Page 53 of Sincerely, Secretary of Doom

He pulled the book out. A picture filled the cover of a white fox with nine long, luminous tails all with deep red tips. The fox held a ruby in its teeth.

A stifled moan brought him back around to observe his human secretary. She held onto the shelf with one hand for balance as she adjusted her shoe with the other. Mor hadn’t noticed how sharp and deadly those shoes were until she held one up in her hand. He caught a glimpse of torn flesh at her heel before she put the shoe back on. She stood tall again, still wobbling a smidgen when she let go of the shelf. She leaned her back against the bookcase and… her eyes closed.

Queensbane, was she going to take a cursed nap right here in the library?

Mor dragged a hand through his curly hair. “Wake up, Human,” he said, tucking the book under his arm. He walked over to her and dropped to a knee to reach her feet. Violet started when he took hold of the first shoe and tugged it off.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he pulled off the second shoe, too. He stood and handed her the pair of deadly foot weapons—which seemed to really only be a weapon againsther.

“Hold these,” he said. She took them by the stabby points and held them to her chest as Mor reached around her legs and lifted her into his arms. He would have carried her out that way if he wasn’t worried about the wrath of the librarians who might consider his noble act a ‘lovey dovey shenanigan’ and cast him out of this building for eternity. He vanished from the shelves instead.

He put Violet to bed when they returned to the cathedral. She tried to object, but all it took was a little nudge and she’d toppled onto his duvet. Her eyelids didn’t protest—they closed immediately as she mumbled something absurd about bubble tea again, and Mor sighed, fighting the impulse to point out that she was of no use to him in this state. He dug through her purse for her cold iron pills, and he set them on the pillow beside her face so she could find them when she awoke. As he pulled the blanket around to tuck her in, he eyed the scrapes with leaky blood on the backs of her bare heels. No wonder she’d had such trouble keeping up to him on the walk.

Mor left Violet there to sleep off her dizzy spell and he flipped open his library book. He read as he puttered around the cathedral and cleaned with his free hand. The book told stories of nine tailed foxes among humans. Fun, thrilling stories. Completely unrealistic stories. All of the foxes in the tales were cunning females. None of the stories told how to defeat or outsmart a fox, though one told of a human stable boy who swallowed a female fox’s bead during a kiss and stole her powers. Another one told of a great fox feast where the foxes tricked humans into eating poisoned food, then made them bargain to get their lives back. Yet another told of a lonely female fox who stole one thousand secrets and transformed herself into a human. The last two tales he didn’t bother to read. It was all nonsense anyway.

Mor slapped the book shut after several hours. He used both his hands to clean after that.

The cathedral was in much better shape by the end of the day. Mor’s back had grown stiff from all the sweeping and scrubbing and window washing. Even the wooden rail of the stairs was polished.

It didn’t look perfect, but at least the lobby and the living space were shiny. He hadn’t gotten around to sweeping the dusty hallways or stabbing the spiderwebs in the corners with a broom. That was a job for another day.

He stopped at the office to straighten the papers but found that everything had already been tidied up. The articles were organized on the shelf, the desk was clean, and the floor looked to have been scrubbed of its ink stain. Mor ventured in, his fingers trailing over the empty desktop. He paused at a freshly printed paper still sitting in the mouth of the ink-giving machine. It seemed Violet had forgotten to come back for it. He slid the page out and began to read the article, already having every intention of publishing it, but no intention of letting her know that right away. She’d come riding into his cathedral on such a high horse, he was determined to make her work hard for her accolades at The Fairy Post.

Violet’s words soared off the page. A slow smile crept over Mor’s mouth when he reached the end of her work. “Secretary” didn’t feel like a fitting title for the human female scribe. Not that this was the first time he’d read her articles. Perhaps he had been a little obsessed with Violet Miller’s writing even before he saw what she looked like on TV and had been nearly assaulted by her in his bell tower. Though her prettiness had nothing to do with anything.

