by Paul Krueger
Jess laughed. “Oh, man,” she said. “You’re gonna fit right in.”
The rest of the journey to Jess’s office became an informal tour. There was the game room, where techs went to unwind because company policy mandated they spend time away from their desks to avoid burnout. And there was the records station, which allowed employees to transfer digital music onto vinyl discs, a casual undoing of two decades’ worth of technological progress.
The farther they went, the more impressed Bailey grew. In her most recent workplaces the sole amenities were the huge collection of booze she wasn’t allowed to drink and a bathroom that may or may not have breathable air, depending on the night. “I’m surprised you don’t have a place for live music,” she said as they rounded yet another corner.
“Ooh!” Again Jess’s phone appeared like mag—well, not like magic, but very quickly. A moment later she put it away and beamed. “I just texted management. Someone will start looking into it tomorrow. Here we are.”
Bailey didn’t know what incited more jealousy: how nicely put together Jess’s office was or the fact that she had an actual office. Apparently Jess had gotten very into upcycling; almost everything in the room was made from used wooden pallets painted in pastel colors. Bailey secretly loved clicking through DIY projects online, but Jess actually Did Them Herself.
As they took seats on opposite sides of a seafoam-colored desk, Bailey tried to hand over a résumé, but Jess waved it off. “I’ve got it here,” she said, holding up a tablet. Of course. This was the future, after all. Self-consciously Bailey undid one jacket button in a last-ditch attempt to casual it up.
Jess set aside the tablet without reading it. “So what’ve you been up to, girl? I heard you kicked ass at Penn. What brought you back? Did you get tired of eating cheesesteaks and running up all those library steps so you could punch the Liberty Bell?”
Bailey didn’t know whether to answer or correct Jess’s wild misconceptions about Philadelphia. “Well, they’re museum steps,” she said.
“Right,” said Jess. “I guess it makes more sense to have the Liberty Bell at a museum than a library.”
“Actually—”
“And what’ve you been up to?” Jess plowed on. “I know it took me forever to get back to you—once again, so sorry about that—but what’s been going on in Bailey world? Just being cool, doing Bailey things?”
“Oh, you know—” Killing monsters. Secretly protecting the city. Madly crushing on Zane Whelan of all people. Getting magic lessons from the hulking blind anarchist who runs a gay bar. “—stuff.”
“Cool, cool, cool,” Jess said. “So, let me walk you through the major details of this job first, and then we can get to your questions, okay?”
The job was nothing groundbreaking. If hired, she’d start out doing administrative work in the firm’s finance department: scheduling, copies, logistics, research.
“Oh, and spreadsheets. Can you make a spreadsheet?”
Nailed it. “Absolutely.”
“Excellent.” Jess beamed. “It was so, so, so nice to catch up, Bailey. Really. Hey, wow, did you realize your name almost rhymes with really?”
“Nope,” Bailey said. Because it doesn’t? Then again, this was the girl who’d rhymed “Ides of March” with “That’s way harsh.”
Jess grabbed her buzzing phone off the desk. She read the message and then looked at Bailey. “Good news,” she said.
Bailey’s heart swelled. They were going to hire her on the spot. This was a tech start-up after all; things moved fast. Maybe amid all the reconstituted driftwood and bare Edison bulbs, there was a CCTV camera beaming her top-notch interview to the Powers That Be. Maybe Bailey was about to be officially done with bars and bartending forever.
“You can come with us to the bar!” Jess said.
“Thank you s—what?” Bailey frowned.
“Brian’s canceling on our wristband deal, so we’ve got a spot open,” Jess explained. “You’re totally in, right?”
Wristband deals were the only way around the quirky Illinois drinking law that prohibited happy hours: drink prices couldn’t go down (nor could their potency go up) based on time of purchase. But if a big enough group bought special wristbands in advance, they could get discounted drinks for a few hours because it was part of a “private promotion,” rather than an all comers’ happy hour.
“Oh,” Bailey said. “I mean, um, totally!”
