Nina hung her head, and I felt my lower lip start to quiver, felt the choking lump in my throat. “That’s what you came to tell me?” I whispered. “That Mr. Sampson is dead?”
“Sophie, I’m sorry.”
I stood up so quickly my chair flopped onto the floor behind me. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true. I’m sorry. I hate to be the one to tell you this. You don’t understand how hard it is for me to see you hurt—to make you hurt—again. But I needed to be the one to give you the news.”
Vlad righted my chair, and I sunk down again. “Why? Why did it have to be you? In person?”
Alex opened his coat and pulled a long, thick envelope, folded lengthwise from his pocket. “Because Mr. Sampson wanted to be sure that you got these.” He pushed the envelope across the table toward me, and I just stared at it, until it swirled in front of me, lost in a rush of tears.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s an answer to most of your questions,” Alex said.
My eyes flashed. “So, you saw him? You saw him before he died? Was he okay? What happened to him?”
Alex looked at his lap and wagged his head. “I didn’t see him before he died. This was something I had promised to do long before any of this—even any of this with the chief—ever happened.”
I sniffed and nodded my head, then used my fists to wipe the tears from my cheeks.
“What’s in the envelope, Soph?” Nina asked.
I swallowed heavily, unhooked the latch, and peeled out a tri-folded stack of papers covered in very carefully handwritten script. “It’s from my grandmother,” I said, fingering the paper.
While Alex, Nina, and Vlad looked on, I smoothed the letter against the table, licked my lips, and learned the truth about my life.
Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of
UNDER GROUND,
the next novel in the
Underworld Detection Agency Chronicles,
coming in November 2011!
It’s nearly impossible to get hobgoblin slobber out of raw silk.
I know this because I had been standing in the bathroom, furiously scrubbing at the stubborn stain for at least forty-five minutes. If I could do magic, I would have zapped the stain out. Heck, if I could do magic I would zap away the whole hobgoblin afternoon and be sinking my toes in the sand somewhere while a tanned god named Carlos rubbed suntan lotion on my back. But no, I was stuck in the Underworld Detection Agency women’s restroom—a horrible, echo-y room tiled in Pepto pink with four regular stalls and a single tiny one for pixies—when my coworker Nina popped her head in, wrinkled her cute ski-jump nose, and said, “I smell hobgoblin slobber.”
Did I mention vampires have a ridiculously good sense of smell?
Nina came in, letting the door snap shut behind her. She used one angled fang to pierce the blood bag she was holding and settled herself onto the sink next to me.
“You’re never going to get that out, you know.”
I huffed and wrung the water from my dress, glaring at Nina as I stood there in my baby-pink slip and heels. “Did you come in here just to tell me that?”
Nina extended one long, marble white leg and examined her complicated Jimmy Choo stilettos. “No, I also came in to tell you that Lorraine is on the warpath, Nelson used his trident to tack a pixie to the corkboard, and Vlad is holding a VERM meeting in the lunchroom.”
I frowned. “This job bites.”
Nina smiled, bared her fangs, and snapped her jaws.
Nina and I work together at the Underworld Detection Agency—the UDA for those in the know. And very few people are in the know. Our branch is located thirty-seven floors below the San Francisco Police Department, but we have physical and satellite offices nationwide. Word is the Savannah office gets the most ghosts but has the best food. The Manhattan office gets the best crossovers (curious humans wandering down), and the good ol’ San Francisco office is famous for our unruly hordes of the magnificent undead, mostly dead, and back from the dead. However, we’re rapidly becoming infamous for a management breakdown that tends to make incidents like the fairy stuck to the corkboard barely worth mentioning. Some demons blame the breakdown of Underworld morals. I blame the fact that my boss and former head of the UDA, Pete Sampson, was killed last year and has yet to be replaced. Thus, we’ve been privy to a semi-permanent parade of interim management made up of everything from werewolves and vampires to goblins and one (mercifully short) stint with a screaming banshee.
So am I a demon? Nope. I’m a plain, one hundred percent first-life, air-breathing, magic-free human being. I don’t have fangs, wings, or hooves. I’m five-foot-two on a good day, topped with a ridiculous mess of curly red hair on a bad day, and my eyes are the exact hue of lime Jell-O. My super powers are that I can consume a whole pizza in twelve minutes flat and sing the fifty states in alphabetical order. And that I’m alive. Which makes me a weird, freakish anomaly in an Underworld office that keeps blood in the fridge and offers life insurance that you can collect should you get the opportunity to come back to life.