Mr. Bond caught sight or scent of Val and darted around my knee to reach the book.
“Okay. Let’s get you some food.” I stood, shifting Val behind me and breaking Mr. Bond’s laser focus on him. When I picked up the bowl instead of filling it, Mr. Bond meowed. Grabbing the ceramic food canister, I headed for my bedroom, accompanied by Mr. Bond and his increasingly insistent yowls. I set the bowl and canister next to my desk and scooped fresh food atop the few remaining kibble. Mr. Bond twined through my legs, then buried his face in his food. I slipped out of the bedroom and shut the door behind me.
“Come on in,” I said, swinging the door open. Niko picked up his supplies and stepped into my apartment. Trouble roused himself from his sprawl across my welcome mat and plodded into my front room. My apartment shrank to half its normal size, and I didn’t know if the blame lay with Niko or the Great Dane.
“What’s going to happen to Sam?” I asked.
“We’ll talk about it later. Grab bowls for food and water, and we’ll get the pooka set up.” Niko swung the bathroom door open. “It’s going to be a tight fit, but I think it’ll work.”
I mentally measured the bathroom against the length of the Great Dane and silently agreed. Trouble listed against the kitchen wall while watching me pull two enormous bowls down from my seldom-used baking shelf. The pooka looked like he could nod off any moment.
Niko waited in the hall while I set the bowls next to the tub and filled one with water, the other with food. Trouble perked up at the smell and moseyed to the food bowl. Kibble disappeared in enormous bites, and I added more food to the bowl, then squeezed between the Great Dane and the toilet to get back to the hallway.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The pooka would come and go with me, and he could sleep in the bathroom at night. It wasn’t ideal, but we could make it work.
“This is a lichtwand,” Niko said, holding up a rod that looked like a fluorescent tube light without a cord. “You will have to recharge it daily.”
I blinked to Primordium and surreptitiously checked my soul. It was easy to forget Trouble had the patchwork soul of a pooka when I looked at him in normal sight, and I’d forgotten to be careful about where I touched him. I was clean, and I made a big deal out of thanking the pooka before closing the bathroom door. Positive reinforcement couldn’t hurt.
Niko set the lichtwand against the base of the door and flipped an on-off switch. A sheet of lux lucis lifted from the lichtwand to coat the entire doorway in light. I reached into it, expecting resistance, but lux lucis wrapped around my hand with a soft feathery sensation. The energy connected above my hand, like water flowing around a rock. Lux lucis spread an inch to either side of the lichtwand, which was exactly the width of the threshold, and extended a few inches up the door frame above the door.
I’d seen Niko use one of these before, but I hadn’t had time to ask about it. Nor had I ever expected to need one in my own home.
“A ward won’t hold in the amount of atrum the pooka might release. This has a better chance.”
“How much do these cost?” I braced myself for sticker shock.
“Even a standard-size one like this isn’t cheap. For now, keep mine. Hopefully this won’t be a long-term solution.”
Once the pooka has control, then what? I wanted to ask, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear the answer. The pooka on a short tether was complicated enough. Picturing the pooka free to roam unsupervised made my stomach contract.
I trailed Niko to my front room and leaned against a wall while he warded my sliding glass door. His movements were fast and efficient, leaving a sparkling barrier between me and any creatures the pooka might attract while I slept. Fear moved sluggishly up my spine at the thought. I redirected my attention to the pull of Niko’s jacket across his shoulders and the steady glow of his soul, and I didn’t allow a tendril of anxiety to take root.
Niko walked past me down the hall and I followed. Even numb with exhaustion, I wasn’t going to miss the sight of Niko in my bedroom. I slipped through the door and breathed a sigh of relief: I hadn’t left any underwear lying out.
Mr. Bond supervised Niko’s warding from between the optivus aegis’s feet, mewing the whole time. Niko gave him a pet when he finished and Mr. Bond used a paw to pull Niko’s hand back for a second inspection, then rubbed his face against Niko’s warm palm. I wondered if I could get away with the same maneuver.
“You’re moving pretty well on that ankle already,” Niko said, interrupting my wayward thoughts. “Don’t forget to take some anti-inflammatories.”
