The people around him began to move away as they became aware of the greater amount of space. Jasper pulled his hand from Crimson’s. “Where are we?”
“This is the Summer Solstice Tour,” explained Crimson as they joined the throng of people working their way up the slope. “Some people call it the Summerlands. It’s a little pocket dimension the spellcasters colonized, oh… I don’t know, five… six hundred years ago. Every equinox, entrances crop up all over the world, so they have a big festival for people to visit. Lots of spellcasters retire here. Well, all the good ones anyways.”
Holy shit. Charlie’s crazy plan was actually working. Of course, he had anticipated it would work out in some way, eventually. He just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly, nor so extravagantly.
“We’re at the Elven Star Port.” Crimson pointed over the sea of bobbing hats, headscarves, and hoods, to a small boulder resting at the base of the hill. A seven-pointed star had been carved into its face on all four sides. “Don’t forget. If we get the wrong one on the way back, we’ll end up in, like, Hong Kong or something.”
“Noted,” said Jasper.
At the top of the hill, a banner floated over the path without the aid of support poles, the word WELCOME fluttering, cycling through more languages than Jasper could identify. Beyond, the path widened to encompass the festival, which stretched beyond the line of sight.
They stopped to get drinks at a small stand not far from the entrance. A troupe of garishly dressed performers were playing lively music within earshot of their picnic bench while several others danced wildly around a huge multicolored bonfire. The shadows they cast seemed to move with a life of their own, not quite mimicking their counterparts.
The drinks were glowing, Jasper’s the bright fluorescent blue of a bug zapper, Crimson’s go-light green. Crimson assured him the glow was merely cosmetic and it would quell the uneasiness in his stomach, so he gave it a shot.
It was ice cold and as sweet as raspberry lemonade, with an underbite that made his tongue tingle and completely cleared his sinuses. By the end of the first glass, he felt drunker than he had ever felt in his life, but also elated, energetic. They had a second glass over a substantial number of cigarettes while they watched the people come and go. By the third drink, Crimson decided he was going to go dance in the spinning circle around the bonfire. He asked Jasper along, and Jasper felt so amped up he almost said yes, but something withheld him. He shook his head.
“Suit yourself,” said Crimson.
He waited until the werespider was gone, then pulled out his phone. The experts in the magical research and development wing would kill for a few snapshots of this place.
The screen was dark. For a few minutes, he tried to get it to turn on, holding down the “on” button, taking out the battery and putting it back in, even banging it once on the bench. No good. Either it had gotten fried during the jump, or there was some sort of warding charm to prevent people just like him from taking photographic evidence. Maybe it was for the best. Crimson was just starting to warm up to him, and he didn’t want to do anything to arouse his suspicions.
Slipping the phone back in his pocket, he went and ordered another drink, this one a mellower, rosy shade of pink. It was weaker, and he nursed it while he kept an eye on the demon. He planned to stay focused.
His plan didn’t last very long.
#
Time passed in a blur. Jasper was no longer sure exactly how many drinks he’d had, but his pack of cigarettes was empty all too soon.
Crimson had surely come better prepared. Jasper made his way around the circuit of dancers, searching their strange faces for the werespider’s familiar one. Clusters of people stood around the outside of the ring, drinking and smoking and chatting, some of them tangled together in intimate poses that made Jasper’s skin prickle hotly.
Through the crowd, he spotted Crimson. The werespider was standing in a small circle, smoking with a dark-skinned woman in a skull mask, a patchwork nightmare of a man in a tweed jacket, and a scantily clad blonde woman in high heels and snakeskin.
As he watched, the woman in the skull mask smiled, laughing at something and slapping Crimson’s shoulder, shaking her head. Her eyes were bright blue, shining out of the sockets of the mask. Something about her tickled the back of Jasper’s mind, but he couldn’t place her.
“Crimson darling, don’t be so gauche,” she was saying as Jasper approached. “You simply must come to the auction. Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there.”
