of ivory-colored grass gone to seed, spindly bushes. A thin trail had been worn through them into a darker space in the corner. The stairs. Terrible slid in front of her without touching her and pushed his way along the path; the dead plants tried in vain to grab his arms as he passed.
Soft sounds drifted down the stairs when they hit the bottom. Chess paused, took a deep breath. Something rang in the building, so faint it was more of an implication than an actual fact, but there nonetheless. Magic. The slow, deep slither of magic, inching up her legs and along her arms, curling into her stomach.
Not just average magic, either. Almost everyone did some; there was an entire successful industry in spellbooks and items designed for the average person who had little or no skill or natural ability. Most of them didn’t really work. They relied more on the practitioner’s belief that it would be effective than any actual results.
She was familiar enough with how those spells and charms felt. She’d encountered enough of them in the homes of her subjects: dream safes designed to ward away nightmares, charm bags for wealth or safety, or occasionally sex spells planted in bedrooms. Those tended to be the most effective—and thus the most irritating for Chess, who did not like sex magic—simply because sex was the most accessible type of energy for most people. Any idiot could get turned on.
But this didn’t have the blunt edge of amateur magic, not at all. Too subtle; too well hidden.
She didn’t realize she was staring at the landing above them until Terrible’s low voice broke her reverie. “Any wrong?”
“Feels like magic in here,” she said, echoing his quiet tone.
“Some do, aye? Them with them luck spells or aught.”
“Not like this, though. Spells like that—spells done by people who really aren’t talented—they don’t feel…finished, if you know what I mean. They’re not well formed, they’re just like little blobs of weak energy. This isn’t—” She stopped, suddenly aware that they were having a conversation. A normal conversation.
One that wouldn’t last if she even considered pointing that out. Oops. “This isn’t like that. Whoever’s been casting in here knows what they’re doing. And they’ve tried to hide it. The magic, I mean. They’re trying to hide what they’re doing.”
“All Bump’s here, dig. Them to keep the eye out. Ain’t should be doin up that shit here.”
“All of them? They’re all Bump’s people?”
He shrugged. “What they ought, aye.”
“I guess we should go see, huh?”
Another small shrug, like he couldn’t really be bothered to complete the movement, and he preceded her up the cement staircase. The floor had once been covered in linoleum; curled edges of it remained like bookends where the stairs joined the walls.
The smell hit her nose at the same moment her feet hit the landing. Terrible stopped short; she would have run right into him if she hadn’t done the same. He turned to her, and in that moment she wasn’t thinking about what she’d done or what he’d done or what she wished they could do. She was thinking about the scent of death and how it raised the hairs on her arms, and she was thinking things had just gotten a fuck of a lot worse. For everyone.
Remember the power inherent in blood. I recommend burning anything it touches. This may seem like an extreme measure, but better safe than sorry!
—Mrs. Increase’s Advice for Ladies, by Mrs. Increase
They both ran. Up the stairs, through the open doorway to the left of the empty landing, where Chess’s stomach gave a great heave and barely managed to hold its contents.
It wasn’t a murder. Wasn’t a multiple murder. It was a slaughter; there was no other word for it, no other way it could be described.
Blood covered everything so thickly and thoroughly she thought for a moment she was seeing through a lens. Only the dirty plaster peeking through the spatter on the upper walls convinced her it was blood and not red paint coating them, still dripping slowly down. The scrap of threadbare carpet on the floor was soaked with it; the heaped garbage bags in a corner were slick with it; a couple of ragged blankets slumped sodden against the wall.
It took her a second to find the bodies in that sea of blood, but they were there. At least…the parts were. They were scattered across the floor as if some careless child had been playing with them and grew tired of the amusement; a leg here, an arm there, a torso, a head…
Her stomach lurched again. Desperately she swallowed, hard, forcing down the saliva that suddenly filled her mouth. Too much, this was too much, everywhere she looked she saw an empty staring eye or a horrible sharp piece of white bone protruding from shriveling flesh—
Terrible’s hand, hard and warm on the back of her neck, wrestled her out onto the landing. An open window there, a blank hole in the smoke-colored wall; he thrust her head through it, forced her into the cool fresh air. She filled her lungs, heard them like bellows in her chest. Blinked furiously, trying to clear her vision of the spots obscuring it.
Slowly she came back to herself. At least enough to realize they weren’t alone on the landing. Muffled sounds, like someone speaking in another room, floated through the stillness and became audible as her breathing slowed.
She spun around. No one there. But Terrible had evidently heard it too; his cautious gaze scanned every inch of the landing while she checked the ceiling. He barely looked better than she felt, and she wondered if he’d hustled her to the window purely for her benefit or because it provided him with a good excuse to get some air himself.
To the right of the stairs, across from the blood-filled deathchamber, another entrance loomed. There, sheets of newspaper covered the windows and blocked the light, rattled ominously in the breeze.
Still the voice. Wordless. Muffled. She realized what it was and jumped forward, only to be caught by his hard arm across her chest. He shook his head. So he realized it too, then. Knew what was in that room. Knew they’d found either a survivor or a murderer.
She watched him poke his head cautiously into the gloom and look both ways. He motioned her forward with a quick twitch of his fingers.
No blood in that room. Graffiti covered the walls instead; fuzzy shapes dotted the floor.
One of them moved.
Chess jerked back. Kind of a stupid thing to do, really; she could see what it was—who it was—even as her feet moved without her. But the tension in the air crawled all over her body, the memory of that blood-filled room refused to leave her head, and she could still feel the weight of Terrible’s hand on the back of her neck.
“Right, now, little one.” Terrible held his left hand up by his shoulder, palm facing the huddled figure on the floor. His right sneaked behind his back; Chess watched it wrap around the handle of his knife. Just in case. “Ain’t nobody hurt you, aye? Whyn’t you get on up, we—”
The person—the woman—raised her eyes. Chess looked into them and saw what Terrible couldn’t possibly see: the dark glee of black magic. Felt its aura
