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by Stacia Kane

Downside Ghosts - 3.6

Chapter 1

“Love is not the most powerful magic. But it feels like it is.”

—Truth for Teens, a Guidebook for the Young Adult, by Elder Carroll Chapter 1

Most—no, all—of her cases started the same way: A homeowner or building resident called the Church to report a haunting. The Church assigned a Debunker to the case to investigate the haunting and hopefully disprove it, to make sure the person in question wasn’t just faking in order to get a nice fat settlement in exchange for the Church’s failure to protect them from the dead.

After all, just because the population was smaller thanks to Haunted Week twenty-four years before, when the ghosts had risen and killed every living person they could, and just because the Church of Real Truth was in charge now, didn’t mean people didn’t still need money. They did. Just like Chess. She needed money for food, for rent, for the electric bill and the cell phone bill and all of those other things. And of course for drugs: the things that made her life worthwhile.

So Chess worked, and she worked hard, and she’d handled a lot of cases and gotten a lot of bonuses for disproving a lot of hauntings. But she’d never had a case before where a neighbor called the Church to report the ghost and the homeowners insisted there wasn’t one.

She’d rather not have the case. It was probably a huge waste of time; time she could be spending with Terrible, in his big gray bed. Just thinking about him made her smile, sent a cheerful little shiver up her spine. Love was terrifying, and weird, and sometimes uncomfortable. But it was so fucking sweet.

It was also going to fuck up her concentration if she didn’t stop thinking about it. With effort she tamped down the heat rising in her chest, reached into her pillbox and popped a couple of Cepts to help chase the feeling away.

The street looked like any other in Cross Town. Like any other street in any of the suburbs of Triumph City, really, or any in the District. Houses with smooth blank faces, all of them alike, watching each other across a wide expanse of concrete, two shiny cars in each driveway like weapons laid out on a table before them. So living-the-good-life.

So upwardly mobile.

So rotten. The people living inside those assembly-line buildings were people who gave a shit what others thought of them, and that made them dangerous. That made them people who’d sell out their mothers if it meant getting into the right person’s address book.

Chess knocked on the pale blue front door of number 422, a bland two-story with peaked windows and a tiny afterthought of a front porch. The woman the door revealed when it opened looked like every self-satisfied suburban real-estate agent Chess had ever seen. The scent of smug drifted from her in waves.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Brent?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Chess Putnam, from the Church. You made a complaint about a haunting—”

“Yes, yes, get inside. Hurry, please.” Mrs. Brent’s clawlike fingers wrapped around Chess’s upper arm and pulled, exhibiting the sort of wiry strength Chess usually associated with desperate speed-pumpers on a long run. Chess almost stumbled over the threshold; Mrs. Brent slammed the door behind her.

The second she flipped the lock, Mrs. Brent’s entire manner changed. Her face didn’t move—Chess didn’t think it was capable of that, not with all the surgeries and injections the woman had obviously had—but her shoulders relaxed, her back straightened.

“There. May I offer you a drink, Miss…Parkman, did you say? Are you related to Judge Parkman, by any chance?”

“It’s Putnam, actually. No, thank you, I don’t need a drink. Why don’t you just tell me about the ghost? What made you call the Church?” Mrs. Brent motioned Chess into the wide living room to the left, so full of beige it was almost invisible: the interior design equivalent of a bowl of porridge. The couch was comfortable enough, though, especially when sweet opiate peace started drifting through Chess’s bloodstream from the Cepts she’d taken outside.

“I’ve been watching them.” Mrs. Brent sat too close, leaning in. Like she and Chess were pals or something. “I’ve seen the ghost. In their kitchen one night. In the living room another. All hours of the night it’s wandering around in there, glowing just like it has a right to be there. Just like it isn’t disgusting to—”

“How did you see this?” The last thing Chess needed was for Mrs. Brent to go off on an indignant little tangent. The sun had just started to set and the Runners were playing at Chuck’s later, and she was going to meet Terrible there and needed to get ready first.

The sooner she left Mrs. Brent’s self-righteous pseudo-mansion the better.

The woman colored slightly beneath her stiff, ultra-frosted blonde hair and matching stiff, ultra-frosted makeup. “My kitchen windows face their house. I’ve been working on tracing some more ancestors lately—we go back over two hundred and fifty years, isn’t that wonderful?—so I’ve been in there working, making tea and such, you know. And from my desk there I can clearly see that ghost running around their house. It’s terrifying.”

Finally. “Can I see the kitchen?”

“Of course.”

Chess followed her down a hallway lined with posed family photos: Mrs. Brent, a balding man running to floridity and fat, two kids with toothy grins. Typical family. Typical house.

So average they could move out and another family could move in and no one would even notice. Just being there made Chess itch.

“See? Right here. This is my desk.”

Not so much a desk as a section of granite countertop without a cabinet below, really, and two small drawers. Neat stacks of paper sat next to a closed laptop computer. The Brents were online, then. Good. Chess made a quick note in her pad: Check internet records re Brents. It wasn’t unheard of for people to conspire together, after all.

“When I sit here I see right through their windows, see?” Right through was a bit of an exaggeration. Mrs. Brent wasn’t that much taller than Chess’s own five-foot-six, and Chess had to hold herself in a hunched sort of squat over the chair as if it were a public toilet in order to see the Solomon house. So Mrs. Brent was nosy. Not a surprise.

“I saw it more than once.” From her stack of papers Mrs. Brent produced what appeared to be a list, all typed out on plain white paper, printed in a “cheerful” font in bright green ink. “I’ve noted all the dates and times here, as you can see.” Chess scanned it, pretended she cared. “Can I take this?”

“Of course, sure. That’s going to help you, right? I can testify. I’m ready to testify anytime. Those Solomons, her with her jingly jewelry and her tacky long skirts, and him, he’s some sort of…some sort of hippie, or something, he owns some organic store or something. Just look at their cars.”

