Chasing Magic

Terrible took a few cautious steps forward, his knife still ready. Chess grabbed hers, too. Not so much because she thought she’d need it—although it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—but because she felt safer with it. That man was dead. She knew he was dead. She knew it because she’d seen him die, and she knew it because when she glanced up she saw the bird swooping overhead, limned in the last rays of sun. The psychopomp taking his soul.

“Somethin in him hand.” Without taking his eyes off the man, Terrible waved her forward. He crouched beside the body, reached out—

And fell.

Thankfully he was only a couple of feet away; she’d already been approaching him. Still it seemed to take forever to reach him. She threw herself to her knees, ignoring the pain streaking up her thighs, and clutched at him. He was so fucking heavy. What had he touched, what the hell was—

A little plastic packet was what he’d touched. It lay on the dead man’s palm, still half in it, with Terrible’s fingers barely making contact.

She grabbed his hand, pulled it away from the packet. Pulled his head into her lap. He’d come around fast, he usually did, shit, people were watching and he’d just—he’d be furious. He’d be furious and he’d be humiliated, and the fear already building inside her grew sharper, colder, when she thought what that might mean. How it was her fault, and how her attempts at fixing it thus far had failed. How if she were Terrible she’d be giving up on the idea that she could fix it. Would have already given up, in fact.

His eyes opened. For a second they scanned her face, the sky, the crumbling buildings edging the street, before consciousness snapped back into them. “Fuck.”

“I don’t—”

“Fuck.” He pulled away from her, his gaze still wandering up and down the street. The crowd around them watched. Double fuck.

She didn’t bother to glare at them. Didn’t dare to react at all. The last thing she wanted to do was make him angrier, more upset. Already his neck and jaw flushed darker every second, color creeping up over his face. He could control his expression, could make himself look like a forbidding statue, but he couldn’t stop that. Never had been able to.

A minute passed. Two. He pulled two cigarettes out of his pocket, lit them and handed her one. He cleared his throat. “Guessing whatever he got there ain’t just drugs, aye?”

“Yeah. It looks like it, anyway.”

His chin jerked. “Oughta call some others out here, have em pick it up, pick him up, too. Ain’t wanna be—”

“Why?”

He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised, but didn’t speak.

“Let me at least have a look at it. I know Bump has all those chemicals and stuff that can analyze it or whatever, but—”

“Ain’t want you touchin it.”

“But I won’t—I mean, I’ll put on some gloves, okay, and now we know something’s there, right, so I’m prepared for it.” Damn it. Of all the fucking things to happen.

He didn’t meet her eyes as he nodded.

Well, shit. The least she could do was get it over with quickly so they could get the fuck out of there. She wanted to go home. She wanted him to go home, and she wanted to go with him. She wanted to forget this whole horrible day.

No chance of that. Forgetting wasn’t as easy as it seemed; life had taught her that, if nothing else. But it had also taught her that where there was a will there was a way, and she had a pillbox full of ways in her bag.

She took four of them and slipped on a pair of latex gloves for the second time in as many days. “Okay. Let’s see what he had.”

It was a little packet, exactly like the one in Chess’s bag at that very moment. Not quite an inch square, with a Ziploc top, filled about a third of the way with whitish powder. Just like any one of dozens, hundreds, she’d held or seen or used in her lifetime.

But none of them had ever sent energy roaring up her arm to explode in her chest, so much of it and so thick that there wasn’t enough room for breath. None of them had made a stinging, screaming screen of red wash over her vision, made her head ring so loud she thought for a second she might have gone deaf. No wonder Terrible had collapsed. What the fuck was in that packet?

For a few seconds she struggled with it, forcing it down into something she could handle, pushing against it with all her might, until it finally started to ease up. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. Her vision cleared.

Terrible turned to DV. “Where he buy this?”

DV shrugged. “Offen Rickride, same as always, what I got. Buy he three bags, dig, only one’s left there.”

Terrible’s face darkened. Rickride must be Bump’s dealer, then, the one who lived in the area.

She’d ask him about it later. Discussing it on the street probably wasn’t the best idea. Time to focus, so they could get the fuck out of there.

Up close the body before her looked even worse. His skin hadn’t yet taken on the artificial pallor of death, that sort of waxy flatness, but the scratches and marks on his skin already stood out more sharply, looked angrier and more vivid.

