Chapter 91

“Welp, this sucks.” Sam muttered in the darkened hallway. “Of fucking course management let the enchantments on the emergency magical lighting fixtures fail.” She grouched as she gripped her wand with white knuckles. It was stupid, but she was trembling a little bit as she walked through the mostly silent apartment.

“Not all of them.” Gleipnir added with an unhelpful level of sarcasm. “There were at least three that I could see functioning on the second floor when we passed it in the stairwell.”

“Yeah.” A snort bubbled out of Sam despite the seemingly dire circumstances, “But there’s none on this level.” Her voice was saccharinely sweet with tender bile. “And this is where the monster ‘smell’ is coming from.”

“Just stay behind me and I’ll take care of it.” Always willing to play the big brave protector, Gleipnir was eating up the fact that Sam was… not… comfortable? Yeah. Not comfortable with a monster being on her floor.

“What are the odds that the only monster in the building is on my floor?” Her grousing continued. “I mean, come on. There’s six other floors in this building. Hundreds of apartments. Unless it formed up here it would have had to climb four stories to hunker down in one of these apartments.” Her words were quiet but angry hisses now.

“Conversely,” The pact item offered more unhelpful information, “It could be a flying creature that climbed down three floors.” That stopped Sam. She froze in the dark processing the information. The only light she could see was little lines of light that seeped under the doors lining the hallway. Some were weak sunlight. Others seemed like maybe there were magical lights on in some of the apartments. All were quiet.

“Nope.” The worried warlock finally broke the unnatural silence.

“Nope, what?” Finally, noticing that Sam was no longer following him, Gleipnir turned can floated back toward her.

“Nope. I’m not doing it. I will yeet myself out of this building before I fight a flying monster.”

“Oh. Pish posh.” The floating Gleipnir patted Sam’s hand with his ribbon. “It’s an enclosed space. You’ll have the advantage.”

“I’m a magic technician, Gleip, not a battle mage.” Sam hissed with just the slightest, okay more than slightest, bit of terror in her voice.”

“It’s fine. It’s positively tiny compared to what we took on the other day. Now, come along. We’re almost there and you’ll never believe where I think it is.” The morbid excitement in Gleipnir’s conspiratorial tone only made the cold dread in her belly roil all the harder.

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“Really?” It was dry, without any humor, because Sam just did not have any more shits to give at the moment. So, instead, she held up her wand like a flashlight and murmured a light spell. “Kynda.” A pure white and yellow light like a small dim sun formed at the tip of her wand already properly adjusted to a brightness that wouldn’t hurt her eyes. Still, Sam blinked several times as her vision adjusted to the new light source.

“Yes, yes.” Came the distractedly happy reply, “You can spark a light now. I’m sure it isn’t in the hallway, so you being able to see won’t let it know we’re coming.” Now her pact item was downright bubbly with anticipation. “You know, I’ve come to realize that I kind of like fighting monsters… Sometimes… okay, no I hated fighting the big monster. That was… traumatizing. But maybe I’ll like fighting this smaller one.” As he babbled, Gleipnir’s tone became less and less sure and Sam found herself tilting her head quizzically while she listened.

“You sound a bit uncertain about that.” They paused in the hall outside their apartment and she looked keenly at her best-friend-slash-pact-item-slash-roommate.

“Ugh. Okay. You’re right. I hate fighting monsters. I just thought that if you thought I liked it then we could get this over with faster so we could just go home and not have to worry about monsters anymore. But… hmmm…” He stopped talking as he examined the door to their apartment intently glancing back and forth between theirs and their neighbor. “I was not expecting that. Because who would? I mean the odds against it were… Because who even has luck that bad?” His glances at first one door than another became even more intense as he sniffed t first one then the other.

“Let me guess,” The weary Sam interrupted before Gleip could get distracted again, “We do. We have luck this bad. It’s in our apartment, isn’t it?”

“Ha, haaahh.” He drew out the second ‘hah’ or a beat before agreeing with a defeated sigh. “Yeah. It’s in our apartment.”

“Alright then.” Pulling up the sleeves of her warlock’s robe, she pulled out her keys and unlocked the door. “On three. You go high. I go low.”

“Right. Just like Mom taught us.” There was no rhyme or reason to it, but Sam smiled. She couldn’t help it. It always made her a little bit happy when Gleipnir, a millennia old magical being, referred to her mom as their mom. Because as old as Gleipnir was, his life hadn’t really begun until the day he became her pact item. Scared, lonely, drowning in eons of guilt and self-loathing for what he’d been a part of, but so full of life and with so much love to give and terrified that he’d never been seen as anything other than what he’d been made to do.

“Right.” Sam agreed softly. “Just like mom taught us. One, two,” Sam caught her breath and steadied her nerves for a second pausing longer than she should have in the middle of a count. “Three!”

They threw the door open and Sam flooded the room with light from her wand, throwing the spell she’d been holding onto up against the ceiling where it would do the most good. But, they saw nothing. Or more correctly, they saw… their living room. It was just as they had left it with no major changes. Sam’s cold coffee was still sitting on the coffee table. Gleipnir’s workout equipment was strewn around the floor instead of tidily packed away in the corner of the room that was his dedicated gym.

Like always.

“Well, this is ominous.” Gleip chimed enthusiastically.

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