My ankle twinged as if in agreement.
Niko warded my front door, told me to call him if I needed him, then let himself out. I locked up after him and put my back to the door. The temptation to slide to the floor and sleep right there almost overpowered me, but I pushed back into motion.
After taking Val out of his strap and wiping most of the grime off his cover, I stored him in my filing cabinet. Then I devoured a banana and two ibuprofen and stripped, putting my filthy clothes into the washing machine. I had to give Trouble a push to get into the bathroom. The Great Dane sprawled from the doorway to the tub, making a bed of my bathmats. I stepped between his feet and over his head into the shower. He woke when I turned off the shower and watched me with sleepy eyes while I dried off.
“I’ll be just across the hall and I’ll come get you when I wake up,” I said. His eyes tracked me to the door; then he flopped back onto his side. I closed the bathroom door and activated the lichtwand. Mr. Bond darted to the wall of light and batted his paws across the surface, sniffing along the top, with his face submerged in lux lucis. When he finished his investigation, he tore around the apartment to his scratching post.
I towel-dried my hair and crawled under the covers. Sleep dragged me under before Mr. Bond settled on my feet.
I woke to a shaft of pain cleaving my skull. Clutching my scalp, I cracked an eye. Sunlight fractured the pain into jagged shards. I moaned and burrowed under the covers.
The front door clattered shut, and I bolted upright. Pain turned my breath to a strangled gasp. Footsteps moved through my front room, then back to the kitchen. Muted thumps registered as cupboards opening and closing.
Only three people had keys to my house: Bridget and my parents. I glanced at the clock. At two in the afternoon, Bridget was still at work. My parents had no reason to stop by, and if they had, they wouldn’t barge in. They’d call. Furthermore, Mr. Bond was fond of all of them and would have darted out of the bedroom to greet them.
Instead, my overweight cat perched on the end of my bed, body stiff with tension. When I moved, he crouched, primed to hide under the bed skirt. Sadly, he was too large to fit under the bed. So was I.
I clawed the covers to my chin and tried to think over the pounding in my brain. A stranger had broken into my house. I’d seen enough news stories to know that when burglars discovered people at home, it never ended well. My only real weapon, the knife I’d purchased for my job, wasn’t going to help me. It lay atop the washing machine, where I’d left it after stripping last night—which was exactly where I’d left my cell, too. With my home phone in the front room cradle, my chances of calling 911 dwindled to nil.
I swallowed a whimper. As much as I yearned to pull the covers over my head and pretend they’d keep me safe, I had to get up.
Sucking in shallow, quiet breaths, I slid the covers back and eased to the floor. Cold air pebbled my naked skin from my breasts to my toes. I found nightgowns strangulating and pajamas constricting, but I’d never wished harder for the protective illusion of clothing. I wasted precious seconds pulling on dirty sweatpants and a T-shirt from the hamper.
Metal screeched, and I collapsed to my hands and knees next to my bed before I recognized the sound of the accordion door leading to the cramped laundry closet. I grabbed a tuft of hair and squeezed my scalp. My head was telling me I’d polished off a bottle of tequila last night, but I hadn’t had a drop of liquor.
/> The possibility of a connection between the stranger rooting through my apartment and the pain made me blink to Primordium. I expected to find a swarm of vervet gnawing on my scalp. Maybe a demon drilling into my head.
The room glowed with peaceful energy. Across the hall, the lichtwand radiated lux lucis against the closed bathroom door. Behind me, Niko’s strong ward haloed the window, and my forest of plants shone strong and untainted, as did Mr. Bond and my own soul.
My brain bounced adrenaline-fast through possible explanations for the intruder and my headache. Lux lucis concentrate. Gavin said I would feel the effects today. What an understatement!
Of course, if I could have woken without my heart beating like a hummingbird’s, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.
The sounds from the front of the apartment quieted. That couldn’t be a good sign. So far, the intruder hadn’t made a move toward the bedroom, but my luck wouldn’t hold. I had two options, escape or hide. My eyes darted around the room. My closet was too shallow and packed to disguise me. My desk was too small to crawl under. My wicker laundry basket creaked when I tossed in a sock; there was no way to hide beneath my smelly clothes without alerting the burglar. Which left escape.
