Sacrificial Magic
Sacrificial Magic
Stacia Kane
Enter a world of danger, ghosts and magic in the fourth book of the fantastic Downside Ghosts series.Ghosts; ghouls; things that go bump in the night. Chess has seen them all in her role as a witch and ghost hunter.Right now life is going surprisingly well for Chess Putnam. Her bank balance is healthy, she’s pretty sure she can call Terrible her “boyfriend”, and the last few months have been devoid of anyone trying to kill her.So when Chess is ordered by an infamous crime boss – who also happens to be her drug dealer – to use her powers as a witch to solve a grisly murder involving dark magic, she is unsurprised; she knew the recent calm wouldn’t last. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Chess’ ex lover Lex, son of a rival crime lord, is trying to re-ignite the sparks between them.Plus there’s the little matter of Chess’ real job as a ghost hunter for the Church of Real Truth; investigating reports of a haunting at a school in the heart of Downside. Someone seems to be taking a crash course in summoning the dead—and if Chess doesn’t watch her back, she may soon be joining their ranks.As Chess is drawn into a shadowy world of twisted secrets and dark violence, it soon becomes clear that she’s not going to emerge from its depths without making the ultimate sacrifice.
STACIA KANE
SACRIFICIAL MAGIC
Book Four of the Downside Ghosts
To the real
Chelsea Mueller,
with thanks
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u3818331c-6a6b-586a-8220-8715f4995ee3)
Dedication (#ub4c0f74b-c8e9-5776-b5a3-47cec1d742bf)
Chapter One (#u8ccf37ac-b7da-59e0-8da4-d5f79f5fd3a8)
Chapter Two (#uaf4ab7af-94a2-5df2-809c-b7a8bac49e6e)
Chapter Three (#u5508ed86-fa52-5657-8169-e3ef56598d58)
Chapter Four (#ufca4abbf-0819-55c0-ab43-8ef8dec1ab63)
Chapter Five (#u6e277778-2182-5267-8393-d6fcf34bc19e)
Chapter Six (#u897598ab-10a9-55f9-bdaa-2ae9dfaef655)
Chapter Seven (#u3a1f2c10-5d22-5d4a-993d-73186b96628b)
Chapter Eight (#u85540df7-7614-5833-bbd8-cc0656077998)
Chapter Nine (#u107feb55-c1a1-56fb-a83d-133dec6ac5c9)
Chapter Ten (#u3e63f435-eee5-5a66-b840-8aa59d228f7b)
Chapter Eleven (#uc96de715-4e99-5528-9582-795beaa34775)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Stacia Kane (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Only the bravest fight the dead.
—Grand Elder Thomas, speech to graduating students, 2007
Had the roof over her head not been a broken mess, shredded insulation and pieces of tile dangling like the rotting innards of the living thing it had once been, she wouldn’t be getting hit on the head with cold droplets of water at odd, annoying intervals.
That would have made her happier. Or at least not quite as unhappy. Nothing could have made her happy at that moment, when she was about to wander down a dark hall where a ghost lurked and hopefully manage to freeze it before it sliced off her head or stabbed her or whatever the hell else it planned to do. The odds of a ghost in this corpse of a building not having a weapon were—well, hell, there were no odds at all. Only the dumbest ghost on the planet wouldn’t have found some sort of weapon in this ramshackle palace of destruction, where her boots sloshed through a good two inches of foul water, broken glass, metal shards, pulped books, and who the fuck knew what else.
“Think it’s in there, Chess?” Riley Martin, a brand-new Debunker, pointed toward the mouth of the hallway ahead. In there the ceiling had apparently maintained its integrity; the hall was only shadows, a dark tunnel straight to the grave. Or rather the Crematorium, and the City of Eternity. None of which really sounded like a fun way to end her evening.
But neither did leaving the ghost here to kill other people, or telling the Church she’d decided to fuck off to the bar instead of doing her job. “Probably. No, don’t turn your light on yet. Try not to if you can help it. Let’s go stand right inside until our eyes adjust, okay?”
Riley nodded. Chess followed him, neither of them bothering to keep their movements quiet. If they could somehow attract the spirit, draw it out, that would be easier and safer. The last thing either of them wanted to do was to walk into some kind of ambush.
Fucking Lamaru. Fucking Arthur Maguinness-Beldarel shithead. If they hadn’t played their stupid power games and set a bunch of ghosts free the month before, she wouldn’t be out here doing something that technically wasn’t her job but that every Church employee capable of doing it had to do at least one night a week when they weren’t otherwise engaged or on a case.
Which Chess wasn’t. Damn it.
They stopped in the shadows; the almost imperceptible breeze hadn’t penetrated there at all, so the horrible ammoniac stench, full of mold and worse, assaulted her nose the second they entered the hall. Her eyes stung.
But more than that, a warm tingling sensation began crawling up her arms and across her chest as her magical tattoos reacted to the presence of a spirit. A ghost was definitely nearby. She looked at Riley. “Are you feeling it?”
“I—I don’t know. My skin feels kind of funny.” What little of his face she could make out didn’t look happy.
“You get used to it.”
A flash of light down the hall, so fast she only saw it out of the corner of her eye. But it had definitely been light, and it had definitely been the bluish light of a ghost.
Riley’s breath caught. This was the time that, if she was a normal sort of person, she’d be able to say something reassuring and at the same time cool, the kind of thing that would make Riley feel brave but not patronized. And then they’d both sort of smile and head off down the hall to Banish that ghost.
But she was not that kind of person, and the last thing she had any idea how to do was reassure Riley and make him feel good about himself. Cliché was probably about the best she could do.
“You’ll be fine,” was the one she gave him, and to her surprise it seemed to work. “Come on.”
Every step they took, every slow step through the soup of bacteria and rot sucking at her boots brought them closer to that faint death-glow. She’d mixed some graveyard dirt and asafetida earlier, stuck it in a bag in her pocket; now she reached inside and grabbed a small handful. Ready.
They moved a few steps in silence broken only by the occasional plonk of water dripping from the ceiling behind them. Something rattled. Chess spun around to look but saw nothing.
Ghosts weren’t the only things that might hang out in abandoned buildings at night. They weren’t in Downside, no, but they weren’t exactly in the nicest area, either. This building, which had once housed offices of some kind and a warehouse, stood just a few streets into Cross Town, a whole city block of condemned cement with a ten-foot chain-link fence around it.
A chain-link fence with holes in it. She wondered how many neighborhood kids had made this their weekend hangout until two nights before, when one of them met a gruesome death just inside the front doors.
Another tiny glimpse of light.
“It is a ghost, right?” Riley whispered. “I mean, I feel like there’s a ghost here, but could that be something else?”
“It could be anything else. But it’s probably a ghost, yeah.”
The comforting weight of her knife sat in her pocket. Debunkers weren’t supposed to be armed. Fuck that. She’d rather take her chances with Church discipline than with anyone or anything she might come across in a place like this.
She probably wouldn’t need the knife anyway. Damn it, the kid’s nervousness was making her twitch, and as much as she sympathized with him she really didn’t need that at the moment. It had been a good two hours since she’d taken her pills, and while she still had time—she wasn’t worried—places like this didn’t help her keep calm. All that filth, all those germs, soaking into the bottoms of her jeans, brushing against her skin, her hair, invading her lungs. People caught diseases from places like this, especially after a rain.
Or they got their throats sliced open by ghosts armed with rusted shards of metal or whatever the fuck else. She edged her way down the hall, her back pressed against that gross excuse for a wall just because she couldn’t really see well enough to walk down the center. The glow got stronger with every step. Her fist clenched around the dirt.
Another plonk. Another rattle. Something like a whisper, that could have been a voice or the sound of a makeshift blade leaving its sheath of soaked pulp or crumbled cement. The glow from a doorway another ten feet or so down the hall.
In its reflection, Riley’s face looked even paler. The only thing keeping hers from looking the same—assuming it didn’t, which she was just going to go ahead and assume—was the fact that she was still just high enough to be not quite as scared as she should be. And the fact that she was an absolute fucking expert at lying to herself.
But with every step closer to that glowing doorway, that ability drew just a tiny bit farther away from her.
Whatever. Wasn’t like she could just turn around and run. So she took one last deep breath and spun around the doorframe with her arm ready to throw the dirt at the first dead thing that moved.
And found herself staring at three teenagers, who were obviously very alive, and who obviously thought they’d done something very clever, and who should have been thanking the gods who didn’t exist that Riley was there too because if he hadn’t been she would have been very tempted to beat the shit out of them with the nearest heavy object.
“What are you doing here?” Riley asked, but it was obvious from the stunned looks on their faces. Whoever they’d been expecting to walk through that door, it wasn’t two Church employees.
One of them glanced at the other two, and cleared his throat when they didn’t speak up. Fucking cowards. “We, uh, we thought you were some friends of ours.”
Damn it, why were her tattoos still tingling, if a ghost wasn’t in this room? This didn’t feel right, not at all. She needed to get those little bastards out of there as quickly as possible. “You need to leave, okay? Time to go.”
“We’ve been in here for like an hour,” the kid replied. The flashlight he’d hidden under his dark-blue jacket still glowed, made him glow. That’s where that bluish light had come from, she guessed, but nothing about these kids should have been setting off the alarms in her tattoos. Something else was around, waiting. “We haven’t seen anything.”
“Oh, right. That must mean nothing is here. This is such a small building.” She stepped sideways from the door; Riley, she was pleased to see, had already taken a step back into the hall. “Go on, get out of here.”
“But we can help you,” the first guy started.
Started, but didn’t get to finish. Because before the last word hit the air, the ghosts—who’d clearly been waiting for just this sort of noisy fun—slipped through the walls. Four of them.
And thanks to the debris and shit on the floor, including what appeared to be a damned cigarette lighter sitting on top of a backpack tucked against one of the drier sections of wall, they were ghosts with weapons.
Chess started to throw her dirt, put as much power behind it as she could, but missed as the teenagers freaked out and started running. One of them knocked her against the wall; another bounced off her and tumbled back. The third … the third had a face half obscured by blood, presumably from the chunk of concrete the ghost beside it was readying for another swing.
The kids screamed. Riley yelled something. Chess fought the rising tides of fear and irritation and grabbed another handful of dirt.
Go for the concrete-wielding ghost first, because if it smacked that kid again there’d be a nice layer of brains added to the general slime and mess on the floor. She managed to freeze that one, glanced around to see Riley doing the same with another.
That left two. Two ghosts and three teenagers who really should have fucking known better crowded into that small space. There was barely room to move in there, much less do anything else, and two of the ghosts were still mobile.
Flames erupted in the corner of her vision. That backpack had apparently been filled with papers—of course it was, they were high school kids—and one of the ghosts had set the whole thing alight. It threw the flaming sack at her.
She ducked, and slipped in the vile sludge covering the floor. Eeew. Cold water—and who knew what else, probably blood and urine and vomit—soaked her jeans.
Worse, while she’d been distracted, the other moving ghost had found a length of pipe and used it to try to pop off one of the teenagers’ heads like a ball off a tee.
At least that’s what she assumed had happened. The flashlight in the one guy’s jacket had gone out, or been smashed. The unearthly, hideous glow of the four spirits provided the room’s only illumination, giving everything the unreal look of a nightmare.
Another garbled yell from Riley. She barely heard him over the sound of her breath in her ears and the shouts of the teens. One of them slipped just as she had. The ghost raised its pipe.
Graveyard dirt still in her fist. She threw it, threw her power, too. The ghost froze and dropped the pipe; it clattered on the kid’s back, knocked him down into the floor sewage.
Riley had managed to freeze the fourth ghost. Not that it mattered that much. They wouldn’t stay frozen forever; ten minutes tops. Riley and Chess needed to get passports on the things, and they needed to get a salt circle down as fast as possible—that would be fun, in the wet sludge.
And they needed to get those motherfucking kids out of there before the scent of their blood, the taste of their terror in the air, attracted more dead. Who knew how many there might be in the area? She and Riley had been told to expect two at the most, and here there were four. Like a deadly double-score bonus on the world’s worst game show.
Well, hey, at least she got to win something, right?
“Riley, get them out of here.” She managed to stand, cringing at the feel of her nasty wet jeans touching her skin, and started digging through her bag for her salt. “I’ll try to get a circle down.”
“I don’t think I can,” Riley said.
“What?” Had some of the salt spilled when she fell? She’d thought she packed more.
“I don’t think I can.”
How could he not shoo a couple of injured kids out of the building? They were probably desperate to leave anyway. She looked up at him, annoyed, but what she saw changed the annoyance to the sort of oh-fuck-no feeling she was all too familiar with.
He stood against the wall, his face pale, his body still, staring at the ghosts with fear-wide eyes. “I don’t think I can, Chess. I’m sorry, but I—look at what they did, look at those kids.”
“Yeah, but Riley, they’re frozen now, right? They can’t move. Let’s just—I’ll lay the circle and you start the ritual, okay? Or you lay the salt. The sooner we start, the sooner we can get out of here, right?”
He shook his head. “I can’t get close to them.”
“You got close to them in training.” In another minute or two the first ghost was going to shake off the power holding it—him—and start moving again. She needed to at least get him marked, and now. “Remember training? You can do this, you can.”
“That was different. That was in class, with the Elders and everybody. I can’t … I can’t …”
Choice time. Keep trying to coddle Riley and hope to get him to de-stun, or ignore him and Banish four ghosts by herself, with her lone psychopomp, which would probably require two separate callings.
The teenagers—aside from the one with the broken nose, who huddled against the wall moaning—watched with interest. That, at least, wasn’t a tough decision. “Get your friends and get the hell out of here. Now!”
“But, we want to watch you—”
Her sigh passed through every inch of her body before it finally came out. “Get. The hell. Out of here. Or I will make sure you all get a nice long afternoon in the stocks next Holy Day.”
Finally, something she said produced some kind of result. They left, brushing past her as they walked out the door. They’d probably stand just outside listening, and the knowledge pissed her off, but it would take too much time to lecture them any more.
“Riley. Are you going to help me?”
He shook his head. Great.
Another bone-sucking sigh, and she popped the cap off her Ectoplasmarker. At least her psychopomp could be counted on to behave the way it was supposed to.
Chapter Two
Teach your children from a young age to be careful in their choice of friendships. Unwise acquaintances can have unforeseen consequences.
—FamiliesandTruth, a Church pamphlet by Elder Barrett
And it had, thankfully, but the whole thing—including driving that pussy Riley back to the Church, filing her report, and giving Elder Griffin a quick rundown of Riley’s freakout—took way longer than she’d thought, which pissed her off again. One of the benefits of taking a newbie along was supposed to be sticking them with the paperwork. Just her luck to get the one who couldn’t handle it.
That wasn’t fair of her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Especially not when the effects of her pills were starting to wear off, leaving her ragged around the edges and even antsier than she would ordinarily be. She grabbed her pillbox from her bag, shook four Cepts into her palm, and downed them with a slug of water before heading for the shower. Rushing through her shower, really, and everything that came after.
That quick, tickly, lifting sensation in her stomach—that feeling that never got old, that feeling she would give her soul for and pretty much had—intensified when she finally got to Trickster’s bar about an hour and a half after leaving the Church. Later than she wanted, but still she had made it, and given the whole quadruple-ghost fun, the result could have been a lot different.
Red assaulted her eyes when she stepped into the building, like walking into a bordello in hell—if hell existed, which it didn’t. Or rather, no one else thought it did. For them the City of Eternity, where everyone’s souls lived on after death, was a peaceful loving place, a quiet rest several hundred feet below the surface of the earth. Only Chess thought of it as hell, as punishment, cold and unrelenting and miserable. Life sucked, yes, but the City was worse.
Then again, sometimes life could be okay. Terrible stood in his usual spot against the back wall, talking to a couple of guys whose names she didn’t remember. They all looked the same to her, to be honest, or maybe it was simply that she never really bothered to look at them. Their faces didn’t interest her. Nothing they said interested her, not when she could be talking to Terrible instead.
Seeing him was like being hit in the chest. Like something exploding inside her, a quick ravenous fire that made her shiver. So bright and so hot it still amazed her that no one else seemed to notice it, that every eye in the place didn’t turn to her while she went incandescent.
But they didn’t—which was a good thing, since spontaneous human combustion would probably raise an eyebrow even there. No one seemed to notice at all. They were all too busy drinking dollar beers, listening to X’s “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” and talking or arguing or trying to pick each other up. Spiky heads, heads bald or slick with pomade, like bizarre flowers strewn in a humid half-dead meadow, swaying in a stale-beer breeze. None of them turned to her.
Excellent. She didn’t want to be noticed. She never did, but especially not just then.
She shoved a couple of bucks at the bartender for her own beer and a tip and pushed her way through the field of oblivion-hunters until she reached him, stopping about a foot away, careful to not quite meet his eyes.
He did the same. “Hey, Chess. You right?”
She shrugged. Sipped her beer. “Right up. What time do they go on?”
“Ain’t for certain. Ten minutes maybe, fifteen? Thought you was comin earlier.”
“I was. My trainee lost it, I had to handle it all myself.”
“Handle what?”
She gave him a quick rundown, her mind only half on her words. The rest was examining him, his black hair slicked back with pomade, the width of his shoulders, his height. His face, the face she’d once thought ugly with its crooked, repeatedly broken nose, its scars, its heavy brow and thick muttonchop sideburns. The kind of face people ran away from because the only place it looked like it belonged was behind a loaded weapon. Hell, it made his body look like a loaded weapon. Which it was. And that’s all people saw.
People were shitbags, with their easy smiles and their cold eyes and brutal hearts. She knew that better than anyone. Knew, too, that the face she looked at wasn’t ugly, that it was strong and it was Terrible’s. That meant it was hers to look at as much as she wanted, and that made something she thought might be genuine happiness ride higher in her chest.
“Telling on getting shit done,” he said, “Bump got an ask for you. Whyn’t you come on out back, lemme give you the knowledge.”
She shifted on her feet, glanced at the other guys still standing there, waiting to be included in the conversation. “Can’t it wait?”
“Could, aye, but might as well give it you now.”
The song ended; she nodded in the second or two of silence before the next one started. “Yeah, okay then. But let’s make it fast. I don’t want to miss the band.”
He shrugged. “Neither me. Longer you stand here, longer us take gettin back in, aye?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him, still careful not to look him in the eye, and headed down the hall that led to the bathrooms and the back door. Technically it wasn’t a back door. Technically it was an emergency exit. But the alarm wires had been ripped from the wall years before, and even if they hadn’t been it wouldn’t have mattered. Fire trucks didn’t respond to calls from Downside in general; one too many false alarms that ended in muggings and murders had stopped that particular service, and there was little worth saving there anyway.
Terrible pushed it open for her. She ducked under his arm and stepped into the alley, the soft squelch of still-wet dead leaves and garbage under her shoes reminding her for one unpleasant second of the earlier fun in the construction swamp. She couldn’t decide which one smelled better, but neither was pleasant.
But while the building had been full of people and ghosts, the alley was empty. Not even any light from the tenement windows behind occupied the space; only the dull glow of the gibbous moon overhead showed her that no living beings—no human ones, at least—waited there.
Terrible obviously noticed that, too. The sound of the exit door slamming back into its frame hit her ears at the same time his body slammed her against the back wall, farther into the shadows where no one could see him kiss her long and hard.
Had she thought seeing him made her insides explode? She’d been wrong. This was an explosion. This was better than anything else; sometimes she thought it was even better than her pills. At his touch something inside her that had been tense and twisted and black finally relaxed. At his touch something inside her that was constantly terrified found a little security.
Security Chess hoped and hoped would last, despite the nagging voice in the back of her mind that insisted it couldn’t, it wouldn’t, she didn’t deserve it, and she should just give up on the very idea.
Fuck that stupid voice. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pushed her hands down the collar of his shirt to feel his bare skin warm against hers. He was always warm. His palms left shivering trails of heat from her face to her throat, blazed up her thighs and ribcage, over her breasts.
Finally he pulled away enough to meet her eyes. That jolt of electricity, the one she’d been so careful not to feel inside the bar, hit her. Her cheeks tightened, her mouth curved into a grin she couldn’t stop. “I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it at all.”
“Aye, me too. Glad you did. Feelin like I ain’t seen you in weeks.”
“It’s been three days.”
“Feels longer. We all clear now?”
She nodded. The past week had been the first time in her life she wished she wasn’t what she was, wasn’t a witch, didn’t have extra power in her blood that meant anyone coming in intimate contact with it would be affected by it; wished the Binding effect of that contact wasn’t part of the marriage ceremony and so meant a commitment she didn’t think either of them was ready to make.
If she wasn’t a witch it wouldn’t matter. Marriages were bound by blood and magic combined, not one or the other, so they required the Church’s assistance. But magic was in her blood, and that meant spending six days burning with frustration.
His eyebrows rose; his hands wandered with more purpose. “You ain’t really wanna stay here, aye? Whyn’t we head on out now instead?”
“I thought you wanted to see the band,” she teased.
“Changed my thought. Let’s us go. Back my place, aye?” He was smiling, that smile she’d always loved, while his hands distracted her and his body warmed her through her clothes. Summer drew closer every day, and the temperatures reflected that, but it seemed like she was always cold when he wasn’t around. “C’mon.”
“My place is closer.”
“Aye.” He leaned in to bite her neck; she shivered. “But mine’s got thicker walls, dig, an I plan on makin you scream a few times afore we get to sleeping.”
It took her a minute to draw enough breath to speak, through a throat suddenly too tight for anything but a gasp. “I thought we decided we wanted to actually get out tonight, though.”
“And done it. Now us can go back in.”
“I don’t know,” she managed to say. It was becoming more difficult to talk, especially since he’d started sucking gently on her neck, making her dizzy.
“Think on this one, then, Chessiebomb. Nobody seein us right here, aye?” His nimble fingers popped the top button of her jeans. “Then we still out.”
“No way.” She giggled and swatted at his hands. “Last time I got a splinter—”
The sound of his phone ringing, a loud jangly sort of ring, cut her off.
“Ignore it,” she suggested, but she knew he couldn’t. They both knew he couldn’t. Midnight was practically the start of a working day in Downside, yes, but she doubted anyone who’d be calling him at that hour would have good news.
She was right. Within seconds of answering the phone his face darkened; darkened and took on that look she’d only seen a few times before, that lowered-brow-narrowed-eyes look of absolute rage. The kind of look that would be the last thing the person who caused it would ever see. His fingers tightened on her waist.
“Aye,” he said. “Get em—aye. On my way.”
Her heart sank. Looked like they weren’t going back to anybody’s place, to anybody’s bed. At least not for a long time.
His phone snapped shut. “Pipe room’s burnin.”
“What?”
He was already walking up the alley, back toward the street, holding her hand in an almost painful grip. “Fuckin Slobag, ’swhat. Pipe room up Sixtieth, green one. On fire.”
She didn’t want to say “What?” again, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t seem to get any other words into her head. A pipe room burning? All those people, even on a weeknight. All that Dream, waiting to be smoked, waiting to send those people into a soft golden fog. Gone. “What?”
He didn’t answer. She had to trot to keep up as he pulled her along, dropping her hand just before they emerged from the alley. She almost wished he wouldn’t, wished they hadn’t decided to keep everything secret. Certainly she could have used more physical contact at that moment. With every step the awful picture in her mind grew clearer: burning bodies in a pit of flames, exploding glass, storerooms full of Dream knobs, their smoke wasted. She wrapped her arms around herself to still the shakes.
Terrible’s car, a black 1969 BT Chevelle, waited for them in the circle of pale yellow cast by one of the few working streetlights. “Waited” being the operative word. To Chess, the car always seemed ready to leap from its resting place, ready to start mowing down pedestrians just because it could.
But it didn’t. It stayed silent and still while Terrible opened the door for her, closed it behind her, and got in on the driver’s side.
On their way to the fire, to the—Wait. “The one on Sixtieth? Didn’t you say nobody’s in that one, Bump’s doing something else with it?”
“Aye.” The car plowed away from the curb in a squeal of rubber. “Were thinkin on makin it storing rooms, dig, gettin other shit done there too. Figured on setting a new room a block up.”
“So no one died.” The tightness in her chest eased a bit.
“Naw. Least not what Bernam say. Maybe one or two in there, ain’t can say certain. But nobody ought, leastaways.”
“Good.”
He glanced at her, swinging the heavy car right, north on Sixtieth. “Aye, cepting, how Slobag knew nobody in there?”
“If the room’s closed—”
“Ain’t hardly nobody got that knowledge, though. Nobody been told. Just let em know tonight, first night it shut down.”
“Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t care who he killed.”
Terrible snorted. “Still a fuck of a chance.”
She sat for a few seconds watching his profile before finally resting a hesitant hand on his thigh, not sure it was welcome. Not sure if she should say anything. Anger still hovered around him, filled the car and tried to find a way into her body. She felt it like icy fingers sliding over her skin.
Not much she could do when he was in that kind of mood, at least not in the car on the way to check the wreckage.
Not to mention … he hadn’t said anything. She didn’t know if he was thinking it, if he’d thought of it. But he probably had.
If Slobag had some sort of inside information about Bump’s operations, he had to be getting that information from somewhere. And there she was, the one person Terrible knew for a fact had been in Slobag’s pocket; or to put it more bluntly, Terrible knew she’d been in Slobag’s son’s bed, for months. Knew she still talked to him.
How long before she became a suspect?
Chapter Three
Because they had no unified rule, they had no peace. Peace in the world can only be found through the Church, just as peace of the soul can only be found through the Church.
—AHistoryoftheOldGovernment, 1620–1800, from the Introduction by the Grand Elder
The last vestiges of the cheer she’d managed to find at Trickster’s evaporated. It wouldn’t be long. He’d think of it. He’d wonder.
And she couldn’t blame him. What was she supposed to do, get all pissed and indignant because he didn’t trust her? Why the hell should he trust her? He’d trusted her before and she’d paid him back by fucking his enemy. He’d be stupid not to wonder about her now.
That sucked. But it was true.
Their destination wasn’t difficult to spot. The Chevelle growled up Sixtieth, chasing the orange glow of the flames ahead. A fire indeed. The building had simply disappeared. In its place a set of half walls created a bowl of fire, surrounded by curious onlookers standing too close even though it was spring. A few of them held out sticks with various animal parts on the ends; free fire shouldn’t be wasted.
Chunks of cement littered the pavement, more and more of them as the Chevelle approached the scene, until finally Terrible had to park because there were too many of them to avoid. Broken glass sparkled under their feet.
Against the angry flames, Bump’s profile stood like a pimp-shaped inkspot, his hat brim ostentatiously wide, his cape moving in the breeze. Even at a distance she could see how pissed he was, just from the way he held his shoulders.
The closer they got the more obvious his anger got. He glowered at the fire, glowered at Terrible, glowered at her. “You finding they, Terrible, yay? Fuckin make they dead.”
It wasn’t much of a greeting, but she supposed it could be excused under the circumstances. Hell, even if they weren’t standing in front of what was probably half a million dollars or so on fire, it could be excused; it would have to be excused. No matter who she slept with, no matter who she still couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to sleep with, the fact was that at its base her relationship—such as it was—with Bump entailed the biggest power imbalance possible. She was a junkie. He was her dealer.
In other words, he got to say whatever he wanted to her, do whatever he wanted to her, treat her like less than nothing, and she got to take it without resistance if she wanted to keep getting her pills. Which she did.
He glanced at her now. “Ay, Ladybird. Ain’t fuckin supposing you witchy skills fuckin find they done it.”
She shook her head. “Sorry” sat on the tip of her tongue; she swallowed it. “Not the sort of thing I can do, no.”
“But you got them fuckin snooping skills, yay? Do you findin out things, on you fuckin cases or what-the-fuck them is you doin.”
Shit. Usually the problem she had with people knowing her job was that they thought she could wave her hand and make things disappear or whatever; now she had Bump obviously thinking she was some sort of Sherlock Holmes or something and could just pop in and find out who—of the hundreds, even thousands, of possible suspects—had spied, had set this up.
If she had a choice … well, she’d probably still say yes, because this affected Terrible’s life, and that made it something she needed to do. But she didn’t have a choice anyway.
“I’ll try.” She shifted her weight, hoped she didn’t look as uncomfortable as she felt. “But really, I don’t know any of the people involved, so I don’t really see what I can do.”
“Aw, nay, ain’t you fuckin count youself short. Got them fuckin brains hidin in you head, yay? You use em for Bump. Use em for Terrible, yay? Got the thinkin you catch this one straightup fast, yay, fuckin straightup. What fuckin happening if them get Terrible afore you fuckin get the finding? Thinkin you ain’t fuckin liking that.”
No, she certainly wasn’t fucking liking that. Did he not realize that was why she’d agreed to help out?
She’d known it was a mistake to tell Bump what was happening between them, what had happened. Being right usually felt a lot better than it did at that moment. This night was just going from shitty to shittier, wasn’t it?
