Mar'i hummed as she nestled the curtain rod on the fixtures she'd drilled into the wall herself. She floated backward to make sure that the curtains were the length.
A knock on her door startled her and she let herself drop to the ground, worried that she'd been caught.
"I asked you not to fly in the house," Bruce said disapprovingly.
"Well, Terry's not here, and I hate using the ladder. It's not harming anyone."
Bruce frowned at her. "Terry's here a lot. And he can be very quiet."
"I have super hearing, Grandpa," she reminded him with a roll of her eyes.
"You didn't hear me."
"Yeah, well. I was concentrating."
"It looks nice in here," Bruce said after looking around for a moment.
He'd given her some money to decorate the room so she would feel at home. Ordinarily, she would feel weird about taking money she knew she couldn't pay back, but she figured it was for his house, so she let herself pretend she was on HGTV decorating her dream home, without even worrying about the budget.
Her father would be proud of her. She'd been using power drills and sanding furniture and staining things. She pulled up the old, dingy carpet (with her hands, not that her grandfather would be happy to hear that) and oiled the hardwood underneath. She'd put a throw rug under her bed, one across the room, added a loveseat, a bookshelf, and a shelf for a TV. She'd stripped the wallpaper off three of the walls and painted them lilac.
Next, she was going to hang some wall decorations, posters, paintings, photos. It was a fun way for her to spend her last week until classes begun.
"You know, there's a lot of other spaces in this house that need to be spruced up. The kitchen, for example."
Mar'i cast a quizzical look at him. "What do you you mean?"
"I mean, you did a fantastic job in here. Maybe it's time to redo the rest of the house."
She chuckled. "I couldn't do that. I don't know anything about decorating, like, a kitchen or a living room. I just made my room the way I wanted it. Besides, the kitchen doesn't need to be 'spruced up', it needs to be renovated. Walls need to be knocked down."
Bruce shrugged. "Not a problem. I'll get a contractor in here and they'll help you make the kitchen more functional."
"I don't know. I'll have to see what I think about it when my classes get going. I might not have much time to spare."
"Bruce?"
Bruce raised his eyebrows at Mar'i, and she rolled her eyes. His footsteps were so heavy, she definitely would've heard him coming.
"We're in Mary's room, McGinnis," he called back.
A few moments later, Terry appeared in the threshold. He gave Mar'i a short wave and glanced around the room. "Man, it looks totally schway in here. You should do the rest of the place."
"Oh, I don't-"
"We were just talking about that," Bruce said, and he was smiling.
"Schway," Terry said with a nod. "Uh, Bruce, we have a thing."
Bruce blinked at him. "A 'thing'?"
"Yeah. Sorry, like… that urgent thing."
"Fine. Get the car ready, I'll be there in a minute."
"Got it boss," Terry said, and he nodded at Mar'i before leaving.
"Again?" Mar'i demanded. Yesterday she was in the middle of cooking dinner for herself and her grandfather when Terry barged into the kitchen saying something about an emergency at Wayne Enterprises. "What is it now?"
"Terry's horrible at taking messages. It could be anything. We'll reschedule our dinner for tomorrow."
She made a pouty face at him. "You said that yesterday. I mean, X'hal, Grandpa, it's been a week and I've barely seen you."
"I'm sorry, Mar'i. Really."
"Just go, it's fine and whatever."
She waited until he rounded the corner of the hallway before she lifted into the air to follow him.
She knew something sneaky was going on. It wasn't so much her grandfather as it was Terry. He was just Bruce's chauffeur and errand boy. Plus it seemed kind of like he was a surrogate son or something. But why would Terry keep coming to Bruce so late with seemingly intensely important emergencies? It also seemed weird to her that even when he really wanted to spend the evening with his granddaughter he didn't have some manager or assistant he could use instead.
Instead of going out the front door, Bruce continued down a long hallway that was headed to the complete opposite end of the Manor. He approached the den at the end of the hallway and turned around, causing Mar'i to dive into a room with furniture draped in white sheets and thick curtains drawn over the window.
When she peeked out from behind the door frame, he was gone.
"What the hell?" she muttered to herself, and she flew to the middle of the den.
"Grandpa?" she called. She didn't really expect an answer but she didn't know what else to do.
