Chapter 1
My day wasn’t going well, and it was only ten-thirty in the morning. I gave my phone a last wistful glance as I opened the door into the offices of Proctor & Sullivan Accounting Services. What a way to start the second day of my new temp job.
Ms. Dover, thank you for your application, but no.
The email’s contents hadn’t changed since arriving earlier, but the font seemed larger and somehow in bold.
“You’re late, Maddie,” Lisa said, blocking the way into the small space we shared at P&S. She was dressed in a neat white blouse and blue slacks matching her deep blue lipstick, her midnight black hair cropped short to the beautiful curve of her head.
I wore jeans, a green sweatshirt, sneakers, my brown hair gathered in an easy ponytail, and the beginnings of a zit on my forehead.
“But—”
“You’re late.”
Surreptitiously, I glanced down at my phone’s clock before pocketing it. “I don’t start until—”
Lifting her chin, she looked at me down her upturned button nose. “You’re late.”
I sighed and accepted defeat. “Okay.”
Lisa gave me a sharp nod, happy with the acknowledgment of my erroneous ways, but didn’t move. I wanted to nudge her so she would step aside, but Lisa wasn’t the kind of person you casually nudged. Plus, I needed her on my side—office work was boring already as it was without friendly faces nearby.
Also, I really, really enjoyed being alive.
“I need you to go down to the archives.”
Oh, wow. Scratch that about the day not going well—it was sliding right into a catastrophic debacle. “You mean down to the…?”
Another jerk of her chin. “The basement, yes.”
My face must’ve looked like an upside-down smile emoji, because she cleared her throat and got very busy unhooking her keycard from the waist of her slacks. “I need some files from an older client, and they haven’t been digitized yet.” She held out the keycard. “Make yourself useful for being late.”
I eyed the card like it was a viper. This might be my second day at Proctor & Sullivan, but I was no stranger to the building, and had, in fact, done temp jobs at a few other businesses here. People involved with Fae magic tended to stick together, given the rest of humanity was unaware it existed, and something about the building made everyone happy. The parts above ground, at least.
The basement, better known as the Bowels of Hell, was another thing altogether.
“Shouldn’t you go?” I asked in my smoothest tone, blinking a couple of times for added effect. “It’s probably not legal for me to use your keycard, is it?”
“Maddie, take the card and bring me the file. Are you going to drag your feet every time I need you to do something? Because in that case, I can ask Joe to—”
At the name of my temp agency boss, I snatched the card from her hand. “No need to go there,” I grumbled. This might be a temporary job, but thanks to the email I had received that morning, I still needed it.
Lisa beamed for a second then went to her desk and dropped onto her chair. “You know which room?”
I searched my memory. Everyone—including me—went into the basement at least once, hoping to show off and demonstrate there was nothing scary down there. Some made it out…wrong.
Or so went the stories.
“I think so.”
Lisa waved me away and swirled her chair to face her monitor. “Hurry up.”
And that was how I found myself waiting by the elevators outside the office in the middle of a beautiful spring morning, about to go into the Bowels of Hell. Naturally, I decided the best thing to do was to take out my phone and check my email. Again.
Yup, there it was, on top of the list. My newest, and seventh, rejection for the job of my dreams. And because I was me, I decided to further uplift my day by reading it again.
Ms. Dover, thank you for your application, but no.
A. Greaves
Greaves, aka the Jerk, aka the boss at the Magical Artifacts Retrieval and Research Institute. The person who stood between me and my ideal job. Ever since I was a kid and my mother told me of the Fae, I had dreamed of joining the Institute, going on treasure hunts, and finding out everything there was to know about their artifacts. The Fae might’ve gone back underground a hundred years ago, but their magic and their descendants—part Fae like me—still ran amok on the surface.
I had waited to apply until I hit twenty, thinking the two in front of my age would serve me better than a one. It hadn’t. So I had moped for a bit then applied again. And again. And gotten temp jobs in the meantime, hoping to soak up more information while I worked around those who dealt with magic and artifacts.
And now, at twenty-four, I was starting to wonder if what I needed was a three instead of a two.
But! There was a bright side to all of this, I told myself with a wide smile. The Jerk had thanked me. It hadn’t been simply Ms. Dover. No. like the fifth and sixth rejections, or signed by his assistant like the fourth. I was growing on him. Perhaps the eighth would do the trick, or maybe what I was missing was more experience in the field of fakes versus authentic. I was, after all, only one-sixteenth Fae. I needed to supplement.
I thought about nudging Joe to get me a job at Kane’s antiques shop on the second floor. Joe had contacts everywhere in the building, since he was the only one supplying temp workers with an inkling of the existence of Fae magic. He could put me in there even if they didn’t need a temp. I was an excellent employee. I deserved the assist.
It was better than my current plan of simply outlasting the Jerk and hoping he got fired.
The elevator doors opened, and I slipped inside along with a few other office workers. There were a couple of private firms similar to P&S on the same floor, along with a big insurance business—Fae magic could be pretty tricky, and activating a Fae artifact or a ward by accident could lead to interesting, if not devastating, results.
The cab began its descent, and I opened a text convo with Kane. Hey, I typed, space for me at the shop? Thinking of getting in some extra hours. Better to ask first before forcing Joe’s hand.
“Hi, Maddie. How’s the new job working out? We miss you at the office.”
Pocketing the phone, I grinned at Bea. “Good so far.”
“They got you on coffee runs, huh?”
I touched the keycard. If only. “Kind of.”
The doors opened again, and we spilled into the reception lobby. The main elevators did not reach the basement, so I bid Bea farewell and turned toward the stairs in the back of the hall. My steps immediately slowed. You could sense the gloom emanating from the basement slowly encroaching on the sunny day. It turned the corner leading to the stairs into something akin to the entrance of a dark alleyway. Not the dark, irresistibly dangerous type, but more like the I bet there is a monster rat living in there kind.
My feet got even slower when I noticed a man leaning against the wall by the second elevator. Like the basement stairs, his foreboding expression brought a cloud of gloom to the morning, and my instincts told me there was some Fae blood in there. I eyed him curiously as I walked by. He was tall, maybe in his late twenties, dressed in jeans, black t-shirt, and a bomber jacket. He wore his dark hair short, and his jaw had the beginnings of a stubble that looked like those scratchy sponges you use when you really need that grime off your pans. And his nose—slightly too hooked, slightly too long—commanded attention and had no shame in doing so. I could spend hours looking at that face, not because it was handsome, but because it was so interesting.
Our eyes met and held for a couple of never-ending seconds. I was trapped. Until I stumbled sideways. He showed no reaction. His gaze simply moved away to land on something else.
A slow roasting of shame heated my cheeks as I plowed on toward the stairs, my sneakers squeaking against the polished floors the whole way. Caught staring like a five-year-old. Thumbs up, way to go, Maddie. The squeaking turned my arms into a mass of goosebumps, the sound so loud half the lobby must be looking my way. Or more, judging by the thousand tiny pricks nailing my back.
I inhaled deeply to calm myself. The day might not be showing a lot of promise so far, but really, it could only go up from there, right? Soon I would be out of view. The basement was just that, a basement. A rejection was just that, a rejection. Plus, the Jerk had thanked me. One day, when I was a member of the Institute (and in the Jerk’s chair), I would look back at today and smile fondly at all the adventure I didn’t yet know was to come.
The thought improved my mood. The stranger forgotten, I bounced down the steps into the Bowels of Hell.
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