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Bump gave her a slow, fluid sort of nod, the kind that told her he’d known all along that she would do it, and how he’d get her to do it. Damn him. He wasn’t stupid; no one got to be lord of the streets west of Forty-third—almost all of Downside—without being smart, tough, and fast, and of course utterly ruthless. Bump was all of those, with a greasy layer of sleaze smoothed on top like rancid frosting covering a moldy cake.
He leaned back on his gold-tipped cane, crossed one ankle in its furry boot over the other. Somehow even standing on the street across from a burning building he managed to look as if he was lounging around his horrendous living room, perfectly relaxed, lord of his tacky pornography empire.
“Nobody in, aye?” Terrible asked. He stepped closer to her; just half a step, really, nothing anyone would notice, but she did, and it helped.
“Nay, ain’t none people in there, when it fuckin go. Only our fuckin supplies, yay? Fuckin only half got out, fore it blowin the fuck up.” He leered at her. “Too fuckin bad, yay? Got less smoke now, price goin up, Bump gots the guessing on. ’Course, could be you ain’t gotta get the fuckin raise, you helping Bump out, get what we needing done up, yay?”
She didn’t answer him. Would not. He didn’t deserve an answer.
Instead, she watched the fire, watched Terrible’s profile silhouetted by it and the way it cast changing golden light on everything. Downside looked almost wholesome with the flames dancing in their enormous makeshift firecan; the delicate changing light softened the sharp edges, bleached out the blood and needles and filth, the passed-out bodies and pockmarked walls and broken streets. The fire smoothed it all over, made it look almost normal.
Funny, she’d never noticed that before. But then she’d never paid this much attention to a fire before, at least not one she wasn’t inside. Burning buildings were as common an occurrence in Downside as muggings and beatings; they no longer attracted much attention, save from scavengers looking for something to snatch from the wreckage.
After the fire finally died they’d swarm, looking for every scrap of metal, every piece of furniture, every smoke-damaged pipe. And of course, any lumps of Dream that might have survived. The thought pinched her heart. She could use a visit to the pipes just then. It would be nice to forget Bump’s beady eyes, his dismissal of her, the confidence with which he used her.
But that was the price she paid, and she knew that. So she squared her shoulders. “You don’t have any idea who could have told? Who knew the place would be empty?”
“Terrible an meself, coursen. An a some they others. They needed for fuckin clearin up, dig, movin fuckin furniture. Movin them fuckin Dream out, yay. They Bump gots fuckin trust for.”
“So who could they have told?”
Bump shrugged. “Ain’t shoulda given none the fuckin tell, yay? Bump’s business Bump’s own fuckin business. Ain’t for nobody givin out.”
“Well, clearly someone you trust isn’t really someone you should be trusting,” she said without thinking, and regretted it when Terrible glanced at her. He did it fast, just a quick cut of his eyes in her direction and then away again, but she saw it. She felt it.
It was starting already. She wished she could say she was surprised, wished she hadn’t been waiting for it, expecting it the way she expected rain from black clouds overhead. Nothing in the world was permanent, especially not happiness.
She’d always known that. She just wished life would stop proving her right.
Chapter Four
Duty to the self can only be served after duty to the Church. It is right and proper that the Church come first.
—TheBookofTruth, Laws, Article 217
That thought, and the feeling of doom it created in the pit of her stomach, burning a hole into her soul, stayed with her as she walked into Elder Griffin’s office the next morning. Most cases were given out on Wednesdays, and she could use a new case. Sure, she’d made a good chunk of cash on her last one—and almost been killed a few times to earn it—but after a new car, couch, and some clothes, a weekend at the pipes and another in a hotel in Northside with Terrible, her bank account still looked good, but not as good as she would have liked.
Besides, seeing Elder Griffin made her feel better, as much as she could. And she could use it. She’d ended up home in her own bed, alone, because Terrible and Bump had things to talk about, things to do, people to beat down—so she assumed—and he didn’t know how long it would be. She’d left her kitchen light on hoping he’d come over when he was done, but he hadn’t. He’d texted around six to say he was just going back to his place because it was closer. She really, really wanted to believe that.
It grew so exhausting waiting for the other shoe to drop that she wondered if she wasn’t trying to make it fall already. Sometimes, even, she almost wanted to tell him to just end it and get it over with. But she couldn’t. Just the thought of it … No. She couldn’t.
Elder Griffin stood up to answer her quiet knock, to greet her as she pushed the already unlatched door open and slipped inside. “Good morrow, Cesaria. How fare thee?”
She dipped into a quick, automatic curtsy. “Very well, sir. How are you?”
He smiled, his blue eyes kind. And happy. He looked … yeah, happy. Not happy like he usually looked. Extra happy. “Excellent, my dear. Come, sit down.”
She followed him back to his broad, shiny wood desk, situated right in front of the window covered with sheers. Through that gauzy, barely-there fabric the side lawn of the building glowed with the green of early spring while the trees showed off their new leaves. Everything new. Everything except her. She hated spring.
She sat in the leather chair opposite, some of her tension—the tension even four Cepts hadn’t managed to chase completely away—fading. It would never totally disappear, no matter what she did or what she took. But it faded a little. Just the sight of the room, the skulls on the shelves, the jars full of herbs and potions, the television mounted high on the wall behind her with the sound muted, felt safe. The way the building felt safe. The first place that had ever been a home to her, the place where her entire life changed.
“I’m pleased you’ve come,” he said, folding his hands on the desk. “I have a few things to discuss with thee, if I may. My trust in you and your discretion is absolute, my dear, which is why I chose you.”
Uh-oh. “Chose me for what?”
“A sensitive case. And … a sensitive issue I’d like to discuss with you.”
Double uh-oh. “Elder Griffin, I really appreciate it, but I don’t think I’m ready to be Bound again. It’s—”
“Oh, no, no. I apologize. I surely did not mean to make you think ’twould be so strict. No, I merely wanted to discuss something with you of a more—a more personal nature.”
Her brow furrowed. What personal issues could he possibly have to discuss with her? Sure, he liked her. She knew that. Knew she was probably his favorite out of all the Debunkers he worked with. Certainly he’d always been her staunchest supporter.
But they never talked about personal things. Not like that. “Is everything okay, sir?”
“Oh, of course, of course. All is perfectly well.” He gave her a quick smile, then looked down at his hands, the smile fading. “I am certain you know the Grand Elder has decided to step down.”
“Yes. I’m sorry to hear it.” Actually she couldn’t give a fuck. She’d never particularly liked the Grand Elder, always found him far too hale-n-hearty and far too little actual thinking-n-caring. But even she had to admit that his reasons for leaving were sad: the Lamaru—an anti-Church terrorist organization—had murdered his daughter and sent one of their own people in with the strongest glamour anyone had ever seen. Strong enough to make the girl look just like his child.
And she’d fooled him. Chess suspected that was what did it—not just that his daughter was dead, but that he’d spent a week with her killer, taking her to dinner, chatting with her in his office, touching her, hugging her. And he hadn’t known.
Hell, if he hadn’t stepped down, Chess would have put decent odds on him being asked to. Not that she knew for sure he hadn’t been. But she kept that thought to herself.
“As am I. But his resignation leaves a spot open, which in turn leaves more spots open. There might be one for me, methinks.”
“You want a promotion?” A trickle of cold she hadn’t expected slid down her back, into her heart.
She’d lose him. On top of everything else she felt slipping away, everything pouring through her fingers no matter how tightly she tried to grasp them, Elder Griffin wanted to leave her.
Intellectually she knew it wasn’t about her. Intellect didn’t slow her panicky pulse.
“I am considering it, yes. I do enjoy my position. I enjoy working with you—all of you.” His eyes lingered on her face just long enough to make her feel the emphasis on “you.” Just long enough to make her feel special. And just long enough for her to start mourning the loss of that feeling.
“But I would also enjoy moving up. Perhaps to a position with a larger responsibility. And a higher income.”
She gave him the best smile she could; her face felt like plastic. “Sure, of course. That makes sense.”
He sighed. “I hoped you would think so, I very much hoped. I do not know how much support there would be for me in that endeavor. Many Elders are interested, of course. But I do not think of putting my name in to be the Grand Elder. I would never presume. I simply thought, perhaps a Resident Elder, or a High Elder … perhaps a Master in the schools.”
“I think you’d be great at any of those,” she managed. He would be, too.
“Thank you. You see, Cesaria, part of the process is to give the Elder Triumvirate the name of at least one departmental employee over whom I have direct authority, so they can question you and make sure I am effective in my position, that I uphold the Truth and the laws—I am sure thou knowst the sort of thing of which I speak.
“Certainly of all the Debunkers your record is the most impressive, but I would also hope … I believe that—I have always believed in your skills, Cesaria, and I believe you have always trusted me, and mine. Your recommendation would be … meaningful to me.”
He cleared his throat. Before she could respond—before she could even think of a response—he continued. “You see, I have another person to concern myself with these days. I have … met someone, and we plan to be married.”
“Wow, that’s—Congratulations.” This just kept getting better, didn’t it. Well, no, that wasn’t fair. She was happy for him, she honestly was. How the hell could she not be? She wasn’t that selfish.
She’d just never thought of him as being a man with a personal life. A romance life. She couldn’t picture him out on the town, having a few drinks and meeting people, or home with street clothes on instead of his Church suit and stockings, with sneakers or something instead of his formal buckle shoes. Elder Griffin Casual was just not an image she could conjure, no matter how hard she tried. She might as well try to picture him in a clown suit.
His blush showed faintly through the light everyday white powder he wore. “Perhaps you’ll meet him? Methinks he would very much like that. Of course I would.”
“Yeah. Um, of course, I’d love to.”
“Excellent.” His eyes caught hers again, held them. “I am glad you feel that way, Cesaria. I admit the thought of working in a different department, of not seeing all of you, is rather painful to me.”
Sodon’t go, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t. Not when he looked so happy, so excited about what his future might hold. That was the way normal people felt when they were trying to move up, when they’d found someone to love who loved them back. Not the way Chess felt, like she was trying to stem an arterial bleed with her fingertip.
But then, normal people didn’t start their relationships by fucking people over, and normal people weren’t convinced that at any moment the person they were with was going to realize how completely worthless they were and run away as fast as they could. Normal people didn’t deserve to have the person they were with run away as fast as they could. So that might make a difference.
“My hope is that you will still feel free to visit me. Assuming I am promoted, which of course is not guaranteed.”
“Of course you will be. And, um, yes, I’d love to visit you.”
“Excellent,” he said again. He cleared his throat, sat up straighter in his chair. Chess could practically see an imaginary dial on his back turning from personal to business.
“I have a case for you.” He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a slim manila folder. Yes! Awesome, she could totally use a case. A real one, not chasing air for Bump.
A case would leave her less time for that, but she’d still have enough. Wasn’t like she was the only one looking for the rat, either. Bump and Terrible would probably suss him out within a day or so, and they could all move on. She hoped.
“The decision was made this morning to give the case to you, and I concur with that decision. You know I have always had the deepest belief in your abilities, and your discretion.”
“I know.” Yeah, he had. And now she’d get some different Elder, who didn’t know her, didn’t care. He’d probably hate her; he’d see through her to the filth inside, and he’d know everything, and he’d hate her for it.
“Good. This case was previously given to Aros Burnett.” He looked up at her gasp, the tiny sound she tried not to utter but which slipped out before she could stop it. “Yes. Aros found it … particularly difficult, and he gave it up. Gave up his post in Triumph City as well, as I see you remember.”
Her neck practically creaked as she nodded. Of course she remembered. The halls had barely stopped buzzing about it; it had only been eight or nine days.
“Aros was unable to give us a satisfactory solution. You’ll see his notes in the file. They become rather—jumbled, near the end, I’m afraid. But we feel strongly that you will be able to bring us an answer. We have seen the Fact and Truth of your skill many times. I look forward to seeing your resolution.”
“Thanks.” The file hovered in his hand, just over his desk; she took it and started to open it. “Where is it?”
“Well. That is another reason you were chosen, in truth. ’Tis not too far from your residence. You are familiar with Mercy Lewis Second School? In Downside, on—”
“Twenty-second,” she finished for him, barely noticing her own rudeness as she cut him off. Barely noticing anything except that address, staring at her from the original report in the file. Twenty-second and Foster.
Right in the middle of Slobag’s territory.
Chapter Five
The dead invaded the schools, hiding in the shadows inside to turn the students into soldiers of death themselves.
—TheBookofTruth, Origins, Article 57
The parking lot outside Mercy Lewis Second School hardly looked like a parking lot at all. If not for the four or five battered cars parked at odd angles among the gravel and weeds, Chess would have thought it was just a vacant lot like any other.
Four or five battered cars, and one sleek shiny coupe, gunmetal gray, the same color as Chess’s new car, although hers wasn’t as stylish. Or as expensive. As unobtrusively as possible she wandered over to where the car sat, pretending to be interested in the view on the other side of the rusty, torn chain-link fence, and committed the license plate number to her temporary memory. She’d write it down as soon as she got inside.
Despite everything else—and really, given its location and the fire the night before, this case couldn’t have been worse for her—her spirits lifted as she headed up the cracked concrete path to the large front doors. Working again. Something else to focus on, something she could actually do something about, something with actual procedures to follow and clues she was trained to understand. That felt good.
Mercy Lewis Second School—formerly an embassy for some South Pacific country, she thought—was clearly a product of that phase of architecture that had believed bland was better. It just … sat there, dull and brown, staring out at the dirty streets and crumbling buildings with an air of resignation. Whatever had happened to it, whatever changed in the world, it would remain, glowering at them all, suffering the crowds of teenagers abusing it every day.
It could join the damn club. She made her way to the graffiti-covered entrance, pulled open a heavy door that gave a loud shriek of protest. Great. Well, good to know, anyway. When and if she came back at night with her Hand, this was not the entrance to use. She made a note—writing down the license number of the too-expensive car in the lot while she was at it so she could let it drop from her memory—and followed the faded signs to the office down the hall.
The itching started when she’d made it about halfway down. Not withdrawals—not even possible, she’d dosed up right before she got out of the car—but something worse, something that told her three Cepts wasn’t going to be enough and made her wish she’d washed them down with a couple of shots, too.
Second school. Any school. She couldn’t say the worst memories of her life came from schools—far, far from it—but the ones she did have weren’t fucking good, that was for sure. The memories she had of when she’d gone; when she’d been forced to go. All of her foster parents made her, because if her attendance dropped they wouldn’t get paid anymore, but none of them gave a shit if she actually learned anything, and her teachers hadn’t either.
Those voices still echoed with every step she took. Just the air in the building, that particular chalkboard-antiseptic-dust-and-despair smell of school, reminded her where she was, made her remember how it felt and how much she’d hated it. The cold metal lockers lining the walls watched her, considered her, as her boots clicked on the polished concrete floors. She didn’t care what they thought, or what anyone she was about to meet thought, but she still felt that invisible cloud of judgment that seemed to hover near the ceiling of every school, ready to descend on anyone unlucky enough to walk beneath it.
Whatever. She’d never gone to this school, and it wasn’t her prison now. She was an adult, she was a fucking Churchwitch, and someone in this school was trying to scare people and scam some money out of the Church. So she would catch them. It was as simple as that, and she knew it and believed it as strongly and purely as she knew Facts were Truth.
Although … who would get the money, if the Church ended up paying a settlement? The Church owned the school, of course, and ran it, at least ostensibly. The Church wouldn’t pay a settlement to itself. So … another note in her pad. Whoprofits?
The classroom doors she passed were closed. Through the narrow windows in each of them she caught glimpses of chalkboards and teaching Goodys standing before them, the occasional slice of backs bent over desks. Boredom and sadness seeped through the walls.
Finally she reached the end of the hall, another closed door. administration was written on it in peeling black letters, with “Fuck the” scratched into the glass above it. Heh. Without knocking she pushed it open, got a good visual snapshot of three women standing around chatting before they stopped to look at her.
The one behind the desk, an enormous woman—she had to be close to six feet tall, and solidly built—with thin, frizzy brownish hair hanging limp from the top of her head, gave her the sort of disapproving smile Chess thought people with minor authority must practice in front of mirrors. Inexpertly applied red lipstick made her mouth look like a wound. “Can I help you, Miss?”
The other two stepped away from the desk, almost in a flanking motion. Had they been Downside kids and not school ladies Chess would have thought they were getting ready to jump her. Then again, maybe they were. Just not physically.
“I’m Cesaria Putnam.” She didn’t offer her hand. “From the Church. I’ve come about your haunting.”
A moment of silence, as if none of them knew what to say. What the hell? They had to be aware of the procedure, they’d had another Debunker out there already. Then one of the women outside the desk, petite with red hair and a horrible baggy plaid dress, gave her a tentative smile. “Of course, yes. Please come in and sit down. Can we get you anything? Coffee, tea?”
“No thanks.” Like she’d ever drink anything a subject gave her, at least in a situation like this. She did sit down, though, on the dingy couch that sank too far beneath her, so her ass hung lower than her knees. Getting out of that would be fun.
The third woman just looked at her, an odd sort of smile on her face. As if she knew something Chess didn’t and was waiting for Chess to figure it out, or she was waiting for Chess to speak so she could belittle her. A smug look. Chess didn’t like it, and she didn’t think she liked the woman, although something in the way she stood, the tilt of her head and that smirk, reminded Chess for some absurd reason of Lex.
Yes, the woman was Asian, but that certainly wasn’t it. She didn’t know what it was. She’d seen other men who had some sort of Lex-like quality about them, but never a woman. Oh well. There was a first time for everything. Women could be smug bastards, too.
Then the woman shifted, and the resemblance disappeared, leaving just an attractive woman with straight, shiny dark hair in a casual knot at the base of her neck. Compared to the other two she looked especially gorgeous, in her black pencil skirt and loose white Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“We weren’t sure we would get someone else,” she said, one graceful elbow propped on the counter. “Aros left so abruptly, and we haven’t heard anything since.”
Chess grabbed her notepad. “He told you he wouldn’t be back?”
The women smiled at each other, as though Chess had just said something adorably naïve. Bitches.
“We got that impression,” Horrible Plaid said, “when he screamed at us all that he was never stepping foot in this place again, broke a window, and ran off in the middle of the day.”
Damn. What exactly had he encountered?
She didn’t know Aros; he’d been a recent transfer. So she had no idea how tough he was, or what kinds of cases he’d handled wherever it was he’d come from. She made a quick note to ask Elder Griffin about it, and pushed the tiny flash of sadness out of her head.
“He never seemed comfortable here,” Big Frizzy—the name plate on the edge of the desk read laurie barr—said. Or rather, deigned to say. She still looked at Chess as if Chess was something rotten that had melded with the refrigerator shelf. Whatever.
“Do you have any idea why that might be?”
“Working with youth isn’t for everyone.”
“Yes, but, did he seem to have any particular troubles?” It really wasn’t her business; it really wasn’t part of the case. But she couldn’t help being curious, and who knew. Maybe there was something there. If someone had been harassing him, that might be a good lead.
Or it might not. Anti-Church sentiment wasn’t too widespread in Downside—most people there didn’t give a fuck about the Church, either pro or con, save being suspicious or getting the hell out of her way when they saw her ink—but on this side of town, that changed. That could very well account for the Asian woman’s smirks, too. People whose religion had centered on ancestor worship didn’t tend to appreciate the government that told them they weren’t allowed to do that anymore, not without paying a hefty fee and going through the Church itself.
This just kept getting better and better. As if it wasn’t shitty enough working a case that would put her in more contact with the wrong side of town, and how that would look—she was not looking forward to Terrible’s reaction when he found out where she’d be spending large chunks of her time—it was in an area where she’d be even more unwelcome than usual.
“He just seemed nervous,” the Asian woman replied. None of them had volunteered their names yet. How polite of them. “He seemed to particularly dislike Vernal Sze and his friends. I believe he was afraid of them.”
“Did he have reason to be?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so. They like to look tough, but they’re really not. They just haven’t been shown enough examples of proper behavior.”
Laurie gave an eye-roll so elaborate Chess almost expected her head to topple off. Horrible Plaid noticed—or rather, noticed Chess noticing—and said, “Beulah is our Community Liaison. She’s not a teacher.”
Chess waited, but none of them explained what that meant or why it mattered. Okay. “And what does that entail?”
The Asian woman—Beulah—smiled that smug smile again, her eyes focused tight on Chess’s face. What the fuck? Those Significant Looks were starting to creep her out. “I’m actually here on a volunteer basis several days a week, working with students and helping to foster a better relationship between the school administration and the community.”
Chess had never heard of such a thing. She supposed it made sense, given that most school administrators were Church employees—most of them were Elders, actually—and that might be tense in this area. She couldn’t see it being such a huge deal that they needed community outreach, but what the fuck did she know? Her pretty much sole experience with anyone on this side of town was Lex, and he didn’t care about anything enough to get angry about it.
“Who handles that?” she asked. “I mean, is there a charity set up that you work for, or … ?”
“I’m paid out of school overflow funds,” Beulah said. “Whatever the school manages to raise through donations or other outside sources, beyond their annual budget, gets put into a separate account. That’s divided among several programs, and mine is the largest one. So technically I am a school employee, but I administer my own program.”
Must be nice, Chess thought. Laurie seemed to agree; she watched Beulah with a look of such open hostility that Chess almost expected her to start hitting her.
Something to think about later, because hadn’t Beulah just given her a very important piece of information? So any extra cash in the school coffers went to Beulah—well, Beulah and whoever ran these other programs. She’d need to see those records. Aros hadn’t included those, or even mentioned them, in his file.
But for now … she stood up. “Maybe one of you could take me around? And if you could show me where entities have been seen, or anyone experienced anything unusual, that would be great.”
Chapter Six
Death simply means the opportunity to live on in eternity. And that is Fact, which makes it Truth.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
Horrible Plaid’s name—surprise!—wasn’t Horrible Plaid. It was Monica—Monica Freeman—and she was the secretary to Master Elder Conrad, the school’s headmaster. She told Chess this with self-deprecating pride, as though she expected Chess to be impressed but wanted to seem like she didn’t, as though she thought it was silly to expect it.
Which of course it was. Chess tried not to mistrust the woman—mistrust all of them—on general principles, but she couldn’t help it. Even if she hadn’t been there investigating a possible haunting she would have mistrusted them. They might claim to be Church—at least the Elders did, and the teaching Goodys did—but they weren’t, not really. They didn’t give a fuck about any of the students, about anyone but themselves.
“In here is the theater.” Monica leaned against the thick door, its wood stained a horrible orangey color. Who the hell had picked that color? Almost every school she’d ever seen had it, and it looked awful in every one of them. “The first sighting was in here.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Okay. Can we go in? And you can tell me what happened?”
“No one’s been in here since then.”
Chess raised her eyebrows. Okay. Monica didn’t seem to understand direct questions. “Can we go in, and you can tell me what happened?”
“I can unlock it.” Beulah pulled a set of keys from somewhere. Where she had room to hide them in that skirt Chess had no idea, although she had to admit the skirt was gorgeous. Either “community outreach” paid awfully well, or Beulah had a sugar daddy. Or simply lived beyond her means. Checking her financials would probably be a good idea.
Monica moved out of Beulah’s way a little too fast, as if she was afraid Beulah would mow her down. Funny. They’d all seemed perfectly friendly when Chess walked into the office.
The door opened with a creak right out of a horror film. For fuck’s sake, was the school budget really so tight they couldn’t afford a can of fucking WD-40? Chess had never seen a building so creaky in her life. Another note to make.
Through the open door she saw only darkness; the air breathing out at her smelled stale and felt cold against her skin. An air conditioner still hummed somewhere inside.
“No one’s been in here? Why? And for how long?”
Monica answered, standing right behind her. “It’s been about three weeks, I guess. Well, Aros might have been in here without telling us, but three weeks since any of us have been inside.”
If Aros had entered the theater without even bothering to lubricate that hinge, then something was seriously wrong with the man. Oh well. “Because of the haunting?”
“Of course.” Beulah pushed past both of them. For a moment her head and lower body disappeared, her white blouse just a faint glow in the gloom, before something slammed like metal against metal and the lights came on.
Not that it made much difference. Shadows still lurked along the walls and between the rows of seats, which rose stadium-style from the sunken stage at the front to a small booth in the center at the back. It wasn’t a large room, really, but then it wasn’t a large school. Maybe a hundred seats, a hundred and fifty? Drama didn’t seem to be a popular activity at Mercy Lewis. It hadn’t been at any school Chess had ever attended.
Beulah walked toward the stage, her slim figure appearing and reappearing between the rows like a lion through tall grass. “A few students were in here after school, about three weeks ago.”
“Where they shouldn’t have been,” Monica muttered.
“They were hanging out on the stage,” Beulah continued, ignoring Monica. Ignoring, too, Monica’s next snide interruption, which was the word “Drinking.”
Beulah glared at Monica. “Talking. According to Vernal.”
“This is the person you mentioned before? The one Aros was afraid of?” Chess asked.
“Yes. Good memory. Anyway. They were in here talking, Vernal and three of his friends, when the ghost appeared. They said it came through the curtains there”—she pointed to the right—“and started moving along that wall. Then it apparently noticed them and came toward them, which is when they ran.”
“Did it follow them out of the theater? What did it look like, did they say?”
“It didn’t follow them,” Monica said. “And they said it looked like Lucy McShane.”
Chess looked at her blankly. It was always so cool when people expected her to know things there was no possible way she could know. Of course she was familiar with all of the famous ghosts and hauntings; the special team that still lived in the Tower of London, for example, just to contain them all. Edward DeWitt, the ghost of a murder victim who was so hell-bent on revenge it took them four weeks to track him down and Banish him. And of course the Fallow Creek Five, and the suburb they’d turned into a literal ghost town back in 2007.
But nowhere on that list, and it was quite an extensive list, did anyone named Lucy McShane appear.
Either Beulah saw her blank look and sympathized, or Beulah saw her blank look and patronized. Whatever her motive, at least she told the fucking story. “She was a suicide from just after this building was converted into a school, maybe 1999, 2000? According to the story, she was in the school play and fell in love with the director. He seduced her, and then when she got pregnant he dumped her. So she flung herself from the lighting platform up there.”
Chess glanced up. Above her head a rack of lights hung in a gentle arc, white cone-shaped fixtures aimed at the stage. “She jumped off of that? How would she get up there?”
“There’s a catwalk,” Monica said. “Want to go up and look?”
Ugh, not really. Chess wasn’t afraid of heights, but the thought of depending on the rickety-looking metal walkway she could just make out near the ceiling didn’t appeal. But it was her job, so … “Yeah, sure.”
The theater looked smaller from up there. So did Monica and Beulah, both of whom had used their skirts as an excuse for why they couldn’t accompany her. Not that she cared. Without them watching her quite so closely she could be more thorough.
They couldn’t watch her closely if they tried, in fact. When she stopped and looked down at them, the floor almost seemed to spin so far below. A girl had jumped from that catwalk, thrown herself from it. Had her body cracked open on the seats down there, on the edge of the orchestra pit? Had she died instantly? How must it have felt for her, watching the ground come at her, knowing that she’d done it, she’d really taken that final step and it was really over, it would end and she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, it—
Chess blinked. Her fingers convulsed on the railing. What the fuck had she been doing? Leaning over that rail, the empty space beyond. Not a good thing to do. She didn’t want to die, not that day. Work. That’s what she needed to be doing.
She’d grabbed a couple of small video cameras from the Church supply before she left, but she hadn’t expected she’d get the chance to use them. She grabbed one from her bag and affixed it to the light strip, so the stage filled the tiny screen. Good. It would start recording if it detected movement.
The catwalk stretched from the tiny booth at the back of the room all the way to where she now crouched, where the light strip hung from the ceiling. From that point it branched off; another walkway ran perpendicular to it, from one side of the room to the other. On her left it dead-ended at the wall. On her right … On her right it seemed to turn left again at the wall and head back, behind the curtain. An odd arrangement.
“Hey, why does the catwalk cross the stage over there?”
“What?” From Chess’s position Monica looked like a blob of shrieking plaid. Beulah had, of course, settled into one of the chairs, where she lounged as if she was about to light up a smoke and crack a beer. Or, not a beer; she didn’t appear to be much of a beer type. A wine spritzer or something equally girly.
“The catwalk,” Chess said. “Why does it cross the stage?”
“Oh. Not sure, really. I’ve heard that it’s a leftover from when this was a meeting room for dignitaries, or maybe it was built because they needed it for effects for some play.”
Weird. “Where does it go? Does it hit the back wall?”
“Um, I think so.”
Wow, she was helpful. Sure, she was an administrative assistant, but it still seemed to Chess that Monica might have some knowledge of the oddities of the building.
It didn’t matter. Whether or not she knew what it was for, she’d have to walk it all the way. So she arranged her bag more securely on her shoulder and started moving, her thighs aching from the peculiar squat-walk she was forced to use.
