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.”
    I lifted my head and looked around. “For real?” I lowered my voice. “What about Wesker? Doesn’t he need you up at Tome, Sweet Tome cataloging those books in the Black Stacks?”
    Jane shook her head. “I told him one of them bit me in a ‘lady place’ and I had to have it checked out. He didn’t really ask questions after that.”
    “Great, then,” I said. I started flipping through one of the piles in front of me. “Can you find me a T-642?”
    Jane pulled up a pile of papers off the top of Connor’s desk and held them up for me. “Are any of these them?”
    I stared across the partners desk at her.
    “What?” she said. “We don’t get all this paperwork in the arcana division.”
    I looked at the forms in her bunch and grabbed the appropriate one out of it.
    “Thanks,” I said. “Make sure you put them back the way you found them, okay? Connor was a bit anal about things before he left.”
    Jane looked at the neat towers of paper over on Connor’s side of the desk. “He is coming back, right?”
    “He’d better,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad he took the time when he did. He took it pretty hard when the address we found for his missing brother turned out to be a dead end …”
    “That wasn’t just a dead end,” Jane said. “The whole block had been demolished, probably to make way for another Trumptastic eyesore …”
    I sighed. “I just wish Other Division had the budget to get a temp in here.”
    “Like I said,” Jane said, batting her baby blues at me. “I’m here to help. Remember, I was a temp.”
    “Yes, for cultists.”
    She started sorting out several of Connor’s stacks. “Same diff,” she said. “Just less bloodstains on the paperwork.”
    The two of us fell silent for most of the afternoon, plowing through case files, research requests, and requisition forms. Several of the piles started to shift in size or dwindle away as I interofficed forms to the four winds. I was thrilled to find that several inches of Connor’s in-box could simply be shredded, as they were catalogs from Gravediggers Monthly , Parapsychology Today , or The Sharper Image . In the end, with Jane’s help I not only managed some progress in my existing caseload; I had a somewhat detailed report of the creature from the grocery store set to go off to the Inspectre’s office. I carried it upstairs and slid it under his door and ran off again before I could be cornered into anything else. When I got back to my desk, Jane looked ready to leap out of Connor’s chair.
    “We good to go?” she said.
    “If we leave now,” I said, scooping up my shoulder bag. “If traffic’s light, we can hit the Theatre District before curtain.”
    Jane jumped up from her chair and the two of us headed back through the office, out into the theater, and up the center aisle as Hannibal Lecter listed some of his favorite ingredients when dining on the census taker. Jane leaned over to me and spoke softly.
    “You know, all this paperwork? Kinda makes me long for the old days.”
    “When we started dating?”
    “No,” she said, “before that. My Sectarian days, back when I was all villainous and trying to kill you.”
    I pulled aside the curtain at the top of the aisle, the one that led back into the coffee shop. “Really?”
    Jane nodded and stepped through. “At least it was interesting. And involved less paper cuts.”
    “True,” I said. We fell in step side by side. I threw my arm around her and squeezed her tight as we headed toward the door and the street. I leaned into her. “I miss you trying to kill me, too.”

3
    It was funny how quickly a lovely evening could go straight to hell, all in a span of twenty minutes. The concrete and glass canyons of Manhattan zoomed outside the windows of our minivan cab. It sped along at a brisk pace, unlike the conversation between Jane and me. That had put on the brakes and skidded to a halt … possibly even spun out of control.
    “You could have let it go to