Chasing Magic

  They weren’t going to be together during the fight. They weren’t going to be accidentally separated as they had the month before, when Slobag’s witch had made his move and when Terrible had made it in time for the ending. This was different, would be different. Terrible would be fighting for his life against the only man who’d ever come close to matching him, and she’d be—well, she’d be somewhere, fighting her own battle.

  Probably losing her own battle. She hoped she wouldn’t, but she knew she probably would; what the fuck else was going to happen? She could trace the magic back, she could destroy it, but whether or not she could survive it afterward … She’d barely managed to fight the magic on the ship, and this would be so much worse.

  But as his arm wound around her waist, as she was filled with the smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of his body hot and hard against her, she didn’t care. Because right at that moment she had him, and right at that moment she could finally let herself rest, could stop worrying, could get past all of the things that scared her and let herself go.

  Even there, in that strange room, on time borrowed from someone else. They’d have plans to make and things to do when they left; every minute that went by was a minute stolen from the night’s preparations—a minute they handed to Kyle Blake and his horde of zombie slaves.

  It was worth it.

  What wasn’t worth it, unfortunately, was the idea of having sex next to a corpse. So she forced herself to break the kiss and step away, pushing at him with reluctant hands. “We need to go.”

  For a second she thought he was going to argue; then he glanced over at Razor lying on the floor and nodded. “Aye. Right, then, let’s get us movin.”

  Shaky again, her movements not quite as smooth as they should have been, she got the lid off the tub and held it in front of her like a serving platter. “Okay. Open the door.”

  Blank faces jumped to angry life when the door swung aside; angry faces changed to dull acceptance when she got closer to them. It worked. Holy fuck, it worked. It deadened them out, stopped them from attacking.

  Stopped them within a few feet, at least. She and Terrible exchanged glances; his arm went around her shoulders, pulling her close to his side, as they made their way through the crowd. Outside the few feet around them, the bespelled pushed and lifted weapons; a few of those close to her fell, beaten over the head or kicked or whatever else by those outside the spell tub’s sphere of influence.

  It felt almost like walking down the aisle at a wedding, or what walking down the aisle looked like, anyway, since she’d never done it. Outside the protective circle, chaos reigned. Inside it, where she held Terrible close and he held her back, all was still and calm, the crowd parting so they could walk through it. She’d never experienced anything like it.

  She hoped she never would again. Too bad that was as false a hope as—well, as just about any other hope, any other sweet lie people told themselves. She would have to experience it again, probably that very night, because what she’d told Terrible was true.

  The sorcerer knew they were coming for him. And he was going to do whatever he could to get to them first.

  Crawling down the rope ladder was even worse than crawling up it, even with Terrible below her steadying the thing as much as he could. The journey in the horrible little dinghy or whatever it was didn’t seem any better, either, especially not since the sun had lowered in the sky. She didn’t want to see the faint red streaks starting around it as ominous, but she couldn’t help it. A bloody sky over Downside … Well, hell, when wasn’t it, really?

  But she couldn’t suppress the shiver that ran through her when she looked at it, when she thought of it.

  Back into the tunnel, completely dark now from the setting sun and with the floor under about an inch of water—Terrible tossed his earlier captive into the dinghy—and back up into the taxidermist’s office. Shit, she just wanted to go home; she was so tired of trudging here and trudging there, of the whole mess— What the fuck?

  Something flew at them; Terrible leapt forward and caught it. Again the sound of flesh against flesh, again Terrible fighting, and something thudded in her chest when she realized who he was fighting. Lex was there. Lex and his assassin—Devil, or whatever the Cantonese word for that was. How the fuck did they get there?

  She’d probably find out—at least, she hoped she would. Terrible’s fist snapped Devil’s head back. Devil’s foot swept sideways, slamming into Terrible’s leg just below the knee. Their anger, their violence, filled the room; she could feel them, beating against her skin, assaulting her, and fear crawled up her stomach to lodge in her throat.

