Flash of Hex

“Somebody’s dead—and I can’t decide between Boston cream or jelly.”

Security at the lab was pretty relaxed at 7 a.m. I swiped in at the first checkpoint, submitted my palm print, and within moments I was wandering through the glass-partitioned world of the Mystical Crimes Division. It looked like any other well-funded crime lab, but if you peered closer, you might see a few unusual pieces of evidence. Like a cursed amulet, or an enchanted shotgun capable of firing itself. There was a secure evidence locker for items like that, placed alongside the regular archive and drying room for more terrestrial samples. I passed the firearms lab to my right, where an intern was awkwardly trying to carry a lump of yellow ballistics gel as it wobbled on a plastic tray. By the end of the day, it would be obliterated by all sorts of different ammunition—blossoming Hydra-Shok bullets, Glazer Rounds that mushroomed on impact, Black Talons that could shred through human tissue at incredible speed, and even tracer bullets loaded with mandrake that reacted to mage’s blood.

Devorah Kynan stood a few feet from the autopsy table. None of us moved. We were like some eerie tableau. Words died in my mouth. The emptiness in Devorah’s eyes would have swallowed anything that I might say, any easy platitude or gesture of condolence.

I wasn’t allowed to smoke in the lab, which seemed like a crime.

Moonbase was still the hottest club for supernaturals—and various immortals—in Vancouver, although from the outside it resembled a warehouse or a paper company. Dunder Mifflin for vampires. It was within walking distance of Crush, the underage trolling ground, as well as the Roxy, which was just—gross. Plenty of snacks for those inclined to devour stupid teenagers. The last time I was here, I had to interview Sabine, the vampire who almost killed me. Good times. I don’t know where she went after Caitlin banished her from the city, but I liked to imagine that she was Dumpster diving somewhere south of the border.

The last thing I’d expected to do this morning was visit a necromancer’s apartment in the pathologically trendy Yaletown district, but here I was, trying to find parking on Davie Street as it became a steep incline before intersecting with Pacific Boulevard.

In the months since Selena had taken over Marcus Tremblay’s old office, the stacks of paper and colored file folders had only increased, slowly breeding and multiplying until they threatened to overwhelm every inch of free space. Aside from a framed portrait of Selena and her husband, Gary—who was shorter, wore glasses, and smiled with surprising normalcy at the camera—nothing else had changed. The room’s sole window, which had once overlooked a small square of park outside, was now completely obscured by books, binders, and legal broadsheets. Selena’s desk managed to hold two bulging in-trays, a printer, a laptop, and various islands of paperwork that had been tagged to death with adhesive notes. I saw that she’d unplugged the phone and shoved it into a corner, where it sat lifelessly, unable to blink or buzz. It was only a matter of time until the receptionist figured out why her extension wasn’t picking up.

The toxicology lab used to be part of one big Serology unit—a happy DNA family—until the division got too massive and entangled to control. Apparently, the old director got so tired of staining histopath samples from demons and analyzing short tandem relay patterns from warlock DNA that he just walked out one day, never to return. So it was split into DNA, controlled by the lovely and acerbic Ben Foster (don’t forget the PhD at the end of his name), and tox, which was run a bit more loosely by Carla King. Ben made me crazy, but Carla was like an oasis of wry sanity in the midst of the MCD. She hated three things: gossip, bullshit posturing, and incompetence. And if she was in a good mood, she could run a sample through the GCMS in less than two hours for you, provided that you asked nicely and didn’t look over her shoulder.

