by Stacia Kane
Shit. She would be trapped anyway, one day. She was going to die one day. And when she did she’d end up there. For eternity.
Anna, Jillian, and Bruce were still talking, but Chess couldn’t wait. No foreign objects or substances were allowed in the City and she was pretty sure vomit counted, and she couldn’t hold it down anymore.
Those bespelled walls, those lines of pale blue light mocking her. Those glowing shapes of the dead coming for her, ready to grab her and hold her there and never let her leave. The pounding of her heart and the knowledge that she was wrong, she was broken so badly she couldn’t even see the beauty everyone else did … She didn’t belong there, she was ruined, she was dirty and abnormal, she didn’t feel the way everyone else felt because something was just fucked up inside her. She stumbled toward the door as fast as she could with sweat stinging her eyes and her chest aching as she fought her tight throat for air, and she flung herself through the iron-chain curtain and her knees hit the train platform with a bone-jarring smack as she threw up all over the concrete.
Chapter Seven
Shit. Chess took the little plastic cup Jillian offered her and downed its contents in one horrible pink-minty swallow. She didn’t want it; a real drink was what she wanted, but fat chance of that. At least Jillian had brought her a Sprite, so she had something to wash down the medicine with. Because she didn’t have a choice on the medicine.
She could either admit that she’d thrown up because she’d realized that instead of her soul living forever in peace and comfort, it would be trapped forever in a world even colder and emptier than the one she now inhabited, or she could lie and say something she ate must not have agreed with her. She chose the latter.
Couldn’t even blame it on her hangover, because really, it wasn’t like that looked much more professional, was it? “Oh, yeah, I knew we had a lot of work to do today so I decided to get hammered alone in my room last night” was probably not a great thing to say.
Not that she cared. She couldn’t bring herself to care about much of anything at that point; it was like someone had reached into her mouth and scraped out her insides through her aching throat. She’d failed. Three years of studying her ass off, spending hour after hour reading and taking notes and working to try to get somewhere, and she’d failed in the biggest and most important task of all: she’d failed to see what everyone else saw, didn’t have inside her whatever it was that she was supposed to have that would make her see the City the way it truly was.
“You sure you’re okay?” Jillian rinsed the little cup and tucked it back into the medicine cabinet. They were in her cottage on Church grounds, a basic one-bed-one-bath just like all of the other employee cottages. Or most of them; the Elders who chose to live on-grounds had bigger houses, especially the higher-ranking ones. And married Church employees got bigger houses, too.
But Jillian was neither, so her place was approximately the size of a blanket. And about as difficult to navigate, because all of the cottages were laid out the same, with a door opening into a living room, a kitchen area in the back to the right, the bedroom in the back to the left, and a bathroom in between.
That made Chess shudder, too, for reasons she didn’t understand. Being like all the others … there was nothing wrong with that, right? Wasn’t that what she wanted, to be like the rest of them, not like herself? Didn’t she lie awake at night wishing she was like them, that she’d grown up clean?
Yeah, she did. That didn’t mean she deserved it. Maybe that was the problem.
Something to worry about later, though, because Jillian had been talking and Chess should have been listening. “Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you wanted to lie down for a while or something, or if you want to get to the library. It’s okay with me if you want to stay here or go back to your room—”
“No, the library is fine. I want to get to work.”
Jillian looked doubtful.
“Really, Jillian, I’m feeling better. And—well, you’re going to have this solved soon, right? So I want to make sure I get as much done as I can, you know?”
That worked. Awesome. “Yeah, I know. Come on.”
Chess followed her through the living room—ugh, lots of pink and bright blue, lots of little pillows everywhere and pictures of ballerinas; Jillian was girlier than she appeared—but stopped at the door. The open door … “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t Trent say—at the Warings’ house—didn’t he say the front door was unlocked? And the garage door was open?”
“Right, yeah.”
“So why would the Warings have left their door unlocked like that, their house open, at night?”
Jillian shrugged and, as if to illustrate her words, closed her front door behind them and turned to walk away without locking it. “Lots of people don’t lock their doors until they go to bed. They’re home, they’re in their living room … why would they need to be locked in?”
“But the Warings were paranoid. Remember all those spells I found? They had a bunch of protection and ownership charms, and they’d bought some of them, at least I think they had.”
“Maybe some were given to them as gifts. Maybe they just liked them. Owning them didn’t mean they were using them.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It was ghosts, remember? It’s not like you can lock them out.”
They’d reached one of the main footpaths leading back to the tall double doors at the front of the Church; they’d be inside in a minute, and once they got inside they wouldn’t be able to discuss the case so openly anymore. Chess twisted her hair into a knot to keep it from blowing into her face—damn breeze—and tucked it into her shirt collar. “But the ghosts were Summoned, right? So there’s a person behind it.”
Jillian considered it. “You’re thinking whoever Summoned the ghosts did it at the Warings’ house?”
“Well—”
“We didn’t find any signs of that kind of witchcraft.”
