I took the train to Sour Candy, where Mick held up a hand.
“He’s not here.”
“Good,” I said walking toward the back. “I’m not here for him.”
Mick moved my way. “He doesn’t want to see you.”
Apparently, one of the biggest drug dealers in the city was mad at me.
I leaned to peer down the hall, where a pair of identical cardboard boxes were stacked on the floor near Fish’s office. They were the same boxes I had seen before.
“Where can I get one of those?” I asked.
“Those are empty,” Mick said, moving me back with his arm. “If he finds you here, you’re gonna be in trouble.”
“When’s he back?”
“Any minute now. You need to leave.”
I was wearing my mirrored aviators to hide the massive bruise of my eye. My nose was a little swollen as well. I caught myself in the mirror on the wall and tapped the skin under my eye gingerly. It was puffy and purple. No amount of foundation was going to cover that shit.
Maybe it was because I had been looking at tarot cards, but immediately in the reflection I noticed a deck in a stiff plastic case, hanging on a spinning rack next to a Jesus Christ action figure, complete with karate-chop arm. I wasn’t sure if that was to beat the devil or stop you from masturbating. Maybe both. I pulled the deck from the wire hook. It was totally not what I was expecting. It came with a free download, a way to get guided readings by yourself through your phone. I guess there really is an app for everything.
The door bells jingled while I was reading the instructions on the back and I immediately moved to hide. I ducked behind the plush toys at the end of a row. A few moments passed in silence, and I noticed it had gotten too quiet. I listened. I walked around the aisle of Japanese toy figurines. Nothing. But someone had come inside. I heard it. I doubled back around the other side of the row and saw him. There was a guy in the shop, pushing six feet probably, and solid. Dressed like an off-duty cop. He glanced at the mirror at the back, saw my reflection, and walked out casually like this wasn’t the Hallmark gift store he was expecting.
I ran to the front, tarot deck still in my hand, and Mick ran after me. He hopped the counter like he was a TV cop sliding over the hood of a car, but his shoe snagged on the lip and he fell face-first on the ground. But I wasn’t stealing. I stopped at the sidewalk and found the big guy walking away nonchalantly with his hands in his jacket pocket. He kind of hunched a bit, like he was perpetually under a cloud. The good news was that if I was being followed, that meant no one had found the girl.
“Get your own leads!” I yelled.
Mick took my arm like a rookie cop making his first arrest.
“Dude is totally cheating,” I told him.
“I’m going to pay for it,” I objected as he dragged me back inside.
“When are they picking up the empties?” I asked as I dug some cash out of my bag.
“Why would I tell you?”
I slapped a $100 bill on the counter. Funny thing about addicts . . .
Mick slipped it into his pocket. “Sometime later today, I think.”
He rung me up and the register dinged. I paid and got change and found a perch behind a rubbish bin across the street where I could watch the front door of the Sour Candy without being seen. I learned something very important then. People aren’t lying when they say stakeouts are really boring. You’re basically planted somewhere for indeterminate hours with no guarantee that the person you’re waiting for will even show. And it’s not like you can play a game or read a book. All it takes is a few seconds for them to appear around a corner and then disappear inside.
Traffic picked up with rush hour and the sun got low and the shop lights came on. Eventually, a 1970s silver Lincoln pulled in front of the shop, but it was no one I recognized. It was another hour before I saw her. She had the same shaved head, the same knee-high boots I had seen in Bastien’s room, even the same dog collar, like it was part of her style, something crazy to wear instead of a choker. She was in a neon blue camo-print jacket and tight leather pants. Over her shoulder she carried an oversized handbag that matched her metallic purple lipstick. To the purple, she’d added a single line of gold down the middle of her lower lip. She went into the shop, was gone for about twenty minutes, and came back out. Her bag seemed heavier, but she carried it like it was nothing. She stood by the door for a minute in plain view and lit a cigarette. Then she started walking.
I figured he’d show up for the potions, or send his familiar.
After giving her a decent enough head start so as to leave a gap between us, I stepped out and followed her from the opposite side of the street. I watched her duck under the scaffolding in front of a barber shop. I watched her weave through the racks of clothes on the sidewalk in front of a narrow discount leather clothing store. The proprietor, a man in a turban, stood on the curb keeping watch on his wares like they were wandering sheep. In the second my eyes strayed from her to him, she was gone.
