Unholy Ghosts dg-1 Page 3

  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. N
o ghosts tonight.”

  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 Blackwood 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 slaughter house. 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?