City of Ghosts

Terrible sat down; she turned and started to sit beside him the way she would have done before, but his look stopped her. Right. She scooted down, leaned against the opposite arm.

Still Bump did not move. Both his hands rested on the top of the cane. His head was bowed. Sky-blue silk covered his skinny chest and arms; gaudy bright gold covered his wrists and fingers.

“Ladybird,” he drawled. She could feel him watching her out of the corner of his eye. “Hear tell you wanderin round Bump’s places, yay? Bringin you fuckin Churchcops along. Bump hear true?”

“Yes.” Okay. No First Elders showed up; the room was still clean—figuratively speaking. But then, that wasn’t the difficult part, right? Where she’d been wasn’t part of the Binding.

“Got a fuckin tell for me?”

Okay. Deep breath time. “It’s nothing to do with you, okay? Church business.”

The cane switched hands, angled to the side, like Fred Astaire performing some graceful move. But this wasn’t a Technicolor musical. And it sure as fuck wasn’t a beautiful dance hall. “All business Bump’s business down here, Ladybird. All business. You want to keep doing Bump’s business, yay? Keep getting yon fuckin needs? You chatter it out now.”

“I—it’s an investigation we’re doing. That’s all.”

Bump’s brows turned into an arrow; he spun on her with the kind of speed she knew he possessed but had never seen. “Think we playin a fuckin game here? Ain’t fuckin playin, yay? You tell now. Or Terrible get he fuckin fight up. Thinkin you ain’t like that one, yay?”

“It’s nothing to do with you, Bump, okay? I can’t talk about it.”

Bump shook his head, his expression sorrowful. Chess didn’t buy it for a second.

Then she didn’t have a chance to buy it, because her face hit the dusty red carpet and something hard and heavy dug into the small of her back. Terrible’s knee.

He’d taken her down. He’d really, genuinely taken her down. Like he’d never talked to her, touched her. Like he’d never bought her dinner or sat next to her on her broken couch. Like she was nothing to him. Just another junkie who owed Bump money, just like all the rest of them.

Her right shoulder rang an alarm; he’d twisted it back, pinned her wrist between her shoulderblades. It didn’t hurt, but whether that was because she was so loaded with painkillers she wouldn’t have felt it had he amputated her foot or because he was being gentle with her, she didn’t know. She suspected the former, hoped for the latter.

“Ain’t can believe we here,” Bump drawled. “Thought we had us some fuckin trust, yay? You an Bump. Thought we had us some fuckin understanding. Hurts Bump, this do. An Terrible…Dig me, Ladybird, think you putting the fuckin hurt on he, hard. Why ain’t you just give me the fuckin tell, yay? An end this, so’s we can be fuckin friends again. Ain’t you like bein Bump’s friend?”

“Black magic,” she managed. “The Lama—”

The words turned into a scream, one so loud and long it scared even her, as her wrists caught fire. Agony like she’d never felt before, agony like the worst withdrawals multiplied by a dozen, shot up her arms and into her chest, into her brain, until nothing else existed. Bright red flared behind her squeezed-shut eyelids, searing her retinas; patterns like the ones on her wrist swirled in her brain.

Dimly she felt Terrible leap off her as she writhed on the floor, her body curling and twisting like a salt-covered slug, and felt his big hands lift her. Felt one of them on the side of her face, turning it, patting it. Heard his voice calling her name.

It only lasted a few seconds, maybe ten. They were the longest of her entire life. When she came out of it her cheeks tingled and burned from tears; her entire body shook when she tried to sit up. Terrible’s arm was behind her back, trying to help her, but she couldn’t do it. Her vision spun and popped in front of her, like she was seeing the room through some crazy funhouse lens. She squeezed her eyes back shut and tried to hold on to the water in her stomach.

His free hand moved, lifting her wrist and exposing the underside of it. The skin there still stung, as if she’d been smacked with a wet towel; an itchy, twitchy sort of sting too tender to scratch. Like a healing sunburn, or the first indications she’d gone too long between pills.

“Fuck, Chess,” he said, and she realized she hadn’t heard him say her name in weeks. “The fuck you do?”

