Chasing Magic

He was naked. At least from the waist down. A tattered T-shirt stretched across his chest, stained with ever-darkening sweat-rings of gray, like gathering storm clouds. Black shoes covered his feet. The crowd parted; shit, she was looking at a man even Downside dock-dwellers were afraid of.

He stopped screaming. The silence slapped her, made her body sigh in relief for a split second before he started again.

The closer he got, the weirder he was. Before Terrible stepped in front of her she could see the man’s body crisscrossed with scratches and marks, all up and down his skinny legs and arms. Track marks, some of them, but not all of them.

He kept wailing, his voice cutting in and out as it cracked. He stumbled in a pothole and fell; when he stood, blood ran down his knees.

For a second she thought maybe he’d keep running, that he’d be just another freaky-ass thing to see near the docks, but no such luck. He fell again, with an ugly crack. Had he broken a bone? He didn’t seem to be in any particular pain, but she had a distinct feeling that he wasn’t exactly dealing with reality at that moment.

Terrible’s hand closed over her arm; she could feel him wanting to drag her back to the Chevelle and throw her in. No fucking way. She let him stay in front of her though, so she was partially hidden by his broad frame but still able to see. The man remained on his hands and knees on the street, wretched hoarse sobs coming from his throat.

“Please,” he said. “Please, don’ lettem get me. Don’ lettem get me.”

“Be my friend,” the man with the orange hair murmured. “Told you, he fucked in crazy.”

Terrible glanced down the street from where the man had appeared. Chess did, too. Emptiness. No one chasing him. Hell, no one even followed him, at least not that Chess could see.

But he kept turning back, his eyes wide and terrified. “Look. Look, they coming.”

“Ain’t nobody there.”

“I see em.” He tried to stand up. Oh, fuck, he tried to stand, and he’d snapped his leg. When he stood the bone broke the skin, popping out of his shin like a flipped lever. He tumbled back to the pavement.

Terrible’s hand touched hers in warning, and he took a step forward. “Nobody comin. None there.”

“Be the truth, Creaseman,” said the orange-haired man. “Be me here, be DV. You friend DV, aye? Nobody comin, nobody there, you—”

“They see me.” Creaseman kept dragging himself along the street, leaving a trail of blood behind him. His voice shook; it was barely a whisper. “They see me.”

He moved his hand to pull himself farther along and collapsed.

It took Chess a second to realize what was happening. At first she thought maybe he was crying, but then she realized his entire body was shaking and horrible foam started dripping from his open mouth. A seizure.

She jerked forward. Terrible’s hand stopped her. Right. Nothing she could do, really, and who knew what he might do to her if she got near him. No point in trying to help. She knew that.

It still made her feel sick, though, as he kept seizing. It didn’t last long, she didn’t think; thirty seconds, tops. But long enough for the image to embed itself in her brain and join the other horrible things in there. Another member for the club, something else to taunt her in her dreams.

He stopped. Started again. Stopped. His hands stretched over his head. He flipped onto his back.

And died.

Chapter Seven

You must always look beneath the surface. The real solutions are always hidden. So are the real mysteries.

—The Example Is You, the guidebook for Church employees

Without realizing it, she’d been pressing herself against Terrible, fisting his shirt. His arm slid around her and gave her a quick squeeze before releasing her. Right. She ought to let go, needed to let go, because they weren’t alone on the street, and while she wasn’t the only woman grabbing the nearest man—or vice versa—even by the docks it wouldn’t be a good idea to look too comfortable touching him like that.

Terrible took a few cautious steps forward, his knife still ready. Chess grabbed hers, too. Not so much because she thought she’d need it—although it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—but because she felt safer with it. That man was dead. She knew he was dead. She knew it because she’d seen him die, and she knew it because when she glanced up she saw the bird swooping overhead, limned in the last rays of sun. The psychopomp taking his soul.

“Somethin in him hand.” Without taking his eyes off the man, Terrible waved her forward. He crouched beside the body, reached out—

And fell.

Thankfully he was only a couple of feet away; she’d already been approaching him. Still it seemed to take forever to reach him. She threw herself to her knees, ignoring the pain streaking up her thighs, and clutched at him. He was so fucking heavy. What had he touched, what the hell was—

A little plastic packet was what he’d touched. It lay on the dead man’s palm, still half in it, with Terrible’s fingers barely making contact.

She grabbed his hand, pulled it away from the packet. Pulled his head into her lap. He’d come around fast, he usually did, shit, people were watching and he’d just—he’d be furious. He’d be furious and he’d be humiliated, and the fear already building inside her grew sharper, colder, when she thought what that might mean. How it was her fault, and how her attempts at fixing it thus far had failed. How if she were Terrible she’d be giving up on the idea that she could fix it. Would have already given up, in fact.

His eyes opened. For a second they scanned her face, the sky, the crumbling buildings edging the street, before consciousness snapped back into them. “Fuck.”

“I don’t—”

“Fuck.” He pulled away from her, his gaze still wandering up and down the street. The crowd around them watched. Double fuck.

She didn’t bother to glare at them. Didn’t dare to react at all. The last thing she wanted to do was make him angrier, more upset. Already his neck and jaw flushed darker every second, color creeping up over his face. He could control his expression, could make himself look like a forbidding statue, but he couldn’t stop that. Never had been able to.

A minute passed. Two. He pulled two cigarettes out of his pocket, lit them and handed her one. He cleared his throat. “Guessing whatever he got there ain’t just drugs, aye?”

“Yeah. It looks like it, anyway.”

His chin jerked. “Oughta call some others out here, have em pick it up, pick him up, too. Ain’t wanna be—”

“Why?”

He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised, but didn’t speak.

“Let me at least have a look at it. I know Bump has all those chemicals and stuff that can analyze it or whatever, but—”

“Ain’t want you touchin it.”

“But I won’t—I mean, I’ll put on some gloves, okay, and now we know something’s there, right, so I’m prepared for it.” Damn it. Of all the fucking things to happen.

He didn’t meet her eyes as he nodded.

Well, shit. The least she could do was get it over with quickly so they could get the fuck out of there. She wanted to go home. She wanted him to go home, and she wanted to go with him. She wanted to forget this whole horrible day.

No chance of that. Forgetting wasn’t as easy as it seemed; life had taught her that, if nothing else. But it had also taught her that where there was a will there was a way, and she had a pillbox full of ways in her bag.

She took four of them and slipped on a pair of latex gloves for the second time in as many days. “Okay. Let’s see what he had.”

It was a little packet, exactly like the one in Chess’s bag at that very moment. Not quite an inch square, with a Ziploc top, filled about a third of the way with whitish powder. Just like any one of dozens, hundreds, she’d held or seen or used in her lifetime.

But none of them had ever sent energy roaring up her arm to explode in her chest, so much of it and so thick that there wasn’t enough room for breath. None of them had made a stinging, screaming screen of red wash over her vision, made her head ring so loud she thought for a second she might have gone deaf. No wonder Terrible had collapsed. What the fuck was in that packet?

For a few seconds she struggled with it, forcing it down into something she could handle, pushing against it with all her might, until it finally started to ease up. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. Her vision cleared.