Unholy Magic (17 page)

She slipped around the corner, chanced a peek into the living room. One of the servants was setting up a projector; a neat little thing, sleek and stylish and obviously very expensive. Nothing but the best for the Pyles. At least it would keep them busy; hopefully they wouldn’t decide to check on her.

Every step felt like a mountain she had to climb, but thankfully no one saw her. The walls tilted, the floor spun. She couldn’t breathe. Her shirt stuck to her chest by the time she got to the top.

Which room had they given her? There were so many doors, so many, and she couldn’t remember if hers was the second on the right or the third. Did it matter? How many doors were there?

She stumbled on numb feet across the hall and opened the first one she saw. If she was wrong, she’d be wrong. So what.

Arden Pyle knelt before the gleaming white toilet of a small bathroom, one hand holding her pale, sweaty hair off her face. Throwing up. A nice preview of what Chess’s night would be. She was tempted for one confused, bizarre moment to ask the girl to move over.

Arden’s mouth fell open. She turned her guilty face down, then back up, meeting Chess’s eyes. A small purplish bruise peeked out from the open neckline of her bathrobe, like a hickey. “Don’t tell,” she said. “I just … Don’t tell my mom, okay?”

Chess nodded dumbly and turned away, pulling the door closed. Bulimia. Not a surprise, really. Also none of her business. And not something she was even remotely capable of lecturing about. What was she supposed to say? Try downers instead, they suppress the appetite? Life advice was definitely not her forte.

Her room was the next one to the left. She flung herself on the bed and waited to die.

Not dead yet. The numbers on the clock were fuzzy, glowing red in the darkness. She couldn’t read them. Couldn’t focus on them. Too bright. Hurt her eyes.

A weight sat on her; she sweated beneath it. The blankets. She vaguely remembered pulling them over her during the last bout of shivering. Her jaw ached. Her arms and legs ached. Her stomach had disappeared, leaving behind a fiery pit.

A fiery pit that demanded attention. She threw the covers off. Or rather she tried to throw the covers off. Her arms refused to throw. Instead all she managed to do was push feebly at the blanket, like a newborn.

The next cramp came. She fell off the bed in a sweaty, painful heap. The bathroom? Where was the bathroom? It was so dark. The room wouldn’t stop moving, she couldn’t make it stop, a roller-coaster ride she couldn’t get off of. Helpless. Hopeless. Beneath her hands and knees the carpet rubbed like straw, cutting her, tearing into her. She’d be slick with blood by the time she made it to the bathroom. If she made it.

Her mouth filled with saliva, acrid and bitter. She couldn’t swallow it. Couldn’t spit it out on the carpet. So she held it there, warm and disgusting as a mouthful of urine, and tried to crawl to the bathroom.

Too weak. She fell, her skin shrieking when it rubbed against the carpet. It was so cold in there, so fucking cold, she couldn’t take it, she needed her pills, oh fuck …

Try again. Pain shot through her body, bending her double. Her stomach again. Itchy. Scratch the itch, make the itch stop. Push the wet, ropy strands of hair off her face and scratch her neck, her legs, her arms. Everywhere itchy. Wouldn’t stop.

She couldn’t hold back the sobs anymore. Her mouth opened and they came out, dribbling onto the rug along with her spit. Things crawled beneath her skin. She wasn’t Chess anymore. Couldn’t think of herself by name, couldn’t think of herself as a person. There was only pain and cold and shaking, only the burning need she couldn’t get away from, looming over her like a dark entity in the room.

She’d eaten that dessert, that fatty, greasy dessert. She saw it again, the plate full of whipped cream and chocolate, and she couldn’t hold it any longer.

The bathroom door was closed. She fumbled at the knob while the contents of her stomach forced their way up, threw herself at the toilet and missed. She puked on the floor, on her hands. Her knees hit the tile. One more note of pain to add to the symphony.

The toilet glowed white beside her. She climbed her hands up it, rested her head against the cold porcelain. Too hot now, her whole body, hot and swollen like she would burst open in a stiff breeze.

Her hands traveled down her legs, scratching, tearing at her skin. Her pills. She needed her pills, oh fuck, oh fuck, she needed them so bad, she couldn’t
do
this.

