Chasing Magic (10 page)

They all turned—everyone—to see the figure emerge from one of the intact buildings a few doors down and start running toward them.

He was naked. At least from the waist down. A tattered T-shirt stretched across his chest, stained with ever-darkening sweat-rings of gray, like gathering storm clouds. Black shoes covered his feet. The crowd parted; shit, she was looking at a man even Downside dock-dwellers were afraid of.

He stopped screaming. The silence slapped her, made
her body sigh in relief for a split second before he started again.

The closer he got, the weirder he was. Before Terrible stepped in front of her she could see the man’s body crisscrossed with scratches and marks, all up and down his skinny legs and arms. Track marks, some of them, but not all of them.

He kept wailing, his voice cutting in and out as it cracked. He stumbled in a pothole and fell; when he stood, blood ran down his knees.

For a second she thought maybe he’d keep running, that he’d be just another freaky-ass thing to see near the docks, but no such luck. He fell again, with an ugly
crack
. Had he broken a bone? He didn’t seem to be in any particular pain, but she had a distinct feeling that he wasn’t exactly dealing with reality at that moment.

Terrible’s hand closed over her arm; she could feel him wanting to drag her back to the Chevelle and throw her in. No fucking way. She let him stay in front of her though, so she was partially hidden by his broad frame but still able to see. The man remained on his hands and knees on the street, wretched hoarse sobs coming from his throat.

“Please,” he said. “Please, don’ lettem get me. Don’ lettem get me.”

“Be my friend,” the man with the orange hair murmured. “Told you, he fucked in crazy.”

Terrible glanced down the street from where the man had appeared. Chess did, too. Emptiness. No one chasing him. Hell, no one even followed him, at least not that Chess could see.

But he kept turning back, his eyes wide and terrified. “Look. Look, they coming.”

“Ain’t nobody there.”

“I see em.” He tried to stand up. Oh, fuck, he tried to stand, and he’d snapped his leg. When he stood the bone
broke the skin, popping out of his shin like a flipped lever. He tumbled back to the pavement.

Terrible’s hand touched hers in warning, and he took a step forward. “Nobody comin. None there.”

“Be the truth, Creaseman,” said the orange-haired man. “Be me here, be DV. You friend DV, aye? Nobody comin, nobody there, you—”

“They see me.” Creaseman kept dragging himself along the street, leaving a trail of blood behind him. His voice shook; it was barely a whisper. “They see me.”

He moved his hand to pull himself farther along and collapsed.

It took Chess a second to realize what was happening. At first she thought maybe he was crying, but then she realized his entire body was shaking and horrible foam started dripping from his open mouth. A seizure.

She jerked forward. Terrible’s hand stopped her. Right. Nothing she could do, really, and who knew what he might do to her if she got near him. No point in trying to help. She knew that.

It still made her feel sick, though, as he kept seizing. It didn’t last long, she didn’t think; thirty seconds, tops. But long enough for the image to embed itself in her brain and join the other horrible things in there. Another member for the club, something else to taunt her in her dreams.

He stopped. Started again. Stopped. His hands stretched over his head. He flipped onto his back.

And died.

Without realizing it, she’d been pressing herself against Terrible, fisting his shirt. His arm slid around her and gave her a quick squeeze before releasing her. Right. She ought to let go, needed to let go, because they weren’t alone on the street, and while she wasn’t the only woman grabbing the nearest man—or vice versa—even by the docks it wouldn’t be a good idea to look too comfortable touching him like that.

Terrible took a few cautious steps forward, his knife still ready. Chess grabbed hers, too. Not so much because she thought she’d need it—although it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—but because she felt safer with it. That man was dead. She knew he was dead. She knew it because she’d seen him die, and she knew it because when she glanced up she saw the bird swooping overhead, limned in the last rays of sun. The psychopomp taking his soul.

“Somethin in him hand.” Without taking his eyes off the man, Terrible waved her forward. He crouched beside the body, reached out—

And fell.

Thankfully he was only a couple of feet away; she’d
already been approaching him. Still it seemed to take forever to reach him. She threw herself to her knees, ignoring the pain streaking up her thighs, and clutched at him. He was so fucking heavy. What had he touched, what the hell was—

A little plastic packet was what he’d touched. It lay on the dead man’s palm, still half in it, with Terrible’s fingers barely making contact.

She grabbed his hand, pulled it away from the packet. Pulled his head into her lap. He’d come around fast, he usually did, shit, people were watching and he’d just—he’d be furious. He’d be furious and he’d be humiliated, and the fear already building inside her grew sharper, colder, when she thought what that might mean. How it was her fault, and how her attempts at fixing it thus far had failed. How if she were Terrible she’d be giving up on the idea that she could fix it. Would have already given up, in fact.

His eyes opened. For a second they scanned her face, the sky, the crumbling buildings edging the street, before consciousness snapped back into them. “Fuck.”

“I don’t—”

“Fuck.” He pulled away from her, his gaze still wandering up and down the street. The crowd around them watched. Double fuck.

She didn’t bother to glare at them. Didn’t dare to react at all. The last thing she wanted to do was make him angrier, more upset. Already his neck and jaw flushed darker every second, color creeping up over his face. He could control his expression, could make himself look like a forbidding statue, but he couldn’t stop that. Never had been able to.

A minute passed. Two. He pulled two cigarettes out of his pocket, lit them and handed her one. He cleared his throat. “Guessing whatever he got there ain’t just drugs, aye?”

“Yeah. It looks like it, anyway.”

His chin jerked. “Oughta call some others out here, have em pick it up, pick him up, too. Ain’t wanna be—”

“Why?”

He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised, but didn’t speak.

“Let me at least have a look at it. I know Bump has all those chemicals and stuff that can analyze it or whatever, but—”

“Ain’t want you touchin it.”

