Kelly opened the glass door. “Yo. Work out your sexual tension on your own time before Hayley gets involved in your shit. Less bickering, more calling.”
Morgan’s ears burned as the door swung shut again.
Did it matter if he was lying about why he got her the promotion, as long as she didn’t fall for it? Would she be a bad person if she let it happen? She tried to decide as she showed Luke how to log calls in Salesforce. She hadn’t had anything to do with Tim’s death. People got jobs they didn’t deserve all the time, and anyway, he was right—it wasn’t a permanent position. It was a chance to get some experience, nothing more. Except she wasn’t sure she had the experience necessary to even get anything useful out of this. “Fake it ’til you make it” had never been her style.
“So what number do we put in this field?” Luke was saying.
She pulled her attention back to the present. “Standard contracts start at $50K.”
He looked blank. “Is that a little or a lot?”
“Both?” she shrugged. “For a multi-billion-dollar company, it’s nothing. For me, that’s more than I make in a year.”
His eyebrows creased. “So what’s a soul worth, then?”
“Priceless!” she exclaimed.
“If it were priceless, we wouldn’t be able to buy them,” he reasoned. “How about another angle—I was taught that in some human cultures, if someone dies and it’s someone else’s fault, they have to pay. Is Zabloom going to pay for Tim’s death?”
“It wasn’t directly Zabloom’s fault, so I don’t think they have to pay anything,” she said slowly. “I guess if it happened because of, like, the building falling in or something, they would have.”
She paused to do a quick search online, trying to ignore the sounds from the floor above of a saw screaming like thesouls of the damned. Maybe it felt homey to Luke. Hopefully it didn’t mean her own parents would get a payout. “Looks like the average settlement ranges from a few thousand to a few million dollars.”
“So that’s probably what a soul’s worth,” Luke said.
“What? No!”
Kelly was glaring at them again.
“Just finish calling your list,” Morgan said, exhausted.
They didn’t get around to eating lunch until after three. By five, Morgan had a pounding headache. Normally she wouldn’t dare duck out this early, but surely “my boss died and I had to take over his job and start managing an intern” was an excuse to leave on time on Friday for once. Or maybe it was a reason she should stay even later, but if she stayed later, she was going to pass out on the desk.
“Don’t forget, everyone! The funeral is at 11:00am on Monday!” Hayley reminded them on her way out.
“Are we closing the office?” Vijay asked.
“No, bereavement leave is only available for immediate family,” Hayley answered cheerily. “But you’re welcome to take an unpaid day without penalty!”
“That was fun,” Luke said wistfully as they got on the subway.
“Fun.”
He winced. “I just meant—I was right, I like the pitching a lot better when I don’t have to close.”
“I’m glad you had a good time,” she grumbled.
“It was a good distraction from the fact that I’m basically doomed,” he sighed.
Her automatic impulse was to reassure him that he wasn’t doomed. But she wasn’t actually sure of that. Worse, shewasn’t sureshewasn’t doomed along with him. Human stories were littered with the warnings about what happened when you accepted magical aid. Fairy gifts, genie wishes, monkey’s paws. So what if she hadn’t made a Deal—she had said she wished she could do marketing in the earshot of a demon. Who was to blame for what would come next?
7
She was trying very hard not to be annoyed with Luke, but it wasn’t easy.
The weekend hadn’t been that bad; they’d done a crash course on basic human office etiquette and spent some time thrifting a few much-needed personal possessions. But Monday had been rough—she had been listening to the demon work his way through their combined list with his distractingly seductive voice while she tried to make sense of Tim’s left-behind files. She managed to find the contact info for both the ad agency and the PR agency and emailed them a bland version of events, receiving shocked emails and meeting appointments for the following week in return. She began the process of reclaiming the social media accounts. Mostly she started lists of all the systems she didn’t have access to yet and people she didn’t have contact information for yet and the questions she didn’t have answers to yet and wasn’t sure if she ever would. All the while listening to Luke call and call and call, clearly choosing to have exactly enough success to blow her numbers out of the water while not being completely implausible. He didn’t even seem to be doing it to spite her, just from the sheer joyof feeling competent. It wasn’t his fault, she knew, that she was jealous. He was just so much better at her job than she had ever been. Kelly even smiled at him. She wanted Kelly to smile at her. When the never-ending construction on the floor above them began, he put in earbuds she suspected him of magicking into noise cancellation, continuing his calls without a flinch while she jumped every time the crew upstairs dropped what sounded like bowling balls above their head until they could finally go home and then start all over again the next morning.
It wouldn’t have stung so much to be shown up if she’d been having any success at the marketing angle. Ronaldo had asked her with great confidence for a list of the leads who had shown interest on the website. It seemed like a creepy-but-plausible ask; she knew in the foggiest way that the whole theory of digital advertising involved basically stalking people. If she bought a toaster, she would get toaster ads in every sidebar for weeks as if she were some kind of toaster deviant looking to build a toaster collection. She could find plenty of thought pieces that implied it was possible to put resources on your website to entice visitors and convert them to leads; she could find references to tracking information in some older version of Google’s analytics. But she could not figure out how to get the data herself. She dreaded admitting she didn’t know what she was doing, yet the best information she could find was from endless vague blog posts, none of which solved her problem. A problem she would never have had if a certain demon hadn’t decided to “help” her.
