Page 35 of Sweeter than Honey

“Oh, I thought maybe you had a beau,” my mother frowns. “If you’re not going to get back together with Dylan, then you should really be looking for someone else, Lily. At your age, most women are married, orstillmarried. If you want Eli to have any sisters or bothers…”

“I have to get to work, mom,” I say, grabbing my purse and keys. “I’ll be home before midnight.” I give Eli a kiss on the top of his head. “Be good for grandma!”

And I’m off to work.

IwishI didn’t have the daytime shift.

Chapter 13: Human Resources

Lily

The first few hours of my shift fly by. After having a week off, I’m sharper and even more enthusiastic than usual, jumping between projects and supporting the hotel staff with renewed energy. Ilovegetting into the flow at work, and there’s no shortage of things to catch up on.

“Come in!” calls a piercing voice. I enter the Human Resources office with a pile of completed forms in my hand.

Mel sits cross-legged behind her desk, working intensely at a Rubik’s cube she holds in her long fingers. Her eyes seem to be flashing different colours depending on the side of the cube she’s working on. Her tangled green hair falls in waves around her, and she wears a bright yellow blazer with what looks like a small twig sticking out of the pocket. She looks like how you would dress if you had just a passing idea of what businesspeople were supposed to look like, but you’d never actually seen one in person.

I’ve always suspected she was some sort of magical person, but I have no idea what she could be. I know there are vampires, and witches, and people who can turn into animals (animals!), but I’m not too familiar with other magical groups. Are fairies a thing? That seems plausible, given the colour palette and her general inability to focus on anything for more than a second.

Except this Rubik’s cube, apparently.

She sighs heavily, and slams the uncompleted cube down on herdesk with a shake of her head.

“Ridiculous,” she says. Her golden eyes survey me, as though she’s just noticed I’m here. “Oh, Lily. What are you doing here?”

“I have some questions about the paperwork that Lexi collected from the new internship students,” I say.

Mel stares at me, without blinking.

“Um, I think we’re going to have to redo some of them,” I continue, shuffling through the hastily-completed forms. “One of them listed ‘the Devil’ as her emergency contact…?”

“Oh, that’s Lilith,” Mel replies. “The Devil is her dad.”

I stare back at her, sure I’ve misheard. “What?”

Mel waves her hand impatiently. “It’s fine. Just put ‘Lucifer Morningstar’ and hope that you never have to call Him.”

“That’s the other thing,” I say, gesturing to a line on the form. “We need to have a way to get in touch with students’ emergency contacts, in case something happens. But there’s no phone number, or even an email address. It just says, ‘Speak His name thrice and He shalt appear before ye.’”

“Well, thatishow you contact him,” Mel says with a sigh. “Is there anything else?”

She looks at me as though I’ve interrupted her doing something very important, rather than solving a Rubik’s cube in the middle of the work day.

“No, I suppose not,” I say, standing to go back to my office.

But then something occurs to me, and I turn back toward her. “Actually…there was something I was thinking of asking you about…”

She stare at me blankly. “What is it, Lily?”

“Well…” I sit down again, not sure how to phrase what I want to ask her. “I just have a hypothetical question. Not, like, that anything’s happened or anything, I was just talking to a friend of mine, andshewas asking…”

Mel doesn’t say anything.

“Uh…I was just wondering if the hotel…has a policy about workplace relationships?”

Her head cocks to one side. “Relationships?”

I feel my face reddening. “Yes, like,romanticrelationships. If, say…someone were to decide to get in a relationship with someone else at the hotel. You know, like Celine and Amara.”