Finding Magic

Chapter Two

The sedan pulled up in front of a bland-looking ranch house in Cross Town, a semi-suburb struggling to leave the working class behind. The house, a slab of dull tan and brown, hid behind a couple of trees and about half a dozen sedans and Squad cars. Holy shit, this was a real crime scene.

Well, duh, people were dead, right? Of course it was a crime scene, or at least a dead-body scene. But still … Chess was aware of her feet crossing the tidy green lawn, the sound of her boots sliding against the grass and the sound of her bag shifting on her shoulder. The lawn looked extra green, the sky extra blue, like the nights back in the Corey Youth Home when she and a few of the others would score some Sizzle and spend the night giggling and watching the colors dance in the air. But that had been fake. This looked too real. It looked like something she didn’t want to see.

Jillian approached two men standing just outside the wide-open front door. “Vaughn, Trent.”

The men nodded. One of them spoke. “Morrow.”

Their gazes fell on Chess, who forced herself not to fidget under their weight. They wanted to look at her and wonder? Let them. She didn’t need to offer them any information.

Jillian gave her up. “This is Cesaria Putnam. She’s a student, out with me for her last-year shadowing.”

The men’s eyes thawed a little. One of them—Trent?—gave her an appraising kind of smile. “Thinking of joining us?”

Chess shrugged.

Trent’s face hardened; clearly he’d expected her to blush and giggle under his manly attention or something. “Well,” he said, stepping back and sweeping his arm out in a you-first kind of gesture, “this is as good a start as any, right? Go ahead.”

She should have hesitated. She should have looked at Jillian, waited for a nod.

But she didn’t. Not with Vaughn smirking and Trent still standing there waiting for her to move.

She started walking.

“Let’s see how tough she is now,” she heard one of the men murmur. Her back stiffened. They had no idea what tough was.

Tough was walking through that wide-open doorway and entering an entirely different world, a world full of blood and body parts thrown around, a world of overturned furniture and broken glass and death. A world where the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with horror, still in shock at what they’d been forced to witness.

Holy shit. Bile rose in her throat; stars exploded before her eyes. What she was seeing? How many people had been killed there, how many bodies made up the clutter of lost mortality strewn across the oat-colored carpet?

A chuckle from behind her managed to penetrate the roaring in her ears. Right. Right, they were watching her, waiting for her to break down. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

Jillian’s hand on her arm. Something in her eyes, something not quite sympathy but not quite pleasure, either. More like … curiosity, maybe? Annoyance. “You okay?”

Chess nodded, forcing herself not to pull away from Jillian’s presumptuous touch no matter how much it made her skin crawl. She was trying, she was getting better with that, better every day, but … it still sent discomfort skittering along her skin, down her spine. “I’m fine.”

Jillian paled as she looked at the mess. “Damn. They weren’t kidding when they said it was awful.”

“What happened? I mean, what do—”

“These people were murdered, that’s what happened.” Trent stood in the doorway; as he spoke he started walking, essentially shoving Chess and Jillian further into the death-chamber. Sunlight made his hair a brownish halo around the shadowed oval of his face, so she couldn’t read his expression. She bet she knew what it was, though. “See, when people get all torn apart like that, they usually can’t live anymore.”

Chess stared at him. A long, even stare, one that told him exactly what she thought of him and his patronizing little games.

Vaughn cleared his throat. “Neighbor called this morning, screaming, saying she’d come over to pick up the woman—Mrs. Waring, Shannon Waring—to go shopping, found them all like this. She said she didn’t enter the house.”

“Any confirmation on that?” Jillian asked.

“Still working on it.” Vaughn flipped a page in the little notebook he carried. “Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, everyone’s horrified, the Warings were such nice people, you know, the usual shi—stuff neighbors say. Doors weren’t locked, garage door was open. There’s a tire track off the driveway, but we have no idea when it might have been made.”

“I guess we should—” Jillian started, but Trent cut her off.

“I think we should ask our new recruit what she thinks we should do.” Amusement glinted in his eyes as he looked at Chess. “She can learn by doing, right?”

Was he always this much of an asshole, or was it something personal?

Not that it mattered. Fine. He wanted to be a dick, he could go right ahead. One benefit of an upbringing like hers: nobody could make her feel worse about herself than she already did. His attitude, his dislike, was just another raindrop hitting floodwaters.

There was a pause; in it she felt them all waiting for her reaction, Jillian and Vaughn torn between wanting to stand up to Trent and wanting to see what she’d do.

So she looked around the room, thought for a second. “What about the weapon? Do you know what kind of weapon was used?”

“A knife.” Trent had moved, so she could see his face, the glint in his eyes. What did it feel like to be so smug all the time? Not that she cared, really; it was just idle curiosity.

But wait. He did look smug, didn’t he? And he wouldn’t be looking so smug if she wasn’t missing something, if there wasn’t something big she should have figured out but hadn’t.

She stopped and inspected the scene again, trying to separate the bloody limbs and lumps of flesh from what they meant. It was so … grisly. What did that—why was that? Why had the bodies been chopped up and left lying around like that? Usually when killers chopped up bodies it was to make them easier to dispose of, right?

