Unholy Ghosts

Chapter Thirty

Cool wind blew across her face as she knelt before the lock. Pretty basic, really. Shouldn’t take her more than a minute or so to pick.

What was going to be more difficult were the wards and spells. An itch that had nothing to do with drugs crawled across her skin, made her jaw clench like she’d just chewed a couple of Cepts.

She slipped one of the smallest lockpicks from its case and stuck it into the ridged slot in the bottom of the lock. The mere fact that it was a key lock and not a combination one worried her. Someone from the Church would know how easily those locks could be picked. They must have a lot of confidence in their spells.

“Okay,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder while her gloved fingers worked the pick. Terrible stood with his back to her, watching the empty parking lot. At the sound of her voice he turned his head just enough to acknowledge her.

The lock clicked. Chess snaked the shackle out of the metal hasp in the door. “I’m not sure what they’ve got protecting this place, so…just give me a minute.”

Another short nod.

If the last few days had taught her anything, it was to be prepared, and the trip to Edsel’s had certainly helped. From her bag she pulled sandalwood, benzoin, and two glass jars wrapped in bubble wrap. The larger jar contained an infusion of herbs; the other a mixture of inert salt and her own menstrual blood, which all women in the Church were required to save and share with the men.

Chess would have saved it anyway; the blood was too powerful—potent for both positive and negative spells—to simply discard. She saved her hair, too, the tangles from her brush or the ends after a trim, and burned it to keep anyone else from using it in magic against her. Hair wasn’t like blood; it couldn’t be depersonalized and used as a generic spell ingredient. If someone was doing magic with her hair, they were doing it with her as a specific target, and although it was possible they had positive results in mind, it was far more likely they were trying to harm her. She’d learned early in life to make “cautious” her default setting.

All the same she hoped Terrible wouldn’t ask what it was. It wasn’t simply the personal nature of the blood powder; it was magic itself, the complex system of energy and meaning, the way her own magic differed subtly from that of the next Church employee, and theirs from the next after. One of the most important parts of training was developing one’s own style, finding what energies worked best. It became as personal as a fingerprint in time, identifiable if one knew how to read it; too bad the group nature of the Lamaru magic made it impossible to trace to any one person.

Last she grabbed a half-full bottle of water, in which rested three iron rings, and three stubby black candles.

The late-afternoon sun felt good on her back, but had warmed the pavement a little too much. She sat anyway, wincing slightly as her tender skin scorched through her jeans, and pulled off her boots. “Terrible, I need you to switch your shoes.”

“What?”

“Put your shoes on the wrong feet.”

His broken, scarred face didn’t do “nonplussed” very well, but she caught definite hints of it.

“Footprints are powerful. Magically powerful, I mean, the left one is. If someone’s going to hex you, it’s one of the first things they’ll go for. So if you switch your shoes—”

“Confuses em, aye?” He nodded. “Okay.”

Even just the short moment of shared laughter when they both looked at each other’s feet, now in the wrong shoes as if they were toddlers who’d insisted on dressing themselves, eased a little of the tension in her chest. Her sense that she’d been correct to come out here, correct to connect this place to the Lamaru—of course, what other explanation could there be, for the way Goody Tremmell had tried to bury that invoice—grew with every passing moment. Unfortunately so did her sense of foreboding.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a little broom or something in your car, would you? A brush of some kind? I remembered all this other stuff…Do you have one?”

“Lemme see.” He popped the trunk. Chess wiggled her toes in her now-uncomfortable boots and watched his head disappear into the blackness of the Chevelle’s trunk.

He popped up a minute or two later with a small paintbrush, only an inch and a half wide or so, but good enough, and watched as she used it to thoroughly dust the rough cement lip at the bottom of the door. Her legs ached by the time she was done; she was crouched as far away as she could be, holding her breath so as not to accidentally inhale any dust, if it was there.

“Basic warding,” she said, seeing his expression. “Sprinkle goofer dust or any kind of hexing powder, and people pick it up on their shoes.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, I know. Give me your hands.”

Wearing gloves helped; she didn’t have to feel his bare flesh against hers. All the same, the memory of those hands elsewhere on her body, holding her up, buried in her hair…She swallowed and focused on moving the black chalk over his palms and the back of his hands, made herself casually avoid meeting his eyes when she reached up to draw another sigil on his forehead. He didn’t move during this process, didn’t even blink, focusing his stare somewhere over her shoulder.

Businesslike, she sketched the same patterns on her own hands and forehead, and bent to light the candles. “Saratah saratah…beshikoth beshikoth…” She dumped the herbs and the blood powder in her little firedish and set them alight. “Power to power, these powers bind. Let this power, my power, become pure.”

