by Mel Sterling
Just like Stephen.
Her brother had withered away to a mindless husk with an empty smile. Gone now, buried six months ago. Stephen had been convinced that he, too, was something other. Big brother Stephen, her dark elf. The senselessness of his death still gutted her. Stephen's problems had changed the direction of Tess's life.
Aaron was the fourth such client the rehab center had treated in the past ten months. Four young men, all handsome, all with the world at their feet, steadily decaying from bliss to utter absence of personality, recognition of responsibility or humanity. All of them convinced they were becoming something other than human.
Just like Stephen. While he hadn't been a client at her center, as his sister and only living relative, Tess had been deeply involved with his treatment and eventual hospitalization. Stephen's decline and death had transformed her from a mere counselor to a woman desperate to find a solution. She'd been unable to help any of the young men and unable to determine what drug they'd taken. Its effects were much like heroin, but not one of them had the telltale track marks.
Tess knew that meant it was something they'd swallowed or inhaled, though they all denied doing either.
Her contacts at the police department just shrugged when she asked about new drugs on the street. It wasn't something they'd seen on patrol or on calls. And it was only four young men, decent citizens, no real criminal records except for the occasional oddball behavior—jousting with a sedan on a city street or scaling the sides of buildings only to become stranded on a narrow window ledge four floors up. One of them had ridden an office chair like a skateboard down the steep slope of a neighborhood street, heedless of cross traffic or pedestrians. They weren't stealing or robbing or killing. They wouldn't have blipped cop radar if not for citizen complaints.
But for Tess, it was four people she knew, four souls she hadn't been able to reach, much less save. There was no methadone treatment for whatever addiction this was. No going cold turkey, no patch. Three of the four lived like vegetables, fed and watered like babies, their noses and asses wiped when necessary.
Which meant Aaron was living on borrowed time. She would do her damnedest to save him. If that meant she had to step outside professional boundaries, so be it. Aaron was someone's beloved brother, too.
Tess sat in her aging Jeep outside Aaron's family's house. The Craftsman bungalow looked warm and welcoming in the noncommittal rain of October, yellow lamplight showing through several windows. She reread Aaron's file by the tiny light on her keychain. All of his counselors and doctors had been baffled by the lack of information provided by testing and interviews. For some time now, it had been in her mind to knock at the door, go in and talk to Aaron's parents, his sister, anyone who could tell her where he'd first found the drug. It was crossing the professional line, and she knew it. So she was still sitting in the chilly car, watching the rain seep along the seams of the Jeep's old tonneau. In another climate, sun rot would have long ago destroyed the canvas, but here in Portland, the wet seemed to preserve it, stretched drum-tight but still snapping into place grommet by grommet each autumn.
She leaned her head back, crushing her brown ponytail against the headrest, staring at the Eisleys' front door, debating. Go in, violate her client's confidentiality, or stay here like a coward, keeping Aaron's secrets in the dark where they could continue to destroy him.
I'm a Green Man, a Wild Man. She had looked it up, just like she'd looked up Stephen's dark elves, and the redcaps and sprites of other clients. Aaron believed he was a force of nature, a man more than human, a man whose hair was fresh green leaves, whose fertility was vast and relentlessly potent.
Her left hand crept to the door handle and had locked around it when a wedge of light from the front door spilled onto the sidewalk. Aaron himself came out, hunched in his dark hoodie, hands jammed into the kangaroo pouch. He moved down the street as if hypnotized.
He moved like Stephen had, in those last months before Tess was forced to institutionalize him. The same puppet-like pace, jerky and other-guided. He moved with purpose, but not his own. Something compelled him forward in the rainy October darkness.
Tess drew a long breath. She could go in and talk with his family now, and perhaps Aaron would never know...or she could follow him, and maybe figure out what mess he was in and who his pusher was. Somehow, find justice and closure for herself and Stephen.
