Page 7 of Wreaking Havoc
Sascha tookhis time returning to his house, a shabby number in the Queen Anne Victorian style—two whole stories, not including the attic, all of it shaded by the enormous trees surrounding it.
He wasn’t sure why Ivan had insisted on paying cash for a whole-ass house, rather than just renting him a place, especially since Sascha was without his usual maid service to keep the damn thing clean. It no doubt fit into his nefarious schemes somehow, in some way Sascha wasn’t privy to. It had come fully furnished, and Sascha was fairly certain the former owner had died in there, but he tried not to think about that part too hard.
Either way, it was…a lot. Sascha’s apartment in New York had been nothing to sneeze at, but this was a whole goddamnhouse. One that made a lot of noises. Which he’d been assured—by both Ivan and the plumber who’d come to fix the pipes—was just the sound of the house’s bones settling with the changing weather.
Although, frankly, Sascha didn’t like to think of his humble abode as having bones at all. It made him think too much of the house as a monster, ready to devour him.
Not that he was scared, or anything. He was almost thirty, for fuck’s sake. He just didn’t like old, weird houses that seemed to talk.
Like now.
Sascha paused, bottles of nail polish in hand. He’d been setting up a station for himself—sheets of newspaper on the coffee table in case he made a mess—but he’d just heard a strange rustling sound, maybe coming from the attic room in the front turret (because, yes, his house had aturret).
There it was again.
Sascha frowned up at the ceiling. “If you’re a ghost up there,” he called out, shaking the bottles vaguely in the direction of the attic, “I’m asking you kindly to get the fuck out of my house.”
There was no answer, only the same strange noise again. It was probably the old owner, wasn’t it, come to tell him to fuck off back to New York?
Or, even worse…
Sascha stood in a hurry, setting the bottles on the table. “Oh, fuck no. There better not be rats up there.”
If there were rats in that goddamn attic, he was moving out, no matter what Ivan said.
He headed upstairs, turning on each light as he went, no matter that it wasn’t dark yet outside. He wasn’t facing a ghostorrats in anything less than complete brightness.
He climbed up the ladder into the attic room, pulling the cord to turn the one pathetic light bulb on once he got up there.
He was met with a few pieces of dusty furniture and a whole stack of boxes. And…more boxes, more than he had the energy to get into anytime soon. Couldn’t the house’s seller have cleared it ofanyof the previous owner’s junk?
He paused. There was that rustling sound again.
Sascha peered around the boxes, barely daring to breathe. There were scattered books on the ground, dusty and a little water damaged. Had they been knocked over?
But he didn’t see any droppings or—actually, Sascha had no clue what other signs to look for when it came to rats. A ratlike smell, maybe?
But the attic smelled just fine. A bit musty, but not rank or anything. Sascha bent down and picked up one of the books. It was a real fancy number, leather-bound, with intricate designs etched into the cover. Skinny though. Barely a hundred pages.
He flipped it open. What words there were, were written in a language he didn’t recognize. It almost looked like it could be Latin. But Sascha knew Latin—one of the takeaways of boarding school, along with how to give and receive furtive blow jobs after hours—and this wasn’t it.
The book was mostly illustration, with pretty designs on almost every page. They looked like runes of some kind. Huh.
Sascha held on to the book while he did one more cursory look around the room. He didn’t find anything worth freaking out over. The noise must’ve been the house’s old, creepy bones after all.
He took the book down with him—it would give him something to stare at while he painted his nails. Six weeks in this tiny town and he was sick to death of trash TV.
And he’d never thought he’d see the day when he could claimthat.
Sascha set the book on the coffee table and perched on the edge of the couch, ready to get to work. He’d decided to go with the electric blue—Seth seemed nice and all, but Sascha didn’t know him well enough to get all matchy-matchy with him when it came to nail colors.
He painted his left hand as best he could and studied the results, which weren’t half-bad. Although it did make his clothes—his beige sweatshirt and black joggers—look a bit boring in comparison.
Maybe he should get something a little more fun to wear, just for at home. Some looser pants, maybe. Something flowy and…pretty.
Bright.
After all, what Ivan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
