Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (10 page)

I tried to pull myself back. I needed to be reasonable, to try to force myself to look at this from her point of view, see things through her eyes.

At least she hadn’t included condoms on her last list of reimbursement charges.

That I knew of.

Shit. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and sent Suze what I felt was a rather remarkably restrained text mentioning that we had something that we needed to talk about when we saw each other tonight.

My phone immediately rang, filling the room with the Imperial March, her customized ringtone.

“Oh no,” I muttered to myself as I hit the ignore button. “I’m too clever for that.” This was
not
a discussion that we were going to have over the phone.

Not that it really gave me something to look forward to later, of course. And, just my luck, she’d already mentioned that she and her cousins would be swinging over to my workplace later. Fantastic.

If I’d been at home, there would’ve been no solution to my situation except to break out
The Lord of the Rings
, extended cuts, and mainline nine hours. Lacking that, I gave serious consideration to going over to the mansion’s home gym and exhausting myself with one of the punching bags. But instead, I spent the next few hours in my brother’s office, poking through the older immigration records in the hopes of finding a useful parallel to the current situation of the succubi. At least, I reminded myself, the succubi were actually sincere in their need for me. I was hoping that the records would hold something that I could use to help strengthen my current case—and while I had no real hopes of convincing Prudence, a little bit of precedent seemed like a useful way to leverage my brother out of his current state of Swiss neutrality. Loren came in when I’d been at it for about forty minutes, and after a quick assessment helped me out by checking the reference catalogue for me. While my family did follow trends in such areas as plumbing and fashion, in other ways they could remain frustratingly old-fashioned, such as my brother’s dislike of the Boolean method of searching. So far he had refused to allow Loren to make our records searchable with an online system, and instead we were stuck with a neatly typed and maintained card catalogue. I’d attended college at Brown, and was no stranger to researching my way through the periodical stacks, thanks to a number of my professors who were fanatical about the value of primary sources when putting together research papers, so going through the old family records at least brought back a few moderately pleasant associations to offset the flavor of dust and old paper. Chivalry had even undertaken the practice of using bound books for record-keeping, which were numbered and ordered, so once I had Loren working the card catalogue, the process went fairly smoothly.

The problem wasn’t in the methodology—it was in the result. Over the next few hours, a clear picture emerged about the Scott approach to supernaturals hoping to reside in the territory and benefit from staying in my mother’s long shadow. Most who were allowed to enter were large and established groups who could promise quick prosperity and had notable cash incentives that they were willing to offer, like the ghouls or the bears. Others were small, such as when Atsuko Hollis had entered the territory after the end of World War II—but she had offered the potential for a powerful future ally. The witches who came in were the best parallel to the succubi—a troublesome possibility of exposure, and they had never petitioned for entry in groups any larger than individuals or immediate family units, but their offers of crippling fees and painfully high tithes had been balanced with the fact that most witches worked as some kind of doctor or medical professional, and their earning potentials were almost universally high. The succubi had no cash reserves to smooth their passage, and frankly, my sister’s dislike of the witches was strong enough that even mentioning them in conjunction with this current situation would only hurt the succubi by mere association. Prudence had done her best to shut down any witch immigration completely, and had made no secret that her preference would’ve been to kick all the other witches out of the territory completely. Her hatred for the witches was as pure a passion as any I’d ever seen her exhibit, yet one that no one in my family had ever explained the history of, making me wonder if she had experienced some strange inversion of love at first sight. It was probably as good an explanation as I’d ever get—my family excelled at keeping secrets.

By three in the afternoon, I had a solid coating of dust from pulling down and looking into records that hadn’t been touched in decades and a splitting headache from deciphering the handwriting of generations of Chivalry’s secretaries, which ranged from perfect copperplate to downright cramped. I vowed that if I ever ended up the boss of Chivalry for a day, my first decree would be that we hire a fleet of temp workers and have all the records transcribed to digital files. I was nursing a very new but passionate appreciation for standard font styles.

