Unholy Magic

Arden’s pretty little face scrunched itself into a glower. “Give me a break.”

“Miss Putnam, I assure you we’re not doing anything of the kind. Our daughter has a very active imagination.”

Maybe, maybe not, Chess thought. She’d have to make sure she got a chance to talk to Arden Pyle alone at some point. Not today—they’d be watching her too closely—but at some point. “That’s okay, Roger. Let’s just get back to the question, shall we? When did you first see the entity?”

“This is bullshit,” Arden said. Chess steeled herself for more delaying on the part of her parents, but neither reacted.

Instead, Kym spoke up. “I was in my work room. Embroidery. I’m putting our family tree on a tapestry for that wall.” She nodded to indicate the wall behind Chess, who didn’t turn around.

“I was just finishing my great-grandmother’s name when I realized it was quite cold, despite my sweater. So I got up, planning to call one of the staff members to turn up the heat, and…” Her hands clenched in her lap. “It was a woman. She looked terrified, and I spun around to see if something was behind me, but nothing was. When I turned back around to ask her what she was looking at—I thought maybe she was one of the staff—she was gone.”

“I saw a man,” Roger said. “In one of the guest rooms. I’d gone in there to check and see if we needed anything—we were having some friends stay that weekend—”

Arden snorted.

He ignored her. “—and I thought I’d check the bathroom of the room they’d be staying in, make sure we had shampoo and toothpaste, you know, the things people need. I didn’t see him so much as glimpse him, standing in front of the window—I think it was a man, anyway, taller and broader than a woman—but by the time I realized it wasn’t one of the staff, he’d disappeared.”

“Did you feel anything? Cold, nerves, fear, anything unusual?” Not everyone did, but then not everyone knew that.

“No. Like I said, I assumed he was staff, waiting for me, or taking a few minutes for himself. I don’t mind if they do that, as long as everything is done…” He caught Kym’s disapproving eye. “Well, I don’t. I thought it was odd he didn’t respond when I said hello, and then he just…poof, gone.”

“This happened during the day?”

“Technically, I guess. It was about five in the afternoon. But it gets dark so early now.” He shuddered. “The nights are so long.”

“And the sightings have grown more threatening since?”

Both Pyles nodded. Arden stayed as she was, with her arms folded and a bored look on her face.

“We were attacked in our sleep two weeks ago,” Roger said. “Kymmi was injured. It’s gotten worse since. We don’t shower alone. We don’t go anywhere alone at night, anywhere in the house.”

Chess shuffled through the stack of photographs balanced in her lap until she found the one she wanted. She assumed it was Kym; the image was of a woman’s toned back, covered in long shallow scratches. She held it up. “This was your injury, Mrs. Pyle?”

“Yes. The marks are still there.”

“Show her, Mom.” Arden turned to Chess. “My mom likes to show people her body, don’t you, Mom?”

Kym looked as if she wanted to slap the girl, but she kept her composure. “Do you need to see them, Miss Putnam?”

“If you don’t mind, that would be helpful.”

Kym rose from her seat and turned around, crossing her arms in front of her to grip the hem of her dress. Chess opened her mouth to speak—she hadn’t meant for the woman to do this in front of her child—but it was too late. The dress slipped up, displaying Kym’s silky thong and the lean expanse of her back, interrupted by a bra strap in matching pink.

Trying to behave as if this weren’t creepily inappropriate, Chess stood up to look closer. The scratches had faded. No longer the angry, puffy wounds in the picture, they were thin and scabbed over. “This happened two weeks ago?”

“They didn’t want to heal,” Roger said. “We tried everything. They’ve only just started to get better.”

“Actibac?” Chess asked, unable to resist.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“We get injured a lot, so we keep up on stuff like that.” She resumed her seat, hoping Kym would get the hint and lower her dress, but it took a good thirty seconds before the woman finally let the thin fabric slide back down over her body.

“See, I wish I’d known that, we could have just called the Church and asked them, wouldn’t that have been good, Kymmi?”

Kym gave him a tight smile, but her gaze stayed focused on Chess.

