Читать книгу Chasing Magic - Stacia Kane, Stacia Kane - Страница 8

Murder is a crime. Murder by psychopomp is an evil.

—Psychopomps: The Key to Church Ritual and Mystery, by Elder Brisson

No point in setting up a firedish inside the circle; that thing would either kick it over or smash it. But she could set one up just outside, and the smoke would drift into it. The faint breeze came from the west, so that’s where she set up, on the broken curb by the sewer grate.

Asafetida and ajenjible went in first, followed by corrideira—all she had—and some melidia. Whatever the hell that thing inside the body had once been, it was now a murderer, and sending it to one of the spirit prisons would be one of the best things—no, would be the best thing—that had happened to her that day.

Thick smoke started drifting from the dish, barely visible in the darkness settling over the street. The smell of it filled the air, filled Chess, and chased some of her fear away. That was the smell of Church, the smell of magic, the smell of things she knew how to do. Things she could do, and do well. She might not be worth much as a person, but she was a fucking good witch, and she could do this.

Iron had lessened the spell’s power before, so that was the first thing she grabbed, gritting her teeth against the sensation of alien hands scrambling her innards. Iron had lessened it and salt had held it, and the two of them together were pretty fucking strong. Stronger than the spell, she hoped.

She filled her palm with them, held them over the hot, fragrant smoke. “Power to power, these powers bind.”

Energy warmed her skin; she could practically see it glowing. Good. She took a deep breath and threw the iron and salt at the animated body still fighting against her circle.

“Cadeskia regontu balaktor!”

Blowback like a brick flung at her chest knocked her over. Her head hit the sidewalk with a thud she barely felt. The power was too strong, too dark, for her to feel anything else. It surged over her, buried her beneath it. She struggled for air.

Through her slitted eyelids she saw the body in the circle wavering, saw the ethereal glow of the ghost emanating from it. She’d done something, she’d managed to start separating them somehow, but not enough. Fuck.

Okay. Crow’s bone and wolfsbane, some black powder and blood salt. Ignore the throbbing pain in her head and get to work. Again she placed her hand in the smoke; again she said the words of power and flung the charged herbs.

This time she was ready for the backlash. It hit her, but not as hard, and she was able to keep watching.

The body—the killer, the ghost, the animated corpse, whatever she should call it—started to weave, its movements slow and staggering like a drunk looking for a place to vomit. What the fuck did it take to separate that thing? Usually the corrideira and ajenjible were enough, more than enough.

She tossed a chunk of snake onto the fire in the dish, gathered more salt in her hand, and scooped up some cobwebs to go with it. The cobwebs might trap the spell; that worked with some hexes, so why not try it here.

Without much real hope, she powered it over the smoke—purplish now from the burning snake flesh—and threw it. No. Just as she’d thought. This was bullshit. Anger rose higher in her chest every second, anger and a kind of frustrated determination. She should be upstairs with Terrible, warm and safe and high from Cepts and his body. Instead, she was on the street, looking more stupid every minute that she failed to break that spell.

Should she go ahead and summon her psychopomp? Yeah, the ghost-thing would probably hit her while she did the summoning, but it wasn’t as if she’d never been hit before. And her psychopomp could tear the ghost from the body—if she could get a passport on it.

The thought of touching that stump of an arm, ragged from where she and Terrible had sliced it in two and still dripping dark blood, made her want to be sick. But if she couldn’t separate them any other way … what else could she do?

Nothing she could think of, unless she wanted to be there all night. Which she didn’t.

Right, then. She dug into her bag, pulled out the silk-shrouded dog’s skull, and unwrapped it. Her psychopomp. In her right hand she grabbed her Ectoplasmarker and tugged the cap off with her teeth. She had no idea who that ghost was, so no way to design a proper passport for it even if she had time, but whatever. If she marked it the psychopomp would sense the marking, and hopefully take it instead of her.

She tucked more wolfsbane into her pocket to help hide the scent of asafetida on her skin from the psychopomp, and stepped into the circle.

It felt so awful in there, so awful, like stepping into a pool of cold murky water. A pool brimming with dead things, with sea beasts full of teeth.

The body sensed her, or heard her, or something. She didn’t know. What she did know was that it turned and walked toward her, waving that fucking disembodied arm—what the fuck, was it some kind of security blanket or something?—and making horrible grunting noises.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Terrible move. She shook her head, held up her hand. No. As much as she wanted him to, no. Too risky.

She braced herself and waited for it to come. Once it got close enough, she could scrawl something on it and duck away. At some point she’d have to fight the thing off her; she didn’t have a choice. But not yet.

It lunged. She managed to grab its arm above the wrist, avoiding the gruesome prize it brandished but not able to avoid touching it at all. Under her palm its flesh was warm and solid, as if it were alive. What the fuck did that mean, then? Because the thing felt like a ghost and she couldn’t imagine a living person was in there, so how the hell did its body still feel normal?

She guessed she’d find out later. She hoped she’d be alive to find out later, anyway.

Three circles would do for a passport. She scrawled them on quickly, tossed the Ectoplasmarker toward Terrible, who caught it, just as she knew he would.

