T
he sedan pulled up in front of a bland-looking ranch house in Cross Town, a semi-suburb struggling to leave the working class behind. The house, a slab of dull tan and brown, hid behind a couple of trees and about half a dozen sedans and Squad cars. Holy shit, this was a real crime scene.
Well, duh, people were dead, right? Of course it was a crime scene, or at least a dead-body scene. But still … Chess was aware of her feet crossing the tidy green lawn, the sound of her boots sliding against the grass and the sound of her bag shifting on her shoulder. The lawn looked extra green, the sky extra blue, like the nights back in the Corey Youth Home when she and a few of the others would score some Sizzle and spend the night giggling and watching the colors dance in the air. But that had been fake. This looked too real. It looked like something she didn’t want to see.
Jillian approached two men standing just outside the wide-open front door. “Vaughn, Trent.”
The men nodded. One of them spoke. “Morrow.”
Their gazes fell on Chess, who forced herself not to fidget under their weight. They wanted to look at her and wonder? Let them. She didn’t need to offer them any information.
Jillian gave her up. “This is Cesaria Putnam. She’s a student, out with me for her last-year shadowing.”
The men’s eyes thawed a little. One of them—Trent?—gave her an appraising kind of smile. “Thinking of joining us?”
Chess shrugged.
Trent’s face hardened; clearly he’d expected her to blush and giggle under his manly attention or something. “Well,” he said, stepping back and sweeping his arm out in a you-first kind of gesture, “this is as good a start as any, right? Go ahead.”
She should have hesitated. She should have looked at Jillian, waited for a nod.
But she didn’t. Not with Vaughn smirking and Trent still standing there waiting for her to move.
She started walking.
“Let’s see how tough she is now,” she heard one of the men murmur. Her back stiffened. They had no idea what tough was.
Tough was walking through that wide-open doorway and entering an entirely different world, a world full of blood and body parts thrown around, a world of overturned furniture and broken glass and death. A world where the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with horror, still in shock at what they’d been forced to witness.
Holy shit
. Bile rose in her throat; stars exploded before her eyes. What she was seeing? How many people had been killed there, how many bodies made up the clutter of lost mortality strewn across the oat-colored carpet?
A chuckle from behind her managed to penetrate the roaring in her ears. Right. Right, they were watching her, waiting for her to break down. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Jillian’s hand on her arm. Something in her eyes, something not quite sympathy but not quite pleasure, either. More like … curiosity, maybe? Annoyance. “You okay?”
Chess nodded, forcing herself not to pull away from Jillian’s presumptuous touch no matter how much it made her skin crawl. She was trying, she was getting better with that, better every day, but … it still sent discomfort skittering along her skin, down her spine. “I’m fine.”
Jillian paled as she looked at the mess. “Damn. They weren’t kidding when they said it was awful.”
“What happened? I mean, what do—”
“These people were murdered, that’s what happened.” Trent stood in the doorway; as he spoke he started walking, essentially shoving Chess and Jillian further into the death-chamber. Sunlight made his hair a brownish halo around the shadowed oval of his face, so she couldn’t read his expression. She bet she knew what it was, though. “See, when people get all torn apart like that, they usually can’t live anymore.”
Chess stared at him. A long, even stare, one that told him exactly what she thought of him and his patronizing little games.
Vaughn cleared his throat. “Neighbor called this morning, screaming, saying she’d come over to pick up the woman—Mrs. Waring, Shannon Waring—to go shopping, found them all like this. She said she didn’t enter the house.”
“Any confirmation on that?” Jillian asked.
“Still working on it.” Vaughn flipped a page in the little notebook he carried. “Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, everyone’s horrified, the Warings were such nice people, you know, the usual shi—stuff neighbors say. Doors weren’t locked, garage door was open. There’s a tire track off the driveway, but we have no idea when it might have been made.”
“I guess we should—” Jillian started, but Trent cut her off.
“I think we should ask our new recruit what she thinks we should do.” Amusement glinted in his eyes as he looked at Chess. “She can learn by doing, right?”
Was he always this much of an asshole, or was it something personal?
Not that it mattered. Fine. He wanted to be a dick, he could go right ahead. One benefit of an upbringing like hers: nobody could make her feel worse about herself than she already did. His attitude, his dislike, was just another raindrop hitting floodwaters.
There was a pause; in it she felt them all waiting for her reaction, Jillian and Vaughn torn between wanting to stand up to Trent and wanting to see what she’d do.
So she looked around the room, thought for a second. “What about the weapon? Do you know what kind of weapon was used?”
“A knife.” Trent had moved, so she could see his face, the glint in his eyes. What did it feel like to be so smug all the time? Not that she cared, really; it was just idle curiosity.
