Unholy Magic (27 page)

But something about their visitor bothered her, whether it was the odd fixed stare or the way he seemed unaware of what his body was doing. He ignored them, ignored the Chevelle tilted up on the curb. Like they weren’t even there.

“Hey!” Terrible said, but the man didn’t even blink. His half-closed eyes stayed focused straight ahead, on a point somewhere beyond their vision, something that softened his face and made his mouth hang open despite the cold.

He looked like a man about to fall into bed with a woman.

Terrible and Oliver both must have thought the same thing. The three of them looked at one another, realization dawning on their faces.

“The prostitutes,” Chess said. “The tri—the men. They’re killing them.”

“What a way to go.” Oliver’s smile faded when Chess and Terrible glared at him. He shrugged. “Well, it is, right? When you’re my age you tend to think of such—”

Chess grabbed her phone. “We need more people. If there’s going to be men there, even if it’s only a few, and they’re that fixated and probably armed, they could be dangerous.”

“Aw, right. Ain’t wanna make a move without Lex here, aye? Let him get his eyes in?”

None of the responses she thought of were sufficient, so she just glared at him and dialed. “I suggest you call Bump and let him know.”

“Ain’t give a fuck what you suggest.”

Lex answered, his usually smooth, rapid speech muffled and slow. “What’s up, Tulip?”

She explained the situation as fast as she could, glancing over her shoulder. Terrible was on his own phone, his black steel gaze following her as she paced. Stripping her.

“Aye, okay,” Lex said. “Guessing I’ll get over there, me. Hang on, aye?”

“Yeah.”

She stuck the phone back in her bag, pulled out her black chalk. “Come here, both of you. We’re going to need some protection.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Minds and mouths lie. Souls do not.

—
Families and Truth
, a Church pamphlet by Elder Barrett

Oliver, his face almost hidden by magic symbols, smoked a cigarette against the side of the Chevelle. He really was good; he’d done his own arms and showed Chess a few tricks she hadn’t thought of. What a shame things at the Church had turned out so badly for him, she thought, and had to stop herself from smiling. Earlier she’d been convinced Fletcher was a murderous pedophilic blackmailer; turned out he was just a blackmailer. Everybody had their flaws.

At least he was there. She could almost forgive him for forcing her to add yet another lie to the stack she’d already told the Church, just because he was there and willing to help.

Too bad not everyone was so quick to forgive.

Terrible sat on a stack of crates along the curb, his long legs stretched before him, his arms folded over his chest. She needed to mark him, to scrawl protective runes and sigils across his skin to keep him safe, but the thought of actually doing it …

Well, that was a lie. She didn’t have to. She could have asked Oliver to do it. His memory was good enough, even if he was high. He certainly had the power to put behind them.

She
wanted
to. That was it, the fact and truth of it. She wanted to mark him, because she wanted to touch him again. Because somewhere in the back of her mind she thought if she could touch him, if she could get close to him and look him in the eyes, she could explain. She could have him back. Even if he didn’t want her anymore, maybe he would be her friend again. She missed him. It had only been a day and she missed him.

“Pitiful,” she muttered, but the chalk still shook a little in her fingers as she planted herself between his legs. “Look up.”

He glanced up, then away.

“Terrible. Tilt your head back. Come on.”

He didn’t move for a minute, such a long minute she started wondering if she might have to call Oliver after all. Then he gave a half-nod, as though he’d decided something, and angled his head back, eyes to the sky.

Not looking at her.

Chess bit her lip and leaned forward.

He flinched when the fingertips of her left hand came to rest on his neck, just below the jawline. Like it hurt to have her touch him.

Which maybe it did; she wasn’t feeling too good herself.

And here she was again, with the scents of his pomade and smoke and soap filling her nose, feeling the vein throb beneath his skin, hearing his breath catch and seeing his eyes darken when he realized she’d heard it.

She scrawled a basic protective sigil on his forehead, her focus shifting at that moment from him to what she was doing, putting as much power as she could behind it. Next came a few runes, one to lend him strength, one to dispel fear—not that he needed either of them, but it made her feel better to do it.

Her left hand slid around to the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in his hair to shift his head. His sideburn brushed against her wrist; could he feel her pulse pounding?

She stepped closer to him, closer than she’d intended, until her knees wedged between his thighs and his chin hovered right around her breasts. If he looked down, or even straight ahead …

She swallowed. Down the side of his brow to his cheeks she moved the chalk, adding anything she could think of to protect him, to dispel as much of the power they were about to face as she could.

