Not being a scotch man, the burn of it filled my throat, and I waited for it to pass as Godfrey poured us a second round. Already I felt it hitting me stronger than I’d thought it would, and I decided to slowly sip the next one. Unfortunately, drinking in the late afternoon only helped me to feel worse about losing my powers, and I found myself staring blankly into my glass instead of pumping Godfrey for info.

“Simon . . . ?” Godfrey said. I don’t know how long I had been staring, but I lifted my head. “You okay?”

I actually thought about it for a second. Was I okay? A wave of anger overtook me and I slammed my glass down onto the corner of his desk. “Frankly, no, I’m not. Fucking gypsies . . .”

Godfrey sat upright at my language and pushed his glasses back up on his face. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t want to bore you with the details,” I said. “I just . . .”

“No, really, please do tell,” he said. “If I’m about anything, I’m about the details.”

“I just . . . crossed paths with the wrong Romnichal, and now I’m jinxed or cursed or whatever you want to call it. I’m powerless. I haven’t been able to get a psychometric reading off anything all day.”

Godfrey looked at me with sympathy.

“I’m normal now,” I said, with bitter distain in my voice. “I always wondered what type of life I would have lived had I never had my power.”

I didn’t want to get into my past with him, but questions about my whole life started flooding my head. Would I ever have gotten mixed up with Mina and her gang when I had worked the antiques stores? Would I ever have worked at an antiques store? But the scotch was bringing out my darker heart about it all. “The truth is, I miss having them so far. It set me apart from the rest of the world. Not to mention I feel a little scared to be without them. I feel like I’m missing a limb.”

I looked up at Godfrey. He looked hurt.

“What’s your problem?” I asked.

“You act like being normal is a curse,” Godfrey said, a little upset. “Some of us like being ‘normal,’ you know. Most of the planet deals with it.”

I hadn’t come down here to argue. I had come here to try to wean a little information out of my archival little friend.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping to swing the conversation back around. “I wouldn’t label you as normal, Godfrey. I mean, think about it. You have a real knack for being at the right place at the right time.”

“How do you mean?”

Godfrey took a long sip of scotch, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. Daring to soil his coat must have meant Godfrey was flying pretty high already.

“Well,” I said, “the night we took the Sectarians down at the Met, for example. By the time we came rushing out of the building, you were already there taking down details. You were even there before the cops came. And at the boathouse the other night.”

Godfrey nodded, excited to once again be talking shop. “Well, I can’t be everywhere all at once,” he said, “but I’m pretty lucky when it comes to things like that.”

Luck? I wondered. Or something more? I nodded and let a moment of silence pass between the two of us. I didn’t want to seem too eager leading him on, but I needed to know more about his past if my hunch was correct.

“Have you always had this sort of luck?” I asked, hoping I sounded nonchalant about it.

Godfrey Candella took the bait, his eyes lighting up. He seemed more than eager to talk about his life.

“Before I was recruited into the Department,” he said, pushing his horn-rims back into place, “I had lived what an Other Division agent like you might call a quiet and mundane life. Five years ago, I experienced what I thought was a stretch of bad luck. The law firm I had been a clerical assistant at for four years fired me very suddenly, and for no apparent reason that I could figure.”

“That must have been tough.”

Godfrey nodded. “For someone as meticulous about details as I am? Yes, it was. I was devastated, but that only lasted for a couple days.”

“What changed your mind?” I asked.

Godfrey gave a bittersweet smile. “Two days after I was let go, the building exploded.”

“What?”

“It’s true,” Godfrey continued. “They were redecorating the office suite next to my old office and an errant nail gun punctured a gas line. It must have sparked, and WHOOM! Destroyed the whole place.”

I gave an appropriate moment of silence out of respect for the dead. “Yeah, I’d definitely call that lucky.”

“Being the only survivor really shook me up for several months,” he said. Godfrey pulled off his glasses. He looked on the verge of crying. “Survivor’s guilt over my dumb luck.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder.

Godfrey needed a moment to compose himself, taking the opportunity to pour us another round.

“So, then what did you do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “After my near brush with death, I found myself unable to procure another job, which I found astounding, but no one wanted to hire the sole survivor of such a tragedy. Everyone thought I was bad luck. Heck, even I thought I was. I went three months just trying to figure out what I should do with myself. I had no idea. That’s when the letter showed up.”

“Letter?”

“An invitation to become a clerical official to a government office—one that I didn’t realize was secret until I found it hidden away behind the Lovecraft Café, that is. I don’t know how they got hold of me or why they even chose me, but I was running out of money. The timing was perfect.”

Too perfect, I thought, but remained silent. I doubted the D.E.A. would have done anything so nefarious as blow up a building full of civilians to get a new recruit, but there was something weird about all this. No one was this lucky. Maybe Godfrey possessed a power even he didn’t know about.

The D.E.A. didn’t send out blanket snail mail to people hoping to find recruits. They preferred more cryptic means of drawing members to our organization. For instance, I had found them in the classified ads, and the Inspectre was busy screening the people who gravitated toward us at Comic Con. Someone had specifically sent that letter from the D.E.A. to Godfrey. But who, and why? I had my suspicions, but testing them would have to wait until I sobered up just a little. I checked my watch. It was almost time for my daily training with the Inspectre, and hopefully that would yield some answers, too.

25

Even though the immediate threat of vampires seemed like it was gone, Inspectre Quimbley insisted I had to be prepared for the day I met one, so he was once again dressed in his long black Dracula cape, with a padded chest piece bearing a heart target. I found myself fighting both the Inspectre and an entire six-piece dining room set. If I was supposed to “stake” him like the vampire he was pretending to be, I needed to overpower the enchanted furniture and smash it to have something pointy. Compared to things like the rampaging bookcases uptown at Tome, Sweet Tome, an embroidered chair seemed much less menacing . . . or so I thought.

What the dining set lacked in size and crushing power, it made up for in speed and viciousness. The six chairs galloped around the open area of the training room like miniature racehorses. My shins already sported several bruises, and the longer I had to contend with them, the harder I found it to walk around. I hadn’t even managed to grab one of them and break off a stake. My vampire had nothing to fear yet.

To my surprise, I found that showing up a little buzzed for my training actually kept me loosened up. My reflexes were generally slower, but the buzz kept me from overthinking every possible move. I reacted more out of instinct, which saved me from what I could only imagine would have been three times the bruises I was already sporting.