Sacrificial Magic

  Laurie scanned the list. “Room 122 will be empty in forty-five minutes. You can use that one. It’s down the hall, at the other end of the building.”

  Damn, who would have thought Laurie—who still looked just as sour and disapproving as she had the day before—would be helpful? But then, with a roomful of people, none of whom she appeared to like, why wouldn’t she be? “Thank you.”

  Beulah still watched her. Well, good. She could quit smirking and do something for Chess, since she obviously had nothing else to do. And since she had keys. And since the crowd apparently looked to her, for whatever the hell reason. “Beulah, will you come with me, please?”

  The wreckage of the catwalk still stretched across the theater, a dead steel monster staring at her when she stepped into the room. Beulah brushed past her to hit the lights. Brighter this time. Interesting. And worth mentioning. “There are overheads?”

  “Yes, why?” Beulah did innocent very well. “Oh. Sorry, I just didn’t think to turn them on yesterday.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Beulah followed her farther into the room. “They’re farther along on the— You can’t think I deliberately left it dark in here.”

  “Can’t I?” Hell, why not just say it outright? Wasn’t like Beulah thought they were becoming friends or something. Wasn’t like Chess cared if she thought that, either. The only reason Beulah was there was to open the door and turn on the lights, and to get her out of the office.

  “You can believe anything you want to believe. That doesn’t make it true.”

  “Wow, you’re so wise.” Chess walked down the aisle, ducking under the catwalk, toward the stage. Checking the camera she’d tied to the catwalk the previous day would be useless; all it could have filmed was a small section of floor, and since it was motion-activated she seriously doubted it would have caught anything.

  But there was plenty of work she could still do in the theater.

  “Are you trying to be unpleasant, or are you just like this all the time?”

  Chess didn’t even glance back. “But gee, you’ve been so nice to me.”

  Beulah muttered something; Chess didn’t hear it well enough to know if it was in English or Cantonese, and she didn’t care. All she cared about was searching that backstage area. Alone. She’d wanted Beulah to let her in, wondered if she would say anything about the others; since she hadn’t, and since the theater was open, she’d served her purpose. “You can go now.”

  “Oh, am I being dismissed?”

  “Do you plan to keep sniping at me? It’s not my fault you have an issue with the Church.”

  “Who says it’s got anything to do with the Church?” The amusement in Beulah’s voice made Chess turn around. “Maybe I just don’t like you personally.”

  “I guess I’ll have to live with that pain,” Chess replied, turning back to the stage. It wasn’t until the sound of the door closing echoed in the empty room that she realized Beulah had left. And that she herself was smiling. Weird. But oh well.

  A set of short black-painted steps led from the floor at the bottom of the rows of seats up to the stage; off to the left a small orchestra pit hid quiet and empty. Chess ignored that for the moment.

  Dust hit her nose when she walked across the curtain now crumpled on the stage, sending her into a brief sneezing fit. Ugh. And she couldn’t even have a cigarette to settle it down; the staff at— Wait a minute. Yes, she could. She could do anything she wanted to. What were they going to do, fire her?

  And while she was at it she could grab another couple of Cepts from her pillbox.

  The overheads revealed a floor covered in dusty footprints; the faint scent of kesh smoke hung in the air, but whether that was recent or from the curtains or, hell, from her cardigan, she had no idea.

  She walked around some boxes and a stack of wooden platforms of varying heights, looking for something, anything. Any evidence of ritual magic.

  The odds of her finding any were about as good as her odds of getting Terrible and Lex to have a pajama party together. If she’d been able to look the day before … But she hadn’t, and that left them plenty of time to clean up. For all she knew, the minute she’d left the office they’d had an alert raised.

  Sometimes, for just a second, it bothered her to be so suspicious of everyone. Then she remembered she was dealing with people, and that people were capable of every sick fucking thing she’d ever experienced or imagined and a whole lot of other shit that even she hadn’t, and that feeling disappeared.

  Something creaked on the other side of the curtain.