The catwalk rattled beneath her, which was just what she needed, but it seemed steady enough. After a moment or two she found a sort of rhythm, even, with one hand on the rail and the other on the floor to help keep her steady. In no time, it seemed, she reached the wall, made the left, and kept going.
Over the curtain, which seemed unusual, but then how else could it go, right? Right. Dust coated the top of the curtain so thick the color of the fabric was no longer visible; Chess only knew it was red because she’d seen it from the floor.
Backstage—well, it looked like every backstage Chess had ever seen. No, she’d never been in any school plays or anything—the very idea was ridiculous—but backstage areas were dark and private, the perfect place to skip class and get high or steal a few naked minutes with whomever she’d felt like giving the privilege to that particular day.
Tall canvas-and-wood flats rested against the wall; old desks and a battered sofa and other odds and ends of furniture braced them up. Boxes of costumes, boxes of props, general dust, and detritus littered the floor. Typical.
What wasn’t typical was the faint odd smell in the air, and what her adjusting eyes could see was a stub of candle and a small tray on the floor.
Shit. She grabbed her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, but what she really needed to do was get down there and look. And she needed to do it without bringing either of the women with her; she didn’t want her discovery of the candle and tray—if they were even related, and not just left behind by some kids who came here to make out or whatever—to be noted. Never let them know you’ve seen anything of interest: one of the first rules of Debunking. That went double for this case, when one Debunker had already been driven away and the potential suspects numbered in the hundreds.
So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …
The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.
So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.
But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.
Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?
She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.
One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.
“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”
Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible boing, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.
The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.
So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.
She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.
She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.
Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.
So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?
Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.
Chapter Seven
When questions arise, the Church is the first place to which one should turn. Always.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
When she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.
Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.
She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.
Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.
And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.
Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.
She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”
They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”
Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!
Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”
“No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.
Not that it mattered. Anyone in that room already knew they were coming.
She’d dropped her flashlight but had a cheap plastic lighter in her pocket; she flicked it on, and Monica found the right key and opened the door.
Empty.
Well, not empty. It was a classroom. It had classroom things inside it. But it was empty of people, and people were what Chess needed. Her heart would have sunk if she hadn’t been expecting to find no one there, and if she wasn’t still buzzing from adrenaline.
The adrenaline gave her extra speed to cross the room. That door wasn’t locked. It hit the wall with an echoing bang when she flung it open, when she flung herself into the hall and found nothing but silence. More emptiness. Of course.
Beulah might be a bitch—well, okay, to be fair, Chess couldn’t yet say that with absolute certainty, just with a lot of it—but she wasn’t stupid. She started opening doors down the right side of the hall, peering into each room, leaving them open so that Chess could look into them as she opened the doors on the left.
“Where else could they be? Where could they have gone?”
Beulah shook her head. “Anywhere. The stairs at either end lead to the science hall and the cafeteria. From there they could keep going into the rest of the school, or out to the parking lot. There’s some sort of activity going on in the gym right now, they could slip in there and we’d never know it.”
Fuck! It was about what she’d expected, but fuck! anyway.
The adrenaline started to fade, leaving her hands shaky and her chest and head aching. She could take care of that, but … Damn it. She pressed her palm to her forehead for a second, took a deep breath, and headed back into the drama classroom. The odds of her finding anything useful in there were slim to none, but she’d look anyway. At least she could make a note that she’d looked, that she’d—
Howhadtheyknown?
She hadn’t called before heading out, hadn’t told anyone at Mercy Lewis to expect her. Nor, to her knowledge, had anyone at the Church, although of course she’d have to double-check that.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone when she arrived except Beulah, Monica, and Laurie. Hadn’t seen anyone, and although technically anyone could have seen her when she arrived, nothing about her—her scuffed and dusty boots, her black jeans, the faded blue polo she wore over a black long-sleeved T-shirt, or her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut—screamed “Church employee.” Quite the opposite, in fact; she’d deliberately worn street clothes.
So how had anyone known who she was, to sabotage the catwalk while she was on it? How had someone not only known who she was, but made it into the drama room in time to start fucking with the bolts? Not to mention the wires.
That suggested a planned attack. More than one person.
Had it even been aimed at her at all? And if not, what the hell was the point?
She grabbed her notebook to scribble all of that down while it was fresh. Especially because now that the shakes and flashbacks were starting—she could feel the way her hand gripped the pen too tightly—and she knew she’d be alone for, oh, four or five hours at least, she planned to head home, crack her pillbox, and try to forget it all as quickly as possible.
Someone had tried to kill her. Or at least, given the way the catwalk had hit the stage fairly harmlessly, to scare the fuck out of her. Whether they knew she was Church or not, someone had just fucked with her in a particularly unpleasant way. A particularly unpleasant way that wasn’t already on her list of things she took drugs to forget, anyway.
Unless, of course, someone had made some calls. Both Monica and Beulah had made bathroom or office stops before they headed to the theater, so either of them could have picked up the phone. Laurie could have done so after they left the administration area. Shit. Four hours on the case, two of them spent doing research at Church, and she’d already survived a murder attempt. That didn’t bode well.
But it boded better than what she saw on the wall, what she found on the wrench lying on the floor nearby. Just two little smears of it. Two little smears of what she hoped was Vaseline or some similar substance, but which the knowledge she’d gotten from her Church training and the knowledge she’d gotten from a lifetime of having everything go wrong every damn time told her was something much worse.
Ectoplasm.
After all of that—after inspecting the roof above the theater and finding nothing at all, after finally getting out of the building she was already beginning to hate on more than just general principles—the last thing she expected to see was Lex, leaning against her new car, smoking a cigarette and grinning at her like she had dirty words written on her forehead and he wasn’t about to tell her.
“Hey there, Tulip. Ain’t usual seeing you this side of town, aye?”
“What are you doing here?” They shared one of those awkward kiss-hug-or-what moments, ending up kissing on the cheek. Odd, that. She and Lex had never really been cheek-kissers, but since they weren’t kissing anywhere else these days she guessed it was the thing to do.
Especially since it gave her another few seconds to figure out how to react to his presence there in general. As far as she knew, Lex didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around schools; why would he? He’d gone to one, she assumed, but his business didn’t involve spending time there.
Or again, so she assumed. For all she knew one of the teachers had a habit bigger than hers, or part-timed as a hooker and Lex was there to pick her up for her shift. The possibilities were endless; someone could be a fence, someone could have—
Information. Uh-huh. “How did you know I was here?”
His grin widened. “Glad to see me?”
“Surprised.” But she smiled. Of course she was glad to see him; she usually was. “Who told you I was here?”
“Why anybody gotta give me the knowledge? Could be I just makin a drive-by, see them new wheels you got and gave you the stop, me. That so hard to believe?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
The spring sunlight hit the black spikes of his hair and made them shine; he tilted his head and the light spilled across his face. Sometimes she forgot how handsome he was. But then, it was easy to forget things like that when it didn’t matter. “Been hearing crazy shit on this place. Figured on givin it a check-out, I did, then look who shows up. Got any knowledge what’s on the happening in there?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ain’t expect any else. An what’s the happening with that face you got? Ain’t run into that Boil again, I don’t think.”
Shit. How bad did her face look? She hadn’t checked.
But she smiled at the reference. “It was Doyle, and no, I just fell down.”
“Must have fell hard.”
“Yeah, I did.”
His fingers stroked her sore cheekbone, light and delicate and warm. She fought the tiny shiver threatening to rise and risked a glance at his face, but his gaze focused on her cheek. “Ain’t a safe place,” he murmured.
Chess swallowed. The sun still shone, the air was still clear and fresh with the smell of blooming spring, but something had changed. No more breeze; everything seemed to stop and wait, including her own breath, damn it.
Nothing like that had happened the last couple of times she’d seen him. If it was even happening, which how would she know? The only men she’d ever spent more than a single night with were Lex and Terrible—one of whom she used to touch all the time because they were generally together for that purpose, and one of whom she’d almost never touched until they started touching in private. Maybe friends did that sort of thing all the time. He was only touching her cheek, inspecting it. It wasn’t like he’d started playing with her breasts or something.
Then it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. A gust of wind chased away the stillness, chased away the expression on his face so thoroughly she wondered if she really had imagined it. “You leaving?”
She nodded.
“Got time, maybe you wanna come back mine for a few?”
No. The answer should have been no, especially after that weird little moment. But then … aside from one night of wandering around and the night in Graveyard Twenty-three she’d tried her damnedest to forget, she’d never really been outside his bedroom on this side of town. He might have some information that would help her. Hell, he might have some information about the explosion at Bump’s pipe room, although she didn’t much expect he’d be willing to say a word to her about that.
And she kind of missed hanging out with him, if she were honest with herself, which she generally tried not to be. And nothing had happened in that moment, and nothing would. She knew that. “What have you got in mind?”
“Nothing good, Tulip.” Then, seeing her eyebrows rise, “But nothing you gotta worry youself on, neither. C’mon. Getting twitchy standin here, aye?”
Oh, what the hell. “You drive.”
His room hadn’t changed. The house hadn’t changed. Only the looks given her by the various guards or enforcers or whoever they were had, from bland acceptance to subtle suspicion.
And she’d changed, it seemed. At least a bit. In the car, chatting, all had been well, but when the door closed behind her it occurred to her how long it had been since she’d been there. And what had happened the last time she’d been there. Happened several times and again in the morning, if memory served, which it did.
Another awkward moment when she started walking toward the bed, remembered, and turned back to the couch against the wall. Lex already sat there, lighting a cigarette, flipping a switch behind him so the Jam started playing in the background. King of his room-castle, just like one day he’d be king of his side of town.
“So what’s up?” The question sounded lame even to her, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. The bed with its plain blue blanket and sheets loomed larger and larger in her vision.
“Church sent you that school? Thinkin on it being for real? The spooks, meaning.”
“Too early to tell.” Not totally a lie. She’d taken the wrench, scraped the ectoplasm off the walls and into inert plastic containers to be tested. It felt like ectoplasm, sure, but that could be faked. People had faked more conclusive evidence than that. Hell, for all she knew it was some new hair gel or something. Way too early to start convincing herself that that bonus wouldn’t be hers.
“Aye? Some fucked-up place, that one. Ain’t envy you wanderin around there at night.”
“Who says I wander around there at night?”
He gave a short, low laugh. “Aw, c’mon now, Tulip. You forgetting, I been along with you on a few of them cases you get. Know the drill, I do.”
“Maybe this one is different.”
“Aye, and maybe it ain’t. Only thing I gots to say is be careful. Ain’t a good place, there.”
“Why?” She pulled out her own cigarette, lit it up to give her something to look at. Not sure how much credence she should give anything he said to her, if she should even listen, but at the same time listening hard.
Yes, sure, things were different now. But while she couldn’t say Lex had never lied to her—of course he’d lied to her, and she’d lied to him—she couldn’t see any reason for him to lie to her about a case.
Then again, she’d never had a case on his side of town before.
“Just ain’t safe. All kinds of shit in there, them teachers and all.”
“How do you know this?”
He looked at her with his head tilted. “It matter?”
“No. I just wonder what you know.”
“Ain’t know much. Hear tell on they being the sort sell them mamas it get they what they wanting, if you dig.”
She blew out smoke, shifted in her seat to face him better. “How does that make them different from anyone else?”
“Guessing it ain’t. Only most people ain’t big crowds like they. Could get up a fuck of a double-cross, be what they wanting to do.”
Chess looked at him without speaking, let the minute drag on long enough to have made anyone else feel uncomfortable. Lex didn’t, of course, because Lex never did, but his expression went from bland to curious before she spoke. “Is that what you came there today to tell me?”
“Nay, just came by check the place out, I did.”
“But why? And why today? And how did you know that was my car, you’ve only seen it like once before.”
He smiled, slowly, letting the change of expression itself waste time. “Aye, somebody gave me the tell you was there. Came by give you a hello. That a bad thing?”
What wasn’t he telling her?
And how much did it matter?
She pushed it all into the back of her head for later. He wouldn’t tell her if she asked outright anyway. Better to move around the question and see if anything else came out later. “So I guess I’ll be spending a bit more time on your side of town for a while.”
Lex stood up and headed for the mini-fridge he kept against the wall. Without asking he pulled a couple of beers out, opened them both, and handed her one. “Guessing you will.”
His amused expression told Chess he knew very well what she was getting to. Damn it. But not a surprise. “And I guess I won’t be the only person who lives on my side but spends a lot of time here.”
The couch sank when he plunked himself down, close enough that his hand almost touched her thigh. “Aw, Tulip, figured you come up with a better try-on than that. You know I ain’t givin you that knowledge anyroad.”
“Yeah, but I had to try.”
“Aye, guessing you did.” He laughed. “An now you done it.”
“But someone did tell you. About the pipe room.” That was pushing it, she knew. Sure, he’d laugh at her attempts to find out who the snitch was, which one of the people Bump and Terrible trusted had given Slobag the let’s-go on blowing up that pipe room. But he wouldn’t laugh for long. Especially now that her attempts to feel him out for information were no longer followed by her allowing him to perform his own feel-outs on her.
Sure enough, his eyes narrowed a little. “Maybe them did. Maybe not. Maybe somebody’s luck were just running right up. Thought you and me weren’t having the troubles on this one.”
And there it was. The iron door slamming shut. “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I just—Never mind.”
Yeah, she could probably tell him why it mattered so much to her. But so what? Their friendship seemed to be persisting despite the fact that they kept their clothes on when they met these days, but that didn’t mean he’d actually go out of his way for her. Her life wasn’t in danger, just her—Well, okay, it was her life, but not in a way Lex would care about.
Not to mention she just didn’t want to. She didn’t want to admit to him that she felt as though a big red pointing finger of suspicion hung right over her head, and that everyone saw it. Including the man Lex probably knew she’d essentially dumped him for.
It was her problem, and she’d deal with it.
Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills.
Chapter Eight
You might not think it’s true, but it is: Everyone is capable of some magic, no matter how small. Everyone can change things in their lives. Even you.
—You Can Do This! A Guide for Beginners, by Molly Brooks-Cahill
Lex dropped her back at her car a couple of hours later, pleasantly cotton-wrapped from the Pandas he’d given her and ready—mostly—to head home. Lurid orange streaked the sky above her, above the Mercy Lewis school; the building stood against it like a lurking shadow, cold and unreal.
Or maybe she was just high.
She didn’t think so, though. Well, yes she did, of course she was fucking high. But she suspected the sunset was really that gorgeous, the lone cherry tree beside the school blooming pale pink, the evening chill about to set in but not enough to make her cold in her long sleeves.
Lex had just driven away when she heard the sound, a clanging, crashing noise behind the building. At least she assumed it came from behind the building; the spring air still held enough crispness for sound to carry well.
Probably just a custodian emptying the trash. Or a Cooking Goody doing who the hell knew what to the food. Or a ball hitting a steel fencepost, or any number of things.
But it could be someone who liked to play with metal, maybe someone who hadn’t known a person would be on the catwalk and decided to go ahead and bring it down? It wouldn’t bring in a lot of cash, but not a lot was usually enough, especially in Downside. You could bolt things down to keep people from stealing them, sure, but they’d just get a wrench.
Her boots slid through the grass, jewel green at her feet, as she walked around to the side of the building. Not tiptoeing or sneaking, no. Just walking. With care.
Voices floated toward her, and another clank, clearer than the last one. Female voices, murmuring and giggling. It didn’t reassure her. Women could be just as dangerous as men; life had certainly taught her that.
These weren’t really women, of course. They were girls, high school girls. So focused on the small firedish before them, the pocket-sized floral book next to the little portable stang they’d set up—they were fucking serious—that they didn’t even notice Chess rounding the corner of the building and approaching them until she was close enough to hear their individual breath. Her shadow fell over their altar, and they froze.
For a moment they all just stood there—or in the case of the girls, knelt there—looking at each other. What was Chess supposed to do? Magic certainly wasn’t illegal. Quite the opposite. Citizens were encouraged to try their own spells, though the girls were being more elaborate than most. Even if magic had been illegal, Chess’s authority only covered one or two very specific crimes.
And even if it didn’t, the bottom line was that she just didn’t care enough to bust them. Especially not when she was there to investigate their possible haunting; the last thing she wanted to do was set herself up as a horribly strict authority figure. She needed them to talk to her.
Finally one of the girls—her bleached-blond hair made a striking contrast with the warm, pale golden color of her skin—spoke, rather bitchily. “You needing something?”
Right. Her arms and chest were covered; the girls had no idea who she was. “Just wondering what you’re doing. I was about to get in the car and heard you, and thought it might be related to the haunting I’m here to investigate.”
“You the new Churchwitch, then? The new Debunker, or whatany you’re called?”
Chess nodded. “Do you know anything about it, have you seen anything?”
Bleached Blonde shook her head, but her friend—oh, such a typical best-friend type, a little chunkier, a little less pretty, a little more desperate—spoke up. “I ain’t—we ain’t—but Vernal did.”
“Vernal Sze?” The one Beulah had mentioned as a good kid who needed a place to hang out, and Monica had acted as if he was one step down from a serial killer.
The boy who’d apparently scared Aros.
The girl nodded. “Saw in the theater, and in the gym on the later.”
In the gym, too? No one had mentioned a sighting anywhere but the theater.
Of course, it was possible they just hadn’t gotten to it yet. Aros’s notes were as bad as Elder Griffin had implied; after the first couple of pages they degenerated into scribbles and random words like “turtle” and “butler.” Who knew what information he’d gathered?
And he’d disappeared, so she couldn’t even ask him.
“Vernal told you about it?”
The girls glanced at each other, like they needed to check before they answered. Hmm.
“Aye,” said the bleached blonde. The challenging look in her eye grew deeper, stronger; an edge crept into her voice. “Gave the story to lots of people. Sayin it’s proof the Church ain’t doing them job.”
Chess would not rise to the bait. Wouldn’t remind them that they were only alive because the Church was doing its fucking job, and that the general statistic in the District of one ghost-related death per 350,000 people was further proof. If the Church wasn’t doing its job, no one would be alive.
But no, she wouldn’t say it. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t. Instead she just shrugged, let the girl see the comment didn’t bother her. “Do you believe him, that he saw a ghost?”
Another pause. Another glance. “Aye. Vernal ain’t give us the lie, not on a tale like that.”
“Besides, he ain’t the only one seen it,” her friend said. “Were like four of em in the theater, I recall, they all seen.”
If that meant anything at all in cases like this one, Chess would be glad to have that information. As it was, who the fuck cared? So a bunch of kids lied for each other. Yeah, that was really trustworthy confirmation.
They could all be telling the truth, of course, but lying was probably the better guess. “Do you know who the others were? And maybe what they were doing in there that day?” The tray and candle behind the curtain crept back into her head. Had Vernal and his pals been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing in that theater? Not just drinking, as Monica had said, but magic? Summonings, even?
It shouldn’t have been possible. If they had the kind of power required to do that sort of magic, the Church would have found them, and they’d be in school there.
Unless, of course, being from this part of town they’d refused. But even then—She forced herself to stop the mind-wander she was about to take when Bleached Blonde opened her mouth again.
“One of them Goodys should be able give you the knowledge. Ask them.” Her mouth turned down. “In the middle of something, we are. An wanna get it finished up.”
Little bitch. “Right. What are you doing? Memory spells for studying, or a glamour or something?”
No answer. She crouched down herself, bracing one hand on the ground so the weight of her bag didn’t make her tip over. Maybe they were doing a love spell or something equally embarrassing, and that’s why they didn’t want to say?
No. Whatever they were doing, it was not a love spell. Wasn’t any kind of spell anyone should have been doing outside of the Church, and she would have known that even if the girls hadn’t leapt up, snatched the book, and run when she saw the Herb Paris berries in the firedish.
Half an hour later she closed her front door behind her with a sigh, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and headed for the two-week-old couch. Pretty cool not to have to dodge broken springs when she sat down anymore, yeah, but … That old couch had been one of the first things she’d bought when she moved into the cozy one-bedroom apartment in what used to be a Catholic church. One of the first things she’d ever bought for herself that was permanent, bought for the first real home she’d ever had outside the Church.
But then, she probably could have held on to it longer if she and Terrible hadn’t broken it one night, so she guessed that was a pretty fair trade-off. Blood rushed to her face at the memory; her face, and other places, too. He wouldn’t be there for at least another hour or so.
Which she supposed was fine—or, not fine, it sucked. For the tenth or twentieth time she considered calling him, just to hear his voice. Just to see what he was doing, to know from the way he answered the phone that he was happy she’d called him, that he wished he was with her.
But he was probably busy, and she’d be interrupting him. He’d get annoyed, and she’d look clingy and pitiful. It would be like admitting she needed—no, not admitting, there was nothing to admit. It would be like saying that she needed to have him around, and if she did that he’d be turned off.
How the hell was it that she’d always been so comfortable with him before, but as soon as she’d realized she was in love with him, as soon as she told him that … she was nervous all the time?
So she didn’t press the button on her phone. Instead she pulled out her case file to look over while she waited, and hoped that when he got to her place he wouldn’t be in a worse mood over the fire at the pipe room. Had that really been only the night before? It felt like years had passed.
The girls had been playing with Herb Paris berries, and whatever that book was that they’d snatched from the base of the stang when they ran.
Could have been some sort of love spell, sure. Herb Paris berries were very versatile.
But Herb Paris berries were also used in casting the Evil Eye—among other things—and something told her the girls were a bit more the Evil-Eye-or-other-things type. Perhaps it was the fact that they took off so damn fast. Chess didn’t buy the old “innocent people have no reason to run” line—the only people she’d ever known who did were naïve, stupid, or just plain assholes—but given the shit attitude both girls had given her before she discovered their little firedish crime, she suspected “innocent” wasn’t a word that would describe either of them. It wasn’t a word that described anyone in Downside, really. Certainly not her.
Anyway. The girls and their spell were probably irrelevant. The ectoplasm … that was relevant. The fact that Aros’s notes degenerated further and further into utter nonsense with every page—alarmingly quickly, in fact—was relevant. Had the ghosts made him crazy? Someone doing some sort of illegal magic? Had the stress of the case snapped a spring in his brain? Or was he just fucking insane, and it had finally come out?
What would really help would be a conversation with Aros himself. Too bad nobody seemed to know where he was. He’d dumped off his notes with Elder Griffin, thrown his fit at the school, and took off.
If they hadn’t cleared his cabin on the Church grounds, she might be able to get some information from looking through it. She also needed to know if he had family anywhere, people he might have gone to. That should be in his employee file, but perhaps she could find some of his friends or whatever through the cabin.
The sound of an engine rumble outside—the rumble of a particular engine—drew her from her ruminations. Her heart gave a cheerful leap; most of her other body parts started tingling in anticipation. And there was that damned grin again.
That was so dangerous. So fucking dangerous. And every day that went by only made it worse, only made it harder to face the inevitable moment when he’d decide he’d had enough of her, when he’d get tired of her body and realize who she really was. That he didn’t trust her and never could.
Every day that went by was another day gone. Another day closer to the end.
She popped into the bathroom to give her hair a quick brush, give her face a bit more makeup. She had to tell him where her case was. She had to tell him she’d gone to Lex’s place. Had to tell him right away. Not just because he might find out himself, but because that was the right thing to do, and she wanted to do that.
She threw three more Cepts into her mouth, washed them down just as his key turned in the lock and the wards on the door slipped open around him.
His presence filled the room. He seemed to vibrate when she looked at him. Of course that could be her nerves, but she didn’t think so. It wasn’t the first time it had happened.
She stood up, waited at the juncture of kitchen and living room, trying not to grin like a lovesick lunatic. Trying to be casual. Trying to gauge his mood. “Hi.”
His eyes sparked hard behind their darkness as he crossed the kitchen floor, not speaking. Too much energy moved in the air around him, and when he stood right in front of her—close enough to make her tilt her head all the way back—and reached out to touch her cheek she knew what it was. He’d had quite a day, she guessed; violence clung to him like black oil.
Violence and a wild sort of intoxication from that violence, to be more exact. Whatever it was inside him that made him so good at his job, that made him the most feared man in Downside, had been riding him for hours from the looks of it, the feel of it. Now there was nothing else to hit, and that energy, that almost feral whatever-it-was … wanted to find some other satisfaction. Something or someone else to overpower, something or someone else to subdue, to defeat, to conquer.
She knew he’d never think of it that way. He probably wasn’t even aware of it, that dark bloodthirsty excitement lurking behind his eyes, surrounding him like a vicious cloud. His work—fighting in general—didn’t always do that to him, not that she’d seen, but when it did … Her heart jumped into her throat, then fell straight into her pelvis and stayed there, beating like a hummingbird’s wings.
“The fuck happened here? It hurting?”
“Oh, I just …” She bit her lip. “I got a new case today. And no, it doesn’t hurt, not really.”
“Aye? Ain’t so much?”
“Yeah, it looks worse than it—”
Definitely violence. Even if she hadn’t known from his energy she would have known from the way he kissed her, the way he fisted her hair tight at the nape of her neck, the firm possessiveness of his hand on her bottom as he yanked her up against him, bending her backward. Rough and eager, and that energy infected her, too, made her grab his shoulders, wrap her leg around his.
She bit his tongue just hard enough to hurt a little, her head already swimming. His gasp shot a thrill straight down her spine, shot her temperature up what had to be ten degrees or so, because she was sweating even before he slid his hand between her legs from behind and it was her turn to gasp. A gasp more like—almost embarrassingly so—a whimper. A week was too long, way too fucking long. A minute was too long, it was all too long when he was every fast panting breath she took, when the smell and taste and sight of him blotted out everything else in the world.
She already had one leg around him; she wanted to add the other one, to climb up him and let him take her wherever he wanted to go.
Which he did anyway. Instead of her climbing him, he grabbed her hips, hustled her the few steps into the living room until the backs of her thighs hit the arm of the couch. She drifted over it slowly, controlled by his hold on her.
She needed to tell him. She needed to tell him right away. Now, as he helped her slide up on the couch so he could cover her with his body. Now, before they actually had sex. If they had sex before she told him, it would look as though she’d been trying to hide it from him, as though she’d known he’d be mad and wanted to make sure she got laid first. Or as though she hoped that after, he’d be in such a good mood and so relaxed that he wouldn’t care. It would look like manipulation.
But fuck, she didn’t want to say anything or do anything that might make him stop. Not when his mouth left hers to play with her neck, sucking on it, biting it. Not when she could feel the energy around him changing, that savagery that told her what he’d been doing all day turning into something else, something just as primitive. Just as dangerous. Her heart pounded and wouldn’t stop; desperation choked her.
She ran her palms down his back over his shirt, then up under it over his chest to feel his skin, the thick hair and the scar on the left side, over his heart. The heart beating fast against her hand, almost as fast as hers. The heart that kept beating because of that scar, because of what she’d done.
What she was so glad she’d done. Because if she hadn’t done it he wouldn’t be alive, wouldn’t be there with his hands hot on her back, unfastening her bra beneath her shirt, then sliding around to her front. She wouldn’t be shivering harder and arching her back into those hands, reaching up to grab his hair thick between her fingers.
She swallowed; hard to do with her breath coming so fast in her throat. She couldn’t get enough air to speak louder than a husky whisper, didn’t want to break the kiss long enough to speak at all. But she had to. “I wanted to tell you something.”
In response he lifted the hems of her two shirts together. It almost hurt to have to take her hands off him so he could tug both of them over her head, catching her open bra on the way; the second her arms were free she grabbed him again, feeling as if it had been months and not barely an eyeblink. And every fearful alarm in her brain warned her about that, and she couldn’t ignore it but neither could she help it.
She wanted to continue, to tell him what she had to tell him; instead she put her mouth to much better purpose, tasting the skin of his throat salty from sweat. And while she was pulling the collar of his shirt out of her way she might as well start undoing the buttons, get it off him so he could take off the shirt underneath and she could feel his skin against hers. Her insides buzzed; she felt shivery and hot, like her body was made of liquid just about to hit the boiling point.
Or maybe just at the boiling point. His lips traveled over her collarbone and farther down to tease her nipples in turn, to pull them into the hot cavern of his mouth, and what had been a whimper turned into something even more than that. More like begging, and his eyes flashed satisfaction at her when he glanced up. Pleasure at his victory.
It felt like years instead of a week since he’d touched her, since she’d gotten to feel his weight on hers, his lips on her body; they’d decided it was better not to start anything they couldn’t finish.
She had to tell him. Had to, but the words wouldn’t come out. Not when every cell in her body threatened to explode, not when her body acted on its own accord from wanting his so fucking bad and she knew he felt the same.
She tilted her pelvis up so the ridge of his erection pressed against her through their jeans. Another gasp from him, a mumble of something that sounded like her name but the roaring of her blood made it too hard to hear.
Her thoughts were starting to disappear, to focus less on actual thinking and more on instincts and sensations, especially when he popped open the button of her jeans, tugged the zipper down, and hooked his fingers under the waistband and her panties. She lifted her hips so he could pull them down, his gaze fixed on her bare skin being revealed.
