Unholy Magic

Time was the only concern. Helping both Bump and Lex would put enough on her plate as it was. She didn’t have a choice there, and she was beginning to feel certain she didn’t have a choice here, either.

“The bonus offering on this case is a tidy one,” he said finally. “Forty thousand dollars.”

Her car was on its last legs. Her couch sagged. Her jeans were developing holes in the knees. Even with the money she saved getting her pills free from Lex it was hard to make ends meet, hard to afford the pipes and the pills she bought from Bump to keep up appearances and the beer and cigarettes and CDs and…Forty grand bought a lot of time in dreamland.

She nodded. “I’ll take it.”

Chapter Five

The dead do not offer forgiveness. They do not feel. They do not advance or grow. They remain frozen as they were, save for the replacement of love with hate.

—The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 329

Normally she would have gone up to the library to research Pyle’s address and put in a request for his financial records and employment history, but in this case there was no need. The newspaper clipping and blueprints gave her what she needed to figure out the address, and the financials were already there.

Besides, Roger Pyle was famous. So famous even Chess knew who he was. He’d parlayed a clever stand-up act into a TV series, and rumor had it he was about to make the move to the big screen. She’d never watched his show, a spoof of a BT religious order, but she didn’t need the pictures in the file to know what he looked like, that was for sure.

Nor did she need the financial records to know how wealthy he was. Pyle couldn’t be faking a haunting for the money. Even if there were numerous entities in his new house, the most he could hope for would be, what, maybe a couple of hundred thousand? A drop in the bucket for someone like him.

Still, there were other reasons to fake a haunting, and forty grand was a lot of money for her. She needed it, and she needed to prove he was lying.

But first…The image of those empty eye sockets haunted her, the image and the knowledge that this would happen again if she didn’t do something about it. Whether it was a ghost or something else, she didn’t know, but the Church’s extensive library was as good a place as any to start finding out.

Goody Glass squatted behind the desk like a troll on a heath, right down to the malevolent facial expression. With an effort, Chess kept from returning the disdain. Goody Glass had never liked her, not from the first week of training when she’d caught Chess eating crackers—crackers stolen from the kitchens—in the stacks.

A minor crime, but it wasn’t the crime itself for which the Goody held a grudge. It was the way that discovery had led to a deeper, uglier one: that Chess had stolen the food because she wasn’t used to being fed on a regular schedule, that she had no ancestry, no family. A fairly common situation since Haunted Week, but not for Church employees.

The Goody’s thick eyebrows rose over her beady eyes. “Art thou working on a case, Miss Putnam?”

“I am, Goody.” Chess waved the file.

She got no reply, but she didn’t expect one. Instead, the door to her left clicked and she entered the Restricted Room, charmed as always by the displays of religious artifacts from the past, all sitting beneath the bright lights as if waiting, hoping, that one day they might be useful again, be something more than relics.

She knew it shouldn’t, but the benevolent smile of the fat golden Buddha in the corner made her feel safer. She smiled in return and set her file and her bag on one of the long, empty wooden tables.

Beneath the glittering gold cross on the far wall—another symbol of religions past—the Church kept shelves full of magical reference books. Chess knelt in front of them, scanning the titles. Eyes…eyes.

She’d used eyes before in magic, of course, but only as ingredients in other spells. Salamander eyes were sometimes used in poultices to heal energy deficiencies. Raven eyes could be dried and powdered and used in protection spells. But she’d never heard of human eyes being used for anything of the sort, much less being used in sex magic, and she had a feeling the eyes were more than simply spell ingredients anyway.

Finally she grabbed a couple of books and sat down with them. The first was a slim volume on sight magic; she had hopes for it, but it related more to psychic visions and spells for out-of-body investigating. That sort of thing was done by the Black Squad, Church government employees, as opposed to regular Church employees like Chess. They handled crimes mundane and magical, the breaking of legal codes as well as moral, whereas Chess dealt pretty much exclusively with the crime of fake hauntings—“conspiracy to commit spectral fraud,” was the official term—and with banishing the ghosts if they did exist.