“Shit.”
I ran across the street, cars honking—”Sorry!”—to the last spot I had seen her: a capped metal post, like an unused pipe, that erupted from the concrete at the corner of a building, near a gap too narrow to pass. I peered down it. How did she get through there?
“Oh. It’s you,” she said disappointedly.
I looked up. Irfan was sitting on the ledge of a fire escape, heeled boots dangling over the side.
“You were expecting to be followed by someone else?” I asked.
She hopped down like it was nothing. Apparently, she was athletic.
“I should’ve known. You reek of death.” She plugged her nose.
“Death?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know what death smells like?”
“I met him once,” she said, walking away.
I scoffed. But her legs were longer than mine, and I had to power-walk to keep pace.
“It’s true,” she said. “It was years ago. In the desert. He was wrapped in rags and carried a long, forked reed-cutter in one hand and a heavy coin purse in the other. There was that earthy-sweet stench of dried dung on top of the dust of ages. That’s what you smell like. Dung and dust.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on. You can do better than that.”
“Stop following me.”
“Or what?” I asked.
“Keep it up and you’ll find out.”
I flashed my middle finger at her.
“Fine,” she said. “You’ll see. Honestly, I don’t get what he sees in you.”
“Who?”
She laughed a very snooty laugh. “Why do you think he was acting so weird?”
I hesitated. “I wouldn’t know.”
“I think he thinks you’re a challenge or something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The other day. For a moment, it seemed he had you, just like all the others. Then your soul . . .” She scowled and tried to think of the right word. “Sparked. And threw off the charm.”
“Sparked?”
She nodded.
“I smell like death and my soul sparks?”
She turned to me with a look of mock seriousness. “Like it was ripped in half. Goodbye.”
She trotted across the street and walked into the convenience store on the corner. A moment later, I followed her in. The man behind the counter looked to be about 80. He wore a red polo shirt with a name tag that said HARV. Irfan was snagging an expensive bottle of “artesian” water from the refrigerated case.
“I told you,” she said as I came up behind, “if you keep following me, you’re going to get hurt.”
“Let’s say, hypothetically, that I believed in things like charms.”
She grabbed a cup from the dispenser at the fountain. Purple slush churned like a washing machine in its reservoir over the spigot.
“What else could break one?” I asked.
“You’re like a tiny little sand fly. Bzz, bzz, bzz. You’re gonna get squished.” She pinched her fingers together in front of my nose. Then she filled her cup.
“Tiny little? Is that a crack about my size?” I copped a fake English accent. “However do you come up with these darling little insults?”
She watched the cup fill slowly in twisting blobs.
“So?” I urged. “What else could do it? Pregnancy, maybe? Another soul on board?”
She looked up—like she hadn’t thought of that. She looked at me with a kind of grudging respect. “Yeah. Maybe.”
She seemed lost in thought as she grabbed a clear plastic lid and a straw from the rack.
“Oh, come on,” I objected. “You mean after all that, you’re not even gonna tell me I’m not as dumb as I look?”
She flashed me a sarcastic, tight-lipped smile as she pulled a wad of napkins from a dispenser. She crumpled them tightly into a ball between both palms, pressed hard for several seconds, and then blew long and slow between her thumbs, the way you’d blow on a fire to stoke the embers without kicking up the soot. Her eyes flashed, and she dropped the wad into the open rectangle cut into the counter. It disappeared into the trash can underneath, which was almost full.
“What did you just do?”
“Trust me, little fly,” she said. “You don’t want to graduate from dumb to dangerous.”
“Or what?”
“I told you. Keep this up and you’ll see.”
She grabbed her slush and her water and walked to the front, where she put on her best ditzy American girl accent.
“Um. I think your machine is broken or something. I wanted a whole Power Grape Slush not three-fourths of a Power Grape Slush.”
She showed the old man the cup, which she hadn’t filled, and he scowled at the machine over the stack of paper towels in the middle row.
“I’ll charge you for the smaller size.”
She giggled.