The words burbled up in her chest, flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. Before she even realized she’d thought them. “I hung out at Lex’s place for a while today.”
Pause. Long pause. His head dropped, hanging loose from his neck. His hands stopped moving and left her hips to sink into the couch cushion beneath them. Oh, shit. Even for her—and her track record of saying the right thing, or of not saying the wrong thing, was pretty abysmal—that was bad.
“Aye?”
Just one word, but that one word felt like a slap, so distant, so … so impersonal. Fuck. He wouldn’t even look at her; he sat up, ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck with his gaze focused somewhere off in the distance. She’d known he wouldn’t react well—how could he—but she hadn’t expected him to be this cold.
Kind of a stupid expectation on her part. Particularly stupid given the mood he was in when he arrived. Sure, Lex’s name had come up before, but she hadn’t spent “a while” with him since the battle in the City of Eternity. And Terrible had been there then. She certainly hadn’t been to Lex’s place since then; hadn’t been there in a couple of months, actually, since two nights before Terrible caught them in the graveyard. Hadn’t really been alone with Lex.
Not to mention that having this conversation—any conversation—was obviously not what he’d wanted to do. Especially not when that had been their first chance in a week, and he was so cranked up that her skin felt ready to burst into flame just from his energy touching it.
“My case, my new one? It’s on Twenty-second, the Mercy Lewis school.” It felt rather odd to be discussing work while she lay on the couch naked from the waist up; part of her wanted to grab her shirts or at least her bra, but she didn’t want to sit up, either. If she did that she’d be admitting this was going to be a real talk, a long serious one, not a quick interruption. “He showed up as I was about to leave. I guess someone told him a Churchwitch was there and he wanted to see who it was.”
Actually, that wasn’t right, was it? Someone had told him she was there, specifically. Or they’d described her and he knew who it was. Maybe she shouldn’t mention that, since she wasn’t certain.
“An lucky chances, turns up bein you.”
“Terrible …”
His bowling shirt lay in a careless heap on the floor; the heavy muscles under his skin moved as he dug around in it—shit, she could watch that all day, even through her fear—pulled out two cigarettes, and handed her one.
When he flipped the wheel on his black steel lighter the six-inch flame cast shadows on the walls, on his face; sunset had darkened the room to thick dusk.
“I didn’t ask for the case. They just—Elder Griffin gave it to me, because Aros, the guy who had it before me? He took off and Elder Griffin thought I’d be able to handle it.”
Still no response; still he didn’t look at her. Shit.
Her shirts draped over the arm of the couch where he’d tossed them. It took her a second to flip them right-side-out together; then she pulled them over her head, tugged them down, wished she’d kept her damn mouth shut.
“It’s not like I can say no. This is—Damn it, I can’t help where they assign me, and I shouldn’t have to—”
“They tell you head back his place after?”
She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself. “No. But I thought maybe I could find something out, maybe I could find out who the spy was, how they knew the pipe room was empty last night.”
The silence changed a little, thawed a little. “Get anything?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk to me about it. At all. I asked as soon as we got to his bedroom, but—” Fuck. Oh, motherfuck, what was wrong with her? She’d almost been off the hook, or at least on her way to it, why had she just said that? Why had she said it that way? Damn it. “Nothing happened or anything, okay? Nothing.”
“Stayed a while, though, aye?”
“I just—I almost died on that fucking catwalk—I was on a catwalk and it fell, that’s how I hurt my cheek—and I didn’t feel like being alone and I knew you were busy, and he was there.”
“Oh, I dig. Hey, maybe you give me the number that dame Cassie, the one wore your face? Next time aught happens to me, I give her a ring-up for company. No worries, aye?”
“He’s my friend, okay, that’s all, and you know that, you know I still talk to him. You said—”
The ringing of his phone interrupted her, loud and annoying. Terrible shot her a this-isn’t-over glare and checked the phone, then answered it. More bad news, probably. The only people she could see him taking calls from at that moment were Bump or Felice, the mother of the daughter he had in another part of Triumph City. No one except Bump and Chess knew about Katie; Katie didn’t know Terrible was her father. And Terrible wanted to keep it that way. “Aye.”
His face paled, so pale her heart skipped a beat before the dull red flush of anger started creeping up his neck. “Aye, what—Aw, fuck. Aye.”
What should she do? Should she touch him? Or would that just piss him off more? What the hell did people in relationships do when shit happened, when the other person was probably regretting being there to begin with and wondering how they could have ever thought they actually wanted to be?
“Coming.” He snapped the phone shut, scooping up his long-sleeved shirt in the same movement and slipping it on. Even in the midst of everything Chess felt a pang of regret seeing his chest disappear; not just because it was his or the fact that she liked to look at it so much—which she did—but because of what its disappearance meant. He had to leave, probably right away, while something awful and painful and all her fault crouched between them like a troll under a bridge.
And he might not be able to come back that night. Hell, he probably didn’t want to come back. Ever. Fuck!
“Get yon shoes on.” His voice was flat; he didn’t look up from buttoning his bowling shirt.
“Why, what—”
“Found a body. Corner man, name of Bag-end Eddie. Just find him in the pipe room, half-burned, dig. Gotta get us up there.”
The fact that he wanted her to go with him should have made her feel better. And she had to admit it did. But not much.
Why did he want her to go? Sure, maybe he wanted to finish their “discussion,” but he was going to look at a dead body. Surely he didn’t think she should be forced to look, too? Looking at dead bodies wasn’t really very high on her Things-Chess-Enjoys list. And yeah, her total knowledge on what people in relationships did might fill a shot glass—especially if she used extra-large letters to write SEX—but something told her “looking at dead bodies” wasn’t a generally accepted togetherness-type activity, either.
Of course, not going might look—Oh, fuck this. “Um, I’m fine to go with you, but … do you actually want me along? I mean—”
The look on his face cut her off, grim and dark. “Bump say me bring you. Ain’t just killed. Say got magic shit all around. Somethin you oughta see.”
Chapter Nine
The presence of dark or evil magics should be reported immediately. That is your duty as a citizen.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
They’d almost hit Brewster before Terrible finally spoke again, his voice a low rumble over Black Sabbath on the Chevelle’s stereo. “Ain’t like you seein him.”
“I know.” Relief flooded her chest; at least she hoped it was time for relief. “I’m sorry. I just, I thought maybe I could find something out. And yeah … I was kind of shaken up, and having some company sounded good.”
“Aye, guessin it did.” Something in his tone made her narrow her eyes, inspect him more closely. He almost sounded … upset? Pissed off? Hurt? She couldn’t tell for sure, but he definitely didn’t sound the way he usually did.
But then there was no reason for him to, was there.
They rode on in silence for another minute; he hooked a right onto Brewster. She’d been this far north before—of course she had, the day before during the fire—but only once or twice before that. If they kept going, eventually they’d be as far up as the Crematorium, and the Nightsedge Market she’d been to once with Lex.
Terrible made a sound next to her, a sort of half-laugh. “What a time you choose to gimme the tell.”
More relief. “I didn’t want you to think I was hiding it from you or being sneaky or something.”
He didn’t say more; she knew he probably had more to say, but she hoped when he did he’d say it like that, and they could talk about it, and she wouldn’t have to sit there with terror icy in her stomach because she’d fucked everything up—again—and the minute hand on their relationship’s internal clock had just moved a tick closer to midnight.
The very thought made her already chilled skin colder. She grabbed her pillbox and water bottle from her bag and took two more Cepts, hoping they might warm her; the three she’d taken when he’d arrived at her place had hit, but not enough. She needed to get rid of that cold inside her, that frozen-solid knot of fear and guilt she couldn’t stand, didn’t want to feel anymore. Five was pushing it, she knew, but what-the-fuck-ever.
If she was lucky they’d kick in before they got to the body, and that would be a help, too.
Why did she even bother thinking what might happen if she was lucky? The only luck she’d ever had in her life pulled the Chevelle up to the curb and threw it into neutral, and she seemed hell-bent on fucking that one up for herself no matter how hard she tried not to.
Spring had come and the cherry trees were in bloom, but the nights still held the remainder of the dead winter, and the breeze, heavy with the acrid resinous scent of charred wood, cut through her clothes when Terrible opened her door. Good thing she’d put her bra back on, but she should have remembered her cardigan.
Candlelight danced in a few windows, making the buildings look like carved Festival pumpkins with horrible greedy eyes. The burned-out shell of the pipe room, destroyed walls supporting nothing, sat there in silence. Dull moonlight revealed the ruin beautiful in its destruction, dignified in death. Chess shivered.
Bump’s unmistakable drawl rode the wind to where she and Terrible stood. The anger in his voice didn’t ease the feeling of foreboding.
Nor did the open doorways on the street, tall lean shadows like upended coffins. Anything could be hiding in those openings, in the alleys and empty spaces. She was glad of Terrible’s arm touching hers as they walked, grateful for the knife she knew he could grab instantly if necessary.
Details on the dead building grew sharper as they neared it; well, of course they did. Black streaks above the glassless windows, the fire’s signature. Ashes collected in the cracks on the street, covering the sidewalk, obscuring the garbage piled everywhere. A stray cat ran by, its fur smudged with soot. And over it all that silence, that odd intrusive silence. Even Bump’s voice, droning on, didn’t break that silence. It only made it clearer and stronger. His voice was an insult to it, one it paid no attention to. Bump would be gone soon. The silence would stay.
The horrible creosote smell of smoke burned her throat, stung her eyes. It was so heavy, thick enough to make her want to gag; it made her desperate for even the air around the Slaughterhouse.
But she couldn’t head over there, couldn’t go anywhere at all. Instead she stayed at Terrible’s side, walked through the crumbling archway that had once been the door and into the short dark hallway just inside.
To her right was the bar, the chairs and charred countertop now exposed to the city-gray night sky, the floor littered with chunks of metal and wood, scraps of black-edged rags, broken glass. To her left a wall covered with curled strips of wallpaper, its pattern indistinguishable. How old was that building? How long had it stood there?
Once it had been someone’s home. It had survived Haunted Week. It had seen thousands of people over the years it had been a pipe room. And now … it was destroyed, thanks to Slobag and his attempts to wrest territory away from Bump. It had outlived its purpose. It had nothing more to give except perhaps a few bricks that would always bear the imprint of its death.
She reached out, touched the wall with one tentative finger. The building was finished, but at least it knew that. At least it didn’t have to wait and wonder anymore. She blinked, fast. Her eyes were damp.
Terrible’s hand found the back of her neck. Blindly she turned in his direction, hit his broad solid chest with her forehead and wrapped her arms around him tight. After a second, his closed around her, his lips brushed her hair.
It didn’t last long. Ten seconds, maybe. Fifteen. But warmth spread through her anyway; it could have been her Cepts kicking in, but she didn’t think so. And those seconds chased some of the darkness’s threat away, so she could move again. She curled her index finger in his belt loop and let him lead her across the wreckage-strewn bar and through a short hallway.
Narrow streams of light spilled from cracks around a door at the far end of what had been the actual pipe room, lessening the gloom and revealing the blackened skeletons of couches and pipes. The place should have been hopping, filled with Dreamers … she could have lounged on one of the couches herself and left all of her worries behind for a few hours, and wouldn’t that be the most welcome fucking thing in the world right about then.
Instead she stood in a charred death-pit about to go look at an apparently mutilated body, absorb the images of it. How typical.
Something else hid there beneath the horror of sudden, violent death. Magic. Not that she expected anything else; from what Terrible had said, she expected exactly that. But it wasn’t … wasn’t right. It felt muted, distorted somehow. Like a spell that had been done there years before and simply never cleaned up. It didn’t feel fresh, and it didn’t feel like horrible death, either. That could have been the fire, of course. It fucked with magic, changed the energy. So it probably was the fire. She just couldn’t be certain.
Terrible reached for the door. She let go of him as he pushed it open—“pushed” being the operative word, since it was just a slab of wood blocking the room and not a proper door—revealing something that made her wish she’d kept holding on to him.
Bump, standing against the wall beside them, gave them an annoyed glance as they walked in. “Bout fuckin time you get your fuckin show-up on, yay? Ain’t hardly fuckin dig standin round this shit.” He gestured toward the scene with a wave of his hand. “Had me a fuckin meal before the fuckin call finding me, almost fuckin emptied up me again.”
Agreeing with Bump wasn’t something Chess usually did, but in this instance she agreed wholeheartedly. The sight before her was horrifying.
Bag-end Eddie had been … crucified. Not in a standing position, no, but it was clear from the position of his charred body. Crucified on the cement and burned, the flames turning his corpse into an overcooked bone-in roast spread-eagled on the floor like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Unburned flesh remained on his face and chest, and in strips down the centers of his thighs.
His eyes, wide open in horror, stared at the dull moon above through the hole in the roof.
“What you think, Ladybird? I fuckin saying, looking fuckin witchy to me, yay? An ain’t fuckin wrong, do I? Bump never gets the fuckin wrong side.” He looked so smug, as if the gruesome death in front of them all only mattered as a way to prove his intellectual superiority again.
Or like it had taken a fucking genius to figure out there was magic involved in this. Like the body arranged carefully on the floor, the precise lines of soot she picked out around him, were some sort of obscure clue to the presence of witchcraft and not a blinking sign.
“No,” she managed. She should have taken three more Cepts instead of two. She should have brought a kesh or a bottle of vodka. As it was she’d have to settle for water. “No, you’re not wrong.”
“Yay, see?” Bump turned to the man beside him, grinning. The man’s face was a horrible shade of pasty, as if he’d covered himself in glue and let it dry. She’d always wondered what that would actually look like, if it would be shiny or not, but then she was just trying to distract herself so she wouldn’t have to look again at what had once been a living person.
Distraction was good. So was delay. All those D words, especially “drugs.” Another Cept would make six, and why the hell not. She dry-swallowed it while she was reaching into her bag to pull out a pair of latex gloves and her small camera. What else might she need … She’d have to get a closer look to know.
A closer look. Great.
Within reach of where she stood were Eddie’s feet. Just beyond those were the soot lines she’d noticed, dark lines, as though the cement itself had burned.
But the energy still didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like death magic. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of spell she was aware of that needed a murder to help power it. Those were—Wait.
“His—his face, the top of him, isn’t burned.” She looked at Bump and the pasty guy. “Why is part of him burned?”
Bump’s lips went thin; he stared at her for a long moment. “Had we a fuckin fire, Ladybird, ain’t you was fuckin here on the last—”
“Gee, really? No shit. Why is his body burned everywhere except on top? He’s burned from the ground up but the—his skin is still there, on his nose and forehead and chin.”
Pause, while they all inspected the body. Ha! Look at her, actually noticing something that might be important. She gritted her teeth to keep from smiling. Six was definitely her magic number after the food she’d forced herself to eat earlier. Or it could be the five finally really hitting, in which case six would be too much. She was too high to worry or care. If blessings were legal, that would certainly be one.
But smiling around a corpse wasn’t really appropriate, so she managed not to, concentrating again on standing still so her high flowed through her body in a smooth arc, making her feel like she was floating. Like maybe things were okay after all. Like maybe she was okay after all.
“Fuckin metal all on, yay,” Bump said. Oddly festive sparks of light danced on the walls as he waved his beringed hand; Chess followed it to see a slab of sheet metal—what had once been the reinforcement of the floor above, she guessed, which had probably been some kind of processing room—leaned up against the wall. “Got he on the fuckin find neathen it.”
“It fell on his body?”
“Ain’t it what I fuckin saying?”
Whatever.
So the metal slab had fallen on the body, and on the symbol. And had kept the parts touching it from burning. That had to mean something. What did that mean?
“The fire was here before the metal fell. I mean, look. Look at the lines. He was on fire, the fire started on the floor. Or, maybe it didn’t start here, but the floor was on fire when the metal fell. So the spell, whatever it was—it was burning already. Was there carpet here?”
“Naw,” Terrible said. “All cement.”
She looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”
Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”
“Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.
With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.
And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.
That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.
She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.
“It’s a hafuran,” she said.
Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”
“It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”
“Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”
“This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”
Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.
Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all get them because it—well, we get a lot of different sigils and runes and symbols and stuff, but this one is an all-around power enhancer. Whatever we do, the hafuran makes it stronger.”
Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.
“Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”
“No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”
She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”
She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.
“Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.
Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.
A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.
Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.
So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”
“Be one of them death curses?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”
She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?
She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.
“Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”
Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t know what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.
He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.
And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.
But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.
Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.
And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.
Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.
But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.
Not even her. Maybe especially not her.
So what did her new fucking disgusting friend want? And wasn’t she just thrilled that she got to try to figure it out?
“Gots us an even fuckin bigger bad needs fuckin chattering on,” Bump said. He lit a cigarette slowly, waiting until they were all giving him their full attention before continuing to speak. “Ain’t come on this by fuckin accidentals, yay? Gots me a fuckin tip on it, got the knowledge fuckin gave to us.”
Terrible waited. Pasty waited. Chess couldn’t. She couldn’t because she thought she knew what he was going to say, what he had to be going to say; she was sure the others did, too, but she didn’t think it made them feel as sick as it did her. “Who gave it to you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Crankshot fuckin gave it on the earlier. Hear Slobag fuckin givin the chatter on he fuckin witch him find heself. How’s that fuckin sound, Ladybird? Slobag gone and gotten heself a witch.”
Chapter Ten
The hordes of ethereal killers were terrifying and unstoppable, and the citizenry quailed at their approach.
—TheBookofTruth, Origins, Article 39
She’d hoped that when she woke up Terrible would be in bed next to her. She’d slept so fucking hard she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d come in and started jumping up and down on the bed, and he’d sneaked in to surprise her before, so the hope was there. But no.
She couldn’t think about that. Not when she got up, not when she checked her phone and found the text he sent around four—not even that fucking late—saying he was staying at Bump’s. Which wasn’t that damn far from hers. Why would he want to sleep in that museum of gynecological art when he could sleep with her?
Slobag had a witch. Slobag had someone doing magic for him. Slobag knew about things Terrible had told Chess, and now Slobag’s witch was doing rituals inside buildings Terrible told her were empty during a time she’d been off working and had been late to meet Terrible, and she knew he’d put that together in his head just as fast as she had, maybe faster.
And he knew she’d been hanging out with Lex the day before. Slobag’s son Lex.
And he hadn’t come home with her, hadn’t come in to sleep with her.
Another thing she didn’t want to think about; way too many reasons for that particular decision flew into her head.
What she needed to think about was work. What she needed to think about was finding Vernal Sze and his friends and getting them to talk to her. No, she didn’t need to think about it, she needed to do it. Right away.
She left her new car in the gravel-strewn lot at the side of the building and started for the front doors of the Mercy Lewis school.
But today the walkway wasn’t empty. Students—she assumed they were students, they carried books—stood in straggly clumps outside, talking or smoking furtive cigarettes, listening to the Circle Jerks. Their eyes stripped her bare as she walked past; their conversations died when she got close enough to hear their words. It wasn’t just paranoia from the couple of Nips she’d popped to help her wake up after sleeping so hard, either. Their suspicion and aggression felt like pebbles against her skin, stinging where they hit.
The front door opened with the expected screech, though not as loud against the music playing as it had been in the previous afternoon’s silence. For a second she almost missed that silence. No one had been staring at her then.
Down the hall past the empty classrooms—apparently Mercy Lewis had a late lunch period, since it was just past one—to the office, where she was greeted by … a whole fucking crowd of people.
Frizzy—Laurie—was there, as were Monica and, smirking in the back in a gorgeous charcoal-gray suit, Beulah. She was the only one smiling. The others just glared—at each other, at the walls, at the various doors to small offices within the main Administration area, and especially at Chess.
“Here’s Miss Putnam now,” Beulah said. She unfolded her arms and straightened from her elegant lean. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer your questions.”
Bitch. She’d barely finished the last word before they all started talking at once. Because it was totally easy for her to make out individual comments from that, right? How stupid were these people?
Asking that question wouldn’t win Chess any friends. And the worst part was that she actually needed them to be—well, not friends, but at least sort of friendly, because there were too damn many of them and she had nothing to go on in the case.
So she stood against the door, waiting for the inevitable moment when someone would finally drown the others out.
The drowner emerged rather more quickly than she would have expected: a man, not tall but solid, with thinning hair and a broad face. “When is the Church going to do something about this? Students are afraid to come to school.”
“It’s been three weeks,” a woman—heavy, officious, sneering—interrupted. “If you people actually cared about us, you’d have done something by now.”
Another voice, she didn’t see whose. “The Church doesn’t care. They’ve never cared.”
“They care about our money,” said another, and as if that were some sort of switch, the yelling started again.
But they weren’t yelling at each other. They were yelling at her, looking right at her with their eyes narrowed and their faces reddening. She pressed herself against the door and shifted her weight, getting ready to duck from the angry voices and their condemnation, to brace herself for the fists and use her own, when she realized what she was doing. Getting freaked out? By these people? Who the fuck were they, anyway? A bunch of officious assholes who thought she owed them something. Fuck that, and fuck them.
So she straightened her back, raised her eyebrows, and just looked at them. Waiting. Sure enough, the shouts turned into speech, into grumbles, and finally into the embarrassed silence of someone who’s just vented their rage and discovered that the subject of that rage doesn’t give a shit.
Which she didn’t. Well, she did, of course she did, but not about them. Or their self-righteous desire to play victims.
She gave them another minute in the silence. “Who are you all, again?”
Balding-and-Stocky glowered at her. “We’re concerned parties.”
“And what is your concern? Do you work here? You have kids here? What?”
The small crowd was suddenly full of shifty eyes. Uh-huh. “I’m Wen Li. I’m chairman of the Student Association.”
“What is that?”
“We help mediate between students in trouble and the school administration.”
A woman—helmet hair, glasses—piped up, “I’m co-chair. Martha Li.”
Yes. They looked perfect for each other.
The introduction game made its circle around the room; every single damn one of them was chair or head of some committee or project or something. Which meant, if her memory served and what she’d learned the day before was correct, that every single damn one of them stood to bank some cash if the haunting turned out to be real. Which made them and their anger about as believable and sincere as a declaration of pure and faithful love from Bump.
After they’d finished she gave them another minute of silence. “And have any of you actually seen or experienced anything here?”
She didn’t expect anyone to speak. She was right. No one did.
“Fine. If anyone has information that might help me, let me know. I really am here to help, and believe me, I want this situation settled just as much as you do. Okay? But if you’ll excuse me, I do have some work to do today.”
She pushed herself through the crowd—well, not pushed, they stepped out of her way—and handed Laurie the list she’d made earlier. “I need to speak to these students individually, and I need an empty room to do it in.”
“Those students have a right to have an adult with them while they’re being questioned,” Wen said.
She wanted to roll her eyes, but refrained. “No, actually. They don’t.”
“They’re—”
“They’re not suspected of any crime, I’m not the Squad, and they’re over fifteen.”
Laurie scanned the list. “Room 122 will be empty in forty-five minutes. You can use that one. It’s down the hall, at the other end of the building.”
Damn, who would have thought Laurie—who still looked just as sour and disapproving as she had the day before—would be helpful? But then, with a roomful of people, none of whom she appeared to like, why wouldn’t she be? “Thank you.”
Beulah still watched her. Well, good. She could quit smirking and do something for Chess, since she obviously had nothing else to do. And since she had keys. And since the crowd apparently looked to her, for whatever the hell reason. “Beulah, will you come with me, please?”
Chapter Eleven
A Church employee never panics in the face of danger, because a Church employee knows the Truth of the afterlife.
—TheExampleIsYou, the guidebook for Church employees
The wreckage of the catwalk still stretched across the theater, a dead steel monster staring at her when she stepped into the room. Beulah brushed past her to hit the lights. Brighter this time. Interesting. And worth mentioning. “There are overheads?”
“Yes, why?” Beulah did innocent very well. “Oh. Sorry, I just didn’t think to turn them on yesterday.”
“Uh-huh.”
Beulah followed her farther into the room. “They’re farther along on the—You can’t think I deliberately left it dark in here.”
“Can’t I?” Hell, why not just say it outright? Wasn’t like Beulah thought they were becoming friends or something. Wasn’t like Chess cared if she thought that, either. The only reason Beulah was there was to open the door and turn on the lights, and to get her out of the office.
“You can believe anything you want to believe. That doesn’t make it true.”
“Wow, you’re so wise.” Chess walked down the aisle, ducking under the catwalk, toward the stage. Checking the camera she’d tied to the catwalk the previous day would be useless; all it could have filmed was a small section of floor, and since it was motion-activated she seriously doubted it would have caught anything.
But there was plenty of work she could still do in the theater.
“Are you trying to be unpleasant, or are you just like this all the time?”
Chess didn’t even glance back. “But gee, you’ve been so nice to me.”
Beulah muttered something; Chess didn’t hear it well enough to know if it was in English or Cantonese, and she didn’t care. All she cared about was searching that backstage area. Alone. She’d wanted Beulah to let her in, wondered if she would say anything about the others; since she hadn’t, and since the theater was open, she’d served her purpose. “You can go now.”
“Oh, am I being dismissed?”
“Do you plan to keep sniping at me? It’s not my fault you have an issue with the Church.”
“Who says it’s got anything to do with the Church?” The amusement in Beulah’s voice made Chess turn around. “Maybe I just don’t like you personally.”
“I guess I’ll have to live with that pain,” Chess replied, turning back to the stage. It wasn’t until the sound of the door closing echoed in the empty room that she realized Beulah had left. And that she herself was smiling. Weird. But oh well.
A set of short black-painted steps led from the floor at the bottom of the rows of seats up to the stage; off to the left a small orchestra pit hid quiet and empty. Chess ignored that for the moment.
Dust hit her nose when she walked across the curtain now crumpled on the stage, sending her into a brief sneezing fit. Ugh. And she couldn’t even have a cigarette to settle it down; the staff at—Wait a minute. Yes, she could. She could do anything she wanted to. What were they going to do, fire her?
And while she was at it she could grab another couple of Cepts from her pillbox.
The overheads revealed a floor covered in dusty footprints; the faint scent of kesh smoke hung in the air, but whether that was recent or from the curtains or, hell, from her cardigan, she had no idea.
She walked around some boxes and a stack of wooden platforms of varying heights, looking for something, anything. Any evidence of ritual magic.
The odds of her finding any were about as good as her odds of getting Terrible and Lex to have a pajama party together. If she’d been able to look the day before … But she hadn’t, and that left them plenty of time to clean up. For all she knew, the minute she’d left the office they’d had an alert raised.
Sometimes, for just a second, it bothered her to be so suspicious of everyone. Then she remembered she was dealing with people, and that people were capable of every sick fucking thing she’d ever experienced or imagined and a whole lot of other shit that even she hadn’t, and that feeling disappeared.
Something creaked on the other side of the curtain.
She stopped, one foot half off the floor ready to take her next step. Her body buzzed. Was that a ghost, or nerves?
It didn’t feel totally like a ghost. It didn’t itch as much as ghosts did. But her skin tingled and crawled an alarm, the kind that told her someone was doing something with magic or ghosts, something they shouldn’t be doing. The kind that told her she wasn’t alone anymore, that made her feel as though a target stood out clear and bright on her head and someone had their finger on a trigger.
For a long, aching minute she stood there without moving, until the sound of the creak began to blur in her memory and she couldn’t be sure she’d actually heard it. Fuck. Her cigarette fell to the dusty stage and she ground it out with her toe.
The silence waited. Breathed around her.
Her muscles ached. This was bullshit. She’d count to five, and then she’d get back to work. One … two … three …
The movement came at four. A tiny blur in the corner of her eye, so fast she couldn’t catch it. Fuck!
Her skin tingled worse. Something wasn’t right. That felt like a ghost, but it also felt like magic. A witch doing ghost-magic? Shit, after Maguinness she really didn’t want to deal with that again.
Too bad it wasn’t up to her. There was a ghost, and there was magic, period. A summoned ghost, maybe, or a ghost working with a mate. Double fuck.
She pulled her knife out of her pocket and snapped it open, used her left hand to grab a handful of asafetida and graveyard dirt. Let them fucking come. She was ready.
What she wasn’t ready for was the fast whoosh of something flying through the air, or the heavy sharp weight slamming into the back of her skull. The dirt and her knife flew from her hands; the floor flew up to greet her. Painfully.
She barely had a chance to realize what had happened before everything went dark.
It was still dark when she opened her eyes, and her head felt like someone had jammed nails into it.
Not that the rest of her was any more comfortable. She felt stiff and smushed
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Stacia Kane
Enter a world of danger, ghosts and magic in the fourth book of the fantastic Downside Ghosts series.Ghosts; ghouls; things that go bump in the night. Chess has seen them all in her role as a witch and ghost hunter.Right now life is going surprisingly well for Chess Putnam. Her bank balance is healthy, she’s pretty sure she can call Terrible her “boyfriend”, and the last few months have been devoid of anyone trying to kill her.So when Chess is ordered by an infamous crime boss – who also happens to be her drug dealer – to use her powers as a witch to solve a grisly murder involving dark magic, she is unsurprised; she knew the recent calm wouldn’t last. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Chess’ ex lover Lex, son of a rival crime lord, is trying to re-ignite the sparks between them.Plus there’s the little matter of Chess’ real job as a ghost hunter for the Church of Real Truth; investigating reports of a haunting at a school in the heart of Downside. Someone seems to be taking a crash course in summoning the dead—and if Chess doesn’t watch her back, she may soon be joining their ranks.As Chess is drawn into a shadowy world of twisted secrets and dark violence, it soon becomes clear that she’s not going to emerge from its depths without making the ultimate sacrifice.
