Sacrificial Magic (38 page)

“I said I was sorry.”

“Let’s not stand out here and talk about it, okay?” Beulah glanced around the still-empty parking lot as if she expected a lynch mob to appear any second. “Let’s just get in, and you can argue with us then.”

Chess shrugged. “Whatever.”

None of them spoke again until they got inside the atrium; Chess felt them watching her as she picked the lock and wondered if Beulah had a key and just wasn’t telling her. Probably.

Didn’t matter, though. As with everything else Beulah-related, she didn’t care. “Okay. I’m going to set up in the cafeteria, I think, so you guys can wait here.”

“I think we should go with you.”

“Well … I don’t.”

“Gots me an ask, I do. What happens them ghost shows up here, an you in there?”

Shit. She hadn’t thought of that. Stupid of her, yeah, but then she hadn’t actually wanted to think of it, had she? No. Because that meant she had to let them come along if she wanted to not turn them into some kind of sacrificial ghost-bait, and she didn’t want to do that. Or at least she didn’t want to do that to Lex.

She closed her eyes, wished this was already done and she was out of the building. Too bad it wasn’t, and she wasn’t. “Fine. Come on. But no talking, and you do exactly what I tell you to. Okay?”

   She ended up being kind of glad they’d tagged along after all. The tables in the cafeteria weren’t heavy, but they were numerous, and rather awkward to move. It would have taken her a lot longer to clear the floor herself.

The ghost probably wouldn’t be outside the building, so she could mark those walls and the windows looking out onto the sad field of scrub grass and rusty goalposts that Mercy Lewis students were supposed to play sports on or whatever. She marked the floor to solidify it on the astral plane while she was at it, had Lex help her get the ceiling just in case.

One set of stairs didn’t have a door; she sketched a
quick Bindrune over it to act as a barrier. She’d leave the other doors open until Lucy showed up, so the herb smoke and the sounds would spread through the building more easily.

“Okay. That’s as much as I can do until she gets here. When she does, if it’s possible for you to close the other doors, do. If she’s carrying a weapon or coming after you, just get away. Lex, I know you know the rules, you don’t look her in the eyes, you try not to engage her or attract her attention. She might not notice you with me here. Questions? Good. Go sit over there.”

Another few minutes to set up her stang in its iron holder, the firedish at its base and the Church-grown blue and black roses wreathed over the top. She poured water into her cauldron, added wolfsbane, and lit the flame under it. A few minutes for that to heat up and she could light the mullein and benzoin to call Lucy’s ghost; wasn’t always necessary—usually wasn’t, actually—but given how large the building was, and given what Terrible and Bump were doing and that Lex would undoubtedly hear about it when it happened … she figured the faster she called Lucy, the faster she could get rid of her.

She’d topped up her salt canister, and she set up the bag of graveyard dirt taken from Lucy’s drawer in the Church’s Grave Supplies department on the right side of the stang. Her black chalk—shit, she should probably do that, too.

“Here,” she said, crossing the room. “Let me mark you guys, just to be safe, okay?”

Lex shrugged. He’d sat on one of the long benches at the far end of the room, where the lights were especially dim. “Know it ain’t bother me none.”

“Yeah.” She smiled, went ahead and let him see the fondness in it. “I know.”

Beulah didn’t say anything. Fine with Chess.

It felt weird to be so close to Lex again, weirder even
than it had felt to be in his room, almost weirder even than it had been to kiss him. Sitting on the couch across from his bed hadn’t involved touching. The kiss … well, that hadn’t lasted long, hadn’t meant anything, and had ended almost before she realized it was happening.

But standing with her hand on his cheek … his own came to rest on her hip, and she didn’t know how to tell him to take it off. It would be kind of prissy of her to say that, wouldn’t it? Wasn’t that big a deal when he set the other one on her other hip, either. Right?

