Dance with Darkness - Red Masquerade

Chapter 2

Hawke wants to schedule a 1 on 1 with everyone.  Prepare for the Inquisition.

                        ~Mags

The email from my coworker pinged into my inbox ten minutes before lunchtime.  My job, a run-of-the-mill office worker at a catering company, had recently changed bosses, since we’d been picking up the slack for our previous one too much.  Unfortunately, our new boss was strictly no-nonsense, and I had already made a bad first impression by walking out on her introduction after getting news that my sister was found.  Add that to my involvement in the supernatural world and my constant excuses to hide the fact, and I was not off to a good start.

True to Maggie’s message, a schedule for private meetings with our new boss was sent out close to the end of the day.  I was signed up for one of the earlier interviews, which put me at a disadvantage because I wouldn’t be able to ask the others for some tips on getting through it.

“You’ll be fine,” Maggie reassured me in her usual optimistic manner.  “Think of it this way—you get it over with quicker.  Besides, it’s not for a few days still, so you’ll have time to prepare for it.  Maybe study our mission statement or something.  ‘Breaking Bread—Let them eat cake!’”  She giggled at our silly mantra, but I had a hard time bringing a smile to my own face.

“Thanks, Mags,” I said.  “It’s just…I’m a bit worried about my sister and a few other things right now.”  Well, that was an understatement.

Maggie’s expression quickly turned to concern.  “Oh, yeah.  How’s she doing?”

I shrugged, hating that I sounded like such a downer.  “Still unresponsive.”

She gave me a hug.  “I’m sorry.  Want to come bowling tomorrow night to take your mind off it?”  She and her boyfriend, Henry, had lately starting going cosmic bowling with a group of friends, and she had been trying to persuade me to go the last couple of times they went.

I shook my head but gave a smile.  “No, but thanks for offering.”  I’d be way too busy playing vampire geisha to a certain undead someone at that time of the night.

She nodded in acceptance, her curly black hair bobbing in its ponytail.  “Well, all right.  Just don’t overwork yourself, you hear me?  You’ve been sick a lot more often lately, it seems.”

I plastered a smile on my face, unwilling to admit that my “sick days” in the past few weeks had just been a cover for when demon hunting had taken priority for the day.  I had been assigned to work with the Amethyst Team at Triple H on a still-unsolved investigation known as the Decayer Case.  Vampires had been shriveling up and rapidly decaying instead of bursting into ash when they were killed, and the clues had originally led to an air daemon named Jin Amberley.  However, it turned out that he had been secretly helping Matthieu Beaumont and another vampire, Dracule Andrei Moldovan, investigate the killings.  We’d gotten so far as to find out that golems, presumably controlled by the long-lost Stone of Fál, had been partly to blame, but who was controlling them and why they were after a Chinese vampire named Min was still a mystery.

Fortunately, I was on a break from demon hunting, as my ghost partner had suddenly deemed herself emotionally compromised for some reason and decided she needed a break.  Without her, my kicks and punches were only passable, and my knife-throws were deadly to anything except the practice target, so I found myself with a bit of time to get involved with vampires instead, apparently.

“It’ll probably just be better for me to get a good night’s sleep,” I told Maggie, wishing such a thing was actually possible.  Between the late night escapades with the hunters and now midnight rendezvous with Matthieu, I’d be lucky not to fall asleep in the middle of my one-on-one with Ms. Hawke.