Stacia Kane: City of Ghosts

“It’s in your file.”

“Oh. Right.”

Lauren smirked and swung herself up from her seat. “Be outside, if you don’t mind. I’d rather not have to waste time coming up to get you.”

That remark, and several others, were still stewing in Chess’s head when Lauren pulled her sports car—cherry red, the perfect little princess vehicle for the Grand Elder’s perfect little daughter—up onto the curb at the corner of Fifty-fifth and Brand. “That lot, there,” she said. “That’s where they took the second picture.”

Chess nodded and got out, taking a deep breath. The air stank, a vile, rotting scent from the slaughterhouse four blocks or so away. When the wind hit the deathhouse right all of Downside smelled like a burned-out plague pit in the summertime. And lucky her, this was one of those times.

She had to admit, though, it did have a few advantages over the cloying fragrance of perfume and bitch that filled Lauren’s tricked-out coupe. Like not having to sit right next to Lauren. Or not having to listen to Lauren talk. Or especially not having to listen to Lauren’s music.

Decaying carcasses were infinitely preferable to that, she thought, then regretted it—a little—when she remembered why they were there. Her stomach, already a touch uneasy under its load of four Cepts and a couple of Nips, gave a slight protest; she popped the top of the Coke can she’d grabbed for just that reason and poured some down her throat.

“You know, caffeine can mess with your energy,” Lauren said. “It’s best to stay away from artificial stimulants.”

It was probably the funniest thing anyone had said to her in weeks. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’m just saying, if you want to advance in the Church you should use every advantage, and one of them is keeping your power as sharp as possible. You don’t want to—”

“Yeah, thanks. So where did they find—them?”

Lauren’s raised eyebrows told Chess exactly what she thought of the change of subject, but she accepted it. “There. Come on.”

Together they crossed the street, the heels of Chess’s boots as silent as she could make them on the broken slabs of cement. The road itself looked like a patchwork quilt: squares of dirt, sections filled with dirty gravel, here and there a foot or two of blacktop.

It looked empty, and every alarm bell in Chess’s head started ringing faintly. Downside streets were never empty, especially not at night. Like tall grass concealing a predator, it was when they were still and silent that they were at their most dangerous. Ready to strike. She knew there had to be at least a dozen pairs of eyes on her back at that very moment, at least a dozen hands reaching into pockets and belts and hairdos in search of weapons.

Lauren’s car was probably loaded with wards, safe as it would be inside the Church itself, but the women’s tattoos were designed to protect them from ghosts and magic, not from Downsiders out to make their illegal livings.

She hadn’t worried about that stuff in a while. Usually if she was out at night she was with Terrible, and nobody dared fuck with Terrible; hell, nobody dared even look at Terrible for more than a few respectful seconds. Even if she wasn’t with him physically, everybody knew who she was, or rather, they knew who she was with; everyone knew Downside’s Churchwitch worked for Bump.

But Terrible hated her, and she had no idea if Bump knew what she’d done. What she’d been doing. “Stupid” was one word for people who thought they could get away with betraying Bump. The other word was “dead.”

She had a funny feeling both those words would end up being accurate if they didn’t get out of there quickly. The whole area felt off, even with the speed turning her blood into river rapids in her veins. Speed tended to mask her reactions to ghosts, but not usually to magic in general, and this corner vibed like a just-struck bell.

“You feeling anything?” she asked softly as they hit the patchy grass at the edge of the lot.

“Hmm. A little.” Lauren didn’t bother to lower her own voice; it sounded like the first bird chirping at dawn. Chess cringed, tried to glance around without being too obvious about it. Still nothing, no movement. This was not good.

Dead grass whispered warnings against their shoes as they trod across it, heading for the inside corner. Rickety buildings leaned over it, ready to topple; they formed a ramshackle archway, a frame of sorts. Chess knew without being told that this was where the body—the body parts—had been found.

Still the presence of magic set her head buzzing, a little high that she would have enjoyed if she hadn’t been half-numb with fear. This wasn’t her neighborhood. She didn’t know it. Inside those buildings could live a few families scratching out livings working the pipe rooms or at the slaughterhouse or crematorium, or picking pockets in better parts of town. People who kept themselves to themselves.

Or they could be half-mad hallucinating Nipheads with dead nerves and deader eyes. Or worse. No way to tell until they were right on top of her, and then it would be too late.

She shook her head, watched Lauren trot into the shadows in the corner with barely a pause. Either the Black Squad were a bunch of crazy-tough motherfuckers, or Lauren Abrams was dumb as dirt. Chess knew which theory she preferred.

“It was here.” Lauren made a circle with her hand, waving it over an area about a foot square. Well, that was all the space that had been needed. It hadn’t been laid-out corpses in those photos. More of a … pile, really.

Lauren pulled a heavy silver flashlight out of the backpack slung over her shoulder and switched it on. The patch of ground flew into colorless focus, cast spiky shadows against the crooked boards of the wall behind.

Shit. Chess had two choices. Go stick her hand in what was certain to be a raging pool of nasty energy floating above the lit-up spot, or look like a total pussy. And given those options, touching horrible death energy sounded positively appealing.

Tingles ran up her hands, slipping over the new scars on her wrists. In the stark light from the flash the patterns beneath her skin were black; they shifted and curled with the spot’s energy, and she felt it like fingernails tickling her.

Darkness lurked there too, a slow chuckle beneath the surface. But not like she would have expected, not at all. This didn’t feel like death magic, or even really like serious black magic. It felt like the kind of curse Church students tried out on one another: forgetfulness or clumsiness spells, charms to temporarily confuse the tongue so the bespelled victim couldn’t speak clearly. Spells that wore off in ten or fifteen minutes. Harmless shit.

But piles of bloody body parts, carved with Lamaru symbols … That was not harmless. Nothing the Lamaru did was harmless.

So what the fuck was going on?

Lauren seemed to feel it too, the wrongness of it. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Even if they committed the murder elsewhere and just left the parts here, the energy would be darker.”

“Are you sure it was here that they found it?”

“This is where they told me. It’s in the pictures too, so it’s got to—”

Every hair on Chess’s body jumped to attention. She’d just started to spin around when red light splashed across them, across the walls, turning Lauren’s hair into a river of blood around her face.

The circle stood in the middle of the intersection, deep red fire, swirled with icy-hot black energy. Chess’s stomach jerked. It was darkness in that circle, darkness and misery and despair, and whatever was inside would deliver more of it the second it was unleashed. She knew it. Knew it even before the squealing started.