Moira #5: Interview

When Moira steps into the restaurant, the disdain from the maître d’ as he looks her over is palpable. “May I help you?”

She doesn’t think she looks that bad. Yes, she’s in jeans, but they’re jet black and unfaded. She’s got nice sandals on her paws. She’s in a blouse for once. The jacket is leather, but fashionable. “I’m here to meet someone.”

The stoat arches a brow, and his whiskers twitch. Eventually he offers a stiff smile. “Please take a seat while you wait.”

Moira sits, and glances at her watch. She’s not late, but she’s not early, either. Frankly, she’s not sure she should have come at all. She doesn’t know who she’s meeting. He’d left her voicemail and email and sent actual physical mail, though. She’d ignored it all except for that last one: an envelope with a short, single-page letter inside.

I understand your reticence, believe me. But I’m serious when I say my firm may have a role for you in it. Please give me a chance to sync up in person for a few. I may not convince you, but you’ll at least understand why I’m so keen on a chat. Drinks this Saturday at Axe & Larder, 4pm? Best, Max Howell.

It was on expensive, cotton bond letterhead: Celestial Capital Private Equity Group. And the “MVH/as” typed in the lower left corner suggested it had been typed by Howell’s secretary, so it likely came from the actual office. Didn’t rule out stalking, but it made it less likely. But what the hell “role” would she have at a private equity group?

A fox walks into the restaurant, and her eyes immediately widen.

It’s not that he’s unusually attractive—well, he is, in that “fashion model in a suit” way. But what grabs her attention isn’t the perfect haircut or the thousand dollar blazer, not the whole “Ivy League bad boy” vibe. Those just make her want to punch him. No, it’s that she can tell, instantly, that he’s not mortal.

The snooty stoat recognizes him, too, but just as a regular. He beams. “Mr. Howell.”

“Hey, Jim.” He fist-bumps the maître d’, who looks just as awkward doing a fist-bump as you’d expect. “Business interview.” He looks over at Moira and grins. “And you must be Moira.”

She stands. “Must be.” As she takes the fox’s hand, Jim looks stricken.

“Max Howell, Celestial Capital. You are one tall rabbit.” Max grins. “Let’s head to the back.” He motions her to follow him into the bar. Like the rest of the place, it’s decorated in grayscale, but everything shifts darker; the wood flooring switches from light ash to ebony, the walls become dark grey instead of white.

He’s tall, too, but she still has an inch or two on him. “I’m a hare.”

“Never been clear on the difference. Hares are bigger?” He slides into a booth near the back.

She takes the opposite side. “Right.” She leans back, studying him. Another god? How? Conmac was a trickster, but he’d never been a disguise artist. Anyway, as far as she knows he sailed beyond the sea at the end of the last age. But if Max here isn’t from the old era, that raises even more questions. She asks the most straightforward one. “Who are you?”

“I already introduced myself.” There’s a hint of a grin on his muzzle as he meets her gaze with his. “But you know why I wanted to talk now, don’t you?”

When the waitress comes by, Max orders something called a Last Word. Moira asks for whatever their double IPA is. When she heads off, Moira looks back at Max, crossing her arms expectantly.

“Simply put, our company looks for people with our… natures to recruit. And it’s rare and exciting to find someone we just didn’t know about. Also a little concerning.”

“Okay. I’m kind of offended that you don’t know who I am, but I’m still stuck on how you’re with a private equity company that… finds and hires gods?”

He laughs. “Now I know who you are. Or should I say, who you were. When was the last time you had a tale told or a song sung about you? The gods of your era are, well, literally bygone.” He spreads his hands. “At least, so we thought, until we started getting reports about a giant rabbit—excuse me, hare—woman. A giant pika in a fucking wheelchair. A bacchanalia involving hundreds of herbivores.” He sighs, taking a big swig of his drink. “We don’t do that sort of thing now, and until recently, neither did you.”

They stop talking for a moment as the waitress drops off the drinks. Moira shrugs. “Hey, everyone at that ‘bacchanalia’ just remembers it as a dream.”

“One, since we’re having to recruit an entirely new police force, I’m going to call bullshit on ‘everyone.’ Two, it was a vivid shared dream that’s left more than a few wolves and tigers confused about why they’re happy being led around on a leash by mice and sheep, and more than a few mice and sheep happy to hold leashes.”

Oh, she hadn’t heard that. She grins. “That’s pretty cool.”

Max sighs and sets his glass down. “You really are out of the loop, aren’t you?”

“Loop? There hasn’t been a loop to be in for a thousand years. People stopped believing in us and we left. Except for me, because I’d already been written out.”

“There are new gods. Our work is all around you. You had stone and wooden temples. We have banks. We have skyscrapers.” He swings a hand around as if indicating a grand panorama. “We have all this. And this is what I want to bring you in on.” He leans toward her. “You’ve been blending in with the mortals so well we didn’t even know you were here. And that meant what? Not just no magic, no worshippers, but… nothing. Down with the bottom ninety-nine percent. And you’re bored, aren’t you? From the legendarily rebellious goddess of love herself to… frankly, there’s not much evidence you’re doing anything at all.”

She looks around. This isn’t a temple, it’s an overpriced hipster gastropub. “You name it, I’ve probably done it. Fletcher, blacksmith, courtesan, miller, brewer, steamboat crew, printmaker, punch card operator, pretzel seller, census taker—”

Max groans. “If that list isn’t a sign of a desperately bored immortal, I don’t know what is. Come on. You’re a goddess, Moira.” He swirls around his drink like it’s wine. “Frankly, we don’t care why you were exiled. It’s a different time now, a different pantheon, a different focus. Don’t make these weird little magical disruptions to entertain yourself. Make a difference.”