But wait. He did look smug, didn’t he? And he wouldn’t be looking so smug if she wasn’t missing something, if there wasn’t something big she should have figured out but hadn’t.
She stopped and inspected the scene again, trying to separate the bloody limbs and lumps of flesh from what they meant. It was so … grisly. What did that—why was that? Why had the bodies been chopped up and left lying around like that? Usually when killers chopped up bodies it was to make them easier to dispose of, right?
Well, she didn’t know that for a fact, but she’d known a few people in her life who would have. And it just—it just seemed like if a killer was going to go through all the trouble of slicing and dicing a corpse, there ought to be some purpose to it aside from making the biggest possible mess.
But. There was one type of killer who might very well chop people up just for fun and discard the individual parts like peanut shells tossed on a barroom floor. There was one type of killer who had the kind of rage that would drive a person to destroy another like that; one type of killer who felt nothing but hate.
Chess lifted her chin, looked right into Trent’s oh-so-clever eyes. “Ghosts did this, right? You found ectoplasm?”
His face fell. She managed not to smile.
Vaughn shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “We did, yes. And this isn’t the—” He stopped himself. The three Squad members exchanged looks.
“There’ve been others?” Chess asked.
Pause. Long pause, while the others had some sort of silent conversation. Chess didn’t watch them. Now that her initial shock had passed she was more interested in the room, in the house itself.
It was nice, in a dull sort of way. Like someone with not much flair but a decent amount of cash had decorated it, and like the people who lived in it—who
had
lived in it—either didn’t spend a lot of time there or were a bit on the neat-freaky side. Of course, given the horrendous mess in there at the moment, it was hard to tell, but she noticed dust-free picture frames, glass cabinet doors devoid of fingerprints. They had one of those entertainment-center units with drawers and boxes built in, presumably for pictures or knitting or who the hell knew what; Chess had lived with one family once who had one of those, too, but they’d used the drawers to stash porn and drugs. Maybe these people did the same? They didn’t necessarily look like the type, but there really was no “type,” was there? There were just people, and they were all sick beasts with shit to hide.
Jillian’s voice cut into her thoughts; apparently the three of them had reached some kind of decision. “We have had a few ghost murders recently, yes. We believe there may be a small band of ghosts that escaped from the City, and we’re working to find them.”
“How would they escape?”
Vaughn shrugged. “It happens sometimes. Nothing for you to worry about. We’ll catch them quickly, we always do.”
“The current ghost-caused death rate in the District is one in every half million,” Jillian added. “That’s very low, as you’ve probably been told. And it’s low because we’re very good at handling just this sort of problem.”
The fact that this was at least the third murder of this type—Chess figured it had to be at least three, because if there had only been one before, Jillian would have said “another” instead of “a few”—seemed to indicate that they weren’t as good as they thought, but Chess sure as hell knew not to say that.
And really, it was about all she knew, wasn’t it? She hadn’t even graduated yet, much less started training. Yes, she’d read ahead; all those late nights in the library, sneaking books from the Restricted Room and the Archives to study, all those long silent hours of peace meant she probably knew more than the average last-year student.
But there was so much more to know, so much more to learn. No, she didn’t want to join the Squad, but she might as well try to get something out of her time there, right? The more knowledge she gathered and the harder she worked, the better chance she had of graduating, of passing training, of getting to be somebody. “So what do you do next, then? How will you catch them?”
“We’ll talk to a Liaiser, maybe,” Jillian said, glancing at the men. “See if they’ve picked up anything about unrest among the dead, or if perhaps they know who’s gone missing.”
Vaughn nodded. “We’ve upped the street patrols, of course. The others have been in neighborhoods like this one, so we’re making sure the streets are well covered at night.”
“Do you warn people, or anything? Maybe have someone go around laying out salt or putting blood on—”
Trent started laughing. “Are you crazy? And terrify half the city? Hell, no, we haven’t made an announcement. And you won’t tell anyone, either, none of your little friends back at Church, understand?”
Okay, now she was pissed. To imply that she—of all people—couldn’t keep a secret? She’d kept secrets that would turn his Haircolor for Men No. 8 hair white.
And she was still keeping them. She always would. “I know how to keep a secret.”
“Well, if you don’t, we’ll certainly find out soon enough, won’t we?”
“Give her a break, Trent,” Vaughn muttered.
“I’m just teasing.”
Ah, yes. Just Teasing: the defense of the cowardly asshole. Whatever.
Jillian touched Chess’s arm—what was the deal with that?—and glanced toward the hallway. “You want to come check out the other rooms with me, Cesaria? I’ll show you how we run a search.”
