Chapter One part 1

It was well past bedtime, but Thom's eyes were wide open.

The house was quiet, or as quiet as it could be. Both his parents were snoring no more than three feet away, to start with. The house itself was squeaking under the rough autumn wind, the wooden shutters of the window clattering loudly every few moments. Then there was the fact that the city itself was never asleep. People you would never see in daylight were out and about. They were eating, drinking, laughing, working and trading like everyone else. Yet each of these actions had a bit of a dark edge.
They ate things that were either stolen or rotten, they drank liquids that could intoxicate you until you couldn't feel the cold biting off your toes anymore, their laugh was raspy and too loud to be sincere, and as for the work and trade... well. Instead of selling goods they sold their own body, or if they had the power of the leader, other people's bodies. They traded in stolen goods, illegal goods, goods that were frowned upon by the Church and foreign goods that came from so far away that they hadn't even been named yet.

Although Thom had only just turned fifteen, he already knew a great deal about all this. In fact, the folded piece of paper he was clutching in his palm contained some of those goods.

After waiting twice as long as he had promised himself he would, Thom finally moved. He slowly, so slowly, lifted up a tip of the ragged blanket, holding his breath when Andy suddenly moaned in his sleep. False alarm. Thom's heart was beating twice as fast as normal when he slid out of the bed and tiptoed away, around the table, towards the smoldering bits of wood that had been a roaring fire earlier that evening. Shivering, he shook the contents of the piece of paper into his left palm.

It looked different from last time. Thom held his hand closer to the red glow of the wood in the fireplace. Definitely bits of green there. Thom hesitated for a moment. For all he knew it was pure poison, for all he knew he could die a slow, painful death doing this. Like the new thing, the other kind. He'd heard of people not waking up after taking it. It wasn't called 'Saint Anthony's Fire' for nothing, he mused.
Nah. If he didn't try this, he'd never hear the end of it and be called a wuss until the end of days.

Thom unconsciously sucked his lower lip into his mouth as he started dividing the stuff over the scrap of paper, then pressing them together with nail-bitten, stubby fingers and tried to roll the paper around them. It took him four times to get it right, and by the time he had the little stick in between his fingers, he wasn't all that cold anymore. With a glance towards his snoring parents and practically comatose brother, he took a dry leaf from out of the fireplace corner and pressed it to a still quite actively smouldering bit of wood. Within a few moments, it caught fire. Thom quickly put the stick between his lips, held the end in the flames and sucked.

Thom yelped as quietly as he could when the flames ran out of leaf and decided to try his fingers instead. In doing so, he let the stick drop out of his mouth and onto the floor. Cursing inwardly, he scooped it up from the floor - holy baby Jesus, what if the entire house caught fire? - and sucked on it again. The tip lit up in the dark and Thom let out a sigh of relief, not yet inhaling the smoke that was filling his mouth but blowing it in the direction of the fireplace. He got up, grabbed a coat from a chair nearby the door, carefully slid through a narrow opening of the door and set foot in the world that was Ghent at Night.

Trying to find a nice, quiet place to smoke, not too far away yet far enough from the house, he passed a group of old men gathered around a makeshift fire in the middle of the road. Most of them were looking rather grim, except a few, who were holding an animated conversation Thom couldn't pick up. Their accent sounded peculiar, foreign yet close enough to Dutch to notice the similarities. Thom slid the hood of his coat over his head and buried himself in the fabric. They couldn't possible find out that it was in fact a 15 year old kid wandering around the city on his own by night. He might not survive, or if he would, he didn't want to know in which conditions. The moment he walked past, as close to the buildings as possible, a few men noticed his figure and stared him down. It was only when he had practically passed them, that the others turned and sniffed the air curiously. Thom didn't have to think twice and ran as if his life depended on it; because it quite possibly did.

When he finally dared to look back over his shoulder, he was relieved to see that they hadn't followed him. Less relieved, however, to realise that he'd entered a part of the city that he didn't really know all that well. Wisely deciding that it was best to not go any further, he slumped against a brick wall, hidden from the street view by a large oak standing in front of it. He took another sip of his little tobacco stick, like he had been doing even whilst running, to see if it was still going strong. The good thing was that it was still lit, the bad thing that he'd apparently wasted nearly a third up until now. After glancing around him one last time, he took a deep, long drag and let the smoke fill his lungs.

Immediately, his throat closed up while tears were forming in his eyes. Thom pinched his nose, desperate not to cough and reveal his hiding spot. After a moment, he drew in a shaky breath, trying to suppress the tickly feeling in his lungs. Then he felt it: a slight waver in the atmosphere, like a ripple gliding through a water surface. He opened his eyes and for a moment saw the world moving a bit. Excited, he took another drag, carefully, and a slight smile formed on his face when he noticed that it happened again, stronger this time.

By the time the glowing end had nearly reached his fingernails, Thom was smiling broadly, letting the sense of giddy happiness wash over him without any restraint. The sky was turning from dark to bluish, and holding onto the last straw of responsibility, he decided that it was time to go home. What he hadn't counted on was the state of his body: when he lifted himself up, he nearly slammed into the oak tree, at the last moment deciding that hugging it was a better idea. He let out a high-pitched giggle, forgetting his previous anxiousness at being found out. He clung onto the trunk for dear life, whilst trying to compose himself and make the world stop spinning around him (or less fast, at least) and then staggered home, miraculously finding his way back without much effort, or so he assumed later.