Five Down

by Stacia Kane

  She dragged her mind from those cheerful images and focused on the Solomon living room. Nothing special. Nothing special at all. A few bookshelves, a couch and easy chair, a widescreen TV. Macramé planters hanging from the ceiling. Prints on the walls, generic stuff like black-and-white pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and some sort of hippie tie-dyed tapestry thing.

  On the side wall, though, on the other side of the kitchen… What was that?

  She pressed her nose against the glass. Damn it, the Solomons had turned off their lights before bed—a pretty good indicator that they didn’t have ghosts. Most people suffering a real haunting made their homes so bright that sunglasses were required. Ghosts didn’t like the sun or light, so such action did occasionally help—not to mention the general fear of the dark, the almost instinctive way fearful people sought the light, tried to wrap it around themselves as if seeing a danger coming would make it go away.

  It wouldn’t. It never did. Chess had learned that a long time ago.

  But even in the dark, she could just make out the object sitting on a low table, next to the phone. “Shit.”

  “What’s troubling?”

  “Here, put me down. They’ve got a rat skull and spine in there, tied up with owl feathers.”

  He obeyed. “Owls take ghosts down the City, aye? So they pullin shit with ghosts?”

  She dusted her hands on her jeans—the windowsill hadn’t been exactly clean—and smiled at him. Of course he knew that. He knew it because of her, because he paid attention, and because he was so much smarter than he thought he was. “Yeah. They’re sometimes used in binding rituals. Like, Maguinness was bound to a ghost, remember? He used toad-magic and mistletoe, but a lot of people use rat skulls or spines.”

  Terrible nodded. “Be why them claiming them ain’t got a ghost, aye? Causen them the ones bringin it.”

  “Exactly. Damn it!”

  They started walking toward the back of the house, where a wide cement patio lay bare save for a generic umbrella table-and-chairs set. “What the trouble, though? They binding themselves a ghost, you bust em in, aye?”

  His absolute confidence in her never failed to make her face warm. To make her insides warm, too. She didn’t deserve that kind of trust, not at all. But it felt so fucking good, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up. Couldn’t let him see how little she was actually worth it.

  “Yeah, but it’s still a ghost. I get half my bonus because they Summoned it themselves, but... It’s just a pain in the ass, you know? All the research and everything I have to do to figure out who the ghost was, get its grave supplies and all of that…not to mention I have to notify them they’re under investigation now and I’m stuck with this case. This sucks.”

  A set of sliding glass doors led into the kitchen; the blinds were closed over them so Chess couldn’t see through. Her own reflection stood out clearly, though, hers and Terrible’s as he came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “All be right up, ain’t you worry on it. An you needin lashers, you know I got—”

  “No, I’m fine.” She slipped out of his grasp. Yeah, she knew he had money. Plenty of money. She didn’t know exactly what Bump paid him, but she imagined it was some sort of percentage of profits, and profits from all of the gambling, prostitution, and especially drugs in Downside west of Forty-third were considerable. Hell, the amount she herself spent on drugs every year was considerable. Addiction was a lot of things, but cheap wasn’t one of them.

  Which was why she couldn’t take money from him. She couldn’t take it because they slept together, and she couldn’t stand the idea of money and sex having anything to do with each other. Nor did she want him to pay for her drugs. They’d never discussed it or anything, but she’d never asked him to bring them to her—save for one emergency when she’d been trapped and withdrawing hard—and he’d never offered.

  He said he didn’t care about her addiction, that he loved her no matter what, and she believed him. But not caring was a lot different from approving.

  The whole thing made her want to hide. And lucky her, she had some chemicals to hide behind. She dug her pillbox from her bag, grabbed three more Cepts and washed them down with water.

  As she looked down to put the silver pillbox back in its little pocket, she noticed something on the other side of the glass doors, below the bottom of the blinds. What…what was that? She squatted down to get a closer look.

  “What you seein?”

  She glanced back, waved him to her side. “What does that look like to you? There, see? On the floor just inside.”