Hamilton Street was packed with cars and flush with reflected street-light when we parked outside Lucian’s warehouse. Derrick swore as he maneuvered around the fragments of cobblestone and pockmarked scars in the pavement, all remnants of a time when Yaletown used to be the warehouse district. I stared at the puddles and the silvery lux of the street and all the expensive shoes as they hurried by. Umbrellas sprung open in harmony like black and checkered butterfly wings as hipsters and businesswomen and students all hurried to protect themselves from the weather. Umbrellas in Vancouver were more of an accessory than a tool. I could hear faint strains of mellow blue jazz circulating from Aqua Bar across the street, where the next generation of urban pros mingled with visiting actors and other glitterati who’d come to “Hollywood North” for lush scenery and cheap production costs. You’d be amazed at how many action scenes shot on the gritty streets of New York were actually filmed in downtown Vancouver with only a minimum of creative editing.

Duessa agreed to cooperate with our investigation, but I still felt like we were leaving empty-handed, since Wolfie was the one with the real knowledge and he wasn’t about to tell us anything. It didn’t seem like such a good idea to push a volatile kid with the power to set you on fire. Sparks were always dangerous. And Duessa was—something else. A part of me felt like we were lucky to have made it out of there alive. Even Lucian seemed relieved when we dropped him off at the warehouse.

I woke up to a message from Lucian Agrado on my voice mail, which was odd, since normally I just got calls from BC Hydro or my mother:

I started to leave a frantic message on Derrick’s cell—mostly just a mix of screaming, profanity, and creative adjectives—but then I thought the better of it and just texted him: Heidi Klum, our agreed-upon holy-shit page. I didn’t want to risk bleeding any case details over the phone. And this was a world-class hemorrhage.

It was surprisingly warm as I made my way down Cordova to Waterfront Station, the transit hub for downtown Vancouver, which throbbed with students and businessfolk in the morning but would be almost deserted by midnight. I passed Steamworks, the trendy pub on the border of Gastown, where you could buy raspberry ale and mingle with the fit, upwardly mobile twentysomethings who ruled this neighborhood. The south harbor gleamed in the distance, a shifting surface of black with the outline of cranes and tankers wavering like metallic skeletons. Burrard Inlet was a barely distinguishable crescent of scattered lights and lapping waves, all the ships asleep for the night, dreaming of global commerce and the shouts of stevedores. The station itself, with its neoclassical elegance, was built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1914 as a grand terminus for trains crossing the Rocky Mountains. It was actually designed by an architectural firm out of Montreal, which may have explained why it looked so much older and more irritably dignified than the surrounding buildings.

I don’t know how I got to Yaletown. Maybe I walked all the way down Richards, or maybe I even got on a bus without realizing it. My shoulder was electric. I’d dealt with broken bones, fractures, and dislocations before, but the pain was always a surprise. You never remember what it feels like until it happens again, and suddenly your whole body is on fire and all you want to do is curl into a ball and throw up. My face was bruised and banged up as well, and some people who saw me on the streets looked mildly alarmed. Most just walked by without even changing expression. Maybe they thought my boyfriend had beaten the shit out of me. Or my pimp.

Lucian was gone when I woke up. I’m not really sure why I’d expected him to stay, like we might go out for breakfast and chat. He left me a polite note telling me that I could stay as long as I liked. A spare key sat on top of the note. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the reality of that. I told myself that he was just being pragmatic, and left immediately without snooping around the warehouse. The key felt like a grenade in my pocket. I kept it separate from my house keys, as if there might be some form of cross-contamination otherwise.

I had to wait until Mia was asleep before calling in reinforcements.

The drive to Nanaimo was short and tense, as Derrick fiddled with the radio and I watched the dark, serpentine expanse of Hastings Street gliding by like a river of asphalt. Vancouver’s answer to the Nile. We passed the Native Community Center, along with scattered cafés and restaurants that were like outposts on some strange journey between pockets of the city proper. Traffic jammed up as we got closer to the intersection of Nanaimo and Hastings. Residents crowded into Donald’s discount supermarket before it closed, and I spied a few couples sitting at the Sweet Tooth Café, sharing one of their epic cinnamon buns (they also served pretty decent Thai food, incidentally). The Roundel was packed with young hipster parents, spearing forkfuls of organic greens and braised tofu while their kids lounged in SUV-sized prams or shoulder Björns. The cook there yelled at me once because I didn’t finish my tempeh steak. A few skater punks loitered outside the liquor store, rubbing their hands and smoking to keep warm, hoping that someone might buy them a six-pack of Coors. Music drifted indolently from a side street. It sounded like Eva Cassidy.