Chess couldn’t. The house blocked them. Nor could she see in any other windows of the Solomon home, which belied Mrs. Brent’s statement, but whatever. Busybodies liked to exaggerate. It made them feel important. “Are there any other windows that face their house?”

“Just the landing.”

“Can you show me?”

Mrs. Brent kept up her stream of brittle chatter as she led Chess back down the hall and up the stairs—not about the Solomons anymore, but about the country club and some ball being held there, and her children’s school, and whatever other shit Chess didn’t give a fuck about. But from the landing Chess could indeed see into the Solomons’ living room, which Mrs. Brent termed “ghastly,” presumably because the Solomons had used colors that didn’t match their skin tone.

A little blue sportscar sat out front. That must have been the vehicle that annoyed Mrs.

Brent, although Chess couldn’t figure out why. She supposed it looked like some sort of superfast threat, but only to someone who didn’t know anything about real cars. What it actually looked like was a midlife crisis. Terrible’s Chevelle would leave that thing in the dust.

“When they had their parties, people parked all over the lawn. Our lawn, too. Sometimes they’d leave tire marks. And—”

“Parties? They do that a lot?”

“Almost every weekend until a month or so ago, I think. Sometimes they have their parties in the dark, too. If you know what I mean.” Mrs. Brent’s mouth twisted in disapproval.

“They were having…adult parties?”

“I suppose you can call them that. All sorts of people, about a dozen, and they’d play music for an hour and then the lights would go off, and all we could see was maybe a little bit of light. And then everyone would leave a few hours later. I’m not complaining, but you tell me what normal kind of party only lasts until ten or eleven at night.” How the fuck would Chess know? She’d never been invited to a party in her life, at least not as a guest. As a child—before the Church found her and made her a witch, made her one of them, gave her a real life—she’d been the entertainment at a few, sure, but she’d stopped looking at the clock early on, when she realized the hands only moved slower when she paid attention to them. And in Downside, where she lived, eleven at night was practically dawn. Things were just getting started.

“Is there anything else you can tell me, Mrs. Brent? Have you noticed any strange sounds coming from the house? Have you experienced anything—chills, things moving without you having moved them, feelings of being watched, that sort of thing?” Mrs. Brent shook her head. “How can I keep that from happening? I have two children, Miss Pitman. I don’t want them in danger just because the Solomons live like hedonists.”

“Putnam. And I’m afraid there really isn’t, no. They don’t tend to drift much, though, not when they’re on their own. If there’s a ghost—”

“If? I’ve seen it. I know it’s there.”

“If there’s a ghost, it’s probably there for a reason. Some sort of connection to that house or that piece of land. That’s what we usually find, anyway. So chances are it won’t drift over here.”

Mrs. Brent followed Chess back down the stairs. “So when will you get rid of it? How long will that take?”

“I have to prove its existence first.”

“But I know it’s there. I saw it. You know, my husband went to school with Javier Ramos, the Elder, and I’m sure when he tells Javier about your refusal to—” That was it. Chess stopped short on the stairs and fixed the woman’s plastic face with a dead-eye glare. “Mrs. Brent. I am following Church procedure, and Church procedure in these situations is very clear. Elder Ramos will tell you that himself. I assure you I’m going to do everything I can to keep you and your family—and the Solomons, and everyone else—safe. But it can’t be done in a day. Okay?” Mrs. Brent sniffed. “Well, that’s fine, but I hope you have a resolution to this soon. I have a very important dinner party the week after next and I can’t risk something happening that night.”

Right. Never mind the possible deaths or anything. Never mind that ghosts were basically just killing machines and if the Solomons had one it was only a matter of time before the thing built up the strength to attack them, Mrs. Brent’s social standing was on the line. Another typical thing about this typical woman, and Chess was starting to choke on the thick fog of snobbish conformity polluting the air.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

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.”

Chapter 3

Mrs. Solomon—Margaret Solomon, née Margaret James—stood in her doorway wearing some sort of dashiki-thing, her long rust-colored hair hanging almost to her stomach.

Her feet were bare, her face innocent of make-up. A cloud of sandalwood incense smoke drifted out around her in an annoying hippie fog.

“But we don’t have a ghost,” she said. She started to fold her arms across her rather considerable chest then apparently thought better of it. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time.”

Liar. “I appreciate that. But I’m going to have to come in and investigate anyway.”

“You can’t—”

Chess already had her hand on the paper; as Mrs. Solomon started to speak, she pulled it from the folder she carried and held it out. “This is an Order of Relinquishment, which certifies that I have the right to enter this home anytime, for any reason, with or without your approval.”

Two more sheets. “This is an Order of Non-Culpability, which says anything I may damage in the course of the investigation isn’t my responsibility to repair or replace. And this one is an Order of Domain, which says you must leave these premises at any time I ask and stay away until I permit your return. All of these Orders are subject to my discretion, and failure to obey any of them is grounds for a prison sentence.” Mrs. Solomon examined the papers. Her hand shook ever so slightly, a faint twitch that made Chess’s eyebrows rise. Nervous? Good.

“Now. Will you step aside and allow me to continue my investigation, or do I need to order you out and call the Squad?”

Mrs. Solomon stepped a foot or so to her right. “Come in, Miss…?”

“Putnam. It’s right there on that form. Thank you.” The sandalwood smell got worse when Chess stepped over the threshold onto the woven raffia mat on the floor; patchouli joined in when Mrs. Solomon moved. Ugh. Both of those scents were…well, suspicious, actually. Yes, they were very popular ones among the wheat-germ-and-whole-grain crowd, but they were also strong enough to mask a lot of other scents. If the Solomons had summoned a ghost into their house—and they had, Chess knew they had—they would have used some sort of incense or burned some sort of herbs. For that matter, if they were harboring a ghost they might want or need to keep something burning all or most of the time.

