Stacia Kane - Chasing Magic

His lips twitched. “You givin me the orders now, aye?”

“Yes. So cut it out.”

Another pause; she could see him trying to come up with another argument and plastered a don’t-even-fucking-try-it look on her face.

Finally he sighed. “Aye, right, then. But iffen you wanna change yon mind, you just say.”

“I won’t.”

They’d parked near the dull industrial-green façade of Gordon’s building, peeling and dusty in the afternoon sunlight. He opened her door and led the way up the semi-intact sidewalk. Hopefully they’d get some information in there.

Or not. The second she picked the lock and Terrible swung open the door to Gordon’s apartment, she knew they wouldn’t find anything of use—or, to be more exact, they wouldn’t find anything magic-related. No energy beckoned them farther into the room, no dark power set her tattoos on fire.

A good thing, yeah, but not helpful.

Searching through Gordon’s things wasn’t much better. Playing cards were everywhere—scattered over the carpet and furniture, decks tidy on shelves and the kitchen counter. Chess stopped counting them when she hit twenty-three.

More signs of Gordon’s habit showed up in other places. Books on poker and blackjack strategy by the bed, in the bathroom, lying with their spines bent on the floor. Racing forms. Sports pages from four different newspapers. Sports magazines. Poker chips made bright circles all over the dirty brown shag carpeting; torn lottery tickets and betting slips covered them, confetti for a loser’s parade.

“Lots of boxes around,” she commented as they entered the dim, stale-smelling bedroom. Gordon hadn’t been too worried about personal cleanliness; a dark sort of coffin-shaped smudge on the right side of the bed indicated both where he slept and that he didn’t change his sheets much. “Was he moving or something?”

“Ain’t got any on that.” Terrible shifted a few of the boxes so he could get to the closet doors, then stopped. “Hold up. Check this.”

She crossed the dirty carpet to take the paper—no, the photograph—from his hand. Two men sitting at a table covered with beer bottles, their arms around each other, drunken grins plastered across their faces. “What? Who’s that?”

“’sGordon there, aye? An Yellow Pete there.”

Gordon and the man he’d killed. The man he’d been magically directed to kill. “They were friends?”

“Guessing so. Never seen em together what I recall, but ain’t like I seen either much, ceptin when Pete checked in, handed over he lashers an whatany else. Pete weren’t a gambler, neither.”

She started to sit on the bed, then reconsidered. “So somebody didn’t just kill Pete, they made his friend kill him?”

“Aye. Guessing they figure makes it easier, dig? Pete ain’t be scared on Gordon, he sees him comin.”

“Did Pete have reason to be scared of someone?”

He shook his head once, a quick twitch. “Aw, Chess. Always reason to, aye? Ain’t can trust on nobody you see.”

Yeah. She knew that.

He opened the closet doors to reveal the emptiness within. “Guessing—”

“Wait.” Okay, that could be something. That might get them somewhere. Right? “Gordon and Pete knew each other. They were friends.”

“Lookin so, aye.”

“So someone—whoever did this—knew that, right? Because it’s too weird to think they just happened to pick Gordon to kill Pete, and they just happened to be friends. The sorcerer knew.”

The approval in his eyes made her feel warm all over. “So the spell maker, he knew em too, aye? Knew em both.”

“Looks like it, huh.”

He nodded. “Maybe be good talkin to some at the card games. Ain’t guessin he neighbors be much for knowledge on him.”

Terrible’s phone rang. Shit. Lately it seemed like it was never good news, and this time didn’t seem to be an exception. He hung up—slammed the phone shut, would be a better term—and rubbed his forehead. “Gotta go. Gots us another man down.”

“What? Another—Lex, you mean. Another street guy dead.”

He nodded, already pulling his keys out of his pocket and heading for the door. “By the docks, this one. Lemme get you home.”

“Why? Why?”

“Gettin late, baby, ain’t wanting you up there—”

“And taking me home is going to cost you at least another twenty minutes or so. No. I’m going with you.”

“Ain’t safe there, an I don’t—”

“But you’ll be there. There are people there, right? I’ll be fine. Come on, take me with you.”

Another dealer killed by Lex—another man killed by Lex or at Lex’s order. At least so Terrible and Bump thought. But maybe it wasn’t him; maybe someone else was doing it. Maybe if Chess saw it, she could find out.

Maybe she just needed to see it. To see that Lex really had done it, that he really was doing his best to fuck up her life.

Whatever the reason, relief blossomed in her chest when Terrible nodded. “Aye, right, then. Only you do what I say, dig? I say get in the car, you do. Aye?”

“Don’t I always do what you say?” She raised her eyebrows, grinning at the little flash of memory—memories—the words invoked and the accompanying heat in her veins.

“Aye, guessin you do.” His hand brushed her behind when he stepped back to let her in the car, and her temperature kicked up another degree or two. Probably not the most appropriate response right after getting news of a murder, but it wasn’t as if they were detouring to her place for a quickie, so what the hell. A second or two of inappropriate thinking was fine.

They were in the Chevelle and speeding up Eightieth before she thought to ask. “By the docks? I thought Bump didn’t put men up there.”

He shook his head. “Naw, gots a few locals do some selling, only in the day, dig. This ain’t one, though. Greenback, he name. Works—worked—round Fiftieth. Only found by the docks.”

“So what was he doing up there?”

He sighed and nosed the Chevelle around the corner. “Guessin we gonna find out.”

A crowd of wrong people is still wrong; numbers do not make Right.

—The Book of Truth , Veraxis Article 1549

She’d never been this close to the docks before. Terrible had refused to take her—not that she was desperate to see them or anything.

But it was still … interesting.

She’d seen a neighborhood like it once before, out by the Nightsedge Market on Lex’s side of town, up near the Crematorium. A neighborhood where the few remaining intact buildings almost seemed ashamed of themselves for being so, where crumbling walls and roofless rooms open to the sky were the norm.

And it smelled, the dank rotten scent of the bay mixed with oil and human waste and filth, a horrible fugue that made her wish she had a surgical mask or something to put on. All those germs in the air, bacteria dancing on dust motes and searching for a nice warm body to invade and set up home in.

Terrible noticed her shudder. “Can wait in the car, if you’re wanting.”

“No.” Whatever the reason she wanted—needed—to see the body, she still did.

“Told you were shitty here.”

“Yeah, but—look, the water is kind of pretty.”

He followed her gaze across the pitted cement to the water, which gleamed with the sunset’s reflection between the looming hulks of boats. Under that glow, she knew, lurked filth and muck and death, but the surface … the surface was beautiful. Just as with so many things.

He shrugged and took the few steps that brought him to the small circle of people in the middle of the intersection. They moved aside for him without speaking; Chess wondered if a few of them were able to speak. They looked barely human, like evolutionary throwbacks to the period when tiny dark creatures discovered fire. Masses of dirty hair tangled from the tops of their heads to midway down their backs; what appeared to be burlap sacks covered their bodies, and their feet were bare. Even Chess had never seen anything like it. Downside was poor, yes, but these people weren’t poor, they had nothing . And people who had nothing developed their own world to compensate, and now she’d walked into it.