before the fuckin call finding me, almost fuckin emptied up me again.”
Agreeing with Bump wasn’t something Chess usually did, but in this instance she agreed wholeheartedly. The sight before her was horrifying.
Bag-end Eddie had been … crucified. Not in a standing position, no, but it was clear from the position of his charred body. Crucified on the cement and burned, the flames turning his corpse into an overcooked bone-in roast spread-eagled on the floor like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Unburned flesh remained on his face and chest, and in strips down the centers of his thighs.
His eyes, wide open in horror, stared at the dull moon above through the hole in the roof.
“What you think, Ladybird? I fuckin saying, looking fuckin witchy to me, yay? An ain’t fuckin wrong, do I? Bump never gets the fuckin wrong side.” He looked so smug, as if the gruesome death in front of them all only mattered as a way to prove his intellectual superiority again.
Or like it had taken a fucking genius to figure out there was magic involved in this. Like the body arranged carefully on the floor, the precise lines of soot she picked out around him, were some sort of obscure clue to the presence of witchcraft and not a blinking sign.
“No,” she managed. She should have taken three more Cepts instead of two. She should have brought a kesh or a bottle of vodka. As it was she’d have to settle for water. “No, you’re not wrong.”
“Yay, see?” Bump turned to the man beside him, grinning. The man’s face was a horrible shade of pasty, as if he’d covered himself in glue and let it dry. She’d always wondered what that would actually look like, if it would be shiny or not, but then she was just trying to distract herself so she wouldn’t have to look again at what had once been a living person.
Distraction was good. So was delay. All those D words, especially “drugs.” Another Cept would make six, and why the hell not. She dry-swallowed it while she was reaching into her bag to pull out a pair of latex gloves and her small camera. What else might she need … She’d have to get a closer look to know.
A closer look. Great.
Within reach of where she stood were Eddie’s feet. Just beyond those were the soot lines she’d noticed, dark lines, as though the cement itself had burned.
But the energy still didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel like death magic. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of spell she was aware of that needed a murder to help power it. Those were—Wait.
“His—his face, the top of him, isn’t burned.” She looked at Bump and the pasty guy. “Why is part of him burned?”
Bump’s lips went thin; he stared at her for a long moment. “Had we a fuckin fire, Ladybird, ain’t you was fuckin here on the last—”
“Gee, really? No shit. Why is his body burned everywhere except on top? He’s burned from the ground up but the—his skin is still there, on his nose and forehead and chin.”
Pause, while they all inspected the body. Ha! Look at her, actually noticing something that might be important. She gritted her teeth to keep from smiling. Six was definitely her magic number after the food she’d forced herself to eat earlier. Or it could be the five finally really hitting, in which case six would be too much. She was too high to worry or care. If blessings were legal, that would certainly be one.
But smiling around a corpse wasn’t really appropriate, so she managed not to, concentrating again on standing still so her high flowed through her body in a smooth arc, making her feel like she was floating. Like maybe things were okay after all. Like maybe she was okay after all.
“Fuckin metal all on, yay,” Bump said. Oddly festive sparks of light danced on the walls as he waved his beringed hand; Chess followed it to see a slab of sheet metal—what had once been the reinforcement of the floor above, she guessed, which had probably been some kind of processing room—leaned up against the wall. “Got he on the fuckin find neathen it.”
“It fell on his body?”
“Ain’t it what I fuckin saying?”
Whatever.
So the metal slab had fallen on the body, and on the symbol. And had kept the parts touching it from burning. That had to mean something. What did that mean?
“The fire was here before the metal fell. I mean, look. Look at the lines. He was on fire, the fire started on the floor. Or, maybe it didn’t start here, but the floor was on fire when the metal fell. So the spell, whatever it was—it was burning already. Was there carpet here?”
“Naw,” Terrible said. “All cement.”
She looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”
Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”
“Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.
With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.
And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.
That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.
She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.
“It’s a hafuran,” she said.
Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”
“It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”
“Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”
“This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”
Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.
Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all
