Kahrin yanked on her boot and zipped it up, cringing at the whirring noise it made in the stone silence of the dark apartment. She pulled her pant leg down over the top, straightened her tank, and stood up, looking for her jacket.
She should have been able to dodge the hand that grabbed her arm and pulled her back to sitting on the bed, but she was tired and hadn't specifically spent the hours just after dawn sleeping.
"Leaving already?" Carver leaned his nose into her hair, and she closed her eyes, thankful for the dark hiding her face.
"I have work to do, and I shouldn't be here to begin with, liquid lunch." She shrugged out from under his arm.
He ran fingers through her hair anyhow. "You're succumbing to my charms, admit it," and she could hear the smirk on his literally damned face when he said it. Repeat performances where not her usual M.O., and yet here she was.
"I'm succumbing to the idea of not having to sleep in that roach motel I'm hiding in every single night. And stop sniffing me. That never stops being wiggin' me out."
Carver sniggered and pulled her down for another kiss, which she didn't fight. She never fought it anymore, and as wrong as that sounded in her head it didn't have to make any damned sense because she enjoyed it. Part of her enjoyed the absolute wrongness of it even as she worked so hard to play it casually.
Even as that wrongness lie in a grey area she didn't particularly want to get into. Even if technically the circumstances of his changing had some technicalities and oddities that she didn't fully understand or fully trust.
"We need to know what's in the box." Kahrin put a hand between their mouths and pushed him firmly away, standing up again and running her hands through her hair, smoothing the tangles he'd just worked into it.
Carver sniggered as he stood up and pulled his pants on, and Kahrin gave him a swift elbow to the ribs. "That's enough out of you. What are you, twelve?"
"It was one of the best years of my life, so why not?" He swung an arm around her and squeezed her a bit to him.
"OK, Forehead, ew. And secondly, no." She shrugged his arm off of her, which would have been a more effective point if she had actually left that morning.
As it stood she was going to have to do the walk of shame out of the lift in the previous day's clothes, and she wasn't looking forward to that. Not that she gave a particular damn that anyone knew she was enjoying the more rock 'em sock 'em parts of life, but having to pass by Red's desk and endure her trap yapping at her and sharing her thoughts on this situation was enough to make her avoid this ride.
Almost.
Of course, it didn't help that the boys lived like Bert and Ernie and if the dungeon of an apartment they shared was any smaller they would have had to use bunk beds. Lucky for her she was rather short and didn't really care if a rubber duckie showed up so long as she got hers.
Kahrin knew she hadn't been especially sneaky, stumbling in exhausted as she had after her patrol, but obviously it didn't matter because other than the occasional significant glance when the lift landed on the upper floor, Anders didn't comment. And thankfully neither did that nosy busybody.
He was awfully distracted by his new kitten. She'd never seen him fawn over a living thing that way, and she would rib him over it if she didn't think it kept him from complaining about the extra person in their apartment.
She took a deep breath and did her perp walk out of the lift, Carver predictably right on her heels. She went straight to the coffee maker and poured herself a cup, hugging it to herself in two hands, like the steam might breathe life into her all on its own while Carver poured himself a mug from the container in the fridge and shoved it in the microwave.
Saoirse, for her part, was sniffling up a storm, her eyes puffy and red and looking like she'd had a far better time the night before than talking the ear off of Phantom Rory who shared her apartment. In between sniffles she tried to stick to her typing and was quickly getting no where.
"Shit, Red, have you been watching the after-school specials again? You look like shit, all teared up like that."
"Fuck you. It's that sodding cat you dragged in here. I think it's trying to kill me." She blew her nose again, as Pounce wound himself around her feet. She huffed slightly, and when Anders turned around, she smiled a huge grin at him.
"I think Pounce likes you." Anders walked over and scooped the fur ball up from the floor. "Don't you? Who's a good kitty?" He scritched behind the cat's ears and frowned at Saoirse. "Are you all right?"
She sneezed and sniffled again. "Oh, I'm just great. Peachy keen." She glared at the cat, who reached out and touched her face with a tiny kitten paw, making her eyes instantly water more.
"He's worried about you because you're sick." Saoirse wheezed in slight relief when he pulled the kitten away and walked over to where Kahrin and Carver and Finn were gathered around the research.
