by Stacia Kane
The birds turned. For the first time since she’d passed them, Chess allowed herself to look at the fighting men.
They were barely visible. Black smoke filled the air around her, the physical manifestation of the dark wards. She’d been so caught up with the birds she’d barely paid attention, but when she stopped she still felt it, whispering around her, trying to sap her strength.
Terrible’s head moved above the crowd; he still stood, still fought. She caught a glimpse of Lex’s spikes, of Oliver’s pale, exhausted face, of a few others she recognized.
But everywhere were bodies, and everywhere were ghosts.
The birds swooped as one. Oliver’s head turned in time to see them, in time to see the hole opening behind him. His lips formed words she could not hear, his arms rising and lowering, pushing the living away from the open gateway.
Ghosts flailed and fought to no avail. The birds did their job, their wingspans seeming to grow as they dove, as they clutched the lost souls in sharp talons and dragged them from the world of the living.
Chess felt each flexing of claws, each lifting of wings, as if her body had suddenly sprouted those parts. Her body was moving, imitating, carried away by the strength of the magic coursing through her.
It seemed to happen so slowly, to take so much time, but as the hole closed on itself she realized it had taken just seconds.
And not all of the birds had gone. Half of them still circled the building, waiting for her next command.
Too bad she didn’t know what that could be—but she figured there was only one way to find out.
Oliver appeared from the swirling black fog, followed by Lex and, a moment later, Terrible.
“Should we go in with you?”
Chess nodded. She didn’t want to speak. Wasn’t actually sure if speaking would break her connection with the birds, and didn’t want to find out.
They left a few of their men still fighting the last stragglers, walked across the narrow, cracked stoop, and opened the weatherbeaten front door.
Chapter Thirty
What is right is Moral, because the Church decrees it so. What is Immoral is Abomination.
—The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 336
Dust filled her nose at the same time the sex energy, so much stronger inside than out, hit her body. The result was a sort of shuddery, gasping sneeze, and she struggled to regain control. The men looked around uneasily, or at least Oliver and Terrible did. True to form, Lex appeared unconcerned.
They stood in what had once been a lovely entry hall. A lone candle burned in an iron sconce at the far end, casting flickering light across the grimy floor. Wallpaper hung in tatters from the water-stained walls; piles of shreds and chunks of plaster lined the baseboards.
Music filtered into the room, too faint for her to pick up the tune. Violins, she thought. Something orchestral. She couldn’t tell where it came from. She didn’t hear anything else. Every nerve in her body twanged and shuddered, waiting for Kemp, for Vanita, for the ghosts. For whatever existed in this house.
To their left, an empty room with broken floorboards revealing gaping blackness below. A shrouded chair, a broken mirror so old and filthy it looked more like a blank gray eye staring at them.
Without speaking they headed toward the end of the hall, toward that single flame. The door flapped on its hinges behind them.
And all the while Chess felt the birds overhead waiting for their passengers. Felt their indifference. They didn’t care who lived or died, they only waited to clean up after it was over.
A staircase curved up on their right, its banisters catching the candlelight and shining it back. The wood felt solid enough, but the stairs creaked.
Not that it mattered. The ghosts knew they were here. She was certain Vanita and Kemp knew, too. It was a trap, but it was a trap they couldn’t refuse to walk into, not unless they wanted more people to die. She couldn’t let that happen. None of them could.
Of course, it was easy to be so definite when she hadn’t yet seen what awaited her at the top of the stairs. When she did, it was all she could do to keep her feet under her.
The men gasped, but whether from the blast of sexual power or the sight before them Chess didn’t know, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.
For some reason she’d thought the ghosts would be upright. Instead, iron frames were fixed around the edges of the single beds, flush with the mattresses. From the top and bottom of each frame, cuffs extended, threaded with wires, circling the wrists and ankles of the ghost on each bed. Electric current running through the wires gave them solid form; their skin was silvery white, eerily pale as they writhed on the beds. They appeared sculpted from moonlight.