Though why in the hell anyone would want to harbor a ghost Chess had no idea. Why?

Because they liked taunting themselves with death, liked seeing how far they could push it before they actually did die? Because they hated themselves and wanted to die but couldn’t bring themselves to—

The thoughts stopped there. Ghosts and drugs were not the same thing.

Right?

“My husband isn’t home at the moment.” Nerves were obviously getting the better of Mrs. Solomon. The Orders Chess had given her still shook in her hands; when she changed her grip she left soft damp spots where her fingers had been. “He’s at the store.

He owns a store—Earth’s Blessings? Organic foods, farmed sustainably? You know, people say we don’t need to worry about the environment anymore because the population is so much smaller, but they’re so wrong, it’s still incredibly important, don’t you think?”

“Sure.” Whatever. The rat skull and spine were gone, Chess noticed. Damn, she would have liked to touch the piece, to see if it had been used recently in a Summoning. She still could, but that would require either asking about it or conducting a full search with Mrs. Solomon standing there, which she didn’t want to do. Better to come back that night with her Hand of Glory to put the Solomons into enchanted sleep so she could do a really thorough search. Without having to listen to Mrs. Solomon babble, barely pausing.

“…And people are really starting to catch on, I think, one day we’ll convince everyone, we just have to raise our voices together in joy, you know, and make sure people know how beautiful life can be if they just let it.” Chess resisted the urge to roll her eyes and headed for the window on the far wall, the one visible from the Brents’ landing. Sure enough, a thin layer of salt covered the sill.

Salt, and a few runes scratched into the wood. The window at the front of the room facing the street was similarly covered. Chess reached out, let her hand rest just over them to feel the faint tickle of energy on her skin.

“Isn’t it something, that stuff on the sills? It was like that when we moved in, we have no idea where it came from, but Doug—that’s my husband, Doug—said they were probably protections of some kind, and we poured salt on them to neutralize them just them case.”

Another lie. Was the woman really so naïve that she didn’t realize Chess knew she and her husband were the house’s first residents ever?

“Why didn’t you call the Church?”

“I’m sorry?”

Yeah, sure she was. Chess looked up, met Mrs. Solomon’s earnest brown eyes. “Why didn’t you call the Church? When you found the runes here, I mean. Someone would have come out and helped you.”

“Oh. Oh, right, well, we just didn’t think of it, we didn’t want to bother anyone, you know, it didn’t seem important, really.”

She didn’t ask if they were in fact important, or what they meant, or even if Chess recognized them. Chess hadn’t expected her to.

Next they wandered into the kitchen, decorated in a horrible mustardy color with brightly painted clay masks and woven baskets dotting the walls. Magic in the room, definitely. If Chess hadn’t felt it sliding under her clothes, reaching out to tickle the back of her neck, the louder, more frantic tone of Mrs. Solomon’s voice would have told her: “You know, we don’t know anything about those things, we just want to live our lives, you know, and give something back to the earth and society, we want to contribute, that’s what we’re all here for, to learn and to teach.”

“You’ve never had any sort of problems? Discomfort? Prickling feelings on the back of your neck or your arms? Sudden chills? The feeling someone is watching you?”

“No. Nothing like that. We, wouldn’t we know if we had a ghost? And we’d want to report it, wouldn’t we, so we could get a settlement?”

“Some people use ghosts as weapons.” The runes: now that she could see them more clearly she picked out Egam and Bonro. Ghost runes, summoning runes. Spirit home runes, used to bind a spirit to a particular place. Big surprise. “Or to gain power.”

“Why would we want that, we don’t want that, we’re not that kind of people.” Chess just looked at her. What did it feel like to be that innocent, that trusting?

Everyone was that kind of people; it wasn’t even a kind of people, it was just people.

And Mrs. Solomon, for all her “I love everyone, life is beautiful la la la” shit, was no different from anyone else. She obviously wanted something badly enough to break the law, and whatever she wanted was obviously something that benefitted no one but herself. Something that could very well be harmful to everyone else.

Mrs. Solomon followed her through the rest of the house. Three bathrooms, four bedrooms with one acting as an office. A nice place, really, if one was into that sort of thing. Which Chess wasn’t.

The master bedroom was huge, almost as big as Terrible’s warehouse apartment. Nature pictures and a few bright paintings hung on the walls. A satin nightgown in a deep wine color lay shriveled like a discarded snakeskin on the unmade bed; a few vibrators and various other adult toys—at least Chess assumed that was what they were, she’d never seen some of those things before—sat on a shelf next to it.

Well, well. More clothes covered the floor in little clumps. Mostly men’s clothes, button-up shirts and khaki trousers, boxer shorts and boxer briefs, jeans and t-shirts. Average clothes.

So why did something about them bug her?

She didn’t know, and with Mrs. Solomon standing there chattering and blushing harder by the minute she wasn’t going to figure it out. She snapped several pictures to look at later.

Mrs. Solomon had just finished telling her about how love was the most powerful force on earth when sounds drifted up the stairs.

“My husband’s home.” The woman’s bright smile hardly moved as she talked. “So you can meet him, and I’m sure you can see there’s no ghost here, and we can call this whole thing finished.”

Oh, man, this lady was not going to give up, was she? It didn’t change anything, of course. It was just irritating.

Doug Solomon appeared to be a few years older than his wife, with a salt-and-pepper beard and matching hair that reached his shoulders. His tie-dyed t-shirt—ugh—had a slightly stretched collar, and his jeans had holes in the knees. Brown sandals completed the look. Double ugh.

He wasn’t as nervous as his wife. “That bitch next door needs to mind her own business.

It’s because she wants us out of here, you know. We ruin her image of the perfect neighborhood. She didn’t like our parties, she doesn’t like our music, she doesn’t like our clothes or our cars or anything else.”

“Why do you think that is? I mean, can you think of some reason why she dislikes you so much?”

