“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Showtime!”
She groaned as they turned up the music. “Tuck your feet in.”
The demon looked baffled. “Why does everyone suddenly not want to be on this car?”
One of the boys cartwheeled down the aisle and nearly kicked Lucareoth in the teeth.
“That’s why,” she sighed. The New Yorker Code required one to disregard behavior on the subway that didn’t concern you, no matter how weird, so she tried to get back on topic while ignoring the breakdancers performing in the aisle. “I’m an SDR.”
“A what?” He was having a lot more trouble focusing on her while a teenager swung around the pole a foot away.
She raised her voice a little to be heard over the music. “Sales development representative. I’m supposed to make all the cold calls, find potential prospects, and then pass them on to an actual salesperson.”
She’d expected his eyes to glaze over like everyone else she told this to, but his gaze sharpened instead as he focused back on her. “So you want to be in sales?”
“I was trying to be in marketing, and this was the closest I could get.”
“But that’s not what you actually want.” He stared at her with an intensity she found unnerving.
She’d never really figured out the answer to that one. “It beats the alternatives. Or at least the ones that were available to me at the time.”
“Do you like it?”
She glanced at him quickly, trying to evaluate why he was asking. No one asked. It was a polite fiction that everyone carefully preserved, that they were passionately committed to whatever job they’d managed to land out of the ones that would have them. Almost like the fiction that magic wasn’t a thing.
One of the boys grabbed the overhead bars on either side and did a perfect backflip.
Screw it. There were the things she was supposed to always lie about, and the people she was supposed to never lie to. She’d just lied to her mother and the world hadn’t ended; who would he tell if she told the truth for once? Sure, he was trying to fish for a way to lure her into a Deal. But she wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it, and she was going to send him back before he could tell any real humans. “No, I hate it. I hate calling strangers to try to sell them stuff they don’t want,I hate pretending I think this product is any good at all, and I hate that, as good as I am at lying about either of these things, I’m still behind on my quota and my boss is going to kill me.”
“If he’s going to kill you…” Lucareoth started hopefully.
“Not literally,” she said quickly. “And it’s she, now, since the boss that pronoun applied to is dead. Kelly will inherit me back, I guess.”
It was only now sinking in that Tim was dead. They hadn’t been close. He wore a little too much aftershave, and he used the phrase “low-hanging fruit” way too much, and he’d seemed to lack any spine at all. She was pretty sure Brad kept him around as his pet yes-man. But he hadn’t been a bad guy, and he’d gotten her a Starbucks gift card on her last birthday. She didn’t think he’d been particularly passionate about HR solutions, either, but she knew he had a lot of alimony and he’d clearly been doing his best. He deserved a better rest than giving himself a heart attack at work after hours.
“It’s weird,” said Lucareoth, who kept running a hand through his hair in a way that suggested that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. She wondered if he could feel the hair himself, or if he felt the scales and horns but saw the hair in reflection in the window. Either way, it was bothering him. “But that sounds really familiar.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “My life is familiar.”
“Talking to strangers, pretending what you’re selling is good, being behind quota, boss getting mad.” He snorted. “It’s not so different, really.”
“It’s totally different,” she said flatly.
“Is it, really?” he asked. “If you were friends with someone, would you call them about your thing?”
Well, no. “It’s just their company’s money, not their soul.” You could talk about selling souls on the subway. No one would guess it was literal. Hell, anyone listening to two junior salespeople complaining would probably say they’d both already sold their own souls.
Shit. Maybe they did have something in common.
She had to remind herself that this… person… next to her would have taken Tim’s soul, if he hadn’t died. He would have taken hers as well, and Vijay’s, and the panhandler’s. And he’d have been happy then, because he was finally hitting his quota. She shouldn’t be identifying with him. Even if she felt bad for him. Even if he was cute.
Another one of the teenagers danced past her and part of her—the part of her that was less worried about a black eye—was impressed at their breakdancing skills. Spinning on your head while the train shifted around a bend was a feat worthy of admiration. She would never admit it because it would make her look like a tourist, but she kind of loved Showtime. Instead, she stared resolutely at the floor, determined not to break the code and encourage them. Or give them more money she couldn’t afford.
“You want to watch the dancers, but you don’t want anyone to know you want to watch the dancers, and it doesn’t make sense,” Lucareoth observed. How did he know that? She wanted to demand answers, but she couldn’t do that here. She glared at him while the dancers started moving up and down the car with a hat out for tips.
He seemed to get the message to stay on less magical topics. He said, “I wish I just could do your part.”
“What do you mean? It’s the worst part,” she said. “Marketing does all the creative stuff to get people’sattention, and then I have to do all the stressful boring parts that make people hang up on me and curse me out. Then, whenever I succeed at all, Sales gets all the credit and most of the money. It sucks!”
