Chapter 76: Ephemeral

When a barrel of alcohol had been rolled over to his table, the other patrons of the bar began staring. When Syryn started downing Demon's Kiss like water, a crowd had formed around their table. Word had gotten out that a crazy teenager was attempting to empty a barrel of Demon's Kiss and that caused a surge of patrons that came exclusively to watch Syryn drink.

"S'ryn are ya sure yer not dyin' from alcohol poisonin'?" Sebastian's worried voice penetrated the wall of an alcohol-induced fog that surrounded his mind. Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn't have put himself in such a vulnerable position but Syryn had faith in Sebastian's ability to defend them both should the case arise.

"He shouldn't be drinking this much. Take him home, son." An older gentleman shook his head at the irresponsible behaviour that was being encouraged by the crowd.

"S'bash.. cheers!" Syryn raised his cup in the air to the boisterous calls of the other drinkers. "I'm a heeler. If I die then I'll kill myself." It made no sense to the sandy-haired mage who watched the teenager, unease taking the fun out of what should have been a good time.

"I'm beyond impressed," he told the younger man. "The barrel is more than half empty. You've made your point so let's stop drinkin', Syryn." The younger man's assurances meant nothing to Sebastian. That much alcohol was just a disaster waiting to happen.

"Shure.. in exchange for receiving a demon's kiss..you get your wish," Syryn nodded slowly feeling like his brain was a piece of rock sloshing around inside his skull.

More confusion for the mage. "What?" he leaned forward, "you want me to have a cup of that?"

The younger man violently shook his head and looked annoyed. "I've got a list.. of people I must kiss before I die. Your name... on it, S'bastian."

More amused than he had felt in weeks, Sebastian grabbed Syryn's cup and drank what was left of it. Enough was enough, the mage decided. A heavy pouch of gold was dropped on the table and it sounded weighted enough to pay for more than a barrel of alcohol.

"C'mon Syryn. Let's get out of here and I'll give you that kiss ya want so much." There was a wide smile on Sebastian's face and it was because Syryn was leaning on the chair, posed like a heavily pregnant woman.

A quiet curse slipped out when the younger man felt a stir of nausea. Syryn promised himself never to drink so much again. Never. A sense of deja vu hit him but it was gone as soon as he felt a strong arm support his swaying body.

"This is what ya get for drinkin' like an alcoholic fish, S'ryn. A-mu will have my hide when he hears about this, and he will hear about it too."

"Awww he's not gonna drink no more?"

"Let him empty the barrel!"

"I put a bet on the boy drinking it all up! Bring him back here!"

Sebastian pushed through the crowd of drunk sweaty men. With some effort, Syryn was finally out of the bar and into the crisp night air. The younger mage was just dead weight in Sebastian's arms.

"Eos.." Syryn weakly moaned. "Please.. let me die.." He had underestimated the alcohol tolerance of his younger body.

Sebastian shook his head at the tottering teen. He then hauled Syryn onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The younger mage moaned again when his vision swam and nausea hit him like a brick to his face.

"Let's take a walk to Rum district. Hopefully, you'll be sober by then."

"Give me.. ntox"

"You want Untox?"

"Nngh..tox"

With care, Sebastian placed Syryn back onto his feet. He allowed the younger man to lean on his chest while he felt around his pockets for the cloth bag where he had a pill. Sebastian found it and was dismayed when he saw that it was empty.

"That's strange," he told himself.

Syryn swung his head and looked up at the mage who was frowning.

"Whatstrange?"

"I remember checkin' and findin' a pill before we left that night, S'ryn." Sebastian held the bag upside down but nothing came out of it. "Yer outta luck. You'll hafta ride this one out raw."

Syryn sank to his feet and squatted with his head between his knees. If he was about to throw up, he didn't want any of it splashing onto his shoes.

"Yer hammered, S'ryn. Ya couldn't have asked fer a kiss at a better time. I don't think I could look ya in the eye fer it if you weren't so out of it." The amused smile played on his lips again. "Say, did ya also kiss A-mu?" Because Sebastian couldn't think of a list of kissable men that did not include Artemus.

