The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  The kidnappers who'd been shooting at me a moment ago were leaning over the edge of the speed boat, hauling a struggling Jane on board. As soon as they'd tossed her onto the deck, where she lay gasping like a netted fish, the big guy surged up and into the boat himself. The motor of the boat was throbbing now, pulsing with power. A spotlight sprang to life on the bow, and its beam began skimming over the water. I dove just before it reached me.

  Too late. Jane's abductors must have had eyes like cats, to pick me out in the darkness. Guns cracked and bullets churned into the water all around me. I swam until my ears were ringing and my lungs about to burst...

  I surfaced just in time to see the back of the speed boat kicking up a skew of spray as it turned a tight circle and roared out into the harbor. I treaded water, watching it go. There was no way I could rescue Jane now. Lone Star's harbor patrol vessels could catch up to that boat—but I could hardly call for their backup. Not if Dass' crazy ideas were true and Lone Star really had been the ones to lock Jane up and throw away the key to her memories and her sense of self.

  No, Jane was gone. I'd lost her. All I could do was watch the running lights of the speed boat as it roared off into the night.

  11

  Ever heard of the expression "hide in plain sight"? Dass was a big believer in it.

  There was no way a police officer could succeed in going undercover as a local on Nova Scotia's south shore. The tiny communities that dot the rocky coast between Digby and Yarmouth are towns of perhaps a few dozen families each, where everybody knows everybody else. Gossip travels faster over the back fields than data flows through the Matrix.

  Fortunately, the area is popular with tourists. Most come for the scenery along the old highway, which winds back and forth along the coast, following the rolling hills past clumps of wind-blown spruce, blueberry fields, and whitewashed houses with steep black roofs. The coastline ranges from high slate cliffs to low, mud-flat beaches tucked into the coves where the rivers flow out into the sea. But no matter what the terrain, it's almost always foggy. Even in summer patches of fog hang over the ocean until midday, when the sun finally burns them off.

  Tourists come to this area for its natural beauty and to see a slice of the 20th century. The towns here haven't changed much since the 1900s; people still rely on lobster fishing to get by. Along this stretch of the coast, lobster is the poor person's lunch.

  Dass was playing up the role of gawky tourist, the big-city person asking a lot of dumb questions. I was pretending to be her dog. I don't know which of us drew more stares: Dass, with her brightly patterned African dress and magical fetishes; or me, obviously pure wolf but as well-behaved and docile as a lap dog. On top of everything else, we didn't speak French—and this part of the coast was mainly Acadian. The locals could speak English, but did so only grudgingly.

  Good thing we weren't relying on questioning the locals to get us where we wanted to be. Instead of doing standard police legwork, we were doing nose-work. Or rather, I was. While Dass played tourist, snapping pictures of the picturesque churches, I kept my nose to the ground, searching for even the faintest whiff of a para. It was the only way I was going to find Jane.

  Somehow, she was connected with the smugglers. When we'd first met, that night on the pier on Georges Island, she'd said that her friends called her Jane. Her blackberry-cat-smuggling friends, who presumably were also in the business of importing corpselights. I now was certain that those "friends" were the ones who'd abducted her from the hotel. When we found the base of the paranormal animal smuggling ring, we'd find them—and Jane.

  Dass and I had been meandering up and down the coast for three days, stopping every kilometer or so for Dass to sit and "meditate" in the sunshine while I took a run. What Dass was actually doing was using astral projection to check out any boats that went by. She would sink into a trance, then skip her astral body across the water like a stone, entering the lobster boats and scallop draggers and checking the holds for any signs of paranimals. I'd given her a good description of Jane's four kidnappers, so she searched the bridges and crew quarters of each of the boats for them. Meanwhile I stood guard over Dass's body, keeping one eye on it while I sniffed along the shore for any familiar scents.

  So far we'd come up empty. But as soon as we found what we were looking for, Lone Star would send a team from the Magical Task Force to make a raid.