“Oh, geez . . .” I said. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
The clerk rang her total and she handed him a five. The register drawer dinged open, which is just about the time the fire rose from the trash. The old man cursed loudly and slid the drawer back as he ran for the fire extinguisher, which was in the hall by the restrooms. Irfan jammed a finger in the drawer at the last second to keep it from closing. She put the water in her bag, leaned across the counter, pulled a wad of twenties from the till, and walked out with her slush.
“Fuck.” I mean, I figured it was gonna be something like that, but still.
I heard the old man yell and both of us took off at full speed, leaving him with a growing blaze.
“You realize they have security cameras in those places, right?” I said, running.
“So?”
I heard glass clinking in her bag. Lots of it, like somehow she’d fit all three boxes of potions in there.
After turning and crossing a side street, we came up on a four-way intersection where the last few seconds of the crosswalk were counting down. We were too far to make it, and both of us slowed. But Irfan sped up again almost immediately, just as a bike messenger moved between us, nearly knocking me down.
“Hey!”
She ran across the crosswalk after the light turned, and I stepped out just in time to be nearly run over by a cab. I jumped back. Fucker didn’t even honk. It was still rush hour and the line of cars was constant. Irfan held up her grape slush from across the street and waved goodbye.
I was livid. I don’t know that I had any real reason to be. But I was. I was tired of being ditched and dumped and lied to. I was tired of being the person everyone thought they could scrape off whenever it was convenient. Especially Irfan, with her unnaturally long legs and perfect skin and amazingly symmetrical C-cups. What kind of name was Irfan anyway? It was stupid. I watched her saunter away. That’s what it was, sauntering—
Right toward the freeway. It was two blocks ahead. At ground level, it was a solid block wall. She would only have two choices. If she turned left, she’d head toward the bridge, where after a block or so, the elevated ramp curved in front of the street and there was no pedestrian access, which meant she was almost certainly going the other way. I trotted right, moving against the traffic of the busy road. At the first slight gap between the cars, I zigzagged across the street, cursing myself and drawing a few honks and squealing brakes, before running through the doors of a private high school. The boy’s lacrosse team was getting out of after-school practice, and they had the doors open.
“Hey, kids,” I yelled. “Stay off drugs!”
I cut down the locker-lined hall to the back, emerging onto the faculty lot that abutted the next street. I ran out, hoping I’d be able to meet Irfan coming up the other way.
And I did. I almost ran into her, in fact. It surprised the shit out of us both. Her slush hit the sidewalk. Then she turned and ran across the road.
“Seriously?” I called.
She ducked down an alley between a single-story grocer and a multi-story gym, but whereas she was tall and had to move around the rolling rubbish bin at the corner, I was short and could use the empty produce boxes stacked next to it to go over the corner and give her a hard shove in the back. I landed on my ass while she stutter-stepped past the bin and went down near a little pile of broken pallets. Her bag hit the ground and I heard breaking glass.
My hands had stopped my fall, and small bits of gravel had been pushed painfully into my palms. It stung. I was about to brush them off when a length of pallet wood struck the side of my head.
Bang.
I grunted with an involuntary exhale as I went hard to the pavement. Irfan stood over me holding the strip of shattered wood. My ear throbbed hard enough to make my eyes water. I could feel it flush with heat, and there was a wetness. Blood dribbled into my ear canal, and I cupped it.
“Are you trying to kill me?” I yelled.
There were nails in the wood. I don’t think any of them had hit me. But still.
“Have you even heard of tetanus?”
“You can’t catch me that easily,” she said with a grin, like it was a game or something.
She tossed the pallet wood to the pavement and turned to leave me there. But I’d had enough. I pushed myself up and hit the red release latch for the fire escape over our heads. The metal ladder slid free on the far side and struck her mid-retreat. She turned just in time to see what was coming. I didn’t expect it would hurt her, just slow her down. But instead of blocking it with her hands, she landed on her back amid the clatter of the metal. The pegs of the ladder landed on the pavement on either side of her throat.
“How’s that, bitch?”
I coughed and leaned my butt against the wall to rest. I touched my ear gently and flinched. Definitely blood. Definitely pain. Now, I not only had a black eye and bruised rib, I had a split ear as well.
I was expecting a retort, but she didn’t respond. I realized I could no longer hear her breathing either. And she was writhing a little, like she was suffocating.
