Stacia Kane - Unholy Ghosts

One last thing, a Church-designed anti-hex. Goody Tremmell would surely have used a Church ward to protect her space.

Chess spun counterclockwise, closing her eyes, feeling the energy vortex rising from her toes up into the sky. Her mouth opened; it would be so easy now, not to say the words, to keep letting the power take her, to ride it like any other high. To keep spinning, and spinning, until she didn’t even exist anymore, until she exploded.

But the words came anyway. “Hrentata vasdaru belarium!”

Her spell flew forward at the words. She felt it invade the space behind the door, felt it unlock the hex ward inside the unit. Dizzy, she stumbled sideways, her feet in the wrong shoes unable to find purchase. Terrible caught her then jerked his hands away. She didn’t blame him, wouldn’t have even if it weren’t for what had happened the night before. She could only imagine what it felt like to touch her just then, while her hair still stood on end. A shock for a normal person, but for someone she suspected carried a bit of power himself, not enough to work for the Church but enough to convey some sensitivity…it must have been like trying to grab the business end of a stun gun.

Without waiting for the dizziness to pass, she nodded at him and grabbed the handle jutting from low on the right side of the door. Terrible grabbed the one on the left, and together they rolled the door up.

A blast of malevolence hit her in the face, like the foul breath of an evil giant. Her eyes stung, her throat locked up, her legs shook. It only lasted a few seconds, but when it was done Chess was gasping, hanging on to the brick dividing wall between the storage unit and the one beside it.

No sooner had her breath returned than it left again. Not because of power or magic, but because she saw what waited inside the unit.

Stacks and stacks of junk, boxes full of magic implements and ragged parchments. Against the back wall stood a rack covered with jars and bottles of blood like carbuncles on the rusty shelves. There were herbs, and bones, and rough sketches of every kind of magic symbol she’d ever seen, and some she hadn’t.

She handed Terrible a pair of gloves and together they started sifting through the boxes, working quickly. Chess’s heart refused to slow its pounding; she may have rendered the hexes inactive, but they had not disappeared. She could feel them waiting in the air. One wrong move, one wrong word, would be all it would take to set them again, and they could strike before she knew what happened.

She couldn’t help the sound that burst from her throat when she unrolled a particularly large scroll, though. Tucked in the corner with the air of something temporary, it gave off no energy at all. A Church scroll, specifically rendered inert.

A map of the City of Eternity. Why would they…Pieces clicked into place in her mind.

“Fuck.” Her hands shook as she looked up, finding Terrible across the small room, letting him see the newly found panic in her eyes. “The Festival. That’s what this is about. The Festival. They want to free the ghosts again.”

They stared at each other for a beat, perhaps a moment longer. Terrible opened his mouth, started to move, but at that moment Chess’s ears exploded with sound, a deep loud ringing like she’d plunged headfirst into an impossibly deep pool of water.

She’d said “Festival.” She’d set off the spell.

Tendrils of blackness snaked across her vision, obscuring her view of Terrible’s face going from concerned to confused. Shit. Her tattoos offered her more protection, she could probably fight her way out of even a spell as powerful as this one. But he couldn’t. All he had was what little she’d been able to give him with her chalk, with the smoke she’d smudged him with.

Like swimming, like wading through oil, she moved toward him, her hands outstretched. She opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a high-pitched squeal. Her lips refused to form words. She saw him reaching for her, his eyes clouding over.

Gloved hand met gloved hand. She touched him, felt the heat of him through the layers of latex, and grabbed hold.

She couldn’t speak but she could think, words of power echoing in her head as she tugged him toward the wide open door. The clear air she saw through it seemed miles away but she fought anyway, dragging his reluctant weight, only daring to glance back once to see him stumble and almost fall under the weight of stinking evil.

Her tongue felt thick and heavy in her mouth, rigid as the soles of her boots. When she tried to speak, it fought her, refusing to become pliable enough to form words.

She screamed instead, calling on every bit of power she possessed, turning her panic and horror at the full scope of the Lamaru’s plan into energy, letting it sing from her throat.

It worked. Her feet moved faster, yanking Terrible toward that open door, until finally they reached it. She tumbled out into the bright empty road; Terrible practically fell on top of her, and the storage unit door slammed down behind them.

She shoved some french fries into her mouth and waved the box under his nose, hoping their sodium fragrance would cut through the herbal scent inside the car. They’d rinsed their bare skin thoroughly with her tincture and shared swigs from the iron-ring water; she’d sprinkled pinches of the red salt in their shoes. It was the best she could do to cleanse them and keep them safe at the moment. “You have to eat. I’m not hungry either but really, you have to.”

Finally he consented to take one, eyeing his own burger with distaste. “No wonder you so tiny, if yon magic shit feel like this all the time. First Tyson, now this…Damn, Chess.”

“It doesn’t though. That was particularly nasty. A trap—it would have held us there, fed off of us, if we hadn’t gotten out. You’ll get over it, trust me. You just need to get some food in your stomach.”

That was apparently good enough. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him eat, gaining enthusiasm about halfway through. Good. Sometimes people suffered long-term problems from spells like that. Apparently he was strong enough to overcome them. She was relieved, but not surprised; he’d gotten over what happened at Tyson’s place quickly enough, though that hadn’t been the same type of spell.

“So they after the City? Them Lamaru, meaning.”

Her food turned into a horrid lump in her throat, hot and solid as rage. She forced it down and nodded. “I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before. I guess I was so focused on the Mortons, you know? But Bruce—he’s a Liaiser, you know, he travels to the City and talks to the dead—I heard him the other day saying the spirits were all stirred up, like they were scared or upset or something. And the Grand Elder even mentioned how it takes them a while to calm down after the Festival, but I didn’t even think someone would be going down there, trying to break in….” She had, almost. In the bar, when he’d asked her if the Dreamthief would control the other spirits. If she hadn’t been so fucked up then she might have caught it.

“That’s why they’re using the thief. Some of the other Debunkers have dreamed about him already, see? He can get into dreams, almost anyone’s. He’d eventually become powerful enough to possibly invade even the Elders’ dreams, to draw from them and force them into sleep. Then, once the Lamaru had figured out how to get the City doors open…I think they were down there, last night. Investigating. That’s why there were ghosts on the platform.”

“The spooks wander free, aye, and no Church to do nothing because they all sleeping?”

She nodded. Genius, really. Certainly the most ambitious Lamaru plan she’d heard of—and the most deadly. Thousands of people could die if the spirits were set free like that, all of them swarming out of the earth in silent, bloodthirsty waves, while the Church slept.