“But I won’t—I mean, I’ll put on some gloves, okay, and now we know something’s there, right, so I’m prepared for it.” Damn it. Of all the fucking things to happen.

He didn’t meet her eyes as he nodded.

Well, shit. The least she could do was get it over with quickly so they could get the fuck out of there. She wanted to go home. She wanted
him
to go home, and she wanted to go with him. She wanted to forget this whole horrible day.

No chance of that. Forgetting wasn’t as easy as it seemed; life had taught her that, if nothing else. But it had also taught her that where there was a will there was a way, and she had a pillbox full of ways in her bag.

She took four of them and slipped on a pair of latex gloves for the second time in as many days. “Okay. Let’s see what he had.”

It was a little packet, exactly like the one in Chess’s bag at that very moment. Not quite an inch square, with a Ziploc top, filled about a third of the way with whitish powder. Just like any one of dozens, hundreds, she’d held or seen or used in her lifetime.

But none of them had ever sent energy roaring up her arm to explode in her chest, so much of it and so thick that there wasn’t enough room for breath. None of them had made a stinging, screaming screen of red wash over
her vision, made her head ring so loud she thought for a second she might have gone deaf. No wonder Terrible had collapsed. What the fuck was in that packet?

For a few seconds she struggled with it, forcing it down into something she could handle, pushing against it with all her might, until it finally started to ease up. She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. Her vision cleared.

Terrible turned to DV. “Where he buy this?”

DV shrugged. “Offen Rickride, same as always, what I got. Buy he three bags, dig, only one’s left there.”

Terrible’s face darkened. Rickride must be Bump’s dealer, then, the one who lived in the area.

She’d ask him about it later. Discussing it on the street probably wasn’t the best idea. Time to focus, so they could get the fuck out of there.

Up close the body before her looked even worse. His skin hadn’t yet taken on the artificial pallor of death, that sort of waxy flatness, but the scratches and marks on his skin already stood out more sharply, looked angrier and more vivid.

Terrible edged closer to her, grabbed her arm. “Getting you outta here. Now.”

“But—”

“Take you some pictures, iffen you need a better look. That body ain’t gonna be here much longer.”

“What?”

He glanced at the growing crowd, at the mist now tickling their legs, gripping his knife tighter as he did. Chess felt his unease; it didn’t show, wasn’t apparent to any of the people standing a few feet away—at least she hoped not—but she knew it was there. Felt it the same way she felt darkness in that fog like angry whispers, and the power created by the edges of the earth by the jointure of three elements. The mist was hungry; it wasn’t magic in itself but it had its own power, as everything
did, and that power made the hairs on her neck tingle and shift.

Was it her imagination, or had the crowd gotten a little closer than it was before?

“C’mon.”

He stared at the crowd while she pulled out her camera and snapped four or five pictures. They probably wouldn’t be important at all; just scratches, not runes or sigils or anything like that, but still. She needed them, and, if she was lucky, enough respect remained for Terrible that the crowd of hungry faces watching her wouldn’t decide to try to take the camera from her. Terrible could handle a lot of things, but the crowd looked too big now even for him.

She’d barely lowered the camera when Terrible started hauling her to her feet. She tucked the little plastic packet into her pocket. When she got home she’d toss it straight into the African Blackwood box she kept for magical items of dubious origin.

Assuming she got home. The crowd stepped closer still.

Terrible didn’t look scared, but she knew he was—or, well, not scared but uneasy. And she knew all that unease was for her, as if she’d heard him say it out loud. He wasn’t worried about protecting himself or being attacked, he was worried about it happening to her, and she knew it not only because she knew him but because he took her hand as they started to walk.

“Push yon sleeves up.”

“Wha—oh.” Of course, dumbass. She did it as quickly as she could, hoping the people staring at them with blood in their eyes knew what the tattoos on her arms meant. Hoping they even knew what the Church was, for that matter.

She couldn’t tell if they saw her ink or not, or if they cared. But a woman with long brown dreads who
smelled like a sewer stepped out of their way as they neared her.

Terrible didn’t seem to be moving quickly, but he was, and she tried to keep up without appearing to speed herself.

The hardest part was not looking back. They’d passed the edge of the crowd, into the mouth of the street beyond, into the fog. It should have been a relief, being out of the way of them, but it wasn’t. It made her feel even more naked, made her feel as if at any second someone would hit her over the head or she’d fall before she heard the bullet coming. She tightened her grip on Terrible’s hand.

He squeezed back but didn’t look at her until he had her in the Chevelle, with the doors locked. The crowd outside inched closer to the car; Chess couldn’t see the bodies anymore. All she saw was people, those ramshackle dock-dwellers standing in ragged lines, with the mist moving up behind them.

Terrible started the car and put it in gear. “Told you, ain’t a good place to be.”

“No.” She rubbed the back of her head, trying to brush off the stares she imagined she could still feel. “No, I guess not. And I guess we have to go back tomorrow, huh?”

“Aye. Talk to DV again, try to find Rickride see where that speed come from.”

“Great.” One last glance back at the shadowy shapes in the mist. “I can’t wait.”

Half an hour later they trudged up the stairs to her apartment. Neither of them spoke, just as they hadn’t in the car on the way there, every foot they drove a reminder that they’d have to do it in reverse the next day. Every foot a reminder of what they’d left behind. Chess couldn’t stop seeing bone exploding from skin, couldn’t
stop seeing foam in the corners of a dying mouth or Terrible’s head sinking when he touched the speed.

There were too many things to say to pick one, so all of them bottlenecked in her throat, forming a horrible lump that writhed and stung and felt like it was trying to break through her skin. She had no idea if Terrible felt the same.