The old gods. Huh. So they not only existed and interacted with the world, they had it in particularly for me.

Jevol was looking more casual than I'd ever seen him. His tie was actually loose around his neck. And there was another sign, even more telling, that I'd never witnessed: he looked tired.

“Blacklisted?” Kathy exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
I threw my laptop down on the couch and myself shortly after “I mean that every single company I've contacted has responded with a perfunctory 'no thanks' or hasn't responded at all. And I'm not exactly throwing around a commonplace resume these days.”

“I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go,” Mr. Jevol said. His face was as inscrutable as ever – and it might have been my imagination – but I thought I heard a hint of remorse in his voice. Probably my imagination. For as long as I'd known the man, he'd never emoted anything but dry cheerfulness.

“So what do you think?” I asked for the fifth time. Kathy had looked away from the sheaf of papers, so maybe she was actually done reading this time. She looked up at me, this time without the glare of annoyance.

“This has... has been a lot of fun,” Kathy slurred. “Although... maybe next time, we should just get coffee?” One of her cultured curls had flung itself over an eye. She hadn't bothered to correct it. One of her legs was also flung over mine. I hadn't bothered to correct that.

Kathy collapsed into her old, moth-eaten couch – her favorite. No dust clouds plumed upwards, but it certainly looked like there should have. Her parents kept telling her to get rid of it. No such way. She'd sit it on the day she died.

I stifled a yawn for the third time in the last minute. Sitting for five hours straight at a desk will mess with you that way. I really felt like I was on the brink of something, though.

“I'm sorry to see you go,” I said. I meant it, too, in more ways than one. I had learned a bit more about professionalism over the last year, though, so I stood up straight and offered my hand for Kathy to shake. She took it and smiled.

Kathy was crying and I felt like the worst person in the world. I had been trying my best to help her out. She was smart – brilliant, really – but it was becoming increasingly obvious that her high-grade education hadn't done what it should preparing her for the realities of this kind of work.

“So, ahh...” I said. “What makes you want to work in channeling node services?” I restrained from straightening my unfamiliar tie. I tried to peak my hands in front of me like Mr. Jevol did, but my shaking fingers ruined the drama.

“Oh, dear,” Helai said, looking down at the body of Rile Andersen. “I guess he was right.” She hit her pager and started filling out the paperwork while waiting for Mr. Washburn to arrive.

“I'm pretty sure an hour of this is going to kill me,” Rile said. His face glowed bright red with blood and the sentence only came out between gasps.

“I don't expect you'll actually die,” Helai said. “You might wish you had, but we'll be here to pick up your sad, collapsed body and get you back to working order soon enough.”

“So, Mr. Philips,” Mr. Jevol said, shuffling papers around in front of him. “I've heard nothing but good reports coming from your manager down in the... ah, ritual chambers. How have you been liking it so far?”

Smack. Schlorph. Crunch. The normal, everyday sounds of cleaning up after the latest batch of rituals. It wasn't commonly spread around, but the release of a spirit from a corpse was... not pleasant for the corpse. Fortunately nobody was actually using it anymore. Furthermore, it made sure that nobody in my line of work would be using it themselves. Most people considered that a bonus, even if the means were on the messy side.

So they like to blab on the news a lot about how necromancy is an “ancient, respectable art” with “grand traditions” that is innately built around the “inherent balance between life and death.” That may all be true. But when you get right down to it, there's an awful lot of blood, viscera, rot, and really, really late night shifts.

Mr. Jevol shuffled some papers on his desk, looking at them intensely through his square spectacles. He wasn't actually reading anything. I could tell just by tracking his pupils. That made him the kind of person that liked to look official and important. Ah, well. There were worse traits to have in a boss.