We arrived home to find Mia and Miles watching an old VHS copy of Uncle Buck, with John Candy about to drill through the bedroom door.

Stanley Park comprises over 1,000 acres. Bigger than Central Park, which is only 846 acres, give or take a tree. It isn’t especially safe at night, but people go there anyway. Some trails are known to offer up anonymous sex, if that’s what you’re looking for. Not a tourist attraction that Vancouver likes to advertise, but it’s there all the same. The seawall stretches almost nine kilometers around it, like a medieval barbican or some other strange fortification, patrolled by roller-blading teenagers rather than knights. The peninsula upon which the park sits—designed as a military reserve back in the 1860s—abuts the Pacific Ocean, now watching over everyone and no one, an empty fortress whose gears and cannons were long ago overgrown with rich dark moss and silent, cavernous roots.

Wolfie shifted in his chair, sliding the glass of Coke forward, then back, then forward again in a maddening way. He’d absolutely refused to come down to the lab, so I took him to the Ovaltine Café on Hastings. I couldn’t think of any other place, and at least it was on his home turf. He knew that he could leave at any time. Pink and green light from the café’s neon sign bathed him in an eerie glow. It reminded me of a psychic I’d seen once, sitting in the window of her small shop, backlit by a wild rose-quartz glow. Her dark eyes had seen straight through me as I walked by.

My mom had lent me her car (“for safety’s sake, dear”), and I felt weird sitting in the leather-upholstered driver’s seat, like when I was six and used to walk around the house in her Mary Janes. She never had a problem with it until the day she caught me wearing her sunglasses with an unlit cigarette dangling out of my mouth, pretending to gossip about the neighbors. That was when the dress-up games ended. “I have similar stories,” Derrick told me once, “although mine all end with me stealing my mother’s eighty-dollar lip liner and trying to drink Vanilla Stoli.”

It was quiet on the corner of Hastings and Columbia, where Duessa had told me I might be able to find a loose community of hoppers, slingers, scammers, and other undesirables who hung out with Patches the Hex dealer. You could get anything on this corner from crystal meth to black tar heroin and joints dipped in embalming fluid (not a smart choice, even for vampires). Hex was still a bit tricky, though. As a hybrid drug, it was a thorn in the CORE’s side, and our vice division patrolled the neighborhood ruthlessly looking for buyers and dealers. I marked more than a few agents under cover, dressed in grubby clothes and carrying bulging wallets with flash rolls: wads of cash that seemed authentic at first glance, but were actually fake once you got past the first couple hundreds on the top. Sometimes, if the operation was particularly involved, an agent would get authorization to carry scads of real money. Enchanted, of course. We may deal in occult crime, but we’re still a business, and the CEOs like to make sure that their money always comes back to them.

After filling out the appropriate expense forms (and promising Selena on pain of death that I’d get the money back), I found myself at Commonwealth, the old faithful pub that lay exactly between home and work. It was about as different from the Sawbones as you could get: refinished hardwood—still richly scarred in a few places, and dotted with pools of light that came through the screen door—mismatched folding chairs scattered around black oak booths and broken-down card tables, and a jukebox in the corner that played nothing but Peter Frampton. The bar was stainless steel with an old brick façade, and various trinkets and weird items poked out of the dusty corbels, including an ancient troll doll, a medal for perfect penmanship, and a stuffed armadillo. All we knew about the bartender was that her name was Tina, she loved to wear berets, and she’d probably been a pretty fierce lady killer in the mid-to-late-eighties.