There had to be an explanation for this. The floor was blanketed in thick carpet, so a trap door was probably not in play. There was a huge bookshelf that was the length and width of the back wall. Tentatively, she flew up to the top shelf and pulled a book out.
"Dammit," she muttered, and she threw the book on the floor.
She landed on the floor with an angry thump, and she dropped from too high and it hurt her feet a little.
After going through everything to get her father to let her stay here and working through community college and looking forward to having a little bit of unsupervised free time with her grandfather for basically the first time, he was blowing her off. And lying to her. And she was so mad at him. and Terry, too, interrupting them and always hanging around Bruce like a lost puppy.
This wasn't fair.
She stormed back to her room and slammed the door, which was less satisfying when there was no one around to hear it slam.
She grabbed her phone and flopped onto her bed.
It wasn't a conscious decision that she made, but before she could stew any more about how upset she was, she was FaceTiming Lian.
Lian Harper was her best friend. She was three years older than Mar'i, but their dads were best friends and they grew up inseparable.
Lian got to moonlight as Speedy, something Mar'i was endlessly jealous about. Their fathers had different opinions about vigilantism, although to be fair, no one ever got Jokerized in Star City.
"What's up?" Lian asked as she adjusted her phone's camera to better frame her face.
"I'm having such a sucky time here, I think this whole thing was a mistake."
Lian blinked at her, confused. "What?"
Mar'i sighed. "My stupid grandfather always promises to do stuff with me and then bails. I have no friends. Bruce's little errand-boy barely speaks to me."
"Well, babe, you've only been there a week. You don't have any friends because you haven't left that big freaky mansion."
"I know, but I only stay in here because Bruce keeps promising to spend the day with me. And, get this. Earlier Terry just bursts into my room saying something about an 'emergency thing' and Bruce says 'okay, start the car'. But he didn't go to the car. He went into the den and disappeared."
"Uh, Mar'i… You snuck around following your grandfather in his own house?"`
"He made me!" Mar'i shouted, and her face felt warm. "I shouldn't have to defend myself to you. I'm having a terrible time here. And I know that something freaky is going on, and I'm going to find out what."
Lian looked truly distressed for a minute and the image shifted as she changed her position. "I'm sorry, Mare, I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. I just think you need to relax. It's a super old, super big mansion. Maybe there was a back door or something."
"You think I didn't look? There was no door. I even tried pulling a book out of the bookshelf to see if a secret passage would open up. Isn't that crazy?"
Suddenly, Lian looked pale. Her eyes focused on something beyond her phone.
"Uh, are you okay?"
Lian's dark eyes flicked back to the camera. "Yeah, I'm fine. Listen, I have to go. I'm sorry you're having a tough time, I'll call you later, okay? I love you."
"Wait-Lian-"
The call disconnected before she could say anything else.
It wasn't like Lian to defend someone Mar'i was angry at.
A powerful urge to bend her phone in half swept over her, but she threw it at her new curtains instead. She kind of wanted to cry, but her blood was rushing too fast and too hard through her veins. She desperately wanted to go out to a balcony that her grandfather had shown her during a tour of the Manor to shoot off some starbolts, but she couldn't remember how to get there.
She laid back on her bed and tried to collect herself. Although she was angry at Lian, she remembered what she said about not leaving the Manor. Gotham was at her fingertips and she was hiding in this dark, empty mansion.
She flew over to her closet and pulled out a tight black skirt with a zipper that went all the way down the middle and a pink camisole. She paired the outfit with some ankle booties and stormed out of the house.
Catching the train into Gotham from Bristol required walking several long blocks to the nearest subway entrance, but Mar'i was still stewing and the walk didn't seem so far. She wasn't that familiar with the scene in downtown Gotham. Bludhaven was a city, but it didn't have the nightlife that Gotham had and it only had two clubs that weren't strip clubs. She did hear Terry talking about one club called Galaxy, and she didn't really realize that she was going there until she was already on the subway. There was no off-chance of running into him, since he was probably still busy with his "emergency" with Bruce.
She got in quickly, and once she got there she didn't feel like she was about to burst from the amount of rage simmering beneath her skin.
She felt like an idiot.
Going to a club completely alone sounded like rock bottom.
She should've stayed in bed and cried.
"Excuse me," someone said as they bumped into Mar'i's shoulder. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Mar'i mumbled, and she blinked to clear her eyes.
