Authors: Scott V. Duff
“I kicked him to the curb about a year ago, finally,” she said, “so I was only stupid for a year.”
“So what are you doing now?” he asked, then his eyes grew wide and he looked around him. “I’m interrupting your interview is what you’re doing now. I’m so sorry, Seth, let me get out of your hair.”
More scratchings as Peter and Richard shifted over with Norton. He went straight to the desk phone and started pushing buttons.
“No, David, just have a seat and join us,” Mike said. “You may as well be a part of this.” I stayed where I was. It was getting crowded in the middle of the room as Peter and Richard strolled across to meet the “new guy.”
“Hiya doin’, I’m Peter Borland and this is my father, Richard,” he said, introducing himself to Caitlin. I watched the flow of both Norton and Osbourne’s aura as they dealt with their immediate issues. A circus of activity developed for a few minutes as everyone jockeyed for seats. Peter came around behind the couch and stood beside me.
“Things didn’t go well with Mr. Norton?” I asked, watching him argue with someone on the phone but trying to ignore the conversation. His back was to us but I could still hear him and his thoughts were crystal clear to me.
“Surprisingly well, actually,” Peter said. “Right now, he’s furious with his parents and his older brother for keeping him in the dark. Seems they’re fairly well connected to the US council and he thinks that they were actually one of the families targeted a few weeks back. He was in the Bahamas on a vacation as part of his graduation present. Pure accident of timing that he wasn’t home when it happened. He said he’d rescheduled that vacation twice for different reasons.”
“Definitely looks mad,” I agreed. “You want to hire him?”
“We all like him well enough so I don’t see why not,” Peter said. “What about her?”
“I think the jury is still out there,” I answered softly. “Kieran seems a little standoffish still and Ethan hasn’t said anything at all.”
“Huh, you’re right. We do seem to have been left out of the conversation completely, haven’t we?” he said.
“Idiots!” Norton said harshly, slamming the phone down. He stood rigid for a moment, collecting and calming himself before facing us again. He finally came over and fell onto the two-seat couch next to Jimmy, sighing heavily.
“Family problems?” I asked mildly. He grunted at me and I chuckled in return. “You’re not alone. Even the best families have problems. Skeletons in the closet, kids they don’t talk about.” Ethan started sputtering and Kieran’s eyes danced with the grin on his face.
“I think that was aimed at you, Robert,” Richard said, patting Dad’s shoulder.
“Huh? What? What did I miss?” Dad said, looking around the room quickly.
“Your son is picking on you,” Mike said.
“Mike!” I cried, turning his name into three syllables in imitation of Ian.
“What? This was a secret somehow?” he asked me, his voice suddenly softer with a heavier accent.
“No, but you’re supposed to be on my side, not snitch me out,” I said, laughing. “All I’m saying, Steven, is that families come ready-made or have to be built. They’re never perfect, not even the best of them, and they’re always a hell of a lot of work. You wouldn’t believe what it took from me to get my brother and my father talking again.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Dad interjected, jovially. “That’s private, now! Besides, he took the first swing.”
“I did not!” Kieran cried, laughing. “You liar!”
“What have you instigated?” Peter asked calmly, watching the couch pillow fly by. “Did you mean for it go this far?”
“No, but as long as everybody’s getting along…” I said, shrugging off the end of the thought. “We should further this along though.”
Mike perked up and rapped a few times on the coffee table. “Lady and gentlemen, we have a vote on the floor to continue with a consensus of three. Do we have any against? Very well, Ms. Osbourne, could you describe to us what qualifications you have that you feel may have bearing in our decision to hire you?” Seems Mike either had really good hearing or he was paying a lot of attention to me specifically today.
“I would first have to know exactly what the job entails,” she responded. “Gordon was somewhat obscure in his description of the situation. And frankly, Mr. Norton’s reaction is a bit alarming, doubly so considering the attitude of all of you.”
“Ah now,” I said, sending my tongue more deeply South than usual. “Don’t judge Steven too harshly for that. He hasn’t lost sight of the elephants in the room. I would have thought that more important.”
“Mr. McClure is right,” Norton said. “About everything he said really. And it helped, thank you. If you’ll have me, yes, I will join your crew. If I’m gonna be a gopher, I might as well be a gopher in paradise.”
“In general, ‘Seth’ is sufficient,” I said. “There are too many ‘Mr. McClures’ running around here. It gets confusing. But why does our calm about Steven’s aggravation bother you, Miss Osbourne?”
“None of you seem the slightest upset that he got into an argument on the phone just a few moments ago. In the middle of a business meeting? Granted, I can’t quite judge when half of you are invisible to me and half of the remaining are guarded elders, but I should have seen some reaction. But it was as if you all expected him to be angry.”
“It was one of several possibilities but the most reasonable, Miss Osbourne,” Dad said calmly. “Considering the circumstances around what I suspect he was told, it was probably a fairly mild reaction.”
Norton grunted in disgust. His aura roiled in anger and frustration.
“The job is for an assistant to our team,” I said and went on to cover the basics that we’d discussed with everyone, including the privacy geas.
“And we’re hoping that we can coordinate this in the right way and with the right people so that we can just move you into the corporate structure as our personal needs decrease with time and we move more people in,” Peter added. “We aren’t going to stand in one place, so we don’t expect or even want you to, either.”
“By the same token,” Kieran said, “if any particular member proves to not be up to task, we have no problem removing that person and either placing him elsewhere or removing him completely.”
“But as Steven has just discovered, this is not the safest job in the world,” I said. “And, right now, we are not in the safest of worlds, either. We are at the center of the war on magic users and we’re not sure why. We currently deal directly with three different councils. Also, on Thursday we meet with emissaries from both Courts of Faery on an unknown agenda and several other councils have members invited to that ceremony, so the number will probably increase then.”
