by Andrew Peed
“What’s normal? Boring,” Kaylie said as she inched closer to him. All that she had to do was cross his form with the blade of her soul dagger, and the job would be done.
Erik’s spirit took a half step back from Kaylie.
“Did you come to the car lot to kill me today?” he asked, looking from side to side. He was trying to formulate an escape plan from the building.
“No, absolutely not! I was sent to help you move on because they knew that you weren’t going to do so on your own,” Kaylie explained, shaking her head.
“They? Who are they?” Erik demanded.
“That is a complicated question to answer, and I really don’t have time to go into it right now.” Kaylie shifted her weight to her other foot. Erik’s spirit saw her move and shifted himself, still moving away from her.
Like the snap of a bear trap, Kaylie lunged at the spirit. He saw her move and ducked just a little too quickly through the wall to the outside of the building. She passed through the nothing and smashed head first into the wall and tumbled to the ground. It would have been worth it if she had gotten him, but with him still free, it was not. She rolled to one side and grabbed her nose.
It hurt, but she didn’t feel any blood, so that was good. Kaylie rolled over and pushed herself up off the ground. She left the old building and darted around the side. If she lost him, she would have to hope that the phone could hold on long enough to catch up with him again.
She found him, but she hated where she saw him going. He dropped down into the cellar of the large white house. The asshole even waved at her while he descended through the door.
She dropped to her knees for a moment, took a deep breath, and slammed her fists on the ground. She wanted to scream, but that was not going to solve her problems, and it would probably get her noticed on someone’s property. She got up from the ground and brushed herself off.
Kaylie calmly walked around to the front of the house. Using her phone, she checked to make sure that he was still inside—he was. She walked to each of the windows that she could reach, but she couldn’t see inside. They were very dirty. She walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Loud bells rang all over the house, surprising her.
She pulled her hood off and took a deep, calming breath. She returned the dagger into its sheath on her back and reached up and rang the doorbell for a second time.
When the door opened, a young man, tall and looking exhausted, was standing just inside. He looked like he’d just woken up and leaned on the door for support. He was at least a foot taller than Kaylie was, and he stared down at her. He had unkept black hair and was wearing a uniform. A name tag said, I’m Waylon from IT. How may I help you?
“Hello,” Waylon said, looking a little out of it.
“Good evening,” Kaylie replied with a grin. She was having a hard time finding the right words. She couldn’t just ask him to look around in his cellar for a spirit that was running away from her. It would be very weird.
“Are you here for the roommate ad?” he asked with a long yawn.
Chapter 04: Roommate Interview
Waylon stood in the kitchen doing two things. He was putting on a pot of tea for his guest and giving himself a last-minute pep talk. The girl in the sitting room was very attractive. He needed to stick to what he had said in the ad. He needed that money, and he did not need to be manipulated by her. He had a history of being manipulated by pretty girls.
A loud thumping caught his attention behind him. He whipped around in a blur to see a pair of red eyes under the kitchen table in the shadow. The room was half full of darkness. The sun had gone down, and the lights weren’t on, so the only light in the kitchen came from the hallway.
Not now. He shook his head in disbelief.
Kaylie sat quietly with her fingers laced together in the pocket of her hoodie. The teapot began to whistle in the other room. She sighed and leaned back in the large couch.
“Hello?” she called out after a long while had passed. She stood up from the couch and walked to the opening to the hallway. “Where’d you go?” she called out again.
She left the sitting room and followed the sound of the whistling teapot. Two doors down from the sitting room, she found the kitchen filling with steam from the teapot. Waylon was standing in the middle of the kitchen with his back to the stove. His eyes were fixed on something under the table while he muttered to himself quietly.
Waylon made no move when Kaylie walked into the room, and he did not notice when she walked over to him and waved her hand in his face. He didn’t event indicate that he knew she was in the room. Kaylie knelt down beside the table to see what had his attention. She smiled when she saw a little osueco hiding in the darkness, pressed into the shadow. Kaylie touched her temple, speaking several words of a dead language. The darkness faded away, leaving everything in the room as if she were looking at it in the middle of the day.
“What are you doing under there, little guy?” she asked the creature. She knew that they were scary looking, but she also knew that they were relatively harmless. They only fed off of pent-up energy, and they wouldn’t actually hurt anyone.
Kaylie reached under the table and pet the monster’s fine black fur. They were a creature that was hard to describe, mostly because people didn’t often see them other than their eyes. They were humanoid with a few extra heads. The actual number of extra heads could range from two to twelve; it just depended on the state of the osueco when you counted them. They had sharp narrow red eyes, and they had long pointed teeth, mostly used for eating rodents.
Standing back up from the floor, she leaned back onto the table, crossing her arms over chest. She looked over Waylon from top to bottom for a moment. Really looked at him, deeper, beyond the surface that normal people could without the help of magics. She took a step closer and reached out, touching her fingertip to his arm.
