Sacrificial Magic (33 page)

Was he not listening to her, or what? She bit back the sharp answer she wanted to fling at him, took a deep breath. “Maybe. Maybe I will, yeah. I’ll do that if I have a chance.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but luckily they’d rounded a corner, headed past Doyle’s cabin and Atticus Collins’s, and Aros’s sat right before them, its shutters down, its door closed against them.

It yielded to the key, though. Chess stood back to let Elder Griffin handle that; let him push the door open, straining to shift the pile of mail behind it.

She glimpsed dark furniture against a pale background before Elder Griffin stepped inside. She followed, only to almost run into him as he stood in the arched doorway—the doorless doorway—between the entry hall and the living area.

Every square inch of the walls was covered. With papers and drawings; maps and pages torn from magazines. Pentacles were everywhere, pentacles and—holy shit—a crucifix upside down between two windows. Couldn’t get much more illegal than that; what the fuck was he doing with religious items?

It almost seemed unimportant, though, against everything else. Words scrawled on the walls in thick black markers, so many she could barely see the paint between them. Nonsense words like in his notes. More words in the form of newspaper headlines pinned up everywhere. Sketches of horrible screaming faces, destroyed and burning bodies.

All those drugs had more than done their job. And now the man who’d created this museum of mania was walking the streets.

Elder Griffin caught her eye. She saw the same thought in his face.

“When was the last time you saw him here? I mean, have you seen him since he left?”

“I have not.” He reached out, almost touched one of the pentacles, then jerked his hand back as if it burned him; maybe it had. “But I do agree with your thinking, Cesaria. I cannot believe he left all of this behind.”

“Are those active?” She nodded toward a pile of gris-gris bags on a low table. “I mean, are they powered, did he power them?”

“It seems so.”

Right. Here was her chance to confirm one thing at least. She crossed the floor, placing her feet carefully—something told her not to go wandering around willy-nilly in that place—until she reached the table.

The second her hand touched the gris-gris she knew she was right, knew her hunch—okay, not a hunch, a horrible dark suspicion—was correct. She
knew
that energy, she’d felt it before in front of the Mercy Lewis school.

Aros was the killer. Aros was the one trying to steal power from the world or whatever the hell he was trying to do, heedless of what it might destroy. It was him.

And thanks to the secrecy she’d kept up until that moment, of course, she couldn’t tell Elder Griffin about it. Fucking great.

Still, at least now she knew who it was, and there could be, had to be, a way to catch him for that. Maybe in the papers they’d come looking for.

His bedroom held more revelations. Pictures of Lucy McShane everywhere; photographs, probably given to him by Chelsea. Sketches and paintings.

He’d been a rather skilled artist, actually. On one wall were portraits he’d done of many people Chess knew: Monica, Beulah, Wen Li—looking particularly pouty
and babyish, heh— Laurie Barr, Vernal, Jia—more than one of Jia, in fact. Several of Jia.

Including a nude.

Her already cold blood turned even colder. Had he been—had he been having an affair with the girl? How fucking sick
was
this guy, and how the fuck had he managed to get hired by the Church, stay employed with them?

But then, they let her stay, didn’t they, and enough filth and sickness and slime hid behind her eyes for an army. So she guessed she couldn’t judge them too harshly for that.

She could raise her eyebrows higher when she thought of Chelsea Mueller, though, and the relationship he had with her. Perhaps they weren’t lovers, or maybe he’d been carrying on with both of them? Wasn’t like that couldn’t possibly happen. Lex had almost certainly been seeing someone else while he was seeing her—if “seeing” was really the proper term for what she’d been doing with Lex—and for all she knew … No. Terrible hadn’t been seeing anyone else. How would he have found the time?

Not even that. He wouldn’t have. She knew he wouldn’t.

An itch on her cheek made her swipe at it; swiping at it made her realize tears were pouring down her face. Great. Sure, easy for Elder Griffin to say apologize, call him. Like she could do that, like she could just—sooner or later he was going to run out of forgiveness for her. Sooner or later he was going to get sick of dealing with her, was going to realize sleeping with her wasn’t worth the trouble of putting up with her.

If he hadn’t already, which he probably had, given what they’d fought about and that he hadn’t called her.

She scrubbed at her face with her sleeve, blinked until the room came back into focus. Naked double bed, the
sheets and blankets nowhere to be seen. A dresser with half the drawers hanging open, empty. A desk— Ha!

A desk with papers inside, and files. She grabbed them, lifted them from the drawer.

Her phone rang. Shit, who was calling her? She set the papers down and hunted for it, not looking away from the pages as she tried to shuffle through them. Maybe Chelsea’s file would be there. Not likely, but she could still hope.

“Cesaria!” Elder Griffin’s voice, shouting over the ringing of her phone. Shouting with the kind of panic she’d never heard him display, and as she started to turn toward it she realized what and why, realized it was too late.

Aros had set a trap. A trap like the rune on the door of that apartment in Downside, but this one was live, and a wave of thick black power, sharp and cruel as razor blades, roared through the small cottage. Right at her.

Chess hit the floor, knowing it wouldn’t help but trying it anyway. The papers crumpled in her fist as she grabbed her bag with her other hand and ran toward the sound of Elder Griffin’s voice.

With no idea what spell she faced, countering it would be difficult. And by “difficult,” she meant practically fucking impossible. But the one thing she had going for her was that no matter how evil and dark Aros’s magic had gotten, it still had that methodical feel, still had that
Church
feel, and Church magic was magic she knew, magic she could counter.

Not to mention that she had Elder Griffin there. He didn’t have a bag full of supplies like she did, but he was an Elder, and a powerful one.

