The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts. Stacia Kane
Her stomach settled almost immediately and her head cleared. A lot of guys had taken to carrying cardesca when they went out drinking or drugging, the theory being it would prevent hangovers the next day. The fact that it cost over a hundred dollars for one tiny bottle didn’t hurt when it came to showing flash, either, but maybe it wasn’t just an affectation.
“Thanks,” she said again, handing the bottle back.
He tucked it into his pack and pulled out his cell phone. Chess didn’t ask. He was going to call Bump, and at some point tonight she was going to have to tell Bump the airport he wanted to take over was either truly haunted, or some seriously dark shit was going down there.
Sadly, she had to hope for the former. Battling black witches wasn’t part of the deal.
The horizon glowed pink and orange before the grisly relic finally emerged from the well. Chess stood, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching Bump’s men milling around, trying to act like they were too tough to be bothered by the condition of the body, and debating the best way to remove it, none of which had a chance of working. Finally two unlucky souls had to be lowered in after it. It would have been funny if she hadn’t been so chilled.
It—he, actually; a scraggly beard still clung to his weak chin—looked even worse once they laid him out on the ground. He was naked, his genitals gone, his midsection only visible ribs and a spine. Bare, fish-belly white arms and legs splayed out over the grass, almost glowing in the gathering darkness.
Chess swallowed hard and headed over, trying to keep her gaze focused on his skin and not the places where skin should be and wasn’t.
“What you see, ladybird?” Bump somehow managed to lean even when there was nothing to lean against. “You think witchy?”
I think pukey. She put her hand over her nose and mouth and crouched down to get a closer look.
Finding cause of death wasn’t part of a Debunker’s job. But a single glance was all she needed to know what had killed this man.
“Ritual sacrifice,” she said. The words felt like lead in her mouth, heavy and hard to form, and crawled across her skin like insects. “They took his …” She flicked her gaze over his empty groin, saw the men’s faces pale as if on cue. “Burned, probably. Seat of power, you know? And see the, ah, slashes on the wrists, the shapes? Those are runes.”
“What say?”
She shook her head. “Black ones, I mean black magic. They’re forbidden to us. But he couldn’t have carved them himself, and—ah!”
They all jumped back, like the chorus line of an old Busby Berkeley musical, as the dead man’s heart gave a slow, squelchy beat.
“Ain’t dead! He ain’t—” Bump started to shout, but Chess cut him off, waving a hand that felt stiff and clumsy with cold fear. Not just from what she was about to say, but from what she saw, the rune sliced into the dead man’s heart, the rune that matched the amulet in her Blackwood box at home.
“He’s dead. It—they—they’re feeding off his soul. His soul is still trapped in there.”
“There is no proof, of course, that a clean, well-run home automatically equals a safe, ghost-free one, but why take chances?”
—Mrs. Increase’s Advice for Ladies, by Mrs. Increase
“Don’t get how the soul and the heart got anything to do with each other.” Terrible slid into the exit lane, heading off the highway to take her home. She couldn’t wait to get there. The thought of that man—Bump had identified him as Slipknot, a cutpurse who worked the financial district—and the horror his last hours must have been, of the indignities his spirit was suffering even now and how she could do nothing to help him … She rubbed her forehead with her palm like she was trying to erase the unwanted vision.
“Technically they don’t. But as long as there’s life in the body, the soul can’t leave.”
“So he’s not dead.”
“No, he is dead. His soul is trapped. His body isn’t sustaining life. The spell is sustaining his physical life so it can feed off his soul.”
Terrible thought about this for a moment. “So they do the spell, use his blood and innards to power it. Then they trap his soul, aye, so’s it can keep feeding the magic. And the magic keeping the body alive? Like a cycle?”
“Right,” she said, surprised he’d caught on so quickly.
“And you can’t help him? Ain’t that what you do?”
“Normally we’d do a ritual to release the soul. Like a Banishing.”
“Send him to the City, aye?”
“Right.” She shifted uneasily in her seat. “But we can’t in this case, because we don’t know what the spell is.”
“Don’t it end the spell, you Banish the soul?”
“Don’t know.” She’d smoked so much that day the tip of her tongue burned, but that didn’t stop her from lighting another. “If I can decode that amulet, find out what the spell is for, I should know how to end it. Probably. But as it is … detaching the soul might end the spell, or it might backfire. Somebody else could get sucked into it.”
“Somebody like you.”
“Yeah.”
It almost had sucked her in. She’d never felt darkness like that, and greed. What was happening at Chester was far worse than a simple haunting. And thanks to her own stupid curiosity, she’d managed to get herself tangled further in the mess. The amulet hiding in her bag had tasted her blood. She’d fed it, in her small way, and she had no idea what that meant for her except chances were that if the spell needed another soul, hers would be the first one it came to. Whoever cast it hadn’t been stupid or amateurish, that was for sure.
Fuck.
“We find the spell, we set Slipknot free?”
“I’ll do my best.”
He nodded. “Slip not a low one. He don’t deserve it, being trapped.”
“I don’t think anybody deserves it.”
“Aye?” he glanced at her, the dashboard lights coloring his face greenish as he turned onto her street. “Then you ain’t had such a bad life at that, Chess.”
Five hours later, after a restless nap that felt more like swimming through sleep than actually sleeping, she arrived at the Mortons’ house. The street was soulless and blank, dark houses lined up like empty tombs while cars slept on their driveways. Only the trees spoke, whispering back to the breeze.
Chess set her bag on the stone walkway leading to the Morton’s front door and unzipped it. The Hand’s fingers tried to grip hers as she pulled it out and placed it next to the bag.
Lockpicks came out next, in their leather case, followed by a short, fat candle. The Hand twitched, then shriveled slightly as its muscles tightened around the candle’s base. Her camera had fallen to the bottom, but she found it after a minute of searching and slipped the strap around her neck. Last was the steel syringe full of thick, oily lubricant for the lock.
This she squirted in, sliding the needle as far into the mechanism as she could get it. Some Debunkers used a spray can with a tube, but Chess found that too messy, especially after one of her books had managed to wedge against the nozzle of her old one and soak everything inside her bag. The syringe worked better, was quieter and more accurate.
After that sat for a minute she went to work with the picks as silently and quickly as she could, listening for the minute click that would tell her the catch had given.
It