“I might be able to do something about that,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “At what cost?”
“No cost,” he said hastily. “I have a limited amount of… influence on this plane. Like the illusion thing.”
“Illusion thing?” Gisele asked, interested.
“Oh, right,” he waved a hand, and his human-image disappeared.
“Oh, my,” said Gisele. Her eyes rounded for a moment and then she controlled her reaction.
The second time around, Morgan found the horns less alarming. The tail was kind of fun. Now that he was less agitated, it curled up behind him like a question mark. And the scales… She wanted to run a finger along them and see what they felt like. And then remembered that he could probably tell and shoved that thought straight into a mental trash can.
“Anyway, I have a certain dispensation to use small amounts of power over here to—” he cut himself off at Morgan’s glare. “To protect myself. I can convince people of things, if they’re already inclined to believe them.”
“Convince them you’re on payroll?” Morgan asked.
“Maybe he’s not on payroll,” Gisele said.
“Pretty sure unpaid interns are illegal these days.”
“So maybe someone else is paying him,” Gisele argued. “Like a work-study thing. He’s a college senior, he’s got a scholarship that pays so he gets real-world experience. Then all you have to do is convince Hayley is that she signed the paperwork for the internship, without needing budget and stuff.”
Morgan pursed her lips. “Is that something you can do?”
“If you tell her, I can make her believe it,” he said with confidence, ruined slightly by the ice cream on his chin. That she wanted to lick off. She caught Gisele staring at her staring at his chin. Her roommate raised her eyebrows just enough that Morgan could tell that, as soon as they were in private, she was in for a thorough grilling about the insanely hot demon she’d dragged home and exactly what Morgan might be thinking about doing with him, and possibly if he had additional broodmates at home who were not already claimed. She resolved to simply never be in private again.
“All right. Just until we get access to the phone room and get you home,” she warned. The faster he was gone, the better.
“I want to get home as fast as I can, too,” he pointed out. “Before your mother notices I’m here or my boss notices I’m gone. Because if they do—”
“There’ll be Hell to pay,” Morgan said. They all contemplated that for a moment.
“So,” Gisele said brightly. “Who wants to watch implausible explanations for Stonehenge?”
5
It’s not going to work.” Lucareoth—Luke—dodged a coffee cart parked on the sidewalk.
“It might,” Morgan said, knowing she was being stubborn but not quite willing to accept that they might have to go through with a more elaborate plan. “We were flustered last night. It would be stupid to not at least check the easy way. The cleaners barely ever vacuum and Hayley’s probably going to need photos if the insurance company wants some kind of investigation. The circle will still be there. We’ll pour a little more salt, I’ll tell you you’re dismissed, and you might be back on your plane half an hour from now.”
It would have been better if she had been able to find the website Tim had been using. She should have kept his phone. But wherever he’d found it, she hadn’t been able to get anything to come up on a Google search. (She wasn’t surprised; she knew the Shadow Council put a fair amount of effort into removing accurate spells from the internet whenever they found them. She didn’t know how Tim had found the ritual in the first place, but it had probably involved money changing hands.) But the walls between the planes had been thinner in the back phone room, and their easiestsolution could be taking advantage of that before the walls thickened again.
Or at least, that’s what she kept telling herself.
She’d tossed and turned all night, her brain producing one disaster after another. What if her mother realized she’d missed the demon in front of her and came back? What if she tried to cut his head off right in front of Morgan? What if Fionadidn’trealize, and spent the rest of Morgan’s life asking why she let the cute intern get away? What if Zabloom decided to outsource marketing and fired her? What if they hired a new marketing person who hated her and fired her? What if her mom cut off the sales intern’s head in front of everyone at Zabloom, andthatgot her fired? What if she were a terrible person for worrying about her job when her boss had just died and Lucareoth was in danger of getting his head cut off and so she would deserve it when she lost her job and had to live in a cardboard box that smelled even more like pee than the stinkovater?
There hadn’t been much sleep.
She pushed open the doors into the lobby and swept by the security guy, hoping that if Luke was visibly with her, no one would make him fill out a form and produce a photo ID and get a little name-tag sticker. She didn’t know if he knew how to write in English and he certainly didn’t have a driver’s license and she didn’t want to have to start the day by hoping he could mind-whammy security. Her stomach tightened.
The security guard never even looked up.
Clearly the building management didn’t pay security enough to care, or maybe they didn’t have to watch the same bad training videos about social engineering that she’d been forced to complete. (She wondered sometimes if Hayleygot a buy-one-get-one-free along with the state-required sexual harassment training video and chose to grabPhishing, Smishing, and You!at the same time. Apparently smishing was phishing by text/SMS, but she still thought it sounded like some kind of weird sex thing.) They walked right in.
She tried to head straight for the phone room, but Hayley got to her even as she emerged from the elevator. The Head of People (what was wrong with “HR” as a title?) tossed her honeyed, carefully blown-out curls over her shoulder.
“Oh, Morgan,” she said, her eyebrows pinched with sympathy in a look Morgan wondered if she’d practiced in the mirror that morning. Hayley’s Pomeranian, Floofums, narrowed his eyes and growled at her. Morgan had been excited about the idea of working in a dog-friendly office until she met Floofums. “I’m so sorry about your experience —how traumatic! Are you all right? You know my door is always open if you want to talk.”
