“No, we can’t lie. At all. It’s one of the things they drill us on that trips up new reps. We forget that humans can flat-out lie to us. I mean, we can obfuscate and tell shades of the truth and imply things and let you make assumptions, but straight-up telling something that we know is untrue? That’s a human thing, and you folks are messed up. I don’t get how you get anything done at all. You sign contracts with each other and then turn around and break them all the time. It’s no way to run a society.”
“But…” Centuries of stories about silver-tongued devils warred in her mind. “Then how do you convince us to call you in the first place? Who does your marketing?”
“Humans! Humans do all our marketing for us. You tell stories and write songs and perform plays about how great it is to make Deals with us. It’s all humans: we can’t even get to this plane without someone here calling us. And if you can’t think of ways to do marketing without lying, well, that says more about you than me.”
He got up abruptly and headed for the kitchen, done with her and the entire conversation for the moment.
Shame welled up. How much of demon-human relations had been classic projection? All right, they really did buy souls. But she had been calling him a liar in her head this entire time, and she was the only one lying.
Which also meant that when he said he only got her this job because he wanted to balance the scales, he’d been telling the truth.
She should go after him. She started to stand up, but before she could do more than push her chair back, Kelly stuck her head in. Morgan was starting to understand why Tim had hidden in the back phone room so often. His office was like Grand Central station. She’d had no idea how many people just wanted “help with this simple thing,” none of which turned out to be simple. Someone above them turned on a power saw and the exposed pipe running down the wall next to her conducted the noise into a sound like the banshee who lived down the block from her parents. She and Kelly both winced.
“I wanted to give you a heads-up,” Kelly shouted over the whine. “I got a call from Brad. We’ve got a change in direction, so you’re going to need to update the deck for the webinar this afternoon.”
Her stomach clenched. She’d completely forgotten about the webinar. She’d never done a webinar. She could do a webinar, right? Her mother had once faced an entire graveyard full of zombies, Morgan could at least manage to talk about the company to a webcam. “What kind of a change in direction?”
“Apparently some of the investors he’s been talkingto haven’t been as excited about quantum-based hiring platforms—the range is too narrow to get the kind of multipliers they’re looking for. So we’re going to be expanding the scope into a full HR information system.”
“But…” The deck was already written, and it wasn’t about an HRIS. For that matter, Zabloom wasn’t an HRIS. Morgan wasn’t even entirely sure what an HRIS was, beyond something to do with HR. “I can’t demo that.”
“Keep it high level, very top of funnel.” The skin around Kelly’s eyes was very still; Morgan couldn’t tell what she thought of this at all. “B2B marketing has a long horizon. By the time the leads are warmed up, Carter’s team will have more to show.”
“Oh. Umm. OK.” Be positive. High-level. She forced a smile. “That’s great. I’ll just… do that. Now.”
“I’ll leave you to it—send me what you’ve got in half an hour.”
Half an hour? She tried not to hyperventilate. How was she going to rework an entire deck to sell something the company didn’t do yet and she didn’t even fully understand in half an hour? She needed a coffee. She needed so much coffee. She didn’t have time to get coffee.
Luke ducked in and closed the door behind him. His eyes looked wild. “Morgan? I may have made a mistake.”
8
Idon’t have time for mistakes right now,” Morgan said. His shoulders crumpled a little and she relented. “What happened?”
“You’re going to be mad,” he started.
“Did you make a Deal?”
“… Not exactly.”
“Spit it out.”
He opened his mouth. Before he could say anything, something came galloping around the corner, a square of cloth dangling out of its mouth.
“Come back here!” Ronaldo chased after it. “Goat stew can be part of a high-protein diet!”
Morgan pinched the bridge of her nose. “Luke. Did you get Hayley a goat for goat yoga?”
“She wanted it really badly, and she asked me if I knew any goat-friendly instructors because you said I was from California, and I thought maybe if she liked me more…”
“Then she’d accept a Deal?” She was going to kill him.
“No one said that goats were kids!”
“No, kids are goats. It’s what you call a baby goat…” Shetrailed off at the expression on Luke’s face. “Luke, did you think you’d just summoned a baby demon?”
“Didn’t I?” He looked panicked.