STACIA KANE
SACRIFICIAL MAGIC
Book Four of the Downside Ghosts
To the real
Chelsea Mueller,
with thanks
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u3818331c-6a6b-586a-8220-8715f4995ee3)
Dedication (#ub4c0f74b-c8e9-5776-b5a3-47cec1d742bf)
Chapter One (#u8ccf37ac-b7da-59e0-8da4-d5f79f5fd3a8)
Chapter Two (#uaf4ab7af-94a2-5df2-809c-b7a8bac49e6e)
Chapter Three (#u5508ed86-fa52-5657-8169-e3ef56598d58)
Chapter Four (#ufca4abbf-0819-55c0-ab43-8ef8dec1ab63)
Chapter Five (#u6e277778-2182-5267-8393-d6fcf34bc19e)
Chapter Six (#u897598ab-10a9-55f9-bdaa-2ae9dfaef655)
Chapter Seven (#u3a1f2c10-5d22-5d4a-993d-73186b96628b)
Chapter Eight (#u85540df7-7614-5833-bbd8-cc0656077998)
Chapter Nine (#u107feb55-c1a1-56fb-a83d-133dec6ac5c9)
Chapter Ten (#u3e63f435-eee5-5a66-b840-8aa59d228f7b)
Chapter Eleven (#uc96de715-4e99-5528-9582-795beaa34775)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Stacia Kane (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Only the bravest fight the dead.
—Grand Elder Thomas, speech to graduating students, 2007
Had the roof over her head not been a broken mess, shredded insulation and pieces of tile dangling like the rotting innards of the living thing it had once been, she wouldn’t be getting hit on the head with cold droplets of water at odd, annoying intervals.
That would have made her happier. Or at least not quite as unhappy. Nothing could have made her happy at that moment, when she was about to wander down a dark hall where a ghost lurked and hopefully manage to freeze it before it sliced off her head or stabbed her or whatever the hell else it planned to do. The odds of a ghost in this corpse of a building not having a weapon were—well, hell, there were no odds at all. Only the dumbest ghost on the planet wouldn’t have found some sort of weapon in this ramshackle palace of destruction, where her boots sloshed through a good two inches of foul water, broken glass, metal shards, pulped books, and who the fuck knew what else.
“Think it’s in there, Chess?” Riley Martin, a brand-new Debunker, pointed toward the mouth of the hallway ahead. In there the ceiling had apparently maintained its integrity; the hall was only shadows, a dark tunnel straight to the grave. Or rather the Crematorium, and the City of Eternity. None of which really sounded like a fun way to end her evening.
But neither did leaving the ghost here to kill other people, or telling the Church she’d decided to fuck off to the bar instead of doing her job. “Probably. No, don’t turn your light on yet. Try not to if you can help it. Let’s go stand right inside until our eyes adjust, okay?”
Riley nodded. Chess followed him, neither of them bothering to keep their movements quiet. If they could somehow attract the spirit, draw it out, that would be easier and safer. The last thing either of them wanted to do was to walk into some kind of ambush.
Fucking Lamaru. Fucking Arthur Maguinness-Beldarel shithead. If they hadn’t played their stupid power games and set a bunch of ghosts free the month before, she wouldn’t be out here doing something that technically wasn’t her job but that every Church employee capable of doing it had to do at least one night a week when they weren’t otherwise engaged or on a case.
Which Chess wasn’t. Damn it.
They stopped in the shadows; the almost imperceptible breeze hadn’t penetrated there at all, so the horrible ammoniac stench, full of mold and worse, assaulted her nose the second they entered the hall. Her eyes stung.
But more than that, a warm tingling sensation began crawling up her arms and across her chest as her magical tattoos reacted to the presence of a spirit. A ghost was definitely nearby. She looked at Riley. “Are you feeling it?”
“I—I don’t know. My skin feels kind of funny.” What little of his face she could make out didn’t look happy.
“You get used to it.”
A flash of light down the hall, so fast she only saw it out of the corner of her eye. But it had definitely been light, and it had definitely been the bluish light of a ghost.
Riley’s breath caught. This was the time that, if she was a normal sort of person, she’d be able to say something reassuring and at the same time cool, the kind of thing that would make Riley feel brave but not patronized. And then they’d both sort of smile and head off down the hall to Banish that ghost.
But she was not that kind of person, and the last thing she had any idea how to do was reassure Riley and make him feel good about himself. Cliché was probably about the best she could do.
“You’ll be fine,” was the one she gave him, and to her surprise it seemed to work. “Come on.”
Every step they took, every slow step through the soup of bacteria and rot sucking at her boots brought them closer to that faint death-glow. She’d mixed some graveyard dirt and asafetida earlier, stuck it in a bag in her pocket; now she reached inside and grabbed a small handful. Ready.
They moved a few steps in silence broken only by the occasional plonk of water dripping from the ceiling behind them. Something rattled. Chess spun around to look but saw nothing.
Ghosts weren’t the only things that might hang out in abandoned buildings at night. They weren’t in Downside, no, but they weren’t exactly in the nicest area, either. This building, which had once housed offices of some kind and a warehouse, stood just a few streets into Cross Town, a whole city block of condemned cement with a ten-foot chain-link fence around it.
A chain-link fence with holes in it. She wondered how many neighborhood kids had made this their weekend hangout until two nights before, when one of them met a gruesome death just inside the front doors.
Another tiny glimpse of light.
“It is a ghost, right?” Riley whispered. “I mean, I feel like there’s a ghost here, but could that be something else?”
“It could be anything else. But it’s probably a ghost, yeah.”
The comforting weight of her knife sat in her pocket. Debunkers weren’t supposed to be armed. Fuck that. She’d rather take her chances with Church discipline than with anyone or anything she might come across in a place like this.
She probably wouldn’t need the knife anyway. Damn it, the kid’s nervousness was making her twitch, and as much as she sympathized with him she really didn’t need that at the moment. It had been a good two hours since she’d taken her pills, and while she still had time—she wasn’t worried—places like this didn’t help her keep calm. All that filth, all those germs, soaking into the bottoms of her jeans, brushing against her skin, her hair, invading her lungs. People caught diseases from places like this, especially after a rain.
Or they got their throats sliced open by ghosts armed with rusted shards of metal or whatever the fuck else. She edged her way down the hall, her back pressed against that gross excuse for a wall just because she couldn’t really see well enough to walk down the center. The glow got stronger with every step. Her fist clenched around the dirt.
Another plonk. Another rattle. Something like a whisper, that could have been a voice or the sound of a makeshift blade leaving its sheath of soaked pulp or crumbled cement. The glow from a doorway another ten feet or so down the hall.
In its reflection, Riley’s face looked even paler. The only thing keeping hers from looking the same—assuming it didn’t, which she was just going to go ahead and assume—was the fact that she was still just high enough to be not quite as scared as she should be. And the fact that she was an absolute fucking expert at lying to herself.
But with every step closer to that glowing doorway, that ability drew just a tiny bit farther away from her.
Whatever. Wasn’t like she could just turn around and run. So she took one last deep breath and spun around the doorframe with her arm ready to throw the dirt at the first dead thing that moved.
And found herself staring at three teenagers, who were obviously very alive, and who obviously thought they’d done something very clever, and who should have been thanking the gods who didn’t exist that Riley was there too because if he hadn’t been she would have been very tempted to beat the shit out of them with the nearest heavy object.
“What are you doing here?” Riley asked, but it was obvious from the stunned looks on their faces. Whoever they’d been expecting to walk through that door, it wasn’t two Church employees.
One of them glanced at the other two, and cleared his throat when they didn’t speak up. Fucking cowards. “We, uh, we thought you were some friends of ours.”
Damn it, why were her tattoos still tingling, if a ghost wasn’t in this room? This didn’t feel right, not at all. She needed to get those little bastards out of there as quickly as possible. “You need to leave, okay? Time to go.”
“We’ve been in here for like an hour,” the kid replied. The flashlight he’d hidden under his dark-blue jacket still glowed, made him glow. That’s where that bluish light had come from, she guessed, but nothing about these kids should have been setting off the alarms in her tattoos. Something else was around, waiting. “We haven’t seen anything.”
“Oh, right. That must mean nothing is here. This is such a small building.” She stepped sideways from the door; Riley, she was pleased to see, had already taken a step back into the hall. “Go on, get out of here.”
“But we can help you,” the first guy started.
Started, but didn’t get to finish. Because before the last word hit the air, the ghosts—who’d clearly been waiting for just this sort of noisy fun—slipped through the walls. Four of them.
And thanks to the debris and shit on the floor, including what appeared to be a damned cigarette lighter sitting on top of a backpack tucked against one of the drier sections of wall, they were ghosts with weapons.
Chess started to throw her dirt, put as much power behind it as she could, but missed as the teenagers freaked out and started running. One of them knocked her against the wall; another bounced off her and tumbled back. The third … the third had a face half obscured by blood, presumably from the chunk of concrete the ghost beside it was readying for another swing.
The kids screamed. Riley yelled something. Chess fought the rising tides of fear and irritation and grabbed another handful of dirt.
Go for the concrete-wielding ghost first, because if it smacked that kid again there’d be a nice layer of brains added to the general slime and mess on the floor. She managed to freeze that one, glanced around to see Riley doing the same with another.
That left two. Two ghosts and three teenagers who really should have fucking known better crowded into that small space. There was barely room to move in there, much less do anything else, and two of the ghosts were still mobile.
Flames erupted in the corner of her vision. That backpack had apparently been filled with papers—of course it was, they were high school kids—and one of the ghosts had set the whole thing alight. It threw the flaming sack at her.
She ducked, and slipped in the vile sludge covering the floor. Eeew. Cold water—and who knew what else, probably blood and urine and vomit—soaked her jeans.
Worse, while she’d been distracted, the other moving ghost had found a length of pipe and used it to try to pop off one of the teenagers’ heads like a ball off a tee.
At least that’s what she assumed had happened. The flashlight in the one guy’s jacket had gone out, or been smashed. The unearthly, hideous glow of the four spirits provided the room’s only illumination, giving everything the unreal look of a nightmare.
Another garbled yell from Riley. She barely heard him over the sound of her breath in her ears and the shouts of the teens. One of them slipped just as she had. The ghost raised its pipe.
Graveyard dirt still in her fist. She threw it, threw her power, too. The ghost froze and dropped the pipe; it clattered on the kid’s back, knocked him down into the floor sewage.
Riley had managed to freeze the fourth ghost. Not that it mattered that much. They wouldn’t stay frozen forever; ten minutes tops. Riley and Chess needed to get passports on the things, and they needed to get a salt circle down as fast as possible—that would be fun, in the wet sludge.
And they needed to get those motherfucking kids out of there before the scent of their blood, the taste of their terror in the air, attracted more dead. Who knew how many there might be in the area? She and Riley had been told to expect two at the most, and here there were four. Like a deadly double-score bonus on the world’s worst game show.
Well, hey, at least she got to win something, right?
“Riley, get them out of here.” She managed to stand, cringing at the feel of her nasty wet jeans touching her skin, and started digging through her bag for her salt. “I’ll try to get a circle down.”
“I don’t think I can,” Riley said.
“What?” Had some of the salt spilled when she fell? She’d thought she packed more.
“I don’t think I can.”
How could he not shoo a couple of injured kids out of the building? They were probably desperate to leave anyway. She looked up at him, annoyed, but what she saw changed the annoyance to the sort of oh-fuck-no feeling she was all too familiar with.
He stood against the wall, his face pale, his body still, staring at the ghosts with fear-wide eyes. “I don’t think I can, Chess. I’m sorry, but I—look at what they did, look at those kids.”
“Yeah, but Riley, they’re frozen now, right? They can’t move. Let’s just—I’ll lay the circle and you start the ritual, okay? Or you lay the salt. The sooner we start, the sooner we can get out of here, right?”
He shook his head. “I can’t get close to them.”
“You got close to them in training.” In another minute or two the first ghost was going to shake off the power holding it—him—and start moving again. She needed to at least get him marked, and now. “Remember training? You can do this, you can.”
“That was different. That was in class, with the Elders and everybody. I can’t … I can’t …”
Choice time. Keep trying to coddle Riley and hope to get him to de-stun, or ignore him and Banish four ghosts by herself, with her lone psychopomp, which would probably require two separate callings.
The teenagers—aside from the one with the broken nose, who huddled against the wall moaning—watched with interest. That, at least, wasn’t a tough decision. “Get your friends and get the hell out of here. Now!”
“But, we want to watch you—”
Her sigh passed through every inch of her body before it finally came out. “Get. The hell. Out of here. Or I will make sure you all get a nice long afternoon in the stocks next Holy Day.”
Finally, something she said produced some kind of result. They left, brushing past her as they walked out the door. They’d probably stand just outside listening, and the knowledge pissed her off, but it would take too much time to lecture them any more.
“Riley. Are you going to help me?”
He shook his head. Great.
Another bone-sucking sigh, and she popped the cap off her Ectoplasmarker. At least her psychopomp could be counted on to behave the way it was supposed to.
Chapter Two
Teach your children from a young age to be careful in their choice of friendships. Unwise acquaintances can have unforeseen consequences.
—FamiliesandTruth, a Church pamphlet by Elder Barrett
And it had, thankfully, but the whole thing—including driving that pussy Riley back to the Church, filing her report, and giving Elder Griffin a quick rundown of Riley’s freakout—took way longer than she’d thought, which pissed her off again. One of the benefits of taking a newbie along was supposed to be sticking them with the paperwork. Just her luck to get the one who couldn’t handle it.
That wasn’t fair of her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Especially not when the effects of her pills were starting to wear off, leaving her ragged around the edges and even antsier than she would ordinarily be. She grabbed her pillbox from her bag, shook four Cepts into her palm, and downed them with a slug of water before heading for the shower. Rushing through her shower, really, and everything that came after.
That quick, tickly, lifting sensation in her stomach—that feeling that never got old, that feeling she would give her soul for and pretty much had—intensified when she finally got to Trickster’s bar about an hour and a half after leaving the Church. Later than she wanted, but still she had made it, and given the whole quadruple-ghost fun, the result could have been a lot different.
Red assaulted her eyes when she stepped into the building, like walking into a bordello in hell—if hell existed, which it didn’t. Or rather, no one else thought it did. For them the City of Eternity, where everyone’s souls lived on after death, was a peaceful loving place, a quiet rest several hundred feet below the surface of the earth. Only Chess thought of it as hell, as punishment, cold and unrelenting and miserable. Life sucked, yes, but the City was worse.
Then again, sometimes life could be okay. Terrible stood in his usual spot against the back wall, talking to a couple of guys whose names she didn’t remember. They all looked the same to her, to be honest, or maybe it was simply that she never really bothered to look at them. Their faces didn’t interest her. Nothing they said interested her, not when she could be talking to Terrible instead.
Seeing him was like being hit in the chest. Like something exploding inside her, a quick ravenous fire that made her shiver. So bright and so hot it still amazed her that no one else seemed to notice it, that every eye in the place didn’t turn to her while she went incandescent.
But they didn’t—which was a good thing, since spontaneous human combustion would probably raise an eyebrow even there. No one seemed to notice at all. They were all too busy drinking dollar beers, listening to X’s “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” and talking or arguing or trying to pick each other up. Spiky heads, heads bald or slick with pomade, like bizarre flowers strewn in a humid half-dead meadow, swaying in a stale-beer breeze. None of them turned to her.
Excellent. She didn’t want to be noticed. She never did, but especially not just then.
She shoved a couple of bucks at the bartender for her own beer and a tip and pushed her way through the field of oblivion-hunters until she reached him, stopping about a foot away, careful to not quite meet his eyes.
He did the same. “Hey, Chess. You right?”
She shrugged. Sipped her beer. “Right up. What time do they go on?”
“Ain’t for certain. Ten minutes maybe, fifteen? Thought you was comin earlier.”
“I was. My trainee lost it, I had to handle it all myself.”
“Handle what?”
She gave him a quick rundown, her mind only half on her words. The rest was examining him, his black hair slicked back with pomade, the width of his shoulders, his height. His face, the face she’d once thought ugly with its crooked, repeatedly broken nose, its scars, its heavy brow and thick muttonchop sideburns. The kind of face people ran away from because the only place it looked like it belonged was behind a loaded weapon. Hell, it made his body look like a loaded weapon. Which it was. And that’s all people saw.
People were shitbags, with their easy smiles and their cold eyes and brutal hearts. She knew that better than anyone. Knew, too, that the face she looked at wasn’t ugly, that it was strong and it was Terrible’s. That meant it was hers to look at as much as she wanted, and that made something she thought might be genuine happiness ride higher in her chest.
“Telling on getting shit done,” he said, “Bump got an ask for you. Whyn’t you come on out back, lemme give you the knowledge.”
She shifted on her feet, glanced at the other guys still standing there, waiting to be included in the conversation. “Can’t it wait?”
“Could, aye, but might as well give it you now.”
The song ended; she nodded in the second or two of silence before the next one started. “Yeah, okay then. But let’s make it fast. I don’t want to miss the band.”
He shrugged. “Neither me. Longer you stand here, longer us take gettin back in, aye?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him, still careful not to look him in the eye, and headed down the hall that led to the bathrooms and the back door. Technically it wasn’t a back door. Technically it was an emergency exit. But the alarm wires had been ripped from the wall years before, and even if they hadn’t been it wouldn’t have mattered. Fire trucks didn’t respond to calls from Downside in general; one too many false alarms that ended in muggings and murders had stopped that particular service, and there was little worth saving there anyway.
Terrible pushed it open for her. She ducked under his arm and stepped into the alley, the soft squelch of still-wet dead leaves and garbage under her shoes reminding her for one unpleasant second of the earlier fun in the construction swamp. She couldn’t decide which one smelled better, but neither was pleasant.
But while the building had been full of people and ghosts, the alley was empty. Not even any light from the tenement windows behind occupied the space; only the dull glow of the gibbous moon overhead showed her that no living beings—no human ones, at least—waited there.
Terrible obviously noticed that, too. The sound of the exit door slamming back into its frame hit her ears at the same time his body slammed her against the back wall, farther into the shadows where no one could see him kiss her long and hard.
Had she thought seeing him made her insides explode? She’d been wrong. This was an explosion. This was better than anything else; sometimes she thought it was even better than her pills. At his touch something inside her that had been tense and twisted and black finally relaxed. At his touch something inside her that was constantly terrified found a little security.
Security Chess hoped and hoped would last, despite the nagging voice in the back of her mind that insisted it couldn’t, it wouldn’t, she didn’t deserve it, and she should just give up on the very idea.
Fuck that stupid voice. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pushed her hands down the collar of his shirt to feel his bare skin warm against hers. He was always warm. His palms left shivering trails of heat from her face to her throat, blazed up her thighs and ribcage, over her breasts.
Finally he pulled away enough to meet her eyes. That jolt of electricity, the one she’d been so careful not to feel inside the bar, hit her. Her cheeks tightened, her mouth curved into a grin she couldn’t stop. “I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it at all.”
“Aye, me too. Glad you did. Feelin like I ain’t seen you in weeks.”
“It’s been three days.”
“Feels longer. We all clear now?”
She nodded. The past week had been the first time in her life she wished she wasn’t what she was, wasn’t a witch, didn’t have extra power in her blood that meant anyone coming in intimate contact with it would be affected by it; wished the Binding effect of that contact wasn’t part of the marriage ceremony and so meant a commitment she didn’t think either of them was ready to make.
If she wasn’t a witch it wouldn’t matter. Marriages were bound by blood and magic combined, not one or the other, so they required the Church’s assistance. But magic was in her blood, and that meant spending six days burning with frustration.
His eyebrows rose; his hands wandered with more purpose. “You ain’t really wanna stay here, aye? Whyn’t we head on out now instead?”
“I thought you wanted to see the band,” she teased.
“Changed my thought. Let’s us go. Back my place, aye?” He was smiling, that smile she’d always loved, while his hands distracted her and his body warmed her through her clothes. Summer drew closer every day, and the temperatures reflected that, but it seemed like she was always cold when he wasn’t around. “C’mon.”
“My place is closer.”
“Aye.” He leaned in to bite her neck; she shivered. “But mine’s got thicker walls, dig, an I plan on makin you scream a few times afore we get to sleeping.”
It took her a minute to draw enough breath to speak, through a throat suddenly too tight for anything but a gasp. “I thought we decided we wanted to actually get out tonight, though.”
“And done it. Now us can go back in.”
“I don’t know,” she managed to say. It was becoming more difficult to talk, especially since he’d started sucking gently on her neck, making her dizzy.
“Think on this one, then, Chessiebomb. Nobody seein us right here, aye?” His nimble fingers popped the top button of her jeans. “Then we still out.”
“No way.” She giggled and swatted at his hands. “Last time I got a splinter—”
The sound of his phone ringing, a loud jangly sort of ring, cut her off.
“Ignore it,” she suggested, but she knew he couldn’t. They both knew he couldn’t. Midnight was practically the start of a working day in Downside, yes, but she doubted anyone who’d be calling him at that hour would have good news.
She was right. Within seconds of answering the phone his face darkened; darkened and took on that look she’d only seen a few times before, that lowered-brow-narrowed-eyes look of absolute rage. The kind of look that would be the last thing the person who caused it would ever see. His fingers tightened on her waist.
“Aye,” he said. “Get em—aye. On my way.”
Her heart sank. Looked like they weren’t going back to anybody’s place, to anybody’s bed. At least not for a long time.
His phone snapped shut. “Pipe room’s burnin.”
“What?”
He was already walking up the alley, back toward the street, holding her hand in an almost painful grip. “Fuckin Slobag, ’swhat. Pipe room up Sixtieth, green one. On fire.”
She didn’t want to say “What?” again, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t seem to get any other words into her head. A pipe room burning? All those people, even on a weeknight. All that Dream, waiting to be smoked, waiting to send those people into a soft golden fog. Gone. “What?”
He didn’t answer. She had to trot to keep up as he pulled her along, dropping her hand just before they emerged from the alley. She almost wished he wouldn’t, wished they hadn’t decided to keep everything secret. Certainly she could have used more physical contact at that moment. With every step the awful picture in her mind grew clearer: burning bodies in a pit of flames, exploding glass, storerooms full of Dream knobs, their smoke wasted. She wrapped her arms around herself to still the shakes.
Terrible’s car, a black 1969 BT Chevelle, waited for them in the circle of pale yellow cast by one of the few working streetlights. “Waited” being the operative word. To Chess, the car always seemed ready to leap from its resting place, ready to start mowing down pedestrians just because it could.
But it didn’t. It stayed silent and still while Terrible opened the door for her, closed it behind her, and got in on the driver’s side.
On their way to the fire, to the—Wait. “The one on Sixtieth? Didn’t you say nobody’s in that one, Bump’s doing something else with it?”
“Aye.” The car plowed away from the curb in a squeal of rubber. “Were thinkin on makin it storing rooms, dig, gettin other shit done there too. Figured on setting a new room a block up.”
“So no one died.” The tightness in her chest eased a bit.
“Naw. Least not what Bernam say. Maybe one or two in there, ain’t can say certain. But nobody ought, leastaways.”
“Good.”
He glanced at her, swinging the heavy car right, north on Sixtieth. “Aye, cepting, how Slobag knew nobody in there?”
“If the room’s closed—”
“Ain’t hardly nobody got that knowledge, though. Nobody been told. Just let em know tonight, first night it shut down.”
“Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t care who he killed.”
Terrible snorted. “Still a fuck of a chance.”
She sat for a few seconds watching his profile before finally resting a hesitant hand on his thigh, not sure it was welcome. Not sure if she should say anything. Anger still hovered around him, filled the car and tried to find a way into her body. She felt it like icy fingers sliding over her skin.
Not much she could do when he was in that kind of mood, at least not in the car on the way to check the wreckage.
Not to mention … he hadn’t said anything. She didn’t know if he was thinking it, if he’d thought of it. But he probably had.
If Slobag had some sort of inside information about Bump’s operations, he had to be getting that information from somewhere. And there she was, the one person Terrible knew for a fact had been in Slobag’s pocket; or to put it more bluntly, Terrible knew she’d been in Slobag’s son’s bed, for months. Knew she still talked to him.
How long before she became a suspect?
Chapter Three
Because they had no unified rule, they had no peace. Peace in the world can only be found through the Church, just as peace of the soul can only be found through the Church.
—AHistoryoftheOldGovernment, 1620–1800, from the Introduction by the Grand Elder
The last vestiges of the cheer she’d managed to find at Trickster’s evaporated. It wouldn’t be long. He’d think of it. He’d wonder.
And she couldn’t blame him. What was she supposed to do, get all pissed and indignant because he didn’t trust her? Why the hell should he trust her? He’d trusted her before and she’d paid him back by fucking his enemy. He’d be stupid not to wonder about her now.
That sucked. But it was true.
Their destination wasn’t difficult to spot. The Chevelle growled up Sixtieth, chasing the orange glow of the flames ahead. A fire indeed. The building had simply disappeared. In its place a set of half walls created a bowl of fire, surrounded by curious onlookers standing too close even though it was spring. A few of them held out sticks with various animal parts on the ends; free fire shouldn’t be wasted.
Chunks of cement littered the pavement, more and more of them as the Chevelle approached the scene, until finally Terrible had to park because there were too many of them to avoid. Broken glass sparkled under their feet.
Against the angry flames, Bump’s profile stood like a pimp-shaped inkspot, his hat brim ostentatiously wide, his cape moving in the breeze. Even at a distance she could see how pissed he was, just from the way he held his shoulders.
The closer they got the more obvious his anger got. He glowered at the fire, glowered at Terrible, glowered at her. “You finding they, Terrible, yay? Fuckin make they dead.”
It wasn’t much of a greeting, but she supposed it could be excused under the circumstances. Hell, even if they weren’t standing in front of what was probably half a million dollars or so on fire, it could be excused; it would have to be excused. No matter who she slept with, no matter who she still couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to sleep with, the fact was that at its base her relationship—such as it was—with Bump entailed the biggest power imbalance possible. She was a junkie. He was her dealer.
In other words, he got to say whatever he wanted to her, do whatever he wanted to her, treat her like less than nothing, and she got to take it without resistance if she wanted to keep getting her pills. Which she did.
He glanced at her now. “Ay, Ladybird. Ain’t fuckin supposing you witchy skills fuckin find they done it.”
She shook her head. “Sorry” sat on the tip of her tongue; she swallowed it. “Not the sort of thing I can do, no.”
“But you got them fuckin snooping skills, yay? Do you findin out things, on you fuckin cases or what-the-fuck them is you doin.”
Shit. Usually the problem she had with people knowing her job was that they thought she could wave her hand and make things disappear or whatever; now she had Bump obviously thinking she was some sort of Sherlock Holmes or something and could just pop in and find out who—of the hundreds, even thousands, of possible suspects—had spied, had set this up.
If she had a choice … well, she’d probably still say yes, because this affected Terrible’s life, and that made it something she needed to do. But she didn’t have a choice anyway.
“I’ll try.” She shifted her weight, hoped she didn’t look as uncomfortable as she felt. “But really, I don’t know any of the people involved, so I don’t really see what I can do.”
“Aw, nay, ain’t you fuckin count youself short. Got them fuckin brains hidin in you head, yay? You use em for Bump. Use em for Terrible, yay? Got the thinkin you catch this one straightup fast, yay, fuckin straightup. What fuckin happening if them get Terrible afore you fuckin get the finding? Thinkin you ain’t fuckin liking that.”
No, she certainly wasn’t fucking liking that. Did he not realize that was why she’d agreed to help out?
She’d known it was a mistake to tell Bump what was happening between them, what had happened. Being right usually felt a lot better than it did at that moment. This night was just going from shitty to shittier, wasn’t it?
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Bump gave her a slow, fluid sort of nod, the kind that told her he’d known all along that she would do it, and how he’d get her to do it. Damn him. He wasn’t stupid; no one got to be lord of the streets west of Forty-third—almost all of Downside—without being smart, tough, and fast, and of course utterly ruthless. Bump was all of those, with a greasy layer of sleaze smoothed on top like rancid frosting covering a moldy cake.
He leaned back on his gold-tipped cane, crossed one ankle in its furry boot over the other. Somehow even standing on the street across from a burning building he managed to look as if he was lounging around his horrendous living room, perfectly relaxed, lord of his tacky pornography empire.