Kaylie got a flash, and she knew in that instant what he was. Waylon was a warlock. He was a warlock who had a ton of built-up power that was chaotically writhing inside of him. In a perfect world, he would have discovered his potential years ago, but this was not a perfect world, and he did not know what he was. It was a sad waste of magical energy.
With a deep breath, she decided to deal with the spirit in the basement. After that, she would return to this poor fellow and see if she could lean him a hand. In addition, it would seem that this lost soul she was chasing may have led her straight to a solution to a major problem.
The screen on her phone lit up a dark blue as she pointed it through the house. It was at its darkest when she pointed in the direction of the basement. Kaylie reached under her hoodie behind her back and pulled out one of her soul daggers. With her other hand, she returned her phone to her pocket, then pulled out an orb that was a little larger than a marble.
Leaving the kitchen, she found her way down into the basement. The house was old, and the lights were very dim. She had to move carefully, taking the stairs one at a time. One well-timed scare from the spirit, and she could end up with a broken neck, or at the very least, a broken arm.
At the bottom of the stairs, she found that the large room split off in several directions. She retrieved her phone and got her bearings. Following the blue, she made her way through the main room filled with art supplies. She hesitated a few times, looking at several pieces but refocused quickly to the task at hand. She did note that many of the drawings and paintings were very good, but they looked like they’d been done by someone who was having trouble figuring out their art style.
As she approached a door at the other end of the basement, the color on her phone’s screen reached its deepest blue yet. She approached the door as quietly as she could. The floor was a concrete slab with carpet over it, so her steps were practically silent. The door was cracked, and she could see that inside it was a garage. Lightly, she pushed the door open enough for her to slip into the room. The light from the room was a shimmering emission from the spirit.
Erik’s
spirit stood over the hood of a car and was staring down at the vehicle like he was lost in thought. He made no indication that he noticed as Kaylie joined him in the room. Facing the door, there was no way that he could have missed her movements, no matter how subtle they were.
Kaylie gripped her dagger and rolled the small orb in between her index and pointer fingers nervously. She needed this reap. A win would be a good thing in her boss’s eyes—the last few reaps in her last station had not gone so well. She didn’t want any more trouble on her record.
“Were either of those lovely people hurt in the van?” Erik’s spirit asked.
Kaylie sucked in a surprised gasp of air and stopped moving. She considered the spirit for a moment. This was the first time that one of her targets tried to have a conversation with her instead of just yelling nasty things at her.
“Uh, no… Well, yes, but nothing that they won’t heal from,” Kaylie said. She slowly began moving toward the spirit but did everything she could to keep from being noticed.
“Good,” he said, shaking his head. The garage grew cold as he moved away from the car and floated over to the corner of the room.
“Yeah. It is good.” Kaylie snuck her way around the car. She was getting very close. If she could just keep from spooking him, the whole thing would be done.
“Everything is fading away. This morning I saw my wife, and now I can hardly remember what she looks like,” the spirit complained, looking down at his hands.
“That’s why I am here to help you. Soon nothing will remain but anger and hatred. Those feelings root for eternity,” Kaylie explained. She gave him an empathetic look.
“I don’t understand why it had to be today,” he said, looking at Kaylie. His eyes welled with sadness.
“That sort of thing is out of our control,” Kaylie said with a deep sigh and shook her head.
“Will it hurt?” he asked and drifted toward where Kaylie stood.
“I don’t know, but I like to think that it doesn’t,” she said, shrugging.
The spirit moved toward her. He had discovered that he could hover above the ground and no longer needed to walk like a living person. He floated a few inches off the ground in front of her.
“I have one last question,” Kaylie said, lowering her dagger and looking the dead man in the eyes.
“What?” he asked sharply.
“Why did you come here?” she asked.
“This is the last car that I sold before the incident. I’m worried that something bad will happen to this boy,” Erik’s spirit admitted.
“I’ll look after him,” Kaylie said with a wide smile.
Erik’s spirit returned the smile. Kaylie reached out and took his arm. With her abilities as a reaper she could feel his flesh as if it were still alive and right there. She pulled his arm so that his forearm was within reach, then pressed the blade of her dagger to his skin and quickly pulled it through his existence. There was no blood, only a white smoke that rose from the wound. She tapped the tip of the blade on the surface of the small orb that she held in her hand.
In a bright flash of light, the room went from blinding light to almost total darkness. Erik’s spirit was gone. Kaylie held up the orb, and it was no longer crystal clear. A haze of white smoke billowed around inside.
“Now I just have to find a broker,” she said, shaking her head. She knelt down and dug into her bag until she found a small wooden box that had runes carved all over the outside. Inside, there were four small impressions that would perfectly cradle the orb in velvet. Kaylie placed Erik’s spirit in the box and closed it, then put the box back inside and stood up. Now to figure out what was going on with the warlock upstairs.
Waylon was still standing in the kitchen mumbling to himself. Kaylie walked past him and to the pot that had completely evaporated the water. She lifted it up and walked over to the sink so she could refill it and put the pot back onto the burner, waiting for the water to heat up.
