Poisoned Pearls

by Leah Cutter

  A shadow detached itself from the wall.

  “Fuck, Hunter,” I told him. I hadn’t seen him at all. He’d blended in perfectly.

  In addition to my pounding head, now my heart was going triple time. Then I swallowed my fear. “Let me out. Asshole.”

  “What do you mean?” Hunter asked. He seemed startled.

  “You hit me. You knocked me out. Why did you do that?” I asked. “Aren’t I your blood brother or something?”

  Even in the dim light, I could tell Hunter looked ashamed. “I didn’t want to,” he whined. “But I needed to get you here. To get you safe. And you wouldn’t have come with me if I’d asked.”

  “Are you sure?” I challenged him. “You’d just rescued me from the bad guys. I might have come.” I knew he was probably right, that I wouldn’t have gone with him, but he should have given me a chance.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Hunter said sternly. “I can’t always see, but I knew that.”

  I didn’t nod my head—hurt too much. But I had to concede the point to him.

  “You still don’t do that to people,” I told his back as he walked away from me, going over to the bed.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Fuck you,” I said. It was locked, of course. I yanked on the door handle. Made my head hurt worse.

  With a sigh, I turned back toward my captor.

  Hunter had placed a small glass vial on the bed, along with what looked like an asthma inhaler. Beside that was a string of pills, each encased in its own packaging, round and glowing with pearlescent luster.

  “What’s that?” I asked, though I knew.

  Hunter was going to keep me here until I went tripping with him.

  “Two options,” Hunter replied. He pointed to the aerosol. “A version of PHS, Psychic enHancement and Stimulant, provided courtesy of our friend Josh.” Then he pointed to the other. “Street version of the same. Goes under the name Ghost Tripper currently. Has also been called the blood, peacemaker, and even blues, though the pills are always white, like pearls.”

  I shuddered. “What makes you think I’m going to take either? The junkie inhaler or the poisonous pearls?”

  Hunter turned to look at me. In the weird half-light of the room, his eyes shone almost pale. “I saw the man killing your friends,” he said. “You’ll never be able to find him, to stop him, unless you can see him. That’s why I brought you here. To help you.”

  Shit. “Where was he? Who is he?” I asked. Hunter’s confirmation settled something in my gut. I knew it had been a single john, handing out drugs to people.

  It also confirmed what I’m sure the tests had shown—I had abilities.

  I wasn’t one-hundred-percent mundane.

  Hunter shrugged. “Haven’t seen anyone like him before. He isn’t a man,” he warned.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Not a man? What crazy delusion did Hunter have? Had he actually seen the guy? Or was he lying to me?

  I never knew when people were lying to me. Look at the train wreck of my life, most recently Natasha.

  Hunter sighed, then drew himself up straight, standing at attention. “One of the reasons why Josh and his company continue to monitor me is because I see more than just the future. Or at least, that’s how I’ve come to understand it. I see several futures. Several worlds. Ghosts of future possible.”

  I looked at him, curious. “How can you tell the difference?”

  “Ghosts,” Hunter said sharply. “They started bleeding through. Keep coming into this world.”

  “And the ghosts are different than the pre-cog stuff?” I asked.

  “Yes. No.” Hunter shook his head. “Sometimes the paths merge and the ghosts cross over. Sometimes the worlds are so far apart they can’t touch me, can’t get to me, can’t slide over.”

  “Hunter, do these ghosts attack you?” I asked, incredulous. Was that why he’d been running in a zigzag as we’d left the health center? Not because of imagined bullets coming from behind, but because he was seeing ghosts crowding the sidewalk in front of him? Beings that weren’t actually there, not even in a recognizable future?

  “Sometimes,” Hunter said, defensively. “They notice me. And attack. Sometimes they help. Some of them have continued my training. Taught me how to move. How to fight.”

  Hunter was impressively trained. I’d seen evidence of that more than once.

