The Downside Ghosts Series Books 1-3: Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts. Stacia Kane
harmless request.
“Aye.” He nodded his head, but his gaze didn’t leave her face. “Thinking I got an idea.”
She swallowed. “What?”
“Touching that Hand, you know, weren’t pleasant. Kind of a big favor, aye?” He’d stepped closer to her, close enough for her to see each individual eyelash and to smell cigarettes on his breath. Her heart rate sped up.
One hand caught her neck, gently, with his thumb under her chin. The other slipped around to the small of her back. His body trapped her against her car, but there was no threat—or rather, no malice.
“Think I kiss you, tulip,” he murmured. “How’s that for an owes?”
Chess opened her mouth, unable to think of a reply but feeling certain she should make one. She didn’t have a chance. His lips took hers with the utter confidence of a man who knows his kiss is welcome, and fear blossomed in her chest as she realized he was right.
Heat snaked through her body, into her arms and legs, into the fingers she gripped his shoulders with and slid along the back of his neck. His tongue insinuated itself into her mouth, finding hers, greeting it and leaving again as he pulled away from her.
“Guess like we all even now,” he said. His car door opened with a faint snick, and he got in. “You call me, keep me on the update, aye?”
She hadn’t quite gotten her mouth to form words again when he sped away up the brightening street.
Smoke curled into the sky as she turned the car off the highway onto her exit. Nothing surprising in that. Once a month or so someone’s firecan turned over, or a junkie passed out with a lit cigarette in what ever squat they inhabited at the time, and a deserted building became a destroyed one. The craggy, black-stained walls interspersed with whole buildings mutely testified to the poverty of Downside. No one would pay to have the wreckage removed. No one would pay to build new. And no one really mourned the dead.
Of course, they weren’t supposed to, not in the way mourning had been done Before Truth. Bodies were incinerated, souls transported to the City and kept there. For a prohibitively large fee those left behind could still, with the aid of a Church Liaiser, communicate with them. All neat and tidy, all controlled in the same careful and precise way the Church had controlled everything since Haunted Week twenty-three years before. Almost exactly twenty-three years, in fact. The anniversary was just a few weeks past.
But Chess didn’t have time to think of how busy she had been during the Festival, or of anything else. Her bones ached with tiredness. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Her hand—among other parts—still throbbed faintly, and she craved sleep almost as much as another Cept.
Her ramshackle little car—on its last legs, but how was she supposed to afford a new one?—crawled through the deserted streets, past boarded windows and graffiti, finally sliding into a parking space half a block from her building. Chess grabbed her bag and her knife and headed for home.
She crossed the entry hall that had once been the nave and headed up the stairs, only to stop halfway up the first flight. It wasn’t unusual to find people in here trying to escape either rain or cold or people with weapons, but the boy sprawled across the landing was neither.
“Chess,” he said, and that slightly high, nervous voice placed him in a way his narrow face had not. “I talk to you?”
“What are you doing here, Brain?”
“I talk to you?” he asked again, glancing around the stairwell as if he expected someone to leap out of the solid wall and attack him. His nervousness bothered her. If someone was after him she didn’t want to be involved.
But neither could she tell him no and send him back out on the street. He was just a kid. Damn it.
“All right,” she said, pushing past him up the steps. “Come on.”
It felt like she hadn’t been home in weeks. She half expected to see a shroud of dust covering all the furniture. Or rather, more dust than there was already.
Brain closed the door behind him and stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot. In his small face his eyes looked huge, shiny as marbles.
“So what’s up, Brain? What’s the tale?”
“Hunchback. He … He heared about t’other night. Guessing Terrible gave him the speech. He mad at me, Chess. Say he don’t want me around no more …” He blinked rapidly, his thin mouth twisting.
Shit. “What did Terrible say to him?”
“Angry, methinks. Of cause Hunchback saying the tales about Chester being haunted and all. Hunchback blame me now. Say I not so brainy after all.” His too-big black coat bunched up around his shoulders as he crossed his thin arms over his chest.
“Ain’t got no other place, not now. Maybe I sleep here? Just a few hours, aye? Then I find a new place. I knows other people out there, somebody help me. Only none of them awake now.”
Something about the way his eyes shifted as he spoke made Chess suspect this wasn’t the entire truth. He’d had no reason to believe she’d be awake either, but he’d come here, and if what he’d said about Hunchback on Friday night was true, his squat was a good twenty blocks away. A long walk in the chilly, dangerous Downside predawn.
“You can stay for now,” she said, setting her bag on the kitchen counter. “But just for now. You’re not moving in, got it?”
“Aye, oh my thanks, Chess, my thanks, you ain’t gonna even know I’s—”
“No, I won’t, because you’re not going to be here long enough for me to notice. You can sleep on the couch. Don’t touch anything, got it? Nothing.”
He nodded.
“And don’t tell anyone either. How did you get into the building?”
“Back door lock’s loose.”
“What do you mean, loose?”
“I only had to play with it a minute afore it gave. Loose.”
“You broke in?”
“Was I ain’t supposed to?”
She sighed. As if her money situation wasn’t bad enough, now she’d have to pay to get the lock fixed and new keys made for everyone in the building. Leaving the back door unprotected was out of the question.
In fact … she always carried spare nails, good strong iron ones so they had the additional benefit of warding spirits. That would at least put a temporary stick on it. It wasn’t a fire-safe stick, but the chances of someone breaking into the building were a lot better than those of it catching fire. She didn’t particularly rate the odds against either.
“No. You weren’t supposed to, but it’s done now. You can fix it before you go to sleep. I’ll get you some nails and a hammer, you can close the door and jam the lock.”
“Ain’t suppose you got some eats? Only my belly getting tight. Can’t remember last food I put in.”
Chess ignored him and set a couple of nails on the counter. Their pointed tips reminded her she’d need to refill her lube syringe, so she grabbed the bottle of oil from under the sink, too.
“Chess? Got me a few dollars, I could help for some food …”
“Take a look in the fridge. I don’t think there’s much.”
There wasn’t. Brain stared into the empty depths as though a four-course meal would magically appear. When one didn’t his shoulders sagged. “I have a beer?”
She shrugged. “If you want one. Get me one, too.” Hey, he wasn’t her kid, and chances were he’d already done a lot more than have a beer or two. Kids younger than him OD’d every day.
He handed her one. “I ask you something?”
“Sure.”