Sacrificial Magic

She ducked, and slipped in the vile sludge covering the floor. Eeew. Cold water—and who knew what else, probably blood and urine and vomit—soaked her jeans.

Worse, while she’d been distracted, the other moving ghost had found a length of pipe and used it to try to pop off one of the teenagers’ heads like a ball off a tee.

At least that’s what she assumed had happened. The flashlight in the one guy’s jacket had gone out, or been smashed. The unearthly, hideous glow of the four spirits provided the room’s only illumination, giving everything the unreal look of a nightmare.

Another garbled yell from Riley. She barely heard him over the sound of her breath in her ears and the shouts of the teens. One of them slipped just as she had. The ghost raised its pipe.

Graveyard dirt still in her fist. She threw it, threw her power, too. The ghost froze and dropped the pipe; it clattered on the kid’s back, knocked him down into the floor sewage.

Riley had managed to freeze the fourth ghost. Not that it mattered that much. They wouldn’t stay frozen forever; ten minutes tops. Riley and Chess needed to get passports on the things, and they needed to get a salt circle down as fast as possible—that would be fun, in the wet sludge.

And they needed to get those motherfucking kids out of there before the scent of their blood, the taste of their terror in the air, attracted more dead. Who knew how many there might be in the area? She and Riley had been told to expect two at the most, and here there were four. Like a deadly double-score bonus on the world’s worst game show.

Well, hey, at least she got to win something, right?

“Riley, get them out of here.” She managed to stand, cringing at the feel of her nasty wet jeans touching her skin, and started digging through her bag for her salt. “I’ll try to get a circle down.”

“I don’t think I can,” Riley said.

“What?” Had some of the salt spilled when she fell? She’d thought she packed more.

“I don’t think I can.”

How could he not shoo a couple of injured kids out of the building? They were probably desperate to leave anyway. She looked up at him, annoyed, but what she saw changed the annoyance to the sort of oh-fuck-no feeling she was all too familiar with.

He stood against the wall, his face pale, his body still, staring at the ghosts with fear-wide eyes. “I don’t think I can, Chess. I’m sorry, but I—look at what they did, look at those kids.”

“Yeah, but Riley, they’re frozen now, right? They can’t move. Let’s just—I’ll lay the circle and you start the ritual, okay? Or you lay the salt. The sooner we start, the sooner we can get out of here, right?”

He shook his head. “I can’t get close to them.”

“You got close to them in training.” In another minute or two the first ghost was going to shake off the power holding it—him—and start moving again. She needed to at least get him marked, and now. “Remember training? You can do this, you can.”

“That was different. That was in class, with the Elders and everybody. I can’t … I can’t …”

Choice time. Keep trying to coddle Riley and hope to get him to de-stun, or ignore him and Banish four ghosts by herself, with her lone psychopomp, which would probably require two separate callings.

The teenagers—aside from the one with the broken nose, who huddled against the wall moaning—watched with interest. That, at least, wasn’t a tough decision. “Get your friends and get the hell out of here. Now!”

“But, we want to watch you—”

Her sigh passed through every inch of her body before it finally came out. “Get. The hell. Out of here. Or I will make sure you all get a nice long afternoon in the stocks next Holy Day.”

Finally, something she said produced some kind of result. They left, brushing past her as they walked out the door. They’d probably stand just outside listening, and the knowledge pissed her off, but it would take too much time to lecture them any more.

“Riley. Are you going to help me?”

He shook his head. Great.

Another bone-sucking sigh, and she popped the cap off her Ectoplasmarker. At least her psychopomp could be counted on to behave the way it was supposed to.

Chapter Two

Teach your children from a young age to be careful in their choice of friendships. Unwise acquaintances can have unforeseen consequences.

—FamiliesandTruth, a Church pamphlet by Elder Barrett

And it had, thankfully, but the whole thing—including driving that pussy Riley back to the Church, filing her report, and giving Elder Griffin a quick rundown of Riley’s freakout—took way longer than she’d thought, which pissed her off again. One of the benefits of taking a newbie along was supposed to be sticking them with the paperwork. Just her luck to get the one who couldn’t handle it.