Ten of them, or a dozen; she wasn’t capable of counting at that moment.
Chess didn’t recognize them. Was glad she didn’t recognize them, didn’t connect them with the living women they had once been or the empty bodies she’d seen on the cold streets. It wasn’t the triumphant greed on their faces. It wasn’t the way their skin glowed as they sucked the life force from the magic-trapped men above them.
It was the eyes. Naked, bloody eyes, slightly shriveled and blackened now but still recognizable. They’d been placed in the women’s sockets, a sick joke in the unreal perfection of their faces.
Chess’s mouth went dry; she could do nothing but stare for one long, sickening moment at the unearthly horror before her.
The ghost on the nearest bed was terrible, and beautiful, and desire built in Chess to go to her, touch her, experience for herself what that perfection felt like. Someone moved behind her, then stopped; perhaps impervious Lex had caught whoever it was.
Perhaps whoever it was had simply seen the man above the ghost, his flesh seeming to melt away, his eyes hollow and dead in his agonized face. Or maybe they’d seen the viscous stain on the mattress as overused body parts exploded again and again, as they chafed and went raw and finally bled. Every bed, every ghost, was smeared with blood and semen, with tears and saliva. The mattresses stank, the floors were thick with a glistening, congealing stew of human fluids.
Still the men’s hips kept moving, still their hands roamed over the bodies beneath them. Transfixed. Trapped. Caught in an ever-tightening finger trap they could not escape from no matter how hard they tried. Bile rose in Chess’s throat, sharp and sour; she forced it back down, forced herself to focus on ending the horror instead of absorbing it further into a soul that had already seen far too much of it.
Should the psychopomps come in first, or should they try and get the men away and then bring them in? Of course, she didn’t know if she could get the men away, nor was she certain the birds wouldn’t simply shuck the men free of their bodies like ears of corn and carry them into the City as well.
Or even if there would be enough left of them to live if she did free them. The man before her was barely more than skin and bone, his lips shriveled back from his teeth, his skin shining through the thin downy hair on top of his head.
They should probably try to free him just the same. If they freed all the men, she could simply call the birds in. The iron cuffs and electric current wouldn’t pose a problem for—
The crash slammed her knees to the filthy carpet. Before she knew what had happened she was leaping back to her feet and flinging herself forward purely on instinct. Her skin burned and itched, her tattoos were hot to the point of pain. She wanted to scream but was too scared.
She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know what happened next, but she did know without a doubt that whatever black magic guarded this place had been tripped.
Thick, grimy glass filled the window in front of her. Through it she barely made out the shadows of the birds outside in their endless circles. Still under her control. Waiting.
For now, anyway. Shit, she had no idea what to do. No idea, and it was getting hard to breathe. Hard to think. Her legs shook beneath her, her vision blurred. The spell, the protection, was feeding on her.
&nb
sp; Feeding on all of them. Through the doorway of the bedroom she saw Lex and Terrible’s men, still standing in the hall, bracing themselves on the rickety banister, on one another. If she didn’t get her shit together, they would all die.
“Oliver!” Where was he? Was that dust in the air, making it thick and dark?
No. The screaming pain of her tattoos, the creeping terror up her spine, told her that. Ghosts. More of them, who knew how many, called into being by the curse or Kemp or simply because they sensed death and fear in this place and wanted to join the party.
Before she could think about it, before she could second-guess herself, she smashed the window.
Glass drove itself into her arm, into her hand and shoulder. A scream tore from her, as if her flesh itself was screaming.
Birds poured in through the window. Over the pain she felt them feeding on her blood, connecting her to them more strongly. Felt their greed, their coldness. Felt, with a sinking horror, the malevolent spell fight them.
