by Battis, Jes
“Your father,” he said softly.
I nodded. “Bingo. Dear old dad. Maybe he brought this thing into the world. Maybe it brought him into the world. Maybe they’re old poker buddies. I don’t know the specifics, but I’ve felt this creature before. I remember it. And I know it has something to do with my past. You know—the part of my childhood we don’t talk about anymore. The part where the photo albums are all blank. Or cursed.”
“Our powers both come from the same source,” Derrick said slowly. “I don’t remember anything before I was adopted—my birth parents could have been from the ninth ring of hell. I’ve got no idea. And you’ve never known anything but Diane and Kevin Corday, the two most loving parents in the universe.” He blinked. “It’s been twenty-five years, Tess. This could unglue your whole life. You have no idea what you’re going to see.”
“I know I have to look. And if Diane and Kevin love me, that can’t ever be destroyed, right? It’s always going to be there. No matter what I see.”
“The love will stay. Sure. But you could be letting something else in. Something dark and terrible and evil. And it’ll stay there, too, like an oil slick in your heart.”
“I don’t want to interrupt this really intense moment,” Wolfie said, “but this place isn’t exactly the Hilton. There’s an abandoned suite inside, and we jury-rigged the lock so that we can get in and out. But someone else could drop by anytime. If we’re going to do this, we have to get a move on. I don’t want company.”
Derrick looked at me again. “Why here? We could have done it back at the house. We’d be safer.”
“I’m not bringing this shit into our home. I never intended to. If this happens, it happens here, in this place. And then we’ll never have to think about it again.”
Derrick closed his eyes for a moment. Then he sighed. “Here.” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a bundle of neatly folded clothes. It was my favorite pair of jeans, along with his oversized Food Not Bombs T-shirt. He’d even folded my socks and underwear atop the pile, like I was about to go on a camping trip.
“I brought these. Just in case you need to change—afterward.”
I took the clothes from him. My mouth quivered.
“You knew.”
He shrugged. “I suspected. And besides—one has to look one’s best, even in the face of ancient evil.”
I kissed him on the cheek. “You’re amazing.”
“I know. Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.”
Wolfie took us around the back of the building. We stopped outside a garden-level suite, and he knelt to push open the window, which was slightly ajar. It groaned, and I was afraid that the wood frame might snap for a moment, but Wolfie managed to slide it up so that we could fit inside. Feeling a bit undignified, I squatted and climbed through the dark opening. My left foot found purchase on a counter, and I lowered myself onto the hardwood floor.
The suite was a mess. Old needles, crack spoons, and discarded rubber tubing littered the floor and hallway. The sink was filled with broken dishes, and the air smelled like a mixture of urine, body funk, and mildew. A few scattered mats lay on the floor, along with some dirty pillows and cast-off furniture. Mostly just particleboard shelves balancing on milk crates and old, upturned boxes.
“Great,” I said. “It’s got a real Turkish prison feel to it.”
“It’s the space that’s important,” Wolfie replied. “Not the décor. And the bathroom is clean. I’ll—ah . . .” He held out his hand. I gave him the vial of Hex, and he looked at it strangely for a second.
Was he jealous? Or just haunted by memories of doing this for Jacob Kynan? It couldn’t have been easy watching your lover as he slowly killed himself.
“I’ll go get the gear ready,” he said at last, disappearing down the hallway.
I sat down awkwardly on one of the mats, and Derrick sat beside me.
“Reminds me of college,” he said, a nervous little smile playing across his face. “Remember when we dropped acid for the first time?”
“You thought a giant rat from space was going to attack us. And I just kept eating Rice Krispies squares and hiding underneath the desk.”
He looked at me. “You’re really going to do this?”
“I really am.”
“Then—I’m here.” He touched my hand. “I’ll be your Virgil.”
“You are my Virgil, baby.”
We kissed once, lightly, on the mouth. It didn’t happen often. There was very little sexual about it, since Derrick and I had never been a hot item. It was more like an expression of absolute comfort. He was gay, I was straight—that would never change. At least I didn’t think it would. But in those rare moments when we did kiss, I always had to think: What if? I wondered if he thought the same.