Razors? Were there razors? She should have taken Arden’s from her closet. Should have taken it, and she could have slit her throat. The City didn’t scare her, not now. Not when this was life, this pain, this need, this desperate horrible shaking and cramping and spit pouring from her mouth and tears from her eyes and she needed to use the toilet for something else now, something unpleasant …

It lasted forever, acid falling from her. All the while she scratched. Her hands clenched into talons, she couldn’t unbend her fingers, they hurt, every muscle in her body cramped, and she was going to fall off the toilet, and wetness under her nails told the tiny rational part of her that she’d broken her skin with the scratching and she was bleeding.

Blood. Her blood was so empty. She needed her pills. Why hadn’t she brought more pills? She could have hidden them. It was gross but she could have done it. Why not, why pretend she had any fucking self-respect at all? Was self-respect worth this pain?

Vomit splattered the floor in front of the toilet. Good thing she’d taken her jeans off when they started hurting her skin. What difference did it make? They’d find her in the morning, they’d come and find her and call an ambulance and maybe it would get there, maybe they would take her somewhere, and everyone would know. Everyone would know how filthy she was, how weak and desperate, because she thought she was too good to use a woman’s best hiding place.

That was what one of her foster mothers had called it. Chess saw the woman again, her thin body bare as she showed Chess exactly how many things she could hide there, how little Chessie could hide things for her too and then take the bus across town and let the nice men take the things out, and they would give her some candy, and some money for Mrs. Foster Mother. Saw her, saw the endless parade of them all, leering at her, yelling at her, telling her how worthless she was and how she was only good for one thing, calling her names, felt their punches and their invading fingers like they were there in the room with her. And all the while she screamed in her head and saw the mess she’d made, and shame and despair overwhelmed her.

Toilet paper. Find the toilet paper. Wipe her mouth … wipe her legs. Wipe away the memories. Wipe the floor. She couldn’t do it well, but she could do something, couldn’t she? To prove she wasn’t as bad as they said, she wasn’t worthless, she was … Tears ran down her face, spattered her hands. She
was
worthless, they were right.

Hot again, burning hot. Delirious. She thought she saw something pale in the room, something moving past the open bathroom doorway …

Her shoulder crashed into the floor as another cramp, worse than the others, seized her, drove her out of her body, out of consciousness. She wanted to scream. Wanted to keep screaming until she passed out again and stayed out.

The cabinet was next to her face. It took her four tries to grasp the handle and pull the door open. Its rough edge hit her thigh, scraping her bare skin. Felt good. Scratching the itch. She did it again, until her arm hurt and she dropped the handle while her hand cramped up again.

Too dark to see in there. Razor blades? Drain cleaner? Anything. She couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t feel this anymore. The worst spirit hell, the darkest prison pit in the city, couldn’t feel like this. Even what she’d seen in Prison Ten wasn’t this bad. There was respite there.

This was punishment for all her trespasses, wasn’t she paying for them now? Surely when the psychopomp—
her
psychopomp, the one coming to get her—picked her soul up on its feathered back and flew her underground, it would know that, feel that?

“I’ve paid,” she moaned, and the sound of her own voice scared her. “I’ve paid enough.”

She brushed her hand over the cabinet floor. Nothing under there. Not even a fucking washcloth she could shove down her throat. Suffocation wouldn’t be that bad, right? It wouldn’t be so terrible.

Her legs kicked at nothing. They wouldn’t stop moving. She threw up again, barely able to lift her head to move it out of the way. Her head hurt. Hurt so bad. Like someone slamming a hammer into it, over and over, beating her with it, everywhere. Her vision was red with the blood in her brain.

Another flash of white passed the doorway. A shape, vaguely human, looming there. So big. Almost as big as …

The shape turned into nothing but a blur. Had to stop crying. Should stop crying. What difference did it make? Good that a ghost was there. It would kill her. It would put an end to this, oh fuck, she couldn’t wait, end this now …

Her arms shook under her weight. She crawled out of the bathroom. Find the ghost. She’d find it, and she’d—there were heavy things, right? It could crack her skull open. That would be quick. End the pain.

She collapsed and crawled on her belly to the bed. The ghost stood in the corner, not moving. Did it see her? Was she even there?

She didn’t have her knife. Hadn’t brought it. Hadn’t brought anything, hadn’t brought her pills, oh shit, her pills, she needed them so bad, she couldn’t live without them, she couldn’t take this anymore …

It took hours to open her bag. The ghost stayed by the window. Through the window only blackness. The snow had stopped. Fucking lot of good it did her, she couldn’t drive like this, couldn’t get out of this room, walk down the stairs, much less steer a car. She wouldn’t even be able to get her feet into her shoes, her toes were cramped, bunched up at the ends of her feet like dead mice.