“Yeah, but—wait.” They stopped at the front doors; Chess grabbed Jillian’s arm. “This is the third murder, right? The third ghost murder? What if it’s not just random, what if someone’s deliberately targeting these people?”
“I don’t know.” Jillian shook her head. “I’d think if that was a possibility, Trent and Vaughn would have figured it out by now.”
“Maybe they weren’t thinking about it.”
Jillian glanced at the front doors, at the parking lot, at the doors again.
So Chess made another push. “We can ask them, right? I mean, you can ask them. Maybe they’ve thought of it and already know it’s not what happened or whatever, but maybe they didn’t.”
“They’re good investigators, Cesaria.”
“But even good investigators miss stuff. Isn’t that what you told me before?”
She wasn’t sure why she was pushing so hard, especially when it didn’t really matter. She was only in training. She wouldn’t get any kind of bonus—did Inquisitors get bonuses? She’d heard Debunkers did, and Liaisers got annual payouts based on how many ghosts they’d channeled, but she had no idea about any of the other employees—and she wouldn’t get anything in her file or anything, no class credit, but … she didn’t know.
She only knew that somehow, suddenly, it was important to her. Somewhere along the line, between the day before when she’d seen the Warings’ living room transformed into a bloody abattoir and that moment when she stood looking at Jillian, it had started to matter to her. She wanted to figure it out, because she wanted to be right. To win.
She wanted to prove that she wasn’t wrong about everything.
“I’ll ask them,” Jillian said finally. “I’ll see what they think. And if there’s time and you want to look for a connection between the victims, I guess you can—after you look up Mark.”
“Thanks.”
A nod. “Well, come on, let’s check out the ghosts, anyway. But remember, we don’t have proof that the ghosts Anna
and Bruce found missing have anything to do with the murders, much less that they were Summoned to pick people off some list or something. You can’t assume things in this job.”
“Sure.” Whatever. Well, no, not whatever; Jillian was right. But still. The more Chess thought about it the more she thought it made sense, the more she could see how it could be done, even. How someone could use ghosts as murder weapons. All they needed to do was Summon some ghosts—
No, they hadn’t found any evidence of Summoning. So how would they …?
Maybe they could Host? No, a person could only share his or her body with one ghost at a time. Of course, there could be more than one killer involved, and hence more than one ghost. And it wouldn’t be at all unusual for people to let their ghosts go free to kill someone, or even for the ghosts to—No, that couldn’t be it in this case, though, because Trent and Vaughn hadn’t found any real evidence of other people in the house. Only ghosts.
So how would someone move ghosts from place to place? How could ghosts be kept contained, kept in line, during that travel?
A van. They could transport ghosts in a van, one of those windowless ones lined with iron like the Church used to transport corpses or those who committed magical crimes—or both.
So someone could be at that very moment driving around Triumph City with a van full of ghosts, just waiting for their next opportunity. And if Chess wanted to get anywhere in the Church, she needed to convince Jillian that was a distinct possibility. She needed to prove it.
As usual, the wide, bright hallway just inside the front doors made something rise in her chest, something she thought might be real happiness, real pride. She belonged there—well, sort of. They thought she belonged there, and she was going to make damn sure they never had reason to doubt it.
They walked past the long low bench where people waited for Liaising appointments or to meet with other Church employees, up the staircase, and across to the library, where Jillian led her to the filing cabinets along the back wall. “The green labels are place files, where it’s recorded if a building or something is confirmed to be haunted. Mostly Debunkers use those, though we sometimes check them. Red labels are ghosts themselves, pre–Haunted Week deaths. If you want to check people who died after that, or living people, you have to check the computers, although how much information you can get depends on your position. Only Elders have access to full files, but we have almost as much, and then other employees usually have less. But to get everything you’re always going to have to ask an Elder or a Chief Inquisitor.”
Chess nodded.
“Here.” Jillian headed for the computers, typed something into one of them. “That’s the Inquisitor training login. It won’t let you alter any files, but that shouldn’t be a problem, right? So you can check out whoever you want there. You have a notebook or something?”
Chess pulled hers out of her bag. It was tucked in right next to her flask; the sight of the flask made her mouth water at the same time as it sent a hot flood of shame and nausea through her body and into her stomach, where it sat and festered.
But Jillian didn’t see it—well, of course she didn’t, she wasn’t peering into Chess’s bag like some kind of purse busybody. She just kept talking. “The best way to start is to just type in the name you’re looking for. It’ll bring up whatever files exist. You can narrow it down by birth date or whatever, and then when you open the files there are usually pictures, and … well, that’s it.”
Jillian sat down at the next computer. Damn, couldn’t she have at least moved one more down, so Chess had a little privacy? Having someone sit so close to her … it was like being breathed on. Kind of gross and uncomfortable, but there was no decent way to request that they stop. What was she supposed to say to Jillian, Don’t watch what I’m doing in the Church’s private restricted files?
No. Somehow she thought that wouldn’t work very well. She glanced around, hoping she could use other people in the library as an excuse to move, but no; a one-way mirror separated the computers from the rest of the library, so no one could see over her shoulder.