“By… joining a financial firm.”

“You think that sounds crazy, but what runs the world now?” He pauses for effect, but doesn’t wait long enough for her to answer. “Capital. Money. And who channels the energy, follows the ley lines, creates the divine magic?” He spreads his hands. “We do. We have key investments and ownership stakes in every industry, every country. Shape the world with us, Moira. Rule the way modern gods do.”

Moira has been sinking lower in her seat as the fox talks. It’s been centuries since she’s had her worldview upended and she’s remembering why she doesn’t like it. Why can’t a revelation about the universe show it’s better than she thought for once?

“Gods aren’t rulers, Max,” she finally says. “They’re gods.”

He gives her a blank look.

“Sometimes we’re down here—well, were down here—meddling with this and nudging that, having petty fights, bestowing favors and curses, bedding mortals, whatever. But we’re archetypes. We’re legends. Role models. Cautionary tales. We’re not kings or presidents or prime ministers or… or bankers.”

Max opens his muzzle, closes it, gets the kind of expression twenty-somethings get when they’re trying to explain the internet to grandma. “And how did that all work out for you? I’m on the cover of business magazines and you’re in passages in musty history books. I’m flying private jets to private islands and you’re slumming in some random city picking bar fights.” He sighs, adapting a more earnest tone. “Look. You’re bitter. I get it. But you want to get back in the game. Stop pissing around creating messes we have to send out cleaners for and—”

“‘Cleaners.’” Her voice drops to an ominous monotone. “Cleaning. What.”

The fox’s ears skew and he laughs uneasily. “Moira, you can’t go around just handing out quasi-divinity like party favors. We have to find people you’ve affected and…” He waves a hand. “I don’t know. Bring them in or shut them down.”

She stares at him silently until his ears fold down. “There’s just one thing I need to know, then.”

“What’s that?”

“What you’ll do if I do this.” She reaches out and taps his hand with a finger, then lifts the finger away slowly, tracing it around lazily in circle.

He watches in confusion. “Do—”

She taps the finger to the side of her beer glass. With a surprised yip and a small splash, Max drops into the IPA like he’d just been pushed into a pool. The newly tiny fox splutters, trying to tread beer and glancing all around in a panic before he looks up at the looming hare.

“Moira!” he shrieks. “For all the gods’ sake.” He looks more cross than nervous, lifting a hand over his head and snapping his fingers. There’s a brief flash—

—and nothing else. He sinks down into the beer with a surprised expression.

Moira picks up the glass. “You’re gonna have to do better than that to get out.” She takes a swig of the beer, and he shrieks again as he bounces off her lower lip. Now he looks nervous.

“M-Moira!” He squeaks, then quickly tries to compose himself to look and sound as authoritative as someone shrunk to a few inches tall in someone else’s drink possibly can. “Enough. We’re colleagues. Restore me right now.” The fox’s voice is firm, reasonable, not as much commanding as inspiring, the kind of voice that gets armies to march into battle for lost causes. Any mortal wizard would have followed the “request” instantly.

Moira, though, is no mortal. “Nice try.” She gives the glass a quick swirl, sending Max into a brief whirlpool and another shrieking fit. She smirks. “What else you got?”

He treads water faster, looking out and out panicked now. She can feel more attempts to throw magic at her, but they’re about as menacing—and as effective—as spitballs.

She shakes her head and takes another drink, this time letting the force of the cascading beer hold him against her lower lip for several seconds. Then she sets the glass down firmly on the table, hard enough to make him go under, as she stares down with a grin so predatory dire wolves would stand and applaud. “You new gods of capital may be great at the capital part, but from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re absolute shit at the god part.”

“I told you, this isn’t what we do now! Please, just—”

“Tell me what you did to Hazel and Diana.”

“Who?”

She picks up the glass again and takes another drink. This time she sucks him in just enough to let his face hit her lower front teeth.

He wails. “I don’t know I swear please let me talk!”

She lowers the glass, but doesn’t set it down, focusing on the bedraggled, soaked fox.

He gulps, spluttering in the beer again. “L-look. We’d give them the same kind of offer we—not as good as we’d make you, of course, since they’re—very inexperienced. But we’d g-go out of our way for them! We don’t get m-many diversity hires at, uh, your level…”

Moira frowns, studying him as he desperately fox-paddles in the IPA. “Meaning your new gods are mostly men, mostly carnivores, or what?”

“I… I guess we are. Nothing formal about it, just that women and herbivores aren’t as likely to have that… uh…” He glances from side to side at the glass walls.

“That ‘killer instinct,’ right?” She lifts the glass up to her muzzle again.

He whines, trying futilely to swim away. “We both know g-gods can’t kill other gods.”

Moira lifts a brow. “Who told you that?”

He stares up at her, horrified. “It’s… it’s in the employee handbook.”

“Max, we both know I’d make a lousy employee.” She tilts the glass back, opening her mouth wide.

“No no no!” Max can’t stop himself from racing along with the drink. He manages to brace himself with his hands on her huge bottom teeth, yowling as the beer races past him. She gives him a couple seconds of hang time there before flipping his hands and arms up with the tip of her tongue. His yowl increases in terrified pitch as he slides along that tongue like a waterslide, becomes a splutter when he hits the back of her throat, then fades after she swallows.

She sets the nearly empty glass down, wipes her lips, and gets up.

Jim the stoat gives her a furrowed brow look as she approaches, glancing back in the bar. “Where’s Mr. Howell?”

She shrugs. “He got drunk.”

His frown deepens. “That’s not like him,” he says archly.

“Yeah, things change.” She pats him on the shoulder as she walks past. “At least, they’re going to.”