“Nobody in, aye?” Terrible asked. He stepped closer to her; just half a step, really, nothing anyone would notice, but she did, and it helped.
“Nay, ain’t none people in there, when it fuckin go. Only our fuckin supplies, yay? Fuckin only half got out, fore it blowin the fuck up.” He leered at her. “Too fuckin bad, yay? Got less smoke now, price goin up, Bump gots the guessing on. ’Course, could be you ain’t gotta get the fuckin raise, you helping Bump out, get what we needing done up, yay?”
She didn’t answer him. Would not. He didn’t deserve an answer.
Instead, she watched the fire, watched Terrible’s profile silhouetted by it and the way it cast changing golden light on everything. Downside looked almost wholesome with the flames dancing in their enormous makeshift firecan; the delicate changing light softened the sharp edges, bleached out the blood and needles and filth, the passed-out bodies and pockmarked walls and broken streets. The fire smoothed it all over, made it look almost normal.
Funny, she’d never noticed that before. But then she’d never paid this much attention to a fire before, at least not one she wasn’t inside. Burning buildings were as common an occurrence in Downside as muggings and beatings; they no longer attracted much attention, save from scavengers looking for something to snatch from the wreckage.
After the fire finally died they’d swarm, looking for every scrap of metal, every piece of furniture, every smoke-damaged pipe. And of course, any lumps of Dream that might have survived. The thought pinched her heart. She could use a visit to the pipes just then. It would be nice to forget Bump’s beady eyes, his dismissal of her, the confidence with which he used her.
But that was the price she paid, and she knew that. So she squared her shoulders. “You don’t have any idea who could have told? Who knew the place would be empty?”
“Terrible an meself, coursen. An a some they others. They needed for fuckin clearin up, dig, movin fuckin furniture. Movin them fuckin Dream out, yay. They Bump gots fuckin trust for.”
“So who could they have told?”
Bump shrugged. “Ain’t shoulda given none the fuckin tell, yay? Bump’s business Bump’s own fuckin business. Ain’t for nobody givin out.”
“Well, clearly someone you trust isn’t really someone you should be trusting,” she said without thinking, and regretted it when Terrible glanced at her. He did it fast, just a quick cut of his eyes in her direction and then away again, but she saw it. She felt it.
It was starting already. She wished she could say she was surprised, wished she hadn’t been waiting for it, expecting it the way she expected rain from black clouds overhead. Nothing in the world was permanent, especially not happiness.
She’d always known that. She just wished life would stop proving her right.
Chapter Four
Duty to the self can only be served after duty to the Church. It is right and proper that the Church come first.
—TheBookofTruth, Laws, Article 217
That thought, and the feeling of doom it created in the pit of her stomach, burning a hole into her soul, stayed with her as she walked into Elder Griffin’s office the next morning. Most cases were given out on Wednesdays, and she could use a new case. Sure, she’d made a good chunk of cash on her last one—and almost been killed a few times to earn it—but after a new car, couch, and some clothes, a weekend at the pipes and another in a hotel in Northside with Terrible, her bank account still looked good, but not as good as she would have liked.
Besides, seeing Elder Griffin made her feel better, as much as she could. And she could use it. She’d ended up home in her own bed, alone, because Terrible and Bump had things to talk about, things to do, people to beat down—so she assumed—and he didn’t know how long it would be. She’d left her kitchen light on hoping he’d come over when he was done, but he hadn’t. He’d texted around six to say he was just going back to his place because it was closer. She really, really wanted to believe that.
It grew so exhausting waiting for the other shoe to drop that she wondered if she wasn’t trying to make it fall already. Sometimes, even, she almost wanted to tell him to just end it and get it over with. But she couldn’t. Just the thought of it … No. She couldn’t.
Elder Griffin stood up to answer her quiet knock, to greet her as she pushed the already unlatched door open and slipped inside. “Good morrow, Cesaria. How fare thee?”
She dipped into a quick, automatic curtsy. “Very well, sir. How are you?”
He smiled, his blue eyes kind. And happy. He looked … yeah, happy. Not happy like he usually looked. Extra happy. “Excellent, my dear. Come, sit down.”
She followed him back to his broad, shiny wood desk, situated right in front of the window covered with sheers. Through that gauzy, barely-there fabric the side lawn of the building glowed with the green of early spring while the trees showed off their new leaves. Everything new. Everything except her. She hated spring.
She sat in the leather chair opposite, some of her tension—the tension even four Cepts hadn’t managed to chase completely away—fading. It would never totally disappear, no matter what she did or what she took. But it faded a little. Just the sight of the room, the skulls on the shelves, the jars full of herbs and potions, the television mounted high on the wall behind her with the sound muted, felt safe. The way the building felt safe. The first place that had ever been a home to her, the place where her entire life changed.
“I’m pleased you’ve come,” he said, folding his hands on the desk. “I have a few things to discuss with thee, if I may. My trust in you and your discretion is absolute, my dear, which is why I chose you.”
Uh-oh. “Chose me for what?”
“A sensitive case. And … a sensitive issue I’d like to discuss with you.”
Double uh-oh. “Elder Griffin, I really appreciate it, but I don’t think I’m ready to be Bound again. It’s—”
“Oh, no, no. I apologize. I surely did not mean to make you think ’twould be so strict. No, I merely wanted to discuss something with you of a more—a more personal nature.”
Her brow furrowed. What personal issues could he possibly have to discuss with her? Sure, he liked her. She knew that. Knew she was probably his favorite out of all the Debunkers he worked with. Certainly he’d always been her staunchest supporter.
But they never talked about personal things. Not like that. “Is everything okay, sir?”
“Oh, of course, of course. All is perfectly well.” He gave her a quick smile, then looked down at his hands, the smile fading. “I am certain you know the Grand Elder has decided to step down.”
“Yes. I’m sorry to hear it.” Actually she couldn’t give a fuck. She’d never particularly liked the Grand Elder, always found him far too hale-n-hearty and far too little actual thinking-n-caring. But even she had to admit that his reasons for leaving were sad: the Lamaru—an anti-Church terrorist organization—had murdered his daughter and sent one of their own people in with the strongest glamour anyone had ever seen. Strong enough to make the girl look just like his child.
And she’d fooled him. Chess suspected that was what did it—not just that his daughter was dead, but that he’d spent a week with her killer, taking her to dinner, chatting with her in his office, touching her, hugging her. And he hadn’t known.
Hell, if he hadn’t stepped down, Chess would have put decent odds on him being asked to. Not that she knew for sure he hadn’t been. But she kept that thought to herself.
“As am I. But his resignation leaves a spot open, which in turn leaves more spots open. There might be one for me, methinks.”
“You want a promotion?” A trickle of cold she hadn’t expected slid down her back, into her heart.
She’d lose him. On top of everything else she felt slipping away, everything pouring through her fingers no matter how tightly she tried to grasp them, Elder Griffin wanted to leave her.
Intellectually she knew it wasn’t about her. Intellect didn’t slow her panicky pulse.
“I am considering it, yes. I do enjoy my position. I enjoy working with you—all of you.” His eyes lingered on her face just long enough to make her feel the emphasis on “you.” Just long enough to make her feel special. And just long enough for her to start mourning the loss of that feeling.
“But I would also enjoy moving up. Perhaps to a position with a larger responsibility. And a higher income.”
She gave him the best smile she could; her face felt like plastic. “Sure, of course. That makes sense.”
He sighed. “I hoped you would think so, I very much hoped. I do not know how much support there would be for me in that endeavor. Many Elders are interested, of course. But I do not think of putting my name in to be the Grand Elder. I would never presume. I simply thought, perhaps a Resident Elder, or a High Elder … perhaps a Master in the schools.”
“I think you’d be great at any of those,” she managed. He would be, too.
“Thank you. You see, Cesaria, part of the process is to give the Elder Triumvirate the name of at least one departmental employee over whom I have direct authority, so they can question you and make sure I am effective in my position, that I uphold the Truth and the laws—I am sure thou knowst the sort of thing of which I speak.
“Certainly of all the Debunkers your record is the most impressive, but I would also hope … I believe that—I have always believed in your skills, Cesaria, and I believe you have always trusted me, and mine. Your recommendation would be … meaningful to me.”
He cleared his throat. Before she could respond—before she could even think of a response—he continued. “You see, I have another person to concern myself with these days. I have … met someone, and we plan to be married.”
“Wow, that’s—Congratulations.” This just kept getting better, didn’t it. Well, no, that wasn’t fair. She was happy for him, she honestly was. How the hell could she not be? She wasn’t that selfish.
She’d just never thought of him as being a man with a personal life. A romance life. She couldn’t picture him out on the town, having a few drinks and meeting people, or home with street clothes on instead of his Church suit and stockings, with sneakers or something instead of his formal buckle shoes. Elder Griffin Casual was just not an image she could conjure, no matter how hard she tried. She might as well try to picture him in a clown suit.
His blush showed faintly through the light everyday white powder he wore. “Perhaps you’ll meet him? Methinks he would very much like that. Of course I would.”
“Yeah. Um, of course, I’d love to.”
“Excellent.” His eyes caught hers again, held them. “I am glad you feel that way, Cesaria. I admit the thought of working in a different department, of not seeing all of you, is rather painful to me.”
Sodon’t go, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t. Not when he looked so happy, so excited about what his future might hold. That was the way normal people felt when they were trying to move up, when they’d found someone to love who loved them back. Not the way Chess felt, like she was trying to stem an arterial bleed with her fingertip.
But then, normal people didn’t start their relationships by fucking people over, and normal people weren’t convinced that at any moment the person they were with was going to realize how completely worthless they were and run away as fast as they could. Normal people didn’t deserve to have the person they were with run away as fast as they could. So that might make a difference.
“My hope is that you will still feel free to visit me. Assuming I am promoted, which of course is not guaranteed.”
“Of course you will be. And, um, yes, I’d love to visit you.”
“Excellent,” he said again. He cleared his throat, sat up straighter in his chair. Chess could practically see an imaginary dial on his back turning from personal to business.
“I have a case for you.” He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a slim manila folder. Yes! Awesome, she could totally use a case. A real one, not chasing air for Bump.
A case would leave her less time for that, but she’d still have enough. Wasn’t like she was the only one looking for the rat, either. Bump and Terrible would probably suss him out within a day or so, and they could all move on. She hoped.
“The decision was made this morning to give the case to you, and I concur with that decision. You know I have always had the deepest belief in your abilities, and your discretion.”
“I know.” Yeah, he had. And now she’d get some different Elder, who didn’t know her, didn’t care. He’d probably hate her; he’d see through her to the filth inside, and he’d know everything, and he’d hate her for it.
“Good. This case was previously given to Aros Burnett.” He looked up at her gasp, the tiny sound she tried not to utter but which slipped out before she could stop it. “Yes. Aros found it … particularly difficult, and he gave it up. Gave up his post in Triumph City as well, as I see you remember.”
Her neck practically creaked as she nodded. Of course she remembered. The halls had barely stopped buzzing about it; it had only been eight or nine days.
“Aros was unable to give us a satisfactory solution. You’ll see his notes in the file. They become rather—jumbled, near the end, I’m afraid. But we feel strongly that you will be able to bring us an answer. We have seen the Fact and Truth of your skill many times. I look forward to seeing your resolution.”
“Thanks.” The file hovered in his hand, just over his desk; she took it and started to open it. “Where is it?”
“Well. That is another reason you were chosen, in truth. ’Tis not too far from your residence. You are familiar with Mercy Lewis Second School? In Downside, on—”
“Twenty-second,” she finished for him, barely noticing her own rudeness as she cut him off. Barely noticing anything except that address, staring at her from the original report in the file. Twenty-second and Foster.
Right in the middle of Slobag’s territory.
Chapter Five
The dead invaded the schools, hiding in the shadows inside to turn the students into soldiers of death themselves.
—TheBookofTruth, Origins, Article 57
The parking lot outside Mercy Lewis Second School hardly looked like a parking lot at all. If not for the four or five battered cars parked at odd angles among the gravel and weeds, Chess would have thought it was just a vacant lot like any other.
Four or five battered cars, and one sleek shiny coupe, gunmetal gray, the same color as Chess’s new car, although hers wasn’t as stylish. Or as expensive. As unobtrusively as possible she wandered over to where the car sat, pretending to be interested in the view on the other side of the rusty, torn chain-link fence, and committed the license plate number to her temporary memory. She’d write it down as soon as she got inside.
Despite everything else—and really, given its location and the fire the night before, this case couldn’t have been worse for her—her spirits lifted as she headed up the cracked concrete path to the large front doors. Working again. Something else to focus on, something she could actually do something about, something with actual procedures to follow and clues she was trained to understand. That felt good.
Mercy Lewis Second School—formerly an embassy for some South Pacific country, she thought—was clearly a product of that phase of architecture that had believed bland was better. It just … sat there, dull and brown, staring out at the dirty streets and crumbling buildings with an air of resignation. Whatever had happened to it, whatever changed in the world, it would remain, glowering at them all, suffering the crowds of teenagers abusing it every day.
It could join the damn club. She made her way to the graffiti-covered entrance, pulled open a heavy door that gave a loud shriek of protest. Great. Well, good to know, anyway. When and if she came back at night with her Hand, this was not the entrance to use. She made a note—writing down the license number of the too-expensive car in the lot while she was at it so she could let it drop from her memory—and followed the faded signs to the office down the hall.
The itching started when she’d made it about halfway down. Not withdrawals—not even possible, she’d dosed up right before she got out of the car—but something worse, something that told her three Cepts wasn’t going to be enough and made her wish she’d washed them down with a couple of shots, too.
Second school. Any school. She couldn’t say the worst memories of her life came from schools—far, far from it—but the ones she did have weren’t fucking good, that was for sure. The memories she had of when she’d gone; when she’d been forced to go. All of her foster parents made her, because if her attendance dropped they wouldn’t get paid anymore, but none of them gave a shit if she actually learned anything, and her teachers hadn’t either.
Those voices still echoed with every step she took. Just the air in the building, that particular chalkboard-antiseptic-dust-and-despair smell of school, reminded her where she was, made her remember how it felt and how much she’d hated it. The cold metal lockers lining the walls watched her, considered her, as her boots clicked on the polished concrete floors. She didn’t care what they thought, or what anyone she was about to meet thought, but she still felt that invisible cloud of judgment that seemed to hover near the ceiling of every school, ready to descend on anyone unlucky enough to walk beneath it.
Whatever. She’d never gone to this school, and it wasn’t her prison now. She was an adult, she was a fucking Churchwitch, and someone in this school was trying to scare people and scam some money out of the Church. So she would catch them. It was as simple as that, and she knew it and believed it as strongly and purely as she knew Facts were Truth.
Although … who would get the money, if the Church ended up paying a settlement? The Church owned the school, of course, and ran it, at least ostensibly. The Church wouldn’t pay a settlement to itself. So … another note in her pad. Whoprofits?
The classroom doors she passed were closed. Through the narrow windows in each of them she caught glimpses of chalkboards and teaching Goodys standing before them, the occasional slice of backs bent over desks. Boredom and sadness seeped through the walls.
Finally she reached the end of the hall, another closed door. administration was written on it in peeling black letters, with “Fuck the” scratched into the glass above it. Heh. Without knocking she pushed it open, got a good visual snapshot of three women standing around chatting before they stopped to look at her.
The one behind the desk, an enormous woman—she had to be close to six feet tall, and solidly built—with thin, frizzy brownish hair hanging limp from the top of her head, gave her the sort of disapproving smile Chess thought people with minor authority must practice in front of mirrors. Inexpertly applied red lipstick made her mouth look like a wound. “Can I help you, Miss?”
The other two stepped away from the desk, almost in a flanking motion. Had they been Downside kids and not school ladies Chess would have thought they were getting ready to jump her. Then again, maybe they were. Just not physically.
“I’m Cesaria Putnam.” She didn’t offer her hand. “From the Church. I’ve come about your haunting.”
A moment of silence, as if none of them knew what to say. What the hell? They had to be aware of the procedure, they’d had another Debunker out there already. Then one of the women outside the desk, petite with red hair and a horrible baggy plaid dress, gave her a tentative smile. “Of course, yes. Please come in and sit down. Can we get you anything? Coffee, tea?”
“No thanks.” Like she’d ever drink anything a subject gave her, at least in a situation like this. She did sit down, though, on the dingy couch that sank too far beneath her, so her ass hung lower than her knees. Getting out of that would be fun.
The third woman just looked at her, an odd sort of smile on her face. As if she knew something Chess didn’t and was waiting for Chess to figure it out, or she was waiting for Chess to speak so she could belittle her. A smug look. Chess didn’t like it, and she didn’t think she liked the woman, although something in the way she stood, the tilt of her head and that smirk, reminded Chess for some absurd reason of Lex.
Yes, the woman was Asian, but that certainly wasn’t it. She didn’t know what it was. She’d seen other men who had some sort of Lex-like quality about them, but never a woman. Oh well. There was a first time for everything. Women could be smug bastards, too.
Then the woman shifted, and the resemblance disappeared, leaving just an attractive woman with straight, shiny dark hair in a casual knot at the base of her neck. Compared to the other two she looked especially gorgeous, in her black pencil skirt and loose white Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“We weren’t sure we would get someone else,” she said, one graceful elbow propped on the counter. “Aros left so abruptly, and we haven’t heard anything since.”
Chess grabbed her notepad. “He told you he wouldn’t be back?”
The women smiled at each other, as though Chess had just said something adorably naïve. Bitches.
“We got that impression,” Horrible Plaid said, “when he screamed at us all that he was never stepping foot in this place again, broke a window, and ran off in the middle of the day.”
Damn. What exactly had he encountered?
She didn’t know Aros; he’d been a recent transfer. So she had no idea how tough he was, or what kinds of cases he’d handled wherever it was he’d come from. She made a quick note to ask Elder Griffin about it, and pushed the tiny flash of sadness out of her head.
“He never seemed comfortable here,” Big Frizzy—the name plate on the edge of the desk read laurie barr—said. Or rather, deigned to say. She still looked at Chess as if Chess was something rotten that had melded with the refrigerator shelf. Whatever.
“Do you have any idea why that might be?”
“Working with youth isn’t for everyone.”
“Yes, but, did he seem to have any particular troubles?” It really wasn’t her business; it really wasn’t part of the case. But she couldn’t help being curious, and who knew. Maybe there was something there. If someone had been harassing him, that might be a good lead.
Or it might not. Anti-Church sentiment wasn’t too widespread in Downside—most people there didn’t give a fuck about the Church, either pro or con, save being suspicious or getting the hell out of her way when they saw her ink—but on this side of town, that changed. That could very well account for the Asian woman’s smirks, too. People whose religion had centered on ancestor worship didn’t tend to appreciate the government that told them they weren’t allowed to do that anymore, not without paying a hefty fee and going through the Church itself.
This just kept getting better and better. As if it wasn’t shitty enough working a case that would put her in more contact with the wrong side of town, and how that would look—she was not looking forward to Terrible’s reaction when he found out where she’d be spending large chunks of her time—it was in an area where she’d be even more unwelcome than usual.
“He just seemed nervous,” the Asian woman replied. None of them had volunteered their names yet. How polite of them. “He seemed to particularly dislike Vernal Sze and his friends. I believe he was afraid of them.”
“Did he have reason to be?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so. They like to look tough, but they’re really not. They just haven’t been shown enough examples of proper behavior.”
Laurie gave an eye-roll so elaborate Chess almost expected her head to topple off. Horrible Plaid noticed—or rather, noticed Chess noticing—and said, “Beulah is our Community Liaison. She’s not a teacher.”
Chess waited, but none of them explained what that meant or why it mattered. Okay. “And what does that entail?”
The Asian woman—Beulah—smiled that smug smile again, her eyes focused tight on Chess’s face. What the fuck? Those Significant Looks were starting to creep her out. “I’m actually here on a volunteer basis several days a week, working with students and helping to foster a better relationship between the school administration and the community.”
Chess had never heard of such a thing. She supposed it made sense, given that most school administrators were Church employees—most of them were Elders, actually—and that might be tense in this area. She couldn’t see it being such a huge deal that they needed community outreach, but what the fuck did she know? Her pretty much sole experience with anyone on this side of town was Lex, and he didn’t care about anything enough to get angry about it.
“Who handles that?” she asked. “I mean, is there a charity set up that you work for, or … ?”
“I’m paid out of school overflow funds,” Beulah said. “Whatever the school manages to raise through donations or other outside sources, beyond their annual budget, gets put into a separate account. That’s divided among several programs, and mine is the largest one. So technically I am a school employee, but I administer my own program.”
Must be nice, Chess thought. Laurie seemed to agree; she watched Beulah with a look of such open hostility that Chess almost expected her to start hitting her.
Something to think about later, because hadn’t Beulah just given her a very important piece of information? So any extra cash in the school coffers went to Beulah—well, Beulah and whoever ran these other programs. She’d need to see those records. Aros hadn’t included those, or even mentioned them, in his file.
But for now … she stood up. “Maybe one of you could take me around? And if you could show me where entities have been seen, or anyone experienced anything unusual, that would be great.”
Chapter Six
Death simply means the opportunity to live on in eternity. And that is Fact, which makes it Truth.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
Horrible Plaid’s name—surprise!—wasn’t Horrible Plaid. It was Monica—Monica Freeman—and she was the secretary to Master Elder Conrad, the school’s headmaster. She told Chess this with self-deprecating pride, as though she expected Chess to be impressed but wanted to seem like she didn’t, as though she thought it was silly to expect it.
Which of course it was. Chess tried not to mistrust the woman—mistrust all of them—on general principles, but she couldn’t help it. Even if she hadn’t been there investigating a possible haunting she would have mistrusted them. They might claim to be Church—at least the Elders did, and the teaching Goodys did—but they weren’t, not really. They didn’t give a fuck about any of the students, about anyone but themselves.
“In here is the theater.” Monica leaned against the thick door, its wood stained a horrible orangey color. Who the hell had picked that color? Almost every school she’d ever seen had it, and it looked awful in every one of them. “The first sighting was in here.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Okay. Can we go in? And you can tell me what happened?”
“No one’s been in here since then.”
Chess raised her eyebrows. Okay. Monica didn’t seem to understand direct questions. “Can we go in, and you can tell me what happened?”
“I can unlock it.” Beulah pulled a set of keys from somewhere. Where she had room to hide them in that skirt Chess had no idea, although she had to admit the skirt was gorgeous. Either “community outreach” paid awfully well, or Beulah had a sugar daddy. Or simply lived beyond her means. Checking her financials would probably be a good idea.
Monica moved out of Beulah’s way a little too fast, as if she was afraid Beulah would mow her down. Funny. They’d all seemed perfectly friendly when Chess walked into the office.
The door opened with a creak right out of a horror film. For fuck’s sake, was the school budget really so tight they couldn’t afford a can of fucking WD-40? Chess had never seen a building so creaky in her life. Another note to make.
Through the open door she saw only darkness; the air breathing out at her smelled stale and felt cold against her skin. An air conditioner still hummed somewhere inside.
“No one’s been in here? Why? And for how long?”
Monica answered, standing right behind her. “It’s been about three weeks, I guess. Well, Aros might have been in here without telling us, but three weeks since any of us have been inside.”
If Aros had entered the theater without even bothering to lubricate that hinge, then something was seriously wrong with the man. Oh well. “Because of the haunting?”
“Of course.” Beulah pushed past both of them. For a moment her head and lower body disappeared, her white blouse just a faint glow in the gloom, before something slammed like metal against metal and the lights came on.
Not that it made much difference. Shadows still lurked along the walls and between the rows of seats, which rose stadium-style from the sunken stage at the front to a small booth in the center at the back. It wasn’t a large room, really, but then it wasn’t a large school. Maybe a hundred seats, a hundred and fifty? Drama didn’t seem to be a popular activity at Mercy Lewis. It hadn’t been at any school Chess had ever attended.
Beulah walked toward the stage, her slim figure appearing and reappearing between the rows like a lion through tall grass. “A few students were in here after school, about three weeks ago.”
“Where they shouldn’t have been,” Monica muttered.
“They were hanging out on the stage,” Beulah continued, ignoring Monica. Ignoring, too, Monica’s next snide interruption, which was the word “Drinking.”
Beulah glared at Monica. “Talking. According to Vernal.”
“This is the person you mentioned before? The one Aros was afraid of?” Chess asked.
“Yes. Good memory. Anyway. They were in here talking, Vernal and three of his friends, when the ghost appeared. They said it came through the curtains there”—she pointed to the right—“and started moving along that wall. Then it apparently noticed them and came toward them, which is when they ran.”
“Did it follow them out of the theater? What did it look like, did they say?”
“It didn’t follow them,” Monica said. “And they said it looked like Lucy McShane.”
Chess looked at her blankly. It was always so cool when people expected her to know things there was no possible way she could know. Of course she was familiar with all of the famous ghosts and hauntings; the special team that still lived in the Tower of London, for example, just to contain them all. Edward DeWitt, the ghost of a murder victim who was so hell-bent on revenge it took them four weeks to track him down and Banish him. And of course the Fallow Creek Five, and the suburb they’d turned into a literal ghost town back in 2007.
But nowhere on that list, and it was quite an extensive list, did anyone named Lucy McShane appear.
Either Beulah saw her blank look and sympathized, or Beulah saw her blank look and patronized. Whatever her motive, at least she told the fucking story. “She was a suicide from just after this building was converted into a school, maybe 1999, 2000? According to the story, she was in the school play and fell in love with the director. He seduced her, and then when she got pregnant he dumped her. So she flung herself from the lighting platform up there.”
Chess glanced up. Above her head a rack of lights hung in a gentle arc, white cone-shaped fixtures aimed at the stage. “She jumped off of that? How would she get up there?”
“There’s a catwalk,” Monica said. “Want to go up and look?”
Ugh, not really. Chess wasn’t afraid of heights, but the thought of depending on the rickety-looking metal walkway she could just make out near the ceiling didn’t appeal. But it was her job, so … “Yeah, sure.”
The theater looked smaller from up there. So did Monica and Beulah, both of whom had used their skirts as an excuse for why they couldn’t accompany her. Not that she cared. Without them watching her quite so closely she could be more thorough.
They couldn’t watch her closely if they tried, in fact. When she stopped and looked down at them, the floor almost seemed to spin so far below. A girl had jumped from that catwalk, thrown herself from it. Had her body cracked open on the seats down there, on the edge of the orchestra pit? Had she died instantly? How must it have felt for her, watching the ground come at her, knowing that she’d done it, she’d really taken that final step and it was really over, it would end and she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, it—
Chess blinked. Her fingers convulsed on the railing. What the fuck had she been doing? Leaning over that rail, the empty space beyond. Not a good thing to do. She didn’t want to die, not that day. Work. That’s what she needed to be doing.
She’d grabbed a couple of small video cameras from the Church supply before she left, but she hadn’t expected she’d get the chance to use them. She grabbed one from her bag and affixed it to the light strip, so the stage filled the tiny screen. Good. It would start recording if it detected movement.
The catwalk stretched from the tiny booth at the back of the room all the way to where she now crouched, where the light strip hung from the ceiling. From that point it branched off; another walkway ran perpendicular to it, from one side of the room to the other. On her left it dead-ended at the wall. On her right … On her right it seemed to turn left again at the wall and head back, behind the curtain. An odd arrangement.
“Hey, why does the catwalk cross the stage over there?”
“What?” From Chess’s position Monica looked like a blob of shrieking plaid. Beulah had, of course, settled into one of the chairs, where she lounged as if she was about to light up a smoke and crack a beer. Or, not a beer; she didn’t appear to be much of a beer type. A wine spritzer or something equally girly.
“The catwalk,” Chess said. “Why does it cross the stage?”
“Oh. Not sure, really. I’ve heard that it’s a leftover from when this was a meeting room for dignitaries, or maybe it was built because they needed it for effects for some play.”
Weird. “Where does it go? Does it hit the back wall?”
“Um, I think so.”
Wow, she was helpful. Sure, she was an administrative assistant, but it still seemed to Chess that Monica might have some knowledge of the oddities of the building.
It didn’t matter. Whether or not she knew what it was for, she’d have to walk it all the way. So she arranged her bag more securely on her shoulder and started moving, her thighs aching from the peculiar squat-walk she was forced to use.
The catwalk rattled beneath her, which was just what she needed, but it seemed steady enough. After a moment or two she found a sort of rhythm, even, with one hand on the rail and the other on the floor to help keep her steady. In no time, it seemed, she reached the wall, made the left, and kept going.
Over the curtain, which seemed unusual, but then how else could it go, right? Right. Dust coated the top of the curtain so thick the color of the fabric was no longer visible; Chess only knew it was red because she’d seen it from the floor.
Backstage—well, it looked like every backstage Chess had ever seen. No, she’d never been in any school plays or anything—the very idea was ridiculous—but backstage areas were dark and private, the perfect place to skip class and get high or steal a few naked minutes with whomever she’d felt like giving the privilege to that particular day.
