Kiss and Spell
“Well, if you’re sure …”
He took a deep breath and appeared to force his shoulders to relax. “I’m not saying I’m sure this is a great idea, but I don’t seem to have much of a choice.”
I realized we’d been talking for quite a while and wondered what our watcher thought. A long chat at the front door after a date shouldn’t be too strange, I hoped. I impulsively leaned in to give Owen a kiss on the cheek, like I was saying good night. We both paused for a moment, then kissed on the lips, lingering ever so slightly. “I don’t think you should come inside,” I said, quite reluctantly because I didn’t want to be alone or let him out of my sight. I wasn’t even sure where he lived in this world. “Like I said earlier, I was being proposed to by someone else just a couple of hours ago, and we don’t want them to think we’re privately plotting.”
After one last kiss, he turned to leave and I headed up the front steps. I paused at the front door to turn back and didn’t have to fake a besotted grin as I watched him go. I had to fight to keep that grin when I saw that the gray guy stayed on the sidewalk in front of my building. It made sense that I was the one being watched when I was the one who’d resisted the magic, but that didn’t make me any more comfortable about it.
When Owen was out of sight, I unlocked the front door and went up the indoor stairs to my apartment. Once inside, I changed into sweats before attempting Granny’s veiling spell and peeking out the window. The gray guy was still out there, but he didn’t seem to be watching my place with an intense focus.
There was one way to find out. I tiptoed to my door and then up the stairs. I didn’t recall ever seeing a neighbor coming downstairs or hearing any noise above me. When I reached the upper landing, I paused and listened for any signs of life coming from that apartment. There was no stereo or TV on, but it was late enough that most people would be in bed.
Feeling like I was violating all kinds of social mores, I put my hand on the doorknob, then I squeezed my eyes closed in dread as I turned the knob. It did turn, and the door eased open, so either nobody lived there or my neighbor didn’t lock his door and I was about to be really embarrassed.
I couldn’t see much in the dim city light coming in through the windows, but I didn’t think there was much to see, just a lot of nothing. The exterior walls looked like the back side of a movie set, and I had to be careful as I crawled because the floor joists were bare, the plaster of my ceiling showing in the open spaces between them. Although crawling was slower than walking, I soon felt like I’d gone beyond where the wall of my apartment should have been. I glanced at the windows and saw that they were a slightly different size and in a slightly different position. The open space must have extended into the next building. I suspected it might go on until there was some reason it had to stop, like the end of the block or an inhabited apartment.
I wanted to keep exploring, but the risk of getting stuck somewhere and not being able to get back to my place without being caught by my watcher was too great. As I crawled back toward the door, I wondered how much of this prison was just an empty shell, a Hollywood-style backlot to create street scenes. But even if most of it was empty, building something like this seemed like a huge undertaking requiring a lot of resources, either physical or magical. That had to mean that what they were keeping secret by bringing us all here was equally huge.