Terrible edged closer to her, grabbed her arm. “Getting you outta here. Now.”

“But—”

“Take you some pictures, iffen you need a better look. That body ain’t gonna be here much longer.”

“What?”

He glanced at the growing crowd, at the mist now tickling their legs, gripping his knife tighter as he did. Chess felt his unease; it didn’t show, wasn’t apparent to any of the people standing a few feet away—at least she hoped not—but she knew it was there. Felt it the same way she felt darkness in that fog like angry whispers, and the power created by the edges of the earth by the jointure of three elements. The mist was hungry; it wasn’t magic in itself but it had its own power, as everything did, and that power made the hairs on her neck tingle and shift.

Was it her imagination, or had the crowd gotten a little closer than it was before?

“C’mon.”

He stared at the crowd while she pulled out her camera and snapped four or five pictures. They probably wouldn’t be important at all; just scratches, not runes or sigils or anything like that, but still. She needed them, and, if she was lucky, enough respect remained for Terrible that the crowd of hungry faces watching her wouldn’t decide to try to take the camera from her. Terrible could handle a lot of things, but the crowd looked too big now even for him.

She’d barely lowered the camera when Terrible started hauling her to her feet. She tucked the little plastic packet into her pocket. When she got home she’d toss it straight into the African Blackwood box she kept for magical items of dubious origin.

Assuming she got home. The crowd stepped closer still.

Terrible didn’t look scared, but she knew he was—or, well, not scared but uneasy. And she knew all that unease was for her, as if she’d heard him say it out loud. He wasn’t worried about protecting himself or being attacked, he was worried about it happening to her, and she knew it not only because she knew him but because he took her hand as they started to walk.

“Push yon sleeves up.”

“Wha—oh.” Of course, dumbass. She did it as quickly as she could, hoping the people staring at them with blood in their eyes knew what the tattoos on her arms meant. Hoping they even knew what the Church was, for that matter.

She couldn’t tell if they saw her ink or not, or if they cared. But a woman with long brown dreads who smelled like a sewer stepped out of their way as they neared her.

Terrible didn’t seem to be moving quickly, but he was, and she tried to keep up without appearing to speed herself.

The hardest part was not looking back. They’d passed the edge of the crowd, into the mouth of the street beyond, into the fog. It should have been a relief, being out of the way of them, but it wasn’t. It made her feel even more naked, made her feel as if at any second someone would hit her over the head or she’d fall before she heard the bullet coming. She tightened her grip on Terrible’s hand.

He squeezed back but didn’t look at her until he had her in the Chevelle, with the doors locked. The crowd outside inched closer to the car; Chess couldn’t see the bodies anymore. All she saw was people, those ramshackle dock-dwellers standing in ragged lines, with the mist moving up behind them.

Terrible started the car and put it in gear. “Told you, ain’t a good place to be.”

“No.” She rubbed the back of her head, trying to brush off the stares she imagined she could still feel. “No, I guess not. And I guess we have to go back tomorrow, huh?”

“Aye. Talk to DV again, try to find Rickride see where that speed come from.”

“Great.” One last glance back at the shadowy shapes in the mist. “I can’t wait.”

Half an hour later they trudged up the stairs to her apartment. Neither of them spoke, just as they hadn’t in the car on the way there, every foot they drove a reminder that they’d have to do it in reverse the next day. Every foot a reminder of what they’d left behind. Chess couldn’t stop seeing bone exploding from skin, couldn’t stop seeing foam in the corners of a dying mouth or Terrible’s head sinking when he touched the speed.

There were too many things to say to pick one, so all of them bottlenecked in her throat, forming a horrible lump that writhed and stung and felt like it was trying to break through her skin. She had no idea if Terrible felt the same.

What she did know was that if there was a worse possible time for Lex to show up, she couldn’t imagine what it could be.

Terrible stiffened. She did the same. Oh fuck, please, no, don’t let him be there to try to push Terrible again about working for him; Terrible was pissed off enough already. And probably pissed off at her; it was her fault he kept passing out, after all.

That the alternative was being dead didn’t seem to matter so much. Didn’t matter, to some degree, because she knew that if he couldn’t do his job he’d probably rather be dead.

