Under Attack

Chapter Five

I slammed my hand against the nightstand again, trying to quell the infernal racket of the morning-show DJs cackling on my alarm clock. Instead I managed to knock the whole thing over. “Crap,” I muttered, sitting up in my bed.

It was just after six-thirty and the last time I looked at the clock—just before I fell asleep in the greying light of dawn—it was five-forty. My eyes stung and my eyelashes were clumped with bits of post-sleep goo. My cheeks felt tight from the hours of inexhaustible tears and the spine of my father’s journal was wedged into my rib cage, leaving an angry—though impressive—red indentation.

I made it to the bathroom without completely opening my eyes and yawned through a hot shower. It wasn’t until I was showered and pink and standing in front of my fogged-over bathroom mirror that I noticed it. In the snatches of clear mirror my reflection looked odd—my fire-engine red hair had a noticeably silver hue and rather than the usual wet-rat look of my post-shower curls, my hair fell in elegant long waves. I yanked off my towel and used it to scrub the steam from the mirror.

I looked at my reflection.

It looked back at me.

I ran a hand through my hair, patted my cheeks, leaned forward, and scrutinized myself.

My reflection did the same, and then it started laughing.

I jumped back, slipped on my discarded towel and steadied myself by ripping down the shower curtain. I landed in a naked vinyl heap on the bathroom floor, jaunty electric-blue shower-curtain fish swimming over my naked stomach.

“What the hell?” I screamed.

“Now, Sophie Annemarie Lawson. Watch your mouth. Hell is a heck of a place and you don’t want to mention it too much.”

I scrambled to my feet, steadying myself with both hands against the bathroom sink, then used one finger to poke at the offending mirror.

“That is so annoying. Now I know what all those poor fish feel like at the dentist’s office. Poke, poke, poke.”

I watched my grandmother’s index finger poke against the mirror glass, watched the windy ridges of her fingerprints smudge the inside of my mirror.

“Grandma?”

“Ah!” Grandma said from behind the glass. “She remembers me!”

I rubbed my head, looking behind me, trying to recall if my naked acrobatics had resulted in a head wound.

No such luck.

“Grandma, are you in the mirror?”

Grandma nodded slowly, her expression a combination of amusement and annoyance that I remembered from breaking curfew in my teen years.

I swallowed. “But you’re dead.”

“That’s my Sophie,” Grandma said, snapping her fingers. “Smart as a whip.”

“No,” I said again, my hands on hips. “You’re not here. You’re dead.”

Grandma crossed her arms in front of her chest, her lips set, her expression indignant. “And you’re naked. Really, Sophie, you amaze me. Is seeing your dead grandmother in your bathroom mirror really all that unbelievable? Really? Maybe we should ask your vampire roommate. Nina, is it? Nina ...”

Witches, I’m used to. Banshees, vampires, werewolves, trolls, hobgoblins, and other—provided that “other” was a corporeal being. My dead grandmother showing up in my bathroom mirror (and me being buck naked to receive her)—was odd. Very, very odd.

I pulled my bathrobe from the hook and yanked the belt tight around my waist. “What are you doing here?” I asked as I wrapped my hair in a towel turban. “Not that I’m not thrilled to see you. Where are you?” I leaned in closer, peering around the sides of the mirror, trying to see behind her. “Are you in Heaven?”

Grandma raised an eyebrow. “No, I’m in your bathroom mirror.” She dragged another finger across the glass. “Which could use a very good cleaning, by the way. Really, Sophie, I haven’t been gone that long. I know I didn’t teach you to clean house like this,” she tsked.

“Can you come out here?” I stepped back, offering her a space.

“No. Specters—that’s what we are, specters—isn’t that just a darling way to refer to us? So much better than dead or afterlifers or life-retired. Anywho, specters can only be seen on shiny surfaces.”

“But why now?” I felt the sting of tears beginning to pool behind my eyes, and I leaned in toward the mirror again. “Grandma, I’ve needed you for so long. The last year of my life has been so ...”

