City of Ghosts

by Stacia Kane

  That wasn’t a conversation to look forward to, not at all. No, she wasn’t seeing him anymore—well, what they’d been doing together wasn’t really “seeing,” not unless the sentence finished with “each other naked. A lot.”

  The problem was, he didn’t know that.

  Sure, he probably had some idea. Seeing her go hysterical—which was a bit of an understatement, really—when Terrible almost died, and commit a capital offense to save him, probably gave Lex some indication that their days together were numbered. Luckily he’d missed most of the horrible scene in the graveyard; well, luckily for her, anyway, as it spared her some embarrassment. Not so luckily for Lex, who’d been out cold on the frozen ground with a broken jaw after Terrible caught them together and expressed his feelings on the subject.

  Anyway. She wasn’t going to be able to put it off much longer. Thanks to the wired-shut jaw, he hadn’t hit on her much while she was still in the hospital, but now she was out … he’d be expecting to see her, and he’d be expecting to see her the way he usually did, which was in his bed. After he’d given her drugs.

  Technically the drugs and the bed didn’t have anything to do with each other. The drugs were payment for the destruction of Chester Airport; it had been haunted, and Bump had wanted her to banish the ghosts so he could run drugs into it. She hadn’t been able to, and the airport was no more, and that was good for Lex.

  The bed … that was just a bit of fun. Had been a bit of fun, until she’d realized two things: One, that accepting free drugs from someone with whom she was sleeping felt and looked way too much like whoring for drugs; and two … Two was standing at her side with the air of a man who’d prefer inserting knives into his own throat to being anywhere near her.

  The sudden cut-off of the music drew her back to the ramshackle stage before her, silence hovering for a second over the crowd before they started murmuring.

  A man walked onto the stage.

  At least she thought it was a man. He was tall, even taller than Terrible, she thought, but that could have been just the stage adding height.

  Any resemblance to Terrible stopped there, though. Where Terrible was broad and packed with muscle, this man was a rake, his striped waistcoat and drainpipe trousers hanging off his bones. The sleeves of his dingy, inexpertly mended white shirt ended a couple of inches above his knobby wrists; the ragged hems of his trousers exposed ashy-pale ankles over mismatched shoes. And black hair, torrents of it, sprouted from his head and fell in a tangled curtain down his back, over his face, meeting up with a scraggly beard that reached his stomach.

  “Good morrow, kind ladies and sirs!” His heavily accented voice rang deep and clear over the waiting crowd. “May the Truth keep you all safe in its arms! For today you are about to see Truth the likes of which you have never seen before!”

  Another figure walked onto the stage; this one tiny, in a flowered all-in-one suit with feet. Not a child, though. A little person like Goody Vanderpeet, one of the kitchen Goodys.

  But nothing at all like Goody Vanderpeet, aside from stature. This person had bright purple hair, standing straight up in a stiff, elaborate curlicue unaffected by the wind. His face was painted green, as were the palms of his hands.

  “My assistant LeRue will open the case, and I will show you wonders the likes of which you have never seen. I come in Truth, good people, and in Truth you shall discover today the miracles of my potions, for I am Arthur Maguinness and my name is known far and wide!”

  Chess rolled her eyes and glanced around the crowd. Most of them wore the same yeah-right expression as herself, but not all; she caught a few open mouths and wide eyes.

  With a flourish LeRue opened a green-and-purple-striped trunk squatting on the far end of the stage. The lid stood almost as tall as he did; that was one big-ass trunk. As the lid rose, shelves did as well, covered with oddly shaped bottles and flagons. The potent potions, she assumed.

  “One touch, one taste, of my potions will change your life, and I guarantee it! In those bottles lives the result of centuries of knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, by the finest masters in history! Men to whom even the Church bowed, begging for the information they possessed!”

  Chess jerked at that, a little. Bullshit. Standard bullshit, yes, but still irritating. Legitimate businesses weren’t allowed to make such claims, but Maguinness up there looked so far removed from the word “legitimate” she was amazed his name shared a few of the same letters.

  Unaware that he was being given the narrow-eye by a Churchwitch, Maguinness bent his long frame like a folding ruler and held up one of the bottles, a fancy cut-glass item of the type usually found on the sideboards of social climbers. This one was dusty and smudged; the liquid inside was a noxious shade of orange.

  Her arms itched. She scratched them absently while Maguinness began describing, in florid detail, the benefits of that particular concoction, but it didn’t seem to help. The itch remained just below the surface of her skin.

  That wasn’t right. She’d dosed up just before she left the house, so she wasn’t withdrawing. Something was wrong. It was magic, yes, and given that there were potions not far away that undoubtedly had magical ingredients, it wasn’t so strange for her to feel it. But this didn’t feel … normal. Like the magic she used, or was used to.

  Instinctively she looked at Terrible fidgeting beside her, with his arms folded and his weight shifted away from her. That wasn’t right, either. Well, leaning away from her was, at least these days. But the way his fingers twiddled with the fabric of his sleeve, the way he kept swallowing … not right at all.