Mrs. Solomon sniffed. “She disapproves of our lifestyle.” Chess looked at them blankly. They stood beside each other against the living room wall like suspects in a lineup, but instead of looking at Chess they looked at each other, reached for each others’ hands. It was almost…well, no, it wasn’t almost. It was. Sweet.

It felt like a private moment, one Chess shouldn’t be seeing, and it made a little spark of pain flare in her chest. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be working or watching the Solomons. She wanted to be with Terrible, wanted to touch him, to have him touch her. It…it actually physically hurt that he wasn’t there.

She’d always thought it would hurt to be in love and not be loved back; that it did hurt, when Terrible wasn’t speaking to her and she thought she’d blown it for good. She hadn’t realized that the pain didn’t come from whether or not the feelings were returned.

The pain came from love itself, and nothing could stop it or keep it at bay.

Nothing except drugs, anyway, and as soon as she got out of there she was going to take some.

“We’re polyamorous,” Mr. Solomon said, breaking her reverie. “Moxie—Margaret, I mean, I call her Moxie sometimes—and I often invite other men to share our bed. We had parties for people like us, who enjoy celebrating their intimacy and love by sharing it with others.”

Chess wasn’t about to comment on the whole idea of “celebrating love,” no matter how many people were involved. “So Mrs. Brent knows you have these sex parties, and that’s why she hates you?”

“They weren’t sex parties.” Mrs. Solomon seemed stronger with her husband present and holding her hand. Some of the tension had left her voice. “They were just parties for people we like, who like us. And if the mood was right and we found ourselves wanting to express ourselves physically, we did.”

“It’s not illegal,” Mr. Solomon cut in. “It’s not adultery if she has my permission and I have hers.”

Even if it were illegal, Chess wouldn’t give a shit. Not her department. Besides, the Solomons were facing a much tougher charge. Adultery was a day in the stocks outside the Church, assuming a betrayed spouse wanted to press charges; summoning a ghost was a death sentence.

“Why did you stop having them? The parties, I mean.” The Solomons glanced at each other; Mr. Solomon spoke up. “We’ve just been busy lately, is all, and tired. But we will have them again. We’re not going to let that nosy bitch keep us from living our lives. What we do is none of her business, and we believe in spreading love around, that it’s positive and right to spread love around, and we’ll keep doing it.”

Mrs. Solomon leaned closer to her husband, rested her head on his shoulder. “If it’s never happened to you, you don’t know. The…the energy we can raise together, the joy we fill the room with…it’s beautiful.”

Mr. Solomon twitched. Not a big twitch, nothing Chess would have noticed had she not been specifically looking for it. But a twitch was a twitch, and Mrs. Solomon had mentioned raising energy, and now Chess knew how they were summoning ghosts. She just didn’t know why.

Speaking of twitching… It was time to go. She had some pills in her bag with her name on them.

She stood up. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time this afternoon. You’ll probably hear from me at some point in the next few days, so don’t leave town or spend the night elsewhere or anything until further notice.”

“We have a vacation home in Crestview,” Mr. Solomon said. “We were planning on taking a long weekend—”

“Sorry. You need to stay here until my investigation is complete. I’ll try to finish it as quickly as possible.”

Not that it mattered. When she finished her investigation the Solomons would go to prison and then to the City of Eternity below the earth where the dead lived forever.

Where humanity was safe from them, because a ghost aboveground was a fucking killing machine, and the Solomons were putting thousands of lives at risk.

One last thing. Chess stopped at the door, held out her hand. “Thanks again, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon. I’ll be in touch.”

Mrs. Solomon shook first. Energy, yes, but not particularly strong or powerful. It was definitely in the air, in the house, but that was only to be expected. Especially since the woman was so open. She had no protections, no “psychic armor” for lack of a better term, to keep her energy inside and away from people. A born victim, really. Just a twist of fate had led her to being a villain instead.

Mr. Solomon was different. His hand touched Chess’s, and energy shot up her arm and made her tattoos vibrate. She glanced up at him just in time to see a flash of silver disappear from his eyes.

Mr. Solomon was Hosting.

Chapter 4

“Like that dude Tyson, aye?” Terrible slid the Chevelle up against the curb two streets away from the Solomons’ house. “Got a ghost inside.”

“Right. He’s not as creepy, but he’s still sharing his body with a ghost. That’s why they have all those sigils and shit on the windowsills and doors. They’ve made their house a spirit home to keep the ghost there.”

Terrible got out of the car, came around to open Chess’s door for her, a little habit of his.

She’d wondered a few times where it came from, why he did it; certainly he hadn’t had a mother or father to teach him. He’d grown up like her. Well, he’d grown up both better and worse than her, sleeping on the streets or being taken care of for a week or two by the occasional drunk or lonely junkie instead of being moved from foster home to foster home like she’d been, beaten or raped by a string of shithead rent-a-parents, starved or treated well all according to chance.

“Why do you do that?” she asked, as they started walking toward the Solomon house with his hand engulfing hers, making her feel safe. “With the door, I mean. I always wondered.”

“Ain’t you like it?”

“I do, I just wonder where it came from.”

“One of Bump’s dames. Brenda, were her name. Told me I should.”

“Bump’s women taught you a lot of things.”

“Aye.” He grinned down at her. “Recall I tell you on Lisa?”

“The one who taught you how to read?”

“Ain’t all she taught me.”

She stopped, and gave his hand a little tug to make him do the same. His puzzled expression relaxed when she reached for him, wrapping her arms around his neck to press her lips to his. “I think she did a very good job.” His hands slid further down her back, all the way down to hold her bottom and pull her closer. “Aye? Thinkin maybe I forgot me some, maybe you oughta give me some reminding. True thing, ain’t wanna lose the knowledge.”

“Later.”

It sucked to pull away from him, but she had to. If nothing else, they stood in the middle of somebody’s lawn in a strange neighborhood at one in the morning. Not really the time or place to start taking off clothes.