  It didn’t last that long, even though every second of it felt like hours to her. Terrible hooked his foot around Devil’s ankle, punched him in the face; Devil stumbled, bent over.

  When Devil came up, he had something in his hand, something that gleamed dull in the low light. A gun.

  Chess started to shout; before she finished drawing breath for it, Terrible’s hand moved again, pulling his own gun. They stood there, glaring at each other. A standoff.

  She acted without thinking. Not that it mattered; she’d have done the same thing if she had thought about it, if she’d stopped and considered all of her options.

  But there wasn’t time, because Devil and Terrible were glaring at each other, their hatred filling the dusty room, and she yanked the gun Terrible had given her from the pocket in her bag, pulled back the slide to cock it in the same movement, and aimed it.

  At Lex. “Tell him to drop it.”

  Lex might have looked surprised. Then again, he might not have. He almost looked as if he was smiling. “Why?”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “You ain’t shoot me, Tulip.”

  “You want to bet on that?”

  No. He’d better not want to bet on it, because she wasn’t so sure herself. Not after what happened in his bedroom. Not when his fucking paid killer stood there only a few feet away from her.

  She’d made a choice. She’d made it months ago. She hadn’t realized—well, she’d realized, but not completely, if she was honest—how seriously she took that choice until that moment. Did she want to make it? No. Did she want to shoot Lex? Fuck, no.

  But she would, and she knew it, and she let him see it in her eyes before she gave him an out. “We need to talk to you about what we found today and what’s coming. Probably coming tonight. You need to know, because it affects you.”

  That solved the problem of how to suggest to Terrible that they might want Lex’s involvement with what would likely happen later. But she was right about that. She knew she was. The drugs, the murders, had been on Lex’s side of town, too, and just because they were all headquartered on the Agneta Katina didn’t mean Lex’s side of town wasn’t going to have a problem.

  “They’re planning to take over Downside. All of Downside. That means you, too, Lex. And you can’t stop them without me.”

  Nobody moved for a long moment. Chess’s arms started to ache, but she couldn’t let them falter. Couldn’t let them move even the tiniest bit, because if they did, it would look like she was wavering, and Lex would see that as weakness.

  Finally he sighed. “Aye, fine, then. Oughta all drop the guns, we should. Let’s have us a chatter.”

  They stood inside the abandoned taxidermist’s; well, where the hell else would they go? Wasn’t like any of them wanted to be seen talking to one another on the street. Frankly, Chess was surprised Lex had shown up at the docks at all, but then she figured he’d heard how empty they were through one of his spies—or just through the rumor mill—and figured he’d be safe. Which he clearly was, since she half-expected tumbleweeds to roll down the streets.

  Somehow that emptiness didn’t make her feel any safer, though. Maybe it was the knowledge of what was inside the Agneta Katina, or the knowledge that the person or persons responsible—Blake and his sorcerer, Blake and his gang—could be watching from any one of the blank-fac
ed buildings lining the streets.

  Or maybe it was that Devil watched Terrible like a beast about to pounce, and Terrible watched both Lex and Devil in exactly the same way, and she thought she might very well drown in the sea of furious testosterone and repressed violence filling the space in which they stood.

  But they were standing, and Terrible caught her eye, gave her an almost imperceptible nod that sent relief flooding through her system. Good. At least he knew why she was doing what she was doing. Why she was telling Lex what they’d found, which she did in the quickest way she could, concluding with, “So Blake knows we’re after him, he’s going to know we were on the ship, and I think—we think—he’s not going to wait anymore. He’s going to do whatever it is—set them all out killing each other, killing whoever they can—tonight. And they’re not going to stop at Forty-third.”

  “Shit. Tried buyin me out, too, he did. Made me the offer maybe five, six weeks past, just after—when I take over, dig.” Lex paused, shifted his weight. “Ain’t gave it much thought, what with street men being killed an all.”