She cradled his face in her hand, wished stupidly she could keep doing this. With his breath heating the tender skin of her inner arm, his mouth silent, his angry eyes focused elsewhere, she could almost pretend nothing had changed. With his body so close to hers, so close his broad back sheltered her from the wind, she could almost imagine they weren’t here on the street, they were somewhere else, somewhere warm and dark where sheets whispered against their bare skin.

Her entire body tingled. Power, some of it; she was summoning as much as she could, letting it flow from her to him through her hands and the chalk. But the rest … The rest was simply her, wanting him, arousal sizzling up her spine and along every nerve ending, flooding her lungs and stomach and all points lower.

“Other side.” Was that her voice? It sounded dry and hoarse, both too quiet and too loud on the dead street.

He obeyed, his face lifting, and their eyes met.

The chalk fell unnoticed from her hand.

He still wanted her. She saw it in the burning depths of his gaze. Felt it in his body almost touching hers, in his slightly too heavy breath and rapid pulse. He was angry, oh yeah, that was there, too. But he still wanted her, and he knew she wanted him. Knew she wasn’t just trying to protect him, she was trying to seduce him.

For that one long moment they just stared at each other. Her fingers were numb and shaking; all the same they moved, holding his jaw, her head tilting down of its own volition, trying to get closer to his. Her hair fell forward to hide them in their own private world. Just a few more inches and they would be kissing, just another couple of tiny inches …

Something brushed the inside of her leg; his hand. Oh shit, his hand, and it slid up past her knee, farther, until her mouth opened and she gasped, a soft cry she couldn’t stop, and his hand wedged against her, hard, sending shocks through her entire body. She knew he could feel how hot she was through her jeans and she was falling into his eyes, falling so her lips tingled with the heat from his because only a hairsbreadth separated them.

He tensed, swallowed. “Chess. Got an ask for you.”

“Yeah?” It took her two tries to get the word out.

“I got some pills on me, dig. Figure I hand em over, I come back your place on the later an fuck you? Ain’t sure how much you charge, but—”

She slapped him. Hard enough to make her hand scream, hard enough to make her entire right arm go heavy and sore. He had a jaw like a chunk of concrete, the asshole, the total fucking—

Oh shit. He jerked up from his perch on the crates, eyes flashing, face flushed around the pale mark of her hand. His arm rose, drew back.

Chess started to duck, knowing she would be too late. She’d hit Terrible. Nobody hit Terrible and lived to—

The blow didn’t fall. Instead the crates lifted, shot through the air toward the seedy bar to her right. Wood flew when they splintered against the pockmarked bricks, the crash just slightly louder than Terrible’s growl.

“Fuck!” Oliver—shit, she’d forgotten he was even there—ducked, staring at them both like they’d just turned on him with guns. “What the hell is the matter with you two?”

“Ask her,” Terrible said. His thick finger pointed at her like an accusation. Which it was. “Goan, ask her.”

“Fuck you, Terrible. Fuck you.”

“Fuck
you
, you lyin little bitch.”

“Asshole.”

“Feels shitty, somebody play you the lead on, aye?” His eyes narrowed. “Make you feel stupid?”

He opened his mouth to say more, but Oliver spoke again, straightening his torn, bloody shirt as if he was about to give a speech at a black-tie dinner.

“Can I remind you both what we’re facing here? And that I have friends and family in the hospital? This isn’t exactly the way I’d choose to spend my evening, even without you at each other’s throats.”

“Fuck you, too,” she said, but without vehemence. She couldn’t manage it; as her anger faded, misery poured in to replace it, and the tingle in her eyes and ache in her throat told her she was about to start crying. She’d thought … She’d been so stupid, but she’d thought for a minute there …

She turned away from them both, not wanting them to see her. Wishing she could disappear, wishing they didn’t have to be there so she could visit the pipes and obscure the pain in a cloud of thick honey-sweet smoke. Wishing she could swallow every pill in her box and make this all go away.

Seeing Lex’s car pull up didn’t make her feel any better. Seeing his face made it worse.

“What the hell—” she started, then remembered. Terrible had knocked him out, hadn’t he?

Looked like he’d done more than that. The entire left side of Lex’s face was bruised and swollen, his eye nothing more than a suggestion beneath his brow.

“Hey, Tulip,” he said, and Chess cringed. The last thing she wanted was to hear his pet name for her. Or to have Terrible hear it.

Lex saw her look, glanced at Terrible, who stood with his arms folded and his face turned away. “Broke my jaw, he did. All full of wires.”

