Especially better was the sight of the bespelled slipping on her blood, falling, their bodies hazy outlines in the clearing smoke. Her blood, strengthened with energy and herbs, touching them—it might be a start. She hoped it was a start.
In her shaking left hand she still held the key. She didn’t really know how to use it, but she had it. Maybe— Yes, worth a try.
The room was full. Terrible tugged her out through the doorway, punching his way through the crowd, kicking at those who fought back. Hands pulled her hair, more hits on her head and limbs, more pain. Twice on the top of the head, fast and hard so her vision jangled and her knees buckled.
It was just the two of them, just her and Terrible in the center of a horde of grasping hands and blank faces. The key burned her skin; it hurt. It burned and hurt because ghost magic and iron didn’t mix, and the key was both. It burned her skin because she was pushing her own magic into it, and that didn’t mix.
It wasn’t safe to do it. It could overload her, could deaden her. Hell, it could kill her. But Terrible had to get out. She couldn’t let him die there.
She sucked in a deep breath, hard, wishing to fuck there was something mixed in with it to calm her down. It was all down to her, she had to be the one. He was counting on her.
What words of power should she use? A Banishing spell, a— No. She was supposed to increase the power.
Hard to do with her heart pounding so hard and her chest so tight and her breath coming so fast, but this was her job. The one thing—well, okay, one of two things—she knew she could do. Knew she was good at, damn it.
So she took as deep a breath as she could, feeling her chest—her whole body—fill with every bit of power she could summon, ducked down, and shoved it all into the key. Into the key, into her blood, into the air already thick with smoke and magic. “Garmarak kedentia ronlo prientardus!”
The words shot heat, strong raging heat, up her legs, into her head, like a pot boiling over. Words to build and enhance magic, words to make it stronger, combined with everything she was pushing into the key—she shook, barely able to keep her fingers closed over the iron as it turned white-hot against the floor.
Power spread from it, though, radiated from it. She felt it racing along the floor, crawling up the walls and the legs of the possessed and into the air. She’d been right. She’d been right about her blood giving it a kick, increasing the power, been right about the smoke and the key.
But she’d also been right about the cost, about what it required, about how mixing magic with iron wasn’t a great idea. Well of course she’d been right about that, it was one of the first things they learned in training, and when you considered that the iron in question—the key—was coated with ectoplasm-infused paint, it was worse. Iron and ghosts didn’t mix, and by pushing her power through the paint, through the key and into the iron itself, she was trying to make it mix.
The iron rebelled. Her body rebelled. Fuck, it felt like she was dying; her insides twisted and writhed, and the key hurt to hold. Waves of blackness, dizzy and sick, washed over her, through her.
Her legs gave. She slumped to the floor, thankfully sparing her knees but not her forehead, which hit the steel with a painful thud. Her fingers burned. Her bangs stuck to her forehead from sweat; her already itching and tingling body felt sticky and slick from it.
Still she pushed. Still she drew power from everything and everywhere she could. It wasn’t enough; it couldn’t be enough. The floor weaved in her vision and burned her arm when she fell onto it. She barely noticed. All of her focus was on the key in her fingers, the horrible sick heat of it. She had to give more, there had to be more power somewhere, more power inside her.
Thudding in her ears: her heartbeat, the sound of her blood in her veins like waves crashing against the shore in a hurricane, louder and faster. Her lungs didn’t seem to work properly. Dizziness clouded her vision, made her feel as if she clung to the key in the middle of a swirling vortex, a hellish merry-go-round that threatened to fling her off into nothingness at any second. She was weakening, she was losing …
The floor beneath her vibrated, but was that from falling bodies or just because she was shaking? Looking up would be a good idea; she should look up, should check and see what was happening, but it seemed like an impossible thing to do.
And she wasn’t sure she wanted to, either. She’d been trying to override the spell, trying to override a spell like Terrible’s sigil; what if she’d done so and done it so well he’d never come back? Yes, Elder Griffin’s sigil had been holding—but for how long?
