Monster Control Inc. 6

In which Our Hero meets with Human Resources

• MCI 001

• MCI 002

• MCI 003

• MCI 004

• MCI 005

Monster Control Incorporated's main office didn't look like the headquarters of a paranormal defense contractor. No gothic architecture. No gargoyles. No walls mounted with the stuffed heads of extinct supernatural creatures. Instead, it was fourteen floors of boring corporate glass and steel in downtown Chicago, wedged between an accounting firm and the regional headquarters of a pharmaceutical company.

The mundane exterior was deliberate. MCI thrived on being professionally low-key. Normal people didn't want to know that werewolves hunted under the Full Moon, that vampires stalked nightclubs, or that about two percent of the fortune-tellers in America were actually the genuine article. They wanted to believe their world was safe and sensible and monster-free. MCI was one of several firms making very good money keeping it that way.

And I'd just stupidly taken a steaming dump all over that careful illusion.

Three days after my disaster with Elise and Tyler, I was finally out on bail—paid for by the company, though Kim made it abundantly clear this wasn't a sign of support, just expedience and embracing the lesser evil. Now I sat in a chair outside the Human Resources department, nursing a coffee that tasted like it had been filtered through a sweaty gym sock, waiting for my professional execution.

My face still looked as if I'd gone ten rounds with a cheese grater. The burns from the mace had faded from angry red to a patchwork of pink blotches. My eyes weren't swollen shut anymore, but they remained bloodshot and sensitive to light. I'd ditched the hospital-provided eye patches yesterday, figuring I'd look slightly less pathetic without them.

"Mr. Scrubb?" The receptionist's voice cut through my self-pity. "Ms. Keller will see you now."

I stood up, straightened my tie—a grey paisley on black silk number left over from my grandfather's funeral—and tried to look like someone who was worth keeping employed. The receptionist gave me a tight smile as I passed. She knew. They all knew. Word traveled fast at MCI, especially when it involved an agent going off the reservation and getting arrested for felonious assault on a civilian.

The door to Janet Keller's office bore a simple nameplate: J. KELLER, DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RESOURCES. Beneath it, someone had taped a small sign that read: KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING OR DIE SCREAMING. I assumed it was a joke, but I couldn’t be certain.

So I knocked.

"Enter."

Janet Keller sat behind a massive oak desk that looked like it had been carved from a single ancient tree. She was a woman of indeterminate middle age, with iron-gray hair cropped short and practical glasses perched on a nose that had been broken at least once. She wore a charcoal pantsuit nearly identical to Kim's, except for a small silver pin on her lapel shaped like a shield. The pin marked her as one of the Originals—the first group of employees that had worked for MCI when it was a struggling startup back in the '80s.

Before she was shunted to HR, Janet Keller had been a legendary field agent. There were stories about her taking down an entire nest of vampires with nothing but a pencil and a Super Soaker filled with holy water. I doubted they were true, but I was pretty sure she could kill me at least seventeen different ways without getting out of her chair.

"Sit," she said, not looking up from the file on her desk. My file, presumably.

I sat.

For a full minute, she didn't speak, just turned pages in the file, occasionally making small humming noises that sounded ominous. I tried not to fidget.

Finally, she looked up and fixed me with eyes the color of a winter sky. "Horace Aloysius Scrubb."

Only my mother called me by my full name, and only when I was in deep shit. The comparison did not bode well.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you know why you're here, Mr. Scrubb?"

There were so many possible answers to that question, none of them good. I went with the simplest. "Because there were some misunderstandings."

"Some misunderstandings?" she said, tapping a manicured nail against my file. "Is that how you would characterize assaulting an unarmed civilian with a deadly weapon, violating at least seventeen company protocols regarding unauthorized surveillance, and then talking openly about the existence of the supernatural to an officer of the Chicago Police Department?"

Put like that, it sounded even worse. "I admit, I made a mistake in my threat assessment—"

"A mistake." Her voice could have frozen lava. "Do you know how much your 'mistake' is costing this company?"

I swallowed hard. "A lot?"

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars in settlement money to the unfortunate young man you assaulted. Another forty thousand in legal fees. Plus the cost of the cleanup team to contain the PR nightmare, the bribes to certain officials to ensure this doesn't become a media circus, and the repair to our relationship with Detective Dawson, who, as it happens, has been a valuable ally in covering up supernatural incidents in the past." She smiled thinly. "So yes, Mr. Scrubb. A lot."

"I'll pay it back," I offered weakly.

Janet actually laughed at that. It was not a comforting sound. "On your salary? You'd be working for free until approximately 2057."

She closed my file with a snap and leaned forward. "Let's be clear about something, Mr. Scrubb. You're not here because you cost the company money. You're here because you endangered everything we've built here. Because you let your personal feelings interfere with your professional judgment. And because you forgot the first rule of this organization."

"Keep the darkness in the dark," I recited automatically.

"Exactly. We don't expose civilians to the truth. We clean up the messes, we eliminate the threats, and we maintain the popular illusion that monsters aren't real. That is our purpose. And you very nearly destroyed all of that because you were obsessed with a pretty half-fae girl."

I felt heat creep up my neck. "I wasn't obsessed! I was just concerned for her safety."

"Concerned enough to stalk her for weeks without authorization? Concerned enough to show off by killing a werewolf right in front of her instead of containing the situation and eliminating the threat discreetly? Concerned enough to attack her boyfriend based on the flimsiest of evidence?"

"He’s not her boyfriend!" I insisted. Even as I said it, I realized that probably wasn’t HR’s primary concern.

Janet sighed, a sound of infinite weariness. "The psychological evaluation suggests you've been under considerable stress. The pressure of violent monster hunting over time has had a deleterious effect on your judgment. And clearly, you're suffering from a form of paranoia that makes you see threats where none exist."

"I'm not paranoid," I said. "And I'm not crazy."

"I didn't say you were crazy, Mr. Scrubb. I said your judgment is impaired."