Sacrificial Magic

  Just like she could remember the way he’d looked at her the first time he saw her naked—the way he looked at her every time—the way his hands slid over her stomach, her ribcage, and farther up—”Huh? What?”

  “What kinda power they tryna raise by killing people?”

  Oh. Right. Dead body. What the fuck was wrong with her? “The hafuran is a power builder, like I said. So whatever they’re doing, it’s to try to make someone or something stronger.”

  “Ain’t got any else?”

  “No. Only that whatever they’re trying to build their power for isn’t good. Positive spells don’t usually require ritual slayings.”

  Lex’s eyebrows rose. “Aye? Wouldna guessed that one, me.”

  The impulse to stick out her tongue was childish, she knew, but she did it anyway, fast so the others wouldn’t notice. Lex did; his grin widened.

  She was grinning, too, at least until she glanced down and saw the dead body again, wondered why the hell she was there again. Unfortunately, there was something else she could do. Something she should do. She inched closer to the circle, concentrating on holding on to that good feeling, and held out her hand.

  Power flew up her arm, raced through her body as fast as a speed-loaded spike and almost as strong. Not just death power, death energy, either. She hardly felt that at all. Instead it felt like earth energy, earth power. What the— Why? Why would a death spell feel like something else?

  The thought flashed through her mind so fast she could hardly grab it, because the air left her chest in a hoarse gasp; she felt her feet move, felt her legs shake and struggle to keep her standing. Felt it like it was happening to someone else, because the only thing her conscious mind could feel was that power flooding her body, filling her, seeking … something. Looking for something inside her, some energy to latch on to and strengthen. Oh shit. The only real energy inside her at that moment was—

  Sex. The realization hit her mind at the same time as the swirling, charging power found what it was looking for.

  This time it was an entirely different sort of gasp. The kind that spoke of warm hands in the dark, a warm body close to hers, on hers, inside hers. Sweat broke out on her skin, her blood pounding through her veins and stopping, eager and tingling, below her waist. It was so hot all of a sudden, so hard to breathe, this was torture. Somewhere in the back of her mind it registered that the energy was male but she couldn’t think of it, couldn’t focus on it, not when her mind whirled and spun and she was afraid she was going to drown in the thick warm desire swirling through her.

  She yanked her arm back, snatching it away as if from a blazing fire. Which it had been. The energy inside her lessened. Didn’t disappear, but lessened, at least enough for her to be able to breathe again.

  A shame it wasn’t enough to stop her from feeling totally embarrassed. Sure, it might have looked like she was just focusing or even being hurt or whatever else. Probably did, to Beulah and the men.

  Probably didn’t, to Lex.

  She couldn’t look him in the eye as she wiped her damp palms on her thighs—a residual tingle ran up them just at that—and dug in her bag for a smoke. Focus. That was what she needed: focus, clear, concise thinking. What had she felt, what did it mean?

  Nothing good. That was for damn sure.

  “Right. Anyway. The symbol, the hafuran, increases the power that’s there. It helps … helps it focus, is the best way to describe it. But in this case, it’s stealing power, at least it feels like it is. Transferring it from the earth to whoever it is doing the spell. So they’re using the murders to steal power. At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with.”

  Beulah had been staring off into space, up at the sky, anywhere but at Chess. At those last words her head snapped down, though. “That’s what happened on your side of town, too, right? The stealing power?”

  Shit. She’d forgotten Beulah knew about that now. “Um, yeah.”

  “Hold it, now. What you meaning, she side of town?” Lex looked at Chess. “You got this same shit happen before?”

  Was he serious? He looked serious. That didn’t always mean anything when it came to Lex, but … he genuinely seemed perplexed.

  So did Slobag, for that matter. And his musclemen, the ones who could rip her apart if they wanted to and probably didn’t have any idea that would mean putting themselves at the top of Terrible’s kill list. Assuming he had one, which she figured he did. What the fuck was she supposed to do?

  She avoided Lex’s eyes. “Yeah, a pipe room burned down two days ago, and a body just like this one—the sigil and everything—was inside it.”