Wolfie came out of the bathroom holding a leather satchel with various pockets. He knelt down next to us, pulled up a broken-down table, and laid the satchel across it, like a doctor about to extract his set of surgical tools.
“How do we make it sterile?” Derrick asked.
Wolfie snapped on a pair of latex gloves. He withdrew a small jar from the satchel, along with a sheet of tinfoil, which he then spread across the table. Uncapping the jar, he spread some antiseptic gel onto the tinfoil. Then he withdrew two sealed packages, which he broke open, laying down a disposable needle and syringe.
“Well”—Derrick blinked—“I guess that answers my question.”
“You don’t fuck around,” Wolfie said simply. “Not if you know how to do this. Not if it’s your life.”
“Was it . . .” I suddenly wanted to take the question back. “I mean, did you—”
“I used,” Wolfie said, picking up an alcohol wipe. “Of course I used. But I’ve been clean for a while now. Intend on staying that way.”
I rolled up the sleeve of my blouse.
I guess this was really happening.
I let Wolfie daub at the inside of my arm with an alcohol wipe. Then he fitted the needle to the syringe. Easy as snapping together a car part, or those Tinkertoy things you used to play with as a kid. Snap, snap. Build yourself a whole new world.
Wolfie took out a stainless steel spoon. “You can’t use silver,” he said absently, as if he were talking to himself. “Shit breaks down and gets in your veins. Just like you can’t use a cigarette filter because it’s toxic. That poison leaches into you.”
He picked up the Hex. The green liquid seemed to flare and boil with light as Wolfie tipped the vial. An arc of emerald satin poured onto the spoon. He recapped it, and I noticed—a bit relieved—that it was still more than half-full. What would half a dose of Hex do to me? It had to be better than a full dose. Less fatal?
What the fuck was I doing?
He placed a hand underneath the spoon. I felt a flush of thermal materia, and curls of steam rose off the Hex as it boiled.
“Guess you don’t need a lighter,” Derrick said.
Wolfie tore open another package, then placed an antiseptic cotton swab onto the spoon, where it began to soak up the Hex. Gently, he inserted the tip of the needle and began to draw liquid through the swab. I watched the syringe fill.
Satisfied, Wolfie removed the syringe and placed the spoon to the side. He unfastened another pocket on the satchel and pulled out a piece of flexible rubber tubing, a dull yellow in color. “This shouldn’t be too hard,” he said. “You’ve got virgin veins.”
“Well, at least some part of me is still a virgin.” I held out my arm.
Wolfie looped the plastic tubing around my bicep. He tied the ends and pulled them tight. “This okay?”
I nodded.
“Good. Now flex.”
Slightly embarrassed by my lack of upper-arm strength—although I was still pretty solidly built for my height—I flexed for him. The skin around my bicep was pale, almost translucent. Damn Irish complexion. He tapped the underside of my wrist gently. I watched, in a kind of horrible fascination, as my cephalic vein slowly flared to life
, a current of blue across my skin. He’d better know what he was doing. If he stuck that thing in my brachial artery by accident, I was going to be mighty pissed off (in between spraying out arcs of blood all over Derrick’s brand-new coat).
“Good veins,” Wolfie said.
“Thanks. I think.”
“All right. Deep breath.”
I inhaled, then nodded.
No going back now.
I am the worst guardian ever. I am the worst parent in the whole fucking universe. Social Services is going to take Mia away. I’m a crack mom. I’m unfit—
There was no way to think about it. This was happening. I’d be different afterward. I’d still be Tess, but in a way, things would be different. That didn’t mean I couldn’t come back from it. That I couldn’t still be—me.
Wolfie loosened the tourniquet, and then he injected the needle. I felt a heavy pinch, and a little spot of blood appeared as he pulled back the plunger, which meant that he’d found the vein cleanly. He pushed the needle in. I winced.