Crimson drew on the cigarette, held in the smoke for a moment, and then puffed it out with a laugh. The light from the fire gave the cloud a strange, soft pink cast. “Yeah, that’s exactly why I’m not goin’.”
Jasper tossed back the last of his drink and plucked the cigarette from between Crimson’s fingers. “Hey, let me hit that real quick.” He brought the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. The smoke was sweeter than the harsh tobacco flavor of the Marlboros he smoked. He took another longer, deeper hit to get a better sense of the flavor. It tasted almost like candy.
Crimson watched him with a bemused expression, one eyebrow raised, a crooked smile pulling the corner of his mouth. He cleared his throat. “You know that’s not a cigarette, right?”
“What do ya mean?” It looked like a cigarette and burned like a cigarette, but he supposed, trying it again, it didn’t really taste like a cigarette.
Crimson took it back, taking a quick hit before passing it over to the woman in the skull mask. She breathed in the smoke, eyes burning like blue fire. She winked one of them at him and spoke briefly in a language Jasper couldn’t identify.
The patchwork man laughed once, a short sound like nails in a meat grinder.
“Now, Morg,” scolded Crimson, his voice as mild as a dreamy stream, lofty as a cloud, “be nice. He couldn’t have known.”
“He will know soon enough.” The pinkish smoke wreathed the woman. There were little fissures and cracks in her mask, the ivory faded and stained with time. It was impossible to pretend it was made from anything other than human bone. She took another hit and passed it to the man, who inhaled until the smoke escaped through the stitches on the sides of his throat. He laughed again, horribly and stupidly.
Jasper’s eyes widened, and he looked to Crimson with accusation. “Was that… drugs? Did you give me drugs? You have to tell people shit like that.”
“Hey, man, you took it without askin’.”
“Crimson.”
“Alright, don’t get your panties all in a twist.” The werespider put an arm around his shoulders and turned him, walking him away from the small group. “You aren’t gonna freak out, are you? You barely had any.”
Jasper was currently in another dimension, surrounded by spellcasters and demons and generally people who would probably want to kill him, a werespider his only connection here, and had just smoked… what? Some weird magic pot? He thought he had a pretty good reason to freak out.
Yet, as Crimson walked him over to the outskirts of the party, where lush trees with dark blue-green bark sat clustered together in a small wooded area, their thick, heavy branches muffling the sounds of celebration, Jasper didn’t feel like he was freaking out. He felt relaxed, loose, if a little light-headed. He breathed in the clear night air and didn’t know if he’d ever breathed anything as pure and as sweet.
“I’m not freaking out. It’s just, like, you shoulda warned me or whatever.”
“Well, I’ll warn you that you’re about to have a fantastic time.” Crimson grinned. Crimson and Jasper both had widely varied opinions on what constituted “a fantastic time.” He would have said so, except the idea seemed to become entangled somewhere between his mind and his lips. The world seemed sharper and brighter, like the details had been held underneath a magnifying glass. “Besides, no one ever died from a few huffs of hallucinistem.”
“It is nice here,” he admitted. Charlie would certainly be pleased. Well, not about the drinking or the s
moking or the weed. But a secret pocket dimension full of spellcasters and demons? Finally, something interesting. He leaned against the nearest tree, looking back at the party through the branches, his eyes eventually settling on Crimson. The light of the giant bonfire waned here, the sky, seeming stuck in a permanent twilight, casting his profile in purple light. “It’s really… pretty.”
“Oh yeah, it’s great.” Sometimes Crimson’s grin seemed so genuine that he wanted to believe it was real. “Now, what do you wanna do first? The wild bats are friendly. Sometimes you can get them to let you ride them. There’s dueling in the coliseum right now. Or we could check out the bazaar.”
“I don’t really like flying,” replied Jasper, much less on a wild bat.
“And the duels don’t get any good until the finals,” said Crimson. “Guess that leaves shopping. Let’s go.”
The festival was spread across a large area of land, interspersed between patches of wood and larger clearings with foot trails leading the way. Crimson dragged him up a slope, weaving his way around the vendors and food stands that sat atop it.
