Sacrificial Magic

So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …

The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.

So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.

But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.

Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?

She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.

One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.

“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”

Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible boing, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.

The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.

So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.

She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.

She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.

Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.

So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?

Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.

Chapter Seven

When questions arise, the Church is the first place to which one should turn. Always.

—The Church and You, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett

When she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.

Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.

She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.

Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.

And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.

Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.

She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”

They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”

Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!

Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”

“No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.

Not that it mattered. Anyone in that room already knew they were coming.

She’d dropped her flashlight but had a cheap plastic lighter in her pocket; she flicked it on, and Monica found the right key and opened the door.

Empty.

Well, not empty. It was a classroom. It had classroom things inside it. But it was empty of people, and people were what Chess needed. Her heart would have sunk if she hadn’t been expecting to find no one there, and if she wasn’t still buzzing from adrenaline.

The adrenaline gave her extra speed to cross the room. That door wasn’t locked. It hit the wall with an echoing bang when she flung it open, when she flung herself into the hall and found nothing but silence. More emptiness. Of course.

Beulah might be a bitch—well, okay, to be fair, Chess couldn’t yet say that with absolute certainty, just with a lot of it—but she wasn’t stupid. She started opening doors down the right side of the hall, peering into each room, leaving them open so that Chess could look into them as she opened the doors on the left.

“Where else could they be? Where could they have gone?”

Beulah shook her head. “Anywhere. The stairs at either end lead to the science hall and the cafeteria. From there they could keep going into the rest of the school, or out to the parking lot. There’s some sort of activity going on in the gym right now, they could slip in there and we’d never know it.”

Fuck! It was about what she’d expected, but fuck! anyway.

The adrenaline started to fade, leaving her hands shaky and her chest and head aching. She could take care of that, but … Damn it. She pressed her palm to her forehead for a second, took a deep breath, and headed back into the drama classroom. The odds of her finding anything useful in there were slim to none, but she’d look anyway. At least she could make a note that she’d looked, that she’d—

How had they known?

She hadn’t called before heading out, hadn’t told anyone at Mercy Lewis to expect her. Nor, to her knowledge, had anyone at the Church, although of course she’d have to double-check that.

She hadn’t spoken to anyone when she arrived except Beulah, Monica, and Laurie. Hadn’t seen anyone, and although technically anyone could have seen her when she arrived, nothing about her—her scuffed and dusty boots, her black jeans, the faded blue polo she wore over a black long-sleeved T-shirt, or her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut—screamed “Church employee.” Quite the opposite, in fact; she’d deliberately worn street clothes.

So how had anyone known who she was, to sabotage the catwalk while she was on it? How had someone not only known who she was, but made it into the drama room in time to start fucking with the bolts? Not to mention the wires.

That suggested a planned attack. More than one person.

Had it even been aimed at her at all? And if not, what the hell was the point?

She grabbed her notebook to scribble all of that down while it was fresh. Especially because now that the shakes and flashbacks were starting—she could feel the way her hand gripped the pen too tightly—and she knew she’d be alone for, oh, four or five hours at least, she planned to head home, crack her pillbox, and try to forget it all as quickly as possible.

Someone had tried to kill her. Or at least, given the way the catwalk had hit the stage fairly harmlessly, to scare the fuck out of her. Whether they knew she was Church or not, someone had just fucked with her in a particularly unpleasant way. A particularly unpleasant way that wasn’t already on her list of things she took drugs to forget, anyway.

Unless, of course, someone had made some calls. Both Monica and Beulah had made bathroom or office stops before they headed to the theater, so either of them could have picked up the phone. Laurie could have done so after they left the administration area. Shit. Four hours on the case, two of them spent doing research at Church, and she’d already survived a murder attempt. That didn’t bode well.

But it boded better than what she saw on the wall, what she found on the wrench lying on the floor nearby. Just two little smears of it. Two little smears of what she hoped was Vaseline or some similar substance, but which the knowledge she’d gotten from her Church training and the knowledge she’d gotten from a lifetime of having everything go wrong every damn time told her was something much worse.

Ectoplasm.

After all of that—after inspecting the roof above the theater and finding nothing at all, after finally getting out of the building she was already beginning to hate on more than just general principles—the last thing she expected to see was Lex, leaning against her new car, smoking a cigarette and grinning at her like she had dirty words written on her forehead and he wasn’t about to tell her.

“Hey there, Tulip. Ain’t usual seeing you this side of town, aye?”

“What are you doing here?” They shared one of those awkward kiss-hug-or-what moments, ending up kissing on the cheek. Odd, that. She and Lex had never really been cheek-kissers, but since they weren’t kissing anywhere else these days she guessed it was the thing to do.

Especially since it gave her another few seconds to figure out how to react to his presence there in general. As far as she knew, Lex didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around schools; why would he? He’d gone to one, she assumed, but his business didn’t involve spending time there.

