A Flash of Hex

by Battis, Jes

  “I can deal with you, and you alone, Miss Corday.”

  I nodded, trying to keep my shuddering in check. “That works for me.”

  “I know the creature of which you speak. I’ve dealt with it—transacted with it—on multiple occasions.”

  My stomach gave a lurch. “What can you tell me?”

  “Have you ever taken Hextacy, Miss Corday?”

  I frowned. “No. Of course not. That shit can kill you.”

  “A lot of things can kill you, if administered improperly.” He reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a vial of green liquid. It was the color of his eyes. “Sometimes, in that delicate space between killing and learning, we can see what needs to be seen. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  He slid the vial toward me.

  “What . . .” I blinked. “You want me to use?”

  His nod was encouraging.

  “No fucking way.”

  “This is a special batch. Its purity is really quite remarkable.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not a Hex user.”

  “One time does not a user make, Miss Corday.”

  “Yes it does! That’s how it starts!”

  “Are you so afraid of it?” He smiled sadly. “Do you doubt yourself that much? If you’re strong-willed, a little dose should be no problem for you.”

  “I’m sure you’ve said that to lots of crackheads before.”

  He tapped the vial with one claw. “The answers are inside here. More to the point—they’re inside your own head. But this will unlock them.”

  With a little shock, I remembered what Duessa had said to me.

  It’s in there somewhere. Just keep digging.

  Were they both right? Was it possible that I knew who the killer was already? That I’d seen it? Felt it?

  Mister Corvid stared at me levelly. “On the street, a single dose of this would go for a cool eight grand. It’s the closest you can come to seeing the future.”

  “This”—I shook my head—“this is against everything I believe in. I can’t possibly drop a dose of Hex. I’ll lose my job! I’ll lose—everything.”

  “Or you’ll gain the knowledge you need to find this killer.” He shrugged. “Isn’t that a fair trade? And besides”—his eyes gleamed—“haven’t you always been a little curious? You’re not entirely antidrug, are you? Tess?”

  The way he said my first name made me want to throw up.

  I stared at the vial.

  “Well? What’s it going to be?”

  The green liquid shimmered, like something from Oz.

  I walked out of the office with the vial. I didn’t look back.

  16

  Derrick looked more than a little confused as he crossed the street, coming to stand next to me at the corner of Hastings and Columbia. It was getting chilly, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his spring jacket, doing that impatient bouncing thing that people always do when they want to be somewhere else.

  “I got your text,” he said with a frown. “Cryptic much? I’m not sure why we couldn’t meet at the house.”

  “It’s a bit complicated.” I glanced at the time on my cell.

  “You waiting for something?”

  “Sort of—um . . .” I flashed him an apologetic smile.

  “Okay, look. I’ve got this plan. But it might be crazy. I mean, it probably is crazy. But I need to make sure that you’ve got my back.”

  His frown deepened. “I’ve always got your back. What’s this about?”

  The 135 Hastings bus pulled up to the curb. As a stream of people got off, I recognized Wolfie and gave a short wave. He walked over to us and smiled. It was one of those corner-of-the-mouth smiles that usually precedes a bad decision.

  “Hey.” He cast a glance at Derrick. “So, did you explain shit to him?”

  “Not yet. I was waiting for you.”

  “Whoa.” Derrick was full-on glaring at me now. “What’s going on? Have you two been working this case without me?”

  “No! Nothing like that. But I did call Wolfie after I met with the supplier.”

  His eyes went flat. “You called him before you called me?”

  Shit. This was not going well.

  “Like I said, its complicated. Why don’t we go—”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you spill it. You’ve never had a problem confiding in me before. This shouldn’t be any different, and the cloak and dagger shit is starting to piss me off, to tell you the truth.”

  “Wait until the punch line,” Wolfie muttered.

  Derrick seemed to retreat into himself. I could feel his muscles tensing. His expression went very dark. I hadn’t seen him this angry in a long time. Not good. And we hadn’t even gotten to the really insane part yet.

