Читать книгу: «Unholy Ghosts», страница 2
Warily she reached for the bag. Her impulse was to grab an Oozer, but she managed to refrain and took another Cept instead. She had a feeling she would need her brain for this one.
“Good, that’s real nice. Now, why don’t Bump tell you what? You hear my plan?”
She nodded, dry-swallowing the Cept.
Bump sat down next to her, close enough for her to smell the pipe room on his clothes. He smiled. “Maybe I got a problem. Maybe you help me with it.”
Uh-oh. She was going to have to turn him down. The only people who ever asked witches for favors were those who wanted either unholy luck or unholy deeds done, and she didn’t much feel like doing either. Especially considering Bump was already a pretty lucky guy, and she wasn’t a killer.
“What’s the favor? I’m not agreeing, I’m just asking.”
“Oh, I think you agree, ladybird. I think when you hear, you say yay. Let me run this down. You know the airport?”
“Muni?” Even if the third Cept had kicked in—which it hadn’t—she wouldn’t have been more mystified. Triumph City Municipal Airport was a major hub, and one of the few areas that was heavily policed. Most Downside residents, especially drug dealers, stayed as far away from Muni and the surrounding factory district as they could.
“Naw, naw, what you fuckin say? Muni. Not Muni. Chester. You know Chester Airport.”
“Chester’s been shut down for years.”
“Yay, it have. But maybe Bump open it back up. Maybe Bump expand his fuckin business, he open it up.”
This was starting to make some kind of sense. “I don’t have enough pull in the Church to lean on the city leaders for something like that, nowhere near enough.”
“Bump got the pull. Bump already got that place wide up, see, wide up. But Bump gotta problem. Bump’s planes—planes carrying them sweet pills you ladybirds like—Bump’s planes crash. Something attacking planes, dig? Make they go all silent. Turns they off.”
“I don’t know anything about planes. I’ve never even been in a—”
“Not planes, ladybird. Ghosts. Say Chester haunted. Don’t guess on that. Somebody sending signals, making planes silent. Electromagnetics and such, yay? You find sender. You find sender, you rid they.”
He leaned back and lit a cigarette, letting smoke wreath around his head. “You catch me them fake ghosts, so my planes they fly. You catch, ladybird, and we even. No more debt to Bump.”
Chapter Three
“Above all, to work for the Church is to be entrusted with the protection not only of yourself and your loved ones, but of the human race. You must never forget this responsibility.”
—Careers in the Church: A Guide for Teens, by Praxis Turpin
Pleading exhaustion was not the best idea for getting out of doing something for a drug dealer. Or, to put it a different way, it was a very good idea. As Terrible drove them out toward the airport, Chess’s entire body felt sparkly, light, as if someone was about to tell her the punch line of a very good joke at a fabulous party. At least that’s how she imagined it would feel.
He’d even chopped up four more Nips nice and fine for her and bagged them, so she could snort them tomorrow if she wanted to. There had to be some advantage to having him grab her by the balls—figuratively—and squeeze, right? And this job wouldn’t take long, probably only one night, so she should milk it for all it was worth. The kind of equipment that would down a plane couldn’t be easy to conceal. She’d find it, she’d tell Bump, and four thousand dollars worth of debt that had magically grown to fifteen would go bye-bye. Not a bad deal, really.
She felt so damn confident and good in that moment she would have agreed to walk naked into a Church service.
Something cold and wet nudged her arm. “Oughta have you some,” Terrible muttered, pushing the bottle of water up to her face now. “You don’t realize the thirsty until morning. That speed, she make you dry.”
“Got my own.” She pulled hers from her bag and took a long swig. “Thanks for the reminder, though.”
He shrugged.
They were out of Downside now, speeding along the highway. Chess couldn’t see the stars through the city lights but she knew they were there, winking above them, forming patterns and shapes in the sky. She sighed and settled back in her seat, glancing at the speedometer.
“Are you really driving a hundred and twenty?”
Terrible shrugged again.
“Not real verbal, are you, Terrible?”
This time he glared at her, the greenish lights from the dash highlighting the astonishing ugliness of his profile. His crooked nose—it must have been broken several times—the way his brows jutted out like a cliff over the ocean, the set of his jaw. She held her hands up, palms out. “Okay. Just making conversation.”
