Sacrificial Magic (37 page)

“An that fuckin scum set he onto workin, yay, burn up Bump’s buildings. Leavin fuckin dead pieces in em. Motherfucker.”

“I’m not sure.” She leaned forward, sucked up one of the lines. Oh, that was so fucking nice. That bitter numbness—so soothing—in her nose and sinuses, the
back of her throat … like parts of her didn’t exist anymore. Especially when her heart jumped and happiness blossomed in her chest, in her mind. Definitely like parts of her didn’t exist anymore. All the bad parts.

Or at least most of them, because if she got rid of all of her bad parts there’d be nothing left.

“The sigil the murder was committed on is a
hafuran
, and it’s a basic power builder, so the spell is designed to build and change power. And in this case— Okay. Back in 2001 there was a girl at the Mercy Lewis Second School named Lucy McShane, and she killed herself.”

Bump folded his arms, recrossed his ankles in the other direction. Yeah, yeah, boredom, whatever. This was important information, and she felt so damn good she didn’t care if he fell asleep.

In fact she wished he would, and she could be alone there with Terrible. Sure, all that speed meant it would take her forever to finish if she managed to at all—which was unlikely—but she could still watch him … her insides did a flip.

Bump’s eyebrows rose so high they looked like arrowheads.

“Oh, chill out, this is important. Lucy had a cousin named Chelsea Mueller, and Chelsea was almost powerful enough to enter Church training, but she didn’t quite make it.”

Terrible had given her thigh a quick squeeze when she told Bump to chill, but said nothing, and Bump actually looked almost interested and didn’t mention it himself. “What on the dead dame, Lucy, yay? She holding up the fuckin juice do you fuckin magic shit?”

“Her Church-test scores weren’t as good as Chelsea’s.”

“That why they doin the murders? Tryin bring Lucy back for real, dig, not like when we seen her on the other night.”

“Right.” Chess grinned at him before she bent to the mirror again. Just this one, and she’d let at least ten minutes or so pass before she did the last one, because speed this good should be savored. Empty the lungs with an exhale, pinch the nostril … there were better things in life, yeah, but not that many.

“That’s what I think, anyway,” she continued a second later. “Chelsea wants Lucy back, but she’s not powerful enough to summon a ghost on her own. So she gets Aros to do it, and to do these murders to steal power and give it to her. I guess she figures that way she can be strong enough to summon Lucy for good. Like permanently.”

Terrible shook his head. “Seem like a dumb fuckin plan, aye?”

“Yeah, but if they want Lucy back it’s kind of the only option. Unless Chelsea wants Aros to do the summoning and powering all the time, which … she’d really be dependent on him then, she’ll have nothing when he leaves her, right? So really she’s doing the smart thing not letting him have all the control, making sure she doesn’t have to need him so much so she isn’t left in the lurch when he ends things …”

Even through the speed’s cheerful jig in her bloodstream she knew that was the wrong thing to say. Terrible’s face hadn’t changed, or rather it hadn’t changed a lot, but she still saw the tiny downtwist of his mouth, the darkening in his eyes and the faint flush blossoming on his throat. Fuck.

“So why’s Slobag fuckin giving the yay to that fuckin plan? Ain’t making no fuckin sense, not even on that fuckin scum.”

She never thought she’d be grateful for Bump’s interruptions, but she was. She took her gaze from Terrible’s, took a long drink from her water bottle to help ease her speed dryness. The third line she’d cut sat there on the
mirror, waiting. Fuck ten or fifteen minutes, she needed it now. She picked up the straw again. “I don’t think he cares. I mean, he might not know, but as long as the stuff he wants done gets done, he might not care.”

“Aye, had the thought on that.” Terrible didn’t quite look her in the eyes again, but he did look at her, and he hadn’t taken his hand from her leg. At least that was some reassurance. “Like if Slobag gets heself an address, an he witch—Aros—heads heself over to it afore, does he spell, an the building burns up from it? Like that?”

“Right.”

He picked up the map he’d set beside him when they first arrived. “So’s we thinkin all them addresses picked by Slobag, or maybe not?”

