Page 7

CHAMPAGNE PROBLEMS

THE BOOKSTORE IS called Bibliomecca and the book Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenans, fant?mes, etc. The book is old and French and horrible, all of which makes it somewhat conspicuous on the shelf of brightly colored, contemporary American fiction. When you compound this with its cracking spine, grubby dust jacket, and the fact that it sticks a solid four inches past the lip of the ledge, it seems rather miraculous that more people don’t stumble into The Library of Spirits by mistake.

But then, New Yorkers can be remarkably myopic.

The douchey weekend manager, Kevin, once told Konstantin that Mary Shelley had borrowed liberally from Fantasmagoriana when writing Frankenstein , but he had never cared enough to confirm that fact. Kostya had no head for fiction, and no stomach at all for ghost stories. He had tasted enough phantom food over the years to hold the conviction that ghost stories had nothing in common with actual ghosts. Their writers had clearly never come in contact with a spirit; if they had, they wouldn’t make every ghost into a haunt, some creepy ghoulie come back from the Dead to wreak havoc and incite fear. That was baloney. The ghosts he encountered (if you could call it that) seemed mild mannered, even sentimental.

At least, that’s what Kostya inferred from the flavors they left in his mouth:

Poppy-seed piroshky laced with boozy rum raisins, scoop of melting vanilla soft serve, mouthful of watered-down black currant tea. Late April, walking past a funeral home in Sheepshead Bay.

Deep-dish pizza, crust crispy and layered as a croissant, pepperoni and pineapple topping, so hot it burns the roof of your mouth. Two weeks back, riding the northbound Q past Times Square.

Pork dumplings, the wontons deep-fried but eaten refrigerator cold, hint of chive, hoisin, and rice wine vinegar, kick of spicy mustard. Just that morning, stuck in Holland Tunnel traffic on his way to drop off a pallet of cheap vodka for Uncle (not his real uncle) Vanya.

These didn’t taste like the throats of people looking for blood. They struck Kostya as nostalgic. Maybe they were hungry, the restaurant options in the Afterlife not quite hitting the spot. Or maybe they just communicated with whatever receiver they had available and his happened to be a tongue. He wished there were a way to ask them, to discover what they wanted him to do with these flavors they kept pushing on him, but the moments were so brief, the tastes so fleeting, that often he barely had time to register what he had been tasting before it vanished without a trace.

Most of the time, the flavors were typical—more dead people than you’d think crave some variety of sandwich—but sometimes they were entirely foreign, hailing from cuisines Kostya hadn’t known existed, spices he couldn’t have imagined. Even the obscurest tastes would somehow disclose themselves to him, a metaphysical-ethereal-neural miracle that let him intuit the component parts of everything he tasted.

Like the chicken wings smeared with sambal oelek , which scorched his throat one night as he traversed Bryant Park by Citi Bike.

Or the warm, heady ras el hanout , smothering the beef tagine he got as he handed the rent check to his frowning landlord on the third of the month.

Or the mouth-puckering amchur in the kati roll that visited him at the Urgent Care clinic, awaiting the results of a strep test (negative).

He’d known the names of those flavors though he didn’t know how. He had never tasted them before, had never even seen them on a menu; they were just there , identified, companions to the aftertastes, escort ingredients simmering beneath the surface of his consciousness, waiting to be invoked. The bubbling answers to a question.

Too bad it was the wrong question.

Sure, it was nice to know what he was eating, but he’d much rather know why, or who had sent it. What he was supposed to do with it. Without all that, it was just an odd, abnormal quirk, something he’d spent the better part of two decades hiding from people who, once they got a whiff of this thing, would almost certainly insist he be committed (his own mother included).

Not that an institution—or heavy sedation—could stop the aftertastes from coming. Sometimes just hearing about dead people triggered them. Listening to some deceased’s name pronounced in reverent tones on the late-night news. Catching an overheard snippet of mournful conversation on the sidewalk. And there it would be: a message from beyond, unfurling on his tongue. Other times, there would be no prompt at all, like that morning: driving bumper-to-bumper and the idiot behind him leaning on his horn and Nirvana screeching on the radio and— voilà!— pork dumplings, dead ahead.

