Page 94 of Installment Immortality

“Hello,” I said, acknowledging the mouse.

“Hail,” squeaked the mouse. “Hail to the Arboreal Priestess, for surely she remembers that Caffeine Is Bad for the Baby?”

“Decaf,” I said gravely, holding up the pod I was intending to use and tilting it so that she could read the lid.

She studied it with equal gravity, whiskers bristling, and turned so that I could see her own swollen abdomen, which she pressed with her paws in an unnervingly human gesture. The Aeslin liked to send their pregnant colony members to speak with me, believing my attention would bless their unborn pups. I tried not to think about it too hard. It was difficult to see my attention as any sort of blessing these days.

“Acceptable,” squeaked the mouse, finally.

“Would you like some?” I snapped the pod into the machine, closing the lid and hitting the button to start the brew cycle. “I’m planning to add sugar and cream to mine.”

“I would like that very much,” allowed the mouse.

“Deal.”

I’m not huge on sharing food, but sharing a cup of coffee with a mouse meant tipping a teaspoon-full into a bottle cap, and honestly, that was cute enough that I didn’t particularly mind.

The coffee brewed the way it always did, and I had just finished fixing my cup and pouring a spoonful out for my mousey attendant when someone knocked on my apartment door. I shot it a sour look. If someone was knocking without me ringing them up, they had to be a resident of the building, which meant I couldn’t just ignore them and hope they’d go away.

Yes, for the first time in my life, I had a job that didn’t include short skirts or impractical footwear. Until I could dance again, I was serving as property manager for one of the investment properties owned by the local dragons: an apartment building on the East Side, rent-controlled, and occupied entirely by cryptids who were either able to pass for humans or had remote jobs that let them pay the rent.

I wasn’t the apartment handyman—even if I’d known how to fix a pipe, which I didn’t, I was eight months pregnant and no longer on speaking terms with my feet. If this was a problem that needed to be repaired, I’d have to call down and wake our actual handyman.

Sadly, I could understand why they would come to me first. Between me and the handyman, I was the less likely to get upset and take a limb off. I might snarl and mutter, but at the end of the day, I knew my job, and I knew how lucky I was to have it. There’s not a lot in the way of career opportunities for former professional ballroom dancers who don’t want to go into choreography and can’t teach yoga and share their living space with several dozen talking, highly religious mice. Building management for dragons was about as good as it got.

Whoever was outside knocked again. I scowled and set my coffee mug aside, then shuffled for the door as quickly as my scrambled center of balance would currently allow. Even hurrying, they knocked a third time before I got there, and I wrenched the door open with an irritated, “What?”

The woman on my doorstep raised an eyebrow, giving me a quick up-and-down glance that took in the sum of me, from my stained tank top to my bare feet and messy hair, in what felt like less than a second. Then she rolled her shoulders in a shrug that looked unnervingly like a prime boxer getting ready to wade into the ring, and said, “They didn’t tell me it wasthisbad. Look out, Val, I’m coming in,” and she pushed past me into the apartment while I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that she was there, right there, at my door, to judge me.

“Malena.” I closed the door as I turned to watch her progress through my space, trying to see it the way she must be seeing it. And to be honest, I wasn’t too impressed.

The apartment I was renting from the dragons was palatial by New York standards, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, as well as a full bathroom and a funny hall closet that might have been half of a bedroom once upon a time, based on the shape of it. If it had been, the other half was now the property of the adjoining apartment, and it wasn’t coming back any time soon. It contained the absolute bare minimum in terms of furnishings—the front room, where Malena was now looking around disapprovingly, had a couch that could convert into a futon, and a surprisingly nice hardwood coffee table that the dragons had scavenged from a street corner, stripped, and refinished into something that would probably fetch a pretty penny at one of the more upscale vintage furniture shops. And that was it.

There was no television, no rug, no shelves of books or other little knickknacks that might prove someone actually lived here. Therewasan empty pizza box on the coffee table: living with Aeslin mice means never needing to worry that leaving food out will lead to cockroaches or other pests. The mice had picked the box completely clean before the cheese had a chance to congeal, and if they hadn’t, they would have just viewed any insects the leftovers attracted as extra protein for them to hunt down and enjoy.

Who was I to deny the mice a little enrichment?

“This is fuckingbleak,Val,” said Malena, stopping at the built-in counter between the living room and kitchen. She dropped her duffel bag to the floor as she turned to face me, expression remaining flat and somewhat disturbed, like an older sibling looking in on a younger sibling’s room and finding it in a total state of disarray. “Did you forget that humans need to keep their enclosures interesting if they don’t want them to turn depressing?”

“Who’s the human expert here, Malena?” I asked.

“That would normally be you, but since you’re the one acting like you’re trying to perform some sort of penance, I’m taking your title.”

I sighed. “Can we stop sniping at each other and get to the part where you give me a hug and say you’re glad to see me? Please?”

“Sure, Val.” Malena bounced back across the living room with a spritely ease that would have been offense in my current condition coming from just about anybody else. She pulled me into a hug, which I gladly returned. She smelled of oil-treated leather and rose perfume, and her embrace was warmer than the human norm by at least five degrees.

I would still have taken her for human if I’d passed her on the street. Malena was a lean, muscular woman of apparently Mexican descent, with rich brown skin and frustratingly lush black hair that currently fell to her shoulders in a heavy wave. I’d seen her shed that hair like an unwanted hat, multiple times, and somehow it always grew back even healthier than it had been before. Just another deeply frustrating benefit of therianthropy.

She let me go and pulled back, smile fading into a look of deep concern. “Seriously, Val, you look like hammered shit.”

I pointed at the great dome of my belly. “Hey, I’m pregnant. You can’t talk to me like that.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” She folded her arms. “You’ve been wearing those clothes for at least two days. Three, if the chicken I smell was fresh when you ate it. You’re not wearing any mascara, you’re not moisturizing, and if you were trying to prove that you’re a natural blonde, giving up on the idea of washing your hair does more than just confirm you don’t need to get your roots done, so you know. You look exhausted, and like you’re doing the absolute bare minimum to keep yourself standing while all this is going on. I know what happened to David. I’m so sorry, Val, I really am. But for your sake, and the sake of that pup you’re incubating, I needyou to get your head out of your ass and stop acting like you’re both dead.”

“You done?” I asked.

Malena paused, considering. “Think so,” she finally said.

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