She could say Terrible wouldn’t like it, and that if she knew he wouldn’t like it, she shouldn’t let Lex do it. The problem with that method was that Terrible wouldn’t like anything Lex did to her, up to and including smiling from across a crowded room. So that really wasn’t the best guideline.

And it didn’t matter anyway, because she had a responsibility to mark him. She focused on putting as much power as she could into the protection sigils she drew across his forehead and down his cheeks. Only protection; he wouldn’t be doing anything but sitting, so he should be safe anyway. The marks were just a little insurance.

“Here, look up.” This was harder than she’d thought it would be. Not because she still wanted him; she didn’t. It was just that … well, she still kind of wanted him. How did that make sense?

She wasn’t in love with him. The difference between how she felt about Terrible and how she felt about Lex couldn’t have been deeper or more obvious. And given the choice between sleeping with him and sleeping with Terrible … that wasn’t a question, either. Hell, that was a decision she’d already made.

But she couldn’t lie and say she didn’t still enjoy touching him, looking at him. Couldn’t say that when
she did, when she stood there with him so close, with his faint smoke-and-spice smell in her nose and his hands on her, her body didn’t react, even though it wasn’t as intense. Or that she didn’t remember other times, didn’t recall those hands in other places and how skilled they were. Didn’t remember how they’d made her gasp. Or how he’d made her laugh.

Not like Terrible did. And the thought of regretting that choice didn’t even cross her mind; how could it? Terrible was who she wanted, he was the part of her that had been missing, and she was terrified she’d lose him, and she’d never worried about losing Lex or felt like Lex understood her. He didn’t.

But her fingers curled around the back of his neck anyway, sliding into the hair at his nape, and she rested her knee on the bench just outside his thigh and leaned into him without fully realizing what she was doing. Leaned in probably closer than she should have, while she marked the back of his neck.

“Tulip.” His voice, low and a little husky, slid under her clothes, slipped into all those spots where she’d just been remembering his hands; those hands tightened their grip when her eyes met his. “Lessin it were someone I ain’t know gave you them neck bites, maybe you oughta be all finished on me now, aye?”

The words were as effective as a bucket of ice water thrown over her head. Shit. In his eyes was a Truth, one she hadn’t wanted to see before, one that made her feel guilty. No, he wasn’t in love with her, either, at least she didn’t think so.

But he wanted her. He still wanted her, and she’d hurt him when she’d ended their—well, she’d told herself it wasn’t a relationship, but it had been, the first one she’d ever had. All those memories playing in her head were playing in his, too, and if that familiar tingle of arousal stirred low in her belly, it definitely did in his. He wasn’t
telling her to stop, he was asking her to. Asking her to give him a break.

She should have known that the minute she started getting involved with other people they started hurting. Bad enough when it had only been herself she was trying to destroy. Now she was taking other people down with her.

All of this flashed through her head in one confused second; all it took for her to remember the last time she’d heard that tone in his voice, and for guilt to crash down on her like a wave, carried on that tide of shameful pain she expected to drown her any day.

She stepped back so fast she almost stumbled. “Sorry, I— Sorry.”

He gave her a shrug, a half nod, casual as if he’d practiced it in a mirror. Which knowing Lex wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility.

But he didn’t look her in the eyes again.

Well, she wouldn’t have to worry about that with Beulah. Not that Beulah didn’t present her own set of problems. She did. Not least of which was fighting the temptation to fake some scribbles on her and let the ghost have fun.

Which she wouldn’t do. Of course she wouldn’t; she wouldn’t do that to someone she hated, and no matter what she felt about Beulah at that moment, the fact remained that even if Chess could be so callous, that girl was Lex’s sister, someone he cared about. And Chess had hurt him enough, hadn’t she.

So she gritted her teeth and set the chalk to Beulah’s forehead, pushing her hair back out of the way. Beulah wasn’t quite as magic-dead as Lex; her eyes widened a little. “What is that?”

