Deader Still

5

Fate, it seemed, had cut me some slack. When I returned to my desk, Connor wasn’t at his, so it looked like I was momentarily spared figuring out how to implement my new orders. Tension in my shoulders, which I hadn’t even realized was there, melted away, and I dropped into my seat feeling exhausted.

The rest of the office had returned to normal, and the buzz of the hive activity was soothing to my ears. I hated being in this position. It was one thing to have been chosen for the Fraternal Order—that was beyond the scope of the work Connor and I did together. Holding sway over Connor in an official capacity after only six months with Other Division, though, would be an entirely different situation.

For now I made the decision to keep Connor in the dark. Maybe I could handle the situation so that he never realized I was in charge. I was new to the art of deception, and the guilt was already eating at me. To compensate, I started thinking of ways to make it up to him.

Then it hit me: his brother. When we had first started testing my power of psychometry, a beat-up Spider-Man PEZ Dispenser led to the tale of how his brother had vanished one summer at Cape Cod back when they were kids. Unfortunately, any follow-up had been pushed aside when the craziness with cultist-rights leader Faisal Bane and occult bookstore owner turned paranormal drug czar Cyrus Mandalay ensued.

But now I finally had a chance to get back on the ball with helping Connor, even if it was to ease my own guilty conscience. No time like the present for starting on the brother stuff.

I glanced around the office before standing up and heading over to Connor’s side of the partners desk. It was marginally neater than mine. Instead of three-foot-high stacks of casework, he had only one-foot-high stacks. I could only aspire to such streamlined paper-stacking skills, but until I had Connor’s many years’ experience under my belt, I’d have to contend with my larger Leaning Towers of Paper.

We had used the Spidey PEZ Dispenser several times since that early training session, and I knew he kept it in the desk somewhere. I sat down at it, excited at the prospect of helping out Connor with his missing brother, and not for a second feeling guilty about going through his desk. In the past six months, I had been over there hundreds of times to get forms, Post-its, and whatnot from him.

I slid the desk drawers open, one by one. The usual assortment of crap was in them—Post-its, pens, a microcassette recorder, an assortment of half-empty vials, presumably for that ghost-capturing mixture he always had on him. In the bottom-left drawer, a clipped bundle of papers caught my eye and I pulled them out. Some of them were Xeroxes from the historical archives, but others were simply newspaper clippings or memos. The top article came from in-house and showed the archives’ heading. Underneath the heading was an article detailing the night I had dressed as Zorro at the Sectarians’ museum bust. I flipped to the next page. This copy of a file described the night I had assisted Connor with that rogue spirit in an alley near Washington Square, the very night Connor had become a White Stripe. I skipped all the way to the bottom of the pile and found that even the first entry was also about me—a welcome mention in the Department’s HR newsletter. Connor had kept all of it. Having found this emotional treasure trove made me feel a little awkward about going through his desk, even though my intentions were good. I stood up and shut the drawer. I couldn’t do this right now.

I was both warmed by the discovery and ashamed by my behavior. Only when someone nearby spoke up did I snap out of it.

“Lost?” Connor asked, half joking and half suspicious. I looked up and there he was, standing in the main aisle by our desks, still in his trench coat.

“Umm, I was looking for a requisition form for getting myself a new cell phone,” I lied, patting his stacks of casework as if I had only been giving a cursory look at what was visible. “What with the old one melting in the Oubliette . . . I thought you might have a form.”

Connor shrugged. “Not sure, kid. I’d check with the supply room. I think they have a twenty-pager you have to fill out, one of the kinds that still uses carbon paper, so your fingers should be good and purple by the time you’re done. And remember to press down firmly. I think it’s a 21-10, if I remember correctly. And you’ll have to get Jane’s signature on it as well.”

“Jane?” I said, startled. “What for?”

As if we were two sumo wrestlers sizing each other up, Connor territorially circled to his side of the desk and I went back to mine.

“Well,” Connor said, slipping off his coat and sitting down, “technically, she’s the official offending witch for melting your cell phone, and the Department likes to keep records on that sort of thing.”

Even though Jane had been taken under Wesker’s wing in Greater & Lesser Arcana, I hadn’t really thought of her as a witch. Until she had turned my phone into a smoldering mess, I hadn’t even known she had the ability to do such a thing. Now I knew differently. She was clearly dabbling in something powerful.

“Where’d you run off to?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

Connor grabbed about an inch of paperwork from the top of the pile in his in-box. He winced in faux pain and dropped the paperwork on his desk, flexing his hand.

He sighed and said, “Couple of Faisal’s old followers were brought in and some of the White Stripes needed a hand getting them down to booking. Got a little rough.”

I was shocked to hear the mention of Faisal Bane. “You mean the Sectarians are still operating?” I asked. “I had hoped we’d put them out of business.”

Connor laughed and looked up at me.

“Cultists don’t just go away because their public funding does, kid. The Department will be chasing down Sectarians long after you and I are both gone; that’s for sure.”

I stood at my desk, feeling somewhat defeated.

“So any victory we gain will always be undermined by a second, third, or even fourth wave of evil washing over this city. It never ends.”

“Pretty much,” Connor said. “We’d be out of a day job if it did.”

What it really meant was that the piles of paperwork sitting on my desk would just keep growing with each and every encounter.

I decided to get out of there. If I went down to Supply, got the forms, and then headed over to Tome, Sweet Tome for Jane’s signature, I could at least start the requisitioning process for my new phone. With a day as shit-filled as this one, I’d take the small victories wherever I could get them.

And then, of course, there were the vampires to find . . .