Unholy Magic

by Stacia Kane

  —The Book of Truth, Rules, Article 178

  Somewhere by the ceiling she hovered, looking down at herself, a tiny bedraggled figure huddled against the wall, shivering. She’d given up trying to climb back onto the bed. Given up on the idea of forcing her jeans back on her bleeding, oversensitive legs. Given up on everything. She was gone. She was lost in the pain.

  Monsters clawed at her from the inside, biting her guts with sharp teeth. Her heart pumped gasoline through her veins. The small trash can in her arms was hot from her skin and full of bile. Her legs wouldn’t stop moving, every scrape against the carpet making her want to scream.

  A black shape appeared in the window. First a head, then shoulders. Fingers closed around the bottom of the pane and lifted. Chess slammed back into her body.

  Her head lolled sideways. “Hi,” she wanted to say, but what came out was “Please.”

  Didn’t seem to matter. She didn’t think he’d heard her.

  He slid himself through the window, reached back, and yanked the ladder into the room. What was he doing? Why was he taking so long?

  He wasn’t going to help her. She knew it now. He’d come to laugh at her. To taunt her. She’d thought … she’d thought it was okay, that he cared enough to help her, she’d been wrong, fuck, so wrong.

  He barely glanced at her, stepping over her restless legs to the bathroom. Light burned her eyes. She closed them and turned away. Did he have to look at her?

  Water running. Big hands on her head, on her arms. He pressed something cool against her forehead, wiped her face clean. It felt good. It felt amazing. “Chess. C’mon, Chess. You keep aught down?”

  Her answer was a sob. Now that he was there, now that she knew he would help her, all she could do was cry.

  “Gimme that now.” The trash can left her arms. “All be right, aye? Hang on.”

  “I can’t.” She fell forward. His broad chest caught her, so hard, so strong, and she huddled against it. Tried to climb into it, to become part of him and never have to be alone again. Cold still clung to his coat, it must have been freezing out there. “I can’t, shit I’m sorry, thank you, please help me, please help me thank you so much … please Terrible I’m so sorry …”

  He gripped her shoulders and set her back against the wall. For some reason this made her feel even worse. She really was disgusting, wasn’t she? He couldn’t even bear to look at her. Good thing she hadn’t called Lex, then. It hadn’t even occurred to her.

  Another cramp hit and wiped the thought from her mind. She bit her lip and tasted blood. Her stomach roiled again; she lunged for the trash can and threw up. Kept throwing up, then fell to the floor. No strength left to hold herself up. Her hands clawed the carpet.

  Terrible picked her up, set her against the wall again. “Cool, Chess. Let’s get you right up, aye? Gimme your arm.”

  “Wha—no, no. No needles, please, no needles …”

  “No choice, baby. C’mon. You ain’t keep aught down, you ain’t swallow no pills. True thing, Chessiebomb. Lemme do this.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Aye, you can. C’mon. Left me some footprints in that snow outside like an arrow, dig? Ain’t got much time afore somebody sees, them security keep the schedule you say.”

  Air swirled around her body when he scooped her up and carried her into the bathroom, setting her on the cold tile. She kept her eyes closed. Too bright in there, the white tiles and the white lights like some garish institution. She could only imagine what it looked like in there, despite her pitiful efforts to clean it up. She didn’t want to see. She hated that he could, that he saw the mess, saw her in her bra and panties like a corpse waiting to be disposed of. So weak, so fucking weak …

  The rubber catheter, slightly sticky. The faint ache in her arm when he pulled it tight, the flat sound of it snapping. The sharp scent of alcohol, cold on her skin. She swallowed, swallowed again. Her feet hit the floor, fast, pattering like a drumroll. It was coming. Oh fuck it was coming, the needle made her sick but relief was coming and she didn’t care anymore, didn’t care …

  “You make a fist?” His fingers closed over hers, helping her. “Fist up, baby, c’mon. Make a fist for me, aye?”

