrutiny at all. This would be so much easier if he was some alpha-male tool. But here he was, being all charming and rakish, and rakish vampires seemed to be my kryptonite.
I blamed Iris and her stash of romance novels for my even knowing what the word “rakish” meant. I rolled my eyes and told him, “ ‘That boy’ is Marty. He works in my department. And for wasting your request on a boy who doesn’t mean anything to either of us, I should be allowed to silver-spray you again.”
“Or, instead, we could do this,” he said, bending his head toward me, and gently brushed his lips across mine. I stiffened, lips parting as I gasped against his mouth. He took advantage, sliding his tongue between my lips and teasing my own into a slow, tangling dance.
After a long moment, I pulled back. “You remember anything yet?”
He shook his head, ducking to recapture my mouth. He pulled my bottom lip between his teeth, nibbling lightly. I moaned, wrinkling the hell out of his shirt as I gripped it and pulled him closer to me. I could feel his fangs growing into sharp little points, scraping against my lip. My breath caught as a tiny bead of blood welled up and he lapped it away with his tongue.
He growled, palming my hip in his hand and pushing me against the wall. My cardigan rode up, and my back scraped against the brick, but that only put my nerves on edge. Every neuron seemed to fire at once, making everything I felt ten times more intense. His mouth worked at the little wound on my lip, his movements becoming quicker and more frantic.
I couldn’t do this, right? I couldn’t just make out with a vampire right outside my office door. I was sure there were security cameras around somewhere, and this was not the sort of thing I wanted getting back to Ophelia. Not to mention, I didn’t want to get a reputation as a willing fang-bunny among my undead colleagues. Plus, the man didn’t even own a laptop. How was I going to find common ground with someone who was neither a PC nor a Mac guy? We were doomed.
Right, OK, I’ll push him away in three . . . two . . . just one more kiss . . . Seriously, this is the last one. The next-to-last one.
Finally, I pushed him away, and he was panting, staring at my mouth with the sort of hunger that tested my knees’ resolve all over again.
And the repeat performance of the paradigm-twirling kiss was interrupted by the screech of tires. The Dorkmobile, Iris’s bright yellow minivan, emblazoned with the Beeline logo, was barreling down the street toward us.
Dang it.