That was how Bailey, Jess, and thirteen other Divinyl staff members ended up packing into McNee’s, a pub in the South Loop that was exactly what Bailey would have expected from a joint with an Irish name: dark wood everything, shamrocks posted up all over the place, and absolutely no traces of genuine Irish culture. There were huge banners of bikini-clad women, smiling and holding up cans of light beer against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. That’s not very smart, Bailey thought, drinking something cold while near naked in a frozen wasteland. Then she remembered the target audience was probably unconcerned with being very smart.
Each group member wore a bright orange wristband, tagged like an animal to be tracked. “Look,” Jess said, holding up hers. “Orange. Your favorite color, right?”
“Uh, yes.” Bailey couldn’t believe Jess remembered; she’d never embraced the hue with quite the same extravagance as Jess had loved pink.
“What’ll it be, everyone?” The waitress appeared at their table, and Bailey realized it’d been months since she’d ordered in a bar like a normal person.
“Lager,” said one of the Divinyl guys.
“Yeah, lager.”
“Lager.”
“Lager for me,” said Jess with a nod. “Bailey?”
“Uh, I’ll take a chimayó,” Bailey said. The waitress dutifully wrote down the order, but the Divinyl guys looked at her as if she’d just ordered a glass of human blood.
“Is that one of those girlie cocktails?” one said. “I bet it’s pink.”
“Actually, it’s an apple-based tequila cocktail,” Bailey shot back. Which lets you astrally project your consciousness, if you make it right. “And I happen to be quite fond of it, so there.”
“Ooh, on second thought, I’ll take one of those, too,” said Jess.
After ten minutes of shop talk, office gossip, and Bailey politely sipping at her ice water, the waitress returned with their drinks. Bailey perked up and said “Thank you” when she got her glass, but the Divinyl guys were silent except for grunts and a shared annoyed but knowing look. The waitress started to head off, but one of the guys—Kyle, from before—threw a hand into the air and snapped his fingers.
Mortified, Bailey gripped her drink. She heard Vincent’s voice in her head: If a guy snapped his fingers at me, I’d snap his fingers off.
“Hey,” she said to Kyle, “can you not do that, please? She’s got a lot of tables to get to. She’ll be here soon.”
Clear across the floor, the waitress saw him, adopted what anyone in the service industry would recognize as a gunpoint smile, and headed back over.
“What?” Kyle said. “I’m doing her a favor. If she doesn’t serve us fast, she’s not getting tipped.”
Not tipping. Unfathomable. Monstrous. “You can’t just not tip,” Bailey said, sipping at the surface of her chimayó. “She needs that money.”
“Then she can earn it,” said a scruffy-looking guy sitting to Kyle’s left. Bailey recognized him as the one who’d been working on the stationary bike. “He just snapped at her. It’s not that big a deal. Also, who are you again?”
“Bailey’s an old friend,” Jess said, “and we were looking very seriously at adding her to the team. I think it’s great she’s so, uh, service oriented?” She flashed Bailey a warning look: I get it, and I’m sorry these guys are assholes, it said, but don’t push this any further. At least that was how Bailey read it.
The waitress reappeared. “Sorry,” she said, rictus smile still in place. “We’re just a little busy right now. What can I do for you guys?”
“And a round of Jägerbombs!”added Kyle, whose light-light-beer was already almost empty. Their companions whooped approval.
Bailey did not. When the waitress left, she got up. “I’m just going to … the bathroom.”
“Oh, cool,” said Jess, standing, too. “I’ll come with you.”
“Oh, um, great.” Great.
As they pushed through the crowd, Jess said, “Don’t let them get to you, okay? Boys are dumb. Except the cute ones. I mean, they’re still dumb, but it’s not as bad because they’re cute.”
“Sure.” Bailey shook her head, distracted. How did people think this behavior was okay? No, that was an easy one: they were dumb, like Jess said. But Bailey had done a lot of dumb things in her life. How many times had she been careless when talking to Zane? Or her dad, a shopkeeper? How many times had she mindlessly complained about the service at a restaurant when her overworked waiter was within earshot?