He obviously disagreed. His strong arms stayed around her, trapping her against him as he kissed her again. Harder this time. Deeper. Deeper still, until her blood pounded in her veins and her hands wouldn’t stop moving, exploring his back under his shirt, tucking themselves into his jeans.

“Let’s get us back in the car.” His voice, low and thick in her ear, made her shiver.

“No.” One last kiss before she pulled away again. This time he let her go. “Let’s just get this done. Then we have the whole night. In bed.” The streetlight on the corner cast half of his face in shadow, but the visible half clearly showed him calculating how likely he was to get her back into the car.

Not likely. She tugged on his hand. “Come on. It won’t take long, I promise.” They started walking again.

“So why you thinking he got it on? Tryna kill somebody? Power, maybe? You get any feel from him why?”

“I didn’t get much of a feel for either of them, really. They’re just…lame. The only halfway-interesting thing they seem to do is sleep with other people together.”

“What?”

“Didn’t I—? Oh, no, sorry, I didn’t have time to mention it before. They have an open marriage or something, and they both sleep with other people, and sometimes I guess they both sleep with that other person at the same time. A threesome.”

“Damn. Them out here got so much they don’t mind givin the share, aye?” They’d reached the Solomon house, once again dark and silent inside. Oh, they had a ghost. They just weren’t scared of it, didn’t feel the need to turn on lights.

Stupid. Lots of people—especially people who’d managed to build themselves a little power by borrowing from others in a gathering like the Solomons had done—tried to summon ghosts. Some of them succeeded, too. And most of them died. A ghost couldn’t be controlled, couldn’t be reasoned with, or at least something like ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them couldn’t be. Their humanity…changed, after death. Disappeared, really. All ghosts wanted to do was kill.

“I didn’t think of it that way,” she said. Funny, that. But he was probably right; he usually was. These people didn’t mind sharing because they always knew there’d be more. They never doubted it.

This time he was the one who stopped, tugged her back to him. His hands were warm and solid on the sides of her face, cradling it while he kissed her. “Got some knowledge for you.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

His lips touched her forehead. “Don’t give a fuck what else I got. Ain’t never sharin you.” Sometimes he looked at her and their eyes met, and it felt like time stopped. Like he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking into her, and like she was doing the same to him.

She reached up to stroke his face, his thick muttonchops rough and soft at the same time against her fingertips. “Me either.”

She’d always loved his smile. Even back in the very beginning, when she’d thought he was ugly and, well, terrible, she’d noticed it. She’d been so stupid then not to see the rest, to waste those months because she was scared or whatever the hell her problem had been.

“C’mon,” he said finally, pulling away. “Let’s get us inside, aye?” Chess knelt on the cement slab that called itself a porch and pulled the Hand of Glory from her bag. Terrible stood by silently while she lit the candle in its palm, whispered words of power. The click—or whatever it was, she always thought of it as a click—when the spell set came back to her a second later. She turned back to him and nodded.

A minute with her lube syringe and lockpicks got them inside the house. Even in the middle of the night the scent of incense assaulted her as if they had a pound of it on the fire.

Terrible sniffled, his face hidden in the dark. “Likes they some stink-herbs, aye?”

“Yeah. I think they’re using sandalwood to cover up something else.”

“An they all asleep? Ain’t wake up?”

“Nope.” She pulled her flashlight out of her bag. “The spell lasts until I put out the candle, so they’re in enchanted sleep. You could shoot a gun in here and it wouldn’t wake—”

His lips cut her off, taking hers in a kiss that refused to be denied. She knew that kiss.

Knew it meant that he had no intention of stopping until both of them were exhausted, and if she wanted him to stop she needed to say something fast. The trouble was, as his hand slipped under her shirt and up to slide over her breast, as he pulled her bra cup out of the way so he could roll her nipple gently between his fingers, she didn’t want him to stop. She never wanted him to stop, not ever.

This was a subject’s house. This was so wrong, she shouldn’t even have brought him along. If the Church found out about it she could get into some serious trouble. Even Chess, whose file looked pretty damn good—certainly the best Debunking record in the District—would get a big-time slap, if not a day in the stocks, for this.

“Gots it all to weselves, aye?” His warm breath on her throat, her ear, his teeth gentle on her flesh. “Just you an me.”

She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t, because she knew she should be saying no, telling him to wait until they got back to her place or his. But the words refused to come. Instead she just made a gasping sound, almost like a whimper.

He kissed her harder, his tongue sliding past her lips to find hers. Metal clinked; he’d popped open his belt buckle, and his other hand left her breast to undo the buttons of her jeans.

“Want you so bad, Chessiebomb. Now.” His teeth on her neck, biting harder. “Aye? Now.” The Solomons had several bean bags dotting the floor in their living room. Hippies.

Terrible lowered her onto one of them, reaching over to yank another closer and tuck it under her head. The cold heavy cotton shocked the bare skin of her lower back, the suddenly-bare skin of her bottom when he slipped off her panties and pushed them down along with her jeans.

His back under her palms, so warm and solid. His chest so strong, covered with the thick hair she’d never imagined she’d like as much as she did. Covered on the left side over his heart by the scar she’d made, the shape of a binding sigil that had kept him alive the night he’d been shot. That sigil might still be keeping him alive for all she knew.

But he was alive, and that’s what mattered to her. It was all that mattered as she let her palm run down his stomach to play over the thick blunt head of his cock, all that mattered when he gasped above her.

He pushed her hand away, catching her right thigh in the crook of his elbow as he did, thrusting into her before she had a chance to realize what was happening, yanking a cry from her throat then quieting it with his mouth. The beanbag sighed beneath her, shifted as he started to move slowly, carefully, making little circles with his hips, dancing in and out of her for endless delicious minutes until she dug her heels into the backs of his thighs to urge him to speed up.

