“You seem awfully young to have owned this building for so long.”

“I inherited the building from my mother.” After she was murdered.

“I see.” He tapped one of his fingers idly against the glass. “I’m sorry for your loss. And your father?”

“Not in the picture,” I said shortly. I had never met the man, never seen a photograph of him. His name wasn’t even on my birth certificate. Whoever he was, my mother hadn’t thought too much of him. She’d never spoken of him.

“Again, I am sorry to hear that.”

This was not a line of questioning that I wanted to continue. It seemed much too personal for a tenant-landlord relationship. “Those windows were just installed four months ago. They’re a lot more energy efficient and they help keep the house warmer in the winter.”

He turned away from the window and touched the metal coils of the steam heater that sat directly below the window. He seemed to be refocusing himself, remembering why he was there. “This is an older heating system, yes?”

“Yes, unfortunately, it’s much more expensive to replace. It’s also unnecessary, since the steam heat keeps the building very warm, even during a Chicago winter. But the kitchen and bathroom have been updated in the last year.”

I waved him toward the back of the house. He walked slowly through the empty rooms, his heels ringing on the floor.

“This is one of the bedrooms,” I said. A very small room opened off the living room. “There’s a large storage space in the closet.”

He obligingly opened the closet door and looked inside. “Are those your apartment stairs above this space?”

“Yes,” I said. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

“It must be difficult,” he said as he stood inside the closet and stared up at the diagonal ceiling.

“What’s that?”

“Living alone, with no family to help you.” He turned to face me and I again had the disquieting sense of falling into his eyes.

“The bathroom is this way,” I said, ignoring his comment. I would not be drawn into a personal conversation with a stranger. It would be impossible to explain how Beezle and I had managed to dodge child services for years until I came of age, and it wasn’t Gabriel Angeloscuro’s business in any case. I’d lived by myself since I was thirteen years old. Yes, it was lonely with no one around except an overweight gargoyle, but I’d gotten used to it. I wasn’t used to hot guys prying into my private life.

Gabriel seemed to accept my change of subject and followed me through the rest of the apartment, nodding at the second bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen.

“There’s a small yard out back and laundry downstairs,” I said. “You would share both with me. There’s also a storage space for this unit in the basement.”

He said nothing, only stared out the row of kitchen windows at the small porch, the patch of grass, my scraggly little vegetable garden. I almost hoped he wouldn’t want the apartment. There was something about Gabriel Angeloscuro—the familiar way he spoke to me, his disconcerting gaze—that made me deeply uncomfortable.

At the same time, could I afford to wait another five or six months for a better tenant? Probably not. Just because he was handsome and had some boundary issues wasn’t a good enough reason to turn him away. If he wanted the place, it would only make good business sense to give it to him—as long as his credit and references checked out, of course.

“I believe I would like this apartment,” he said, and then he smiled, showing white, white teeth.

Since an Agent’s work is never really done, I had to head downtown immediately after Gabriel Angeloscuro’s departure. Paperwork—the bane of my existence—had to be filed in a timely manner or else I would be forced to listen to J.B. rant from now until kingdom come.

“Beezle, I’m headed to the office,” I called.

There was a faint grunt from the mantelpiece. The gargoyle was in brood mode and hadn’t said a word to me since Gabriel had left. He had, however, seen fit to throw several black looks my way and to mutter imprecations under his breath.

“Whatever,” I said. I stepped to the side window and thought about going to the Main Office. As I pictured the building—an unassuming brick nine-story in the Loop—my wings sprouted from my back. I swept out the window and into the morning air.

A handy side benefit of being an Agent is that no one other than the departed can see you when your wings are out. Well, almost no one. Many, many mentally ill people had caught sight of me over the years, as well as any number of folks using psychotropic drugs.

And children. Not all of them, although my mother told me that it used to be that she couldn’t pass by a single child without being noticed. If she had to fly by a school playground during recess, she’d cause a riot.

But not anymore. I think children today are desensitized to the possibility of magic and wonder. Most kids I see have their noses buried in a handheld video game or are whining for their parents to buy something for them. Those kids are already too emotionally detached to notice a woman with black wings flying by.

But there are a few still—the ones who read on the playground instead of playing kickball with the other kids, the ones who stare dreamily out the classroom windows during science class, the ones who pretend their closet is a spaceship and their bedroom is the rocky surface of Mars—those kids see me. Really see me, and know that I’m not a figment of their imagination.