“Sort of.” I glanced over at my new enemies and shrugged. “Celebrity. You get used to it…Come on, we need to go to the other end of the hall before I can tell the story. These morons just served me with a restraining order because we kicked their asses in a friendly little fistfight.”

“Really? Just for that?”

“It was even a fair fight.”

The Australian scowled at them. “What cocks.”

“I know!”

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Twenty minutes later, the tie was undone, sleeves rolled up, stuffy decorum had been ditched, and I was at the far end of the hall, surrounded by a crowd of Hunters as I told them the story about facing off against the Dread Overlord in its home dimension. After the Australians had drawn attention, I’d picked up a mess of assorted Europeans, some Brazilians, two guys from India, and an absolutely stunning woman from South Korea. Apparently, obliterating a great Old One with a doomsday device designed by Isaac Newton was so awesome that it transcended all cultural and language barriers, plus it helped that I did great sound effects.

Careful to leave out the classified or embarrassing parts, such as me being the Chosen One and surviving zombie bites, Agent Franks’ real identity, the fact that the MCB had been infiltrated by a death cult, or that the Condition’s necromancer had once been a member of MHI, it still made for a pretty nifty story. Plus it had been a while since I’d had an audience where it was legal for me to actually tell it to. Everyone at MHI had already heard it a dozen times.

Earl and Julie came by at one point, with Earl just shaking his head in amazement. I wasn’t getting the information that he wanted, but I was certainly succeeding as MHI’s goodwill ambassador. Offending the gnomes and getting beat up that one time had been an aberration on my diplomatic resume. I could be perfectly decent at networking when I put my mind to it. Julie seemed rather proud of me, and gave me one of those wifely I knew you could do it smiles.

I folded the restraining order into a paper airplane and sailed it over to Julie without even interrupting my narrative. She caught, unfolded, and read it while mouthing something that looked suspiciously like ducking mother truckers, but I’m not very good at lip reading. Julie immediately whipped out her phone, surely to call MHI’s own attorneys. Our little spat with PT was about to get even uglier. You did not want to play business hardball against Julie.

I was surprised when Agent Archer had joined my crowd, though he had probably been sent over to make sure I wasn’t giving away any state secrets. So I pointed him out as one of the heroes of the Arbmunep fight, not that I had any idea what he had actually done during that particular fight, since I’d been rather preoccupied at the time. The young agent’s cheeks grew red with embarrassment, but since I’d now singled him out as one of the good guys, he was pretty much trapped into agreeing with me about how stupendous everything had been.