You wait near the tree. You’ve brought some things that make you feel stupider than you’ve ever felt, including the time you had to give an oral report on the French Revolution in history and blanked, and Tommy never let you hear the end of it.
(You’ve brought scissors, a comb, vitamins, a dress with sleeves.
You want to be prepared; when you tell her about the researcher, she might say yes.)
Near dark, just before it’s really night, she comes by all the same, with careful footfalls.
When she sees you, she stops.
“Hello,” says the armless maiden.
You say, “Hello.”
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second novel, Glad Rags, is forthcoming in 2014, Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies such as Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, and Teeth. Two of her stories were nominated for the World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award. Her nonfiction and reviews have been published by NPR.org, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine. She is a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books).
A cheap graceless ring . . . blue lace agate was supposed to be protection, but it hadn’t even done that much for the girl who had worn it. . .
BLUE LACE AGATE
Sarah Monette
Jamie Keller and his partner hadn’t found the shoggoth larva smugglers yet, but his boss, the head of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation’s southeast hub, had other things on his mind: “And, ah, how are you and Sharpton doing, Keller?”
It was a loaded question, and Jamie considered it carefully before he answered. “Me and Sharpton—Sharpton and I, sorry, sir—are doing just fine.”
Jesperson’s eyebrows went up. He knew it was a lie. But Jamie met his eyes steadily.
“I’m not complaining, sir.”
“No, you’re not. Another two days and you’ll beat the record, you know.”
“Yessir.” Jamie had been Mick Sharpton’s partner for two weeks and three days. He knew why no one lasted longer than that.
“Well, all right then. Be off with you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jamie said, and was not surprised, when he got back to the office the six junior-most agents shared, to discover that his partner had already left for the day.
He grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, turned off the lights on his way out the door. Shrugged into his jacket in the elevator. He checked his watch and booked it to the bus stop, just in time to catch the southbound M that would get him home.
Where Lila would be waiting.
The elderly white lady sitting across from him gave him a funny look, and he knew she was probably afraid his smile—incongruous on a man six-four, black, homely, tattooed, and built like a Mack truck—meant he was high on something and about to start ripping chunks out of the bus. He nodded at her, and she looked quickly away.
He got off the bus at Lindale and Davis and walked another five blocks to the ugly concrete apartment building he currently called home. The guys in 1A had left the front door propped open again, and Jamie sighed, foreseeing yet another unpleasant conversation about why the safety of the building’s thirty other tenants was more important than the convenience of their lazy asses. But for now, he just kicked the wedge free and went upstairs.
Third floor, apartment 3B. Lila was on the phone, and after ten seconds and an exasperated eyeroll, he deduced that the person on the other end was her mother. Jamie kissed the back of Lila’s neck as he edged past her into the kitchen, and started scrubbing potatoes.
He wondered if there was something wrong with being so happy with this rather tawdry domesticity, and decided he didn’t care.
Three days of nothing, and today promised to be more of the same. Mick Sharpton sat fuming in the passenger seat of the Skylark—he didn’t drive, and Jamie had decided early on not to ask if “didn’t” meant “wouldn’t,” “couldn’t,” or “shouldn’t.”
Jamie drove as an alternative to engaging with Mick’s anger. He was, as it happened, perfectly capable of driving and holding a conversation at the same time, but Mick seemed to want to believe Jamie was a big dumb lump, without a thought in his head that Jesperson didn’t approve first. And if that was what Mick wanted to believe, Jamie was happy to play along. It made his life easier.
And he didn’t want to fight with Mick. He didn’t want to compete with Mick, didn’t want to threaten Mick. He wanted to keep this job—more than that, for the first time in his life, he’d found something he wanted to do well. And having had a chance to evaluate the other junior agents, he knew Mick Sharpton was his best hope of being not merely good at his job, but remarkable.