“Dames always wanna talk.”
“Not like there’s anything else they’d want to do with you.”
Terrible reached forward and turned up the radio. The Misfits blared from the speakers, singing about skulls. It somehow suited the moment. Chess rested her head on the door, trying to see the stars.
She blinked, and they were at the airport. How in the world did Bump think he was going to smuggle drugs into an airport so close to town? Didn’t he know people would hear the planes, see them?
Silly thought. Bump didn’t care. Neither did she. In fact, the easier it was for him to get his drugs, the better for her.
Terrible rolled the car—a black 1969 Chevelle, built in the period known as Before Truth—to a stop just outside the remnants of the old airport building, now just boards impaling the sky. Chess had no trouble seeing with her pupils dilated like they were.
Grass grew on the runways in fitful patches like a rash. Nothing had landed here in decades, she guessed, since the Church made Triumph City its headquarters and the Muni was built. This whole area looked forgotten, felt forgotten. Neglect oozed from the ground into the sky.
Terrible came around and opened the door for her, a courtesy that surprised her so much she almost forgot to get out of the car. She did, though, grabbing her bag from the backseat.
He watched without comment as she pulled out her Church-issued Spectrometer and handed it to him, then grabbed a piece of black chalk and her knife, just in case. Some witches used salt to mark their skins, but Chess had better control over the chalk, found it worked for her and was easier to clean up. It was more efficient, and efficiency was its own reward.
“Come here, please.”
Terrible obeyed, dipping his head as she reached up and marked it with the chalk, pressing her fingers to his jaw to help her balance. A protection sigil, crawling across his forehead like a scorpion. He closed his eyes for a second. Did he feel it? He didn’t seem the type, but maybe she didn’t either.
She was feeling something, too, wasn’t she? Below the cheerful buzz of her body, or rather, inside it. The subtle, familiar creep of power, and the even more subtle slide of arousal.
She shook her head. She was standing in an abandoned, weedy parking lot with Terrible, for fuck’s sake, and she was getting turned on. It was the Nips. Speed always had this effect on her. Too bad fucking on speed was so worthless. If it wasn’t she might have Terrible drop her back at the Market, find a man who wouldn’t ask questions and wouldn’t ask for anything else either.
She shook her head to get her focus back and drew the sigil just above the bridge of her nose. Not necessary—most of her protection was in her tattoos—but something about this place gave her the creeps. It was probably Terrible. The idea that for even one tiny second she’d come remotely close to entertaining the thought of letting him touch her would give any sane woman the creeps.
“Okay,” she said, stepping back from him. “You know this place or what?”
He nodded. His eyes glittered like dirty jewels in the shadows below his brow.
She took back her Spectrometer and turned it on. “Let’s go then. Give me the tour.”
He led her to a hole in the bowed, rusty chain-link fence and watched as she slipped through it, then followed.
Their footsteps crunched faintly in the bits of gravel still remaining by the fence, then went silent again as they crossed the cracked remains of the cement walkway. Weeds grew here, too, sliding over her boots, making her think with some discomfort of hands scrabbling for purchase on the scuffed thick leather.
The airport was larger than it had looked when they pulled up outside, the runways stretching back as far as she could see in the darkness.
A spot of light appeared on the destroyed wall in front of them. Chess jumped back, her heart pounding, and stumbled into Terrible’s chest. He held a flashlight in one large hand.
“You scared the shit out of me! I thought that light was—damn it, please don’t do that again.”
“Sorry.”
She had to be the stupidest woman on the planet. There was no other answer, because it had just occurred to her that she’d agreed to come to an abandoned airport in a slum neighborhood with the most feared drug enforcer in the city. If he left her body here, it would be months before it was found, years, if ever.
“Hey, Terrible. Um, you ever heard what happens to someone who kills a witch?”
He grunted. She decided to take that as a no.
“They’re haunted for the rest of their lives. Especially when you kill a Church witch like me. The Church makes a special dispensation, did you know that? No compensation, no disposal. The killer’s haunted every day and every night, no escape. Pretty awful fate, huh?”
“Nobody plan to kill you, Chess.”
