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Chapter 3

Mrs. Solomon—Margaret Solomon, née Margaret James—stood in her doorway wearing some sort of dashiki-thing, her long rust-colored hair hanging almost to her stomach.

Her feet were bare, her face innocent of make-up. A cloud of sandalwood incense smoke drifted out around her in an annoying hippie fog.

“But we don’t have a ghost,” she said. She started to fold her arms across her rather considerable chest then apparently thought better of it. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time.”

Liar. “I appreciate that. But I’m going to have to come in and investigate anyway.”

“You can’t—”

Chess already had her hand on the paper; as Mrs. Solomon started to speak, she pulled it from the folder she carried and held it out. “This is an Order of Relinquishment, which certifies that I have the right to enter this home anytime, for any reason, with or without your approval.”

Two more sheets. “This is an Order of Non-Culpability, which says anything I may damage in the course of the investigation isn’t my responsibility to repair or replace. And this one is an Order of Domain, which says you must leave these premises at any time I ask and stay away until I permit your return. All of these Orders are subject to my discretion, and failure to obey any of them is grounds for a prison sentence.” Mrs. Solomon examined the papers. Her hand shook ever so slightly, a faint twitch that made Chess’s eyebrows rise. Nervous? Good.

“Now. Will you step aside and allow me to continue my investigation, or do I need to order you out and call the Squad?”

Mrs. Solomon stepped a foot or so to her right. “Come in, Miss…?”

“Putnam. It’s right there on that form. Thank you.” The sandalwood smell got worse when Chess stepped over the threshold onto the woven raffia mat on the floor; patchouli joined in when Mrs. Solomon moved. Ugh. Both of those scents were…well, suspicious, actually. Yes, they were very popular ones among the wheat-germ-and-whole-grain crowd, but they were also strong enough to mask a lot of other scents. If the Solomons had summoned a ghost into their house—and they had, Chess knew they had—they would have used some sort of incense or burned some sort of herbs. For that matter, if they were harboring a ghost they might want or need to keep something burning all or most of the time.

Though why in the hell anyone would want to harbor a ghost Chess had no idea. Why?

Because they liked taunting themselves with death, liked seeing how far they could push it before they actually did die? Because they hated themselves and wanted to die but couldn’t bring themselves to—

The thoughts stopped there. Ghosts and drugs were not the same thing.

Right?

“My husband isn’t home at the moment.” Nerves were obviously getting the better of Mrs. Solomon. The Orders Chess had given her still shook in her hands; when she changed her grip she left soft damp spots where her fingers had been. “He’s at the store.

He owns a store—Earth’s Blessings? Organic foods, farmed sustainably? You know, people say we don’t need to worry about the environment anymore because the population is so much smaller, but they’re so wrong, it’s still incredibly important, don’t you think?”

“Sure.” Whatever. The rat skull and spine were gone, Chess noticed. Damn, she would have liked to touch the piece, to see if it had been used recently in a Summoning. She still could, but that would require either asking about it or conducting a full search with Mrs. Solomon standing there, which she didn’t want to do. Better to come back that night with her Hand of Glory to put the Solomons into enchanted sleep so she could do a really thorough search. Without having to listen to Mrs. Solomon babble, barely pausing.

“…And people are really starting to catch on, I think, one day we’ll convince everyone, we just have to raise our voices together in joy, you know, and make sure people know how beautiful life can be if they just let it.” Chess resisted the urge to roll her eyes and headed for the window on the far wall, the one visible from the Brents’ landing. Sure enough, a thin layer of salt covered the sill.

Salt, and a few runes scratched into the wood. The window at the front of the room facing the street was similarly covered. Chess reached out, let her hand rest just over them to feel the faint tickle of energy on her skin.

“Isn’t it something, that stuff on the sills? It was like that when we moved in, we have no idea where it came from, but Doug—that’s my husband, Doug—said they were probably protections of some kind, and we poured salt on them to neutralize them just them case.”

Another lie. Was the woman really so naïve that she didn’t realize Chess knew she and her husband were the house’s first residents ever?

