There was an electric blue frog bouncing around the room. Sherlock couldn’t take his eyes off it. Its movements were erratic and clumsy, and once or twice it ran headlong into a wall, and there would be laughter. Sherlock didn’t laugh – he observed.
The room was hazy from cigarette smoke, but for the people in the room it was hazy in other ways too. Time was hazy. There were maybe five of them in there. Every time Sherlock counted that number seemed to change, but five was the average. Raz was sprawled out across a dirty couch, his gecko curled up in the hood of his sweater. He was the only one in the room Sherlock knew. The rest were a jumble of faces and strange animals with toxic blood.
Raz had smoked some pot earlier and that was all. He was still a kid, the others had said, he wasn’t old enough for anything else. He’d made a feeble protest but he was afraid of anything else. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see that.
It was a slightly different high than he’d had at home. The principle of the drug was similar to cocaine, Sherlock deduced, but it was engineered differently – everything was slightly off in this place. Still he felt the familiar rush of energy and it felt good, but maybe he should have been watching the people. He couldn’t stop watching the frog.
It hopped manically from side table to armchair to windowsill and back to side table, making its rounds through the room while its human did another line. The other daemons in the room were antsy, making noises and shifting about, but the frog was bounding with energy. Maybe her human had had too much.
He was laughing. Sherlock could hear him, but he didn’t look. He watched as the frog sprang onto Raz’s shoulder, then leapt towards the coffee table.
The smoke in the room was thick. A woman got up to open a window, leaning out to blow smoke into the night air.
The frog was a blur of bright blue, she leapt onto her human’s head. He was laughing still.
She made her way again around the room, and again onto the windowsill, and then out.
Sherlock watched the spot where it had been, dully remembering that they were three flights up, that there was nothing to stop the daemon’s fast descent towards the pavement below. Her human was laughing, but god it must have hurt like hell. Or maybe the cocaine dulled that connection.
It felt like ages but it was only a few seconds. No one was laughing anymore because the frog hit the ground and her human collapsed and it was too late to save him. Lips as blue as his daemon.