Something small and cool fitted itself into the palm of her hand. Her phone. The outside world. Someone she could call.

Someone she wanted …
needed
. The thought cleared her head, as much as it could be cleared, and she clutched the phone as if it was a full pillbox.

The ghost didn’t move. Didn’t even look at her. Why? Why wasn’t it moving?

Her fingers hurt. She dropped the phone. She couldn’t hold it, not in her claw of a hand.

Crying again, crying and putting her fingers in her mouth, her disgusting fingers, but she didn’t have a choice. She gagged, gagged again. Bit down on her fingers and forced her wrist up and away. Had to unbend her fingers. Had to use them.

The ghost disappeared. Good. She’d need to open the window. If he answered. If he came. Oh please …

The phone didn’t want to open. She worked it with her bleeding, slimy fingers, poked at it with her teeth. Got it. Dropped it when another cramp turned her body into a crooked plank on the floor. Picked it up again. Pressed the button.

Please … please … please …

He answered. Asked questions. She tried to reply, tried to make sense. Tried to tell him how to get in.

And waited, unmoving, on the floor by the bed.

Chapter Seventeen

For a human to work with a ghost is a grievous error, a crime against humanity so severe it cannot be fully expressed. For above all acts it is one with no gain; nothing good can come of it.

—
The Book of Truth
, Rules, Article 178

Somewhere by the ceiling she hovered, looking down at herself, a tiny bedraggled figure huddled against the wall, shivering. She’d given up trying to climb back onto the bed. Given up on the idea of forcing her jeans back on her bleeding, oversensitive legs. Given up on everything. She was gone. She was lost in the pain.

Monsters clawed at her from the inside, biting her guts with sharp teeth. Her heart pumped gasoline through her veins. The small trash can in her arms was hot from her skin and full of bile. Her legs wouldn’t stop moving, every scrape against the carpet making her want to scream.

A black shape appeared in the window. First a head, then shoulders. Fingers closed around the bottom of the pane and lifted. Chess slammed back into her body.

Her head lolled sideways. “Hi,” she wanted to say, but what came out was “Please.”

Didn’t seem to matter. She didn’t think he’d heard her.

He slid himself through the window, reached back, and yanked the ladder into the room. What was he doing? Why was he taking so long?

He wasn’t going to help her. She knew it now. He’d come to laugh at her. To taunt her. She’d thought … she’d thought it was okay, that he cared enough to help her, she’d been wrong, fuck, so wrong.

He barely glanced at her, stepping over her restless legs to the bathroom. Light burned her eyes. She closed them and turned away. Did he have to look at her?

Water running. Big hands on her head, on her arms. He pressed something cool against her forehead, wiped her face clean. It felt good. It felt amazing. “Chess. C’mon, Chess. You keep aught down?”

Her answer was a sob. Now that he was there, now that she knew he would help her, all she could do was cry.

“Gimme that now.” The trash can left her arms. “All be right, aye? Hang on.”

“I can’t.” She fell forward. His broad chest caught her, so hard, so strong, and she huddled against it. Tried to climb into it, to become part of him and never have to be alone again. Cold still clung to his coat, it must have been freezing out there. “I can’t, shit I’m sorry, thank you, please help me, please help me thank you so much … please Terrible I’m so sorry …”

He gripped her shoulders and set her back against the wall. For some reason this made her feel even worse. She really was disgusting, wasn’t she? He couldn’t even bear to look at her. Good thing she hadn’t called Lex, then. It hadn’t even occurred to her.

Another cramp hit and wiped the thought from her mind. She bit her lip and tasted blood. Her stomach roiled again; she lunged for the trash can and threw up. Kept throwing up, then fell to the floor. No strength left to hold herself up. Her hands clawed the carpet.

Terrible picked her up, set her against the wall again. “Cool, Chess. Let’s get you right up, aye? Gimme your arm.”

“Wha—no, no. No needles, please, no needles …”

“No choice, baby. C’mon. You ain’t keep aught down, you ain’t swallow no pills. True thing, Chessiebomb. Lemme do this.”

“I can’t.”

“Aye, you can. C’mon. Left me some footprints in that snow outside like an arrow, dig? Ain’t got much time afore somebody sees, them security keep the schedule you say.”

