Sacrificial Magic

Chapter Nine

The presence of dark or evil magics should be reported immediately. That is your duty as a citizen.

—The Church and You, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett

They’d almost hit Brewster before Terrible finally spoke again, his voice a low rumble over Black Sabbath on the Chevelle’s stereo. “Ain’t like you seein him.”

“I know.” Relief flooded her chest; at least she hoped it was time for relief. “I’m sorry. I just, I thought maybe I could find something out. And yeah … I was kind of shaken up, and having some company sounded good.”

“Aye, guessin it did.” Something in his tone made her narrow her eyes, inspect him more closely. He almost sounded … upset? Pissed off? Hurt? She couldn’t tell for sure, but he definitely didn’t sound the way he usually did.

But then there was no reason for him to, was there.

They rode on in silence for another minute; he hooked a right onto Brewster. She’d been this far north before—of course she had, the day before during the fire—but only once or twice before that. If they kept going, eventually they’d be as far up as the Crematorium, and the Nightsedge Market she’d been to once with Lex.

Terrible made a sound next to her, a sort of half-laugh. “What a time you choose to gimme the tell.”

More relief. “I didn’t want you to think I was hiding it from you or being sneaky or something.”

He didn’t say more; she knew he probably had more to say, but she hoped when he did he’d say it like that, and they could talk about it, and she wouldn’t have to sit there with terror icy in her stomach because she’d fucked everything up—again—and the minute hand on their relationship’s internal clock had just moved a tick closer to midnight.

The very thought made her already chilled skin colder. She grabbed her pillbox and water bottle from her bag and took two more Cepts, hoping they might warm her; the three she’d taken when he’d arrived at her place had hit, but not enough. She needed to get rid of that cold inside her, that frozen-solid knot of fear and guilt she couldn’t stand, didn’t want to feel anymore. Five was pushing it, she knew, but what-the-fuck-ever.

If she was lucky they’d kick in before they got to the body, and that would be a help, too.

Why did she even bother thinking what might happen if she was lucky? The only luck she’d ever had in her life pulled the Chevelle up to the curb and threw it into neutral, and she seemed hell-bent on fucking that one up for herself no matter how hard she tried not to.

Spring had come and the cherry trees were in bloom, but the nights still held the remainder of the dead winter, and the breeze, heavy with the acrid resinous scent of charred wood, cut through her clothes when Terrible opened her door. Good thing she’d put her bra back on, but she should have remembered her cardigan.

Candlelight danced in a few windows, making the buildings look like carved Festival pumpkins with horrible greedy eyes. The burned-out shell of the pipe room, destroyed walls supporting nothing, sat there in silence. Dull moonlight revealed the ruin beautiful in its destruction, dignified in death. Chess shivered.

Bump’s unmistakable drawl rode the wind to where she and Terrible stood. The anger in his voice didn’t ease the feeling of foreboding.

Nor did the open doorways on the street, tall lean shadows like upended coffins. Anything could be hiding in those openings, in the alleys and empty spaces. She was glad of Terrible’s arm touching hers as they walked, grateful for the knife she knew he could grab instantly if necessary.

Details on the dead building grew sharper as they neared it; well, of course they did. Black streaks above the glassless windows, the fire’s signature. Ashes collected in the cracks on the street, covering the sidewalk, obscuring the garbage piled everywhere. A stray cat ran by, its fur smudged with soot. And over it all that silence, that odd intrusive silence. Even Bump’s voice, droning on, didn’t break that silence. It only made it clearer and stronger. His voice was an insult to it, one it paid no attention to. Bump would be gone soon. The silence would stay.

The horrible creosote smell of smoke burned her throat, stung her eyes. It was so heavy, thick enough to make her want to gag; it made her desperate for even the air around the Slaughterhouse.

But she couldn’t head over there, couldn’t go anywhere at all. Instead she stayed at Terrible’s side, walked through the crumbling archway that had once been the door and into the short dark hallway just inside.

To her right was the bar, the chairs and charred countertop now exposed to the city-gray night sky, the floor littered with chunks of metal and wood, scraps of black-edged rags, broken glass. To her left a wall covered with curled strips of wallpaper, its pattern indistinguishable. How old was that building? How long had it stood there?

Once it had been someone’s home. It had survived Haunted Week. It had seen thousands of people over the years it had been a pipe room. And now … it was destroyed, thanks to Slobag and his attempts to wrest territory away from Bump. It had outlived its purpose. It had nothing more to give except perhaps a few bricks that would always bear the imprint of its death.

She reached out, touched the wall with one tentative finger. The building was finished, but at least it knew that. At least it didn’t have to wait and wonder anymore. She blinked, fast. Her eyes were damp.