  He crouched, squinted as he leaned forward. “Like dirt, maybe? An got some scratch-ups on there, too, but ain’t can make em out.”

  “Runes,” she said. The cement patio hurt her knees. Not just because it was hard, but because it had absorbed the sun’s heat all day. It felt like kneeling in a frying pan. “Protective runes, and some bindrunes. Some sigils I don’t recognize, too, like they invented them themselves. Normal people can’t cast shit like that.”

  “Thinkin them witches, too?”

  “I don’t know.” She pulled her camera out of her bag. She probably wouldn’t get any decent shots of the symbols on the other side of the glass, but she couldn’t exactly copy them down by hand; inscribing a sigil was basically the same thing as casting it, at least for witches like herself, and no way was she going to chance activating some sigil when she didn’t know what it did. “I guess it’s possible they could be unlicensed witches, but if that’s the case I’d think the neighbor would have noticed them doing magic and told me about it. She certainly seems to spend enough time watching them.”

  “Maybe them ain’t doin it on they alones.”

  “I wonder if— Oh. Right! Mrs. Brent—the neighbor—said they used to have these big parties every week, where the lights would go out after half an hour or so and everyone would leave a couple of hours after that. She thought it was some kind of sex party, but if they had a lot of people… She said it was about a dozen, I bet it was thirteen.”

  He stood back up when she did. “Get a gang-up on, all them gots a little power, they pool it all together, aye?”

  “Yeah. I guess so, anyway.”

  His hand touched the back of her neck, gave it a gentle squeeze. “Takes a many of them make one almost as good as you.”

  There was that blush again. “Well. Um, let’s walk around the rest of the house, and get going, okay? I kind of want to go home, I don’t know—”

  His arms wrapped around her waist; his head bent to hers. A slow kiss. A soft one that made her tingle all the way down to her feet. “Feel like gettin you home myself. Maybe get some eats in you, what you thinkin? You eat today?”

  She buried her face in his broad, strong chest for a minute, took a deep breath of the soap-smoke-and-pomade smell of him, mixed with bay rum from shaving and whatever indefinable other scent that was his alone. She wasn’t hungry. She especially wasn’t hungry when she knew any minute her pills would kick in and set butterflies dancing in her stomach.

  That feeling was a hell of a lot better than food. But for some reason he’d been insisting of late that she eat, which was sweet and made her feel special while at the same time annoyed and wishing he’d quit paying so much damn attention. Being taken care of was…confusing. Weird. Not always comfortable.

  She’d known telling him she loved him would mean giving up some privacy. She just didn’t think it would entail so many reminders of that sacrifice, that it might mean having to answer for things like how much she ate and slept. That he would watch those things. Care about them. She’d never realized it meant she’d become responsible for things.

  But she didn’t argue, didn’t mention any of that. Instead she smiled at him. It was practically impossible to look at him without smiling, so that was easy.

  “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go home and get something to eat.”

  3.

  MRS. SOLOMON—MARGARET SOLOMON, NÉE M
argaret James—stood in her doorway wearing some sort of dashiki-thing, her long rust-colored hair hanging almost to her stomach. Her feet were bare, her face innocent of make-up. A cloud of sandalwood incense smoke drifted out around her in an annoying hippie fog.

  “But we don’t have a ghost,” she said. She started to fold her arms across her rather considerable chest, then apparently thought better of it. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time.”

  Liar. “I appreciate that. But I’m going to have to come in and investigate anyway.”

  “You can’t—”

  Chess already had her hand on the paper; as Mrs. Solomon started to speak she pulled it from the folder she carried and held it out. “This is an Order of Relinquishment, which certifies that I have the right to enter this home anytime, for any reason, with or without your approval.”

  Two more sheets. “This is an Order of Non-Culpability, which says anything I may damage in the course of the investigation isn’t my responsibility to repair or replace. And this one is an Order of Domain, which says you must leave these premises at any time I ask and stay away until I permit your return. All of these Orders are subject to my discretion, and failure to obey any of them is grounds for a prison sentence.”

