Page 46 of Night Shift

CHAPTER 8

CALLIOPE

The only thing I hate more than a mandatory staff meeting is a mandatory staff meeting held at two a.m. during an ongoing supernatural crisis.

You’d think the biggest perk of working at Ghoulish Grinds, an occult-adjacent coffeehouse, is that the coffee part outweighs the occult. Wrong. In the days since Erebus’s grand romantic gesture—which is what Mrs. Garcia now calls The Situation—Blackthorn Bay’s entire infrastructure has slipped like noodles through a colander. We—the baristas, the volunteer latte-art demonstrators, the sandwich-generation witches pulling double espresso shots for their caffeine-overdosed interns—are left to mop up the unending spill.

No one’s sleeping right. You’d think perpetual night would thrill insomniacs, but even the vampires clocking in for overnight shifts look nervous. Our circadian rhythms are not adaptable; we’ve all started resembling the fish at Big Willie’s Sushi, which rumor says come from the storm drains. Glazed eyes, slow blinks, occasional unprompted violence.

Tonight’s meeting features full-blast Daylight bulbs dangling over the service counter and Donut Messiah’s finest—a dozen donuts that taste like they could kill a god. Their logo is a cherubic infant impaled on a cruller. I try not to take symbolism too seriously, but this seems like a neon sign from the universe.

Petra perches on the espresso machine’s edge, hunched over a mug of yerba mate and a half-stitched voodoo doll.

“He’s blocked my number,” she moans, not for the first time.

“I don’t think you can guilt-trip primordial darkness,” I say, though secretly I admire the effort. “He’s not your ex, Pet.”

“He’s all our ex now.” She glowers at the mug, then at me. “We’ve all been dumped, Calliope.”

My own phone sits on the condiment bar, screen off, battery dead. There are texts from Erebus I’m pretending not to read, their little blue dots of unreadness pulsing like guilt.

I miss him.

That is the most infuriating part.

I can be angry at him and still remember the way he looks at me like I’m the first interesting thing to happen since the formation of the universe. I can know he is wrong and still want to find him sitting at his usual table when I turn around.

Apparently love does not have the decency to become inconvenient only when you stop feeling it.

Mrs. Garcia presides from a circle of folding chairs set up by the pickup window. Her knit beanie reads HOT YOGA INSTRUCTOR, which is only partially a lie.

“The real issue is the goats,” she announces. “They’re overstimulated. Yesterday, Bean and Chorizo took down the crosswalk sign in the parking lot. Had to herd them back with a stun gun.”

Petra leans forward.

“Are you saying the lack of dawn is making the goats feral?”

“They’re daytime creatures. Their internal clocks are shot.”

“What about ours?”

Mrs. Garcia gestures broadly at the room.

“Look around.”

Fair.

“The longer this goes on, the sooner we go full Lord of the Flies.”

“With goats?” Petra asks.

“With everybody.”

Petra takes a long drink of yerba mate.

Then something changes in her expression.

I know that expression.