Terrible’s hand found the back of her neck. Blindly she turned in his direction, hit his broad solid chest with her forehead and wrapped her arms around him tight. After a second, his closed around her, his lips brushed her hair.

It didn’t last long. Ten seconds, maybe. Fifteen. But warmth spread through her anyway; it could have been her Cepts kicking in, but she didn’t think so. And those seconds chased some of the darkness’s threat away, so she could move again. She curled her index finger in his belt loop and let him lead her across the wreckage-strewn bar and through a short hallway.

Narrow streams of light spilled from cracks around a door at the far end of what had been the actual pipe room, lessening the gloom and revealing the blackened skeletons of couches and pipes. The place should have been hopping, filled with Dreamers … she could have lounged on one of the couches herself and left all of her worries behind for a few hours, and wouldn’t that be the most welcome fucking thing in the world right about then.

Instead she stood in a charred death-pit about to go look at an apparently mutilated body, absorb the images of it. How typical.

Something else hid there beneath the horror of sudden, violent death. Magic. Not that she expected anything else; from what Terrible had said, she expected exactly that. But it wasn’t … wasn’t right. It felt muted, distorted somehow. Like a spell that had been done there years before and simply never cleaned up. It didn’t feel fresh, and it didn’t feel like horrible death, either. That could have been the fire, of course. It fucked with magic, changed the energy. So it probably was the fire. She just couldn’t be certain.

Terrible reached for the door. She let go of him as he pushed it open—“pushed” being the operative word, since it was just a slab of wood blocking the room and not a proper door—revealing something that made her wish she’d kept holding on to him.

Bump, standing against the wall beside them, gave them an annoyed glance as they walked in. “Bout fuckin time you get your fuckin show-up on, yay? Ain’t hardly fuckin dig standin round this shit.” He gestured toward the scene with a wave of his hand. “Had me a fuckin meal before the fuckin call finding me, almost fuckin emptied up me again.”

Agreeing with Bump wasn’t something Chess usually did, but in this instance she agreed wholeheartedly. The sight before her was horrifying.

Bag-end Eddie had been … crucified. Not in a standing position, no, but it was clear from the position of his charred body. Crucified on the cement and burned, the flames turning his corpse into an overcooked bone-in roast spread-eagled on the floor like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Unburned flesh remained on his face and chest, and in strips down the centers of his thighs.

His eyes, wide open in horror, stared at the dull moon above through the hole in the roof.

“What you think, Ladybird? I fuckin saying, looking fuckin witchy to me, yay? An ain’t fuckin wrong, do I? Bump never gets the fuckin wrong side.” He looked so smug, as if the gruesome death in front of them all only mattered as a way to prove his intellectual superiority again.

Or like it had taken a fucking genius to figure out there was magic involved in this. Like the body arranged carefully on the floor, the precise lines of soot she picked out around him, were some sort of obscure clue to the presence of witchcraft and not a blinking sign.

“No,” she managed. She should have taken three more Cepts instead of two. She should have brought a kesh or a bottle of vodka. As it was she’d have to settle for water. “No, you’re not wrong.”

“Yay, see?” Bump turned to the man beside him, grinning. The man’s face was a horrible shade of pasty, as if he’d covered himself in glue and let it dry. She’d always wondered what that would actually look like, if it would be shiny or not, but then she was just trying to distract herself so she wouldn’t have to look again at what had once been a living person.

Distraction was good. So was delay. All those D words, especially “drugs.” Another Cept would make six, and why the hell not. She dry-swallowed it while she was reaching into her bag to pull out a pair of latex gloves and her small camera. What else might she need … She’d have to get a closer look to know.

A closer look. Great.

Within reach of where she stood were Eddie’s feet. Just beyond those were the soot lines she’d noticed, dark lines, as though the cement itself had burned.

But the energy still didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like death magic. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of spell she was aware of that needed a murder to help power it. Those were—Wait.

“His—his face, the top of him, isn’t burned.” She looked at Bump and the pasty guy. “Why is part of him burned?”

Bump’s lips went thin; he stared at her for a long moment. “Had we a fuckin fire, Ladybird, ain’t you was fuckin here on the last—”

“Gee, really? No shit. Why is his body burned everywhere except on top? He’s burned from the ground up but the—his skin is still there, on his nose and forehead and chin.”

Pause, while they all inspected the body. Ha! Look at her, actually noticing something that might be important. She gritted her teeth to keep from smiling. Six was definitely her magic number after the food she’d forced herself to eat earlier. Or it could be the five finally really hitting, in which case six would be too much. She was too high to worry or care. If blessings were legal, that would certainly be one.

But smiling around a corpse wasn’t really appropriate, so she managed not to, concentrating again on standing still so her high flowed through her body in a smooth arc, making her feel like she was floating. Like maybe things were okay after all. Like maybe she was okay after all.

