sludge up the stairs like a regular Jane, when there was a commotion, and I looked up to see lights flickering brightly from...
Hey. My apartment. What the hell?
I had the front door opened, the inner security door opened, and was up the stairs to my landing before I was aware I’d taken my keys out of my coat pocket. It might even have been faster than Translocating.
However fast I was, though, the super was faster. He was standing outside my door, glaring at me like it was all my fault. Clearly he had been waiting for me.
“What the hell’s been going on?” he greeted me. “All day, all night, noises and thumps, and now you’re leaving untended flames when you’re out? And locking the door so I can’t get in? I was about to call the fire department, have them bust down the door.”
I stared at him, totally lost. “I haven’t been home all day,” I said. “I’ve been at work.”
“This has been going on too long,” he said. “I’m tired of hearing the complaints about your parties which were bad enough, but this... ”
I moved past him, putting my keys into the lock, in tent on proving him wrong, that I hadn’t left any flames burning, tended or otherwise. At the same time, the memory of the flickering lights in my window taunted me. What the hell?
I opened the door – and it opened easily, with the standard key he had, too – into a reassuring darkness. Reaching out to flip the light switch, so I could see the super’s face when I told him off, was a mistake, though. The entire apartment was a disaster, furniture shoved utterly out of place, the mattress down on the floor, the sheets piled up in the center of the room like a giant nest.
And my mosaic, my beautiful, delicate, shimmering rainbow glass mosaic, was in a hundred thousand pieces on the floor.
It was too much, on top of the worry about Venec, and the sheer exhaustion of everything else. I almost cried.
“Enough,” the super said, not seeming to care that whatever flames we’d both seen were not only gone, but were never there. “You seemed like a nice kid, but this is enough. There are too many complaints already, this is just the last straw. Building management’s got cause to cancel your lease, for this.”
I heard him, but it barely registered, staring at the disaster of my once-beautiful apartment. The utter chaos...
Chaos. Causing trouble.
My eyes narrowed, even as my brain started to work again. The Roblin. It had to be. Damn it, what did I ever do to that damned imp?
* * *
ten
I suppose I should have, as per orders, reported in immediately. The thought, though, of facing everyone, of dealing with more questions and what-ifs... it was too much. It was all just too much and I needed the quiet to just not-think, for once.
Also, if The Roblin was following me, targeting me, I wanted to be somewhere well-warded to even discuss it.
So instead I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the shards of the mosaic, and putting things back to order, best I could. Current was surprisingly crap at moving physical objects – you needed more energy than it took to move it physically – and I didn’t want to risk even more pissed-off complaints from my neighbors, so mostly I left the heavy stuff where it was for now, and focused on getting my mattress and sheets back up onto the loft platform where they were supposed to be. I’d hoped that the activity would wear me out enough so that I’d be able to fall asleep and not think or dream about either Venec or the weird trace we’d found or The Roblin, sniffing at my heels.
No such luck. The adrenaline rush finally wore off, but my brain was way too revved up to shut down enough to sleep. Unfortunately, it was also too exhausted to do any real thinking. So I ended up sitting on the off-skew sofa, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of cocoa heavily dosed with peppermint schnapps, trying very very hard not to reach out to the sense of Benjamin Venec, in a hospital bed several miles to the north. My trying not to do something, though, apparently had the exact opposite effect, because there was a sliver into my awareness, as though responding to a ping I hadn’t sent.
*sleep?*
*yes, baby* I responded without thinking. *sleep*
Benjamin Venec, drugged