“Sorry. Has to be deep, or else you just skin-pop. I don’t want to think about what injecting this shit into your muscle might do.” He looked at me. “Ready?”
I closed my eyes and nodded. I didn’t see him press the plunger down. I felt something cold shoot through me. Ice-water in my vein. Like Socrates in the Crito, feeling the low black pinch and flow of the hemlock.
The room took on a strange, silver cast. I was aware of Wolfie removing the needle, and I felt his thumb applying pressure to my arm. Derrick said something, but I couldn’t quite make out the words. Everything seemed to be falling into static. I was a cipher: a warm beating heart surrounded by snowdrifts. I felt my breathing slow. Narcotics depress your breathing, I heard a medical textbook in my head say. But this wasn’t in my head. It had nothing to do with acing forensic tests or being a good investigator. This was happening right now to my body. I was living my choice.
Invisible hands guided me to one of the mats. The sound of my own blood was incredibly loud, like the roaring of a train in my ears. The room seemed very dark, and everything was still frosted. I stared at the doorway. Silver smoke began to roil around its edges, like dragon’s breath. It smelled sweet and somehow forbidden. Two eyes formed in the smoke. They dangled like rubies. Then the creature opened its mouth, spewing gemstones at me, each one exploding with a different bell tone. I wasn’t afraid of the fire as it moved across my body. It was resplendent. Derrick and Wolfie flickered at the barest edges of my vision, like bruised clusters of light. I thought I felt Derrick’s hand on my head, but it also felt like an insect’s wings. A stuttering touch.
The smoke drifted toward me. I looked down, and I could actually see the tendril of earth materia that connected me to the ground, undulating in that sea plant way that the energy had when Miles was manipulating it. Did he see the power that way all the time? His life must have been a web of sparkling, multicolored lights, a prismatic shell that followed him around all the time. Was it maddening? Or were the colors a strange, paranormal sort of comfort, like a flickering diorama or night light? Proust’s lantern flickering across the ceiling as he waited for a chaste kiss.
I let my fingers hover above the strand without touching it. I could feel the seismic energy that ensheathed the materia like copper wire, singing with power from the earth. The smoke curled around my outstretched finger. It wrapped itself around my wrist, following the pathway of my radial artery. A perplexity of things whispered inside the fog. I heard voices, grunts, half whispers, incarnadine laughs, and a hissing sound, like a feral cat might make. I saw flickers, heard chains clinking together, caught flashes of darkness and flame the color of lapidary. I wanted my body to dissolve into smoke. Already, I felt so much lighter.
The mat wasn’t there anymore, or if it was, I felt no contact with the ground. The edges of the room had receded to lavender smears. Up and down seemed to peel away from each other, like one of those Band-Aid packages. Was I on the ceiling? Hey, kind of like Willow in that episode of Buffy. Maybe I’d turn into Dark Willow. I’d look damn good in that freaky leather bustier of hers.
As the smoke curled along the rest of my body, I tried to think if I’d ever felt like this before. When I was ten, I fractured my hip and got put on a morphine drip for three solid days. It felt like my body was paper thin, and I was floating in some Homeric wine dark sea with no thoughts of pain or discomfort. Just somewhere between sleeping and waking, the interval between life and death.
That had been black-and-white. This was in vivid Technicolor.
Tess.
Something buzzed around in my brain. I pushed it away.
Tess. Silence. Then: Bitch, snap the fuck out of it!
I looked up, startled. Derrick was standing in front of me. He looked wavery and a bit see-through, as if someone had made an overhead transparency of him and was fluttering it before my eyes. But he was there.
I can’t normally open this channel, he continued, but you and I are very close, and I think that boosts my abilities.
So you’re . . . actually in my head?
I felt him nod.
I wish I could tell you what this feels like.
I’d rather you didn’t. Just concentrate on this hidden memory .
I can’t see. Are you holding my hand?
Of course. I have been the whole time.
I smiled. That’s good.
Don’t get woozy. You have to concentrate.