She waited until he was a block ahead, nearly out of sight in the dimness between streetlights, before she turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of her parking spot. She didn't think he'd be alert enough to notice a Jeep creeping along behind him, but it was best to keep her distance all the same.
Three blocks away, he boarded a bus that took him out of the Alameda neighborhood and down the hill toward the Willamette. Now she didn't have to be as cautious and picked up speed to keep him in sight. The bus crawled through the rainy evening, stopping, starting, but Aaron didn't step off until it had crossed the Burnside Bridge and entered Old Town.
Tess passed him while the bus hid her, turned the Jeep to the right into Chinatown, and stopped just short of the crimson gate guarded by the gold-painted fu dog statues. She parked illegally in a loading zone. It was after business hours and hopefully no one would notice. She grabbed her purse and slung it across her body, locked the Jeep, and hurried to the corner. Aaron had already crossed Burnside Street, headed for the staircase that would take him down to the impromptu market and ersatz camp that formed Sunday nights after the legitimate artisans and vendors had packed up and gone home. This gray market would run in fits and starts between roustings by cops, until the next weekend, when the artisans returned.
She stared, open-mouthed, hardly believing this could be coincidence. Surely Aaron didn't come to the bridge just to visit with the hard-luck cases sheltering there. Boys from the Alameda neighborhood were expected to do better than that. Glancing left and right, she jaywalked, reaching the stairs just as Aaron disappeared under the bridge. Tess followed.
She'd been under the Burnside Bridge a hundred times before, visiting the weekend market with family and friends over the years, and using the market as a shortcut at other times. It had been one of Stephen's favorite places. He loved to prowl the booths and food trucks, always wanting her to share a cinnamon-sugar elephant ear with him. Even in his darker days, as the drugs clawed deeper into him, he'd wanted to go there. Tess still visited on special occasions, but she no longer ate the sweet treat that reminded her so painfully of her brother. She had been thinking of Stephen more and more lately, but sometimes she wished she could leave responsibility and memory behind, cut herself free of that weight, travel more lightly.
For the first time, she began to wonder if Stephen's attachment to the Saturday Market was less about fun and more about hooking up with his pusher. He'd haunted Old Town, too, and seeing Aaron following a path that Stephen had taken gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. In the months since Stephen had died, Tess had skulked cautiously through Old Town and other seedy parts of Portland at odd hours, trying to spot something, anything, among the hopeless and homeless, that could lead her to a solution for the other young men whose lives were effectively ended. Now she might have a chance at a breakthrough. She'd made the right choice to follow Aaron, rather than confronting his family.
Tonight, the area beneath the bridge sheltered a remarkable crowd of people from the drizzle, more than she would have expected on a gloomy evening. It took her a moment to locate Aaron. He was about fifty feet away, watching a young boy drumming on a collection of overturned cat litter buckets, trashcans and refrigerator drawers. The beat seduced Aaron's feet to a stuttering, hopping dance as he joined a ring of people bobbing and swaying around the drummer. But Aaron lacked grace; the drug, whatever it was, had stolen much of his coordination and sense of timing. Now he looked like any other hopped-up junkie twitching for his next fix, taken over by sensation and stimulation.
Tess tried to be inconspicuous, b
ut her tall frame caught the eye of the vagrants and gray market merchants alike. At the foot of the stairs, she paused next to a man sitting on a blanket with a collection of scavenged books arrayed in front of him. As her gaze passed over the market, he lit a flashlight and shone it over the titles, swiftly flicking the pool of light, watching her face for reactions to the more lurid covers. "You look like an educated woman! I have books for you. Any book, just a dollar!"
Tess shook her head and moved away, keeping her eyes on Aaron, who continued to dance.
Another man spoke. "Hand-rolled smokes here. You know you want one."
"No, thank you." Her fingers curled more tightly around the strap of her cross-body bag as she tried to look unapproachable, uninterested, fiercely confident, and aware of her surroundings all at the same time. Tonight it was difficult, because she wasn't simply moving through the throng, she was lingering. She couldn't expect to be ignored.