“Why didn’t you call the Church?”

“I’m sorry?”

Yeah, sure she was. Chess looked up, met Mrs. Solomon’s earnest brown eyes. “Why didn’t you call the Church? When you found the runes here, I mean. Someone would have come out and helped you.”

“Oh. Oh, right, well, we just didn’t think of it, we didn’t want to bother anyone, you know, it didn’t seem important, really.”

She didn’t ask if they were in fact important, or what they meant, or even if Chess recognized them. Chess hadn’t expected her to.

Next they wandered into the kitchen, decorated in a horrible mustardy color with brightly painted clay masks and woven baskets dotting the walls. Magic in the room, definitely. If Chess hadn’t felt it sliding under her clothes, reaching out to tickle the back of her neck, the louder, more frantic tone of Mrs. Solomon’s voice would have told her: “You know, we don’t know anything about those things, we just want to live our lives, you know, and give something back to the earth and society, we want to contribute, that’s what we’re all here for, to learn and to teach.”

“You’ve never had any sort of problems? Discomfort? Prickling feelings on the back of your neck or your arms? Sudden chills? The feeling someone is watching you?”

“No. Nothing like that. We, wouldn’t we know if we had a ghost? And we’d want to report it, wouldn’t we, so we could get a settlement?”

“Some people use ghosts as weapons.” The runes: now that she could see them more clearly she picked out Egam and Bonro. Ghost runes, summoning runes. Spirit home runes, used to bind a spirit to a particular place. Big surprise. “Or to gain power.”

“Why would we want that, we don’t want that, we’re not that kind of people.” Chess just looked at her. What did it feel like to be that innocent, that trusting?

Everyone was that kind of people; it wasn’t even a kind of people, it was just people.

And Mrs. Solomon, for all her “I love everyone, life is beautiful la la la” shit, was no different from anyone else. She obviously wanted something badly enough to break the law, and whatever she wanted was obviously something that benefitted no one but herself. Something that could very well be harmful to everyone else.

Mrs. Solomon followed her through the rest of the house. Three bathrooms, four bedrooms with one acting as an office. A nice place, really, if one was into that sort of thing. Which Chess wasn’t.

The master bedroom was huge, almost as big as Terrible’s warehouse apartment. Nature pictures and a few bright paintings hung on the walls. A satin nightgown in a deep wine color lay shriveled like a discarded snakeskin on the unmade bed; a few vibrators and various other adult toys—at least Chess assumed that was what they were, she’d never seen some of those things before—sat on a shelf next to it.

Well, well. More clothes covered the floor in little clumps. Mostly men’s clothes, button-up shirts and khaki trousers, boxer shorts and boxer briefs, jeans and t-shirts. Average clothes.

So why did something about them bug her?

She didn’t know, and with Mrs. Solomon standing there chattering and blushing harder by the minute she wasn’t going to figure it out. She snapped several pictures to look at later.

Mrs. Solomon had just finished telling her about how love was the most powerful force on earth when sounds drifted up the stairs.

“My husband’s home.” The woman’s bright smile hardly moved as she talked. “So you can meet him, and I’m sure you can see there’s no ghost here, and we can call this whole thing finished.”

Oh, man, this lady was not going to give up, was she? It didn’t change anything, of course. It was just irritating.

Doug Solomon appeared to be a few years older than his wife, with a salt-and-pepper beard and matching hair that reached his shoulders. His tie-dyed t-shirt—ugh—had a slightly stretched collar, and his jeans had holes in the knees. Brown sandals completed the look. Double ugh.

He wasn’t as nervous as his wife. “That bitch next door needs to mind her own business.

It’s because she wants us out of here, you know. We ruin her image of the perfect neighborhood. She didn’t like our parties, she doesn’t like our music, she doesn’t like our clothes or our cars or anything else.”

“Why do you think that is? I mean, can you think of some reason why she dislikes you so much?”

