City of Ghosts

Chapter Twenty-seven

Lauren’s red sports car lay in wait across the street from her building, a big shiny reprimand that Chess hadn’t called her that day.

And she should have, she really should have. After what Lauren had been through the night before it was really inexcusable; she wasn’t exactly a Lauren fan, but she should have called to check on her. Score one major insensitivity point for Chess.

“Shit,” she said, breaking the silence. And it had been silent, the entire drive back; with the Supersuckers playing through the speakers, but without a single word exchanged between herself and Terrible. “Just what I—Oh, shit, stop!”

He did, so suddenly and effectively that only the seatbelt kept her from hitting the dash. “What?”

“That’s Lauren’s—She can’t see you. She can’t see your car. Quick, back up or something.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“The other night, in the lot. She asked me about you and I told her I didn’t know you, she saw your car, if she sees you she’ll know I—”

The car raced backward, slid against the curb neatly as a magnet attaching itself to a refrigerator door.

“Thanks. I just—”

“I dig it. Don’t want her knowin you know me. Gave her the lie.”

“But—” No, he couldn’t be thinking that, could he? “Only because I didn’t want to drag you into it, I mean, she thought you were involved, you know? Wanted to question you. And I didn’t think you’d want that.”

He nodded, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Shit.

“I don’t know if you want to call me later or something …” She swallowed. “I don’t have your number anymore, I guess. I tried to call you last night but you changed your number.”

Long pause. “Aye.”

She wasn’t quite sure what to say; with every passing second she became more and more convinced that she should be sure, that she should say something, but nothing came to mind. Nothing appropriate, anyway.

“Chess.”

“Yeah?”

He lit a cigarette, leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling. Watched it. “Sorry. True thing.”

“Sorry—why? I mean, because you changed your number, or—”

“You know why. Shit. I ain’t meant to—”

“But you know what? You did. You still did, Terrible, you can’t sit there and tell me you don’t still want—”

“Wanting ain’t fuckin trusting, aye?”

“Right. All those months, and now you can’t trust me just because of one thing, one thing that—”

“One—You got any fuckin thought what you done to me? Any fuckin thought what seein you under that—Fuck. Trusting you, an you lyin every fuckin day.”

“But I didn’t! The only thing I lied about was seeing him—”

“Fucking him. A lot, aye?” His voice dragged sharp icicles across her skin. Her temper roared.

“And who were you fucking? How many? Am I supposed to believe—”

“Weren’t fuckin nobody wanted to see you dead. Not like you. Weren’t playin you a lead-on game, neither, lyin about wanting you, like you lied—”

“But I didn’t lie! I just—I couldn’t handle it, you know—you know this, I told you all this, on the bridge, that I just needed—”

“Ain’t needed time with Lex, aye? Months you with him, an—”

“Because I didn’t fucking care about him!” Shit. That came out too loud; the car itself seemed to shrink away from her voice. “I didn’t and I still don’t, he was a friend that’s all, that’s all it ever was—”

“Oh, aye, you fuck all your friends? Or just the ones look like he—” He snapped his mouth shut, looked away.

Oh. She should have known. And she supposed if she were honest with herself, she had. But she never thought about the way Terrible looked, at least not that way. He hadn’t been ugly to her for months; he’d gone from just being a face she was familiar with to being a face she loved to look at, a face that made her … happy.

Who gave a shit what anyone else saw when they looked at him, when they saw the crooked, many-times-broken nose, or the scars, or the jutting brow or thick jaw and heavy muttonchops? She knew what she saw, and that was all that mattered. Knew what was behind those hard dark eyes, and wanted it more than anything.

She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t aware of his insecurities, the few he had. She knew he was embarrassed by his lack of education, that he was continually and vocally impressed by hers. Knew he thought he wasn’t very smart, despite all evidence to the contrary. That he didn’t see himself as being good for much more than muscle.

But somehow she’d never thought those insecurities were serious, that they applied to her or that he would think … Shit. What a dumbass she was. He’d even told her himself, words whose significance she hadn’t seen at the time: Only reason any dame want a baby off me is money. The night she’d met his daughter, the night she’d kissed him and he’d told her what he really wanted from her. She hadn’t thought much about those words then, but sitting in the car, hearing them in her head again …

How would she feel if she were him and saw her with Lex? Handsome Lex with his perfect features and his clever smile and his arrogance? Some smart fucking Churchwitch she was.