The second book offered a little more information. It opened with a quote she’d heard before, about eyes as windows to the soul, and studied that idea from the perspective of magic.

Perhaps that was what the glyph meant, the sigil branded into Daisy’s skin and marked on the wall behind her? Chess pulled out her camera to examine the image from the night before, her mouth instinctively tightening at the sight of that horrible fallen face. She scrolled through the images until she found the one she wanted.

It didn’t look like a face at all, not really. Faces weren’t shaped like triangles. But the symmetry of it suggested it could be a face, or perhaps another body part. Terrible had said that Daisy’s was the first female body found, that not much had been left of the second victim—Little Tag, if she remembered. Was it possible someone was building a new body, a vessel for a lost soul?

Such things were rare, of course. She’d only heard of it happening, had never been faced with such a crime or even the faintest evidence of one. But eyes deteriorated quickly when not frozen; if they were indeed being used to give sight to an earthbound spirit, that spirit’s companion or Bindmate or whatever would need a fresh supply.

More deaths.

She pulled the sleeves of her red sweater over her hands and hugged herself, but the chill slithering up her body had nothing to do with the air in the room. Ghosts didn’t care who they killed; last night’s experience with Annabeth Whitman would have been a sharp reminder of that if she’d needed one. But the ghost’s summoner, the one who kept it earthbound, who fed it energy…

It shouldn’t have surprised her. Didn’t she know better than almost anyone what sort of filth humans were capable of? But it did, every time, a sort of weary, miserable surprise that someone out there had found a new way to create pain.

She flipped through the rest of the book but didn’t find much else, barely enough to fill a page in her notebook. She’d talk to Terrible about it later, he might have some ideas, might know more that would help. Probably would, in fact.

With a sigh she reshelved the books and checked the clock at the far end of the room. Almost noon. She’d have to look through the Church’s rune and sigil libraries another time—she already knew she’d never seen the glyph before.

One more place to check. Goody Glass frowned at her as she left the Restricted Room and headed for the long wall of files in the regular library. Chess ignored her.

The files contained—or were supposed to contain, as almost everyone forgot to update them half the time—all the information about every haunting or suspected haunting in Triumph City, about every building, every vacant lot.

And the files at the end…those were full of worse things than hauntings. Here lived the executed criminals and those who’d died of natural causes, both before and after Haunted Week. As she’d just discussed with Elder Griffin, murder scenes carried their own resonance; victims often hung around, trapped in the moment of their death, just as murderers often attempted to recreate their crimes.

Whoever the Cryin Man was, he’d be here, if they had any information at all.

The picture she found when she opened the file nearly made her drop the whole thing. As it was, she gasped loud enough for Goody Glass to give her a disapproving frown.

The Cryin Man—aka Charles Remington—had murdered ten prostitutes, all in the area that now covered Downside, back in the early nineteenth century.

And he’d taken their eyes. The photograph on the top of the stack of yellowed documents could have been the one on the memory chip in Chess’s camera, from the ragged, sawing cuts to the ice crystals forming in the coagulated blood. The poor woman.

Fuck. Just what she needed. A murderous ghost, come back for another round. So much for not getting too deeply involved in this one.

Her first glimpse of Pyle’s house—or rather, of the white stone wall surrounding it—did nothing to dispel her concerns or take her mind off the uneasy waiting sensation she’d had ever since she photocopied that file. The wall, broken by a wooden gate, hid the building itself but allowed a glimpse of treetops and the crest of a gray slate roof. Chess pulled up before the gate and rolled down her window, shoving Charles Remington, his victims, and Daisy out of her head. Time to work.

A mechanical voice emanated from a small steel box. “Name and business, please?”

“Cesaria Putnam, from the Church. I’ve come about your haunting.”

The gate glided out of the way and she drove through.

No, money was probably not a concern for Pyle. White walls, interrupted by shining windows, stretched wide across the winter-dead lawn. The house stood between naked trees, branches jutting aggressively like arms trying to hold it back. It might have been graceful, even beautiful, in summer, when the grass was green and the leaves softened the sharp edges. Now it simply stared at her with dozens of blank eyes, daring her to discover its secrets.

