he motioned to one of the security staff. As the guy came over, Trez said, “I’ve gotta go crash upstairs. Tell Alex to close up tonight.”
“You okay, Mr. Latimer?” the human asked. “You don’t look so good.”
“Migraine. It happens.”
“My sister gets ’em. I’ll tell the boss. You need anything?”
Trez shook his head. “Thanks, man. Just gonna go lie down.”
“Okay, Mr. Latimer.”
As Trez walked over to the stairs to the second floor, he was grateful for the twenty-minute, quiet-before-the-storm part of the headaches. After the light show started, he had just enough time to get himself situated somewhere dark and quiet before the pain came. Of course, since he knew what was coming, his heart always pounded with adrenaline overload, his body’s flight-or-fight response having no real options for expression.
There was nothing to fight, and as for the run-away side of things? Since everywhere you went, there you were, it wasn’t like that was going to help.
Plus, hello, he was going to be throwing up soon, and a brisk jog was not going to be fun with that symptom.
Back up in his office, it was a relief to get out of the paths of all those lasers and away from the pounding music. He didn’t waste time as he shut himself in. Kicking his shoes off, he shucked out of his slacks, and got the little trash can from the bathroom. Stretching out on his leather sofa, he propped his head up with a throw pillow, crossed his ankles, and put his hands over his chest like he was a corpse. He could still see the aura even after he closed his eyes, and he watched it transition from a spot to a less-than sign… after which the bifurcated, sparkling angles flattened out and moved off to the side before disappearing.
Maybe this time the headache wouldn’t hit. The nausea wouldn’t cripple him. The floaty disassociation wouldn’t pull him away.
In the eerie no-man’s-land between the prodromal and the party time, an image came to him. It was of Therese looking up at him in the hospital corridor, anger and hurt darkening her pale eyes.
He had a feeling that memory of her was going to haunt him like a ghost. But before he could dwell on that, a thunderclap of pain lit off in one half of his skull, and—
As he wrenched to the side, and started to throw up that snack he’d had an hour ago, he decided he deserved this.
On so many levels.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was hard to know exactly how long it took Therese to realize something was wrong in her apartment building—and not just minorly wrong. Eventually, though, she stopped shoving things in her duffel bag and frowned. Sniffed the air. Looked to the door to the outside hall.
For a moment, she wondered if she hadn’t lost her mind… if maybe her lack of sleep wasn’t causing olfactory hallucinations. But after having been at the rooming house for so long, she was well familiar with all kinds of food smells, whether they be rot or a case of over-roasting. And this was different. This was… not food.
Going over to her door, she put her hand on the panels, even as she felt like a paranoid fool. Just because part of her life was melting down, and she was taking her doomed romance far too seriously, did not meant her building was doing the same—and what do you know, the flimsy wood was room temperature under her palm. It was fine.
“Come on, now,” she muttered to herself. “You’re losing it.”
A fresh round of shouting across the hall made her refocus and breathe in through her nose again. The strange odor was stronger, and there was a sweet undertone to it, something—
Alarms began to go off, the shrill sounds firing from both ends of the outer corridor. Alarmed—natch—Therese opened things and leaned out. Across the way, black smoke was seeping from the gaps around a closed door.
“What’s going on?” someone said.
Therese looked to the right. A woman with a lit cigarette and sleep in her eyes had come out of the apartment next to the smoke.
“I don’t know,” Therese answered.
All around, other tenants emerged from their units, many of them similarly confused, although whether that was from a disturbance in sleep or an inconclusive assessment as to whether this was real or a drug-induced hallucination, Therese did not know.
“Has someone called nine-one-one?” she asked.
Without warning, an explosion blew open the door across the hall, the impact of the shock waves pitching Therese