by Stacia Kane
“It don’t feel like magic?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it. “It—I guess so. I mean, I felt something. I felt sick, just like I did earlier.”
He took the bottle from her hand and drank from it himself before handing it back. “With you waitress there? Both times she came near you, aye?”
“With—what?” As soon as the words left her mouth, though, she knew what he meant. “No. No, it wasn’t both times, you’re right. When she took my drink order I didn’t feel it. I felt it when she came back with the drinks, and that’s when she looked really hot, too. She was fine before.”
“So whatany happening, happening fuckin fast. Be why Harmony ain’t seemed to have trouble long afore she burning. Thinkin maybe be a spell needing some shit to get started up? Maybe got a timer on it, if you dig, some delay?”
“Like a bomb?” It felt weird to smile, but she let it happen anyway. Not because what he said was funny; it wasn’t. But because she was looking at him, at his rough, craggy features washed with bluish light from Chuck’s, at the black bowling shirt with wide red stripes on either side of the buttons. She smiled, too, because it was so familiar: Discussing a case with Terrible, hearing what he had to say, feeling his gaze on her as he waited for her reactions to his thoughts. His always-valuable thoughts. She would never stop being amazed at how lucky she was.
It really wasn’t the time, though, so she killed the smile once she saw that he’d seen it, that he understood it. “I don’t know. It’s possible, but that’s really complicated magic. Really difficult, and it requires a lot of power, not just for the death but to set it as a trap. This doesn’t feel powerful enough. It doesn’t feel like a death charged it.”
That was it, wasn’t it? Death magic felt like, well, death. Destruction, hatred concentrated and turned into power. And a sacrifice; building a death curse required a murder. What she’d felt had been sick and dark, but it hadn’t been powerful enough to be death magic.
Maybe someone had tried to build a death curse but hadn’t known about the necessity of a sacrifice, or hadn’t had the guts to do it? Kind of silly, the idea that it was okay to murder someone by magic but not with a knife or axe or slowly by starvation or whatever the specific spell required or the specific practitioner preferred. But someone not as skilled, someone who’d done some real studying but not enough, might not know that.
“So what you thinkin?” He scanned the crowd in that alert, suspicious way of his, always watching everyone. “Guessing ain’t a witch done it, aye? Be just—”
Headlights bathed his face, lit up the graffiti-marked walls around them and the thinning herd of people gathered around the corpse. Bump’s men in their van, there to collect what was left of Harmony and take her—rather unnecessarily, really—to the Crematorium to join all of the other bodies waiting to be destroyed. At least, the ovens in the Crematorium would be unnecessary; the official stuff wasn’t. Harmony’s death could still be legally recorded. Cause of death wouldn’t even have to be fudged very much, aside from saying the fire was an accident rather than intentional.
Which just might be the Truth.
3.
THE FIRST THING SHE DID after she disentangled herself from a still-sleeping Terrible’s arms the next morning and took her pills was text Blue. A very long shot, yes, but the only shot she had.
Her phone buzzed a couple of minutes later, as she was closing the bathroom door behind her. One big disadvantage to the fact that she now lived with someone else in what was essentially one cavernous room: if she didn’t want to disturb him, she had to sit in the one place with a door.
It didn’t help much, considering the amount of echo-y tile in there, but if she kept her voice down he could usually sleep through it. “Hey.”
“You’re up early,” Blue said, sounding chipper as always. How Chess ended up friends with a morning person she’d never figure out. “What’s going on?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” She pressed her back against the wall and slid down to a sit, grateful for the cold tile. “Thinking about the waitress, you know.”
“What about her?”
“Well…” Shit, she should have thought this out a little more. But then she hadn’t thought Blue would call her quite so quickly, either. “Actually, I was wondering if that Inquisitor called you.”
“Will? Yes, he did. Why?”
“Did you guys talk for a while? Do you like him, I mean?”