Tall canvas-and-wood flats rested against the wall; old desks and a battered sofa and other odds and ends of furniture braced them up. Boxes of costumes, boxes of props, general dust, and detritus littered the floor. Typical.
What wasn’t typical was the faint odd smell in the air, and what her adjusting eyes could see was a stub of candle and a small tray on the floor.
Shit. She grabbed her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, but what she really needed to do was get down there and look. And she needed to do it without bringing either of the women with her; she didn’t want her discovery of the candle and tray—if they were even related, and not just left behind by some kids who came here to make out or whatever—to be noted. Never let them know you’ve seen anything of interest: one of the first rules of Debunking. That went double for this case, when one Debunker had already been driven away and the potential suspects numbered in the hundreds.
So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …
The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.
So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.
But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.
Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?
She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.
One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.
“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”
Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible boing, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.
The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.
So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.
She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.
She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.
Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.
So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?
Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.
Chapter Seven
When questions arise, the Church is the first place to which one should turn. Always.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
When she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.
Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.
She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.
Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.
And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.
Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.
She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”
They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”
Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!
Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”
“No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.
Not that it mattered. Anyone in that room already knew they were coming.
She’d dropped her flashlight but had a cheap plastic lighter in her pocket; she flicked it on, and Monica found the right key and opened the door.
Empty.
Well, not empty. It was a classroom. It had classroom things inside it. But it was empty of people, and people were what Chess needed. Her heart would have sunk if she hadn’t been expecting to find no one there, and if she wasn’t still buzzing from adrenaline.
The adrenaline gave her extra speed to cross the room. That door wasn’t locked. It hit the wall with an echoing bang when she flung it open, when she flung herself into the hall and found nothing but silence. More emptiness. Of course.
Beulah might be a bitch—well, okay, to be fair, Chess couldn’t yet say that with absolute certainty, just with a lot of it—but she wasn’t stupid. She started opening doors down the right side of the hall, peering into each room, leaving them open so that Chess could look into them as she opened the doors on the left.
“Where else could they be? Where could they have gone?”
Beulah shook her head. “Anywhere. The stairs at either end lead to the science hall and the cafeteria. From there they could keep going into the rest of the school, or out to the parking lot. There’s some sort of activity going on in the gym right now, they could slip in there and we’d never know it.”
Fuck! It was about what she’d expected, but fuck! anyway.
The adrenaline started to fade, leaving her hands shaky and her chest and head aching. She could take care of that, but … Damn it. She pressed her palm to her forehead for a second, took a deep breath, and headed back into the drama classroom. The odds of her finding anything useful in there were slim to none, but she’d look anyway. At least she could make a note that she’d looked, that she’d—
Howhadtheyknown?
She hadn’t called before heading out, hadn’t told anyone at Mercy Lewis to expect her. Nor, to her knowledge, had anyone at the Church, although of course she’d have to double-check that.
She hadn’t spoken to anyone when she arrived except Beulah, Monica, and Laurie. Hadn’t seen anyone, and although technically anyone could have seen her when she arrived, nothing about her—her scuffed and dusty boots, her black jeans, the faded blue polo she wore over a black long-sleeved T-shirt, or her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut—screamed “Church employee.” Quite the opposite, in fact; she’d deliberately worn street clothes.
So how had anyone known who she was, to sabotage the catwalk while she was on it? How had someone not only known who she was, but made it into the drama room in time to start fucking with the bolts? Not to mention the wires.
That suggested a planned attack. More than one person.
Had it even been aimed at her at all? And if not, what the hell was the point?
She grabbed her notebook to scribble all of that down while it was fresh. Especially because now that the shakes and flashbacks were starting—she could feel the way her hand gripped the pen too tightly—and she knew she’d be alone for, oh, four or five hours at least, she planned to head home, crack her pillbox, and try to forget it all as quickly as possible.
Someone had tried to kill her. Or at least, given the way the catwalk had hit the stage fairly harmlessly, to scare the fuck out of her. Whether they knew she was Church or not, someone had just fucked with her in a particularly unpleasant way. A particularly unpleasant way that wasn’t already on her list of things she took drugs to forget, anyway.
Unless, of course, someone had made some calls. Both Monica and Beulah had made bathroom or office stops before they headed to the theater, so either of them could have picked up the phone. Laurie could have done so after they left the administration area. Shit. Four hours on the case, two of them spent doing research at Church, and she’d already survived a murder attempt. That didn’t bode well.
But it boded better than what she saw on the wall, what she found on the wrench lying on the floor nearby. Just two little smears of it. Two little smears of what she hoped was Vaseline or some similar substance, but which the knowledge she’d gotten from her Church training and the knowledge she’d gotten from a lifetime of having everything go wrong every damn time told her was something much worse.
Ectoplasm.
After all of that—after inspecting the roof above the theater and finding nothing at all, after finally getting out of the building she was already beginning to hate on more than just general principles—the last thing she expected to see was Lex, leaning against her new car, smoking a cigarette and grinning at her like she had dirty words written on her forehead and he wasn’t about to tell her.
“Hey there, Tulip. Ain’t usual seeing you this side of town, aye?”
“What are you doing here?” They shared one of those awkward kiss-hug-or-what moments, ending up kissing on the cheek. Odd, that. She and Lex had never really been cheek-kissers, but since they weren’t kissing anywhere else these days she guessed it was the thing to do.
Especially since it gave her another few seconds to figure out how to react to his presence there in general. As far as she knew, Lex didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around schools; why would he? He’d gone to one, she assumed, but his business didn’t involve spending time there.
Or again, so she assumed. For all she knew one of the teachers had a habit bigger than hers, or part-timed as a hooker and Lex was there to pick her up for her shift. The possibilities were endless; someone could be a fence, someone could have—
Information. Uh-huh. “How did you know I was here?”
His grin widened. “Glad to see me?”
“Surprised.” But she smiled. Of course she was glad to see him; she usually was. “Who told you I was here?”
“Why anybody gotta give me the knowledge? Could be I just makin a drive-by, see them new wheels you got and gave you the stop, me. That so hard to believe?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
The spring sunlight hit the black spikes of his hair and made them shine; he tilted his head and the light spilled across his face. Sometimes she forgot how handsome he was. But then, it was easy to forget things like that when it didn’t matter. “Been hearing crazy shit on this place. Figured on givin it a check-out, I did, then look who shows up. Got any knowledge what’s on the happening in there?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ain’t expect any else. An what’s the happening with that face you got? Ain’t run into that Boil again, I don’t think.”
Shit. How bad did her face look? She hadn’t checked.
But she smiled at the reference. “It was Doyle, and no, I just fell down.”
“Must have fell hard.”
“Yeah, I did.”
His fingers stroked her sore cheekbone, light and delicate and warm. She fought the tiny shiver threatening to rise and risked a glance at his face, but his gaze focused on her cheek. “Ain’t a safe place,” he murmured.
Chess swallowed. The sun still shone, the air was still clear and fresh with the smell of blooming spring, but something had changed. No more breeze; everything seemed to stop and wait, including her own breath, damn it.
Nothing like that had happened the last couple of times she’d seen him. If it was even happening, which how would she know? The only men she’d ever spent more than a single night with were Lex and Terrible—one of whom she used to touch all the time because they were generally together for that purpose, and one of whom she’d almost never touched until they started touching in private. Maybe friends did that sort of thing all the time. He was only touching her cheek, inspecting it. It wasn’t like he’d started playing with her breasts or something.
Then it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. A gust of wind chased away the stillness, chased away the expression on his face so thoroughly she wondered if she really had imagined it. “You leaving?”
She nodded.
“Got time, maybe you wanna come back mine for a few?”
No. The answer should have been no, especially after that weird little moment. But then … aside from one night of wandering around and the night in Graveyard Twenty-three she’d tried her damnedest to forget, she’d never really been outside his bedroom on this side of town. He might have some information that would help her. Hell, he might have some information about the explosion at Bump’s pipe room, although she didn’t much expect he’d be willing to say a word to her about that.
And she kind of missed hanging out with him, if she were honest with herself, which she generally tried not to be. And nothing had happened in that moment, and nothing would. She knew that. “What have you got in mind?”
“Nothing good, Tulip.” Then, seeing her eyebrows rise, “But nothing you gotta worry youself on, neither. C’mon. Getting twitchy standin here, aye?”
Oh, what the hell. “You drive.”
His room hadn’t changed. The house hadn’t changed. Only the looks given her by the various guards or enforcers or whoever they were had, from bland acceptance to subtle suspicion.
And she’d changed, it seemed. At least a bit. In the car, chatting, all had been well, but when the door closed behind her it occurred to her how long it had been since she’d been there. And what had happened the last time she’d been there. Happened several times and again in the morning, if memory served, which it did.
Another awkward moment when she started walking toward the bed, remembered, and turned back to the couch against the wall. Lex already sat there, lighting a cigarette, flipping a switch behind him so the Jam started playing in the background. King of his room-castle, just like one day he’d be king of his side of town.
“So what’s up?” The question sounded lame even to her, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. The bed with its plain blue blanket and sheets loomed larger and larger in her vision.
“Church sent you that school? Thinkin on it being for real? The spooks, meaning.”
“Too early to tell.” Not totally a lie. She’d taken the wrench, scraped the ectoplasm off the walls and into inert plastic containers to be tested. It felt like ectoplasm, sure, but that could be faked. People had faked more conclusive evidence than that. Hell, for all she knew it was some new hair gel or something. Way too early to start convincing herself that that bonus wouldn’t be hers.
“Aye? Some fucked-up place, that one. Ain’t envy you wanderin around there at night.”
“Who says I wander around there at night?”
He gave a short, low laugh. “Aw, c’mon now, Tulip. You forgetting, I been along with you on a few of them cases you get. Know the drill, I do.”
“Maybe this one is different.”
“Aye, and maybe it ain’t. Only thing I gots to say is be careful. Ain’t a good place, there.”
“Why?” She pulled out her own cigarette, lit it up to give her something to look at. Not sure how much credence she should give anything he said to her, if she should even listen, but at the same time listening hard.
Yes, sure, things were different now. But while she couldn’t say Lex had never lied to her—of course he’d lied to her, and she’d lied to him—she couldn’t see any reason for him to lie to her about a case.
Then again, she’d never had a case on his side of town before.
“Just ain’t safe. All kinds of shit in there, them teachers and all.”
“How do you know this?”
He looked at her with his head tilted. “It matter?”
“No. I just wonder what you know.”
“Ain’t know much. Hear tell on they being the sort sell them mamas it get they what they wanting, if you dig.”
She blew out smoke, shifted in her seat to face him better. “How does that make them different from anyone else?”
“Guessing it ain’t. Only most people ain’t big crowds like they. Could get up a fuck of a double-cross, be what they wanting to do.”
Chess looked at him without speaking, let the minute drag on long enough to have made anyone else feel uncomfortable. Lex didn’t, of course, because Lex never did, but his expression went from bland to curious before she spoke. “Is that what you came there today to tell me?”
“Nay, just came by check the place out, I did.”
“But why? And why today? And how did you know that was my car, you’ve only seen it like once before.”
He smiled, slowly, letting the change of expression itself waste time. “Aye, somebody gave me the tell you was there. Came by give you a hello. That a bad thing?”
What wasn’t he telling her?
And how much did it matter?
She pushed it all into the back of her head for later. He wouldn’t tell her if she asked outright anyway. Better to move around the question and see if anything else came out later. “So I guess I’ll be spending a bit more time on your side of town for a while.”
Lex stood up and headed for the mini-fridge he kept against the wall. Without asking he pulled a couple of beers out, opened them both, and handed her one. “Guessing you will.”
His amused expression told Chess he knew very well what she was getting to. Damn it. But not a surprise. “And I guess I won’t be the only person who lives on my side but spends a lot of time here.”
The couch sank when he plunked himself down, close enough that his hand almost touched her thigh. “Aw, Tulip, figured you come up with a better try-on than that. You know I ain’t givin you that knowledge anyroad.”
“Yeah, but I had to try.”
“Aye, guessing you did.” He laughed. “An now you done it.”
“But someone did tell you. About the pipe room.” That was pushing it, she knew. Sure, he’d laugh at her attempts to find out who the snitch was, which one of the people Bump and Terrible trusted had given Slobag the let’s-go on blowing up that pipe room. But he wouldn’t laugh for long. Especially now that her attempts to feel him out for information were no longer followed by her allowing him to perform his own feel-outs on her.
Sure enough, his eyes narrowed a little. “Maybe them did. Maybe not. Maybe somebody’s luck were just running right up. Thought you and me weren’t having the troubles on this one.”
And there it was. The iron door slamming shut. “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I just—Never mind.”
Yeah, she could probably tell him why it mattered so much to her. But so what? Their friendship seemed to be persisting despite the fact that they kept their clothes on when they met these days, but that didn’t mean he’d actually go out of his way for her. Her life wasn’t in danger, just her—Well, okay, it was her life, but not in a way Lex would care about.
Not to mention she just didn’t want to. She didn’t want to admit to him that she felt as though a big red pointing finger of suspicion hung right over her head, and that everyone saw it. Including the man Lex probably knew she’d essentially dumped him for.
It was her problem, and she’d deal with it.
Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills.
Chapter Eight
You might not think it’s true, but it is: Everyone is capable of some magic, no matter how small. Everyone can change things in their lives. Even you.
—You Can Do This! A Guide for Beginners, by Molly Brooks-Cahill
Lex dropped her back at her car a couple of hours later, pleasantly cotton-wrapped from the Pandas he’d given her and ready—mostly—to head home. Lurid orange streaked the sky above her, above the Mercy Lewis school; the building stood against it like a lurking shadow, cold and unreal.
Or maybe she was just high.
She didn’t think so, though. Well, yes she did, of course she was fucking high. But she suspected the sunset was really that gorgeous, the lone cherry tree beside the school blooming pale pink, the evening chill about to set in but not enough to make her cold in her long sleeves.
Lex had just driven away when she heard the sound, a clanging, crashing noise behind the building. At least she assumed it came from behind the building; the spring air still held enough crispness for sound to carry well.
Probably just a custodian emptying the trash. Or a Cooking Goody doing who the hell knew what to the food. Or a ball hitting a steel fencepost, or any number of things.
But it could be someone who liked to play with metal, maybe someone who hadn’t known a person would be on the catwalk and decided to go ahead and bring it down? It wouldn’t bring in a lot of cash, but not a lot was usually enough, especially in Downside. You could bolt things down to keep people from stealing them, sure, but they’d just get a wrench.
Her boots slid through the grass, jewel green at her feet, as she walked around to the side of the building. Not tiptoeing or sneaking, no. Just walking. With care.
Voices floated toward her, and another clank, clearer than the last one. Female voices, murmuring and giggling. It didn’t reassure her. Women could be just as dangerous as men; life had certainly taught her that.
These weren’t really women, of course. They were girls, high school girls. So focused on the small firedish before them, the pocket-sized floral book next to the little portable stang they’d set up—they were fucking serious—that they didn’t even notice Chess rounding the corner of the building and approaching them until she was close enough to hear their individual breath. Her shadow fell over their altar, and they froze.
For a moment they all just stood there—or in the case of the girls, knelt there—looking at each other. What was Chess supposed to do? Magic certainly wasn’t illegal. Quite the opposite. Citizens were encouraged to try their own spells, though the girls were being more elaborate than most. Even if magic had been illegal, Chess’s authority only covered one or two very specific crimes.
And even if it didn’t, the bottom line was that she just didn’t care enough to bust them. Especially not when she was there to investigate their possible haunting; the last thing she wanted to do was set herself up as a horribly strict authority figure. She needed them to talk to her.
Finally one of the girls—her bleached-blond hair made a striking contrast with the warm, pale golden color of her skin—spoke, rather bitchily. “You needing something?”
Right. Her arms and chest were covered; the girls had no idea who she was. “Just wondering what you’re doing. I was about to get in the car and heard you, and thought it might be related to the haunting I’m here to investigate.”
“You the new Churchwitch, then? The new Debunker, or whatany you’re called?”
Chess nodded. “Do you know anything about it, have you seen anything?”
Bleached Blonde shook her head, but her friend—oh, such a typical best-friend type, a little chunkier, a little less pretty, a little more desperate—spoke up. “I ain’t—we ain’t—but Vernal did.”
“Vernal Sze?” The one Beulah had mentioned as a good kid who needed a place to hang out, and Monica had acted as if he was one step down from a serial killer.
The boy who’d apparently scared Aros.
The girl nodded. “Saw in the theater, and in the gym on the later.”
In the gym, too? No one had mentioned a sighting anywhere but the theater.
Of course, it was possible they just hadn’t gotten to it yet. Aros’s notes were as bad as Elder Griffin had implied; after the first couple of pages they degenerated into scribbles and random words like “turtle” and “butler.” Who knew what information he’d gathered?
And he’d disappeared, so she couldn’t even ask him.
“Vernal told you about it?”
The girls glanced at each other, like they needed to check before they answered. Hmm.
“Aye,” said the bleached blonde. The challenging look in her eye grew deeper, stronger; an edge crept into her voice. “Gave the story to lots of people. Sayin it’s proof the Church ain’t doing them job.”
Chess would not rise to the bait. Wouldn’t remind them that they were only alive because the Church was doing its fucking job, and that the general statistic in the District of one ghost-related death per 350,000 people was further proof. If the Church wasn’t doing its job, no one would be alive.
But no, she wouldn’t say it. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t. Instead she just shrugged, let the girl see the comment didn’t bother her. “Do you believe him, that he saw a ghost?”
Another pause. Another glance. “Aye. Vernal ain’t give us the lie, not on a tale like that.”
“Besides, he ain’t the only one seen it,” her friend said. “Were like four of em in the theater, I recall, they all seen.”
If that meant anything at all in cases like this one, Chess would be glad to have that information. As it was, who the fuck cared? So a bunch of kids lied for each other. Yeah, that was really trustworthy confirmation.
They could all be telling the truth, of course, but lying was probably the better guess. “Do you know who the others were? And maybe what they were doing in there that day?” The tray and candle behind the curtain crept back into her head. Had Vernal and his pals been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing in that theater? Not just drinking, as Monica had said, but magic? Summonings, even?
It shouldn’t have been possible. If they had the kind of power required to do that sort of magic, the Church would have found them, and they’d be in school there.
Unless, of course, being from this part of town they’d refused. But even then—She forced herself to stop the mind-wander she was about to take when Bleached Blonde opened her mouth again.
“One of them Goodys should be able give you the knowledge. Ask them.” Her mouth turned down. “In the middle of something, we are. An wanna get it finished up.”
Little bitch. “Right. What are you doing? Memory spells for studying, or a glamour or something?”
No answer. She crouched down herself, bracing one hand on the ground so the weight of her bag didn’t make her tip over. Maybe they were doing a love spell or something equally embarrassing, and that’s why they didn’t want to say?
No. Whatever they were doing, it was not a love spell. Wasn’t any kind of spell anyone should have been doing outside of the Church, and she would have known that even if the girls hadn’t leapt up, snatched the book, and run when she saw the Herb Paris berries in the firedish.
Half an hour later she closed her front door behind her with a sigh, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and headed for the two-week-old couch. Pretty cool not to have to dodge broken springs when she sat down anymore, yeah, but … That old couch had been one of the first things she’d bought when she moved into the cozy one-bedroom apartment in what used to be a Catholic church. One of the first things she’d ever bought for herself that was permanent, bought for the first real home she’d ever had outside the Church.
But then, she probably could have held on to it longer if she and Terrible hadn’t broken it one night, so she guessed that was a pretty fair trade-off. Blood rushed to her face at the memory; her face, and other places, too. He wouldn’t be there for at least another hour or so.
Which she supposed was fine—or, not fine, it sucked. For the tenth or twentieth time she considered calling him, just to hear his voice. Just to see what he was doing, to know from the way he answered the phone that he was happy she’d called him, that he wished he was with her.
But he was probably busy, and she’d be interrupting him. He’d get annoyed, and she’d look clingy and pitiful. It would be like admitting she needed—no, not admitting, there was nothing to admit. It would be like saying that she needed to have him around, and if she did that he’d be turned off.
How the hell was it that she’d always been so comfortable with him before, but as soon as she’d realized she was in love with him, as soon as she told him that … she was nervous all the time?
So she didn’t press the button on her phone. Instead she pulled out her case file to look over while she waited, and hoped that when he got to her place he wouldn’t be in a worse mood over the fire at the pipe room. Had that really been only the night before? It felt like years had passed.
The girls had been playing with Herb Paris berries, and whatever that book was that they’d snatched from the base of the stang when they ran.
Could have been some sort of love spell, sure. Herb Paris berries were very versatile.
But Herb Paris berries were also used in casting the Evil Eye—among other things—and something told her the girls were a bit more the Evil-Eye-or-other-things type. Perhaps it was the fact that they took off so damn fast. Chess didn’t buy the old “innocent people have no reason to run” line—the only people she’d ever known who did were naïve, stupid, or just plain assholes—but given the shit attitude both girls had given her before she discovered their little firedish crime, she suspected “innocent” wasn’t a word that would describe either of them. It wasn’t a word that described anyone in Downside, really. Certainly not her.
Anyway. The girls and their spell were probably irrelevant. The ectoplasm … that was relevant. The fact that Aros’s notes degenerated further and further into utter nonsense with every page—alarmingly quickly, in fact—was relevant. Had the ghosts made him crazy? Someone doing some sort of illegal magic? Had the stress of the case snapped a spring in his brain? Or was he just fucking insane, and it had finally come out?
What would really help would be a conversation with Aros himself. Too bad nobody seemed to know where he was. He’d dumped off his notes with Elder Griffin, thrown his fit at the school, and took off.
If they hadn’t cleared his cabin on the Church grounds, she might be able to get some information from looking through it. She also needed to know if he had family anywhere, people he might have gone to. That should be in his employee file, but perhaps she could find some of his friends or whatever through the cabin.
The sound of an engine rumble outside—the rumble of a particular engine—drew her from her ruminations. Her heart gave a cheerful leap; most of her other body parts started tingling in anticipation. And there was that damned grin again.
That was so dangerous. So fucking dangerous. And every day that went by only made it worse, only made it harder to face the inevitable moment when he’d decide he’d had enough of her, when he’d get tired of her body and realize who she really was. That he didn’t trust her and never could.
Every day that went by was another day gone. Another day closer to the end.
She popped into the bathroom to give her hair a quick brush, give her face a bit more makeup. She had to tell him where her case was. She had to tell him she’d gone to Lex’s place. Had to tell him right away. Not just because he might find out himself, but because that was the right thing to do, and she wanted to do that.
She threw three more Cepts into her mouth, washed them down just as his key turned in the lock and the wards on the door slipped open around him.
His presence filled the room. He seemed to vibrate when she looked at him. Of course that could be her nerves, but she didn’t think so. It wasn’t the first time it had happened.
She stood up, waited at the juncture of kitchen and living room, trying not to grin like a lovesick lunatic. Trying to be casual. Trying to gauge his mood. “Hi.”
His eyes sparked hard behind their darkness as he crossed the kitchen floor, not speaking. Too much energy moved in the air around him, and when he stood right in front of her—close enough to make her tilt her head all the way back—and reached out to touch her cheek she knew what it was. He’d had quite a day, she guessed; violence clung to him like black oil.
Violence and a wild sort of intoxication from that violence, to be more exact. Whatever it was inside him that made him so good at his job, that made him the most feared man in Downside, had been riding him for hours from the looks of it, the feel of it. Now there was nothing else to hit, and that energy, that almost feral whatever-it-was … wanted to find some other satisfaction. Something or someone else to overpower, something or someone else to subdue, to defeat, to conquer.
She knew he’d never think of it that way. He probably wasn’t even aware of it, that dark bloodthirsty excitement lurking behind his eyes, surrounding him like a vicious cloud. His work—fighting in general—didn’t always do that to him, not that she’d seen, but when it did … Her heart jumped into her throat, then fell straight into her pelvis and stayed there, beating like a hummingbird’s wings.
“The fuck happened here? It hurting?”
“Oh, I just …” She bit her lip. “I got a new case today. And no, it doesn’t hurt, not really.”
“Aye? Ain’t so much?”
“Yeah, it looks worse than it—”
Definitely violence. Even if she hadn’t known from his energy she would have known from the way he kissed her, the way he fisted her hair tight at the nape of her neck, the firm possessiveness of his hand on her bottom as he yanked her up against him, bending her backward. Rough and eager, and that energy infected her, too, made her grab his shoulders, wrap her leg around his.
She bit his tongue just hard enough to hurt a little, her head already swimming. His gasp shot a thrill straight down her spine, shot her temperature up what had to be ten degrees or so, because she was sweating even before he slid his hand between her legs from behind and it was her turn to gasp. A gasp more like—almost embarrassingly so—a whimper. A week was too long, way too fucking long. A minute was too long, it was all too long when he was every fast panting breath she took, when the smell and taste and sight of him blotted out everything else in the world.
She already had one leg around him; she wanted to add the other one, to climb up him and let him take her wherever he wanted to go.
Which he did anyway. Instead of her climbing him, he grabbed her hips, hustled her the few steps into the living room until the backs of her thighs hit the arm of the couch. She drifted over it slowly, controlled by his hold on her.
She needed to tell him. She needed to tell him right away. Now, as he helped her slide up on the couch so he could cover her with his body. Now, before they actually had sex. If they had sex before she told him, it would look as though she’d been trying to hide it from him, as though she’d known he’d be mad and wanted to make sure she got laid first. Or as though she hoped that after, he’d be in such a good mood and so relaxed that he wouldn’t care. It would look like manipulation.
But fuck, she didn’t want to say anything or do anything that might make him stop. Not when his mouth left hers to play with her neck, sucking on it, biting it. Not when she could feel the energy around him changing, that savagery that told her what he’d been doing all day turning into something else, something just as primitive. Just as dangerous. Her heart pounded and wouldn’t stop; desperation choked her.
She ran her palms down his back over his shirt, then up under it over his chest to feel his skin, the thick hair and the scar on the left side, over his heart. The heart beating fast against her hand, almost as fast as hers. The heart that kept beating because of that scar, because of what she’d done.
What she was so glad she’d done. Because if she hadn’t done it he wouldn’t be alive, wouldn’t be there with his hands hot on her back, unfastening her bra beneath her shirt, then sliding around to her front. She wouldn’t be shivering harder and arching her back into those hands, reaching up to grab his hair thick between her fingers.
She swallowed; hard to do with her breath coming so fast in her throat. She couldn’t get enough air to speak louder than a husky whisper, didn’t want to break the kiss long enough to speak at all. But she had to. “I wanted to tell you something.”
In response he lifted the hems of her two shirts together. It almost hurt to have to take her hands off him so he could tug both of them over her head, catching her open bra on the way; the second her arms were free she grabbed him again, feeling as if it had been months and not barely an eyeblink. And every fearful alarm in her brain warned her about that, and she couldn’t ignore it but neither could she help it.
She wanted to continue, to tell him what she had to tell him; instead she put her mouth to much better purpose, tasting the skin of his throat salty from sweat. And while she was pulling the collar of his shirt out of her way she might as well start undoing the buttons, get it off him so he could take off the shirt underneath and she could feel his skin against hers. Her insides buzzed; she felt shivery and hot, like her body was made of liquid just about to hit the boiling point.
Or maybe just at the boiling point. His lips traveled over her collarbone and farther down to tease her nipples in turn, to pull them into the hot cavern of his mouth, and what had been a whimper turned into something even more than that. More like begging, and his eyes flashed satisfaction at her when he glanced up. Pleasure at his victory.
It felt like years instead of a week since he’d touched her, since she’d gotten to feel his weight on hers, his lips on her body; they’d decided it was better not to start anything they couldn’t finish.
She had to tell him. Had to, but the words wouldn’t come out. Not when every cell in her body threatened to explode, not when her body acted on its own accord from wanting his so fucking bad and she knew he felt the same.
She tilted her pelvis up so the ridge of his erection pressed against her through their jeans. Another gasp from him, a mumble of something that sounded like her name but the roaring of her blood made it too hard to hear.
Her thoughts were starting to disappear, to focus less on actual thinking and more on instincts and sensations, especially when he popped open the button of her jeans, tugged the zipper down, and hooked his fingers under the waistband and her panties. She lifted her hips so he could pull them down, his gaze fixed on her bare skin being revealed.
The words burbled up in her chest, flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. Before she even realized she’d thought them. “I hung out at Lex’s place for a while today.”
Pause. Long pause. His head dropped, hanging loose from his neck. His hands stopped moving and left her hips to sink into the couch cushion beneath them. Oh, shit. Even for her—and her track record of saying the right thing, or of not saying the wrong thing, was pretty abysmal—that was bad.
“Aye?”
Just one word, but that one word felt like a slap, so distant, so … so impersonal. Fuck. He wouldn’t even look at her; he sat up, ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck with his gaze focused somewhere off in the distance. She’d known he wouldn’t react well—how could he—but she hadn’t expected him to be this cold.