Kostya hadn’t stopped thinking about them. They’d been good. Like, really good. The kind of thing he wished he could taste again. He thought about the filling—it had just a touch of sweetness—across three boroughs as he delivered bottom-shelf booze. He thought about who would have eaten them cold, the wonton skins soggy, as he parked the truck in Uncle Vanya’s warehouse in Jersey City ( Vanya’s Victuals: Proud Purveyors of Fine Food and Spirits since 1992. Cash Only! ). He contemplated the hoisin and the rice wine vinegar as he rode the PATH back into Manhattan, as he wove through the tourists overrunning Times Square, as he trudged up the steps to his minuscule apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. He thought about the banality of the situation—cars, horns, traffic—and about the mad magic—ghosts, real actual fucking ghosts—as he showered, changed, and went back out to work his night shift dishwashing at The Library of Spirits.

And he was thinking about it now as he wiped another glass dry. There were a dozen clean, wet glasses lined up on the bar in front of him, dripping onto the heirloom oak. Probably making water stains.

Kostya selected another and smiled smugly to himself.

He wasn’t supposed to be in the front-of-house, and he liked sticking it to Kevin, who was absurdly easy to hate. Kevin wanted Kostya and his stained T-shirts in the back, where he wouldn’t interrupt the high-end gentlemen’s club vibe he’d crafted, right down to the self-congratulatory cocktail napkins ( brAVO, OLD CHAP! in Edwardian Script, without any hint of irony). When Kostya complained about having to wait until the bartenders had a break in service to haul the dirty glasses back to him (which sometimes wasn’t until the very end of his shift), Kevin smiled with all his teeth and said he’d be happy to let him out front if he’d look the part, which in Kevin’s world meant spending more on a tailored shirt than Kostya made in a week. Kevin was a real piece of New York shit.

Duncan, the Tuesday night bartender, may have been an SNL sketch of a Park Slope hipster—tailored vests, Dublin accent, well-oiled beard—but that also made him look like a guy you could trust to pour your twenty-four-dollar apothecary cocktail. But Duncan had bailed when his girlfriend’s water broke, so Kostya got upgraded to the bar— Kostya , who, in stark contrast to Duncan, looked like he could only be trusted with the kind of schlock you’d pay a buck fifty for from a Port Authority vending machine, and no promises he wouldn’t keep your change.

It hadn’t always been like that.

Not that he could ever have driven home handsome, but he used to be able to at least idle in the vicinity of serviceable. There was a certain appeal (boyish face; bright eyes; good teeth; dark hair) that had gotten him by in the past, and he’d always felt (even if he never acted on it) that if he just lost the extra weight in his jowls and gut (twenty years and fifteenish pounds’ worth of eating his feelings), he’d be a solid six (seven in dim lighting).

But the last few months had been rough, so rough that he really wasn’t fit for public consumption: dumped ( yet again), moping (continuously), ungroomed and unmotivated and seriously unhappy, the weight the least of his issues. His wardrobe (like the T-shirt he wore now—phlegm colored, with Uncle Vanya’s sickle-and-shot-glass branding on the chest) had suffered considerably when Alexis, his ex, left him. And his body, grown soft on beer and burgers, had never done well in the standard-issue humidity of Manhattan summers, but had rebelled spectacularly since he’d stopped exercising altogether (coinciding with Alexis’s departure and her custody of their dog, Freddie Mercury, whose walks had wholly comprised Kostya’s calisthenics). Just now, there were dark rings of sweat migrating down from his armpits, where even the antiest of perspirants couldn’t penetrate.

If Kevin were there, he would have murdered Konstantin on the spot, wrung him out with his own dishrag. But Kevin was probably doing lines of coke off somebody’s bikini wax in the Hamptons, so fuck him and fuck his rules. Kostya would dry all this right on the bar, in plain sight of anyone with the balls to stroll in and order five minutes before The Library closed, fuck you very much.

OUTSIDE THE BAR, in the stacks of Bibliomecca, a man paced back and forth, casing the spine of Fantasmagoriana . He passed its shelf four and a half times before his itchy fingers finally gave in and tugged the book forward. As he watched the bookcase shimmy away from the wall, revealing the dim staircase down to a chamber that smelled like old money and privilege and Scotch—weren’t those all the same things?—a wave of relief broke over him.

He’d promised a half-dozen people that he wouldn’t drink tonight, and he’d really meant it then, but he didn’t mean it now. They must have known, he told himself, that he wasn’t good for his word, not on this. Not on the anniversary. So there he was, minutes to midnight, scurrying down the steps to The Library of Spirits, three hundred and five days sober. Or was it three hundred and four?

Didn’t matter. He’d have to start the count over again in the morning. If he woke up.

WHEN KONSTANTIN HEARD the click-latch of shelving, his eyes darted up from the highball he was drying, barely believing his ears.

