Sacrificial Magic (30 page)

But he nodded, smiled his gentle smile, and she knew she couldn’t do that. Just because she didn’t deserve happiness, just because she’d ruined her only chance at it and gotten her ass dumped, didn’t mean he didn’t deserve it. She could help him, and she would. Chess Putnam, fairy fucking magicmother.

“Sir, do you know if Aros had some family in the area that I could talk to? Or maybe one of his training Elders in his last post?”

“He had no family, no,” Elder Griffin replied, leaning back to open a drawer in his desk. From it he pulled a pale-blue file. Aros’s employee record.

She took it from him, opened it while he continued to speak. “Of course he had high recommendations from the Elders in his previous office— Indianapolis, that was—and an excellent record.”

“Nobody there knew he had all those prescriptions?”

Elder Griffin shook his head. “As far as we can tell, he did not. What information I’ve managed to get so far indicates he started on those while handling the Mercy Lewis case. I hate to say it but I am glad he removed himself. Were it discovered he was so compromised …”

“Right,” she said, rather louder than she meant to.
“Um, so he started on the case and he was fine, and then it just went bad.”

“Yes.”

Thanks to Chelsea. So she assumed; so she’d put in her preliminary report.

She flipped through the pages he’d given her: more pictures of Aros’s apartment, copies of notes and papers handed in by the Recovery Team who’d picked up Aros and done the crime scene work on his place. What the fuck?

Aros had notes about Jia … lots of notes about Jia. Well, she guessed that wasn’t too big a surprise, given that Jia had somehow been involved with Chelsea and Aros had apparently discovered Chelsea.

But he also had notes about Beulah. And about Beulah’s father. Along with an address Chess recognized. Their home address.

Chelsea had to be getting power from somewhere; she didn’t have enough on her own. Chess had suspected it came from Aros, of course, but with Aros dead …

That brought her right back to Slobag. And his witch.

She needed to find out who the hell that was.

Beulah sat behind her desk; she looked up and smiled when Chess entered. “Hey, Chess. Why didn’t you call me and let me know you were coming? I would have waited outside for you. Did they give you any trouble?”

“There wasn’t anyone out there.” Chess sat down uninvited in the cushy blue chair opposite Beulah’s desk. “Besides, I didn’t know if you’d be here. Aren’t you only supposed to work a few days a week?”

Beulah shrugged. “Interesting stuff going on. I don’t want to miss it.”

“Right.” She looked at Beulah, sitting there with her shining hair hanging straight down. How much did she actually know, what might she tell? Assuming Chess could trust anything Beulah did say, which she wasn’t entirely sure she could. “Why do you do it, anyway? Work here. Lex doesn’t have some kind of outside job.”

“Lex is a boy. My father wouldn’t let me take over the business even if Lex wasn’t older. This is something to do, really. And I can get to know a lot of people, people who might be useful one day.”

“Like me?”

Beulah smiled. “I think Lex already had you there, no pun intended.”

Chess’s answering smile felt stiff, like a pair of wax lips. “So you don’t really have much to do with the business. Like you don’t know about the day-to-day stuff.”

“Some of it I do.” Beulah’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. Speaking of you knowing people, though … that girl Jia. Who were her friends, do you know? What kinds of stuff did she do?”

“You already know some of her friends. Vernal, Maia, that gang. Jia wasn’t … she wasn’t as in with them, if you know what I mean? Always seemed to be on the edges a little bit.” Beulah leaned back; the soft leather chair in which she sat tilted, rocked gently. “She was more serious, wanted to go to college. She did a lot of community stuff, too, with Mrs. Li and her girls’ groups.”

“Seems like there are a lot of groups here. Was Mrs. Li the only one whose groups Jia joined?”

“No … I don’t know, really, but she was in a few, I think. I know she was in one of Mrs. Li’s, yeah, but one of Mr. Li’s, too. I didn’t know her really well.”