Three years older than Jamie, Mick Sharpton was a sharp-boned, pale-skinned man with long dyed-black hair and long lacquer-black fingernails. The left side of his face bore evidence of reconstructive surgery: the cheekbone that didn’t quite match, the skin that responded stiffly when he smiled. Jamie had not asked what had happened, and Mick showed no signs of wanting to tell him.
Mick Sharpton was also a clairvoyant. That was why Jesperson had hired him, had kept him on despite the trouble he caused—why Jamie was willing to put up with a great deal to keep Mick as his partner.
Mick’s esper rating was 3(8); most of the time his clairvoyance meant only that his hunches were unusually good, that it was useless to try to lie to him. But that latent eight meant he was liable to precognitive and retrocognitive flashes, telepathy, rescognition, all the usual occult trappings of seeing ghosts and auras. Unfortunately, the latent eight also meant none of it was under his conscious control, a fact that irritated Jesperson profoundly. Thus far, Mick had refused to take esper training—and made his decision stick by daring Jesperson to fire him. Jamie was just as glad to have missed the resulting explosion; he’d gotten several gleeful eyewitness accounts from agents happy in their schadenfreude that he was the one saddled with Sharpton now.
Jamie parked the Skylark in the lot of the Tree of Life. The next informant on their seemingly endless list was the proprietor: Charlene Pruitt, better known as Madame Anastasia. She used the hippy-dippy froufrou of her store to camouflage a much darker and more serious class of transactions. She was very careful, and therefore never prosecutable—at least, not yet—but her desire to keep on the Bureau’s good side made her frequently quite helpful as a source of information.
“Oh, fuck it, Keller. Not here!”
Jamie turned off the engine and looked over at Mick. “She’s next on the list.”
Mick rolled his eyes and muttered, “Fucking Jesperson,” but he didn’t argue, and Jamie smothered a smile as he got out of the car.
“Your door locked?”
“Yes, the fucking door’s locked. Come on!”
Jamie followed his partner’s nervy, arrogant stride across the parking lot and into the Tree of Life, where they were greeted by the sweet jangle of a string of tiny bells. Sitar music permeated the air, as strong and characterless as the incense. Mick muttered something under his breath and stalked away to glare at the Tarot decks. Jamie went up to the counter and asked if Madame Anastasia was available.
The white college-age clerk, pierced in eyebrow, nostril, and lip, and wearing enough sandalwood to choke a phoenix, looked up at Jamie, at the broad, unlovely lines of his face, at the octopus tattooed on the shaved side of his head and down his neck, black swirling lines on skin nearly as dark, and said, “I’ll, um, go see, okay?”
She scurried off in a flap of Birkenstocks and long shapeless skirt, and Mick prowled over to say, “Charlene sure can pick ’em, can’t she?” then began running his fingers restlessly through a basket of cheap silver rings: Celtic knots, snakes, dolphins, pentacles, hearts.
Jamie noticed the bitterness in Mick’s voice, and was just deciding, again, that it would
do more harm than good to ask, when Mick said, “Hey! This one doesn’t—”
Glancing at the ring Mick had picked up—silver set with blue lace agate—Jamie was about to ask what on Earth Mick thought was wrong with it, when he saw the wear on the edges of the band, the brass showing through the thin silver wash.
He looked up, but whatever he would have said died in his throat at the expression on Mick’s face. Mick’s eyes had gone wide, his mouth a little slack. He said, “We have to go now,” in a voice unlike anything Jamie had heard from Mick Sharpton before, the voice of a child who is frightened and trying to hide it.
Jamie couldn’t argue with that voice. “Okay,” he said and shepherded Mick to the door, calling over his shoulder, “We’ll come back later,” as the rattle of the beaded curtain announced the clerk’s return.
Jamie unlocked the passenger-side door first, which normally would have provoked a sharp comment from Mick about not being that kind of girl. This time, it barely seemed to register; Mick got in and fastened his seat-belt, and then simply waited, pale blue eyes staring a hole in the dashboard, until Jamie, seat-belt buckled and engine started, said, as gently as he could, “Where are we going?”
