Stacia Kane: Unholy Magic

“Stay on, aye? Gimme a minute.” Over the screams and shouts of the brawl she heard Lex speaking Cantonese to someone, heard several different voices answer.

Chess crouched lower in her not-very-good hiding place, her stare focused on the fight. Berta kept swinging her machete, southpaw. Chess expected to see heads start flying at any second. With her free hand she found her knife; her palm was so sweaty it took her three tries to get a grip on it and pull it out. Just in case …

“Tulip? You there?”

It took her a few seconds to find her voice. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Aye, hang on there. All be over soon. You all hidden up? Stay out of sight. Them dudes, they ain’t know you, dig?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get it.”

“What you doing on Forty-fifth?”

“Terrible asked me—”

“Terrible’s there? All by hisself, aye?”

“No, not by himself. There’s a fucking army here, okay? And even if he was by himself—which he isn’t—I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Thought you was fun.”

“I’m not.”

“Why he ask you to go there for, anyhow? Ain’t safe there, you know that.”

“There’s a—there’s a dead girl. One of Bump’s girls.” Hell, he was going to find out anyway, if any of his men made it back safely. Which she guessed they would. A voice rose over the shrieks of the girls on the street, Cantonese ratcheting through the empty air. A call to retreat, she hoped.

“Oh? Looks like somebody getting some payback,” Lex said with satisfaction. The empty eye sockets of the dead girl flashed into Chess’s mind. If he’d been standing in front of her, she’d have tried to slap him.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Ain’t talking about nothing. Just saying, is all.”

“What’s that—I gotta go.” She snapped the phone shut as Terrible appeared at the end of the alley, his broad form blocking out what little light there was. Behind him she saw Slobag’s men becoming shadows again, disappearing into the spaces between the buildings.

“Come on out now, Chess.”

Her legs didn’t want to support her as she stood. More bodies appeared—Red Berta, a few of the other girls, Chess couldn’t tell which ones. All were panting like they were being paid extra to get into it, but they were alive.

Most of them, anyway. The hooker Chess had watched fly through the air did not get up. Neither did four of Slobag’s men. Red Berta and her girls emptied the dead men’s pockets with crisp efficiency, like murderous bank tellers.

Chess dug into her bag and pulled out some tissues, which she used to dab at the deep, swelling cut under Terrible’s eye. She had to brace her free hand against his chest and stand on tiptoe to do it, putting her face only inches from his when he looked down at her.

Their eyes met, and heat flooded her skin. Her heels slammed back onto the sidewalk. “Sorry, maybe, um, maybe you should—here.”

She shoved the wad of tissues at him, felt him take them from her. Too bad he couldn’t take away the confusion—and something like panic—making her stomach feel like someone was tickling it from the inside. Stupid sex magic.

She cleared her throat. “Another half-inch to the left and you’d need a hospital.”

Orange light caught the wet spots on his shirt and illuminated a long rip in one sleeve. Beneath it the flesh was almost as raw as his knuckles.

“Naw, I’m right.” He took the tissues away, sniffled, and pressed them back against his face.

“It’ll scar.”

A deep rumble of laughter. “Guess another scar make a difference?”

He had her there.

“What’s your thinkin on Daisy?”

“Wh—oh.” The dead girl still lay on the pavement. Whitish frost on her skin turned her into an eerie sculpture, like the statues of the original Church leaders outside the Government Headquarters up Northside. Those were carved from white limestone, coated with diamond dust to make them gleam. The rime on Daisy’s dead body created the same illusion, making her mutilated form beautiful.

“I don’t—I don’t know. If it was a ghost, I mean. It’s really too soon for me to tell, it’s so dark and …” Chess shivered. She’d have to tell him about the sex spell, but not now. Not when her blood still simmered a little too fast for comfort.

“Aye. Don’t worry on it, Chess. Maybe you free tomorrow, come back for another look? In the daylight, dig at the walls an all. Bring yon Church stuff, them little machines and all you use.”

“I thought you didn’t think it was a ghost.”

His eyelids flickered and he nodded toward the huddle of girls, counting their money and lighting the dead men’s smokes. “They do. Bump an me, we ain’t so sure. You ain’t think it’s fair chances, them showing up here this night, aye?”

“You think—”

“I pick you up tomorrow round midday, cool?”

She didn’t want to. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help him; it was that Lex’s words about payback wouldn’t stop echoing in her head. If this was a gang thing, some sort of territory struggle, she did not need to be involved. Her life worked, as much as it could. Getting in between the people to whom she owed her loyalty—the one person to whom she owed loyalty, anyway, all Bump did was sell her pills and run the closest pipe room to her apartment—and the one with whom she swapped bodily fluids probably wasn’t the best way to make sure it kept working.

But there really was no good way to refuse. It wouldn’t just look suspicious, it would be … it would be wrong.

She glanced again at Daisy’s body, abandoned like a busted Dream pipe on the cracked and pitted sidewalk. If it weren’t for the Church, that could have been her. Probably would have been her. Certainly it was what she’d grown up expecting.

So she nodded. “They told me not to worry about coming in tomorrow, not after what happened tonight. No new cases anyway.”

“They give you the day off? How bad your night go?”

“Oh … it was nothing. I got poisoned a little bit. They had an antidote, no big deal.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m here, right? No problem. Where’s the girl who saw the ghost?”

He started to say something, then stopped himself. “Laria. She name is Laria.”

“Yeah, her.” Chess scanned the little crowd of women, picking out the frizzy brown head. Laria stood near the back, a confused look on her face. Chess tried to catch the girl’s eye, but she wasn’t sure if it was possible for anyone to catch the girl’s eye at this stage; she looked like she was ready to keel over backward.

“I get her.”

Laria looked younger close up than Chess had thought. Sixteen, perhaps, or seventeen at the oldest. Her pale blue jacket had stains on the sleeves and a tear in one elbow. When she squeezed her arms tighter around her chest her pinkish-white skin poked through the hole like a turtle peeping from its shell.

“Laria, I’m Chess. Could you tell me what you saw earlier? The man who killed Daisy?”

Laria shook her head. Her clouded brown eyes filled with tears. “Ain’t seen nothin.”

“You said earlier you saw—”

Laria shook her head again. Her hair moved with it like a clump of dirty steel wool.

Chess glanced at Terrible, not bothering to hide her irritation. She had sympathy, sure, but it was late and freezing cold and she just wanted to go home, and Laria’s reticence wasn’t helping anyone.

He gripped Laria’s arm. “You tell she, girl. Only way for us to catch him, dig?”

“I ain’t—”

“Ain’t nothin. You the one left she alone so’s you could go stab up, aye? Least you owe she some knowledge.”