Prologue: A Redhead's Monologue.

Immortal wasn't exactly correct.  Just not dying didn't make his flesh and blood any less mortal than any of the other shmucks that lived on the planet.  No, if anything he was what you would call unkillable, and nothing more.  See, while he himself was pure squishy human through and through, he had a tagalong that happened to like his state of living, and had for the past two centuries, and so decided to keep him that way. it was a subtle change in things, like looking at a river for a moment, only to double take to discover that it wasn't moving.  That in itself isn't a great metaphor since the speed at which a body ages is far less noticeable than a river's flow.  Perhaps like a glacier, but those take longer even than humans to get to their destination.  As for the more troublesome issue of a more sudden death, the little tagalong had that covered in various ways, most of which involved fortune cookies and loud explosions.  He tended to move a lot.  The tagalong itself wasn't immortal either, just very long lived, very powerful, and very bored.  Lately he went by the name of Max and happened to like wandering around the world in the form of a cat.

With this in mind, the view out this window at a man sitting waiting for the bus in the rain with his cat on his head that kept batting at the umbrella handle that extended up past it takes on a slightly more entertaining light than it already had.  The fact that the man was your neighbor across the hall who you seldom talked to is what made you stop to look in the first place, and the fact that he doesn't have anything with him along with the fact that the stop he is at is not for the city bus, but rather a cross-country bus is what made you stop at the window to watch.  At first you might have thought he was waiting for somebody, but then he could have done that inside where it's warm.  After a while you saw him pull a piece of paper out of his pocket, right around the dimensions of a ticket, then shove it back in his pocket after a quick glance.  You know that the bus is late because you hear it go by every Thursday around now in the afternoon, so you deduce he must have been checking to see if he got the time wrong.  He hasn't, in fact.  Even after two centuries his mind is sharp enough to elude me.

When you heard a knock in the hall ten minutes earlier and saw me standing there waiting at the door, you thought I looked scary, or else you would have informed me of the location of my prey.  I will take note of this for the future.  You came back in here to look out the window a bit more, and might have gone down to talk to the man if you hadn't lost your own umbrella a week back.  Five minutes ago when you head his door open, you checked the hallway again.  For a minute or two you didn't see anything of note, but the cigarette lighter that was on the floor, the door that was ajar, and a thin sliver of the apartment that seemed perfectly empty.  You remember that it used to have Victorian furniture or something around it, nicely furnished, but you didn't see or hear any of it moved out in the past few days.  It happens to be in a deck of cards in the man's pocket at the moment.

You picked up the lighter, and then I started talking to you about this, telepathically of course.  The only lips on this lighter are the KISS emblem on the side, and they don't talk.  I told you how five minutes ago I opened that door, was about to step inside the apartment, and then what looked like a bucket of water fell on me.  It happened to be a prank spell designed to trigger if I specifically showed up.  Wouldn't have hit the landlord.

You were shocked, I was convincing, and now you're holding me up so that we can watch the man and his cat.  I'll be fine in a day or so, but I find it hard to confront him as a lighter, so I'll catch him at the next place, once I track him down. Look, there's the bus.  Anyway, if you don't have anything else to do, let me tell you about my first encounter with that man. . .