“That’s genies. I’m a demon.”
“And you’re definitely not going to possess someone else? It would be much easier to bring you to investor meetings if you were in Kelly instead of the intern.”
Morgan’s skin crawled at Brad casually offering Kelly up for possession.
“This is the body I need to be in when I’m on this plane,” Luke said firmly. Because it was his actual body, but he didn’t bother to say that.
“You’re never going to get anywhere with that can’t-do attitude,” Brad chided him, slapping him on the back. “You demons have a career ladder?”
“You have no idea.”
“Nothing compared to the corporate jungle here. Woof! Fortunate for you all that I’m an alpha.” He started to leave. “Hey, marketing girl.”
“Morgan.”
“Right, right. You got that analyst pitch deck together yet?”
“Working on it right now.”
“No more about the quantum-based HRIS stuff, investors know that the real recurring revenue is in the subscription model.”
Did Kelly know about this? Kelly was going to have a heart attack. “I thought HRIS was a Software-as-a-Service model? That everyone would have seats on?”
“Old news. No, quantum-based wellness is where it’s at. Where it’s going to be. Skate to the puck. The key is being nimble. Are you nimble enough for a fast-paced environment?”
Quantum-based wellness. Surely telling Kelly was aboveher pay grade. Why couldn’t he just pick an idea and stick to it? She said weakly, “Definitely nimble.”
“Excelsior,” Brad said, and made finger guns at her on his way out.
The joy of a glass door was that she couldn’t put her head on the desk and groan like she wanted to. She suspected that was part of the point of the glass doors. She was close enough to see that Luke’s smile was twitching a little bit at the corner. She wondered if demons could get a nervous tic.
“Is he always like this?” she asked. She had never had all that much interaction with Brad before this, besides the occasional condescending question at a happy hour.
“All week,” Luke confirmed.
“And Bel’aliol is OK with all the requests?” She brought the PowerPoint back up. That part was kind of fun, actually. She was enjoying turning the pitch into a coherent story. That was apparently now about wellness. She wasn’t sure it still counted as nonfiction, which she wasn’t thrilled about, but the actual deck building felt like a satisfying puzzle. Certainly better than fiddling with the demo that she still couldn’t get to work properly: she was dreading the moment someone asked her about it. She would ask Kelly for help. She would. Tomorrow. Maybe she’d figure it out herself this afternoon, and then she wouldn’t have to ask. Besides, the deck was clearly the priority right now, and she was rocking that part.
“Are you kidding?” Luke leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “Bel’aliol loves it. Remember: the bigger the ask, the bigger the arbitrage. Every ridiculous trinket Brad requests adds to how uncomfortable his stay on our plane will be once he’s working off his debt.”
“I don’t get it,” Morgan said. “How has he not figured this out? Does he not care?”
“I tried to explain and he brushed me off with something about ‘little details are for little people,’” Luke said. “I think he figures he sold the soul once, so he might as well get everything he can out of it.”
“What if he’s got some kind of scheme?” She just couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of blithely living on borrowed time. She held her breath every time she crossed the street, waiting for a speeding cab to send her back to Bel’aliol.
“What, like wishing for more wishes? They always do. It never actually works.”
“Do you have to give him exactly what he asks for?”
Luke snorted. “No. It’s kind of encouraged, really, to undermine things a little—if you take things literally enough, so they never get what they want, they have to keep asking and their debt keeps growing. Although Brad’s not the type to ever stop wanting, even when he gets what he thought he wanted.”
“Says here he wants a yacht.” She typed a query and turned her laptop around. “How about this for a starter yacht?”
Luke looked at the product page for a remote-controlled toy yacht with a startlingly high price tag and gave her the first smile of the day that didn’t twitch. She smiled back and reminded herself not to want more. It was enough to see her friend look a little less hunted.
“What’s the analyst thing?” he asked as he started looking up alternate products that could still fit Brad’s specifications.
“How do I explain this… When companies want to buy something expensive, they want to be sure they’re getting the best thing, right?” She tried to decide whether the page ofheadshots should go in the middle or the end. She was sure Brad would want it at the beginning, but she didn’t think the analysts would care about whether his headshot showed off his expensive haircut. “They want an expert to tell them which company has the best product. There are a couple of different analyst firms that go around researching all the products in a space and ranking which ones are the best this year.”
