City of Ghosts (28 page)

Rumored dead, but not dead. An address the Lamaru were writing to, but no address listed in the Church system.

Baldarel had disappeared. And Chess knew a damn good place to disappear to.

If Maguinness and Baldarel were the same person, it would answer a lot of questions—how he’d known to find them at the slaughterhouse, for example. It would also create more. The Lamaru were learning from and at war with the same person?

Unless Baldarel had, by letter, advised them to visit “Maguinness.” He’d wanted to check them out in person, to see what kind of people he was dealing with, and she guessed he’d found out. And now he was slowly leading them into trap after trap. She almost admired him, but she was more terrified by him. Someone who could use the Lamaru like lapdogs—how appropriate—and get them running scared was definitely someone she didn’t want to fuck around with, and that someone knew who she was, had read her.

But hadn’t come after her. Why?

The whole thing made her head hurt; or would have, had she been capable of feeling physical pain. As it was she was simply tired, her thoughts running creaky circles in her head like an exhausted treadmill mouse. Baldarel and Maguinness and dogs and toads and Lamaru, rooms and streets crimson with blood … Terrible’s hands on her skin, his mouth on her throat—

“I have an image here, if thou wouldst look.” Elder Griffin turned the slick flat screen of his desktop toward her; a flash from the overhead light turned it momentarily into a blank silver slab, revealing nothing. “Is this the man you encountered?”

The screen cleared. With very little surprise Chess found herself nodding, staring at a picture of a young Arthur Maguinness—a young Baldarel—leering out of a grainy scanned photo.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s him.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

One who will perform dark magics will stop at nothing else; evil is evil.

—
The Book of Truth
, Veraxis, Article 915

She’d never been in this section of the tunnels before. Well, that wasn’t a surprise; she’d never been in a lot of sections of the tunnels before. With the exception of one night, when she’d used them to escape from the train platform outside the City of Eternity, she’d really only ever used them to travel between her place and Lex’s. And with the exception of that one night, never alone.

Lex always seemed to know where he was. She generally had some idea, enough to be fairly certain she wouldn’t get totally lost down there—and there were exits—but nowhere near the kind of confidence he displayed.

It wasn’t just fear of being lost that kept her from feeling entirely comfortable with the idea of wandering around alone down there, though. The night she’d made her escape from the platform—from the Lamaru who’d chased her there—she’d literally stumbled upon some of Slobag’s dirty little secrets: dead bodies in the tunnel, executed men rotting away beneath the earth.

It wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.

Add to that memory the antipathy any witch felt to being underground, to the concerns and confusion over what she and Elder Griffin had discovered, and Chess would have been twitchy even without the Nips in her system. Or without the memories that refused to leave, or the jumpy, irrational certainty that Lex could tell when he looked at her that she’d been with Terrible, as though even after a couple of showers and a night of sleep he’d left imprints on her skin.

Outside it was only five-thirty or so. Inside it was eternal fluorescent-bulb night, stark and unnatural, with deep shadows that moved when she wasn’t looking and snapped back into place when she turned around. Playing tricks on her, those shadows—the sneaky games of children, of twisted little bodies …

Ugh.

Lex must have noticed her shiver. “Be you wanted to come on down here, Tulip. Ain’t made you, I ain’t.”

“I know, I just—How much farther?”

“Ain’t much long now. You feelin it?”

She thought for a second. Did she? Beneath the speed twitches and general nerves, the memory of Maguinness’s hideous family and … everything else …

Yes. Something was down there, now that she focused on it. They weren’t close enough for her to get a read on it, though.

She told him as much, and he nodded. “Aye, ain’t far now. You know what’s on the happening, though? Who it be? Ain’t like thinking of them Lamaru using my tunnels.”

“I’m not sure it’s—Ouch!” She folded her arms over her chest, trying to think of another way to put it. “There’s this potions guy, set up a booth in the Market? My market, I mean. He’s got a cave, or something. Up at Ninetieth and Foster.”

“He the one got this, then?”

“I think so, yeah.” She thought so; well, no, she knew so. So did Elder Griffin. Hopefully so would Lauren, when Chess finally got in touch with her to tell her; she was out with her father, with their phones off.

It didn’t matter much, really. Knowing Maguinness/Baldarel’s true identity was all well and good, but it meant absolutely nothing when they had no idea where the bastard was hiding.

Lex led her to the right, into another, dimmer tunnel. “So more’n one set down here. Ain’t likin that, Tulip.”

“Yeah. Me either.”

His lips moved; the closest he could get to a smile. “Guessing you ain’t.”

“When do the wires come out?”

He shrugged. “Nother week or so, them tell me. Be good when they do.”