In the six months he’d been doing this job, not one person had shown up past eleven thirty. It was an unspoken rule. Speakeasies weren’t like the sleazy sports bars or collegiate watering holes where you could pop in for a single shot of Fireball on your way to your hairdresser’s Uber driver’s house party in Alphabet City. They were intimate spaces with exorbitant prices and cocktails that begged to be sipped, savored. He was dying to see what kind of person—money to burn, surely—would roll in at five-of only to lay down thirty bucks for a drink they’d barely get to taste. So imagine Kostya’s surprise when down the steps came a guy who looked—was it possible?—rougher even than he did.

The man was a rail. Tall. With dishwater eyes shining beneath a ball cap, and a huge, sad Steven Tyler mouth.

“Uh, hey?” he said.

“Hey.” It took Konstantin a second to catch himself. “I mean, hi! Hello! Welcome to The Library. Of Spirits.”

Steven Tyler’s long-lost twin blinked uncertainly at him. “You still open?”

He nodded at the pile of glasses.

“Yup. For the next”—Kostya consulted his watch—“three minutes.”

“Cool.” He slid a stool from beneath the bar and settled onto it, sniffing once, loudly. Kostya hoped he wasn’t getting comfortable; what he needed was some extra sleep before his delivery shift, not a late close because this dulcet brosky wanted a nightcap. “Uh, can I get a Manhattan?”

Oh, here we go.

“Yeah, so… I’m not actually a bartender. He had to take off. Family thing. I’m just the dishwasher.”

“But you can still make a drink, right?” There was an edge of desperation to his voice.

“I mean, I don’t technically have a bartending license—”

“So I didn’t get it from you.”

“And it might not taste right.”

“A risk I’m willing to take! Just hit me. Whatever’s easy.”

“Okay… but I still gotta charge you full price.”

The edges of Steven Tyler’s enormous mouth twitched. His eyes were fixed on Kostya’s hand—the highball glass he was polishing held midair—as if he was willing its movements telepathically toward the booze.

“You okay, man? You don’t look so—”

“Just get me a goddamn drink!” He was suddenly shouting, his eyes darting and frantic.

“Chill out, okay? I was just—”

“Now. Now! Before your fucking bar fucking closes and I can’t fucking toast to my poor, dead, beautiful wife!”

In the silence that followed, it felt like all the hot air had left the room. Particles of dust danced slowly in the space between them as Kostya and this sad, strange, large-lipped man gazed across the bar at each other, their stares combusting, gunpowder in a long, still moment before everything sparked.

Steven Tyler snatched a wet glass from Kostya’s lineup and smashed it on the floor. He shattered another and another, smithereens flashing like lightning. Kostya made a lunge for him, but a familiar puff of air hit the back of his throat, an aftertaste coming on. It happened so quickly, so clearly—like it was as desperate to make it into his mouth as this guy was for a drink—that Kostya froze in concentration.

It was a cocktail.

Light effervescence, slight tang. Champagne? Or, no. Drier. Cava. And gin. Lemon juice. Sweeter than sour. Meyers, maybe. And something floral. Elderberry and… and lavender? With mint? Not quite. Something that tasted like this candle his ex used to burn. Patchouli Dreams. Yes, patchouli. Did people even eat that? There was a smear of syrup, too, thick and sweet and tart. A cherry. A Luxardo cherry.

It seemed almost contrived that here they were, in a bar stocked with obscure tinctures and infusions, when someone—this guy’s dead wife, surely?—sent through an obscure cocktail made of just such tinctures and infusions.

Kostya could feel an electric tingle in his fingers. He had never before tried making the dishes he tasted. For one thing, though he was a championship eater, he rarely cooked, and for another, it had always seemed taboo, like chanting Bloody Mary into a mirror by moonlight. But this aftertaste—this drink, here, in this place—was a provocation as much as a libation. A dare.

Steven Tyler broke another glass.

“Quit it!” Kostya whined, and as the guy wound up to smash another snifter, he blurted out, “She liked Cava, right? Your wife?”

He set the snifter down so slowly it seemed like it might never arrive.

“How did you know that?” he asked, his enormous mouth a thin white line.

“I’m going to make you something,” Kostya answered instead. “Sit.”

He turned toward the illuminated shelves behind him and selected a number of jars and eyedropper vials. He gathered ice and a shaker. A jigger. A glass. A bottle of Bombay, but then, thinking it over, smacking his lips together although the aftertaste was gone, swapped for Hendrick’s. There was an open bottle of Cava in the wine fridge behind the bar, and—Kostya nipped a little taste—it was exactly right.