  Mrs. Solomon examined the papers. Her hand shook ever so slightly, a faint twitch that made Chess’s eyebrows rise. Nervous? Good.

  “Now. Will you step aside and allow me to continue my investigation, or do I need to order you out and call the Squad?”

  Mrs. Solomon stepped a foot or so to her right. “Come in, Miss…?”

  “Putnam. It’s right there on that form. Thank you.”

  The sandalwood smell got worse when Chess stepped over the threshold onto the woven raffia mat on the floor; patchouli joined in when Mrs. Solomon moved. Ugh. Both of those scents were…well, suspicious, actually. Yes, they were very popular ones among the wheat-germ-and-whole-grain crowd, but they were also strong enough to mask a lot of other scents.

  If the Solomons had summoned a ghost into their house—and they had, Chess knew they fucking had—they would have used some sort of incense or burned some sort of herbs. For that matter, if they were harboring a ghost they might want or need to keep something burning all or most of the time.

  Though why in the hell anyone would want to harbor a ghost Chess had no idea. Why? Because they liked taunting themselves with death, liked seeing how far they could push it before they actually did die? Because they hated themselves and wanted to die but couldn’t bring themselves to—

  The thoughts stopped there. Ghosts and drugs were not the same thing.

  Right?

  “My husband isn’t home at the moment.” Nerves were obviously getting the better of Mrs. Solomon. The Orders Chess had given her still shook in her hands; when she changed her grip she left soft damp spots where her fingers had been. “He’s at the store. He owns a store, Earth’s Blessings? Organic foods, farmed sustainably? You know, people say we don’t need to worry about the environment anymore because the population is so much smaller, but they’re so wrong, it’s still incredibly important, don’t you think?”

  “Sure.” Whatever. The rat-skull-and-spine was gone, Chess noticed. Damn, she would have liked to touch the piece, to see if it had been used recently in a Summoning. She still could, but that would require either asking about it or conducting a full search with Mrs. Solomon standing there, which she didn’t want to do. Better to come back that night with her Hand of Glory to put the Solomons into enchanted sleep so she could do a really thorough search.

  Without having to listen to Mrs. Solomon babble, barely pausing. “…And people are really starting to catch on, I think, one day we’ll convince everyone, we just have to raise our voices together in joy, you know, and make sure people know how beautiful life can be if they just let it.”

  Chess resisted the urge to roll her eyes and headed for the window on the far wall, the one visible from the Brents’ landing. Sure enough, a thin layer of salt covered the sill. Salt, and a few runes scratched into the wood. Yep. The window at the front of the room facing the street was similarly covered. Chess reached out, let her hand rest just over them to feel the faint tickle of energy on her skin.

  “Isn’t it something, that stuff on the sills? It was like that when we moved in, we have no idea where it came from, but Doug—that’s my husband, Doug—said they were probably protections of some kind, and we poured salt on them to neutralize them just them case.”

  Another lie. Was the woman really so naïve that she didn’t realize Chess knew she and her husband were the house’s first residents ever? “Why didn’t you call the Church?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Yeah, sure she was. Chess looked up, met Mrs. Solomon’s earnest brown eyes. “Why didn’t you call the Church? When you found the runes here, I mean. Someone would have come out and helped you.”

  “Oh. Oh, right, well, we just didn’t think of it, we didn’t want to bother anyone, you know, it didn’t seem important, really.”

  She didn’t ask if they were in fact important, or what they meant, or even if Chess recognized them. Chess hadn’t expected her to.

  Next they wandered into the kitchen, which was decorated in a horrible mustardy color with brightly painted clay masks and woven baskets dotting the walls. Magic in the room, definitely. If Chess hadn’t felt it sliding under her clothes, reaching out to tickle the back of her neck, the louder, more frantic tone of Mrs. Solomon’s voice would have told her. “You know, we don’t know anything about those things, we just want to live our lives, you know, and give something back to the earth and society, we want to contribute, that’s what we’re all here for, to learn and to teach.”