Mick said, his voice not much louder than a whisper, “She’s in the river.”
“Oh, Christ.” Jamie considered for a fraction of a second telling Mick to call it in, but he didn’t think Dispatch would be able to make heads or tails of Mick in his current state. He grabbed the handset and reported November Echo and November Foxtrot en route on a rescog.
Heading west toward the river, Jamie counted. Thirty-four seconds after he cradled the handset, the radio crackled to life with Jesperson’s voice: “November Foxtrot and Echo, report!”
“Mick had a flash, sir.”
“A flash of what?”
“I don’t rightly know. We were in the Tree of Life, waiting for Ms. Pruitt, and he picked a ring up out of a basket. And now we’re on our way to the river.”
“Latent bloody clairvoyance. All right, Foxtrot-niner. You two go check it out. I’ll give Juliet Victor and Mike the rest of the list.”
“Yessir. We didn’t get a chance at Ms. Pruitt.”
“Duly noted. Able out.”
Mick gave him directions as they went, leading them to a residential neighborhood: one-story houses, most in dire need of new siding, and decrepit docks sticking out into the muddy river like half-rotted teeth. Everything shabby, faded, cars rusting, grass dying, and the river behind it all like a stain that won’t come out.
But there were children playing in the yards and on the sidewalks, mostly white, although some black and some Hispanic. A pair of long jump-ropes were being wielded with professional aplomb by two teenage girls, and the little girls standing giggling in line for their turn were every shade from as white as Mick to as black as Jamie.
All at once, Mick said, “Here!” his voice so urgent that Jamie slammed on the brakes in instinctive response, hard enough to throw them both forward against their seat belts. He swerved the car over against the curb; Mick was already clawing at the door, scrambling out, leaving the door not only unlocked but flapping open. Jamie locked the car and followed him more slowly, knowing that it wasn’t going to matter. Not precognition or telepathy—Jamie’d never scored higher than a two on the esper equivalencies—just brutal truth. The woman who had worn that ring was dead, and he didn’t need to find her to know that.
But he went after Mick, picking his way through the crabgrass and old Coke cans. Mick was down by one of the docks, up to his knees in river water, tugging at something that seemed to be trapped in the dock’s underpinnings, something limp and pale and horrible.
“Mick,” Jamie said. “Mick, come away. We need to call the police.”
Mick wasn’t listening, his breath coming in sobs, but he wasn’t making any progress, either. She was well and truly stuck. Jamie’s imagination offered him a hideous picture of Mick trying to dive under the dock to get her loose, and that was enough to make him step off the bank himself, to take Mick’s arm and say gently, “Come on, Mick.”
Normally, Mick reacted to being touched with a sidestep and a snarl. But this time, he let himself be led out of the water and then back to the car, where he sat obediently in the back, his wet feet dripping onto the curb, while Jamie, sitting likewise in the front, called Dispatch and got them to notify the police. For once, Mick wouldn’t be sneering at him for doing things by the book.
After a thoughtful look at Mick, he did not suggest that they leave. They waited quietly; Mick’s eyes had not regained their customary sharp, shuttered expression, and Jamie knew it was only his own presence in the car that kept Mick from going back down to the dock and the poor, gruesome thing trapped under it.
After a few minutes, he noticed the blue lace agate ring lying on the floor of the car and picked it up. It told him nothing, just a cheap graceless ring—there were probably thousands like it in this city alone. Blue lace agate was supposed to be protection; it hadn’t even done that much for the girl who had worn it.
He twisted to hand the ring to Mick. “What else do you know about her?”
Mick held the ring on his palm as if it were some strange, possibly poisonous insect. “She was with her friends. Excited, laughing. They were going to—oh Jesus!” He shuddered, his fingers closing hard over the ring.
“Mick?”
“They figured they’d found a way to live forever. One of them—a boy—had a book. He said it told them everything they needed to know. But they didn’t tell her.”
“What was her name?”
