by Paul Krueger
“You mean, you come out dressed for battle, something snarly and homicidal obliges you and shows up, and you summarily kick its ass?” He laughed. “Not so much. In this case, it’s really to your benefit to go looking for trouble.”
“Right.”
“Mona swears she can sense them. A disturbance in the Force or something. She gets so determined about that stuff. I love it.”
Bailey stiffened at the L word.
“Anyway, I told her—”
“So,” Bailey said before she could stop herself, “you and Mona, huh?” She gave a cursory glance under the bed of a white pickup.
“Yup.” Zane gave a little sigh as he peered down a narrow alley. “Me and she, she and me. Jury’s still out on what our celebrity-couple name will be. I’m thinking Zona because otherwise it’d be Mane and—”
“How’d that, um, happen?” Bailey interrupted. Just be chill. Casual. Absorb all this information and make it as normal as possible. “She doesn’t seem like your type.”
“I have a type?”
“Well, sure.” Five foot nothing, Chinese American, a little drunk on experimental old fashioneds … When Zane frowned a little, she back-pedaled. “Okay, not really. But I see the way you are now …”
“Hmm.” It wasn’t agreement or disagreement, just acknowledgment. “She kind of came out of nowhere, honestly. I was out in Humboldt Park one night, catching up with a guy I know who’s stationed out there—at a bar, I mean. Cantina La Estrella? Makes a killer margarita.” Bailey shook her head, and Zane kept on. “Anyway, she was working a shift with Hector. He went out to patrol, and things got busy back on the home front.”
Bailey blushed but then realized that he really meant at the bar. “So you jumped behind the bar and helped out?”
Zane did a palms-up. “I tried. You should’ve seen her. She didn’t need my help. Shaking, stirring, salting rims. She’s really good, Bailey. Almost superhuman.”
Bailey gave a noncommittal mmm.
“And then, when I saw her fight for the first time …” He heaved a contented, faintly visible sigh into the chilly air. “I gotta tell you, Bailey, she might be the best bartender I’ve ever seen. Better than Garrett in his prime.”
“Better than you?”
“It’s like we’re doing two different jobs. She’s bartending, and I’m mixing drinks and occasionally killing stuff. She’s helped me grow so much as a bartender. And when I told her about my whole pipe dream for the Long Island … she didn’t think I was crazy. She was right on board. Can you believe it?”
Bailey couldn’t believe it, actually. At that moment she’d rather believe in tremens.
“So is it normally this quiet?” She put herself on high alert, scanning the shadowy patches.
“Not really,” he said, a bit more businesslike. “But quiet’s a good thing. When it comes to tremens, you can always hear them com—”
And just then one darted out in front of them.
“Shit!”
Bailey saw it first. It surged into the dim light from under a Dumpster, its muscles visible with every motion. The slit mouth between its eyes was already open wide, creepy and hungry.
“Zane!” Bailey grabbed his forearm but worried she was too late. She remembered how impossibly fast her tremens had moved.
But she’d never seen Zane in action.
He thrust out a hand and jerked the tremens aside with nothing but his psychic powers. It hurtled into the base of a streetlight with a dull clank, then spilled to the sidewalk.
“Zane,” Bailey said. “Zane!”
The tremens stumbled to its feet, but Zane was ready. A manhole cover ripped out of its resting place and plowed into the tremens’s ankles, sweeping it off its feet. And there Zane stood, guiding the metal disk with a determined face and a steady hand.
The manhole cover had overshot, but it braked in the air and then fired back at the tremens. Bailey stared, awed by Zane’s control.
The creature wobbled to its feet (or whatever its appendages were), a sitting duck for the careening piece of city property. But at the last possible instant it surged to life and hopped onto the manhole cover as if it was a skateboard.
“Shit,” Zane said. With brows tensed, he twisted his wrist and the disk flip-flopped. But rather than slip off, the creature used the momentum to springboard itself and speed into the dark.
“Is it gone?” Bailey said, but she already knew the answer.
“No.” Zane’s voice was as tight as her grip on his arm. “They don’t usually give up when their prey fights back. They—there!”