  However, I had a hard time believing that his ghosts had done that for him. It must have been the Army. Or online videos. Or something. I didn’t care that I’d never seen anyone move like Hunter did. Not even those crazy guys who did parkour. There had to be a more rational explanation.

  “So if I take this enhancer of yours, you think I’ll start seeing like you do?” I asked. “That I’ll start having ghosts visiting me as well?” No, thank you. My life was hard enough as it was. I didn’t plan on going insane on top of everything else.

  Hunter sighed and sat down on the bed, his weight perfectly placed so nothing on the bed was disturbed.

  “This is why we’re here, in a neutral space. So that you don’t get overwhelmed. So that you don’t end up going crazy. I’m here to help you, to guide you, to train you.”

  Hunter looked away from me for a moment, before he finally turned back to face me again, his pale eyes pleading. “No one was there for me when my sight started changing. No one could explain what I was seeing. All they did was label me as crazy. Insane. No longer highly functioning.”

  I could hear the quotations around the last one. Figured it was part of an official diagnosis that still burned.

  “I don’t want to be addicted to some drug.” I already had enough things that I craved. Like smoking. Like good sex with pretty girls.

  Hunter shook his head. “Only the original version was addicting. The new versions aren’t. The sight itself is addicting, but that’s it. It’s less addicting than, oh, say, cigarettes.”

  I was impressed. I’d never heard Hunter be sarcastic before. I didn’t know he had that level of subtlety in him.

  “Still—why would I want that?” I asked reasonably. “If I don’t take any enhancer, I won’t have any vision. I’ll stay sane. And I won’t be addicted to some drug.”

  “And blind,” Hunter said. “And you’ll never catch the person who’s killing your friends.”

  “That’s a job for the police,” I told him, though I knew it was bullshit even as I spoke the words.

  Hunter shook his head. “They’ll never find the non-man. If you go through regular training, it will take years for you to come to your full potential. And everyone you know will die before then.”

  I’d always had my friends’ backs. Always. Even when they didn’t have mine.

  “It won’t be as painful for you as it was for me,” Hunter promised. “You’ll always know what you’re seeing. You won’t get lost between the worlds, like I was, for so long.”

  “If I ever do get lost, you better bring me back, you son of a bitch,” I told him, reaching for the tabs.

  As my mother had always said, I had more stubbornness than brains.

  And I was going to catch the bastard who was killing my friends.

  Chapter Eleven

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Sparkles, at the very least. But nothing happened. I felt a little woozy, like I was coming off a night of drinking straight scotch and smoking like a chimney. It wasn’t just the hit to the head. It felt different than that.

  Hunter had me lie down on the bed, his cool fingers on my wrist counting my heartbeats, his pale eyes flickering over my body, probably taking in as much as Ferguson’s recording pen, maybe more. Hunter stayed perfectly still, as if he were part machine himself.

  Would I be able to do that, once I’d finished my training?

  But I didn’t see anything. No ghosts came to visit. No sudden visions happened, either.

  Hunter pulled a penlight from some hidden pocket and flicked it at my eyes.

  “Ouch!” I complained. I was comp
letely blind from the bright light. “Fucker.” Made my head hurt even more.

  “You should be fully under now,” Hunter said, nodding. “Let’s begin.”

  He had me sit up, leaning against the warm pine wall. My eyes must have been way dilated at that point because the room was lit up like there were lights in every corner, plus the edges of everything were fuzzy. Not that there was much to see: a green painted wooden door in the corner, Hunter’s pile of blankets on the floor, a portable toilet in the other corner.

  “Close your eyes,” Hunter directed me. “Now, imagine yourself as a blue dot.”

  “Blue, huh?” I asked. All the TV shows had used blue to represent the seer, as well.

  Hunter shrugged. “It’s the color that works.”

  “Huh,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to see a single blue dot in the darkness.

  I got a sense of that dot, baby-boy blue, warmer than a summer sky. It pulsed in the corner of a black field.

