Page 6 of A Fae in Finance
“How was your evening?” I asked him, though I already knew what he would say—
“Terrible,” he said, “I worked until two a.m.”
I didn’t know what he spent all this time working on. He didn’t have a deal going. Or any clients. Or a manager. He spent all of this time on his computer doing… PowerPoints? Research? One time, I saw him rendering a video game background in MS Paint.
“Bummer,” I said.
He shrugged.
I sighed, still trying to engage him in conversation for some reason. “You hear we might be going to Faerie soon?” I asked.Wemeant me and Jeff.
“Yeah, travel sucks,” he said.
This didn’t feel like the appropriate response to being told your colleague was one of the first humans invited to Faerie in centuries.
Or at least one of the first humanspubliclyinvited.
Jeff rounded the corner, wearing a full pinstripe suit and matching blue tie that made his skin look positively pink. He was always clean-shaven and had reached the age where men’s chins start to sag into their neck, no matter how slender they are.
He grunted toward us and strode past into his office.
This was a good greeting, for Jeff.
I turned back to my computer and alt-tabbed over to an Excel spreadsheet, shushing my roiling stomach. Maybe it would be a calm day after all.
“Miri, get in here!” Jeff barked from his office at the end of our row of cubicles. “When you have a minute,” he added, perhaps for the benefit of a colleague walking by.
When you have a minutemeantnow. I pushed away from my desk and stood, my knees cracking. So much for calm in the office.
The thirty steps to his office were muffled by the gray carpet and punctuated by sharp pains in my big and pinky toes. I leaned against the doorframe.
“Jeff,” I said, because he’d already turned back to his computer.
“Miri,” he said. “What do you need?”
I blinked, unsure what to say. He’d just called me over like, fifteen seconds ago. “Uh, did you—uh…” I stopped, stumbling over my words. Jeff’s window looked over New York City, out west to the Hudson and Jersey City. Up into the endless sky.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We’re going to dinner tonight in that shithole. Dinner’s outside, can you believe it?”
“We’re going to Faerietonight,” I said in disbelief.
“Yes, the Duke said tonight.”
“Princeling.” The title of Princeling didn’t exactly mean aprinceor aking, wasn’t a name likeRowanorOberon, and wasn’t a descriptor likeFairy Godmother.
The Princeling justwas. And most of all, what hewaswas in charge of everything Faerie. The very few public statements we’d gotten about the Fae bore his signature, and the faeries who’d come out of the woodwork to join the mortal realm all claimed loyalty to him. As far as I could tell, he was their ultimate authority.
“Yeah, Princeling. I know.” Jeff stuck his pinky in his ear and started scratching.
I shifted my weight away from the doorframe. “Are we bringing our own food?”
Jeff finally looked at me, his eyes narrowed. The purple bags under his left eye were bigger than the bags under his right. “Why would we do that?”
I rubbed my thumb against the gold band on my index finger, queasy. “Um. Doesn’t faerie food trap you in Faerie?”
Jeff snorted. “Food can’t trap you somewhere, Miri,” he said, his tone cool. He leaned back in his chair. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I swallowed. “Jeff, I—”