“Do you remember the days when he didn’t talk so much?” Ethan whispered to Kieran.
“Last week?” Kieran whispered back, grinning. Ethan snickered. Dad threw the couch pillow at them unexpectedly, hitting Kieran in the side of the head and rebounding into Ethan.
“Somebody had to say it,” Ethan said, the smarm evident in his grin, returning the pillow to its rightful place. Peter and I were snickering then.
“Actually, you’re in a better position at this point to judge us than either David or Steven were about how well you think you’d fit in with us,” I said. “We’re pretty much all together now and you have just a little bit more information than either of them did. This pretty much brings us back around to Mike’s question: what do you think you can bring to the table?”
She hesitated, glancing around the room. “Am I the only woman in the group at the moment?”
Peter arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re not actually in the group yet, but yes. We interviewed another, our first actually, but she had issues similar to yours and we mutually agreed that we would not be a good fit at that point in time.”
“We did like her, though, and once we get up and running, we’ll consider her again for other positions,” I said.
“What are you seeing as ‘my issues’?” she asked.
“Ethan, you weren’t with us when we talked with Madeline,” I said, slipping a lop-sided grin on and forcing attention onto him. He’d been quiet a little too long. “Would you like to field this one?”
“Yeah, make me out to look like a heel,” he said through slitted eyes as he sat up. “A lack of perspective would be my first thought, specifically the aforementioned ‘elephants’.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘elephant’ ,” Osbourne said.
“Usually, it’s the big, clunky, ugly thing in the room that everyone tries to ignore but can’t,” Richard said. “I believe in this case, they are saying that you are the only one who managed to ignore them and shouldn’t have.”
“Safe bet,” muttered Jimmy.
“First!” I snapped quietly at him.
“And the lack of perspective has other connotations as well,” Peter said, trying to move attention away from Jimmy and me. “For instance, you’ve been asked the same question twice and have yet to answer, choosing instead to qualify and misdirect. Not necessarily a bad thing especially politically, but here?” He shook his head, grimacing.
“So what
are
the elephants?” Osbourne asked Richard, turning back to him.
“I suppose that depends on your perspective,” he said, smiling. “But let’s look at it logically from yours for a moment. Right now, of the ten men in the room, who do you think is the most powerful? Who is the most important?”
“Six of you are related in some manner and of those six, four of them have auras that are invisible to me, so I would put the most powerful among them,” she said logically. “It would be difficult to say who is stronger without some evidence to judge. But since this is a mostly family oriented venture, I would say that the most important man here is either you or Mr. McClure.”
“That’s logical,” Mike said, nodding. “And had you acted as if you believed that prior to Richard’s question, he wouldn’t have asked it.”
“And while Richard and I appreciate the vote of confidence, neither of us is particularly important in the world right now,” Dad said.
“Hey!” Peter and I shouted simultaneously, aggravated. I went on, “The hell you’re not important! Both of you! I’ve seen you both at work lately. You’re not ready for an ice floe yet, old man,” I said loudly. And damned if he didn’t look shocked about it. I refused to reach into his mind to find out why, though.
“Calm down, little brother,” Kieran said softly. “He was exaggerating.”
“Well, the same goes for me, too,” Peter said, bopping his father with a magazine as he passed behind him.
“Don’t look at me. I hate the cold,” Richard said, ducking too late then rubbing his head in mock pain.
“You live in Canada!” Dad exclaimed in disbelief, looking up at Richard.
“The correct answer to both of those questions, by the way, is Seth,” Kieran said to Osbourne, shaking his head at the newest circus to erupt. “Mike, let’s arrange the next group with just the five of us, okay?”
Again the phone rang. Peter answered this time as he headed into one of the bedrooms. He had a short conversation then called Mike to the phone, then continued to the bedroom.
“We have a running disagreement on that point,” I said.
“The four of you are pretty damn close,” Dad said.
“I didn’t know you’d seen Peter or Ethan,” I said, looking over at Mike as he hung the handset in the cradle and headed back.
“Tuesday,” he answered.
“So it is possible to see your auras, then,” she said.
“We see each other just fine,” Ethan said. “We took turns tying our eyesight to Robert so he could see.”
“Would you do that for me?” she asked.
“No,” he answered without explanation. I didn’t offer one either.
“Then who do you believe is the strongest and most important of you now?” she asked me.
“There’s that perspective issue, again,” I said and I was pretty sure I was condescending when I said it. “But to answer your question, Kieran is the strongest of us while I am the most important.”
She laughed lightly as she looked around at each of us. “You seem so genuine and in the beginning, so self-effacing. The youngest of the brothers and yet everyone agrees that you are the most important. Why?”
“I thought we covered that,” I answered. “Let me put it another way. I have the greatest responsibility. Until my realm can support itself properly, over a million people depend on me, therefore I am the most important.”
“Our last appointment of the day has canceled,” Mike said sitting again. “We will reschedule sometime next week, after the emissaries. That gives us the rest of the day off now.”
That pronouncement caused a mass turning of heads as everyone oriented on Caitlin Osbourne. She squirmed in her seat for a moment as she fought to remember exactly where in the interview process we were. I was done hinting though, my patience at an end. She did remember the direction of Mike’s question.
“While I’m probably not particularly well-suited to fetch coffee, I am fairly well acquainted of many of the current members of the US Council as well as CEOs and board members of businesses where wizards and other magic users hold influence,” she explained. The phrasing showed forethought but why she hadn’t used it when the question was originally posed I couldn’t tell. “Through travel on family business and educational pursuits, I have met with a wide array of knowledgeable people that I can call upon for information and advice.”