Air swirled around her body when he scooped her up and carried her into the bathroom, setting her on the cold tile. She kept her eyes closed. Too bright in there, the white tiles and the white lights like some garish institution. She could only imagine what it looked like in there, despite her pitiful efforts to clean it up. She didn’t want to see. She hated that he could, that he saw the mess, saw her in her bra and panties like a corpse waiting to be disposed of. So weak, so fucking weak …

The rubber catheter, slightly sticky. The faint ache in her arm when he pulled it tight, the flat sound of it snapping. The sharp scent of alcohol, cold on her skin. She swallowed, swallowed again. Her feet hit the floor, fast, pattering like a drumroll. It was coming. Oh fuck it was coming, the needle made her sick but relief was coming and she didn’t care anymore, didn’t care …

“You make a fist?” His fingers closed over hers, helping her. “Fist up, baby, c’mon. Make a fist for me, aye?”

She tried, fighting against the searing pain. Worked it as tight as she could, released it, did it again. His light smack on her inner arm made her want to scream, but she gritted her teeth and kept flexing her hand, kept doing it …

It didn’t hurt. Not like it had when she’d done it herself. She felt the needle pinch, felt it sit for a second, felt Terrible’s hands move. Felt the catheter unsnap.

Felt …
fuck
. Oh, yeah. Oh fuck yeah …

Still humiliating. Still horrid. But it didn’t matter so much now, did it. No. No, because her muscles were relaxing and tears of gratitude pricked her eyes and her stomach cooled and settled. Her headache disappeared.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Lights danced behind her eyelids, beautiful lights, peaceful lights. “Thank you …”

The trash can appeared under her chin before she realized she needed it, before she threw up again and felt absolutely nothing while doing it. Amazing. That’s what it was. Cool damp fabric wiped at her mouth, at her face, soothing her sweaty skin, and she sighed and tilted her head back so he could get her neck and chest, too.

Wanting him to move it farther down, to wipe away the sweat and blood and tears like he’d wiped away the misery, and make her clean and whole again.

Her eyes flew open. Terrible. She’d called Terrible. When he hated her. When he’d betrayed her, sold her out to Bump, put her in the position he’d put her in.

But seeing him crouching beside her, his eyes scanning her face, she couldn’t seem to find the anger. Maybe she was too high. Now that was a glorious thought. High again, peaceful again. The ugly memories receded, the angry accusing voices disappeared. All of them, and nothing mattered anymore. Not even how pissed she was.

“Aye,” he said. He reached out with the cloth again, then seemed to think better of it and handed it to her instead. She wiped her sticky fingers on it while he continued, “I gotta get gone. Had to park a good way off, dig, road still ain’t clear closer up.”

“Oh.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a little bag. Cepts, a dozen or so. He was forgiven.

“These get you home on the morrow, aye?”

“Aye—yeah. Thanks.”

“You right now?”

She nodded, wiping her eyes with her hands so she didn’t have to look at him. She might have forgiven him, but it didn’t seem he’d forgiven her.

Or maybe he had and it was simply that she was huddled on a bathroom floor, a few feet away from the mess she’d made earlier, with her soaking wet hair clinging to her skull and her entire body streaked with blood and coated with sweat and vomit. Yeah. Not exactly her most alluring moment.

“Cool. I … cool. Chess, gimme a call you get back, aye? Got … got some stuff Bump wants done, gotta have a chatter on.”

Fuck. One thing she could say for heavy torturous withdrawal, at least she hadn’t had to worry about what Bump wanted her to do. Or think about what had happened in the car.

But she just nodded, as if the subject didn’t make a heavy weight thud into her chest. “Fine.”

For a second she thought he was going to say something else. His mouth opened, his head tilted to the side. Then he picked up the spent needle and catheter and shoved them into his pocket. “Right. On morrow then.”

She watched him cross the room, watched him push the ladder back out the window and slip over the sill, disappearing into the night. Gone.

Gone, like the ghosts who’d ignored her earlier. Strange, that. She’d think about it later. Right now all she wanted to do was sit and feel good, sit and relax.

And clean up the filthy bathroom before morning.

She stuck a fresh-rolled kesh between her lips and fired it up. Almost five o’clock, back at her apartment, and she had nothing to do and nowhere to be. The free time felt odd. She kept expecting someone to knock at her door and drag her out into the cold.

Nobody did, though. Good. The last thing she wanted to do was think about hookers, or Bump, or Lex. Or, especially, Terrible. Instead, she sucked the hot, harsh smoke deep into her lungs and started flipping through Fletcher’s financial records, at least those the Church had been able to access on such short notice, rifling through the details of his accounts with cool calculation. Just the way she knew he would do were their positions reversed.

