Unholy Magic

  Her head swam. Too much booze, too many pills, too much movement. Blackness crept in around the edges of her vision. She fought it with what little energy she had left. She didn’t want to sleep here. Wanted to go home. There was no way in hell she was okay to drive, but she had more speed, she could snort herself sober and make it if she was careful. Merritt’s place smelled funny and small, and she wanted to leave.

  His fingers curled around her hips, dug into them, and the pain drew her attention back to him as he finished. She barely managed to keep herself from sighing with relief. He was done. He was done, and she could go home, and maybe—maybe—she could figure out a way to fix things.

  Or she could just pass out, which seemed more likely.

  Either way, she couldn’t help being a little grateful to him. He’d gotten her out of the house, gotten her drunk, given her a few minutes of peace.

  It wasn’t much, but sometimes it was enough.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Magic is neither benevolent nor malevolent; it is not good or evil. The motives of the practitioner are important, but that does not mean magic is safe if your heart is pure. Quite the opposite can be True….

  —The Book of Truth, Rules, Article 980

  An hour and a half later she left her car in the lot by her building and trudged toward the steps. Her thighs ached. Everything ached. Her mouth felt fuzzy, her teeth sharp and rough in her mouth. The half-gallon of water she’d forced herself to drink sloshed around in her stomach; she had to fight to keep it down. At least it was still dark. She didn’t think she could face the sun.

  Terrible waited on the steps. Chess stopped short, her mouth open like an unhinged door.

  His gaze took her in head to foot, her messy hair and smeared makeup, her rumpled clothing and unsteady footsteps. She felt his judgment and wanted to hide, wanted to curl up into a ball on the pavement and wail until he went away.

  “Hi,” she managed.

  His hands dug into his pockets; he glanced around. A few buildings down, a small crowd of teenagers passed a kesh between themselves on the steps, their laughter blasphemous in the silence.

  “Terrible, please … just let me explain.”

  He shook his head. “You say anythin to him?”

  “What? I—”

  “About … where I take you, on the other day. You tell Slobag about it?”

  Katie. She shook her head so fast she felt her brain jostle in her skull. “No! No. I promise. I didn’t—it wasn’t like that, I didn’t—”

  “You tell him and I kill you,” he said, his voice so rough it was almost unrecognizable. “Dig me? Ain’t lyin.”

  “I didn’t. I would never—”

  “Ain’t interested in what you never. Just had to say it. Just so you got the knowledge.”

  The sob burbled up out of her mouth before she could stop it, rising through the heavy, thick oppression of her high. “Please, can’t we talk? Can’t I just explain?”

  He stared at her for a minute, like he’d never seen her before. Maybe he hadn’t.

  The pain in her chest was fucking unbearable. She thought she’d need to cut out her heart to make it stop hurting.

  He turned to leave, and she thought of something. Something she did need to know. “Terrible. Did you—did you tell Bump?”

  He stopped, but didn’t turn around. Shook his head.

  Hot, fat tears rolled down her face, down her neck, washing away the last vestiges of Merritt’s unschooled mouth.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Ain’t done it for you.” He glanced back at her, every bump and line on his craggy profile sharp in the streetlight’s glow. “Think I want Bump knowin how I fucked up? Tellin him you was worth trust? Him knowin how I—” He shook his head. “Ain’t done it for you.”

  “I wasn’t lying.” She just wanted to keep him talking. Like if she could talk to him enough, she could convince him to trust her again, to be her friend again. To want her again. She wasn’t scared anymore. Being with him wouldn’t be scary. Being without him, being alone again … That made her booze-diluted blood run cold. “On the bridge. I wasn’t lying.”

  “Fuck, Chess. I ain’t as smart as you, but I know when I’m bein used, aye?”

  “Terrible, you’re not stu—”

  “Naw. We get your help, if we find us this ghost house. Figure you can work that one, seein as how it’s helpin yon boyfriend too. Othersides that … ain’t want to see you. You and me, it’s done, dig? Nothin there.”