  “Okay, got it,” I said.

  I didn’t have to see Hunter to know that he gave me a huge grin. “Perfect,” he said. “The drugs are working. Now, draw a square around that dot. Lines should also be blue.”

  I frowned after I tried a couple of times. “Does the dot have to be in the center of the square?” I asked. Because I couldn’t really get a square. It was more of a rectangle. Some sort of straight lines going out from the dot made more sense to me, but I had to trust Hunter that he knew what he was doing.

  “Yes,” Hunter insisted. “And the square should start out square. It can grow more rectangular later. But keep it square.”

  I shook my head. The square kept morphing.

  Finally, Hunter told me, “Open your eyes.”

  The room had grown dim again. I figured most of the drug had left my system.

  “What am I doing wrong?” I asked Hunter.

  “I don’t know,” he said, obviously frustrated. “It should work. The squares work. It’s part of the training. It’s what everyone follows.”

  I shrugged. “They aren’t right,” I told him. “Or I’m not right.” Maybe I didn’t have the powers that Hunter thought I did.

  Maybe I didn’t actually have any abilities. Maybe Josh and Hunter and everyone was wrong.

  “No, I must be doing something wrong,” Hunter said, accepting the blame for my failure.

  I blinked at him. Guys didn’t normally do that.

  “Let’s take a break. Rest. Try again,” Hunter said.

  I nodded. I was exhausted. I didn’t understand why focusing my mind on a single dot had left me so tired, but it had.

  I really wanted a cigarette, but I fell back asleep before I could ask about it.

  When I woke up, we tried again. And again.

  And I failed every time.

  ***

  Eventually, Hunter let me take a smoke break. The afternoon was turning gray and dark—I guessed it must have been 3 p.m. or so. It felt later, as if I’d been working on focusing my mind for three days.

  I was surprised at the neighborhood. It must have been someplace in southern Minneapolis. The houses were all from the 1930s and ’40s, all two-stories, with large front and backyards. The street was actually wide enough for cars to be parked on both sides. In the quiet of the afternoon, I could hear the freeway humming nearby.

  The house we stayed in was solid brick, with a couple gables sticking out from the snow-covered roof. Tall trees arched across the street and between the houses. No one was out, though next door some kids had tried building a snowman on the one warm day we’d had in the last month, when the snow would have stuck together.

  When I reached in my pocket for my gloves, I realized that Hunter had left me my phone—I knew better than to think he’d forgotten it there. I sent off a message to Travis, asking for him to cover me until later that night.

  Would I be able to make it in? Would I ever go back? Better to be covered, though I knew Chinaman Joe would be pissed.

  Hunter appeared beside me. I had no idea how long he’d even been outside with me.

  “It isn’t working, is it,” I said, drawing another deep drag on my cigarette and purposefully not looking at him.

  “No, it’s not,” Hunter finally admitted.

  “I don’t have any sight. Any ability,” I said, breathing out. I don’t know why saying that hurt so much. I’d denied having any abilities my entire life. I hadn’t thought I’d had any for even a single day.

  But it felt like letting go of a huge, lifelong dream.

  “You do,” Hunter insisted. “I know you can see. I just—I don’t know how to access it. Or how to teach you to access it.”

  “So I should go back to the center. Get proper training,” I said carefully.

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said. “We could try the spray instead.”

  I glanced at him. “Because we both trust Josh so much,” I said dryly.

  Hunter gave me a flash of a smile for that before he turned serious again. “Point.”

  “I should get to work,” I told Hunter.

  “You want to try again?” Hunter asked, surprised.

  “No. My job,” I told him. “At the shop.”

  Hunter took a deep breath, then blew it out. White fog billowed from him, instantly frozen in the cold afternoon air. “All right,” he said. “But I hadn’t expected this. I’d thought…well. I’d seen a different future.”

  “Is it possible to change the future?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Hunter said. “We do it all the time when we see. We see so we can change things. So they don’t have to remain as they are.”