  “What’s going on?” he repeated. This time his voice was deadly quiet. It was that quietude that freaked me out the most.

  I swallowed. “I called Wolfie because I needed some advice.”

  “What—I’m not good enough, all of a sudden?”

  “Don’t get your back up. Wolfie knew more about this—stuff—than either of us. That’s why he’s here.”

  He folded his arms. “Are you going to elaborate on what this ‘stuff’ is? Or should I prepare myself for a game of charades?”

  “Maybe you should just show him,” Wolfie said.

  He scowled. “Yes. Why not? Show me this magic stuff, Tess. Whatever it is, it better explain why you’re acting like such a head case all of a sudden.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. Derrick took it from me and slowly unwrapped the contents. He stared at it for a moment, then handed it back to me, his eyes cold as glass.

  “You’re insane.”

  “Derrick . . .”

  “No, you’ve seriously lost it this time. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get in for carrying that shit around?”

  “Well, Selena did originally plan for me to buy some. So I presume she knew that I’d have to actually touch it at some point, right?”

  “Yeah, for the sake of the con. She didn’t intend for you to be carrying it in your purse like some fucking Tic Tacs. Jesus.”

  I bundled the parcel back into my pocket. “Can we just talk and walk? It’s a lot easier than standing on the corner. And people could be watching.”

  “Where are we going? Do I get to see your stash?”

  “It’s not like that, Derrick.”

  Wolfie started walking, and we followed him. I was glad that he was keeping out of this, although a part of me would have liked some support. Not that I expected it. Maybe Derrick was right. Maybe I really had lost it.

  I told him about my conversation with Mister Corvid in fits and starts while we walked up Columbia. Dusk was settling like an iridescent haze on downtown Vancouver, making the buildings shine with a subtle purple afterglow. It was a certainly a beautiful evening for ruining my life.

  “Wait.” Derrick held up a hand. “You’re telling me that this Corvid guy is dealing with the killer? Not only won’t he give up the name, but now he wants to play both of you off each other and see who wins? That’s fucked, Tess.”

  “He’s veritas—a pureblood. They have a sick sense of humor. I’m not sure if he cares about either side winning, really. All he wants is to turn a profit.”

  “Sure, and if he gets to destroy the life of a CORE employee while he’s at it, so much the better, right? Like a bonus gift with purchase.”

  “This isn’t going to destroy my life.”

  I honestly didn’t know that for sure.

  “Tess—you need to listen to yourself very carefully. What you’re proposing is completely insane. This is the type of shit that we fight against every day. You want to become part of that nightmare? You want to invite it willingly into your life?”

  “If it’ll save more lives—why not? Isn’t that worth it?”

  “But you don’t even know if this will work. You’re taking
it on faith from some pureblood demon whackjob. I mean, it could even be tainted. What if he gave you a hotshot? Maybe he wants to watch you fry your own brain.”

  “I don’t think that’s his game.”

  “You don’t know his game!” He grabbed my shoulder. “Tess, we’ve got a life, okay? We’ve got a family. You can’t make these split-second decisions anymore. We’ve got to think about Mia.”

  “Mia would want me to do the right thing. She’d want me to take the risk—I know her. I know what she’d say.”

  “So, because a fourteen-year-old kid says it’s the right thing to do—what—that’s all you need to know? If that were the case, we’d all be making out with the Jonas Brothers right now. Listen to yourself. You made up your mind before you even called me. I’m only here to clean up the fucking mess!”

  I sighed. “You’re here because I need you. I need an anchor. Wolfie can handle the assembly and delivery—he’s here to make sure that everything’s done right. But I need you to hold my hand and pull me back down—if I drift too far away.”

  “And you think you’ll actually find answers this way? Are they even going to make sense when you’re tweaking your head off?”

  “I’m going to ground myself with earth materia. That should keep my body in a kind of stasis.”

  “Tess, haven’t you read anything about this shit? It feeds on materia like candy! The more you use, the more powerful it gets. All you’ll be doing is stoking the fire, and this may be a news flash to you, but the central nervous system doesn’t particularly like being set on fire.”

