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not going to come to me, I had to come to you.”
    “But here? On the subway? Right now? ” I glared at him, hoping he’d at least put a spell on himself to prevent anyone of the human persuasion from noticing the cute little goat haunches he happened to be sporting.
    Oh, did I forget to mention Jarvis is a faun who prefers to go around without pants—regardless of the fact that not wearing pants is tantamount to sharing entirely too much information about one’s self with people one does not know?
    No one sitting or standing near us seemed to have noticed that a supposedly mythological creature was hoofing it on the subway with them, so I relaxed a little. The last time Jarvis had been spotted out in public, it had been by a little boy at a Starbucks and it had almost caused a scene.
    “I think the time is ripe to make the introduction you promised me,” Jarvis said, interrupting my train of thought and ignoring the look of surprise that overtook my face.
    “Oh that ,” I said, relaxing as I realized Jarvis wasn’t here to badger me on Cerberus’s behalf. The promise he was referring to was of a more personal nature.
    “Yes, that ,” Jarvis replied, getting all persnickety.
    “But now?” I repeated, no witty rejoinder finding its way into my head and out through my mouth.
    “I’ve had my eye on the lady in question, and I feel if I am ever going to act, I must do it now,” Jarvis continued, his thick black eyebrows raised in consternation.
    He may have been a faun—a half-man/half-goat whose human torso balanced precariously upon cloven-hoofed lower extremities right out of the barnyard—but he was still a pretty handsome-looking fellow. He had a head of thick black hair he kept carefully pomaded in place, a Tom Selleck mustache that would be considered “sissy” on anyone else’s face, and dark, luminous eyes that were always keyed in on exactly what I didn’t want them to see. Still, where human women were concerned, I had a feeling his smaller stature—Jarvis was no taller than four-eleven on a good day—and lack of human-looking equipment downstairs might preclude him from catching the eye of the lady he was enamored with at the moment:
    Namely, Hyacinth Stewart, my power-monger boss.
    I’d graduated from Sarah Lawrence with a degree that prepared me for absolutely nothing. Sure, I knew what the term “postmodern feminism” meant, but I’d had no idea how to roll calls or make an Excel spreadsheet. I was woefully unprepared for my first foray into the workforce—despite the fact that I was starting at the bottom rung of the ladder, in what could only politely be termed an “entry-level” position.
    You’d think a chimp could do my job (I’m the Executive Assistant to the Vice President of Sales at the aptly named House and Yard—the company that brings you all the house and yard crap you see at three in the morning on the Home Shopping Network), but you would be sadly mistaken. Dealing with the whims of a highly neurotic boss who wants nothing more than to make my life a living hell is not for the banana-slurping constitution of a primate.
    Opposable thumbs or not.
    I respected Hyacinth for her astute business acumen, but I had loftier goals for myself. I wanted to work for Vogue —or any other fashion rag that would have me—so I was kind of annoyed by my boss’s unwillingness to promote me or, at the very least, put in a good word with one of her publishing diva girlfriends. I just knew she had the connections to give me a leg up if she wanted, but ever since I’d heard through the grapevine—the grapevine being my fellow Executive Assistant in crime, Geneva—that Hyacinth actually liked having me around, I’d known there would be no plans for advancement in my future.
    A fact I was still trying to come to terms with.
    With the economy in the crapper, and me being a coward who hated confrontation, there was no chance I would have it out with Hy. So instead of dealing with my