Stacia Kane - Sacrificial Magic

“No thanks.” Like she’d ever drink anything a subject gave her, at least in a situation like this. She did sit down, though, on the dingy couch that sank too far beneath her, so her ass hung lower than her knees. Getting out of that would be fun.

The third woman just looked at her, an odd sort of smile on her face. As if she knew something Chess didn’t and was waiting for Chess to figure it out, or she was waiting for Chess to speak so she could belittle her. A smug look. Chess didn’t like it, and she didn’t think she liked the woman, although something in the way she stood, the tilt of her head and that smirk, reminded Chess for some absurd reason of Lex.

Yes, the woman was Asian, but that certainly wasn’t it. She didn’t know what it was. She’d seen other men who had some sort of Lex-like quality about them, but never a woman. Oh well. There was a first time for everything. Women could be smug bastards, too.

Then the woman shifted, and the resemblance disappeared, leaving just an attractive woman with straight, shiny dark hair in a casual knot at the base of her neck. Compared to the other two she looked especially gorgeous, in her black pencil skirt and loose white Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“We weren’t sure we would get someone else,” she said, one graceful elbow propped on the counter. “Aros left so abruptly, and we haven’t heard anything since.”

Chess grabbed her notepad. “He told you he wouldn’t be back?”

The women smiled at each other, as though Chess had just said something adorably naïve. Bitches.

“We got that impression,” Horrible Plaid said, “when he screamed at us all that he was never stepping foot in this place again, broke a window, and ran off in the middle of the day.”

Damn. What exactly had he encountered?

She didn’t know Aros; he’d been a recent transfer. So she had no idea how tough he was, or what kinds of cases he’d handled wherever it was he’d come from. She made a quick note to ask Elder Griffin about it, and pushed the tiny flash of sadness out of her head.

“He never seemed comfortable here,” Big Frizzy—the name plate on the edge of the desk read laurie barr—said. Or rather, deigned to say. She still looked at Chess as if Chess was something rotten that had melded with the refrigerator shelf. Whatever.

“Do you have any idea why that might be?”

“Working with youth isn’t for everyone.”

“Yes, but, did he seem to have any particular troubles?” It really wasn’t her business; it really wasn’t part of the case. But she couldn’t help being curious, and who knew. Maybe there was something there. If someone had been harassing him, that might be a good lead.

Or it might not. Anti-Church sentiment wasn’t too widespread in Downside—most people there didn’t give a fuck about the Church, either pro or con, save being suspicious or getting the hell out of her way when they saw her ink—but on this side of town, that changed. That could very well account for the Asian woman’s smirks, too. People whose religion had centered on ancestor worship didn’t tend to appreciate the government that told them they weren’t allowed to do that anymore, not without paying a hefty fee and going through the Church itself.

This just kept getting better and better. As if it wasn’t shitty enough working a case that would put her in more contact with the wrong side of town, and how that would look—she was not looking forward to Terrible’s reaction when he found out where she’d be spending large chunks of her time—it was in an area where she’d be even more unwelcome than usual.

“He just seemed nervous,” the Asian woman replied. None of them had volunteered their names yet. How polite of them. “He seemed to particularly dislike Vernal Sze and his friends. I believe he was afraid of them.”

“Did he have reason to be?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think so. They like to look tough, but they’re really not. They just haven’t been shown enough examples of proper behavior.”

Laurie gave an eye-roll so elaborate Chess almost expected her head to topple off. Horrible Plaid noticed—or rather, noticed Chess noticing—and said, “Beulah is our Community Liaison. She’s not a teacher.”

Chess waited, but none of them explained what that meant or why it mattered. Okay. “And what does that entail?”

The Asian woman—Beulah—smiled that smug smile again, her eyes focused tight on Chess’s face. What the fuck? Those Significant Looks were starting to creep her out. “I’m actually here on a volunteer basis several days a week, working with students and helping to foster a better relationship between the school administration and the community.”

Chess had never heard of such a thing. She supposed it made sense, given that most school administrators were Church employees—most of them were Elders, actually—and that might be tense in this area. She couldn’t see it being such a huge deal that they needed community outreach, but what the fuck did she know? Her pretty much sole experience with anyone on this side of town was Lex, and he didn’t care about anything enough to get angry about it.

“Who handles that?” she asked. “I mean, is there a charity set up that you work for, or … ?”

“I’m paid out of school overflow funds,” Beulah said. “Whatever the school manages to raise through donations or other outside sources, beyond their annual budget, gets put into a separate account. That’s divided among several programs, and mine is the largest one. So technically I am a school employee, but I administer my own program.”

Must be nice, Chess thought. Laurie seemed to agree; she watched Beulah with a look of such open hostility that Chess almost expected her to start hitting her.

Something to think about later, because hadn’t Beulah just given her a very important piece of information? So any extra cash in the school coffers went to Beulah—well, Beulah and whoever ran these other programs. She’d need to see those records. Aros hadn’t included those, or even mentioned them, in his file.

But for now … she stood up. “Maybe one of you could take me around? And if you could show me where entities have been seen, or anyone experienced anything unusual, that would be great.”

Death simply means the opportunity to live on in eternity. And that is Fact, which makes it Truth.

— The Church and You, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett

Horrible Plaid’s name—surprise!—wasn’t Horrible Plaid. It was Monica—Monica Freeman—and she was the secretary to Master Elder Conrad, the school’s headmaster. She told Chess this with self-deprecating pride, as though she expected Chess to be impressed but wanted to seem like she didn’t, as though she thought it was silly to expect it.

Which of course it was. Chess tried not to mistrust the woman—mistrust all of them—on general principles, but she couldn’t help it. Even if she hadn’t been there investigating a possible haunting she would have mistrusted them. They might claim to be Church—at least the Elders did, and the teaching Goodys did—but they weren’t, not really. They didn’t give a fuck about any of the students, about anyone but themselves.

“In here is the theater.” Monica leaned against the thick door, its wood stained a horrible orangey color. Who the hell had picked that color? Almost every school she’d ever seen had it, and it looked awful in every one of them. “The first sighting was in here.”

Now they were getting somewhere. “Okay. Can we go in? And you can tell me what happened?”

“No one’s been in here since then.”

Chess raised her eyebrows. Okay. Monica didn’t seem to understand direct questions. “Can we go in, and you can tell me what happened?”