“But if you did you wouldn’t tell me, right? I mean, you wouldn’t just turn around now and say, ‘By the way, Bump told me to kill you, so if you’d be kind enough to come closer I can wrap my hands around your throat,’ right?”
He stared at her, then uttered a sound somewhere between a creaky door and the gurgle of an old furnace. It took her a moment to realize he was laughing.
“You one crazy dame,” he said. “The speed crazy you up, don’t it? Nobody’s gonna kill you here. Bump need you. No other witches he got something on, aye? He needs you right.”
It was probably the longest speech she’d ever heard from him, and she believed him. Not enough to tuck the knife back into her bag, but enough.
“Come now. What that box do, anyways? It supposed to beep or light up or something?”
“Something. Just show me around. We’ll see what happens.”
He took her arm again as he led her through the gaping darkness of the doorway to the building itself. Only part of the roof remained, rusted tin supported by rotten wooden pillars, but it was enough to blot out what little light the moon cast into the interior.
And it stunk, like woodlice and dead things and fuel, a cocktail of disgusting that made her sensitive, empty stomach twist.
They shuffled through layers of bones and garbage, while things scuttled away from them across the floor. The boards that had once been solid walls looked like zebra stripes, like camouflage as they picked their way through the bombed-out interior.
Still the Spectro remained silent. Of course, they hadn’t explored very thoroughly yet. Who knew where the gadgets might be hiding? They could be anywhere, in the building, in the tall grass, under a rock…
She refused to believe the alternative, and more to the point, she didn’t feel the alternative, the distinctive sensation of her tattoos warming, the hairs on the back of her neck moving. Something was off—an unusual energy was starting to wrap itself around her—but not ghosts, unless of course the Spectrometer wasn’t working. Her body’s reactions could be muddled by the speed, much as she hated to admit it, but the Spectro should work no matter what.
“Hand me that flashlight.”
He slapped it into her palm with vigor.
She ran the light over the cracks by the roof. That was usually the place electronics could be found, especially something big enough to mess with airplane computers. Actually, she’d never seen anything big enough to do something like that, but old habits died hard.
People never looked up. They looked down, they looked from side to side, but almost never did they think to tilt their heads back and see what was above them. That little human idiosyncrasy left a lot of room for error, so Chess always checked above first, a task she could tick off her list.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary up there, so she cast the light down. More difficult here, with all the debris. What she needed was a broom, but she somehow doubted Terrible would be carrying one with him. Instead she headed for the wall and shuffled along it, moving her feet in tiny increments. “Feel for anything solid,” she said. “Anything heavy.”
If they made a silly picture—the tattooed witch in her tank top and jeans and the hulking guard in his bowling shirt and trousers, black pompadour slipping down into his eyes, sliding their feet along the walls like they were trying to ice-skate over garbage—she didn’t care. Nobody was there to see them, anyway.
Except the thing creeping silently along outside. Chess caught a glimpse of it through a gap in the boards, hunched and dark.
“What’s in the eyes?” Terrible’s voice rumbled across the empty space. “What you seeing?”
She smacked her hand down through the empty air, signaling him to be quiet. Blessedly he seemed to understand, and stood stock-still while she waited. They both waited.
She glimpsed it again, hovering just outside where Terrible stood, and pointed.
She knew he was fast, but didn’t know how fast until his arm shot out through the gap and grabbed the apparition by the throat. It let out a distinctly unghostlike squawk as he pulled it through the boards. They crumbled like wet toast.
“Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! I’s just passing, I swear, I don’t know nothing!”
Terrible didn’t speak, but he didn’t loosen his grip either. The flashlight’s beam passed up and down the figure he held, little more than a child in ragged trousers and a stained poncho. The hood had slipped off when Terrible sucked the boy into the building.
“What business you got here?”
“I’s just passing—”
“Nobody just passing here. You speak, boy, you tell me. What business?”
The boy glanced at Chess, his eyes wide and dark in his dirty face. “Lady, don’t—”
The sound of Terrible’s hard palm striking the boy’s peaky face seemed impossibly loud. Chess stepped forward, her hand out, before she remembered. Lots of gangs used kids to do their dirty work. Just because the boy said he was innocent didn’t mean he was.
