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“Good. I’m Jonathon.”

“I’m Ph-Patrick.”

Phury was glad they didn’t shake. He didn’t have a paper towel, and his pockets were making his own sweaty palms worse.

The ECCC’s basement had cement-block walls that were whitewashed in cream; a floor carpeted in low-napped, high-traffic dark brown; and a lot of fluorescent lights in the low ceiling. Most of the thirty or so chairs that were arranged in a fat circle had someone parked in them, and when Jonathon headed to a vacancy at the center, Phury nodded a see-you-later and took one as close to the door as he could.

“It’s nine o’clock,” a woman with short black hair said. Getting to her feet, she read off a piece of paper: “Everything that’s said here, remains here. When someone is talking, there is no side conversation or cross talk. . . .”

He didn’t hear the rest of it because he was too busy checking out who was there. No one else was wearing Aquascutum like he was, and they were all humans. Each one of them. Age range was early twenties to late forties, maybe because the time of day was convenient for folks who worked or went to school.

Staring at the faces, he tried to figure out what each one had done to end up here, in this coconut-smelling, stark basement with their butts planted on black plastic.

He didn’t belong here. These were not his people, and not just because none of them had fangs and a problem with sunlight.

He stayed anyway, because he had nowhere else to go, and he wondered whether that could be true for some of them as well.

“This is a speaker group,” the woman said, “and tonight Jonathon is going to talk.”

Jonathon stood up. His hands were still working the remnants of the paper towel, rubbing back and forth over what was now an impacted Bounty cigar.

“Hi, my name is Jonathon.” A pattering of hellos bounced around the room. “And I’m a drug addict. I . . . I, ah, I used cocaine for about a decade and lost just about everything. I’ve been to jail twice. I’ve had to declare bankruptcy. I lost my house. My wife . . . she, ah, she divorced me and moved out of state with my daughter. Right after that, I lost my job as a physics teacher because I just was going from bender to bender.

“I’ve been clean since, yeah, last August. But . . . I still think about using. I live in transitional housing right now because I got through rehab and I have a new job. Started two weeks ago. I’m teaching in a prison, actually. The prison I was an inmate in. Math, it’s math.” Jonathon cleared his throat. “Yeah . . . so, ah, one year ago tonight . . . one year ago tonight I was in an alley downtown. I was making a buy from a dealer and we got caught. Not by the cops. By the guy whose territory we were in. I got shot in the side and the thigh. I . . .”

Jonathan cleared his throat again. “As I lay there bleeding, I felt my arms get moved around. The shooter took my coat and my wallet and my watch, then he pistol-whipped me in the head. I really . . . I really shouldn’t be here right now.” There were a lot of uh-huhs murmured. “I started coming to meetings like this because I had nowhere else to go. Now I choose to come here because I want to be where I am tonight more than I want the high. Sometimes, sometimes that’s only by a slim margin, so I don’t look into the future any further than next Tuesday at nine o’clock. When I come here again. So, yeah, that’s where I’ve been and where I am.”

Jonathon sat back down.

Phury waited for people to pile on with the questions and the comments. Instead, someone else stood up. “Hi, my name is Ellis. . . .”

And that was it. Person after person testifying about their addiction.

When it was nine fifty-three, according to the clock on the wall, the black-haired woman stood up. “And now for the Serenity Prayer.”

Phury rose to his feet with the rest of them and was shocked when someone reached for his hand.

His palm wasn’t wet anymore, though.

He didn’t know whether he was going to make it long-haul. The wizard had been with him a lot of years and knew him like a brother. The one thing he did know was that next Tuesday