  Slobag’s eyes narrowed. “Someone broke into the wreckage? Bump doesn’t keep his—”

  “No.” Was he kidding? “No, the ritual started the fire. Someone broke into the room before it burned, and did this. Exactly this. That’s what started the fire.”

  Damn the poor lighting out there. The moon wasn’t far from full, but the cloud-filled sky diffused the light, weakened it. She couldn’t make out Slobag’s expression well enough to know how much of his shock was genuine; she didn’t know him well enough to know, either.

  She pushed a little further. “The guy who was killed was named Bag-end Eddie. He was mutilated, just like this.”

  Okay. No mistaking that response. Slobag’s eyes narrowed. “He worked for me.”

  Her mouth opened. Thank fuck she managed to snap it shut before she spoke, but … what?

  So Eddie had been killed on her side of town, but Eddie worked for— No, that couldn’t be right. Bump and Terrible acted like Eddie worked for them. Not just acted like; Terrible had said Eddie was one of Bump’s corner men, a street dealer.

  Did they not know?

  Lex glanced from her to Slobag and back again. “So who done this, then, Tulip? You got the knowledge?”

  She looked at Slobag. Looked at him and took the plunge, despite her fear. “I don’t know. Did that pipe room get burned by accident, or did someone order it?”

  Yeah, maybe it wasn’t a huge plunge. It was more cautious than that. A semi-plunge. But she wasn’t fucking stupid, was she?

  “I don’t see what the difference is,” Slobag said finally.

  “It makes a difference when you think about who knew the room was empty.”

  “Lots of people could have known that.”

  “Yes, but who ordered a fire in that pipe room? What witch might have known it was empty?”

  Slobag drew himself up—he was about Lex’s height—and glared at her. “Do you—”

  “You said the spell takes power from the earth, right?” Beulah cut in, her gaze jumping from Chess to Slobag and back again, her voice just a touch off nervous. “Does that weaken the earth’s power or something?”

  Shit. Chess didn’t take her eyes off Slobag, but the moment was over, and she knew it. Damn it, she’d been so close, so close to having something she could give Terrible, to having a piece of this bizarre and deadly puzzle.

  She gave Slobag a final glare and turned to Beulah. Time to pretend to be calm and confident. “I’m not entirely sure. Power needs to be in balance. Throwing it off, like this does, can be kind of dangerous. Aside from just making the spell caster really, really powerful.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “When power goes out of balance like that, and stays that way—that’s the real problem, you can take that power but you need to give it back, and this is a lot of power—it can cause problems with the barriers in the world. The veil between the worlds, the one the ghosts came through during Haunted Week. That’s what we think caused it, a serious energy imbalance.”

  “Good,” Slobag said. “So you know how to stop it.”

  “What? How the fuck would I know?” What the hell, she’d already practically accused him of murder. She figured a little “fuck” here and there was no big deal.

  “The Church started Haunted Week. So surely you have been taught how to stop it.”

  For fuc
k’s sake. This again? “The Church didn’t cause Haunted Week.”

  The others snorted or rolled their eyes, a circle of patronization. “Aye,” Slobag said. “Of course it didn’t.”

  “Just like you didn’t burn the pipe room?”

  Okay, that was too far. The silence felt solid, like a heavy damp cloth over her face, making it hard to breathe.

  Slobag glared at her through it. “Just get it fixed. None of us want more ghosts.”

  “I don’t know how. I don’t even think it can be done.”

  Nobody believed her. Not even Lex—he’d shifted closer to her, which she had to admit she appreciated—looked as if he believed her. Terrible would have. But of course he wasn’t there, and no amount of lonely wishing would make him appear. “The veil repaired itself. The Church didn’t do it. It doesn’t— It can’t stay open long, the veil I mean. It’s unequal when it’s open, it’s an interruption.”

  “The world wants to be back in balance,” Beulah said.

  “Right. The earth’s energy—that includes the veil and everything else—needs to flow. If it’s interrupted like that, it can’t, and all that energy backs up. It could— It’s really not good. And the person doing this could steal that power, and that would be a huge problem. It is a huge problem, I mean, because that’s what they’re doing. At least that’s what I think.”

