The Forever Drug (2 page)

I was just about to pass the last of the housing projects when I heard gunfire. Eight or nine shots in rapid succession from a small-caliber handgun, then a pause as the magazine was changed, and a half-dozen more shots. Someone was pumping out lead as fast as possible, and cursing in a loud, panicked male voice. Someone else—either a child or a woman— was screaming. The echo behind the sounds told me they were coming from inside an enclosed space— probably the parking garage in back of the projects.

I hesitated for a moment, but the screaming decided me. I wasn't with the Patrol Division anymore, but I still felt compelled to respond. There wasn't a police patrol in sight.

I unzipped my shirt and peeled it off, then stepped out of my pants and shoes. Nobody gave me a second look as I stashed them under a parked car. In this part of town, with all of its crazies and chipheads, a naked man didn't warrant more than a glance. Hopefully, the parked car wasn't going anywhere and my clothes would still be there when I got back.

Then I dropped to my hands and knees on the grimy sidewalk and ...
changed
.

My body lengthened, my limbs stretched, and my bones cracked as my knee joints articulated in a different direction. Lush gray hair covered my body in a silky flow and my ears swiveled erect. Claws sprang out of my fingers and toes, which formed into blunt paw pads, my spine grew a bushy tail, and my teeth elongated and sharpened.

The screams and gunfire shifted in pitch as my hearing changed, the lower tones becoming more muted and the higher tones becoming clearer. And my sense of smell intensified. Even from here, a block away from the action, I could smell the sharp scent of gunpowder, the stink of human fear and fresh urine, and something ... well, something
unusual
was the best I could describe it.

I loped down the block and around the edge of the nearest building, toward the confrontation. As I entered the parking lot and started to spiral down into its underground levels, past the derelict cars and squatters' trash, I saw four figures below. Two were down and not moving—I recognized them as gangers by the tattoos on their arms—and two were on their feet. One of the latter—a teenage elf—was standing utterly still, a look of rapturous joy on her face, her head tilted to one side and her arms held out. A ball of light about the diameter of a dinner plate hovered just behind her, its cold, blue-white light framing her head like a halo. She was dressed like a street shaman, her black leather jacket covered in runic signs and her hair braided with feathers. A medicine pouch hung from a cord around her neck.

The other upright figure—a burly troll with a single horn that spiraled out of the center of his forehead like a unicorn's horn—had his back to me as I descended the final ramp of the parking garage and emerged onto the lowermost level. He was firing wildly at the ball of light. Flame spat from the heavy pistol in his hand as he pumped bullet after bullet at the thing.

Suddenly, one of his bullets caught the girl in the chest. Red blossomed on her shirt front, and she sagged at the knees. But despite the intense pain she must have been feeling from her wound, the elf girl kept smiling. She moaned once, softly, but it sounded more like the satisfaction of sexual pleasure than pain. It made me wonder if the ball of light was the physical manifestation of some emotion-controlling spell.

The troll cried out in anguish as the girl suddenly collapsed. Now the ball of light was headed toward him. After two futile clicks of the trigger—his magazine was empty—the troll hurled his pistol at the thing. His aim was good. The weapon hit the ball of light square on—and sailed harmlessly through it. Still cursing, the troll turned and ran, his patent leather military boots slipping on the scattering of diamond-sparkle window glass that covered the concrete floor.

This had all taken place in the second or two it took me to lope around the corner. As the troll scrambled past me, I made the split-second decision to let him go by. The elf girl was still alive—but wouldn't be for long. The scent of her freshly spilled blood nearly overwhelmed me. Saliva dripped from my tongue as I fought to control my instincts.

The ball of pale blue-white light floated gently toward me, as if pushed by an unseen breeze. I felt the hackles on the back of my neck rise, and growled low in my throat. I couldn't say why, but the thing filled me with a sense of dread. And I don't scare easy.

The ball of light paused, hovering, giving me a chance to shift my perceptions into astral space. I had to know what I was dealing with. The cold gray walls around me blurred to gauzy, insubstantial surfaces and the writing on them disappeared. I could see the elf girl's aura fading rapidly as she died. The ball of light bulged and elongated ...

Spirits frig me. That was no spell effect. The ball of light was
alive
.

The creature was huge. It had the size and shape of an octopus, with a bulbous central body and as many as twenty long, writhing tentacles. Its flesh was a mottled purple and yellow, the color of old bruises. A single black eye the size of a dinner plate irised open and shut in a weird, spiraling blink. One tentacle caressed the back of the elf girl's neck, drawing the last of her aura up through sucking pores in the tip of the tentacle.

Frig, that thing was feeding on her. Eating her alive.

The other tentacles reached out toward me, billowing as if they were stirred by an invisible current. As they drew nearer, the scent of the creature engulfed me, making me gag. It was the smell of meat rotting in the sun; of fly-speckled, over-ripe fruit; of murky, algae-slimed water.

Every instinct screamed at me to run. And the logical part of my brain was in perfect agreement. What could I do? Bite one tentacle and hope the thing didn't use its other nineteen tentacles to ice me as it had the elf girl and the two humans who lay dead on the floor behind her? Back when I was with K9, it had been my sworn duty to serve and protect. I still felt bound by that oath, especially within the bounds of my territory. But now that the elf girl's aura had gone out, there was no one left to protect.

I backed away slowly, my fur raised, growling through bared teeth. I needed to call for some backup on this one.

The thing floated closer, its tentacles writhing in a hypnotic pattern. Too late, I realized that it was backing me into a corner. I ducked to the side as a tentacle floated into the space I had just been occupying. Thank the spirits this thing moved slowly, its tentacles drifting in a lazy flow. But there were a lot of them. Too many to keep dodging for long. And there
was no telling what magical hicks the creature might
have up its sleeves.

