by Stacia Kane
She hung back and let Lauren pick the lock on the door. If trouble started she was welcome to be first in line for it.
But no trouble came, and when they slid into the cave Chess understood why.
It was empty.
Maguinness’s energy still waited there, foul and thick around them. The ceiling ropes still hung with their rows of bizarre decoration; the little bed slats still hugged the walls.
But not a single body slept in them. Not a single living being slept anywhere in the cave, at least not that she could see, and when she opened up to the Hand’s magic she found it hadn’t touched anything, hadn’t found a living person to enchant.
He’d known they were coming. Had to have known, unless he simply liked to be out and about at all hours of the night. Which wouldn’t have surprised her, but the idea that he’d taken his entire family with him did.
She knew that wasn’t it anyway. The air of neglect already hung over the place, as if Maguinness had taken something vital from the room itself when he left.
But had he left because she’d been there earlier and he knew she’d be back, or was it because … well, because of something else? Because of war with the Lamaru, or whatever?
“Shit.” Lauren’s shoulders sagged.
Chess tried to hide her relief. Maybe even did a decent job of it. “Come on. We still might find something.”
They split, Chess moving off to the right and Lauren the left. Being in the room, deserted though it was, felt lousy; the power she’d felt earlier had dissipated but it hadn’t disappeared. And every step she took showed her another little bed, another bone or scrap of garbage, another reminder of what had lived here. And worse, that the family was now out on the streets. Who knew what they were doing?
Tied beneath each slat bed was a little charm, a toad bone wrapped in black thread with a piece of mirror dangling from it. Chess reached for one; her skin started crawling before she even touched it.
She fished in her bag for a glove, glanced at Lauren across the room. “What do you think the charms are?”
“Who knows. Not sleep safes or anything like that. Probably just general protection.”
“Yeah, but those are toad bones. Who uses toad bones in general charms? And how did he get so many of them?”
“There are black markets everywhere, Cesaria.” Lauren’s dismissive tone rankled. Chess was looking at more toad charms, which connected in her head with the toad fetish she’d seen earlier, the ones at the murder scene and the slaughterhouse, and the way they’d practically eaten her soul. As she’d told Terrible, toad magic was serious magic; those charms could be anything, for any purpose, and they were strong enough to sting her even through her narcotic haze.
“Hey, Lauren? Maybe you could stop acting like my legitimate questions aren’t worth your time, do you think? How does it not bother you that someone doing whatever it is he’s doing has a supply of toad bones?”
“This isn’t our case, Cesaria. We’re investigating the Lamaru and their psychopomps. When that’s done, maybe we’ll look for this guy—and by ‘we’ I mean the Squad, not you—and find out what he’s doing. But we don’t need to get distracted, and that’s what you’re doing. Focus on the case at hand, please.”
Chess opened her mouth, shut it again. Lauren was right—well, she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. They were only here in hopes of finding some evidence that Chess was correct in thinking the dead bodies had been members of Maguinness’s family and that he was thus at war with the Lamaru.
But then, hadn’t the people who’d attacked Ratchet, who’d been about to destroy the building with that hideous thing still in her bag, been Lamaru?
Maybe. Probably. But Lauren didn’t know about that, and Chess couldn’t tell her; further reflection had failed to show her any possible way to explain what she’d been doing in that building.
At least not outright. “I was thinking, though. If the Lamaru are doing something with psychopomps, they might use toads, right? So if this guy has a steady supply of them, maybe they came to him? Maybe he made some illegal magic for them, and they didn’t pay him or something, and that’s what started the fight?”
Lauren’s sigh carried all the way across the room. “And when we catch the Lamaru, we’ll ask them, and make a case against them. This isn’t one of your Debunking cases, where you can just follow your whimsy wherever it leads. This is a Squad case, and there are protocols to be followed.”
