Chapter One

Stephanie

Crap! I don’t want to be late for my interview. I need this personal assistant job.

I check the address in my text stream, then double-check the GPS to make sure I entered it correctly. How is it that I’ve lived less than ten miles from here my whole life and have never been in this part of the area before? I shrug. Although there aren’t many houses around, my phone says I’m going in the right direction.

I may need this job, but I’m not sure I want it. Frankly, I’m nervous as hell. Well, that’s not entirely true. I don’t think my dry mouth and the tightness in my chest are mere nerves. It’s fear edging toward terror.

For the last five years, I’ve been working remotely for a small mom-and-pop startup. Over the last six months, people have been slowly removed from the employee roster. I’d email a coworker and get an auto-response that said the person no longer worked there.

The company hemorrhaged money and laid people off as things worsened. Finally, they couldn’t stay afloat. I was slow on the uptake and didn’t see the writing on the wall. Should I feel proud or foolish that I was the last person they let go?

When Ben and Louise Vance emailed to tell me my services were no longer necessary, starting immediately, they told me I had been indispensable. Well, they’ve dispensed with me now.

With no income, I’ve been scrambling to make ends meet while frantically applying for jobs. The boom in work-from-home jobs that helped me land the job at Vance Industries has turned into a bust.

Remote work is no longer easy to find, and although the Vances appreciated my skill set. I only finished one year of college because I couldn’t manage to support myself and study. Sadly, I don’t have the post-high school education most employers are looking for.

That’s why I desperately need this job.

Working from home meant I have no professional clothing. Who needs more than t-shirts and jeans when you’re at a computer eight hours a day and order DoorDash when you don’t want to eat one more home-cooked grilled cheese sandwich?

I didn’t have the money to buy something for this interview, so I found an old jean skirt in the back of my closet and used the shower to steam my nicest blouse to get out the worst of the wrinkles. My long, brown hair pulled into a low ponytail completes my not-so-chic ensemble.

“Sorry. That’s the best I can do,” I tell the rearview mirror.

It’s not my clothing, though, that’s heating my cheeks and making my heart beat violently in my chest. It’s the guy who’s going to interview me. Alphonse Foster.

That was a shocker.

I sent in my application and received an instant autoreply. I’ve read it so many times that I’ve memorized it.

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for your interest in Job Posting #12884. Before you read the full job description below, please be advised that this job will be approximately half remote and half at my place of business, which is at my home in rural Johnstown, Georgia.

Although I’d been hoping for a completely work-from-home gig, I swallowed and decided half-time in someone’s home office wouldn’t be too terrible, so I read on.

You will report directly to me, Alphonse Foster. Feel free to Google me before you respond to this ad. I’m a minotaur. My father, Senator Sam Foster, recently made headlines. There are plenty of pictures of me online.

If you meet the job requirements and are still interested in the job…

It went on to describe my duties as personal assistant to Mr. Foster, who is in the music business. It sounds as though I’ll be doing a little of everything from website updates to correspondence.

Continuing to follow the turn-by-turn directions of the crisp British man’s voice on my phone, I recall the search I did on the Internet immediately after reading the job duties.

Alfie, as Alphonse is referred to in the press, and his adopted brother Theo, were orphaned on this planet twenty-six years ago. Five thousand Others, as we call them, dropped onto the sands of the Mojave Desert one day.

A quarter of a century later, our best and brightest scientists still don’t have a clue as to where they came from or how they got here. Minotaurs, nagas, orcs, wolf-guys who call themselves wolven, and other species only heard about in fairytales arrived from what my research described simply as another world.

All the Others were rounded up and herded into a fenced area in the worst part of L.A. They’ve been in that ghetto, euphemistically called the Integration Zone, although laughingly called the Exclusion Zone, since then.

Except for Alfie and his adopted brother. His father, the senator, evidently had enough clout to adopt the two unrelated infants. Until a few months ago, they’d pretty much been hidden away in their homes in Georgia.

Their lives turned upside down when a photographer caught Theo kissing a human woman. Their pictures were splashed across the media from The New York Times to TMZ.

During that uproar, Alfie, who’d been secretly creating electronic music that drew from his minotaur heritage, was outed. I’d never heard of him or his group, Labyrinth, which is well-known in millennial circles. My research says sales of his music have increased tenfold since the media frenzy.

After reading the job description and then researching who my new employer would be, I had a long heart-to-heart talk with myself. The idea of working for someone straight out of a fairytale was difficult to wrap my head around.

I spent long minutes poring over his pictures online. His email was correct when it said there were plenty of them. It took me a while to come to terms with the idea of working for a nearly seven-foot-tall, shaggy, horned minotaur. If the job were one hundred percent remote, it would be a dream, but half-time working side by side with him might be a challenge.

While I was still dithering about whether to respond to the job posting, my phone pinged with a text of this month’s energy bill. It’s been a mild winter, so the amount wasn’t higher than expected, but it just reminded me of how few dollars I had left in my bank account.

“How bad could it be?” I ask my empty car. “He’s a senator’s son. I’m sure he’s well-spoken and has good manners. I can get used to anything, including working with someone who differs from me. Besides, the starting salary would be about ten percent more than I’d been making at Vance.”

“Your destination is six hundred feet ahead on your left,” my polite British GPS interrupts my reverie.

Up ahead is a gravel drive with one of those robotic one-armed sentries blocking the entry. Mr. Foster’s instructions said to press the button, and he’d let me in.

I heard a story once that flipping a coin to make a decision was a helpful thing to do. Not that the flip of a coin should determine anything, but that when the coin was in the air and you found yourself wishing for heads or tails, it helped you discover what you wanted.

I don’t physically flip a coin, but as I sit here debating whether to press the button, I decide I actually do want this job.