  “Terrible,” she whispered, leaning closer. “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t hear her. Or maybe he was just ignoring her. She tried again, reaching out to touch his arm. “Terrible, are—”

  He jerked away with a violence that made her heart stop and glared at her before turning and starting to push through the crowd. “Right. ’Sgo.”

  She’d thought a few times in the past—more than a few times, really—that he had some magic skill of his own. Not enough to work for the Church; only slightly more than the average person. But more nonetheless. Had he felt it too, the odd tingle given off by Maguinness?

  Nobody else seemed to, or if they did they were hiding it well.

  So it was affecting her, and it was affecting him … The thought finished itself before she could stop it.

  Had she done something to him, when she’d carved that sigil into his chest?

  The sigil itself was illegal. It had been used in the early days of the Church as protection for their employees in case of ghost attacks, Binding their souls to their bodies until medical help could arrive. A student had modified it with horrifying results, though, turned the person he marked with it into a wide-open receptacle for spirit possession.

  She hadn’t used the modified version. It should have been safe.

  But then, she should have grown up being well taken care of by loving foster families, and that sure as hell hadn’t been the case. Not unless you considered “well taken care of” to mean “fucked and beaten” and “loving foster families” to mean “child-raping, drug-running, money-grubbing pieces of shit.”

  So much for “should have.”

  Once inside the car he thrust the file into her hands and shot the car off the curb in a maelstrom of squealing rubber. She looked at him sharply, her back tensing in anticipation of an argument.

  She’d fucked him over hardcore. She’d betrayed him and she’d lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she’d led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she’d hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he’d felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he’d eventually decide she’d been punished enough and they could maybe mov
e on.

  But at that moment they were on their way to interview the man—Ratchet—who’d found the body parts in the vacant lot. She needed to have her wits about her, not to be waiting for the next verbal barb or dirty look. He could slash at her with knife-sharp words later; maybe if he did it enough her blood would finally flow clean.

  Somehow she doubted it ever would.

  But he didn’t speak at all. He’d flipped on his sunglasses so she couldn’t see his eyes, but the set of his heavy jaw and lowering brow, the tension in his arms and the way his lips pressed together …

  “Are you okay? I mean,” she added quickly, “do you feel okay. That guy back there, I don’t know about you, but he made me feel kind of twitchy. He had some power and I felt it. So I just wondered if maybe you did, too.”

  “Ain’t no witch.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you look like—He was creepy and I just wondered if you’d felt it, too, is all.”

  When he didn’t respond, she tried again. “That sigil in your chest, have you been feeling—”

  “I’m right.”

  “I’d really want to help—”

  “Said I’m right, dig?”

  She bit her lip and turned to the file. Thanks to his sneaky thief act the night before she hadn’t even had a chance to look through it, only to skim it before trotting outside like a good little doggie to wait for Lauren.

  And she hadn’t missed much. At least she hoped she hadn’t; but no, they wouldn’t have stolen anything. Copied it, sure, she had no doubt. But not stolen.

  Sun glinted off the heavy chain around Terrible’s right wrist and stung her eyes, and for once she had her sunglasses. She was digging around for them when he pulled the car up in front of an empty-eyed building with dead weeds poking out of the ground floor windows, its walls dark with remembered flames. A squat.

  She grabbed her notebook and pen, secured the edges of the file with a rubber band, and stuffed it into the depths of her bag.

  He didn’t ask if she was okay, but opened his trunk while she climbed out of the car and stood on the patch of crumbled cement that had once been a small parking lot. Ahead of her, dried blood crusted the street; she could still see the tire tracks he’d left when he’d peeled away the night before.

  The pig carcasses were gone, of course. And now that she thought about it—Yes, the air carried the faint fragrance of roasting pork. She couldn’t imagine the glee that little bit of magic must have left in the hearts and stomachs of the neighborhood, most of whom had probably never seen that much meat in their lives. Didn’t want to imagine if any of those lives had been lost in the battle over who got to eat it, either. None of her concern.

  She tried to shrug off the heavy stares she knew the two of them were getting, and headed for the empty doorway when she heard the trunk slam shut.

  The entire bottom floor was choked with weeds as high as her chest, long spiky stalks of ivory-colored grass gone to seed, spindly bushes. A thin trail had been worn through them into a darker space in the corner. The stairs. Terrible slid in front of her without touching her and pushed his way along the path; the dead plants tried in vain to grab his arms as he passed.

  Soft sounds drifted down the stairs when they hit the bottom. Chess paused, took a deep breath. Something rang in the building, so faint it was more of an implication than an actual fact, but there nonetheless. Magic. The slow, deep slither of magic, inching up her legs and along her arms, curling into her stomach.

  Not just average magic, either. Almost everyone did some; there was an entire successful industry in spellbooks and items designed for the average person who had little or no skill or natural ability. Most of them didn’t really work. They relied more on the practitioner’s belief that it would be effective than any actual results.

  She was familiar enough with how those spells and charms felt. She’d encountered enough of them in the homes of her subjects: dream safes designed to ward away nightmares, charm bags for wealth or safety, or occasionally sex spells planted in bedrooms. Those tended to be the most effective—and thus the most irritating for Chess, who did not like sex magic—simply because sex was the most accessible type of energy for most people. Any idiot could get turned on.