Kahrin had set her mug on top of the table and walked over to where Finn was lost in his translation, steeling herself for a barrage of chatter she wouldn't understand. One of these days someone would remember to just do all of this beforehand and point her in the direction of whatever needed to be beaten and maimed and she and her stake would tear shit up.
Finn had a considerable stack of books that were teetering precariously on the edge of his desk, which looked like it had been salvaged from an alley anyhow, and that at any moment it could collapse under the weight of the tomes. Where in the hell he pulled all of these maps and charts, Kahrin never knew, but he seemed to have an endless supply of them handy.
"I have a hunch as to what came through that portal," Finn looked up, dark circles betraying just how much sleep he'd had as he handed her a heavy book of engravings. "I've marked the page, but don't bend it. That book is priceless and the only other known copy is in the Gallow's archives."
"That's pretty gruesome, man. I've gotta admit." Kahrin looked at an engraving of what appeared to be
a giant man with his mouth stitched shut and his face in a mask. He possibly had horns once, but they were cut off. "He looks a little 'grrr... arrgh...' here."
Carver set his mug down and looked over her shoulder. "What are the chains for? Seems like an overkill."
"It's a Serabaas. A magic wielder of his race. They are believed to be cursed," Finn's face looked as thought he'd bitten glass. "Their people brutally bind and imprison them. The portal left a residue that reads from their dimension. It could be one of them."
"Could be? We're not going to launch an assault on a 'could be'." She gave him an eyebrow and picked up a mug. "Could bes wind me up in the pen. The sleeping arrangements aren't as cosy there."
"We're not launching an assault at all. That would be suicide." Anders set Pounce down, who promptly hopped up on the desk, knocking two of the books to the floor and a sheaf of papers as he walked nonchalantly across. When he reached the space directly in front of Finn he flopped over on his back and exposed his belly, staring up at Finn in disbelief that he was not already being adored.
While Finn flailed his arms trying to figure the best way to dislodge the cat and all its hair from his books, Kahrin looked up at Anders in disbelief. "We're not? So we're just going to let them have whatever it is while we sit here all inept? Fantastic plan."
Anders smirked. She hated it when he smirked. "I didn't say that, now did I?"
He watched, amused, as Pounce leaped off the desk with a sheet of translations and rolled around on the floor with it and as Finn chased after him, his brow set it an angry arch. "We're not going to get anything accomplished this way, cat!"
"Finn, I think Pounce likes you too! Look, he's playing. He thinks you need to relax a little." Anders turned his attention back to Kahrin, who was once again trying, half-heartedly, to thwart Carver's hands. "What I was saying, is that we can't just attack the building. This requires a more … precise strike." He scooped Pounce up again and walked over to one of the maps, unrolling it. "There is a sewer entrance here. I think we could get in with relatively little attention drawn to ourselves and-"
"Whoa, hold on there, just a moment. 'Very little attention' tends to have a way of winding up with me in a coma, or Red nagging us over how close to dead you almost were." She slapped Carver's hand again. "Watch the ass, Ass."
She took a deep drink from her mug, begging her brain to wake up, and as soon as the thick liquid hit her tongue the copper tang made her reflexively spit all over the desk, and very nearly made her toss the breakfast she'd neglected to eat.
Carver looked down innocently at the mug of coffee sitting near him on the table. "Oh, oops."
"Oh, oh that's- I think that's the most disgusting thing I've ever had in my mouth. Oh." She dropped the one in her hand to the floor.
"I highly doubt that," Saoirse sniped from her desk, more than likely meaning to be heard.
Finn jumped up from the floor. "Oh, look at this mess! My research! Do you have any idea what you've done?"
Kahrin was still choking and sputtering pig's blood down her chin, it smearing across her face as she tried to wipe it off, and she still managed to shoot Finn a glare through watered eyes.
"I don't think I've ever realized how disgusting that is." Carver looked at her, blinking.
"Water, water would be good," she shoved him back hard, still coughing, and Anders began cleaning up the mess from the floor even as Pounce good-naturedly stepped through it and began making a decorative show of tiny kitten paws all around, swishing his tail proudly at his contribution.