Under Wraps (34 page)

“Alex?” I asked, my heart starting to thump.

“Hi, Sophie.”

“What are you doing here?” I rose up on tiptoes in a halfhearted effort to look over the stall wall. “You shouldn’t be here. And you really shouldn’t be here, here.”

Alex looked unfazed.

“I have a date out there,” I hissed.

Alex shrugged, looked nonchalantly over his shoulder. “Shall I tell him you’ve been detained?”

“No! No! You can’t tell a guy that I went to the bathroom and never came back. He’ll think I have explosive diarrhea or something.”

Alex leaned an elbow against the stall door. “So tell him you have to end your date because you ran into an ex-boyfriend.”

I could feel my eyes bulge, feel the color rising in my cheeks. “Ex-boyfriend? Look, buddy, you were not my ex-boyfriend, let alone any kind of ex—”

“Buddy,” Alex chuckled, stepping closer to me.

“Boyfriends do not poof! Disappear. And they do not return again in a public restroom. Especially not in the ladies’ room.” I dropped my voice. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“This was the only place I could get your undivided attention.”

I blew out an annoyed sigh. “Not
here,
here.” I spread out my arms, my fingers banging the stall walls. “Here. In San Francisco. On Earth.”

Alex looked around, the corner of his mouth pushing up in that deliciously annoying half smile of his. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.

I unlocked the stall door, steadied my hands on Alex’s chest, and pushed him out. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh!” A woman pushed through the bathroom door and gaped at Alex and me. “You people are disgusting!” She turned on her heel and sped out of the bathroom, clucking the whole way.

I pointed to the bathroom door as it clapped shut after the disgusted woman. “Isn’t it things like that that are going to keep you out of heaven? Or, wherever it is you’re headed?”

“Sophie, I need your help.”

I glanced at myself in the mirror, frowned at the bright-red blush of my cheeks as the blood surged through. “You know what? I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it. You disappeared. Gone—without a trace. Or a phone number.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for leaving the way that I did. I just didn’t think you’d understand. I thought it would be easier if I just … wasn’t there.”

I put both my hands on my hips. “I work in the demon realm. I live in San Francisco. There are very few things that I don’t understand. But, ironically, you disappearing was something that I didn’t understand.”

“I have a chance to go back. To restore my grace.”

“To go back to heaven?”

Alex nodded slowly.

“Heaven?” I said again, one eyebrow raised.

“Can we talk about this, please? Maybe somewhere that isn’t”—Alex looked around the she-she pink powder room—“here?”

I tried my best to stay solid, not to lose myself in the cobalt blue of his eyes, in the firm set of his jaw. “Meet me back at my apartment in about an hour,” I muttered.

Alex grinned. “What about your date?”

“I’ll think of something,” I told him.

* * *

Eric was gnawing on a breadstick when I went back to the table.

“Everything okay?” he asked, his mouth full of bread.

“I’m sorry, Eric, but I’m just not feeling very well.”

Eric swallowed, his eyes sympathetic and locked on mine. “Oh.”

“I think I just need to lie down. I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me.”

Eric stood up, flattened his palm against my belly. “It’s okay,” he said when I flinched. “I’m a doctor.”

“Oh, right.”

“Where does it hurt?”

Eric grinned down at me, and I thought momentarily about how nice it would be to date a doctor. Who breathed. Who came from a place with an actual postal code and who didn’t
pouf!
into thin air and who wouldn’t (theoretically) sprout wings when all was right with his world again.

“You know what?” I said, sinking down into my chair. “I think it passed. Why don’t we have a drink?”

Eric and I had had two rounds of cocktails and were sharing a crab appetizer when I felt my phone buzzing in my purse. I fished it out, glanced nonchalantly at the readout.

“I’m sorry. It’s my roommate. Do you mind if I grab this? It’ll just be a second.”

Eric wagged his head and I connected.

“Nina?”

“Sophie.”

I lowered my voice, hunching behind my arm. “What do you want? I’m on a date with Eric.”

“I know. Do you know where I am? At home. With an angel. Your angel.”

I dropped my voice. “He is not
my
angel.”

“Whatever. He’s on
my
couch. And he said you were coming home to talk to him.”

“I am. Eventually.”

