Pocket Dungeon 2, page 12
“Shit,” I breathed out.
“What is it?” Yasha asked. I looked over and met the fox-woman’s inquisitive gold eyes.
I hesitated for a moment, because I didn’t want to frighten Iris any more than she already was, but I also didn’t want to keep any information from either of them. I exhaled slowly.
“One of the men,” I said. “He had a gun. I think both of them probably did, but I only saw the one. It isn’t the sort of weapon a security guard would usually carry, at least not any security guard I’ve ever seen. It’s some pretty heavy-duty firepower.”
I made sure my voice was low. The last thing I wanted was to freak out everyone on the street by making them think someone with a seriously dangerous gun was hanging around. That was a great way to cause mass chaos in city streets, and that was not something I was interested in doing.
“A gun?” Iris hissed. I was glad she had picked up on my attempt not to draw attention in our direction, but despite the effort, her eyes were still wide with unflinching panic.
“I think it was a rifle,” I said. “I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s anything we have to worry about right now. I can’t imagine them opening fire in the street for any reason, but it’s good to know we need to be more careful from here on out. Remember, Harper doesn’t know you’re here, much less that you’re even alive still.”
“Right,” Iris breathed, and my words seemed to have calmed her down a little. “So, what do we do then?”
“We keep an eye on him still,” I said. “Right now, I’m not sure what the best course of action is, because we don’t really have enough information about the situation. But the information we do have is that Harper is dangerous, and it seems like he has dangerous people working with or for him.”
“Do you think Harper could have been the one who sent the people after us?” Yasha asked. “The ones that were following us?”
I paused. “I’m not sure. Maybe? I can try to reach out to some friends I knew in grad school. They were computer guys. They might be able to do some searching for me from the license plate number I snagged, but I don’t know if anything will come of it. I’ve been a little paranoid that maybe the person following us could be related to Harper, but I don’t want to bank on that right now.”
I looked over at Iris after I stepped back onto the sidewalk next to her and Yasha. The blonde woman’s face had gone paler than I’d ever seen it, and I could have sworn her hands were shaking ever so slightly.
Despite that, though, an air of resilience radiated off of her. She might have been terrified, but she also wasn’t willing to go down without a fight. It was that sort of energy that I was certain had kept her alive for fifty years in the dungeon.
“Things will be okay,” I told her. “I promise.”
Iris took a long moment before she looked at me. Our eyes met, and there was an undeniable intensity in the glance that shot through me like lightning.
Slowly, she nodded her head. “Okay. I believe you, Wes. Thank you for showing me this. I would have been upset if you knew and didn’t tell me about it.”
“Of course,” I said. “You deserved to know. And it’s harder to keep us all safe if we’re in the dark on the things that might hurt us.”
“And we will not let anything hurt you,” Yasha said. “They will have to get through me first.”
The fox-woman might not have had her katana on her, but I knew she could be just as deadly without the weapon. She squeezed Iris’ arm before she let go and took a slight step back to give the other woman some space.
Iris exhaled a breath and nodded her head again. “I think I want to go back to the apartment now, if that’s alright. I don’t know if I’m feeling up to any more shopping right now.”
“Of course,” I said. “I don’t blame you. This was a lot to take in right now. We can always go back out again tomorrow.”
“Come,” Yasha said and linked one of her arms through Iris’ while she carried her bag of books in the other. I had tried to carry the bag for her like I did Iris’, but Yasha had insisted that she wanted to carry it herself.
I followed closely behind the two women as we retraced our steps back to my apartment complex, but even though we were moving farther and farther away from Harper’s building with each step, my thoughts couldn’t leave it behind.
I knew I hadn’t imagined the sheer volume of people who were moving in and out of the building, and I knew from my research into the new establishment that there wasn’t anything else that currently operated out of the location.
So why were there so many people going in and out in such a rush? And why had at least two of them been heavily armed? I could understand a security team having some sort of concealed weaponry, but these guys weren’t in any discerning uniforms, and they were carrying the sort of weapons I’d associate with a soldier, not a guy working security at a new record label branch.
The thoughts lingered in the back of my mind the entire way back to the apartment, and even as we stepped inside my home sweet home, I still felt like I was back on the street corner staring at Harper’s new fortress in Chicago.
“You have a look on your face,” Yasha said to me after Iris excused herself to go use the bathroom.
I sighed and set the paper bag filled with books down on the island in the small kitchen. I then shrugged off my leather jacket and placed it next to the bag. I took the crystal out of the inner pocket and slipped it into the front pocket of my jeans for safekeeping as I tried to formulate a reply. Yasha’s words might have been a little vague, but I knew what she was talking about without having to ask.
“I know,” I said. “I’m still thinking about the building. I just don’t want to freak Iris out. She’s already been through so much, and it might be nothing. I don’t want to set her on edge if it isn’t anything important.”