“Oh, honey, I know. I have been there; you just weren’t able to see me. It’s a different magic that allows this”—Grandma indicated herself and the mirror—“than you’re used to. This one you might actually not be immune to. I tried to appear before—in stainless steel dishes, in your rearview mirror. Even on a sunny day on the back of Mr. Matsura’s head. That poor man has been balding since he was twenty-three. Took me a little while to get the knack for it.”

“You showed up on Mr. Matsura?”

Mr. Matsura was the kindly old man who lived across the hall from me and walked his toy poodle Pickle three times a day.

“My grandmother appears in my bathroom mirror and on my neighbor’s bald head.” I sat down on the edge of my tub, rubbing my temples. “And now I know why I was driven to drink.” Seeing your dead grandmother projected on the bald head of an aging Japanese man would do that to you. “I guess this is a relief. I thought I was going crazy.”

“This seems like a really inopportune moment to say, ‘Gotcha!’” Grandma grinned her trademark toothy smile, both her wrinkled hands held shotgun style in front of her.

“Are you here to tell my I’m in mortal danger?” I asked warily.

“Now that would be cliché, wouldn’t it? Dead grandmother appears in bathroom mirror, warning of the evil to come. Wooooo, whooooo!” Grandma did ghostly hands, her wrinkled lips forming an ominous O.

I laughed. “Yeah, I guess it would be.”

“But really, Sophie,” my grandma said, the smile dropping from her voice, “you are in danger.”

“You said you weren’t going to do that!”

“No, I said it would be cliché. Cliché, but necessary. Now listen to me, Sophie. You are in serious danger. Have you ever heard of the Vessel of Souls?”

“Yup. You missed it. Alex Grace, fallen angel. Filled me in on the whole thing.”

Grandma appeared to be thinking. “Alex Grace? You mean that hot ball of cheesecake you had over last night?”

“How did you know?”

Grandma shrugged. “The man had to use the bathroom.”

“Grandma! Did you look?”

“Oh honey, I might be old, but I’m not—well, that phrase doesn’t work anymore, now does it? Anywho, enough about Alex. You need to know that you’re being tailed, watched. Someone is looking for you and believe you me it’s not Ed McMahon with one of those big Publishers Clearinghouse checks.”

“So the driver last night—that was real? Someone really was trying to kill me?” I felt my heart flutter when I thought back to his headlights piercing through the dark night.

Grandma nodded solemnly.

“Do you know who it is? Also, Ed McMahon is dead.”

Grandma looked pleased as she clapped her hands in front of her chest. “Really? Dead? I should look him up, maybe invite him to bingo. Oh, honey, I’ve got to run.” Grandma looked over her shoulder. “That’s the breakfast bell. You have to move quickly around here or you’re the only specter without a waffle.”

I sprang up, pressed my hands against the mirror. “Grandma, no! Wait! Who is it? Who’s tracking me? I have so many questions!”

“I’ll be back, sweetie. I promise.”

I pressed my forehead against the mirror and sighed when my own reflection stared back at me.

I dressed quickly and drove to work, considering what was more odd: that my dead grandmother had appeared to me in my bathroom mirror or that I wasn’t more freaked out about it. There was also the idea of her playing bingo with Ed McMahon and the issue of a waffle shortage in Heaven, but those rang in at a distant third, what with the apparition and the ominous warning.

Someone’s out to get you... .

It was a singsongy voice ringing in my ear. A thought I didn’t realize I was having.

Someone’s going to get you... .

I pulled to a four-way stop and scrunched my eyes shut, willing the voices and the ghosts to go away until the man behind me angrily laid on the horn, making me jump in my car seat and slosh a wave of black coffee across my pale-blue button-down.

“Oh, crap,” I said, pulling into the intersection, driving with my knees, licking the coffee from my wrist.