“I thought you weren’t a bartender?”

“I’m improvising,” Kostya answered.

Though that wasn’t entirely true. Something—someone—was guiding him. He’d always been able to pinpoint the ingredients, but now someone was illuminating the pale memories of the aftertaste for him, showing him exactly what he had to do with them, each step apparent. He layered the ingredients together, concocting the drink from the way it had danced around his mouth: the Luxardo cherry and a half teaspoon of its juice was drizzled directly into the bottom of the glass; the Cava and gin went into the shaker with a single drop of patchouli oil, a splash of St-Germain, and a healthy squeeze from the pipette of the preserved Meyer lemon jar. Konstantin added ice, and shook like he was James Bond.

“A Jack and Diet would’ve done the trick.”

“Shut up,” Kostya snapped, struggling to concentrate.

He strained the cocktail into a frosted Collins glass and used a drink stirrer to taste. Nearly there. He pinched a few grains of salt from the well behind the bar and sprinkled them on the drink’s surface. He didn’t even need to taste it again. His stomach gave a lurch, like a leap over a hill, and he just knew.

Kostya slid the glass across the bar.

Steven Tyler lifted it slowly to his lips, hand trembling, and closed his eyes.

“What’s it called?” he asked.

Kostya thought a moment. “A Spectral Sour.”

EYES STILL CLOSED, Charlie Katzowsky—no relation to Steven Tyler—took his first sip of alcohol in nearly a year. Tears streaked his face as he did it, making two straight paths to his chin. It wasn’t the alcohol—though his body did feel like it was unfolding, the tension melting away at the removal of the prohibition—but the drink itself, its flavors and notes and highs and lows. He hadn’t had much hope for this guy beyond being able to pour him a few fingers’ worth of whiskey, but this drink—it was poetry.

It tasted like Anna’s last year: sweet and bright and bubbling with life at the start, and then complicated, striated, serious and earthy and saline in drips, and then, at the tail, bitter and nauseous, bilious, whatever floral he’d put in there the exact same scent as her hospital room when things got bad, when she stopped responding to treatment and all the flowers people had sent started rotting at the same time, the air thick with waterlogged stems, suffocating, that awful smell. He took another sip, and he was back with his wife, alive, with her smile and the gap between her teeth, her ringing laugh, her short, sunshine hair dappled with light in his lap in the park, the blanket beneath them damp with dew, and he was reading something aloud, a New Yorker review, but then no! The salt! The way they’d both cried when she said goodbye, the stale wreaths and floral crosses overwhelming the funeral parlor, their petals curling as he wept. He’d taken a third sip when he heard the shlumpy mock-bartender yelp— Holy fucking fuckballs! —and opened his eyes in time to see it happening.

Anna was materializing on the edge of the bar.

She arrived in a million pinpricks of light, each one glowing and fading and glowing again like a field of atomic fireflies. Her hair and face and smile illuminated in ghostly green, beaming at him, all of her exactly how she’d looked at the very end—thin, pale, ready to let go—only absolutely transparent, so clear he could still see the dishwasher’s disbelieving face through hers, the rows of liquors and infusions and syrups behind where her neck and shoulders and breasts were coming into being. She was sitting on the bar, laughing—could he bottle the sound?—with her long, lanky legs dangling down, kicking with life, and when they bumped his knee he gave an anticipatory jump even though they passed right through.

He looked back down at the Spectral Sour, then through Anna’s slender arm at the wannabe mixologist, who was inching his way back into the kitchen.

“Hey!” he called. “What the hell was in this?”

But the coward retreated through the swinging door and was gone.

“Hey, loser,” Anna said then, and the familiar rasp of her voice—a voice he’d have paid anything to hear just one more time—snagged something in his chest.

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

She leaned toward him and whispered, “Your line is ‘Hey, bitch.’?”

IN THE SANCTUARY of The Library’s supply room, Konstantin was trying to wrestle his heart back down his throat. There was a lady ghost on the bar. A lady ghost on the bar. A lady ghost! On the bar!

Shit.

He took several deep breaths and then a swig of Tito’s from the family bottle.

Okay. Okay okay.

He’d made a drink. And his drink had brought someone back from the Dead. No need to panic. Nothing to see here.

No. Big. Deal.

He took another swig of vodka.

