City of Ghosts

Chapter Nineteen

Death waited at the bottom, she knew it. She’d been up too high, there was no way she could survive the fall—

Her back slammed into the pavement. She was dead. She must be dead. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt that bad, her leg screamed but she was—

She wasn’t breathing.

For one long, agonizing moment she stared at the sky while her lungs refused to inflate. Flames poured from the window above her, bits of ash dancing on the wind. She saw it in slow motion, the fire escape black, Lauren’s body a denim spider inching down the ladder at the end. She could not breathe. She could not breathe, this was it … Her psychopomp would come for her, she waited for it, watched the nightbirds circling overhead and wondered which one it was, hoped the horrible ravens hadn’t escaped from the building but knew they might, if they didn’t burn up …

Something gave in her chest, a gear finally snapped into place. Her lungs inflated. Her eyes stung, her mouth opened.

She rolled over, thinking she was going to be sick, but nothing happened. Nothing but the world coming back into focus, the feel of her blood racing through her body and the agony of her burned and cut leg and sore hands and her throat raw from smoke and screams.

Lauren hit the pavement beside her—on her feet, a much more graceful landing than Chess had managed.

Oh, shit. She was lying there ruminating while beside her a burning building was about to collapse and the parking lot was full of Lamaru.

She didn’t need Lauren’s rough hand to get her up. She did need it to hold her steady; for a moment the world veered crazily around her.

She was moving before it righted itself, a hesitant, stumbling run that jarred her knees. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the crowd breaking up, turning toward her and Lauren.

Her ears were ringing. At first she thought it was from her fall, but as hands brushed her arms she realized it wasn’t ringing, it was sirens, and her body flooded with relief as red lights swirled against the surrounding buildings and caught Lauren in their strobe effect.

The fire trucks had arrived.

The Lamaru—and Maguinness’s people—shouted and ran around her, ignoring her now in their haste to escape. Firemen were Church employees, and they never traveled into Downside alone—well, they hardly ever traveled into Downside, period, but when they did they brought with them a full Squad. Clearly the Lamaru didn’t want to stick around to tell the Squad how someone had interrupted their illegal psychopomp party.

Behind her, steel groaned, the sound tearing the air and shooting straight up her spine. Every step was agony. Everything hurt. Her chest felt ready to explode, her smoke-choked lungs wanted to die. But if she didn’t haul her ass out of there immediately it was going to burn right off, and she hadn’t escaped from that fucking building just to be crushed by it when it collapsed.

They hit the bushes and turned, heading for the main gates. No need for stealth now, and they needed to wave down the arriving Squad members and inform them of the ghosts and the three psychopomps still in the building.

On the other side of the fence—the street side—Chess caught a glimpse of a tall, shaggy form that could only be Maguinness, strolling along with his hands in his pockets like an innocent freak just out for a casual jaunt. She’d been right, then. It had been him; was him.

Bastard. She didn’t give a fuck about him trying to kill the Lamaru; hell, she’d give him a hand if she could—and if he wasn’t such a bizarre ball of criminal awful.

But he’d bombed that building with her inside it, just as she was about to catch the Lamaru and earn herself fifty grand. Fifty grand and the chance to be done with Lauren for good. So fuck him.

As if he felt her eyes on him, read her thoughts, Maguinness stopped and turned around. Even at that distance she could see him smiling.

“I just don’t get it,” Lauren said again. Her sports car, dusty but none the worse for wear, idled on the street outside Chess’s building. Dirty baby wipes filled the interior; between them they’d used almost a whole pack trying to tidy themselves up.

Chess shook her water bottle over her open mouth, desperate for the last drops. Her throat felt like she’d been sucking tailpipes and she did not want to talk. Not now. Not tonight. She wanted to go upstairs and swallow her entire pillbox, wanted to trudge to the corner store and buy a tub of ice cream and eat it on her couch while watching mindless television. Oliver Fletcher, the bastard, had sent her an entire box of his intellectually vacant TV shows on disk; she hadn’t done more than glance at it, but tonight she couldn’t imagine anything better.

Well, no. That wasn’t entirely true. She could imagine a few things better, but only one of them was feasible, and even she didn’t think the pipe room was a good idea with her throat the way it was. Damn it, she’d been looking forward to that all day.

“I don’t either,” she managed. Her voice creaked. “But what difference does it make? Either they somehow got into your bag—when they slashed your tires, maybe—or they’ve managed to cast some kind of spell over—No, wait. They had some kind of fetish, in the psychopomp room. Maybe it infected your ravens.”

“I can’t see how they’d be able to make anything that powerful. But then I guess they are pretty … pretty strong …” Lauren sighed. Sighed again.

And again. Chess glanced at her, her thoughts running fairly solidly along what-the-fuck lines, and then she saw with horror that Lauren was crying.

Oh, shit. What was she supposed to do?

She reached a hesitant hand over, rested it lightly on Lauren’s shoulder. “Hey … um, are you …”

Stupid question. People didn’t cry because they were okay. Even Chess knew that. Hell, she knew that better than anyone, didn’t she?

“How did you get over it?”

“What?”

Lauren looked at her, her eyes gleaming in her sooty face. “How did you get over it? Having them—having them do things to you?”

Oh, fuck. Sore throat or not, she was getting her ass to the pipe room the second she managed to extricate herself from the car. She knew what Lauren was talking about. Knew she’d been right when she wondered if Lauren had managed to fight off her own attackers. Knew she hadn’t.

And apparently—obviously—Lauren knew things, too. Things about her. The bitch, the total fucking—She’d read Chess’s file. Not just her regular file, her confidential file. The one with the results of her medical tests, the ones that showed how she didn’t need the birth control implant given to female Church employees in active jobs because her body was as barren and inhospitable as the world around her.