I managed to make it the UDA offices coffee-scented yet otherwise unscathed, and I was greeted by Nina at the front desk. She was wearing rhinestone-studded horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a clipboard, her long hair wound into a tight bun. She was tucked into a pencil skirt that made her appear as wide as—well, a pencil—and she had an embroidered pink cardigan that I swore once belonged to Donna Reed resting on her shoulders. Her crisp white blouse was unbuttoned just enough to reveal a tiny peek of her white lace bra, and somehow, she had hoisted her breasts to just under her lifted chin. She looked like a porn star for library fetishists. I stared at her breasts.

“Where did you get those?” I asked them.

Nina waved dismissively. “They came with the bra. Where have you been? Dixon wants to interview everyone today.”

“Everyone?” I asked.

Nina fell in step with me as I snagged a bagel and headed toward my office. “Okay, that’s no big deal. I’m comfortable with my job performance,” I told her.

In my last four years at the UDA, I never failed to lock up my werewolf boss once. After Mr. Sampson, I kept the interim bosses abreast of standard operating procedure, and I acted as the go-between for the under and upper worlds when the banshee was filling in. Whoever had given her the job had failed to realize the fact that for mortals, laying eyes on a banshee means instant death—hence the usual warning scream. The upper world lost two baristas and a meter maid before that little snafu was fixed.

I took a big bite of bagel and spoke with my mouth full. “The interview will be cake.”

“Yeah,” Nina said, looking disgusted, “as you are a veritable poster child for the proper businesswoman.”

I looked down at my coffee-stained blouse that was now spotted black with poppy seeds. “I had a bit of a rough morning,” I said, swallowing.

“Well, it’s about to get rougher,” Nina said, eyes trailing.

“Steve,” I said with a grimace.

As usual, I smelled him before I saw him. Steve was a troll and one thing that everyone should know is that trolls smell—badly. Like a slightly more pungent combination of bleu cheese and belly button. At one point, Steve and I had one of those love-hate relationships. He loved me and I hated him. At least I did hate him. That’s not to say that I loved him now—far from it. But when someone saves your life, you tend to have a soft spot for him.

“Never fear, ladies and demonettes, Steve is here.” Steve’s small grey troll hands clutched his lapels and he grinned up at Nina and me, his yellow snaggled teeth glistening in the harsh fluorescent overhead lights.

“Wow, Steve, you look nice,” I said.

Steve was wearing a slick sharkskin suit. Shiny, pointed black wingtips stuck out from underneath his stubby pant legs and his pink-and-grey striped tie sat lopsided over his stout stomach. What remained of his bushy black hair was oiled down into a careful comb-over that did little to conceal the overwhelming baldness on his ill-shapen head.

“Steve thinks Sophie likes what she sees,” Steve said, waggling his bushy caterpillar brows. “Too bad that ship has sailed.”

Steve’s affections for me had been replaced—immediately and irrevocably—when he met Sasha, a busty paramedic who had a thing for short guys. She had lost her sense of smell over a previous Zicam addiction, so she and Steve were an odd, weird-looking match made in Underworld heaven.

“Steve is meeting with the new bigwig today.”

“With Dixon? Why?” I wanted to know.

“Good business practice,” Steve said assuredly. “Steve wants Mr. Andrade to put the face with the name Elpher Brothers Moving.”

Steve and his three-foot-high troll brothers ran the moving and operations company that serviced the UDA. While his height and smell didn’t exactly promote a sense of well-being or ability when it came to large furniture moving, Steve and his brothers had a surprising way of getting things done. I just hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.

“Steve would love to stay and chat, but business calls.” He jabbed a pudgy finger at the gleaming face of his gold watch. “Time is money,” he said as he strutted toward Mr. Andrade’s office. Nina and I peered down the hall as Steve reached his destination. We watched him arch up on his tiptoes, small arm extended, his fingertips just missing the doorknob. Undeterred, Steve sank back onto flat feet and swiftly began kicking the door until one of Dixon’s henchmen pulled it open.

“That little troll’s got—”

I clamped my hands over my ears and shook my head. “Don’t say it! I don’t want to hear about anything that Steve has.”

