8
There will be days when you will be tempted to pull a stunt of unbelievable incompetence to escape your vampire employer and collect unemployment benefits. Do not pull this stunt.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
The Linoge file was missing.
Missing. Absent. Mislaid. Gone.
I will admit that over the last couple of days, my desk had gotten a little messy, but I didn’t make a habit of losing incredibly important super-secret files that could potentially incriminate my employer. Someone had gone into my desk, moved my box of tampons, and taken the file I rightfully stole! I felt so violated.
My options for recovering it were limited. I looked around and under my desk. I very discreetly asked Jordan and Aaron if they’d seen a red folder marked “Linoge” lying around, but they said no. I waited for Ophelia to bust into my office and kneecap me for hoarding inappropriate information, which didn’t happen. And so, since I couldn’t exactly go into the archives and steal the file back, I pretended the whole thing had never happened. (Because wondering who’d rifled through my desk and found the file would eventually drive me mad.)
And that theory worked for almost a week. I kept my head down. I did my work. I tried to find a way to discuss Marty’s competency issues that didn’t sound like I was accusing him of being incompetent . . . which was difficult. I did nothing to draw attention to myself. And since I was not, in fact, fired or kneecapped in that week, it helped justify my decision when I noticed that Waco Marchand’s office was still empty. Mr. Marchand had been killed a few years before, and he had never been replaced. Of course, he’d been killed by Cal after he attempted a nationwide vampire poisoning in order to make a fortune providing the antidote for said poison, tried to kill Cal in order to prevent Cal from investigating the poisoning, tried to kill Iris for helping Cal, and tried to kill me because I happened to be there. I chose to believe that the vampires didn’t want to replace him because they were afraid they would get another like him. But it was more likely that the paperwork had gotten held up because some thousand-year-old vampire administrator refused to learn to fax.
I even wore black slacks and a black eyelet blouse to add an extra layer of un-noticeability while I committed my office cat burglary. With my colleagues occupied, I made an excuse to visit Sammy, sneaking down the hall to Mr. Marchand’s empty office. I shut the door behind me and didn’t bother with the light. I had some illumination from the streetlight outside, just enough to creep around Mr. Marchand’s dark, baroque furnishings.
I felt a pang of guilt when I saw the antique painting of Mr. Marchand’s family in front of their Civil War–era mansion. With his resemblance to Colonel Sanders and his chivalrous ways, Iris had once considered him the epitome of genteel vampire manners. And then, of course, he tried to murder us. So while I felt sort of bad for breaking into his office, he had been kind of a dick.
By some miracle of poorly supervised office equipment, Mr. Marchand’s computer was sitting on his desk, untouched since the last time he’d used it, if the accumulated dust was any indication. The administration’s solution to keeping us out of “forbidden” areas of the server was to limit our access through our user names. As IT drones, we were granted more access than most, including enough authority to create user names without linking them to our work stations. I checked the employee handbook for some sort of ironic punishment for taking advantage of this counterintuitive loophole but found nothing.
The computer roared to life, blowing out a bit of burned dust as the tower’s fans started up. But the monitor showed updated programs from the office server, so I clicked on the ADMIN logo and created a user name for Dominic Purcell, the actor who played Dracula in Blade: Trinity. Because it would take them years to catch on to that one. Using the dummy user name, I searched for files that included the word “Linoge.”
A big red “RESTRICTED” message flashed across my screen, demanding a password.
“Bitch, please.” I snorted, tapping a few keys that allowed me around the restriction.
One file folder popped up under a directory labeled “Watch List.” That seemed promising. The folder was labeled “Renart.” I opened it and found a list of names and birth/death dates and locations. All women with the last name Renart, starting with a woman named Marie Renart, who lived near Rouen until her move to America just before the Louisiana Purchase.
The Renarts were not a particularly fecund bunch. Once they landed in Louisiana, the family tree was more of a bush, sticking with one or two kids in every generation, and not all of those kids carried on the family name. But the list abruptly stopped in 1968, which wasn’t super-helpful. Also, I didn’t see the Linoge name anywhere in the document. Anywhere. When I opened the metadata for the file, there it was in the keyword section, which, again, not helpful. Curiouser and curiouser, but ultimately, I’d learned . . . not that much.