In a weird-ass twist of fate, the kind of bullshit plotline only a novelist could devise, he had somehow managed to prop open a portal, all I-see-dead-people style, only without the crazy color-coding. Was this what the ghosts had been waiting for all these years? A fucking snack?

Kostya clambered onto a step stool and peered through the smeared window of the swinging door. There she was, firework bright, gesticulating, sending sparks. He nudged the door open, just enough to hear.

They were arguing. About celebrities.

“… and I was just kind of expecting you to look more like Bradley Cooper by now.”

“You’re impossible, you know that? It’s not like you came back as Zoe Kravitz!”

“You still into her? You know there’s, like, no chance, right?”

He grinned. “Screw you.”

“I’d love to, babe, but I’m not exactly corporeal. Though I guess we cou-ld-d—” She suddenly jittered, her spangled image blinking in and out like a bad connection.

“Anna?” He gasped as she blipped out of sight. “ Anna! No!”

He was shouting, his hand trying to grab hold of hers, closing in on itself.

“No-no- no . Come back!”

“Drink!” her voice instructed, disembodied somewhere.

He fumbled for his glass—spilling half in the process—and took a big gulp.

A moment later, there she was again, all chartreuse and sparkles, a movieland extra from the Emerald City.

“Sorry!” she gasped. “You have to keep drinking. The taste of that thing—I think that’s what’s keeping me here.”

He frowned at her, dubious.

“Really? This? ”

“Don’t you remember it?” She gave him a meaningful look. “From Santorini? That place with the boats?”

His eyes lit up. “Oh. Oh. Really? That was this ?”

“Down to the garnish.”

“That was a good night.”

“The best.”

Something passed in the air between them, both breathlessly happy and devastatingly sad.

“But, okay? So we’ll make more.” (Backstage, Kostya was nodding. Yup. Game the system.) “That guy’s just hiding in the kitchen; I can see him spyi—”

But she shook her head. “I think it’s a one-shot deal.”

“What? Why?”

“Just a feeling. Like this is kind of a swan song. A final bow.”

“I don’t understand.”

She glanced at his glass. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have much time.”

“For what?”

“To make peace.”

He went pale. “Peace? Oh God, Anna—have you been haunted? All this time? I fucking knew we shouldn’t have scattered your ashes on the Belt Parkway!”

She shook her head.

“Oh, honey.” She was gentle as she said it. “I made peace with my death a long time ago. I came back for you . Because you would have taken those pills in your pocket if I hadn’t. Because you’re still holding on to us, and it’s ruining your life.”

He went pink. “I wasn’t actually going to do it.”

“Yeah, you were. And when you did—oh, Charlie. You’d miss so much more that’s waiting for you. Good stuff. Great stuff. Worth sticking around for.”

He blinked rapidly, fighting tears. “What kind of stuff?”

She gave him a smile. “You’ll have to wait here to find out.”

“I hate waiting.”

“I know. You couldn’t be patient to save your life. It’s why I came back.” She gave a little laugh, but when she blinked, a streak of molten emeralds cascaded down her face, beautiful tears. “To tell you to live. To let go. Because when you do, you’ll get to move on. And so will I.”

Her light dimmed again, a bulb dying, and Charlie lifted the glass and took a tiny sip. Konstantin could see its perfect synchrony, the way her skin lit up in time with the dip of the drink. She glanced, nervous, at his near-empty lowball, and spoke very quickly.

“Please. I have to get this out. What I said at the end, about never loving anyone else, about expecting the same from you—it was selfish. It was cruel. I was in a bad place, and I thought you’d figure that out once I was gone; I hoped you’d know me well enough to know that I didn’t mean it. That I wanted you to be happy.” She reached for his hand, but her fingers went right through. “But it’s been years and you haven’t even tried to meet anybody. And I know it’s because of me. I can feel the way you hold on, like we’re chained together. And you’re still young now, but if you don’t let me go you’re going to die young and alone. Or worse. You’ll die old and alone and you’ll have lived a miserable, empty life.”

He looked at her for a long moment, fine as crystal, something shattering in him.

“I really fucking miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

He stared into the bottom of his glass. “I don’t want to let you go.”

“I know.” Anna sighed, in a way that really did feel like she knew it. “But letting go doesn’t mean that you forget me. Just that you don’t let the memories hurt you anymore.”

“That sounds healthy. I hate it.”

“Remember that green drink? From the health food place?”

He cracked a smile, a faraway memory flickering over his face. “Friggin’ kale.”

“Friggin’ kale,” she agreed.

