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He glanced at her as he pulled the car up by a burnedout building. “You think be a ghost, Bump gonna call the Church, ask them take care of it? Or you think he come to you?”
Shit.
His jacket practically swallowed her when she slipped it on. She shrugged it off and handed it back. Best not to look like a little girl. Probably best not to show up wearing his clothes, either. Their casual friendship already sparked enough rumors—although those probably wouldn’t have been as fierce if she hadn’t lost her head and let half of Downside see her practically fucking him in a bar three months before. She shrugged the memory off, too, tried to focus on what was in front of her instead of what was behind.
Fires in steel trash cans added a little heat to the air and cast eerie shadows against the blank, broken walls along the street. Forty-fifth was practically no-man’s-land this far down, a street constantly under siege from Slobag’s men as they struggled to gain more territory. Here and there lights flickered in broken windows, indicating human inhabitants, but for the most part only shattered bottles and dirty needles called the street home.
Chess glanced to her left, across the street. A block away Slobag’s buildings started. Ten or eleven blocks farther north and a few east lived Lex. She shivered and had to force herself not to cross her arms over her chest. If she was going to suffer the cold in order to look tough, she needed to do it right.
The cold was abating a bit anyway as those last two Cepts worked their way into her system. Speaking of Lex, she’d need to go see him in the morning.
A tall woman with a mane of red hair so bright it glowed in the light strode away from the ragtag crowd and headed toward them. Her long legs were wrapped in woolly tights almost the same color, finished with thick knee-high orange-striped socks that peeped from the toes of her red high-heeled sandals. She wore no skirt, only a thick green sweater, and over her shoulders hung a sleek black fur coat. On anyone else Chess would have thought it was rat, but this was Red Berta. It could have been sealskin from before Haunted Week, or just about anything else. She looked terrifying, like a doll dressed by a homicidal child.
“Terrible,” she said, and beneath the brashness of her tone Chess heard her fear, felt it tingle. “Took you long enough.”
He didn’t reply, just pushed his way through the ring of people and glanced back at Chess. She followed, her steps slowing against her will. A dead body was not what she’d had in mind when she went out for a drink. A dead body, in fact, was never what she had in mind for anything, and feeling so many eyes on her did not make it easier.
Some watched with curiosity, some with hostility. Those she could ignore. It was the hope that drove a knife into her stomach and twisted it. A few girls in short skirts, their pale legs the ashy pinkish-white that indicated the beginning of hypothermia, huddled together and stared at her as if she could wave a magic wand and bring their friend back to life. Very few people realized she really wasn’t that powerful. Usually it made her life easier. Tonight it didn’t.
Neither did the unmistakable evidence that at least a few of these girls were using some low-level sex magic. Not unusual for those in their profession, but not comfortable for Chess. Their energy licked over her skin, damp and insistent. Molesting her. Heating her blood against her will. The warmth was welcome; the reason for it was not. Neither were the memories it brought back. She never used sex magic.
Terrible caught her eye. His were shadowed, both from the absence of light and from something like sadness. Not good, then. She steeled herself and went to his side.
Empty eye sockets stared at the sky, filled with blood. It was all Chess saw for a long minute, that dark space where life should be. Whoever had killed the girl hadn’t just taken her eyes, he’d cut the flesh around them so bone peeped from the ragged edges. Chess closed her own eyes and set her feet more firmly on the cracked sidewalk. Not just because of the sight before her; that same invasive magic hung in the air around the girl, stronger than from any of the others.
That didn’t make sense. The girl was dead. Her spell should have died with her instead of insinuating itself farther into Chess’s own energy, curling and spinning, tinged with a throbbing darkness Chess didn’t understand. Instead of running hot it felt cold, dank, and oppressive. Like being shoved into a cave. She knelt by the girl’s pale, motionless arm, hoping to steady her trembling legs.
The girl’s age was indeterminate, in the way of most prostitutes. She could have been fifteen or fifty; the slack, ruined skin of her face told Chess nothing.