She ducked around and looked into Waylon’s eyes. He was completely zoned out of this world, and she could only wonder what he was seeing. His eyes were darting all around, but they weren’t focused on anything. She ducked down and reached under the table, grabbing the osueco while petting one of his heads.
Kaylie carried the little guy out of the kitchen and headed down the hallway to the front door. She opened it, leaned down, and continued to pet him on the head.
“What am I going to call you?” She scratched him behind the ear. He purred something akin to a cat, but he a little more monstrous and a little less cute.
The osueco did not answer her question, but he did not struggle against her. She put him down on the ground and stood up.
“I think I’m going to call you Tome,” she said. She stepped back and pushed the door closed. Tome circled a few times and vanished into a plume of smoke. She watched the smoke make its way out to some nearby trees.
Kaylie walked back into the sitting room and sat down on the couch and took a deep breath. The water on the stove in the kitchen began to whistle. She closed her eyes and concentrated. Strange ancient words left her lips, outside of her control, whispering under her breath. With a snap of her fingers, she opened her eyes and smiled.
~//~
Waylon turned around to a steaming pot of water. There was no way that it could be steaming already. He rushed over, feeling a little out of it. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was considerably darker than it had been only a few seconds ago when he had walked into the kitchen.
He pulled down two mugs from the cabinet and dropped a bag of tea in each. After pouring the steaming water over the bags, he stopped to take a deep breath.
Kaylie was sitting on the couch when Waylon walked into the sitting room holding the two mugs of tea. She smiled up at him. He handed her one of the mugs and sat down on the oversized armchair across from her.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Waylon said. He wasn’t even sure how long he had just made the poor girl wait.
“It’s no big deal. You can’t rush perfection. Isn’t that what they say?” Kaylie sipped her tea. She cleared her throat and set the mug down on the table.
“So, about the ad,” Waylon said. He couldn’t help but be awkward. He was trying in the back of his head to figure out what was going on with himself.
“Yes, about that ad, could you refresh my memory?” Kaylie asked. She maintained an innocent smile.
“Um, sure,” Waylon said as he looked at Kaylie for a moment. “I have a few extra rooms. I’ve decided to get a roommate to help ease the cost of living. I’m only asking for four hundred dollars a month. Covers everything. Rent, utilities, internet, and I figured that we could share the food budget.” He sipped his own tea before setting it down on the table.
“That sounds pretty good,” Kaylie said. Waylon watched as Kaylie considered the offer for a minute before accepting. In that short span of time there seemed to be dozens of calculations running through her mind. He started to wonder if maybe the whole thing was a bad deal, a little bit of research probably would have been a good idea. “Are there any questions that I need to answer?”
Waylon thought for a moment and scratched his head. He hadn’t had any time to think of what the interview process would consist of. He had not even expected anyone to see the ad for a few days.
“To be honest, I’ve never had a roommate or anything,” Waylon said, shaking his head.
“I’ve had two,” Kaylie said, “in the small building that I lived in in the last city. I didn’t really like them much. I even had to share a room with one of them. Thankfully my work kept me out most of the time.” She smiled when she spoke. Waylon watched her closely.
“Well, there will definitely be no sharing in this house.” Waylon smiled. “I guess all that I really need is the first and last month’s rent.”
“Um, well, is there any way that I could pay you tomorrow?” Kaylie asked. “I don’t get my first paycheck until then.” She looked down at the floor.
“I don’t see why not,” Waylon said with a shrug.
“And would it at all be possible that I stay here tonight?” Kaylie asked. She wrapped her fingers around the strap of her bag and gripped it tightly.
“I guess that couldn’t hurt anything,” Waylon said with a smile.
Waylon stood up from the couch and held out his hand to indicate he wanted to show her the rest of the house. Kaylie stood and put her bag over her shoulder and followed him. He led her upstairs.
The bedroom that Waylon was giving her was not the first one on the landing but the second door down the hallway. He did this because this room had its own bathroom, and that way she wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with him.
“This is the room,” Waylon said.
Kaylie walked in. Waylon leaned on the door frame for a moment and watched her. She walked to the bed and put down her bag, not letting go of the strap but loosening her grip on it.
“It’s completely furnished, but if you have your own stuff, I can get everything moved out tomorrow afternoon.” Waylon scratched his head. It was a sincere offer, but he hated the idea of moving all of the old heavy furniture.
“No, no. I don’t have anything. I had to leave my last place pretty quick, and the furniture was not mine to take.” She sat down on the bed and looked out of the window. Moonlight was pouring into the room.
“You’re not wanted by the cops, are you?” Waylon asked. He smiled and crossed his arms over his chest, doing his best to mimic his ex-boss Mr. Hicks, but he didn’t have it in him to be such an asshole.
“No, nothing like that. I had to follow my work,” Kaylie said, shaking her head.
“What do you do for work? If you don’t mind me asking.” Waylon relaxed his stance and leaned on the door frame again.
“I work in acquisitions for a fairly big organization,” she said, seeming to want to remain as vague as possible.