  She stopped, one foot half off the floor ready to take her next step. Her body buzzed. Was that a ghost, or nerves?

  It didn’t feel totally like a ghost. It didn’t itch as much as ghosts did. But her skin tingled and crawled an alarm, the kind that told her someone was doing something with magic or ghosts, something they shouldn’t be doing. The kind that told her she wasn’t alone anymore, that made her feel as though a target stood out clear and bright on her head and someone had their finger on a trigger.

  For a long, aching minute she stood there without moving, until the sound of the creak began to blur in her memory and she couldn’t be sure she’d actually heard it. Fuck. Her cigarette fell to the dusty stage and she ground it out with her toe.

  The silence waited. Breathed around her.

  Her muscles ached. This was bullshit. She’d count to five, and then she’d get back to work. One … two … three …

  The movement came at four. A tiny blur in the corner of her eye, so fast she couldn’t catch it. Fuck!

  Her skin tingled worse. Something wasn’t right. That felt like a ghost, but it also felt like magic. A witch doing ghost-magic? Shit, after Maguinness she really didn’t want to deal with that again.

  Too bad it wasn’t up to her. There was a ghost, and there was magic, period. A summoned ghost, maybe, or a ghost working with a mate. Double fuck.

  She pulled her knife out of her pocket and snapped it open, used her left hand to grab a handful of asafetida and graveyard dirt. Let them fucking come. She was ready.

  What she wasn’t ready for was the fast whoosh of something flying through the air, or the heavy sharp weight slamming into the back of her skull. The dirt and her knife flew from her hands; the floor flew up to greet her. Painfully.

  She barely had a chance to realize what had happened before everything went dark.

  It was still dark when she opened her eyes, and her head felt like someone had jammed nails into it.

  Not that the rest of her was any more comfortable. She felt stiff and smushed somehow. What the—

  She was in a box. She was trapped.

  Holy shit. Oh holy shit holy shit holy shit. Trapped, trapped in that tiny space that made her heart pound and her lungs feel cracked and unable to work properly. For a long horrible minute she lay there panting, struggling to move, to make her head stop spinning, before she managed to get herself under control. So she was trapped. That didn’t mean she was dead or something. She could get out of this. She would get out of it.

  The top side of the box—of the trunk, rough wood dry against her fingers—was an arm’s length above her head, enough for her to sit up if she was careful. That was the first thing she needed to do. Sitting meant control, sitting meant not cringing on the floor like a little girl trying to hide behind the water heater or in the crawlspace under the house.

  Hiding like a little girl who got found anyway, no matter where she tried to hide.

  She swallowed the memories, swallowed the rising panic. She was sitting, she would get out of this.

  A barely detectable seam under her fingertips told her where the lid was. The trunk apparently sat on its side, with the lock at the top. Great. The floor would keep the hinges from opening. If she wanted to get out, she’d need to flip it onto its bottom first. That would be fun.

  I’m trapped, I’m trapped, I’m trapped—

  No. Fuck that. Sitting up had given her
legs some room; not a lot, not enough, but some. At least her heels weren’t pressing into her ass anymore.

  Her tattoos weren’t tingling.

  Her tattoos weren’t tingling, so the ghost or the witch or whatever wasn’t around anymore. That was good news, at least, right?

  Oh, yeah, that made it totally better to be trapped in a trunk in the school theater that— Shit, that no one had entered in three weeks or so because everyone avoided it like it would dye their skin green.

  So much for hoping someone would come along and let her out.

  And— Shit again. That seam, the seam she could barely feel. How airtight was that? How much air did she have, how much fucking air did she have?

  She pressed her face against the wood, against the seam, in a futile attempt to feel if air could get through. No. Or if it could, she didn’t feel it.

  Pushing on the lid didn’t do anything, either.

  Time to flip it.

  That at least gave her something to do with her panic. She turned it into energy, throwing herself to the left as hard as she could.