If that bitch thought she could make Chess uncomfortable, she was wrong. Chess allowed herself a tiny eye roll as she looked away and grabbed her Spectrometer. “Okay, why don’t you give me a tour of the house? Show me where the sightings and attacks have taken place? We’ll see what we can find.”

The Church operated a few living museums for the benefit of its employees; Chess especially liked the synagogue one, with instructors wearing those little hats they used to call yarmulkes. The Pyle home reminded her of one of those museums, as intensely and carefully decorated as the living room she’d already been in, and as impersonal.

They trooped up the graceful, winding staircase into a long hall. Windows at each end were blank white holes covered with blinds. Any light they might have let in was rendered useless by the bright electric bulbs at short intervals down the hall’s length. It must have cost a fortune to keep all those bulbs burning.

Ten rooms, including the master suite, Arden’s room, a computer room, library, and separate spa. The rest were guest bedrooms, unique only in their nondescript colors.

Chess’s Spectrometer gave off the occasional blip as she followed the Pyles through each guest room and bathroom, but not frequent or strong enough to give her any information. She took careful note of the layout. If the Pyles weren’t sleeping at night, it would be next to impossible to sneak in after dark and use her Hand of Glory to deepen their sleep so she could investigate. Of course, with all that security, paying an afterdark visit would be difficult whether the Pyles slept or not. She had a feeling their security didn’t. Maybe Merritt…?

No. Even if it were the sort of thing she could ask, she couldn’t ask. Trusting him would be foolish. A year or so of shared history didn’t make them friends.

“Roger,” she asked, interrupting him in the middle of showing her where he’d seen the ghost of a young man coming out of one of the bathrooms, “do you know where the boundaries of the original house stood? The one where the murders took place?”

“As far as we can tell—the foundation had been filled in and the walls demolished before we bought the land—the north walls aligned where our bedroom is. But from the measurement estimates we got from the surveyor, that house ended just after this room.” He indicated the doorway. “We haven’t seen any ghosts in that part of the house, not yet, anyway.”

“Have you been sleeping there?”

The Pyles exchanged glances—even Arden, who hadn’t spoken a word throughout the tour.

“We just haven’t been sleeping at night,” Kym said. “In any of the rooms.”

“Arden stays with a friend some nights,” Roger added. “And Kym and I stay in the living room.”

Chess nodded. She could probably use a warding spell to keep them off the top floor while she investigated up there, but it would make things more difficult. If she could even figure out a way in.

They headed back up the hall toward the master suite, the last room on the right. Chess had expected grandeur. She hadn’t expected the bed to be quite so bargelike, a slab of mattress covered with silk sheets. She definitely hadn’t expected to see hanging over it an enormous painting of a naked Kym. Was this what Arden meant when she said her mother liked to show off her body?

She certainly seemed to be enjoying it. Lying on her side on what looked like a fur rug—how original—with one hand demurely not quite covering the pale curls between her legs and the other thrown back behind her head. A lovely piece of work, Chess had to admit, but still…No wonder Arden was so grumpy, having to compare her own developing figure to the best body money could buy.

That was one problem she herself hadn’t had to deal with. Of course, in her case it would have been an improvement to be worried about how she measured up to the naked women she saw, rather than worrying about what they planned to do to her or make her do to them that time, but…

“The night you were attacked in here,” she said, “what exactly happened?”

“It was dark.” Roger looked as though he might have been coming down a bit; his eyes weren’t quite so glassy. “I don’t remember falling asleep or even waking up. Just…just hearing it, movements in the room, and Kymmi screaming, and I couldn’t seem to feel my hands…and it laughed and screamed.” His eyelids fluttered, blinking back tears. Chess reminded herself the man was a professional actor. “It was terrible.”

Kym herself was silent. Chess made a mental note to search for her private financial records. The file contained statements from several accounts, but they were all joint accounts. If Kym was looking for a good way to end the marriage and get as much money as she could, faking a haunting could be an effective, if roundabout and chancy, way to do it.

It was also a very public way, one that could end Roger Pyle’s career.

She studied the rest of the room in a slow, careful sweep while the Spectrometer beeped quietly from its new holster around her waist. Two dressers, two bedside tables with ornate handles on the bottom doors. Everything in the room had a twin, a mirror image of itself. How imaginative of Kym. If she hadn’t married whom she married, Chess thought, she probably would have been one of those women who hung plaster ducks on the walls and collected painted plates.