  Actually, I did know a lot about it.

  I knew, for instance, that Hextacy was twice as addictive as any alkaloid of morphine, including undiluted heroin. I knew that, in addition to binding at the brain’s opiate receptors like any other narcotic, Hex could also triple and even quadruple the production of certain neurotransmitters, like norepinephrine and acetylcholine. Heroin had first been synthesized in 1874 from morphine, which in turn was gathered by scraping the milky white fluid from the unripe seedpods of Papaver somniferum, the poppy plant. The fluid had to be scraped by hand and then air-dried. In hospitals, they called it morphine; on the streets, they called it heroin.

  But unlike the average bag of heroin, which might contain anywhere from thirty to fifty milligrams of the pure stuff—cut with starch or quinine—a dose, or “flash,” of Hex came from purely processed organic materia. We didn’t know what it was cut with. Maybe flesh and blood. Maybe the bones of warlocks. The processing occurred in the most clandestine of laboratories, and they were always abandoned when we finally got to them, leaving only the reek of chemical precursors and bad magic behind.

  We had drugs that could mimic Hex, like Hydromorphone and Dilaudid, for the type of “breakaway” pain experienced by terminal cancer patients whose bodies no longer responded to other treatments. And we had Fentanyl—quite lucrative on the street—which could be delivered through a transdermal patch almost instantly. You could even suck on a citrate Q-tip and absorb it directly through the mucous membrane. But Hex could only be delivered intravenously. It needed blood to activate. And just as Derrick said, my own power would feed it.

  My hope was that the earth materia, even if did strengthen the drug, would also tie me to the physical world and keep my vitals in check. It would act like an arterial line, connecting me to Derrick and Wolfie, so that all Derrick had to do was brush that line with his own power and I’d wake up.

  Hopefully.

  I knew that a dose of Hex this pure would tear through every nerve in my body like apocalypse on legs. I could be doing permanent damage to my central nervous system. It was possibly the stupidest idea I’d come up with since I’d decided to become a mage in the first place, when I was only twelve years old.

  I also knew—in the same way I’d felt connected to Mia a year ago, knowing that I had to protect her at any cost—that this was the only solution. From the moment Duessa had suggested that I might have some knowledge about the killer locked inside my brain, I’d felt, deep down to the marrow, that she was right. When Mister Corvid said the same thing, I hadn’t really been surprised.

  This was something older than I’d first imagined. Something to do with me. And what I feared—what I still couldn’t tell Selena—was that I understood only too intimately why this killer had been leaving magical artifacts at the crime scenes. Yes, it was a taunt, an insult. But the creature wasn’t taunting mages in general.

  It was taunting me.

  I had a connection to this thing. I didn’t understand how or why, but Duessa had seen it right away. There was demon in me, after all. I’d been conceived through an original act of demonic violence when my mother was raped by—something. That’s where the magic came from. A place of shadow, blood, and smoldering power. For twelve years, I’d tried to bend it back into something good, tried to find the light and the warmth and the joy of having magic running through my veins. But the longer I stayed on this case, and the closer I got to this creature, the more hopeless I felt. There was a black hole inside me. This thing and I were connected by a strand of gleaming shadow, and instead of trying to break that strand, all I could do now was follow it back to its source. The memories before the power even stirred.

  I needed to know what came first.

  “Tess? Are you even listening to me?”

  We’d stopped outside a run-down old walk-up apartment building, heavily shaded by rotting trees and a tattered green awning. It wasn’t the sort of place where you composed a great piece of music or raised a loving family. It was, instead, the sort of place you went to forget everything about your life. A place for getting fucked up, fucked over, or simply fucked.