What I didn’t have, unfortunately, was anything that would help the succubi.

At least I’d been able to give Loren the ability to carry out the grocery directive. Given my new knowledge of her firsthand experience with the feeding and maintenance of teenagers, I’d put the entire task in her capable hands. My own lunch had been provided by Madeline’s cook and served to me, unrequested, on a tray. The remnants of an excellent grilled cheese sandwich with an accompanying bowl of applesauce and a slice of pecan pie rested on a side table. While I’d lived on my own since college, and had never regretted it for even a single moment, I had to admit that there were huge perks to having a dedicated kitchen staff who not only knew all of my favorite foods, but were more than willing to make it almost magically appear along with a dessert. It was kind of like having Potter-esque house elves.

Another check at my watch, though, had me heading for the door. I could make a check-in call to Saskia during my break, but it was time to head to work. In my current financial situation, quitting this job was not exactly an option, however tempted I might be to deliver my resignation over the phone and continue scraping through the Scott archives in the hope that a scrap of paper could solve all of the succubi’s problems.

The drive from my mother’s mansion in Newport to my apartment in Providence generally took anywhere from forty minutes to an hour, depending on the season, the traffic patterns, and whether I had the misfortune to become trapped behind an elderly driver on one of the one-lane roads. Today, with the bitter cold keeping the tourists and the pleasure drivers safely tucked in their houses, and an overcast gray sky that, while not overtly threatening snow, was certainly keeping it a possibility, I was able to make the drive quickly. After tucking the Scirocco safely in the parking lot, with its solitary windshield wiper lifted up just in case a few inches came down before I got home, I made a brief stop upstairs to change into my work clothes. Knowing that a possible relationship-shattering fight in my future added a strange dimension to getting dressed. I put on my third-favorite set of jeans. If a pair of pants had to forever be sullied as the pants I was wearing when Suzume and I broke up, then it was better that it be a pair that I could throw away without regrets.

The hours of research into historical records, and lunch, and the drive back might’ve given me some welcome distance from my anger at Suzume, but I was under no illusions that it had smoothed things out. That anger was still there, and the mere thought of “billable hours” was more than enough to bring it surging back to the forefront of my brain.

There were a lot of things I didn’t enjoy about my current job, but at least the uniform wasn’t one of them. It was a fairly minimal dress code—just a company T-shirt and a small waist apron to stash crucial items like my order pad and a few dozen extra pens. I also appreciated that my workplace was in my own neighborhood of College Hill, just a quick bus ride away from the apartment. In better weather, it would even be within a possible walking distance if I wanted to save on the bus fare—not that I really expected to still be working there by the time summer rolled around again.

Waiting tables at a karaoke bar was not something I particularly wanted to make a long-term career choice.

I’d been to good karaoke bars before—the ones that did karaoke in the Japanese style, with fancy private rooms and sake cocktails, with incredible decor. Redbones was not a good karaoke bar. The owner, Orlando Bouchard, made no secret of the fact that transforming Redbones from a local dive bar into a local dive bar that centered on karaoke had stemmed entirely on his desire to find a way to get more people through the door without having to do any kind of major upscaling of the bar, which would probably have necessitated getting a real kitchen going. I personally felt that he’d also realized that if he could find something to appeal to the female college student population, the local male population would invariably follow. In that, Orlando wasn’t exactly wrong.

My employment at Redbones was actually even flakier than my usual fly-by-night minimum-wage drudgery. The waitstaff position that I currently occupied was one that had been vacated by Orlando’s niece when she went on maternity leave (an event that Orlando cursed daily), and it had been made extremely clear to me that as soon as the niece felt ready to come back to work, I was out on my ass. Not that I was making any arguments. I’d done more than my share of waitstaff jobs before, and nothing at Redbones was particularly difficult. There was no kitchen, and the only food that could be ordered was table baskets of popcorn, pretzels, cookies, and things like that, which were the simple matter of going into the back room, dumping the requested foodstuff into the basket, and carrying out again. The fanciest anything got was when people ordered off of the “celebration specials” page, which involved cupcakes. That meant that I went into the back room, took down the requisite number of cupcakes, put them on a plate, and stuck in the appropriate party toppers. Those came in birthday, bachelorette party (Orlando had tried stocking bachelor party, but no one had ever ordered those), and breakup. Breakup had sad kittens.

