“Third and final try for right now… House on Half Street, if there’s a trace of power to take, take that power, self repair, do what you gotta do, but let’s get this basic, really nice thing going again, okay? Hot showers for the rest of our lives together. It sputtered, rumbled, water churning, one piece of metal banged against another as the water moved… Since the ritual, it had given her hot water for one in three times she wanted it. It sputtered, and there was a faint hum, before it went cold. It was crap, it was rusted out, it had probably been old before the house had been left to go to pieces. The basement was unfinished, and at the one corner was the water heater. She got up, went downstairs, and grabbed a shitty snack bar from her bag, along with some lemonade to chase it down. The faint loneliness of being the only person in the house made her want to get up and send those early morning texts.Įveryone she wanted to text was in town. The ‘change, help, do, be, bookstore!’ energy got her moving- at least enough to roll to one side, reach for her pants on the floor, and get her phone. One with a really cool library on Half street with a living space above it. To make Kennet’s downtown into a cool spot where people would come by. That this was it.Īs she’d drifted off, she’d thought about seizing on that and really using it as a motivator to change the area, help Kennet, do more, be more. If she was going to have a space built around a bookstore, then to have it be her space, it would have to be right here… or at least, it would have to be retrofitted here, and she’d make it a place that wandered, but that was a whole other thing that required a lot of work. Whatever mental picture she had in the future, it would probably have this house as part of it. We don’t make a fuss over holidays or anything if we don’t want to, and we do what’s fun together.’Įxcept, like, this was her house now. She’d imagined the kinds of relationship that would work for her, and she’d gone back to the old standby of, like ‘you have your house, guy, I have mine. She’d had a thought, last night, while dwelling on the Jeremy situation. It was all a big circular loop that made her want to pull the covers tight around herself and never move, while simultaneously making her feel guilty for not being up and moving the moment she was awake. But to do that she had to get past the big ritual, and to do that she had to answer Matthew’s call. Maybe one day she could create something to keep herself company. It couldn’t help her with how lonely the big house felt. She couldn’t do anything about the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach when she thought about the upcoming ritual and the stakes. That got unconsciously adjusted.īut the house couldn’t help her with the nagging awareness of Matthew. There were no wonky springs in her mattress from her and Lucy jumping on it years ago, creating spots that were too firm. But if her blankets were too heavy while she was in the middle of sleeping, the temperature dropped a bit. It wasn’t like… soft mattress or anything. The nice thing about sleeping here was that it was comfortable. She’d spent the night in her Demesne, prepping, stayed up late, and then slept. “Did Alpy have to pull extra duty, slipping a dream-notice under our doors?” “Just about every method of Other-y communication is letting me know I’ve got to respond, huh?” Verona asked the empty room. She woke up, and the dream became a faint, annoying buzz that lingered, like an alarm going off on the street. She dreamed of visits to Matthew’s house, of sitting around the fire eating, of council meetings, and visits to the basement to see McKay, the doppleganger that had taken their classmate Hailey’s cop uncle’s shape.