“I really am sorry—” The apology ended in a gasp, a choke that bent her double. They were close now, she felt it, energy punching her suddenly like a surprise blow to the gut. The tunnels had a curious dampening effect on magic sometimes, she’d noticed; it didn’t dissipate the way it did above ground, becoming something one eased into, felt tingling long before reaching the actual place where it had been performed. Rather it stayed tight, lurking like a pocket of darkness between streetlights.

“Got it now, aye?”

She nodded. Oh, that was awful. Really, really awful. It wasn’t just the horrible sensation she remembered from the toad fetish, or the slithering wrongness of Baldarel’s family. Something deeper, more shocking clung to it, hung beneath it like slugs on the bottom of a rock. Death magic—death itself. The void a life left behind when it was ripped without mercy from a body.

“Lookin kinda pale, Tulip. You right?”

“Right—No, not really. There’s—Let’s just hurry up, okay?”

He shrugged. “That’s what you’re wanting.”

His fingers on her arm helped keep her feet steady; they sped up, feet making muted splashing sounds through the thin stream of …

The thin stream of pinkish water, turning ever deeper red with every step they took. Lex noticed it at the same time she did; his muttered oath was like a spur in both of their backs.

They didn’t have to go far. The body lay just around another curve. Chess saw the few light strands of hair beneath the sticky dark blood, saw the empty chasm where the chest had been—

Vanhelm had been slaughtered. Not just murdered, no; no clean gunshot wound or slit throat. No death curse finally bringing an agonizing but outwardly unremarkable end to his life by a stroke, a heart attack, the slow shutdown of his internal organs.

He didn’t even possess those anymore. He lay there staring at the ceiling with his milky eyes wide, his chest cracked open and plundered.

But the thing that made her shut her eyes, that turned her instinctively to Lex to hide her face in his chest—making her feel like a total pussy for doing it but unable to stop herself—were the teethmarks.

Three deep breaths of the clean detergent-smoke-and-Lex scent of his Blanks 77 shirt was enough to clear her head a bit, at least enough to force the bile in her throat back where it belonged. She shifted away, embarrassed, to see Lex’s own face pale above hers; but he lit a cigarette with a smooth movement and tilted his head back to blow out smoke. When he looked at her again his color had returned, his brows raised in the way they did when he was about to be particularly Lex-like.

“That some shit, aye?”

Absurdly, she laughed, a short gasp of laughter like the bark of a yappy dog. Dogs …

Chess plucked the cigarette from his fingers and dragged from it herself, taking a step closer to Vanhelm’s ruined body. Okay. To say she hadn’t been expecting this was an enormous understatement. What the hell was going on? Could the Lamaru …?

Well, yes, they certainly could have. And Vanhelm had been working with dogs; the sorts of dogs who left teethmarks like—Damn, those were some big-ass dogs.

Pulling a pair of gloves from her bag, she crouched by the body to take a closer look. Nothing like a mutilated corpse to get a girl’s mind off other things.

Something wasn’t quite right. That Vanhelm had been attacked by dogs—that he’d most likely been killed by dogs—seemed plain. The long teethmarks, the way his throat had been—she swallowed hard—ripped open, the claw marks on his cheek.

But while blood still colored the water flowing beneath and around him, growing paler now as he bled out, there were no splotches of it on the dry cement. A dog attacking and killing a human might eat that human’s organs; much as the thought made her stomach churn, she could see it happening. But would they have been able to eat an entire intestine without its touching the floor or leaving stains or marks anywhere else?

And peeking into Vanhelm’s abdominal cavity showed none of the—well, none of the
mess
she would expect to find had dogs removed those organs. It looked like they’d been cut from him.

So why would someone wait until he’d been mauled to death by dogs, then tidily remove his heart and stomach and … yuck, everything else?

Someone must have had excellent control of their dogs. And someone must have needed those parts for a spell. Fuck! Murdered bodies had all sorts of power, power she didn’t even want to think about. Not that she had a choice. As with everything else in her life.

Lex leaned over her, peering down. “Dogs ate him all up, aye?”

“I don’t think so.” She explained her reasoning to him, stumbling a little over the words. Even in her line of work, it wasn’t common to utter sentences like “His stomach doesn’t appear to have been torn out.”

Lex nodded. He’d lit another cigarette; in the stifling air, still thrumming heavy with power, the smoke hung around his face and half-obscured his features. “So somebody cut them parts out, usin them for they witchy business.”

“Yeah, but, Lex …” She bit her lip. He wasn’t going to be happy with what she said next.

His raised eyebrows told her he already had a good idea what was coming. “Aye?”