  She tried, fighting against the searing pain. Worked it as tight as she could, released it, did it again. His light smack on her inner arm made her want to scream, but she gritted her teeth and kept flexing her hand, kept doing it …

  It didn’t hurt. Not like it had when she’d done it herself. She felt the needle pinch, felt it sit for a second, felt Terrible’s hands move. Felt the catheter unsnap.

  Felt … fuck. Oh, yeah. Oh fuck yeah …

  Still humiliating. Still horrid. But it didn’t matter so much now, did it. No. No, because her muscles were relaxing and tears of gratitude pricked her eyes and her stomach cooled and settled. Her headache disappeared.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Lights danced behind her eyelids, beautiful lights, peaceful lights. “Thank you …”

  The trash can appeared under her chin before she realized she needed it, before she threw up again and felt absolutely nothing while doing it. Amazing. That’s what it was. Cool damp fabric wiped at her mouth, at her face, soothing her sweaty skin, and she sighed and tilted her head back so he could get her neck and chest, too.

  Wanting him to move it farther down, to wipe away the sweat and blood and tears like he’d wiped away the misery, and make her clean and whole again.

  Her eyes flew open. Terrible. She’d called Terrible. When he hated her. When he’d betrayed her, sold her out to Bump, put her in the position he’d put her in.

  But seeing him crouching beside her, his eyes scanning her face, she couldn’t seem to find the anger. Maybe she was too high. Now that was a glorious thought. High again, peaceful again. The ugly memories receded, the angry accusing voices disappeared. All of them, and nothing mattered anymore. Not even how pissed she was.

  “Aye,” he said. He reached out with the cloth again, then seemed to think better of it and handed it to her instead. She wiped her sticky fingers on it while he continued, “I gotta get gone. Had to park a good way off, dig, road still ain’t clear closer up.”

  “Oh.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little bag. Cepts, a dozen or so. He was forgiven.

  “These get you home on the morrow, aye?”

  “Aye—yeah. Thanks.”

  “You right now?”

  She nodded, wiping her eyes with her hands so she didn’t have to look at him. She might have forgiven him, but it didn’t seem he’d forgiven her.

  Or maybe he had and it was simply that she was huddled on a bathroom floor, a few feet away from the mess she’d made earlier, with her soaking wet hair clinging to her skull and her entire body streaked with blood and coated with sweat and vomit. Yeah. Not exactly her most alluring moment.

  “Cool. I … cool. Chess, gimme a call you get back, aye? Got … got some stuff Bump wants done, gotta have a chatter on.”

  Fuck. One thing she could say for heavy torturous withdrawal, at least she hadn’t had to worry about what Bump wanted her to do. Or think about what had happened in the car.

  But she just nodded, as if the subject didn’t make a heavy weight thud into her chest. “Fine.”

  For a second she thought he was going to say something else. His mouth opened, his head tilted to the side. Then he picked up the spent needle and catheter and shoved them into his pocket. “Right. On morrow then.”

  She watched him cross the room, watched him push the ladder back out the window and slip over the sill, disappearing into the night. Gone.

  Gone, like the ghosts who’d ignored her earlier. Strange, that. She’d think about it later. Right now all she wanted to do was sit and feel good, sit and relax.

  And clean up the filthy bathroom before morning.

  She stuck a fresh-rolled kesh between her lips and fired it up. Almost five o’clock, back at her apartment, and she had nothing to do and now
here to be. The free time felt odd. She kept expecting someone to knock at her door and drag her out into the cold.

  Nobody did, though. Good. The last thing she wanted to do was think about hookers, or Bump, or Lex. Or, especially, Terrible. Instead, she sucked the hot, harsh smoke deep into her lungs and started flipping through Fletcher’s financial records, at least those the Church had been able to access on such short notice, rifling through the details of his accounts with cool calculation. Just the way she knew he would do were their positions reversed.

