Page 19 of Cheater Slicks

“That’s when I lucked up on the Midnight Parade.” Her pupils expanded and then retracted, her focus shifting beyond me. “I hope I’m not late for supper.”

This whole conversation contracted my heart like a closed fist within my chest.

No, no, no.

This wasn’t happening. She was going to be fine. I wouldn’t let her be anything else.

Walking backward, I tried latching on to her arm without any luck. “How do I get you out of here?”

Impact sent me stumbling to one side, and I realized I had bumped into a parked car.

The parade marched on, and before I could pivot after Vi, they evaporated into whirls of blue mist.

“Well, we found them.” I gritted my teeth as Kierce ran to me. “Fat lot of good it did us.”

Gently, he helped me test my hip where I had smacked it on a non-folding car mirror. It might bruise, but I would be fine. I couldn’t say the same for Vi if we didn’t prioritize freeing her. Matty might be too far gone to realize he needed saving, since he couldn’t recognize me. Breaking through to him, and breaking him out, were looking more and more like two separate but equal tasks.

“We knew this wouldn’t be easy,” he soothed me. “This is only the first step.”

“It would have been nice if Pierre mentioned whether this is a nightly occurrence. And if it is, does it always happen here? On this street? At this time? Or do they pop up all over the city?”

“We can go back, see if he’ll tell us more.”

Worry that Kierce might end up the one in debt, for his own reasons, left a sour taste in my mouth.

“If I had anything he wanted, he would have bargained with me instead of bargaining through me to get to Vi.” I massaged my hip. “I’ve already run up her tab. I can’t keep adding to it without knowing the cost.”

“Then we wait,” he decided. “See if they circle back.”

Searching behind him for Pedro, I was relieved to find he had left to comfort Josie. “And if they don’t?”

“Then we come back tomorrow, same time, same place, and we wait.”

“I don’t understand.” I stared in the direction my brother had gone. “I couldn’t put hands on him.”

“Neither could I.” Kierce rubbed his fingers together as if the attempt had left behind a residue. “There’s magic chaining him to the others. They’re all connected.” He grew pensive. “There’s one more oddity. As far as I could tell, none of them are dead.”

“That makes sense.” In my mind’s eye, I saw Vi’s still form beneath her velvet bedspread. “Their bodies are still alive.”

“The spell must be weaving a collective bond between the spirits.”

Had Matty tuned out what was happening to avoid the magic nipping at his mind? Pain could trigger a Pavlovian response if he fought against the spell. Maybe he had given up when no help came. Or maybe blissful dissociation was how the magic worked, almost a reward for its victims going with the flow.

“Vi stumbled across the parade while she was investigating a patron’s wife’s illness.”

“Do you think the magic somehow trapped her?”

“Neither of us got stuck, but we’re both god adjacent. Our divinity might have protected us.”

“Perhaps,” he allowed, his expression going distant, “but we can’t be certain without a broader sampling of the afflicted factions.”

Thoughts veering back to Kierce’s interaction with Matty, I asked, “Did he say anything to you?”

“He introduced me to a woman in front of him who told me I was handsome and asked me to dance.”

“It’s like he’s reading from a script. He didn’t recognize me. There was just this…generic happiness…I guess? He didn’t understand what I was saying enough to engage with me. He repeated the same words on a loop, but that was it.”

“They must have a set number of phrases, though I don’t see why they would require the presets only to interact with one another.” Kierce mulled over his impressions. “Unless the victims are programmed to sweep others into the procession with them. That could be how the affliction was spread.”

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