"It's the best, just in from eastern Washington. That high desert grass, you gotta try it!"
Tess glanced at the man, who was moving too close with his cupped handful of joints. They were odd, fat little doobies with twisted ends tied shut with what looked like Christmas tinsel. "I said no thank you." She put an edge in her voice and he backed off, nearly stepping on the offerings of the bookseller behind him.
"Watch it, man," said the bookseller. "Stay outta my space."
"Peace," said the man with the smokes. Tess left them to their argument. She passed another blanket covered with knitted hats, and a street girl with a ferret on a leash. The ferret gave Tess a long, direct look, or perhaps it was her imagination. She shook her head, sidling away, keeping Aaron in her peripheral vision.
A sleepy-looking young man lounged against one of the concrete pillars that held up the Burnside Bridge. "You and me, babe. Meant to be. Fate."
It didn't even provoke a grunt from her. The young man was almost as handsome as Aaron, but there was something unpleasant about him. A breeze off the Willamette brought with it the familiar weedy stink of the river, even through the moistness of the rainy night. The young man slid a hand down his flat belly to his crotch and licked his lips, laughing when she turned away repulsed.
Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, Tess thought, continuing to edge through the vendors and loiterers, the city kids out for thrills, stepping out of the way of a skater boy cruising swiftly past on his board. Off to one side, a woman was grilling bits of meat on a hibachi standing on a three-legged card table. She had rigged a golf umbrella to shelter the grill from the weather, and replaced the missing table leg with a dented trash can. The meat smelled both burnt and spoiled.
Perhaps it was her heightened awareness now that she was following Aaron through the market, but the place seemed more inimical than it had in the past. She felt jumpy and nervous. She told herself it was foolish to feel so paranoid. These people couldn't help their situations. They were poor and homeless. What they needed was kindness and understanding, not revulsion. Moving on, Tess carefully avoided the space where two people leaned against each other like herd animals, one keeping watch while the other slept curled and dream-twitching on the pavement. At last she paused near a woman who sat on a paint bucket behind a tiny plastic patio table. Sitting with her back to the chilly concrete of a bridge footing, the woman shuffled ceaselessly through a deck of tarot cards, droning,
"Searching for love,
hungry for fame,
I give you truth
when you give your name."
Though she'd seen the fortuneteller here before, for the first time Tess really looked at the woman, who grinned up at her from a face as glossy and seamed as a walnut shell. In the dimness the woman could have been any age from twenty to eighty, hidden in half a dozen tattered shawls. Tess fumbled in her pocket and came up with a five-dollar bill. The woman stretched out two fingers, and with a flicker the bill was folded and gone.
"Give me your name, pretty girl."
"Julie."
The woman shook her head. "Not your truename, no. Truename, pretty girl."
"It's my name tonight."
"Truename, truename, or the Old Ones, they say nothing you should heed."
Tess slid a glance at Aaron, who had left the circle of dancers, but was still jitterbugging his sleepwalking way through the market. She couldn't follow yet. "I'll take my chances. What fame can five bucks bring me, madam?"
The woman thrust the cards at Tess. "You show me. Shuffle till they feel right to you."
Tess leafed through them absently. The cards felt dusty and sticky, and she wanted to wipe her hands on her jeans. Aaron had paused at a barrel filled with fire. Three men stood back from it a short distance, heads down, caps pulled low, jackets zipped. Could this be it? The men fed a paperback to the fire, page by fluttering page. Each burned with a brief flare, lighting Aaron's blank brown eyes and shadowing his cheeks.
"Pretty Julie."
Tess jerked her gaze back to the tarot reader and put the deck in the woman's waiting palm.
"He's a pretty boy too. Seen him here lots." The woman's chin pointed toward the fire barrel.
"Have you?" Tess tried to control her eagerness.
A slow smile creased the woman's face. "Gave me his truename, so I spoke him true."