I closed my eyes, imagining that we were in the Nerve, the CORE’s sim-room. Freud said that the unconscious was like a movie screen, after all. I should be able to project my whole life back onto it. In theory.
So I reached for that dark little sliver. The strange feeling of cold recognition I got whenever I visited the crime scenes. The feel of Duessa’s lips pressing softly on my cheek, like a moth’s wings. The image of the coire and athame together, so familiar, like an act from a play I’d forgotten.
My mother appeared.
What?
She was standing in a doorway. She looked angry.
“Leave now,” she said simply.
Someone was leaning against the doorframe. He seemed impossibly tall and thin, like a pillar of twined shadows. Was my subconscious distending him? Or did he really look like that? I could feel malice rising off him in whiskey fumes.
“She belongs to me, Diane.”
“She’s beyond your reach now.”
“That category encompasses very little.” He moved in closer. I thought I saw one of his eyes, winking in the darkness. It was the color of dirty ice.
“Get out. This place won’t have you. It’s protected.”
“I can smell that. Learned some new tricks, have we?”
My mother drew something out. Something that gleamed. A bar of neon, or a slash of silver against the air.
She was holding an athame.
“I can think of somewhere I’d like to put that.”
“I’m sure you can. Now go. I won’t say it again.” Her face was cold. I’d never seen it like that before. She was beautiful in her rage. “You won’t see her. As long as I live, you won’t ever know her.”
“But I’ve got a much better health plan than you, Diane. I’ll be alive when you’re mulch in the ground. Then what happens?”
“You’ll see.” She flicked the edge of the blade. Green sparks licked the air. Green—the color of earth materia.
He shrugged. “Fine. If not today, then tomorrow. We’re very patient.” His mouth widened to a grin, and for the first time, I saw that his teeth were black and serrated. “It’s in our blood.”
His we echoed in my mind. I tried to peer past him. At first there was nothing, but then, gradually, a shape coalesced. It was man-shaped, but not a man. I saw a thin, angular form. Something that looked like a liquid black coat. Long fingers, like Mister Corvid’s, clicking against each other. Skin so cold and blue it was cyanotic. Empty pits where eyes should have been. Holes leading into a void so black,
it was forever. I wanted to scream. I think I did.
The dark shape closest to my mother turned. His features kept shifting, but those wasted, ice gray eyes locked on me. Something that might have been a mouth curved into a half smile.
“Tessa? Is that you?”
For a split second, I was two people. There was Tessa the adult, floating in a blissed-out Hex haze. And then there was the six-year-old version of myself, sneaking past my mother and peering out the door.
The thing without eyes turned toward me. Two small holes, like a maggot’s air spiracles, clenched in the middle of its face, and I realized it was smelling me.
A name unscrolled in fire across my brain.
It hurt. The syllables grilled my flesh, each one a hot iron brand. I screamed. Then I heard Derrick say something. A shadow reached out to my left, and I felt him pluck the vibrating string of earth materia. His hand was in my guts. I screamed louder, and then the room came back into focus. The edges were still frosted with silver light, but I could see Wolfie and Derrick again.
“Tess?” Wolfie laid his hand on my arm. “You’re coming out of it now. I’m going to flush your system, like we talked about. Are you ready?”
I nodded weakly. I think.
“It’s going to hurt, baby.” He tightened his group. “Okay. Now.”
Someone touched an arc welder to my body. Flame blossomed through every vein and vesicle. I couldn’t scream. I was a living scream. For a split second, I thought I was going to explode. The pain was a sheet of white light cutting me into a million different angles of flesh. I was on the butcher’s block. Someone had harnessed a bit of starlight, and they were using it to shear through me. I was a loaf of bread caught in an electric slicer. My blood boiled.
Then it was gone. I fell forward, but arms caught me and lowered me to the floor. “Don’t move yet,” Derrick was saying. “Wolfie’s getting you something.”
My stomach heaved. I turned to the side, and Wolfie shoved a bucket under my head just as I started to puke. It came out in torrents. I sobbed and puked for what seemed like a good ten minutes. Then, weakly, I rolled over.