Neither did her body. Beneath the blood already freezing into a crackled coating, her limbs were slender, but it was rare in Downside to find people who managed to eat more than a few times a week. Almost everyone was thin, even painfully so.
The only thing that stood out about the girl, save the obvious, horrible fact of her death, was the thick sex energy wrapping itself around Chess, sliding up her arm when she touched the girl’s ice-hard flesh. It couldn’t be hers, it couldn’t belong to her. It had to be an aftereffect of her death. Part of the ritual, perhaps? Had they somehow used sex magic to kill her? The darkness hiding in that energy, smooth and secret as an intimate chuckle, indicated that whatever it had been, it was not a regular sex spell.
“It be the Cryin Man,” someone said helpfully. “He tooken she eyes, so she ain’t see him even in the City, aye?”
“Left his mark on her, too,” another voice piped in, younger and higher with fear. “On her, and on yon wall.”
Chess glanced up, finding the speaker’s pointing finger and following it to the symbol scratched into the wall. Not a rune, as she’d originally feared. A glyph of some kind, like a gang sign. A triangle, decorated with upside-down arrows and crosses. It looked more like a bizarre doodle than something to inspire fear, but the hairs on the back of her neck stood up just the same.
Finding the symbol on the girl took a minute. Chess expected it would be carved into that too-pale skin, but it wasn’t. The mark covered her left breast, just below the plunging neckline of the girl’s hot-pink top. Not cut in. Burned. And burned before she died, because blisters had started to rise on the wound.
“Did anybody hear anything?” She had to clear her throat to get the words out, to busy herself with snapping a couple of quick pictures of the mark to keep from seeing the entire body, as if she could filter away the girl’s lost humanity by viewing it through the lens.
“Cryin Man ain’t let she scream,” someone told her. “Nobody hear nothing.”
“Was anyone with her?” Did it matter? Shit, how was she supposed to do this? Yes, Debunkers sometimes investigated witchcraft-related crimes, but only as they related to cases like Madame Lupita’s or ghost abuse. She wasn’t a detective. How the fuck did Terrible or Bump expect her to look at this poor dead girl and know whether or not a ghost had done this?
Of course…shit, she already knew one hadn’t, at least not alone. Ghosts couldn’t do magic. Unless the girl had been trying out an incredibly strong new spell—not likely, as the kind of power Chess felt wasn’t the kind just anyone could project—her murderer had definitely been human.
Red Berta shoved someone forward, one of the hookers standing in the circle. The girl stumbled on her teetery shoes and righted herself, but not before Chess saw how high she was.
“I hadda go get somethin,” the girl mumbled, swaying in place.
“You left Daisy alone to die.” Red Berta fixed her with a glare that would have made a sober person quake. At almost six feet tall, Berta wasn’t someone to mess with. She’d been a showgirl before Haunted Week—Haunted Week and an attack from a razor-wielding ghost. Berta had survived. Her looks had not.
Chess stood and glanced at Terrible’s impassive face, then back at the girl. “Did you see anything? When you got back?”
“Bettin she saw lotsa things,” someone whispered in the back. “Flowers an puppies floatin upward the sky, aye?”
“Saw the spook.” The girl hugged herself. “Saw it disappear when I come back.”
“You saw the ghost?”
“Aye.”
“What did it look like?”
“Wearin a hat.”
Fear rippled through the crowd as everyone took a step back. “She seen the Cryin Man. Cryin Man wear a hat.”
Before Chess could reply, Berta spoke up. “Terrible.” She nodded across the street.
Chess followed the look with the slow sinking feeling of someone whose night had just gone from worse to deadly.
Slobag’s men watched them from the alley.
Chapter Three (#ulink_e99e5176-fa6b-5171-8520-086ef901cd63)
Violence is the worst of humanity’s foibles, and the least necessary. The Church protects you from the need to perform such acts; there is no excuse for violent behavior in modern society.