“Don’t know why you’re bothering,” Trent said. “You know ghosts are opportunity killers. Searching the last few houses didn’t—”
“Because it’s a good way for her to learn,” Jillian said. “Because I’m supposed to be teaching her.”
The scream from outside interrupted whatever response Trent was about to make, and sent a chill up Chess’s spine for good measure. It was a horrible scream, the high, long shriek of pain and loss. “Nooooo! Mom—Mommy! Daddy! What—”
Vaughn was moving before the words really gelled in Chess’s mind; to Trent’s credit—look at that, she could find one nice thing about even him—he was right behind, with Jillian following. Chess hesitated for a minute; was she supposed to go, too? It really wasn’t her business. It definitely wasn’t something she wanted to see.
Not that staying there with a couple of dismembered corpses appealed more, but … Oh, shit. The door was open, and from the doorway those corpses were clearly visible, and if that scream came from the dead couple’s daughter she really, really wouldn’t need to see that.
Chess leaped for the door, intending to slam it shut, but she was too late. The green lawn and black cop cars she saw through the doorway disappeared, replaced by a woman’s body, little more than a shadow against the sunshine outside. She
was
a shadow, blotting out the light, her misery and pain more than enough to cast darkness all around her.
She stared at the room, stared at the carnage, her jaw working soundlessly, her eyes wild in her round face. Chess saw those eyes start to roll back and made a move, but it was Trent who caught the woman when she fell.
B
eyond the closed door Chess could hear the voices of the Evidence Team cleaning up the mess in the living room, but in that room—apparently Gloria Waring’s childhood bedroom—silence reigned.
Chess hadn’t volunteered to babysit the victims’ adult daughter. Something told her an eighteen-year-old girl was maybe not the most qualified to do the job, either—especially not when the eighteen-year-old girl in question was herself, who had almost as much experience with loving families as she did with mechanical engineering. Which was none. But there she was, sort of standing around, trying not to look at Gloria huddled on the bed staring swollen-eyed into space. Her sadness filled the room, made Chess’s skin feel raw.
Pictures in glass frames sat on the dresser, covered the walls. Gloria and her parents in front of a lake. Gloria and her parents at Gloria’s second-school graduation. Gloria and some people Chess assumed were Gloria’s friends on a beach. A picture of a group of adults, the image tinted with the sort of orangey color given by age; closer inspection showed Chess two people she thought were Gloria’s parents, standing in the back.
Interesting. Well, not really—Chess didn’t give much of a shit about the late Warings—but interesting that Gloria kept the picture in her room.
But then … it looked more like a guest room now, didn’t it? A few souvenirs of the type of childhood normal people had were visible, a couple of yearbooks on the lone shelf and kindergarten art projects on the walls. But the furniture, the curtains and bedcoverings, were new and generic. So maybe the Warings had just stuck things in there they no longer wanted to display elsewhere. In fact … yes, the lake picture had been in the living room as well, only larger. Chess picked it up to get a closer look.
“Deep Creek Lake,” Gloria said. “I was sixteen.”
Shit. What was she doing? Chess set the picture back down, hoping her face hadn’t gone as red as it felt. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Gloria sniffled and sat up, clutching the cheap floral comforter around her as she did. “What are you supposed to do, just watch me lay here?”
Okay, then. “Um. I’m sorry. For your loss, I mean.”
Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say; Gloria’s face crumpled again. Shit. Chess took a step toward her without any real sort of plan—was this a touch-her situation, should she pat the woman on the back or something?—but was saved from the necessity of doing anything by a tap on the door, the turn of the knob. “Gloria?”
A man. Gloria’s boyfriend, or—no, her husband. Relief probably wasn’t the right thing for Chess to feel upon realizing she no longer had to touch Gloria, but she felt it anyway. And really, when had she ever felt the right thing?
“Matt!”
They hugged. They blocked the door. Damn. That would have been the perfect moment to slip out of the way, too. All that naked emotion … it made Chess feel like her hands and feet were too big, her arms and legs too long. Awkward and uncomfortable, like she was being forced to observe things that were none of her business. Which she supposed technically she was.
Thankfully, Jillian poked her head around the door a minute later. “There you are. Come on, I want to show you something.”
Chess angled herself past the weeping Warings—or whatever their last name was; maybe Gloria wasn’t a Waring anymore, since she was married—and followed Jillian down the short hall to the master bedroom. A decent-sized room, heavy on ruffles, taupe, and rose, with bowls of potpourri all over the dressers and the desk and the shelves of the TV cabinet. It smelled like a cinnamon stick had thrown up in there; how had they slept in that air? It made Chess’s nose and throat itch.