Or again, so she assumed. For all she knew one of the teachers had a habit bigger than hers, or part-timed as a hooker and Lex was there to pick her up for her shift. The possibilities were endless; someone could be a fence, someone could have—

Information. Uh-huh. “How did you know I was here?”

His grin widened. “Glad to see me?”

“Surprised.” But she smiled. Of course she was glad to see him; she usually was. “Who told you I was here?”

“Why anybody gotta give me the knowledge? Could be I just makin a drive-by, see them new wheels you got and gave you the stop, me. That so hard to believe?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

The spring sunlight hit the black spikes of his hair and made them shine; he tilted his head and the light spilled across his face. Sometimes she forgot how handsome he was. But then, it was easy to forget things like that when it didn’t matter. “Been hearing crazy shit on this place. Figured on givin it a check-out, I did, then look who shows up. Got any knowledge what’s on the happening in there?”

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Ain’t expect any else. An what’s the happening with that face you got? Ain’t run into that Boil again, I don’t think.”

Shit. How bad did her face look? She hadn’t checked.

But she smiled at the reference. “It was Doyle, and no, I just fell down.”

“Must have fell hard.”

“Yeah, I did.”

His fingers stroked her sore cheekbone, light and delicate and warm. She fought the tiny shiver threatening to rise and risked a glance at his face, but his gaze focused on her cheek. “Ain’t a safe place,” he murmured.

Chess swallowed. The sun still shone, the air was still clear and fresh with the smell of blooming spring, but something had changed. No more breeze; everything seemed to stop and wait, including her own breath, damn it.

Nothing like that had happened the last couple of times she’d seen him. If it was even happening, which how would she know? The only men she’d ever spent more than a single night with were Lex and Terrible—one of whom she used to touch all the time because they were generally together for that purpose, and one of whom she’d almost never touched until they started touching in private. Maybe friends did that sort of thing all the time. He was only touching her cheek, inspecting it. It wasn’t like he’d started playing with her breasts or something.

Then it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. A gust of wind chased away the stillness, chased away the expression on his face so thoroughly she wondered if she really had imagined it. “You leaving?”

She nodded.

“Got time, maybe you wanna come back mine for a few?”

No. The answer should have been no, especially after that weird little moment. But then … aside from one night of wandering around and the night in Graveyard Twenty-three she’d tried her damnedest to forget, she’d never really been outside his bedroom on this side of town. He might have some information that would help her. Hell, he might have some information about the explosion at Bump’s pipe room, although she didn’t much expect he’d be willing to say a word to her about that.

And she kind of missed hanging out with him, if she were honest with herself, which she generally tried not to be. And nothing had happened in that moment, and nothing would. She knew that. “What have you got in mind?”

“Nothing good, Tulip.” Then, seeing her eyebrows rise, “But nothing you gotta worry youself on, neither. C’mon. Getting twitchy standin here, aye?”

Oh, what the hell. “You drive.”

His room hadn’t changed. The house hadn’t changed. Only the looks given her by the various guards or enforcers or whoever they were had, from bland acceptance to subtle suspicion.

And she’d changed, it seemed. At least a bit. In the car, chatting, all had been well, but when the door closed behind her it occurred to her how long it had been since she’d been there. And what had happened the last time she’d been there. Happened several times and again in the morning, if memory served, which it did.

Another awkward moment when she started walking toward the bed, remembered, and turned back to the couch against the wall. Lex already sat there, lighting a cigarette, flipping a switch behind him so the Jam started playing in the background. King of his room-castle, just like one day he’d be king of his side of town.

“So what’s up?” The question sounded lame even to her, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. The bed with its plain blue blanket and sheets loomed larger and larger in her vision.

“Church sent you that school? Thinkin on it being for real? The spooks, meaning.”

“Too early to tell.” Not totally a lie. She’d taken the wrench, scraped the ectoplasm off the walls and into inert plastic containers to be tested. It felt like ectoplasm, sure, but that could be faked. People had faked more conclusive evidence than that. Hell, for all she knew it was some new hair gel or something. Way too early to start convincing herself that that bonus wouldn’t be hers.

“Aye? Some fucked-up place, that one. Ain’t envy you wanderin around there at night.”

“Who says I wander around there at night?”

He gave a short, low laugh. “Aw, c’mon now, Tulip. You forgetting, I been along with you on a few of them cases you get. Know the drill, I do.”

“Maybe this one is different.”

“Aye, and maybe it ain’t. Only thing I gots to say is be careful. Ain’t a good place, there.”

“Why?” She pulled out her own cigarette, lit it up to give her something to look at. Not sure how much credence she should give anything he said to her, if she should even listen, but at the same time listening hard.

Yes, sure, things were different now. But while she couldn’t say Lex had never lied to her—of course he’d lied to her, and she’d lied to him—she couldn’t see any reason for him to lie to her about a case.