Chess’s hand closed over the charm and snapped the thread holding it, quickly so Lauren couldn’t see. Maybe harder than she needed to; if she didn’t break something she was going to start screaming. “Why the fuck are we here, then, if you don’t care about Maguinness or his connection—”
“We’re here because you made it sound like he might have witnessed something, or like perhaps he’d been victimized. So I thought we’d come in and see if we could get him to talk while he slept, and if we couldn’t we’d wake him up and question him. He’s not here. Fine. So we have a quick look around and we leave. Unlike you, I actually want to solve this case. I’m not Bound, remember? I’m not getting an extra grand a week just for keeping my mouth shut.”
Even her Cepts were barely enough to help keep her voice calm. “I’m trying to solve the case, Lauren. I want it solved just as much as you do, and you know it.”
Lauren shrugged. “Then stop going off on tangents.”
“Fine.”
Fuck Lauren, and fuck her focus. If she didn’t want to listen to Chess, that was her problem, but Chess wasn’t about to give up. There was a connection between Maguinness and the Lamaru, and it was more than the Lamaru picking some of his children to kill or him trying—and succeeding, to some extent—to kill them in return. It had started somewhere. They’d found each other somehow. That both were involving themselves in the same type of magic, or at least in connected magics, could not be a coincidence.
Lauren could do whatever the fuck she wanted. Chess was going to solve the case. She turned back toward the wall, ready to finish her search—the room ended only a few feet away—and caught sight of a shadow, a thin vertical line in the smooth dirt.
The edge of a door. It thrummed with power when she touched it, sent vibrations up her arms, but wasn’t warded or hexed. Wasn’t even locked. Apparently Maguinness felt it was safe enough in his little dwelling.
She’d wondered vaguely why all the beds were so small when Maguinness himself was so tall; here was her answer. His bedroom.
Her Hand twitched a little when she picked it up and used its candle to light her way. The flame danced, sent shadows waving onto the walls. The walls …
Covered in skins. Not all of them were animal.
She took a deep breath. Wasn’t like that was news. Maguinness was a sick fuck; big shock.
A sick fuck who slept on a mattress stuffed with herbs beneath a wire canopy frame of some kind. She assumed it had once held more skins arranged as draperies, but those were gone. By the side of the bed sat a battered wooden table; its surface was covered with dust-free spots where ornaments or candles had rested.
The only other item in the room was a trunk. Not the one he’d taken onstage with him, but a different one, covered in pink silk faded to dusty salmon and radiating black energy like a revving engine.
She glanced back through the open doorway; Lauren had disappeared around a corner. “Lauren!”
“What?”
“I found his bedroom. He’s got a trunk in here you might want to come see.”
She expected the other woman to sigh again, or groan, but she didn’t. Instead her footsteps sounded on the dirt floor and she appeared in the doorway a moment later.
Her face crinkled into a little moue of disgust. “I can feel that thing all the way over here.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t improve when you get closer. Come on.”
“I really think this is a waste of—”
“I know. But we’re here, right? So let’s just take a look any
way.”
The trunk’s lock was a flimsy tin affair; Chess picked it, although she thought one good yank would be enough to break it.
She also thought she must be higher and fuzzier than she felt, because until the lock clicked open it didn’t occur to her to wonder what exactly the trunk was doing there. Why had he left it behind?
Only one way to find out. She tugged up the heavy lid.
Power breathed out of it, power and the sick, rancid stench of death. Both women gasped. Chess’s tattoos heated; her skin crawled. Not just power, not just magic. Ghosts.
She spun around at the same time Lauren did, her hand already finding the zipper slide of her bag. She had graveyard dirt in there, she had—
Nothing. The room was empty.
What the fuck? Nothing else made her feel that way, it had to be … In the trunk.
Not a ghost, though. At the bottom of the trunk, alone and small in the center of the half-rotted boards, lay a thick bundle of what looked like burlap. Chess reached for it with her still-gloved hand, but Lauren was faster.
