Chapter Two
Felicity wiped her hand across her sweaty forehead, well beyond caring that it would leave a smudge of black across her face.
Her strategy was flawless. She’d honed it over the months she’d been working the auction side of second-hand goods, and it worked.
Get the unit. Come in the morning with her trailer and unload the unit, dividing everything into three piles.
Trash. Donate. Keep. When she was done with that, she’d repack the keep pile into fresh, sturdy boxes, use the old boxes to hold the donate pile, and then load the trailer so that she could hit the dump to unload trash on her way to the thrift store with the donate and then home, where she could unload her keepers at her leisure.
Then came the bedazzling.
But this time... Well, she was making swift progress, but her keep pile thus far consisted of the cockeyed recliner—because she’d damn well paid for it and needed something to sit on—a well-worn go set, a few dozen National Geographics she could cannibalize for decoupage, a coffeemaker sorely in need of descaling, and one wobbly end table that she might or might not be able to fix. And the storage unit was almost empty.
She wasn’t even hoping for a Rembrandt now.
Just enough raw materials to make back her investment.
Broken Fiestaware she could use for mosaics.
Shattered glass in unique colors she could recycle into beads or tumble to seaglass.
She could even find an ironic use for antique porno mags.
But whoever had owned this mess, they had somehow managed to live through the seventies without collecting a single item that had appreciated in value.
She’d feel sorry for him, if it weren’t for the well-worn board games and the hints of a long life comfortably lived.
If it didn’t uncomfortably remind her of what her own worldly possessions might look like to a stranger, if they were stuffed in a storage unit and sold at auction.
Mr. Board Games at least had a damn recliner of his own.
She had a shed full of broken crap and crafting supplies, some nice power tools, a Wal-Mart floor lamp, and a twin bed.
That was basically it. And even if she’d had a selection of board games, who would she play them with?
Not Mandy anymore. Not anyone, actually.
She had fallen into the grind of using her art to make money years ago, and any friends she’d once known had drifted away.
They were social media friends, not get-together friends.
And she was back to feeling sorry for herself about Mandy moving out. Fuck that.
She turned back to the last row of boxes. They were all the same size and shape—that mid-sized moving box that seemed to be the default for general storage. Small enough that they’d be liftable filled with books, large enough to hold most household items.
Not one difference. Stacked neatly across the back of the storage unit. Not even marked with their contents.
First off the truck.
Last on the truck.
These were the ones someone else packed for him after he died.
Ugh. That was a morbid thought.
But for some reason she was quivering with anticipation. Heart pounding like she was in the middle of her workout. Something in her gut clenching, but not in an intestinal distress way.
This is it.
She watched her hands take down the top box in the center of the pile, feeling vaguely detached from her own movements.
Had she inhaled too much dust? She’d worn a mask, but it wasn’t like it was top of the line.
Maybe the old dude was really a serial killer and he was storing anthrax in here. Maybe—
The box was heavy. Books or dishes? Weights? Unshielded uranium?
She tingled with either anthrax or anticipation. Or radiation sickness.
Her disconnected hands slit the tape on the box with a box cutter. Reached into the open box. Pulled out something encased in bubble wrap. Carefully unwrapped it.
A bottle.
It was made out of a smoky purple glass, with an odd swirled texture to it that almost seemed to move as she watched it.
Hand-blown. The graceful neck was collared with filigree metal that swooped out into a wide handle, then back in to a base that cupped the round glass.
Four claw-footed legs splayed out to form a stand, with a coiled tail stretching out beneath the handle, creating the impression that the bottle was a strange beast, the collared neck a gaping maw reaching for the sky.
Felicity stroked the glass with a knuckle, not wanting to leave a fingerprint on the glossy surface. It seemed to ring in her head like someone running their finger around the wet rim of a water glass, or like a clear, distant carillon of bells.
Mine, she thought.
Probably worth a decent sum of money, a more practical side of her replied.
Fuck off, Felicity replied to herself. It’s mine.
Fine, replied Practical Felicity. Pack it up and keep moving.
I will.
She didn’t. Instead, she carried the bottle out into the open air and held it up in the afternoon light. It was entrancing, but she forced herself to be un-entranced and think like someone who needed to pay her damn rent.
