“Fair point,” I conceded. Part of the tattooist’s raw emotions were welling up again, and had me wanting to pick a fight, but I fought the urge. “Truth be told—if we’re going for messed up math here—I’d probably say that my caseload paperwork takes up at least a hundred and twenty percent of my time on the clock.”
Aidan cleared his throat. A ring of keys was in his hand. “Do you mind?” he asked, unlocking one of the glass doors that led out onto the rainy streets of Manhattan.
“Your gratitude is underwhelming,” I said. I held my hand out and felt the rain coming down hard on it. “At least I don’t have to worry about getting dry anytime soon.”
“Sometime tonight, kids,” Aidan said. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t banter here.”
“Fine,” I said. “Although I’ll have you know that I consider banter a necessary tool in keeping from wetting myself in a lot of these situations.”
Jane gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Sexy.”
Aidan frowned. “Can I add that to my list of things I wish I could unhear?”
I started to respond, but Jane grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the streets. “Come on,” she said, “before you say anything else that makes me question our relationship further.”
As we exited the building, the Columbus Circle wind at the southwest corner of Central Park whipped Jane’s long wet hair around like she had gone all Medusa. I turned around as something struck me odd.
“I’m surprised you didn’t call Connor first,” I said. “My partner is the resident ghost whisperer in Other Division with the Department, you know. . . and your brother.”
“Oh, believe me, I did call him first,” Aidan said, “but he was busy.”
“So nice to be considered second choice,” I said. “It’s like my prom all over again.”
“Connor’s too busy for his own brother?” Jane asked. She ran her fingers through her already windblown hair as she tried in vain to make it settle down. “You’d think after a twenty-year absence . . .”
Aidan pulled his hood up to avoid the water. Whether it was vanity or some vampiric aversion to it, I didn’t know.
“That’s kinda the problem,” he said. “Not every day can be a happy family reunion. . . especially with the workload your boss heaps on him. Plus there’s all the work Brandon has Connor doing for our cause. Apparently vampires going bye-bye the past few years, and then just showing up again all friendly like, has caused a lot of meetings between our people.”
“Lucky Connor,” I said, “playing liaison to the undead. . .”
Aidan smiled as the two of us walked off to the curb, his fangs showing once again. “I guess having a vamp in the family means he gets the short straw.”
“We’ve got to get to our own meeting,” I said, not wanting to delay any longer. “Hopefully ours doesn’t involve your meetings. They might meet to make little baby meetings.”
“Let’s hope not,” Jane said, hailing a cab that was rounding Columbus Circle. It slowed for her, even as disheveled as she was. “I hope the meeting goes quickly either way. I still need to wash all the glass out of my hair. Ick.”
“Better glass than blood,” I said.
“Agreed,” Aidan added from over by the great glass doors of the Gibson-Case Center, and then gave me a dark smile as his eyes moved to Jane. “Would be a waste of perfectly good blood.”
I ignored his words, but the residual anger I was experiencing rose up inside me and wanted me to go back and see how large a pile of dust I could leave him in. I didn’t need to reawaken the vampire/human war simply because I had an all-too-intense reading with my power.
3
As our cab shot down Broadway to the East Village, the two of us jostled around in the back of the vehicle. Still distracted by the intense jealousy of the tattooist coursing through me, I almost jumped out of my skin when Jane’s hand brushed up against the back of mine.
“Brandon’s going to be pretty cheesed off by the amount of damage we did in there,” Jane added.
“We didn’t do the damage,” I said. “That creepy tattooist lady did it all. Granted, she was tossing stuff at us left and right, but we didn’t do anything except try to stay alive through all that.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“Let the Big Biter on Campus try to collect damages,” I said. “Ha! Compensation from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs during a budget crisis? Good luck with that. Don’t worry. Aidan’s just worried what his boss will think of all the damage done under his instruction like a good little vampire lapdog.”
“Fangs and all,” Jane said. “You’re right. Connor will probably talk some sense into them.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said. “Hopefully a little brotherly love should calm Captain Emo and his master down.”
I laid my head back against the seat and remained silent for the rest of our cab ride. When it dropped us off at our East Village coffee shop cover operation on Eleventh Street, we hit the sidewalk right outside of the large red doors that led into the Lovecraft. We raced out of the rain and into the café, embracing its warmth and its dark wood floors and exposed brick walls that were adorned with movie posters on both sides of the long, open space. Most of the décor was a clutter of mismatched furniture—comfy chairs, low café tables—and a long, wooden counter ran along the entire right side of room. The coffeehouse wasn’t full, but the faces I did see gathered around in the café area were all people I knew from the Department hidden beyond the cover operation.
“Looks like half the Department is on a coffee break,” I said, acknowledging the throng of coworkers that had assembled in the public café area.
“What’s going on?” Jane asked. “Why is everyone up here in the coffeehouse?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe they’re fumigating the Department again. Don’t tell me. . . they can’t get the smell of rotting zombies out of the curtains in the hidden office area.”
An especially familiar face came into view as my partner, Connor Christos, came walking over to us. “Not quite, kid,” Connor said, his hands jammed down into the pockets of his beaten old trench coat. His clothes underneath it were a bit dressier than my usual jeans and T-shirt but my partner always looked a little wrinkled around the edges. His simple black tie was loose and skewed to one side. As if the thick white streaks in his sandy brown hair weren’t enough, the grim look on his face made him look older than his midthirties. “We were in the middle of one of our all-night financial meetings, when the Inspectre took a call from Dave Davidson downtown. Quimbley’s got the details. Wouldn’t tell me a thing except I needed to get you down here.”
Ever since a set of even more draconian Departmental cuts than usual a few weeks ago, and the loss of lots of ancillary staff members, I knew things had been rough, but I hadn’t realized it was so bad they had to be going over the books in the midnight hours. I switched my focus to farther back in the coffeehouse over by the service counter where Inspectre Argyle Quimbley was surrounded by a few other people. The old Brit leader of Other Division was in his usual tweed, twirling the ends of his walrus-like mustache as he looked over a folder. Next to him was a dark-skinned woman whose hair was pulled back off her shoulders in a no-nonsense ponytail—Allorah Daniels, doing double duty as a member of our governing Enchancellors as well as our resident vampire hunter. She held a folder identical to the one in the Inspectre’s hands.
I headed across the room to them, addressing my boss. Connor and Jane followed. “Inspectre. . . ?”
Despite the concern on the old man’s face, he smiled when he saw me. “Hello, my boy,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked as a horrible thought dawned on me. “We’re not. . . fired, are we?” I could barely say the words, and when I did, a panic rose in my chest. The last thing I wanted was to be forced back into a life of thieving to survive in the skyrocketing real estate market that was Manhattan. My apartment down in SoHo was my last holdover from those days, the one thing I had kept to ease into the transition to using my powers for good.