“I don’t care what he looks like,” she said carefully, waiting for another explosion. “I don’t care because I lo—I like the way you look, so much more, I—”

“Fuck.” He flicked his smoke out the window, lit another. “Don’t—ain’t even can trust nothing you say, don’t know why I even botherin to give you the chatter, wasting my fuckin time. You gave me the lies then, you give me em now, lied for months behind my back, and now—”

“And if you didn’t give a shit about me that wouldn’t bother you.” Her throat felt like someone had rammed a steel pipe down it. She had to get out of the car. Had to get out, immediately, before she said or did something else she would regret—another regret to add to a lifetime full of them.

But the words flowed from her mouth anyway, before she could stop them. “If you really, honestly didn’t care about me and didn’t still—then it wouldn’t bother you, you wouldn’t care, you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to me. Yeah, I lied and I shouldn’t have and it was lousy of me and I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you, I never wanted that, and I wish so bad I could take it all back, okay? But we both know which one of us is lying now and it’s not me. So you call me when you want to actually talk to me and not just yell at me or tell me what a shitty person I am. I already … yeah, I already know that, okay?”

She slammed the door on his reply and strode away with her head high, her shoulders set; grateful he could only see her back, that he couldn’t see the tears streaking down her face.

She hadn’t really had a choice when it came to telling Lauren about Maguinness, not after he’d almost burned them both to death and staged a bar brawl in the slaughterhouse parking lot. Finding out if those body parts did indeed belong to members of Maguinness’s family—or rather, confirming that they did—was important. Talking to him was even more important. She hadn’t been able to pull rank with Terrible there, but a Squad member made a difference, and they were so fucking close to a solution.

He could find the Lamaru if they ventured into Downside; he obviously had some kind of connection with them. Maybe a connection they could use. Hell, maybe if the Lamaru knew their enemy was working with the Church, they’d back off. Not likely, but possible.

Maguinness was scary powerful; he’d make a terrifying enemy. She’d sure as fuck clear out if he was after her.

At least that’s what she wanted to do. What she would have done if she hadn’t been who and what she was. Instead she stood at Lauren’s side at two in the morning, hidden by the darkness of broken streetlights at the corner of Ninetieth and Foster, getting ready to break into his place and have a look around.

The meeting at the Church earlier had been short and sweet, her worst fears come to pass. No more psychopomps, not until the Lamaru were caught. She was the only Debunker currently working. The others were on indefinite leave until the problem was solved, until every skull in the Church stores had been tested and cleared.

She’d never realized before how much she counted on her psychopomp, how much she counted on her ability to send ghosts to the City. Without it she felt vulnerable, exposed; her belief in the Church and its magic, which she’d once thought unbreakable, lay in shards around her feet. It felt like she was struggling to save a life already gone, and the Lamaru had done that, and hatred burned hot and strong in her chest.

Her Hand of Glory twitched in her palm. Reading her energy, she assumed; she certainly wasn’t feeling very calm, despite the four Cepts she’d managed to down in the Stop Shop bathroom.

It wasn’t just the rage, or the vague sense that even both of them and their Hands wouldn’t be enough to enchant Maguinness and his family to sleep. Wasn’t the fear of what he might do to them if he caught them. Lauren had a gun; if it came to trouble, they’d blast their way out of there.

It was the memories of earlier that refused to leave her alone. His skin against hers. His voice in her ear. His hair between her fingers, his body under her palms. Sense memory, so strong she almost gasped, overwhelmed her; her muscles clenched.

“What is wrong with you?” Lauren finished loading a fresh clip into her gun and tucked it into the shoulder holster beneath her jacket. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

At least the comment gave all that hot blood somewhere else to go—not that she liked knowing her face was as red as Lauren’s hair. “I’m fine. Just … I really think we ought to call for some backup or something.”

“Why? You said he was a creepy guy with a few creepy kids. Hell, he should be glad we’re here, if he’s really fighting the Lamaru. We can beat them for him and make sure they leave him alone.”