Nina blew out a sigh. “Would eventually be before or after
Glee?
He might be an angel, but he’s a complete remote-control hog.”

I groaned. “I’ll be home in a few minutes.”

When I got back to my apartment, Nina, Vlad, and Alex were assembled around the kitchen table, staring at each other. I dumped my keys on the counter and walked in, hands on hips. “Okay, Alex, what is so important that you have to pop back into my life and interrupt me on a date?”

Nina swallowed hard, and I sank down into the only empty chair at the table, then slapped my palm against my forehead. “Oh, wait, let me guess—it’s Eric, right? He’s evil? He’s actually Satan or something? Of course. I meet a nice guy who seems to breathe, seems to have regular old blood coursing through his veins, and there is something paranormally wrong with him.”

“No,” Nina said, “he’s a breather.”

“And his blood is fine,” Vlad confirmed.

I grimaced. “Okay, then what is it?”

Alex’s eyes were hard. “It’s Sampson.”

“Pete?” I asked, my voice sounding small. I looked from Alex to Nina. “What about him? Have they found him? Is he okay?”

Nina hung her head, and I felt my lower lip start to quiver, felt the choking lump in my throat. “That’s what you came to tell me?” I whispered. “That Mr. Sampson is dead?”

“Sophie, I’m sorry.”

I stood up so quickly my chair flopped onto the floor behind me. “I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. I’m sorry. I hate to be the one to tell you this. You don’t understand how hard it is for me to see you hurt—to make you hurt—again. But I needed to be the one to give you the news.”

Vlad righted my chair, and I sunk down again. “Why? Why did it have to be you? In person?”

Alex opened his coat and pulled a long, thick envelope, folded lengthwise from his pocket. “Because Mr. Sampson wanted to be sure that you got these.” He pushed the envelope across the table toward me, and I just stared at it, until it swirled in front of me, lost in a rush of tears.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s an answer to most of your questions,” Alex said.

My eyes flashed. “So, you saw him? You saw him before he died? Was he okay? What happened to him?”

Alex looked at his lap and wagged his head. “I didn’t see him before he died. This was something I had promised to do long before any of this—even any of this with the chief—ever happened.”

I sniffed and nodded my head, then used my fists to wipe the tears from my cheeks.

“What’s in the envelope, Soph?” Nina asked.

I swallowed heavily, unhooked the latch, and peeled out a tri-folded stack of papers covered in very carefully handwritten script. “It’s from my grandmother,” I said, fingering the paper.

While Alex, Nina, and Vlad looked on, I smoothed the letter against the table, licked my lips, and learned the truth about my life.

Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of
UNDER GROUND,
the next novel in the
Underworld Detection Agency Chronicles,
coming in November 2011!

It’s nearly impossible to get hobgoblin slobber out of raw silk.

I know this because I had been standing in the bathroom, furiously scrubbing at the stubborn stain for at least forty-five minutes. If I could do magic, I would have zapped the stain out. Heck, if I could do magic I would zap away the whole hobgoblin afternoon and be sinking my toes in the sand somewhere while a tanned god named Carlos rubbed suntan lotion on my back. But no, I was stuck in the Underworld Detection Agency women’s restroom—a horrible, echo-y room tiled in Pepto pink with four regular stalls and a single tiny one for pixies—when my coworker Nina popped her head in, wrinkled her cute ski-jump nose, and said, “I smell hobgoblin slobber.”

Did I mention vampires have a ridiculously good sense of smell?

Nina came in, letting the door snap shut behind her. She used one angled fang to pierce the blood bag she was holding and settled herself onto the sink next to me.

“You’re never going to get that out, you know.”

I huffed and wrung the water from my dress, glaring at Nina as I stood there in my baby-pink slip and heels. “Did you come in here just to tell me that?”

Nina extended one long, marble white leg and examined her complicated Jimmy Choo stilettos. “No, I also came in to tell you that Lorraine is on the warpath, Nelson used his trident to tack a pixie to the corkboard, and Vlad is holding a VERM meeting in the lunchroom.”

I frowned. “This job bites.”

Nina smiled, bared her fangs, and snapped her jaws.

