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Chapter 2

Her mood didn’t improve until she got three Cepts into her stomach and her body into a warm shower to wash off the smell of suburban self-righteousness. Ugh. What a pain in the ass.

But, then, it was better than alternative pains in the ass. Certainly she was glad no one was trying to kill her and that she wasn’t having run-ins with powerful lunatics performing ritual sacrifices, like on her last case. That was something to be grateful for.

The other thing to be grateful for was sitting on her couch when she got out of the shower. Terrible. Her smile was so wide she felt like it stuck out past her cheeks.

She couldn’t help it. He was there, and she didn’t get to spend enough time with him—

no amount of time would be enough—and they had the whole night. That was something to smile about, so she was going to.

He smiled, too, his smile that changed his whole face. Once—before she got to know him—she’d thought he was ugly, with his many-times-broken nose and harsh features and scars, his thick mutton chop sideburns and those dark hooded eyes that threatened so many people. Now she knew better. He looked like himself, and she loved him, and she could stare at his face for hours and not get bored. He looked better to her than anyone else in the world ever had.

He started to get up when she padded barefoot down her short hall into the living room.

“Hey, Chess. You right?”

She pushed him down and plunked herself onto his lap. “Right up, yeah.”

“Aye?”

How did he do that? How did he manage to kiss her so little shocks ran through her body, so she felt warm and soft but electrified at the same time? However he did it, she hoped he’d never stop.

He pulled away, tugging at the towel she’d tucked around her. “Gots me an idea, now.

Whyn’t you come on into bed with me, let me give you it.”

“What exactly is it that you want to give me?” He gave a snort of laughter, but his mouth was busy on her collarbone, the base of her throat, where droplets of water still clung to her skin. “Give you whatany you want, Chessiebomb. Anything.”

“You don’t want to head out? We’re already late.”

“Be fast, aye?”

“No.” With effort—a hell of an effort, actually, because his hand had slipped under the towel and found one of his favorite spots—she slid off his lap back onto the couch.

“Come on. I know you want to see the band, and—”

“Oh, aye.” But he pulled the towel completely open to fall on the cushion behind her, started kissing her neck again, right where he knew she liked it. Without her meaning it to, her head tilted to the right, giving him better access.

“You’re the one who said—”

His hand slid up her ribcage, over her breast, so lightly she felt it all the way through her body. “You so fuckin pretty, you got that?” The hand moved lower. “So pretty everywhere.”

She swallowed. Her mouth had gone so dry it was hard to talk. “To you, maybe.”

“Aye.” His lips moved further up her neck until he pulled away enough for their eyes to meet. “Aye, to me.”

This time the kiss was deeper, more forceful, more demanding. A demand she really had no desire to oppose.

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Well…there’s an opening band anyway, right?” Five hours later they stood together outside the Solomons’ home, the heavy-hot summer air damp around them. They’d left the Chevelle a block over so as not to attract attention, and even that short walk made Chess’s Bettie Page bangs spiky with sweat, especially after the oven-like heat inside Chuck’s. Chess hated summer.

“What you want? We head in, or do a check out here?”

“Just outside, tonight. I don’t have my Hand to deepen their sleep, and I didn’t get to check the doors and windows and stuff earlier since it was still light out.” Their feet made faint rustling sounds through the tidy grass—shorter on the Brents’ side than the Solomons’, she noticed, the line of demarcation sharp and obvious. She imaged Mr. and Mrs. Brent tsk-tsking. Snobs.

Not that the Solomons weren’t snobs; they probably were, too. She’d find out later. For now she wanted to see what if anything she could discover before they learned she was investigating them.

The living room window on the left side of the house was the first to check, and it was one of several reasons she’d brought Terrible: it hung above her head, and he had about a foot on her. Not only could he see through it, but those thick muscles he packed made it easy for him to lift her up, to hold her in place so she could take a good long look, too.

The same size that made him the most feared enforcer in Downside made him the perfect partner for late-night investigations. Or, well, the perfect partner for anything, at least as far as she was concerned, but that was due to more than just how tall and strong he was.

She dragged her mind from those cheerful images and focused on the Solomon living room. Nothing special. Nothing special at all. A few bookshelves, a couch and easy chair, a widescreen TV. Macramé planters hanging from the ceiling. Prints on the walls, generic stuff like black-and-white pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and some sort of hippie tie-dyed tapestry. On the side wall, though, on the other side of the kitchen… What was that?

She pressed her nose against the glass. Damn it, the Solomons had turned off their lights before bed—a pretty good indicator that they didn’t have ghosts. Most people suffering a real haunting made their homes so bright that sunglasses were required.

Ghosts didn’t like the sun or light, so such action did occasionally help—not to mention the general fear of the dark, the almost instinctive way fearful people sought the light, tried to wrap it around themselves as if seeing a danger coming would make it go away.

It wouldn’t. It never did. Chess had learned that a long time ago.

But even in the dark, she could just make out the object sitting on a low table, next to the phone. “Shit.”

“What’s troubling?”

“Here, put me down. They’ve got a rat skull and spine in there, tied up with owl feathers.” He obeyed. “Owls take ghosts down the City, aye? So they pullin shit with ghosts?” Chess dusted her hands on her jeans—the windowsill hadn’t been exactly clean—and smiled at him. Of course he knew that. He knew it because of her, because he paid attention, and because he was so much smarter than he thought he was. “Yeah. They’re sometimes used in binding rituals. Like, Maguinness was bound to a ghost, remember?