Mrs. Solomon sniffed. “She disapproves of our lifestyle.” Chess looked at them blankly. They stood beside each other against the living room wall like suspects in a lineup, but instead of looking at Chess they looked at each other, reached for each others’ hands. It was almost…well, no, it wasn’t almost. It was. Sweet.

It felt like a private moment, one Chess shouldn’t be seeing, and it made a little spark of pain flare in her chest. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be working or watching the Solomons. She wanted to be with Terrible, wanted to touch him, to have him touch her. It…it actually physically hurt that he wasn’t there.

She’d always thought it would hurt to be in love and not be loved back; that it did hurt, when Terrible wasn’t speaking to her and she thought she’d blown it for good. She hadn’t realized that the pain didn’t come from whether or not the feelings were returned.

The pain came from love itself, and nothing could stop it or keep it at bay.

Nothing except drugs, anyway, and as soon as she got out of there she was going to take some.

“We’re polyamorous,” Mr. Solomon said, breaking her reverie. “Moxie—Margaret, I mean, I call her Moxie sometimes—and I often invite other men to share our bed. We had parties for people like us, who enjoy celebrating their intimacy and love by sharing it with others.”

Chess wasn’t about to comment on the whole idea of “celebrating love,” no matter how many people were involved. “So Mrs. Brent knows you have these sex parties, and that’s why she hates you?”

“They weren’t sex parties.” Mrs. Solomon seemed stronger with her husband present and holding her hand. Some of the tension had left her voice. “They were just parties for people we like, who like us. And if the mood was right and we found ourselves wanting to express ourselves physically, we did.”

“It’s not illegal,” Mr. Solomon cut in. “It’s not adultery if she has my permission and I have hers.”

Even if it were illegal, Chess wouldn’t give a shit. Not her department. Besides, the Solomons were facing a much tougher charge. Adultery was a day in the stocks outside the Church, assuming a betrayed spouse wanted to press charges; summoning a ghost was a death sentence.

“Why did you stop having them? The parties, I mean.” The Solomons glanced at each other; Mr. Solomon spoke up. “We’ve just been busy lately, is all, and tired. But we will have them again. We’re not going to let that nosy bitch keep us from living our lives. What we do is none of her business, and we believe in spreading love around, that it’s positive and right to spread love around, and we’ll keep doing it.”

Mrs. Solomon leaned closer to her husband, rested her head on his shoulder. “If it’s never happened to you, you don’t know. The…the energy we can raise together, the joy we fill the room with…it’s beautiful.”

Mr. Solomon twitched. Not a big twitch, nothing Chess would have noticed had she not been specifically looking for it. But a twitch was a twitch, and Mrs. Solomon had mentioned raising energy, and now Chess knew how they were summoning ghosts. She just didn’t know why.

Speaking of twitching… It was time to go. She had some pills in her bag with her name on them.

She stood up. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time this afternoon. You’ll probably hear from me at some point in the next few days, so don’t leave town or spend the night elsewhere or anything until further notice.”

“We have a vacation home in Crestview,” Mr. Solomon said. “We were planning on taking a long weekend—”

“Sorry. You need to stay here until my investigation is complete. I’ll try to finish it as quickly as possible.”

Not that it mattered. When she finished her investigation the Solomons would go to prison and then to the City of Eternity below the earth where the dead lived forever.

Where humanity was safe from them, because a ghost aboveground was a fucking killing machine, and the Solomons were putting thousands of lives at risk.

One last thing. Chess stopped at the door, held out her hand. “Thanks again, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon. I’ll be in touch.”

Mrs. Solomon shook first. Energy, yes, but not particularly strong or powerful. It was definitely in the air, in the house, but that was only to be expected. Especially since the woman was so open. She had no protections, no “psychic armor” for lack of a better term, to keep her energy inside and away from people. A born victim, really. Just a twist of fate had led her to being a villain instead.

Mr. Solomon was different. His hand touched Chess’s, and energy shot up her arm and made her tattoos vibrate. She glanced up at him just in time to see a flash of silver disappear from his eyes.

Mr. Solomon was Hosting.