Syryn felt a sense of crisis hitting him. To lie or to lie? Ignore him and pretend you didn't hear, anything, experience whispered. Eyes closed, he breathed in deeply, in and out, in and out.

"Guess that answers it." A hand gently turned his face around and Syryn felt the lightest brush of lips on his mouth. It was just as chaste as the one Artemus had given him. The cool air was back on his lips when Sebastian freed him. "That good enough for the list?"

He received a nod from the morose teen.

"Guess we'll hafta sit here till yer feelin' better then."

About 20 minutes later.

"You call that a kiss? A dead fish could do better." The final vestiges of intoxication had left his system. Syryn got to his feet and was rewarded with a grin from the older mage.

"If ya wanted a passionate kiss then ya should've said so," Sebastian replied. The smile on his face was not the sort that could be flaunted in polite company. "But, yer only 16, S'ryn. I have a.. sister your age, met her when I was travellin'. When I think about a guy my age hittin' on her- well, ya get it right?"

"You and mu-mu are made for each other." And he meant it too. Sebastian's easy laughter and laid back nature was the perfect foil to the professor's stiff and cool demeanour.

"Ya think so? Artemus would disagree, but thanks for saying that." Sebastian replied with a chuckle.

"So what did you say about the Untox pill?" Syryn asked, an air of seriousness back to his speech.

Sebastian was silent for a moment as he struggled to voice what might have sounded stupid if it wasn't for the squid being an equally stupid thing he'd already blabbed about.

"I might've taken the pill sometime when we were in Rum district. Either that or it disappeared... somehow."

Syryn raised his brows at the mage. "You kept telling me you didn't take the pill. What changed your mind?"

"I swear I had one on me when we left your home, S'ryn. It was there. And now it isn't."

Syryn frowned at the mage who kept telling him things that could not be proved. "Show me your pillbox?"

Sebastian handed the small cloth bag over to Syryn and it was empty. "I made sure to check before we left. I had it in there. I swear on my magic." The strings on the tiny bag were drawn so tight it couldn't have slipped out. Sebastian had also checked for holes but the silk was perfect in its form.

The situation had gotten even more complicated. Syryn widened the mouth of the bag and took a sniff inside to confirm that it indeed used to hold the deep maroon pill that had a distinctly sweet smell to it.

"Why do you not remember eating it?"

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"Maybe I was so drunk I forgot?" Even Sebastian didn't believe the words he had just spoken.

"If you had the presence of mind to take an Untox then you weren't drunk enough to purge the memory of taking it."

"Then what's wrong with me, S'ryn? Am I still sick or am I feeling the side effects of whatever happened with the pregnancy?" The mage had on a crestfallen look that bothered Syryn. As Sebastian's healer, it was an affront to his prided abilities.

"We will go home right now and examine every inch of you!" Syryn suddenly declared.

"After we visit Rum district."

"Right, after we get the squid. But we're not even drunk anymore, Sebastian."

"It's a squid, S'ryn. Ya think it can check yer blood alcohol content? Just act drunk."

"It can go through walls, Sebastian. I won't be surprised if it can actually gauge drunkenness."

When the two fake drunks made a circuit of Rum district, they had been prepared to find the squid, not a dead mage.

"Another victim of the squid?"

Like its previous victims, the mage was unharmed on the outside. A big rat came scurrying out of the man's wide sleeve and it startled Syryn out of his unfocused stare on the corpse.

"We should let the mage hunters know," Sebastian said to him.

From between his barely parted lips, Syryn could see a fading bluish glow that he would have missed if he hadn't been paying attention to the mouth. He knelt before the corpse and pried open the already stiffening jaw. "He's been dead at least three hours," Syryn informed Sebastian. The glow had disappeared like it was never there. He conjured a will O the wisp and it hovered just above the waxy face of the corpse.

"What are you looking for?" Sebastian asked almost too quietly.

"I saw something glowing in his mouth."

The younger mage frowned and took a sniff close to the mouth. "He doesn't smell like alcohol," Syryn's gaze flickered to Sebastian's gold eyes which were eerie in the light of the will 'O' the-wisp. They held eye contact, both wondering if the theory about the squid catching drunk mages had just been shot.

"This could be an outlier," Sebastian offered.