Chess followed the curving drive along the front—it seemed to have been designed so those approaching were forced to watch the building for as long as possible, or vice versa—until she reached a gleaming guard shack.

A second guard stepped out, clad in bulky dark-green trousers and a jacket of the same color that turned his shoulders into mountains. Not as big as Terrible, but not far off. A hat turned his features into a generic authoritarian blank, and he carried a clipboard like a weapon.

“Miss Putnam?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

His blue eyes ran over every detail of her face, impersonally, as though she were a sculpture he was going to have to draw from memory later. Finally he gave her a short nod. “Pull your car around there.” His pen stabbed at the air to his left. “Someone will escort you inside.”

“Where—,” she started, but he’d already turned away and encased himself back in his little booth. Warmer in there, she imagined, although for winter it was actually rather balmy outside.

She rolled her window back up and followed the drive farther until it cut back behind a copse of pine trees. There a garage sprawled, large enough for six cars, with a wide blacktop in front of it. Several more guards stood at the edge waiting for her. Was this a private home or a fucking prison? They looked like they were expecting a riot any minute.

For a moment she sat there in her car, feeling a little like she was in a standoff, before turning the key. The engine coughed into death and she opened her door, feeling their eyes on her. She should have bumped up before she arrived; comedowns made her edgy.

“Chessie?”

Her bag fell from her hand as she spun around, into the face of one of the guards. He looked familiar, yes, even under that damned hat, but she couldn’t quite place him…

“Merritt Hale, remember me?” He took off his hat, and the memory snapped into place.

“Merritt? Wow, how are you?”

They shared an awkward moment, unsure if they should hug or kiss or shake hands, and finally settled into a clumsy half-embrace.

“Been a long time, huh?” he asked, his face splitting into the wide, crooked grin she remembered. “Ten years? Nine?”

“About that, yeah.”

“Since you left to study with the Church.” He nodded at her bag. “Guess you made it, huh? I finally got out when I hit seventeen. Well, you remember, they’ll only keep you until then.”

“I remember.” She didn’t want to, but she did. Corey Youth Home, they’d called it, but it wasn’t anything like a home. More like a zoo, but instead of standing and watching the animals they locked you in with them.

Merritt seemed to be thinking the same thing. His blue eyes clouded for a moment, and he put the hat back on to cover his sandy-blond hair. “Anyway, I guess you’re here about the ghosts.”

She nodded. “Have you seen any?”

“I haven’t, but I’m day shift. I know a couple of guys did, or thought they did, anyway. Come on. I’ll escort you in.”

His hand on the small of her back guided her across the blacktop and past the other guards watching with narrowed eyes. Merritt held up a hand. “I know her.”

“Why are they watching like that?”

“Normally they’d search you, make sure you don’t have weapons or anything, you know.”

Chess thought of her knife, tucked into the side pocket of her bag, and of her full pillbox. If she was going to get searched every time she came here…she’d have to be careful.

“What, just my bag, or my person?”

His glance flicked over her entire body, from feet to top of head, while he grinned again. He always had been a hound. And she should know, having given him a try once or twice. There wasn’t much else to do in the Corey Home, and sex was the most valuable currency she’d had.

Still was, if she thought about it, but she didn’t really want to. She wasn’t with Lex for drugs. Technically.

“Everything. Mr. Pyle doesn’t take chances, and neither do we.”

She filed that away for future use. She wouldn’t be spending long hours here, that was for sure, not if she couldn’t bring her Cepts. The last thing she needed was to start itching and getting sick while with a subject.

Merritt led her to what looked like another room attached to the far wall of the garage, with an outside door. It turned out to be a hallway. Fluorescent bulbs cast a garish, shadowless light along its length; it felt like walking through an operating room. She pulled her sunglasses back down.

Merritt smiled. “Mr. Pyle likes bright lights. And with everything going on…”

That was a point in Pyle’s favor, certainly. It was something those who faked hauntings never seemed to think of, people’s almost instinctual desire for light when scared. Odd, but true.