The tremens had reemerged. It circled them, approaching closer with each pass.
Bailey felt like she was going to barf. The tremens moved too quickly, too fluidly, and her RUN instinct was blazing in her brain. Zane’s apparently wasn’t. He was pivoting around her to keep the tremens in his line of sight.
“Just a little closer,” he muttered. “A little closer, you skinless bastard …”
Don’t scream, Bailey told herself. Don’tscreamdon’tscreamdon’tscream. The tremens wasn’t even touching her, but she could already feel that hopeless, helpless ache churning in the pit of her stomach.
“Gotcha.” Zane pointed a finger at the asphalt and levered his thumb as if working the hammer of a gun. A loose bit of pavement pulled away just as the tremens stepped on the spot: a small shift, but enough to send the tremens sprawling and slamming onto the pavement. As it fell, the manhole cover whirled out of the shadows, spinning vertically like a saw blade. Bailey watched as the cover dropped—
—and cut deep into the pavement. The tremens scuttled off.
“Son of a bitch,” Zane said, as if narrowly missing a kill shot on a homicidal demon was no more annoying than getting stuck at a red light. The tremens darted back to the Dumpster, but Bailey caught a glimpse of its face: one yellow eye was shut, the flesh around it covered in burns.
She barely had time to look before she realized something was wrong. Maybe she didn’t have Mona’s sixth sense, but she could see, and something was coming. Right for Zane. Only one thought filled her mind: scream.
“On your back!”
Zane was too slow. The tremens knocked him to the ground, wrenching his arm from her grip and sending Bailey to the ground with a thump. She scrambled off her stomach, grabbing for her friend, but the tremens had already wrapped its tendrils around him. When it breathed him in, Zane convulsed in pain. His mouth opened to scream, but no sound escaped. Above them the streetlights flickered.
Do something, Bailey thought. But what? She had zero powers and even less combat experience. There was nothing she could do.
But if she didn’t do something, Zane would die.
Fuck it, Bailey thought.
She sprang to her feet and sprinted away from Zane and the tremens as fast as her legs would carry her. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes. Hair tie next time, she thought. If there is a next time. When she reached the end of the block, she banked hard and, lungs burning, turned around.
Somewhere she’d read that the average manhole cover weighed approximately 110 pounds, or slightly less than the average Bailey. So she knew she wasn’t strong enough to throw a one at the tremens. She was, however, strong enough to throw something else: a Bailey.
The tremens heard her coming; it must have because it turned and trained its terrible yellow eyes right on her. But Bailey kept charging. She plowed into it with a shoulder check that would’ve gotten her benched from her middle school lacrosse team for aggressive behavior. The tremens fell, and Bailey, her momentum spent, sprawled across Zane’s prone form.
“Now! Kill it now!”
Even as she said it, the manhole cover came crashing down like an iron comet. It hit the tremens in the middle of its back, folding it grotesquely in half. Smoke was already rising, its acrid smell snaking down Bailey’s throat and reactivating her vomit instincts.
Don’t scream don’t puke don’t—
; The cover clanged to its side. The tremens was gone, a puddle of black ooze the only proof it’d been there at all.
“Holy shit.”
Bailey coughed, blinked, and felt for broken ribs. She was alive, and Zane was alive—very alive, actually, directly underneath her, still breathing and very warm.
“Yeah.” Zane blinked but didn’t get up. Didn’t move her either. “I guess I learned what a howitzer—”
Bailey leaned down and kissed him.
It wasn’t sweet, or planned, or even particularly neat. Bailey was thrumming with rye whiskey and adrenaline, and kissing Zane only added to the excitement. But she was kissing him, and he was kissing her, his arms pulling her closer, lips parting, familiar even as the kiss was infused with something new. Something they hadn’t had four years ago. This was deeper. Better.
Or it was until Zane yanked away.
“What the hell was that?!” His voice was a full octave higher than usual.
Bailey’s chain of thoughts exploded in slow motion. She’d kissed Zane. That was bad. She’d kissed Zane. He had a girlfriend. She’d kissed Zane. She liked it, but that didn’t matter, because that was bad.
