But the energy still didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like death magic. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of spell she was aware of that needed a murder to help power it. Those were— Wait.
“His—his face, the top of him, isn’t burned.” She looked at Bump and the pasty guy. “Why is part of him burned?”
Bump’s lips went thin; he stared at her for a long moment. “Had we a fuckin fire, Ladybird, ain’t you was fuckin here on the last—”
“Gee, really? No shit. Why is his body burned everywhere except on top? He’s burned from the ground up but the—his skin is still there, on his nose and forehead and chin.”
Pause, while they all inspected the body. Ha! Look at her, actually noticing something that might be important. She gritted her teeth to keep from smiling. Six was definitely her magic number after the food she’d forced herself to eat earlier. Or it could be the five finally really hitting, in which case six would be too much. She was too high to worry or care. If blessings were legal, that would certainly be one.
But smiling around a corpse wasn’t really appropriate, so she managed not to, concentrating again on standing still so her high flowed through her body in a smooth arc, making her feel like she was floating. Like maybe things were okay after all. Like maybe she was okay after all.
“Fuckin metal all on, yay,” Bump said. Oddly festive sparks of light danced on the walls as he waved his beringed hand; Chess followed it to see a slab of sheet metal—what had once been the reinforcement of the floor above, she guessed, which had probably been some kind of processing room—leaned up against the wall. “Got he on the fuckin find neathen it.”
“It fell on his body?”
“Ain’t it what I fuckin saying?”
Whatever.
So the metal slab had fallen on the body, and on the symbol. And had kept the parts touching it from burning. That had to mean something. What did that mean?
“The fire was here before the metal fell. I mean, look. Look at the lines. He was on fire, the fire started on the floor. Or, maybe it didn’t start here, but the floor was on fire when the metal fell. So the spell, whatever it was—it was burning already. Was there carpet here?”
“Naw,” Terrible said. “All cement.”
She looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”
Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”
“Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.
With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.
And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.
That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.
She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.
“It’s a hafuran,” she said.
Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”
“It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”
“Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”
“This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”
Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.
Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all get them because it—well, we get a lot of different sigils and runes and symbols and stuff, but this one is an all-around power enhancer. Whatever we do, the hafuran makes it stronger.”
Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.
“Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”
“No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”
She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”
She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.
“Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.
Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.
A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.
Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.
So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”
“Be one of them death curses?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”
She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?
She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.
“Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”
Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t kn
ow what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.
He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.
And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.
But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.
Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.
And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.
Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.
But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.
Not even her. Maybe especially not her.
So what did her new fucking disgusting friend want? And wasn’t she just thrilled that she got to try to figure it out?
“Gots us an even fuckin bigger bad needs fuckin chattering on,” Bump said. He lit a cigarette slowly, waiting until they were all giving him their full attention before continuing to speak. “Ain’t come on this by fuckin accidentals, yay? Gots me a fuckin tip on it, got the knowledge fuckin gave to us.”
Terrible waited. Pasty waited. Chess couldn’t. She couldn’t because she thought she knew what he was going to say, what he had to be going to say; she was sure the others did, too, but she didn’t think it made them feel as sick as it did her. “Who gave it to you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Crankshot fuckin gave it on the earlier. Hear Slobag fuckin givin the chatter on he fuckin witch him find heself. How’s that fuckin sound, Ladybird? Slobag gone and gotten heself a witch.”
She’d hoped that when she woke up Terrible would be in bed next to her. She’d slept so fucking hard she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d come in and started jumping up and down on the bed, and he’d sneaked in to surprise her before, so the hope was there. But no.
She couldn’t think about that. Not when she got up, not when she checked her phone and found the text he sent around four—not even that fucking late—saying he was staying at Bump’s. Which wasn’t that damn far from hers. Why would he want to sleep in that museum of gynecological art when he could sleep with her?
Slobag had a witch. Slobag had someone doing magic for him. Slobag knew about things Terrible had told Chess, and now Slobag’s witch was doing rituals inside buildings Terrible told her were empty during a time she’d been off working and had been late to meet Terrible, and she knew he’d put that together in his head just as fast as she had, maybe faster.
And he knew she’d been hanging out with Lex the day before. Slobag’s son Lex.
And he hadn’t come home with her, hadn’t come in to sleep with her.
Another thing she didn’t want to think about; way too many reasons for that particular decision flew into her head.
What she needed to think about was work. What she needed to think about was finding Vernal Sze and his friends and getting them to talk to her. No, she didn’t need to think about it, she needed to do it. Right away.