Lex watched them walk down the hall, his nose wrinkling. “Been having you two a time in the sewers? Look like you done rolled around in a dust pile, you do.”

At least she had some words for him. “This really isn’t a good time, Lex.”

“Aye, tell me on it,” he replied, shifting himself out of the way so she could unlock her door. “Ain’t a good time for nobody, Tulip. Thinking it be just the opposite, dig. Crazy shit going down my side of town.”

She felt what he carried in his pocket before he pulled it out and gave it to her, before she even knew he carried anything at all.

“Where did you get that?”

He folded his arms, gave the ceiling an exasperated glance. “Ain’t you even gimme the invite in? Got some knowledge for you.”

She pushed the door open. The wards on it stung her skin as they reacted to the energy from the powder in her pocket and in her hand.

Terrible shoved past Lex to follow her into her apartment. The first thing she did was grab the African Blackwood box from its spot on the bottom shelf in her living room, toss both packets into it, and slam the lid. The weight of heavy clotted magic lifted from her shoulders. Much, much better.

Too bad she couldn’t put Lex in there, too. For that matter, too bad she couldn’t put the whole fucking day in there.

Terrible crossed to the fridge, gave her a questioning glance. Beer would be good, wouldn’t it, a cold— No. No, because she wanted to get a couple of Oozers down her throat immediately. No fucking way was she going to process what had happened sober. “Water.”

He grabbed a bottle of that and a beer, and walked to the counter at the edge of the kitchen.

“Could use me a beer, too, I could,” Lex said.

Terrible glared at him. “Fridge’s there.”

A long moment passed before Lex shrugged and crossed the floor. The silence was ugly.

Chess spoke a little too loudly in her haste to break it. “So where did that come from, Lex? What is it, where did you get it?”

“Took it offen some jaxers.” He twisted the cap off the beer. “Always got such cheap beer, you do. Why you ain’t buy better?”

“Because I want to piss you off, that’s why. Who did you take it off of? How did you find it?”

He acknowledged her sarcasm with a twist of his lips. “Four of em, dig, having theyselves a wander down the street on the yesterday. Seemed wrong, they did. Too spaced, like them bodies all stringy-loose. An scared as shit, they was, too, all balled together like tryna hide under theyselves, but having them some freaky-ass laughing. Were mighty fucked up, Tulip. Never seen any so bumberjaxed, I ain’t. Never seen powder like that, neither.”

He’d plunked himself down on the couch, right in the center so if either she or Terrible wanted to sit they’d be cozying up next to him.

She sat on the arm with her feet on the cushion, so she could face Terrible, still standing at the kitchen counter. “Do you know what it is?”

“Nay, but this ain’t the first time we got these, dig. Third time, seen two like it in the last week. So brought it here, aye. Figured on you giving me the help.”

“Why?”

He rolled his eyes. “Like you ain’t gonna.”

“No, I mean, why me? What can I do?”

“Thinkin you know what. ’Sall magic and ghost shit, it is.”

Yeah, she knew that. But how the hell did he know that? Lex had about as much magical ability as a plastic cup.

He must have seen the question in her eyes—well, she wasn’t exactly trying to hide it—because he tipped his head in the direction of the Blackwood box. “Take that box off in the dark, dig, an give it an open. Shit’s all glowing, it is. Damn freaky.”

Glowing? Fuck. That didn’t sound good, not at all.

Terrible followed her into the bathroom—the only room in the apartment without windows. It wasn’t light outside, no, but she wanted utter darkness for this.

She set the box on the toilet lid, hit the light switch, and opened it.

First the wave of dark magic rolled over her; she kept some unpleasant shit in that box, not just the packets but some curse items, a few things she’d found and a few she’d bought for security’s sake.

All of which she could see, because Lex had told the truth. The packets glowed. She shot a quick glance at Terrible. “You okay?”

He nodded. “’Sget he outta here, aye?”

That was probably for the best, huh. But first … “That guy, DV, he said his friend bought the speed off what’s-his-name—”

“Rickride.”

“Right. He’s one of yours, right? One of Bump’s?”

He nodded, his face white in the pale blue light from the open box.

“And now I guess one of Lex’s people sold the same bad speed. Do you guys get your stuff from the same—”

“Naw. Not what I got, anyroad. Don’t deal with the same supply.”