  He was gone before she could think of a reply.

  She woke up with the sheets tangled around her like a snake, sweaty and shivering on her rumpled bed, feeling like she’d been fighting instead of sleeping. Her head ached. Her muscles ached. She felt dirty and tired and old, so old, like she’d been alive a hundred years instead of twenty-four. Like everything good that would ever happen to her had already happened, and all she had to look forward to now was death.

  Without getting up she chopped out a line on the scarred tabletop next to the bed and sucked it up, wishing she could numb her brain as effectively as her nostrils and sinuses. As it was she would settle for the false calm of her pills, four little white friends to soothe her.

  She stared at the water stains swooping across her dingy ceiling until her stomach settled and fog descended on her brain. Then she got up. Showered, washing the smell of Merritt’s skin off her body. Dressed. Pretended it was a normal day, just like any other. Pretended she hadn’t been busted, hadn’t fucked over people she cared about, hadn’t undone everything that might have been good for her along with her buttons the night before with Lex.

  She had work to do. A haunting to lie about, a case to close.

  Elder Griffin had given it to her personally. And she was about to let him down the way she’d let down everyone else who trusted her. Okay, the one other person who’d trusted her.

  She stared at herself in the mirror, grateful for the false sparkle speed lent her eyes. She still had a job to do. Even if it was a lie, she still had that. Time to get it over with. Fill out the forms and turn them in so she could go back home and hide in bed for the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week.

  Or the rest of her life.

  Her car screamed at her as she floored it to Church, redlining the battered engine, rattling the windows. It had started snowing again, dusting the roads with white, making them slippery and treacherous. She didn’t slow down. Maybe she’d wreck, just lose control and blast into a wall, and it would be over.

  No such luck. Instead she made it to Church in record time, fishtailing into the lot and dumping the car at an angle across two spaces.

  Despite the cold, sweat trickled down her back, thin acrid speed sweat, by the time she got inside. The wind made her face feel like a peeled tomato, as if it would bleed if she touched it.

  Chess stopped in the wide hall, her heart pounding, as the reality of her situation overcame her. She was about to lie to the Church. Not the way she lied every day, pretending she was just like everyone else. A real lie. A lie that would cost them money. She wanted to scream, to rage around the airy space and throw benches and punch holes in the walls.

  She was sick of this. Sick of being nothing more than a piece of someone else’s puzzle, a stick of furniture to move wherever it suited someone else’s needs. She was here, and she was stronger than this, harder than this. They could make her hate herself, make her doubt herself, but they couldn’t take away her deepest instinct. Not just the need to survive, but the need to survive long enough and strong enough to tell them to go fuck themselves. She’d play Fletcher’s game, but she would never let this happen again.

  So she opened the door of Elder Griffin’s office and marched inside to report the haunting with her head high.

  Only to find him slumped at his desk, his hair sticking up and circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with Church ceremony.

  “Cesaria,” he said. “How fare thee?”

  What w
as going on with him? He looked worse every time she saw him, as though something was eating him from the inside.

  “Very well, sir,” she managed finally.

  “I assume you’re here about Oliver Fletcher,” he said. “I saw you requested his records. I … I cannot apologize enough. We thought since his involvement was peripheral …”

  He sighed, shook his head. “I didn’t agree with keeping it from you. I told them you would figure it out, that you were better than they thought. How they could have so little trust in you, when we have seen the fact and truth of your skill before, is a matter of extreme disappointment to me. But you … you have not disappointed me. Sit down, then.”

  Oliver Fletcher? Why on earth was he talking about Oliver Fletcher?

  She plunked herself down in the cushy ivory chair opposite him, grateful for the chance to sit. Her legs didn’t want to support her. They wanted to jiggle and shake, to work off the nervous energy that welled in her the minute she stopped moving, but they did not feel up to keeping her body off the floor at that moment.