His hands stroked the sides of her face, slid up into her hair, over her breasts. They gripped her hips and tilted them up, holding her steady for him, his fingers digging into her skin hard enough to make pain mingle with pleasure and drive any other thoughts from her head. She didn’t want to think about anything else, anyway. What was the point, what else was there?

Nothing. Only him, his hand shifting again to slide down between them and touch her in the spot he knew would have the greatest effect. His body driving into hers, against hers, wrapping around hers even as she wrapped around him. His face above hers, his eyes half-glazed and focused on her. Completely on her, like there was nothing else in the world.

The beanbag shifted beneath them with every thrust. She twisted her arms around his and used them to brace herself so she could lift her hips to meet him, heat building, pressure building like white light pooling in her pelvis, like a star about to supernova.

He gasped her name. His hips moved faster, harder. The rest of the room disappeared; she didn’t feel the beanbag beneath her, didn’t see the ceiling over them, didn’t smell the horrible incense. She was flying and the only thing holding her to the earth was Terrible’s hands, Terrible’s weight above hers. Terrible putting her back together when she burst apart beneath him, clutching his arms. Terrible gasping louder, pushing her harder, speeding his pace even more, totally absorbed. She heard his breathing grow shallow, felt him swell inside her, watched his face change as he shuddered over her and fell into her arms.

Chapter 5

Their breath barely had a chance to return to normal when headlights flooded the front windows and the sound of an engine idling outside made her lift her head. What the fuck?

Oh, no.

Terrible looked at her, the same thought reflected in his eyes. But he was faster, leaping off the beanbag and peering out the window. “Cab in the drive.”

“What? They— Shit! Shit, shit! They weren’t home, they’re not here asleep, they were out. Fuck, we need to get out of here.”

“Ain’t got time. Them outta the car, dig.”

She tried to remember the layout of the house as she snatched up her stuff from the floor. “Down the hall there’s a closet. Come on.” This was one of the stupidest situations she’d ever been in on a case. Fuck! Thankfully it appeared the Solomons didn’t use the closet often; an ironing board, a few boxes, and what looked like an exercise machine of some kind, covered in dust, huddled against the walls. Enough room for both of them to get their jeans back on.

“Hopefully they’ll go to bed soon,” she whispered, leaning back against him. She blew out the candle on her Hand.

She had every right to be there. As she’d told Mrs. Solomon, the Church granted her authority to enter anytime she chose, at any hour of the day or night. But getting caught was…bad form. Among Debunkers, not getting caught was a point of pride.

Of course, there was the added complication that she’d brought her…well, boyfriend, though as always that word was too small to encompass what he was to her. That could be a problem.

Terrible’s lips tickled her ear. “I could just knock em out, aye?” She laughed softly, tilted her head to kiss him. “I somehow think that wouldn’t be good if the Church finds out.”

Voices filled the air: Mrs. Solomon, laughing about something. The door closed behind them. Chess leaned forward a little to hear.

“I’m tired,” Mrs. Solomon said. A male voice mumbled something Chess didn’t catch, and Mrs. Solomon laughed. “Right, Joe.”

Joe? Mr. Solomon’s name was Doug, she’d called him Doug earlier. But maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was her boyfriend, or some guy she’d picked up, or who the hell knew what.

Chess tilted her head back, turned her face toward Terrible’s. He leaned down so she could reach his ear. “What did the guy look like? Outside, I mean, when he got out of the car. What did he look like, did you see?”

“Weren’t too light, but lookin…like them out here, dig. Clean. White buttoned shirt. Had he a beard, them brown pants an shined-up shoes. All straight.”

“And it was just the two of them?”

“Aye.”

Chess had tossed the beanbags back into an approximation of where they’d been; it seemed like she’d done all right, because no alarm was being raised. Instead, murmurs and soft laughs drifted back from the living room. Were they going upstairs or what?

She rubbed her arms, shifted her weight. Hoped Mrs. Solomon and this Joe person would get the fuck upstairs so she and Terrible could sneak out. The incense smell, so strong even in the closet, made her nose itch; her arms itched, her chest—

Shit. That wasn’t a normal itch. That was ghosts: the tingling, burning kind of itch they always caused when their energy hit the magic imbued in Chess’s tattoos. There was a ghost in the house, a ghost nearby. But Mr. Solomon was the one Hosting, and his name wasn’t Joe, and the man Terrible described didn’t sound at all like Mr. Solomon: She doubted Mr. Solomon had ever worn trousers and button-down shirts in his life. The man owned a business and ran it wearing torn denim, so…

The lights in the living room hadn’t gone on, and—oh, shit—little sounds started making their way into the closet, sounds that were unmistakable indications that Mrs. Solomon and her companion were doing some “celebrating.” Terrible pulled back Chess’s hair so he could kiss her neck. “Be in here a while, aye?”

“Maybe he won’t last long.”

Terrible’s short laugh made his chest move against her back. “Aye, maybe so.” Mrs. Solomon yelled something, something that had something to do with cowboys, if Chess heard right, and— Wait. Wait a minute.

Mr. Solomon was Hosting. He shared his body with a ghost, but Chess would only feel that when the ghost was “out,” so to speak—when it had control of his body. The underwear on the floor in the bedroom came back to her. Of course. One man preferred boxers, the other briefs. No, Mr. Solomon didn’t wear khakis, he wore jeans and t-shirts, but there had been tidier clothing on the floor, right? So the ghost wore button-downs, the ghost wore trousers. She honestly didn’t think she’d ever seen anything like it, heard of anything like it in six years of Church training and almost four more of Debunking.

People didn’t Host spirits and just…let those spirits exist as another person using their body. They Hosted for power. They worked with a ghost but didn’t allow the ghost independence. How fucking dangerous was that? What was the matter with these people, did they not realize what a ghost would do if given control of a body?