“You tell me, or you get worse.”
The boy rolled his eyes at Chess again, then looked down. “I heard there was ghosts. Wanted to see me one.”
“Who told you?”
“Nobody.”
Another slap. Chess refused to watch.
“Okay, okay. I tell you. It were Hunchback, you know him? From Eighty-third. Say he heard from somebody else, who was told by somebody else, that if you comes here some nights, you see them. The ghost planes, right? I came to see, that’s all.”
Terrible considered this for a minute. “What Hunchback look like?”
“Small guy, dig? With a limp. Crazy eyes and no hair. He call me Brain. Said I got one in my head.”
“You don’t, you come playing here,” Terrible replied, but he let go of the boy. The marks made by his meaty palms were fading. “No place for kids here.”
“I come here all—I sorry. I just wanted to see me some ghosts, is all.”
“You here before? You see others here?”
“No, I never did. Just me. My friend Pat. We come, but we ain’t seen planes yet. You gonna see them, you here for them?”
“Here on business.” Terrible glanced up, saw Chess watching. She dug her notebook out of her bag and flipped to a fresh page. Hunchback. If he was spreading rumors about the ghost planes, he was as good a place as any to start asking questions.
Terrible must have thought the same thing. He folded his arms across his chest. “Go now. No ghosts to night.”
Brain had one leg over the edge of the hole Terrible had made in the wall when Chess’s skin blazed with heat, her tattoos practically tearing themselves from her flesh. At the same time the Spectrometer made a long, solid yowling beep, every light on it turning bright red, casting an eerie glow against the damaged walls for a split second before the room lit up like day and the roar of an airplane directly overhead made Chess dive down to the filthy floor.
Chapter Four
“You will not raise the dead, nor will you seek to commune with them outside the Church. To do so is to court thy own doom.”
—The Book of Truth, Laws, Article 26
It went on forever, the waiting to die, while her heart beat triple-time in her chest and Brain’s thin, high scream hit her ears, barely audible over the noise. It was coming, it was coming to smash into them all and destroy them in a quick flash of rocket fuel and smoke. She tried to scramble out of the way but there was no way to get out of. The lights didn’t dim or change direction, and she had somehow managed to fall against the only unbroken section of wall in the ramshackle place. She wrapped her arms around her head, knowing it wouldn’t make one damn bit of difference.
Wood exploded next to her, splinters catching her cheek and bare arms. She tried to duck away from it but something grabbed her arm, something hard and hot, ripping her through the wall.
Terrible. He dragged her through the hole he’d punched in the rotted wood and out of the building, to her feet, and as she stood she realized the noise had stopped. There were no lights. There was nothing but Brain’s panting sobs and the terrible rushing emptiness filling her ears.
Her body felt like rubber as she tried to stand but fell again. Terrible’s arm wrapped around her chest, just below her breasts, and pressed her to his side.
“Nothing here, Chess, nothing here.” She didn’t know how many times he said it before it finally sank in, before the queasy vibrating stopped in her legs and she could raise her head and look at him.
“Thought you was good with the spook stuff,” he said. “You look like some dead.”
“And you look like Elvis vomited you up,” she managed. “So?”
Hinges creaked in her ears again as he laughed. “So we both looking bad, guesses. But I do always, and you do never. You right now?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m right. Come on. Show me around outside here.”
“You little machine made the beeps, before the noise started.”
“It’s a Spectrometer. It measures disturbances in the metaphysical plane—ghosts exude metaenergy and leave trails of it behind.”
His jutting brow furrowed. “So—”
“Woo-hoo!” Brain’s cry split the darkness and made Chess jump back against Terrible. The Nips were making her too jumpy, with all the extra adrenaline. She needed to finish this up and take something to come down.
“I seen it! I seen a ghost! Wait’ll I say! They all listen now, they all lis—” The words turned into a queer gurgle when Terrible’s hand closed around his throat again.
“You say nothing, young one. You say to nobody, dig?”
Brain nodded.
Terrible let go. “Ain’t no haunts here. We find who’s pulling tricks, we kill them. You don’t spread no stories, or I come get you and make sure you don’t. Or worse.” He turned and gestured toward Chess. “You know she, right?”