Energy, invisible but tangible, swirled around her; the energy of the earth and air, the inherent energy of all living things, which the Church taught her to channel. She waved her hand through the smoke, making sure to cover the entire door and Terrible in the fumes. Her skin warmed, but not from whatever hexes had been placed on the door. Her spell was working.

One last thing, a Church-designed anti-hex. Goody Tremmell would surely have used a Church ward to protect her space.

Chess spun counterclockwise, closing her eyes, feeling the energy vortex rising from her toes up into the sky. Her mouth opened; it would be so easy now, not to say the words, to keep letting the power take her, to ride it like any other high. To keep spinning, and spinning, until she didn’t even exist anymore, until she exploded.

But the words came anyway. “Hrentata vasdaru belarium!”

Her spell flew forward at the words. She felt it invade the space behind the door, felt it unlock the hex ward inside the unit. Dizzy, she stumbled sideways, her feet in the wrong shoes unable to find purchase. Terrible caught her then jerked his hands away. She didn’t blame him, wouldn’t have even if it weren’t for what had happened the night before. She could only imagine what it felt like to touch her just then, while her hair still stood on end. A shock for a normal person, but for someone she suspected carried a bit of power himself, not enough to work for the Church but enough to convey some sensitivity…it must have been like trying to grab the business end of a stun gun.

Without waiting for the dizziness to pass, she nodded at him and grabbed the handle jutting from low on the right side of the door. Terrible grabbed the one on the left, and together they rolled the door up.

A blast of malevolence hit her in the face, like the foul breath of an evil giant. Her eyes stung, her throat locked up, her legs shook. It only lasted a few seconds, but when it was done Chess was gasping, hanging on to the brick dividing wall between the storage unit and the one beside it.

No sooner had her breath returned than it left again. Not because of power or magic, but because she saw what waited inside the unit.

Stacks and stacks of junk, boxes full of magic implements and ragged parchments. Against the back wall stood a rack covered with jars and bottles of blood like carbuncles on the rusty shelves. There were herbs, and bones, and rough sketches of every kind of magic symbol she’d ever seen, and some she hadn’t.

She handed Terrible a pair of gloves and together they started sifting through the boxes, working quickly. Chess’s heart refused to slow its pounding; she may have rendered the hexes inactive, but they had not disappeared. She could feel them waiting in the air. One wrong move, one wrong word, would be all it would take to set them again, and they could strike before she knew what happened.

She couldn’t help the sound that burst from her throat when she unrolled a particularly large scroll, though. Tucked in the corner with the air of something temporary, it gave off no energy at all. A Church scroll, specifically rendered inert.

A map of the City of Eternity. Why would they…Pieces clicked into place in her mind.

“Fuck.” Her hands shook as she looked up, finding Terrible across the small room, letting him see the newly found panic in her eyes. “The Festival. That’s what this is about. The Festival. They want to free the ghosts again.”

They stared at each other for a beat, perhaps a moment longer. Terrible opened his mouth, started to move, but at that moment Chess’s ears exploded with sound, a deep loud ringing like she’d plunged headfirst into an impossibly deep pool of water.

She’d said “Festival.” She’d set off the spell.

Tendrils of blackness snaked across her vision, obscuring her view of Terrible’s face going from concerned to confused. Shit. Her tattoos offered her more protection, she could probably fight her way out of even a spell as powerful as this one. But he couldn’t. All he had was what little she’d been able to give him with her chalk, with the smoke she’d smudged him with.

Like swimming, like wading through oil, she moved toward him, her hands outstretched. She opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a high-pitched squeal. Her lips refused to form words. She saw him reaching for her, his eyes clouding over.

Gloved hand met gloved hand. She touched him, felt the heat of him through the layers of latex, and grabbed hold.

She couldn’t speak but she could think, words of power echoing in her head as she tugged him toward the wide open door. The clear air she saw through it seemed miles away but she fought anyway, dragging his reluctant weight, only daring to glance back once to see him stumble and almost fall under the weight of stinking evil.

Her tongue felt thick and heavy in her mouth, rigid as the soles of her boots. When she tried to speak, it fought her, refusing to become pliable enough to form words.

She screamed instead, calling on every bit of power she possessed, turning her panic and horror at the full scope of the Lamaru’s plan into energy, letting it sing from her throat.

It worked. Her feet moved faster, yanking Terrible toward that open door, until finally they reached it. She tumbled out into the bright empty road; Terrible practically fell on top of her, and the storage unit door slammed down behind them.