Of course a point in Pyle’s favor was a point against her, but no way was she giving up this early.

Merritt opened the door at the end of the hall and ushered her through to a small, plain room, still blindingly light but empty. He gripped the bright gold doorknob. “Ready?”

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I know I am,” he muttered, but before she could respond he stepped through the doorway, tilting his head to the side to indicate she should follow.

The ceiling rose above her, cresting so far up it was hard to see the ridge. Pale wood beams crisscrossed below it, giving an illusion of intimacy Chess wouldn’t have thought possible.

That bleached wood was echoed in the huge mantel over the fireplace, big enough Chess figured she could almost stand in it, and the chairs and couches with their ivory cushions and pale orange throw pillows. The carpet was the same pale orange. It was a beautiful room, ostentatiously cozy.

In the center of it stood Roger Pyle. He exuded charisma the way Bump oozed sleaze; it felt like he’d physically hit her in the chest with charm, and she fought the reaction. Wouldn’t do to start liking the subjects.

But she couldn’t help liking him a little when he crossed the room with his hand outstretched and an eager, uncertain smile on his face.

“Miss Putnam, is it? Thank you so much for coming. We’re really…we’re really at loose ends here, don’t know what else to do.” He raised a hand to scratch his stubbled chin, and she noticed the bags under his eyes she hadn’t seen when he was smiling.

“I’m here to help any way I can, Mr. Pyle.” They always thanked her for coming at first. Very few of them thanked her later.

“Please, please, call me Roger. And, oh, sit down. Where are my manners—Merritt could you ask one of the maids to get Miss Putnam a drink? Drink, Miss Putnam? What would you like? We have everything, you only have to ask. Snack? There’s plenty of food, all kinds of things, cold meats and chips and shrimp cocktail, it’s all in the kitchen, we can get you anything you like…” He looked around, shoved his hands in his pockets like a guilty child who’d just been caught talking during class and was being made an example of.

Chess took pity on him and pulled her water bottle from her bag. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“Oh, you have a drink. Excellent, excellent. Well, let’s see, where do I start? What do you need to know? Did you look at the file I gave you? I mean, not you, but the Church? I put everything in there, everything I know, and the pictures and everything.”

“I’ve looked at it, Mr.—Roger. It’s very detailed. Before we discuss it, though, we really should get your family in here as well. Are they available? It saves time to talk to all of you together.”

It also made it easier to gauge their reactions and see if they tried to help one another out, but she didn’t mention that.

“Oh, of course, of course. Merritt can you please get Kymmi and Arden? I think Kym’s upstairs trying to get some sleep, and Arden—I don’t know. Maybe the rec room, or something? Her room? She could be watching TV, that’s possible.”

Merritt nodded and left the room, giving Chess a reassuring glance as if he thought she’d be nervous at being alone with Roger.

Nervous wasn’t the word for it, though. A suspicion, one that didn’t surprise her but piqued her curiosity, had already started worming its way into her head. Perhaps most celebrities talked this much. She didn’t much care about them or their lives, but it was difficult to escape the occasional headline or news story or bit of gossip, and she knew most people assumed famous people had incredible egos and talked just for the sake of it.

She didn’t think that was the cause of Roger Pyle’s unexpected loquacity, though. Or nerves. And when he sat down on the polished wood coffee table to face her, she saw she was correct.

Roger Pyle was high as a kite.

His pupils were just black spots the size of dust specks in the famously golden brown of his irises, and they veered around, never quite settling on anything. He rubbed the tips of his thumbs against the balls of his index fingers, back and forth, back and forth, as if he was playing a tiny violin, and she could see his pulse practically jumping out of his neck. He certainly wasn’t lying about having a hard time sleeping. Looking at him, she doubted if he’d be able to sleep in a vat of liquid Dream.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said again, looking up at the ceiling, out the windows, down at his tapping feet. “We’ve only been here three months, you know? Had the place built, moved in…It was our dream house, Kymmi and me. My wife, Kym, I mean, and our daughter, Arden. Well, you’ll meet them when Merritt gets back with them.”

“What made you move here?”