  The trunk might not actually be airtight, but it sure as fuck felt like it was, like the air around her was getting too hot, too thin. Her head hurt worse with every second, and that wasn’t withdrawals. That was fear, biting into the back of her neck and tearing, slicing at her with icy talons. She’d never liked close spaces—who the hell would, after being shoved into them so many times, left there the way she’d been—but they didn’t upset her usually; she’d been able to get past it. Her job demanded she get past it.

  That’s what pills were for, too, right? She could— She didn’t have her bag. Of course not. Her bag with her pick case. That would have come in way too handy, wouldn’t it?

  She slammed herself against the left side of the trunk with all the strength she could muster, finding a rhythm. The trunk started to rock. She pushed harder, barely hearing the booming sound of her body hitting the wood, barely aware of the choking half sobs escaping her throat. How much air did she have, she was trapped, they were never going to let her out, never, never—

  The trunk flipped. Stars exploded in the blackness before her eyes, so bright it hurt. Or maybe it was just the impact that hurt, because that was sure as fuck not pleasant, either.

  It took her a couple of minutes to unwedge herself enough to set her feet and bottom on the floor again. She gave the trunk lid a shove. Nothing. Of course.

  How solid was the wood? She scooted herself farther down onto her back, pressed the soles of her feet against the lid. One slow, solid push, or a bunch of fast ones?

  Fast. She couldn’t stand to do anything else, not when she thought for sure her air would run out any second or her heart would explode from panic.

  The wood caved the tiniest bit under her feet. Nowhere near enough. Fuck, that wood was solid. Of course. It was important that a fucking stage prop for a fucking school play or something would be built airtight and strong enough to survive a fucking explosion.

  Another kick. Another. Another. How long had she been in there? How long had she been unconscious? Ten minutes? Three hours?

  Her legs started burning. It made her madder. Made her kick harder. This was bullshit, she was not going to suffocate or starve or what-the-fuck-ever in this box. She had things outside that place, she had Terrible, and she was not going to die when things were weird between them.

  Or any other fucking time, either.

  Strength she didn’t know she had pulsed through her limbs, and she used it. The wood started to creak. More. Harder. The sounds coming from her mouth weren’t choking little noises now, they were louder, screams, unstoppable and sharp in the tiny space.

  One last kick, one last scream, and the lid flew open. Air blew over her, cold on her sweaty brow, so fresh it made her dizzy.

  She was free. She’d gotten out, she was free. She felt like she’d just run a marathon that ended with plummeting down a flight of stairs, but she was free.

  Her legs shook as she stood up. Even the dim light in the theater hurt her eyes; white spots expanded and exploded in front of them, expanded and exploded.

  “Are you okay?”

  The voice made her stumble, almost falling over the back of the trunk. What the fuck, what— She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again, and saw Beulah.

  “Are you okay? What were you doing in there?”

  Beulah stood halfway down the aisle. Halfway down. In the theater. How long had she been there? Had she— Someone had slammed a pole or a slab of wood or whatever it was into the back of Chess’s head, a heavy one. That didn’t take a lot of strength to do. It wouldn’t have taken much strength to shove her into the trunk, either, especially not with an accomplice.

  Chess ran her fingers through her sweaty bangs. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see if you were hungry, actually, and I heard you screaming. What were you doing in there?”

  Like she was going to tell. Sure, it would totally be cool to let Beulah know she’d gotten jumped and locked in a trunk. Didn’t make her look like an idiot at all. “Investigating.”

  “Uh-huh.” Beulah sat down, held up a plastic tray and cup. “Here, I brought you these.”

  Eating or drinking something Beulah offered her didn’t seem like the best idea. But her water bottle was almost empty and her throat felt like someone had set sawdust on fire and shoved it down there, so …

  She took the cup, downed the contents in one long swallow, and almost spit them back up. “Ugh, what the fuck is that?”

  “Green tea. It’s unsweetened, it’s good for you. Cleans the blood, gets rid of impurities.”

