“Oughta give it the leave-out, Chessie, ain’t can—”
“No, I can. I will.”
He still didn’t look at her. Shit. She inched forward, raised herself on her tiptoes so she could be closer to him—so her face could be closer to his, so she could put everything into her eyes and force him to see it. “I know you don’t really like talking about—I don’t like it, either. But you have to let me try this stuff, okay? I know it’s not fun. I know that one time it made you sick, but it was only the—”
He pulled away. “Aye, right. Right, then.”
He didn’t mean that, either. She knew that “Right, then.” It meant I’ll agree so we can stop talking about this.
Too bad knowing what it meant didn’t give her any way to counter it. She stood there for a minute, a long uncomfortable one, before finally managing, “It’s important, Terrible. I’m sorry. I’m—but I’m not going to let this keep happening. You have to let me fix it. I know I can fix it.”
Finally he nodded. “Aye. Guessin us might as well keep givin it the try.”
The bathroom wasn’t a big room at all, especially not with him in it, but she still had to reach out to grab him and pull him close enough to press her forehead into his chest. “I’m so fucking sorry about this. I’ll fix it. I’ll find a way to fix it, I swear. It’s all my—”
Lex’s voice intruded through the closed door, ruining the moment as effectively as—well, as effectively as he ruined so many other things. “You two forgotting on me?”
Shit.
“Tryin to,” Terrible muttered, but he opened the door and walked into the short hall after her.
Lex twisted his upper body on the couch to watch them return. Chess steeled herself for some kind of dirty joke, but he said, “Ain’t good, aye?”
“No.” She set the now-closed box back down on its shelf. “No, not good at all.”
“Ghosty shit, aye?”
“Yeah, but—” Oh, damn, that was fucked up. She sat down beside Lex, barely noticing she was doing it. She hadn’t made the connection in the bathroom, hadn’t really thought about it because their discussion hadn’t gone that way. But now that she did …
“But?”
“It isn’t ghost magic that glows,” she said, still trying to get her head around it. “Ghosts themselves glow. But the reason they glow, what glows about them … How is that even possible?”
“Wanna spit it out, Tulip? Pretend like some of us ain’t witches got the same knowledge as you.”
That at least snapped her out of her daze, just in time for her to catch Terrible’s eyes narrowing at Lex. She wondered what parts of Lex’s body Terrible was removing in his head. Not that she really wanted to know. “Ectoplasm.”
“What?”
“Ectoplasm.” She looked at both of them, Lex on the couch beside her and Terrible standing against her bookshelves glowering at Lex. “Ectoplasm is what glows. It’s what they’re made of— I mean, ghosts are souls but it’s ectoplasm that’s visible. That’s what enables them to solidify, why they can only solidify around things that are already solid, because of the way it reacts to— Never mind. The point is, the only thing that feels like a ghost and glows is ectoplasm.”
They stared at her for a second. Not as if they were waiting for her to go on—both of their expressions told her they knew very well what she was saying—but as if they were having the same problem she was.
Terrible said it first. “Why the fuck anybody snort a ghost?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’ll—I can’t see it giving some kind of high. I mean, I’ve never heard of somebody getting high off it.”
Thankfully neither of them mentioned that if it were possible to do so, she probably would have done it.
And now she probably should. A heavy gong struck somewhere in her stomach. “I’ll try it.”
Terrible’s brows lowered farther. Oh, here it came. “No fuckin way.”
“No, listen. I’m the only one who can. Lex wouldn’t feel any magic, so he wouldn’t know what the effect was, and you’d—you’d need to be there in case something went wrong, so—”
“Naw, don’t give a fuck, Chessie. Some else gives it the try. Not you.”
“Aye, thinking he got it right, I do, you ain’t should be giving—”
“Shut up, both of you.” Like it wasn’t bad enough having one person worry about her like that, in that tight way that made her feel obligated, as if something was expected from her. No matter how much she loved Terrible, it still grated, and that was only one person. She didn’t need to have two. “How are we going to know why people are doing it if we don’t know— No, that doesn’t make sense.”
Thinking about it made her reach for her pillbox. “Lex, you didn’t feel anything when you touched it. So you would have done it, right? If you’d bought it. You would have chopped a line like normal.”
“Aye, guessing so. Them two days past were shooting it, too.”
“And it feels like magic, too.” She washed three Cepts down with water from her bottle and grabbed a cigarette. “It’s not just ectoplasm, it’s magic.”
“You get high on that?”
“Not that kind of high, no. And especially not magic like that.” Yes, there was a little high in it: the rush of power, the lifting feeling of magic in the pit of her stomach, and the way it could force a smile onto her face like a drag off the pipes. It was a weak high, usually, not one she chased, but still there.
The men waited for her to continue. “It’s dark magic. Someone who can feel it will know that. It feels … well, it feels bad. It feels unhappy and sick. Nobody who could actually feel the energy coming off that shit would snort it, seriously. But if you can’t feel it when you touch it, I don’t think you’d feel it after you did it, you know?”
Terrible nodded. “So you thinkin it ain’t the ectoplasm they tryna get high from, an not the magic neither. Them buyin it ain’t know—’sall hid in there.”
“Right.”
Lex put his empty beer bottle on the rickety table. “Aye, sounding all on the sensibles, but where the hell it coming from, then? Ain’t thinking we got no troubles in our supplies, iffen you dig. Ain’t can say the same on Bump, but guessing Terrible knows.”
“No trouble, not what I got.”
“Guess you guys need to start asking some questions, then,” Chess said.
Lex lit up a cigarette, leaning back on her couch and propping his feet on the table. “Talkin on questions, when you coming on over, Terrible, start working with me?”
“I ain’t.”
Silence. Lex blew smoke slowly into the air. “Really thinking you wanna have you a mind-change on that one, I do. Ain’t tryna pull no shit with you here.”
Terrible didn’t respond; his face didn’t move, not a blink, not a twitch. Any normal man would have been extremely uncomfortable right about then, with that cold blank look aimed right at him.
Lex wasn’t a normal man. Or, he wasn’t abnormal, he was just … normal with a few extra shots of arrogance, like a cocky blended coffee drink. And Chess knew that Lex didn’t believe deep down that Terrible would seriously injure him. Didn’t believe Terrible would kill him.
Because of her. She’d stopped Terrible from continuing to attack Lex after he’d broken his jaw that night,