Stacia Kane - Chasing Magic

Bump and Terrible watched her: Bump with impatience, Terrible with concern, but neither with understanding. Right, of course they wouldn’t know.

“I killed him,” she said. “My psychopomp killed him. He was alive, and my psychopomp ripped out his soul and killed him.”

She would not throw up. She would not cry, either. She hadn’t had a choice. And, as she recovered from her initial panic, she realized that she really hadn’t had a choice. If he was still alive and moving—or at least, if his soul was still in his body and he was moving, what the fuck—after Terrible crushed his throat and head, then there hadn’t been any other way to kill him, and there hadn’t been any way to subdue him, and she’d done the only thing that could be done save for literally chopping him into pieces while he watched.

That made her feel better. Some. But still … she’d used magic to kill someone. She’d used her psychopomp to kill someone, and that was different from using a real weapon to save her life when she was being attacked. Using magic to commit a murder … that was an automatic death sentence.

Of course, so was killing a psychopomp and carving an illegal sigil into someone’s chest to prevent them from dying, and she’d already done those, so what the hell.

The thought almost made her smile—not quite, but almost. At least it loosened her chest enough for her to take a deep breath.

“You right, Chess?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Um, yeah, I’m okay. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out what’s inside him or whatever.”

Bump raised his eyebrows. “Any fuckin place I gots the thinking of where some shit maybe got stuffed into, I ain’t for fuck wanting get my fuckin look-see in.”

Eeww. She hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, I’m not really, either.”

Terrible shifted his weight beside her, his arm touching hers. “I cut he all open, aye? Straight down, we get a look inside.”

“I’ll check his mouth first,” she said, moving to do exactly that. What there was of his mouth; his teeth wobbled at odd angles—the few still remaining did, though she had no idea how many of them he’d had before Terrible used his skull as a footrest—and beneath the skin his jaw felt like gravel in a sack.

It made her job easier. His lips stretched open wide enough for her to fit her latex-covered hand inside; she wiggled her fingers in his throat, swallowing the sympathy gag threatening to rise in her own. The man was dead, after all. She could shove her hand all the way down into his stomach and he wouldn’t feel it or care.

“I don’t feel anything.” Except tonsils. Ugh.

Terrible pulled out his knife. “Straight down, aye?”

“I guess so.”

The point of the blade slid into Gordon’s flesh and disappeared, moving like a zipper’s tongue from the base of his throat to his groin. Terrible glanced at her. She shook her head.

“Yay, let he have the keeping on he fuckin cock.” Bump grinned. “Ain’t fuckin wanna see that come off nowheres.”

Ah, Bump. Polite as ever.

Silence reigned as Terrible made another cut perpendicular to the first across Gordon’s abdomen. He kept his left hand above the skin, making sure not to touch, but Chess wondered how strongly he felt it, how hard he was fighting against that horrible darkness rising like steam from Gordon’s innards.

He stepped back. “Cool?”

“Yeah, I—yeah.” What was she supposed to do, reach in and start pulling stuff out? Shit, what was she doing, why was she doing this? How the hell had she ended up there, in a freezer, about to shove her hand into a corpse like it was a cereal box and she was looking for a prize?

Did it matter? Addiction led to working for Bump, working for Bump led to falling in love with Terrible, and it would take weeks spent pawing around inside dead bodies to even come close to making her wish she didn’t have him. She guessed all things considered, messing around with body parts was a small price to pay.

That didn’t stop her insides from jerking a warning when her fingers closed around something she was pretty certain was Gordon Samms’s stomach.

“How’s it feelin, Chessie?”

“Really fucking gross,” she managed. “And yeah, still powerful. Can you cut this open?”

That was what did it. When Terrible cut the stomach open so she could see what remained of Gordon’s last meal … she barely made it to the wall before throwing up, humiliated to be doing it in front of Bump, humiliated to be doing it at all, but unable to stop herself.

Terrible’s hand in her hair, gathering it behind her and holding it out of the way. His other hand on her back, rubbing it in slow circles until she finally managed to get herself under control. “’Sall cool, baby, aye? No worryin on it, ’sall cool here.”

She started to raise her hands to her streaming eyes and nose but he stopped her, turning her instead to face him while he wiped her face with a rag he’d gotten from somewhere. It was smudged with motor oil on one side but clean elsewhere. Even if it wasn’t, she would have been grateful. “Thanks.”

“Aye.”

Bump nodded when she returned to the table. “Ain’t fuckin put the blame on you, Ladybird. Fuckin sick, yay.”

What? Had Bump—had Bump just been nice to her?

How the hell was she supposed to feel about that? Ugh. Who cared. She had way more important things to worry about.

Like the fact that as the pile of internal organs—ugh, ugh, ugh—grew, she wasn’t finding any other spell bag, no spell ingredients. But everything felt like ghosts and magic, every part of him she touched. As if the spell was part of him. How could that happen?

“Ain’t finding shit, yay, Ladybird?” Bump shook his head. “Got he all fuckin emptied up, what you fuckin do on the now?”

“I don’t know.” She eased the gloves off, trying but failing to keep the blood off her skin. When she got home, she was going to spend an hour or so in a very hot shower, and maybe Terrible could pour bleach over her every couple of minutes. “I don’t know. Let’s see what’s in the spell bag, I guess.”

She slipped on a fresh pair of gloves and jerked the tip of the iron blade she kept in her pick case through the black stitches at the top of the bag.

The rough edges of the fabric fell open, revealing a—well, damn. The spell was about the size of a walnut because it was a walnut—a large one, but a walnut all the same.

She dug the point of her knife into the crack in the shell and pried it open. Blood oozed out. Thick dark blood, so clotted that for a second it looked like some sort of rotted fruit inside the shell.

Her stomach gave another heave, but she ignored it. Not just because she didn’t want to go through that again but because part of her was honestly fascinated. How the hell had he—the same spell caster, the same man—done that? What the hell was that spell?

“Ain’t lookin so fuckin bad.” Bump leaned over the table, peering down. “Fuckin small, yay?”

“But really strong.” Were those clots in the blood, or was something else in there? “Blood … I think it might be corpse blood, like from a murder victim, or maybe menstrual blood. When someone’s using blood like that in a spell, they’re not fucking around.”

Of all the things she could have done without that day, having to say “menstrual” to Bump was—okay, not the biggest or the most important, no, but it was certainly on the list. Not because she was embarrassed; she wasn’t. She just didn’t want to have to discuss anything remotely related to the female reproductive system with him.

Sure enough, he grinned. “Yay, seen me some of that blood fuckin turn dames into—”

“There’s hair in there,” she interrupted, holding one of the hairs up with her gloved index finger and thumb. “See? It’s been tied in knots, too. I wonder if it’s his.”