  The last line was spoken with a suspicious half glare at Terrible, who returned it with the kind of blankness Chess knew all too well. Hmm. Not that it was her business—it decidedly was not, and she didn’t want to know about it, not really—but still. Hmm.

  She cut into the heavy silence. “So, we need a plan for tonight. They’re going to know we were on the boat. They’re going to know we’re expecting something, that we know what’s going on. Hell, they’re going to know there’s a witch involved. But they might not know where we are, where we’re planning on coming from.”

  For the first time, Lex and Terrible looked at each other instead of glaring. The silence stretched between them, broken by a rat or something rustling in the piles of garbage and old bones lining the walls. Chess didn’t turn to see.

  “Guessing I could send some down here,” Lex said finally. “We get them streets all filled up though, aye? Set watches, what you thinking, Terrible?”

  Oh, how Terrible was hating this. She knew it from the look on his face, the set of his shoulders, the prickly feeling of his energy. But he nodded finally, glaring at Devil. “Aye.”

  Pause, while they all absorbed that. Yeah, Lex and Terrible had worked together before, but that had been off the books, as it were. To save her, and to save the City and the Church. This was different.

  “Okay.” She shifted her feet, ignoring the sound of some fragile bone breaking under her shoe. “Okay, then. So tonight—I think, I bet—they’ll come out of here, the bespelled people, because they have to move fast. We—”

  “Why we ain’t set the fucker on fire, Tulip? Them bodies burn up right, aye?”

  Was he serious? “We can’t.”

  “Why come?”

  Her mouth opened; it took her a second to answer him. “Those are— They’re people, Lex. Actual people, bespelled people. They’re innocent. We can’t just kill them.”

  “Them coming to kill us.”

  “They’re victims. We can’t burn them to death. Besides …”

  Terrible took his gaze away from Devil—he’d been watching him as if he were a cockroach he couldn’t wait to stomp on—long enough to glance at her. “That many bodies, the Church hears on it, aye?”

  “I don’t see how they wouldn’t. I mean, not everyone on the ship is even necessarily from Downside, you know? They could be anybody who came down here to score. It could bring a lot of attention.”

  “Aye, dig it now.” Lex nodded. “So you break them spell, an they all free?”

  “Yeah. If I break the spell they’ll be themselves again. Hopefully they’ll go home, chalk it up to a bad experience. Some of them might contact the Church, but I doubt it—they’re not going to want to get busted for drugs, and they’d have to admit what they were doing if they told. They’d probably get tested, anyway, with a story like that.”

  “How you break the spell, then?”

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

  All three of the men were watching her—or, rather, all three of them were waiting for her to speak. Only Lex actually looked at her. The other two stared at each other, their aggression sparking in the air like tiny bombs. Devil, she noticed, hadn’t spoken a single word. She couldn’t decide if that made him more threatening or made him look like a moron.

  Of course, if he thought he could beat Terrible—without his sneaky fucking tricks, at least—he was a moron, but oh well. His problem, not hers. She edged closer to Terrible so her arm brushed against his. She needed the contact, especially for the answer she was about to give. “I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

  Damn, she hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.

  * * *

  Terrible glanced in the Chevelle’s rearview again. “Thinkin it work?”

  “I don’t know.” Three Cepts ought to do it, right? Lift the clouds but still leave her able to think fast, move fast, if the need arose—when the need arose, because she was pretty sure it would. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  Part of her wanted the sun to set, wanted to get to the rooftop where they’d agreed to meet and get it over with. The other part didn’t want to do anything but run home and hide. She wasn’t ready. If she had one more day, just one more …

  He turned, heading back toward her place. “So the sorcerer, he doin shit you ain’t seen before? Where you figure he learn on it? Always wondered, dig, where them pick this shit up.”