She left her new car in the gravel-strewn lot at the side of the building and started for the front doors of the Mercy Lewis school.
But today the walkway wasn’t empty. Students—she assumed they were students, they carried books—stood in straggly clumps outside, talking or smoking furtive cigarettes, listening to the Circle Jerks. Their eyes stripped her bare as she walked past; their conversations died when she got close enough to hear their words. It wasn’t just paranoia from the couple of Nips she’d popped to help her wake up after sleeping so hard, either. Their suspicion and aggression felt like pebbles against her skin, stinging where they hit.
The front door opened with the expected screech, though not as loud against the music playing as it had been in the previous afternoon’s silence. For a second she almost missed that silence. No one had been staring at her then.
Down the hall past the empty classrooms—apparently Mercy Lewis had a late lunch period, since it was just past one—to the office, where she was greeted by … a whole fucking crowd of people.
Frizzy—Laurie—was there, as were Monica and, smirking in the back in a gorgeous charcoal-gray suit, Beulah. She was the only one smiling. The others just glared—at each other, at the walls, at the various doors to small offices within the main Administration area, and especially at Chess.
“Here’s Miss Putnam now,” Beulah said. She unfolded her arms and straightened from her elegant lean. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer your questions.”
Bitch. She’d barely finished the last word before they all started talking at once. Because it was totally easy for her to make out individual comments from that, right? How stupid were these people?
Asking that question wouldn’t win Chess any friends. And the worst part was that she actually needed them to be—well, not friends, but at least sort of friendly, because there were too damn many of them and she had nothing to go on in the case.
So she stood against the door, waiting for the inevitable moment when someone would finally drown the others out.
The drowner emerged rather more quickly than she would have expected: a man, not tall but solid, with thinning hair and a broad face. “When is the Church going to do something about this? Students are afraid to come to school.”
“It’s been three weeks,” a woman—heavy, officious, sneering—interrupted. “If you people actually cared about us, you’d have done something by now.”
Another voice, she didn’t see whose. “The Church doesn’t care. They’ve never cared.”
“They care about our money,” said another, and as if that were some sort of switch, the yelling started again.
But they weren’t yelling at each other. They were yelling at her, looking right at her with their eyes narrowed and their faces reddening. She pressed herself against the door and shifted her weight, getting ready to duck from the angry voices and their condemnation, to brace herself for the fists and use her own, when she realized what she was doing. Getting freaked out? By these people? Who the fuck were they, anyway? A bunch of officious assholes who thought she owed them something. Fuck that, and fuck them.
So she straightened her back, raised her eyebrows, and just looked at them. Waiting. Sure enough, the shouts turned into speech, into grumbles, and finally into the embarrassed silence of someone who’s just vented their rage and discovered that the subject of that rage doesn’t give a shit.
Which she didn’t. Well, she did, of course she did, but not about them. Or their self-righteous desire to play victims.
; She gave them another minute in the silence. “Who are you all, again?”
Balding-and-Stocky glowered at her. “We’re concerned parties.”
“And what is your concern? Do you work here? You have kids here? What?”
The small crowd was suddenly full of shifty eyes. Uh-huh. “I’m Wen Li. I’m chairman of the Student Association.”
“What is that?”
“We help mediate between students in trouble and the school administration.”
A woman—helmet hair, glasses—piped up, “I’m co-chair. Martha Li.”
Yes. They looked perfect for each other.
The introduction game made its circle around the room; every single damn one of them was chair or head of some committee or project or something. Which meant, if her memory served and what she’d learned the day before was correct, that every single damn one of them stood to bank some cash if the haunting turned out to be real. Which made them and their anger about as believable and sincere as a declaration of pure and faithful love from Bump.
After they’d finished she gave them another minute of silence. “And have any of you actually seen or experienced anything here?”
She didn’t expect anyone to speak. She was right. No one did.
“Fine. If anyone has information that might help me, let me know. I really am here to help, and believe me, I want this situation settled just as much as you do. Okay? But if you’ll excuse me, I do have some work to do today.”
She pushed herself through the crowd—well, not pushed, they stepped out of her way—and handed Laurie the list she’d made earlier. “I need to speak to these students individually, and I need an empty room to do it in.”
“Those students have a right to have an adult with them while they’re being questioned,” Wen said.
She wanted to roll her eyes, but refrained. “No, actually. They don’t.”
“They’re—”
“They’re not suspected of any crime, I’m not the Squad, and they’re over fifteen.”