“I was going to say ‘an appointment,’ little Miss Mind in the Gutter. So what was so rough about your morning?”

“My grandmother appeared to me. In the bathroom mirror.”

Nina’s eyes went wide. “Shut up! You are so Jennifer Love Hewitt ghost whispering right now! Did you lead her to the white light, cross her over?”

“I’m serious!”

Nina thrust out her lower lip and pouted. “Me, too. It’s not like I have a whole lot of ghostly experience. What’d she look like? All skeletal and stuff ?”

I glanced at Nina, who looked positively titillated. “I always wished I could talk to dead people,” she said. I held up a finger and Nina grabbed it, glared. “Oh, you know what I mean.”

“She said I was in grave danger.”

“Original. What does she know?”

“She didn’t tell me much; basically, you know, ‘hey, how you doing?’ and ‘you’re in grave danger.’”

Nina’s eyes were far away. “And then she crossed over into the light ...”

“No, she went to breakfast. Possibly with Ed McMahon.”

“We can learn so much from the dead.”

I had barely settled into my chair when I blinked up at an impossibly tall vampire in an elegant suit who seemed to materialize in my office doorway. He smiled down at me, a calm, disarming smile, and stayed silent for a moment.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Ms. Lawson, correct?”

I nodded, scooting forward in my chair, my eyes glancing over my desk calendar, the stack of unopened files in my in-box. “I’m sorry. Did we have an appointment Mr.—”

“Rosenthal,” the man supplied politely. “May I sit?” He did so without me answering. His movements were fluid and he settled in comfortably, his eyes focused on mine, his legs crossed, hands folded in his lap. I chanced a look over his head, one of those “What the hell is going on here?” looks that best friends share, but Nina—who had been standing just outside my office door—had just as silently dematerialized.

“I don’t have an appointment. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.” Mr. Rosenthal kept smiling. “I’m just here to observe.”

I gulped. “Observe what?”

“Mr. Andrade would just like to get a better feel for what it is all of his key staff members do.” His smile, meant to be disarming, was starting to give me the creeps.

“Oh. Oh ...’kay.”

“Just go ahead, go about your business. Pretend I’m not even here.”

I took another look at Mr. Rosenthal, who now had a small notebook resting in his lap. He nodded encouragingly. I looked helplessly over his left shoulder, where Vlad was parading his team of VERM supporters down the hall, TAKE BACK YOUR AFTERLIFE! signs waving. I wondered if it would reflect poorly on me if I threw a blood bag into the hallway and let Mr. Rosenthal and the VERMers duke it out while I slipped out the back door.

I clicked on my computer and dragged a few files from my in-box closer to me, hearing the deafening pulse of my heart.

I have no reason to be nervous, I told myself. I’m good at my job.

I flipped open the file on top of my stack labeled Active Vamps—Sunset—and the thick red cover knocked over my teacup, dousing the remaining files and two stacks of Post-it notes with day-old tea. I felt my face flush as I pillaged through a box of Kleenex, dabbing at the mess. Mr. Rosenthal remained silent and smiled serenely as he leaned down and wrote something on his notepad.

I cocked my head, trying to hear Mr. Rosenthal’s low murmur. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” I said.

Mr. Rosenthal looked up at me, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

“I didn’t hear what you were saying.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

I heard the murmur again and held up an index finger. “That! Someone must be outside... .” I concentrated, hearing a low snicker.

Mr. Rosenthal’s lips eased back into the smile that I thought was serene, but now I was starting to recognize as patronizing. “I assure you, Miss Lawson, no one is speaking.” He tapped his ear. “Supernatural hearing, remember?”

I felt my face flush, felt my blood thicken and rush through my veins. Mr. Rosenthal’s smile seemed to take on a more sinister edge.

“I heard that,” he said with a thirsty smile.

I gulped; few things were more eerie than a fanged office superior who could hear the blood rushing through your veins.

I sunk back into my seat and tried to continue my work.