—The Book of Truth, Laws, Article 347
It wasn’t a large crowd. Five, perhaps six men stood in the shadows, caught by the firelight. They didn’t move when all faces turned toward them. Somehow that stillness was more threatening than sharpening machetes or playing with guns would have been, as if they knew beyond a doubt there would be no reliable defense against their attack.
Then Terrible stepped forward, lifting the bottom of his bowling shirt so the diamond-patterned handle of his knife showed. Chess tried not to respond. On his opposite hip the brushed steel butt of a gun reflected the watery moonlight. When had he started carrying a gun? Usually he didn’t, at least not so obviously.
Next to Chess, Berta reached up and extracted what looked like a machete from the crimson bird’s nest of her hair. In an instant the mood changed from terrified sadness to hot rage. Excitement. Butterfly knives opened in a blur of metal, zippers gave way so sharpened nail files and pipes could be pulled from cheap nylon purses. One of the girls flicked open an ivory-handled straight razor that had to be a hundred years old. Nobody spoiled for a fight like a group of Downside hookers around the corpse of one of their own.
Slobag’s men didn’t move. Fuck! What was she supposed to do here? Slobag’s men were Lex’s men, and she doubted he’d take too kindly to her fighting with them, no matter how much he liked having her in his bed. On the other hand, Terrible was her friend, and the people around her were—well, they were his friends, or his to protect, anyway.
Not to mention the dead body turning to ice on the pavement at her feet.
“Chess,” Terrible said, his lips barely moving. He held his head like he was sniffing the air for prey. “Whyn’t you head back into yon alley, aye? Get yourself offen the street.”
“I have my knife.”
“Naw, naw. Get on out. Ain’t your fight.”
Wasn’t going to be a fight at all, if she had anything to say about it. She held up her hand, intending to pat him on the back or arm, something to show her thanks, but she dropped it before it reached him. It would only be a distraction.
Instead she pulled her phone out of her bag as she picked her way through the black alley. Things rustled and moved in the garbage piled along the battered walls. Rats, probably. Maybe cats or small dogs. She stepped carefully, hearing the sliding shink of Terrible’s knife being drawn as she opened the phone.
The bright screen hurt her eyes and made her feel like a fucking target, standing there in a pool of light. It hit her then what she’d done. Left the fight, picked up a phone. Target indeed. She didn’t have much time.
Her fingers didn’t shake as she scrolled down to Lex’s code name. He was only one of three numbers she had programmed into the phone.
Her ass hit something hard and sharp-edged when she crouched down. A metal box of some kind. Her mind automatically took note of it—it looked like just the sort of place to hide electronic equipment of the kind used to fake hauntings—but Lex picked up before she had time to really register it.
“Hey, Tulip, what you up to this night?”
“Call them off, Lex,” she whispered, but as the words left her mouth she knew she was too late. Someone shouted. The fight was on. They clashed in the middle of the street opposite the alley, giving her a perfect view of what was happening. Not just five or six of Slobag’s men; at least as many again poured onto the street from somewhere. How many had been waiting, and why? Did they just keep an eye on the street, or what?
“Call who off? Ain’t know what you saying. You right?”
“No, I’m not fucking right. Your men, Lex. Slobag’s men. They’re here, they’re—” A scream cut her off. Red Berta in full battle cry, the voice that used to belt out show tunes, striking fear into the hearts of anyone within a few miles. The machete sliced through the air and grabbed a piece of one of Slobag’s men. He howled and stumbled sideways.
Terrible didn’t miss a beat, grabbing the man’s hair and slamming a heavy fist into his face. The man fell. Terrible turned to the next one.
All around were the hookers, stabbing at the men with their small blades, wielding pipes like pros. Sharp heels dug into soft leather shoes. They were holding their own, but they were outnumbered. Even as Chess watched, one of the girls went flying, her screech ending abruptly when her face hit the street.
“The fuck is that sound? Where you at?”
“I’m on Forty-fifth, dammit, Forty-fifth and Berrie, and there’s a bunch of your guys here and they’ve started a—”
“What you doing there? Ain’t nowhere near your place.”