The Spectrometer found a steady beat while Chess paced the floor, speeding up by the bed, slowing down by the window, finally beeping faster outside a closed door on the right-hand wall. She glanced up.

“Bathroom,” Roger said.

Chess went inside.

No, Kym Pyle was not a woman with a lot of inhibitions. The window in the bathroom had no blinds or shades; cold white light spilled over the marble tub and floor and filled the mirror to Chess’s right. In summer it might have been pretty. Now it felt sterile, and hushed like a cemetery.

Something of life was in the room, though. The Spectrometer continued beeping, the high-pitched sound bouncing off the marble until it sounded more like one long continuous whine and Chess’s heart started pounding. Whatever noise her boots made on the shiny floor was lost while she walked this way and that, trying to determine the source of the beeps. Trying to find the ghost. Her shoulders tensed. She was not alone in this room, she knew it. Dead eyes watched her from a place she could not see. Her skin crawled and tingled, her tattoos warming, waiting for it. Whatever it was.

But nothing happened. After a few minutes she started to relax. The Spectrometer’s beeps didn’t have to mean a ghost was present, just that one had been—and there were ways, illegal ways, to fool even the Spectro. She didn’t see how any of those could be used here—there wasn’t much room to hide them—but still…

She shook her head. It was not time to start thinking of this as a real haunting yet. She was spooking herself. A bad move. Time to get going.

It wasn’t until she turned around to leave that she became aware of the smell. It had been there almost from the moment she stepped into the room, but subtle, almost undetectable. The minute she caught it, recognized it, it grew stronger still. Death. Decay. Rotting things, squirming things buried in the earth. Everything foul and wrong hid inside that smell, was caught by it and transmitted to her through it.

She still felt safe enough; even her tattoos had stopped tingling. But the odor remained, wafting through the air like a whisper. She checked the tub drain, wondering if perhaps the scent came from inside, but it was no stronger there than anywhere else.

That left the double sinks below the mirror. Her feet moved as if through mud. The smell was all she could think of, all she could focus on; it blurred her vision, made her ears ring and her head hurt.

The sinks were white, gleaming and pure in the dark green countertop. Chess thought the smell might be stronger there but couldn’t be sure. She was beginning to doubt she would ever breathe fresh air again. The thought of all the bacteria that must be carried in that smell, the thought of plagues and epidemics, made it almost impossible to check the other sink.

She didn’t have to. Movement caught her eye. She turned automatically and saw a cockroach crawling over the lip of the sink, its horrible black body an abomination against the spotless marble. Another appeared, and another. Chess forced herself to take a step closer, being careful to keep her body away from the counter itself, and saw movement in the drain, heard the dry rustle of scabrous exoskeletons rubbing together.

Her fists clenched. A spot of red liquid flew from the drain and landed on the mirror. Her insides twisted as one drop became two, became three, and blood burbled up from the drain, viscous bright blood filled with squirming bodies, rising in the sink.

She didn’t realize she’d been moving until the back of her thigh hit the high, cold side of the tub. For a second she teetered, trying not to fall, unable to take her eyes from the groaning, bubbling sink.

Her hand hit the edge of the tub to brace herself. She would not throw up, would not, could not. This too could be faked. It wasn’t a difficult trick to do. Even the smell of the blood, a coppery tang beneath the stronger odor of decay, could be faked. She’d never seen anything this elaborate on a case before, but she’d never investigated millionaires, either.

“Okay. Okay.” Her own voice soothed her, brought her back into herself. It was time to leave this room. Every cell in her body screamed at her to get out. She’d come back later, examine, investigate. She had the layout of the house down, she had an idea of how the family worked and what their relationships were, it was all she needed.

Her composure thus regained, she strode out of the bathroom with a smile that made her cheeks ache. Church policy for Debunkers: Never, ever indicate you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary or been scared by anything you’ve seen. If they’d staged it, they’d wonder why she hadn’t mentioned it and it would unbalance them. If they hadn’t, mentioning it might sound like an admission.