I was missing something. All of the pieces were right there. I just couldn’t make them fit.
Wait. The Renart line started near Rouen, which was in the north of France. Linoge was executed for rampaging across the north of France. Could Marie Renart be the girlfriend whose bad magical influence the early Council blamed for Linoge’s feeding issues? Was that why they’d tracked the family over the years, because they were afraid the Renarts would mess with more vampires?
I took out my phone and took several shots of the screen. Logging off the server, I cleared the computer’s history and shut it down.
I listened at the door for anyone walking down the hall outside the office, then stuck my head out to check for passersby. I hustled down the hallway, careful to avoid the range of the security cameras mounted near the ceiling. And I managed to snag a mocha from Sammy on my way back to our office, so I wouldn’t look completely suspicious . . . to the empty office I found upon my return.
Well, I could at least succeed at not getting caught.
• • •
“Gladiola?”
I jumped in my seat. Honestly, I needed to keep a mirror on top of my monitor so people would stop sneaking up on me.
I turned to see Marty leaning against the wall near my desk, car keys in hand. “I was thinking I should walk you out to your car. Our shift ended a few minutes ago.”
I sat back in my desk chair and tried not to let my annoyance show at his use of “Gladiola.” Aaron and Jordan had left just a few minutes earlier, in keeping with their barely-there punctuality. And I couldn’t help but notice Aaron’s hand slipping into Jordan’s as they walked into the hall. Aw, nerd love.
Even though I was ready to jet home, I needed to stay late and check Marty’s work from that day one more time, just in case he’d gone back to fix his multitude of errors. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I stuck with “Marty, I’ve told you, I prefer to be called Gigi. I don’t go by Gladiola.”
“Well, Gladiola is a much more mature name than Gigi,” Marty said, a faint expression of distaste wrinkling his mouth. “So I’m going to call you Gladiola. Besides, I like that I’m the only one who calls you Gladiola. It’s like I have my own cute little nickname for you.”
“Yes, a nickname that belongs on the door of a nursing-home suite,” I muttered, refraining from pointing out that as his superior, however technically, I could file a disciplinary action for insubordination for his use of a too-familiar and embarrassing birth name. But I figured that would be an abuse of power.
“Now, can I walk you to your car?”
“No, thank you, Marty,” I said. “I’m not ready to leave just yet.”
“Oh, I can wait,” Marty assured me, dropping his messenger bag next to my chair.
“No, really,” I insisted. “You go on home. I have paperwork I have to finish, all part of the project leader thing.”
There, a very subtle reminder that I was higher on the office food chain. And if he continued to call me Gladiola, the reminders would become less subtle.
“Are you sure?” Marty said, placing a hand on the back of my chair. “I don’t mind.”
“No, please, go on home,” I said, waving him away. “I need time to come up with the correct wording for my own job description. I think Ophelia wants to double-check that I understand what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“I can stay to help,” he offered.
“Go home, Marty,” I said, just a little sterner than I should have been, because Marty pulled this wounded-puppy expression that made me feel like a jerk.
“All right.” He sighed, moving very slowly to pick up his bag. “Good night, Gladiola.”
I thunked my head against my chair. Great. I was the office ogre. And I was sticking around to sabotage the wounded puppy’s chances of gainful employment. So I was a vengeful ogre. Being a grown-up kind of sucked.
I gave Marty a few minutes to come back and check one more time if I wanted to leave with him. When I was sure he was gone for the day, I ran every example of his work through the testing program one more time, just in case. It was still garbage. Unusable garbage that failed to meet even the basic standards of coding, much less the version we were using. I was starting to wonder if Marty walked me to my car most nights to make sure I wouldn’t stay behind and discover this dickery.
I logged off my computer and noticed that Marty hadn’t bothered doing so before leaving for the night, which was a major security-policy violation. I shut down his computer, too. After gathering up the printouts I needed, I walked with purpose down the hall toward Ophelia’s office. Her dowdy human assistant, Margaret, sat outside the closed double doors, stapling papers with such economy of movement that it was practically surgery.