“I never seen—”
“You seen her skin, young one, you know she is. You want her after you? She help me find you, but maybe I let her take care of your mouth.”
Chess took a step forward, wanting to say something, but nothing came out. This wasn’t her business, this was street business, Bump’s business, and interference would be unhealthy.
Besides, the last thing any of them needed was for her involvement in the affair to become common knowledge. The Church might look the other way about a lot of things, but using their equipment and her abilities to aid drug traffickers probably wouldn’t get her any commendations.
So she just watched while Brain nodded, his wide eyes gleaming white in the darkness, and Terrible dismissed him with a jerk of the head. The boy ran away in a tiny spray of gravel.
“Right,” Terrible said, turning back to her. “Let’s finish this up, go home.”
The rest of the airport consisted mostly of scrub grass and broken cement. They wandered the perimeter, the breeze cool on her fevered body, but she didn’t find anything. No transmitters, no interrupters, no projectors or even electromagnets. Nothing indicated the airport wasn’t genuinely haunted.
And her skin, her own powers, clearly indicated it was, even without the Spectrometer’s sudden violent awakening. But why had it hit her so hard and so suddenly, when the apparition was right on top of them? She should have felt something before that, shivers of warmth, goose-bumps, anything.
Unless that speed was doing more than “crazying her up.” Her Cepts didn’t really interfere with her abilities, at least not in normal doses, but she didn’t do speed very often, especially not while working.
It was odd that her Spectrometer hadn’t so much as beeped before redlining, but that was easier to explain. Someone could have sent a blast of magical energy to it at the same time as they switched on whatever powered the lights and transmitted the sound; there were lots of illegal gadgets that fucked with Spectrometers, which was why they were simply tools for detection used in addition to the Debunkers’s personal powers.
Hell, if the gadget and the sound-and-light set was portable enough and whoever ran it was fast enough, they could have ducked through the fence and been gone before Terrible pulled her out of the building.
Either way, one of the first things she’d learned in her training was never to assume anything, and to keep investigating until an undeniable conclusion had been reached. Which meant, damn it, this was going to take a lot longer than she’d originally thought.
She was still ruminating on it when they reached the far end of the field. The remains of the building were little more than a shadow when viewed from here, and the grass brushed against her thighs.
Terrible plodded along ahead of her. His tall broad frame parting the weeds sounded like death whispers in the still night, like a predator sliding over the plains.
She took another step, and stopped short. Power shot up her leg, curled over her skin. Something had happened here, a ritual…a sacrifice, even. Something that cooled her blood and made her wish desperately that she was back home in bed.
“What’s troubling, Chess? Why you so white?”
She shook her head. It was trying to talk to her, to tell her something…she just didn’t know what. She couldn’t hear it, it was trapped in the whispers, all the voices crowding together in her head.
Her skin crawled as dark energy skimmed over her tattoos. It took everything she had to step back, not to crouch down and listen, to put both feet inside the circle and let the darkness take her where it wanted to go.
“Somebody’s been doing magic here,” she whispered, then, feeling a little foolish, she said it again louder. “Forbidden magic.”
“Like raising ghosts?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She took a step to the right, placing her foot carefully, trying to feel the edge of the circle as best as she could. She did not want to walk into it again. At least, most of her didn’t.
The breeze picked up, lifting her hair and cooling the back of her sweaty neck. It wasn’t old, the spell. A month, six weeks at the most, but probably more recent. She couldn’t imagine how much power there must have been here while it was being cast. The kind of power that required either a very experienced, very powerful sorcerer, or a very innocent victim. Or both.
Either way, it wasn’t anything she wanted to be around anymore.
Three more careful steps gave her a good idea of how wide the circle was. Nine feet, big enough for several people.
Terrible started toward her, but she put her hand out. “Don’t. You don’t want to chance stepping into it. You still got that flashlight?”
He stopped and held it out to her, waiting patiently like a faithful dog while she examined the ground as much as she could from outside the perimeter. The prior week’s rain, if not the general passage of time, had eliminated pretty much anything she’d have been able to see, but something glittered on the ground, very faintly, right near the center.
