Darcy nips my arm with his teeth. “Experience is sexy.”
“Seven thousand? I guess that is between Fox and Tag,” Romily ponders via Fox.
“Oh, he’s older than that, but—” I stop, turning to Darcy. “Is that private information?” He didn’t tell me not to tell anyone, but he didn’t like talking about it either.
Darcy grimaces, but waves toward them. “Go ahead.”
Romily looks like he’s dying of curiosity, so I alleviate that itch. “He doesn’t have memories of his life before about seven thousand years ago. No clue how old his body is—do you remember before you were incarnated?” I ask, wondering if he lost his memories from when he was a djinn.
“I was young. Only a few centuries. I remember them, but only vaguely. It’s fairly common to lose all but the most important memories as you grow older,” he replies as we land in my apartment.
I smile, nodding, but it falls off my face as I look around my place. It’s trashed. My books have been torn apart and left scattered all over the floor, my coffee table is in three chunks, and someone shredded my couch. There’s a pile of feces on what’s left of it, and someone wrote a bunch of misogynistic, homophobic slurs on my apartment walls in what looks like blood.
Eesh.That’s not good. Someone got aggressive in here.
“What the fuck?” Darcy growls. He hands me my crutches and waits for me to get to my feet before jumping off the array.
The others must expect the array to disappear, because none of them fall like I did the first time he did that to me.
“Who the fuck has the audacity to come in here—” Darcy cuts off the rant he’s gearing up for, marching to the window that’s smeared with something I don’t want to know about. He shoves the window up and chimes out of it like a real church bell and just as loud. I bet people three blocks over can hear his chime.
A few seconds later three little gargoyles land in my living room, and the sound of their church bell language fills the apartment. They sound distressed.
I’m not looking forward to the clean up, but whoever did this isn’t going to enjoy what happens when Darcy gets ahold of them, so I hop toward my busted front door grimacing at the way it’s barely hanging on the hinges. We’re going to have to call Chetagain. I’ll just have to make sure Darcy isn’t around for that. Gotta keep my promise.
“Romily, you want to come help me get my leg out of storage?” I ask, leaving Darcy to deal with the break-in.
He’s already pulling things out of his utility belt and combining them into a little bowl. If it didn’t smell like actual shit in here, I’d love to watch him, but it’s gag-inducing, and I need to get my leg anyway.
Romily smiles as he joins me, stepping over broken glass and what looks like a puddle of piss. Smells like it too. I’m not sure I’ll be able to live here after this.
“I’m not getting my deposit back,” I sigh, leading him to the elevator that will take us to the basement. That’s a bummer.
He gives me a sympathetic look, nodding in understanding. He makes a complicated gesture that tells me he’s curious about who would do this to my place—no, he’s asking if it was Stalker Steve.
“Oh. I guess it could be Stalker Steve. Darcy already warned him off, but it could be anyone. One of the neighbors tried to kill me the other day because I gave Darcy a BJ. It was so weird. I don’t know what’s wrong with people. They really get attached to me in unhealthy ways, you know?”
Romily’s eyes go wide.Really?he asks without words.
I nod. “It’s been a problem in the past. I can only think of one person I dated who wasn’t a problem afterward. She’s the girl I dated my freshman year before I realized that I was super gay in a no-thanks-to-girls way. She’s a good friend now. She murdered someone for me the other day.”
Romily presses his hand over his heart.
“I know. She’s super sweet.”
The elevator opens into the basement, where about half the lights are always out. It’s creepy down here, which is one reason I invited Romily along. He’s probably wondering if I’m leadinghim to his doom, so I pat his back. “It’s creepy but harmless. Probably. I mean, I’ve never had any issue down here, but it's fucking creepy.”
Romily follows me to my locker, and I tell him the combo to the lock so he can open it. My leg is behind the box with a fake Christmas tree my mother sent me last year, and he helps me by grabbing it and the little bag with the sock for it. I lock the locker back up, and we head back to the elevator.
I come to an abrupt stop when a black mass of writhing darkness grows out of nothing and hovers in the air between us and the elevator. Dread descends as I look at it, and I get the feeling that approaching it would be unsafe. “That’s never happened before,” I tell Romily so he knows I didn’t invite the malevolent spirit or whatever.
Romily holds his phone up to my face, pointing out that he has no bars.
I take the phone and check to see if my wifi reaches down here. Barely. There’s a single bar on the wifi that belongs to me. I connect to it and hand it back to Romily. “Wifi’s spotty, but maybe you can climb up on something and get a better connection to it.”
Romily pats my butt and moves away, climbing up on top of a dryer that’s been hanging out in the basement, abandoned and unused, since I moved in here. There isn’t even a laundry room in the basement; someone just brought a dryer down here and left it.
I watch the writhing mass for a minute while Romily contacts someone to come rescue us. Hopefully the people who deal with magic all the time know what to do with malevolent spirits.