  “So stop it.” Slobag’s expression had gone from disbelieving to angry to threatening.

  She swallowed. Hard. Why the fuck did she keep getting involved in shit like this? Wasn’t there some other witch who could handle all of the body parts and sick magic and dangerous killers? She didn’t need it. She needed to be home in bed. Who knew how many nights of that she had left?

  “Why can’t your new witch do it?”

  Silence. Not a long silence, but one she felt just the same. “He’s busy.”

  Right. Busy. So guess who got to do the dead body cleanup? Chess. Everybody’s favorite murder maid.

  Of course, it didn’t escape her that Slobag had referred to his witch as “he,” either. Hmm.

  “Waiting,” Slobag said. “Sure you can find a way.”

  Chess looked at Lex, at Beulah. Neither of them said anything. Fuck, and double fuck. She really should have been nicer to Beulah; she had a feeling Beulah would have stood up for her if she had been. She seemed like the type.

  Lex? He probably thought it was funny. At least that’s what she figured until he said, “Hey, it ain’t magic she got. How she can do it iffen she ain’t got the knowledge?”

  “She’ll think of something.” Slobag’s eyes never left her face.

  She felt those eyes like just-spent matches, scraping her skin with rough black ends, burning tracks down her back as she crossed the patio back to the circle. Punishing her for questioning him.

  With every passing minute Jia’s body looked worse. Which made sense, sure, but didn’t make looking at it any more pleasant. If she hadn’t had all those lovely drugs in her system to soften the blow, she probably would have puked. As it was she just held her breath for a few seconds until the nausea went away, and tried her damnedest to think of a way to neutralize that symbol.

  “I guess we should take the body out of it first,” she said, more thinking aloud than actually speaking to anyone. “That should lessen some of its power.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Damn, she was high, but she couldn’t be that high. He couldn’t mean that. “Me?”

  “It’s powerful magic, you said so. I don’t want any of mine touching it. You know the magic. So you touch it.”

  Yeah. She knew something else she’d like to touch just then. Like a trigger. Or her knife. Or anything in one of the pipe rooms, or in her apartment, or in Terrible’s place, or—hell, anywhere. She’d rather be sitting in that foul temple of lewd that was Bump’s ghastly crimson living room than standing there, about to reach into a wall of death magic and pull out a human body.

  Why couldn’t she just call the Church, again?

  Fuck.

  They all watched her as she pushed up her sleeve and grabbed a pair of latex gloves from her bag. She always kept a couple in there for situations like—well, no, not for situations like this, she didn’t pack her bag anticipating the possible need to fondle dead bodies—but in case she needed to touch anything she didn’t want to touch. They snapped onto her hands, tight and powdery dry. Teeth-gritting time. Jia’s leg lay right at the edge of the circle; she’d grab that and start dragging.

  It was just a leg. It wasn’t a bomb, even if it felt like one. She reached in for it, and fear like ice water poured over her entire body.

  What the fuck? Sweat formed on her forehead, rough itchy fright sweat, as her heart pounded and she snatched her hand back. “I can’t.”

  Lex opened his mouth, but Slobag spoke first, his face almost immobile under his hat’s heavy red brim. “You will.”

  She looked again at Lex, again at Beulah. Neither of them met her eyes. Fine. Maybe she should take more pills; it certainly seemed like one of the best ideas she’d ever had, but by the time they hit she’d be done. So she hoped.

  So instead she took a deep breath, held it. Gritted her teeth again, and reached for the leg.

  This time the spell found something else inside her. Fear. Not just fear. Terror. Pure thundering terror enveloping her, smothering her. The leg almost disappeared in the hazy purple mist of it, in the sudden tears blurring her eyes, as it drew closer and closer around her. Choking her.

  Screams wanted to escape her throat, crammed against her tonsils, held back only because her jaw was clenched so hard it almost hurt. Would have hurt, if she’d been able to feel it; she couldn’t, not really.