“Yeah, but …” Damn, and damn again, and fuck for good measure. She’d had to downplay her encounter with Maguinness in the retelling, not wanting Lauren to know Terrible had been there—so completely leaving out the physical threat stuff—and especially not wanting her to know how Maguinness had read her Binding marks. That he’d read her, knew who she was, that the case could be compromised. If they booted her off it, she’d have to give the money back.

It hadn’t even come close to occurring to her that Lauren would want to bounce on over to his place that very night without bringing any more of the Squad. Without even calling Elder Griffin first to let him know what was going on. Chess had envisioned a full-on invasion of his disgusting underground charnelhouse, not two women—no matter how skilled or well armed—popping in to ask a few questions.

“But what?”

“I just think it would be a good idea to call someone,” Chess finished. “That’s all.”

“Why, are you scared?”

“Hell, no.” Hell, yes. But she’d rather slit her wrists than admit it, especially to Lauren.

“Do you normally call someone when you enter your subjects’ homes?”

“No.”

“Then we don’t need to now. Come on. I want to get something to eat after this.”

“We already—Never mind.” Apparently Lauren liked to eat a lot. Fine.

Lauren pulled her own Hand out of a little leather case inside her bag and set it on the pavement while she dug out a stub of white candle to place in the palm. Chess already had hers ready to go.

Lauren was being awfully … nice, though, wasn’t she? After what happened the night before and her insistence that Chess become her counselor and very best friend?

Whatever. Wasn’t like Chess could judge how people handled things, especially not while three hundred milligrams of narcotic slid its slow, warm way through her bloodstream and settled false calm over her nerves. Maybe Lauren’s response was normal. Chess’s certainly wasn’t.

They lit their candles in unison, two bright sparks of light on the dark street. “Algha canador metruan,” Chess whispered, and heard the words echoed by Lauren.

She hung back and let Lauren pick the lock on the door. If trouble started she was welcome to be first in line for it.

But no trouble came, and when they slid into the cave Chess understood why.

It was empty.

Maguinness’s energy still waited there, foul and thick around them. The ceiling ropes still hung with their rows of bizarre decoration; the little bed slats still hugged the walls.

But not a single body slept in them. Not a single living being slept anywhere in the cave, at least not that she could see, and when she opened up to the Hand’s magic she found it hadn’t touched anything, hadn’t found a living person to enchant.

He’d known they were coming. Had to have known, unless he simply liked to be out and about at all hours of the night. Which wouldn’t have surprised her, but the idea that he’d taken his entire family with him did.

She knew that wasn’t it anyway. The air of neglect already hung over the place, as if Maguinness had taken something vital from the room itself when he left.

But had he left because she’d been there earlier and he knew she’d be back, or was it because … well, because of something else? Because of war with the Lamaru, or whatever?

“Shit.” Lauren’s shoulders sagged.

Chess tried to hide her relief. Maybe even did a decent job of it. “Come on. We still might find something.”

They split, Chess moving off to the right and Lauren the left. Being in the room, deserted though it was, felt lousy; the power she’d felt earlier had dissipated but it hadn’t disappeared. And every step she took showed her another little bed, another bone or scrap of garbage, another reminder of what had lived here. And worse, that the family was now out on the streets. Who knew what they were doing?

Tied beneath each slat bed was a little charm, a toad bone wrapped in black thread with a piece of mirror dangling from it. Chess reached for one; her skin started crawling before she even touched it.

She fished in her bag for a glove, glanced at Lauren across the room. “What do you think the charms are?”

“Who knows. Not sleep safes or anything like that. Probably just general protection.”

“Yeah, but those are toad bones. Who uses toad bones in general charms? And how did he get so many of them?”

“There are black markets everywhere, Cesaria.” Lauren’s dismissive tone rankled. Chess was looking at more toad charms, which connected in her head with the toad fetish she’d seen earlier, the ones at the murder scene and the slaughterhouse, and the way they’d practically eaten her soul. As she’d told Terrible, toad magic was serious magic; those charms could be anything, for any purpose, and they were strong enough to sting her even through her narcotic haze.