Kemp and Vanita had turned the house into a spirit home, a guardian. The psychopomps could not do their job; magic blocked them, forced them into impotence. They buzzed angrily around the room, wings beating the air, their rage apparent. Their rebellion apparent; she would lose them in a few minutes. Already she felt them slipping away, straining to break her control despite their pleasure in her sacrifice.
And they were feeding. Even if the house wasn’t already sucking her energy away, the birds were. It was getting harder to hold them, harder to see, harder to move. She needed help. Needed someone who could share some power. Oliver. He had power and he would know how to help, right?
She had no idea what was happening in the hall, if the men were still there, if they had succumbed to the house’s thrall. Feathery wings battered her face, her bloody arm, her legs, as she fought her way through the flock and back to the hall, her nostrils dry and caked with dust.
Hands grabbed her, spun her around. She screamed. Her fist connected with solid bone. Oliver, holding his nose, glared at her. Only the whites of his eyes were clearly visible.
No time to apologize. “The house is protecting them!” she shouted. “It’s a spirit house, we have to break it.”
He nodded. Blackmailer or no, she really owed him something after this.
His hot, sticky hand grabbed hers, forming a skin connection. Through it she felt his power slip into her body and meld with hers. The darkness before her eyes cleared. Her muscles responded.
Together they moved forward. The heart of the house, the seat of the spell. That’s what she needed to find. Vaguely she knew Terrible’s and Lex’s men were following them, felt Lex at her side with his knife ready.
A shape appeared before them, forming itself from the air. Vanita. Her pale skin glowed in the darkness, too perfect for life. Her figure in its black dress disappeared in the black fog. She was all around them, filling them. Impossible to escape, no chance, just give up …
Pain exploded in her torn arm. Her head snapped up to see Oliver’s face inches from hers. Had he punched her? Fucker.
He was right, though. This was not the time to give up. Blood dripped down the fingers of her free right hand as she reached into her bag, found the herbs and dirt she still carried. This wouldn’t be enough, and she knew it; somehow Vanita was connected to the house as well, and she would not be sent to the City until the house’s spell was broken.
But if Chess could freeze her, slow her down, steal some of her power, they had a chance.
“Arcranda beliam dishager!” Chess flung the graveyard dirt at that smug, glowing face, followed it with ajenjible and powdered crow’s bone, and grabbed her Ectoplasmarker from her pocket. Ready.
Vanita did not disappear, but she faltered. It was enough. Behind her Chess saw what she needed. A doorway, one from which darkness radiated, one that made her legs weak. That was where they needed to be, she knew it.
She dared to look away long enough to find Terrible, little more than a hulking shape in the shadows. “The door,” she told him. “Break the door.”
He nodded.
She flung herself forward, into Vanita. Icy cold ripped her breath from her lungs; evil stole her sight. She faltered, blind, rummaging around inside a ghost, certain at any moment she would fall. She would be lost, lost forever, lost in the endless darkness …
I am already lost. The words shouldn’t have given her strength, but they did. There was nothing this bitch could do to her that hadn’t already been done, nowhere lower she could go. She turned the thought into a mantra, let those negative words and images she tried so hard to forget flow free through her mind, and found her skin warming again and the darkness falling away and she saw Terrible battering at the door, throwing his huge body against it again and again. The frame buckled; the walls groaned. Her skin, her tattoos, vibrated as the spell weakened.
Vanita watched, too, and in that moment when she was distracted Chess took her chance. Vanita’s body was translucent, but her hands were solid; Chess used her Ectoplasmarker to scribble the passport she’d designed earlier to direct her psychopomp onto that spectral hand, completing it just as Vanita noticed and yanked herself away with a wail.
Too late.
Terrible crashed through the door. Foulness poured through the open frame, thick greenish-black, choking.
Her knife seemed to jump into her palm. She pulled energy from Oliver, from the air, from the well of blazing anger in her soul, and entered the room.