She met him just inside the living room. He stood in front of her while she dropped the papers and started yanking things from her bag. Iron filings, ajenjible, asafetida of course—not that it would be all that useful here, without a ghost, but still—goat’s blood, cobwebs, dragon’s blood, coffin nails, sapodilla seeds … damn it, what else, she could have sworn she’d just stocked up on some anti-hexing supplies at Edsel’s. Okay, she had
some arrowroot and vervain as well. Not much to work with.

Elder Griffin glanced down, approval in his eyes. At least she thought that’s what it was. It was hard to tell, getting hard to see. Hard to breathe. The hex, the curse, whatever it was, had started draining her energy, draining her power, and with every passing second she grew weaker and it grew stronger.

Elder Griffin stumbled; it was affecting him, too. He reached out to brace himself on the desk. To her horror, Chess saw blood seeping from beneath his fingernails.

First things first. The walls wavered, the papers on them flapping and moving in the magic-stirred air. Chess grabbed a handful of iron filings, tossed them at Elder Griffin, tossed them into the air over her head. Her voice didn’t want to project, but she managed to croak out a few words of power anyway.

That felt a bit better, but not enough. Aros had booby-trapped that place good.

Elder Griffin knelt beside her, started going through the items she’d laid out. His voice was barely audible over the roaring in her ears. “I touched the wall, and it—it began.”

She nodded, intrigued despite her fear and anger. Not a threshold spell, then, an actual interior spell. Very difficult to do, and the sort of thing that verged on—well, that tipped over the verge of—paranoia. And spoke of a very solitary life, because the odds of a random visitor setting it off was too great, it was too hard to turn off if someone did come over.

She and Elder Griffin gathered up her supplies and walked back into the living room. With every slow careful step she felt her heart beat faster, harder. With every step she felt her legs grow weaker, until she rocked sideways and brushed her hand against the wall. Magic screamed up her arm, furious and violent; thin red lines
like paper cuts appeared on her fingertips, and she braced herself for the pain.

And pain it was. The second her blood hit the air, the spell throbbed; she felt it suck at her like a vacuum cleaner.

But they were almost at the door. Chess worked the cap on the goat’s blood, filled her palm with sapodilla seeds. Elder Griffin had the ajenjible and spiderwebs. Another few steps and they could do something about it, surely they could—

Smoke. The smell of smoke hit her nose at the same time that she saw the orange glow start dancing on the wall before her, saw their shadows against it. Oh, fuck, the files. Couldn’t something just go fucking right? For once?

No. The hex ward had exploded into fire, burning the curtains in Aros’s room, the drawings and pictures on the walls. So tired, she was so fucking tired …

It seemed to take hours to move a foot, back toward where she’d left the papers, and with every second the flames shot higher. Dimly over their hissing voice she heard Elder Griffin yelling; his power hit her skin, a weak echo of what it should have been but still something. She needed to be there to help, shit; she turned around and pushed through the energy again, every step an effort.

The fire spread. She put her hand on his shoulder, caught his glance and started speaking with him.
“Arkharam arkharam, parfakan parfakan, hectarosh …”

The hex-rune practically glowed there on the door, especially as the fire brightened behind her. That fucking cabin was going up like a cord of dried wood in the middle of summer. But then, why wouldn’t it; magical fires always spread faster, especially magical fires fed by the power of two trapped witches.

Chess set the point of the coffin nail in the center
of the rune, glanced at Elder Griffin. He nodded and chanted louder.

Weapons weren’t technically permitted on Church grounds, at least not when carried by Church employees who weren’t supposed to be armed, like her. Whatever. She tugged her knife—her old knife—from her pocket, used it to hammer the nail into the wood, shouting the last anti-hex words along with Elder Griffin.

The power disappeared. The fire did not. Her blood still dripped to the floor but she didn’t care; the cottage would probably burn to the ground and she sure as fuck did care about that, but there wasn’t much she could do.

Shouts from outside made their way through the walls. Of course—they were on Church grounds. It wasn’t Downside, where a fire engine would only come if the building was something like the Slaughterhouse or the Crematorium, or maybe if it was the middle of the day. Any second, the hoses would be set up and water would start pouring on the cottage.

That would destroy pretty much everything in the place, wouldn’t it?

Fuck.

As if on cue it started, thick streams of water hitting the windows, the walls, drumming against the roof. In another couple of seconds someone would bust down the door.

The fire edged so close to those files. Even as she started running, she saw she’d be too late. The sick, heavy feeling of power still sat in the air, clogging it, making her feel she was running through a cold lake. Bright flames ate the floor, ate almost a third of the files.

“Cesaria!”

She ignored him. Those files were important, Aros was a murderer and there might be something valuable in there, an address for Chelsea, something else. She threw herself forward, crashed painfully to the floor.

Her bleeding fingers gripped the burning paper, raised it to slam it against the dull carpet.

Too late.

The door of the cottage burst open; Chess glanced up in time to see a hard plume of water shooting right at her.

It hit her in the chest, pushed her back a few feet. Worse, it ripped the files from her already-slick fingers. Damn it!

The stream moved away from her. She dragged herself to her feet, took a few staggering steps in the direction the files had floated, but she knew it would be pointless. The bedroom already looked like a pool; bits of half-burned paper clung to the bed and the walls, the ink running in mottled streams.

“Cesaria!” Elder Griffin’s voice again. The water stopped. Agnew Doyle burst into the cottage, followed by Dana Wright, a few other employees, Elders Ramos and Jones. With them came a blast of fresh air. She hadn’t realized how smoky the cottage had gotten. Dana grabbed her, hustled her out of the building, with Doyle and Elder Griffin right behind.