  On the third afternoon after Jane's kidnapping we stopped in Short Beach, a town so small it didn't even appear on the map. It was pretty much a ghost town; we'd been told that the only inhabitant was a local named "Crazy John," a hermit who was said never to venture out of the scrap-metal house he'd built for himself in the hills behind the town.

  Short Beach consisted of an abandoned fish-processing plant, a couple of derelict lobster boats beached along the shore, four unoccupied houses with broken windows and roof tiles torn away by winter gales, and a government wharf made of concrete rather than wood—a necessity in these parts, where gales blow up on a regular basis. At the end of the wharf closest to the shore was a chain link fence with a rusted No Trespassing sign hanging on its locked gate. The sign was so old it had department of fisheries and oceans, Canada printed on the bottom of it. Canada had ceased to exist as a separate nation thirty years ago, back when the UCAS was formed, which indicated how long it had been since the wharf was in use. The chain link fence looked equally old—full of holes and ready to fall over at any moment.

  A rusted-out freighter was tied up alongside the pier—although "tied up" was a bit of a misnomer, since it wasn't going to be sailing anywhere, ever again. Barnacles crusted its hull, and dried clumps of seaweed on its decks indicated that they were probably awash at high tide.

  When the locals said "high tide" in these parts, they meant it. The tides along this stretch of the coast were infamous. The difference between low and high tide in the Bay of Fundy could be close to ten meters— the height of a three-story building.

  The ship had obviously been sitting here for many years, gradually taking on water. It had probably been cheaper to just abandon it here than to tow it out to sea and set the explosive charges that would properly rupture its hull, allowing it to sink.

  The derelict freighter was probably empty of anything but seaweed, salt water, and sludge, but Dass decided to give it a gander while I checked out the fish-processing plant. She settled into a lotus position on the windswept grass. Then she closed her eyes, and began to hum softly.

  I shifted my perception to astral space and watched as she left her body. Dass's aura flowed out of her body and coalesced into a shimmering, ghostly double of herself. It "walked" through the fence and down the wharf, its feet hovering several centimeters above the concrete.

  Although I can perceive the astral plane, I can't separate my consciousness from my body and jander around in it like a mage or a shaman can. It must be an incredible feeling; the closest thing I could imagine were the dreams where I was flying. Dass could do that in real life.

  Time for me to get busy. Nose to the ground, I checked the abandoned fish-packing plant, sniffing for familiar scents. The building hadn't been used for decades, but it still smelled faintly of fish guts. And nothing else. Not a whiff of the kidnappers or a para of any kind.

  I took a quick lope past Dass to make sure she was all right, then sniffed around the empty houses. I paused, once or twice, to leave my mark on top of the spoor of a dog that had passed this way a few days ago. The dog had been excited about something; it had stopped to dig at a corner of the house, in a place where the wall and foundation had crumbled away, leaving a small hole. I put my nose to the hole and sniffed...

  Blackberry cat!

  The scent was as faint as the dog's—maybe three days old. But there was no mistaking that stench. My guess was that the cat had been frightened by the dog and had sought out the nearest cover. When the dog eventually become bored and wandered away, the cat had emerged from the hole and headed off inland. I followed the scent
for several hundred meters, over the crest of one hill and then down the next, through a clump of hackmatack pines, then over the next hill. The trail eventually crossed over a fresher scent; the blackberry cat had been this way recently, a few hours ago at most. My ears perked up as I followed the fresher trail. Then I noticed a shadow looming over me. I looked up and saw...

  Frig—what the hell was that?

  It looked like a gigantic wedge of forest-green metal about six stories tall, with its tapered tip set on a concrete base. Made from a framework of I-beams covered with panels of steel about the size of a sheet of plywood, it was roughly eight meters wide at the base and nearly double that width at the top. The metal walls were perforated with porthole windows and were set with doors made from hatches taken from a ship. A railing of wrought-iron grating ringed the top of the structure, and a gutter pipe ran down one side to a boxlike device. Beside a door in the lowermost level of the wedge, a boiler let out a steady stream of smoke that smelled like half-burned methane.

