“So, did you get the job?” Yulli leans across the tearoom’s sticky table so that her breath almost tickles my face. It’s noisy in here, the establishment filled with dozens of factory workers and shop girls taking lunch. A thin haze of leaf smoke turns the air acrid over the greasy aroma of fried root and bitter tea.
I lean back and nod, twisting my locket. “I start tomorrow.”
“But that’s great!” Then she scowls. “You coulda told me earlier.”
She’s right. I could have. We’ve been talking about getting out of work here for months. But I feel guilty. I’m the one who’s getting out. Yulli will still be here tomorrow, next week, next month. I have a shot at something more. Finally.
“Hello, ladies!” The speaker clamps his hand down on my shoulder, hard, so that I start, but he leans so heavily that I can’t rise.
Yulli’s wide-eyed shock turns to pleasure. “Den!”
I turn my head, my brain catching up with the voice and why the fuck it’s so familiar. His name isn’t Den. It’s Bodin. It’s like seeing a ghost. He’s older, sure, but those features I always thought were fae-like are hard, too sharp, like I’m going to cut my eyes on his contours. Last time I saw him, he wore his hair long, feathered, with dyed-white braids woven in and tied back in a knot. Now he’s shaved the sides, and a floppy dark blond mop falls over one eye. A small skull tattoo on his left cheek grins at me. Badly done. Prison tat.
“Bo—”
“Den,” he completes for me, grinning, that hard gleam in his eyes warning me to agree. Or else. “It’s been years, Em.”
“It hasn’t been long enough,” I snap and make to rise, but that hand on my shoulder tightens, fingertips digging in so that I’m forced to remain on my arse. The locket around my neck buzzes, grows warm, and I resist the urge to pat at it beneath my factory tunic. To make it stop.
Five years ago
“You be careful of that one.” Gem leans against me at The Stuck Pig’s counter, and glances meaningfully at the boy laughing opposite us at the other end. Her breath tickles my ear, and it’s noisy in here; the establishment is filled with students and Gardens District slickers slumming it with the East Bank slackers.
He’s taller than his two mates, no slicker – not with that crazy hairstyle and the multiple piercings that gleam in his ears’ cartilage.
“What about him?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s trouble.”
Maybe I like trouble. I catch his eye across the bar and slide the keep a silver. “Another for me, and another for that boy there. You can keep the change if you tell him it’s from me.”
Later, when the boy leads me out back, I can still taste the dog-root liqueur on his mouth.
Now
“I won’t do it!” I whisper back at Bodin as he all but frogmarches me down the Avenue. He’s moved his grip from my shoulder to my upper arm, and I swear there will be bruises later. The wind is rattling the planes’ bare branches, making me think uncomfortably of bones. The few fellow pedestrians bundled in their fur-trimmed coats barely spare us a glance. To them we’re simply another couple out for a stroll.
“Oh, you will.” He squeezes that much harder, so that my arm is numb.
The locket is hot against my skin, and a corresponding pressure against my skull presents with an insistent almost-audible whispering. It wants in.
“I should go back on shift, it’s my last day,” I whimper, hating myself.
“If it’s your last shift, they won’t really miss you now, will they?”
“I need to pay my landlady.”
“You won’t need to, after this.” His grin is feral.
Bodin brings me to the Grand National Museum, a foreboding edifice built in the post-royal style—a façade of angular columns, a hundred feet high topped with imposing crenelations.
“What?” I snap.
“Look.” He gestures at a billboard that’s recently gone up advertising an exhibition of Roanish grave goods brought over from across the continent.
I goggle at him like he’s grown a second head on his shoulders. “Are you mad?” I snarl. “Breaking into the GN is what got us locked up last time. What makes you think it’s going to work now?”
He presses his hand flat on my sternum, over the locket, his gaze boring into mine with the kind of mania I’ve seen in smoke-dreamers’ eyes on a First-day morning after week’s end. “Because this time you’ll let it out to play.”
Four years ago
I don’t want to do it, but I’m shaking so bad, and it’s like my veins are drawn into my skin, like sinews left to dry when making a drum. Everything is tight, and each breath wheezes in and out of my lungs. Whatever the fucking shit is we’ve been smoking, it’s not just leaf.
Bodin has me waiting in the Avenue, down where Salt-and-Pepper Lane crosses it, where all the whores and peddlers hang on the corner waiting for their customers. Except it’s so late, it’s early, and the wind is rattling the planes’ bare branches, making me think uncomfortably of bones. I hate dressing like a whore. Especially in winter. But it’s how Bodin baits the hook. And he’s the only one fishing at this hour.
