Stacia Kane: Close to You

“No.” Chess watched him free her ankles, and then his. Her feet tingled as blood rushed back into them. “But she’s close.”

A click, a flare of warm light; Terrible had pulled his lighter, and the wild high flame showed her a bedroom. The master bedroom, she guessed; a door at the other end by the headboard looked like a bathroom. And, oh, yeah, in the corner stood a flatbed dolly, the kind used to transport loads of construction materials or heavy, bulky items. Like sedated large animals. Or sedated large people. Bitch. She’d loaded them on there like cases of beer.

Terrible stood up and held out his hand to help her do the same. In the golden light she could see his eyelids lower than usual in his pale face and the unsteady way he stood. Well, yeah, he’d been shot up with animal tranquilizers. So had she, but her body was used to downers. And uppers, and just about anything else she could get her hands on. His wasn’t. And he’d been hit twice, instead of once. “You okay?”

He nodded. “Let’s just get us outta here, aye?”

He wavered on his feet when another wave of magic hit them, and a new worry blossomed in her mind. The sigil she’d carved into his chest to save his life had made him more vulnerable to magic—particularly dark magic—and for a while he’d passed out every time he was exposed to it.

No. Not passed out. Died. He’d died every time he was exposed to it, died for just a tiny fraction of a second but died just the same.

The sigil Elder Griffin helped her design had solved that problem, but it still depended in part on his own strength to work, his own energy. If he was weakened by, say, animal tranquilizers... what would that mean?

She didn’t want to find out. Instead she took his arm to guide the lighter. “I can’t imagine she’s put my bag—oh, shit. No, I bet she did.”

“Put it where she can use all what’s in it, aye?”

“Probably. I don’t see it in here. All I—” Oh, ew. Eew eew ugh yuck.

They were in the master bedroom. Faded curtains with huge yellow-and-green daisies on them covered the window to her right, the same pattern as on the wallpaper. Not that she could see much of the wallpaper, because more framed photos obscured it. Eliza and Vincent’s grinning faces watched her and Terrible from every surface, huddled together on top of the dresser and lining the top of the cabinet-style headboard of the queen-size bed. That wasn’t the gross part.

The gross part was the horrible oblong stain stretching down the right side of the bed, the bits of what looked like dirt but probably wasn’t scattered inside it, and the clumps of matted hair on the pillow. Chess didn’t even have to think about it to know exactly what had lain there, and for how long, and where that object was now.

A long pause while they both looked at the bed. Terrible swallowed and took a step closer to it. “Been sleeping with he body, aye?”

“It’s been in here, I don’t know that she’s been sleeping with—oh.” Her stomach twisted. On the pillow beside the stained one were several long gray hairs. “I guess she has. I don’t—shit. She’s got his body.”

“Be easier for him coming back.”

“Right.”

They stood in silence for a second. “Guessing be why she got all them clocks stopped? Like you say on the earlier, Havisham. You tell me she stopped all she clocks, in that book, aye?”

“Yeah. I guess... after Haunted Week it took a few months to finish getting all the ghosts down to the City. There were still some isolated attacks. I think I read about one in late December that year, around here. Maybe that’s what happened to him.”

It was probably what happened to him. Which made things worse. “If it’s the anniversary of his death, and his birthday, and she has his body, that can make it pretty easy for her to bring him back even without me here. Maybe that’s why she was so sure she’d see him tonight. We need to hurry. If we get there before she finishes summoning him, it’s not a problem, but without my bag…”

He tried the doorknob. Locked. Of course. “Want me breaking this or the window?”

She hesitated. Wandering around outside in the freezing cold didn’t appeal, but for all they knew Eliza had her tranq gun all loaded up and ready to go, and the sound of the door flying open would give her plenty of time to take aim.

He seemed to know what she was thinking. He pushed the curtains open, which didn’t let in much light at all, and tried to slide the window open. It didn’t budge. “Grab you that pillow offen the bed, aye?”

She did, while he stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around his fist and forearm.

“Is this going to be that much quieter than the door?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Iffen she hear it and comes down, still ain’t be so easy to aim at us. Ready?”

Chess ducked her head behind the pillow. The sound of shattering glass drowned out “Close to You” for a second or two; icy air caressed Chess’s skin. She pulled the pillow down to see Terrible brushing glittering shards off the sill and hoisting himself up on to it, over it, landing outside with a barely-audible thud. He held his hand out to her through the hole. “C’mon. Bring the pillow.”

It probably wasn’t necessary, but she set the pillow on the sill anyway. Being sliced by jagged glass wasn’t her idea of fun. Neither was trying to find places for her knees and feet among the photographic detritus covering the dresser. But she did it, and Terrible pulled her safely out through the window and into his arms as a surge of magic from the living room took her breath away.

Or maybe it wasn’t the magic, or at least not that kind of magic. His arm curled around her waist, yanking her to him, and before she could react, his mouth was on hers. One of those kisses she hated as much as she loved, a kiss that knew they were about to throw themselves right into the path of danger and might not survive; a kiss that told her how much he loved her just in case they didn’t.

And she said the same, in the same way, pressing her hands on the sides of his face and pushing her fingers into his hair. This wasn’t the end for them. It couldn’t be. It wouldn’t be, because there never would be an end for them. She knew that. It was Truth, and she believed in it more than she believed in anything else, even the Church.

His fingertips stroked her cheek, barely a touch before he grabbed her hand and started running around the back of the house.

The tide was in. Waves lapped the stone retaining wall only twenty feet or so away, the sound shrouded by both the thick fog that made her feel like they were running through a nightmare and the ever-present “Close to You” that made her want to shove a fucking drill into her eardrums. She gripped Terrible’s hand tighter.

They had to slow down when they reached the end of the house, almost invisible in the mist. Gravel and rocks littered the ground, and who the hell knew what junk they might trip on? Even with the eerie glow coming from what must have been the lit Christmas tree in the front window, there wasn’t enough light to move at anything like full speed. The energy in the air, in the mist, from Eliza’s ritual, thrummed against Chess’s skin and burrowed into her soul. It was hard to breathe, would have been hard to breathe even if the air hadn’t frozen her lungs.

Finally they reached the window. And stopped, staring for a moment they couldn’t afford at the scene framed by fog-edged glass. Mrs. Hudson stood by the tree, her body limned in festive multicolored light, and raised a knife. Chess’s knife. That bitch. Terrible gave her that knife. She’d have to re-consecrate it if she were to use it again—oh, what the fuck was she whining about that for? Surviving this holiday nightmare was sort of a bigger concern just then.