“Open office plan?”
“You, too?”
Stavrula raised the last bite of her popsicle like she was toasting with a champagne flute, then tossed the remainderin her mouth, stick and all. Morgan toasted her back silently and then threw her stick in the trashcan. Unfortunately, her jaws had not evolved to bite through bone.
***
“Knock, knock?”
Brad kept an open-door policy, but she thought that was mostly because executive podcasts suggested it was a mark of a good leader. Morgan wasn’t sure how much the open door was truly open, in the more figurative sense. His were the only walls that were opaque.
Brad had his feet up on his desk, AirPods in his ears, as he bounced a miniature basketball off the wall repeatedly. She wasn’t sure if he was on a call or had left the earbuds in for effect. She also wasn’t sure how Carter had survived in the adjoining office without murdering him for the repetitive thumping noise.
“I met with my contact atForbestoday,” she said. That was enough for him to stop throwing the ball at the wall. She wondered how much of the habit was his actual athleticism, and how much was that he’d seen dynamic business types do it in movies.
“And?”
She shut the door behind her, which sharpened his attention. “For starters, if you’re willing to approve the budget, the byline is yours. I can write it for you or we can hire a ghostwriter.”
He waved a hand. “Send me the draft.”
She nodded but turned as if to go. “It was interesting. She was talking about some of their other bylines, like GreenField UnLtd., and how they’d managed to get so much press so fast.”
The words GreenField UnLtd. caught his attention.
“She was pretty dismissive, really. Said it was only a hack,” Morgan said carefully.
“Hey, don’t dismiss hacks,” he said, straightening up a tiny bit.
“I know, I’ve learned from you,” she said, adding a smile. She felt slimy inside, but this had to work. She’d debated internally—it would have been nice to claim the idea had come from her contact, take the credit. But she didn’t think he would take her as a credible source. “So I went back through Tim’s email. Did you know he was college buddies with GreenField UnLtd.’s sales head?”
She opened up her laptop and pulled up an email.
“No,” Brad said. “Tom never said.”
The man was dead, they’d worked together for at least a year, and Brad still couldn’t remember his name? She hoped they used Brad to power the microwave in the Infernal kitchen. And someone brought in leftover fish to reheat every week. “Tim.”
Brad made ago ongesture. She bit her tongue.
“Anyway, the week before he, uh, you know, his last week, he was talking to Hawk at GreenField. Who sent Tim something.” She paused to bait the hook. “It’s pretty wild.”
“But it worked.”
“For GreenField UnLtd., yeah, apparently.” Tim’s friend really had sent him a large file transfer link. The link had expired, so Morgan had no idea what had been in it. Brad didn’t need to know that, though. She’d debated giving him the ritual she’d gotten from her father’s article, but the last thing she wanted was for more people to have access to a real spell. She was on thin enough ice as it was, and she didn’ttrust Brad farther than she could throw him, which, given how little she could afford a gym membership, was not very far. But that was all right. Brad wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted to be hands-on. He was a big picture guy. Dirty work like writing bylines and summoning demons was beneath him. So she merely pulled up the diagram where it could look all arcane and spooky and didn’t hand over the laptop or transfer the file. “It’s… pretty out there.”
“Like, ayahuasca executive retreats out there, or exchanging blood with your son to live forever out there?”
Maybe it wasn’t that out there. “Like summoning demons out there.”
He looked disappointed. “You know daemons are just background processes, right? It’s like how you can’t eat internet cookies.”
She’d heard Carter complain about daemons in the programming sense but never had the courage to ask what they were or the interest to take thirty seconds to Google it. “No, I mean like actual demons, from the Infernal Plane, ‘make a Deal for your soul and get whatever your heart desires’ demons.”
He looked skeptical. But not as skeptical as the statement should have merited. “Tom was looking into this.”
She decided it wasn’t worth correcting him on Tim’s name again. “Yes.”
“And that’s where all the money GreenField UnLtd. is throwing around came from.”