Mrs. Solomon had been laughing and talking to the ghost. Laughing, talking, and calling it Joe. The man inside her husband’s body. What had Mrs. Solomon said? “We believe in exploring the pleasures of the body,” or some shit like that? Yeah. Some exploring.

Well, she hoped they’d enjoyed it. They wouldn’t be exploring too many bodily pleasures in their prison cells.

Chapter 6

Mr. Solomon had come home at about five the day before, so Chess gave it until almost seven before she arrived at their front door and gave it a happy little knock. She’d been stuck in that damn closet for almost an hour last night while Mrs. Solomon and the ghost in Mr. Solomon’s body had themselves all sorts of fun in the living room. At first it had been funny. Then it was just boring. Then annoying.

But now she had the forms and herbs she needed and she was going to bust them for their rather creepy sex game, and now she had three Cepts and a couple of lines of speed working their warm and delightful way through her bloodstream, so she had reason to be cheerful.

Mrs. Solomon obviously didn’t feel the same. Her face darkened when she saw Chess on that pitiful porch.

“Hi, Mrs. Solomon. I’d like to talk to you and your husband.”

“We really don’t have time right now, Miss Putnam, I’m afraid—”

“It’ll only take a few minutes.” Chess pushed past her into the living room, where she plunked herself down on one of the two armchairs and started messing about with the papers in the file she’d brought. Not that she needed to. She knew where they were, which papers she needed. But it made her look official, and distracted her from the sandalwood smell.

“This isn’t—”

“Come sit down.” Chess’s smile was starting to hurt her cheeks.

Mrs. Solomon looked toward the kitchen, from which Mr. Solomon was emerging with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. “We were just— Doug, can you tell her we’re busy?”

“Maybe Joe can tell me,” Chess suggested.

The Solomons froze. For some reason, the sight of Mr. Solomon, sandwich still in hand, mouth full of food, body stiff as a board, made Chess want to giggle. Or, well, it was probably a combination of Mr. Solomon looking rather silly and how fucking good she felt.

Good physically—great physically—and she and Terrible had slept late and spent the afternoon hanging out in his big gray bed, and he loved her and she loved him and that was the most amazing thing. Which made her feel good, well, non-physically, too.

“Come, sit down,” she said again, indicating the couch. “Let’s talk, and there are some forms I’d like you to sign. I have a list of attorneys for you—you’ll probably want one, of course, but—”

“Please don’t.” Mrs. Solomon’s voice broke. “Please. It’s not what you think.”

“Oh? It’s not Mr. Solomon here Hosting a spirit so you can have sex with it?” A long silence. Mr. Solomon sat down, placing the sandwich on the side table and resting his hand on Mrs. Solomon’s knee. She covered it with her own. Kind of a sweet little gesture, a sad one.

But ghosts were dangerous. Not to mention that what the Solomons were doing could conceivably be ghost abuse, which wasn’t any less serious than Summoning ghosts in order to kill people. They’d broken the law for their kinky thrills, and they had to go down for it. So to speak. In the legal, being-imprisoned-and-executed way.

Mr. Solomon cleared his throat. “It’s not like that. It’s— Joe is…”

“He’s our third,” Mrs. Solomon said. “He’s our lover. It’s not just sex. We love him.” Right. Sure they did. “Mrs. Solomon, regardless of why you’re breaking the law and endangering your neighbors—”

“I would never hurt anyone,” Mr. Solomon interrupted, and at the same moment Chess’s skin started trying to leave her body. Silver covered his eyes, a thin sheen Chess could still see through. Like a shiny film. “I know what you think but I wouldn’t.”

“You’re Joe, I assume.”

He nodded. “Joseph Bayer. And I am not a killer. I’m not like that. I— Doug and Moxie…I love them. I love them, and they love me.”

A trickle of…something…started crawling up Chess’s spine. Discomfort, maybe? Sadness?

What?

Mrs. Solomon glanced at her husband, or rather, at the ghost in her husband’s body, then turned back to Chess. “We used to have parties, as you know. One week we decided to try summoning a ghost. I know, Miss Putnam. I can’t imagine now why we took such a risk, but we did.”

“They summoned me,” Joe said. “I saw the hole and I leapt for it. Miss Putnam, you can’t imagine what it’s like in the City, how cold, how—”

“I’ve been there.”

Definitely discomfort now. Yes, Chess had been to the City of Eternity, the enormous underground cavern where the dead were imprisoned. The enormous underground cavern everyone seemed to think was a beautiful, peaceful place, the enormous underground cavern in which everyone was thrilled to know they’d live forever. Not Chess. To her it was a hell she never wanted to visit, a place so horrible it made even living worthwhile.

Joe’s shoulder relaxed. “Then you know. They’re…they’re more normal, when no living people are around. They’re just like regular people, most of them. But some of them…they never get over being dead, and they’re so angry. It’s awful. It’s awful to be around them. Doug and Moxie saved me.”

“We started summoning him every week,” Mrs. Solomon continued. “And eventually he started hanging around after everyone left, and…we fell in love.” Again her voice went hoarse. She cleared her throat and went on, her eyes damp. “We did some research. We found out how Doug could Host Joe and how we could make the house a spirit home to keep him safe. Our friends all helped us do the rituals. And we’ve been together ever since, the three of us.”

Joe smiled; he leaned over and kissed her forehead. “The three of us.” The silver sheen left Doug Solomon’s eyes. “We love each other. Joe and I can talk, you see, we experience things together. I’m never alone, because he’s there. Moxie is never alone, because we’re both here. We share my body, and I’m happy to share it with him because…because I love him.” He coughed, wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand like a little boy embarrassed at being caught crying.

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Mrs. Solomon sniffled. “But we’re just…we’re in love.

Joe is our third. He’s part of us. He’s…he’s just part of us. He’s like the missing part we never knew was missing, and we can’t— To lose him… Please, please don’t.” Chess shifted in her seat, looked up at the ceiling, over at the far wall, Mrs. Solomon’s sobs cutting into her flesh. Her own eyes stung. Yeah, she did understand. She did know.