Well, she didn’t know that for a fact, but she’d known a few people in her life who would have. And it just—it just seemed like if a killer was going to go through all the trouble of slicing and dicing a corpse, there ought to be some purpose to it aside from making the biggest possible mess.

But. There was one type of killer who might very well chop people up just for fun and discard the individual parts like peanut shells tossed on a barroom floor. There was one type of killer who had the kind of rage that would drive a person to destroy another like that; one type of killer who felt nothing but hate.

Chess lifted her chin, looked right into Trent’s oh-so-clever eyes. “Ghosts did this, right? You found ectoplasm?”

His face fell. She managed not to smile.

Vaughn shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “We did, yes. And this isn’t the—” He stopped himself. The three Squad members exchanged looks.

“There’ve been others?” Chess asked.

Pause. Long pause, while the others had some sort of silent conversation. Chess didn’t watch them. Now that her initial shock had passed she was more interested in the room, in the house itself.

It was nice, in a dull sort of way. Like someone with not much flair but a decent amount of cash had decorated it, and like the people who lived in it—who had lived in it—either didn’t spend a lot of time there or were a bit on the neat-freaky side. Of course, given the horrendous mess in there at the moment, it was hard to tell, but she noticed dust-free picture frames, glass cabinet doors devoid of fingerprints. They had one of those entertainment-center units with drawers and boxes built in, presumably for pictures or knitting or who the hell knew what; Chess had lived with one family once who had one of those, too, but they’d used the drawers to stash porn and drugs. Maybe these people did the same? They didn’t necessarily look like the type, but there really was no “type,” was there? There were just people, and they were all sick beasts with shit to hide.

Jillian’s voice cut into her thoughts; apparently the three of them had reached some kind of decision. “We have had a few ghost murders recently, yes. We believe there may be a small band of ghosts that escaped from the City, and we’re working to find them.”

“How would they escape?”

Vaughn shrugged. “It happens sometimes. Nothing for you to worry about. We’ll catch them quickly, we always do.”

“The current ghost-caused death rate in the District is one in every half million,” Jillian added. “That’s very low, as you’ve probably been told. And it’s low because we’re very good at handling just this sort of problem.”

The fact that this was at least the third murder of this type—Chess figured it had to be at least three, because if there had only been one before, Jillian would have said “another” instead of “a few”—seemed to indicate that they weren’t as good as they thought, but Chess sure as hell knew not to say that.

And really, it was about all she knew, wasn’t it? She hadn’t even graduated yet, much less started training. Yes, she’d read ahead; all those late nights in the library, sneaking books from the Restricted Room and the Archives to study, all those long silent hours of peace meant she probably knew more than the average last-year student.

But there was so much more to know, so much more to learn. No, she didn’t want to join the Squad, but she might as well try to get something out of her time there, right? The more knowledge she gathered and the harder she worked, the better chance she had of graduating, of passing training, of getting to be somebody. “So what do you do next, then? How will you catch them?”

“We’ll talk to a Liaiser, maybe,” Jillian said, glancing at the men. “See if they’ve picked up anything about unrest among the dead, or if perhaps they know who’s gone missing.”

Vaughn nodded. “We’ve upped the street patrols, of course. The others have been in neighborhoods like this one, so we’re making sure the streets are well covered at night.”

“Do you warn people, or anything? Maybe have someone go around laying out salt or putting blood on—”

Trent started laughing. “Are you crazy? And terrify half the city? Hell, no, we haven’t made an announcement. And you won’t tell anyone, either, none of your little friends back at Church, understand?”

Okay, now she was pissed. To imply that she—of all people—couldn’t keep a secret? She’d kept secrets that would turn his Haircolor for Men No. 8 hair white.

And she was still keeping them. She always would. “I know how to keep a secret.”

“Well, if you don’t, we’ll certainly find out soon enough, won’t we?”

“Give her a break, Trent,” Vaughn muttered.

“I’m just teasing.”

Ah, yes. Just Teasing: the defense of the cowardly asshole. Whatever.

Jillian touched Chess’s arm—what was the deal with that?—and glanced toward the hallway. “You want to come check out the other rooms with me, Cesaria? I’ll show you how we run a search.”

“Don’t know why you’re bothering,” Trent said. “You know ghosts are opportunity killers. Searching the last few houses didn’t—”

“Because it’s a good way for her to learn,” Jillian said. “Because I’m supposed to be teaching her.”

The scream from outside interrupted whatever response Trent was about to make, and sent a chill up Chess’s spine for good measure. It was a horrible scream, the high, long shriek of pain and loss. “Nooooo! Mom—Mommy! Daddy! What—”

Vaughn was moving before the words really gelled in Chess’s mind; to Trent’s credit—look at that, she could find one nice thing about even him—he was right behind, with Jillian following. Chess hesitated for a minute; was she supposed to go, too? It really wasn’t her business. It definitely wasn’t something she wanted to see.

Not that staying there with a couple of dismembered corpses appealed more, but … Oh, shit. The door was open, and from the doorway those corpses were clearly visible, and if that scream came from the dead couple’s daughter she really, really wouldn’t need to see that.

Chess leaped for the door, intending to slam it shut, but she was too late. The green lawn and black cop cars she saw through the doorway disappeared, replaced by a woman’s body, little more than a shadow against the sunshine outside. She was 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.