but it didn’t smell like rose petals either. It was the color of sea-water, complete with all the wonderful little particles that reminded you just how many animals lived, breathed, and excreted in there. When she swirled the fluid around, a lot of it clung to the side of the bottle and slid right down again.
“What did Maddy say about this stuff?” Paige asked.
“That it allowed her to see scents.”
“You sure she wasn’t sniffing something else?”
Ned clucked his tongue and stepped back as a row of cars sped down the street. “You know she wouldn’t do anything to endanger another Skinner.”
“Yeah, I know.” Steeling herself as best she could, Paige tipped her head back, opened her eyes wide and held the dropper over the left one. In the end she figured that was the one she’d prefer losing. “How much should I use?”
“Just enough for an even coat. The Squamatosapiens’ gland excreted—” Seeing the glare on her face, Ned skipped ahead to, “Two drops in each eye should do it.”
Before she could convince herself to do otherwise, Paige squirted a few drops onto her left eye. She’d never been good at giving herself eye drops, so a good portion of the stuff splattered on her eyelid and brow. Rather than use any more, she blinked and rolled her eye under the lid. When she reflexively tried to rub it in, she felt a strong hand on her forearm.
“Don’t,” Ned warned. “Just let it soak. How does it feel?”
“Warm. No…cold. It’s cold now, but it was warm a second ago.”
“Open your eyes.”
Paige opened her eyes and looked around. Almost immediately, panic set in. “Everything’s blurry. I think my vision is screwed up. The light’s glaring so much.”
“Just give it a second.”
A second didn’t help.
The next few seconds after that, however, allowed the glare around every light source or reflective surface to fade. “It’s still a little fuzzy.”
“That’s because you’re in direct sunlight. What else do you see?”
Feeling like she was going to lose her footing, Paige focused on the ugly factory or hospital in the distance. At least that gave her something to concentrate on other than the slick layer of goo clinging to her eyeball and the tingling chill slowly filling the entire socket. When she looked at the street again, she saw ghostly waves of different colors drifting on currents of wind like cartoon squiggles denoting a particularly stinky mess.
“I think I see what you were talking about,” she said. “But, it’s kind of hard to pin down. It’s coming and going.”
“That’s because you only put the drops in one eye. Do the other one.”
She took a breath, held up the bottle and reminded herself that she already had one foot in this particular pool. How bad could it be to step in and swim? Ignoring the weight of her arm hanging from her shoulder, which reminded her of her last bad swim, she treated her other eye.
The same mix of warm and cold flooded across the middle of her face, where it connected to the chill in her other eye. Staring out at a street that was now filled with a smeared jumble of moving blobs and colorful waves, Paige asked, “Right before you went blind, did it feel like your eyeballs had frozen into little round ice cubes?”
“I’m not completely blind,” Ned told her, “but yes.”
“Great.”
“Blink, but don’t rub it in. The rest will pass.”
It only took a few seconds for him to be proven right. Her vision cleared to the point where she felt like she needed glasses to see beyond a distance of about twenty or thirty yards. The waves of color, on the other hand, remained. When traffic thinned out, the waves became less like smears hanging in the air and more like smoke that held together without the cars breaking it apart. Most of the colors were dull and stagnant, but there was one particular shade of red that caught her attention.
“You say those Squams hunted Nymar?” she asked.
“Sure did.”
“There’s some sort of trace in the air, but it’s not the same color as the rest.” Lifting her head like a dog that had just caught a whiff of something cooking in a nearby kitchen, she added, “This one’s bright red with some… yellow? Yeah, I guess yellow or orange is about right.”
“That’s it.”
“There’s a scent coming off of you, Ned. It’s got some dark blue and black in it.”
“Maddy said those came from the antidote used to kill that Nymar.”
“Yeah? Well I’d have to agree because those colors are also coming from you.”
Ned patted his pockets and removed a few small syringes containing the antidote that meant instant death to any Nymar who got it injected into their bloodstream. “You still see it?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” she replied as she studied the waves rolling off the thin little cylinders. “But it’s also coming from you. Not the syringes. You.” Twitching toward the sound of an approaching engine, Paige was able to pick out a subtle glow emanating from the car’s windows. She hurried down the sidewalk and soon felt a familiar itch within the scars on her hands. “There’s Nymar in that car,” she said. “I could see them before I could feel them.”
“So the drops really do work,” Ned sighed. “I knew it.”
“They’re weird, but they work. I might have to place an order before I leave.”
“It’ll be a while before I can fill it. That is, unless you’ve spotted any Squamatosapiens recently.”
Resisting the urge to rub her eyes again, Paige tapped Ned’s shoulder as she hurried toward the car. “Which way is the club?”
“A few miles south of here.”
“Some of the traces lead back that way, so I guess that’s the direction they came from.” She pointed past a barely visible cloud of red that only she could see. “If we get moving quickly, I should be able to follow them.”
Ned grabbed her arm with one hand and his cane in the other. “Excellent. Can you drive?”
“I can separate the smells from the stoplights…mostly. How long does this stuff last anyway?”
“Maybe an hour or two. It evaporates fairly quickly, but I’m putting together some wraparound sunglasses to prolong the effect. Conversely, you can let it dissipate so the effect wears off a little sooner.”
He went on about more options for shades, but Paige was too busy rushing to the SUV to listen. Although she was able to see a little better now that she’d adjusted to the constant flow of color drifting around her, it still required some concentration. She simply didn’t realize how many smells were out there until she could see them. Fortunately, the Lizard Men were literally focused on Nymar, so those scents stood out like neon amid a background of forty watt bulbs.
After nearly taking a black hatchback out of its misery while trying to make a U-turn from her parking spot, Paige sped to where she’d first picked up the scent and caught it just as the red waves were dissipating. Driving directly through the scent only disrupted it more, so she kept her eyes glued to the traces in front of her.
“Look out!” Ned screamed.
Getting a warning like that from a man who was nearly blind was not a good sign. Paige swerved around a motorcycle in her lane and tried to watch the road as well as the scents. Her task became a lot easier when she caught up to the Nymar’s vehicle on East Broadway. Her scars reacted to the Nymar presence and her eyes could see their bright red scent billowing out of their vehicle through partially rolled-down windows. They turned onto Sixth Street and headed into a part of town that, depending on whether someone’s glass was half empty or full, could be described as “run-down” or “in development.”
The buildings on either side of her were drab but clean. Parking lots were mostly empty, and there were no angry people baring fangs at her from the sidewalk. So far she didn’t mind the neighborhood one bit. “Have you ever been to this part of town, Ned?”
“I don’t get much past the Central West End anymore.”
Tracking the Nymar through one more turn before they pulled to a stop at a curb, she said, “Well we’re right around Sixth and…Missouri Avenue.”
“Still doesn’t sound familiar.”
Although the Nymar parked in front of a two-story building made from dark red and light brown bricks, none of the three that got out of the car entered the place. Paige stopped along the curb at the intersection, just shy of