Kind of a stupid expectation on her part. Particularly stupid given the mood he was in when he arrived. Sure, Lex’s name had come up before, but she hadn’t spent “a while” with him since the battle in the City of Eternity. And Terrible had been there then. She certainly hadn’t been to Lex’s place since then; hadn’t been there in a couple of months, actually, since two nights before Terrible caught them in the graveyard. Hadn’t really been alone with Lex.
Not to mention that having this conversation—any conversation—was obviously not what he’d wanted to do. Especially not when that had been their first chance in a week, and he was so cranked up that her skin felt ready to burst into flame just from his energy touching it.
“My case, my new one? It’s on Twenty-second, the Mercy Lewis school.” It felt rather odd to be discussing work while she lay on the couch naked from the waist up; part of her wanted to grab her shirts or at least her bra, but she didn’t want to sit up, either. If she did that she’d be admitting this was going to be a real talk, a long serious one, not a quick interruption. “He showed up as I was about to leave. I guess someone told him a Churchwitch was there and he wanted to see who it was.”
Actually, that wasn’t right, was it? Someone had told him she was there, specifically. Or they’d described her and he knew who it was. Maybe she shouldn’t mention that, since she wasn’t certain.
“An lucky chances, turns up bein you.”
“Terrible …”
His bowling shirt lay in a careless heap on the floor; the heavy muscles under his skin moved as he dug around in it—shit, she could watch that all day, even through her fear—pulled out two cigarettes, and handed her one.
When he flipped the wheel on his black steel lighter the six-inch flame cast shadows on the walls, on his face; sunset had darkened the room to thick dusk.
“I didn’t ask for the case. They just—Elder Griffin gave it to me, because Aros, the guy who had it before me? He took off and Elder Griffin thought I’d be able to handle it.”
Still no response; still he didn’t look at her. Shit.
Her shirts draped over the arm of the couch where he’d tossed them. It took her a second to flip them right-side-out together; then she pulled them over her head, tugged them down, wished she’d kept her damn mouth shut.
“It’s not like I can say no. This is—Damn it, I can’t help where they assign me, and I shouldn’t have to—”
“They tell you head back his place after?”
She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself. “No. But I thought maybe I could find something out, maybe I could find out who the spy was, how they knew the pipe room was empty last night.”
The silence changed a little, thawed a little. “Get anything?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk to me about it. At all. I asked as soon as we got to his bedroom, but—” Fuck. Oh, motherfuck, what was wrong with her? She’d almost been off the hook, or at least on her way to it, why had she just said that? Why had she said it that way? Damn it. “Nothing happened or anything, okay? Nothing.”
“Stayed a while, though, aye?”
“I just—I almost died on that fucking catwalk—I was on a catwalk and it fell, that’s how I hurt my cheek—and I didn’t feel like being alone and I knew you were busy, and he was there.”
“Oh, I dig. Hey, maybe you give me the number that dame Cassie, the one wore your face? Next time aught happens to me, I give her a ring-up for company. No worries, aye?”
“He’s my friend, okay, that’s all, and you know that, you know I still talk to him. You said—”
The ringing of his phone interrupted her, loud and annoying. Terrible shot her a this-isn’t-over glare and checked the phone, then answered it. More bad news, probably. The only people she could see him taking calls from at that moment were Bump or Felice, the mother of the daughter he had in another part of Triumph City. No one except Bump and Chess knew about Katie; Katie didn’t know Terrible was her father. And Terrible wanted to keep it that way. “Aye.”
His face paled, so pale her heart skipped a beat before the dull red flush of anger started creeping up his neck. “Aye, what—Aw, fuck. Aye.”
What should she do? Should she touch him? Or would that just piss him off more? What the hell did people in relationships do when shit happened, when the other person was probably regretting being there to begin with and wondering how they could have ever thought they actually wanted to be?
“Coming.” He snapped the phone shut, scooping up his long-sleeved shirt in the same movement and slipping it on. Even in the midst of everything Chess felt a pang of regret seeing his chest disappear; not just because it was his or the fact that she liked to look at it so much—which she did—but because of what its disappearance meant. He had to leave, probably right away, while something awful and painful and all her fault crouched between them like a troll under a bridge.
And he might not be able to come back that night. Hell, he probably didn’t want to come back. Ever. Fuck!
“Get yon shoes on.” His voice was flat; he didn’t look up from buttoning his bowling shirt.
“Why, what—”
“Found a body. Corner man, name of Bag-end Eddie. Just find him in the pipe room, half-burned, dig. Gotta get us up there.”
The fact that he wanted her to go with him should have made her feel better. And she had to admit it did. But not much.
Why did he want her to go? Sure, maybe he wanted to finish their “discussion,” but he was going to look at a dead body. Surely he didn’t think she should be forced to look, too? Looking at dead bodies wasn’t really very high on her Things-Chess-Enjoys list. And yeah, her total knowledge on what people in relationships did might fill a shot glass—especially if she used extra-large letters to write SEX—but something told her “looking at dead bodies” wasn’t a generally accepted togetherness-type activity, either.
Of course, not going might look—Oh, fuck this. “Um, I’m fine to go with you, but … do you actually want me along? I mean—”
The look on his face cut her off, grim and dark. “Bump say me bring you. Ain’t just killed. Say got magic shit all around. Somethin you oughta see.”
Chapter Nine
The presence of dark or evil magics should be reported immediately. That is your duty as a citizen.
—TheChurchandYou, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
They’d almost hit Brewster before Terrible finally spoke again, his voice a low rumble over Black Sabbath on the Chevelle’s stereo. “Ain’t like you seein him.”
“I know.” Relief flooded her chest; at least she hoped it was time for relief. “I’m sorry. I just, I thought maybe I could find something out. And yeah … I was kind of shaken up, and having some company sounded good.”
“Aye, guessin it did.” Something in his tone made her narrow her eyes, inspect him more closely. He almost sounded … upset? Pissed off? Hurt? She couldn’t tell for sure, but he definitely didn’t sound the way he usually did.
But then there was no reason for him to, was there.
They rode on in silence for another minute; he hooked a right onto Brewster. She’d been this far north before—of course she had, the day before during the fire—but only once or twice before that. If they kept going, eventually they’d be as far up as the Crematorium, and the Nightsedge Market she’d been to once with Lex.
Terrible made a sound next to her, a sort of half-laugh. “What a time you choose to gimme the tell.”
More relief. “I didn’t want you to think I was hiding it from you or being sneaky or something.”
He didn’t say more; she knew he probably had more to say, but she hoped when he did he’d say it like that, and they could talk about it, and she wouldn’t have to sit there with terror icy in her stomach because she’d fucked everything up—again—and the minute hand on their relationship’s internal clock had just moved a tick closer to midnight.
The very thought made her already chilled skin colder. She grabbed her pillbox and water bottle from her bag and took two more Cepts, hoping they might warm her; the three she’d taken when he’d arrived at her place had hit, but not enough. She needed to get rid of that cold inside her, that frozen-solid knot of fear and guilt she couldn’t stand, didn’t want to feel anymore. Five was pushing it, she knew, but what-the-fuck-ever.
If she was lucky they’d kick in before they got to the body, and that would be a help, too.
Why did she even bother thinking what might happen if she was lucky? The only luck she’d ever had in her life pulled the Chevelle up to the curb and threw it into neutral, and she seemed hell-bent on fucking that one up for herself no matter how hard she tried not to.
Spring had come and the cherry trees were in bloom, but the nights still held the remainder of the dead winter, and the breeze, heavy with the acrid resinous scent of charred wood, cut through her clothes when Terrible opened her door. Good thing she’d put her bra back on, but she should have remembered her cardigan.
Candlelight danced in a few windows, making the buildings look like carved Festival pumpkins with horrible greedy eyes. The burned-out shell of the pipe room, destroyed walls supporting nothing, sat there in silence. Dull moonlight revealed the ruin beautiful in its destruction, dignified in death. Chess shivered.
Bump’s unmistakable drawl rode the wind to where she and Terrible stood. The anger in his voice didn’t ease the feeling of foreboding.
Nor did the open doorways on the street, tall lean shadows like upended coffins. Anything could be hiding in those openings, in the alleys and empty spaces. She was glad of Terrible’s arm touching hers as they walked, grateful for the knife she knew he could grab instantly if necessary.
Details on the dead building grew sharper as they neared it; well, of course they did. Black streaks above the glassless windows, the fire’s signature. Ashes collected in the cracks on the street, covering the sidewalk, obscuring the garbage piled everywhere. A stray cat ran by, its fur smudged with soot. And over it all that silence, that odd intrusive silence. Even Bump’s voice, droning on, didn’t break that silence. It only made it clearer and stronger. His voice was an insult to it, one it paid no attention to. Bump would be gone soon. The silence would stay.
The horrible creosote smell of smoke burned her throat, stung her eyes. It was so heavy, thick enough to make her want to gag; it made her desperate for even the air around the Slaughterhouse.
But she couldn’t head over there, couldn’t go anywhere at all. Instead she stayed at Terrible’s side, walked through the crumbling archway that had once been the door and into the short dark hallway just inside.
To her right was the bar, the chairs and charred countertop now exposed to the city-gray night sky, the floor littered with chunks of metal and wood, scraps of black-edged rags, broken glass. To her left a wall covered with curled strips of wallpaper, its pattern indistinguishable. How old was that building? How long had it stood there?
Once it had been someone’s home. It had survived Haunted Week. It had seen thousands of people over the years it had been a pipe room. And now … it was destroyed, thanks to Slobag and his attempts to wrest territory away from Bump. It had outlived its purpose. It had nothing more to give except perhaps a few bricks that would always bear the imprint of its death.
She reached out, touched the wall with one tentative finger. The building was finished, but at least it knew that. At least it didn’t have to wait and wonder anymore. She blinked, fast. Her eyes were damp.
Terrible’s hand found the back of her neck. Blindly she turned in his direction, hit his broad solid chest with her forehead and wrapped her arms around him tight. After a second, his closed around her, his lips brushed her hair.
It didn’t last long. Ten seconds, maybe. Fifteen. But warmth spread through her anyway; it could have been her Cepts kicking in, but she didn’t think so. And those seconds chased some of the darkness’s threat away, so she could move again. She curled her index finger in his belt loop and let him lead her across the wreckage-strewn bar and through a short hallway.
Narrow streams of light spilled from cracks around a door at the far end of what had been the actual pipe room, lessening the gloom and revealing the blackened skeletons of couches and pipes. The place should have been hopping, filled with Dreamers … she could have lounged on one of the couches herself and left all of her worries behind for a few hours, and wouldn’t that be the most welcome fucking thing in the world right about then.
Instead she stood in a charred death-pit about to go look at an apparently mutilated body, absorb the images of it. How typical.
Something else hid there beneath the horror of sudden, violent death. Magic. Not that she expected anything else; from what Terrible had said, she expected exactly that. But it wasn’t … wasn’t right. It felt muted, distorted somehow. Like a spell that had been done there years before and simply never cleaned up. It didn’t feel fresh, and it didn’t feel like horrible death, either. That could have been the fire, of course. It fucked with magic, changed the energy. So it probably was the fire. She just couldn’t be certain.
Terrible reached for the door. She let go of him as he pushed it open—“pushed” being the operative word, since it was just a slab of wood blocking the room and not a proper door—revealing something that made her wish she’d kept holding on to him.
Bump, standing against the wall beside them, gave them an annoyed glance as they walked in. “Bout fuckin time you get your fuckin show-up on, yay? Ain’t hardly fuckin dig standin round this shit.” He gestured toward the scene with a wave of his hand. “Had me a fuckin meal before the fuckin call finding me, almost fuckin emptied up me again.”
Agreeing with Bump wasn’t something Chess usually did, but in this instance she agreed wholeheartedly. The sight before her was horrifying.
Bag-end Eddie had been … crucified. Not in a standing position, no, but it was clear from the position of his charred body. Crucified on the cement and burned, the flames turning his corpse into an overcooked bone-in roast spread-eagled on the floor like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Unburned flesh remained on his face and chest, and in strips down the centers of his thighs.
His eyes, wide open in horror, stared at the dull moon above through the hole in the roof.
“What you think, Ladybird? I fuckin saying, looking fuckin witchy to me, yay? An ain’t fuckin wrong, do I? Bump never gets the fuckin wrong side.” He looked so smug, as if the gruesome death in front of them all only mattered as a way to prove his intellectual superiority again.
Or like it had taken a fucking genius to figure out there was magic involved in this. Like the body arranged carefully on the floor, the precise lines of soot she picked out around him, were some sort of obscure clue to the presence of witchcraft and not a blinking sign.
“No,” she managed. She should have taken three more Cepts instead of two. She should have brought a kesh or a bottle of vodka. As it was she’d have to settle for water. “No, you’re not wrong.”
“Yay, see?” Bump turned to the man beside him, grinning. The man’s face was a horrible shade of pasty, as if he’d covered himself in glue and let it dry. She’d always wondered what that would actually look like, if it would be shiny or not, but then she was just trying to distract herself so she wouldn’t have to look again at what had once been a living person.
Distraction was good. So was delay. All those D words, especially “drugs.” Another Cept would make six, and why the hell not. She dry-swallowed it while she was reaching into her bag to pull out a pair of latex gloves and her small camera. What else might she need … She’d have to get a closer look to know.
A closer look. Great.
Within reach of where she stood were Eddie’s feet. Just beyond those were the soot lines she’d noticed, dark lines, as though the cement itself had burned.
But the energy still didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like death magic. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of spell she was aware of that needed a murder to help power it. Those were—Wait.
“His—his face, the top of him, isn’t burned.” She looked at Bump and the pasty guy. “Why is part of him burned?”
Bump’s lips went thin; he stared at her for a long moment. “Had we a fuckin fire, Ladybird, ain’t you was fuckin here on the last—”
“Gee, really? No shit. Why is his body burned everywhere except on top? He’s burned from the ground up but the—his skin is still there, on his nose and forehead and chin.”
Pause, while they all inspected the body. Ha! Look at her, actually noticing something that might be important. She gritted her teeth to keep from smiling. Six was definitely her magic number after the food she’d forced herself to eat earlier. Or it could be the five finally really hitting, in which case six would be too much. She was too high to worry or care. If blessings were legal, that would certainly be one.
But smiling around a corpse wasn’t really appropriate, so she managed not to, concentrating again on standing still so her high flowed through her body in a smooth arc, making her feel like she was floating. Like maybe things were okay after all. Like maybe she was okay after all.
“Fuckin metal all on, yay,” Bump said. Oddly festive sparks of light danced on the walls as he waved his beringed hand; Chess followed it to see a slab of sheet metal—what had once been the reinforcement of the floor above, she guessed, which had probably been some kind of processing room—leaned up against the wall. “Got he on the fuckin find neathen it.”
“It fell on his body?”
“Ain’t it what I fuckin saying?”
Whatever.
So the metal slab had fallen on the body, and on the symbol. And had kept the parts touching it from burning. That had to mean something. What did that mean?
“The fire was here before the metal fell. I mean, look. Look at the lines. He was on fire, the fire started on the floor. Or, maybe it didn’t start here, but the floor was on fire when the metal fell. So the spell, whatever it was—it was burning already. Was there carpet here?”
“Naw,” Terrible said. “All cement.”
She looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”
Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”
“Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.
With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.
And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.
That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.
She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.
“It’s a hafuran,” she said.
Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”
“It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”
“Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”
“This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”
Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.
Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all get them because it—well, we get a lot of different sigils and runes and symbols and stuff, but this one is an all-around power enhancer. Whatever we do, the hafuran makes it stronger.”
Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.
“Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”
“No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”
She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”
She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.
“Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.
Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.
A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.
Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.
So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”
“Be one of them death curses?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”
She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?
She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.
“Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”
Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t know what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.
He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.
And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.
But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.
Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.
And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.
Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.
But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.
Not even her. Maybe especially not her.
So what did her new fucking disgusting friend want? And wasn’t she just thrilled that she got to try to figure it out?
“Gots us an even fuckin bigger bad needs fuckin chattering on,” Bump said. He lit a cigarette slowly, waiting until they were all giving him their full attention before continuing to speak. “Ain’t come on this by fuckin accidentals, yay? Gots me a fuckin tip on it, got the knowledge fuckin gave to us.”
Terrible waited. Pasty waited. Chess couldn’t. She couldn’t because she thought she knew what he was going to say, what he had to be going to say; she was sure the others did, too, but she didn’t think it made them feel as sick as it did her. “Who gave it to you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Crankshot fuckin gave it on the earlier. Hear Slobag fuckin givin the chatter on he fuckin witch him find heself. How’s that fuckin sound, Ladybird? Slobag gone and gotten heself a witch.”
Chapter Ten
The hordes of ethereal killers were terrifying and unstoppable, and the citizenry quailed at their approach.
—TheBookofTruth, Origins, Article 39
She’d hoped that when she woke up Terrible would be in bed next to her. She’d slept so fucking hard she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d come in and started jumping up and down on the bed, and he’d sneaked in to surprise her before, so the hope was there. But no.
She couldn’t think about that. Not when she got up, not when she checked her phone and found the text he sent around four—not even that fucking late—saying he was staying at Bump’s. Which wasn’t that damn far from hers. Why would he want to sleep in that museum of gynecological art when he could sleep with her?
Slobag had a witch. Slobag had someone doing magic for him. Slobag knew about things Terrible had told Chess, and now Slobag’s witch was doing rituals inside buildings Terrible told her were empty during a time she’d been off working and had been late to meet Terrible, and she knew he’d put that together in his head just as fast as she had, maybe faster.
And he knew she’d been hanging out with Lex the day before. Slobag’s son Lex.
And he hadn’t come home with her, hadn’t come in to sleep with her.
Another thing she didn’t want to think about; way too many reasons for that particular decision flew into her head.
What she needed to think about was work. What she needed to think about was finding Vernal Sze and his friends and getting them to talk to her. No, she didn’t need to think about it, she needed to do it. Right away.
She left her new car in the gravel-strewn lot at the side of the building and started for the front doors of the Mercy Lewis school.
But today the walkway wasn’t empty. Students—she assumed they were students, they carried books—stood in straggly clumps outside, talking or smoking furtive cigarettes, listening to the Circle Jerks. Their eyes stripped her bare as she walked past; their conversations died when she got close enough to hear their words. It wasn’t just paranoia from the couple of Nips she’d popped to help her wake up after sleeping so hard, either. Their suspicion and aggression felt like pebbles against her skin, stinging where they hit.
The front door opened with the expected screech, though not as loud against the music playing as it had been in the previous afternoon’s silence. For a second she almost missed that silence. No one had been staring at her then.
Down the hall past the empty classrooms—apparently Mercy Lewis had a late lunch period, since it was just past one—to the office, where she was greeted by … a whole fucking crowd of people.
Frizzy—Laurie—was there, as were Monica and, smirking in the back in a gorgeous charcoal-gray suit, Beulah. She was the only one smiling. The others just glared—at each other, at the walls, at the various doors to small offices within the main Administration area, and especially at Chess.
“Here’s Miss Putnam now,” Beulah said. She unfolded her arms and straightened from her elegant lean. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer your questions.”
Bitch. She’d barely finished the last word before they all started talking at once. Because it was totally easy for her to make out individual comments from that, right? How stupid were these people?
Asking that question wouldn’t win Chess any friends. And the worst part was that she actually needed them to be—well, not friends, but at least sort of friendly, because there were too damn many of them and she had nothing to go on in the case.
So she stood against the door, waiting for the inevitable moment when someone would finally drown the others out.
The drowner emerged rather more quickly than she would have expected: a man, not tall but solid, with thinning hair and a broad face. “When is the Church going to do something about this? Students are afraid to come to school.”
“It’s been three weeks,” a woman—heavy, officious, sneering—interrupted. “If you people actually cared about us, you’d have done something by now.”
Another voice, she didn’t see whose. “The Church doesn’t care. They’ve never cared.”
“They care about our money,” said another, and as if that were some sort of switch, the yelling started again.
But they weren’t yelling at each other. They were yelling at her, looking right at her with their eyes narrowed and their faces reddening. She pressed herself against the door and shifted her weight, getting ready to duck from the angry voices and their condemnation, to brace herself for the fists and use her own, when she realized what she was doing. Getting freaked out? By these people? Who the fuck were they, anyway? A bunch of officious assholes who thought she owed them something. Fuck that, and fuck them.
So she straightened her back, raised her eyebrows, and just looked at them. Waiting. Sure enough, the shouts turned into speech, into grumbles, and finally into the embarrassed silence of someone who’s just vented their rage and discovered that the subject of that rage doesn’t give a shit.
Which she didn’t. Well, she did, of course she did, but not about them. Or their self-righteous desire to play victims.
She gave them another minute in the silence. “Who are you all, again?”
Balding-and-Stocky glowered at her. “We’re concerned parties.”
“And what is your concern? Do you work here? You have kids here? What?”
The small crowd was suddenly full of shifty eyes. Uh-huh. “I’m Wen Li. I’m chairman of the Student Association.”
“What is that?”
“We help mediate between students in trouble and the school administration.”
A woman—helmet hair, glasses—piped up, “I’m co-chair. Martha Li.”
Yes. They looked perfect for each other.
The introduction game made its circle around the room; every single damn one of them was chair or head of some committee or project or something. Which meant, if her memory served and what she’d learned the day before was correct, that every single damn one of them stood to bank some cash if the haunting turned out to be real. Which made them and their anger about as believable and sincere as a declaration of pure and faithful love from Bump.
After they’d finished she gave them another minute of silence. “And have any of you actually seen or experienced anything here?”
She didn’t expect anyone to speak. She was right. No one did.
“Fine. If anyone has information that might help me, let me know. I really am here to help, and believe me, I want this situation settled just as much as you do. Okay? But if you’ll excuse me, I do have some work to do today.”
She pushed herself through the crowd—well, not pushed, they stepped out of her way—and handed Laurie the list she’d made earlier. “I need to speak to these students individually, and I need an empty room to do it in.”
“Those students have a right to have an adult with them while they’re being questioned,” Wen said.
She wanted to roll her eyes, but refrained. “No, actually. They don’t.”
“They’re—”
“They’re not suspected of any crime, I’m not the Squad, and they’re over fifteen.”
Laurie scanned the list. “Room 122 will be empty in forty-five minutes. You can use that one. It’s down the hall, at the other end of the building.”
Damn, who would have thought Laurie—who still looked just as sour and disapproving as she had the day before—would be helpful? But then, with a roomful of people, none of whom she appeared to like, why wouldn’t she be? “Thank you.”
Beulah still watched her. Well, good. She could quit smirking and do something for Chess, since she obviously had nothing else to do. And since she had keys. And since the crowd apparently looked to her, for whatever the hell reason. “Beulah, will you come with me, please?”
Chapter Eleven
A Church employee never panics in the face of danger, because a Church employee knows the Truth of the afterlife.
—TheExampleIsYou, the guidebook for Church employees
The wreckage of the catwalk still stretched across the theater, a dead steel monster staring at her when she stepped into the room. Beulah brushed past her to hit the lights. Brighter this time. Interesting. And worth mentioning. “There are overheads?”
“Yes, why?” Beulah did innocent very well. “Oh. Sorry, I just didn’t think to turn them on yesterday.”
“Uh-huh.”
Beulah followed her farther into the room. “They’re farther along on the—You can’t think I deliberately left it dark in here.”
“Can’t I?” Hell, why not just say it outright? Wasn’t like Beulah thought they were becoming friends or something. Wasn’t like Chess cared if she thought that, either. The only reason Beulah was there was to open the door and turn on the lights, and to get her out of the office.
“You can believe anything you want to believe. That doesn’t make it true.”
“Wow, you’re so wise.” Chess walked down the aisle, ducking under the catwalk, toward the stage. Checking the camera she’d tied to the catwalk the previous day would be useless; all it could have filmed was a small section of floor, and since it was motion-activated she seriously doubted it would have caught anything.
But there was plenty of work she could still do in the theater.
“Are you trying to be unpleasant, or are you just like this all the time?”
Chess didn’t even glance back. “But gee, you’ve been so nice to me.”
Beulah muttered something; Chess didn’t hear it well enough to know if it was in English or Cantonese, and she didn’t care. All she cared about was searching that backstage area. Alone. She’d wanted Beulah to let her in, wondered if she would say anything about the others; since she hadn’t, and since the theater was open, she’d served her purpose. “You can go now.”
“Oh, am I being dismissed?”
“Do you plan to keep sniping at me? It’s not my fault you have an issue with the Church.”
“Who says it’s got anything to do with the Church?” The amusement in Beulah’s voice made Chess turn around. “Maybe I just don’t like you personally.”
“I guess I’ll have to live with that pain,” Chess replied, turning back to the stage. It wasn’t until the sound of the door closing echoed in the empty room that she realized Beulah had left. And that she herself was smiling. Weird. But oh well.
A set of short black-painted steps led from the floor at the bottom of the rows of seats up to the stage; off to the left a small orchestra pit hid quiet and empty. Chess ignored that for the moment.
Dust hit her nose when she walked across the curtain now crumpled on the stage, sending her into a brief sneezing fit. Ugh. And she couldn’t even have a cigarette to settle it down; the staff at—Wait a minute. Yes, she could. She could do anything she wanted to. What were they going to do, fire her?
And while she was at it she could grab another couple of Cepts from her pillbox.
The overheads revealed a floor covered in dusty footprints; the faint scent of kesh smoke hung in the air, but whether that was recent or from the curtains or, hell, from her cardigan, she had no idea.
She walked around some boxes and a stack of wooden platforms of varying heights, looking for something, anything. Any evidence of ritual magic.
The odds of her finding any were about as good as her odds of getting Terrible and Lex to have a pajama party together. If she’d been able to look the day before … But she hadn’t, and that left them plenty of time to clean up. For all she knew, the minute she’d left the office they’d had an alert raised.
Sometimes, for just a second, it bothered her to be so suspicious of everyone. Then she remembered she was dealing with people, and that people were capable of every sick fucking thing she’d ever experienced or imagined and a whole lot of other shit that even she hadn’t, and that feeling disappeared.
Something creaked on the other side of the curtain.
She stopped, one foot half off the floor ready to take her next step. Her body buzzed. Was that a ghost, or nerves?
It didn’t feel totally like a ghost. It didn’t itch as much as ghosts did. But her skin tingled and crawled an alarm, the kind that told her someone was doing something with magic or ghosts, something they shouldn’t be doing. The kind that told her she wasn’t alone anymore, that made her feel as though a target stood out clear and bright on her head and someone had their finger on a trigger.
For a long, aching minute she stood there without moving, until the sound of the creak began to blur in her memory and she couldn’t be sure she’d actually heard it. Fuck. Her cigarette fell to the dusty stage and she ground it out with her toe.
The silence waited. Breathed around her.
Her muscles ached. This was bullshit. She’d count to five, and then she’d get back to work. One … two … three …
The movement came at four. A tiny blur in the corner of her eye, so fast she couldn’t catch it. Fuck!
Her skin tingled worse. Something wasn’t right. That felt like a ghost, but it also felt like magic. A witch doing ghost-magic? Shit, after Maguinness she really didn’t want to deal with that again.
Too bad it wasn’t up to her. There was a ghost, and there was magic, period. A summoned ghost, maybe, or a ghost working with a mate. Double fuck.
She pulled her knife out of her pocket and snapped it open, used her left hand to grab a handful of asafetida and graveyard dirt. Let them fucking come. She was ready.
What she wasn’t ready for was the fast whoosh of something flying through the air, or the heavy sharp weight slamming into the back of her skull. The dirt and her knife flew from her hands; the floor flew up to greet her. Painfully.
She barely had a chance to realize what had happened before everything went dark.
It was still dark when she opened her eyes, and her head felt like someone had jammed nails into it.
Not that the rest of her was any more comfortable. She felt stiff and smushed
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Stacia Kane
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Enter a world of danger, ghosts and magic in the fourth book of the fantastic Downside Ghosts series.Ghosts; ghouls; things that go bump in the night. Chess has seen them all in her role as a witch and ghost hunter.Right now life is going surprisingly well for Chess Putnam. Her bank balance is healthy, she’s pretty sure she can call Terrible her “boyfriend”, and the last few months have been devoid of anyone trying to kill her.So when Chess is ordered by an infamous crime boss – who also happens to be her drug dealer – to use her powers as a witch to solve a grisly murder involving dark magic, she is unsurprised; she knew the recent calm wouldn’t last. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Chess’ ex lover Lex, son of a rival crime lord, is trying to re-ignite the sparks between them.Plus there’s the little matter of Chess’ real job as a ghost hunter for the Church of Real Truth; investigating reports of a haunting at a school in the heart of Downside. Someone seems to be taking a crash course in summoning the dead—and if Chess doesn’t watch her back, she may soon be joining their ranks.As Chess is drawn into a shadowy world of twisted secrets and dark violence, it soon becomes clear that she’s not going to emerge from its depths without making the ultimate sacrifice.