My legs trembled, but I forced myself to a crouch. If I went down the hall, not only would the squeaky floor give me away, but I would also have nowhere to hide. I could chance it, grab the phone, and run for the front door. If I was fast enough, the police would arrive before the intruder caught me.
I didn’t have a lot of faith in that plan.
The only other option was the window. My apartment’s tiny porch stretched from the sliding glass door in the front room to the bedroom’s window. If I could sneak outside, I could hide in the corner, out of sight, until the stranger investigated the bedroom. Then I could dart through the sliding glass door and out the front before he could catch me. Like the first plan, this meant abandoning both Mr. Bond and Trouble until I could return with the cops. I didn’t like it, but I’d like it less if I were dead. So would they, I thought.
If there had been a third option, I would have taken it. Moving on quaking tiptoes, I eased the sliding window up. The metal screen frame creaked when I popped it free. I froze, but the footsteps I expected didn’t manifest. Chilly December air spilled over the windowsill, slithering across my bare feet. Mr. Bond slunk across the bed, puddled to the floor on silent paws, and crouched next to me. Before I slid through the window, I grabbed a heavy brass bookend.
The window ledge sat a foot and a half off the floor, making my escape easy. I hugged the short wall, crouching with hands, knees, and feet on the ice-cold balcony concrete. Mr. Bond hopped out after me, his tail lifting to a happy wag. He explored the porch almost daily, but never through the bedroom window. To him this had turned into a new adventure. At least outside he was less likely to be noticed by the intruder.
A shiver made my teeth chatter. Why had I chosen the third floor? From the second floor, I could have survived the fall. From this height, I’d break my legs on landing, or my spine. Either way, I wouldn’t be escaping.
What if I was making a big deal of nothing? What if the person in my apartment was someone I knew? It could be Niko, come by to check on me. It wasn’t hard to picture him picking my lock or making a spare key. Or Sam. He knew how to pick locks, and he was obsessed with becoming a superhero. Niko supposedly had taken him away this morning, but the boy was tenacious.
Rough concrete bit into the tender flesh of my bruised palms as I inched forward. My heart knocking against my ribs, I peeked through the sliding glass door.
A man stood in the center of my living room wearing a floral pleated skirt and a WWF T-shirt printed with the image of the Earth and the words “Hotter Than I Should Be.” He stuffed a handful of salt and pepper potato chips into his mouth and examined the picture collage above my TV. His feet were bare and muddy.
His soul swirled with liquid atrum and lux lucis.
18
Question Everything
Dumbfounded, I stared at the human-shaped pooka.
A human-shaped pooka. The lichtwand still coated the doorway of the bathroom.
Oh precious lux lucis gods, please let there not be two of them!
The man turned. When he spotted me, he waved vigorously, exactly as Sam had when we’d pulled up last night. Potato chip crumbs scattered across the carpet. He strode to the sliding glass door and pulled it open.
I pushed to my feet and raised the brass statue. The man-pooka paused, then burst out laughing. “I scared you!” he exclaimed between breaths. He mimed round circles around his eyes. “Your eyes!”
Lowering the statue, I blinked to normal sight. The pooka was exactly my height, slender, with thick black hair and the same golden eyes of the Great Dane. On the dog, the color had looked natural. On a human, it was shocking.
“Trouble?” My voice shook.
“Who else?”
The brass statue fell from numb fingers. My knees wobbled, and I braced a hand on the sliding glass door. Trouble twisted under my scrutiny. The red and black skirt flared; the bright pink shirt pulled tight across his shoulders.
“Are those my clothes?” Because that was important.
“Yep.”
Mr. Bond hissed from behind a potted dwarf lemon tree. Trouble regarded my cat and Mr. Bond deflated, then trotted to him, tail raised, and threw his body against the pooka. I backed up a step. Had Trouble just mind-jacked my cat?
