Sacrificial Magic (29 page)

“Witchy shit, aye?” Lex leaned in. “Kinda like on you door, Tulip.”

“Yeah. Kind of.” Except it wasn’t, not really. Chess had general protective wards on her door, a few special ones she’d developed thanks to her Church education.

The wards Aros—it had to be Aros, she couldn’t imagine who else might have done it—had carved into his door were much, much darker than the ones Chess used. The Bindrune the light picked up was
kesrah
, and it was violent and bloody. Illegal.

She waved the light. “Get back, okay?”

Violent, bloody, and illegal. But not active. Or at least not energized. When her fingers brushed against it a jolt of yuck ran up her arm, like touching a wire live with evil.

But just the evil of the rune itself; highly unpleasant, but if it had ever been powered by a witch, that energy was gone. It was … anonymous, was the best way to put it, really.

She ran her hand over the door from the top to the bottom. If Aros—or whoever—had booby-trapped the apartment with illegal wards, setting them off would be a bad idea. Almost as bad an idea as falling in love had been.

The rest of the door felt clean. Well, not clean, but not smeared with evil like the
kesrah
rune. Just the typical yuck of any Downside building; misery and hate, greed and lust, attempts at theft spells and death spells and any other magical vice the human mind could come up with, and the human mind was in general a pretty sick fucking place, as she well knew.

“Okay.” She held her hand out for the key. Beulah
placed it in her palm. It slipped into the lock, didn’t stick on opening.

Something told her this was not going to be good.

She was right. The door creaked open. That smell, that foul stench of death festering in private, belched from the open doorway in a moldering cloud to cover her, to cover Lex and Beulah, and sent them all staggering back to the wall.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Beulah gasped. The sickness in her voice twisted Chess’s stomach even more.

“It is,” she managed in reply. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Something was dead in that apartment—something or someone—and she had to walk in and take a good look at it.

And she didn’t have a handkerchief or cloth or anything. She pressed her sleeve-covered hand over her mouth and nose, waiting for the nausea to subside. Oh, fuck, that was so awful. So awful and just teeming with bacteria and sickness and germs waiting to invade her body, to marry the sickness already inside her so deep it would never leave.

Bleach might clean the apartment she was about to enter, but they didn’t make bleach for people’s insides. She was stuck with her own filth. She didn’t need to add more.

Beulah tied a cloth around her face; Lex improvised with a sleeve, like Chess; and they stepped forward to see what new horror waited for them.

Horror indeed. Chess barely saw the apartment around her, bare walls scribbled with words in black and the dried brownish-red of blood. Nonsense words; the man had seriously gone bug-fuck crazy, hadn’t he? At least if someone considered scribbling “tutu,” “minerals,” and “dancing” in blood on walls to be bug-fuck crazy, which Chess did.

Her flashlight picked up a sofa with stuffing erupting like mushrooms from holes in the rough fabric, a pockmarked table flecked with paint, scraps of thin carpet grayish in the light’s beam. On the left, a stove crusted with filth; on the right, an open doorway emitting stench like a blast furnace giving heat. The bedroom.

Lex’s gun caught a ray of thin moonlight that fought its way through the grimy windows. Beulah pulled a silver dagger from somewhere; Chess followed suit and flicked the blade on her knife. Her new knife. Terrible had given it to her two weeks before. She wished she’d thought of that and brought her old one.

And it wasn’t necessary anyway. As soon as they’d walked far enough to see into the room, she knew it wasn’t. The only person in the room capable of injuring
them was as disarmed as it was possible to be, quite literally.

Aros’s naked body lay on the bed, barely recognizable. He had to have been dead at least three or four days, in that tiny apartment with the heat turned up.

At least she thought it was Aros; she’d only seen him once or twice, quick glances around the Church building. She’d been distracted, to say the least, the kind of distraction where every man looked the same save for one, their faces blurring into a haze in her mind. But she remembered darkish, longish hair such as covered the head of the corpse on the bed, and thought she remembered … well, she didn’t remember anything else. But the apartment was in his name, and it was definitely a man’s body; enough remained of it for her to be certain of that.

And she could be certain the death hadn’t been pleasant. The face was … obliterated, was the best term she could think of for it.

Well. So much for the loose—more than loose—idea she’d had that maybe Aros was the man behind the murders, that maybe he was Slobag’s new witch. She hadn’t fully realized until that moment that the idea had even been there; she’d been mentally classifying Aros with Riley, really, as someone who just couldn’t handle the job. But as she looked at what was left on the bed, she realized that yeah, she’d wondered. Hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself—and had been too high the night before, too busy since Beulah showed up at her place—but she’d wondered. And she’d been wrong.

Aros must have found Chelsea. Must have discovered something that drove him crazy, that led to his murder.

“Ain’t know why I let you get me into this shit, Tulip,” Lex muttered. “Could be doin all sorts else, ’stead of here.”

“Oh, come on,” she managed. “What could possibly be better than this?”

He acknowledged the joke, lame as it was, with a thin smile and jerked his chin at the remains. “Gotta call you Church this one, aye?”

She nodded. At least there was that. At least this wasn’t a death she needed to hide; she could report this one, and the Church could take care of it, and maybe she’d get a tidy report at the end if they thought she could use the information provided.

Seeing the body, the apartment, though, reminded her that she hadn’t gone into Aros’s cottage on the Church grounds, hadn’t even asked yet. She supposed that could be excused, or at least understood; she hadn’t planned to spend her day passed out in her hallway. But it certainly made that task more urgent, didn’t it, that Aros was apparently dead. In a very grisly fashion. He hadn’t done that to himself, had he?

No. She somehow doubted he’d managed to chop off both of his own arms.