At least that’s what she thought he said, since the words were slurred and dim and his jaw didn’t move. No wonder he’d sounded so subdued on the phone.

“Shit.” She reached for him, but pulled back. “Sorry.”

He shrugged. “Ain’t like I never thought he might, aye? Just bad luck.”

“Not really.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t really bad luck. We were—well, I was—set up. I’m pretty sure, anyway. By the guy doing this, running this house. He left a message for Terrible, I don’t know how.”

“Ain’t gonna ask neither, aye?”

“No.”

Several men had gotten out of the car with Lex; they lined up behind him, their handsome bronze faces immobile, their eyes pegged on Terrible.

A few more men arrived, men Terrible had called, apparently. They eyed Lex’s men like tomcats protecting their territory.

Figuring they ought to get moving, Chess quickly marked them all up the way she had Oliver and Terrible. Lex worried her a bit; being unable to touch the left side of his face made it harder to squeeze everything in, but she went down his neck to his chest instead while Terrible’s gaze burned holes in the back of her head.

He hated her. Sure, he still wanted her; he was a man, and men didn’t just stop wanting to fuck somebody they wanted to fuck. At least not in her experience. But their friendship, the feeling she’d had of being on the verge of something more than that, something she’d never thought was possible for her … gone. Gone for good. She’d be lucky if he bothered to help keep her safe tonight, and if he did, it would only be because of what he owed Bump and the dead hookers and missing men.

And Lex? She had no idea what to do about him. She knew what she
should
do, which would be to end it. But what difference would that make now? Wasn’t like Terrible would forgive her as soon as she did.

And she
liked
Lex. Maybe they weren’t compatible in every way, and maybe they both knew there was no real future for them—Hell, no maybe about it; they both
knew
. But he made her laugh and he turned her on, and he was decent company who didn’t ask questions or try to have deep, meaningful conversations with her. In a lot of ways he was the perfect pseudo-boyfriend.

But if she didn’t give him up, there would be no chance of righting things with Terrible, not ever.

So did she stick with the acceptable sure thing, or give it up for the possibility—just the outside chance—of something … else?

She sighed. No point in thinking about possibilities, really. She’d ruined everything. She’d known what the consequences might be and had done it anyway. Self-destruction was one thing, but she was turning into a one-woman wrecking ball.

She grabbed a couple more pills, washed them down, and surveyed her ragtag troops. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The house would have been easy to find even without the line of men patiently curling from the front door around to the side. Easy to find, because Chess felt its call, faint like a soft erotic whisper against her skin, growing stronger and blacker with every step.

A house like any other, one of many lining the broken streets. Blistered, peeled paint that might once have been white or gray still clung in splotches like a festering rash to the walls; a few rickety bars remained of what had once been a porch railing. It should have looked dead, another empty corpse to be disposed of.

Chess knew better, though, and for that reason she saw the house through its greenish-black magic haze like a predator, watching and waiting, its hooded eyes half-closed in feigned somnolence.

No lights came from any windows; several doors down the charred remnants of a similar house still smoked. Burned down, she guessed, when its inhabitants left their heater running or their candles lit in their haste to sample Vanita and Kemp’s treacherous wares. Good thing they’d set up this far on the edges. Had they used a building in the middle of Downside, half the population would have been sucked into their trap.

She turned and checked their men. She and Oliver had worked together to invent an anti-arousal sigil that seemed to be working—certainly none of them were joining the line, although a few of them looked a little dazed—but she had no idea how long the effect would last. Once they got inside …

She shook her head. Time for that later. First they had to get those men out of there. They were too much of a distraction, too much of a threat, to leave on the scene.

“Okay.” She set her bag down and folded her arms. At least for the moment she could forget everything else and focus on this, on her work. “I want to cast a circle around the entire building, so I don’t have to do it individually when I’m inside. Oliver, do you think the sigil will break the spell they’re under?”

“I’m not sure. I suppose we could try.”

“Okay. Do that, and let’s see. I’d rather not draw too much attention. They probably already know we’re here, but still.”

Oliver took the piece of black chalk she offered him, wandered over to the line of men. Chess held her breath.

The man Oliver picked ignored him until the sigil on his arm was complete. Oliver glanced back at her as if to ask what she thought, but before she opened her mouth the man shook his head, glanced around him as though he had no idea what he was doing, and stepped out of the line.

Excellent. “Okay. Oliver, get them all marked. I’m going to start the cast, okay?”

“How bout I go along, me?” Lex had his knife out and ready; beneath his shirt she saw the bulge of a gun.