Six months before she wouldn’t have, and she probably would have been calling the Squad at that very moment.

Which was what she should be doing. No matter what the motive, Hosting a spirit was illegal. Consorting with a spirit was illegal. The Solomons were committing a serious crime.

But she’d done it too, hadn’t she? That sigil on Terrible’s chest, the one saving his life—

that was a serious crime. A forbidden sigil. The psychopomp—a hawk, which had been coming to collect his soul the night he’d almost been killed, the psychopomp she’d shot dead because she couldn’t bear to lose him—that was a serious crime. If it was ever discovered, if anyone ever learned that she’d killed that hawk to prevent it from carrying his soul to the City, that she’d illegally locked Terrible’s soul to his body to keep him alive, she’d be executed. They wouldn’t give a shit that she was Church, that she had a great Debunking record, or that she’d done it because the thought of a world without Terrible in it made her literally want to die. Even the City wasn’t as bad as a life without him would be. She’d committed a capital crime, and if that was discovered she would die for it.

But it would be worth it, because that crime had meant she wasn’t alone anymore, that she would never be alone again. It meant some of the emptiness inside her was gone and would never come back as long as he was there to fill it. It meant that she actually had someone she could trust, someone she could depend on, someone who made her feel special and beautiful and good, like a whole person, like someone who wasn’t dirty and wrong and worthless. He did all of that for her because he loved her, and because she loved him, and every day she thought about that with the kind of gratitude she’d previously only felt for the Church and various pharmaceutical companies.

Terrible was… He was a miracle in a world without miracles, and she couldn’t believe her luck. And there was nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, that she wouldn’t do to keep him in her life, because without him it wouldn’t be a life at all. So, yeah. She knew how it felt to find part of herself in someone else.

Mrs. Solomon was still sobbing. Mr. Solomon had his arms around her, whispering to her.

As Chess watched, his eyes changed; now he was Joe telling Mrs. Solomon how much he loved her, how much he loved Doug, that he always would. His tears fell onto her hair.

They were breaking the law. Chess’s job was to bust them for it. Her job was to keep the world safe and to uphold the Truth.

She swallowed. “Joe…you understand my concerns here. You are a ghost.” He glanced at her over Mrs. Solomon’s head. “I do. But I swear to you, I’m not like that.

I’m human. I’m as human as I was the day before I died ten years ago. I would never harm any living person. I was a doctor, I spent my life healing the sick.” This was so wrong. This was so, so wrong.

But it was all she could do, because she couldn’t look at them huddled together on the couch crying, couldn’t listen to them murmuring to each other, and do something she knew in her heart was cruel. She couldn’t do it because she couldn’t forget how it had felt when she saw Terrible lying so still on the broken sidewalk and knew he was gone forever unless she did something fast.

She tore off a piece of paper from her notebook and closed the file. “Joe, Mr. and Mrs.

Solomon, this is my cell number. I expect you to use it if anything changes. I mean it.

Even if it’s simply that Joe starts to feel angrier than normal. I can take care of it, and you won’t be arrested. But you have to tell me, because if you don’t…if you don’t, we all get busted.”

“What?”

“You need to keep me informed of what’s happening. I need you to swear. I need that to be a magic-bound oath, one you’ll be physically compelled to keep. That means I’ll be putting a magical imperative on that one action, do you understand? And it’s connected to me.”

Mrs. Solomon’s eyes, wide and disbelieving, fixed on Chess, like watching her would keep her in place. “You… I don’t understand. You, you’re not…”

“I’m not turning you in, no.” Chess put the papers back into the file. Good thing she hadn’t told her supervisor, Elder Griffin, what she was on her way to do. She could pass this off easily as the Solomons liking to watch movies in the dark and Mrs. Brent being paranoid. “Provided you agree to my terms. The oath, the phone calls if anything goes amiss. And please, be more careful about what you let your neighbors see, okay?” She expected gratitude. She didn’t expect Mrs. Solomon to burst into tears again, or to throw herself pretty much into Chess’s lap. She didn’t expect Mr. Solomon to fall to the floor and curl up into a fetal position, practically wailing with joy.

Fucking hippies.

Two hours and three more Cepts later she unlocked the front door of Terrible’s apartment and slipped through the magical wards she’d put up as another layer of protection from things both alive and dead. Terrible was sitting on the couch reading a car magazine, Johnny Cash’s “Flesh and Blood” playing in the background. Waiting for her.

“Hey, Chess. You right? All finished?”

She set down her bag and toed off her shoes, pushed them up against the wall. The way she always did, because that’s where they belonged. Because this apartment was where she belonged.

Because with him was where she belonged.

He set the magazine down when she reached him, opened his arms so she could sit in his lap. Her head fit perfectly into that spot just above his collarbone, where his neck met his body. Where she could bury her face in his warm skin and breathe him in.

His arms wrapped around her. “Chessie? You right?” She nodded, closed her eyes for a second and let it wash over her: Happiness from the drugs sliding through her veins. Happiness so bright and strong it burned her heart, because of where she was, because of who she was with. Happiness because now the empty space inside her, the space where everyone else kept love and good memories and peace, had a little bit of those things inside it.

Happiness, too, because she’d done something to help other people feel that way, no matter how nervous it made her when she really thought about it. Hell, that couldn’t be avoided. Love and nervousness went hand in hand, she’d learned; love could be snatched away at any moment, love could end in destruction. Usually did, as far as she knew. But then, what didn’t?

But it wasn’t ending just now, and that was something she could feel good about.

Something she could trust. And she did.

“Yeah, right up,” she said, and planted a kiss on his jaw. “Just glad to be home.”

Content

Home
by Stacia Kane
Downside Ghosts - 3.6

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6