Prologue
Greymarket Towers is, for the large part, invisible. Until it is not.
That is not magic. That is just how cities work. Some buildings are watched; some are watched over; others do the watching. Greymarket, like any good mystery, sits where you are least likely to look: in the corner of your eye, behind the overgrown fence, and between one thought and the next.
You will not find a listing for our building. Not in any paper, app, nor even in the city’s increasingly unreliable permit records. If you arrive at our doorstep, it is because someone, or something, has sent you. If you remain here, it is because the building has decided you fit.
Some say the building was erected atop a ritual site no one remembers consecrating. Others say it is balanced over a sinkhole of failed pacts and forgotten gods, held shut with municipal wards and wishful thinking. I, frankly, do not care. My responsibility is to my tenants and, more importantly, the building itself.?1
Greymarket is unremarkable in many ways. Seventeen floors, two elevators, and a rooftop garden. Luxury units with climate-reactive warding, blackout curtains embroidered with protective sigils, in-unit washers and dryers, and a trash chute that sometimes returns things you didn’t know were missing. We also offer legal services, which are especially useful when tenants discover they’ve been accused of things they don’t remember committing.
Our tenants are a mix of the mundane and the monstrous. Hollis and Jem in 4A are known for their banana bread and a disconcerting knowledge of everyone’s exact move-in date. Thess in 7D manages the Greymarket Gazette, and they have started printing crossword puzzles in a language no one admits to speaking. Sorelle and Micah in 12F perform as Hearthsong Reversal, a folk duo whose haunting harmonies can be heard at city festivals, moon rites, and at the monthly potluck when the building’s mood allows.?2
Mr. Caracas in 17C is our longest-tenured resident.?3 You will most often find him in the community room watching his soaps and serials. He growls at newcomers and maintains the TV remote like a sacred artifact. But if you bring him a warm cinnamon roll and don’t interruptLaw & Order: SVU, he might provide just the right information to save your life someday.
The atrium is a beautiful, cathedral-like space where we once attempted a koi pond. The koi vanished within a week, one by one, until only ripples remained. The Thornfather, who lives there, has been unusually alert. I do not often like to speculate as to the matters of my tenants, but in my experience, I have discovered plants do not sleep when something is wrong in the roots.
And who am I, you may ask? I am Mr. Lyle, your apartment manager. I oversee the usual: keys, contracts, community disputes, and the occasional blood sigil. I have served Greymarket longer than anyone else alive, and possibly longer than some have been dead.?4
New tenants sometimes ask if the building is safe. Well, it depends what you mean by safe. Do not open the stairwell doors past midnight. Do not accept deliveries you didn’t order.?5 Under no circumstances should you peer into the vent grate behind the water heater. Follow these basic rules, and you shall most likely be fine.
Here is the truth: people do not come to Greymarket because it is safe. They come because something in them recognizes it. The building welcomes the fractured, the misaligned, the too-much and not-enough. It shelters those with secrets. It listens, and sometimes, it answers.
HOA dues are $25 monthly, included in rent. Trash days are Monday and Thursday. If your refrigerator hums in harmony with your dreams, let it. If your upstairs neighbor has been dead for three years but still waters your plants, it is only polite to water theirs back.?6
You will find your place here. You might also uncover something that was meant to stay buried. Whether or not you emerge from the experience changed is entirely up to you.
Welcome to Greymarket Towers.
1 Greymarket Towers is not legally classified as sentient. However, multiple third-party evaluations have noted signs of independent will, localized personality traits, and a tendency to hold grudges.
2 If Sorelle starts singing old mourning ballads unprompted, be wary. It means something is watching the building—and the building is watching back.
3 He claims to have invented the concept of Tuesdays. No one has been able to disprove this, and, truthfully, no one wants to try.
4 My start date predates the concept of start dates. HR has yet to resolve the discrepancy.
5 Mail tampering is a federal offense. Greymarket Towers complies fully with USPS guidelines, interdimensional courier regulations, and the Bellwether Pact on Parcel Sovereignty (rev. 1978).
6 This remains true even if your plants are plastic, Mark in 9F. Ghosts can tell when you're being ungrateful.
Chapter
One
It was a beautiful spring evening in the city of Bellwether, and the windows of Tamsin Donover’s parlor were thrown open. A late dusk glow poured through stained glass panels that cast dreamy shapes onto the floor: vines, antlers, and old sigils no one had been able to decode yet. The smell of apple blossoms, wet grass, and candle smoke wafted into the monthly meeting of the The Benevolent Order of the Moonroot Circle, Chapter II.
And Marigold Flynn—Goldie to friends, family, lovers, and everyone else—was trying valiantly to keep her eyes open.
She’d stayed up too late the night before, not for anything wild or scandalous, but because she’d fallen down a particularly satisfying research hole cataloging regional variations of love spells. The sidebar footnotes alone had kept her up past one o’clock, and her mind still kept drifting to a Bulgarian charm that involved goat’s milk, broken mirrors, and a very aggressive sonnet.
The business portion of the meeting had already concluded, and the guest speaker, a fussy little man with a milky aura and a scarf that screamedtenure-track, was currently forty-sevenminutes into a lecture titledA Framework for Responsible Ward Use in Urban Climates.
Only their newest member, Winona Rutheford, sat upright and alert, her eyes wide behind cat-eye glasses. She nodded earnestly every time the speaker paused for emphasis, which was roughly every eight seconds.
The speaker cleared his throat, punctuating his PowerPoint with a joke about binding regulations. It landed with the weight of a wet tissue. Goldie swallowed a yawn.
A sharp nudge met her ribs from the witch on her right.