“I don’t know.” Blue sighed. “He seems okay. But can you imagine me dating somebody from the Church? An Inquisitor? Lex would have a fucking heart attack.”
Again the faint pang in her chest. Nowhere near as serious as it had been—there wasn’t some kind of bizarre energy-and-joy-sucking-fire-spell at work this time—but there all the same. “He was perfectly happy to be involved with somebody from the Church himself.”
“You’re not an Inquisitor. And you’re not exactly a straight arrow, Chess, sorry to tell you.”
“And aren’t you and Lex both glad of that,” she replied, ignoring the sting she knew Blue didn’t intend for her to feel. “Besides, what the fuck do you care what he thinks of who you date?”
“I’m… I’m trying to listen to him more about that stuff.” Then, before Chess could get her mouth open, “Not because I want to obey him or something. But he’s right a lot of the time. He was right about Theo.”
Like seeing that Theo was a piece of shit took a genius or something. Whatever. “Okay, fine. But Theo was a dick to you. I doubt Will would be.”
Suspicion crept into Blue’s tone. “Why do you want me to go out with him?”
Chess sighed. Sighed, and scooted across the floor to the cabinet below the sink. A few weeks before, she’d stashed a little bag of pills in there, in the box where she kept old nail polishes and eyeshadows and shit that she didn’t really wear anymore but didn’t want to throw out. It wasn’t that she was hiding them from Terrible or anything, it was just…sometimes she wanted to take an extra one or two, and she didn’t necessarily want or need him to know she was doing it. He paid attention, she knew, and as much as she loved him—and as much as she appreciated that he never said a word, never judged—sometimes that felt too much like being monitored. Like needing permission.
Besides, she didn’t want him to worry, either. And fucking whatever, she didn’t need to explain it to anyone or justify it to anyone. Her pills were her business.
And just then it was her business to take another one. “Okay. We had a fire here last night. Just like the waitress, another girl, right there on the street. And I want to know who the first victim was and about Will’s investigation, but he won’t give me any information since I’m—”
“Uh-huh.” The suspicion had turned into amusement. “So you want me to whore myself out for information for you.”
“Kind of, yeah. But I really do think you guys would get along. He’s okay, I mean, he was when we were in school and that doesn’t seem like it’s changed.” She paused. “I’d do it for you.”
“Yes, but you’re a whore anyway.”
“Like you’re not.”
Blue laughed. “But you’re asking me to be a cheap whore. I’m not sure I should just—”
“Oh, cut it out.” Chess moved to the edge of the tub and lit a cigarette. “I’m not asking you to sleep with him, just talk to him. See if you can find something out, or if you can get him to share more information with me. And we both know you’re going to do it, because people are dying and you want it to stop as much as I do. So just call him, okay, and quit being a pain in the ass about it.”
Blue gave a big, sarcastic sigh. “Fine, fine. I’ll call him. But you owe me.”
“Owe you what? You act like it’s a fate worse than death, to have some nice harmless preppie—rich preppie, by the way—buy you dinner.”
“And you’re not the one who’ll have to deal with Lex when he finds out. I can’t just quit talking to him like you can, you know. I—�
� Blue’s voice took on a hint of smugness that rang an alarm in Chess’s head. “Fine. I’ll call Will, and I’ll act like I can’t wait to see him, and I’ll tell him he should share everything he’s learned with you because you’re the smartest chick in the world.”
“Awesome,” Chess said. Maybe if she got off the phone fast, she wouldn’t have to find out what Blue was planning that made her sound so sly. “Thank you—”
“If,” Blue continued, “you agree to quit avoiding my brother.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, and damn it for good measure. Yeah, she’d figured at some point she’d talk to Lex again, probably. He was Blue’s brother. She still—she still cared about him, even though she was pissed at him and their once-simple relationship had become fraught with complications and sensitive topics and things that went unsaid.