That wasn’t fair of her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Especially not when the effects of her pills were starting to wear off, leaving her ragged around the edges and even antsier than she would ordinarily be. She grabbed her pillbox from her bag, shook four Cepts into her palm, and downed them with a slug of water before heading for the shower. Rushing through her shower, really, and everything that came after.

That quick, tickly, lifting sensation in her stomach—that feeling that never got old, that feeling she would give her soul for and pretty much had—intensified when she finally got to Trickster’s bar about an hour and a half after leaving the Church. Later than she wanted, but still she had made it, and given the whole quadruple-ghost fun, the result could have been a lot different.

Red assaulted her eyes when she stepped into the building, like walking into a bordello in hell—if hell existed, which it didn’t. Or rather, no one else thought it did. For them the City of Eternity, where everyone’s souls lived on after death, was a peaceful loving place, a quiet rest several hundred feet below the surface of the earth. Only Chess thought of it as hell, as punishment, cold and unrelenting and miserable. Life sucked, yes, but the City was worse.

Then again, sometimes life could be okay. Terrible stood in his usual spot against the back wall, talking to a couple of guys whose names she didn’t remember. They all looked the same to her, to be honest, or maybe it was simply that she never really bothered to look at them. Their faces didn’t interest her. Nothing they said interested her, not when she could be talking to Terrible instead.

Seeing him was like being hit in the chest. Like something exploding inside her, a quick ravenous fire that made her shiver. So bright and so hot it still amazed her that no one else seemed to notice it, that every eye in the place didn’t turn to her while she went incandescent.

But they didn’t—which was a good thing, since spontaneous human combustion would probably raise an eyebrow even there. No one seemed to notice at all. They were all too busy drinking dollar beers, listening to X’s “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” and talking or arguing or trying to pick each other up. Spiky heads, heads bald or slick with pomade, like bizarre flowers strewn in a humid half-dead meadow, swaying in a stale-beer breeze. None of them turned to her.

Excellent. She didn’t want to be noticed. She never did, but especially not just then.

She shoved a couple of bucks at the bartender for her own beer and a tip and pushed her way through the field of oblivion-hunters until she reached him, stopping about a foot away, careful to not quite meet his eyes.

He did the same. “Hey, Chess. You right?”

She shrugged. Sipped her beer. “Right up. What time do they go on?”

“Ain’t for certain. Ten minutes maybe, fifteen? Thought you was comin earlier.”

“I was. My trainee lost it, I had to handle it all myself.”

“Handle what?”

She gave him a quick rundown, her mind only half on her words. The rest was examining him, his black hair slicked back with pomade, the width of his shoulders, his height. His face, the face she’d once thought ugly with its crooked, repeatedly broken nose, its scars, its heavy brow and thick muttonchop sideburns. The kind of face people ran away from because the only place it looked like it belonged was behind a loaded weapon. Hell, it made his body look like a loaded weapon. Which it was. And that’s all people saw.

People were shitbags, with their easy smiles and their cold eyes and brutal hearts. She knew that better than anyone. Knew, too, that the face she looked at wasn’t ugly, that it was strong and it was Terrible’s. That meant it was hers to look at as much as she wanted, and that made something she thought might be genuine happiness ride higher in her chest.

“Telling on getting shit done,” he said, “Bump got an ask for you. Whyn’t you come on out back, lemme give you the knowledge.”

She shifted on her feet, glanced at the other guys still standing there, waiting to be included in the conversation. “Can’t it wait?”

“Could, aye, but might as well give it you now.”

The song ended; she nodded in the second or two of silence before the next one started. “Yeah, okay then. But let’s make it fast. I don’t want to miss the band.”

He shrugged. “Neither me. Longer you stand here, longer us take gettin back in, aye?”