Uh-huh. “What about Aros? Did she seem to have any kind of relationship with him?”

“Not that I noticed, no. But then I wasn’t paying attention. Why?”

Chess shook her head. “No reason. Oh, I wanted to ask, too, if you’ve ever heard the name Chelsea Mueller? It’s only a side issue, really, but—”

“Isn’t that the cousin? Lucy McShane’s cousin? I thought her name was on that file you showed me.”

Damn. Beulah had seen that, hadn’t she. “Yeah, I just wondered if you’ve heard of her recently, like maybe Jia or someone else mentioned her.”

“Hmm. Not that I can remember, but—”

A tap at Beulah’s office door. It opened. Monica stood in the doorway, her cheeks almost as red as her hair. That day she wore a hideous bile-green and mustard-yellow polka-dot dress with an empire waist; she looked like the physical embodiment of a hangover.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Sorry to interrupt. Hi, Chess. Beulah, I wonder if you have a second? I want to show you something, on my desktop.”

Beulah glanced at Chess, who opened her mouth as fast as she could. “I’ll be fine, you go ahead. I’ll just sit and wait here, okay?”

Yes! Beulah nodded. Chess was alone in her office, and that was a very good place to be. It might not last long, but then it didn’t have to, really. Being caught was bad form, but technically Chess had the right to look at every single sheet of paper in that office.

And she’d try to do exactly that.

She kept one eye on the door while she rifled through Beulah’s drawers. Notes about school projects, a contest they’d be holding about ancestry—she gave that one a stronger examination. It looked innocent enough, but given Beulah’s apparent views on the Church …

Not her department. And not a point she could press when she needed help from Beulah, either. Instead, she kept going, her fingers skipping over the tabs, until she found a file marked
GIRLS’ PROJECTS
.

She flipped that one open. Pay dirt. Awesome. Jia’s spidery little signature at the bottom of a page with a few other names; at the top were listed Mr. Li, one of the history teachers, and Monica. Repainting a home for the elderly, performing a traditional dance …

It wasn’t a surprise to discover that Jia lived—had lived—on the same street as Aros’s apartment—on that same block, in fact.

She scribbled it all down in her notebook, even though
she didn’t need to. That, at least, she knew she wouldn’t forget.

Beulah’s voice outside the door. Chess slipped the file back into place and turned her back on the desk just as the door opened. No point trying to get back to her chair; throwing herself into it would look more suspicious than simply having gotten up to have a bit of a wander around the office.

To complete the effect she turned her head a bit. “This is a nice print, where did it come from?”

It was a landscape framed in dark-blue metal, and actually rather dull; just a handy excuse for standing where she did, not at all the sort of thing Chess would imagine Beulah liking enough to display in her office. But what did she know?

“It was here when I got the office, actually.” Beulah came around behind the desk. Chess stepped away, almost stumbling in her haste.

That was when she noticed the two Styrofoam containers in Beulah’s hands. Beulah raised one of them. “I didn’t know if you’d be hungry, but I brought you some lunch anyway. Laurie’s made a ton of food.”

“And she packed it in Styrofoam?”

Beulah smiled. “No, we keep a supply of these. I just figured it would be easier than carrying it in my bare hands, you know?”

“Right. Thanks.” She was hungry, surprisingly; but then, when was the last time she’d eaten? A couple of days ago, maybe? Certainly not since the argument. She’d barely been able to keep her pills down, much less actual food.

Speaking of which, she wanted to pop back into the little office for a few of those, too. She was starting to crash from her earlier dose and it wasn’t pleasant.

But the food smelled good and Beulah watched her expectantly, so she unwrapped the plastic spork Beulah
handed her along with the food and started to eat. It was some sort of rice dish, in a thick sauce, with flecks of beef throughout.

After the first bite her empty stomach came to life with a vengeance. Only the vague desire not to look like a total pig kept her from shoveling it in, instead just eating faster than normal. Especially since it wasn’t bad at all, save the sort of awkward aftertaste, like chalk on a—

Fuck. Oh fuck, oh shit.