“Fuckin metal all on, yay,” Bump said. Oddly festive sparks of light danced on the walls as he waved his beringed hand; Chess followed it to see a slab of sheet metal—what had once been the reinforcement of the floor above, she guessed, which had probably been some kind of processing room—leaned up against the wall. “Got he on the fuckin find neathen it.”

“It fell on his body?”

“Ain’t it what I fuckin saying?”

Whatever.

So the metal slab had fallen on the body, and on the symbol. And had kept the parts touching it from burning. That had to mean something. What did that mean?

“The fire was here before the metal fell. I mean, look. Look at the lines. He was on fire, the fire started on the floor. Or, maybe it didn’t start here, but the floor was on fire when the metal fell. So the spell, whatever it was—it was burning already. Was there carpet here?”

“Naw,” Terrible said. “All cement.”

She looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”

Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”

“Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.

With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.

And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.

That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.

She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.

“It’s a hafuran,” she said.

Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”

“It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”

“Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”

“This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”

Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.

Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all get them because it—well, we get a lot of different sigils and runes and symbols and stuff, but this one is an all-around power enhancer. Whatever we do, the hafuran makes it stronger.”

Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.

“Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”

“No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”

She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”

She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.

“Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.

Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.

A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.

Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.

So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”

“Be one of them death curses?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”

She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?

She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.

“Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”

Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t know what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.

He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.

And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.

But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.

Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.

And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.

Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.

But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.

Not even her. Maybe especially not her.

So what did her new fucking disgusting friend want? And wasn’t she just thrilled that she got to try to figure it out?

“Gots us an even fuckin bigger bad needs fuckin chattering on,” Bump said. He lit a cigarette slowly, waiting until they were all giving him their full attention before continuing to speak. “Ain’t come on this by fuckin accidentals, yay? Gots me a fuckin tip on it, got the knowledge fuckin gave to us.”

Terrible waited. Pasty waited. Chess couldn’t. She couldn’t because she thought she knew what he was going to say, what he had to be going to say; she was sure the others did, too, but she didn’t think it made them feel as sick as it did her. “Who gave it to you?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Crankshot fuckin gave it on the earlier. Hear Slobag fuckin givin the chatter on he fuckin witch him find heself. How’s that fuckin sound, Ladybird? Slobag gone and gotten heself a witch.”

Chapter Ten

The hordes of ethereal killers were terrifying and unstoppable, and the citizenry quailed at their approach.

—The Book of Truth, Origins, Article 39

She’d hoped that when she woke up Terrible would be in bed next to her. She’d slept so fucking hard she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d come in and started jumping up and down on the bed, and he’d sneaked in to surprise her before, so the hope was there. But no.

She couldn’t think about that. Not when she got up, not when she checked her phone and found the text he sent around four—not even that fucking late—saying he was staying at Bump’s. Which wasn’t that damn far from hers. Why would he want to sleep in that museum of gynecological art when he could sleep with her?

Slobag had a witch. Slobag had someone doing magic for him. Slobag knew about things Terrible had told Chess, and now Slobag’s witch was doing rituals inside buildings Terrible told her were empty during a time she’d been off working and had been late to meet Terrible, and she knew he’d put that together in his head just as fast as she had, maybe faster.

And he knew she’d been hanging out with Lex the day before. Slobag’s son Lex.

And he hadn’t come home with her, hadn’t come in to sleep with her.

Another thing she didn’t want to think about; way too many reasons for that particular decision flew into her head.

What she needed to think about was work. What she needed to think about was finding Vernal Sze and his friends and getting them to talk to her. No, she didn’t need to think about it, she needed to do it. Right away.

She left her new car in the gravel-strewn lot at the side of the building and started for the front doors of the Mercy Lewis school.

But today the walkway wasn’t empty. Students—she assumed they were students, they carried books—stood in straggly clumps outside, talking or smoking furtive cigarettes, listening to the Circle Jerks. Their eyes stripped her bare as she walked past; their conversations died when she got close enough to hear their words. It wasn’t just paranoia from the couple of Nips she’d popped to help her wake up after sleeping so hard, either. Their suspicion and aggression felt like pebbles against her skin, stinging where they hit.

The front door opened with the expected screech, though not as loud against the music playing as it had been in the previous afternoon’s silence. For a second she almost missed that silence. No one had been staring at her then.

Down the hall past the empty classrooms—apparently Mercy Lewis had a late lunch period, since it was just past one—to the office, where she was greeted by … a whole fucking crowd of people.

Frizzy—Laurie—was there, as were Monica and, smirking in the back in a gorgeous charcoal-gray suit, Beulah. She was the only one smiling. The others just glared—at each other, at the walls, at the various doors to small offices within the main Administration area, and especially at Chess.