Unfinished Muse (22 page)

She shrugged. “Sometimes that happens on
Mondays. Some clients lose their inspiration over the weekend. You
may have to check out some supplies on Friday and give them an
extra boost Saturday and Sunday to keep the momentum going. It
happens.” She wrote something in a notebook and tore off a sheet.
“Here’s a weekend pass so you can take the supplies home at the end
of the week.”

I took the piece of paper, my hand shaking.
Was I not supposed to take stuff home without permission? Someone
should have told me, since I’d been doing it a lot lately.
“Thanks.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” She folded her
hands together. “So. You got them back on track yesterday,
right?”

“Well, no. That’s why I wanted to talk to
you. They won’t listen. I blow bubbles and think inspiring thoughts
and they go off to do something completely different.”

She did that nose pinching and sighing thing
again. “Wynter, I can’t do your job for you. No one can. Those
three clients weren’t assigned to you at random. They’re your
clients. The Fates department sent down the orders to go
specifically to your inbox. These people are depending on you and
only you to complete their tasks—their dreams. No one else can do
it.”

I sat in silence, staring at a smudge on the
edge of her desk, letting her words sink in. My clients. Fate gave
them to me for a reason, and nobody else could help them.

Holy shit. No pressure.

“So.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. Part
of me wanted to bolt out the door and disappear. “Do you have any
advice at all? How do I make them listen?”

She shrugged. “Just keep trying. You’ll get
through eventually. And if you don’t, you’ll do something else.
Lots of people miss on their first department. If this isn’t the
right one for you, maybe something else will suit you better.”

“Like the Underworld?” I bit my lower
lip.

“Don’t be silly. Legacy’s don’t go to the
Underworld.”

I tilted my head and gave her questioning
look. “And?”

She frowned and put her glasses back on
while tapping on the keyboard with her other hand. “You’re not…”
She blinked at the screen. “Oh. I see.” The glasses dropped to her
chest again. “You’re a Legacy with an empty god file.”

“So they tell me.”

“Well, then. I guess you have two choices
here.” She leaned forward and fixed me with a hard look. “You need
to either get your shit together or find out who your father
is.”

Not for the first time, I wondered how bad
it must be to work in the Underworld. The more people talked about
it, the more terrified I became of ending up there.

“I’ll work on it.” I dragged myself out of
the chair and turned to go. “Thanks for your time.”

I hoped there was no sarcasm in my tone.
None that she could hear, anyway.

“Try to have a good day, Wynter. You’ll get
them back on track. Whatever the reason they were assigned to you,
trust that there
was
a reason.”

I nodded and reached for the doorknob.
“Hey.” I turned to face her again. “What’s going on out there
today? Why is everybody standing around like they’re waiting for a
fire drill?”

Her eyes looked sad. “Trina didn’t make her
deadline. Again. She’s packing up her desk.”

Trina was the only person in the department
who’d been nice to me—besides maybe Polly. “She’s still here?”

“You can probably catch her if you
hurry.”

I slipped through the door and down the
hall. Audrey and Kayla stood sneering at me in the hall, and I
brushed past them without comment. I turned a corner and walked
into the box Trina held in front of her.

“Hey.” She smiled, but some of her light had
gone out. “I guess you heard.”

I nodded. “I am so sorry. Are you okay? Can
I help you carry anything?”

She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “I’ll be
okay. It’s not my first time at this.”

A small potted cactus teetered on top of her
box. I grabbed the ceramic planter before it fell. “Got it.”

We walked past Audrey and Kayla, and Trina
gave them a little wave without letting go of her box. “See you
around, I guess.”

Audrey looked genuinely upset. “Sorry to see
you go, Trina. Come back and visit once you get settled.”

Kayla gave the first sincere smile I’d seen
from her. “We’ll miss you!”

Trina swallowed hard. “We’ll have to do
lunch some time.”

As we walked past, Audrey looked at me with
a curious, puzzled expression, as if seeing me in a different
light.

I walked Trina out to the lobby, still
carrying her tiny cactus. “Hey. You want to get a cup of coffee
before you go?”

