Key decided that gaining resistance to drugs should be banned. It hadn’t been an hour yet, but he could feel the meds already fading from under his skin.
Key breezed past Charlotte as soon as she opened their apartment doors. He didn’t stop until he reached the bathroom sink. He stuck the cup under the tap as he pulled out the pill bottle from his pocket and dropped two pills into his mouth. He tried to swallow. Swallow. Took a gulp of water. Took another, until the glass was empty. It made the bitterness worse and worse and worse until he gagged on it. Until he spit out the paste-y mess of the dissolved magic repressors. He scraped off the bitter powder from the side of his mouth with his fingernails.
The world spun—of course it did, but what he felt was not the world, but him. He spun down and down and down until he hit here, a bathroom floor that wasn’t even his with a hangover with no cure.
Joe nuzzled at his hand until Key ran his hand over the bristliest fur by Joe’s nose. “I’m fine,’ he said even though Joe could see past that lie—curse of smart dogs. He saw that Key was exerting himself with the tiny spells that fired under his skin without permission.
There was nothing, though, to stop the whispers of power struggles, the great acts of balancing happening all around him. The little voices banged at his head, but their actual voices were too quiet to hear what they were promising. He would never be powerful enough to truly hear them again. They would always be faint like now. By the sheer quantity, they must be trying to tell him something important.
The bathroom door clicked open. Footsteps pounded on the linoleum floor and then Millie barreled into Key, licking every visible patch of skin she could. Her tail thumped Joe in the face as he ran to get away from his enthusiastic adopted sister.
Charlotte followed a little slower. She rested on the doorframe, one of her hand rested on her hips, but the other gripped her phone hard enough that her fingers turned white. “Key, honey, are you okay?”
“No.” He shoved himself off the floor. Joe made an attempt to step closer before he realized the Millie still plastered herself on Key’s legs. Key ruffled the top of her head before shoving her face away. She still looked at him with stars in her eyes, but she did give him a bit of space. He made sure to pet Joe’s nose as he passed.
She followed him into the living room. Her eyes followed him, but he refused to be roped into a staring match, so they sat looking vaguely in the same direction. Millie had rolled to press her side to one of his legs—her own legs dangling in the air. Joe had taken a quieter place on his other side.
In a way, Dona had probably either saved him or doomed him. There weren’t many reasons for a reaper to be haunting the ley lines except if they wanted to search large areas at once. To those who would normally be unfindable, they were a nightmare. It was easy to triangulate down areas until you could find specific people.
If the reaper was looking for him and found Dona instead, it might confuse the signal. They would likely not look further then her—stopping too direct of action because they had already changed the order too much to interfere more. Or, if they were looking for Dona and felt him, then, well, that might complicate things.
The question then was, was Dona the one that they were searching for or was it Key.
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