  For fuck’s sake. She didn’t spend most of her income on drugs so she could have clean fucking blood. And that green tea tasted like swampwater and death.

  Beulah obviously saw the look on her face— Chess wasn’t making any effort to hide it—and continued. “You should really start taking care of yourself. You’d feel much better.”

  “I feel fine.” At least she did until she opened that plastic container. The smell assaulted her, that horrible sodium smell, damp meat and soggy pale fries, old pasta with sauce dried into crustiness. Institution food. Food she’d find in Dumpsters behind the school because no one gave her money to buy any. She gagged, swallowed hard the saliva flooding her mouth, and snapped the lid back shut so fast she gave herself a cut with the sharp plastic edge.

  “Sorry,” Beulah said. “I know the food from there is gross, but it’s really not great anywhere around here, and I didn’t know what you’d like, so …”

  “It’s fine.” She needed a smoke. She needed her pills. Needed them like she needed … well, needed them like she needed her fucking pills, and that was an awful lot, more than anything. Beulah’s presence annoyed her, an itch she couldn’t scratch; why wouldn’t the woman go away so she could take her pills? She closed her eyes, wished as hard as she could that Beulah would just leave.

  “So why were you in that trunk?”

  That didn’t sound like leaving, damn it. Chess opened her eyes to see Beulah watching her with an intensity that made her want to squirm. She didn’t, and she wouldn’t, but she wanted to. “What do you mean, why?”

  “I mean why? Did you see something? A ghost?”

  “No.”

  “Then why—”

  “Why nothing. I was looking in it. The lid fell. I got out. No big deal.”

  Beulah nodded toward the trunk—the wreckage of the trunk, the hole in the center of the lid a ragged exit wound. “You just destroyed it? Are you going to replace it?”

  Beulah deserved a punch in the face. “I have the authority to destroy, take, or use anything I want.”

  “Yes. And you do exercise that, don’t you?”

  “What the hell is your problem with me? Seriously. You don’t know me, or anything about me. Is there some reason why you keep acting like I spit on your baby or something?”

  A flash of surprise on Beulah’s face,
and then there was that damned look of amusement again. “You’re right,” she said after a pause. “I’m not being very nice.”

  “Were you like this with Aros?”

  Beulah tilted her head. Thinking. “No. Aros wasn’t as cold as you are. I mean, he seemed very nervous all the time. Like he thought someone was going to start yelling at him. He talked very quietly and he didn’t ask a lot of questions. He probably would have peed himself if he’d walked into that crowd in the office earlier.”

  “The ambush you set up for me, you mean?”

  Beulah smiled, a broad, genuine smile. “I didn’t set it up. I just didn’t do anything to discourage it.”

  Beulah certainly did seem to have an awful lot of authority in the school for someone who wasn’t an administrator. Hell, she wasn’t even technically a school employee.

  So why did she have the keys to all the locks in the building? Why would she talk about the pissy party that had greeted Chess as if her encouragement or discouragement would make a difference?

  “Why?”

  “I guess I wanted to see what you were really made of. As a person, I mean.”

  Right. So Chess was apparently some sort of experiment for Beulah now. Okay, well, good to know. She didn’t trust the other woman anyway, but now she knew really not to trust her. The last thing she wanted to do was hang around near someone whose idea of a good time was to set up mind games for others to navigate, so they could sit back and laugh at them.

  Her phone beeped at her. A text from Terrible, a reminder to let him know when she left Mercy Lewis. He must have just woken up, and— Shit. It was five after two.

  She stood up, fast enough to give herself a headrush. Her stomach gave an unpleasant lurch, too, and she really, really wanted to get some pills into it as fast as possible. “I have to go. I have to talk to those kids.”

  Beulah’s delicate eyebrows rose. “You think they’ll talk to you?”

  “Not really.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “But who knows?”

  Yeah, they didn’t want to talk to her. The first one Laurie brought her was Maia Song. Or, as Chess knew her, Bleached Blonde. Didn’t matter, because she wouldn’t say a word.