How long had she even been there? It felt as if she’d been lying on that floor for hours, for days, as if her muscles had frozen in that position and she’d never be able to move again.
But she did. Through the illness, the wavering vision that distorted everything, she saw bodies staggering, falling, and getting back up. Not enough. It wasn’t enough, fuck, she wasn’t strong enough, she was going to die. She and Terrible were both going to die.
That wasn’t good enough.
She turned back to the key, focused on it as much as she could. Words of power came to her choked, dry throat; she croaked them out, not really feeling as if they were helping but doing it anyway.
The City rose before her. The City of Eternity, the malicious dead waiting to sink cold hooks into her flesh. The darkness, the emptiness, the fear she’d never been able to express to anyone. It washed over her, flooded her system with horror.
But Terrible’s life was on the line. Well, Terrible could die from the spell itself, if Elder Griffin’s sigil failed to hold; was Terrible dying? She couldn’t think of it, couldn’t not think of it, and he was strong in her mind and her heart as she dug deeper, focused harder.
Somewhere inside her was a wellspring of hate. A small furious ball of it, a ball of rage and pain, the knowledge that she wasn’t good enough and never would be, that she deserved all of the pain she’d gotten in her life, all of the abuse. She’d been born bad; she’d been born with something … something wrong with her, something she could never make right. She didn’t belong in the world.
But she belonged with Terrible. He knew her and he still loved her, and damn he was wrong to do that but it was Truth, and she found that thought deep inside herself, a tiny nugget of gold buried in shit. She needed to do this for him.
So she turned that hate—those flashing horrible images of every one of them, all of them who’d hurt her, who’d used her, who’d laughed, who’d treated her like the garbage she was, into power. She took those images in her head and made them strong. She turned that love—and fuck, she did love him, she’d never in her life met anyone who made her feel the way he did—into power, and shoved it with all of her might into the key.
Her heart skipped in her chest; she heard it in her ears. Too much power. She couldn’t handle it. Red lights exploded in her eyes, in her head, searing pain shot through her.
And above it all was the power making her shake, the endless, bottomless well of emotions inside her turned to energy so strong she couldn’t stand it, so strong it ripped her apart. She was afraid to let it go, afraid to let it take over, afraid to let it have what it wanted because it wanted her, all of her, everything. It would consume her soul if she let it.
She didn’t let it. Instead, she pushed it into the key as hard as she could. It reverberated out from there; she felt it hit her blood, hit the walls, hit the floor, wrapping her in her own power, changed from what it had passed through. Her heart kicked so hard in her chest she thought she would die. Maybe she was dying, because blackness rolled through the room, obscuring everything, coming to claim her, and she collapsed into it, exhausted, and let it have her.
“C’mon, Chessie, open yon eyes, know you awake, c’mon, gotta—”
Movement. She was moving. She was lying down, but she was—running. Terrible had her in his arms and he was running down the hall, that awful narrow hall on that ship, and when she opened her eyes she ca
ught a glimpse of the ceiling above her, of Terrible’s worried expression, before she closed them again.
He turned and stopped; a pause while his body jerked and a door slammed. He must have kicked it shut, and the sound of it brought it all back: the bodies, the magic, the pain in her arm and in her mind and soul, the dizziness and the clearing clouds.
And the knowledge that it had worked. Somehow it had worked.
A new voice, one she hadn’t heard before: “Hey! Who the fuck—”
Terrible set her down, rather less gently than usual, but she figured that could be excused when she heard the sound of a fist slamming into flesh. She opened her eyes to see a man fall, Terrible standing over him, ready to deliver another blow.
The man on the floor—she guessed he was Razor, seeing as how his shaved head had images of razor blades tattooed onto it—glared up at Terrible. His right hand reached back toward his pocket, where the handle of a knife protruded; Terrible kicked his arm away before he reached it.
“You Razor, aye? Came to have a chatter with you.”
