“Consider yourself lucky. Do you know how hard it is to have a full-time job
I put my hands on my hips. “Do you even know where your office is?”
Nina growled at me. “Funny.” She looked around, dark eyes raking over my pillaged space. “Sophie, you’re overreacting. So Dixon came in and handed a few of your cases over.”
“He’s edging me out, Nina, I know he is.”
“He already fired you once.”
“Thanks for never letting me forget that.”
“What I’m saying is, if he wanted you out, he would fire you. He did it before, and he’ll do it again.” Nina held up her hands when I tried to protest. “But it’s probably not that. The economy is bad everywhere. There’s a mass exodus out of the city. Everyone’s workload is getting cut.”
“Is yours?”
“No, but I’ve got the novel.” She flopped her hands around. “I think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“Is that even possible? Ugh!” I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “I need some answers. I need help.”
Nina slid her arm across my shoulders and pulled me to her in a marble-cold embrace. “Okay, sorry. What can I do to help, Soph?”
“Aren’t you even the slightest bit concerned about any of this? Mrs. Henderson—she was murdered, Neens. And Bettina, and the centaur.” I swallowed a desperate sob as images burned into my brain.
“I’m immortal.”
“Unless someone knows how to hurt you.”
Nina nibbled her bottom lip as if considering. “Okay. So?”
“So I need you to check up on Dixon.”
“Why me?”
“Because Dixon can smell me a mile away. I just need you to tail him a little bit, find out what’s going on. Everyone on management is a vampire. Are they trying to take over?”
Nina cocked her head. “You realize I’m a vampire, right?”
“But you’re not one of
“Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll tail Dixon. I’ll see if I can find his file folder marked ‘Dixon’s Evil Plan.’”
“That’s all I ask.”
Nina’s dark eyes glittered. “I think my vampire romance is going to have a mystery in it, too.” She tapped a perfectly manicured fingernail against her chin; then she pulled her literary-minded half glasses from her sweater pocket and cleared her throat as she began to free associate.
“Cecila LeChambray stared at the mysterious stranger before her. Something about the darkness in his eyes cut her like ... like ...” She scanned my office; then her eyes settled on mine, expectant.
I flopped back into my desk chair, my forehead thunking against the cold wood of my nearly naked desk. “I can’t help with your fiction career right now, Neens. My nonfiction life is out of control.”
I heard Nina spin, and heard her voice dropping as she walked down the hall.
“Cecilia’s best friend, Stephanie Littleman, was of no help at all. An overanxious mortal, she had trouble with looking a gift horse in the mouth... .”
I spent the rest of my workday holed up in my office, determined that neither a vampire management team nor clients who didn’t want me around were going to push me out of the Underworld Detection Agency. By the time the clock rolled around to five, I had organized everything that remained in my office by color and subject, created a master list of “Things That Could Be Responsible for the Underworld Killings” and hung up on Alex’s voice mail six times. Finally I resigned myself and headed out the door, aiming only for a bottle of wine and a good, long session with my down comforter and pillow.
The next morning I woke up to ChaCha’s kibble breath pouring over my face and what passed for sunlight during a San Francisco summer pressing through my window. I growled at the red numbers on my alarm clock— 10:52—and rolled out of bed and into a pair of sweats, which were either clean or stained consistently enough to look clean. I was lying on the couch balancing a mammoth bowl of Lucky Charms (I’m donut free, remember?) and watching a string of Disney TV shows when Nina plowed through the front door and gaped at me, eyes wide.
“Don’t tell me you’re wearing that,” Nina said.
“Okay,” I said, mouth filled with cereal, “I won’t.”
Nina snatched the remote and clicked off
“Hey! I was watching that.”
“Oh, thank God.”
I shot a narrow-eyed stare over my shoulder, where I found Vlad perched at the dining-room table, eyebrows raised over the top of his open laptop screen. “That ice-cream girl was giving me a toothache.”
I pointed my spoon at him. “When did you get here?”
Vlad gave me his disenfranchised-youth grunt. “I’ve been here.”
God, I hated that supersilent vampire thing.
“I’m buying you a bell,” I said.
Nina raked a hand through her glossy black hair and gave me a parental “I’m not angry, just disappointed” look. “Did you forget what today is?” she asked.
I shifted my cereal bowl, chasing a slew of marshmallows with my spoon. I took a heaping bite. “It’s Saturday.”
Nina looked at me expectantly.
“Saturday, the seventeenth?” I asked. “Wait, did I forget our anniversary?” I chuckled, then choked on a particularly substantial marshmallow.
Nina’s face remained stony. “It’s Saturday, the seventeenth, and my beau—and possible future afterlife mate—”
I raised my eyebrows at her, and Nina waved a hand.
“No one lives forever, Soph.” She stuck out a fat lower lip. “Harley is reading from his book today, and you promised you’d be there. You promised you’d come and support me.”
“I did?”
Nina nodded. “You did.”
“I don’t remember that.”
Nina shoved a single suede pump underneath one of my butt cheeks. “You were just about to get in the shower and wear that cute cashmere twinset that I bought for you, right?”
She bared a fang, and I snarled.
“You don’t scare me, Nina.”
She bared another fang, and I lumbered off the couch, shoving a final enormous scoop of the cereal into my mouth, watching in dismay as a shower of crumbs slid from my lap/dining tray. I turned around quickly, fairly sure my blush was visible from the back of my head, too.
“And hurry up! I told Harley we’d be there early to help him set up!”
After the shortest shower in the history of man or vampire, I shimmied into my birthday twinset and a pair of regular jeans, which had somehow turned into skinny jeans. (Maybe I should give up donuts
Though she was my best friend, and by far the most gentle pointy-toothed afterlifer I’d ever met, there is just something about a vampire staring you down that sends shivers up the spine, and made me suddenly have to pee.
I didn’t dare.
Instead, I pasted on a smile and beelined for my shoulder bag. “Ready to go!” I sang.
“In the car!” Nina bellowed.
Nina and I hurried toward the door, but Vlad stayed put. His dark eyes were intent on his computer screen;