  That should have been a good thing. It wasn’t. Instead of feeling the ache in her jaw she felt walls closing around her, felt the lights go out and the door lock. Spiders on her skin, bugs on her naked body, huddled against a grimy wall in the dirt. Hiding in the same closet hoping they wouldn’t find her—

  Every second brought another wave of it. Brought memories she didn’t ever want to revisit, thoughts she didn’t want to think; memories and thoughts she’d spent years and thousands of dollars on every bit of artificial peace she could find just trying to forget.

  Someone was behind her, a knife raised. She gasped and glanced around. No one there.

  In front of her now. Beside her. The Dreamthief. Maguinness grinning his sharp-toothed grin, Maguinness licking her blood off his fingers. Horatio Kemp, black with ink, pointing his gun.

  Pointing his gun at Terrible. Terrible falling. Terrible leaving. He hit her. He pushed her away. Her heart hammered her chest so fucking hard she thought it would explode. Not that she cared. Let it explode, make it explode if it would end this, these movies of horror that felt so real she couldn’t tell anymore if they were.

  Please let them not be. She was so alone there, so alone, and she had only one person in the entire world who made her feel like she wasn’t, and she was losing him—maybe had already lost him—and her head was too heavy for her back and neck to hold. She fell forward, felt herself falling, and didn’t give a fuck. Maybe she’d hit her head on the cement and pass out. Maybe she’d die.

  The City. The City rose before her, ghosts pale and vicious in the darkness, their eyes dripping, their mouths twisted and obscene. Her entire body shook, it hurt, it hurt so fucking bad, the Lamaru stood over her, ghosts swung knives, doors locked, bodies crushed hers, Elder Griffin told her to get out, Terrible slammed the door behind him as he left for the last time.

  And over it all the panic, the pure head-banging throat-drying panic, that made her want to curl into a ball and hide, bury her head in the sand, bury anything she could in the sand. She couldn’t see anymore. Couldn’t hear a thing but the screams in her ears, the angry voices, the sick ones laughing at their awful pleasures. Doors slammed in her ears; the sound of flesh against flesh—

  Her arm burned. Not a memory burn, a real one. And with t
hat burn, with that pain, came the end. The fear and panic stopped. Instantly.

  Well, no. They didn’t stop. They would never stop. But they lessened; the deep mist before her eyes lifted, and Lex’s arms were strong around her, holding her up, holding her to him, yanking her away from the fire. Her throat ached, felt like she’d been gargling fiberglass. She must have screamed.

  Somehow she found her legs, managed to speed along with Lex to where the others stood, to where they all watched as the hafuran burned.

  It felt like Church magic, like twisted and bastardized Church magic. That thought refused to leave her—that thought, and the dark suspicion that blossomed inside her because of it—as the symbol outlined itself in flames, sparks dancing across the ugly lines. It singed her face, burned her soul.

  Orange, then red, then a bright, painful blue, beautiful and terrifying as they rose into the night sky. Sparks flew from them, sparks and the most oppressive, intense heat she’d ever felt, worse even than when she’d been trapped in the burning Slaughterhouse the month before. Worse because this heat came from within, from her, and it turned her body into a torch. Greedy fire, taking what it could; it would destroy her with its heat, suck her into the inferno and make her another sacrifice. It pulled at her. Only Lex’s hands on her arms kept her from giving it what it wanted.

  Fear washed over her again, all of those vivid terrors the symbol had shown her, playing across the fire where everyone could see. Or could they?

  She managed to drag her gaze away from the bright flames—now heading toward purple—and glanced at the others, panting from the pain, her mouth so dry and hot she thought she felt her tongue crack.

  All of them watched the fire with expressions of frozen horror on their faces; even Lex looked worried, and not only was he completely impervious to magic, she didn’t think anything in existence could actually scare him. That symbol was some powerful shit.

  She turned back to it as it went to purple, then to black, deep shiny black. The pain grew worse, tearing into her organs, pulling her apart to see how she worked, like a cruel child with a spider. It raged at her, dug into her, seared her soul until all she saw was flames, all she felt was pain, she hadn’t been even herself anymore—