a shadow, blotting out the light, her misery and pain more than enough to cast darkness all around her.
She stared at the room, stared at the carnage, her jaw working soundlessly, her eyes wild in her round face. Chess saw those eyes start to roll back and made a move, but it was Trent who caught the woman when she fell.
Beyond the closed door Chess could hear the voices of the Evidence Team cleaning up the mess in the living room, but in that room—apparently Gloria Waring’s childhood bedroom—silence reigned.
Chess hadn’t volunteered to babysit the victims’ adult daughter. Something told her an eighteen-year-old girl was maybe not the most qualified to do the job, either—especially not when the eighteen-year-old girl in question was herself, who had almost as much experience with loving families as she did with mechanical engineering. Which was none. But there she was, sort of standing around, trying not to look at Gloria huddled on the bed staring swollen-eyed into space. Her sadness filled the room, made Chess’s skin feel raw.
Pictures in glass frames sat on the dresser, covered the walls. Gloria and her parents in front of a lake. Gloria and her parents at Gloria’s second-school graduation. Gloria and some people Chess assumed were Gloria’s friends on a beach. A picture of a group of adults, the image tinted with the sort of orangey color given by age; closer inspection showed Chess two people she thought were Gloria’s parents, standing in the back.
Interesting. Well, not really—Chess didn’t give much of a shit about the late Warings—but interesting that Gloria kept the picture in her room.
But then … it looked more like a guest room now, didn’t it? A few souvenirs of the type of childhood normal people had were visible, a couple of yearbooks on the lone shelf and kindergarten art projects on the walls. But the furniture, the curtains and bedcoverings, were new and generic. So maybe the Warings had just stuck things in there they no longer wanted to display elsewhere. In fact … yes, the lake picture had been in the living room as well, only larger. Chess picked it up to get a closer look.
“Deep Creek Lake,” Gloria said. “I was sixteen.”
Shit. What was she doing? Chess set the picture back down, hoping her face hadn’t gone as red as it felt. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Gloria sniffled and sat up, clutching the cheap floral comforter around her as she did. “What are you supposed to do, just watch me lay here?”
Okay, then. “Um. I’m sorry. For your loss, I mean.”
Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say; Gloria’s face crumpled again. Shit. Chess took a step toward her without any real sort of plan—was this a touch-her situation, should she pat the woman on the back or something?—but was saved from the necessity of doing anything by a tap on the door, the turn of the knob. “Gloria?”
A man. Gloria’s boyfriend, or—no, her husband. Relief probably wasn’t the right thing for Chess to feel upon realizing she no longer had to touch Gloria, but she felt it anyway. And really, when had she ever felt the right thing?
“Matt!”
They hugged. They blocked the door. Damn. That would have been the perfect moment to slip out of the way, too. All that naked emotion … it made Chess feel like her hands and feet were too big, her arms and legs too long. Awkward and uncomfortable, like she was being forced to observe things that were none of her business. Which she supposed technically she was.
Thankfully, Jillian poked her head around the door a minute later. “There you are. Come on, I want to show you something.”
Chess angled herself past the weeping Warings—or whatever their last name was; maybe Gloria wasn’t a Waring anymore, since she was married—and followed Jillian down the short hall to the master bedroom. A decent-sized room, heavy on ruffles, taupe, and rose, with bowls of potpourri all over the dressers and the desk and the shelves of the TV cabinet. It smelled like a cinnamon stick had thrown up in there; how had they slept in that air? It made Chess’s nose and throat itch.
Jillian opened a window, giving Chess a half smile as she did. “Pretty awful, huh?”
Chess nodded.
“We probably won’t find much up here—well, actually, we’re pretty sure we won’t. Like Trent said, ghosts are opportunity killers, and we’ve got a couple on the loose here. But we generally have a look around, just to rule out the idea that the victims were Summoning on their own, or whatever. Even good investigators can miss things, so we try to be really careful. You want to start in the closet there?”
“Yeah, sure, but … what am I looking for?”
“Anything unusual. Anything magical—they’ll probably have stuff like sleep-safes or luck charms or whatever, maybe some sex magic. Just bring those out here so we can have a look. And of course if anything seems really strange, let me know before you touch it.”
Jillian pulled a white wad from her bag, which when she held it out proved to be a pair of latex gloves, cloudy with powder. “Here, put these on. And you should pick up a box at the Church store and always keep a pair or two with you. You’d be amazed how often they come in handy.”
Chess snapped on the gloves, hating the medicinal smell and texture and the way they made her hands feel trapped. It was a good idea, though, she had to admit. Or it would be, if she ended up doing some kind of work where she might come in contact with magical items.
Weird to be thinking of her future as something she chose, and not something that she was either forced into or did because she had no other options. Three years since the Church had found her, three years since they’d approved her scholarship and she’d left the Corey Home, and the idea still hit her sometimes, hard and fast like a pissed-off foster father’s blow to her head and leaving her almost as stunned: She might have an actual future. She would have an actual future, if she managed not to fuck it up.
Jillian pulled a little velvet bag out from under the Warings’ bed. “See? It’s a—oh, no, just some rings. Huh. Anyway, go ahead and start in the closet, and let me know if you see anything weird or interesting or whatever.”
Chess nodded and crossed the dull tan carpet to the walk-in closet. The Warings’ clothing was about as adventurous as their bedroom. Lots of earth tones and pastels, the colors nervous people wore so they could hide. Everything cut rather loose, so it seemed, but then Chess hadn’t really seen how big the Warings were, considering that they’d been chopped into pieces.
Ugh, and she was going through their things. Like some kind of ghoul. Those people were dead, they’d been taken to the City of Eternity below the earth to live forever and they’d never be back, and there she was judging their clothing choices. It would have made her sick if she didn’t already know—had known for years—that she was a bad person, a twisted one with filth and darkness in her soul.
She shut her eyes for a second, squeezing the thought from her head, and got back to work. Lots of pictures, boxes and boxes of them. Jewelry boxes, shoes, bags of fabric and craft stuff, a low white box … Oh, shit. “Jillian.”
“Yeah?”
“Come look at this.”
Jillian
