The lift arrives and opens up into a wide hallway filled with doors. As the directory stated, the office I am looking for is clearly labelled room 416. The sight I walk in upon however, is not that of a bustling office.
It is dead silent.
The stale, recycled air reeks of anxiety and stress, as if everyone in the room is waiting for a guilty verdict from some unseen judge. Nobody looks away from the door in the corner or their screen. If they are not hyper-focused, they are waiting on something or someone. A woman nearest me rushes up before I can even take a step further into the room. Her navy aura is barely visible and her own guilt wafts up to my nose like the smell of fungus on a hot day.
“You must be Augustine,” she whispers. “I’m Andrea. I’ve worked with Joanna for two years now.”
“It is nice to meet you,” I say with sincerity, warmth blossoming in my chest at the thought of Joanna telling her co-workers about me. “I’m taking her for lunch.”
“Good, somebody needs to-”
Before she can finish that thought, a deep shout reverberates through the closed door that everyone is now staring at. Andrea’s fungal guilt smell intensifies, and when she looks at me again, it is tinged with fear.
“Patrick’s not normally like this, I don’t think.”
It takes every grain of sand in my being to hold myself back. He is yelling. At my mate. There is a human who has the audacity to believe that he can speak to my queen with anything but reverence. How dare he? The words I am going to have with this man. The people I am going to speak to so that his life becomes so immeasurably difficult that he will have to go back to whatever Spanish hellhole he crawled out of. As my rage threatens to expose the more beastly side of myself, a tremor of fear arises in the back of my mind.
He is scaring my queen.
The door bursts open and Joanna rushes out, head bowed and running straight towards a different, secluded part of the office. She does not look up from her shoes, but she flinches when the door slams shut again. The visceral scent of her defeat and misery trails behind her until it is abruptly cut off. I take a step forward, absolutely ready to drag my mate from this laminate-floored prison.
This is supposed to be a nice surprise for my overworked mate. I never meant to come upon a scene such as this. I am out of my depths of human emotions, but I need to comfort her, to offer Joanna protection against every dark part of her world, and prove to her again that she is safe with me. The paltry woman standing next to me places a hand on my arm and stops me from following. She rushes after Joanna, and I’m right behind her before another hand grabs me and a familiar voice stops me again.
The rude man from the library quickly removes his hold on me when I glare at him. A deep red surrounds him and the smell of his contempt is so subtle, it blends effortlessly in the concerning emotions of this office. While his appearance meant nothing to me weeks ago, now I look at the middle-aged man in the harsh fluorescents of the office space anew. He is average looking, gangly in a way that most people would find attractive. His hair is overly styled, but the grey around his temples and streaking his hair shows his age.
“Let the girls deal with it,” he says. “Lance Jameson.”
Lance.His name sticks in my head like a fly to paper, buzzing until it will drive me to madness. This is the man my Joanna is so desperate for approval from, who she showers in praise for the smallest things as if he is not your average male. I pull the sneer from my face. Civility and poise are the best course of action here. His name is already on a short list to be taken care of in some fashion.
“Yes, you viewed the Milson Bushwhipper book a few weeks ago.”
“Yeah, yeah, real interesting book. Didn’t know there was so much folklore around the city, but you know what they say,” he smiles, and I raise an eyebrow at him.
“No, I do not know what they say,” I state.
A new tension rises in the air and I breathe in the scent of his nervousness. I hold back my own smirk. This is a good feeling for him. He should be nervous around me. He clears his throat as his eyes size me up, lingering on my lapel pin. It is the one I wore the night Joanna and I completed the bond—a nod to her honey sweetness and her as my queen,mon abeille.
“That’s a nice pin. Do you mind me asking where you got it?”
“It is a family heirloom,” I lie. While the pin is certainly old enough to be considered an heirloom, I have been its sole owner since sometime during the Napoleonic wars, worn as more a fashion statement rather than a show of military prowess. It holds meaning now because I have my own honeybee, but previously it was just one of a collection. If Joanna had told me she hated it, I would have tossed it aside and found something she loved.
“You here to see Patrick?” he asks, changing the subject abruptly when I do not further explain my adornment to him.
“Not this time,” I sneer, thinking I should see this man at some point soon to have a discussion of sorts. “I am here for Ms. Cole.”
“Oh, you have a meeting with Jo? Is she working on a project with the Library? I am sure Patrick would be more than happy to discuss-”
“No.” I cut him off quickly. “This is not a business call but a social one. I have come to take my partner for lunch.”
“Partner?”
On the rare occasion that waking humans lose a grip on their emotions, their auras pulse as their feelings and consciousness try to balance out. Lance’s red aura pulses a spark of vibrance before the air scents with his surprise, a spicy savouriness that reminds me of creole food I sampled during a short stint in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. I let my smirk spread ever so slightly across my lips, the barest hint of my lips turning up.
Maybe I should be perturbed that my Joanna has not told him that she has a mate, a partner for all eternity, the way she has Andrea, but instead I am pleased she does not share personal details about her life with this man. She may view him in a way that I find vexing beyond comprehension, but he is nothing more than a work colleague. He is not worthy of her conversation outside the context of work. Lance is not worthy of her conversation, period.
“Yes, and I do believe that is the correct term for our relationship.” The words do not taste correct on my tongue, but I know humans would not understand the depths of my bond with Joanna.
Another tense moment passes before Andrea and Joanna walk in our direction. Audible only to me and my mate, the guilty woman reassures her that budgeting errors happen. That whatever is going on, the company will survive it. My sands pull tight in my chest at the sight of the tear stains on her cheek, the way her eyes and nose are redder than they should be. Her golden aura is dull compared to how it was last night when she arrived at the library. I never want to see her lose the vibrance of her soul, the brilliance shining in her that only I can see being sucked from her by this place, these people.
