1 Chapter 1
1
The night stormed. The dark got darker.
Safely snug and dry in his study, Dan tossed a grin at the tempest. The rain spilled long silvery ribbons across his windows in wild gleeful answer. New York City sparkled beyond glass, a watercolor painting of lights and dazzle and color, blurred and gleaming and lovely as a whole kaleidoscope of stories. He’d always loved storms; he got breathless at the crackle of lightning through the air, electric and vibrant. Thunder snagged his pulse and tantalized his heartbeat.
He’d fallen in love with this apartment in part for the windows. They stretched upward in glorious towering panes; they offered up the world for his gazing. At home, cozy in faded jeans and an ancient long-sleeved NYC Writers Workshop shirt that’d never be allowed near celebrity author photos, he appreciated that world.
So manystories. Lots of history in this building. Old bones and new. Nineteenth-century secrets and renovated tales hanging out side by side.
The building was supposedly haunted; multiple tenants, moving out, swore up and down that they’d been watched. That they’d felt eerie presences. That lights’d gone on and off without explanation. That chilly spots lurked in rooms and furniture shook itself. Dan had rather liked the idea. Past lives and narratives remaining. Personalities. Again, stories.
Stories; and he sighed, left the storm alone, glared at his laptop. Writing. The next novel. Increasingly improbable spy-related thrills. Action and adventure and decently large royalty checks. Johnny Stone and his intrepid undercover team fighting evil everyplace evil popped up.
Movie adaptations, only just beginning—two films in, of six books, so far—but well received as popcorn entertainment. Glitz and glamor and expectations. His name, Daniel Rose, in shiny silver on book covers. Assuming he could come up with the next story.
He couldn’t come up with the next story.
Everything he could think of wouldn’t work. Either too over the top or too mundane. Too obvious, overdone, or else too preposterous. Cosmetics poisoning. Submarine redirecting. Retired adversaries from the past getting randomly angry. No, no, no.
Maybe he was finally done with the spy-novel action-hero world. Maybe he needed something new. A whole new genre. New life. New hope. Or just retirement. What old worn-down men did, right?
He glared at his laptop some more.
Thirty-one wasn’t even old, and he knew it. Felt older. Ancient. Drawn thin and out of ideas. Story-well run dry. Golden fleece spun to non-existence. Ink no longer flowing.
He’d already cleaned the apartment to within an inch of either his or its life. He’d ordered and consumed pizza. He’d done laundry. He’d made and drunk tea. He couldn’t come up with anything else to do.
More accurately, he could: what he should be doing. Except he wasn’t.
He did like rain. Rejuvenating the world. Petrichor and promises. Cool waterfalls and liquid rushing susurration. Nighttime mysteries, potentialities, unfurling roads.
He stared out the window. He tried to think, or to not think: whatever’d lead to a new plot emerging, on this crescendo of an evening. Himself and the storm.
The storm hammered, rappelled down crenellations, summoned up unlikely ideas.
Maybe Johnny Stone’s international spy team could fight a villain with weather-controlling satellite technology. One final send-off. A massive dramatic climax. They could have a battle in the rain. On rooftops. Calling and avoiding lightning strikes. Or localized hurricanes. Miniature personal ones.
The rain decided this was hysterical. Got noisier, chattering away.
His laptop waited, screen unhelpfully blank.
“Yes, fine,” Dan grumbled at it, “someday soon I’ll replace you, see if I don’t,” and tipped his chair back, balancing on two legs, leaning in the direction of noise and clamor and frenetic sheets of exultant water.
A knock bounced off his front door. Rattled through the apartment and down his spine. Startled both him and the rain.
Dan and his chair nearly fell over, got entangled, separated themselves. Rubbing a knee, he managed to arrive at the door before the second knock.
He did peek out before opening up. The building’s security kept its residents well-guarded, and as a writer he wasn’t thatfamous—more so after two red carpets and film premieres, but nowhere near the scale of a Hollywood actor—but he wasn’t expecting anyone. Might as well check and make sure.
He blinked. Looked again. Thunder crashed.
He knew the young man on the other side, for a given value of knew. The young man had, in fact, moved into the building the previous week; they’d progressed to the stage of nodding amiably at each other downstairs.
Dan usually flushed pink and forgot how to talk on those occasions, because the young man smiled like sunrise and had soft-looking stylishly upswept brown hair and generally dressed like a rainbow that’d collided with a trendy coffee-shop, all pink belts and blue leather jackets and multi-hued suspenders and much-loved boots. He also had a tendency to smile at his mail and his neighbors and the world as if they’d made him personally happy. Dan found this distressingly adorable, and never unearthed any good conversational openings through the clouds of vague rose-hued embarrassment.