His eyes didn’t know what to take in first, but he was trying very hard not to stare. The myriad of strange sights and sounds came from every side. To his right a vendor in a long snakeskin suit tried to hail them over to purchase what looked to be baby dragons in cages made of iron and bone. To his left, a woman with bright pink hair was having a very stern talk with a gigantic, lumpy creature that was elsewise indescribable. Crimson excused them around a cluster of creepy doll-like children who all spoke as one, and then cut through an opening in the tree line.
Here the woods gave way to a large open plaza hemmed in by extra-bright green hedges. Stands and tents were erected every few feet with signs posted in front of them in various languages. Brightly colored flags and ribbons were strung between them, lit with small paper lanterns. “Maybe we could find somethin’ to cover up your aura. People are starting to stare.”
“They are?” Jasper had noticed a number of eyes turning in their direction as they made their way through the festival, but he assumed it was mainly because of Crimson, who couldn’t seem to help but make himself the center of attention. Now that he looked, he saw the gazes were more targeted. He wrapped his arms uncomfortably around himself and tried not to look at anyone. “What’s so fascinating about it anyhow?”
“I dunno, man. Can’t see ’em. Your scent though—”
“Yeah, I know I smell weird.” He didn’t know why every demon he met felt like it was necessary to bring this up, but it was getting on his nerves.
“It ain’t like that,” said Crimson. They started to work their way through the throngs of people. Jasper usually didn’t like crowded spaces, and he especially didn’t like them when people kept openly gawking at him, but he still felt surprisingly calm. “You actually smell kinda amazing. Like, y’know that scent in the air on a sunny day in fall? It’s kind of like that.”
He stopped in front of a particularly gloomy-looking stand draped in faded and holey gray fabric, where the table was covered in glowing rocks and statuettes. A thick black candle smoldered with a steady stream of black smoke, casting the stooping hooded figure on the other side in dimmer light. It tilted back its head, nothing but shadow beneath its hood, and gargled out a question.
Crimson said something back in the same archaic language. After a short debate, Crimson removed a cracked stone coin from his pocket and held it out to the vendor, who took it in two craggy, clawlike hands and turned it over several times, then reached under the table and drew out a small silken satchel. It filled this with a mixture of small gemstones and paper-thin bronze coins, then passed it to Crimson.
As he accepted the satchel, the hooded shape made a loud snuffling sound. Its head turned towards Jasper. It croaked another guttural question.
“Hey!” Crimson snapped his fingers at the thing, drawing its attention away. He shook his head curtly, an open scowl making his pretty face look harder, older. The stream of sharp, angry words that came from him were in an ancient language, impossible to understand, but his tone was one of anger.
What was that about?
The thing lifted both hands in the universal signal for calm down.
Crimson muttered something in the language, then nudged Jasper away from the stand with his elbow. “So yeah, something for auras, definitely.”
“What did it say to you?”
Crimson’s hand went to the back of his own neck. “He wanted to know if you were… I mean, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”
“I can’t take it any sort of way if you don’t tell me.”
Crimson stopped by one of the stands, picking at the odds and ends there. “He wanted to know if you were for sale.”
For a moment, the world shrank to embers. Sudden anxiety surged through the heady feeling of the hallucinistem. “Jesus.”
“I told him to go fuck himself, if it makes you feel any better. Well… actually what I said, it doesn’t really translate that smooth. But that was the general gist.”
“Did he say why he wanted to, um… buy me?”
“Something about white light. I don’t know.”
“Oh.” Ivory had said something similar and she wasn’t exactly the first. There had been seers and psychics at the academy who brought it up, although none of them had ever tried to buy him. The topic made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about it. “You sold it something though,” said Jasper. It wasn’t a question.
“Humans experiencing trauma let off bursts of harmless psychic energy. The coin absorbs and stores that energy so it can be later refined.” Crimson spun the satchel the witch had traded him for the coin as he glanced over tables strewn with trinkets and herbal bundles. “Some of the old-timers still trade in them. I’d been carrying that one for almost twenty years, so it was pretty valuable.”
