City of Ghosts

by Stacia Kane

  But she let him hold the flashlight while she used her baby wipes to dab away the little specks of grit and rubbed some antibiotic ointment on the wounds. The burn still didn’t look too bad, mostly just red, with a few insignificant blisters. Nothing that would scar, thankfully. She’d hit the pavement fast enough to put it out before it caused any real damage.

  But she was acutely aware of his eyes on her, watching her hands. Acutely aware that his breathing was still a bit louder than she was used to; and if she took exaggerated care in gliding her fingers up her thigh, in lifting the entire leg and pointing her toe while pretending to do nothing more than examine herself, she supposed she couldn’t be blamed for that, could she? All’s fair in love and war; and at that moment she figured one or both of those definitely applied.

  She took out a fresh package of gauze and folded it to make a pad big enough to cover the burn. Trouble was she couldn’t quite figure out how to hold it in place while taping it—Oh, okay. If she laid the tape sticky side up across her lap she could set the gauze over it.

  Would it have killed him to help her? Wasn’t it enough that he hated her, did he have to watch her struggle like that—

  His hands took the tape from hers. “Hold yon bandage there, aye?”

  Had she thought she wanted him to help her? She’d been wrong; it was much worse that way, with his nimble fingers skipping up her thigh, pressing into her. Too soon, it was too soon. Maybe later she would have been able to handle it, but as it was, when she could still feel him inside her, still feel those same fingers digging into her skin, sliding over her ribcage …

  She gritted her teeth and looked away. His touch was light, almost impersonal, but as the minutes ticked by she realized the tape was on, the bandage fixed in place. He was just stroking her under the pretense of adjusting the tape and smoothing it out, his palm gliding over the top of her thigh, his fingers coming to rest on the inside dangerously close to where she was starting to throb again.

  She jerked away, stood up. “Thanks. I think I’m—I think it’s fine now.”

  “Aye.” His head was down; his hair still stood up in tufty spikes.

  Slipping her jeans on felt like saying goodbye to the entire episode; fully dressed again, as if it had never happened. Only the awkwardness remained, lingering like indigestion.

  Speaking of which … Time for her pills. Well, technically it wasn’t—it had only been forty minutes or so—but she couldn’t have given less of a shit. She took four of them. What the hell. Wasn’t like they were going to be doing anything she needed to be alert for. She wasn’t sure they were going to be doing anything at all, in fact. Now that her eyes had fully adjusted to the meager light, she saw her initial impression had indeed been correct. The room was empty, totally and completely. Bare walls. Bare floor. Only the energy remained to tell anyone that something had occurred there; energy, the faint smell of herbs, and the beeping of the tracking device.

  “Right,” she said, shoving her feet back into her boots. “Um, I guess we should—”

  “Tunnel keep going on, aye?” He swung the flashlight to the side and she saw, just past her ruined underwear—she’d have to grab those and put them in her bag; the last thing she wanted to do was leave a clothing item that personal and therefore powerful in the hands of the Lamaru—an arched opening leading into a regular tunnel, with another battered steel door guarding it.

  It wasn’t lit the way Lex’s were, and she had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t share any other similarities either. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Guessin we oughta check it. Us bein down here anyroad, an yon machine still makin them beeps.”

  The words should have comforted her. At least he wasn’t running out of the room and speeding home to shower with lye and disinfectant or something. Or spitting at her, or even being particularly rude.

  But she knew him. Knew him far too well to think the absence of insults meant all was forgiven, or that he’d changed his mind about not wanting anything to do with her. The words encouraged, but the tone, so flat, as if he were talking to a stranger … that didn’t.

  He was there to do a job, and he was going to do it, and that was that. He could stroke her thigh all he wanted but it meant absolutely nothing.

  Her eyes stung as she shouldered her bag and scooped up her torn underwear, tucking it into a pocket. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  The door was locked, but she had her lube syringe and her set of picks, so it only took a few minutes to get it open. It felt like longer. Trying to concentrate with his body next to hers was like trying to save the best drugs for later; she could pretend it wasn’t there, but every cell in her body knew it was and would not allow her to forget.

