Dead Waters - Anton Strout [58]
I checked my watch. “Running long, I see. Or maybe it’s taking longer with fewer agents out there in the field.”
“I guess,” Aidan said. “He looked a bit frantic and pissed off when he was heading in, but that kind of seems to be his thing, you know?”
I laughed at that. “That, I do know,” I said. “That I do.” I grabbed a pen off my desk and tossed it to him. He caught it in perfect position for writing like it was nothing. “Use his desk, then. Just try to make human sounds and all that while you’re working. When you’re all silent and moving about, it creeps me out.”
“I’ll try,” he said, “but sometimes I forget.” He paused. “Sorry about earlier. With getting Jane all riled up on you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “By the way, if HR comes through and asks why we have a teenage boy filling in at Connor’s desk, good luck explaining it to them.”
Aidan leaned forward and popped his fangs. “Think this will be explanation enough?”
“Doubtful,” I said. “If anything, it’ll just lead to more paperwork for you.”
Aidan retracted his fangs, looking a bit crestfallen. “More?”
I nodded. “For as much hitting squishy things with bats that I get to do, I end up stuck at this desk, writing out the details, an awful lot.”
“Exciting,” Aidan said and resumed looking through his pile of papers. He flew through them with lightning speed.
“That’s one thing I envy about you vampires,” I said.
“Just one thing?” Aidan asked, with a surprised laugh.
“Just one,” I said. “Sorry. Not really keen on the rest of your deal.”
“Fine,” he said. “What is it?”
“Your kind strike me as minimalists,” I said.
Aidan cocked his head. “How so?”
“You dispense with paperwork for the most part,” I said. “I mean, look at the Gibson-Case Center. It’s a city unto itself and yet there wasn’t much of a paper trail when your people built it. Even your history. . . You’ve got some of it written down in that Vampinomicon or whatever it’s called, but let’s face it: if that thing burned up tomorrow, you’d be able to re-create it from an oral tradition because some of you who actually lived that history are still alive. I envy your lack of bureaucracy.”
“I suppose you have a point,” Aidan said, “but you’re forgetting something.”
“I am?” I asked. “What’s that?”
He patted the pile of papers before him. “Time bends for us differently . . .”
“I figured that out when I met your leader and discovered he had named himself after a character from Beverly Hills, 90210. So?”
Aidan grabbed the stack and slowly flipped down through it, page by page. “It means that I get shafted with the mundanely human task of your paperwork thanks to my role as liaison between our two people. For someone whose life is already an eternity, jumping through the hoops of an organization that will most likely wither while all of us still live on makes the task of doing this paperwork a different kind of eternity all its own.”
“Fair point,” I said. “Sorry.”
Aidan picked up a pen and started scrawling at inhuman speeds on one of the detail sheets in front of him. “It’s all right,” he said. “There is some consolation in all this.” Aidan looked up at me, grinning. “I’ll never get those bags under my eyes that you have from all this right now.”
“It’s not the job,” I said. “These are from the hangover.”
“Another thing I’m glad to not really experience,” he said, and fell to his pile of paperwork without another word, blazing through it in a way I could only dream of.
16
Despite the bustling sprawl of New York University from Greenwich Village down to Houston Street, I wasn’t too worried about just how the hell I was supposed to find any of the students I was looking for, thanks to the predictable and cliquish nature of film and theater people. Especially when it came to finding freshmen who were so new to the Big Apple that they latched onto one another like lost, lonely magnets. I started by hanging around Washington Square Park, and it didn’t take me too long to