Sacrificial Magic

  She hadn’t chosen to fall in love. She hadn’t gone looking for it. Hadn’t even wanted it. It had just—happened to her, and there it was. That was the worst thing about it. It just happened, and there was nothing she could do about it, and she would never be, could never be, entirely sure it wouldn’t go horribly wrong.

  All of those thoughts wandered through her head as she bumped up in her car, ducking low so no one could see. They stayed with her as she put away the vial of powder, as she wiped at her numb nose and pulled air hard through her sinuses until it hit the back of her throat with a bitter white rush, as her eyes closed for a second with relief.

  The thoughts stayed with her even after the world started to sparkle and shine, as she walked across the Church parking lot and wished she had her sunglasses to protect her eyes from the already-too-bright morning sun. With the rain and storms of the previous night had come a change in the weather; spring wasn’t coming anymore, it had come.

  It was never spring in her head, in her soul. The contrast between what happened outside and what happened inside was almost a physical ache.

  But the Church building comforted her, at least a little, when she entered the huge pale-blue hall with its frieze of ghostly faces and forms done in dark wood near the ceiling. Her skin tingled faintly from the energy, a nice complement to the rush already in her system. Part of her wanted to sit down on one of the long, low benches by the door and just be, just sit and feel the way her cheeks tightened and created a smile, the way her blood zipped through her veins like it was on its way to a party.

  But she couldn’t. Especially not since more of her fellow employees, more Elders and Goodys, would be arriving any second and they’d probably wonder what the hell she was doing if she just sat there by the door grinning. She’d look—well, she’d look fucking high, was how she’d look, and that wouldn’t be a good idea at all.

  So instead she entered Elder Griffin’s office when he responded to her knock, exchanged the usual greetings, and sat down in the cushy chair opposite his desk. The cool herb-scented air caressing her skin felt wonderful. The room, always her favorite in the building, looked even more charming on that particular morning, with its globe and shelves of skulls.

  “So.” Elder Griffin sat down, folded his hands on his desk. “It was indeed a haunting. But a summoned one.”

  She nodded. In her bag sat the report she’d completed in the school library before she left. She pulled it out and handed it to him, along with Wen Li’s high school diary. “Lucy’s murder wasn’t a suicide, either. Wen Li murdered her. It’s in there—he wrote about it.”

  Elder Griffin’s brows drew together, a subtle expression of distaste. “And he brought her back as well? You said on the phone he’d died when you went to retrieve that talisman?”

  “Yeah, I mean yes, he died, but I don’t know whose idea it was originally, to bring Lucy back. Monica— Chelsea—was her cousin, she would have been helpful in the summoning, since she had some power and the same blood and everything, and Lucy’s possessions. I don’t know which one of them came up with the idea, though. Maybe Aros will, if he … if he survives.”

  He nodded, took a piece of paper from his desk and handed it to her. “You were correct about the drugs, as well. Elder Lyle said the amount of Vapezine in his blood was three or four times what would be found with normal dosages. We’re fairly certain that it started after he was assigned the case. Of course, we know Bill Pritchard was intimate with Monica, and that he prescribed the medication, so …”

  “She seduced him into giving Aros the drugs. And after he’d served his purpose and made Aros insane, she killed him.”

  Elder Griffin nodded.

  “Will Aros recover?” she asked.

  “That we do not know. He may. But he may pass on.”

  Her turn to nod. That made her realize she’d been tapping her heel on the carpet, bouncing her knee, since she’d sat down; speed-fidgets in full swing. She could kill for a cigarette, too. And a— Oh, at least she had some water. She tugged the bottle from her bag, took a hopefully normal-looking drink. So much better.

  “Wen’s wife didn’t know,” she said. The words popped out of her mouth so fast, so unplanned, that it took her a second to realize she’d said them. “They’d been married for almost twenty years and she didn’t know he was a murderer, she never even guessed. He cheated on her all the time and he wasn’t very nice to her, but she stayed with him, and she didn’t even know him really. And all she got out of it was—was being hurt.”

  He was silent for a minute, while she forced herself not to get up and run. Yeah, speed made her talky, but for fuck’s sake. What the hell was the point of even bringing that up? Who the fuck cared?

  “If I may ask, Cesaria, has there been a resolution to your … situation?”

  Shit. She’d hoped he wouldn’t ask about that. A stupid hope, sure—weren’t most?—but a hope nonetheless. “Oh, um … we talked. We ran into each other yesterday, and we talked.”

  “A good talk?”

  Her fingernails had never interested her so much. “I guess so, yeah.”

  “And you feel better?”

  She nodded. Might as well tell him; he’d ask anyway. She watched her toes wiggle inside her shoes. “We’re, he still wants to be with me, so …”

  The light filtering through the sheer curtains on the window behind his head was too bright; it made it hard to see his face, turned him into a gold-edged silhouette. But she thought he was smiling.

  Well, of course he was. He wasn’t the one sitting there being sliced open and inspected.

  Or maybe normal people—people not like her—didn’t mind talking about this stuff. Even liked it. Normal people actually wanted to talk about themselves, to toss their guts on the table before them and invite others to pick through the mess. It made them feel important.