"He's a friend of mine. I'm trying to make sure he stays out of trouble."
The shawled head shook. "Too late, too pretty." The cards practically spun down from the deck onto the table.
"Where'd he find this trouble, so I can help keep him out of it from now on?"
The head kept shaking. Her forefinger dithered between two of the cards on the table, and suddenly she swept up all the cards. The deck vanished in the shawls. "Go away, pretty Julie."
"What about my fame?"
"No truename."
"What about my five bucks, then?"
The woman stood up, folding the table and stuffing its legs into the bucket. "Not my problem. You paid, you lied, I tried, but you lied, you lied..." The singsong continued as she drew her shawls tighter, took the bucket by the handle, and melted away into the shadows.
She didn't move like an old woman. For a moment Tess considered following and continuing to pry for more information about Aaron, but caution stopped her. It was worth the five dollars to know Aaron came here often. If the fortuneteller had seen him, others would have too; Tess just needed to find them. She was turning to check on Aaron when a flutter of ribbon high up in a notch on the concrete bridge footing caught her eye.
Even tall Tess had to stretch to reach it. She tugged at the ribbon, and something small and weighty came away from the hole with it, swinging like a pendulum. She turned to bring it into the light and keep an eye on Aaron, who was moving away from the fire barrel toward the dark, glinting river. The men at the barrel watched him go.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. Tess stuffed the small thing in the side pouch of her purse and meandered up to the barrel.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey, yourself." The men were wary, pulling their caps even lower.
"You know that boy?" She gestured with her chin toward Aaron, tucking her hands deep in the pockets of her sweater jacket.
"What's it to ya?" the tallest of the three asked.
"He's a friend of mine. I'm trying to keep him out of trouble."
They grinned in the dancing light. "Too late, bitch, too late."
She leaned forward a little. "What do you mean, too late?"
"The lady, she ride him. You wanna ride him too, right?"
"Do you mean horse, heroin?" Tess wrinkled her brow. She hadn't heard of a drug called the lady, but maybe it was a new name for something that had been around a while. Still, the man's tone was nothing short of lascivious.
"No, the lady. You wanna keep out of that, you know what's good for you."
"The lady. What lady?"
They tossed in a few pages from the book. Tess blinked watering eyes in the sudden flare of sparks and acrid smoke. In tho
se seconds, the men left her standing alone at the barrel.
Well, she hadn't expected to be able to walk right up and say, "See that young man? He's on some really bad shit, and I need you to take me to his dealer."
Aaron was almost out of sight at the riverbank. Tess hurried after him. She jumped the low chains that separated the marketplace from the roadway. Looking hastily both ways, she jaywalked in the darkness.
CHAPTER THREE
THOMAS LINGERED ON THE PERIPHERY of the goblin market, watching without seeming to watch. He recognized most of the fae here, and even several of the humans who were drawn like moths to the dark flicker of glamour. Some were homeless street people, shuffling through the market gleaning crumbs or coins dropped over the day, mumbling to themselves or shouting at invisible demons. Invisible, that is, to most humans roaming the Underbridge. The street people could sometimes see the fae for what they were. Some were junkies, like the kid reeling around the fairy musician thumping at his skin-covered drums.
And some were normal, like the tall woman walking tensely through the market, one hand wrapped around the strap of her sling bag, and the other jammed in a pocket as though to keep her fingers away from temptation. He'd seen her before, and she always caught his eye with her height, the swing of her brown ponytail, and the intent, concerned look on her vaguely pretty face. She didn't belong in the goblin market, yet she came again and again.
Of course, he could say the same of many of the humans here.
Thomas wondered what she saw. She didn't show the same dread some of the streetfolk exhibited, yet each time she singled out someone, it was the fae she approached. Was she fae herself, and if so, why couldn't he see through her glamour? Or was she like him, living in the half-world, with her human form uppermost? Or was she human, with the second sight that permitted her to glimpse the fae world without revealing its deeper bones to her?
