style="font-size:15px;"> Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.
“Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”
“No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”
She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”
She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.
“Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.
Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.
A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.
Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.
So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”
“Be one of them death curses?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”
She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?
She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.
“Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”
Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t know what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.
He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.
And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.
But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.
Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.
And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.
Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.
But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough. People could justify anything to themselves if they wanted it bad enough. No one was immune to that.
Not even her. Maybe especially not her.
So what did her new fucking disgusting friend want? And wasn’t she just thrilled that she got to try to figure it out?
“Gots us an even fuckin bigger bad needs fuckin chattering on,” Bump said. He lit a cigarette slowly, waiting until they were all giving him their full attention before continuing to speak. “Ain’t come on this by fuckin accidentals, yay? Gots me a fuckin tip on it, got the knowledge fuckin gave to us.”
Terrible waited. Pasty waited. Chess couldn’t. She couldn’t because she thought she knew what he was going to say, what he had to be going to say; she was sure the others did, too, but she didn’t think it made them feel as sick as it did her. “Who gave it to you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Crankshot fuckin gave it on the earlier. Hear Slobag fuckin givin the chatter on he fuckin witch him find heself. How’s that fuckin sound, Ladybird? Slobag gone and gotten heself a witch.”
Chapter Ten
The hordes of ethereal killers were terrifying and unstoppable, and the citizenry quailed at their approach.
—The Book of Truth, Origins, Article 39
She’d hoped that when she woke up Terrible would be in bed next to her. She’d slept so fucking hard she probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d come in and started jumping up and down on the bed, and he’d sneaked in to surprise her before, so the hope was there. But no.
She couldn’t think about that. Not when she got up, not when she checked her phone and found the text he sent around four—not even that fucking late—saying he was staying at Bump’s. Which wasn’t that damn far from hers. Why would he want to sleep in that museum of gynecological art when he could sleep with her?
Slobag had a witch. Slobag had someone doing magic for him. Slobag knew about things Terrible had told