By the time Mr. Rosenthal stood up and brushed the imaginary creases from his impeccable suit, I had dropped the passport of a centaur who needed a sticker into the shredder, stapled the corner of my blouse to a deactivation request and mixed up the employment files for a Nichi demon and a Sousan demon. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t send a baby eater to a nursery and a protector demon to a demolition site. Luckily, the mistake was caught before the Nichi demon actually ate any babies, but still, Mr. Rosenthal cocked his head and then wrote something down on his notepad. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Nice save!

After Mr. Rosenthal left, I slunk into my coat and buzzed Nina. “I’m leaving for lunch,” I said to her. “I need to end this misery at least for a little while. You coming? We could go by that Italian guy you like so much.”

I could hear the low murmur of voices on Nina’s end of the phone, and then she said, “No, thank you. I’m not through just yet.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Nina?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice tight. “This is Nina.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Mr. Andrade is here in my office right now as a matter of fact. I’ll let him know that you bid him good afternoon.”

“I bit him what?”

I heard the clatter of the phone and then the dial tone. “Whatever,” I muttered, slinging my bag over my shoulder and slamming my office door behind me.

I stepped into the hallway and Steve stepped out from the shadows, his small troll legs working hard to keep stride with me. “Sophie doesn’t look too happy.”

“Sophie’s not in the mood today, Steve.”

“Maybe Sophie would like a massage?” Steve laced his pudgy grey fingers together and stretched his arms over his head, releasing a symphony of pops and cracks and a fresh wave of bleu-cheese odor. “Steve is very good with his hands.”

“Pass,” I said, pausing at the elevator and working the up button. “Besides, what would Sasha say?”

Steve shrugged, his shoulders brushing the bottom of his long, pointed earlobes. “Sasha knows that she cannot hold Steve down.” He pushed out his chest. “Steve is just too much troll for one woman.”

I glanced down at him, his wiry hair just brushing the top of my thigh. “I’ll say,” I murmured. “Really, Steve,” I said as the elevator door slid open with aching slowness, “I appreciate the offer, but maybe some other time.”

Steve shrugged his troll shoulders, and dug his hands into his pants pockets. “Suit yourself. But just so you know, Steve won’t be around forever.”

If only.

The elevator doors opened on the police station vestibule and I was halfway out the front doors when I heard someone calling my name. I whirled and Alex caught the back of my shirt.

“Hello to you, too.”

Alex smoothed the part of my shirt he had gripped, the gentle touch of his fingers sending shock waves down my spine, making my knees go wonky. I shrugged out of his grip, afraid of dissolving into a pool of quivering Jell-O right there in the police station. “What do you want?”

“Do you like baseball?”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you want? To know if I like baseball?”

Alex narrowed his eyes. “Geez, Lawson, can you give a guy a break?” He pulled two orange and black Giants tickets from his shirt pocket. I saw the fat baseball logo and felt my grin go all the way to my ears. I snatched the tickets.

“These are behind home plate!”

Alex looked blank. “And that’s good?”

I gaped. “What do you mean, is that good?”

Alex just shrugged.

“You don’t like baseball?”

He lowered his voice. “Let’s just say it was not the pastime it is now when I was around.”

My mouth formed a small O. “Well, then you have to go with me.”

Alex crossed his arms and grinned. “Is that so? You’re inviting me to a game?”

I waggled the tickets. “Behind home plate. You can’t miss it.”

He pulled the tickets from my fingers. “And you must have missed that these are still my tickets.”

I felt myself flush head to toe. “Oh, right. So, you wanted to know if I like baseball, right?”

Alex nodded, his eyes playful, smile wide.

“Yeah.” I kicked at an invisible speck of dirt on the linoleum. “I could take it or leave it.”

“So you don’t mind if I give the tickets to ...” Alex scanned the offices, tickets in hand, and I pummeled him.

“I’ll drive. And buy you popcorn. And beer,” I said eagerly.

“Throw in one of those giant foam fingers and you’re on.”

“Done!”