Beulah stared at her. Chess couldn’t help noticing that Beulah had a different meal in front of her, what looked like the kind of noodles Chess bought at the Market sometimes. Made sense. “Are you okay? You look pale all of a sudden. You ate awfully fast.”

Yes, and if she didn’t get up and get her ass to the bathroom soon, she’d be even paler. As in
dead
. “I’m fine, I just— I have a lot to do, so I’m going to call myself done and leave you to your lunch.”

“Oh, no, you should stay. Or I’ll go with you, I’m not that hungry. And we can talk some more.”

“I can’t, I need to get going, really, I have some stuff to check in the files at Church—”

“Can’t you do that later? You—”

Enough. “I can’t,” Chess said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Her left hand kept a death grip on the food container; she’d need that, even though she knew it was essentially pointless. She knew what the lab would find, or at least had a damn good idea of it.

Her right hand turned the knob and flung the door open. She launched herself out of it, almost knocking into Laurie, who gave a melodramatic yelp as if Chess had pinched her ass rather than simply invaded her personal space for a few seconds.

No time for her, either. Chess managed to get out of the office before she started to run, past a couple of
kids roughing up another one, past the open classrooms where the history of the Church was being taught; she caught the words “Salem witch trials” as she sped past, knew they were discussing the Church’s origins.

Finally the bathroom on her right. She threw herself into it, already letting her bag fall, already reaching up to shove her finger as far down her throat as it could go. She’d never been good at this, which really irritated her. It seemed she could be sick at the drop of a dime, except when she really needed to be, and then she turned into Iron Stomach or something.

It wasn’t working. How much time did she have? And what were the pills supposed to do, anyway?

It had to have been pills. That chalky, faintly bitter aftertaste couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, especially not by her. Someone had dissolved some medication— Vapezine, Chess bet—in water or sauce, or opened the capsules, and mixed it with her food.

Someone who didn’t eat the same thing she had. Someone who practically forced her to eat, someone who didn’t want to let her leave. Someone she’d been questioning.

Someone who apparently wanted her dead, too. A heavy dose of Vapes—strong enough to leave an aftertaste in a dish as highly flavored as that one—could stop a person’s heart, flood their lungs with fluid, even without adding four Cepts to the mix. And a little speed. And a Panda to keep the speed from making her too jittery.

At the very least she was going to be monumentally fucked up if she didn’t manage to get rid of them, and that would be almost as bad as dying, at least if someone noticed and she ended up in the hospital. The second they did a drug test on her they’d see the levels of narcotic in her system, and game fucking over.

In desperation she scrabbled through her bag. Trying
to be sick wasn’t something she normally did; usually it was the opposite, thanks to the occasional narco-nausea. So she had plenty of stuff to counteract that. But to induce vomiting …

To induce vomiting maybe she could just think about the fact that she was on her knees in what was essentially a public bathroom, the place bacteria went to play, and how she was like a fresh new toy for them to jump all over. How many of them did she breathe in every time she inhaled, how many of them would hide on her skin, in her hair?

Or she could remember the last time she’d been in a public bathroom before this case, five weeks or so ago, the night she’d seen Terrible at Chuck’s and run away to hide in the bathroom and he hadn’t let her. He’d followed her, kissed her, picked her up, and she hadn’t been able to get her jeans off fast enough and she’d thought the door might break from him pounding into her so hard against it, and a crowd had formed outside and she hadn’t cared and neither had he. That night when she had so much hope, that night when he’d come for her later and saved her life. The night she’d put her hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and told him she loved him.

That did it. Up came the rice, up came everything else. Disgusting but necessary. Too bad that with it came the pain, the tears she’d managed to hold at bay for the last two days. She didn’t know how she’d managed it—lots of chemicals, mainly—but she had, and now it was too late.