“Don’t want to—”
Another kick. “Ain’t give a fuck. Just come to give you some knowledge you needing, dig? Get outta Downside. Take you boat and whatany other shit an get the fuck out.”
Razor wiped at the thin line of blood trickling from his nose. “Don’t think you unnerstand, see, I gots me—”
The snap of a gun being cocked, and Terrible stood aiming at Razor’s head. “Naw, thinkin you the one ain’t understand. Don’t give a fuck who backin you, payin you bills. Done now.”
Razor glanced at Chess, back at Terrible. His hands rose into the air—the universal “Please don’t hurt me I’m not armed” pose—but something in his eyes, in the set of his mouth, bothered her. He didn’t look worried. He looked like he had an ace up his sleeve.
And the door wasn’t locked.
Chess got up on unsteady legs and wobbled toward it. Anybody could walk in, and when Razor’s voice followed her, she knew that’s exactly what he was counting on. “Hey! Where you going, bitch? This—”
She’d been expecting another kick, another punch. She hadn’t been expecting the gunshot or Razor’s thin, high screech. The lock clicked shut; Razor writhed on the ground, squealing, clutching at his shin.
“Don’t see what you so fuckin pissed about,” he said, when his whining subsided. “Know that boss of yours got a big offer, plenty of cash, and shares in more later. Plenty of cash. Were you I’da taken it, cause this way you don’t get shit.”
“What about the people?” Chess couldn’t keep her mouth shut anymore. “What about all those people you’re killing, turning into fucking zombies? Do they get money? Or no, they get to die, right?”
“The fuck you care?” Razor’s brows drew together. “They just junkies. So they die, so what? Ain’t like they worth a shit, they—”
Another gunshot report slammed off the walls, another scream from Razor.
“Just gimme the tell.” Terrible’s voice was cold, as cold as Chess had ever heard it, and anger poured out of his mouth along with it. “Who the one does the magic? Tell me now, maybe you live, dig. Iffen you don’t … I put more holes in you, throw you in the bay.”
Razor glared at him again, the kind of glare Chess had gotten used to seeing when it came to Terrible: the kind that started defiant, then turned to fear and acquiescence. Good. Fucker. As if he was any better. As if he could judge anyone, any of those people in the hall, any of those people just trying to get through the day.
“Don’t know,” he said finally. “I just get the stuff. The speed an them walnuts I’m s’posed to give em. Tell em they good-luck charms. Dumb fuckin junkies believe it, fuckin wastes of life they all is. Scratch a junkie find a piece of shit, aye? Can you—”
The gun went off again. For the last time.
Chess and Terrible stood in silence while the sound echoed off the walls, in her ears, quieter and quieter until it finally stopped.
She didn’t know what to say. Should she say anything, should she—
Terrible cleared his throat. “Guessin … guessin we oughta search in here, aye? See if we can find any useful.”
“Yeah.” It felt colder in there than it should; her body felt weak and shaky, but whether that was from the magic before or from—well, from what had just happened, she didn’t know.
Pause. “Maybe oughta sit you down, Chessie, still lookin kinda—”
“I’m fine.”
“I can do all the—”
“I’m fine.”
And she was. A little trembly, her movements a little jerky, but fine.
At least she was until she got around the heavy desk in the corner, closer to the tall steel cabinet behind it. The nuts were in there. They had to be, because magic practically haloed the thing, a dark smudge in the air she could almost see. “I think they keep the nuts in here.”
“Aye?” She was used to him moving quietly, to him just appearing nearby, but she still jumped when he was suddenly at her side. She could have turned around, wrapped her arms around him, and held on, buried her face in his chest until she felt normal again.
Could have. But didn’t. And she didn’t because— She didn’t know why. Because she was scared. Because he’d killed someone a few seconds before and she knew he didn’t like it when she saw that, and she knew why he’d done it and he knew she knew, and she didn’t know if he wanted her to say anything or what. So she avoided the subject. “Yeah. Let’s get it open and take a look.”