“So how is this happening, then? How—”

“Ain’t knowin that one, neither.” He glanced away from the box, his eyes glittering in the semi-darkness. “Guessin we got us a connection, though, like the speed and them bespelled dudes—Samms an he just now. The same, aye?”

“I guess so, but I don’t know—well, I don’t know how, or why. The speed doesn’t feel so much like that spell Samms had on him, the nut spell.”

“Be the same ones doin it? You got that from it?”

Damn it. She’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. “I don’t know for sure. This feels male, like that did, but … there’s something different about it. I don’t know what it is, but something’s different.”

He nodded. “Dude back there ain’t had a nut on he, though. For bein controlled, like Samms.”

“No, he didn’t have much on him, did he?”

The eerie glow cast by the tainted speed illuminated his faint smile, the little tilt of his head. “Naw, that he ain’t.”

She saw his hand rising to touch her face, saw the look in his eye start to change, and tried to stop herself from saying the words already formed in her head, in her mouth. Too late. They popped out anyway. “I’m sorry. About the speed—about what happened when—I should have—”

“Ain’t yon fault.” She didn’t think he meant it, though. His eyes left hers, his shoulders lifted like a pair of scissor blades snapping the moment-that-might-have-been in half.

“It is my fault. And I should have found a— I’ll visit the church. I’ll do some more research and—”

“Aw, shit. Don’t know why you still botherin on it, ain’t gonna find—”

“I will.” She reached up and pressed her palms to the sides of his face, his thick muttonchops dense and rough-soft against her palms. “I will. I promise. I just—”

“Oughta give it the leave-out, Chessie, ain’t can—”

“No, I can. I will.”

He still didn’t look at her. Shit. She inched forward, raised herself on her tiptoes so she could be closer to him—so her face could be closer to his, so she could put everything into her eyes and force him to see it. “I know you don’t really like talking about—I don’t like it, either. But you have to let me try this stuff, okay? I know it’s not fun. I know that one time it made you sick, but it was only the—”

He pulled away. “Aye, right. Right, then.”

He didn’t mean that, either. She knew that “Right, then.” It meant I’ll agree so we can stop talking about this.

Too bad knowing what it meant didn’t give her any way to counter it. She stood there for a minute, a long uncomfortable one, before finally managing, “It’s important, Terrible. I’m sorry. I’m—but I’m not going to let this keep happening. You have to let me fix it. I know I can fix it.”

Finally he nodded. “Aye. Guessin us might as well keep givin it the try.”

The bathroom wasn’t a big room at all, especially not with him in it, but she still had to reach out to grab him and pull him close enough to press her forehead into his chest. “I’m so fucking sorry about this. I’ll fix it. I’ll find a way to fix it, I swear. It’s all my—”

Lex’s voice intruded through the closed door, ruining the moment as effectively as—well, as effectively as he ruined so many other things. “You two forgotting on me?”

Shit.

“Tryin to,” Terrible muttered, but he opened the door and walked into the short hall after her.

Lex twisted his upper body on the couch to watch them return. Chess steeled herself for some kind of dirty joke, but he said, “Ain’t good, aye?”

“No.” She set the now-closed box back down on its shelf. “No, not good at all.”

“Ghosty shit, aye?”

“Yeah, but—” Oh, damn, that was fucked up. She sat down beside Lex, barely noticing she was doing it. She hadn’t made the connection in the bathroom, hadn’t really thought about it because their discussion hadn’t gone that way. But now that she did …

“But?”

“It isn’t ghost magic that glows,” she said, still trying to get her head around it. “Ghosts themselves glow. But the reason they glow, what glows about them … How is that even possible?”

“Wanna spit it out, Tulip? Pretend like some of us ain’t witches got the same knowledge as you.”

That at least snapped her out of her daze, just in time for her to catch Terrible’s eyes narrowing at Lex. She wondered what parts of Lex’s body Terrible was removing in his head. Not that she really wanted to know. “Ectoplasm.”

“What?”