Mor cleared his throat and stuffed the page back into the printer’s mouth where it lay flat on the tray. It wasn’t like her articles were the only ones he had been saving all this time. It wasn’t like the thought of her writing columns alongside him made him feel warm and cozy and happy on the inside. It wasn’t like that.

Dusk came over the human city before he knew it, and Mor headed to the upstairs closet to fetch a blanket so he could sleep on the couch.

A sound emerged from his bedroom—muffled voices. He chose a thin blanket from the stack in the closet and headed to peek into his room. He’d assumed Violet would wander to the office after she woke, but when he cracked the door open, he saw her sitting on his bed staring at her phone, her covers off, her hair tousled, and her cheeks… stained with tears. His fist tightened around the door handle as he debated whether to announce himself and go in.

He spied a human news reporter on Violet’s phone screen. Mor tilted his ear to listen.

“…and the whole hospital is sympathizing with thirteen-year-old Sophie Ellis as we all hope and pray for her to wake up. The girl lived at the Moon City Youth Home along with fourteen other kids. The accident occurred early this morning when a passing truck lost control and struck her. Sophie Ellis’s injuries are critical, but the doctors say she may pull through.” The voice changed, and Mor guessed he was listening to the doctor now. “Miss Ellis may never be the same if she wakes up. In some head injury cases like these, the victims must deal with repercussions their entire lives.”

“Violet.” Mor stepped in to interrupt her show.

Violet glanced up from her phone, revealing a look of torment on her face a split second before she dragged the back of her hand over her eyes and wiped it away. Her black eyelash paint stained her knuckles. She cleared her throat and tried to smooth down her disorderly hair.

Her watery green gaze darted back to his. With her face paint smudged, Mor could see her freckles—the same freckles he’d spotted the other night and had needed to see up close.

“If you break every time you see someone who appears as helpless as you felt in your childling years, you’ll never be able to survive,” he said. He came to the bedside, having the strangest overwhelming impulse to push her hair behind her ear. As it was, half her face was covered in stringy, tear-drenched hair strands. But his hand pulled into a stubborn fist at his side so he wouldn’t be a fool.

Violet looked down and nudged her bottle of cold iron. At least she was taking her supplements.

“She’s just thirteen years old. And she lives in a youth home, so even if she wakes up, she has no one. Those are always the worst stories,” Violet rasped.

Mor swallowed, his throat a smidgen tighter than normal. In the beginning, Violet had appeared quite strong and goal driven. But in this moment, she looked like a lost childling who couldn’t figure out where she belonged. Perhaps he should have never prodded into her story while he interviewed her in the kitchen. Perhaps this unearthing of her feelings was his fault. Perhaps he hated the way it felt to see tears on her face, even if their relationship was professional.

He didn’t feel like being professional at the moment.

She wiped the damp hair away from her face on her own, and he was relieved he didn’t have to do it. Though, one measly rebellious strand still stuck to her freckled cheek. Mor’s fingers twitched. He couldn’t stop looking at it, feeling its call to be dealt with. She was not his to hold, or to comfort, or to fix up. Queensbane, he would plunge himself into an ice-cold shower after this until he started thinking reasonable thoughts about his secretary again.

Her lashes fluttered when her eyelid paint got in her eyes. She tried to wipe it away, but she missed a gleaming black spot entirely, and Mor fought an exasperated sound, clasping his hands together. “I know I’m the one who told you to take your cold iron, Human, but I’m pretty faeborn frustrated that I can’t touch you right now,” he blurted at her. He didn’t mean for it to come out hoarse, or with begging, or laced with a tone of desperation that surprised himself.

He was relieved humans did not hear stories in the tones of speech. He may have had a faeborn heart attack if she’d caught what his had just said.

Violet’s expression was unreadable. It was somewhere in the vein of startled, but there was something else hiding in the cracks of it all, too. Her slender throat moved as she swallowed, and she shoved the blankets aside. Heat rushed through Mor as he realized he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and he worried perhaps she had picked up on the story in his words after all.

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