The house roared; she felt it shake through her entire body. She ignored it. Ignored, too, the fight taking place behind her, around her, as Vanita struggled to stop her. Ignored her terror that Kemp would show up any second and kill her. Oliver moved, his hand still in hers, but his voice just a rumble in the general din. She didn’t have much time.
Runes decorated the floor, wall to wall. Terrible had already come in contact with some of them; she felt them burn through the soles of her shoes.
“Baredia lachranta. Baredia lachranta emplorascum. By my power I command it.” The wound in her left palm still bled; she gritted her teeth and deepened it, increasing the flow. Her blood sizzled and spat when it touched the boards at her feet.
“Baredia lachranta resticatum.”
The floor shook. It was working. Working, but not fast enough. Her knees hit the rune-covered wood, now wet with her blood. She dug the point of her knife in, started carving over the runes and symbols as she spoke their names aloud: “Ashtaroth, septikosh, higam, spadirost.”
Vanita screamed. Chess’s blood kept spreading over the floor, sinking into the gouges she made. It wasn’t enough, she didn’t have enough. Oliver’s face was pale beside her, his hand shaking in hers. He was almost empty, it was hard for her to breathe, she needed more power—
She still had the birds. They’d be furious, but she had them, and she was going to use them. Wild feathers filled her mind, her body. She shook with them, unsure for a minute if she was still human, but their energy coursed through her, and she saw something—something squirming in the corner of the room.
A cat. A dead cat, swarming with maggots. The spell’s sacrifice, its rotted flesh feeding the magic, hidden by a visual glamour until she’d weakened the spell enough to fade it out. Rational Chess was disgusted; the rest of her simply saw it, knew what needed to be done.
She lunged forward, lifted her knife, and drove it into the corpse, shrieking with fury and power and fear. With a tremendous echoing groan—Chess felt it all the way to her toes—the spell broke.
The birds screamed, swooping through the air with new purpose. From the rooms came the shouts of the zombie men, angry their prizes had been stolen from them, or relieved to be free, or both—she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. All she knew was she had a job to do.
She yanked her own psychopomp from her bag, set the skull on the ground, and took up a handful of the dirt from Vanita’s grave. “I call on the guardians of the City of the Dead. I call on the escorts. Aid me; collec
t this soul from where it does not belong.”
There was too much magic in the air already; the psychopomp formed from the skull in an instant, roaring and leaping from the floor. Chess jumped back, turned around to see Vanita trying to run away. She threw the dirt.
“Vanita Tailor, I command you to return to your place of silence. By my blood I command it, by my power I command it. I call on the escorts of the City of the Dead to take you there, and it shall be done!”
Vanita tried to run but couldn’t. The dirt trapped her, held her, until the great black dog leapt up and caught her dress in its teeth.
Through the fog and the smoke Chess watched Vanita shrink, watched her being dragged through the hole. It closed around her, around them, the skull rattling back to the floor, the magic releasing in a breath-sucking rush.
For a minute they all stood staring at one another in the waiting silence.
Then they ran.
They flung themselves down the stairs, the wood splintering beneath them as the building’s magic died. Oliver’s hand still rested in hers; she felt how weak he was, how much he’d given her, and had time to feel thankful and a little sorry before the ceiling collapsed behind them.
They spun around the corner and ran faster, the door in sight. Freedom beckoned, freedom and air and even the dim moonlight again, the normal world. Her lungs ached, her entire body hurt, but she ran for that door as hard and fast as she could, dragging Oliver with her, dragging them all with her.
Out the door and onto the pavement, turning in time to see the house fall. It collapsed all at once, like an object dropped from a great height. One minute it was there and the next it was nothing but a pile of rubble, housing the fading, pitiful shouts of the ghosts’ victims. Beside it, birds carried their souls into the still-open hole, dim, flickering light catching their bodies.
Chess took a breath. The stench of sour water and garbage had never smelled so good, so fresh. She couldn’t get enough. One more breath and she would free the birds, then they could leave.