The priest is sensibly bundled in a thick army-issue coat; the collar turned up and his knitted cap pulled down so far that his eyes barely peep out from beneath the ribbing.
“H-hey honey,” I say, my teeth chattering as I step out before him, parting my jacket to reveal my corsetry. “You looking?”
His step falters. I recoil from his hollow gaze, the way his eyes are sunken into the sockets. The skull leers at me from beneath its parchment skin, gains a predatory cast to it in the gaslight. I glance about for Bodin, but wherever he’s lurking—behind a tree or in a doorway—I can’t see him. Oh shit. I’m committed now, though. I need to go through with this. Bodin, where the fuck are you?
The priest and I get as far as the portico of number twenty-three, where the whores usually take their clients, when Bodin slits the man’s throat. He had to, for the priest has his hands wrapped around my neck, his eyes blazing, feral. He’s already bitten me three times and drawn blood.
Later, we’re back at our room in the tenement of Quarter Street, disappointed with our pickings spread over the blanket on our mattress.
“Can’t believe I had to kill a man for this shit,” Bodin says, scratching through the objects scattered before us: two bronze leos, five copper chits, an ivory comb with half its teeth missing, and a tarnished silver locket on an equally tarnished chain. The latter’s clasp is broken. “This isn’t going to pay Clobber.”
And we need more leaf now. Or more precisely, as in yesterday. I’m still shaking, and it isn’t from the cold.
Now
It gets easier every time you do it. I don’t even have to open the locket—I simply open myself. It’s hard to fully put into words what happens when the demon slides under my skin. It’s like I fill out, become more vital. No leaf rush or even a sniff of powder rivals what the demon gives me when I let him ride me, let him send his tendrils through my veins.
Tumblers slip in locks, bars bend like rubber, and safe doors swing open at the merest nudge. Later, like an obedient puppy, the demon slips back to sleep, and I pay the price for acting as his mount. No leaf-low or three-night dust-binge leaves me this flat. My stomach is twisted into a hard, sick ball, I’m sweating and shaking like an old woman, puking into the chamber pot while Bodin gallivants off to the gods know where. He returns, often days later, gin on his breath, wearing unfamiliar silk shirts, and smelling of cheap perfume.
In another world, Bodin would never have been released from prison on the Queen’s Pardon and I’d be working as a chambermaid for some lord and lady in the posh Harbour Crescent. I’d still be poor, but I’d be healthy, the locket quiescent, and its whispers no more than the wash of the ebb tide in the far distance. But it’s this world, and I spend days recovering from each ‘daring heist’ as Bodin likes to put it, while he ‘invests’ our earnings in whorehouses and gin palaces. He hasn’t changed.
One afternoon I’m well enough to wrap myself in an old coat and make my way to the canal a block down. The water is an oily, opaque green, and a dead pigeon drifts past as I regard my haggard reflection over the railing of the pedestrian bridge. The demon is sleeping, sated, and has no idea of my intentions when I drag the chain over my neck and let the cursed locket plop into the water.
Like every other time I’ve tried, this is a futile gesture, for when I manage to drag my creaky frame back upstairs, the locket is resting on the bedside table, still beaded with river water and with a skein of algae threaded through its chain.
Three years ago
The tumblers slip with a click-clickety-clack, and we’re in by the staff entrance of the GN. My vision swims with the demon’s power, and Bodin’s aura is shot through with sparks and whorls. Tonight’s possession makes me feel as if a bladder has been inflated in my chest cavity, pressing against my lungs so that each breath squeaks.
A metallic screeching, like metal on metal, has started in one ear, and when I wipe at the tickling at my nostrils, the back of my wrist comes away scarlet. My face is tight with a rictus grimace, and I can’t stop grinding my teeth. It’s like someone laced powder with scai-syrup. The come-down’s going to kick me. Hard.
All I want to do is send the demon back to sleep, but Bodin needs me alive while we traipse through the halls to the exhibit of Early Kingdoms’ jewellery. He’s been gasping after the peacock gold bracelets—they’re small and easy to melt down, and he can get a fortune for them on the black market. We’re the only ones who can circumvent the museum’s security. They still haven’t figured out how we got in the last time.
It’s when we’re passing through the reconstruction of an Ogdoad-era boudoir that I glimpse myself in a mirror and recoil. A walking cadaver, her eyes sunken into a skull with sallow skin stretched over it leers back. My hair has been falling out in clumps awhile, but this is my first good look at myself in ages.
