The sudden cut-off of the music drew her back to the ramshackle stage before her, silence hovering for a second over the crowd before they started murmuring.
A man walked onto the stage.
At least she thought it was a man. He was tall, even taller than Terrible, she thought, but that could have been just the stage adding height.
Any resemblance to Terrible stopped there, though. Where Terrible was broad and packed with muscle, this man was a rake, his striped waistcoat and drainpipe trousers hanging off his bones. The sleeves of his dingy, inexpertly mended white shirt ended a couple of inches above his knobby wrists; the ragged hems of his trousers exposed ashy-pale ankles over mismatched shoes. And black hair, torrents of it, sprouted from his head and fell in a tangled curtain down his back, over his face, meeting up with a scraggly beard that reached his stomach.
“Good morrow, kind ladies and sirs!” His heavily accented voice rang deep and clear over the waiting crowd. “May the Truth keep you all safe in its arms! For today you are about to see Truth the likes of which you have never seen before!”
Another figure walked onto the stage; this one tiny, in a flowered all-in-one suit with feet. Not a child, though. A little person like Goody Vanderpeet, one of the kitchen Goodys.
But nothing at all like Goody Vanderpeet, aside from stature. This person had bright purple hair, standing straight up in a stiff, elaborate curlicue unaffected by the wind. His face was painted green, as were the palms of his hands.
“My assistant LeRue will open the case, and I will show you wonders the likes of which you have never seen. I come in Truth, good people, and in Truth you shall discover today the miracles of my potions, for I am Arthur Maguinness and my name is known far and wide!”
Chess rolled her eyes and glanced around the crowd. Most of them wore the same yeah-right expression as herself, but not all; she caught a few open mouths and wide eyes.
With a flourish LeRue opened a green-and-purplestriped trunk squatting on the far end of the stage. The lid stood almost as tall as he did; that was one big-ass trunk. As the lid rose, shelves did as well, covered with oddly shaped bottles and flagons. The potent potions, she assumed.
“One touch, one taste, of my potions will change your life, and I guarantee it! In those bottles lives the result of centuries of knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, by the finest masters in history! Men to whom even the Church bowed, begging for the information they possessed!”
Chess jerked at that, a little. Bullshit. Standard bullshit, yes, but still irritating. Legitimate businesses weren’t allowed to make such claims, but Maguinness up there looked so far removed from the word “legitimate” she was amazed his name shared a few of the same letters.
Unaware that he was being given the narrow-eye by a Churchwitch, Maguinness bent his long frame like a folding ruler and held up one of the bottles, a fancy cut-glass item of the type usually found on the sideboards of social climbers. This one was dusty and smudged; the liquid inside was a noxious shade of orange.
Her arms itched. She scratched them absently while Maguinness began describing, in florid detail, the benefits of that particular concoction, but it didn’t seem to help. The itch remained just below the surface of her skin.
That wasn’t right. She’d dosed up just before she left the house, so she wasn’t withdrawing. Something was wrong. It was magic, yes, and given that there were potions not far away that undoubtedly had magical ingredients, it wasn’t so strange for her to feel it. But this didn’t feel…normal. Like the magic she used, or was used to.
Instinctively she looked at Terrible fidgeting beside her, with his arms folded and his weight shifted away from her. That wasn’t right, either. Well, leaning away from her was, at least these days. But the way his fingers twiddled with the fabric of his sleeve, the way he kept swallowing…not right at all.
“Terrible,” she whispered, leaning closer. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t hear her. Or maybe he was just ignoring her. She tried again, reaching out to touch his arm. “Terrible, are—”
He jerked away with a violence that made her heart stop and glared at her before turning and starting to push through the crowd. “Right. ‘Sgo.”
She’d thought a few times in the past—more than a few times, really—that he had some magic skill of his own. Not enough to work for the Church; only slightly more than the average person. But more nonetheless. Had he felt it too, the odd tingle given off by Maguinness?
Nobody else seemed to, or if they did they were hiding it well.
So it was affecting her, and it was affecting him…The thought finished itself before she could stop it.
Had she done something to him, when she’d carved that sigil into his chest?
The sigil itself was illegal. It had been used in the early days of the Church as protection for their employees in case of ghost attacks, Binding their souls to their bodies until medical help could arrive. A student had modified it with horrifying results, though, turned the person he marked with it into a wide-open receptacle for spirit possession.
She hadn’t used the modified version. It should have been safe.
But then, she should have grown up being well taken care of by loving foster families, and that sure as hell hadn’t been the case. Not unless you considered “well taken care of” to mean “fucked and beaten” and “loving foster families” to mean “child-raping, drug-running, money-grubbing pieces of shit.”
So much for “should have.”
Once inside the car he thrust the file into her hands and shot the car off the curb in a maelstrom of squealing rubber. She looked at him sharply, her back tensing in anticipation of an argument.
She’d fucked him over hardcore. She’d betrayed him and she’d lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she’d led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she’d hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he’d felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he’d eventually decide she’d been punished enough and they could maybe move on.
But at that moment they were on their way to interview the man—Ratchet—who’d found the body parts in the vacant lot. She needed to have her wits about her, not to be waiting for the next verbal barb or dirty look. He could slash at her with knife-sharp words later; maybe if he did it enough her blood would finally flow clean.
Somehow she doubted it ever would.
But he didn’t speak at all. He’d flipped on his sunglasses so she couldn’t see his eyes, but the set of his heavy jaw and lowering brow, the tension in his arms and the way his lips pressed together…
“Are you okay? I mean,” she added quickly, “do you feel okay. That guy back there, I don’t know about you, but he made me feel kind of twitchy. He had some power and I felt it. So I just wondered if maybe you did, too.”
“Ain’t no witch.”
“Yeah, I know, but you look like—He was creepy and I just wondered if you’d felt it, too, is all.”
When he didn’t respond, she tried again. “That sigil in your chest, have you been feeling—”
“I’m right.”
“I’d really want to help—”
“Said I’m right, dig?”
She bit her lip and turned to the file. Thanks to his sneaky thief act the night before she hadn’t even had a chance to look through it, only to skim it before