Ninety percent of the menu focused on what we did best—alcohol. Orlando was the man behind the bar, both literally and figuratively, and I had to admit that he was pretty good at mixing drinks. Another big part of my job was that whenever he was busy mixing particularly fancy drinks, I was empowered to fill up basic beer requests or simple drinks myself. That kept the system moving, continued to lubricate the customers, and saved Orlando from having to hire a second barman on busy nights. Not that I worked the busy nights. The bar was open five nights a week, Wednesdays to Sundays, and I was invariably awarded shifts on the slower nights (generally Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays), when Orlando could get away with just having one waiter on duty. Working at a bar was one of those rare jobs where people fought for the weekend shifts, which usually brought much higher tips. I was okay getting the unwanted weeknights, as it was actually better for my schedule. But Thursday night at a karaoke bar could be a very grim vista.

Which of course brought me to the major crux of the issue—it was a karaoke bar. Most people attended in groups, usually after they’d started the evening with dinner at a restaurant. Sometimes people came in groups from particularly friendly workplaces as a way to have a fun night out, but not usually. We had about two dozen small tables, which could be reserved in advance but almost never were except with bachelorette parties. I met groups at the door, escorted them to a free table (and with the nights I worked, there was always a free table), and handed them menus and a laminated songbook. When I swung over to take their drink or snack orders, I also collected their song requests, which they wrote on pads of paper that were kept at each table. I would then deliver those song requests to the karaoke DJ, who put together the song list. There were two large screens on the walls of the bar—one that displayed the lyrics of the song currently being sung, and one that had the arranged song order on it so that people could know if their song was coming up. Redbones had almost four thousand songs in the karaoke catalogue. But most nights it seemed like all people wanted to sing was Journey or Bon Jovi.

Work began as it usually did. We opened at four, but not even the most committed karaoke buff showed up that early, so we spent the first hour prepping. I turned on the popcorn machine in the back room (Orlando had gotten it when the movie theater down the street closed down) and made sure that there were plenty of cookies. We had a deal with a local bakery that I strongly suspected involved taking the cookies that normally would’ve been disposed at the end of their workday and giving them a few more hours of shelf life. I also pushed a broom around the floor—not that that really was going to help the situation, but it at least removed the visual issues. Sometimes I had to push really hard at stuff that was slightly adhered in a gummy mixture of ancient spilled drinks, dirt from shoes, and crumbled food, with just a slight veneer of vomit. What the floor really needed was an exorcism, or at least a few buckets of bleach, but my broom helped cover up its sins for another evening.

At the bar, Orlando furrowed his brow and began the first of several hundred rubdowns with a soft rag. Before the bar was Redbones, it had been various other liquor-dispensing establishments all the way back and through Prohibition, and the bar was as original as the bricks that made up the walls. Unfortunately, like the bricks, the bar really needed some serious rehab. While Orlando argued history as his reason for avoiding an upgrade, I suspected penny-pinching. Pratibha Vhora was the DJ, and she played with her sound checks, cross-examined her equipment, and when all else was done, she just popped on a preset song list and did a few crossword puzzles.

“Hey, Fort,” Pratibha said as I passed her. “‘Actor Guinness.’ Four letters, third one
e
.”

“Alec,” I answered.

She nodded, looking pleased. “Nice.” Once she’d realized my level of film trivia, Pratibha warmed up to me significantly. Supposedly Orlando’s niece had only been able to help out with gardening questions, which didn’t come up as often. Pratibha glanced up from her puzzle, and frowned. “Hey, are you okay tonight?”