*****
I got the house for nine-thousand, three-hundred and sixty-four dollars and seventy-five cents. If you go into an office screaming about hidden termite damage making walls collapse and fire hazards, you'd be shocked how quickly they start trying to placate you. Remember kids: whine often enough and loudly enough, and most people will give you what you want. The world is a funny place sometimes.
I started moving gear in the next day. Guns and assorted knives, silver bullets, garlic and wooden stakes (I have never run into an actual vampire, but helps to be prepared and besides I like garlic on my hamburgers), rock salt, a few cold iron bars, some flares, some kinda voodoo thing that I got from a witch doctor and which works better on ghouls than you'd think, piano wire (for zombies), a large kind of thing that made a 'doink' sound and other than that I'm not sure what it did...
I have a lot of stuff, is the key point here.
Lydia looked critically at the boxes. “Are you certain you are quite sane?”
“Nope!” I said. “But that's what makes life fun.”
“I feel unsafe storing such things in my home, good sir.”
“You're dead. You are in no danger from any of this! Except the stuff in the boxes marked with a kind of cartoon ghost, that's my anti-ghost stuff. And even then, I'm not sure, since you might not have the same weaknesses as a normal ghost. Is it sad that I think of ghosts as normal?” I asked.
“A bit, yes,” Lydia said.
I narrowed my eyes. “You know, I think I liked you better when you didn't talk back. And besides, I thought you were planning to move onto that fluffy cloudy place in the sky after you finished giving old Harry the chop?”
She drew herself up, the very picture of Imperial Womanhood. “I am the guardian of this household, and feel that it is my duty to remain here for now, and if possible to curb your excesses somewhat. I have seen your activities first-hand, and find you to be quite irrational. Clearly, your lifestyle is most lacking, most notably in the utter absence of dignity of any sort. This shall be best restored by a woman's touch around the house.”
“My excesses? You're the one who chopped a ghost in half with a lightsaber.”
Lydia couldn't quite meet my eyes when she spoke next, and it was barely above a whisper, but I definitely heard something that sounded very much like, “He deserved it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, yes, you're a real lady. Please, you make Xena look fluffy.”
“... I do not know what that means,” she said, though she looked vaguely insulted despite this.
“Oh, right. Remind me to set you up with a DVD player or something for after I leave.”
She blinked. “Leave? But you purchased my house.”
“Well, yeah, and I'm gonna fix it up a bit, don't worry, but, um... this isn't really a place I'm planning to live in a lot. It's a safe house. I mean, I'll sleep here on occasion, but it's mostly for storing equipment, and...” I began.
Her eyes were already filling up with tears.
I sighed. “I... well, it's just that most of my orders come online these days, and it's gonna be a pain getting a connection way out here in the boonies, and...”
Her lower lip began to quiver.
“And have you seen all the damage around here? It won't be hard to make it into a place to crash for the night instead of a hotel, but living here? It's gonna cost ten times what I paid for the stupid place to get it into decent condition, which really defeats the purpose of getting it for so cheap, and...”
She made a little sniffling noise. That evil little monster.
“Fine. Ugh, I'll work something out. I guess having like, a central base of operations will impress clients, maybe. Make me look high-class. Just jeez, stop crying,” I snarled.
She giggled girlishly. “Excellent! I believe this shall be a wonderful association, good sir. It will be quite pleasant to have company again, even your rather uncouth brand. Now, by all means, do complete your unpacking. I shall prepare a list of needed repairs. Worry not, together we'll have this place looking as grand as the day it was built!” She said, skipping off. Skipping! Dammit, she actually was cute when she wasn't screaming. Cute and manipulative. She was going to be a huge pain in the ass to live with.
… heh.
Though actually, when I really stopped to think and put it like that, I hadn't 'lived with' anyone in a long time. Even if she technically wasn't living, well she could snark in a kind of old-timey way, and she wasn't unpleasant to be around. Might be kinda fun.
Still, I couldn't let her just skip off after using her feminine wiles on me like that, sent the wrong message. I cleared my throat and said. “And hey, having a guardian spirit around is probably gonna be really useful! Better than a guard dog.”
The skipping stopped cold. “I am not a dog.”
“Of course you're not! You're better, aren't you pretty girl? Arrrrren't you? Whoooooo's a good girl?”
“Honestly. I should have let the monstrous old man torture you for a bit longer. It might have burned some politeness into you,” she muttered.
I pantomimed being shot through the heart. “So cruel! You know, I had to spend nearly a week in the hospital? The hospital. Getting stitches and pills and other medical things. Even now my back hurts like you would not believe. I can barely lift this...” I checked the box in my hands. “... powdered chicken teeth? How the heck is that even a thing, and where did I get a box from?”
“... Are you quite sane?” my roommate asked.
I just smiled.
Yeah, this place was feeling more like a home already.
###
Afterword
Hey, all! You hold in your hands my very first published work. If this were a paper book and you were reading the first edition and I sometime in the future become famous, you could have sold this for millions of dollars. It isn't any of those things, so you won't, but I'm still very happy you bought it!
I have been writing as a hobby for roughly a decade as of this posting, and only just now have I tried in any way to make money from it. This was possibly not the brightest move on my part, but it is probably good for you since it means the quality will be a bit higher, hopefully.
Thank you to Isabel, my dearest heart, for always supporting me in this. Thanks to Jen for editing my hideous first draft, Ari for helping me work out the characters far more organically than I could have on my own, and Lander for some truly awesome cover art.
And to you, the readers, of course!
About the Author
Andrew E. Moczulski is almost kind of a writer, now. He has a Masters degree in business that he has never really used for anything, and which has nothing to do with anything seen here. He is a dog person.
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