Jillian opened a window, giving Chess a half smile as she did. “Pretty awful, huh?”
Chess nodded.
“We probably won’t find much up here—well, actually, we’re pretty sure we won’t. Like Trent said, ghosts are opportunity killers, and we’ve got a couple on the loose here. But we generally have a look around, just to rule out the idea that the victims were Summoning on their own, or whatever. Even good investigators can miss things, so we try to be really careful. You want to start in the closet there?”
“Yeah, sure, but … what am I looking for?”
“Anything unusual. Anything magical—they’ll probably have stuff like sleep-safes or luck charms or whatever, maybe some sex magic. Just bring those out here so we can have a look. And of course if anything seems really strange, let me know before you touch it.”
Jillian pulled a white wad from her bag, which when she held it out proved to be a pair of latex gloves, cloudy with powder. “Here, put these on. And you should pick up a box at the Church store and always keep a pair or two with you. You’d be amazed how often they come in handy.”
Chess snapped on the gloves, hating the medicinal smell and texture and the way they made her hands feel trapped. It was a good idea, though, she had to admit. Or it would be, if she ended up doing some kind of work where she might come in contact with magical items.
Weird to be thinking of her future as something she chose, and not something that she was either forced into or did because she had no other options. Three years since the Church had found her, three years since they’d approved her scholarship and she’d left the Corey Home, and the idea still hit her sometimes, hard and fast like a pissed-off foster father’s blow to her head and leaving her almost as stunned: She might have an actual future. She
would
have an actual future, if she managed not to fuck it up.
Jillian pulled a little velvet bag out from under the Warings’ bed. “See? It’s a—oh, no, just some rings. Huh. Anyway, go ahead and start in the closet, and let me know if you see anything weird or interesting or whatever.”
Chess nodded and crossed the dull tan carpet to the walk-in closet. The Warings’ clothing was about as adventurous as their bedroom. Lots of earth tones and pastels, the colors nervous people wore so they could hide. Everything cut rather loose, so it seemed, but then Chess hadn’t really seen how big the Warings were, considering that they’d been chopped into pieces.
Ugh, and she was going through their things. Like some kind of ghoul. Those people were dead, they’d been taken to the City of Eternity below the earth to live forever and they’d never be back, and there she was judging their clothing choices. It would have made her sick if she didn’t already know—had known for years—that she was a bad person, a twisted one with filth and darkness in her soul.
She shut her eyes for a second, squeezing the thought from her head, and got back to work. Lots of pictures, boxes and boxes of them. Jewelry boxes, shoes, bags of fabric and craft stuff, a low white box … Oh, shit. “Jillian.”
“Yeah?”
“Come look at this.”
Jillian appeared in the doorway, her hair shining beneath the overhead light. “Yeah, what’s—oh. Wow. Is there a license in there for that stuff?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t touched it. Should I?”
Jillian nodded. Chess reached into the box and lifted the Bible sealed in heavy plastic, the framed sampler embroidered with a quote from same under a large cross, a couple of pictures of Jesus. She’d never seen anything like it before—well, of course she had, the Church had plenty of artifacts of the old religions in the Archives, in the Restricted Room and the museums and—she’d seen that sort of thing before, was the point. But never like that, never in someone’s actual home. Certainly the kinds of houses where she’d grown up—the kinds of people she’d grown up with—weren’t really the type who would have cared about religion even if it wasn’t illegal.
But the Warings’ items were in fact legal; Chess found the license at the bottom of the box. She’d definitely never seen one of those before. “It’s made out to the Warings and the New Hope Mission.”
“Huh.” Jillian scanned the document, set it back in the box. “Well, I guess they were religious. I bet Gloria’s too young to remember it, though. She was born in ninety-two, so she would have been five for Haunted Week. That’s pretty young to really remember stuff like that.”
“Should we ask her?”
Jillian shrugged. “Maybe later. It’s not a big deal. Lots of people were religious before and wanted to keep a few things from it. We see it fairly often. As long as it’s licensed it’s okay.”
“So should I set it aside, make a note or something?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. Keep looking.”
About half an hour later Chess had found two small luck charms—ones she was pleased to note that she identified right away, even though they hadn’t covered all the permutations in class yet, ha!—some house-dedication supplies, and four protection spells, which seemed excessive, but what did she know. Behind them sat another bag, a small red velvet one. Shit. She knew what that probably was.
She glanced toward the bedroom, where Jillian was going through drawers. Jillian would come pick the thing up for her if she asked. And she could ask. She was only eighteen, only a student; she
could
ask.