“Can we talk about this later? Call them off, now.”
Metal scraped the pavement. A long, slim knife skittered on the sidewalk across the mouth of the alley, the blade sticky and dark. One of the men fell. His blood steamed in the cold air.
“Shit. A fight? You safe, Tulip?”
“For about the next two minutes. Lex, I’m not kidding here. There’s a fight, and it’s on Forty-fifth and I’m stuck in the fucking middle of it, please find out who it is and call them off!”
Another scream. Blood spurted from one of the hookers’ arms. Chess couldn’t tell which one she was, and in a moment the girl had disappeared, another wounded fighter in a crowd full of them. Over it all Terrible’s face, oddly peaceful, totally absorbed. As she watched he ducked down, catching a man midleap and shoving him over his shoulder and onto the street. His knife flashed in his fist.
“Stay on, aye? Gimme a minute.” Over the screams and shouts of the brawl she heard Lex speaking Cantonese to someone, heard several different voices answer.
Chess crouched lower in her not-very-good hiding place, her stare focused on the fight. Berta kept swinging her machete, southpaw. Chess expected to see heads start flying at any second. With her free hand she found her knife; her palm was so sweaty it took her three tries to get a grip on it and pull it out. Just in case…
“Tulip? You there?”
It took her a few seconds to find her voice. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“Aye, hang on there. All be over soon. You all hidden up? Stay out of sight. Them dudes, they ain’t know you, dig?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I get it.”
“What you doing on Forty-fifth?”
“Terrible asked me—”
“Terrible’s there? All by hisself, aye?”
“No, not by himself. There’s a fucking army here, okay? And even if he was by himself—which he isn’t—I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Thought you was fun.”
“I’m not.”
“Why he ask you to go there for, anyhow? Ain’t safe there, you know that.”
“There’s a—there’s a dead girl. One of Bump’s girls.” Hell, he was going to find out anyway, if any of his men made it back safely. Which she guessed they would. A voice rose over the shrieks of the girls on the street, Cantonese ratcheting through the empty air. A call to retreat, she hoped.
“Oh? Looks like somebody getting some payback,” Lex said with satisfaction. The empty eye sockets of the dead girl flashed into Chess’s mind. If he’d been standing in front of her, she’d have tried to slap him.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Ain’t talking about nothing. Just saying, is all.”
“What’s that—I gotta go.” She snapped the phone shut as Terrible appeared at the end of the alley, his broad form blocking out what little light there was. Behind him she saw Slobag’s men becoming shadows again, disappearing into the spaces between the buildings.
“Come on out now, Chess.”
Her legs didn’t want to support her as she stood. More bodies appeared—Red Berta, a few of the other girls, Chess couldn’t tell which ones. All were panting like they were being paid extra to get into it, but they were alive.
Most of them, anyway. The hooker Chess had watched fly through the air did not get up. Neither did four of Slobag’s men. Red Berta and her girls emptied the dead men’s pockets with crisp efficiency, like murderous bank tellers.
Chess dug into her bag and pulled out some tissues, which she used to dab at the deep, swelling cut under Terrible’s eye. She had to brace her free hand against his chest and stand on tiptoe to do it, putting her face only inches from his when he looked down at her.
Their eyes met, and heat flooded her skin. Her heels slammed back onto the sidewalk. “Sorry, maybe, um, maybe you should—here.”
She shoved the wad of tissues at him, felt him take them from her. Too bad he couldn’t take away the confusion—and something like panic—making her stomach feel like someone was tickling it from the inside. Stupid sex magic.
She cleared her throat. “Another half-inch to the left and you’d need a hospital.”
Orange light caught the wet spots on his shirt and illuminated a long rip in one sleeve. Beneath it the flesh was almost as raw as his knuckles.
“Naw, I’m right.” He took the tissues away, sniffled, and pressed them back against his face.
“It’ll scar.”
A deep rumble of laughter. “Guess another scar make a difference?”
He had her there.
“What’s your thinkin on Daisy?”