Asking a friend to get a cup of coffee gave
me a nervous flutter in my stomach. Friendship was so
hard
.
I had to actually
do
stuff.

Trina grinned. “Sure. They’re expecting me
upstairs, but they didn’t say when. I could use a shot of caffeine
first.”

She probably could. The few conversations
I’d had with Trina in the past had been a lot more…energetic.
Getting booted from the Muse department must have taken a lot out
of her.

We got settled with our lattes in a quiet
corner of the cafeteria. I felt a twinge of Rick-related guilt when
I smelled the cinnamon in my coffee. For the first time, I noticed
Trina’s hands were shaking.

I put my cup on the table. “You okay?”

She took a deep, steadying breath and put
her hands in her lap. “Yeah. I’ll be okay. Thank the gods I’m a
Legacy. Maybe the next place will work out. I’ve got to be good at
something, right?”

“You’d think all their assessments would get
it right the first time. Where are you going next?”

Her expression was serious and intense. “All
the way to the top. They’re sending me to the Fates.” She waited,
as if I was supposed to gasp in surprise or draw back in
horror.

The best I could give her was a slight
raising of the eyebrows. “Is that good? Bad? I have to be honest. I
have no idea what it means.”

One side of her mouth drew up in a wry, half
smile. “I guess I don’t really know, either. I’m just going by the
reactions everybody else gave me.”

I shrugged. “I’m sure it’s an office like
any other.” I held my coffee cup aloft in a toast. “And you will be
fabulous at whatever it is goes on up there.”

“I hope you’re right.” She sipped her drink.
“So, how’s it going for you? I never see you, so you must be
busy.”

I grimaced. “I suck. None of my clients are
behaving.”

She frowned. “How many do you have?”

“Three.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Usually, they
start people off slow. Somebody in Fates must have high hopes for
you.”

“Well, their hopes are wasted. I’m failing
miserably.”

She patted my hand. “You’ll bring them
around. I believe in you.”

“Thanks.” I picked at the sleeve on my cup.
“Wish you weren’t leaving. Everybody else hates me.”

“You mean Audrey and Kayla? I wouldn’t worry
about them.” She gave me a reassuring smile.

I shook my head. “I kind of get the feeling
nobody there is too happy to see me.” Not even Polly, if I were
really being honest with myself.

Trina’s smile faded. “Oh, that.”

I sat straighter. “What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I’d hoped
everybody would forget about it.” She fidgeted in her seat and
looked distressed. “Here’s the thing. There’s only a set number of
people who work in the Muse department in any given region.”

“Sure.” I nodded slowly.

“Somebody had to leave for you to take her
place.” She stared at me like she was waiting for me to understand
some deeper meaning.

“Okay. So, whoever was there before me was
somebody they all liked a lot. But I can’t be somebody else.”

Trina scratched her nose, took a breath, and
tried again. “Your predecessor is named Phoebe. Everybody liked
Phoebe. She was great at her job. Everybody gets a difficult client
from time to time, but it takes three failed projects to fail the
department.”

“So, she wasn’t so great at her job after
all. Or really unlucky with the clients they assigned her.”

“No,” she said, drawing the word out.
“
One
difficult client. Every few months, she’d get that same
client assigned to her with a brand new project. And halfway
through, the client would bail and stop working on it. After the
third time, Phoebe got booted and transferred to the Underworld,
since she isn’t a Legacy.” She gave me a pointed expression, as if
waiting for me to pick up on something she wasn’t saying.

“Well, I’m really sorry to hear that. Why
would they keep giving her the same client, though? Obviously, this
client wasn’t a good investment. What kind of projects are we
talking about, here? Life saving inventions? Setting up charity
events? Building wells in Africa so people can have clean water?” I
didn’t know why certain people were singled out to receive help
from a Muse, but to have help sent three times, the person in
question must’ve had something important to contribute to the
world.

Trina groaned. “You would think, but no.
Cross stitch. Knitting.” She paused and covered my hand with hers
while staring into my eyes. “Quilting.”

My face got hot, and my stomach felt queasy.
That pattern sounded familiar. “No.”