"But why would it suddenly change its behavioural pattern? This place is always crawling with at least a few drunkards every night. It chose a sober mage tonight for what?"

Sebastian blinked as he had suddenly thought of something. "What if we're all wrong about it picking drunk mages?"

Syryn was astute enough that he immediately understood what Sebastian was alluding to. It was like sticking a hand in a bag filled with 10 pink balls and one yellow ball. The probability of blind picking a pink ball was 10/11. Of course, the squid caught only the drunk ones! This was Rum district at an odd hour of the night. Which sober person would take a casual midnight walk in this area? 9/10 Rum district roamers were intoxicated people going home after a night spent in the company of the drink.

Syryn sighed and exchanged another long look with Sebastian. "So what else are we wrong about?"

"Could be everything? I don't understand where this thing came from. We are near the centre of Elysium. How did it appear here? Why? And where does it hide during the day?"

So many questions and they were still none the wiser about why the creature even attacked mages. Syryn forced back a feeling of revulsion and gingerly stuck his fingers in the mouth of the corpse. With his eyes closed, he ignored the nasty feeling of rooting around a dead man's mouth and searched for what it was that had glowed.

"Ah," he breathed out when his finger brushed past a smooth lump that felt different from everything else his skin had come into contact with. He pinched it between two fingers and pulled out what appeared to be a black coloured lump of organic matter. It was the size of a thumbnail.

"What is that?" Sebastian crouched down beside him and stared at the lump on Syryn's palm.

"I have no idea.."

"I hope ya don't catch a disease from it."

Syryn threw Sebastian a dirty look. As if he wasn't already squeamish enough about handling a possibly toxic material with his bare hands, the mage had vocalised the fear that Syryn was barely keeping leashed.

"Let's go home, Sebastian. I need to go back and study this thing." When it came to the squid, evidence of its existence seemed ephemeral. Syryn wanted to extract information from the lump before it became as useless as everything else had proved to be.

"We should report this to the mage hunters," Sebastian argued.

Syryn was opposed to it because it was a waste of their time. "Like all the others, someone's going to find the body in the morning and it'll get reported. Take me home, Sebastian. This is more important."

The older man silently nodded. Together, they headed off to where Sebastian's carriage was parked.

When Syryn was back in his workroom, his mind was heavy from the abuse it had taken. Two nights of straight-up drinking with almost three hours of sleep between them had the alchemist feeling a harsh burn in his eyes. His paranoid self was convinced that it was a symptom of some disease he had caught from fingering a dead man's mouth.

"S'ryn!" The younger man near jumped out of his skin.

"What?!" He asked, eyes wide open in surprise.

Sebastian scowled at him. "I called your name thrice, S'ryn. Are ya tired? You hafta get some sleep. I can't wrap my mind around the fact that ya haven't already keeled over from exhaustion."

"You're right. I'm ready to fall into a coffin," he mumbled. "Let me just-" Syryn blinked at the glass tube he had just taken out from his satchel.

"It's gone," he numbly said. He had stored the black lump inside it when they were at Rum district.

"Of course it's gone. Everything related to the squid just- disappears! What is this thing made out of?"

For once in his life, the dumbstruck half-demon had not even an inkling of an answer. Nothing in the old tomes he'd read from cover to cover had ever mentioned a creature so elusive and mind-boggling.

"I'm going to bed." Syryn began washing his hands with Salem's highest grade of alcohol-based disinfectant.

"Lend me a sleeping roll for tonight. I don't want to go home at this hour."

"My bed is big enough for three people. There's no need to act like a gentleman, Sebastian. We're both too tired to try anything weird anyway."

"For all ya know, I could be a predator pretendin' to be a gentleman so I can catch ya in a vulnerable position," the mage told the younger man as they walked to Syryn's room.

"Between the two of us, Seb, I'm the actual predator. You have no idea what you're going to bed with." Syryn's smile was positively evil. He let down the illusion and stared through indigo eyes that were especially pretty but sinister in the patch of moonlight that they stood under.

Sebastian regarded him with some wariness. "Is there something yer tryin' to tell me, S'ryn?"

The teen smirked and turned away, realising he had just found an interesting avenue for entertainment. Would Sebastian guess correctly? And how would he react to it?

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