  “I did request his records, yes,” she said. Her brain whirred and clicked in her head while she tried to look as if she knew what he was talking about.

  The Elder nodded. “’Twas not my decision.”

  “Whose decision was it?”

  “I knew you would ask to see them,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. Damn. She’d been hoping for more of a clue.

  A pen flashed between his fingers, catching the soft bluish glow from the desk lamp and flashing it back at her with every nervous twirl he gave it. “I told them … And then you showed me that sigil. Did not trust me enough to tell me where you’d seen it, but I deserved that, did I not? For keeping it from you.”

  She opened her mouth, snapped it shut again. He couldn’t mean the sigil she’d found on the dead hookers, could he? What the hell was going on?

  “Which of the Pyles had that carved into their skin, Cesaria? Or was it Oliver himself? He was so proud of that one. Such an advanced design for a third-year student. We were all impressed. Jealous, if the truth be told, those of us in the upper classes. He had the kind of style we all wanted, effortless, so powerful for one his age. One day we might have made Elders, if we worked hard, devoted ourselves. But he had Grand Elder written all over him. We all knew it. All he had to do was reach out his hand and grasp it.”

  What in the world could Oliver Fletcher, film producer, have to do with some murdered prostitutes in Downside? Why hadn’t anyone mentioned his Church education to her? It wasn’t in the file she’d been given. He’d invented that sigil?

  She was so busy trying to fit together pieces that didn’t seem to be part of the same puzzle, she missed what he said next. Fuck! Pay more attention, moron.

  “… but Fletcher seemed to be the brains behind them, really. Landrum may have had the money, but Fletcher? His talent dwarfed us all. So when he designed the sigil, modified it, we were all amazed. So simple, so elegant! Not just to hold the soul, to protect it in the body and prolong the life, but to enable it to be controlled while being held. A way to prevent hauntings should a psychopomp be delayed. A way to ensure no accidents occurred. A regular Church sigil made extraordinary by the addition of a new sigil, one made from rarely used runes, designed in such a way that they had a double meaning. None of us had ever thought of such a thing, but it sprang from Fletcher’s mind fully formed.”

  A way to hold the soul in the body. To keep the body alive and the soul there until the psychopomp came for it.

  She knew this. Had known it, especially after Hat Trick showed her the althea. But she saw it in her head now, the herbs burning in whatever was handy. The sigil branded onto delicate pale skin. The cloth over the mouth and nose, the peaceful death, the soul transferred to the owl—the greatest psychopomp—and taken wherever it needed to go.

  And then released, fully formed. Released and controlled, released and bound with electrically charged wire, to service whoever paid the fee.

  Oliver Fletcher was behind that?

  But why the faked haunting, then? Someone with that much power and skill would surely be able to raise a few real ghosts. Could even control them, keep the Pyles from being seriously injured.

  What the fuck was he up to?

  Elder Griffin seemed to take her furrowed brow, her silence, for anger and disapproval.

  “It was the accident,” he said. “That is why they refused to reveal it. When Kemp … But I should explain. Cesaria, I hardly know how to begin. Suffice it to say that Fletcher and his friends—the three of them were inseparable—Horatio Kemp and Thaddeus Landrum were some of the most skilled students we’ve ever seen. And they ruled over us, walking as if always under a bright light.

  “Until the accident. Until the day they ascended the tower on a dare and Kemp fell off. His body was broken, destroyed. His soul would have left … but Fletcher got there first. He carved the rune into Kemp’s skin. It saved his life, Cesaria. Saved his life but made it not worth living. I cannot imagine how it would feel, being open to spiritual control, spiritual possession….”

  He trailed off, his blue eyes staring at the wall above her head, while her skin crawled and her brain whirred like a blender.