“They’re just protective sigils. They won’t keep you from dying or anything, but they make it harder for
ghosts to hurt you, like they won’t be able to solidify around you.”

“And you put power into them, or whatever? That’s why they feel kind of itchy?”

“Yep.”

“Do you have to do that on purpose, or is that just something that happens when you touch people, or when you draw things on them?”

Chess hesitated. But really, what could Beulah do with that information? How magic worked wasn’t some big secret. Just some of the individual spells. “I have to channel it. I mean, if I’m not paying attention sometimes it projects anyway, most people have energy around them. But yeah, when I’m doing something like this I’m pushing it, because it gives the sigil strength. It makes it work. Without that, it’s just a scribbly line.”

“Hmm.” The sigil she’d just drawn on Beulah’s forehead wrinkled. “So, how does that work, like, if you have to do that for Terrible? Would he pass out the way he does with other magic, or is—”

“Blue!”

“What?” The chalk dropped from Chess’s numb fingers; she saw it fall in slow motion, bounce on the tile, tumbling end over end like it would never stop falling. “What did you say?”

But the look on their faces let her know she’d heard right, and that if she’d thought her situation couldn’t get any worse, she’d been—as always—totally fucking wrong.

Ugly silence shrouded them all, filled the room until Chess felt herself choking on it. Her voice sawed through it hard like a rough serrated blade. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Too late. It was too late for that; it had been the minute Beulah said it. Because she knew. She hadn’t been fishing, looking for some kind of confirmation with that question. It had been genuine. Honest curiosity. What the fuck?

Lex didn’t know about that. Nobody knew about that, no one had been told about that. The last thing Chess wanted, the last thing anyone needed, was for it to be common knowledge that the most feared enforcer in Downside had a fatal weakness, one that any two-bit piece of shit could pay any halfway-talented witch fifty bucks to exploit.

She looked from Beulah to Lex and back again, at the matching expressions of dismay. How she’d managed to miss the family resemblance when she met Beulah she didn’t know, except that she’d expected Lex’s sister to look Downside, not to be a tidy, glamorous community organizer. Whatever, it had been stupid
of her to miss it, because they looked so much alike it scared her.

But not as much as Beulah’s words had. “How— Who told you that?”

More silence. Her head buzzed loud in it, thoughts and images fighting for dominance. Terrible in the car earlier, his words to her outside the warehouse—

The warehouse where he’d collapsed. In front of several other people she didn’t know.

Including one who’d said he’d been out scouting more buildings for Bump. One who’d presumably done it before. One of the few people who probably knew about the Sixtieth Street pipe room being empty that night. The guy with the green hair, what was his name?

“Bernam. That’s his name, right?”

Their expressions didn’t change; she didn’t expect them to. “That’s him, isn’t it, your spy. Isn’t it?”

She couldn’t take her eyes off them. Couldn’t—both of them. Both of them pretending to want to help her, to want to be—pretending to fucking care about her, and all the while they weren’t just trying to fuck up Bump’s business, they were trying to kill Terrible, to exploit his lone weakness. They were trying to take away the one and only good thing she’d ever had outside work. If she’d had a gun at that moment she would have plugged them both in the head without blinking and walked away clean.

As it was, she settled for letting her absolute rage ride in her eyes while she glared at them, for pulling out her phone and holding it up so she could hit Terrible’s number without having to look away from them.

The light on it blinked; a text waiting. From Church, from the lab. Elder Lyle had come through for her. The rush of gratitude she felt didn’t come close to chasing away her anger, but hey, she’d take what she could fucking get.

He’d found a match for the DNA on Bill Pritchard’s body, the female DNA, when he checked it against Lucy McShane’s.

Not a perfect match. The female DNA was too damaged, or too old. But enough of a match that he could say with high probability that Bill Pritchard’s sex partner had either been Lucy McShane or been related to her. Chelsea Mueller again. Not a surprise, but confirmation.