  It made her queasy.

  He leaned forward. “Perhaps an act like murder causes people to make mistakes. Perhaps they feel that mistake in themselves constantly, and replay it, seeking to correct it somehow by doing to others what was done to them, or by accepting behavior they themselves performed in the past.”

  Where was he going with this? She tried to arrange her features into an “of course I totally understand” sort of expression, but if he had a point, if he planned to actually tell her anything, he was picking a very strange and convoluted way of doing so.

  Unless of course she was just speeding half out of her mind and wouldn’t have understood a kiddie story at that particular moment. Which was far more likely.

  “I also believe that any action can … leave a scar on the soul, the sort of scar that always causes discomfort. Perhaps Wen Li had such a scar, and perhaps it covered the parts of himself that would have permitted him to be a faithful husband.”

  Oh, fuck. If that was the case, she was fucking doomed. She had nothing but scars; she was a scar.

  “And perhaps there are people out there who sense those scars in others and want to heal them. That’s why they’re there. Or perhaps there are other people with similar scars, and they understand each other. Perhaps they aren’t even scars, but traits. Perhaps people don’t understand what they feel, or lie to themselves.”

  This was just getting cheerier by the second, wasn’t it? What the hell was he trying to do to her?

  “I’m digressing a bit, and I apologize. My point, my dear, is that there is no guarantee in the world. But I believe ‘tis better to take the chance, even if we later fail, than to never try. I believe the joy is worth it. That is my feeling.”

  That sounded familiar, didn’t it? Rang a bell somewhere in the back of her head. Not the Tennyson quote about loving and losing, but something else. Something … She didn’t know. The memory slipped away from her even as she tried to grasp it.

  He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, hoping she would. What was she supposed to say, though? She’d already bugged him enough. She knew he liked her, sure, but li
king her didn’t mean he’d want to sit there while she whined.

  Finally he cleared his throat, sat up straighter in his chair, changing the atmosphere. “Do you, by any chance, have the recommendation for me?”

  “I do.” She dug into her bag to get it, finished just that morning at a desk in the school office. “Let me know if it’s not okay. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say.”

  “I’m certain it’s very good.” He skimmed it, but thankfully didn’t stop to read the whole thing. Instead he just set it down. “Thank you.”

  She nodded, and with relief and sadness mingling in her chest, stood up. Relief because she could go. Sadness because … well, she didn’t really know, but it was there just the same.

  He watched her, his blue eyes kind as always. “I expect you’ll be taking the rest of the day off?”

  “I’d like to, yes.”

  “Good. See you tomorrow, then. Facts are Truth.”

  “Facts are Truth.” She curtsied without really paying attention to what she was doing, headed for the door.

  “Cesaria.”

  Her hand rested on the doorknob, cool beneath her palm. It felt great. “Yes?”

  His mouth opened, closed again. She braced herself for another question.

  But it didn’t come. Instead he just sort of nodded and tilted his head to the side, like he was making some kind of decision. “Get some rest.”

  Beulah waited for her, leaning against her car, smoking and staring. Sadness radiated from her still form, came to Chess on the soft warm breeze, stronger with every step she took.

  “Hey,” she said finally. Black smudges hung below her eyes; she looked almost as if she’d lost weight in the few hours since she’d left the parking garage, her skin somehow tighter on her bones.

  Chess’s heart sank all the way down into the empty pit that had once been her stomach. Even her high couldn’t keep her from feeling it; even her high couldn’t protect her from the question she knew Beulah was there to ask. The question Chess would give almost anything to not have to answer.

  Especially not after her discussion with Elder Griffin in there. She already felt raw. Not bad—she had too many drugs in her to feel bad, though she could definitely use a bump—but like she’d talked too much. Or rather talked about herself too much.

  At least she could smoke, though.

  “You look tired,” she said. Where was Lex? She figured he would have come along, figured he’d want to know, too. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  Beulah must have seen her curiosity. “Lex has a lot of stuff to do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, he’s in charge now, I mean, there were …”

  Beulah kept talking. Chess knew she was talking because she saw her lips move, but she didn’t hear what Beulah said. She just heard “He’s in charge now” over and over, like an echo chamber made by someone with a really sick sense of humor.

  If she hadn’t been so distracted she would have figured it out herself, would have realized. But she hadn’t really had a second to think about Slobag and his death. Or, more accurately, she hadn’t wanted to think about it, so she hadn’t.

  But Lex was in charge now. It wasn’t Slobag’s side of town anymore, it was Lex’s. They weren’t Slobag’s men anymore, they were Lex’s.

  Which meant Terrible and Lex weren’t just enemies anymore. They were at war. And they probably wouldn’t stop fighting until one of them was dead— Lex would probably go after Bump first, of course, but without Terrible, Bump’s power would be considerably less. Nobody else scared people as much as he did, had the kind of reputation he did.

  Lex wasn’t going to sit back and be half-assed about it either, not like his father had been. She knew him well enough to know that. Just like she knew—had always known, really—that the fires were his idea, not his father’s.

  Fuck. She’d failed to save Slobag’s life, and in doing so she’d brought her own life that much closer to utter destruction. And she hadn’t had that far to go in the first place.