  The tracker’s beeps sped up almost immediately after they stepped through the low doorway into the cool damp darkness. She pulled it from her bag, held it in front of her, watching the red light flash and cast eerie shadows on the crumbling walls. Her and Terrible’s outlines stark against the red, creeping along like gangly insects.

  The tracker’s beeps sped faster, turned into a continuous high-pitched wail; the sensor lay at her feet, half-buried in a pile of dirt. Damn. She picked it up, pressed the button on the tracker so silence fell just as loud and harsh in her ears as the beeps had been.

  His voice startled her. “What we on the look for, aye?”

  “Yeah. Shit.” She took the flashlight from him—their fingers touched and he jerked his away—and focused it on the little black chip in her hand. It didn’t look damaged; there was no sign that it had been attached to Vanhelm at all. Dirt clung to the sticky bit on the back. Was this from his shirt or his car? The tracker told her it was sensor three, but which one was which? “This doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “You expecting it to?”

  “Maybe.”

  He might have made a joke, or said something reassuring. Certainly he would have before. Now he just remained silent, dark eyes examining the tunnel around them as if she wasn’t even there.

  She sighed. “Okay, let’s keep going, huh? If they came this way maybe there’s a reason.”

  Twenty silent minutes later they hit a fork. By Chess’s reckoning—her sense of direction was usually pretty good—they’d been heading northeast, but she had no idea how far they’d actually gone.

  Time seemed to move differently there; she felt she’d been plodding along beside Terrible for hours. Or maybe it wasn’t the tunnels, maybe it was the ache getting stronger with every passing minute, the discomfort growing more intense. The desire to speak, the desire to—She didn’t know what. But it was possible they’d only managed to go a half mile or so. Of course it was also possible they’d more than doubled that.

  Her mood and the gloomy, scratchy silence weren’t the only problems. She’d been right to suspect these tunnels weren’t like the ones Lex and the rest of Slobag’s men used fairly regularly. Those weren’t just lit, they were well kept—as well kept as a tunnel could be, anyway—and clear.

  What they were attempting to traverse now was anything but. The walls crumbled on either side of them, thick dirt tumbling down into their path, scented of mold and age. Lichen and moss sprouted from cracks in the cement, stretched like alien fingers over their heads. Stones and chunks of cement littered the path; every step had to be carefully taken, every foot of forward movement hard-fought.

  Sweat had collected between her breasts and beaded on her forehead when they hit a fork and the tunnel opened into two. The air stank, like dead things and rotting things and things that only grow in the darkness. Things that would slither along the floor and up her legs, things that would crawl inside her and attack—

  She yelped; a rat. An actual scuttling thing, not whatever she was creating in her fevered, overstressed, and overactive imagination. She needed to calm the fuck down. Her pills should have kicked in; they had kicked in, she felt it, but they weren’t soothing her the way they should have.

  Weren’t soothing her, because the press
ure and discomfort and fear didn’t come from inside her. It came from the air around them. She stopped short, glanced at Terrible; his eyes were narrowed, like he was staring into a strong wind.

  “You feeling okay?” She didn’t really expect an answer.

  She didn’t get one. He shrugged.

  “The energy in here’s getting stronger,” she went on, keeping her voice low. “Like we’re getting closer to something.”

  “Which way you figure we take?”

  Neither route appealed; they were identical holes in the ground filled with emptiness. She closed her eyes.

  “The one on the right feels more powerful.”

  “So that the one we should—”

  “I don’t know. Their magic is so masked that it almost seems like it would be wrong to go that way, you know? Because maybe I shouldn’t be able to feel it.”

  She opened her eyes in time to see his gaze leap away from her face. What was—No. The thought of trying to analyze his movements or behavior, trying to read his mind and heart based on the way he stood or talked or grabbed her arm to help her across the rocks or whatever, just exhausted her. She couldn’t do it anymore.