“You don’t have to have long conversations with him,” Blue said. “But at least you could come to my house again, instead of acting like it’s a torture chamber or something. Say hello to him. Quit making faces when I mention him. He is my brother, and we live in the same house, and it’s hard not to say his name ever.”
She could probably refuse. Blue would probably call Will anyway.
But obviously this was important to her; the slight wheedle in her voice made that clear. And Chess was trying to be good at this friend thing. She’d never had a female friend before Blue, at least not since the couple of girls she sort of hung around with at the Corey Home. And they hadn’t been friends, just girls who shared her interests in mood-altering chemicals, guys, and weapons. She hadn’t really trusted them, not really.
Blue she trusted. Blue had risked her life more than once for her. That meant something.
What it didn’t mean, though, was that she was happy about it. Shit, maybe instead of thinking it was pitiful that she only had one friend she should consider going back to having none. Life had been a lot less complicated, that was for sure.
But it had also been less fun, and a lot more lonely. Having a friend was kind of like an addiction all on its own: there was a point where it became a part of everyday life, and then another point right after that where it became a big part, one that would leave a hole so big nothing could fill it. A point where the thought of losing it filled her with terror, especially when it felt like she was losing so many other things. Elder Griffin, her job and relationship with the Church in general…and yeah, even Lex himself, she had to admit. Terrible was all she truly needed, but it—it made her proud to have something else, someone else, too. It made her feel like maybe she wasn’t such a failure as a person after all.
But fuck, why couldn’t Blue be related to someone else, or have asked for anything else?
She let the silence drag long enough to convey her unhappiness before she said, “You really are a bitch, you know that?”
Blue’s triumph came through the line loud and clear. “I’ll call you later and let you know what happens with Will.”
“Fine.”
They hung up. Chess glanced at the time; quarter to ten. She was late if she was planning to play look-what-a-good-girl-I-am at Church; not by much, but enough. It was Thursday, so there probably wouldn’t be any new cases to hand out and the main hall would be full of people waiting for their Liaiser appointments. Another thing that sucked so hard about summer: with the kids off school everyone decided it was a good time to bring them in to visit with Great-Uncle Ezra’s channeled spirit.
Liaising made a lot of money for the Church, and money for the Church was a Good Thing, since it paid her fairly meager salary and the much-less-meager bonuses that actually made her job worthwhile. Hell, her job was pretty fucking lucrative, actually; good money for those without a drug habit, which was everybody but her. Her fellow Debunkers wore expensive jewelry and clothes and got their hair done in salons instead of paying five bucks for bang-trims in a dingy nail place off an alley.
Not that she was complaining. She wasn’t. It just would have been nice if she could get one of those much-less-meager bonuses instead of the penny-ante shit she’d been handed for the last few months, because her savings were about to fall below the five-digit range again. Still a lot of money, yes, but not when she remembered that back in March it had been a lot closer to six digits, and that even after the new car and couch it had been comfortably in the middle of five.
Bleh. She didn’t want to think about it, and she didn’t want to brave the crowds to sit in the Church library and do nothing, either. What she did want to do was head out to Whatever-the-fuck-it-was-again Accounting and see if she could dig up something worthwhile on Harmony or her co-workers, or discover where she’d managed to get hold of a spell capable of turning her into a human torch.
The fact that she was eager to get started on a case that wasn’t hers, that had only the most peripheral connection to her actual job, was so sad she considered—as she did at least once a week these days—heading to Church anyway, storming into Elder Griffin’s office, and demanding he talk to her. Demanding he forgive her. She pictured it as she turned on the shower…and that’s where it died, as it also did at least once a week.
Elder Griffin would not be impressed by her pushing him. And yeah, he was kind and good-natured and gentle, but he hadn’t gotten to where he was without having serious fucking steel at his core. She’d heard stories of some of the things he’d done in his youth and during Haunted Week, and they weren’t stories about hiding in closets while other people did the heavy lifting. They weren’t stories about a guy she wanted to piss off. At least not more than she already had.