I noted its position carefully, then shifted my perception out of astral space. The creature became a ball of light once more. Was its glow a little dimmer? I couldn't be certain. But those tentacles had been close. Too close. I crouched—then leaped across the gap to the next level of the parking garage. No time to waste, I thought as I ran back up the spiral to ground level. This was definitely one for the Magical Task Force to deal with. And I was willing to bet nuyen on it that I would get the assignment of tracking this para down. I'd gotten a good whiff of it, and would know its spoor anywhere.

I grinned as I hurried across the street to a public telecom booth.

2

The glowing ball of light was long gone by the time a squad from the Magical Task Force arrived. But the three bodies were still there. Aside from the elf girl— who had a large and rather obvious bullet wound in her chest—they were unmarked. Cause of death: unknown.

I hung around after the detectives who followed in the wake of the Force had finished interviewing me, watching and listening as the bodies were tagged and bagged. The two human victims were members of the Weeds, a gang of squatters who dossed down on the site of what used to be the Public Gardens. I'd recognized them by the patterns tattooed on their arms: morning glory vines and dandelions growing out of the eye sockets of grinning skulls. The pair had the usual sort of criminal records: drug-dealing, possession of stolen property, aggravated assault. Like the troll, they'd been carrying handguns. Except that they hadn't used theirs.

The elf girl was indeed a street shaman, residing on Summer Street. She'd been arrested only once, for using an unlicensed illusion spell. Otherwise, her record was clean.

As soon as the bodies were off to the morgue and the scene was magically assensed and declared clear, the procedural squabbles about which division was going to investigate the homicides began. Detectives from two divisions had come out to the scene, and now they were embroiled in a loud argument. The detective from the Division of Paranormal Investigation figured that the investigation fell under her jurisdiction, since a paranormal animal with magical capabilities was involved. The detective from Drug Enforcement insisted that it was his case, since these three deaths tied into his ongoing investigation of what had come to be known, in the past week, as the "grinning corpses."

There had been ten deaths so far, not including tonight's body count. All had been tagged as overdoses. Probably because the first two to die—a dwarf couple from Dartmouth—had been known BTL users, chipheads who'd already fried their brains with silicone dreams. And they'd been talking to friends about scoring a nova-hot new drug on the morning before their deaths.

None of the ten bodies had shown any signs of violence, and patrol officers who'd responded to the calls had described each of the corpses as "grinning"— despite the fact that this wasn't physically possible. I knew from previous conversations with forensics lab techs that the muscles of a cadaver normally go slack in death, and only begin to seize up in rigor mortis some three hours later. But for some unaccountable reason, the faces of all the "overdose" victims were frozen in an expression that could only be described as euphoric. That should have clued the patrol officers to the fact that it wasn't a BTL overdose they were dealing with. Magic was involved.

The elf girl killed by the ball of light had the same expression on her face, as had the two gangers who'd died with her in the parking garage. This time, however, the police had a credible witness: me. From the description I gave, the DPI detective concluded that the tentacled creature had used magic to suck the life from all three victims.

It looked like the DPI was going to get the case, after all.

I tagged along with the MTF squad, hitching a ride with them back to Lone Star's Halifax headquarters, a building the size of a small arcology that takes up a full city block at the corner of Gottingen and Rainnie Street. I figured it was time for me to report in to the sergeant, to see if he had another assignment for me. As I jandered down the hall, I stuck my nose into the office of Dass Mchawi, a DPI mage detective and probably the best paranormal taxonomist the division had.

I found her doing datawork. She was hunkered down over her datapad—a laptop computer with a monitor shaped like a crystal ball. The design was almost too cute—a result of the Division of Paranormal Investigation having too much imagination and too large a budget.

The laptop was responsive to voice-activated commands, but Dass was busy entering text data with a keyboard she'd plugged into it, stabbing at the keys with two fingers. Her close-cropped hair was hidden by one of the brightly colored patchwork "scrap caps" that were all the rage. She wore baggy white pants and a bright red shirt printed with stylized silhouettes of drummers whose arms moved in time with her heartbeat. Dass liked to tell people it was a magical effect, but it was actually technological; tiny sensors woven into the fabric triggered color changes in the threads, sending the drummers strobing through a series of pre-set poses.

Dass had been born and raised in the Maritimes, but had traveled extensively in search of her shamanic "heritage," picking up a lot of lore about paranormal creatures along the way. Her family had lived in Halifax for generations, back when this part of the world was still part of Canada. Her great-great-grandparents had been born in Africville, an African-Canadian settlement that was bulldozed in the last century and that now lay buried under Seaview Park. Before that .. . well, Dass really didn't know what part of Africa her ancestors had come from. West Africa was a good guess, since the slave trade had originated there. But she'd found a tradition that spoke to her in East Africa, among the Bantu peoples.

Dass had originally had another surname—now a closely kept secret known only to Lone Star's administrative personnel department. She'd taken the name Mchawi from the Swahili word for "magician." She actually spoke a little Swahili, and used that language to greet me as she looked up from her work.

"
Salamu
, Romulus. I hear you ran into a little trouble earlier this evening."

I leaned against the door frame. Dass was the only one at Lone Star who called me by my human name—Romulus—which my first set of foster parents had chosen after reading a myth about two boys who were suckled by wolves. The rest of the DPI detectives usually called me "Rover" or "Fido"—two nicknames I detested. Dass was also the only one who always smelled friendly. The other detectives were polite enough, but their smiles never reached their pores.

"I was hoping you might know what I ran into, Dass," I said. "I've never seen anything like it, and the DPI detective who responded didn't seem to know what it was." I described the creature for her— both its physical and astral appearance.

"Sounds like a corpselight," Dass said after a moment's thought.