  At least not just then. “I guess we should go to the right. Maybe they just aren’t bothering to clean up after themselves so much.”

  “Figure they use these?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Damn it. That fucking Binding was really starting to piss her off.

  “Guessin you ain’t can talk about that fire, aye?”

  Now it was her turn to shrug.

  He paused, took her elbow roughly to help her over a particularly large dirt slide. “What happen, you chase em there, you and that Churchcop?”

  She ducked her head; not a nod, but enough like one that he could see it.

  “So they catch you in there, blaze the place up?”

  She managed a small shake, a twist of her head to the side; she had to press her lips together, hard, to keep from answering.

  “They ain’t burned it out? Who done the job?” Then, at the pleading look in her eyes, “Be the potion guy, aye? That how you know he in it?”

  “But why would he be trying to kill them?” She spoke before she thought; luckily her wrists kept silent. Apparently speaking hypothetically was acceptable.

  “Maybe them buyin his magic shit. Or buy aught else, an ain’t paid, or using it against him.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know why they’d buy some useless potions, though.”

  “Maybe a front, an he hiding his real business. Maybe he just ain’t like em.”

  “Yeah, making friends isn’t really their strong suit, I guess.”

  He smiled; shit, he smiled, and it was the first one she’d seen from him in a month and it made her heart twist hard in her chest. “Aye, well, we catch on why he after em, could be we—Aw, shit.”

  His gaze had jumped to the left while they talked; she followed it now and saw the reason for his darkening expression.

  The tunnel ended ten feet or so away from where they stood, in a regular steel door like all the others. Dim light showed beneath it; the street entrance, she assumed. End of the line.

  But to the left of it stood another door, surrounded like an exit wound by jagged cement. Magic pulsed from it, from the weathered boards held together with bent nails and half-rotted leather straps; it throbbed faintly before her.

  Terrible’s eyes narrowed; his head tilted to the side.

  “Can you see it?” Lex wouldn’t have, she knew; she wasn’t sure if Terrible would, or if she hoped he could or couldn’t. He’d never had a lot of power; enough to feel uncomfortable in the presence of magic, or to sense a ghost before one appeared, but only a tickle. A fraction of what she felt, or what any other witch would feel.

  But all bets could be off at this point, and she’d done that when she’d carved that sigil into his chest, and guilt warred in her mind and heart with the absolute certainty that she would do it again in a second.

  “See something. Like a—Look like the wall moving there, dig? Like breathing.”

  That was something at least. He couldn’t see it entirely. “There’s a door there. They broke through the cement, I think. And it’s—it’s not a good door.”

  She stepped closer, wrapping her arms around herself. Something was scratched into the wood, a sigil? A … No, not a sigil. This was a drawing; skinny curved arms, a bloated potatoesque body …

  Her breath caught.

  “What? What you got?”

  “There’s a toad scratched into the door. And …” She straightened, checked the top of the rough boards. Swallowed. “A fetish. On top of the door. It’s a toad’s leg.”

  A toad’s leg, tied to a bone with black thread. Herbs poked out of the hole at the top of the leg, the joint where it was once connected to a body.

  “Like what them had on yesterday? That thing you take apart, aye?”

  “Yeah. This isn’t a whole toad, though, it’s just a leg.”

  “What’s the tale on it? Toads, meaning. They magic?”

  “They’re familiars.” She stepped back, pulling herself from the sucking darkness of the makeshift door. “They’re extremely powerful, magically. I mean, they’re illegal, they’re so strong. The Church breeds them—they’re really useful for a lot of things, or they can be, but yeah, they’re used for a lot of black magics. And they’re also …”

  Her voice cracked. She dug around in her bag for her water bottle, but it wasn’t dryness that made her throat tight.

  “Aye?”