His heart pounded against her cheek. Against her cheek…She was in his lap, her legs draped over one of his brawny arms while her ass rested on his thigh and the warm scent of his skin sent a fresh stab of pain—pain that had nothing to do with the fucking Binding—through her chest.

She opened her eyes and caught his, wide with fear, dark with concern. In that one second it was as if nothing had changed—

And it was over. His face hardened; he looked away. Rather than sit there like an idiot staring at him, so did she.

That’s when she saw the blood.

It wasn’t much. Just a few trickles, winding their spidery way down her arm, seeping from the horizontal black scars below her wrists. Oh…shit. Not just pain, then. Blood. A graphic reminder of her oath seeping into the ends of her sleeves.

Was that how the First Elders would kill her if she talked? Open those magically sealed wounds and let her bleed out?

She did not want to find that out for herself. Didn’t even want to think about it, but couldn’t stop. The blood—her blood—transfixed her; now that the pain had faded, all she could do was stare as one lone drop fell from her arm to Bump’s red shag pile.

Terrible lifted her enough to set her on the couch and got up. She heard drawers opening, paper rustling; he came and sat down next to her with some alcohol pads and a couple of Band-Aids.

She started to fold her arms, then thought better of it. “No.”

“Ain’t can leave that shit open,” he mumbled.

“No, it’s not—It won’t help.” She dared to look at him; he was totally absorbed in playing with the little alcohol wipe packet, and pale around the eyes. She could only imagine what he must have been thinking. Having her freak out like that couldn’t have been pleasant. Even Bump looked shaken, at least as shaken as it was possible for Bump to look. The knuckles he wrapped around the tip of his cane were whiter than usual.

“They’re Binding marks.” She waited for the shocking pain to come again, braced herself for it. When it didn’t come she continued. “They’re why I can’t talk about what I was doing. I’m Bound from it.”

Bump’s head tilted back. “You ain’t give Bump the tell then, causen them Church ain’t give you the fuckin yay.”

“Right. I can’t. It’ll—well, you saw. And that’s just a warning.”

Silence. Okay, well, they both knew she couldn’t talk, and knew why, but she had the distinct feeling the matter wasn’t going to drop there. Maybe if she tried something else? A little different wording?

“It’s not about you.” Another shot of pain raced through her bloodstream, but not so bad this time. Certainly not like what it had been a few minutes before. Okay. She was starting to get a feel for this thing now, and that was good.

“But where you at this night…Bump got fuckin business there, yay? Ain’t wanting no Churchcops havin a wander-round there.”

“They found some—” This time she didn’t need the pain. No way was she going to be allowed to let that particular piece of information fly.

Terrible spoke up, glancing at her as he did so with quick little eye-darts, like he was looking at the sun and couldn’t do it for too long. Only in her case she doubted he was seeing anything bright. “Figure on it bein them body parts, aye, Bump? Ratchet find em, you recall, two days past. That it?”

“You know about them?”

His eyebrows cranked up. Right. Of course he did. What went on in Downside that Bump and Terrible didn’t know about?

“You know who found them?”

Another dead look.

“No, seriously. I need to talk to him—her. Whoever. I don’t know if their name’s in the fi—”

Okay, this was starting to piss her off. On the one hand it was good to get some kind of calibration going, to find out exactly how far she could go. Pushing boundaries had always been one of her hobbies. But she could have done with an easier way to figure out where those boundaries were.

Plastic rustled: Bump’s pillbag. Probably the same one he’d offered her months ago, when she first got involved with him—well, involved more than the usual buyingselling game they’d been playing for a few years. She’d taken an Oozer before they came in but it wasn’t kicking in. And even if it had been, why the hell not?

She grabbed two more and chased them with water. The little hand on the clock had sneaked past four; she was crashing hard from the Nips and thought of her bed with the kind of yearning she normally felt for…well, for the pills she’d just swallowed.

Bump tapped his cane against the floor, setting the gold band around the bottom flashing.

“So…Sound like Bump got some fuckin knowledge you need right, yay? Like I do some fuckin help for you. Ain’t have they Churchcops all down Bump’s fuckin business, dig, ain’t have it noways. Think we make us a deal, Ladybird, yay? Fine deal Bump got for you.”