“Okay,” she said. “I think I have basically everything I need, so I’ll get back to the Church and start writing everything up, and I’ll be in touch soon.”

“Soon? How soon?” Kym did not look pleased.

“Oh, um, tomorrow, maybe, after sunset. We don’t really work on Holy Day, of course.”

Kym frowned. “We’re having a party tomorrow night. Arden won’t be here.”

Yes! Finally, something going right. Her chances of getting into the house would be much easier if there were a lot of people around anyway. And if Arden wasn’t home…

“I haven’t seen Arden’s room yet.” She turned to the girl. “Would you mind showing me before I go? That way you can be there while I look at it, it’s less like an invasion of privacy.”

Arden didn’t look convinced, but led Chess down the hall to the second door on the left—odd, wasn’t it, that her room wasn’t directly opposite her parents’?—and opened it.

Dark curtains on the windows turned the room into a cave. Chess picked her way across the floor, through the colorless, limp shapes of discarded clothing, and pulled the curtains. It only took a second to pop the wire out of the security alarm to disable it, and to unlock the window itself. It might be detected, sure, but it at least increased her odds of getting in easily when she came back later. She palmed the wire as she turned around.

The room was…just a room. Posters of pop stars covered the walls—apparently Arden was not into movie stars, which wasn’t much of a surprise considering what her father did for a living—and clothes and schoolbooks covered every available surface. A sparkly pink cell phone and matching laptop sat on an ornate white desk, which was itself almost hidden by stickers and pictures and scribbled phone numbers.

The rest of the room was dark blue and yellow, a surprising choice, but one Chess imagined Arden hadn’t made herself.

More clothes exploded from the closet, and Chess suspected from the anxious sidelong glances the girl kept giving the half-closed door that she had something hidden in there as well, but there was no point in trying to find out what. Not when she could look the next night with a lot more ease.

She gave Arden’s yellow bathroom a cursory glance—staying well away from the sinks—and made her goodbyes, taking with her Roger Pyle’s business card and a burning desire never to return.

Merritt was nowhere to be seen as she climbed into her car and pulled away from the garage. They’d searched the vehicle—expertly, but she knew they’d done it. She could smell them, sense them, hard hands rifling through her belongings, feeling around beneath her seats.

The wooden gate crept open for her once again and she was gone, speeding down the road, managing to get out of sight of the walls before she had to pull over and take her pills.

Chapter Seven

Worse still are those who commit the ultimate evil, who bind themselves unto the dead. No good can come of such an act; at the end of it lies only misery.

—The Book of Truth, Rules, Article 37

“He could have made the brand, yeah,” she said, as Terrible slid the car up on the curb. The Johnny Cash CD cut off with the ignition, leaving too-loud silence in its wake. “It’s not something ghosts normally do, but it’s possible. Or he could have found it, or—I don’t know. It had to have happened right before she died, but I have no idea why.”

“He brand them dames before?”

“No. At least it wasn’t in the file, and there were—there were pictures.” More dead faces to add to the gallery that already followed her: Randy Duncan, Brain—the teenager she’d failed to protect a few months back…Brain’s pale little face refused to leave her. She’d had to put her new bed in a different location, against the opposite wall. Every time she walked into her bedroom she’d seen the shade of that still, wideeyed figure, silent and cold on her old bed.

“So he pick up new tricks, aye, in the City?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

He accepted this without comment and left the car, the removal of his weight lifting his side by several inches. Chess waited in the still-warm interior until he came around and opened her door for her, a habit of his she’d gotten used to.

Without the dead body on the ground, the street somehow managed to feel even more threatening than it had the night before. More empty. Daisy was gone, and already forgotten, as if by dying she’d erased herself from memory as well as the world itself.

Chess looked away from the spot where the girl had lain and nodded at the alley. “In there first, I guess. While there’s still a little light.”

Beneath her clothes her skin felt raw from the vigorous shower she’d practically thrown herself into when she got home. Raw, and a little tingly. The energy wasn’t anywhere near as strong as it had been the night before, but it lingered.

