Stacia Kane: Home

Not that the Solomons weren’t snobs; they probably were, too. She’d find out later. For now she wanted to see what if anything she could discover before they learned she was investigating them.

The living room window on the left side of the house was the first to check, and it was one of several reasons she’d brought Terrible: it hung above her head, and he had about a foot on her. Not only could he see through it, but those thick muscles he packed made it easy for him to lift her up, to hold her in place so she could take a good long look, too.

The same size that made him the most feared enforcer in Downside made him the perfect partner for late-night investigations. Or, well, the perfect partner for anything, at least as far as she was concerned, but that was due to more than just how tall and strong he was.

She dragged her mind from those cheerful images and focused on the Solomon living room. Nothing special. Nothing special at all. A few bookshelves, a couch and easy chair, a widescreen TV. Macramé planters hanging from the ceiling. Prints on the walls, generic stuff like black-and-white pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and some sort of hippie tie-dyed tapestry. On the side wall, though, on the other side of the kitchen… What was that?

She pressed her nose against the glass. Damn it, the Solomons had turned off their lights before bed—a pretty good indicator that they didn’t have ghosts. Most people suffering a real haunting made their homes so bright that sunglasses were required.

Ghosts didn’t like the sun or light, so such action did occasionally help—not to mention the general fear of the dark, the almost instinctive way fearful people sought the light, tried to wrap it around themselves as if seeing a danger coming would make it go away.

It wouldn’t. It never did. Chess had learned that a long time ago.

But even in the dark, she could just make out the object sitting on a low table, next to the phone. “Shit.”

“What’s troubling?”

“Here, put me down. They’ve got a rat skull and spine in there, tied up with owl feathers.” He obeyed. “Owls take ghosts down the City, aye? So they pullin shit with ghosts?” Chess dusted her hands on her jeans—the windowsill hadn’t been exactly clean—and smiled at him. Of course he knew that. He knew it because of her, because he paid attention, and because he was so much smarter than he thought he was. “Yeah. They’re sometimes used in binding rituals. Like, Maguinness was bound to a ghost, remember?

He used toad-magic and mistletoe, but a lot of people use rat skulls or spines.” Terrible nodded. “Be why them claiming them ain’t got a ghost, aye? Causen them the ones bringin it.”

“Exactly. Damn it!”

They started walking toward the back of the house where a wide cement patio lay bare save for a generic umbrella table and chair set. “What the trouble, though? They binding themselves a ghost, you bust em in, aye?”

His absolute confidence in her never failed to make her face warm. To make her insides warm, too. She didn’t deserve that kind of trust, not at all. But it felt so fucking good, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up. Couldn’t let him see how little she was actually worth it.

“Yeah, but it’s still a ghost. I get half my bonus because they Summoned it themselves, but… It’s just a pain in the ass, you know? All the research and everything I have to do to figure out who the ghost was, get its grave supplies and all of that…not to mention I have to notify them they’re under investigation now and I’m stuck with this case. This sucks.”

A set of sliding glass doors led into the kitchen; the blinds were closed over them so Chess couldn’t see through. Her own reflection stood out clearly, though, hers and Terrible’s as he came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “All be right up, ain’t you worry on it. An you needin lashers, you know I got—”

“No, I’m fine.” She slipped out of his grasp. Yeah, she knew he had money. Plenty of money. She didn’t know exactly what Bump paid him, but she imagined it was some sort of percentage of profits, and profits from all of the gambling, prostitution, and especially drugs in Downside west of Forty-third were considerable. Hell, the amount she herself spent on drugs every year was considerable. Addiction was a lot of things, but cheap wasn’t one of them.

Which was why she couldn’t take money from him. She couldn’t take it because they slept together, and she couldn’t stand the idea of money and sex having anything to do with each other. Nor did she want him to pay for her drugs. They’d never discussed it or anything, but she’d never asked him to bring them to her—save for one emergency when she’d been trapped and withdrawing hard—and he’d never offered. He said he didn’t care about her addiction, that he loved her no matter what, and she believed him.

But not caring was a lot different from approving.

The whole thing made her want to hide. And, lucky her, she had some chemicals to hide behind. She dug her pillbox from her bag, grabbed three more Cepts and washed them down with water.

As she looked down to put the silver pillbox back in its little pocket, she noticed something on the other side of the glass doors, below the bottom of the blinds.

What…what was that? She squatted down to get a closer look.

“What you seein?”

She glanced back, waved him to her side. “What does that look like to you? There, see?

On the floor just inside.”

He crouched, squinted as he leaned forward. “Like dirt, maybe? An got some scratch-ups on there, too, but ain’t can make ’em out.”

“Runes,” she said. The cement patio hurt her knees. Not just because it was hard, but because it had absorbed the sun’s heat all day. It felt like kneeling in a frying pan.

“Protective runes, and some bindrunes. Some sigils I don’t recognize, too, like they invented them themselves. Normal people can’t cast shit like that.”

“Thinkin them witches, too?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her camera out of her bag. She probably wouldn’t get any decent shots of the symbols on the other side of the glass, but she couldn’t exactly copy them down by hand; inscribing a sigil was basically the same thing as casting it, at least for witches like herself, and no way was she going to chance activating some sigil when she didn’t know what it did. “I guess it’s possible they could be unlicensed witches, but if that’s the case I’d think the neighbor would have noticed them doing magic and told me about it. She certainly seems to spend enough time watching them.”

“Maybe them ain’t doin it on they alones.”

“I wonder if— Oh. Right! Mrs. Brent—the neighbor—said they used to have these big parties every week, where the lights would go out after half an hour or so and everyone would leave a couple of hours after that. She thought it was some kind of sex party, but if they had a lot of people… She said it was about a dozen, I bet it was thirteen.” He stood back up when she did. “Get a gang-up on, all them gots a little power, they pool it all together, aye?”

“Yeah. I guess so, anyway.”

His hand touched the back of her neck, gave a gentle squeeze. “Takes a many of them make one almost as good as you.”

There was that blush again. “Well. Um, let’s walk around the rest of the house, and get going, okay? I kind of want to go home, I don’t know—” His arms wrapped around her waist; his head bent to hers. A slow kiss. A soft one that made her tingle all the way down to her feet. “Feel like gettin you home myself. Maybe get some eats in you, what you thinkin? You eat today?” She buried her face in his broad, strong chest for a minute, took a deep breath of the soap-smoke-and-pomade smell of him, mixed with bay rum from shaving and whatever indefinable other scent that was his alone. She wasn’t hungry. She especially wasn’t hungry when she knew any minute her pills would kick in and set butterflies dancing in her stomach.