  “You’ve never had any sort of problems? Discomfort? Prickling feelings on the back of your neck or your arms? Sudden chills? The feeling someone is watching you?”

  “No. Nothing like that. We, wouldn’t we know if we had a ghost? And we’d want to report it, wouldn’t we, so we could get a settlement?”

  “Some people use ghosts as weapons.” The runes…now that she could see them more clearly she picked out Egam and Bonro. Ghost runes, summoning runes. Spirit home runes, used to bind a spirit to a particular place. Big surprise. “Or to gain power.”

  “Why would we want that, we don’t want that, we’re not that kind of people.”

  Chess just looked at her. What did it feel like to be that innocent, that trusting? Everyone was that kind of people; it wasn’t even a kind of people, it was just people.

  And Mrs. Solomon, for all her “I love everyone life is beautiful la la la” shit, was no different from anyone else. She obviously wanted something badly enough to break the law, and whatever she wanted was obviously something that benefitted no one but herself. Something that could very well be harmful to everyone else.

  Mrs. Solomon followed her through the rest of the house. Three bathrooms, four bedrooms with one acting as an office. A nice place, really, if one was into that sort of thing. Which Chess wasn’t.

  The master bedroom was huge, almost as big as Terrible’s warehouse apartment. Nature pictures and a few bright paintings hung on the walls. A satin nightgown in a deep wine color lay shriveled like a discarded snakeskin on the unmade bed; a few vibrators and various other “adult toys”—at least Chess assumed that was what they were, she’d never seen some of those things before—sat on a shelf next to it.

  Well, well. More clothes covered the floor in little clumps. Mostly men’s clothes, button-up shirts and khaki trousers, boxer shorts and boxer briefs, jeans and t-shirts. Average clothes.

  So why did something about them bug her?

  She didn’t know, and with Mrs. Solomon standing there chattering and blushing harder by the minute she wasn’t going to figure it out. She snapped several pictures to look at later.

  Mrs. Solomon had just finished telling her about how love was the most powerful force on earth when sounds drifted up the stairs.

  “My husband’
s home.” The woman’s bright smile hardly moved as she talked. “So you can meet him, and I’m sure you can see there’s no ghost here, and we can call this whole thing finished.”

  Oh, man, this lady was not going to give up, was she? It didn’t change anything, of course. It was just irritating.

  Doug Solomon appeared to be a few years older than his wife, with a salt-and-pepper beard and matching hair that reached his shoulders. His tie-dyed t-shirt—ugh—had a slightly stretched collar, and his jeans had holes in the knees. Brown sandals completed the look. Double ugh.

  He wasn’t as nervous as his wife. “That bitch next door needs to mind her own business. It’s because she wants us out of here, you know. We ruin her image of the perfect neighborhood. She didn’t like our parties, she doesn’t like our music, she doesn’t like our clothes or our cars or anything else.”

  “Why do you think that is? I mean, can you think of some reason why she dislikes you so much?”

  Mrs. Solomon sniffed. “She disapproves of our lifestyle.”

  Chess looked at them blankly. They stood beside each other against the living room wall like suspects in a line-up, but instead of looking at Chess they looked at each other, reached for each others’ hands. It was almost…well, no, it wasn’t almost. It was. Sweet.

  It felt like a private moment, one Chess shouldn’t be seeing, and it made a little spark of pain flare in her chest. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be working or watching the Solomons. She wanted to be with Terrible, wanted to touch him, to have him touch her. It…it actually physically hurt that he wasn’t there.

  She’d always thought it would hurt to be in love and not be loved back; that it did hurt, when Terrible wasn’t speaking to her and she thought she’d blown it for good. She hadn’t realized that the pain didn’t come from whether or not the feelings were returned. The pain came from love itself, and nothing could stop it or keep it at bay.