“You feeling anything?” she asked softly as they hit the patchy grass at the edge of the lot.
“Hmm. A little.” Lauren didn’t bother to lower her own voice; it sounded like the first bird chirping at dawn. Chess cringed, tried to glance around without being too obvious about it. Still nothing, no movement. This was not good.
Dead grass whispered warnings against their shoes as they trod across it, heading for the inside corner. Rickety buildings leaned over it, ready to topple; they formed a ramshackle archway, a frame of sorts. Chess knew without being told that this was where the body—the body parts—had been found.
Still the presence of magic set her head buzzing, a little high that she would have enjoyed if she hadn’t been halfnumb with fear. This wasn’t her neighborhood. She didn’t know it. Inside those buildings could live a few families scratching out livings working the pipe rooms or at the slaughterhouse or crematorium, or picking pockets in better parts of town. People who kept themselves to themselves.
Or they could be half-mad hallucinating Nipheads with dead nerves and deader eyes. Or worse. No way to tell until they were right on top of her, and then it would be too late.
She shook her head, watched Lauren trot into the shadows in the corner with barely a pause. Either the Black Squad were a bunch of crazy-tough motherfuckers, or Lauren Abrams was dumb as dirt. Chess knew which theory she preferred.
“It was here.” Lauren made a circle with her hand, waving it over an area about a foot square. Well, that was all the space that had been needed. It hadn’t been laid-out corpses in those photos. More of a…pile, really.
Lauren pulled a heavy silver flashlight out of the backpack slung over her shoulder and switched it on. The patch of ground flew into colorless focus, cast spiky shadows against the crooked boards of the wall behind.
Shit. Chess had two choices. Go stick her hand in what was certain to be a raging pool of nasty energy floating above the lit-up spot, or look like a total pussy. And given those options, touching horrible death energy sounded positively appealing.
Tingles ran up her hands, slipping over the new scars on her wrists. In the stark light from the flash the patterns beneath her skin were black; they shifted and curled with the spot’s energy, and she felt it like fingernails tickling her.
Darkness lurked there too, a slow chuckle beneath the surface. But not like she would have expected, not at all. This didn’t feel like death magic, or even really like serious black magic. It felt like the kind of curse Church students tried out on one another: forgetfulness or clumsiness spells, charms to temporarily confuse the tongue so the bespelled victim couldn’t speak clearly. Spells that wore off in ten or fifteen minutes. Harmless shit.
But piles of bloody body parts, carved with Lamaru symbols…That was not harmless. Nothing the Lamaru did was harmless.
So what the fuck was going on?
Lauren seemed to feel it too, the wrongness of it. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Even if they committed the murder elsewhere and just left the parts here, the energy would be darker.”
“Are you sure it was here that they found it?”
“This is where they told me. It’s in the pictures too, so it’s got to—”
Every hair on Chess’s body jumped to attention. She’d just started to spin around when red light splashed across them, across the walls, turning Lauren’s hair into a river of blood around her face.
The circle stood in the middle of the intersection, deep red fire, swirled with icy-hot black energy. Chess’s stomach jerked. It was darkness in that circle, darkness and misery and despair, and whatever was inside would deliver more of it the second it was unleashed. She knew it. Knew it even before the squealing started.
A pig. Not from the slaughterhouse, but closer, right on top of them, right across the street.
The Lamaru had been waiting for them. How the fuck had they known?
Lauren’s eyes widened; the whites gleamed red around black pupils the size of BBs. Chess only caught a glimpse of them, of the other woman’s terrified face, before she dropped to her knees and ripped her bag open. Running to the car and getting the fuck out of there was tempting, but she couldn’t consider it. Didn’t consider it. There were people in those empty building shells, people hiding and watching, and if she was right about what was going on behind that wall of evil, she’d be condemning every one of them to a messy death, and she had more than enough on her miserable conscience as it was without adding that.
She also had graveyard dirt. Good. Wolfsbane, she always had that, and for the last few months she’d carried melidia as well. Iron filings she’d picked up to replenish her supply—excellent. She glanced at Lauren and unwilling respect tickled in her chest. The other woman was in motion, setting up a small firedish, lighting a long wooden match off a striking strip on her shoe. Clever, that.
“Lauren! Lauren, what have you got?” She had to yell; the squealing had intensified. Not just one pig—one sow, if she was right, oh shit please let her not be right. More than one.
Lauren opened her right hand; three brownish leaves rested in her palm, next to a sprig of mistletoe. Spiritweed. Excellent. They’d need all the help they could get.
Chanting male voices rolled across the lot, slithered along Chess’s skin and set her tattoos tingling and itching. She grabbed her chalk, sketched a couple of protection sigils on her forehead; they burned the second she finished them.
Her skull she grabbed last, then hesitated. They couldn’t cast a circle, not unless they wanted to close the blaze inside it, and that would take too long and bring them too close. But without one, the psychopomps could escape, and that would be almost as bad as whatever was about to burst out of that fire ring; a psychopomp without control would snatch the first soul it found, and that was murder.
Lauren’s eyes met hers. Clearly she’d had the same thought. “I guess we’ll just have to wing it.”
Chess started to reply, but a wave of energy tore the words from her mouth, tore the ground from beneath her feet. Her elbow slammed into the dirt; her shout was lost in the wild crescendo of squeals, the final triumphant shout of the men. Thick, pulsing darkness throbbed around her, so heavy her ears popped from the pressure.
Silence fell. Dead silence, a vacuum. She flipped over, started to push herself to her feet, her eyes full of the circle before her. Wind pushed her hair off her shoulders and face; her entire body waited, like standing on the edge of a cliff and taking the first step off. The relentless beat of her heart thundered in her ears; her body throbbed, a drumbeat in her soul against the reverberating emptiness around her.
Wraiths exploded from the ring of fire.
The soul should not leave the body until the moment of death. To do otherwise is to court disaster.
—The Book of Truth, Laws, Article 449
With their filmy black bodies came the return of sound. The moment of hesitation was gone. Chess had a sick feeling it was the last semi-peaceful moment she’d be experiencing for some time.
Wraiths. A witch’s freed living soul, joined with one of the restless undead. A ghost cranked on living energy, strengthened by magic, its living partner giving it the ability to do what astrally projected spirits could do: fly.
She’d never even seen one, much less fought one. The secret of their creation was closely guarded, the rituals needed—like the sacrifice of black sows—extremely difficult to perform. It was worse than she’d imagined. They swooped and dove above her, absorbing the red light, their slim bodies fluttering in the breeze their flight created.
Beside