  “He could learn it anywhere, really. Even the books we study have this stuff in them, we just don’t work with it. And the really dark magic books are restricted, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. All you need is to be strong enough to work the spells.”

  “Lots of power, then?”

  “He’s pretty strong.” That was an understatement. She shoved the pills into her mouth, washed them down with water from her bottle, and hoped he wouldn’t ask the question she knew he was about to ask, have the thought she knew he was about to have.

  Sure enough, he did. “You stronger, though, aye?”

  “Church magic is always more powerful. I mean, I’m not worried.”

  Another lie. If she wasn’t terrified she wouldn’t need more pills, wouldn’t be wondering if she could sneak a couple of lines of speed in. If she wasn’t terrified she wouldn’t be feeling worse with every passing second.

  Separating the victims from what controlled them would take some serious fucking power, power she didn’t know if she could summon. Power she was afraid of summoning, because it was the kind of power that could overload her—especially with the amount of shit she put into her system, no point in being dishonest about it—and it dawned on her that this could be the last day she ever saw, and she didn’t like that one bit.

  He lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. Such a familiar motion, something he did all the time, something that always made her feel taken care of. Like he was always thinking of her, always watching out for her.

  But then he spoke, and although his voice was casual—so carefully casual—the words sent a chill into her heart she wasn’t sure even her pills would chase away. “What I seen in the City … ain’t the whole thing, aye? Bigger’n that. An ain’t always like it were then, all the shit goin down and ghosts racing around an all. Aye?”

  Oh fuck. What could she say, what was she supposed to say? She didn’t even want to hear that question; she sure as fuck didn’t want to answer it.

  But she did. And she gave him the third lie, the biggest lie, because it was all she had at that moment; because she knew he was picturing Lex’s assassin and an army of soulless magic-controlled killers just as much as she was, and she knew he’d be absolutely horrified if she let on that she knew what he really wanted. And why, which was worse. “It’s much bigger. And, you know, there’s so much there, so many of them … You find people you knew and everything. It’s really, really peaceful and happy and everything.”
r />   Saying it made her feel sick. She took a long drag off the smoke while she tried to pretend nothing was wrong, that he hadn’t admitted anything at all, and that she hadn’t told probably the biggest lie she’d ever told him—bigger, even, than any about Lex. “We were in the anteroom, if you know what I mean. It’s bigger than the area you saw. There’s a lot more to it.”

  He nodded as he spun the wheel to urge the Chevelle around another corner. “Always had the wonder, dig.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice sounded too thin; she cleared her throat. “Everyone does.”

  He didn’t say anything further. Instead, he parked the car across the street from her building and set the brake. “Aye, then. Guessing we finish getting weselves ready.”

  Less than an hour later, she stood with Terrible on the rooftop of a building three blocks away from the Agneta Katina, with the sunset diminished to streaks of bronze and orange behind them as night took over the sky. Waiting.

  Waiting first for Bump, who arrived only a minute or two later in full regalia: slashed pants, fur boots, dirty diamonds, and all. The heat of the day had congregated on the rooftop, too, and Chess’s whole body felt sticky, but it didn’t seem to affect Bump. He looked as cool and calm as ever.

  So did Terrible, of course, but Chess knew him well enough to know what lurked behind that. His anger about what she was going to do, his anxiety about it, hovered beneath the surface of his energy.

  She grabbed three Cepts from her bag and washed them down. A futile effort to calm her nerves, yeah, but at least it was something. Something she could control, something she knew the effects of, because she had about twenty minutes before she jumped down the rabbit hole, and who the hell knew what would happen then.

  Well, no, she knew what would probably happen. She was probably going to die.

  Funny, she’d thought that so many times. So many times growing up, so many times since then. This was the first time she’d actually seen it coming, seen it from a great distance and not because she’d been grabbed or caught or whatever else. Her own death waited for her like a bed she’d crawl into at the end of the night, and she could only hope she managed to finish what she needed to finish before the sheet settled over her head.