“Come on . . .” I scoffed. “It isn’t that heavy.”
After her feet twitched a couple more times, I walked closer, just out of curiosity. At first it didn’t seem like there was any way she could be choking. The bar wasn’t compressing her throat. It was barely touching the dog collar. Nor were her hands even on the metal. They were at her side on the ground, like she didn’t dare touch it. But her eyes were definitely bulging, and red, which I saw when she turned them to me in a panic. It seemed then like she genuinely needed help, like maybe she’d hit her head or something and her lungs no longer worked. I grabbed the ladder quickly and threw it back up into its casing. It wasn’t heavy enough to choke anyone, but it was denser than I thought, as if it were made of crude iron rather than aluminum or steel. I had to use two hands. It rumbled loudly back into place.
She turned sideways on the ground, coughing heavily. I thought maybe something had happened with the collar. It’s a stupid thing for a person to wear anyway. I thought I’d help her get it off, but as soon as my fingers touched the buckle, I convulsed with a vision. I saw a dust devil in a vast desert, a spaghetti-thin tornado that stretched up to the clear blue sky. It diminished and dissipated as Irfan stepped out of it, as if from nowhere, wearing Arabian silks and jewelry. She had a crop of short, curly hair, and her dark skin was dusted in gold, finer than glitter. The tips of her fingers looked like they’d been dipped in it. She was smiling wickedly.
I saw her licking her bloody fingers inside a Bedouin tent. In her other hand she held a curved silver knife with an etched handle. There was a child’s body on the ornate woven carpet.
I saw her made of roaring fire. The snap and crackle of the flames was her cackling laughter, and the people around her huddled in fear.
I saw a man in a stars-and-moons robe chanting over a high din as the fleeing sand tornado was sucked into the narrow lip of the very oil lamp I’d seen in Bastien’s room. The man wore silver earrings and brandished a short, jeweled staff and he shouted in a language I didn’t understand. I heard Irfan screaming as the last of the sand devil twisted into the lamp, whose metal lid fell closed on its hinge.
The visions stopped and I let go of the collar. I fell back, out of breath, just like her, and we both sat there for a moment, coughing in between deep, gulping breaths.
“Looks like I caught you,” I said.
She sneered.
“One thing!” she barked, hoarse. Her voice cracked on the last syllable. “You get one.” She held up a slender manicured nail. “Not three. That’s not how it works. You get one. Just one. That’s all.”
“Fine.” I cleared my throat again. My ear was throbbing. “Where’s Lily?”
“I don’t know who that is, so I guess you’re out of luck.”
She actually snarled then. Like an animal. She stood straight and dusted herself off, but I beat her to the handbag. I lifted and heard glass clink. I handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, like it was a trick, and snatched it—but I held onto the strap. She tugged once, but it wasn’t very hard. It seemed then like she had no strength to take it from me.
“Where’d they hide the dagger?” I asked again.
“I have no idea.”
She tugged again, but it was still weak and I held tight.
“You want it back? You have to answer.”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know that either,” she answered effetely and entirely too quickly.
“But you know where he’s gonna be, don’t you?”
Everything with her was a haggle or a bargain or a trick.
Irfan glowered. Her eyes seemed to flash with flame. She stepped closer.
“You’re going to die,” she whispered, gloating, like no matter what I might’ve thought, it was actually her who had won whatever little game we’d been playing. “I smelled it the moment you lifted the lid.”
Bastien hadn’t opened the lamp. I had. That was why he didn’t want me to touch it.
“You met him, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Death. You met him and now you have an appointment in Samarra and no matter which path you take, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, he waits for you at the end.”
I didn’t answer, and there was a long pause. She glanced at the bag like she was deciding whether or not she really wanted it.
My guess was that Bastien had told her to get the vials, which meant she couldn’t leave them behind. But I had caught her, beaten her in a contest, which meant she couldn’t take it from me.
“Fine,” she breathed.
“Fine what?”
“Fine, I’ll take you to him.”
“Now?”
She huffed, as if she’d been trying to trick me there, too—as if I hadn’t specified a time, she would’ve said “I’ll take you to him next week” or something after I gave her the bag.
“Now,” she answered in defeat.