Seanan McGuire - Discount Armageddon

The manager’s dust-dry voice drifted out of the dark: “What, a Price afraid of a little darkness? What would your father say?” Every word dripped with sepulchral menace.

“My father would say that a Price who won’t walk into a bogeyman’s lair when he’s got his darks on is a Price who plans to live long enough to continue the family line.” I rolled my eyes. “You know the rules. I don’t kill your customers, you don’t try to bait me into your clutches, everybody walks away happy.”

“What do you call what just happened, hmm?”

“Sexual harassment.” I glared at the darkness. “Turn off the darks or let me go back to work. I’m not coming in there.”

A long-suffering sigh answered me, followed by Dave muttering, “You never let me have any fun.” The solid shadows clicked off as he flipped the switch controlling his darks, allowing light to filter into the office. I stayed in the hallway, waiting patiently. Dave grumbled and flipped another switch, turning on the lights.

“That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” I asked, and stepped inside.

The office was small and cluttered, and the low-watt bulbs that were all Dave was willing to use did little to disperse the natural shadows cast by packing too much stuff into not enough space. It was still substantially better than it had been with the darks turned on.

(Darks were invented by an enterprising witch who looked at all the bogeymen, ghouls, and bug-a-boos trying to live below the radar of the human population and saw a niche begging to be filled. The bulbs fit most standard sockets and run off electrical current like almost everything else that plugs into a wall. They’re also crushingly expensive. But they come in wattages from “twilight” to “deepest pit of eternal damnation,” and they work. That’s enough to make most self-proclaimed creatures of the night grit their teeth and deal with the price tag.)

“Spoken like a true day-dweller,” grumbled Dave. Leaning his elbows on the desk, he asked, “Why am I not firing you?”

“Because I’m the best cocktail waitress you’ve got, Kitty’s not available to take her shift back until that tragedy they call a band finishes crashing and burning, and all I did was drop him. He’d grabbed hold of just about anybody else like that and he’d have ended up dead or worse.”

“I’d be more inclined to be lenient if you’d agree to dance for me.”

“I’d be less inclined to stick a high heel up your ass if you’d stop asking,” I answered cheerfully. “Answer’s ‘no,’ Dave. What would my grandmother say?”

Dave paused. “She out of Hell this week?” he asked warily.

“Not until Solstice, but still. She wouldn’t understand.”

He relaxed. “She’d understand that you needed to save your job.”

“I think it’s a little more likely she’d understand that you can kill a bogeyman in a lot of different ways, and come riding in to avenge my honor.”

Dave glowered. I suppressed the urge to laugh, and glowered back.

A person running into Dave in a dark alley—or worse, finding him under their bed—would probably need years of therapy before they could convince themselves he’d never been there. He was close to seven feet tall and skeletally thin, with arms long enough to give him a faintly simian look. His hands were too big for his body, and all his fingers had at least one extra joint. (The longer fingers each had two.) Added to his gray “I’ve been dead for a week” complexion and the subtle wrongness of his face, it combined to form a picture that would give strong men nightmares.

Fortunately for me, I’m not a strong man, and one of my first babysitters was a bogeyman. Also, Dave’s garishly-patterned blue, purple, yellow, and magenta Hawaiian shirt did nothing to add to his overall air of menace. Maybe there’s a world where improbably colored parrots are considered frightening. This is not that world.

Dave was the first to look away. “You know I’d pay you more if you’d start dancing.”

“I’d also get myself disowned.”

“For dancing?” He managed to make the word sound innocent. No small feat coming from a man who looked like a basketball-playing corpse, especially not one who ran a strip club. “You know I’d let you do it under the name you used on television.”

“For dancing in a clothing-optional establishment where I’d be expected to finish the dance in my birthday suit, yeah.” I shrugged. “Conservative parents. What can you do?”

Dave snorted. “If your family’s conservative, I’m the Easter Bunny.”

All desire to make light of the situation fled. “Don’t even joke about that,” I said, in a voice that had gone completely flat. “The Easter Bunny’s no laughing matter.”

“Sorry, sorry!” said Dave defensively. “I didn’t know you were that touchy.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know. Are we done?”

“Ah.” Dave pursed his lips. “Here’s the thing. That boy you decided to chop-and-drop—”

“I didn’t do any chopping!”

“—he and his friends are still here, and I’d rather avoid any more of a floor show than we’ve already had tonight. So I’m going to give their table to Marcy.”

“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said all night.”

“And you’re going to go home.”

I paused, uncertain that I was hearing him correctly. “Excuse me?”

“I’ll pay you for the night, minus tips, of course. You can come back tomorrow.”

“You’re already understaffed, and I need the money,” I protested. “Candy’s out and Kitty’s on tour.”

“Won’t be the first time I’ve pulled Angel from behind the bar. Ryan can mix a Slaughtered Lamb as well as anybody else.”

“Slaughtered Lamb?” I asked, curious despite myself.

“Tomato juice, vodka, rum, tequila, and crushed mint. Unless you’re a ghoul. Then we leave out the tomato juice, replace it with—”

“Don’t want to know.” I raised my hands to cut him off. Dave stopped talking. “Right. You want to give me the night off for attacking customers. I’m going to stop arguing.”

“Good,” said Dave, and flicked off the lights. That was my cue to exit.

I stopped at the door, looking back over my shoulder. “This is because I won’t dance for you, isn’t it?”

“Good night, Verity,” Dave said.

Darkness escorted me the rest of the way out of the room.

I met Dave the night I stepped into his club looking for a part-time job, but he’d been aware of me for quite some time before that. Not because of my family, although that was probably a factor. Dave knew who I was because of Dance or Die .

My family’s been in hiding for four generations now, since my great-great-grandparents told the Covenant they were done exterminating innocent cryptids without regard for their place in a viable ecosystem. (According to the mice, Great-Great-Grandpa Alexander’s exact words were “You can take this unholy campaign and ram it up your bum sideways, you bloody miscarriage of a man!” Since the mice are morally incapable of changing anything they perceive as Holy Writ, and the Festival of Come On, Enid, We’re Getting Out Of Here Before These Bastards Make Us Kill Another Innocent Creature is one of the holiest of their many, many holy days, I’m pretty sure they’re quoting him correctly.) Being “in hiding” isn’t that bad … except for the part where it limits our available training methods.

Mom and Dad were firm on the topic of training: we could grow up to settle down and become accountants if that was what we really wanted, but we’d learn the family business before that happened. Most of the things that would love to brag about how they gutted a Price weren’t going to back off because their target said, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t do that sort of thing, but I can balance your checkbook for you.”