“I need to report this. I need to tell them about the tunnels. If he’s down here, using them for—”

“Oh, nay, nay, Tulip. Ain’t havin no Churchcops down here, ain’t you even think—”

“Lex, I have to. This man is a susp—Ow! He’s a—I have to. I can’t just pretend this didn’t happen.”

“You able to pretend a lot of other shit ain’t happen, so I think. No trouble you just add he on the list, aye?”

“I can’t.”

“Ain’t you can do what you like? You ain’t never give em the true tale on Chester, recall. Ain’t never tell em how you spending your off-days neither, aye?”

She blinked; stood up so fast it made her dizzy. Dizzi
er
, actually, as the power throbbing around her was doing a pretty good job of that all on its own. “Are you—are you threatening me?”

He shrugged. “Just givin you the true.”

“But—” She stopped. But what? She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t naive; and she wasn’t sleeping with him anymore. Which meant, as far as he was concerned, all bets were off.

And honestly, even if she had still been sleeping with him, he might very well have drawn the line at this. The Church wasn’t, to her knowledge, even aware that the tunnels existed, or at least that they were so extensive. Those old municipal maps she’d accessed on Lauren’s tracker were decades old, from BT.

Certainly the Church had no idea a minor drug lord and his crime family used the tunnels as their own private transportation system and dumping ground for inconvenient bodies. And whatever else.

If they knew, they might be driven to take steps. Fill the tunnels in, most likely. No one was supposed to be underground unless they were visiting the City of Eternity itself.

So this was serious, and she had no doubt Lex took it so. And she did, too. But how the hell could she tell Lauren that Vanhelm was dead and not tell her how she’d found the body, or where? How could they move him without possibly destroying evidence …?

She hadn’t really looked for evidence yet. “What about those fetishes and stuff you saw? Were they here?”

Oh, he really was a smug bastard. He tilted his head, smirked at her in that particularly irritating way he had. “Maybe. We havin a trouble on this one?”

She couldn’t look at him as she replied. “No. No trouble.”

“Aye, that’s good, Tulip. Real good. C’mon, lemme show you what’s on the finding.”

His hand under her elbow helped her step over Vanhelm’s corpse, then pulled her around the bend.

Magic hit her so hard that she stumbled, clutching at his arm like a drunk. Damn, every time she thought it was as bad as it could possibly get, it got worse. It filled her nose and mouth, a sludgy miasma of death and misery and dark clotting blood. So strong, so—

“You right, there?”

She barely managed to nod. “I’ll be fine.”

“Guessing pretty bad, aye?”

“Not fucking good.”

He smiled, shrugged. “You know I ain’t can tell, me.”

“Yeah, I know.” She’d never been jealous of his imperviousness to magic before, but she sure as hell was now. This was like death in vapor form.

Oh, and good; there were Vanhelm’s lungs, dropped against the curved wall, out of the water. In between them sat the fetish, its body covered in sticky blood. It appeared to be leering at her, its toad lips stretched wide so she could see herbs stuffed inside like a mouthful of insects. That explained why the power was so much stronger here. Murdered blood combined with already nasty black magic equaled things she didn’t even want to think about.

She grabbed her little camera, and a couple of Cepts while she was at it.

Lex leaned against the wall, watching her. “Thinking on something.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” The camera flashed. Those same awful thick crooked stitches up the toad’s belly, like railroad tracks laid by a tripping lunatic. Carved on the toad’s legs she noticed what appeared to be glyphs or runes.

She sighed and stepped closer, ignoring how her nausea increased as she moved in, tried to take some close-up shots to capture the individual glyphs in each frame.

“Maybe could move that body outta here, aye? Drop him off somewheres?”

“Really? You’d—” She turned, unable to hide her surprise. At least, unable to hide it until another thought occurred to her. One a lot more likely than the idea that Lex was simply being her helpful pal or something. “Wait, why?”

“Why not, aye?”

“Yeah, but—why would you want to help me?”

“Damn, Tulip. You ain’t never stop bein mean. How’s a man sposed to think, when you always like that?”

“Oh, come on. Like you’re nice all the time or—What was that?”

“What?”

“Shh!” She waited, camera poised in her hands. Had she really heard that? Or had it been—

No. There it was again. A soft sound, a series of pattering noises. Like little bare feet running along the—

Oh, shit. “Lex,” she said, stepping closer to him. Keeping her voice very low. “I think we need to get out of here, okay? Fast.”

“Aye? Why? What’s troubling you?”

“I think it’s them, the vendor I told you about and his family—one of them, at least, and I really, really think we don’t want them to find us here.”

“You always so anxious and shit. Got my knife, me, and a gun—”

“No. This isn’t—”

The laugh echoed down the tunnel and over her skin. Every hair on her body stood on end.