Her bare skin touched the burlap. Energy flashed through the room, roaring ravenous energy; Chess saw Lauren’s face change, her eyes grow wide, and then—Holy shit, what the hell?
It wasn’t just Lauren’s expression that changed. It was her entire face. Her features. Her hair. For a split second Chess saw another woman beside her, like a double exposure, before Lauren yelped, dropped the bundle from her shaking fingers, and scrambled away from the trunk.
“Are you okay? Your face changed, it—”
“I’m fine.” Lauren huddled against the far wall, her arms wrapped around her waist and her knees drawn up. “I’m fine.”
“You—” No. Unlike you, I actually want to solve this case still rankled, and she doubted Lauren would actually talk to her anyway. More to the point, Chess didn’t want her to.
Instead she grabbed another glove and carefully lifted the thing out of the trunk. Energy sped up her arms even through the latex covering her hands; her vision wavered for a second, curved around the edges like looking through a fisheye lens. Lauren gasped behind her.
“Chess, your face!”
“What?” Setting the bundle down felt good. Too bad it wouldn’t last; she had to untie the dirty string holding it together.
Or, not untie. She pulled her knife from her pocket and cut the thing.
“Your face—it changed, you looked like someone else.”
“So did you, for a second there.”
Lauren said something else, but Chess didn’t pay attention. The edges of the burlap fell open; her heart sank into her stomach when she saw exactly what she suspected she’d see.
Another toad fetish. But this time she knew what it was for; seeing Lauren’s face change, feeling that awful tingling that meant ghost, was more than enough to tell her, bizarre as it was, hard as it was to believe.
Bound with ghosts, powered by whatever the hell was stuffed inside it and whatever the hell Maguinness had slaughtered to create that thick miasmic energy making it hard to breathe, what she was looking at was a glamour so powerful she hadn’t even realized something like it could exist. A glamour that went beyond illusion and into transformation. This was what Maguinness’s daughter had tried to steal back from her, in the Market. Chess had had the parts laid out on Edsel’s counter; the child must have seen them, must have recognized them. That’s why she said she wasn’t stealing. That Lamaru fetish came from Maguinness.
Most glamours only changed the surface; she could see through them, as could any witch. Like the door that led from the Lamaru’s tunnels and into Maguinness’s place—she’d seen it, and Terrible had known something wasn’t right. But this … It didn’t simply hide things, it changed them. Holy shit. She’d never even heard of such a thing.
Her mind ticked through the possibilities, each one more awful than the next. Soul-powered spells even stronger than the one she’d encountered months before with the Dreamthief. Undetectable Hosts; wraiths inside living bodies, the witch’s soul so intimately bound with the ghost that they behaved as one, felt like one entity, and could leave the body at any moment to wander and fly and perform evil.
All right there in front of her. All terrifying. And all the work of a man who might at that moment be anywhere, doing anything, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Church provides these psychopomps not because only Church-trained psychopomps can take souls to the City, but because only Church-trained psychopomps are proven safe for ritual use. A wild psychopomp is still a wild animal.
—Psychopomps: The Key to Church Ritual and Mystery, by Elder Brisson
It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon before she managed to stumble into the Market with her mood even darker than her sunglasses. All that work. She’d been the one in danger with Maguinness—and still was—she’d been the one who’d wanted to check out his place, to check out his room. She’d been the one who’d found the fetish.
But Lauren had practically snatched it away from her, and she had not a doubt in her mind that Lauren planned to behave as though finding it had been all her doing.
After all, technically it wasn’t connected to Chess’s case, right? So Chess got to piddle around running Lauren’s errands, and Lauren got to look like the golden girl in front of the Elders—as if she needed more of a boost in their eyes.
Which wasn’t really fair. Chess wasn’t an Inquisitor, she was a Debunker, and as such all this jockeying-for-position shit wasn’t part of her job. She didn’t have to worry about promotions or quotas or whatever else the Squad members had to worry about. Debunkers got bonuses, and if she needed help solving a case it looked bad for her, but beyond that she didn’t worry much about Church politics or looking impressive. Which was probably a good thing.