Then again, she’d never had a case on his side of town before.

“Just ain’t safe. All kinds of shit in there, them teachers and all.”

“How do you know this?”

He looked at her with his head tilted. “It matter?”

“No. I just wonder what you know.”

“Ain’t know much. Hear tell on they being the sort sell them mamas it get they what they wanting, if you dig.”

She blew out smoke, shifted in her seat to face him better. “How does that make them different from anyone else?”

“Guessing it ain’t. Only most people ain’t big crowds like they. Could get up a fuck of a double-cross, be what they wanting to do.”

Chess looked at him without speaking, let the minute drag on long enough to have made anyone else feel uncomfortable. Lex didn’t, of course, because Lex never did, but his expression went from bland to curious before she spoke. “Is that what you came there today to tell me?”

“Nay, just came by check the place out, I did.”

“But why? And why today? And how did you know that was my car, you’ve only seen it like once before.”

He smiled, slowly, letting the change of expression itself waste time. “Aye, somebody gave me the tell you was there. Came by give you a hello. That a bad thing?”

What wasn’t he telling her?

And how much did it matter?

She pushed it all into the back of her head for later. He wouldn’t tell her if she asked outright anyway. Better to move around the question and see if anything else came out later. “So I guess I’ll be spending a bit more time on your side of town for a while.”

Lex stood up and headed for the mini-fridge he kept against the wall. Without asking he pulled a couple of beers out, opened them both, and handed her one. “Guessing you will.”

His amused expression told Chess he knew very well what she was getting to. Damn it. But not a surprise. “And I guess I won’t be the only person who lives on my side but spends a lot of time here.”

The couch sank when he plunked himself down, close enough that his hand almost touched her thigh. “Aw, Tulip, figured you come up with a better try-on than that. You know I ain’t givin you that knowledge anyroad.”

“Yeah, but I had to try.”

“Aye, guessing you did.” He laughed. “An now you done it.”

“But someone did tell you. About the pipe room.” That was pushing it, she knew. Sure, he’d laugh at her attempts to find out who the snitch was, which one of the people Bump and Terrible trusted had given Slobag the let’s-go on blowing up that pipe room. But he wouldn’t laugh for long. Especially now that her attempts to feel him out for information were no longer followed by her allowing him to perform his own feel-outs on her.

Sure enough, his eyes narrowed a little. “Maybe them did. Maybe not. Maybe somebody’s luck were just running right up. Thought you and me weren’t having the troubles on this one.”

And there it was. The iron door slamming shut. “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I just—Never mind.”

Yeah, she could probably tell him why it mattered so much to her. But so what? Their friendship seemed to be persisting despite the fact that they kept their clothes on when they met these days, but that didn’t mean he’d actually go out of his way for her. Her life wasn’t in danger, just her—Well, okay, it was her life, but not in a way Lex would care about.

Not to mention she just didn’t want to. She didn’t want to admit to him that she felt as though a big red pointing finger of suspicion hung right over her head, and that everyone saw it. Including the man Lex probably knew she’d essentially dumped him for.

It was her problem, and she’d deal with it.

Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills.

Chapter Eight

You might not think it’s true, but it is: Everyone is capable of some magic, no matter how small. Everyone can change things in their lives. Even you.

—You Can Do This! A Guide for Beginners, by Molly Brooks-Cahill

Lex dropped her back at her car a couple of hours later, pleasantly cotton-wrapped from the Pandas he’d given her and ready—mostly—to head home. Lurid orange streaked the sky above her, above the Mercy Lewis school; the building stood against it like a lurking shadow, cold and unreal.

Or maybe she was just high.

She didn’t think so, though. Well, yes she did, of course she was fucking high. But she suspected the sunset was really that gorgeous, the lone cherry tree beside the school blooming pale pink, the evening chill about to set in but not enough to make her cold in her long sleeves.

Lex had just driven away when she heard the sound, a clanging, crashing noise behind the building. At least she assumed it came from behind the building; the spring air still held enough crispness for sound to carry well.

Probably just a custodian emptying the trash. Or a Cooking Goody doing who the hell knew what to the food. Or a ball hitting a steel fencepost, or any number of things.

But it could be someone who liked to play with metal, maybe someone who hadn’t known a person would be on the catwalk and decided to go ahead and bring it down? It wouldn’t bring in a lot of cash, but not a lot was usually enough, especially in Downside. You could bolt things down to keep people from stealing them, sure, but they’d just get a wrench.

Her boots slid through the grass, jewel green at her feet, as she walked around to the side of the building. Not tiptoeing or sneaking, no. Just walking. With care.

Voices floated toward her, and another clank, clearer than the last one. Female voices, murmuring and giggling. It didn’t reassure her. Women could be just as dangerous as men; life had certainly taught her that.