  But this didn’t have the blunt edge of amateur magic, not at all. Too subtle; too well hidden.

  She didn’t realize she was staring at the landing above them until Terrible’s low voice broke her reverie. “Any wrong?”

  “Feels like magic in here,” she said, echoing his quiet tone.

  “Some do, aye? Them with them luck spells or aught.”

  “Not like this, though. Spells like that—spells done by people who really aren’t talented—they don’t feel … finished, if you know what I mean. They’re not well formed, they’re just like little blobs of weak energy. This isn’t—” She stopped, suddenly aware that they were having a conversation. A normal conversation.

  One that wouldn’t last if she even considered pointing that out. Oops. “This isn’t like that. Whoever’s been casting in here knows what they’re doing. And they’ve tried to hide it. The magic, I mean. They’re trying to hide what they’re doing.”

  “All Bump’s here, dig. Them to keep the eye out. Ain’t should be doin up that shit here.”

  “All of them? They’re all Bump’s people?”

  He shrugged. “What they ought, aye.”

  “I guess we should go see, huh?”

  Another small shrug, like he couldn’t really be bothered to complete the movement, and he preceded her up the cement staircase. The floor had once been covered in linoleum; curled edges of it remained like bookends where the stairs joined the walls.

  The smell hit her nose at the same moment her feet hit the landing. Terrible stopped short; she would have run right into him if she hadn’t done the same. He turned to her, and in that moment she wasn’t thinking about what she’d done or what he’d done or what she wished they could do. She was thinking about the scent of death and how it raised the hairs on her arms, and she was thinking things had just gotten a fuck of a lot worse. For everyone.

  Chapter Nine

  Remember the power inherent in blood. I recommend burning anything it touches. This may seem like an extreme measure, but better safe than sorry!

  —Mrs. Increase’s Advice for Ladies, by Mrs. Increase

  They both ran. Up the stairs, through the open doorway to the left of the empty landing, where Chess’s stomach gave a great heave and barely managed to hold its contents.

  It wasn’t a murder. Wasn’t a multiple murder. It was a slaughter; there was no other word for it, no other way it could be described.

  Blood covered everything so thickly and thoroughly she thought for a moment she was seeing through a lens. Only the dirty plaster peeking through the spatter on the upper walls convinced her it was blood and not red paint coating them, still dripping slowly down. The scrap of threadbare carpet on the floor was soaked with it; the heaped garbage bags in a corner were slick with it; a couple of ragged blankets slumped sodden against the wall.

  It took her a second to find the bodies in that sea of blood, but they were there. At least … the parts were. They were scattered across the floor as if some careless child had been playing with them and grew tired of the amusement; a leg here, an arm there, a torso, a head …

  Her stomach lurched again. Desperately she swallowed, hard, forcing down the saliva that suddenly filled her mouth. Too much, this was too much, everywhere she looked she saw an empty staring eye or a horrible sharp piece of white bone protruding from shriveling flesh—

  Terrible’s hand, hard and warm on the back of her neck, wrestled her out onto the landing. An open window there, a blank hole in the smoke-colored wall; he thrust her head through it, forced her into the cool fresh air. She filled her lungs, heard them like bellows in her chest. Blinked furiously, trying to clear her vision of the spots obscuring it.

  Slowly she came back to herself. At least enough to realize
they weren’t alone on the landing. Muffled sounds, like someone speaking in another room, floated through the stillness and became audible as her breathing slowed.

  She spun around. No one there. But Terrible had evidently heard it too; his cautious gaze scanned every inch of the landing while she checked the ceiling. He barely looked better than she felt, and she wondered if he’d hustled her to the window purely for her benefit or because it provided him with a good excuse to get some air himself.

  To the right of the stairs, across from the blood-filled deathchamber, another entrance loomed. There, sheets of newspaper covered the windows and blocked the light, rattled ominously in the breeze.

  Still the voice. Wordless. Muffled. She realized what it was and jumped forward, only to be caught by his hard arm across her chest. He shook his head. So he realized it too, then. Knew what was in that room. Knew they’d found either a survivor or a murderer.

  She watched him poke his head cautiously into the gloom and look both ways. He motioned her forward with a quick twitch of his fingers.

  No blood in that room. Graffiti covered the walls instead; fuzzy shapes dotted the floor.

  One of them moved.

  Chess jerked back. Kind of a stupid thing to do, really; she could see what it was—who it was—even as her feet moved without her. But the tension in the air crawled all over her body, the memory of that blood-filled room refused to leave her head, and she could still feel the weight of Terrible’s hand on the back of her neck.

  “Right, now, little one.” Terrible held his left hand up by his shoulder, palm facing the huddled figure on the floor. His right sneaked behind his back; Chess watched it wrap around the handle of his knife. Just in case. “Ain’t nobody hurt you, aye? Whyn’t you get on up, we—”

  The person—the woman—raised her eyes. Chess looked into them and saw what Terrible couldn’t possibly see: the dark glee of black magic. Felt its aura slam into her like a freight train, felt her skin grow hot and her brain expand in her head.