Stacia Kane: Finding Magic

The men’s eyes thawed a little. One of them—Trent?—gave her an appraising kind of smile. “Thinking of joining us?”

Chess shrugged.

Trent’s face hardened; clearly he’d expected her to blush and giggle under his manly attention or something. “Well,” he said, stepping back and sweeping his arm out in a you-first kind of gesture, “this is as good a start as any, right? Go ahead.”

She should have hesitated. She should have looked at Jillian, waited for a nod.

But she didn’t. Not with Vaughn smirking and Trent still standing there waiting for her to move.

She started walking.

“Let’s see how tough she is now,” she heard one of the men murmur. Her back stiffened. They had no idea what tough was.

Tough was walking through that wide-open doorway and entering an entirely different world, a world full of blood and body parts thrown around, a world of overturned furniture and broken glass and death. A world where the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with horror, still in shock at what they’d been forced to witness.

Holy shit . Bile rose in her throat; stars exploded before her eyes. What she was seeing? How many people had been killed there, how many bodies made up the clutter of lost mortality strewn across the oat-colored carpet?

A chuckle from behind her managed to penetrate the roaring in her ears. Right. Right, they were watching her, waiting for her to break down. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

Jillian’s hand on her arm. Something in her eyes, something not quite sympathy but not quite pleasure, either. More like … curiosity, maybe? Annoyance. “You okay?”

Chess nodded, forcing herself not to pull away from Jillian’s presumptuous touch no matter how much it made her skin crawl. She was trying, she was getting better with that, better every day, but … it still sent discomfort skittering along her skin, down her spine. “I’m fine.”

Jillian paled as she looked at the mess. “Damn. They weren’t kidding when they said it was awful.”

“What happened? I mean, what do—”

“These people were murdered, that’s what happened.” Trent stood in the doorway; as he spoke he started walking, essentially shoving Chess and Jillian further into the death-chamber. Sunlight made his hair a brownish halo around the shadowed oval of his face, so she couldn’t read his expression. She bet she knew what it was, though. “See, when people get all torn apart like that, they usually can’t live anymore.”

Chess stared at him. A long, even stare, one that told him exactly what she thought of him and his patronizing little games.

Vaughn cleared his throat. “Neighbor called this morning, screaming, saying she’d come over to pick up the woman—Mrs. Waring, Shannon Waring—to go shopping, found them all like this. She said she didn’t enter the house.”

“Any confirmation on that?” Jillian asked.

“Still working on it.” Vaughn flipped a page in the little notebook he carried. “Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, everyone’s horrified, the Warings were such nice people, you know, the usual shi—stuff neighbors say. Doors weren’t locked, garage door was open. There’s a tire track off the driveway, but we have no idea when it might have been made.”

“I guess we should—” Jillian started, but Trent cut her off.

“I think we should ask our new recruit what she thinks we should do.” Amusement glinted in his eyes as he looked at Chess. “She can learn by doing, right?”

Was he always this much of an asshole, or was it something personal?

Not that it mattered. Fine. He wanted to be a dick, he could go right ahead. One benefit of an upbringing like hers: nobody could make her feel worse about herself than she already did. His attitude, his dislike, was just another raindrop hitting floodwaters.

There was a pause; in it she felt them all waiting for her reaction, Jillian and Vaughn torn between wanting to stand up to Trent and wanting to see what she’d do.

So she looked around the room, thought for a second. “What about the weapon? Do you know what kind of weapon was used?”

“A knife.” Trent had moved, so she could see his face, the glint in his eyes. What did it feel like to be so smug all the time? Not that she cared, really; it was just idle curiosity.

But wait. He did look smug, didn’t he? And he wouldn’t be looking so smug if she wasn’t missing something, if there wasn’t something big she should have figured out but hadn’t.

She stopped and inspected the scene again, trying to separate the bloody limbs and lumps of flesh from what they meant. It was so … grisly. What did that—why was that? Why had the bodies been chopped up and left lying around like that? Usually when killers chopped up bodies it was to make them easier to dispose of, right?

Well, she didn’t know that for a fact, but she’d known a few people in her life who would have. And it just—it just seemed like if a killer was going to go through all the trouble of slicing and dicing a corpse, there ought to be some purpose to it aside from making the biggest possible mess.

But. There was one type of killer who might very well chop people up just for fun and discard the individual parts like peanut shells tossed on a barroom floor. There was one type of killer who had the kind of rage that would drive a person to destroy another like that; one type of killer who felt nothing but hate.

Chess lifted her chin, looked right into Trent’s oh-so-clever eyes. “Ghosts did this, right? You found ectoplasm?”

His face fell. She managed not to smile.

Vaughn shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “We did, yes. And this isn’t the—” He stopped himself. The three Squad members exchanged looks.

“There’ve been others?” Chess asked.

Pause. Long pause, while the others had some sort of silent conversation. Chess didn’t watch them. Now that her initial shock had passed she was more interested in the room, in the house itself.

It was nice, in a dull sort of way. Like someone with not much flair but a decent amount of cash had decorated it, and like the people who lived in it—who had lived in it—either didn’t spend a lot of time there or were a bit on the neat-freaky side. Of course, given the horrendous mess in there at the moment, it was hard to tell, but she noticed dust-free picture frames, glass cabinet doors devoid of fingerprints. They had one of those entertainment-center units with drawers and boxes built in, presumably for pictures or knitting or who the hell knew what; Chess had lived with one family once who had one of those, too, but they’d used the drawers to stash porn and drugs. Maybe these people did the same? They didn’t necessarily look like the type, but there really was no “type,” was there? There were just people, and they were all sick beasts with shit to hide.

Jillian’s voice cut into her thoughts; apparently the three of them had reached some kind of decision. “We have had a few ghost murders recently, yes. We believe there may be a small band of ghosts that escaped from the City, and we’re working to find them.”

“How would they escape?”

Vaughn shrugged. “It happens sometimes. Nothing for you to worry about. We’ll catch them quickly, we always do.”

“The current ghost-caused death rate in the District is one in every half million,” Jillian added. “That’s very low, as you’ve probably been told. And it’s low because we’re very good at handling just this sort of problem.”

The fact that this was at least the third murder of this type—Chess figured it had to be at least three, because if there had only been one before, Jillian would have said “another” instead of “a few”—seemed to indicate that they weren’t as good as they thought, but Chess sure as hell knew not to say that.