Page 6 of Demon's Desire

Mica shook his head and covered his face for a second. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I’ve just… never heard anyone use the word ‘easy’ to describe Chicago. I mean, I love it. I do. It’s a great city, but it has its challenges too. I mean, I never lived in Bumfuck, Texas, so I don’t know how it compares, but… I just don’t want you to think it’s gonna be some sort of magical city where nothing goes wrong. It’s gonna suck sometimes. But as long as you’re prepared for it, you’ll be okay.”

“Suck? Like… how?” I was more than a little concerned about that description. I’d have loved this warning, like, a year ago.

“Oh!” Torie interjected. “So, when I first moved up here, I had to live at Mica’s place with his dad. With his dad. And, I mean, his dad is cool, but I did not wanna live with the guy. But I had no choice. We got rejected from four apartment complexes, and it looked like we weren’t gonna find anything. That was a hard few months for me. I felt like I was failing or something because I couldn’t find a nice place to live. Then we found the apartment we have now, and it’s great–”

“But!” Mica cut in. “Even then, you have this great place, you think you’re stable, then bam. All this weird shit starts happening. Like our upstairs neighbor, she has a cat. Cute thing. We’ve cat-sat for her before, and I love the guy. In the last year and a half that we’ve known him, he never makes a sound. Then, three weeks ago, Torie and I wake up in the middle of the night–”

“We have different bedrooms on different sides of the apartment,” she added. “And we both woke up, because the little man was howling bloody murder at two AM.”

“So… Chicago sucks because… a cat had a bad night?” Kelly asked.

Mica shook his head quickly. “No, sorry, listen. Every night since then, the cat wakes us up. Literally, twenty-one days in a row, always at some random time, the cat starts howling about something.”

“That’s weird,” I agreed. “Have you talked to the cat’s owner?”

“Yup.” Torie nodded. “She has no idea what’s going on. She said she’ll get up, and the cat’s just staring out the window doing this weird, like… deep-belly yowl that I’ve never heard a cat do before. She picks him up, and he gets louder. He won’t eat, he won’t relax. If she moves him to a different room, he goes to a different window and keeps making the noise. She’s not sleeping, and neither are her kids.”

“Damn.” Kelly sighed. “I’m sorry. If it gets too bad, you guys could always come here and… you know… sleep on floor pillows.”

They all laughed at that, but something about what they were saying made me tense, so I just smiled. After a moment, Torie waved her hand to calm down. “All right, all right. But you get our point, right? Just be prepared so when something less than ideal happens, you aren’t devastated.”

“Noted.” Kelly nodded. “Thank you for the advice.”

“Hey, um…” I looked down for a second as I tried to think of a way to word my thoughts. “You know, that kind of reminds me of something our downstairs neighbor said last night…”

“Oh my gosh!” Kelly groaned. “Right, okay. So we go down to get food, we’re both tipsy, but it’s not like we’re being loud or anything. And we’re about to go back upstairs and mind our own fucking business when the lady downstairs comes out and tells us that the city is haunted because her window mysteriously broke, and–”

“She mentioned that animals have been acting weird or going missing,” I added. I knew I seemed far less amused than Kelly did. I didn’t believe what Helen said, of course. But… it made me nervous.

“Right.” Kelly nodded. “Right, and she mentioned some other weird things. Some apartments caught fire. Then she tells us that when we were out of our apartment yesterday, she heard someone in here, and that she heard them while we were getting our food. It was fucking freaky. But obviously there was no one here. She was just trying to scare us or something. I don’t know.”

She shrugged and continued eating her food, but I was watching Mica and Torie. They didn’t seem amused. They didn’t even really seem confused. They looked… nervous.

Torie sat up a bit. “Mica, we should probably tell them about, um…”

“Yeah.” He sighed and sat up as well, leaning against the coffee table. “So, you know we’re in Lakeview, right beside you guys. But basically, our whole neighborhood, or at least the nearby streets, has been so weird lately. I’ve seen twice as many potholes as normal. I’ve been hearing bird cries way more often. And… windows have been shattering. Just randomly shattering.”

“What do you mean?” Kelly frowned. “That’s not possible. There’s something causing it.”

Torie shook her head. “This lady a few streets down was taking a video of her daughter dancing, and the window behind the little girl exploded randomly. You can see in the video—nothing hit the window. It wasn’t some sort of pressure change, or it would have happened to other windows, I think. No storms. The window just shattered.”

“Huh?” Kelly cocked her head. “Um… I mean, I guess it can happen. You know, strange weather events or something that we just aren’t aware of. Or the video could be doctored.”

“No way.” Mica shook his head. “I believe it was real. Nothing makes any sense, you know? Like, say someone did fake the window, how are they faking the cat crying randomly?”

“I don’t know, but it’s possible,” Kelly insisted.

I nodded, reminding myself that I was on Kelly’s side. I believed Kelly. She had to be right because that was the only logical answer. I forced myself to smile, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, hey. You majored in Journalism. Maybe you could do some digging and find out some answers.”

Kelly gave me a look. “I majored in Journalism because I was obsessed with Watergate my Senior year of high school when I happened to be applying for colleges. I don’t know that I ever planned to use it.”

“Why would you get a degree you don’t plan to ever use?” Torie questioned.

Mica answered before Kelly had to. “Her mom said she wouldn’t pay for anything ever again if she dropped out of college.”

“Yuuuup.” Kelly nodded. “She thinks it’ll make me more ‘marketable.’ But the joke’s on her because I’m probably going to be a barista for the rest of my life.”

“Come on!” I teased. “You could crack the case of the mysterious Chicago… incidents?”

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