“Don’t know. She thought they were all drinking, but they weren’t. Just her. And he kissed her—Bobby kissed her, and he never had before. And she was so happy. She thought they were playing when they tied her to the chair. But they weren’t. They all had knives, and they took turns cutting her until she died. That was the ritual. Then they each took something of hers, so her death would defend them, and dumped her in the river, chair and all. Please take this ring away from me.”
His tone didn’t change, nor did his pained frown, so it took Jamie a moment to realize what he’d said. When he did, he came immediately around to kneel in front of Mick, whose hand was cramped so hard around the ring that prying his fingers loose took some effort, even with Mick trying to help. Finally Mick’s hand was open, and none of the fingers broken, and Jamie took the ring, wincing in sympathy at the angry red welt where it had dug into Mick’s palm.
“I hate this,” Mick said, his voice so soft Jamie could almost believe he’d imagined it. And before he could decide what to say—or if he should say anything at all—the police had arrived, in a whoop of sirens and spatter of lights as if that would make some difference to the thing wedged beneath the decaying dock.
It was two hours before Jamie was finally able to get Mick away. Partly that was Mick’s own fault—it seemed he could not be satisfied until the body, still tied to an ugly old wooden office chair with all its casters missing, had been pulled out of the river. Then Jamie got distracted by an officer who wanted an account of how two ghoul hunters had come to find a murdered girl, and when he managed to get away, the detective in charge of the case had Mick all but pinned against the police car, snarling questions at him as if she thought she could lever answers out of him by sheer nastiness.
Something seemed to have drained out of Mick with the recovery of the body; Jamie could see the tremor running through him, the unprotected wideness of the pale eyes. Another man might have left Mick Sharpton to be flayed by the police detective. Jamie intervened, patiently, gently, putting his own bulk between the detective and her prey, insisting that her questions could wait, that Mick had told her all he could. Finally, she grudgingly acquiesced, and Jamie dragged Mick to the Skylark before she could change her mind.
Jamie called Dispatch to say November Foxtrot and Echo were emphatically off-duty for the day, and drove to Mick’s apartment, which was in a part of the city as shabby as J
amie’s own neighborhood, but older, still clutching its fading gentility to its bosom. Mick lived on the second floor of a looming brick monstrosity. Jamie had never been inside.
He found a parking place directly in front of Mick’s building and touched the luck charm hanging from the rearview in thanks. He killed the engine, looked across at his partner. Mick was a huddle of long limbs, his head down, and he was still shaking, a fine shiver like a scared cat.
Jamie heaved a sigh. “Come on then, blue eyes. Let’s get you home.”
He supposed it would have looked funny to an observer: the massive black man and the long-limbed white ragdoll he was trying to maneuver. Mick didn’t fight him, exactly, but he was clearly disoriented, confused, and very frightened. He responded to Jamie’s quiet-voiced coaxing, though, and was even able, when they at last made it up onto the porch, to fish his keys out of his pocket.
He promptly dropped them and flinched; Jamie couldn’t tell whether it was from the sound, or from an expectation that Jamie would whack him one. Jamie picked up the keys, unlocked the door and propelled Mick inside with a hand between the shoulder blades. It wasn’t quite a shove.
He followed, made sure the door latched behind him, and then chivvied Mick up the stairs, grateful there was only one flight. Another round with keys and locks, and finally Jamie was able to urge Mick into the apartment, so close behind him he almost stepped on his heels. He locked the door before he did anything else, then turned and examined Mick’s home.
It was a studio apartment—one room, not overlarge, with sink and stove and refrigerator and a minuscule amount of counter space along one wall. Nice big windows, at least. There was a futon mattress on the floor, a chair, a card table, a lamp, and a motley assortment of bookcases, cinderblock and plywood shelving, milk crates, and cardboard boxes, some of which seemed to contain clothes, but most of which housed stacks upon stacks of books and CDs. The only thing in the room that looked like it would be worth the bother of stealing was the stereo, and even at that, Jamie thought, any sensible thief would just let himself right back out again and go try somebody else’s place.
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