And she was still half on top of him.
“I—jeez. Shit. Sorry. So sorry.” She scrambled to her feet. “I didn’t—”
“I have a girlfriend!”
“I know, I know,” Bailey said, squeezing her eyes shut and raising her hands in surrender. She flushed so red that her head felt like it was glowing. “I did a dumb thing that was also wrong and bad, and I know, okay? I know and I’m sorry and I know that I’m sorry.” She was babbling, but that had nothing on the never-ending OH MY GOD WHY DID YOU DO THAT? loop streaming through her head.
Zane muttered something, and Bailey remembered she should be listening. “What was that?” she said.
He’d been on the verge of furious a moment ago, but her sudden attention made him dial it back a few degrees. “It’s nothing,” he said, each syllable overenunciated in a distinctive back off way.
“What?” she said again, more softly.
“I said, Where was that four years ago?!”
No. Absolutely not. Anger, not embarrassment, flared in Bailey’s chest. “I knew it,” she said.
“Knew what?” He was on his feet now, towering over her. His tie was askew and his hair was sticking up, a shadow of the messy Zane she used to know.
“You’re still stuck in high school,” she said. “You’ve changed all these things about your outside but—”
“I’m stuck in high school?” Zane laughed. He pressed a hand to his mouth, shrugged, and then laughed again. “Jesus. Look around you, Bailey. You didn’t hit some big red pause button when you left. I know this’ll shock you since your big college-educated brain has trouble with subjects other than you, but everyone’s life went on when you weren’t here. Mine included.”
Bailey winced. But before she could gather her wits, he spoke again.
“This was a mistake,” he said. “If you can’t keep your cool when things get intense—”
“I saved your life,” she said. “You didn’t even see the second one—”
“What second one?” he said. “Weren’t you listening? They always hunt solo.”
“You scratched up the first one’s face and put out its eye. But the second one was fine,” said Bailey. “There were two of them.”
Zane shook his head. “Impossible. The energy fields—” He folded his arms over his chest, bunching up his suit coat. “You know what? Never mind. I never should’ve let you push me into taking you out tonight. But typical bossy Bailey—”
“I did just fine out here. The problem is you.” Yes, her brain said. That’s the ticket. Deflect, deflect, deflect. “You didn’t teach me how to make my own old fashioned; you just waited until I cracked it by myself. Then you swooped in and drank it and didn’t let me make another one for myself—”
“You shouldn’t have even engaged!” Zane yelled. “This was just a stupid, I don’t know, ride-along!”
“If I hadn’t engaged, you’d be dead,” Bailey said. Now it was her turn to be coldly quiet. “I may not know magic, Zane, but I know teachers, and I know bad ones. Because I’ve spent most of my life in school, and I’ve never been called a bad student.”
Fallen leaves twitched even though no wind blew. She’d gone too far. She sneaked a look at Zane, who was staring hard at the ground, clenching and unclenching his fist. Making the leaves dance. Avoiding her more than anything.
At last he opened his fist, and the leaves fell still.
“Fine,” he said quietly. “I’ll get you a new teacher.”
Her heart sank into the pit of her stomach.
“So here are my last orders to you as my apprentice,” Zane said, putting a nasty emphasis on the last word. “Will you listen to me, for once, and follow them?”
Bailey nodded dumbly.
“Go home,” he said. “Get some rest. If you still want to do this, you’ll be assigned to a new master in a few days.” He looked at her now, right in the eye. “And then you’ll be done with me.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The subsection of Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood known as Boystown cheerfully announced itself to pedestrians with impeccably clean sidewalks and fluttering rainbow flags. The shops were quaint, inasmuch as anything could be quaint within the bounds of a sprawling world-class metropolis. But what the apartments and condos of Boystown lacked in that old Chicago gothicness, they more than made up in the kind of sleekness that would’ve made Frank Lloyd Wright’s mouth water.
And then, like a fly in the proverbial soup, there was Long & Strong.
