All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 2: Flesh and Skin ~ Willow Polson

Music - "The Other Side" by Dexter Freebish

The walk seemed to take forever. At one point, I thought I'd taken a wrong turn, but that same little breeze was drifting in and I figured maybe it knew the way better than me. And then, sure enough, there it was.

The old 1920s building huddled there between a couple of modern-looking glass and metal boxes without any soul to them, as if some angry architect had thrown some shapes on a sketch pad and yelled at his people to just build the damn things because he was going out drinking.

I glanced up at the three female faces molded into the stucco around the entry and, somehow, they calmed me down. Greek muses, I guessed. Just off the street at the bottom of the stairwell was the directory, and the only apartment without a name listed was the one on the pink paper in my hand. I pushed the nameless button.

What the hell am I doing? I don't even know who I'm buzzing.

Nothing happened.

"Okay, maybe nobody's home," I muttered under my breath. My finger hovered over it as I debated pushing it a second time, when the ancient speaker fizzled to life.

"Who is it?" said a woman's voice. My heart skipped a beat at the melody of her faint European lilt.

"Emma? Is that you?"

There was a long pause, then: "Who is this?"

"David. Remember me?" It sounds like her... it has to be her...

The damn thing was quiet for so long that I thought she must have fainted or climbed out a back window, or...

"What do you want?"

"I've been looking for you. I got your note. Please, can we talk? I'm glad you're still around," I babbled, words gushing out of me like a broken pipe.

"Looking?"

"Yeah, but I didn't... you said you were leaving, but then I ran into this girl, like literally ran into her," I said with a nervous chuckle. "She gave me this address in a paper fortune cookie she made. Please, is this Emma or not?" I stopped myself, realizing that The Voice From The Box had never actually said who she was.

Come to think of it... why was she staying in a hotel if she has an apartment right here?

Nothing.

"Please?" I said, practically begging. "I think something weird is going on."

Ten seconds later, the ornate metal security gate buzzed, and I pushed it open before she could change her mind.

The door to her place was already open a crack by the time I got up there, one impossibly beautiful Emma eye looking out at me from under the chain.

"David," I thought I heard her murmur, then she let me in, practically pushing me into the room and closing the door quickly behind us.

I was so stunned by the contents of her apartment that I nearly forgot to talk to her. New-agey stuff everywhere: Crystal ball-looking-things, strings of dried plants and feathers hanging all over the place, weird posters... I had not seen anything like this coming at all. Maybe she had seen me coming in one of those stone balls.

"I thought you were dead," her face and voice flat and to the point.

"Huh?" I said intelligently, turning to look at her finally. She was peering at me like she had X-ray vision or something and could see into my brain. Creepy.

"After what happened, I thought you might be dead. Where were you?"

"Looking for you," I said simply, getting confused. Dead? The hell? What happened?