Over the last week, I’d learned that Margaret was a bit of a blood bunny trapped inside a schoolmarm’s body. She turned her big brown calf eyes at any vampire who crossed her path, simpering and smiling and constantly craning her neck so that the vampires were sure to notice her long, swanlike jugular. But it was hard to complain about her, since she was also a consummate professional when it came to answering questions, responding to e-mails promptly, and juggling Ophelia’s schedule. She also didn’t seem to like me much, but I think that had more to do with my attitude toward her boss than anything else. Much like Jordan, I had a hard time containing my eye rolls when Ophelia was mentioned in the break room.
When she saw me approaching, Margaret threw herself in front of Ophelia’s door, her gray-streaked blond hair flopping over her face. She blew it out of her eyes and told me sternly, “She’s not available.”
“Margaret, I’ve worked here for weeks, and I haven’t met with my supervisor. That’s not reasonable. Also, I have something I need to discuss with her. I can wait right here until she’s available.”
“I meant, she’s not in,” Margaret said quickly. “She’s been out for hours.”
Just then, I heard Ophelia’s voice on the other side of the door. “I have neither the time nor the patience for your excuses, Serena. I expect results, and I expect them immediately.”
I tried not to look too smug when I smiled at Margaret. I really did.
“I demand results!” Ophelia yelled. “Concrete proof that you’re actually making some effort on my behalf!”
“Fine.” Margaret sighed, her florid face taking on a very put-upon expression. “I’ll buzz you through when her call is over. But I’m not responsible if she takes your head off.”
I was aware that she was possibly talking about actual decapitation.
I heard Ophelia bark, “You have thirty days, Serena!” and something plastic shattered against the office door. It was always nice to know you were walking into a room where office supplies were aerodynamically sound.
“Fine.” Margaret sighed, pulling a petulant face while flopping into her desk chair.
I straightened my sweater, shuffled my papers, and knocked on the door.
“Enter, Margaret!” Ophelia yelled.
Before Margaret could warn her, I walked through the door and shut it behind me. Iris had warned me before my initial interview, but really, nothing could have prepared me for the array of crystal-encrusted Hello Kitty desk accessories before me. It was always a shock to walk into Ophelia’s spacious pink office and see the sheer number of cartoon kitty-cat heads, from the rug to the mouse pad to the giant mural on the wall behind her. It was like reporting to an aggressively adorable Tony Montana.
And once again, I couldn’t help but be unnerved by the portrait of Georgie, the beautiful blond, gray-eyed child who also happened to be Ophelia’s vampirized biological sister. Still, I’d met Georgie. And as creepy as it was to speak to the living embodiment of that supersentient little girl from Dune, I still found the Hello Kitty shredder way more upsetting.
Ophelia was wearing an indecently red pencil skirt with a sheer black silk blouse. Her blond hair was pulled into a carefully arranged ballerina bun, and she was wearing honest-to-God red patent-leather pumps.
“Is there a reason you are putting my assistant in the awkward position of telling you that I don’t want to see you?” Ophelia asked, also without looking up from her papers. I supposed this was the newest trend in dismissive office rudeness. “Margaret is a polite soul, you see, and she doesn’t like being openly rude to people. I’ve never had a problem with it.”
“Trust me, I’ve noticed,” I told her. “The others appointed me as project leader. The first task in my job description is ‘serving as a liaison between the project team and supervisory staff,’ which is you. And ‘presenting weekly progress reports regarding the project and any obstacles or problems impeding said progress.’ And since I have not presented this report in the weeks we’ve been working, I figured it’s time.”
Ophelia propped her elbows on her desk and folded her hands under her chin. “Do you have any idea how inappropriate it is to force your way into a meeting with your supervisor?”
I smiled sweetly. “Almost as inappropriate as a supervisor who refuses to meet with her employees because of interpersonal tension rooted outside of the office.”
Ophelia’s eyes narrowed. I was pretty sure that if there hadn’t been witnesses who saw me go into her office, I would have been the first person ever murdered with a Hello Kitty stapler.
A reasonable person with a proportionate sense of self-preservation would have stuck to the tried-and-true methods to avoid digestion by an apex predator: stay still, don’t make eye contact, and definitely don’t arrange one’s face into a big smartass grin.
I never claimed to be reasonable. And my sense of self-preservation was clearly nonexistent. So I just stretched that fake sweet smile into the big smartass grin.