If it was possible to win bars in contests, Long & Strong looked like a consolation prize. The outside boasted zero windows, a chipped brick facade, and an awning covered in fading stripes. Bailey double-checked the address Bucket had texted her, winced, and then triple-checked. North Halsted. This was it.
Well, better this than bumming around at home, Bailey told herself and went inside.
Despite the long hours and thankless scrubbing at the Nightshade, Bailey had liked waking up knowing she had somewhere to be, even if it was just a neighborhood bar with sticky counters. It gave her something to structure her life around. A week of waking up without that structure made her days feel lumpy and misshapen; it took a heroic amount of self-motivation for Bailey to even reach for her phone to order a pizza. She thought she’d be fine interacting with no one aside from her parents and Netflix, but it turned out that too much sitting around drove her nuts. So on the last Friday in September, the fourth day of her between-bars limbo, still in her PJs and still with no word from Zane or any of the Alechemists, she’d screwed up the courage to call Jess for her billionth follow-up on the Divinyl gig. But all she got was voicemail.
“So anyway,” Bailey had said, one minute and thirty-eight excruciating seconds into her message, “I’m totally keeping busy, but not too busy to pick up if you call. So, you know … call me. Please. Sorry. Um. Bye.” Her thumb tapped the end call button.
A moment later she swore loudly, redialed, and left a much shorter follow-up message: “Oh, and I forgot to mention, this is Bailey Chen. Thanks, bye.”
Ugh, ugh. Bailey had fallen onto the couch face-first in total despair, wedged her phone under a cushion so she couldn’t hear it vibrate, and cranked up the TV just to be sure. By the time her dad got home that evening she still hadn’t moved, except to hit “next episode” with the remote.
“No work tonight, Beetle?” he’d said, as if he couldn’t tell from her uncombed ponytail and cereal-stained T-shirt that she was not in going-out mode.
“No work for a little bit,” said Bailey. Mainlining all six episodes of Britain’s longest-running sitcom Oi! What’s All This, Then? had left plenty of free brain space to perfect her cover story. “I’m being, um, transferred. They’re shuffling me to another bar Garrett has a financial stake in, as a way of fostering—”
�
�Wait. So you’re not working with Zane anymore?” Her dad frowned. “I thought that was the whole reason you were tending bar.”
Bailey refused to blush. “Actually, I’m pretty good at it,” she said, more defiantly than she’d meant. “Bartending, I mean. I don’t need Zane’s help.”
Her dad shrugged. “I’m sure you are, Beetle. Hey, does that mean you’d be free to help me out in the shop for a while?”
She fiddled with the remote. “Uh, how about I get back to you on that?”
“Don’t turn your nose up at flower arranging, Beetle. You’re a natural. Besides, it’s got a lot of crossover with bartending.”
“How so?”
Her dad opened his mouth, then closed it.
“The second I think of how so,” he’d said, “you’ll be the first one I tell.”
That night she’d sat on her bed with the door locked, poring over The Devil’s Water Dictionary. Who cared what Zane thought? He’d never bothered to find out what she was capable of. She could mix these cocktails with her eyes closed. But her gaze drifted from the page to the ink-black night outside the window, and her thoughts followed suit. How many tremens lurked out there right now? How many bartenders were out there, protecting people like her—and her parents—from them? What happened if a bartender didn’t get there in time?
What would’ve happened to Zane?
The more questions she asked herself, the more their probable answers gave her the creeps. Especially when she was alone. Alone and in a bedroom whose walls were still painted what Home Depot called Sparkling Mimosa.
Her phone buzzed and Bailey jolted—once from the vibration and again when she saw an unfamiliar 312 number on the display. Okay, so not Divinyl. But still another nonparent human who wanted to talk to her.
“Hello?”
“Bailey?” said a familiar voice. Before she could identify it, though, it saved her the trouble. “It’s Bucket. So, about your reassignment. Are you free tomorrow night?”
“Um,” Bailey glanced at the leather-bound day planner she’d bought in a fit of ambition two weeks before graduation and brushed a streak of dust off the cover. “I think so.”