Bodin hasn’t wanted to fuck me in months. I can see why. I should care more.
The demon’s killing me faster than the drugs.
I don’t think things through. That’s both a blessing and a curse. We’re high-tailing through the Late-Ninth Kingdom Hall when, on a whim borne out by the absence of aura around the various objects on display, I pluck the locket from around my neck and drop it in the funerary bowl of King Nennefer III. I slam back into meatspace with a drunkstumble that has me fetching up against a plinth.
“Em!” Bodin whisper-shouts as he rushes back to pluck ineffectually at me.
But I’m too busy puking up half a lung now that I’m shut off from the demon’s influence. Fine grit from the parquet floor is sandpaper against my cheek.
I start seizing when the city guards arrive, and the oblivion offered by nothingness is a blessing.
Now
The problem with too many possessions in a row is it dissipates you, so that you’re leaf crushed for too many pipes. The demon is hungry, but it’s not clever. It’s also the only thing that gives me the power to kill Bodin.
I should have done this ages ago. I simply didn’t see any other way out of it.
Murderer.
Killer.
Aberration.
My fingers are the iron jaws of a gin trap around his scrawny throat, and I squeeze and squeeze until the cartilage is crushed to a pulp. And then I squeeze some more until the vertebrae give with slick pops. Only then do I drop this meat puppet. This unfathomable mess of ropey muscle sliding under skin.
He used to be pretty. Now he gapes like the fish unloaded at the wharf, his eyes peering sightlessly into nothingness.
Understanding rises in me like our moons revolving, their bright faces gleaming small skulls waxing and waning in their eternal dance. The night is crisp. The night is cold. Yet I don’t need a coat, my skin standing in pins and needles, needles and pins, as I slip downstairs and weave between the bollards alongside the canal where the bargeman smokes a rollup and the water slaps against the hulls. He twitches when he glances my way but turns to face the opposite bank, apparently fascinated by the regimented bollards there.
The cobbles are round and rubbery beneath my feet. Or perhaps it’s my feet that are rubbery. It doesn’t matter, for the sky is shattering above the roofline, sending a web-tracery of cracks into the cloud-scudded sky where ragged tears briefly present pinpricks of stars.
Skolos tumbles her face from the clouds before she grows shy, then I’m dancing down the colonnade that brings me to the Avenue, where the plane trees are raising their arms to the heavens, the wind beating a triumphant tattoo. Inside me crystal-bright splinters twist outward, as I turn and twirl.
No leaf-high, not even the spicy smoke of patu flowers, has ever sung my bones this way.
I caress the locket, and it is icy against my palm.
Two whores dance back from me, their auras pulled tight against them lest I swallow them both down.
“Crazy leaf-head,” the one mutters.
“Sweet saints.” The other makes the Sign of the Star.
This merely draws forth a glossolalia of laughter from me. Mired in the flesh, they don’t understand.
I see him then, in Salt-and-Pepper Lane, and the demon opens my arms to the man in the pea coat. Like a flare, the locket blazes, reflecting and refracting in this wondering, wandering night-stranger’s eyes, singing to the need, the hunger in his blood. How strong and clean his limbs are, the weight of well-fed flesh and ale on his breath. He catches me, and I turn to smoke in his embrace, sliding to the cobbles with a sigh as a moon winks above me through another tear in the clouds caught on the plane tree’s fingers.
The man paws at my bare chest, fumbling at the locket that blazes brighter than the sun.
“What have we got here, my pretty?” he murmurs, his lips pulled into a delighted snarl.
I have strength remaining to clasp his wrist before he whispers the steel tongue of a blade to his other hand. A benediction, then.
“I think I’ll have this, luv.”
“Please,” I hiss. I don’t know if I’m begging or pleading.
It’s so cold. So very cold. The cobbles are leeching what’s left of my warmth as my blood draws me between the cracks and makes runnels towards the gutter where the lost summer’s leaves drift in soggy clumps. A dozen ways in which I could have done this differently, am I right? It all ends in the same place, for all of us, save that some have a last blaze of ignominy. In the stories we tell ourselves when it’s dark, and the wind is howling beyond the shutters, we slip from life in warm beds, surrounded by friends or family holding our hands while telling us how much they love us. The truth is death snatches us when we least expect it, and I don’t even know if my mum or my siblings are still alive to shed a tear at my passing. And I doubt my father has waited for me, wherever we go when our lights are snuffed.
Regret is a vain gesture. The demon is gone, and I can breathe even as I fade. And I am myself. Alone. That matters. A moon is shrouded once more. So it goes.