Ophelia’s hand twitched toward her stapler, but she managed to wrap her other hand around it and press it to the desk. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said, “Very well. What would you like to report?”
“Aaron and Jordan are turning in quality work and meeting their goals, as am I.”
I sighed, crossing my legs and shifting in my chair. I cleared my throat. And I felt like a total bitch for what I was about to do. I didn’t want Marty to be fired. He seemed like a nice guy, just a little overwhelmed. But the bottom line was that Marty wasn’t pulling his weight. And it would be a lot easier to point out more serious issues with his performance in the future if I pointed out his weak points now. So I took a deep breath and phrased it as carefully as I could. “Marty is having difficulty keeping up. His work has not been up to par, and we’re still setting up the most basic functions of the search engine. Not to mention that he just left the office with his computer still logged into the system, which is a problem, security-wise. Aaron, Jordan, and I are going to have to redo all of his work, which will create a slight setback now. But if he doesn’t step it up, that slight setback could become a major delay.”
“I would suggest that you check his work every day, point out any problems, and retrain him.”
“Retrain him? Programming is a basic requirement of his job. That would be like telling someone they have to retrain an accountant in how to do addition. I have to question how he passed the initial interview if he’s having problems like this.”
“It’s not up to you to question the hiring process, Miss Scanlon,” she said, quite frostily.
“But it’s up to me to retrain employees who got through the lax hiring process?”
“Well, as project leader, you shouldn’t have any problems, should you?” She smiled that flat shark’s smile. “Thank you. I look forward to your next report. And by next report, I mean the report you present after you have shown enough professional courtesy to schedule an appointment with Margaret.”
I nodded. “Ophelia—”
“Thank you.”
“Oph—”
“Thankyou!” she exclaimed, not even leaving a pause between the two words. And with that, she turned the pink Hello Kitty–embossed back of her chair to me.
I was pretty sure that between me, the kitties, and the four-hundred-plus-year-old vampire, I was the most mature being in this room. I hoped that with her superhearing, she could hear the way my teeth were grinding.
Had I been right before? Had Ophelia saddled me with a subpar coworker to sabotage the project? Or was she just trying to drive me crazy? It might have seemed like a paranoid, unproductive way of thinking but not nearly as unproductive as having my work hobbled by a manager who was pissed at me for “stealing her boyfriend.”
But that manager also had fangs, and I needed to get out of the office before she put them to use. I was already violating several bullet points from the orientation video. I had pushed up from the chair and gotten about three steps away from Ophelia’s desk when I stopped and turned toward her . . .
Screw it, no one lives forever. I kissed vampires in alleyways. I was a badass.
“You know, it’s not my fault that Jamie wants to have a real college experience. He’s missed out on so much already, being turned before he could graduate from high school. He wants to experience a little bit of the outside world before he settles down, which you know he’s going to do with you. I think it would be kind of selfish of you to try to keep him from that. I only helped him with the application process because it can be overwhelming and scary even without all of the vampire issues. And because it was important to him, and I’m his friend. That’s what friends do for each other.”
Ophelia turned back to me, and while her face was a pleasant mask, her eyes could have curdled milk. “Oh, I think I know exactly how close the two of you are,” she said. “I hear enough about your friendship every time Jamie and I speak.”
“Then you should know that there are no romantic feelings between us.”
“But it is amazing how often he comes running whenever you need something or are hosting something or some member of your dysfunctional group has a hangnail and there’s an emergency meeting.”
I honestly didn’t know how to respond to that. It had been such a long time since Iris and I belonged to a family that we just took it for granted that it was normal for us to be so entangled with Jane and the other vampires. Also, we didn’t have many friends outside of the circle, so we didn’t have a lot of competition for our time and attention. From Ophelia’s perspective, I could see how irritating it might be to have your time with your boyfriend split with his big fat geek vampire family, even if Georgie did seem to find us entertaining.
I was sympathizing with Ophelia. This did not compute.
And damned if I was going to tell her about it.
“That seems like something you should discuss with Jamie,” I told her.
“I don’t think I’ll have to,” she said, giving me dead shark’s eyes that, frankly, freaked me the hell out.
“OK, then.” I nodded. “Good night.”
Ophelia didn’t answer, which was just the cherry on top of her sundae of rudeness.