Schuldig and his
new companion turned downtown on Sixth Avenue and went straight for a couple of
blocks. Willow was quiet for the moment, preoccupied with her ice cream;
Schuldig found himself unconsciously tapping at her mental shields, trying to
hear her. Maybe his telepathy wasn’t quite as capable of being passive as
he’d thought.
“Would you
stop that?” Willow said suddenly, scowling up at him. The effect of the expression
was dampened slightly by the daub of mint ice cream on her nose.
“You have
ice cream on your nose,” Schuldig told her.
“Oh,”
said Willow. “Thanks.” She wiped the ice cream off with a napkin
and tried the scowl again. It worked better this time. “Seriously,
though, can’t you back off a little?”
“Back off
what?”
“I can feel you poking at my mind, you know. It’s
kind of distracting.”
Schuldig
blinked. “You can feel me doing that?”
Willow narrowed
her eyes at him. “Yes, and it’s getting on my nerves.”
“There’s
not much I can do about it,” Schuldig shrugged. “It’s kind of
unconscious. I guess my talent seeks out thoughts on its own.”
“Really?”
Willow crunched down on the last bit of ice cream cone and dabbed at her mouth
with her napkin before tossing it in a trash can at the next intersection. “That’s
interesting, actually. I’ve never actually met an real telepath before—I
hope you don’t mind if I, er, take notes. I have some friends who’d
be interested.”
Schuldig frowned
at her phrasing. “Don’t you mean, you’ve ‘never met another telepath before’?”
“No. I’m
not a telepath. Turn here.” Schuldig braked slightly and swerved on his
rollerblades to turn the corner with Willow, casting a brief querying probe out
as he did so. Several people around them immediately turned as one to look up
at the street sign: Eighth Street. Willow looked at them, a little surprised. “What
was that all about?”
“What?
Those people? I wanted to know what street we were on.”
Willow raised an
eyebrow. “So… Stop me if I’m wrong, by the way: you went to
the trouble of mental command towards a group of unassociated individuals and
read each of their thoughts separately, instead of just looking up at the sign
yourself or asking me what street we were on?”
It did sound a
little silly when she put it that way, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as
she made it out to be, either. Schuldig told her so and then asked, “What
do you mean, you’re not a telepath?”
“I mean I’m
not a telepath,” Willow said, flashing him a quick, sardonic smile. She
paused in front of a tiny doorway between two shops and swung her pack around
so she could reach it.
Schuldig leaned
against the wall of the building as Willow fished for her keys. “But you’ve
got the strongest mental shields I’ve ever seen,” he argued, “and
in the park you talked to me mind-to-mind. That’s telepathy.”
Willow shook her
head at him. “No, it’s not. Ah! Here we go.” The door swung
inward and Willow held it open as Schuldig teetered through on his
rollerblades, then followed him in. “You’re gonna have to take your
‘blades off,” she said offhandedly, before starting up the stairs.
Schuldig
scowled, but it didn’t matter much because she wasn’t looking at
him. For lack of anything else to do, he sat gingerly on the third step up and
began unbuckling his right foot, looking absently around him as he did so.
The door had let
them into what was perhaps four square feet of space before the long, narrow
flight of stairs began. The thoughts Schuldig could pick up in passing from the
other apartments in the building were gray—disinterested, tired, even
dismal: the thoughts of people who disliked where they lived and how they lived
and who they lived with.
Schuldig liked
his own posh doorman building far better.
“The third
floor,” Willow called down to him. “Apartment 3W. I’ll leave
the door unlocked.”
“Okay,”
Schuldig replied, and started on his left foot.
The cheap
wallpaper was peeling, the single banister on the right-hand side of the
stairwell looked to be coming loose; the stairs themselves were painted a sort
of blueish teal color, but the color was severely worn. There was a row of
dented metal mailboxes to the left; once he’d pulled his rollerblades
off, Schuldig stood in his sock feet and peered at the labels, searching for
3W.
Rosenberg.
Okay. Willow
Rosenberg, then. He had a last name at the very least.
Sighing slightly
and wishing lazily for an elevator (though he supposed that if there had been
one, it would have been out-of-order), Schuldig began to climb the stairs.
There were quite
a lot of them—the apartments must have high ceilings. The stairs slanted
straight on past the second floor with barely a pause for the three-foot
landing. Curious, Schuldig stepped off onto the second floor and peered around
the corner—the building must go far back into the block it was on,
because there was a long narrow corridor beyond the second-floor landing.
At the third
floor the stairs ended, and another short landing swerved into a hallway almost
identical to that of the second floor. At the far end of the corridor was the
beginning of the next flight of stairs. Schuldig stepped softly on the cracked
linoleum, shifting his grip on his rollerblades, and headed towards 3W, which
was in the middle of the hallway.
Just as he was
reaching out to push the door open, it swung inward of its own accord and
Willow stuck her head out. “Schuldig! Are you—Oh.” She
blushed, which was almost cute in a really girly sort of way, and quirked that
eyebrow at him before stepping back to let Schuldig in. “I was wondering
if I was gonna have to teleport you up the stairs. For a guy with leg muscles
like that, you sure move slowly.”
“You’ve
been checking out my leg muscles?” Schuldig said, with no small amount of
amusement.