There didn’t seem to be anything liquid sloshing around when she tilted it, or anything solid rattling.
Which was probably for the best, since she had no idea how long the bottle had been in storage.
But now that she thought about it, maybe there was something solid inside, something that didn’t slosh or rattle.
Ooh! Maybe there was a message in the bottle, all written on parchment! Like in that song by the Police.
Even better, maybe there was a message in the bottle from Sting!
Like, maybe it was a special storage-unit scavenger hunt, and the winner would get to go to a free concert, or have dinner with Sting himself!
Which would be cool, even if he was totally old and had been in that awful pre-Chalamet Dune movie.
She’d dated older, and made worse career moves.
Like all of them, said Practical Felicity. Who was kind of a bitch.
Well, she would never know what was inside if she didn’t check.
And even Bitchy Felicity would have to agree that bringing a bottle with unknown contents into one’s apartment was asking for trouble.
Like if it was a bottle of anthrax or...
Well, it probably wasn’t, and if it was, she’d probably die no matter where it was opened, but whatever.
She had to know what was inside.
It was eating at her now, an itch behind her breastbone.
Like an alien trying to bust out, which was not at all the image she needed in her head when she was about to open a mysterious bottle.
She’d seen The Mummy. This was totally the sort of bottle that would have held creepy creatures in a long-lost nth sequel to The Mummy.
One that didn’t even have the budget to bring back the original cast.
And she was going to open it anyhow.
She tugged at the stopper.
It didn’t come out easily, and she actually had to throw a decent amount of her hard-earned bicep strength into it before it released with an audible pop
Felicity tilted the bottle to peer inside, but red smoke started to billow out of the opening, and she jerked back.
Shit! She looked around in a panic, but there was nobody else in her aisle of the storage facility, so she set the bottle on the ground and ducked behind the ragged recliner.
Was the bottle going to explode? Was it poison gas?
It didn’t smell like poison...though actually she’d never actually smelled a deadly poison before, had she?
How would she know? All she could tell was that the red smoke didn’t smell all burny, nor did it smell like nasty chemicals.
It actually smelled kind of like perfume, except some exotic BPAL scent instead of hoity-toity designer crap.
And it wasn’t acting like normal smoke, rising into the air and dissipating in the breeze. Instead, the red clouds billowed out and down to the asphalt, gathering in a nearly perfect circle before it billowed up into a swirling column about six feet tall.
And then it stopped billowing and growing and solidified into the shape of a person.
A man, dressed in flowing red trousers, a stiff red vest embroidered in gold, and a burgundy fez with a golden tassel.
Thick braids of black hair framed his face, which was lean and smooth, medium-bronze skin and winged eyebrows making his kohl-rimmed green-brown eyes seem to glow.
His arms were bare, crossed in a way that made his muscles pop, and he wore wide gold bracelets etched with intricate swirls that might be writing.
He had gold hoops dangling from his ears, a necklace made of linked gold plates with deep red cabochon jewels and a fringe of tiny bells, and burgundy shoes that curled up at the toes.
Cliché, said Bitchy Felicity. Who does he think he is, Prince Ali Ababawa?”
Hubba hubba, said literally every other part of Felicity, from her artistic aesthetic all the way down to her toes. Which were tingling. And not from a lack of circulation.
It may have had something to do with the way the man was looking at her. Intense and focused, as if she were the only thing worth looking at in the world, which in turn made her feel like his eyes were the only thing in the world. All of his other parts were just world-adjacent.
In a toe-tingling way.
“What the fuck?” she whispered.
Those eyes flared with something that could have been humor.
Or passion. Or hatred, even. She still had Bitchy Felicity hanging out behind her eyeballs shouting danger, Felicity Robinson!
Which wasn’t her last name, but it still made her wary of this seemingly perfect-if-cliché man who had appeared out of a frickin’ bottle.
“Greetings, mistress,” the man said in a voice like warm espresso. “I am yours to command.”
Dimitri glared down his nose at his new mistress, Aziz’s words still echoing in his ears.
Seduce her, Aziz had said. Or him. Or them.