Berserkers were monsters, twice the size of an average man, with claws and sharp teeth and a thirst for blood like no other. Of course, he didn’t kill one by himself. It was common sense. And kelpies were terrifying—when they infested any kind of water, they reproduced really quickly because they believed in strength in numbers, and it took a lot of planning and brute strength to actually capture and kill them.
And boggarts?
Well…yeah, maybe that one was true. They had no strength to speak of, and they weren’t that smart.
But everything else was bullshit, and every time I’d tried to tell my friends so, they’d waved me off like I was talking nonsense. So now, I didn’t bother. I just stayed out of their conversations about him altogether.
“Yeah, but not about that stuff,” Eva said with a grin. “C’mon. He’s so hot he kills my braincells. I literally can’t even talk to him.”
Patricia snorted. “Like he’s ever going to talk to you.”
Eva flipped her the bird.
“Honest to God—I want to hate his guts, I really do. But he’s just so dreamy,” Hunter said, looking up at the high ceiling with a goofy smile on his face.
I slapped my hand on my forehead. My friends were idiots. Why in the world did I have to claim a desk near them?
He’s a self-absorbed prick who’ll pretend he doesn’t know you when you go to say hi the day after you practically force him to smile—and makes a fool out of you in front of all your colleagues.
I said that in my head but not out loud, thankfully. I’ve talked to myself since I was a little girl, so it had been a hard habit to kick. Still, I’d worked on it hard since arriving in Manhattan and working in the same place with fifty other people who can hear you perfectly if you, say, talk to the computer or your journal or ask the freaking clock to move faster. The reminder made me flinch. They put all kinds of names on me—crazy, bipolar, schizophrenic, delusional—but I learned my lesson fairly quickly. Now, I only talked to myself when I was all alone in my apartment. The rest of the day, my thoughts remained locked inside my head.
“Anyway, did you hear about Lark?” Patricia continued in that hushed voice again. “He was spotted at a vamp party last night.” She gave us all a knowing smile.
“No way,” Eva whispered.
“Lark? Really? I didn’t think he’d have the balls, to be honest,” Hunter said with a nod, like he was actually impressed that someone would be so stupid as to attend a vamp party. We all knew what happened in those—you got bitten, and the fang venom of vampires gave you the highest high there is, and then you went back a second night and a third and a fourth…until there was no more blood left in you to drink.
“I keep telling you guys, we should try it,” Eva said. “C’mon, you chickenshits! Let’s go get bitten!” Her eyes sparkled as the mischievous smile spread on her face. “Let’s do it tonight.”
Patricia and Hunter were actually considering it.
“You guys, do I need to remind you what happens when you run out of blood?” They all blinked at me. “You die.”
Patricia and Hunter both shuddered and shook their heads. “Stop talking out your ass, Eva. I am not getting bitten by those people, no matter what,” Hunter said, rubbing the sides of his neck. Thank God.
“I hate you,” Eva spit and kicked the leg of my desk with all her strength—which wasn’t much. She, like Patricia, was a witch, and enhanced physical strength was not in their list of abilities. Though they weren’t fae, they had an affinity to magic that most humans didn’t possess. Some were stronger than others, and they cast their spells through sigils—marks that enabled them to suck the energy from something and transform it into whatever they wanted. Mostly, they did it from plants, which was why pixies were paid good money to grow things with magic. The more magic the plant held, the more powerful the spells of a witch.
That’s why Patricia had three small planters around her at all times—a cactus my mother had sent me for her, a peace lily, and the snake plant by her desk’s legs. Eva didn’t care much, though. She only ever used magic when she absolutely had to. Said it drained her body’s energy way too much to be worth the perks, and she relied on the plant supplies of the ODP when she was called out in the field or to do spells for the crews.
I only grinned.
“Okay—I got one more, and then we can go back to work,” Patricia said. It made me want to smile. She always came in fully loaded with rumors every morning. I suspected she came early just to talk to Cecile before she had to actually sit down at her desk. For some people, coffee did the trick to have them awake and functioning. For Patricia, it was rumors. It’s why Hunter called her a rumowhore.
“Apparently, Chief Randall had a meeting with the high-ups last night. Something about some high fae getting involved with some humans, stealing some confidential information, and getting about two dozen people slaughtered in the process.”
“Ooh, slaughter,” Eva said, licking her lips. “I like that word.”
“What kind of confidential information?” I asked. “Whom did they steal it from?”
But Patricia shrugged. “No idea, but it’s obviously very serious. The high-ups rarely call the Chief for personal meetings.”
That was true—hence the reason why I was curious. The high fae owned and operated the ODP—Orion’s Department of Protection. It had been around for over four hundred years, back when the borders of Earth and Faeya, the fae dimension, somehow fell out of existence, and all the creatures of Faeya were suddenly able to cross here. We still had no idea how many fae species truly existed, but I was one of them. Pixies were said to have been tiny in Faeya, but when they arrived on Earth, they mutated, just like every other kind of fae. We grew bigger and lost our wings, but we kept our strange colors and our need for isolation from everyone else who wasn’t pixie. We also kept our love for nature still.
But pixies—and brownies, nymphs, banshees, and the likes—were considered low fae. And the high fae, the unearthly creatures who seemed to have kept most of their true nature, were the only ones who got to travel between worlds now, after the original founders of the ODP put the locks in place again. They rarely stayed on Earth from what we knew, and Patricia was right—they almost never called Chief Randall, who managed our division, for in-person meetings.
That meant that whatever had happened, it was big. It was huge, completely worth all the time in the world, every single effort. It was a purpose all by itself.
And the type of job I could never even come close to.