The knock on the door startled me enough that I dropped the controller. A dragon was already happily chewing on my torso by the time I retrieved it. I checked my watch, it was almost 4 am, who could this possibly be? People didn’t just drop by my home, especially not in the middle of the night. Maybe they had the wrong apartment. I shifted my gaze to the whisky bottle, too much gone for it to be a good idea to answer that door. If I just ignored it, they would assume I was asleep and leave. But the banging just grew more insistent, and a voice joined in, from the other side of the door.
“Rayna Clay? Please be there. You need to let me in,” the voice was unfamiliar, but they clearly knew which apartment they were looking for.
I rose from the couch, steadied myself against the wall and staggered over to the door. Through the peephole, I saw an unfamiliar man. He was pretty. Tall and muscular, with tousled, sandy brown hair and exceedingly blue eyes. An incubus. Who knew my name. And where I lived. There was no explanation for this that wasn’t bad for me. I rubbed my hand over my face, suddenly wishing very hard that I hadn’t been drinking for hours. I had a dangerous job, and if someone had shown up for revenge… I checked the bolts on the reinforced door, they were all in place. So, I stepped away, preparing to return to the couch and pretend he wasn’t here.
“Look,” the incubus pleaded. “If you don’t let me in, I’m a dead man. Please, I think that they followed me here.”
I wasn’t going to fall for that. As long as I didn’t open the door, there wasn’t much he could do. My place was reasonably secure. I could hear muffled cursing from the other side of the door.
“Fuck, what did Cooper tell me to say?” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “What was it…? Cormorant? Canary? Condor!” the last word, he shouted. “Please let someone be in there.”
I froze mid-step. Condor was a code word agents used. It was a request for sanctuary, to be used only in an emergency. And I knew a Cooper, he was a field agent. Could he have sent this incubus here? Why? Only one way to find out for sure. I looked through the peephole one more time, to make sure he was alone. He was. With no real options, I finally reached for the bolts and opened the door. The incubus scrambled inside and slammed the door, before turning to face me. Up close, I could see the fear on his face, it looked genuine. It seemed he wasn’t lying about being pursued.
“Thank you. I really thought that they were…” he paused and looked at me for a long moment, then raised an eyebrow. “Are you drunk?”
“It was my night off, what do you want from me?” I grumbled. “Now, sit. Explain what you are doing here.”
“No offense, but maybe you should call in your people and…”
“No,” I opened the fridge and grabbed an energy drink, popped the top and downed half of it before continuing. “I don’t know you, or why you are here. I certainly don’t trust you.” I returned to refasten the bolts on my door, leaning heavily against it as I did. “If this is a trap, I would prefer that I am the only one caught in it. Got me? If you want me to pull anyone else in on this, convince me why I should.”
Well, that had sounded pretty coherent, I thought proudly. My brain was still trying to catch up with what was going on. I cursed myself silently, this was why I rarely drank. You never knew when things would go sideways. But it was too late for that now, I would just have to make do, as best as I could. I’d focus on getting some fluids and stimulants, and hope that helped. In the meantime, I would just have to get him to do most of the talking.
“OK,” he was still breathing heavily, and sweating. He mopped his forehead with the hem of his shirt. “I guess that makes sense. Maybe it is best not to trust too many others on this, anyway.”
He sank onto my couch with a soft groan. Silence dragged between us for a long moment.
“Who gave you the code word? Who sent you here?” I prompted.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“I was meeting with Harrison Cooper tonight. He’s one of your people, a Partial. He is the one who sent me.”
“Why?”
“It… well,” he chewed on his lip. “I had information to give Cooper, so he met me, in secret, tonight. But someone must have found out. We were meeting in a parking lot a few blocks from here. I showed up first. I was sure no one had followed me, but… he had only just arrived when they opened fire. He was hit, shot in the chest. Right there in front of me. I tried to help him, I…” the incubus looked down at his hands, I followed his gaze and saw the smears of rust-colored dried blood under his nails and in the creases of his hands. He gathered himself and continued. “I dragged him behind a car, but he was hurt badly. The bullet had hit a lung, it was a sucking wound, he was coughing up blood. I tried to… I couldn’t…” he paused for a moment, gathering himself. “Cooper told me he would hold them off, give me a chance to escape. He gave me this address, and the code word. He said you would be here, that you could help me.”