Nina and I work together at the Underworld Detection Agency—the UDA for those in the know. And very few people are in the know. Our branch is located thirty-seven floors below the San Francisco Police Department, but we have physical and satellite offices nationwide. Word is the Savannah office gets the most ghosts but has the best food. The Manhattan office gets the best crossovers (curious humans wandering down), and the good ol’ San Francisco office is famous for our unruly hordes of the magnificent undead, mostly dead, and back from the dead. However, we’re rapidly becoming infamous for a management breakdown that tends to make incidents like the fairy stuck to the corkboard barely worth mentioning. Some demons blame the breakdown of Underworld morals. I blame the fact that my boss and former head of the UDA, Pete Sampson, was killed last year and has yet to be replaced. Thus, we’ve been privy to a semi-permanent parade of interim management made up of everything from werewolves and vampires to goblins and one (mercifully short) stint with a screaming banshee.

So am I a demon? Nope. I’m a plain, one hundred percent first-life, air-breathing, magic-free human being. I don’t have fangs, wings, or hooves. I’m five-foot-two on a good day, topped with a ridiculous mess of curly red hair on a bad day, and my eyes are the exact hue of lime Jell-O. My super powers are that I can consume a whole pizza in twelve minutes flat and sing the fifty states in alphabetical order. And that I’m alive. Which makes me a weird, freakish anomaly in an Underworld office that keeps blood in the fridge and offers life insurance that you can collect should you get the opportunity to come back to life.

“There you both are!”

My head snapped to the open doorway, where Lorraine stood, eyebrows raised and arched, her emerald green eyes narrowed. Lorraine is a Gestalt witch of the green order, which means that her magiks are in tune with nature and are deeply humane. Usually.

Her honey blond hair hangs past her waist and her fluttery, earth-toned wardrobe reflects her solidarity with natural harmony.

Unless you got on her bad side, which, today, I was.

Lorraine glared at my slip. “Can you wrap up your little lingerie fashion show and meet me in my office, please? And you”—Lorraine swung her head toward Nina, who was holding my damp dress under the hand dryer—“can you please break up Vlad’s empowerment meeting and get out to the main floor?”

I looked at Nina. “Vlad is still into the Vampire Empowerment Movement?”

Nina gave me her patented “Don’t even start” look, punched her fist in the air, and bellowed,
“Viva la revalucion!”
while slipping out the bathroom door.

I pulled my dress over my head under Lorraine’s annoyed stare, and then worked quickly to rearrange my mass of unruly hair. When Lorraine sighed—loudly—I wadded my curls into a bun and secured it with a binder clip, following her down the hall.

“Okay,” I said as we walked, “what’s up?”

Lorraine didn’t miss a step. She pushed a manila file folder in my hand with the blue tag—
Wizards—
sticking out.

“Nicholias Rayburn,” I read.

“Ring a bell?”

I frowned. “No. Should it?”

“How about ‘Three-Headed Dog Ravages Noe Valley Neighborhood’?”

“Mr. Rayburn did that?”

“No,” Lorraine said flatly. “You did.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Lorraine let out another annoyed sigh. “Nicholias Rayburn was here last week. Old guy, blue robe, pointy hat?”

I cocked my head. “Oh yeah. Now I remember him.”

“You should, because you allowed him to renew his magiks license.”

My stomach started to sink.

“Yeah. With his three-inch-thick cataracts and mild senility. You were supposed to withdraw his license and strip him of his magiks, but you didn’t, and he walked home, thought a fire hydrant was following him, and unleashed the hound of hell on the land of soccer mom. Not exactly great for our reputation.”

I felt my usually pale skin flush. “Whoops.”

Lorraine stopped walking and faced me, the hard line of her lips softening. “Look, Sophie, I know you’ve had a hard time. I understand that with all you’ve been through you’re going to make some mistakes, but you’ve got to be more aware.”

The events of the last year of my life flooded over me, and I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the imminent rush of tears.

It
had
been rough.

While I had gone for nearly thirty years with nothing so much as an overdue library fine to raise any eyebrows, in the last twelve months I had become involved in a gory murder investigation, been kidnapped, attacked, hung by my ankles in an attempt to be bled dry—

“And I know it’s got to be hard, what with Alex out of the picture and all.”

—and I had fallen in love with a fallen angel who had the annoying habit of dropping into my life with a pizza and a six-pack when things were supernaturally awful, and dropping out when things shifted into relatively normal gear.