She nodded. “I’m afraid so, honey.” She
squeezed my hand. “You were Phoebe’s client before you came here.
And now you’ve got her job.”

“No wonder they all hate me.” Maybe being
sent to the Underworld was all I deserved. And why was I so damned
interesting that I warranted visits from a Muse on three separate
projects?
Craft
projects, no less.

“I wouldn’t take it too seriously. After
you’re there for awhile, most of them won’t even remember anymore.”
She paused and looked around. “Well, except for Jeremy.”

“What’s up with Jeremy? He won’t even look
me in the eye.”

“He was in love with her.”

“Ew.” I couldn’t imagine the little toad
involved with anybody.

“Oh, they weren’t together. She did date
Dave for awhile—gods help her—but Jeremy sort of mooned after her.
Ha! Mooned. Phoebe, goddess of the moon. Get it? I’m hilarious!”
She laughed at her own joke. “Anyway, he was kind of stalkery, but
nothing came of it. She’s probably lucky she got out of there
before he got up the nerve to make a move.”

“That explains so much.” As horrible as I
felt for my shitty life choices getting this Phoebe person fired, I
felt better now that I understood what was going on in the
office.

Trina glanced at her watch. “I feel so much
better. Thank you for sitting with me so I could pull myself
together. I should probably go upstairs now and get myself settled
in my new reality—whatever it turns out to be.”

Back to her usual self, Trina hopped up,
gave me a hug, and disappeared before I could do more than wish her
luck. She left me with far fewer questions than I’d had before, but
a whole lot more guilt.

~*~

The day didn’t get any better. Alex was halfway
through painting the kitchen chairs a flamingo pink, and Missy was
cleaning the oven. I couldn’t even find Mark.

Though I should have been trying harder to
blow some sense into one of the two clients I
could
find, I
knew I needed to change tactics. I had no idea how to do that,
though. I had no backup plan.

Crazy or not, my mom was always the best
place to go when I was in trouble. I was pretty sure this more than
qualified for trouble.

As I pulled into her driveway, a lot of the
tension in my shoulders relaxed. I’d gone through with the whole
Mt. Olympus thing so I wouldn’t have to move in with my mom again.
Maybe that hadn’t been the best choice. Mom’s house wasn’t so bad.
Nobody was trying to send me to hell, here, at least.

Because, honestly, that’s what it felt like
was happening in the Muse department. Whether it was my coworkers
or somebody up in the Fates department, somebody wanted me to
fail.

I found Mom in her bathroom, drawing on the
walls with crayons. She had her long blonde hair tied in a knot on
the top of her head, and it bobbed back and forth with her
movements.

I rapped a knuckle against the open door so
I wouldn’t startle her.

“Hand me the burnt sienna,” she said without
looking up.

I found the crayon she needed and dropped it
in her upturned hand. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetheart. Give me just a minute to
finish this squirrel.”

The last time I’d visited, the bathroom had
been painted a light blue. It was still blue, but she’d been
drawing trees and grass and birds in bright colors on every surface
that the wax would stick to—walls, ceiling, wooden shelves and
cupboards. Not even the floor had escaped. The crayons hadn’t left
much of a mark on the shiny blue tiles, but she’d colored the grout
in between a deep cerulean.

I waited for her to finish shading the tail
of the squirrel she was coloring right above the floor vent, trying
to remember if I’d ever colored on the walls when I was a kid.
Probably not. If I had, Mom would have made a day of it and
helped.

When she was done, she pulled herself up
from the floor and smoothed the wrinkles from her jeans. She wore a
bright green T-shirt with the words
That’s What She Said
printed in yellow.

She put away the crayon I’d handed her,
folded the lid closed and smiled. “There. Let’s get some juice.”
She brushed past me and took off for the kitchen, expecting me to
follow.

After such a crappy couple of days, there
was something immensely comforting in sitting in my mother’s yellow
kitchen, drinking fresh-squeezed juice and eating warm, homemade
bread smothered in butter. For a little while, I felt like a little
kid, untroubled and safe with a happy tummy.

After my second glass of
kiwi-blueberry-pineapple juice and my third thick slice of warm
potato bread, I sighed in contentment and pushed away my plate.