Yasha took a step closer to me and kept her voice low. “But you are not wrong about these things. I trust you, Wes, so what is it?”
“There were a lot of people going in and out of the building,” I explained. “And it doesn’t make sense.”
“That does not sound odd to me,” Yasha said. “Unless things are different here on Earth, people frequent establishments, do they not?”
“They do,” I said. “I guess I should explain a little more. There isn’t anything else in the building, other than Harper’s record company. And it just opened. So why would so many people be going in and out in the middle of the day? They can’t have garnered much business in Chicago already, could they?”
Yasha frowned and mulled over my words. “I see what you mean. That does sound suspicious. But also, I do not know what a record company is. Is this abnormal for a record company?”
Sometimes it was shockingly easy to forget just how much Yasha didn’t know because she was so capable when it came to everything else.
“They make music,” I said. “Well, they find artists who make music.”
“I see,” Yasha said.
“Anyway, I think it’s abnormal because I don’t know how they could have picked up so many clients already,” I said. “Especially because they just opened up here. There is always the possibility that it’s people coming in and out to finish getting the business set up and furnished, and to deal with all of the equipment they would need, but no one was carrying anything that would make sense if that were the case. There weren’t any boxes or moving carts, and I didn’t see anybody with equipment for any purpose. Which makes me wonder what they were doing. The whole thing feels wrong.”
“And weapons are not a part of a record company,” Yasha said. “Is that correct?”
“Exactly,” I said.
But before the two of us could continue our conversation on the strangeness of what we’d seen, Iris emerged from the bathroom. She wiped her damp hands on her jeans and looked up at the two of us with a curious look on her face.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Yasha opened her mouth to explain, but I cleared my throat before she could say anything.
“Nothing,” I said. “We were just talking about the books Yasha found at Page Turner.”
Yasha frowned, but the look was there and gone in a flash. She nodded her head and smoothed out her features into something less concerned.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I found many good books. Would you like to see them?”
I hated keeping things from Iris, especially when I had just told her that the more information she had, the safer she would be. And I meant what I said, but I also knew that sometimes, it was best to get a full picture before I let myself send her into a panic.
She had already been through so much, and the last thing I needed to do was freak her out without having a reason.
A plan started to form in my mind.
I wanted to see if I could keep track of the people going in and out of the building, and if the strange level of traffic also happened at night. That alone would be a way to prove to myself that there was something out of the ordinary going on with the record label.
I would have to wait until Iris and Yasha both settled down for the night, and then I would go and stake out the building to try and see if I could find anything out of the ordinary.
In the meantime, I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to my friends from graduate school who had been in the computer science programs. It was a long shot, but if one of them could use the license plate number I had managed to catch, then maybe they could track down the car and see if it was somehow affiliated with Harper, too.
Once I had a plan in mind, I felt myself relax a little as some of my initial panic at seeing the guns finally started to subside. I wasn’t perfectly relaxed yet, but at the very least, I no longer felt like the stress was going to make me combust.
I always functioned better if I had a plan in mind and knew what to do moving forward. Now all I had to do was bide my time and wait for nightfall.
The sound of the television turning on was enough to draw me from my own thoughts, and I looked over to see that Iris and Yasha had managed to pull up YouTube. Admittedly, I was a little impressed they had actually managed it given both of their technological ineptitude.
Yasha was in control of the remote, and she was very slowly managing to type something into the search bar.
I couldn’t catch what it was she had typed before the screen changed and the search results took its place. A surprised laugh tore from my throat.
The television screen was now filled with the YouTube search results for Aerosmith’s music videos.
“Click on that one,” Iris said and pointed to one of the videos on the screen.
Yasha did as requested and then leaned forward to watch with rapt focus as the music video started to play out on the screen. Iris wore a similar look of focus, but there was something different in the way her eyes moved across the screen.
While Yasha was seeing this, and hearing the music for that matter, for the first time, Iris looked as if she was coming home. It seemed like just seeing the video and hearing the music she had been so entwined with back in her previous life was enough to make her go back in time.
I didn’t move from where I leaned up against the kitchen island, because I was enjoying watching Yasha and Iris bond. After the Aerosmith video ended, Iris mumbled something else to Yasha, and the fox-woman started the slow process of typing into the search bar again.
This time, she pulled up Fleetwood Mac.
Warmth flooded my chest as I watched the two women in my life bond over music and the strange circumstances that had linked us all together.
I didn’t want to interrupt their moment, so I moved quietly behind the couch and into my bedroom without drawing attention to myself. I gingerly pushed the door closed before I made my way over to my dresser and deposited the crystal in its usual place next to the bag that held all of my gold coins.
The stone was far weightier than it looked, and it glowed faintly from within. I didn’t look too closely into the glowing light, however, because I didn’t want to get bounced from entering the dungeons right now.