It wasn’t locked. She half-expected the nuts to come pouring out when the doors opened, but no, they were in plastic bins—inert plastic bins—lined up on the shelves inside.
The energy, though, the malevolent power of them? That poured out of the cabinet thick and strong, a slow-moving tidal wave spreading over her body and making her shiver. She could practically feel each walnut inside as it— Wait.
Terrible grabbed her hand before she could touch the pile of nuts in one of the tubs. “What you doin?”
“I’m—I need to touch them. A couple of them. I think I figured something out.”
“Ain’t you wanting them gloves you got? Could—”
“No, I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. But she was right. She picked up one nut in each hand and held them at arm’s length to her sides, feeling the connection between them arc through her body. “It’s— They’re connected. It’s a mass control spell.”
Pause. “Aye, ain’t you—”
“No. Sorry, no, I didn’t realize it before. How it works, I mean. Yes, it’s a control spell, but it’s all connected. Shit, of course it is, how did I not figure this out before, it’s—” She caught a glimpse of his face, patient but maybe a touch confused, and forced herself to stop babbling.
“Sorry. Here’s the thing.” She set the walnuts on the floor, sat down in front of them. “It’s a master spell. All of these, all of the nuts, are connected. The magic is connected, and it’s connected to one particular master spell—one sorcerer.”
“So … he uses this bag, runs he some other bags from it? Like them Lamaru brought the Dreamthief?”
“Yes. Well, no, not exactly, because those bags were set up as a fence, remember, to hold the Thief in place. But it’s a lot like that. There’s a master spell somewhere. The sorcerer transmits his intent into that one, and it goes from there to all of these, to the people holding these or who have one in their houses or whatever. Some people probably tossed theirs, or haven’t been close enough to them for the spell to really take effect. But most of the nuts are out there, and the people who have them feel the command because it links to the magic in their bodies. They feel it and follow it.”
“Aye, I dig.” He lit cigarettes for them both. “Gives em the drugs, they get the magic in they bodies. Then this one controls em, and he runnin the whole thing from he master bag?”
“Right. With the bags, he doesn’t have to touch each person or anything like that. He ju
st touches his bag or gives it a magical command or whatever, and the magic seeks out the other bags and the people with those ingredients in their system, and they follow the command. It creates a circle.”
“They know? Like they feel what he wants doing?”
“No.” That was the worst part. The horrible part—well, all of it was horrible, but this was the part that made her shiver extra hard, that made her cheeks flush. “They’re completely driven by the drugs. They’re not—They’re probably not even conscious of it. It’s like they’re dead inside, like their souls don’t exist. No free will, no nothing, they’re just compelled.”
If he knew how much that idea bothered her—and she was pretty sure he did, how could he not—he didn’t say it. Instead he laid his hand on the top of her head, gave it a quick rub. “Fuck of a thing to do to people.”
“Yeah. Um, yeah.”
“Thinkin the master spell be in here? Doin all he work from here?”
“I know he sure as hell didn’t have the ability to control the spell.” She tipped her head toward Razor’s corpse, lying on the floor with a look of surprise across his pockmarked face, the off-center bullet hole in his forehead like a third eye seeing right into the City.
“Aye? How’s— Shit, I ain’t even gave you the chance touchin him or whatany, see if he got magic.” He shook his head, his gaze fixed on the floor. “Just got me so mad, Chessie, weren’t—”
“It’s okay.” Why had she waited so long to touch him? That had been a stupid thing to do, because the second she did, the second her fingertips touched his throat, he reached for her, pulling her into his arms to hold her tight. Warmth spread through her body, giving her enough strength to hold him back just as tight. “It’s okay, really.”
“Aye, but still … coulda got more—”
She kissed him, not a long kiss—no matter how much she loved him, three feet away from a dead body, with presumably a gang of magic zombies waiting outside the door, was not the place for an extensive show of physical affection—but a solid one all the same. “We already know who’s behind it, right? I can’t think of any other information we needed from him.”