She stopped beside a giant neon shamrock with the slogan “Erin Go Braless” tastefully spelled beneath. “Actually,” she said, “I think I’m going to head to the bar for a sec and grab a shot. I’ll, uh, check on how our drinks are coming. See you at the table?”
“Sure!” Jess said, brightening. “Order me another of those tequila things you’re having. I’m so into apples right now.”
Bailey nodded and then threaded her way through the thick crowd of off-duty professionals, one of the few situations in life where her small size was useful. (The rest of the time it was just a parade of high shelves designed to mock her or hilarious people using her as an armrest and thinking they were the first person ever to do so.) She burst through a forest of blazer-coated shoulders and elbows to seize a scrap of barside real estate. Leaning up, she looked left and saw only a barback hurrying away with a stack of dirty glasses. She looked right and saw someone familiar standing two feet in front of her.
“Hello, Bailey,” Mona said.
THE DEVIL’S WATER DICTIONARY.
The Chimayó
A libation to extend consciousness’s reach
1. Pour one and a half ounces of tequila into an iced highball glass.
2. Add one ounce of apple cider and a quarter ounce apiece of lemon juice and crème de cassis.
3. Stir once, garnish with an apple slice, and serve.
Much like the martini, the chimayó produces passive effects that render it unpopular for fieldwork. Indeed, astral projection does not immediately lend itself to the eradication of tremens and the protection of human life. Nonetheless, separating one’s consciousness from the body has dozens of practical applications, which will doubtlessly be added to subsequent editions of this book when someone thinks of them.
The chimayó is named for Chimayó, New Mexico, the small apple-growing town in which it first was mixed. Though pre-Blackout documents suggest the existence of a cocktail with similar effects, the modern chimayó wasn’t perfected and codified until the 1960s. It came about in a similar manner to many other great mixological breakthroughs: by taking whatever was at hand and mixing it with booze until the results were palatable.
TEQUILA.
FIG. 47—Tequila was named a Pueblo Mágico (“Magical Town”) by the Mexican federal government.
The national liquor of Mexico, this agave-derived distillate (named for the city of Tequila, whose name comes from the Nahuatl word for “place of tribute”) is by nature a projective force, and its presence in cocktails encourages like effects. Although the world knows this from a mostly vomitative perspective, savvy bartenders appreciate the edge that a properly made tequila drink may grant in an otherwise impossible situation.
Tequila comes with a high historical pedigree; its distillation has been patronized by the Spanish throne since the seventeenth century. But its clout and power come with a degree of volatility. As such, its popularity tends to vacillate relative to the mood of regional Cupbearers Courts. Conservative Courts frown upon the spirit because of the havoc it’s been known to cause, whereas more experimental-minded Courts encourage its use for precisely the same reason.
CRÈME DE CASSIS.
A black currant liqueur native to France. While liquors go through some manner of aging process, liqueurs are usually bottled and sold soon after being mixed. This relative youth renders them less potent, making them unfit as a base ingredient for a cocktail, which of course has not discouraged bartenders from trying. Vivienne Vandenberg, a celebrated Dutch bartender from the early twentieth century, fed her famous coffee addiction by attempting to reinvent many standard cocktails using coffee liqueur. In her time she successfully invented other major cocktails (see WHITE RUSSIAN), but ultimately she met her end attempting to take on a tremens when armed with a cocktail that, upon postmortem inspection, was found to be merely a glass of pure coffee liqueur.
FIG. 48—Ribes nigrum.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bailey stifled a squawk and nearly tripped over a nearby stool. “Mona,” she said, “I thought you worked in Humboldt Park.”
Mona shrugged. “I work where I’m needed. Do you need me, Bailey?”
“No,” Bailey said but then corrected herself as Mona started to turn away. “I mean, yes. I’d like a shot of bourbon, please.” Determined to make up for her companions’ karmic debt, she kept her manners impeccable.
Mona poured a shot and slid it over. “When you’re done, join me outside for a smoke break.”
