“This is exactly why I can’t just concentrate on my research and leave the fieldwork to somebody else,” I muttered to no one in particular.

I stopped on the way out to pick up my newest batch of hate mail.

Most of the nastiness we received came by email. It was easier to send threats and bile via the keyboard than to write it all out by hand, and for most of these people, their laziness was second only to their poor spelling.

I took the handwritten ones more seriously. These people were invested in their hate. They took the time to scrawl page after page of graphic, grammatically tortured prose describing the evils I and New Millennium represented, and the horrific fates we would all suffer for our sins.

All physical mail was screened by security before delivery. We made sure law enforcement received copies. Those letters were also scanned and saved on our servers as evidence in case anyone tried to carry through on their threats.

I’d begun posting the most creative, interesting, or bizarre letter I got each month in a place of honor outside my door, where all could marvel at the people with far too much time on their hands. Last time, it had been a gentleman who was angry about our use of animals in magical research. He apparently thought our PETA protesters were too laid-back and easygoing, and suggested my team should be skinned alive, our hides tanned into leather, our meat processed into McNuggets, and our bones ground into gelatin to be fed to little children in Easter jellybeans.

It was the jellybean bit that earned him a spot by my door. That and the crude drawing he’d included of the Easter Bunny skipping along, carrying what I assume was supposed to be my bloody head, but looked more like a hairy pumpkin in oversized glasses.

The nice thing about people like Jellybean Man was that I knew exactly where I stood. There was no subtlety, no subterfuge or second-guessing. It was a refreshing change from talking to politicians.

I waved my ID at the scanner in front of the main doors to the Franklin Research Tower. A musty odor greeted me as I walked past the guard at the front desk. Patricia Bordenkircher was the only zombie on site. She’d been infected from a zombie romance novel, a subgenre I never would have imagined being popular enough for libriomancy.

As long as she fed regularly—and we had an ongoing contract with a butcher from Vegas, along with a week’s supply of cow brains in an industrial freezer—she appeared as human as the rest of us. She was significantly stronger, with a powerful sense of smell, and teeth strong enough to crush bone. She looked up from her knitting as I passed.

“How’s the grandkid?” I asked.