Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

“My parole officer said I needed to prove I’d gone on a job interview, to keep from going back to jail.”

NickTwo blinked—I guess they hadn’t gotten around to that topic of conversation yet—but Pietr looked dead serious, so he was either dead serious, or a better joker than I could ever manage. Or, possibly, both.

“Seriously?” NickTwo asked, his brown eyes going wide and kidlike in awe.

“For serious, yes.” Then he cracked a smile, and shook his head. “Nah. But it was strongly suggested to me by persons of importance that I get a job to keep me out of trouble. So when this call came I figured, what the hell.”

“I think they’d need a lot more than a job to keep you out of trouble,” NickTwo said, leaning back in his chair with a vaguely disgruntled look. Looked as though I wasn’t the only one to have pegged Pietr straightaway.

He didn’t take offense—just the opposite, actually. “You’re probably right. What’s your excuse for being here?”

NickTwo shrugged, his skinny arms rising in a very Gallic shrug. “I graduated, got a part-time job that pays pretty well, doesn’t eat my life … and it’s boring the hell out of me. The message I got said I’d find this of interest. So …. I’m waiting for them to interest me.”

“Same here,” Sharon said, raising her head from the newspaper without even pretending that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. “I’m a paralegal. Good money, no future, boring as hell. My message told me that, if I wanted to stop wasting my life, to show up here, at this time.” She folded the newspaper and put it on the floor next to her chair. “How ‘bout you, big guy?”

NickOne blinked and came back to us. “Nifty.”

“What?”

“My teammates call me Nifty.”

I mentally patted myself on the back. Teammates, yep. Point to me. And ohmahgawd and holy shit. “You’re Nifty Lawrence.” I didn’t mean for my voice to squeak, but it did anyway. I’d dated a guy in college who was totally into football, not the pros but the college games, and Nifty Lawrence was supposed to be hot enough for the first round of the draft when he graduated, which would have been last year. “Hands like a god, could catch anything on the field, including low-flying seagulls,” my ex had claimed. So why the hell was he here, instead of sweating out the coaching appraisals and counting his cash?

“I am.” He looked sort of embarrassed by that fact, and tugged at the sleeve of his navy jacket as though he’d just realized he was wearing it and wondered how that happened. “And before you ask, I looked around, and decided that maybe just being good enough to go pro wasn’t reason to do it. I mean, I’m good but I didn’t love it. Getting my MBA and finding a corner office somewhere seemed smarter than spending five or ten years getting my head knocked to the turf. Only it takes money to pay for grad school, even with loans. So, I need a job, too.”

My opinion of his brains went up, considerably.

“So what about you?” he asked me. “Boredom, or desperation, or something else entirely?”

“All of the above, I think. A whim? I was curious to see what the deal was.” I looked around, suddenly struck by a thought. “You guys all had messages—did they all say 2 p.m.?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, and Nifty nodded. Sharon frowned, obviously thinking the same thing I was, but Pietr was the one who said it. “Who schedules five interviews all at the same time?”

“More than that,” Nick said, pulling out a battered old-fashioned windup pocket watch and looking at it. “It’s almost 2:20, and we’re the only ones here.”

Four heads swiveled as though we were pulled on a string, to look at the closed door behind us, leading into the rest—I presumed—of the office.

The door remained closed.

“Anyone know the protocol of how long you wait before you assume you’ve been blown off?” I asked, and like we’d rehearsed it or something, the four of us looked at Sharon, who was the only one who seemed as if she might have a clue.

“What, I’m mother hen now?”

“Cluck, cluck,” Nick said, unabashed when she glared at him. Nifty laughed, and she split the glare between the two of them. Oh, Miss Blonde did not like being mocked, even gently.

I’m not much as peacemaker—I never got the hang of being soothing, and while I can dance around the truth I’m crap at lying—but it looked as if it was gonna be my job anyway, just to keep things nonviolent. “Look, I’m straight out of college, don’t know a damned thing, and I know Nifty’s the same, considering he’s only a year older than I am. I don’t know what Pietr’s background is, but getting anything straightforward out of him is impossible. I know that already, after ten minutes.” He made a seated, ironic bow in response. “You and Nick, on the other hand, already have jobs, so you must’ve gone through this successfully before, and I’d trust your opinion over Nick’s on something like this.”

“Hey!” Nick sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take offense or not. I did say peacemaking wasn’t my thing, right? But it seemed to work, because I could practically see the hackles under Sharon’s chignon subside, and she gave a grudging nod.

“By now, I would expect someone to at least check on us, see who was here, maybe call one of us in,” she said. “Unless they have this room on closed-circuit camera … “

“They don’t. I checked.” Nick sounded quite certain of that. “And anyway, the bunch of us in one small room, nervous or anticipating, and a seeing-eye camera? Would last about ten minutes.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told him. “Some of us have actual control.”

“I don’t,” Nifty admitted. “Local stations stopped interviewing me before a game, after their cameras kept fritzing.”

Probably another reason why he decided against a career in pro football. He wasn’t going to make it as a sportscaster, either, with that handicap. Corporate America was definitely a better bet.

“So by now,” I said, “someone should have come out to count noses?”

Sharon nodded. That’s what I had thought. My nerves were starting to hum again. Was anyone even back there, behind the closed door I’d been assuming was the main office? If not, then who had let us in? “And nobody’s had the slightest urge to get up and walk out, despite the fact that we don’t know crap-all, and this mysterious voice has kept us waiting almost half an hour already without any explanation?”

“I thought about it,” Sharon admitted. “I’m still thinking about it. But … “

“Yeah,” I said. “But.” But we were all there, anyway.

The five of us sat there in silence, uncomfortable now, for another ten minutes. The time ticked by in my head, each tick louder than the last, and finally I’d had enough.

Stubborn, I am, yes. Also curious enough to kill a dozen cats, and not really good with the patience thing. When I think about something, I have to follow it all the way through to the end.

“Hell with this.” I put my mug of coffee—still undrunk, because it really was disgusting—on the floor and stood up. “I want to know what the deal is.”

“What, you’re just going to barge in there?” Nick looked somewhat taken aback, but Pietr had a gleam in those eyes that made me think he’d been about three seconds behind me. He liked trouble, yeah. Being in, or causing, or both, I didn’t know. I had a tiny tremor of precog that I was going to find out, though.

“Yep,” I said in response to Nick’s question, and I marched my boots over to the door, knocked once soundly, and waited.

No answer. Not even the sound of someone shuffling around on the other side. That wasn’t good.