Okay. Put it out of her mind and focus. This was her shot, right? Yes. She typed “Mark Pollert” in and waited, and when the results came up she had to admit that was pretty cool. Her first official act as a Church employee. That she technically wasn’t a Church employee yet and was doing a side errand that probably had no bearing on the actual case didn’t matter; it was still a big deal.
Only a few Mark Pollerts existed, which was nice because it meant it was easy to find the one she wanted. Born January 20, 1980, orphaned at age ten, moved from house to house—yeah, she sure as fuck knew that drill—until ending up at the New Hope Mission. With the Warings.
“Hey, Jillian, can I keep this file open and do another search?”
“What else do you need to search?”
Shit. Somehow she didn’t think Jillian was going to approve, but … “I wanted to see if there’s anything on the Mission. The one the Warings worked for, where Mark lived for a while? I thought …” Double shit, because Jillian’s eyebrows were rising and Chess was pretty sure that didn’t mean Jillian loved her fantastic idea.
She plowed on, though. “If I can get some information on the Mission and the people who ran it, maybe I can get a more complete picture of Mark’s life. Maybe some people I can talk to about him, or would be talking to about him if I was actually doing that.”
Jillian didn’t reply; Chess dug her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from saying more, to keep her face calm. Jillian was considering it, Chess knew it, and if she started gibbering justifications and arguing her case, she’d only convince Jillian to say no. The only way to get what she wanted was to act like she didn’t really care.
Sure enough, it worked. “Just hit the plus sign there.”
A couple of clicks, a few seconds of typing, and Chess had the records of the New Hope Mission in front of her and her heart beat much, much faster with every line she read, every name she read, from the list of employees and volunteers at the Mission between 1990 and 1997.
They all looked familiar. “Where’s the list of victims?”
“Why, what—oh. Oh, wow. How did Trent and Vaughn not see this?”
Maybe because Trent’s tunnel vision led only into his own colon. Chess didn’t say that, though. Instead she said, “Maybe the others didn’t have souvenirs of the place in their house, and nobody knew they’d worked there.”
“That’s true.” Jillian typed something on her own computer. “Yeah. The first victim, Harry Stark, there’s nothing in his file.”
“Would stuff they found searching his house be in his file?”
Jillian stood up, already clicking keys on the computer with one hand and pulling out her phone with the other. “No, it wouldn’t. Come on. We need to go see Trent and Vaughn. Right away.”
Chapter Eight
The Warings’ house seemed like the logical place to meet; it was where Chess thought they were going, but Jillian drove past the exit they should have taken off Highway 300. “Where—”
“Downside.” Jillian paused, obviously waiting for Chess to reply, but Chess didn’t really have a reply to make.
Downside. Of course she’d been there. She’d lived there a couple of times; well, not in Downside—she didn’t think that even the branch of Church government that handed out foster children like cheap Festival trinkets would place kids in Downside—but close enough, on the border streets between Downside and Cross Town, Downside and Northside at the far edge. Streets where the distance to Downside seemed to shrink after dark so it felt like living under a looming shadow, like worms of danger crawling out of the earth after the sun went down.
But as with anything dangerous, Downside had its pleasures. Chess knew those, too. She knew Downside. Knew all kinds of things could be found there. Her heartbeat quickened.
Only to drop again when Jillian switched lanes. Yeah, for someone interested in drowning out some memories D
ownside was like a fucking amusement park made of broken glass and sin. But Chess was going there in the company of a fully tattooed member of the Black Squad. Nobody would even talk to her, much less sell her anything.
And even if they would, she wasn’t doing that shit anymore. It had been fine when she was in the Corey Home passing the time any way she could. Not now. Not when she had a future.
She refused to think about the flask in her bag and what it meant. Refused to think about how fucking tired she was, so damn tired of fighting, of putting all her energy into not remembering, not thinking; tired from the nightmares and memories that crowded into her bed with her every night and made sure it would be hours before she slept, if she slept at all.
Tired of being herself, and of feeling like herself, and of knowing what that meant.
“There’s no need to be scared,” Jillian said, interrupting Chess’s thoughts. A welcome interruption.
And one Chess had to stifle the urge to laugh at. “I’m not scared.”
“Hey, it’s kind of a scary place. I mean, even I get nervous going there. I won’t go by myself.”
Chess looked at Jillian. Really looked at her, in a way she hadn’t before. Yeah, Downside would scare Jillian, for all that she was on the Black Squad. Downside would scare Jillian because Jillian didn’t understand that no place was safe and that some of the biggest, most expensive houses in town were more full of hatred and sadism, had worse odds of someone escaping alive and intact, than the worst slum. Jillian didn’t know that money and nice things and clean, shiny hair that fell to her shoulders in perfect waves wouldn’t do shit to protect her if she happened to stumble into the wrong person’s path one day.
Downside was no more dangerous than anywhere else when it came down to it. It was just a hell of a lot more honest.