I struggled to process. It tracked, so far. Word of my mandatory vacation must have gotten around the office. Cooper would have expected me to be at home. That explained how he found the place, at least. But it didn’t mean that he hadn’t killed Cooper himself, or extracted this information through torture. His blood was literally on his hands, after all.
“Continue,” I prompted, pulling another energy drink from the fridge.
“I… I don’t know what else to say,” he stammered. “I ran. I came here. But I think that they followed me.”
“Who followed you? Why? How?”
“I may have been leaving a trail,” he gestured to his leg.
I looked down, there was blood soaking his left pant leg and dripping down his shoe and soaking into my rug.
“Dammit,” I grabbed a handful of dish towels from the kitchen and tossed them at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been shot, idiot!? Put some pressure on the wound,” I grabbed another towel. “I’ll go wipe the blood from the hall, before they find it.”
He grimaced and pressed the towel into the wound,
“Are you sure you should be…”
“Let me worry about me, hmmm?” I snapped, moving to the door. I checked the peephole to see two men in dark suits coming up the hall, guns in hand. Correction, two incubi. “Shit. Too late.”
I dropped my head into my hands. Of all the nights to not be sober. I took a deep breath.
“Do not move,” I whispered.
The incubus was dabbing at his leg with the wad of dish towels, ineffectively. I grabbed the telescoping baton I kept beside the door and flicked it out.
“What are you going to do?” he hissed.
I put a finger to my lips and looked through the peephole again. The suits were closer now, looking down, following the blood drops to my door. Their guns were out, but down, fingers not on the triggers. They weren’t sure where he had gone, yet. Good. I may not be at my best, but the element of surprise should even the odds. As long as I finished this quickly. I watched the first man bend down and put a finger into a small pool of blood on the floor in front of my door. He nodded to his partner, who stepped towards me, filling the view of the peephole. I waited as he reached for the knob, once his hand closed around it, I yanked the door inward, pulling him off balance. As he stumbled a step into my apartment, I grabbed his wrist and smashed his face into the edge of the door. He dropped to his knees, blood spurting from his nose. Surprised, the second man jumped to his feet and made to raise his gun, but I cracked him in the arm with the baton. The sound likely meant it was broken. He dropped the gun and clutched his wrist. As he glanced down, I landed a hit on the base of his skull, and he dropped. I turned my attention back to the first attacker who was struggling back to his feet, one hand on his nose. A quick baton to the solar plexus, then the Adam’s apple and he choked, dropping back to his knees. One last hit to the temple and he was down, next to his partner. I leaned back against the doorframe and closed my eyes, swallowing the urge to vomit. That wouldn’t be very professional. When the room stopped spinning so vigorously, I opened my eyes to find the incubus staring at me, wide-eyed and a little frantic. Like a small animal in the moment before it was hit by a car.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” I gestured to the bodies. “Help me drag them inside, before the neighbors get curious.”
He hesitated for a moment, before finally grabbing a leg and pulling the closest incubus the rest of the way through the doorway,
“How did you do that?”
“Do what? Hit two guys with a stick?” I rolled my eyes, retrieving the flex cuffs from my kitchen drawer and binding the two men in the middle of my living room.
“Why in hell didn’t you just shoot them?” he nodded at the gun on the table by the door.
“Because then the neighbors call the cops. That gets messy. And then I have to move. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent apartment in this city?”
He regarded me with a mixture of horror and confusion. I sighed, civilians.
“Put pressure back on your wound before you bleed out,” I instructed offhandedly, as I used another towel to mop up the blood in the hallway. I was going to need so many new dish towels.