I pushed the unnerving image of her predatory smile from my mind, focusing instead on the mountains of paperwork before me. Employee ID forms, NDA agreements, and a massive, jargon-filled document titled "Essence Regulations and Inter-Species Conduct Protocol." I scanned the latter with a grimace.
"Section 4, Subsection B: Unauthorized consumption of another species' Essence is strictly prohibited and constitutes grounds for immediate termination and/or punitive measures commensurate with the severity of the infringement. Exceptions may apply only under contractual, consensual, or marital circumstances."
I swallowed hard. Contractual, consensual, or marital. So, my boss was either planning to breach company policy, get me to sign something suicidal, or marry me. Given her wolf-demon nature, I didn't think she was interested in the flowers-and-chocolates kind of courtship.
I'd managed to get halfway through the safety briefing—which detailed how to distinguish a genuine vampire bite from a prank—when a sudden, sharp, and entirely human scent cut through the haze of musk and ancient spices that dominated the OmniCorp office. It was clean, slightly citrusy, and utterly devoid of the tell-tale spiritual hum of an Awakened human.
I looked up.
Standing beside my cubicle wall was a man, around my height but slightly broader in the shoulders. He looked exactly like someone who belonged here: khaki pants, a crisp, light-blue button-down shirt, and an ID badge clipped neatly to his belt. He had a mop of bright blond hair that looked perpetually rumpled, and his blue eyes were wide, friendly, and completely oblivious. He wasn't Awakened. He was just... normal.
"Hey there! You must be the new guy, Chase, right?" he asked, extending a hand over the partition. His voice was warm, loud, and free of any hidden menace. He looked to be about twenty-four quite young.
I instinctively switched off my internal alert system, a habit honed over centuries of constant danger. It felt profoundly weird. I shook his hand. His grip was loose, warm, and entirely unthreatening.
"That's me. Chase Vance. You can call me Chase," I replied, a genuine smile finally reaching my eyes. It had been decades, centuries even, since I'd exchanged pleasantries with a baseline human who wasn't currently panicking about a divine judgment or trying to recruit me into their cult.
"Ethan Riley. I'm in QA testing, two floors up, but I usually camp out down here when I'm checking code implementation for the Lore team. Welcome to the asylum," he said with a cheerful chuckle. "Don't mind the décor—or the clientele. It takes some getting used to."
He didn't seem to mean the lurking demon in the corner or the vampire tapping away at a keyboard with unnaturally long fingers. He probably just meant the bad corporate art.
"The clientele seems... motivated," I offered neutrally, gesturing vaguely at a dark-haired woman who was currently staring at me with the intensity of a starved owl.
Ethan leaned in conspiratorially, lowering his voice slightly. "They are, they are. But be warned, the 'Lore' department is a little infamous. They take their immersion very seriously. I swear half of them think they actually are the characters they're writing about." He paused, looking around as if checking for eavesdroppers, then added, "Especially Lilith. She's intense, man. Like, dangerously intense. But she pays well, so we don't ask questions."
"I got that impression," I said, leaning back in my chair. "She just finished the tour."
"Ah, the induction ritual," Ethan winced dramatically. "Did she give you the stare? The one that feels like she's looking through your clothes and into your soul at the same time?"
I nearly choked on my sip of water. "Something like that. It was certainly memorable."
"Classic Lilith," he grinned. "Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself. We don't get many new meat—uh, people—down in this section. Most of the other non-magical stick to HR or Accounting." He gestured to my large pile of onboarding documents. "Looks like you're drowning in forms. Do you need help finding the benefits packet? That one's hidden."
"Actually, that would be amazing," I admitted. The benefits packet was likely where the real fine print about my 'Essence' was hidden.
Ethan pulled up a seat and, using my keyboard, quickly navigated the OmniCorp intranet, his fingers flying across the keys. As he worked, he chatted about the office basketball team, the best coffee machine on the seventh floor, and the incredibly confusing plot of the game the company was currently developing. It was a dizzying torrent of genuine, human normalcy. For the first time since my contract was voided, a profound sense of relief washed over me. This was it. This was the peace I sought. A simple man, talking about simple things.
"There you go," Ethan announced, pulling up a detailed PDF. "The benefits. Health, dental, vacation... oh, and the supplemental 'Infection & Cursed Bite Insurance.' Don't worry, the premiums are only high if you work directly with the Vampire Lead Dev."
I stared at the screen. The policy covered "accidental lycanthropic transition" and "demonically induced memory loss." This was officially the strangest employee benefits package I had ever encountered, and I once worked for a goddess who paid in literal souls.
"Thanks, Ethan. This is... informative," I managed.
"Anytime, man. Seriously, if you need to know which vending machine won't try to steal your change, or which bathroom stall is actually haunted by the ghost of a disgruntled necromancer, I'm your guy," he said, getting up. He clapped me lightly on the shoulder—a casual gesture that felt startlingly sincere.
As he walked away, I watched him navigate the maze of cubicles, greeting a hulking, silent werewolf with a cheerful "Morning, Gary!" The werewolf just grunted, but Ethan didn't even seem to notice the glowing eyes. He was totally, beautifully oblivious.
I turned back to the benefits packet, but my focus was lost. My entire life strategy had been about isolation, about blending into the background until the inevitable predators grew bored. Ethan Riley was a direct, unexpected contradiction to that plan. He was friendly, normal, and entirely unconnected to the spiritual war I had fled.
He was a tether to the life I wanted.
But befriending a baseline human in an office full of hungry monsters who craved the essence I naturally produced? That was dangerous. Not for me, the ancient warrior wrapped in a twenty-two-year-old body, but for him. My presence alone was a magnet for trouble.
I looked at the glowing screen, then at the door of Lilith's office, and finally in the direction Ethan had walked.
Keep your head down, Chase. Don't get involved. Live the simple life.
But the warrior in my heart, the one who had sworn off protecting anyone, felt a faint, unwanted tug of responsibility. Ethan was too trusting for this world. He was a soft, squishy target standing too close to the source of all the office's most dangerous attention: me.
I sighed, pulling up the first chapter of the game lore I was supposed to be reviewing. The rise of the Shadow Queen. A desperate battle between light and darkness.
Right. Just another Tuesday. But now, it wasn't just my life at stake. It was the potential to ruin the only genuinely kind, normal thing I had encountered in this frightening new reality.
I had to be careful. I had to keep Ethan safe, even if he never knew the danger—or that I was the source of it. And I had to do it all while working overtime for the wolf-demon who was currently weighing the pros and cons of seduction versus outright consumption.
My simple life just got complicated.