The file that said why that was the case. The results of the single discussion she’d had about it with Elder Banks years ago.

Elder Griffin … He’d probably read it, too. That’s how he knew, the night before in that horrible purple circle. That’s how he’d known how to help her.

And he’d never told her. No one had ever told her. Did they all know? Did they all watch her walk past and see dirty fingerprints on her body? Did they see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice?

Her head throbbed, fury boiling up her throat and into her brain, loaded with bile from her stomach twisting and leaping in her belly. They all knew, they all knew …

“You just do,” she said finally. Gave Lauren the lie, because she couldn’t bear giving her the truth. Because she didn’t think Lauren needed the truth. “You just move on, and you stop thinking about it because you don’t let yourself think about it.”

“I can’t stop.” No wonder Lauren’s nails were so short; while Chess watched she ripped a hangnail so viciously with her teeth that blood welled from the cuticle, a perfect red teardrop on her pale skin. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Yeah, it just happened, I mean … Why don’t you talk to someone, you know, maybe your father or someone can—”

“I thought I was talking to someone. You.”

“But I’m not—I’m not really, I mean, I don’t think you’ll be really comfortable talking about this with me, right?”

Lauren was a pretty girl—a pretty woman. She didn’t look it now, with her jaw set and her eyes narrowed and her skin dark and still smudgy. Jagged streaks of pale ran down from her eyes. “I think you’re the one who isn’t comfortable with it, Cesaria.”

What the fuck did she want? Some kind of fucking encounter group or something? Empowering chants by candlelight? She could get that shit somewhere else. Chess only lit candles when bright light was too much for her narced-out pupils.

Lauren was imposing on her. Maybe it was wrong to feel that way, not supportive or whatever, but that’s how it felt: as though Lauren was pressing sticky little hands all over her, trying to pull off bits of her skin and see what was beneath it.

And despite the other woman’s tears, which seemed real enough, Chess couldn’t get past the idea that Lauren’s eyes were fixed on her, that she was being viewed through a microscope. Whether that was because Lauren thought she’d somehow Triumphed Over Her Past or because she wanted to make Chess uncomfortable or simply because she was at heart a creepy fuck, Chess had no idea, and at that point it wouldn’t have been possible for her to care less. All she wanted to do was go home, clean and dress her wounds, change her smoke-stinking clothes, and get high. Sobriety was not a fucking option.

“I’m not uncomfortable,” she said. A cough fought to free itself from her throat, but she refused to let it. She didn’t need to show any sign of weakness. “I just don’t think I’ll be very good at helping you. I think there are people better qualified than me. It happened a long time ago. I don’t remember it very well, I mean, I don’t think about it anymore. That’s all. I just think if you go—You should go to the hospital, right? Let them do their tests, and they’ll set you up with someone. You know the program.”

“Right. And let everyone I work with know what happened. That I couldn’t defend myself.”

“There were like a dozen of them, you couldn’t—”

“You did.”

“I only had one of them there. You could have beaten one of them, too.” At least so she assumed. She had no idea if she was right about how many men had attacked Lauren, but Lauren didn’t contradict her, so she wasn’t going to worry about it.

“Whatever.”

Okay … was that enough? Could she go now, or—No. Damn it. “Look,” she said, and put her hand back on Lauren’s shoulder. “You have two choices now, right? You can let this eat at you because you’re too ashamed or scared or whatever to get help—if that’s what you need—or you can try to move past it on your own. And that’s different for everybody. What worked for me might not work for you, and that’s why I can’t really advise you, okay? Just … I’d go to the hospital if I were you. That’s what I would do.”

That was such a fucking lie.

“But you have to do what you think is best. It’s not like, if you don’t do something about it right this second, you’ll never have the chance, you know?”

Shit, had she really said that? That actually sounded kind of wise. Or maybe not. How the hell would she know?

But it was amazing what kind of motivator it was, knowing that all she had to do was get rid of this woman—this woman with whom she felt she’d spent years at this point—and she could be alone. Blessedly alone, and blessedly close to unconsciousness.

Lauren nodded. Yes! “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just feel, I don’t know … so dirty. Like it was my fault. Like I did something to make them want to do it, like I should have been able to defend myself.”

Just like that, Chess’s triumph evaporated. Fuck. She was never going to get out of that car, and to make matters worse she felt that wound, all those old wounds, rip back open at Lauren’s words.

“There is no ‘should have.’” For the first time since this conversation had begun, she knew exactly what she was talking about. “There just isn’t. What happened happened. You can’t change it now; it’s done and you can’t ever go back. So now you just have to move on. However you can.”

It seemed to strike a chord with Lauren; Chess wasn’t sure if she was glad of that or not. Her freedom from that car was worth just about any price, but she hadn’t counted on having to pay with truth. That sucked.

“Thanks, Cesaria. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

They made tentative plans for the next day; as it was two days before Elder Murray’s Dedication, neither could be certain what it might bring and how much time they might have. The entire discussion had lasted much longer than Chess would have liked, but then, the entire endless day had lasted much longer than she would have liked, so what was a few more minutes?

She finally bounded out of the car. Her wounded leg reminded her not to run but fuck, it was tempting. She unlocked the tall wooden door, crossed the tiled lobby that had once been the nave. Pushed herself up the stairs as fast as she could, her keys in one hand, her pillbox already in the other. The second she got inside and closed that door behind her—

Or not.

Lex waited outside her apartment, his long lean frame slouched negligently against the doorjamb. “Hey, Tulip,” he said. “Where you been at?”