Casey nodded as he walked.  Evelyn's voice was a pleasant distraction from the melancholy that had been threatening to overcome him on the drive home.  "Things went well,"  he assured her.  "Everybody's mourning.  Nobody was picking fights, thank the stars."  Her next suggestion caught him off guard.  Share the bed.  They<i>could</i>share the bed.  They were adults.  Hells, they were<i> married.</i>And sleeping together didn't mean they'd have to have sex.<br/><br/>That line of reasoning took Casey's mind down a twisting rabbit-hole, as he moved toward the stairwell to the apartment building.  "I think...  I think I'd appreciate that."  He admitted.  "I mean, if you don't mind sharing.  I'm not about to put you on a couch in your-"  As he was speaking, the sound of an engine easing up the ramp met his ears, and drew his eyes.  A dark SUV was pulling up the ramp, and something was off about it.<br/><br/>"-Own house.  Hey Evie, does any of your neighbors have a black SUV?"  He asked, as the thing pulled past him, before rolling to a stop behind his vehicle.  He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.  "Call the-"  The last word Casey said was drowned out in a cacophony of noise.  Gunfire, before the line went dead.<br/><br/>---<br/><br/>The rear window of the black SUV shattered in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and Casey Murphy flung up a hand between it and himself.  A shimmering dome appeared before the wizard, and as bullets hit the dome, it sapped their kinetic potential.  Casey felt the stored energy welling up like some sort of expectant belch, just waiting to be released, and before he had time to readjust his focus, his cellphone rocketed out of his hand, and toward the vacant window of the SUV.  It smashed against something within, maybe the gunman, considering the sudden stop in gunfire.<br/><br/>Casey used a fraction of the remaining kinetic potential to hurl himself laterally away from the target area of the gunman, groping for his own sidearm, tucked behind his belt at his hip.  His pulse spiked as a quartet of bristly arms burst, spiderlike from the shattered window, and a hairy, chitinous face followed with eight beady black eyes.