How close had he gotten to Chelsea? What the fuck had happened to him?

Beulah found a window, thickly covered by black burlap, and opened it. Fresh air—what passed for fresh air in Downside, that was, which meant it stank of poverty and old grease, but thankfully not of death this far from the Slaughterhouse—began to chase a bit of the suffocating heaviness away, but not much. Not enough.

With that feeble air came light, enough for Chess to see the pills strewn everywhere. She snapped on a latex glove, bent to pick one up with a superstitious shudder.

Vapes; Vapezine. Heavy psychotropic, one she didn’t have a particular interest in. Hallucinatory meds never really did it for her. The odds of a good trip just weren’t good enough. But the floor in that room was littered with them, shiny hot-pink-and-white capsules all over
the carpet, crushed into it like bright candy melting in the sun.

“Lookin like he spend himself some time on the other side,” Lex remarked. “Strong shit there.”

Chess dropped the pill she’d been inspecting. “I guess so.”

“That’s not all he was taking, either,” Beulah said. Against the window she was a silhouette, silver-edged in the dark; she held up a couple of empty pill bottles. “He didn’t buy these from us. He had a prescription. Lots of prescriptions, for all kinds of shit.”

Chess looked at the labels, looked around. “How old are the scripts?”

“Recent. All of them in the last few weeks. All the same prescribing doctor, too: Pritchard, in Cross Town.”

“So he was taking more than just—” Something snapped into place then, the thing that had been bothering her since the second she saw the pills on the floor. Or rather, the other thing that had been bothering her, the thing that had nothing to do with the case at all.

She needed air. “I’m, um, let’s go, okay? Let’s get out of here, and I’ll call the Church.”

“What? But shouldn’t—”

No. She couldn’t stand there another minute, not without a smoke, and another handful of pills, and she wasn’t about to put anything into her mouth in that foul death-chamber. “I’m going to get some air, okay; I’ll be right back.”

She banged her knee against something as she stumbled out of the apartment, the dull circle her flashlight cast bobbing before her as if on a spring. She started to turn right to head back to the street but had the presence of mind not to go down there alone, so instead she went left and up, to the next floor and the roof access door she hoped would be there.

Her breath grew shorter with every step, panic creeping
from her stomach to her head, hitting her harder and harder. That body in there, that body all alone on a bed in a room full of pills, the body of someone who’d gone on a hard run that never ended. It was hers. It was her body, her future, what her future could be. What her future would be now that she’d fucked up everything with Terrible, fucked up her entire life. Again.

The roof door—thank fuck it existed—burst open with one heavy shove; her rubbery legs carried her out onto the flat cement surface, wandering from one side to the other like a pinball while she tried to get herself under control. Dead and alone in a room full of drugs, rotting and alone with pills crushed into the carpet. Dead while nobody gave a fuck, a lonely addict’s death in silence with no one to even notice. Tears poured down her cheeks and she couldn’t stop them; her breath whistled in her chest. Without Terrible that’s what she’d be, no one cared, no one really gave—

Wait a minute. If Aros had found Chelsea—so she assumed, and it seemed like a reasonable assumption—and if she’d killed him like that … how long would it be before she realized Chess was on her trail, and found a way to do the same thing to her?

   Terrible hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. Hadn’t tried to get in touch with her at all.

Well, what the fuck was she, surprised?

No. Just sick. But what else was new.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the time to brood about it. Even more thankfully, she was stuffed so full of Cepts that brooding would be almost impossible even if it had been the time. Not completely impossible, of course; she could still feel the stab there, the emptiness beneath her ribcage where everything important was supposed to be. Where it had always been empty until he came along,
and which he’d left empty again when he’d torn himself away from her. It felt like death.

But she could get through it. She could and she would, because she had to.

Elder Griffin finished looking at her hastily typed report and sighed. “Oh, Aros. So disturbing, he didn’t seem at all … well. I am sorry, Cesaria.”

Chess nodded. Yeah, she was sorry, too. She was getting only part of her bonus money, and if she was going to finish every night at the pipes like she had the last two, the cash in her account wouldn’t last more than another couple of months, tops. Sure, another case might come in, but it might not. She’d gone five months once; that had been the first time she’d gone into debt with Bump, two years before.

Not to mention that whole Chelsea-might-try-to-kill-her thing. And the memory of that body cold and ignored on its diseased bloody bed. And the feeling of walking blind into something big and murky and dangerous, something waiting for her with claws extended.

Elder Griffin’s curtains were open; gray light from the unhappy sky flooded over his desk, made his expression hard to read. “He did ask for permission to rent the place, feeling it would help him to fit in. He said the students refused to speak to him. Did you find that a problem?”

“Kind of.” She shifted in her seat. Yes, kind of, until the son of the local drug lord kissed her in front of a crowd. Then they talked.

“I suppose it matters not. When will you perform the Banishing?”

“Tonight, I think. Might as well get it over with, right? Have you heard anything about Chelsea Mueller, where she is? Any picture yet?”

He shook his head. “Her physical file should have been housed here, but as you know, it has also disappeared,
along with the records in the computer. Aros seems to have deleted it. We are hoping it will be retrieved from the backups by tonight.”

At least that was one thing. The Squad would go with her to make an arrest once they had a face, an address.

Elder Griffin’s chair sighed as he moved. “May I ask, have you yet received the evaluation form for me?”

“Oh, um, yes. I’m going to start it this evening before I do the case paperwork, if that’s okay.” Shit, she’d forgotten it; well, she hadn’t forgotten it. The truth was she didn’t want to fill it out. She wanted to give him a negative report so he’d have to stay with her. She’d lost Terrible. She didn’t want to lose him, too.