Ah. So he was trading in human suffering. Every time Jasper thought he was starting to kind of like the guy, he gave him reason not to. Jasper dismissed it. There was no good reason to fight with him here and now, and they obviously needed the money.
At another stand, a small goblinish man offered them a pocket-sized tin of flowery reeds that he claimed would dim an aura when consumed. “You chew one every two hours, you seem perfectly human.” His voice was earthy and textured, like moss. Crimson selected a small glass jar of pasty salve, a pile of hand-rolled cigarettes, and three vials of some sort of powder, then paid the man with two gemstones, and handed the tin to Jasper.
Jasper looked doubtfully at the reeds. They were about the length and width of a cigarette, with tufts of fuzzy purplish flowers all the way from top to bottom. Better than a dozen were in the box, meaning there would be several spare, but he had never taken anything to alter his aura before and couldn’t help noticing Crimson hadn’t inquired about side effects. Across the way he caught the eye of a stall vendor, a man with a pointed black beard and dark, fathomless eyes. It was hard to tell, but he was pretty sure he was staring at him. Jasper plucked a reed from the tin and chewed it cautiously. Its bitter taste made him wince, and he wished for another of those glowing drinks just to wash the taste out of his mouth.
At the next stand they found a sweater woven from arctic dragon fur and lined with “rare sea serpent skin” supposedly capable of keeping the wearer warm and dry even in harsh climates. Crimson bought that too, along with some sort of weird, crooked tusk he claimed was for Alcander, half a dozen small boxes of rare tea leaves, strange coffee grounds, and a pound of what Jasper could only guess was more hallucinistem, fluffy pink dried herbs. Then, finally, a soft brown leather backpack to throw it all in.
“Don’t you want anything more, uh… magicky?” Jasper asked.
“Nah, man. Magic was more my ex’s thing.” Crimson didn’t quite meet Jasper’s eye, preferring to poke at the feathers on a large dreamcatcher at a nearby stand. Maybe it was just the hallucinistem working on him, but the strings and feathers seemed to abso
rb light, like the reverse of a glow, and when the werespider touched it, the shadows near his feet drew around him while the light bent away. “I was gonna give him the coin for his birthday, but, well, it didn’t really work out.”
“Sorry about that, man. Breakups suck.” Not that Jasper really knew. He could count the number of dates he’d been on without even using all of his fingers on one hand. He was never all that interested in the whole “relationship” scene, and the girls he knew didn’t seem to ever be his type.
“We didn’t break up,” said Crimson. “He was murdered.”
The lady tending the table noticed him playing with the merchandise and spared Jasper the awkwardness of having to inquire further by pointing sternly at the “no touching” sign painted in bright red lettering to the immediate left of the dreamcatcher, then shooed them both away.
The hallucinistem must have had a delayed effect, because it was only just now that the full effects really began to solidly hit him. His limbs felt heavy and relaxed, and the already sharp edges of the world grew more intense. He felt tired, but in a good way.
They took a break in a lofty tent draped with shrouds and tapestries and misty with hookah smoke. Jasper soon found himself lying on a low chaise lounge, tangerine orange with butterscotch yellow stripes, with Crimson sitting on a mismatched pillow on the floor beside him. The spider was smoking from a tall, wide-bottomed glass cylinder. It was half filled with water, with heated stones piled on the top, and bubbled when he inhaled through the rubber tube attached near the base. The sound was soothing. Like water in a stream. Not that Jasper hung around many streams in Manhattan.
The small line of circus elephants patterned on the shroud above him marched in spiraling circles that seemed to rotate into eternity. Some waved balloons as they marched, while others rolled beach balls or rode on tiny trikes.
“Magic?” Jasper asked.
Crimson looked up, squinting. “Are they moving?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope, that’s the hallucinistem.” He blew a puff of smoke over Jasper. The tendrils curled and spun in wispy images that only took full form even as they twisted into new shapes, more intricate and fascinating than the silly cartoon elephants. “Don’t worry. It’ll wear off soon.”
Strangers in the Night Page 14