What would it be like, to have that kind of wealth? Money had never meant much to Chess beyond how much oblivion it could buy, but it was difficult, looking at credit card records showing more money spent on shoes than she spent on food in half a year, not to feel something. Some twinge of envy, some pang of despair. The world was full of men like Oliver Fletcher, men for whom everything came easy. What they did or how they lived interested her not at all, but their peace of mind … that, she envied. And it looked like Oliver could afford an awful lot of peace of mind—at least until she looked more closely.

The kesh burned down nice and slow while she took notes, her occasional drag the only sound in the room save the scratching of her pen on the paper. A lot of money moved into the accounts, but if she wasn’t mistaken, almost as much moved out. Lease payments on seven cars. Mortgages on three homes. Fuel for a private jet. Designer clothing bills that Chess had to read four times to make sure she was seeing them correctly through her increasingly blurry eyes. Payments to management companies, publicity firms, costumers, special-effects companies …

And bank transfers to a separate account. Always the same account number. No name listed. Thousands of dollars at a time.

She made a note of it, checked three times to make sure she’d copied it correctly. Tomorrow she’d put in a request for those records as well, to see who owned the account. It might be important, it might not, but something about Fletcher, the memory of his smirk the night before, made her itch to find some dirt on him. An abuse of her position, perhaps, but who knew. He was certainly one of the best suspects she had.

Not that she had many. She hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Merritt again, to get his impressions of the family. She hadn’t gotten anything from Roger Pyle indicating he had any reason at all to fake a haunting; hell, she hadn’t yet managed to find any real hard evidence the thing was fake, although she knew in her gut that it was.

She took another drag, tapped off the ash into the plastic ashtray on the floor.

Maybe she’d take a nap, put on a record and snooze here on the couch. She hated to waste a good high sleeping, but she hadn’t slept much of late. Of course, having eyeballs left in her car and being followed all over the city didn’t exactly promote sweet dreams, even without the withdrawal, and the fighting with people she—people she liked, and worrying about death curses and being caught.

Someone could be watching her now. She’d tacked a blanket to the ceiling in front of the stained-glass window, a cheap and shabby attempt to keep prying eyes out—the analogy made her giggle a little—but still …

Paranoid. That’s all she was. Paranoid, and the words on the pages in front of her were starting to swim. She stuck them back in the file and closed it. No more reading. Time for some music, or maybe more episodes of Pyle’s TV show, which actually wasn’t half bad. She hadn’t finished the first disc.

And she still hadn’t watched the disks she’d copied at the Pyle house. Now might be a good time.

The disk started playing as soon as she shoved it into the machine, but she grabbed a bottle of water for her cottonmouth before sitting back down. The kesh was almost cashed; she pinched it between her fingers and settled herself cross-legged on the sagging cushions.

The Pyle room. Kym, naked, her wrists tied together, a wicked smile on her face. Oh, shit. Was that all these disks were? Roger and Kym’s private porn collection? Chess was in for a long couple of hours if that was the case. She had about as much desire to watch that as she did to tattoo Lex’s name on her ass.

Yes, they were. The next disk was the same, and the next. Is this what being in a relationship did to people, bored them with each other to the point that they had to dress up as shepherds and milkmaids, as witches and Elders, as schoolgirls and teachers, anything to pretend they weren’t fucking the same person they’d fucked last time?

And these were people who were supposed to like each other—
love
each other. Who’d legally committed to loving each other, had been bound by blood and magic in the Church. Now they were trapped forever, with someone they knew so well that all they had left was boredom. Nobody could really know another person and want them, love them.

Hell, the only reason Lex had stuck around this long, the only reason, aside from the free drugs, that she allowed it, was because they didn’t see each other very often and didn’t care about each other very much.

And she was smart to handle it that way, to keep that distance; hell, didn’t this video, and all the others, prove it? Smart to avoid being with anyone she might actually really feel something for, who might actually really feel something for her. Smart to avoid getting involved with people she knew she could—

Her thought stopped right there as the scene before her changed, a different setup, a new act. Her bleary eyes focused, her mouth fell open, her stomach gave a mighty lurch, and her fingers fumbled for the phone.

Kym Pyle, tied to a wicked-looking iron rack in a room Chess didn’t recognize. Her skin was painted or dusted with some sort of whitish powder, so she glowed in the dim light, and black circles were painted around her eyes. She struggled against the chains holding her, bared her teeth, her naked body twisting as Roger approached, tossed what looked like dirt at her to quiet her.