  A human fiddled with the boiler, peering at gauges and adjusting valves and muttering to himself. He moved slowly, and looked as ancient as the bedrock on which the structure was built. He was tall, skinny, and bald, with a thin white stubble of beard. He wore nothing but a pair of dark green fleece pants that were more hole than fabric, and had skin as brown, weathered, and wrinkled as old leather. He looked about as ancient as a human could be and still be alive—I guessed his age at eighty-plus. Maybe even ninety-plus. He even smelled old. I was amazed that someone so elderly and frail was out here on his own, living alone in the woods.

  I circled close to the structure, taking a better look. The ground around the base reeked of cat. And then I spotted it: indolently sunning itself in one of the porthole windows near the top of the tower. I could tell from its aura that it was no ordinary cat.

  No doubt about it, the old man had to be Crazy John. No sane person would live in a six-story, inverted-wedge tower made from scrap metal and keep a blackberry cat as a pet.

  I didn't want to tackle this on my own. For all I knew, the tower held other paranimals. It might even be the base of the smuggling operation. I slunk off through the pines, then bolted back to where I'd left Dass.

  She had emerged from her trance and was stretching, working the kinks out of her muscles. I doubted she'd found anything; I could smell her frustration. I changed into human form so I could speak to her.

  "I spotted a blackberry cat, Dass. In a tower, just inland."

  Dass broke into a grin. "That's good, because the freighter was a waste of time. The hull was full of sea water. Let's check out the tower, instead. I'll give it a quick scan in astral, then we'll go there in person."

  I was pretty keyed up, and it was hard to just stand around and wait while Dass went into another trance. I used the time to put my clothes back on. I was glad when Dass came back to her physical body after just a minute or two.

  "There's nothing there but the old man and the blackberry cat," Dass said. "No other paras, and no smugglers. And no Jane Doe."

  My heart sank. I hadn't really expected to find Jane so easily—but I could always hope.

  "Let's go bag the cat," I said.

  We walked back to the wedge-shaped tower, not bothering to keep out of sight, playing the part of curious tourists. When we got close enough, Dass pulled out her camera and took a snapshot. She even waved me into the picture, giving me an excuse to get close to the tower. And to the old man.

  He looked at me suspiciously, eyes narrowed. "Who the frig are you?" He spoke English fluently, without a hint of an Acadian accent.

  I held out my hand. "My name's Romulus. The girlfriend and I are down from Halifax on vacation." I looked up at the tower. "Did you build this? It's fantastic!"

  The old man nodded as he shook my hand. His grip was weak and his hand trembled. But I could see that he had been wiry and strong, decades ago.

  "Sure did," he said. "It's my wizard's tower. It took me twenty years to build and I'm going to live in it for another twenty—maybe another century." He grinned, then added as an afterthought: "And my name's John."

  Dass approached. Her arched eyebrow told me she shared my opinion. The frail old man would be lucky to live out another year, let alone twenty.

  "Wizard's tower?" I asked. "Did you use magic to build it?"

  "Wish I could have," he said. "But I don't know a single spell. Folks around here just call it a 'wizard's tower,' since it looks so strange."

  He wasn't a spellcaster then. I hadn't thought so when I'd taken a look at his aura earlier.

  "It took me a full year just to work out the design," John continued in a quavering voice. "The walls are three-millimeter plate steel, and they're designed with a negative slope so no rain hits the surfaces. The interior of the south-facing wall is lined with copper tubing that acts as a gigantic solar heater. The foundation is concrete, poured over wired rebar. The roof collects water, which runs through that pipe on the side down to a water turbine that provides hydroelectric power, and this boiler is a methane cooker. Each of the floors rests on stringers lined with chunks of old automobile tires. The rubber acts as a vibration and heat insulator, so that cold doesn't transfer into the core of the building. There's also a fiberglass vapor barrier that—"

  Dass interrupted by glancing up at the porthole window. "Is that your cat?" she asked. "She's sure a pretty one."