One day soon, though… One day soon she was going to do it anyway. She’d have to, because something had to happen. Something had to give. Punishing her by removing his friendship, his—his whatever it was, his affection for her? That was fair. It hurt like fuck, but it was fair. She deserved it. Actually, she deserved a lot worse.
What she did not deserve was being assigned the useless garbage at the bottom of the case queue. Hell, the most interesting thing that had happened to her work-wise in the last couple of months was discovering that the real haunting she wouldn’t earn a bonus for was the ghost of a murder victim, and catching the murderer. Nice for her sense of justice and her pride, but shit for her bank account.
Bleh again. More things she didn’t want to think about, and thankfully it was getting easier not to as the warm shower and the even more delightful warmth of her pills really started to smooth the rough, hideous edges she seemed to wake up with every morning. Aside from the obvious Truth that the just-before-bed pills had pretty much worn off by the time she woke up, the contrast between sleep’s peaceful oblivion and the reality of being dropped back into her body with her memories and the misery that was a constant companion felt like being forced to stare into a mirror that reflected all the shit inside her head. Like the shock of waking up reminded her who she really was, of the ache even Terrible couldn’t fully chase away no matter how much she wished he could and no matter how much she knew he wanted to.
So mornings pretty much blew; the prospect of long formless hours ahead of her and having to figure out what she would do with them blew. Especially with Terrible as busy as he was these days and the knowledge—there it was again—that she couldn’t spend the whole day at the pipe room or something because he’d hear about it. He wouldn’t be angry or anything, it was just that he would know. It might make him worry, and she didn’t want that.
When she left the bathroom half an hour or so later clad only in her underwear, she found him awake and in the kitchen. Clearly he hadn’t been up long; the scent of the toast he was eating filled the apartment as he stood at the counter, staring out the window so his naked back was to her. Now there was something else that cheered her up, even if they couldn’t do much about it just then. Sometimes being a witch sucked. The six days a month that they couldn’t have sex because to put him in intimate contact with her blood would magically bind them were definitely times when it sucked.
; She could still touch him, though. His skin was warm against her cheek as she wrapped her arms around him from behind, sliding her palms over the thick hair on his chest. Her head fit right between the bottoms of his shoulder blades. “Hey. Did I wake you?”
His left hand snaked around to caress her hip. “Naw, had to get up anyroad. You? You figuring on checkin that numberhouse, aye, where that dame Harmony were workin?”
“That’s my plan.” She kissed his spine.
“Want me going with you?”
“Aren’t you busy?” Her hands wandered down over the hard muscles of his abdomen. She really shouldn’t be doing it, not then, but he…he just felt so good. Touching him reminded her that she was alive, that she belonged to someone. She’d never had anybody in her life she could just touch like that before, reach out whenever she wanted and press her skin against theirs and they were happy to have her do it.
Maybe “happy” wasn’t quite the right word. His right arm came around to lock against her back, pressing her tighter to him; his left hand covered hers and slid it farther down over the waistband of his boxers to his rapidly-hardening cock. “Aye, only iffen you got any you want me doing, just—”
“No.” She gave a little sigh of regret and started to pull away. “Still can’t.”
His arm tightened, refusing to let her move. “Aw, c’mon. Why we ain’t just go on back into bed, see what happen.”
“Nope. Sorry.” This time she pushed a little harder; he let her go. “You can wait a couple more days.”
“Damn.” He turned to face her, so she could see the amusement in his eyes. “I were gonna give all my other dames the ring-up an cancel em for today.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t, then.”
“Aye, guessing so.” He kissed her on the top of the head and headed for the fridge to pull out a bottle of water. “Still take you over there, iffen you’re wanting. Thinkin you get any knowledge?”
“I don’t know. I just—if I could get a look at the Squad file on the first one, it’d be a lot easier. If I could check out all three victims…” She shrugged.