Page 90 of Owned

This apartment building had seen better days—about ten years ago.

The parts of the walls that weren’t filled with holes from fists or feet had been sprayed with graffiti and smeared with stuff I didn’t want to look at too closely.

I let my magic guide me through the building and I slipped soundlessly over the filthy carpet and up the narrow stairwell at the end of the hall. I climbed them slowly—I wasn’t in a rush. Rye wasn’t going anywhere.

The heartbeats I could sense in the other rooms were slow now—sluggish.

Only one was beating with any urgency.

Rye.

The telltale presence of black sap was thick here, and its sickly sweetness mingled with the stench of desperation and rot that permeated the building.

A grin stretched my lips as I felt Rye’s anxiety spike on the floor above.

He knew.

Of course he knew.

But there was nowhere for him to run. Not with my magic coiling through the walls like smoke, tracing every heartbeat and every breath.

I took my time, letting him stew in his fear until I reached the top landing.

The hallway was dim, and a single flickering bulb made jittery shadows against peeling wallpaper.

The first apartment didn’t have a door, but the room was empty. A pair of dirty mattresses lay askew on the floor and my nose wrinkled.

A groan came from an apartment to my left, but I didn’t turn my head to look.

There was only one junkie I was interested in, and his apartment was at the end of the hall.

The door hung slightly ajar, trembling on its hinges.

I pushed it open with a gentle nudge of my magic—I wasn’t touching it with my bare hands—and it slammed against the wall with a satisfying crash.

A weak cry of surprise was enough to tell me I was in the right place.

Leona.

Poor lamb.

“I bet you thought I’d forgotten about you,” I said as I stepped inside.

Rye scrambled back from an overturned couch where he’d been hunched like a rat in a trap. His pallid face glistened withsweat, and his eyes were wide and bloodshot—but he wasn’t high.

The woman on the stained mattress under the window, however, was really high.

But not on ashroot.

I’d seen that blue sheen in her eyes before.

“Is she on Vesper?” I asked incredulously.

The woman flinched away, and I noted the scratches on her arms and legs. She’d had too much of the stuff.

“B-Bastian,” Rye stammered. “I-I was just about to—”

“Lie to me?” I interrupted, advancing on him with slow, deliberate steps.

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