Stacia Kane: Finding Magic

Maybe that wasn’t fair. But Chess didn’t feel like being fair. She was scared and trapped, and being trapped reminded her of all those other times, of her entire lifetime of being trapped, and her fingers itched to grab the flask out of her bag. In another second she was going to do it, Jillian and Church and everything else be damned.

Cars zipped by on the highway; Chess briefly considered trying to signal one of them, then discarded the idea. Even if Mark didn’t kill her before she could attract anyone’s attention, and even if she could manage to attract someone’s attention, no one would do anything. No one ever did. The only place helpful onlookers appeared, the only place people went out of their way for strangers, was in movies. In real life people just focused their eyes on the horizon and pretended they hadn’t seen a thing. They lied to themselves, told themselves they were still good people even as they left others to be abused and die.

She’d have to figure out something on her own. Fuck.

Okay. The Church hadn’t covered anything like this in her training, but life had taught her one or two things about trying to mitigate whatever abuse she was in for, trying to placate sick fucks. It didn’t always work—well, it almost never stopped whatever was going to happen—but every once in a while it helped. Made it a little easier, a little not so bad.

Of course, every once in a while it made it worse, too. She’d have to take a chance.

She cleared her throat. “Hey, um, Mr. Pollert? Mark? I have a flask in my bag. Vodka. Do you want some? A drink? Seems like maybe we can relax a little now that we’re not at the Rosses’ house anymore.”

He didn’t answer for so long she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he snorted. “Of course you need to drink, working with those people.”

Please, please, let her relief not show. Don’t let him see that he’d just said exactly what she was hoping he’d say, that he’d just given her an opening. “It’s a lot of pressure. Trying to be what they want me to be. They expect so much.”

“But not from themselves, do they? Only of other people. Only of you.” He jerked his head in her direction—in Jillian’s direction. “Look at her. Black Squad. Supposed to be the elite. And yet she sits there whining.”

Chess didn’t know quite how to respond to that. He was right, after all.

Which was what bothered her. That what she’d been thinking was so closely mirrored, that she could have anything in common with Mark Pollert … the thought made her squirm. So she lifted her hand to the zipper of her bag. “I’m going to get my flask, okay?”

“You don’t need that thing.” The words weren’t spoken in a harsh tone, but they were definite enough to stop her. Shit. It wasn’t just that she thought if she could get a little booze into his system, get him to loosen up, she could maybe earn a bit more of his trust and it might be easier to escape. It was that she seriously could use a fucking drink.

But then he pulled something out of the van’s center console. A little plastic bag full of pills, round white pills Chess thought she recognized. Lonticepts, or at least that’s what they looked like. Cepts. Opiates, strong ones. Good ones. The kind some of her foster parents used to give her to shut her up or to make her feel better after they’d finished with her. The kind she paid five bucks a pop for in the Corey Home but hadn’t touched since, because she wasn’t doing that stuff anymore now that she had a future.

Right. Because sneaking shots was so much better and stronger. For fuck’s sake, who was she kidding?

Mark shook the bag at her. “Take one. Go ahead.”

So much for her clever trap, for trying to gain his confidence. She hadn’t done anything except show him she had a weakness, give him an intro so he could drug her. Make her more pliable, just like all those other shitheads had done.

“Go on.” He shook the bag again. His voice hardened. “Take one.”

She pretended she hadn’t noticed his tone, didn’t know what he was trying to do. “Hey, thanks. Um, can I give Jillian one? I bet she could use it.” She forced a mean snicker.

He echoed it. “Go ahead. There’s plenty.”

What if she didn’t actually swallow it? She could probably fake it. Palm it and tuck it into her pocket, drop it onto the floor between the door and the seat where he might not look.

Yeah, he might check, he might look for it. That didn’t mean she couldn’t try. She should try.

But she didn’t. She didn’t. Instead she popped that pill into her mouth and dry-swallowed it. Instead she let her eyes close for a second in anticipation, because even though it had been a few years, she still remembered, still knew what was coming, and found herself waiting for it, eager for it, her entire body tense like she was on the brink of an orgasm. The best orgasm, because it would last. It wouldn’t disappear in thirty seconds and leave her alone and stuck inside her own head again.

She didn’t give Jillian the choice, though. She shoved the pill into Jillian’s mouth, ignoring the look in her eyes, and turned away as soon as Jillian swallowed. Maybe Jillian was faking it. Chess hoped not. She didn’t really want Jillian paying attention to what she was saying, what she was doing.

Mark chuckled, an oily, disgusting sound. “Just wait until that kicks in, Princess.”

“I’m not a princess.”

“Oh?” He glanced at her, his face pale in the dashboard’s glow. “Seems to me like you are. Training with the Church, sticking your nose in the air. I bet you think you’re better than me, don’t you? I bet you have a mommy and daddy who worship the ground your precious little feet walk on.”

Not only was he gross and a murderer, he was a fucking lousy judge of character. Was it better to tell him that or to let him go on thinking he’d figured her out?

She only had a second to decide. No. Tell him the truth. Try to form some kind of bond with him. Get him to let his guard down. “I don’t have any family. They—well, my mother, I guess—abandoned me when I was born, before Haunted Week. I was a baby. They found me outside a hospital.”

He steered the van onto the exit ramp at Carter Avenue. They’d passed the Downside exits; where was he—? Oh shit. The Church. He was heading for Church headquarters, and as he did he glared at her so hard it felt like a slap. “Don’t lie to me, like you think it’s going to gain my trust. They don’t let people without families work for the Church. They don’t let trash work for them.”

“I’m not lying, I—”

Stupid. She shouldn’t have tried to argue. “You are lying. I know you’re lying. I passed their fucking tests, and they didn’t let me in. They didn’t let me in because my parents died, because I lived at the Mission. So I know.”

That wasn’t why they hadn’t let him in, or at least she guessed it wasn’t. Something told her that what had kept him out of Church training was the fact that he’d almost certainly murdered his parents and that he was basically a psycho.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he believed it. So she’d have to play along, even though the words felt like vomit in her mouth—because they were lies, and because they weren’t. “That doesn’t surprise me. I mean, you should see some of the games that go on there, the way people backstab and everything, pretending they like you and then ripping you up in front of the Elders … they really just don’t care, you know.”

Maybe he’d have to stop at a red light, maybe she could jump—no. No, he’d probably just run them all, and even if he was dumb enough to stop, and even if she could get out without being shot, she couldn’t leave Jillian and with Jillian dragging her down she wouldn’t get far.