  I turned to Derrick. “I don’t know how to explain this to you. This case—it’s gotten inside of me somehow. It’s gotten personal.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. You’ve lost all perspective, Tess. You’re about to shoot your veins full of poison, and for what? The off chance that you might see some tantalizing vision of the killer? What if you just start drooling and pissing yourself like a goddamn crack addict—”

  “You do not get to talk to me that way,” I said. “Not you, Derrick. Not you. Okay? You have to believe me. You have to trust me, because . . .” I willed myself not to start crying like an idiot. “Because you’re my partner, and my best friend, and I love you so much—and I can’t do this unless you hold my hand.”

  His face was immobile. “I’m not going to watch you do this.”

  “You won’t be watching. You’ll be my spirit guide. My Virgil. You’ll make sure I don’t get lost in the inferno.”

  “I’m not even sure I can do that.” I saw a crack in his resolve.

  “You’re stronger,” I persisted. “Strong enough for this. And you’re the only one who knows me well enough to be an anchor.”

  “What . . .” He stared at the ground. He was definitely wavering. “Fuck—I mean, what about coming down? How are you going to deal with the withdrawal?”

  “That’s where I come in,” Wolfie said. “Duessa showed me how. It’s called ‘burnoff.’ You can flush the body clean of drugs with, like, this huge-ass burst of materia. You almost have to raise the blood to boiling, but only for a second—”

  “Excuse me?” I thought Derrick was going to smash him in the face for a moment, he looked so unhinged. “Did I hear you correctly? Did you actually just use the words ‘blood’ and ‘boiling’?”

  “Just for a second.” Wolfie made a face. “It hurts. A lot. But Tess’ll be drawing earth materia at the same time, which should protect her some. I’m not saying it’ll be a picnic, but I don’t think it’ll do any long-term damage.”

  “Oh, no, of course not—except for nuking your insides and potentially cooking your vital organs.” He stared at me. “You’ve totally stepped off from crazy. You’re on some whole new lunatic plane now.”

  “It’ll work, Derrick.” I tried to sound patient. “I’ve seen th
em do it at the clinic with mages who are addicted, or people who get magically infected. Your body runs hot when you’re on Ecstasy or GHB. This just makes it, you know—a bit toastier than normal. For a second or two. Not long enough to screw anything up permanently.”

  “Haven’t you ever stuck your hand on a burner? That only takes a second, too, but the burn lasts. And you’re talking about doing that to your insides. Tess—”

  “It’s not like that. I’m a miner—I deal with earth materia—and that gives me an affinity with heat as well. Wolfie”—I gestured to him—“is a spark. A very powerful spark. And he’s done this before. He did it for Jacob.”

  Wolfie nodded. “Sometimes he was too fucked up for a date, but he needed the money, bad. So I’d burn the drugs out of his system.”

  “And he ended up dead.”

  I felt a flicker of heat course along Wolfie’s body. His eyes narrowed on Derrick. “You saying I had something to do with that?”

  “No, no . . .” I spread both my hands in a gesture of détente. “Derrick’s just being who he is. My best friend. He’s upset, and he doesn’t want me to get hurt.”

  “I’m also pretty sure you’ve lost your mind.”

  “It’s a good plan,” Wolfie shot back. “It could work. And it’s not like your people have come up with any other brilliant ideas. This motherfucker is still on the loose. If Tess thinks she can use the drug against it—why not? The Lady seems to think that she’s on to something.”

  “The Lady’s nuts, if you ask me.”

  Wolfie took a step forward. The temperature between us spiked. “What? I know you didn’t just cast shade on Duessa—”

  “Stop it! Both of you! I can’t deal with any more pissing contests.” I exhaled. “This isn’t even about me anymore. Wolfie, I appreciate your help, but I know you’re only doing it because you want to get a crack at Jake’s killer.” I turned to Derrick. “And you can talk about Mia and our family all you want, but I know you better than you know yourself, Derrick Bernard Siegel.”

  He blanched at the use of his middle name.

  “You think this plan has a shot. You’re pretty sure it’s brilliant, and that I can get away with it, too. What you don’t want to deal with is what that means for me.” I looked him in the eyes. “Because if I do have a connection to this thing, you know exactly where it’s coming from.”