on it with Sveta. Took a minute but eventually it started growing pretty well. I tried some of it once. Didn’t even give me a buzz.”
Jesus. Lance Gressang had gotten his hands on Merity and he hadn’t even known it. When Alex thought of the damage he might have done if he’d realized the control it could give him over others … But someone else had gotten there first.
“You thought it was worthless,” said Alex. “A shit buzz. So you sold it to Blake.”
“Yeah,” Gressang said, grinning.
“And what did you think when he came back for more?”
Gressang shrugged. “Happy to take his money.”
“Did Kate Masters know you sold Merity to Blake?”
“Nah, she was real uptight. Told us it was poisonous and whatever, not to mess with it. I knew she’d be pissed if she found out. But Blake kept hitting us up for more, and then he brings this other guy around who wants to know if we can get mushrooms.”
“Who?” Turner asked Lance. But Alex already knew what Lance was going to say.
Lance wriggled in his seat. He looked uneasy, almost scared.
“It was Colin Khatri, wasn’t it?” said Alex. “From Scroll and Key.”
“Yeah. He …” Lance leaned back. The bravado had gone from him. He looked at the wall as if expecting to find some kind of answer there. The clock was ticking, but Alex and Turner stayed quiet. “I didn’t know what we were starting.”
“Tell me,” said Turner. “Tell me how it began.”
“Tara was at the greenhouses all the time,” Lance said haltingly. “Coming home late, staying up to try mixing shit, putting the mushrooms together with I don’t know what. She had this little yellow dish Colin gave her. Called it her witch’s cauldron. Colin couldn’t get enough of the tabs she made. He kept coming back for more.”
“Tabs?” asked Turner. “I thought you were dealing with mushrooms.”
“Tara distilled that shit down. It wasn’t acid. I don’t know what it was.” Lance rubbed his good hand up his other arm, and Alex could see his skin had puckered with goosebumps. “We wanted to know what Colin was using it for, but he was real cagey about it. So Tara’s like, guess I won’t be cooking for you guys anymore.” Lance held his hands out like he was pleading with Alex. “I told her. I told her to just leave it alone, just keep taking Colin’s cash.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” Alex said. Rather die than doubt. Tara had sensed something big at play and she’d wanted to be part of it. “So what happened?”
“Colin caved.” Alex couldn’t tell if he sounded more smug or regretful. “One weekend, he and his buddies come get us at the apartment. We all take the tabs Tara made and then they blindfold us and take us into this building, this room. It was real pretty, with these screens with, like, Jewish stars on them, and the roof was open so you could see the skies.” Alex had been in that room the night of the failed Locksmith ritual, when they’d tried to get to Budapest. Had they staged the whole thing knowing it wouldn’t work without Tara’s tabs? “We stand in a circle at this round table and they start chanting in, like, I don’t know, Arabic maybe and the table just … opens up.”
“Like a passage?” asked Turner.
Lance was shaking his head. “No, no. You don’t understand: There was no bottom. It was night down there—some other night—and night up top, our night. It was all stars.” There was real awe in his voice. “We walked through and we were standing on a mountaintop. You could see for miles. It was so clear you could see the bend in the horizon. It was incredible. I was sick as shit the next day, though. And, God, we smelled. It didn’t wash off for days.” Lance sighed and said, “I guess it just went on from there. Colin and that whole crew wanted Tara to keep cooking up her stuff for them. We wanted to keep tripping. Tara wanted to see the world. I only wanted to fuck around. We went to the Amazon, Morocco, those hot pools in Iceland. We went to New Orleans for New Year’s. It was like the best video game ever.” Lance released a little laugh. “Colin couldn’t figure out how Tara was mixing the shit. He acted like he thought it was funny, but I could tell it pissed him off.”
Alex tried to reconcile this Colin—greedy, jealous,