  Having your soul easily susceptible to magical control … She couldn’t even imagine it. Worse, she imagined, than her addictions, than the feeling of throwing herself constantly on the rocky shore of her body’s needs. At least her addictions brought her comfort and peace. Gave her a reason to get up in the morning, gave her something she could wrap around her like a blanket and hold close when she needed it. The Church may have given her purpose, but her pills made that purpose bearable, kept her head from breaking open under the weight of her life.

  But as much as her needs controlled her, she had some free will. She had some choice. A puppet with fewer strings.

  “It made him controllable,” she whispered.

  Elder Griffin nodded. “We were never certain if ’twas because of his gift or simply because of the sigil, but he became … addled. Spirits could enter his body, make him do things—not just powerful spirits, but any of them. He was that vulnerable. He took to wandering the streets at night, doing we knew not what, but a few times he returned with blood on his clothing, around his mouth, and could not recall from where it had come.

  “Fletcher was beside himself with grief. In seeking to save his friend he had condemned him. He studied the sigil, devoted himself to it, bringing himself near unto death to find a way to undo what he’d done. But there was no way. And that was how we discovered that it was not just his modification that made the bearer vulnerable. The sigil, the basic one we all learned, did that in itself. Not to the same extent, oh, no. Nowhere near as much. But it expanded the possibility of possession, of spectral control. We removed it from our books, wiped it from our minds, lasered it from our bodies. Kemp was put in an institution. Fletcher and Landrum left the school. And we did not speak of it, not ever again.”

  “That’s why Fletcher’s Church education wasn’t mentioned?”

  He nodded. “We thought, to dredge it up … Tell me, Cesaria, do you believe Oliver is behind the haunting at the Pyle house? Is it indeed a visitation?”

  She supposed it was possible. The actual ghosts could have been summoned, then filmed, their images forever replaying in the rooms of the Pyle home. Safer that way. Something a man as clever as Oliver Fletcher—a man who’d practically hung a sign over his head reading I DID IT when speaking to her—would have come up with easily, pulling it from his crafty brain like a dangerous sigil.

  But that didn’t feel right, either. And it definitely didn’t match up with the eyeballs in her car or with Vanita.

  She studied Elder Griffin for a minute. She’d trusted him, hadn’t she? Not entirely, but as much as she was able. And he’d lied to her. He could have told her that day in the library. Could have passed her a note. He knew this was her livelihood, knew she needed the money this case would
bring.

  Knew what she’d be dealing with when he assigned the case to her.

  She was so fucking sick of them all. Elder Griffin putting her in danger on a case through his reticence. Terrible taking her to Bump’s to be blackmailed into putting herself in danger. Lex unfastening his jeans with one hand while he gave her pills with the other.

  No, that wasn’t entirely fair. Terrible had apologized. Lex had never made any bones about who he was and what he wanted from her. In his mind, she had no doubt, the connection between giving her drugs and giving her orgasms was tenuous at best. Frankly, she doubted that his jaunty ego would allow him to see it differently.

  But he had used her. Kept her as a spy, her body made more valuable to him by the triumphant sense of putting one over on his enemies.

  “Do you think Oliver would do such a thing?” she replied, stalling. To give him a straight answer at that moment would be committing herself to a course of action, and she wasn’t ready for that. Not until she’d had a chance to talk to Fletcher, to investigate him further.

  He sighed. “The Oliver Fletcher I knew wouldn’t have.” His blue eyes grew overcast with memory. “I didn’t know him well, only one night … We were both at the café, a rainy night. I was—I am—a few years older than he. I believe he was … impressed by me, by the attention I paid him. We …” He shook his head, shutting away the memory while Chess’s eyebrows rose.

  Elders didn’t have sex. Or at least, she never imagined they did, never mind that some of them were married. But Elder Griffin hadn’t been an Elder then, only a student, and Oliver Fletcher was a handsome man.

  A handsome man whose head she’d seen buried between Kym Pyle’s legs. But who was she to judge? Absolutely nobody.