But part of the reason she became a Debunker was so she wouldn’t have to take orders from somebody else. Wouldn’t even have to work with anybody else. So not being in charge on her own investigation, giving up her independence … felt like a fucking iron band around her throat.
Edsel smiled when she got closer to him. “Hey, baby. Guessing you got my message, aye?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
The black lenses of his sunglasses shifted to the left, then to the right. Nervous, then. An anticipatory shiver ran up her spine; not that she wanted Edsel to be scared or in danger, but if he had good information for her … Hell, if he had really good information, Bump would kick him some cash, and with his wife pregnant he could use every penny, she knew. She’d like to see him get it. Would have given him some herself if there was a way to do it that wouldn’t have offended him.
He jerked his head to the right, indicating she should slip behind the counter. Okay, change that “nervous” to “really nervous.” She’d never been back there before.
Not that it was all that different. Just everything on the counter looked upside down, and the power from the really valuable objects, the rare things Edsel kept out of public reach, skittered along her exposed skin and under her clothes, a cheery little high she hadn’t expected.
“Aye, run this down for you, baby. You ever hear the name Baldarel?”
“I—Yeah. Yeah, actually.” Baldarel was the author of the book on ghost magic she’d picked up in the Restricted Room two days before, the one she planned to look through when she went back there after talking to Edsel. “Why?”
“Got a friend got some friends, if you dig. Gave me the tell them Lamaru, they been talking to the dude. Getting him in some of them work. All letters they been sending, ain’t ever seen him for real. Figure maybe the Church got some knowledge where he at, maybe find they like that.”
Slim. But something. “Thanks, Edsel. That might come in handy.”
“Hear knowledge, too, they gots them an enemy. Whatany they got the gear-up for, they tryin to push causen someone after em. Somebody strong, if you dig. Them figuring they get them plan workin
, them win. What tell were gave me, anyroad.”
Hmm. Again, not much she didn’t know, although the idea that the Lamaru didn’t quite have their plan in place, or ready to go yet, reassured her a little. People who rushed things made mistakes. Maybe she could catch them in that mistake? Maybe they’d already made it, by involving Maguinness in whatever fashion they’d involved him—by buying his magic and not paying, probably, as Terrible had suggested.
Still, it was something, and at the moment she was pretty desperate. The Church could hide, pretending there wasn’t a problem, for a few weeks. Maybe even a month. But at some point they’d run into a problem. At some point the Lamaru would come forward.
She’d do anything to keep that from happening. And it looked like she’d probably have to.
Unfortunately, figuring out what to do wasn’t proving to be easy, and the slight confidence boost the conversation had given her faded as she forced herself to read every title on the lower left section of the Restricted Room shelves again. And again.
No question about it. The Baldarel book was gone. What the fuck? Books weren’t supposed to leave the Restricted Room. Not ever. They weren’t even supposed to be taken into the library proper.
But it was all based on the honor system. There were no security sensors in the books, no detectors hidden in the walls. Just Goody Glass hunched behind her desk, glaring at everyone and guarding the key like a gold-hoarding dwarf.
Goody Glass hated her. The feeling was mutual. Still … the book may or may not have contained information that would help her, but the fact was she couldn’t find out now. Not to mention what it could mean if someone had deliberately taken it to keep her from finding it.
So she pushed the door open and approached the desk. “Hey, Goody Glass. Did one of the Elders—”
“Good morrow, Cesaria.” Goody Glass stared pointedly at Chess’s knees until Chess finally caught on. Shit, she hated that woman.
But she gave her a quick curtsy anyway, wished her good morrow just as if she hadn’t already done it not half an hour before when she’d asked for access to the fucking room to begin with. “Did one of the Elders maybe take a book from the Restricted Room?”
