reverberating with the bass beat, and he watched Eerie dance.
Later, he would not be able to describe it, although he would remember it clearly. She was not, he would say haltingly, an amazing dancer, not exactly. Not that he would know, having never danced in his life. But, he didn’t think it was entirely whatever she had given him, though he felt an exhilarating combination of calm and elation that he could only attribute to drugs. No, he would try and explain, there was something special about Eerie dancing.
Margot would tell him much later about other nights the same thing had happened; at retro-styled swing clubs in Los Angeles or hip-hop clubs in Baltimore, in the parking lot of a Phish show outside Phoenix, minutes before closing at a basement club in London, where a small crowd of puzzled transvestites had watched her dance to electro. Eerie, she would tell him, simply liked to dance.
Also, Margot would add, frowning, she has a thing for fucked up people.
But he found out those things later, after he had watched her dance, after he had fallen for her a little bit, in that intense and irrevocably irrational way that even he knew was a hallmark of total naivety. Still, that knowledge didn’t change anything for Alex. Watching Eerie dance, knowing that eventually she would come back to sit next to him, that was the first truly good thing that had happened to him since his home had burned to the ground. Maybe before that, too. He couldn’t remember that well.
She spun and twirled and the light around her had the quality of honey, warm and amber-toned, ambient and soothing. She was not athletic, not flashy, and not dramatic. Her hair hung down in front of her eyes, her sweatshirt slipped down to expose the gentle slope of shoulders, the rise of her collarbone above her tight black top. She moved with a self-assurance and grace he had never seen in her, not in any previous circumstance, but he found himself wondering how it was that he hadn’t always seen it.
People should have stared. They must have seen the sparkling girl, making slow revolutions through the dance floor like she was alone on it, in the midst of the press of bodies but never actually touching anyone. She was vibrant, gleaming with an inner radiance, a honey light. They must have seen her.
Alex couldn’t see anyone or anything else. He stared, his head pleasantly spinning, his heart filled with a benign euphoria, a mild intoxication. The world around him softened, became universally warm and gentle. The light around Eerie seemed to pass right through him, like a current of warm water, or the sound of a summer wind brushing over long brown grass. He tried to hold up his hands to the light, and he could not, or he did not want to. There was no way to be certain. He sat and watched Eerie dance.
And eventually, she came back to him, smiling and breathing hard, her face flushed, soaked with sweat. Alex reached for her without thinking, watching it happen without a trace of panic or anxiety, and she took his hand and squeezed it with her own for a moment, before letting go with a smile.
“What…” Alex croaked, pausing to drink greedily from the bottle of water that she offered him. “What was in the candy you gave me?”
Eerie laughed and patted him on the head. Her smile was benign, tolerant and amused. She beamed at him indulgently, like a favored child.
“Bubble gum, Alex.” She paused, then her expression turned suspicious. “You didn’t swallow it, did you?”
“What? No,” Alex shook his head, confused. He found himself wondering what he had done with the gum, anyway. All he had in his mouth was a soggy paper stick. “I didn’t mean that. What made me all fucked up?”
“Oh,” Eerie said with concern, sitting down next to him on the speaker. “Is it bad?”
She peered into his eyes, concerned, and Alex couldn’t help but grin at her until she smiled back.
“No, not at all,” he said earnestly. “I was wondering, you know, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”
Eerie looked at her hands shyly.
“It’s just me, Alex.” She smiled at him hesitantly. “Because I… because it was in my mouth, you see? Because my whole body is like a drug, Alex.”
“No shit?”
At the time, anyway, it sounded reasonable enough.
“Uh-huh,” Eerie said, nodding. “For normal people, anyway. That’s how the Fey communicate with each other, chemically. Pheromones and particular compounds in… you know,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Sweat. Saliva. That sort of thing.”
Eerie blushed, and Alex wished he could think of something cool to say to change the mood. Alex snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her small round face was earnest, and it was easy to see how nervous she was. His eyes drifted down to her lap, to the strip of thigh that showed between the hem of her skirt and the top of her black knee socks, and for a moment, his train of thought disintegrated. Then he caught himself, and quickly looked back up at Eerie’s face, but she did not appear to have noticed anything. She was staring off at the still- packed dance floor, the crowd increasingly disheveled, energetic and sweaty.
“Is this like empathy?” Alex asked doubtfully. It didn’t feel anything like what Rebecca did — he had no special awareness of Eerie, her thoughts, or her feelings; rather, a general sense of well-being, a fading physical high, and a strange, benign fuzziness.
Eerie shook her head emphatically.
“No, not at all. It’s all chemistry. I like being around parties. They make me happy. When I’m happy, the people who, you know, come into contact with me, they are too.”
Alex sat next to her, and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything at all to talk about. Eerie sat restlessly beside him, kicking her legs against the speaker they hung off of, watching the people dance with obvious desire to rejoin them. He wished he could have thought of a good reason to make her stay there, beside him.
Eventually, she climbed back up to her feet, brushing off the back of her black skirt where she’d sat down, and smiled coyly at Alex.
“I’m going to go dance now. Will you come this time?”
She held out one hand, offering him help up.
Alex shook his head, smiling weakly.
“You’ll regret it, you know,” Eerie admonished him, obviously disappointed. “You will wish you had, Alex.”
She walked off to the dance floor without looking back at him.
I already do, Alex thought bitterly, brushing his hair away from his eyes and feeling bitter. I already do.
Twenty Five
“I haven’t seen you in some time, Alice. How have you been?”
Alice’s smile reminded Chris of the Cheshire Cat. Except much more frightening.
“A busy girl is a happy girl. But I’m certain that you’ve heard,” Alice cooed, sitting down across from him at the cafe table. “Unless you’ve lost your touch for these things?”
“Hardly,” Chris said, smiling back at her tiredly. “I’m afraid that there is still very little that goes on in our sordid underworld that I am not eventually made aware of. Word is that you’ve been working quite a bit these last few weeks. Saigon, Los Angeles, Manila, Paris… all operations targeting the Terrie Cartel, if I’m not mistaken.”
The waiter was clearly unnerved by Alice, and delivered the coffees Chris had already ordered in a hurried manner that made it abundantly clear that they would not be seeing the boy again. Alice seemed vaguely amused by this.
Chris had to admire their waiter’s keen sense of self preservation. Not everyone was so quick to spot Alice for what she was.
He’d first met Alice in Berlin, during the strange and exciting years after the First World War, not long before she’d started working as an Auditor. She didn’t appear to have changed much since — her hair was dyed black, now, and a faint white scar was etched along one cheekbone, but she didn’t seem to have aged at all. Even her clothes weren’t much different from the first time he’d met her, at a friend’s party in a flat in Fredericksburg, in a slinky black dress and high-laced shoes with pointed toes, though she’d ditched the dress and shoes in favor of tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. The coat she hung over the seatback was too heavy and long for the weather, so