  The water tasted like plastic, and like the murky air around them. She grimaced. “They’re used to create psychopomps.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  There are those who seek to hide from the Church, to keep unsavory secrets. They do not succeed. The Church and Truth see all.

  —The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 728

  “What action you want?”

  She didn’t mention what her first choice would be. “I guess we have to go through it.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets, considering. “Got any knowledge where we at?”

  “We’ve been headed northeast is all I know, really. I don’t know how far we’ve gone or anything.”

  “Guessin ten blocks or so, dig. Put us up Ninetieth, round there.”

  “Ninetieth and Foster,” she said.

  “Aye, maybe. You got some knowledge there?”

  “Ninetieth and Foster, that’s where Maguinness lives. It’s the address he gave when he visited Madame Lupita. Remember I mentioned in the car how he saw her before her execution?”

  Curt nod. Whether it was from her mentioning the scene in the car or something else, she didn’t know, and she wasn’t really eager to find out either.

  “Anyway. So maybe this is his place, maybe he …” No, that wasn’t right, though, was it? Well, she guessed it was as good a theory as any, but it still didn’t feel right. That sensor in the tunnel, almost like she was being led here. If he was at war with the Lamaru, and they knew she was tracking them … She wouldn’t put it past those evil fucks to send her into a trap.

  He leaned back against the opposite wall of the tunnel, unobtrusively taking another step back from the hellish door. “So iffen he got a fight up with em, and he livin here, he behind all this toad shit, aye? Them yesterday who killed Ratchet an they. Maybe them toads what he selling em.”

  She hesitated, waiting for pain to streak up her arms. When it didn’t, she nodded.

  “They need to kill to make them psychopomps? That what they getting on?”

  She hadn’t really thought of that, that the killing might itself be part of making whatever psychopomps they were making. If the spell was a destruction spell—which it was—she supposed that was possible. “Psychopomps don’t usually require death to make, but theirs aren’t—ow!—normal. And it’s … it’s a capital crime to kill a wild one, you know. An executable offense.”

  One she’d comm
itted. For him. She let that memory ride behind her eyes for a minute, hoping he’d know and see, but she had no idea if he did. And she sure as fuck wasn’t going to just come out and say it, not now. Not when she knew he’d see it as her trying to force herself on him.

  Again.

  If he did know what she was alluding to, he ignored it. Just what she’d expected. “So we go in here, could get all solved.”

  “Yeah.”

  The answers could be behind that door, sure. The solution to the mystery, the end of—the end of working with Terrible again. For good.

  Fuck, she was so sick of herself—herself and her fucking emotional retardation. How did people do this shit all the time, this wanting people, caring about them? How did they stand it, how did they ever get anything done?

  She was sick of being lost.

  “Yeah, come on. We’re here, we might as well.”

  “Ain’t—I gonna be able to—”

  “Yeah. It’s just a glamour. I’ll have to help you through it, though. It’s kind of short. Okay?”

  She didn’t miss the suspicious cut of his glance, but ignored it. “Aye.”

  “Okay. Hold on a minute.”

  The door didn’t appear to be locked; it was held shut not by a normal bolt or knob but by a metal hook in a loop. A makeshift jamb had been fashioned from a couple of two-by-fours wedged into the dirt just behind the cement hole.

  But looking easy to open wasn’t the same as being easy to open, and nothing that felt like that door did should be touched without first investigating.

  She raised her hand, held it with her palm facing the door. Her tattoos tingled a little, a mild buzzing like touching her tongue to the end of a battery.

  The first ward registered as a blip, an empty space near the topmost leather hinge. Okay. Probably something pretty basic; a decent push of power would likely be enough to unlock that.

  But that very simplicity bothered her. Nobody who created the kind of energy she felt vibrating off that door would be unable to produce a few good wards or hexes. It felt like a trick to her. Like bait, like the crying child on the sidewalk who enticed passersby into stopping so their parent or master or owner—in Downside you never knew for sure—could clock the innocent, stupid victim over the head and steal their wallet.