“Brought one along,” Terrible replied, pulling a long steel flashlight from the trunk of his car. When he leaned over, the butt of his gun and the thin round handle of some other weapon poked at the fabric of his shirt. The sight reassured her—not that she’d doubted. Terrible didn’t take chances.

Neither did she. In her bag was everything she thought she might need if the ghost of Charles Remington showed up again, and a few things she thought she might not but grabbed anyway.

“After, you wanna see Red Berta? Maybe she got more for you. Them dead ones, they ain’t forgotten, if you dig.”

“What, you mean the hookers still remember them?”

“Aye. Ain’t somethin they allow me into, but they got—they got secrets, aye? Knowledge they don’t share, least not with me or Bump. Not with men.”

“Yeah, okay. Is she going to be free tonight?”

“I give her a ring up, you want. After.”

“Okay.” A glance around told her the street was empty, but trusting your eyes was folly here, where shadows multiplied with every passing second. She squared her shoulders and stepped into the mouth of the alley. Another rush of sex magic swirled around her, then settled. “Think we’re going to be alone this time?”

“Slobag always tryin to make a grab,” Terrible said. Not really an answer, but an answer just the same. “Back round Festival time he tried makin some deal up on Fifty-first, get his hands on a buildin. Figured he planned to set up there, Bump and me did.”

“What’d you do? Burn it down?”

“Aye.”

Chess’s fingers brushed Terrible’s as she took the flashlight from him. Normally she would start looking up the walls, at the ceiling had there been one, but that was going to be difficult in this instance, so the ground would be first. She scanned back and forth, slowly, studying every inch revealed by the circle of light.

She didn’t bother asking him if anyone had been inside the building when the fire was started, figuring the odds on it were probably about fifty-fifty. Not her business, anyway.

“He knows it was you?”

She didn’t see him shrug, but knew he did. “Guessin he do. No matter though.”

“Because you’re safe here?”

“Because he always after us. Reason ain’t important.”

A spark of light shot off the flashlight’s beam, but when Chess bent down she saw it was only a bit of broken glass. She shone the light on the base of the wall to her left, listening as the creatures who’d eavesdropped on her phone conversation the night before once again skittered out of her way. Skittered, like roaches…ugh.

“Some things are—” She stopped. “Hey, come look at this.”

He crouched beside her, his arm bumping against her shoulder. “Aye?”

“There. The feather.” Inside her bag was a small box of surgical gloves. She handed the flashlight back and slipped one on, then picked up the feather between her thumb and index finger. Even with the gloves on, a slight tingle ran up her arm. Definitely connected.

Terrible shone the light directly on it, and she could see the buff tinge on the hairs, the stripes and mottling. “Shit.”

“What?”

“It’s an owl feather,” she said.

“Aye?”

“Yeah.” She turned it in the light. “I’m not sure what kind. I think it’s a Great Horned Owl, but I didn’t do as well in ornithology as I should have.”

“Ain’t know the Church teach you birds.”

“Birds are psychopomps. Especially birds of prey. Especially owls.”

“Takin souls to the City, meanin? They what you use?”

“No. I mean, yes, they do in normal circumstances, but no, we use specially trained dogs. Birds are too unpredictable, they can be hard to work with in ritual.”

“Why a ghost use a—a bird? Ain’t need it get up here, aye?”

“I’m not sure. No, he wouldn’t necessarily use it to get up here, but—” With her free hand she found some plastic pouches in her bag and dug them out. “Open one of those, will you?”

He did, holding it out for her to slip the feather into. She felt better once it was sealed away, but not much. “Ghosts don’t use psychopomps, no,” she said slowly, trying to force her recalcitrant brain into thought. “They’re not capable of magic—I mean, they can only feed off energy, not create it.”

“The psychopomp give them it?”

“No. They have energy of a sort, but it’s not the kind a ghost can use.”

Terrible caught the implication, as she knew he would. “So somebody working alongside yon ghost, aye?”

She nodded. The walls of the alley loomed over her, stretching into the dim sky like broad hands trying to cup over her and squash her. She hadn’t mentioned the energy from the night before, but she couldn’t put it off any longer. “Last night…,” she said, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Last night I noticed, I felt the energy from the magic they’d been doing. Sex magic. They were doing sex magic.”