She shoved some french fries into her mouth and waved the box under his nose, hoping their sodium fragrance would cut through the herbal scent inside the car. They’d rinsed their bare skin thoroughly with her tincture and shared swigs from the iron-ring water; she’d sprinkled pinches of the red salt in their shoes. It was the best she could do to cleanse them and keep them safe at the moment. “You have to eat. I’m not hungry either but really, you have to.”

Finally he consented to take one, eyeing his own burger with distaste. “No wonder you so tiny, if yon magic shit feel like this all the time. First Tyson, now this…Damn, Chess.”

“It doesn’t though. That was particularly nasty. A trap—it would have held us there, fed off of us, if we hadn’t gotten out. You’ll get over it, trust me. You just need to get some food in your stomach.”

That was apparently good enough. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him eat, gaining enthusiasm about halfway through. Good. Sometimes people suffered long-term problems from spells like that. Apparently he was strong enough to overcome them. She was relieved, but not surprised; he’d gotten over what happened at Tyson’s place quickly enough, though that hadn’t been the same type of spell.

“So they after the City? Them Lamaru, meaning.”

Her food turned into a horrid lump in her throat, hot and solid as rage. She forced it down and nodded. “I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before. I guess I was so focused on the Mortons, you know? But Bruce—he’s a Liaiser, you know, he travels to the City and talks to the dead—I heard him the other day saying the spirits were all stirred up, like they were scared or upset or something. And the Grand Elder even mentioned how it takes them a while to calm down after the Festival, but I didn’t even think someone would be going down there, trying to break in….” She had, almost. In the bar, when he’d asked her if the Dreamthief would control the other spirits. If she hadn’t been so fucked up then she might have caught it.

“That’s why they’re using the thief. Some of the other Debunkers have dreamed about him already, see? He can get into dreams, almost anyone’s. He’d eventually become powerful enough to possibly invade even the Elders’ dreams, to draw from them and force them into sleep. Then, once the Lamaru had figured out how to get the City doors open…I think they were down there, last night. Investigating. That’s why there were ghosts on the platform.”

“The spooks wander free, aye, and no Church to do nothing because they all sleeping?”

She nodded. Genius, really. Certainly the most ambitious Lamaru plan she’d heard of—and the most deadly. Thousands of people could die if the spirits were set free like that, all of them swarming out of the earth in silent, bloodthirsty waves, while the Church slept.

Even if none of the Church management were asleep, Banishing the entire City back would be difficult. There was a reason why the Festival was so controlled, why only a set number of ghosts were freed each night. It was too dangerous to have them all out at once. Not to mention how terrifying it would be, how people would lose all faith in the Church if there was a mass breakout in the City just as they’d lost all faith in the old religions during Haunted Week. People were fickle. “And the Lamaru can take over.”

“Shit. Ain’t figure on that as a good thing. Figure they really can? Ain’t people notice, say aught?”

“That’s the problem, though. Nobody would know. It would just look like a mass breakout in the City that the Church couldn’t control. So the Lamaru steps in and handles it, and there you go. No more Church.” She shivered. Those bastards. The Church was her home, the only one she’d ever had. Those utter and complete shithead bastards.

“You want me take you back to the Church? Tell them?”

“I can’t. I still don’t know who’s involved in it, you know? If the plot goes as high as Goody Tremmell, it could be anyone.”

“So we handle it, aye? Send the thief back where he come from, an it all ends?”

“Yeah. I hope so, anyway.”

“Still think we got time to check all out, your place? Like to ask your neighbors there. Oughta not take the chance we miss ought, dig, something snap back at us later. If them Lamaru’s the ones break in, could be they nearby watching.”

“We can’t do the ritual until it’s full dark at least, anyway. We might as well.”

The evening stretched before her like an obstacle course. So many things still to do, so much to prepare… And later still the ritual. The ritual that would either kill her or save her, would either defeat the Dreamthief or defeat her.

For a moment she considered Terrible’s suggestion again. It would be easy to head back to the Church. It might even be easy to bypass Goody Tremmell and head straight for the Grand Elder.

But even if she did, and he listened, what would happen? He hadn’t taken Bruce’s concerns very seriously, and she’d heard his thoughts on the Lamaru before, his utter confidence that they were little more than a band of amateurish thugs.

He might be willing to help, eventually. She might even be able to think of a good reason why she’d been out at Chester Airport to begin with, why she’d found Slipknot’s body.

But in the meantime…while she waited for him to come around, while she waited for help, her soul would still be food. She had enough monkeys on her back, didn’t she? Enough memories to suck all the joy out of her life and crush her under their weight.

Her addiction she shouldered willingly, even eagerly. She refused to do the same with the Dreamthief.