“What the fuck you got the thinkin you fuckin see?”

The third line hit the back of her throat. Much better. “We think there might be some kind of pattern. In the addresses, I mean.”

“Aye.” Terrible pulled a thick black marker from somewhere, uncapped it, and started scrawling big Xs on the map. “First one here, dig, Sixtieth an Mercer. Then that school, Twentieth an Foster, aye? An Sixty-fifth an Foster here.”

Bump snorted. “Got the fuckin look like a seven, yay. Ain’t no fuckin truefacts in that one, what fuckin knowledge we gonna get offen that one?”

“It doesn’t look like a seven, it’s—you see it upside down.”

“Yay, so fuckin what? So Bump’s got the lookin—”

“Holy shit.” She glanced from Terrible to Bump—who seemed taken aback at being interrupted—to Terrible again. “He’s looking at it upside down. And it looks right side up to him, right? But it’s upside down.”

“Ain’t gettin it, Chess.”

“Right, I know, sorry, it’s— Here, give me the marker.”

He did.

“Look.” She placed the point where he’d finished his line, at the body they’d found that afternoon. From there she drew another line, ending it at Twenty-fifth and Mercer, then drawing it down to Forty-third and Wayne.

A moment of silence, and Bump spoke. “Be a fuckin star, yay?”

She shook her head. Terrible watched her; she saw the knowledge in his eyes, had another flash of pride. “It’s not just a star. It’s a pentacle. It’s an upside-down pentacle.”

“So thinking he give another one the try tonight?”

The wet gray streets flew past the Chevelle’s windows, almost as fast as her mind whirred and spun. Another two lines from Bump’s private stash had her feeling absolutely no pain, despite Terrible’s telling her he and Bump had plans for the night that he couldn’t break, that he didn’t know when he’d be done.

“I don’t know. Probably, yeah. But we know where he’ll be, that’s good, right?”

He didn’t reply.

“Can’t we set somebody up to watch there, or— I could tell Lex, you know, they could have somebody—”

“Slobag gots he a storeroom there.”

Even with her blood dancing through her veins she felt his discomfort. “Where, at Twenty-fifth and Mercer?”

He nodded.

“Well, so there’ll already be—oh. Oh, shit, seriously? That’s what your plans are for tonight, that’s why you can’t—”

“Maybe best you ain’t ask on it, aye? An won’t be all empty there, gots—”

“I have to be there.”

The Chevelle slowed enough for him to turn it, passing a few bodies huddled in a doorway. “What?”

“I have to be there. If Aros is going to be there—the kind of power he’s generating so far, and where he’s getting it from? He’s destroying the balance of energy, that could be—”

“Naw, ain’t wantin you nowhere nearby, dig? Ain’t be safe there, don’t even—”

“What am I supposed to do, let him kill someone else?”

“Be plenty people around, he—”

“And if he casts some sort of hiding glamour—which he could do, with that kind of power—nobody but me would be able to see him. Not to mention—” She shut her mouth. Fuck.

“What? Not mentioning what?”

They’d almost reached the warehouse and her car, damn it, and he wouldn’t let her go until she told him; she knew him well enough to know that.

“Not mentioning what, Chess?”

Fine. “The sigil. The sigil on your chest. You—”

“Aw, shit. Ain’t on this one again, aye? The fuck am I sposed to do, hide—”

“I just think I should be—”

“Maybe you oughta be figurin on makin it stop, aye, ’stead of makin me some fuckin pussy sit on the outside.”

He hadn’t said that before; their discussions on the subject hadn’t gone that far before, though, either. He’d always found some way to distract her, to change the subject.

Now she knew why, and it was so fucking obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it.

“It’s not like that.” She touched his neck, played her fingers in the hair at his nape, but he wouldn’t look at her. “It’s not like you can’t handle it or something, it’s just—this is stuff I can do, you know? So I want to be there to do it, is all.”

He still didn’t reply.

“You’re the one who said that between you and me we could handle anything, right? And this is my part.”

