Stacia Kane - Unholy Magic

Oliver appeared from the swirling black fog, followed by Lex and, a moment later, Terrible.

“Should we go in with you?”

Chess nodded. She didn’t want to speak. Wasn’t actually sure if speaking would break her connection with the birds, and didn’t want to find out.

They left a few of their men still fighting the last stragglers, walked across the narrow, cracked stoop, and opened the weatherbeaten front door.

Dust filled her nose at the same time the sex energy, so much stronger inside than out, hit her body. The result was a sort of shuddery, gasping sneeze, and she struggled to regain control. The men looked around uneasily, or at least Oliver and Terrible did. True to form, Lex appeared unconcerned.

They stood in what had once been a lovely entry hall. A lone candle burned in an iron sconce at the far end, casting flickering light across the grimy floor. Wallpaper hung in tatters from the water-stained walls; piles of shreds and chunks of plaster lined the baseboards.

Music filtered into the room, too faint for her to pick up the tune. Violins, she thought. Something orchestral. She couldn’t tell where it came from. She didn’t hear anything else. Every nerve in her body twanged and shuddered, waiting for Kemp, for Vanita, for the ghosts. For whatever existed in this house.

To their left, an empty room with broken floorboards revealing gaping blackness below. A shrouded chair, a broken mirror so old and filthy it looked more like a blank gray eye staring at them.

Without speaking they headed toward the end of the hall, toward that single flame. The door flapped on its hinges behind them.

And all the while Chess felt the birds overhead waiting for their passengers. Felt their indifference. They didn’t care who lived or died, they only waited to clean up after it was over.

A staircase curved up on their right, its banisters catching the candlelight and shining it back. The wood felt solid enough, but the stairs creaked.

Not that it mattered. The ghosts knew they were here. She was certain Vanita and Kemp knew, too. It was a trap, but it was a trap they couldn’t refuse to walk into, not unless they wanted more people to die. She couldn’t let that happen. None of them could.

Of course, it was easy to be so definite when she hadn’t yet seen what awaited her at the top of the stairs. When she did, it was all she could do to keep her feet under her.

The men gasped, but whether from the blast of sexual power or the sight before them Chess didn’t know, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.

For some reason she’d thought the ghosts would be upright. Instead, iron frames were fixed around the edges of the single beds, flush with the mattresses. From the top and bottom of each frame, cuffs extended, threaded with wires, circling the wrists and ankles of the ghost on each bed. Electric current running through the wires gave them solid form; their skin was silvery white, eerily pale as they writhed on the beds. They appeared sculpted from moonlight.

Ten of them, or a dozen; she wasn’t capable of counting at that moment.

Chess didn’t recognize them. Was glad she didn’t recognize them, didn’t connect them with the living women they had once been or the empty bodies she’d seen on the cold streets. It wasn’t the triumphant greed on their faces. It wasn’t the way their skin glowed as they sucked the life force from the magic-trapped men above them.

It was the eyes. Naked, bloody eyes, slightly shriveled and blackened now but still recognizable. They’d been placed in the women’s sockets, a sick joke in the unreal perfection of their faces.

Chess’s mouth went dry; she could do nothing but stare for one long, sickening moment at the unearthly horror before her.

The ghost on the nearest bed was terrible, and beautiful, and desire built in Chess to go to her, touch her, experience for herself what that perfection felt like. Someone moved behind her, then stopped; perhaps impervious Lex had caught whoever it was.

Perhaps whoever it was had simply seen the man above the ghost, his flesh seeming to melt away, his eyes hollow and dead in his agonized face. Or maybe they’d seen the viscous stain on the mattress as overused body parts exploded again and again, as they chafed and went raw and finally bled. Every bed, every ghost, was smeared with blood and semen, with tears and saliva. The mattresses stank, the floors were thick with a glistening, congealing stew of human fluids.

Still the men’s hips kept moving, still their hands roamed over the bodies beneath them. Transfixed. Trapped. Caught in an ever-tightening finger trap they could not escape from no matter how hard they tried. Bile rose in Chess’s throat, sharp and sour; she forced it back down, forced herself to focus on ending the horror instead of absorbing it further into a soul that had already seen far too much of it.

Should the psychopomps come in first, or should they try and get the men away and then bring them in? Of course, she didn’t know if she could get the men away, nor was she certain the birds wouldn’t simply shuck the men free of their bodies like ears of corn and carry them into the City as well.

Or even if there would be enough left of them to live if she did free them. The man before her was barely more than skin and bone, his lips shriveled back from his teeth, his skin shining through the thin downy hair on top of his head.

They should probably try to free him just the same. If they freed all the men, she could simply call the birds in. The iron cuffs and electric current wouldn’t pose a problem for—

The crash slammed her knees to the filthy carpet. Before she knew what had happened she was leaping back to her feet and flinging herself forward purely on instinct. Her skin burned and itched, her tattoos were hot to the point of pain. She wanted to scream but was too scared.

She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know what happened next, but she did know without a doubt that whatever black magic guarded this place had been tripped.

Thick, grimy glass filled the window in front of her. Through it she barely made out the shadows of the birds outside in their endless circles. Still under her control. Waiting.

For now, anyway. Shit, she had no idea what to do. No idea, and it was getting hard to breathe. Hard to think. Her legs shook beneath her, her vision blurred. The spell, the protection, was feeding on her.

Feeding on all of them. Through the doorway of the bedroom she saw Lex and Terrible’s men, still standing in the hall, bracing themselves on the rickety banister, on one another. If she didn’t get her shit together, they would all die.

“Oliver!” Where was he? Was that dust in the air, making it thick and dark?

No. The screaming pain of her tattoos, the creeping terror up her spine, told her that. Ghosts. More of them, who knew how many, called into being by the curse or Kemp or simply because they sensed death and fear in this place and wanted to join the party.

Before she could think about it, before she could second-guess herself, she smashed the window.

Glass drove itself into her arm, into her hand and shoulder. A scream tore from her, as if her flesh itself was screaming.

Birds poured in through the window. Over the pain she felt them feeding on her blood, connecting her to them more strongly. Felt their greed, their coldness. Felt, with a sinking horror, the malevolent spell fight them.

Kemp and Vanita had turned the house into a spirit home, a guardian. The psychopomps could not do their job; magic blocked them, forced them into impotence. They buzzed angrily around the room, wings beating the air, their rage apparent. Their rebellion apparent; she would lose them in a few minutes. Already she felt them slipping away, straining to break her control despite their pleasure in her sacrifice.