“But I—”

“No buts,” she said firmly. “Not unless they’re—”

“—yeah, yeah, a Kardashian’s, I know—”

“I would’ve gone with J.Lo.”

“Well, you’ve been dead a while, so.”

They smiled at one another, something unspoken passing between them as her light dimmed again, and he took another precious sip.

Kostya watched through the door, a gnaw in his chest. It was saccharine, sure, and he barely knew them, but still. The way this guy looked at her, even dead, you couldn’t help but feel for him. It was love like starving.

“It’s time,” she whispered.

“I don’t know how,” he whispered back.

“You just live. Like I’m not here. Like nothing you do can hurt me. Just let go,” she said, and reached a glittering jade hand out to him, cupped his face.

Charlie’s eyes fluttered closed, his chin buckling. Kostya could see him shiver, the sensation of her touch both real and imagined.

“It isn’t fair,” he gasped. “That you got sick. That I got to live.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty,” she told him, “for wanting your life. My death—none of it was your fault. I died, babe. I just… died. You didn’t kill me.”

Kostya felt something inside of him blister. He would have given anything, anything , to hear his dad tell him that.

Anna’s light dimmed again, but Charlie’s eyes were still closed, and he didn’t budge this time, didn’t reach for the glass.

“Char—” she began, but her final thought was cut short, her burst of light going dark right in the middle of his name.

Charlie opened his eyes. He blinked at the afterglow of where his wife’s spirit had just been, the retinal burn of her brilliant outline its own sort of ghost. His fingers fumbled with an orange pill bottle in his pocket. He flipped it open, stared long and hard at the contents, then spilled the tablets across the lacquered wood of the bar.

Kostya wondered what was going through his head. Whether Charlie believed what he’d just been told about his future. Whether he was mourning his wife, or his marriage, or the arrested possibilities of his own life. Whether he thought he’d hallucinated the whole thing. Whether he was still planning, after all that, to take those pills. The only thing Kostya knew for sure was that if this guy started popping painkillers, he’d have to step in, call an ambulance, save his life, et cetera. And that meant another late shift and a fuck-ton of questions, none of which he felt like fielding.

But instead of ingesting anything, Charlie just kept staring. When it felt like he couldn’t possibly sit in limbo anymore, like he’d been in that bar all his life, had been born on that obnoxious barstool, swaddled in those asinine cocktail napkins, Charlie picked up his Spectral Sour, and tipped its cherry back into his mouth.

He chewed. Tasted. Licked his lip.

And Anna blipped back into existence, her face streaked with phosphorescent tears, like someone had broken a glow stick. She looked surprised to be there.

“Charlie?” she whispered.

“How did you know?” he asked, voice reverberating with pain. “How’d you know I was really going to do it? I didn’t even know.”

“I know you like a book, babe.”

“You always did.” He nodded, sniffing. “Guess it’s time for a new chapter.”

They gazed at one another with the electric intensity of an imminent goodbye.

“Have an incredible life, Charlie. And when you’re done, find me in the next one, okay?”

She pressed her radiant mouth to his, fighting all the boundaries between them, time and space and life and death, to try to make him feel her there, the ghost of their love story, its arc complete.

When she pulled away, he lifted his empty glass.

“Here’s to you, bitch.”

“See you on the other side, loser.”

And he smashed the tumbler onto the floor, shattering the glass and spraying the minute particles of Spectral Sour across the speakeasy, releasing Anna along with them.

KOSTYA FELT LIGHT-HEADED. He had to grip the wall to steady himself. He waited until he stopped shaking (mostly) and then an extra couple minutes out of respect for the Dead before forcing himself to shuffle back out to the front-of-house.

He wanted to get Charlie’s hot take, to compare notes about what they had heard Anna say, to discuss the mechanics of the drink and the taste and how it had all worked because, hell, who else (except maybe Frankie; he lived for this supernatural shit) would believe this if he told them? He was exploding inside, aching to understand if he could do it again, if maybe, maybe , he could bring someone else back, just for a drink, a last conversation, an apology.

His father felt so close, suddenly. Manifest. Reachable.

But as Charlie began thanking him up and down— Look, I don’t know what that was or how you pulled it off, but you just saved my life. Thank you, man. Thank you. How can I repay you? —Kostya lost his nerve.

This—what had just happened—he’d done it, sure, but it wasn’t about him. It was bigger. Much bigger. Perilously large. And he’d have to uncover it on his own.

“It’s on me,” he told the Charlie formerly known as Steven Tyler. “Just, um—do me a solid? Don’t tell your friends.”