  I nodded. “So maybe someone, somewhere, did something else. And my future has changed as well.”

  Hunter hesitated. I could tell he wanted to instantly deny what I’d said. I decided to press my advantage. “So when was the last time you saw me with abilities? Recently? Yesterday? Today?”

  “That’s different,” Hunter growled. “That’s not something that can change. That’s who you are.”

  “Could the drugs have blocked my ability rather than enhanced it?” I asked.

  Hunter looked worried at that.

  “Not all cures work for every body,” I pointed out. It was one of the things that continued to frustrate the government psychic training program. While the training could be the same, the chemistry was always different.

  “Will you come back?” Hunter asked. “Try again, later?”

  I didn’t want to. It was damned hard work. And it had been so disappointing this first time. Even though I hadn’t known what to expect, I’d had high expectations.

  So had Hunter.

  “I will,” I said. “But—not until tomorrow.” My shift would run until closing again tonight.

  “All right. I’ll meet you back here,” Hunter said, turning to go back into the house.

  “What is this place?” I asked him before he disappeared. It wasn’t his house, I knew that. Just from the few feet I’d walked from the basement stairs to outside I could tell it was actually lived in by a family.

  “Housesitting,” Hunter said seriously. Then he disappeared around the side of the building.

  Housesitting? Who would trust Hunter to take care of their place?

  Then again, if a burglar saw a crazy vet wandering around a house, she’d probably think twice before robbing it.

  I put out my cigarette, kicking the butt under the accumulated snow, then followed my ears up toward the main road. Turned out I was just a couple blocks off Nicolette. Easy enough to catch a bus, get downtown, go to work.

  Because that was going to be my life: a shit job at a sex & toy shop.

  Not seeing ghosts or saving my friends.

  ***

  The shop was more busy than I’d seen it in a while. When I walked in the door, six people stood in line at the checkout stand, and at least another dozen were on the floor, wandering around and looking at things. Plus there was a much longer line for the peep shows.

>   Seemed that Chinaman Joe had decided to put an ad in the weekly free rag and hadn’t bothered to tell us about it.

  For a smart man, sometimes he was pretty dumb.

  I took over the cash register at the peep show and let Travis deal with store customers. Seemed that I was the one who did that best, talking with actual people, telling them the rules of the show (no smoking, no spitting, no masturbating—two out of three which were generally followed). Who knew? I never would have bet that I’d be good at that sort of thing.

  That I’d turn out to be the friendly one.

  At about 9 p.m. the rush finally died down and we were all able to take breaks. I sent Travis and Amy out first, then took my break after theirs. We figured there would be another rush around 10:30, just before the main band up at First Avenue started playing.

  I spent part of my first break breaking down boxes and hauling them out to the alley. I didn’t think anything of the bum I saw going through the dumpster at the Chinese takeout next door.

  Not until I saw him move through the container.

  Fuck.

  I caught my breath and just stared. Was that what Hunter meant by ghosts? Figures that looked real until suddenly they weren’t?

  I was so screwed.

  Of course, Hunter didn’t have a cell phone. I had no way of getting in touch with him. I was just supposed to meet him at the house tomorrow.

  Over the next hour, the visions (visitations?) got stronger. I went from seeing the one guy in the alley to seeing groups of three or four.

  Were they all from this future? Was I seeing futures from multiple worlds, like Hunter?

  I had to admit, once I got over the squick factor, it was kind of cool. I was even starting to get the hang of identifying which ones were real, in the present day, and which ones were just in my head.

  None of them tried to talk to me, or even acknowledged that I was there. And none of them tried to come over and fight me, either.

  It wasn’t until my second break, when I was taking out the last of the boxes, that I saw him.

  That non-man that Hunter had been talking about.

  Unlike the ghosts, he was easy to distinguish as not being in the present. I could see through him. He wasn’t solid at all. His skin glowed faint and white, like the best of Hollywood movie effects.