Willow blushed
harder, but if he hadn’t been able to see the pink in her cheeks,
Schuldig would have thought she was keeping her cool nicely. “Just sizing
up the competition,” she replied breezily. “Look, I’m gonna
take a shower. You can help yourself to anything in the fridge, but don’t
forget to come up with a reason for why you’re asking a girl you don’t
know or particularly like out to dinner.”
How she managed
to sound so condescending when she was still blushing and was talking about
something that, in essence, insulted her, Schuldig had no idea. “All
right,” he said, and added a nod to his statement to give it a little
more oomph.
A corner of her
mouth quirked up—or, quirked further up, because she seemed to wear a
patient smile perpetually—and she shrugged slightly. “All right,
then.” She paused at a small closet on her way to the bathroom, and then
shut the door behind her.
Schuldig bent
slightly to prop his rollerblades against the wall and then began to walk
around the small apartment, snooping shamelessly. There was a tiny, if
well-equipped, kitchen, with a full rack of very sharp knives of varying sizes,
and the whole place was stocked with quick, easy-to-make food: packaged
macaroni and cheese, dried Ramen noodles, carefully sealed tofu, plenty of
fruit, and even more yogurt. Schuldig helped himself to a chocolate Yoplait
before continuing his self-guided tour.
There was a
small doorway draped with a beaded curtain that led to what must be Willow’s
bedroom. A plump futon on top of a low wood frame fit snugly under the back
window; there was barely an inch on either side of the bed between the walls. A
longish bedside table was shoved against the wall as well, and it was crowded
with photographs of people who must have been Willow’s family or close
friends. The same pair, a tiny, perky-looking blonde girl and a tall lanky boy
with curly brown hair, were in almost every picture.
Schuldig had the
feeling he was looking at something private, but since he pretty much made a
habit of doing that, he wasn’t sure why he was sort of possibly feeling a
little bad about it.
He left the
bedroom.
The only other
room besides the bathroom was the one he’d entered into in the first
place, which seemed to constitute dining room, living room, study and library.
Schuldig blinked, having just caught himself expecting every person on the
planet to live rolling in the kind of money Schwarz did and wondered when,
exactly, he’d begun thinking like Bradley Crawford.
With a sigh,
Schuldig retired to the more comfortable-looking of the two chairs in the apartment
(the stool squeezed into the kitchen didn’t count) and looked around him.
Willow’s apartment seemed—well, displaced was perhaps the best word
for it. It didn’t seem to match the building it was a part of at all. The
floors were clean polished wood, the walls looked freshly painted (pastel blue
for the bedroom, yellow for the kitchen and a surprisingly pleasant green for
the main room) and the whole place looked generally taken care of. In fact, it
looked well taken
care of by someone with a larger budget than could be expected from what Willow’s
current occupation appeared to be—that is, rescuing innocents in the West
Village for no pay.
At least getting
to know this girl wouldn’t be mind-numbingly dull. Crawford had set
Schuldig on some really
boring assignments before.
The bathroom
door creaked as it opened, and Willow stepped out, looking quite refreshed and
clean in a different set of clothing. She quirked at Schuldig again as she
rubbed her hair vigorously with a towel.
“So,”
Schuldig said, before she could ask him anything—he’d forgotten to
come up with a plausible excuse while she’d been cleaning off—“if
you’re not a telepath, what are you?”
Willow blinked
at him. She had incredibly long eyelashes. “I’m a witch,” she
said, as though this were obvious.
“Ah,”
said Schuldig. “… That doesn’t really explain much.”
Willow shrugged
at him. Apparently she didn’t mind not making any sense.
“So,”
she said briskly. “Have you come up with a plausible excuse for wanting
to take me out to dinner, or do you want to recant the offer?”
“I haven’t
come up with an excuse,” Schuldig admitted, “but I don’t want
to recant, either.”
“Huh,”
Willow said. “Well. I’ll give you a couple of more minutes to think
about it. I’ll join you for a yogurt, shall I?”
She did, and was
shortly sitting backwards in the second chair (a swivel-chair on wheels) with
her bare feet crossed comfortably at the ankles, looking to be thoroughly
enjoying her strawberry Dannon.
“Come up
with anything yet?” Willow asked when she was done and had thrown the
empy carton away.
Schuldig sighed,
glanced upwards at her expectant face, hoped that Crawford wouldn’t mind
too much, braced himself because what he was about to do wasn’t something
he did very often, and told Willow the truth.
“Okay,”
she said when he was done. She was sitting backwards in the chair again, with
her elbows propped on the back and her feet resting on the stand above the
wheels. “Let me get this straight. You are part of a group of four guys,
and you’re freelance assassins, and the self-appointed boss of this lil’
group is prescient and he sees me in all of your possible futures, and he wants you to invite me to dinner?”
“That’s
pretty much it,” said Schuldig.
“So I can
join your weird little assassin group and possibly help you kill people?”
“…
That too,” said Schuldig.
“Huh,”
said Willow, and nibbled at a cuticle absent-mindedly. “So what you’re
really saying,” she said, “is that you want me to come to your
place for dinner ‘cause it’s Fate?”
“In a
nutshell,” said Schuldig.
Willow grinned
at him. “I’ve never gotten that line before. Friday at eight, bucko. I’ll
be there.”