She adjusted the light, holding it high to try and get a better look. Small and gold, shiny as the edge of a razor blade and from what she could make out, almost as sharp. It nestled among several blades of grass, not revealing itself to her.
“Get me a stick or something.” If it was part of a spell, she could conceivably break it simply by removing the thing. If it wasn’t…she’d put it in the African Black-wood trunk where she kept any dodgy magical items she happened to come across. The energy of the wood was strong enough to block just about anything.
Terrible headed for the stand of trees just outside the fence. She watched him tear a new hole in the chain links and slip through it. Odd how such a big man managed to move so stealthily, but then in his line of work he’d need it. She wasn’t the only person who’d ever been surprised to find him standing right in front of her, just the only one for whom the experience ended without broken bones.
Meanwhile she kept the light focused on the piece of gold, afraid that if she looked away it would change into something else or disappear. Some people might think such a thing impossible, but she knew better. With magic almost anything was possible; all objects had energy, and energy could be manipulated.
Funny how much cleaner the air tasted out here, only fifteen miles or so from Downside but away from the constant fires, the crowds, and the slaughterhouse. Even with the faint garbage odor wafting under her nose whenever the wind changed, it felt more like country than city, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of the city on her free time. For that matter she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of her apartment on her free time, save to buy food or score. What was the point?
The chain links jingled. Terrible headed back through the hole in the fence, his body a shadow that didn’t appear to move but moved just the same.
Better tools existed to do the job, but the stick would have to work. Her body ached from trying to keep still and balanced as she leaned out over the circle, using the tip of the broken branch to ease the medallion closer.
It wasn’t working. Maybe if she put one foot in the circle, kept the other outside, she could get better leverage.
Probably not a good idea. Her heart, already beating rapid time from the speed, gave a sick little lurch at the idea. But she had to have that piece of metal. Had to. It wanted her to have it, and she wanted it.
She lifted her foot and planted it inside the circle, as far forward as she could.
Pain swallowed her leg, sinking in with teeth like thorns. She screamed and dropped to the ground, heedless of where she fell, tumbling headfirst into the remains of the circle.
Black. It was all black in there, and so cold, so cold her bones felt brittle, so cold she could barely remember what heat had felt like. Voices echoed around her like shouts down a wind tunnel, they were saying terrible things, they were laughing about death and horror and something in front of her had giant black eyes like hunks of obsidian set in its bony face and teeth dripping with reddish saliva…
Strength leeched from her body to pour into the dirt. She felt a hole opening beneath her, like the earth was becoming thinner somehow, and as it did the voice grew louder. Not taunting now. Cajoling, promising. For the second time in one night the dead called her, but this was seductive, not violent. If she let go she could have anything she wanted. If she gave up they would take care of her, they would erase all the bad memories and the pain and leave her light and free, filled with air.
She saw Terrible, his lips moving, but no sound reached her. All she heard were the whispers, words she didn’t recognize but understood. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of her voice what came out was shiny and red, a satin ribbon of air curling into the thick darkness around her. She could give in and it would all be over. All the pain, the misery, all of the memories, gone. What she’d been trying to achieve over the years with pills and powders and hard knobs of Dream, she could have it now, she could cease to exist and find the oblivion she couldn’t find in life.
She reached for it. Her fingers closed around something cold and hard, something that cut into her palm with its sharp fierce edge.
Fire shot up her arm. Her blood had activated the metal, fed it, what ever it had done, but the cold blackness turned to heat, unbearable blue-white heat.
Through the haze of agony she felt hands circle her ankles and tug. She’d started to let go of the coin, but now she grabbed it again, squeezing harder, the pain a blessing that kept her conscious in the seconds before Terrible yanked her out of the circle.
Her vision returned in a rush, going from nothing to a confused series of images that failed to imprint themselves on her brain. Terrible hoisted her up over his shoulder and ran across the field while her hand burned and her stomach protested. A sharp piece of chain link scratched her cheek when he dove through the hole in the fence; she almost fell as he wrenched the car door open and practically threw her into it.
Music blared and gravel spewed behind them as he tore out of the parking lot. Chess looked down into her clenched fist. Blood dripped through her fingers onto her black jeans, soaking through them. In her hand was a copper amulet.
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