  John grinned. "You could say that I'm her human." He laughed, but after a moment the laugh turned into a rattling cough. It was a full minute before he could talk again. He coughed so hard he nearly collapsed, and I wondered if I should lope back to the car for the medkit. But eventually John regained his breath.

  I kept an eye on the cat in the window, hoping it wouldn't wake up. I didn't want the little fiend spotting us, and trying any of its tricks.

  "How long has your cat 'owned' you?" Dass asked sweetly.

  I couldn't hide my disgust. I knew it was a popular joke among owners of house cats, but the joke still turned my stomach. I had to glance away so the old man wouldn't see the expression on my face.

  "About a year," John said. "The Mi'kmaqs gave her to me."

  That made my ears perk up. I turned back to the old guy and gave him a foolish-tourist grin. "Mi'kmaq Indians?" I asked. "I didn't know there were any living around here. I thought this area was all Acadian."

  "They come and go."

  "By boat?" I asked.

  Maybe my voice had been a little too eager. The old guy's eyes narrowed. I could smell a whiff of nervousness coming from him.

  The silence stretched out between us until Dass broke it. She'd been peering in the open door on the tower's ground floor.

  "What's in the tank?" she asked.

  "Gribble grubs."

  "What?" I wondered if I'd heard John correctly. Was the old man making up nonsense words now?

  John walked to the door on unsteady legs and waved us inside with an age-mottled hand.

  "Come and see," he said with a grin.

  The main floor of the tower turned out to be one large room with bare metal walls and a concrete floor. At the center of the room was a huge glass-sided aquarium, filled with what smelled like sea water. A tube ran into one side of the tank, from a pump on the floor, and another tube ran out the other side. Smaller pumps directed the water flow inside the tank. At the center of the tank, bolted to the bottom of it, was a large piece of wood, one side of which looked vaguely like a face.

  "Look closer," John said with a grin. He bent to the pump and pushed a button. The pump started up with a hum, and the water level slowly began to rise in the tank.

  Peering into the water, I could see tiny wormlike creatures the size of grains of rice, floating on the surface of the water.

  "Gribble grubs," John said, tapping the side of the tank. "They eat wood. They nibble away at wooden pilings, and as the tide goes up and down you're left with a piling that looks like a spindle. I sculpt with 'em—make portraits."
<
br />   The nervousness I'd smelled on John earlier was gone. Now he was all enthusiasm as he explained, in his high, wheezy voice, the intricacies of keeping the water flow just so, in order to keep the gribble grubs nibbling away at a specific spot. I could see that, if we let him, he'd prattle on for hours about the pumps, tubes, and filters. He seemed more interested in the mechanics of the project than he did in his "art."

  "Your cat," Dass prompted. "Did you know she was magical?"

  "Oh, sure," John said with a dismissive wave. "That's why I wanted her for my wizard's tower."

  "Wasn't she expensive?" Dass asked.

  "She was a gift," he answered. "I helped the Mi'kmaqs fix their bilge pump and—"

  He shut his mouth, as if he'd said something he shouldn't have. But he was too late. I'd caught the gesture Dass had made behind her back as she cast her spell. Even now, she was probing his mind, listening in on the words he was speaking only in his head.

  Her lips twitched in the faintest of smiles, and I knew she'd learned something important.

  John shook his head, as if dizzy. His face paled.

  "Frig," he said. "I feel funny. Are you a wizard or something?"

  I had to change the subject. Fast. I looked around for something to comment on. "Who's the gribble grub portrait of?" I asked.

  "Huh?" He was still shaking his head. "Oh, that's Jane."

  My hackles rose. Was it just coincidence that he'd chosen that name? It was one of the most common on the planet. What were the odds that it was my Jane he was talking about?

  Pretty good, considering that this fellow also had a blackberry cat that had been given to him by Mi'kmaq Indians.

  "Who is Jane?" I asked.

  His expression softened. "A doctor," he said. "I met her six years ago, when she came here to give me the tests. She reminded me of my daughter. When she walked through the door my knees went weak. I thought my daughter had come back from the dead." The wistful tone in his voice told me that he'd loved his daughter very much.