Stacia Kane - Unholy Magic

“That seems to be the case, yes.”

What was it with murder this week? Hearing about murders, seeing dead bodies, now the possibility of tangling with the ghosts of murder victims—hardly her ideal way to spend a few days.

Elder Griffin shifted in his seat. “It was the decision of the Elders that given your … experience with malevolent entities, your handling of Ereshdiran …”

“I’m the go-to girl for murderous ghosts?”

His eyebrows rose. She couldn’t tell whether he was amused or displeased. “We felt you were the logical one for the case, yes. If you find yourself uncomfortable, we can assign another Debunker, of course, but I don’t have to tell you what a case like this could do for you.”

She waited for him to continue. She’d take the case, she already knew that. When the Elders made a decision it was best to abide by it.

And she couldn’t help it. The thought of handling something like this, a career-making case, appealed. Agnew Doyle was still coasting along on the success of his Gray Towers Debunking, and probably would for years.

Doyle. There was a name she thought of as little as possible. He stayed well out of her way these days. As well he might—after Terrible beat the hell out of him for hitting her, Lex had taken his shot, too.

Time was the only concern. Helping both Bump and Lex would put enough on her plate as it was. She didn’t have a choice there, and she was beginning to feel certain she didn’t have a choice here, either.

“The bonus offering on this case is a tidy one,” he said finally. “Forty thousand dollars.”

Her car was on its last legs. Her couch sagged. Her jeans were developing holes in the knees. Even with the money she saved getting her pills free from Lex it was hard to make ends meet, hard to afford the pipes and the pills she bought from Bump to keep up appearances and the beer and cigarettes and CDs and … Forty grand bought a lot of time in dreamland.

She nodded. “I’ll take it.”

Normally she would have gone up to the library to research Pyle’s address and put in a request for his financial records and employment history, but in this case there was no need. The newspaper clipping and blueprints gave her what she needed to figure out the address, and the financials were already there.

Besides, Roger Pyle was famous. So famous even Chess knew who he was. He’d parlayed a clever stand-up act into a TV series, and rumor had it he was about to make the move to the big screen. She’d never watched his show, a spoof of a BT religious order, but she didn’t need the pictures in the file to know what he looked like, that was for sure.

Nor did she need the financial records to know how wealthy he was. Pyle couldn’t be faking a haunting for the money. Even if there were numerous entities in his new house, the most he could hope for would be, what, maybe a couple of hundred thousand? A drop in the bucket for someone like him.

Still, there were other reasons to fake a haunting, and forty grand was a lot of money for her. She needed it, and she needed to prove he was lying.

But first … The image of those empty eye sockets haunted her, the image and the knowledge that this would happen again if she didn’t do something about it. Whether it was a ghost or something else, she didn’t know, but the Church’s extensive library was as good a place as any to start finding out.

Goody Glass squatted behind the desk like a troll on a heath, right down to the malevolent facial expression. With an effort, Chess kept from returning the disdain. Goody Glass had never liked her, not from the first week of training when she’d caught Chess eating crackers—crackers stolen from the kitchens—in the stacks.

A minor crime, but it wasn’t the crime itself for which the Goody held a grudge. It was the way that discovery had led to a deeper, uglier one: that Chess had stolen the food because she wasn’t used to being fed on a regular schedule, that she had no ancestry, no family. A fairly common situation since Haunted Week, but not for Church employees.

The Goody’s thick eyebrows rose over her beady eyes. “Art thou working on a case, Miss Putnam?”

“I am, Goody.” Chess waved the file.

She got no reply, but she didn’t expect one. Instead, the door to her left clicked and she entered the Restricted Room, charmed as always by the displays of religious artifacts from the past, all sitting beneath the bright lights as if waiting, hoping, that one day they might be useful again, be something more than relics.

She knew it shouldn’t, but the benevolent smile of the fat golden Buddha in the corner made her feel safer. She smiled in return and set her file and her bag on one of the long, empty wooden tables.

Beneath the glittering gold cross on the far wall—another symbol of religions past—the Church kept shelves full of magical reference books. Chess knelt in front of them, scanning the titles. Eyes … eyes.

She’d used eyes before in magic, of course, but only as ingredients in other spells. Salamander eyes were sometimes used in poultices to heal energy deficiencies. Raven eyes could be dried and powdered and used in protection spells. But she’d never heard of human eyes being used for anything of the sort, much less being used in sex magic, and she had a feeling the eyes were more than simply spell ingredients anyway.

Finally she grabbed a couple of books and sat down with them. The first was a slim volume on sight magic; she had hopes for it, but it related more to psychic visions and spells for out-of-body investigating. That sort of thing was done by the Black Squad, Church government employees, as opposed to regular Church employees like Chess. They handled crimes mundane and magical, the breaking of legal codes as well as moral, whereas Chess dealt pretty much exclusively with the crime of fake hauntings—“conspiracy to commit spectral fraud,” was the official term—and with banishing the ghosts if they did exist.

The second book offered a little more information. It opened with a quote she’d heard before, about eyes as windows to the soul, and studied that idea from the perspective of magic.

Perhaps that was what the glyph meant, the sigil branded into Daisy’s skin and marked on the wall behind her? Chess pulled out her camera to examine the image from the night before, her mouth instinctively tightening at the sight of that horrible fallen face. She scrolled through the images until she found the one she wanted.

It didn’t look like a face at all, not really. Faces weren’t shaped like triangles. But the symmetry of it suggested it could be a face, or perhaps another body part. Terrible had said that Daisy’s was the first female body found, that not much had been left of the second victim—Little Tag, if she remembered. Was it possible someone was building a new body, a vessel for a lost soul?

Such things were rare, of course. She’d only heard of it happening, had never been faced with such a crime or even the faintest evidence of one. But eyes deteriorated quickly when not frozen; if they were indeed being used to give sight to an earthbound spirit, that spirit’s companion or Bindmate or whatever would need a fresh supply.

More deaths.

She pulled the sleeves of her red sweater over her hands and hugged herself, but the chill slithering up her body had nothing to do with the air in the room. Ghosts didn’t care who they killed; last night’s experience with Annabeth Whitman would have been a sharp reminder of that if she’d needed one. But the ghost’s summoner, the one who kept it earthbound, who fed it energy …