The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts

Terrible must have thought the same thing. He folded his arms across his chest. “Go now. No ghosts tonight.”

Brain had one leg over the edge of the hole Terrible had made in the wall when Chess’s skin blazed with heat, her tattoos practically tearing themselves from her flesh. At the same time the Spectrometer made a long, solid yowling beep, every light on it turning bright red, casting an eerie glow against the damaged walls for a split second before the room lit up like day and the roar of an airplane directly overhead made Chess dive down to the filthy floor.

Chapter Four (#ulink_37193310-0142-50a9-ab13-c565de5e0642)

“You will not raise the dead, nor will you seek to commune with them outside the Church. To do so is to court thy own doom.”

—The Book of Truth, Laws, Article 26

It went on forever, the waiting to die, while her heart beat triple-time in her chest and Brain’s thin, high scream hit her ears, barely audible over the noise. It was coming, it was coming to smash into them all and destroy them in a quick flash of rocket fuel and smoke. She tried to scramble out of the way but there was no way to get out of. The lights didn’t dim or change direction, and she had somehow managed to fall against the only unbroken section of wall in the ramshackle place. She wrapped her arms around her head, knowing it wouldn’t make one damn bit of difference.

Wood exploded next to her, splinters catching her cheek and bare arms. She tried to duck away from it but something grabbed her arm, something hard and hot, ripping her through the wall.

Terrible. He dragged her through the hole he’d punched in the rotted wood and out of the building, to her feet, and as she stood she realized the noise had stopped. There were no lights. There was nothing but Brain’s panting sobs and the terrible rushing emptiness filling her ears.

Her body felt like rubber as she tried to stand but fell again. Terrible’s arm wrapped around her chest, just below her breasts, and pressed her to his side.

“Nothing here, Chess, nothing here.” She didn’t know how many times he said it before it finally sank in, before the queasy vibrating stopped in her legs and she could raise her head and look at him.

“Thought you was good with the spook stuff,” he said. “You look like some dead.”

“And you look like Elvis vomited you up,” she managed. “So?”

Hinges creaked in her ears again as he laughed. “So we both looking bad, guesses. But I do always, and you do never. You right now?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m right. Come on. Show me around outside here.”

“You little machine made the beeps, before the noise started.”

“It’s a Spectrometer. It mea sures disturbances in the metaphysical plane—ghosts exude metaenergy and leave trails of it behind.”

His jutting brow furrowed. “So—”

“Woo-hoo!” Brain’s cry split the darkness and made Chess jump back against Terrible. The Nips were making her too jumpy, with all the extra adrenaline. She needed to finish this up and take something to come down.

“I seen it! I seen a ghost! Wait’ll I say! They all listen now, they all lis—” The words turned into a queer gurgle when Terrible’s hand closed around his throat again.

“You say nothing, young one. You say to nobody, dig?”

Brain nodded.

Terrible let go. “Ain’t no haunts here. We find who’s pulling tricks, we kill them. You don’t spread no stories, or I come get you and make sure you don’t. Or worse.” He turned and gestured toward Chess. “You know she, right?”

“I never seen—”

“You seen her skin, young one, you know she is. You want her after you? She help me find you, but maybe I let her take care of your mouth.”

Chess took a step forward, wanting to say something, but nothing came out. This wasn’t her business, this was street business, Bump’s business, and interference would be unhealthy.

Besides, the last thing any of them needed was for her involvement in the affair to become common knowledge. The Church might look the other way about a lot of things, but using their equipment and her abilities to aid drug traffickers probably wouldn’t get her any commendations.

So she just watched while Brain nodded, his wide eyes gleaming white in the darkness, and Terrible dismissed him with a jerk of the head. The boy ran away in a tiny spray of gravel.

“Right,” Terrible said, turning back to her. “Let’s finish this up, go home.”

The rest of the airport consisted mostly of scrub grass and broken cement. They wandered the perimeter, the breeze cool on her fevered body, but she didn’t find anything. No transmitters, no interrupters, no projectors or even electromagnets. Nothing indicated the airport wasn’t genuinely haunted.

And her skin, her own powers, clearly indicated it was, even without the Spectrometer’s sudden violent awakening. But why had it hit her so hard and so suddenly, when the apparition was right on top of them? She should have felt something before that, shivers of warmth, goosebumps, anything.

Unless that speed was doing more than “crazying her up.” Her Cepts didn’t really interfere with her abilities, at least not in normal doses, but she didn’t do speed very often, especially not while working.

It was odd that her Spectrometer hadn’t so much as beeped before redlining, but that was easier to explain. Someone could have sent a blast of magical energy to it at the same time as they switched on what ever powered the lights and transmitted the sound; there were lots of illegal gadgets that fucked with Spectrometers, which was why they were simply tools for detection used in addition to the Debunkers’s personal powers.

Hell, if the gadget and the sound-and-light set was portable enough and whoever ran it was fast enough, they could have ducked through the fence and been gone before Terrible pulled her out of the building.

Either way, one of the first things she’d learned in her training was never to assume anything, and to keep investigating until an undeniable conclusion had been reached. Which meant, damn it, this was going to take a lot longer than she’d originally thought.

She was still ruminating on it when they reached the far end of the field. The remains of the building were little more than a shadow when viewed from here, and the grass brushed against her thighs.

Terrible plodded along ahead of her. His tall broad frame parting the weeds sounded like death whispers in the still night, like a predator sliding over the plains.

She took another step, and stopped short. Power shot up her leg, curled over her skin. Something had happened here, a ritual … a sacrifice, even. Something that cooled her blood and made her wish desperately that she was back home in bed.

“What’s troubling, Chess? Why you so white?”

She shook her head. It was trying to talk to her, to tell her something … she just didn’t know what. She couldn’t hear it, it was trapped in the whispers, all the voices crowding together in her head.

Her skin crawled as dark energy skimmed over her tattoos. It took everything she had to step back, not to crouch down and listen, to put both feet inside the circle and let the darkness take her where it wanted to go.

“Somebody’s been doing magic here,” she whispered, then, feeling a little foolish, she said it again louder. “Forbidden magic.”

“Like raising ghosts?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

She took a step to the right, placing her foot carefully, trying to feel the edge of the circle as best as she could. She did not want to walk into it again. At least, most of her didn’t.

The breeze picked up, lifting her hair and cooling the back of her sweaty neck. It wasn’t old, the spell. A month, six weeks at the most, but probably more recent. She couldn’t imagine how much power there must have been here while it was being cast. The kind of power that required either a very experienced, very powerful sorcerer, or a very innocent victim. Or both.

Either way, it wasn’t anything she wanted to be around anymore.

Three more careful steps gave her a good idea of how wide the circle was. Nine feet, big enough for several people.

Terrible started toward her, but she put her hand out. “Don’t. You don’t want to chance stepping into it. You still got that flashlight?”

He stopped and held it out to her, waiting patiently like a faithful dog while she examined the ground as much as she could from outside the perimeter. The prior week’s rain, if not the general passage of time, had eliminated pretty much anything she’d have been able to see, but something glittered on the ground, very faintly, right near the center.

She adjusted the light, holding it high to try and get a better look. Small and gold, shiny as the edge of a razor blade and from what she could make out, almost as sharp. It nestled among several blades of grass, not revealing itself to her.