I never thought I’d end up back at the apartment where Jacob Kynan was found, but here I was, standing outside the entrance with my coffee and wishing that it were a mug of scotch rather than a Tim’s double-double. Derrick and Miles shifted nervously on either side of me. We’d come back so that Miles could work his magic on room 208, where Jacob had spent the last moments of his life. The room’s claustrophobic dimensions would actually make the spatial profiling easier, and Selena didn’t especially feel like cordoning off a section of Stanley Park again.

The address led me to a gleaming new high-rise on Hornby Street, where I assumed “Mister Corvid” would be waiting for me. Apparently, Hex dealers did quite well in this city, since the strata payments alone for a building like this would have bankrupted me. I buzzed suite 909, as instructed, and an unfamiliar voice answered.

Derrick looked more than a little confused as he crossed the street, coming to stand next to me at the corner of Hastings and Columbia. It was getting chilly, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his spring jacket, doing that impatient bouncing thing that people always do when they want to be somewhere else.

I barely had time to wash my face and change into the fresh clothes that Derrick had brought me—thank God—before we were driving back down Hastings toward Nanaimo. I’d managed to keep myself from throwing up long enough to pop four extra-strength Motrin and a Gravol from my purse, draining a bottle of water in the process and still feeling like I could drink the Pacific Ocean. My insides were still hot from Wolfie’s fire, and I could feel the residual Hextacy in my muscle, bone, and blood, like a parasite that wouldn’t quite die. I lay curled up in the backseat, knees drawn to my chest, breathing hard—a wounded animal. Derrick concentrated on the road, but his eyes would flick to the rearview mirror every minute or so, checking on me. Wolfie leaned against the passenger window, silent, watching the dark street go by.

We got as far as Surrey—just past the Port Mann Bridge with its rust-colored web of struts and girders, and its insanely narrow four-lane traffic—before my body found a new way to betray me.

I slept for most of the drive home, so if there was any tension, I wasn’t consciously aware of it. I lay nestled in the backseat with Mia, and the last thing I remembered before falling into darkness was Lucian saying something to Derrick about waterfront property values. The idea of them sharing the front seat was like matter and antimatter colliding, but the universe hadn’t been destroyed yet, so we seemed to be doing fine. Mia was pensive, staring out the window, but as I started to slip away, I felt her arm brushing mine. It was a nice feeling.

I woke up in a neat little cocoon of bedsheets and, for a moment, wondered if I hadn’t traveled back in time to when my mother used to tuck me in tightly, grinning as she pronounced: “Snug as a bug in a rug.” My lingering hard-drug hangover, along with my sex hair, confirmed that I was not, in fact, six years old again. I was alone in bed, and early morning light was streaming through the blinds. I glanced at the clock: 7 a.m. Consciousness was a bitch.

Selena was nice enough to hand me a coffee when I got to the lab, which convinced me that she wasn’t about to confiscate my athame or set me on fire. Still, she was a hard one to read. Even though it was shit coffee from the break room in a paper cup, and I’d already had the good stuff at home, I smiled and took it. If ever there was a time to be twitchy and preternaturally aware, it was now.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

A page from Selena forced us to change direction, and we found ourselves heading toward the ballistics lab instead of the break room. I was surprised to find a crowd standing outside the entrance to the lab. Derrick leaned against the glass partition with Miles standing next to him. Mia stood a bit off to the side, talking to an indistinct figure in a gray hooded sweatshirt. The figure turned, and I saw that it was Wolfie. Lucian had come through. He smirked at me, and I nodded.

It was less of a house and more of a crumbling mansion—the sort of place where you could picture Miss Havisham dancing around in widening circles of madness while the living room heaved and collapsed all around her.

After Selena had placed teams on the opposite side of the entrance, we continued on, farther into the gloom. The radio was starting to get patchy. I didn’t want to think what would happen if we lost contact entirely with the world above. I was already getting more claustrophobic by the second, and the Cyalume glow was barely enough to see a few feet in front of my face. The only ones who seemed relaxed were Patrick and Lucian. I guess they were used to the dark.