Once the rope stopped swaying, I sat up and looked around. I was dangling about two feet below the floor level of a nearby balcony. I swung myself over that way, reaching out to grab the rails as soon as they came close enough. Then I pulled myself laboriously upward, finally sliding myself onto the balcony.
The small child who was standing behind the sliding glass door leading into the apartment blinked at me. I blinked back, too surprised to do anything else. Slowly, he opened the sliding glass door.
I said the first thing that popped into my head: “Didn’t your parents tell you never to open the door for a stranger?”
“Superheroes aren’t strangers,” he said, with calm matter-of-factness. I must have looked puzzled, because he explained, “You flew onto the balcony. Strangers don’t fly. If strangers could fly, I’d never be allowed outside. So you’re a superhero. Like the man next door.”
Like the . . . “See, that’s who I was coming here to see,” I said quickly. “We’re supposed to be having a team-up. Can you tell me which way his balcony is? It’s sort of hard to aim precisely when you’re heading for something the size of a building.”
The little boy pointed solemnly to the balcony to the right.
“Great, thank you.” I boosted myself back onto the banister, intending to jump. Then I paused. “Oh, and hey, kid? There are bad superheroes, too. So you really shouldn’t open the door, even for people who can fly.” Most human threats were unlikely to attack from above. That didn’t do much to eliminate the cryptid ones.
“Okay,” said the boy, and closed the door. I guess when a superhero tells you to do something, you do it.
Leave it to Dominic to preach secrecy and caution to me, and forget to consider whether or not his neighbors could see him from their balcony. I smirked as I jumped back down and swung over to his apartment, grabbing hold of the balcony rails and pulling myself up for a second time. This time, no small children greeted me. Instead, the sliding glass doors granted me a view of a sparsely furnished, utterly deserted apartment.
“Jackpot,” I murmured, and started squirming out of my climbing harness.
After the last of the buckles was undone, I used a carabiner to snap the harness to the balcony rail. That way, I’d still be able to reach my rope if I needed to make a quick escape, but I wouldn’t be wandering around the apartment looking like the victim of badly-considered bondage. The kid from next door hadn’t reappeared on his balcony. I decided that was a good thing—no one wants people watching their breaking and entering, especially not when they’re as rusty as I am—and moved to try the door.
It slid open easily. I stopped, blinking. “Okay, that was . . . anticlimactic,” I muttered. Dominic must not have considered the need for exterior nineteenth floor security. If we both survived this, and were on speaking terms when everything was said and done, he and I were going to have some serious talks about that.
That, or this was all a trap. I stayed where I was for several seconds, weighing the possibility that he was playing me against my need to know what was inside. In the end, common sense was solidly voted down by the rest of me.
I stepped inside.
My father always says that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they live when no one’s watching. My brother Alex, for example, didn’t do laundry for three months when he went away to college, because that was how long it took for him to run out of clean shirts. Sarah generally lived like she was totally unaware that the physical world existed. Antimony alphabetized her knives.
Apparently, Dominic lived like he was expecting to be gone tomorrow, and didn’t want to leave too much of a mess for the next people who passed through. There was something almost tragic about the bare wood floor and the empty, Ikea-issue shelves. What little furniture he had was clearly window dressing, purchased because it was expected of him, and then practically unused.
I moved through the apartment like a ghost, opening every drawer and cabinet that I passed. The coat closet was filled with weapons, ranging from a longbow and three quivers of arrows to an assortment of pole arms that had clearly become part of the standard equipment back during the Covenant’s dragon slaying days. The pantry held nothing but ramen noodles, canned chicken, and generic macaroni and cheese, the kind that never looked like food, no matter what you did to it. The fridge was a little better—at least it had a few cartons of takeout Chinese food. I recognized them as coming from the Chinese place we always went to together, on our rare “date nights.” Maybe he didn’t know anything closer.
The medicine cabinet in the bathroom was packed with first aid supplies both mundane and magical. Band-Aids and gauze pads, over-the-counter painkillers and powdered basilisk bones, antibiotics and antivenin, even some Tylenol 3 with codeine—all the things your modern monster hunter needs if he’s going to keep fighting.
Once I had exhausted the rest of the apartment, I moved on to the bedroom. Dominic’s bed was a twin-sized futon mattress without a frame, shoved up against the wall like an afterthought. Looking at it broke my heart a little bit. The Covenant gave him resources and access to knowledge stretching back for centuries. What it didn’t give him was a single person willing to make sure he slept in a real bed, and ate something more nutritious than shrimp-flavored ramen.
“Dammit, Dominic,” I murmured, and began searching the bedroom.
I found what I was looking for under the futon: a sheet of paper on which was written a dockside address, the number for a car rental service—labeled—and another number, unlabeled. I straightened, folding the paper and slipping it into my belt.
“I couldn’t tell you, but I could count on you finding a way to come and get it for yourself,” said Dominic.
I stiffened. Then I turned, slowly, half-convinced that he’d be holding a crossbow with his finger on the trigger.
Instead, he was just standing there, hands in his pockets, looking faintly defeated. “They’re getting settled into our temporary residence,” he said quietly. “I’ve been sent out for food. If you can recommend an ‘authentic Italian’ restaurant that does takeout, I’d be very grateful. None of the places I go will meet their standards.”
“Dominic . . .” I began, and stopped, not sure how to continue. “I’m sorry I broke into your apartment” probably wasn’t going to cut it.
A very small smile crossed his face. “You found the place faster than I expected you to. I was actually stopping by to pick up a few things.”
“Like what?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “There’s nothing here to pick up. You might as well be living out of cardboard boxes.”
“I threw those out months ago.” His smile faded, expression composing itself. “Verity . . .”
“Are you okay? Those people from the Covenant, they’re not hurting you or anything, are they?” It was a stupid question. I didn’t know what else to ask.
“Why would they hurt me? They think I’m one of them.”
“Are you?”
Another smile crossed his face. This one was sadder, and died even faster than its predecessor. “I don’t know, Verity. I wish I did.”
“I’m not in my apartment anymore.”
“Good. I’m glad. You weren’t safe there.”
“You wouldn’t tell them where to find me, would you?”
Dominic sighed. “I don’t know. If I knew . . . there are a great many things that I don’t know, right now. It’s not a pleasant sensation.”
“I’m sorry.” I stepped toward him, offering my hands. After a moment’s hesitation, he took them. “If you need me, call. I’ll try to come.”