Home Sweet Home (mxm)

Chapter 7: Cry for Me

Caleb was waiting for him when he stepped out of the taxi and shut the door. The driver didn't seem to notice, but he'd also not seemed to care about much of anything besides getting paid and hurrying to his next pick-up. 

Adon watched Caleb as the wraith watched him from where it stood beside the spare room's window. He'd never really seen him outside in the open before. Even when he'd be at the apartment with them, he had disappeared when they'd left, then reappeared inside the car. 

So you can physically be outside, too. Good to know. 

"Taylor is in the hospital so I'm here to take care of the fish for him," he said as he slowly started walking toward the house. 

A blur by the window next to the door drew his attention, but he couldn't quite make out anything inside because of the glare from the emerging sun. 

Stopping a few feet from the door, he turned to see Caleb standing a few feet away from him, his stare blank and lips slightly parted. 

"You need to make sure that your brother doesn't come after me. If he tries to attack me, I'm not going to take care of the fish, and I won't let Taylor come back here, either," he warned, getting a miniscule head tilt from Caleb before the wraith disappeared. 

Hope that means he agrees to keep me alive. 

Taking out Taylor's keys, he unlocked the door, then nudged it open so that it slowly swung inward until it bumped against the wall. 

He looked around the entire room before carefully stepping inside, then shut the door. There was no way he'd lock it, but he didn't want the banshee to get out, either, if that were even possible. He'd read up a bit more on that specific type of undead since he'd decided to go take care of the fish for Taylor, and wanted to be as prepared as possible. The information had been pretty adamant that banshee's couldn't travel very far from their bodies, and if killed inside of a structure, they were pretty much locked in there... but then again, the much smaller section of information he'd found on wraiths mentioned the same thing. 

Definitely was wrong there. 

Looking over toward the kitchen counter, he noticed the fish tank sitting where they'd left it and walked over. The animal looked fine at first, swimming near the top of its tank, but then Adon realized that the little pump wasn't working. 

He quickly unplugged it and took it out, then walked over to the sink. After a rinse and scrub, he took a few pieces off the little device. 

"Ah ha," he whispered to himself as he grabbed one of the keys on his keychain and carefully pushed a stuck piece of the fish's plastic plant out of the small clear tube. It hadn't been visible with one of the plastic pieces in front of it, but after he'd taken it off, it was obvious that it would cause the pump to struggle. 

"Hopefully that didn't completely burn out this little thing," he said as he got busy putting it all back together, then walked over to the little fish tank. 

Just to be safe, he tugged the little fake plant out and removed two more pieces of it that were already floating on the surface, ready to ambush the filter's intake tube the moment he set it back up, no doubt. 

"I'll get you something else later, little guy," he said as he tossed the fake plant in the trash, then got the little filter set back up.

After checking it out one more time, he plugged it in and was immediately relieved when it started right up and began aerating the water again. He added a small pinch of food, then grinned.

"There we go. He should be all set now," he said as he turned around, thinking that he'd see Caleb, but the young man was nowhere in sight. 

Instead, he heard a thudding noise echo from beyond the torn-apart wall. It took him a moment to connect the sound to Nicolai's baseball bat as he heard it again.