“Ectoplasm.” She looked at both of them, Lex on the couch beside her and Terrible standing against her bookshelves glowering at Lex. “Ectoplasm is what glows. It’s what they’re made of— I mean, ghosts are souls but it’s ectoplasm that’s visible. That’s what enables them to solidify, why they can only solidify around things that are already solid, because of the way it reacts to— Never mind. The point is, the only thing that feels like a ghost and glows is ectoplasm.”

They stared at her for a second. Not as if they were waiting for her to go on—both of their expressions told her they knew very well what she was saying—but as if they were having the same problem she was.

Terrible said it first. “Why the fuck anybody snort a ghost?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’ll—I can’t see it giving some kind of high. I mean, I’ve never heard of somebody getting high off it.”

Thankfully neither of them mentioned that if it were possible to do so, she probably would have done it.

And now she probably should. A heavy gong struck somewhere in her stomach. “I’ll try it.”

Terrible’s brows lowered farther. Oh, here it came. “No fuckin way.”

“No, listen. I’m the only one who can. Lex wouldn’t feel any magic, so he wouldn’t know what the effect was, and you’d—you’d need to be there in case something went wrong, so—”

“Naw, don’t give a fuck, Chessie. Some else gives it the try. Not you.”

“Aye, thinking he got it right, I do, you ain’t should be giving—”

“Shut up, both of you.” Like it wasn’t bad enough having one person worry about her like that, in that tight way that made her feel obligated, as if something was expected from her. No matter how much she loved Terrible, it still grated, and that was only one person. She didn’t need to have two. “How are we going to know why people are doing it if we don’t know— No, that doesn’t make sense.”

Thinking about it made her reach for her pillbox. “Lex, you didn’t feel anything when you touched it. So you would have done it, right? If you’d bought it. You would have chopped a line like normal.”

“Aye, guessing so. Them two days past were shooting it, too.”

“And it feels like magic, too.” She washed three Cepts down with water from her bottle and grabbed a cigarette. “It’s not just ectoplasm, it’s magic.”

“You get high on that?”

“Not that kind of high, no. And especially not magic like that.” Yes, there was a little high in it: the rush of power, the lifting feeling of magic in the pit of her stomach, and the way it could force a smile onto her face like a drag off the pipes. It was a weak high, usually, not one she chased, but still there.

The men waited for her to continue. “It’s dark magic. Someone who can feel it will know that. It feels … well, it feels bad. It feels unhappy and sick. Nobody who could actually feel the energy coming off that shit would snort it, seriously. But if you can’t feel it when you touch it, I don’t think you’d feel it after you did it, you know?”

Terrible nodded. “So you thinkin it ain’t the ectoplasm they tryna get high from, an not the magic neither. Them buyin it ain’t know—’sall hid in there.”

“Right.”

Lex put his empty beer bottle on the rickety table. “Aye, sounding all on the sensibles, but where the hell it coming from, then? Ain’t thinking we got no troubles in our supplies, iffen you dig. Ain’t can say the same on Bump, but guessing Terrible knows.”

“No trouble, not what I got.”

“Guess you guys need to start asking some questions, then,” Chess said.

Lex lit up a cigarette, leaning back on her couch and propping his feet on the table. “Talkin on questions, when you coming on over, Terrible, start working with me?”

“I ain’t.”

Silence. Lex blew smoke slowly into the air. “Really thinking you wanna have you a mind-change on that one, I do. Ain’t tryna pull no shit with you here.”

Terrible didn’t respond; his face didn’t move, not a blink, not a twitch. Any normal man would have been extremely uncomfortable right about then, with that cold blank look aimed right at him.

Lex wasn’t a normal man. Or, he wasn’t abnormal, he was just … normal with a few extra shots of arrogance, like a cocky blended coffee drink. And Chess knew that Lex didn’t believe deep down that Terrible would seriously injure him. Didn’t believe Terrible would kill him.

Because of her. She’d stopped Terrible from continuing to attack Lex after he’d broken his jaw that night, and she guessed in doing so she’d proven to Lex that she wouldn’t let Terrible kill him and—worse—that Terrible would listen to her and let him live.

She couldn’t feel bad about saving Lex’s life, but damn, she didn’t feel good knowing Lex sat there with confidence wrapped around his shoulders like a king’s ermine because of her. “Making the offer causen of Tulip, dig, but making the offer causen I got a need for my own muscle. Getting that one whether it’s you or some else.”