"No, I know that look. What's the matter, your boyfriend bail on you, too?" The girl seemed nice. She was much shorter than Mar'i, with perfectly straight, inky black hair that fell past her shoulders.
"Um… sort of," Mar'i answered with a wry smile.
"Come on, let me get you a drink. My name's Dana."
"I'm Mary."
"Great! I'm drinking cranberry vodka, let me get you one."
Mar'i let Dana pull her over to the bar, where she quickly got the attention of the bartender. Dana seemed to know everyone there, and they didn't bother carding Mar'i.
At some point, cranberry vodka turned into shots of vodka.
"Your boyfriend just left you? No text?" Mar'i spluttered as she turned her shot glass upside down.
Dana nodded as she sucked on a slice of lemon. "Yeah. I mean, no. He texted me, like, two hours ago or something. But he said he would let me know, and he hasn't said anything since then!"
"You should break up with him," Mar'i said sagely.
"We're kind of on-again, off-again. I know!" Dana shouted when Mar'i made a face at her. "I never thought I would be one of those girls who does an on-off thing, but it's like, we break up and I try to move on and then all the guys out there are so much worse. And we get back together and it's so good for like, a few months, and then he's back on his bullshit."
Mar'i gigged, which made Dana giggle, and soon they were laughing so hard they were struggling to stay seated on their barstools.
"You're drunk," Mar'i said when she regained her breath.
"You're drunk!" Dana countered.
Listening to Dana talk about her problems, Mar'i was feeling way less isolated. Once she was in school, she would make a lot of friends, just like Lian said. Her grandfather was blowing her off, but lots of people blew lots of other people off sometimes. She would sit him down tomorrow and tell him how she was really feeling about everything and then see if she could get him to actually follow through with his plans.
She left so impulsively, she never even texted Bruce to tell him where she was going. She pulled her phone out of her purse to check for any texts, and was a little disappointed when there weren't any.
"X'hal! It's almost four in the morning! I have to go!"
"Are you going to be okay getting home?" Dana asked, spinning her stool around to face Mar'i as she jumped out of her chair and began rushing toward the exit.
Mar'i laughed at that. At Dana's confused expression, she tried to turn her laughter into a coughing fit. "Uh, yeah, I'll be fine. It was so nice meeting you!"
It was dark enough now, with so few people around that once Mar'i moved uptown a little, she could take off and simply fly home. Bruce wouldn't be happy about it, but she wasn't exactly happy with him at the moment.
After a few tries, she managed to get her key into the lock, and when she let herself in the Manor looked exactly the same as when she left it: dark, dusty, and empty. She sighed and flew up to her room.
She paused at the door. Her grandfather's room was only down the hall. He had to be in bed by now. She just wanted to be sure before she want to sleep.
She floated down to his door and cracked it open. It was dark, but there was definitely no one in his bed.
The intense anger she felt before came flooding back to her. Where could he be for so long? He was in his sixties, there was no way he could still be working.
Mar'i flew back to the den. There was something messed up going on.
As she was trying to figure out what to do next, the broken grandfather clock that was fixed to the wall started to shake. As she watched, the clock and the whole wall panel disappeared, revealing a steep, stone staircase.
She landed, more out of surprise than anything else. She considered hiding behind her great-grandfather's desk, or one of the armchairs, but she was still a little drunk and before she could move, she saw a pair of shadows followed closely by footsteps.
Bruce appeared first, and he stopped ascending the stairs as soon as he saw her. He must have been blocking the way, because she heard Terry's voice behind him.
"What? Is something wrong?"
"Mary…" Bruce began, his tone placating.
She almost wanted to light a starbolt and throw it at him, but being drunk definitely took the sharp edge out of her anger so it was more of an impulsive idea instead of an urge. Instead, she pointed an accusatory finger at him and shouted, "I knew it!"'
Here's a sneak peak of the next chapter:
"Terry, fight me," Mar'i commanded, and she hopped up from the table.
Terry looked terrified for a moment before gathering himself and even letting out a small chuckle. "Dude… no. You're drunk, and you're wearing a skirt."
"You want me to take the skirt off? I'll take it off."
"God, Mar'i knock it off."
"No! I'm dead serious, Terry McGinnis. Fight me."
Thanks for reading! Please leave a review to let me know what you think!