“Hey, Lauren? Maybe you could stop acting like my legitimate questions aren’t worth your time, do you think? How does it not bother you that someone doing whatever it is he’s doing has a supply of toad bones?”

“This isn’t our case, Cesaria. We’re investigating the Lamaru and their psychopomps. When that’s done, maybe we’ll look for this guy—and by ‘we’ I mean the Squad, not you—and find out what he’s doing. But we don’t need to get distracted, and that’s what you’re doing. Focus on the case at hand, please.”

Chess opened her mouth, shut it again. Lauren was right—well, she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. They were only here in hopes of finding some evidence that Chess was correct in thinking the dead bodies had been members of Maguinness’s family and that he was thus at war with the Lamaru.

But then, hadn’t the people who’d attacked Ratchet, who’d been about to destroy the building with that hideous thing still in her bag, been Lamaru?

Maybe. Probably. But Lauren didn’t know about that, and Chess couldn’t tell her; further reflection had failed to show her any possible way to explain what she’d been doing in that building.

At least not outright. “I was thinking, though. If the Lamaru are doing something with psychopomps, they might use toads, right? So if this guy has a steady supply of them, maybe they came to him? Maybe he made some illegal magic for them, and they didn’t pay him or something, and that’s what started the fight?”

Lauren’s sigh carried all the way across the room. “And when we catch the Lamaru, we’ll ask them, and make a case against them. This isn’t one of your Debunking cases, where you can just follow your whimsy wherever it leads. This is a Squad case, and there are protocols to be followed.”

Chess’s hand closed over the charm and snapped the thread holding it, quickly so Lauren couldn’t see. Maybe harder than she needed to; if she didn’t break something she was going to start screaming. “Why the fuck are we here, then, if you don’t care about Maguinness or his connection—”

“We’re here because you made it sound like he might have witnessed something, or like perhaps he’d been victimized. So I thought we’d come in and see if we could get him to talk while he slept, and if we couldn’t we’d wake him up and question him. He’s not here. Fine. So we have a quick look around and we leave. Unlike you, I actually want to solve this case. I’m not Bound, remember? I’m not getting an extra grand a week just for keeping my mouth shut.”

Even her Cepts were barely enough to help keep her voice calm. “I’m trying to solve the case, Lauren. I want it solved just as much as you do, and you know it.”

Lauren shrugged. “Then stop going off on tangents.”

“Fine.”

Fuck Lauren, and fuck her focus. If she didn’t want to listen to Chess, that was her problem, but Chess wasn’t about to give up. There was a connection between Maguinness and the Lamaru, and it was more than the Lamaru picking some of his children to kill or him trying—and succeeding, to some extent—to kill them in return. It had started somewhere. They’d found each other somehow. That both were involving themselves in the same type of magic, or at least in connected magics, could not be a coincidence.

Lauren could do whatever the fuck she wanted. Chess was going to solve the case. She turned back toward the wall, ready to finish her search—the room ended only a few feet away—and caught sight of a shadow, a thin vertical line in the smooth dirt.

The edge of a door. It thrummed with power when she touched it, sent vibrations up her arms, but wasn’t warded or hexed. Wasn’t even locked. Apparently Maguinness felt it was safe enough in his little dwelling.

She’d wondered vaguely why all the beds were so small when Maguinness himself was so tall; here was her answer. His bedroom.

Her Hand twitched a little when she picked it up and used its candle to light her way. The flame danced, sent shadows waving onto the walls. The walls …

Covered in skins. Not all of them were animal.

She took a deep breath. Wasn’t like that was news. Maguinness was a sick fuck; big shock.

A sick fuck who slept on a mattress stuffed with herbs beneath a wire canopy frame of some kind. She assumed it had once held more skins arranged as draperies, but those were gone. By the side of the bed sat a battered wooden table; its surface was covered with dust-free spots where ornaments or candles had rested.

The only other item in the room was a trunk. Not the one he’d taken onstage with him, but a different one, covered in pink silk faded to dusty salmon and radiating black energy like a revving engine.

She glanced back through the open doorway; Lauren had disappeared around a corner. “Lauren!”

“What?”

“I found his bedroom. He’s got a trunk in here you might want to come see.”

