The Tenants of 7C: The 7C Stories, #1

By Alice Degan

On a back alley in Toronto's Kensington Market, above the Heaven & Earth Bakery, there's an apartment with a room for rent. The rent is negotiable. The location varies. Humans need not apply.

Clare is human. Definitely human. But she's got a job to do—staging fake vampire hunts for high-paying tourists with Stake, Inc.—and the young tenants of apartment 7C are weird enough that one of them might be a good candidate for the gig. Clare has already sourced the fake blood.

But if magic is real, and so are the bakery's otherworldly customers … Clare is in deeper than she knows. And it's not just her soul at stake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sexton's Cottage
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781988086231

Book preview

The Tenants of 7C

THE TENANTS OF 7C

THE 7C STORIES

BOOK ONE

ALICE DEGAN

Sexton’s Cottage

The Tenants of 7C

Alice Degan

© 2023 by Alice Degan

Published March 2023 by Sexton’s Cottage Books.

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Alice Degan

Cover photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

CONTENTS

The Tenants of 7C

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Alice Degan

THE TENANTS OF 7C

Clare never talked very much about her job. Partly that was because she wasn’t supposed to; the confidentiality agreement that she had signed when she was hired had been oddly long and draconian for an arts-administration position. Mostly , though, it was because she knew nobody outside of her workplace would really get it.

She’d always assumed she would have a job like this, something that would make no sense to people, something where they’d smile and say patronizingly, Oh, that must be interesting, and then ask her some question so dumb and off-base that she wouldn’t even know how to answer it. That kind of thing had just always been the pattern of her life.

So it was easy, when the new app came online, and Clare’s promotion meant her clearance was upgraded, and she learned what the confusing parts of the confidentiality agreement had really been about, to just keep not talking about any of it. Well, that part was easy.

Before the new app and the promotion, Clare had known exactly where she stood in the hierarchy at Stake, Inc. She could look around the high-ceilinged, brick-walled, open-concept office space and place herself precisely: higher than the temps and the special-effects team, inferior to Jake and Laurence, the two hunt coordinators. Now that hierarchy had shifted, with Clare on a level with Jake and Laurence, but the two men had yet to acknowledge it, and that bothered Clare.

And then finally, one day about a month after that first shocking staff meeting, her manager came and propped himself against the edge of her workstation and said, Clare, how would you like to work on a premium today?

She looked up at him, startled, and some part of her wanted to say, truthfully, But I have all these vampire contracts from last week to process, and I have to get on the phone with Mount Pleasant and convince them that we won’t have a repeat of what happened in November, otherwise we won’t have a cemetery to use on the thirteenth, and …

It was the other part of her, the part that lit up at the thought of clawing her way to the top, finally getting Jake and Laurence to admit that she was at least their equal, that won out. She swivelled her chair toward Seevers, turning on her best expression of nonchalant competence, and said, Sure, what would you like me to do?

An hour later, Clare sat in her car, studying a map of the city on her phone. You never got very many instructions at Stake , but even for them, this was a little thin. Use your instincts, Seevers had told her. Your instincts are supposed to be really good. He’d smiled, and she wondered detachedly what sort of smile he thought that was, how did he categorize it to himself, because it didn’t seem very effective to her. Consult the software, of course, he’d gone on, but you don’t have to rely on it too much. When in doubt, follow your nose.

Which sounded like it might be halfway to admitting that the app wasn’t as good as they had made it out to be when it was first introduced. Relying on your instincts wasn’t part of Stake’s business model, that she knew of.

Focus on the positive. She was getting to work on a premium hunt, getting out into the field—well, downtown Toronto—and, if she was lucky, she’d get to see something cool. Something that most people out there, walking around the streets and sitting in offices and riding the subway, didn’t even know was real.

It was cold in the parking garage, icy inside of the car, and she needed to just make a decision about where to go. The map showed shifting swirls of colour all over the downtown core, where she had zoomed in. Little dots burst like bubbles, lines drifted here and there, and then, in a few places, there glowed solid, stationary pools of whatever it was the app actually tracked. Activity was how they referred to it at Stake.

Obviously—her instincts told her—she needed to head for one of those unmoving blobs. She zoomed in on one, a particularly deep red blob with a glowing purple centre in a corner of Kensington Market. That wasn’t far, and maybe after she was done there, she could get something nice for lunch. Maybe even combine the trip with a bit of quick shopping; she needed some spices that