  “Chess? Are you okay?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, sorry, I kind of drifted. What were you saying?”

  Hurt flashed across Beulah’s face, so fast Chess couldn’t be certain she’d seen it. “I— Are you going home now?”

  “Yeah. And so should you. You need some sleep.”

  “I will, I just … what do I tell them, at the school? They’re going to want to know what happened, and I don’t know what it’s okay to tell them.”

  That was totally not the question Chess thought she was going to ask. Not at all. It wasn’t a bad question, either. “You can tell them it was Monica and Wen, sure. It’d be good if you didn’t mention that Aros summoned the ghosts, I mean, I’d really appreciate—”

  “I had the gun.” The words came out fast, in a flat monotone. “I had the gun because I was standing farther to the right, I could see around the circle. And I was shooting. He got hit on the left side, which way was he facing? I don’t know—you didn’t say, and I thought, you would have said if it had been her, but you didn’t say, and I need to know, I— I want to know the truth, so could you tell me please? I really need to know.”

  There it was.

  Chess looked at Beulah, at her puffy bloodshot eyes and pale skin, at the grayish T-shirt and jeans she wore, the flip-flops on her feet. She wanted the truth, she said. And Chess’s duty was to tell it. Truth mattered, Truth was Fact and Facts were solid and concrete. The world was built on them. They were necessary.

  But the other Truth she knew was the sound of Beulah’s screams echoing off the cement, the bullets wasted on her grief. That too was a Truth. And that one felt more important.

  So she gave Beulah her eyes, put as much warmth into them as she could, as much honesty, as much … as much of herself as she could. “It was Monica. He was facing the outside of the garage, she hit him in the left side. Her side of the circle. You didn’t shoot him.”

  Beulah’s eyes closed; her entire body sagged with relief. “I was so … I thought maybe … fuck.”

  Should she touch her arm or something? Or just leave her be? If it was her, she’d want herself to leave; if it was her, she’d feel sick and horrible about talking even as much as Beulah had.

  So she reached out an awkward hand, patted Beulah on the shoulder once, twice. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t.”

  Another thought came to her then, too. “You know, if you ever want—and Lex, if he wants to come—I can get you in to meet with a Liaiser, you could talk to him again. If you want to. It’s usually pretty expensive but … I can get you in if you want. Just let me know.”

  Beulah sniffled. “Thanks. I don’t know if … Thanks, though.”

  Chess didn’t know what to say next; there didn’t seem to be anything to say. It was always strange when a case ended, when suddenly people who’d been among the main focuses of her life became unimportant again, people she didn’t know and wouldn’t see again.

  But Beulah was different. How big a part she might continue to play remained to be seen, but she was Lex’s sister, and if Lex stayed in Chess’s life, so would Beulah.

  “I have to go,” she said finally. “I need to get some rest, and so do you, so …”

  “Right. Okay, well—”

  Before Chess could stop her, before she even knew what was happening, Beulah leaned forward and wrapped her arms around her. Hugged her. Tight.

  Chess’s hands were in her pockets; she pulled them out, rested them on Beulah’s back. When was the last time someone had hugged her, someone other than Lex or Terrible? She couldn’t remember.

  She let it go on longer than she was comfortable with, longer than she would have any other time—Beulah had just lost her father, she could have an extra minute of hug—before she finally pulled away. “Hey, um, I’ve really got to go, I’m sorry. And you should get some sleep.”

  Why did people say that? Like it made anything better. Chess couldn’t remember a single situation in
her life that had ever been improved by sleep. Sure, maybe it made her feel better physically, but so did her pills. Too bad all of her problems were still there when she woke up.

  But it seemed like the thing to say, so she said it, and thankfully Beulah nodded. “Yeah, you too. And thanks for telling me, about Monica being the one. And for … Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  They both stood there for an awkward minute, not talking. Like something wasn’t finished, but Chess didn’t know what it could be.

  She pulled her keys out of her bag to give her an excuse to look away. “Okay, well, tell Lex hi for me, and I guess I’ll talk to him soon, I mean, I assume I will, I don’t know …”

  Holy fuck. She didn’t know. She had no idea at that moment if she’d ever talk to Lex again. He knew everything; no more suspicions, he knew.

  She didn’t think he’d cut her out entirely. But their … their friendship, their relationship … it would be different now, wouldn’t it? More different than it had become when she’d stopped sleeping with him, the kind of different they could never go back from.

  “I’m sure you will,” Beulah replied. “Hear from him. You know Lex.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “I guess I do.”

  Terrible was asleep when she got to his place. That was a disappointment; she’d hoped he’d wait up for her. But then, if she hadn’t been snorting speed all morning she probably would have gone to sleep, too. Especially since she’d left the parking garage to fill out reports, whereas he’d gone out to find Bernam and show him what happened to spies and snitches in Downside.

  Which she guessed he had. Even in the faint light seeping in from under the blackout curtains on his windows, she could see new scrapes and cuts on his hands and forearms, new bruises that hadn’t been there when he’d left her that morning. When she went into the bathroom to splash clean water on her face, she saw his shirts soaking in cold water dark red with blood.