A thrill of excitement wound through me. I honestly couldn’t wait. It felt like I could finally be myself. If they’d hated me before…
A solitary figure waited on the cemetery side of the street. He was lingering in front of one of the cemetery entrances, directly across from my house.
I stopped dead.
My house…
Confused, I looked back the way I’d come. Then further up the street. Then back at the figure I recognized as Smokey, thin and slightly hunched, old and grizzled, human but keeping watch over the supernatural.
Looking back at my house, I crossed the street, my eyebrows lowered.
No-Good Mikey sat a handful of doors away, using someone’s stairs as a seat, clearly unconcerned with how they felt about trespassers. Although he was in his early thirties, his dark face was lined with the stresses of hard living. He wasn’t a crook, but he wasn’t totally straight, either. Like all of us. He didn’t have much, like most of us (ahem), but he made the most of it. This wasn’t a neighborhood for riches or extravagance. It was a neighborhood where most people lived paycheck to paycheck and hoped they had enough to cover rent. Obviously Darius had changed my stars, but this life was etched into my bones. I belonged here in a way I would never belong on that beautiful tropical island.
“You’re back,” he said without preamble. “Been a long time.”
“A couple months. What’s…” I put my hands on my hips, facing my house. “What’s new?”
“Around here? A lot and nothing.”
“Yeah. Regarding a lot…”
“I take it the rich dude did it behind your back?”
“Like usual, yeah.” I rubbed my eyes, shook my head, and turned away. “That fucking vampire.”
Mikey stood. “I got used to not hearing shit like that while you were gone.”
Mikey was human, knew the supernatural existed because of me, and hated anything to do with it. He’d prefer no one mentioned it. He was uncomfortable often. It was hard to be in even the periphery of my life without getting splashed with any of the weird seeping out.
He fell in beside me, topping my height by half a foot. “Been anywhere I’d be jealous of?” he asked.
“It’s not like you to make small talk.”
“Yeah. It’s boring as shit around here lately. I don’t gotta police nothing. It’s like some sort of ritzy neighborhood at this point.”
I looked around at the weed-choked yards, the peeling paint, the broken-down rocking chairs that wouldn’t hold a cat, and the old, dented cars that lined the streets. “Yeah. I see what you mean,” I said sarcastically.
“You’ll see.”
“Super.”
Smokey crossed the street as we approached my house, and I veered off the curb to get a better view of it.
My…much larger…house.
My…much taller…house.
“What the fuck?” I breathed, looking up at the two-story structure with brick columns supporting the redone front porch, equipped with four new rocking chairs. The planter boxes at the base of the house, in front of the plush green grass, had been replanted with different colored flowers to match the new paint, a bluish gray with white trim. “Why?”
A figure shambled out of the shadows on the right side, the leaves of the bushes getting caught in her tangled fire-engine-red hair. The reaching branches pulled taut, but she kept walking, ripping the leaves free, now stuck in her huge mop of hair. She paused in the center of my lawn, crouching and stooping and leaning to one side with her head cocked like a crow, staring at me.
“Red Prophet,” I said dryly. “How nice to see you again.”
“I’d say you picked up some manners off that rich boyfriend of yours,” Mikey said, stepping off the curb to join me in the street, away from the Red Prophet, “but it’s pretty clear you don’t mean it.”
“Caught that, did you? I was laying it on pretty thick.”
“She’s been here for the last week, solid,” Mikey said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Hi, Reagan. Nice to have you back,” Smokey said, stopping beside me and nodding.
“Hey, Smokey.” I crossed my arms to match Mikey. “I think I know the answer, but you didn’t think to remove her?”
“At first, yeah. Pointed a gun at her and everything.” Mikey spat to the side. “She started spouting off all this shit that she no way coulda known. No way coulda known. Personal shit, about my past ’n’ shit.”
“It occurs to me how much I missed punctuating sentences with swearing,” I murmured, and this time it wasn’t sarcasm. I liked the color Mikey could bring to any conversation. The menace.
“Then she started talking about my future, and I got the fuck outta there.” Mikey shook his head and spat again. He clearly had not handled the situation well. “I know I was supposed to look after your place, but fuck, there are limits. She is over that limit.”