“I do a television show, The Monastery? It’s a comedy.”

“Of course.”

“And there’s been talk of a film. For me, I mean, not for the show, so I wouldn’t need to work so much, so I don’t have to stay in Hollywood. We thought, for Arden…not living there might allow her a more normal upbringing. We wanted to be somewhere less crazy, more wholesome. I told my producer I wanted to set up a studio here, film the show from here.”

She hid her amusement by picking up her bag and getting out her notepad and pen. Was he serious? Triumph City was a cesspit. She’d spent the night before examining a murdered prostitute and watching a fatal gang fight.

Then she caught herself. For men like him, Triumph City was more wholesome. He didn’t live in Downside, he didn’t even live in Cross Town or Northside. The white brick monstrosity he and his wife had built sat outside the city limits, out where the streets and houses grew wider and the range of experience grew narrower. What used to be a bustling suburbia and was just now starting to be rebuilt after Haunted Week had decimated the population and driven everyone into the perceived comfort of semi-communal living.

Just the thought of all that empty land outside the walls of the house made her feel she was being watched, not to mention that sitting in the presence of someone speeding into the next dimension was enough to set her twitching. She gripped her pen more tightly and looked up, hoping to ground herself somehow.

She was being watched. A blond woman whose pert nose was as artificial as the deep lavender of her eyes studied Chess from the doorway. The woman’s hair hung in loose porn-star curls around her shoulders, and the snug ivory dress displayed her swelling bosom and an abdomen Chess imagined she could bounce a quarter off of, but there was nothing sexy about her—no spark of warmth or intimacy, no sense that anything of interest hid behind those startling eyes.

“Kymmi, darling,” Roger began, jumping to his feet, “this is Cesaria Putnam, from the Church, she’s come to take care of—”

“I know who she is.” Kym Pyle gave her husband a look that could cut glass. “And don’t sit on the coffee table, please. I’ve asked you before.”

So much for the loving family. Maybe it wasn’t muscle and silicone beneath that soft jersey dress. Maybe it was steel and microchips.

“Sorry, sorry, sweetness. I forgot.”

Kym ignored him, turning the weight of her disapproval onto Chess. For a second Chess saw herself as this woman must: her dyed-black hair with its Bettie Page bangs, her faded red sweater and black jeans, her dusty down-at-heel boots. Nothing. No one of importance, an urchin, someone with no ancestry to speak of. Never mind that Chess deliberately sought to give that impression when she went on a case. It still stung a little.

Then the moment passed. She wasn’t here for a social visit. She was here to bust someone’s ass for defrauding the Church, and she was damned good at her job.

So she met that bitch-queen stare with one of her own and plastered a smile across her face. “It’s lovely to meet you, Mrs. Pyle. Why don’t you sit down too? I have a lot of questions.”

Kym raised a sculpted eyebrow but said nothing as she placed herself in one of the armchairs, her legs crossed tidily at the ankles.

They sat for a few minutes listening to Roger grind his teeth before Arden Pyle entered. Chess put her at about fourteen, pretty, with grayish eyes and a sullen air. A shapeless blue sweater covered her from neck to midthigh, with blue jeans below, and her bare toenails were painted black. For some reason the sight made Chess smile.

“Okay,” she said, “so why don’t you all tell me when this started. When did you first see the spirit, or the first spirit? Dates, places, whatever you can remember.”

“There’s no point to any of this,” Arden said, her tone belying the sweetness of her round little face.

“Arden dear, now you let Miss Putnam—”

“There’s no point”—Arden glared at her father—“because I know you’re faking it.”

Chapter Six

Not every family situation will be pleasant; not every home is happy. Your job will be to determine whether that displeasure has drifted into dishonesty.

—Careers in the Church: A Guide for Teens, by Praxis Turpin

“Arden!” Kym Pyle’s skin reddened beneath the perfect mask of her makeup. “How dare you say such a thing!”

Roger cast an anxious look in Chess’s general direction—she doubted he would actually be able to focus on anything—and said, “Arden, honey, you know that isn’t true. You’re being very unfair, Mommy and Daddy would never do something like that.”