Of course, I could always try again later without any repercussions, but it still felt a little like slamming my head into a brick wall whenever I tried to enter the dungeons before the twenty-four-hour waiting period was up.
Besides, I hadn’t been entering the crystal every day over the last week anyway. Even though I really wanted to do just that, Yasha and I had agreed it was probably the safest option to space the visits out to every other day for the time being, at least until we were able to figure out who was following us and what was going on with Harper.
Sometimes being cautious and well prepared sucked.
I could still hear the sound of 70s rock drifting lazily into the room from the YouTube marathon Iris and Yasha had started, and I bopped my head along to the Eagles as I sat down on the edge of my bed and pulled out my phone.
I fired off a quick series of messages to a couple of the guys I knew from grad school who were involved in computer science, complete with all of the details I thought it was safe to spare, in the vain hope they were able to uncover something for me.
My hopes weren’t too high, but if I didn’t venture down every potential avenue, I knew I would regret it. I needed to do everything I could to make sure I was safe, alongside the women I cared about.
Once my messages were marked as delivered, I slipped my phone back into my pocket and moved back out into the living room to join Yasha and Iris on the couch.
Yasha scooted over to the side so I could easily drop down between the two of them on the sagging cushions. As soon as I sat down, Yasha inched her way over into my lap without a care in the world. It felt like second nature to wrap my arm around her, and it felt crazy to me that she had only been in my life for such a short period of time.
“Here,” I said and took the remote from her hand. “I can type for you instead.”
She sighed in relief. “Thank you, Wes. It is difficult to translate the letters.”
“I’m fascinated by how that works,” Iris said. “The translation thing. I never really thought about it while I was in the dungeons, but I could definitely understand what everyone was saying.”
“It was weird at first for me, too,” I assured her. “But enough about the dungeons for now. What else are we looking up?”
Iris seemed relieved to leave the subject behind for the time being, and instead focus on something she clearly loved-- music. I was happy to oblige her in any of her requests for songs, but all the while, my own thoughts were still locked on my plan.
Something was going on with Harper’s record label in Chicago, I was almost sure of it. And whatever it was, I was going to find out.
Now all that was left to do was wait for night to come.
Chapter 9
As it would turn out, trying to sneak out of my apartment in the middle of the night was a feat far easier said than done.
I had made it only a foot from my bed before Yasha perked her head up. Her ears twitched as she blinked her sleep bleary golden eyes and turned her head in my direction.
She rubbed at her eyes with her fist, yawned, and then squinted at me.
“Where are you going?” she asked at full volume.
I quickly gestured for her to quiet down. “Would you believe me if I said nowhere?”
“I would not, because that is a lie,” Yasha said, this time in an exaggerated stage whisper.
I sighed and moved back to the bed and crouched down so the two of us were closer to eye level and didn’t have to whisper-shout across the very marginal space.
“I want to go check out that building,” I explained. “Harper’s. The one we saw earlier today. There was something weird about it, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I saw two people leave with guns, and it makes me wonder if there’s more.”
“So you are going in the middle of the night so as to not frighten Iris,” Yasha deduced.
“Exactly,” I confirmed with a nod. “I don’t want her to worry, but I also want to make sure you’re both safe and taken care of.”
“Then I will come with you.” Yasha said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world before she swung her legs over next to me and slipped out of bed.
I stumbled back to get out of her way and tried to come up with a reason that she should stay behind, but anything I came up with fell flat, even to my own ears. There wasn’t a reason she shouldn’t come, and in fact, it probably made more sense for her to come with me. She had heightened senses that I didn’t possess, and she was a trained warrior.
Sure, I was scrappy, but there was a difference. Despite the fact I had been keeping up with her in the dungeons, I knew my skills were more of the brain than the brawn at that moment in time.
Yasha had already started pulling on her clothing from earlier in the day, but I held my hand out to stop her.
“Wait,” I said.
“I am coming with you, Wes,” Yasha stated and placed her hands on her hips.
“No, it isn’t that,” I said. “Your clothes. Dress in black. We will be less noticeable that way.”
Okay, so maybe it was equal parts logical and the fact I thought it would get me in the right spy headspace. But Yasha didn’t question me and instead, she simply nodded her head and started pilfering through her clothing-based chaos to find a black skirt and a long-sleeved black shirt. The material of the shirt clung tightly to her chest, so despite the fact most of her skin was covered, her clothes were practically painted on and left little to the imagination above the waist.
While she finished getting dressed, I pulled on a pair of my own dark jeans, as well as a black t-shirt. When paired with my leather jacket, I would also be head to toe in black.
“We have to be quiet, I don’t want to wake Iris up,” I told Yasha once the two of us were finished dressing.
“I understand,” she said. She pulled her beanie on over her head, and her fluffy ears disappeared from view.