  What would it be like, to have that kind of wealth? Money had never meant much to Chess beyond how much oblivion it could buy, but it was difficult, looking at credit card records showing more money spent on shoes than she spent on food in half a year, not to feel something. Some twinge of envy, some pang of despair. The world was full of men like Oliver Fletcher, men for whom everything came easy. What they did or how they lived interested her not at all, but their peace of mind … that, she envied. And it looked like Oliver could afford an awful lot of peace of mind—at least until she looked more closely.

  The kesh burned down nice and slow while she took notes, her occasional drag the only sound in the room save the scratching of her pen on the paper. A lot of money moved into the accounts, but if she wasn’t mistaken, almost as much moved out. Lease payments on seven cars. Mortgages on three homes. Fuel for a private jet. Designer clothing bills that Chess had to read four times to make sure she was seeing them correctly through her increasingly blurry eyes. Payments to management companies, publicity firms, costumers, special-effects companies …

  And bank transfers to a separate account. Always the same account number. No name listed. Thousands of dollars at a time.

  She made a note of it, checked three times to make sure she’d copied it correctly. Tomorrow she’d put in a request for those records as well, to see who owned the account. It might be important, it might not, but something about Fletcher, the memory of his smirk the night before, made her itch to find some dirt on him. An abuse of her position, perhaps, but who knew. He was certainly one of the best suspects she had.

  Not that she had many. She hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Merritt again, to get his impressions of the family. She hadn’t gotten anything from Roger Pyle indicating he had any reason at all to fake a haunting; hell, she hadn’t yet managed to find any real hard evidence the thing was fake, although she knew in her gut that it was.

  She took another drag, tapped off the ash into the plastic ashtray on the floor.

  Maybe she’d take a nap, put on a record and snooze here on the couch. She hated to waste a good high sleeping, but she hadn’t slept much of late. Of course, having eyeballs left in her car and being followed all over the city didn’t exactly promote sweet dreams, even without the withdrawal, and the fighting with people she—people she liked, and worrying about death curses and being caught.

  Someone could be watching her now. She’d tacked a blanket to the ceiling in front of the stained-glass window, a cheap and shabby attempt to keep prying eyes out—the analogy made her giggle a little—but still …

  Paranoid. That’s all she was. Paranoid, and the words on the pages in front of her were starting to swim. She stuck them back in the file and closed it. No more reading. Time for some music, or maybe more episodes of Pyle’s TV show, which actually wasn’t half bad. She hadn’t finished the first disc.

  And she still hadn’t watched the disks she’d copied at the Pyle house. Now might be a good time.

  The disk started playing as soon as she shoved it into the machine, but she grabbed a bottle of water for her cottonmouth before sitting back down. The kesh was almost cashed; she pinched it between her fingers and settled herself cross-legged on the sagging cushions.

  The Pyle room. Kym, naked, her wrists tied together, a wicked smile on her face. Oh, shit. Was that all these disks were? Roger and Kym’s private porn collection? Chess was in for a long couple of hours if that was the case. She had about as much desire to watch that as she did to tattoo Lex’s name on her ass.

  Yes, they were. The next disk was the same, and the next. Is this what being in a relationship did to people, bored them with each other to the point that they had to dress up as shepherds and milkmaids, as witches and Elders, as schoolgirls and teachers, anything to pretend they weren’t fucking the same person they’d fucked last time?

  And these were people who were supposed to like each other—love each other. Who’d legally committed to loving each other, had been bound by blood and magic in the Church. Now they were trapped forever, with someone they knew so well that all they had left was boredom. Nobody could really know another person and want them, love them.

  Hell, the only reason Lex had stuck around this long, the only reason, aside from the free drugs, that she allowed it, was because they didn’t see each other very often and didn’t care about each other very much.

  And she was smart to handle it that way, to keep that distance; hell, didn’t this video, and all the others, prove it? Smart to avoid being with anyone she might actually really feel something for, who might actually really feel something for her. Smart to avoid getting involved with people she knew she could—

  Her thought stopped right there as the scene before her changed, a different setup, a new act. Her bleary eyes focused, her mouth fell open, her stomach gave a mighty lurch, and her fingers fumbled for the phone.