She expected the other woman to sigh again, or groan, but she didn’t. Instead her footsteps sounded on the dirt floor and she appeared in the doorway a moment later.

Her face crinkled into a little moue of disgust. “I can feel that thing all the way over here.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t improve when you get closer. Come on.”

“I really think this is a waste of—”

“I know. But we’re here, right? So let’s just take a look anyway.”

The trunk’s lock was a flimsy tin affair; Chess picked it, although she thought one good yank would be enough to break it.

She also thought she must be higher and fuzzier than she felt, because until the lock clicked open it didn’t occur to her to wonder what exactly the trunk was doing there. Why had he left it behind?

Only one way to find out. She tugged up the heavy lid.

Power breathed out of it, power and the sick, rancid stench of death. Both women gasped. Chess’s tattoos heated; her skin crawled. Not just power, not just magic. Ghosts.

She spun around at the same time Lauren did, her hand already finding the zipper slide of her bag. She had graveyard dirt in there, she had—

Nothing. The room was empty.

What the fuck? Nothing else made her feel that way, it had to be … In the trunk.

Not a ghost, though. At the bottom of the trunk, alone and small in the center of the half-rotted boards, lay a thick bundle of what looked like burlap. Chess reached for it with her still-gloved hand, but Lauren was faster.

Her bare skin touched the burlap. Energy flashed through the room, roaring ravenous energy; Chess saw Lauren’s face change, her eyes grow wide, and then—Holy shit, what the hell?

It wasn’t just Lauren’s expression that changed. It was her entire face. Her features. Her hair. For a split second Chess saw another woman beside her, like a double exposure, before Lauren yelped, dropped the bundle from her shaking fingers, and scrambled away from the trunk.

“Are you okay? Your face changed, it—”

“I’m fine.” Lauren huddled against the far wall, her arms wrapped around her waist and her knees drawn up. “I’m fine.”

“You—” No. Unlike you, I actually want to solve this case still rankled, and she doubted Lauren would actually talk to her anyway. More to the point, Chess didn’t want her to.

Instead she grabbed another glove and carefully lifted the thing out of the trunk. Energy sped up her arms even through the latex covering her hands; her vision wavered for a second, curved around the edges like looking through a fisheye lens. Lauren gasped behind her.

“Chess, your face!”

“What?” Setting the bundle down felt good. Too bad it wouldn’t last; she had to untie the dirty string holding it together.

Or, not untie. She pulled her knife from her pocket and cut the thing.

“Your face—it changed, you looked like someone else.”

“So did you, for a second there.”

Lauren said something else, but Chess didn’t pay attention. The edges of the burlap fell open; her heart sank into her stomach when she saw exactly what she suspected she’d see.

Another toad fetish. But this time she knew what it was for; seeing Lauren’s face change, feeling that awful tingling that meant ghost, was more than enough to tell her, bizarre as it was, hard as it was to believe.

Bound with ghosts, powered by whatever the hell was stuffed inside it and whatever the hell Maguinness had slaughtered to create that thick miasmic energy making it hard to breathe, what she was looking at was a glamour so powerful she hadn’t even realized something like it could exist. A glamour that went beyond illusion and into transformation. This was what Maguinness’s daughter had tried to steal back from her, in the Market. Chess had had the parts laid out on Edsel’s counter; the child must have seen them, must have recognized them. That’s why she said she wasn’t stealing. That Lamaru fetish came from Maguinness.

Most glamours only changed the surface; she could see through them, as could any witch. Like the door that led from the Lamaru’s tunnels and into Maguinness’s place—she’d seen it, and Terrible had known something wasn’t right. But this … It didn’t simply hide things, it changed them. Holy shit. She’d never even heard of such a thing.

Her mind ticked through the possibilities, each one more awful than the next. Soul-powered spells even stronger than the one she’d encountered months before with the Dreamthief. Undetectable Hosts; wraiths inside living bodies, the witch’s soul so intimately bound with the ghost that they behaved as one, felt like one entity, and could leave the body at any moment to wander and fly and perform evil.

All right there in front of her. All terrifying. And all the work of a man who might at that moment be anywhere, doing anything, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.