Page 1 of (Mostly) Human Resources

PROLOGUE

His backpack beat a bruising rhythm against his spine in time with his footfalls. His joints burned with every step, but fear kept him moving. Pain was nothing—so long as the beast didn’t catch him.

His heartbeat thundered in his ears, matched only by the bone-shaking pace of the beast crashing through the forest behind him. Its strides were steady, relentless, shredding the thicket, unencumbered by ivy or the thorny branches scoring its skin.

Dense clouds dulled the moon’s pale glow, but just enough light slipped through to catch a glimmer of water between the trees. Mill Creek cut across the path ahead, and he tumbled in, ankle-deep, the cold soaking his shoes. On the far bank, he hauled himself up the muddy incline, breath ragged.

He looked back.

The beast loomed at the water’s edge, moonlight glinting off sharp, ivory bone and black, hollow eyes. He scrambled back, losing his footing. Panic seized him, choking the air from his lungs. An arm reached out—moss and bone and decaying flesh.

He screamed, and only the forest answered.

CHAPTER 1Entity Headquarters, South Carolina

Entity: A beacon of light in the dark. Specializing in the understanding, classification, conservation and management of supernatural or paranormal creatures and entities.

When the phone rang for the fifth time in as many minutes, Alexys considered throwing it through the window.

She had been trying for the last three hours to clear her inbox of pending cases, barely even pausing to eat lunch at her desk, but the phone was unrelenting. Alexys snatched the receiver from its cradle and modulated her voice in her friendliest tone: “Thank you for calling Entity, this is Alexys in Human Resources. What can I do for you?”

Her inbox chimed at that precise moment, and her right eye twitched.

“Bad time?” It was her colleague Natalie, fellow HR caseworker and confidante. Her shoulders relaxed.

“Just a little,” Alexys groaned. “If I don’t get through the backlog of cases before the leadership meeting, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Cutting it close, I see,” Natalie said with a careless laugh. “You know they care more about completion numbers than pending cases anyway, right?”

Theybeing the corporate overlords that governed their lives.

Alexys cursed under her breath. “Do you need something, or are you just calling to complain?”

“I’m doing you a favor actually,” Natalie chided. “I’m tying up your line.” Alexys rolled her eyes, but a smile tugged at her lips.

Small blessings.

“You’re wasting my most precious pre-meeting time where I quietly wallow in self-pity.”

“Fair enough,” Natalie said. “But in all seriousness, the infield evaluations are on the agenda. It’ll be a long one.”

Alexys took a deep breath, eyed the keyboard, and seriously considered introducing it to her forehead. Her email pinged again.

“I hear that sound in my sleep, I swear,” she groaned.

Natalie snorted. “Just keep your eyes on the prize, yeah? Free coffee at the meeting.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Yeah, yeah, see you soon.”

Alexys put the phone down and uttered a silent prayer it wouldn’t ring again.

Entity’s move to an online booking system was meant to reduce calls, but even the best-laid plans had flaws. By the time cases reached Alexys’s desk, they hit like a hurricane. Nothing could ever wait, but Alexys appreciated that ghouls, cryptids and other assorted nightmare-makers rarely took a day off. And for some reason, Alexys just so happened to be in charge of one of the busiest Districts in the country.

To Entity, the U.S. wasn’t a nation but a grid: 20 Districts, carved into smaller, numbered Quadrants. Each District had a human resources manager, and every Quadrant a Warden. Wardens were Entity’s eyes on the ground: the salesmen and the investigators. Alexys was in charge of District 13 and its four Wardens, handling every case that survived the system’s pre-set filters for Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia (with the occasional jurisdictional squabble over Tennessee). It was Alexys’s job to determine which cases warranted investigations, and which requests could be filtered into the proverbial trash can. Compelling cases were passed off to one of her Wardens, who took point on the investigation from there. But truthfully, as soon as monsters entered the equation, that was when Alexys’s work truly began.

She was, after all, in Human Resource Management, emphasis onmanage the humans.That included those they employed, and those who technically employed them, by keeping everyone alive. Alexys was fairly certain that no company on Earth required more human wrangling than Entity. The clients were bad enough, but the Wardens? Not much better. Monster hunting was never an easy gig, Alexys knew. And still, all things considered, Alexys genuinely loved her job. But the days leading up to the monthly leadership meeting never seemed to go her way, and it left her resenting the case filing system, her phone, and her desk chair for being far too wobbly. It was a good day if the only thing she had to do was assign cases, and it was a downright miracle if her inbox ever emptied. Add in the incident reports, and the complaints, and the follow-ups, and …