Except that asking would make her look like a pussy. Asking would be the kind of thing Jillian might report back, with a sorrowful “I don’t think Cesaria is ready” sort of comment thrown in.
Asking would be like admitting that something was wrong with her. That she was terrified; that she had reason to be terrified. That she wasn’t normal.
So she didn’t ask. She gritted her teeth and reached for the thing. Maybe the gloves would help protect her, maybe they’d form some kind of barrier against—
Or maybe the gloves wouldn’t do a damn thing, or at least not enough. Energy crawled up her arm, greedy sex energy eager to find a home. Someone else’s sex energy, forcing itself upon her, insinuating itself across her skin and down into her belly, lower down, dancing a slow cruel path through her body and making her heart kick in her chest.
That wasn’t just the sex, either. That was panic, the bright painful cry of it in her soul, making her eyes sting. Shit, she couldn’t—couldn’t handle that, couldn’t do it, not in that strange claustrophobic room with its cloying too-warm air. It was too much, too much for her, hard hands on her skin, holding her down, her lungs fighting for oxygen, she had to—
She had to drop the fucking bag, was what she had to do. Her stiff fingers didn’t want to let go for a second; as always, her body betrayed her, wanting more even though it was wrong, wanting more even though it was bad. But finally they obeyed; the bag fell to the carpet with a soft thud, and Chess knelt there for a minute trying to catch her breath, swiping furiously at her damp, stinging eyes with the backs of her wrists. She’d have to touch the thing again to take it into the room and show Jillian, and the last thing she needed was for Jillian to see that anything was bothering her.
It was just a damn sex spell. Lots of people had them, big deal, right? She pressed her hand to her forehead, trying to flatten the furrows she knew were there, rubbing to ease the beginnings of what promised to be a killer headache. Just a stupid fucking sex spell. Nothing more. She was older now, she was a student at Church, in training to be a witch. She could handle a little magic. She could, and she would.
One long deep breath, then another, until they came smooth without catching in her throat. Okay. Fine. She clenched her jaw, got to her feet, and grabbed the bags.
From the closet doorway to the foot of the bed where Jillian had placed a few other items was only maybe fifteen feet. It felt like forever while Chess struggled to keep her expression calm, her chest from heaving. Jillian didn’t look up until Chess reached the pile and dropped the bags just beside it. She’d done it.
Yeah, she’d done it
then
. Once. What happened next time? Or the time after that? What kind of job was she going to find in the Church where she never had to deal with sex magic, ever?
She couldn’t really think of one unless she wanted to be a Liaiser, and the idea of letting spirits have control over her body, communing with them … the thought made her shudder.
Almost as much as that horrible spell bag had. She was going to have to distract herself somehow, because her heart still pounded and she still heard those distant voices telling her how bad she was, how dirty, how it was her fault, and she didn’t want to hear them. Didn’t want to see those faces in her mind.
Jillian peered at her. “You okay?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Sure. Of course.” Chess twisted her lips into what she hoped looked like a wry smile. “Sex magic. Kinda gross, is all.”
“Ooh, let’s see.” Jillian dropped to the floor and started digging in the bag. “Wow, they weren’t kidding with this, were they? I wonder who they hired to make it. This doesn’t feel like the normal homemade type of spell.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No, it’s too strong. Here, take off your glove.” Jillian picked up one of the luck charms and held it up, waiting until Chess had stripped off the thin latex to set it in her palm. “See how it feels kind of weak? Close your eyes and really feel it.”
Chess did, her face warming. Of course. Duh. They’d just started this in class a few weeks ago, energy identification. She should have realized … shit, what else might she be missing? She’d read about this, she’d even practiced it, so why hadn’t she tested herself on it as soon as she saw the charm bags? Why hadn’t she thought to check if the energy was the same, if she could identify it?
Because she was chickenshit, that’s why. Because she’d been so worried about that sex spell that she hadn’t even thought of it. Too selfish, too concerned about her little feelings or whatever.
She was never going to get anywhere if she didn’t think more, focus better.
The energy in the luck charm was like the energy lingering in the room, only a little stronger. And … “Is this female? It feels like a woman made it, maybe?”
To her relief, Jillian nodded. “Very good. Probably Mrs. Waring. They had a couple of books on basic spells in the living room, don’t know if you saw them.”
Chess nodded—she had—but again she hadn’t paid attention. Shit. She’d been training for what, three hours, and she was already missing stuff, already fucking up. She couldn’t even blame that on the sex spell, because she hadn’t known it was there or touched it yet when they first arrived. She just hadn’t noted the books, hadn’t thought to feel the energy of the luck charms to see if she could identify it, hadn’t thought of anything worthwhile.