Bailey nearly dropped her shot. “What?” she said, casting a glance at a nearby window. It was still light outside, if only barely. There would be no tremens activity as long as the sun was up. “Now?”
“Not now. In a few seconds, when you finish your shot. And not that kind of smoke break.” Mona pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “See you outside.”
The well whiskey still burned in Bailey’s mouth a minute later when she and Mona stepped into the back alley. It was classic Chicago: Dumpsters lining the brick walls, asphalt that always seemed to have puddles even though it hadn’t recently rained, and black iron fire escapes that had likely seen more use as make-out spots for rebellious teenagers.
They rounded the corner of the alley and leaned against the wall of McNee’s. Mona tapped out a cigarette.
“Uh, I know it’s a cliché,” Bailey said as Mona sparked her lighter and leaned into the flame, “but those things will kill you.”
“No, they won’t.” Mona took her first drag and exhaled blue-gray smoke.
“Okay, then complications caused by a malignant tumor growing in your lungs will kill you.”
“No, they won’t,” Mona repeated. She sounded matter-of-fact, as if she had simply decided not to get cancer. “You’re probably wondering why I left behind a rush to talk to you.”
“Um,” Bailey said, “yup.”
Mona exhaled more smoke, then cocked her head. “You’re dressed very nicely today.”
“Uh, thank you?” Bailey said. She cast around for an excuse. “My friend invited me because she needed a fifteenth for the wristband deal. She told me it was a work thing, so I dressed up to fit in. I didn’t realize her job was so … casual.”
Nice work, me. Bailey wished she could high-five herself. Not only was the lie perfectly plausible, but every word was technically true.
“So that’s why I’m here,” Bailey said, unable to quit while she was ahead. “I guess you wanted to, uh, talk about that but—”
“I want to talk about Saturday morning.” Mona flicked ash to the damp ground. “About Zane, and you, and what you said about the Nightshade.”
“Oh.”
Bailey would’ve been floored if not for the icky floor. Mona was talking about the Fight. It was one of the most important events, if not the most, of Bailey’s and Zane’s friendship. It was in fact the reason Bailey and Zane were just friends, and sometimes barely friends at that. How on earth had he never m
entioned it to his girlfriend?
“I’ve asked him,” Mona said, as if she could read Bailey’s mind. “He wouldn’t elaborate.”
“So you’re asking me?”
“I’ll like your answer more.”
Bailey bit her lip. She wasn’t proud of that moment in her life at all, and especially now she hated revisiting it. But Bailey had definitely wronged Mona when she’d kissed Zane, so she owed her the truth. Or some of the truth. Mona didn’t need to know the real reason Bailey had been bounced to Long & Strong, but a frank account of the Fight would balance the scales.
Right?
“So,” Bailey said, “Zane and I have been friends basically since we were born. We grew up together and played together and taught each other about music and stuff.”
“The loud band,” Mona said impassively.
“For Dear Life is one of the best third-wave pop punk—okay, anyway.” Bailey cleared her throat. “Point being, I guess I always kind of wondered, you know, why he never seemed to go after any girls. I mean, I figured out early on he wasn’t gay.” She shuddered, recalling the one time she’d accidentally uncovered the search history on his laptop. “And yeah, a lot of the girls at our school kind of sucked, but not all of them did. So I didn’t get it.”
Mona nodded. “Because you were missing the obvious answer.”
Bailey’s mouth twisted as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “Luke Perez’s graduation party. It was Zane and me and a lot of cheap beer we couldn’t really handle, and we, you know—” She didn’t really know how to phrase it tactfully for the ears of the guy’s girlfriend.
“Fucked,” Mona said helpfully.
Bailey blushed. She knew that she, a feminist woman of the twenty-first century, probably shouldn’t be so precious about blunt mentions of sexuality, but still, ugh. “Um, yes,” she said after a moment. “And after—” She hesitated. This was the part of the story that was impossible to spin in her favor. “Zane said he’d been waiting all his life for me to notice him and told me he’d be working in the Nightshade, and the money he got would help him fly out to Philly to visit me a couple times a year. He had it all worked out.”