The warehouse appeared on her left; her car sat a few lengths down on the street. He stopped the Chevelle next to it, sat there in silence for another minute.

“Aye,” he said finally. “Guessin you should be there, handle the magic. Only—only you give me the wait, aye? Ain’t come on till I say. Causen if he don’t show up … rather you ain’t be there, dig.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” She swallowed the sigh of relief that wanted to burst from her, the sigh of something else, too. She’d known how to handle it. Something had bothered him—something big, she knew, how fucking hard must that have been for him to say that, to admit to her how much his reaction to magic since the sigil scared him—and she’d been able to talk to him about it, to make him feel better.

Maybe she wasn’t a complete failure at this after all.

“Send you a text then, aye?”

She nodded.

He glanced at the streets around them, then leaned over to kiss her, faster than she would have liked; the rain had slowed, after all, they were visible through the windows. “An Chess … ain’t want shit bein off with you. But ain’t can have you pickin fights and shit, neither, givin me tests.”

What the hell could she say in reply to that? Nothing came to mind, not a thing. So she nodded, swallowed, squeezed his hand. And got out of the car as fast as she could.

   Her mood didn’t improve when, three hours later, she pulled into the parking lot at the Mercy Lewis school and saw Beulah and Lex standing outside.

“You can’t come in with me,” she said as soon as
she’d parked and gotten within speaking distance. “I’m doing a ritual.”

“Aw, Tulip, that any way to give us a hello?”

“You’ll be in my way.”

If it had just been him standing there she would have been, well, nicer. But it wasn’t just him. Beulah was there, too, and Chess had a report in her bag that said Beulah had given her a plate of food with a one-way ticket to the City mixed into it, in the form of several thousand milligrams of psychotropic medication. She also had the memory of the tea, and that Beulah may have introduced Aros to Slobag, that Beulah may have known more about Jia Zhang than she let on.

And she had the knowledge that Beulah not only hated the Church—or at least seemed to, all those snippy comments—but had been suspiciously pally almost since the moment they’d met, with her fucking jokes and smiles and “I won’t tell Terrible about the kiss” and “Do you want to talk about it” bullshit.

Chess wasn’t sure what pissed her off more: Beulah’s attitude toward the Church, or that she’d actually almost started to … well, to like Beulah. She’d never had a female friend before; looked like she wasn’t going to start. She should have known better.

Sure, it might not have been Beulah who tried to kill her. It might have been some completely random stranger. But the odds of that being the case were awfully slim.

Lex shrugged. “Only sayin, ain’t gotta be mean.”

“What are you guys doing here, anyway?”

“You said you were coming to do that Banishing thing, so we thought we should be here. Keep watch and everything.”

“Aye. We oughta get ourselves inside, we ought. Ain’t no telling how long we stay on our alones out here,
’swhat thought I got. Could get us company on the anytime.”

“Right.” Chess lifted her hands, indicated the empty parking lot around them. “Clearly this is a hub of activity at night.”

“There’s no need to be a bitch,” Beulah said. “What do you care if we want to be here?”

Do not tell her to fuck off, do not tell her to fuck off
. “Sorry. I guess I’m just on edge. If you guys want to stand around out here, you go ahead.”

“Ain’t standin out here, nay. Going inside, along with you. Keepin watch, we are.”

The rain had stopped by the time she’d set out, but the breeze still smelled of it, felt cool and heavy with it as it brushed her skin. “Why are you doing this, anyway? Why are you so fucking set on helping me?”

“The fuck problem you got this night, Tulip? You wanna get on down the City, you go straight ahead. Guessin I had the thought you ain’t wanted that, figured on givin you the help.”

So much for pretending everything was fine. She sighed. “Sorry. I’m sorry, guys. I just want to get this over with, is all.”

That was true. The sooner she Banished that fucking ghost the sooner she could get over to Twenty-fifth and Mercer and hide, waiting for Terrible’s text.

“Gots other places I could be, I do, too,” Lex said, with that air of noble suffering he was so good at. “But figured I ain’t have me so much fun iffen you dead, so here I am. Maybe you ain’t give me the junters for it, aye?”