He used toad-magic and mistletoe, but a lot of people use rat skulls or spines.” Terrible nodded. “Be why them claiming them ain’t got a ghost, aye? Causen them the ones bringin it.”

“Exactly. Damn it!”

They started walking toward the back of the house where a wide cement patio lay bare save for a generic umbrella table and chair set. “What the trouble, though? They binding themselves a ghost, you bust em in, aye?”

His absolute confidence in her never failed to make her face warm. To make her insides warm, too. She didn’t deserve that kind of trust, not at all. But it felt so fucking good, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up. Couldn’t let him see how little she was actually worth it.

“Yeah, but it’s still a ghost. I get half my bonus because they Summoned it themselves, but… It’s just a pain in the ass, you know? All the research and everything I have to do to figure out who the ghost was, get its grave supplies and all of that…not to mention I have to notify them they’re under investigation now and I’m stuck with this case. This sucks.”

A set of sliding glass doors led into the kitchen; the blinds were closed over them so Chess couldn’t see through. Her own reflection stood out clearly, though, hers and Terrible’s as he came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “All be right up, ain’t you worry on it. An you needin lashers, you know I got—”

“No, I’m fine.” She slipped out of his grasp. Yeah, she knew he had money. Plenty of money. She didn’t know exactly what Bump paid him, but she imagined it was some sort of percentage of profits, and profits from all of the gambling, prostitution, and especially drugs in Downside west of Forty-third were considerable. Hell, the amount she herself spent on drugs every year was considerable. Addiction was a lot of things, but cheap wasn’t one of them.

Which was why she couldn’t take money from him. She couldn’t take it because they slept together, and she couldn’t stand the idea of money and sex having anything to do with each other. Nor did she want him to pay for her drugs. They’d never discussed it or anything, but she’d never asked him to bring them to her—save for one emergency when she’d been trapped and withdrawing hard—and he’d never offered. He said he didn’t care about her addiction, that he loved her no matter what, and she believed him.

But not caring was a lot different from approving.

The whole thing made her want to hide. And, lucky her, she had some chemicals to hide behind. She dug her pillbox from her bag, grabbed three more Cepts and washed them down with water.

As she looked down to put the silver pillbox back in its little pocket, she noticed something on the other side of the glass doors, below the bottom of the blinds.

What…what was that? She squatted down to get a closer look.

“What you seein?”

She glanced back, waved him to her side. “What does that look like to you? There, see?

On the floor just inside.”

He crouched, squinted as he leaned forward. “Like dirt, maybe? An got some scratch-ups on there, too, but ain’t can make ’em out.”

“Runes,” she said. The cement patio hurt her knees. Not just because it was hard, but because it had absorbed the sun’s heat all day. It felt like kneeling in a frying pan.

“Protective runes, and some bindrunes. Some sigils I don’t recognize, too, like they invented them themselves. Normal people can’t cast shit like that.”

“Thinkin them witches, too?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her camera out of her bag. She probably wouldn’t get any decent shots of the symbols on the other side of the glass, but she couldn’t exactly copy them down by hand; inscribing a sigil was basically the same thing as casting it, at least for witches like herself, and no way was she going to chance activating some sigil when she didn’t know what it did. “I guess it’s possible they could be unlicensed witches, but if that’s the case I’d think the neighbor would have noticed them doing magic and told me about it. She certainly seems to spend enough time watching them.”

“Maybe them ain’t doin it on they alones.”

“I wonder if— Oh. Right! Mrs. Brent—the neighbor—said they used to have these big parties every week, where the lights would go out after half an hour or so and everyone would leave a couple of hours after that. She thought it was some kind of sex party, but if they had a lot of people… She said it was about a dozen, I bet it was thirteen.” He stood back up when she did. “Get a gang-up on, all them gots a little power, they pool it all together, aye?”

“Yeah. I guess so, anyway.”

His hand touched the back of her neck, gave a gentle squeeze. “Takes a many of them make one almost as good as you.”

There was that blush again. “Well. Um, let’s walk around the rest of the house, and get going, okay? I kind of want to go home, I don’t know—” His arms wrapped around her waist; his head bent to hers. A slow kiss. A soft one that made her tingle all the way down to her feet. “Feel like gettin you home myself. Maybe get some eats in you, what you thinkin? You eat today?” She buried her face in his broad, strong chest for a minute, took a deep breath of the soap-smoke-and-pomade smell of him, mixed with bay rum from shaving and whatever indefinable other scent that was his alone. She wasn’t hungry. She especially wasn’t hungry when she knew any minute her pills would kick in and set butterflies dancing in her stomach.

That feeling was a hell of a lot better than food. But for some reason he’d been insisting of late that she eat, which was sweet and made her feel special while at the same time annoyed and wishing he’d quit paying so much damn attention. Being taken care of was…confusing. Weird. Not always comfortable.

She’d known telling him she loved him would mean giving up some privacy. She just didn’t think it would entail so many reminders of that sacrifice, that it might mean having to answer for things like how much she ate and slept. That he would watch those things. Care about them. She’d never realized it meant she’d become responsible for things.

But she didn’t argue, didn’t mention any of that. Instead, she smiled at him. It was practically impossible to look at him without smiling, so that was easy.

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go get something to eat.”