I blinked back to Primordium and realized the answer was simpler if no less frightening. Trouble had rearranged his soul so a fine layer of lux lucis camouflaged all his atrum. To the untrained eye—and to my cat—his soul looked as clean as an enforcer’s. The pooka had gained a lot of control in the few hours I’d slept. What else had he learned?
A hard shiver jarred my body, setting off a cascade of pain through my brain.
“Inside,” I said. Trouble backed up and Mr. Bond followed. I swiped the bottom of my dirty feet clean on the threshold, then stepped onto the warm cushion of my carpet. Keeping a wary eye on the pooka, I slid the door closed behind me. Whatever endorphins I’d experienced when we imprinted were gone. For the first time, I doubted the wisdom of remaining linked to the creature. It was too late to back out, but damn; what had I gotten myself into? The pooka was far more powerful and magical than I’d comprehended.
I took a deep breath to settle my nerves—and gagged.
“Dear God, what is that smell?”
Trouble looked at the ceiling.
“Can’t you smell that?”
Trouble shrugged slender shoulders. I stalked across the front room into the kitchen, ignoring the muddy footprints strewn from the laminate foyer across the carpeted apartment. A tart, deathly odor coiled in the back of my throat. Grabbing my shirt, I pulled it over my nose. I jerked open the fridge. Nothing. I peeked in the trash bin. It smelled like old pizza and moldy cardboard—almost refreshing. Then I remembered the screech of the laundry closet. Normally I kept the door cracked wide enough for Mr. Bond, since his litter box was inside. Now the slatted accordion door was shut tight.
Holding my hand over my cloth-covered nose, I eased the door open.
Mounded in the center of Mr. Bond’s litter box, completely exposed, was the largest dog poop I’d ever seen. I spun to face the pooka.
Trouble blinked wide eyes and pointed at Mr. Bond.
The cat peeked around the kitchen corner, eyes squinted against the stench. I opened my mouth, thought better of it, and settled on a scowl for the pooka. Grabbing the litter box, I stuffed my feet into shoes, wincing at the twinge in my injured ankle.
“Shut the door after me and don’t touch anything,” I said.
Pain pinched my ankle with each step as I raced down the stairs, arms straining and eyes watering, but the mild pain didn’t slow me. I shoved the entire litter box into the Dumpster, darted back up the walkway, and took a deep breath. Noxious fumes hung in the air, or in my nose, but I no longer fel
t like dry heaving.
Back upstairs, I threw open the sliding glass door despite the chilly winter air. Pulling a wrapping paper bin from beneath my bed, I dumped the contents into a pile, then set up the plastic bottom in the laundry room and filled it with fresh litter. Mr. Bond sniffed around the new box and the washer, the only one of us immune to the stench.
The pooka stared at me with wide gold eyes and flinched when I stomped to the kitchen sink. Standing in the middle of my front room, shoulders hunched in my pink shirt, bare toes curled into the carpet, and a half-empty potato chip bag dangling from one hand, the pooka looked lost and afraid. I deflated. The last jittery tremors of fear abated. The pooka was a powerful mystery, but he wasn’t all bad. It was my responsibility to make sure he became less evil every day, and I couldn’t do that with him scared of me.
I dried my hands and beckoned the pooka closer. He took a few steps, and the cotton skirt swishing around his hairy legs made me fight back a smile.
“You frightened me, and I didn’t find it funny. Sorry for getting upset.”
“Should I change to a dog?”
“No. I like getting to talk to you. I just wish—” My brain stuttered over a memory. I flushed. “You watched me shower this morning!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Don’t argue semantics. You saw me naked.” I’d stepped right over the pooka. He hadn’t just seen me naked; he’d seen parts of me last viewed by my gynecologist.
“You’ve seen me naked,” he said, visibly confused.
I decided against explaining my embarrassed indignation. “Why didn’t you pick this form last night? It would have made everything a lot simpler.”
“I didn’t have these.” The pooka plucked at the hem of the skirt, shuffled his hips, then gave a leg a shake. I flashed on the image of his mammoth testicles, then forced the picture from my mind. Everything had been proportional when he’d changed to the Great Dane. I was not going to picture what was hidden under the floral print.
A Fistful of Fire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 2) Page 27