  Kym Pyle, tied to a wicked-looking iron rack in a room Chess didn’t recognize. Her skin was painted or dusted with some sort of whitish powder, so she glowed in the dim light, and black circles were painted around her eyes. She struggled against the chains holding her, bared her teeth, her naked body twisting as Roger approached, tossed what looked like dirt at her to quiet her.

  As if she were a ghost.

  Ricantha to control and create ghosts. A sigil to lock the soul in the body and althea to keep it from joining its own psychopomp. An owl to hold it after release and carry it where it was needed. Perhaps a mild electrical setup, to force the spirit into solid form?

  Chess couldn’t stop staring at the screen, her own eyes wide and so dry they clicked when she blinked.

  Terrible said a whore’s purse was like her own soul, the only private thing she had. Something with that much energy was a totem, a placeholder to connect a soul to the world above the City.

  She’d been so stupid, so fucking stupid. So focused on eyes and her own precious ass that she’d missed the most blatant clue, the most obvious fucking thing.

  As she’d kept saying, ghosts got stuck where they were when they died. They didn’t move on.

  What did a hooker do? She had sex. She had sex for money.

  So if you were the ghost of a murdered prostitute and you wanted to run a whorehouse, what was the most logical thing to do?

  Fill it with ghost whores.

  The scene on the disk changed, but she wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was hitting Terrible’s button on her autodial, trying to stop her hands from shaking.

  Could she have prevented this if she’d paid better attention?

  She’d handled this all wrong, right from the beginning. Getting involved with Lex and wasting so much time spinning her drugged-up wheels worrying about being watched and being caught and keeping herself from exposing anything she didn’t want exposed.

  And speaking of exposure … She snapped the phone shut. She hadn’t talked to him since he’d left the Pyle house. Hadn’t really talked to him since that stupid argument. What was she supposed to do now, call him up, tell him what she knew, let it end there?

  No. She was just high enough, just excited enough, to decide she had to do this in person. To decide she deserved to see his reaction in person, she deserved to—well, she wanted to see him, and with her head half in the clouds she felt confident enough to do so. After all, she did owe him something, right?

  Time to pay it back.

  Chapter Eighteen

  You are of course enco
uraged to speak to children, to answer their questions with the kind of Truth appropriate to their age and situation. Never forget they are not yet mature; they are children.

  —The Example Is You, the guidebook for Church employees

  Twenty minutes later she stood in the hall outside his place, her stomach bouncing with cheerful butterflies and a twelve-pack of beer weighing down her left hand. The thick steel door gave a flat thud under her knuckles.

  No answer. Okay. Well, where was he? It had never occurred to her he might not be home.

  She knocked again, shifting her weight from foot to foot. What if … what if he was inside, and knew it was her, but wasn’t answering? Didn’t want to see her?

  No. She wouldn’t believe that. She had to talk to him, she had to tell him, and he had to be home to listen because she was right and it was important.

  She had to be right. It was the only answer that fit, but … damn it was a fucked-up theory, wasn’t it? Who the hell would pay to fuck a ghost?

  The twelve-pack in her left hand grew heavy. One more knock, one more minute waiting while she switched the twelve-pack from her left hand to her right.

  Terrible opened the door midswitch. His face gave her nothing. Shit.

  “Hey, Chess.” Pause. “You right?”

  “Yeah, right up, um—here, I brought you—” What was she doing? She held the beer out to him, stopped. She’d brought him beer, was she an idiot? She’d come to tell him something horrible and she’d—Oh, screw it.

  “I figured it out,” she said. “What the ghosts are doing, the killers. I know what they’re doing with the hookers.”

  Well, at least now he looked interested. “Aye?”

  “Yeah, they—they’re fucking them, Terrible. They’re—they’re killing the girls, and they’re trapping them and fucking them. A whorehouse of ghosts. I can’t believe I missed it, that I didn’t figure it out before. But that’s what they’re doing, I know it. I know it.”