Okay. Time for the psychopomp.

She let go of the body, ducked around it, and set the skull on the ground. Her left pinkie had stopped bleeding from setting the salt circle; she squeezed it hard to get the blood flowing again. Kept squeezing until her blood fell on the skull.

This wasn’t the ideal place or situation for a ritual—she didn’t have her stang, didn’t have her cauldron, didn’t have candles—but oh fucking well. “I call on the escorts of the land of the dead. I offer an appeasement for their aid.”

The skull started to rock. Something hard slapped into the side of her head, knocked her over. Her arm scraped the sidewalk. What the—shit, eeww. It had slapped her with the dead hand; her cheek felt as if someone had thrown an ice pack at it.

Ignore it. She lifted her right hand, pressed it against the body’s stomach to keep it away.

Then had to swallow, hard, three or four times, before she could speak without gagging. “I call on the escorts. Take this spirit back to its place of silence.”

The skull erupted into life, rising from the cement as blue light sparked in its eyes. Bones formed behind it, the dog’s skeleton flowing into being, skin and shaggy black hair growing over it. Her psychopomp. It would take the soul back to the City of Eternity under the earth—the hole had already formed, blurry shapes behind a thin place in the air—and it would stay there. Forever.

The psychopomp lunged. Chess ducked.

The killer beat at the dog with the arm in its hand, its grunts turning to howls. No. No fucking way was it going to defeat her psychopomp, no way. Psychopomps were— They always won; it was their job to win.

She had to get that arm out of its hand, and she had to do it without getting in front of the psychopomp, because it would give up on the embodied ghost any second and hunt for a soul it could catch. Like hers. The only other soul in the circle.

Hers might have been worthless—well, no “might have” about it, her soul wasn’t worth shit—but she still wanted to hold on to it for a while longer.

She needed something that would distract the killer, make it drop the arm, but not hurt the psychopomp.

Fire. She needed fire.

The killer’s grunts had turned into wails, loud angry moans in the silence as it beat the dog with its gruesome weapon. The crowd had stepped back. Everyone stood there watching, with their arms wrapped around themselves and fear in their eyes. Ha. They could join the fucking club.

She held out her hand to Terrible. “Lighter.”

He set it in her palm a second later, the black steel warm from being in his breast pocket, warm from his energy. She clutched it for a second, wishing she could do the same to him, then opened it and spun the wheel.

Flame burst from the top, six inches high and pale at the base, just like always. Good. How flammable the body would be she didn’t know, but maybe at least that shirt would catch fire. She only needed a distraction, not a full-on cremation.

The psychopomp appeared on the verge of giving up; its tail had ducked between its legs. It turned to look at her. Fuck.

No time like the present. Especially not if she had any chance of surviving. She jumped forward, fisted the shirt, and touched it with the flame.

As she did, the killer swung that arm at her again, hitting her in the back of the head. She ignored it, fought through it.

Thank fuck, the shirt burst into flame, and she scrambled away as the killer roared again and started to beat at its chest with the arm.

Chess gathered her breath. “Take this spirit back to its place of silence!”

The psychopomp obeyed. The killer still waved the arm around, but its eyes—what was left of them—focused on the fire eating its clothing. It didn’t see the psychopomp lunge.

One last howl from the killer, which turned into a squeal as the psychopomp grabbed its soul. The hole in the world behind it rippled again, like water running over glass; the psychopomp leapt through it, dragging the soul in its teeth.

The hole snapped shut, the skull hit the ground and shattered as the body fell on top of it, and Chess sank to her knees in the now-empty circle, wondering what the fuck was going on this time.

The corpse’s ruined head didn’t look any better under the dull glow of the refrigerated warehouse’s fluorescent lights. Its blood had dried a sticky brownish-red; the skin was pale, marked with the tread of Terrible’s boot and various scrapes from hitting the pavement. Even the six Cepts in her system didn’t help it look any better.

Chess held her hand over it for a second. She hadn’t touched the body at all since drawing the passport on it back in the circle. She didn’t particularly want to touch it now, but she had a feeling she was going to have to.

This time she wouldn’t forget her gloves.

Energy slammed into her palm, anyway, thick dark energy that set off a horrible ringing sound in her head, as if her ears had been boxed. Whatever the spell on the body was, it wasn’t pleasant.

But, then, she hadn’t expected it would be.

“What you think, Ladybird?” Bump drawled from behind a fur scarf. “What kinda fuckin witchy shit be this time?”

She hated to admit it in front of him. “I don’t know.”

Silence.

“I can feel the spell, whatever spell it is, and I can feel that it’s male—the spell caster is male, I mean—but I have no idea what the spell is. It feels like ghosts, too.”

“Be him soul inside him fuckin body do the magic, yay? Like him gone an died, then give a fuckin try to coming back.”

“Ghosts can’t cast spells,” she said, only half paying attention. “Do you know who he is? Who the body is, I mean.”

Bump dug something out of one of the pockets in his floor-length white fur coat. “Got us him fuckin wallet here, dig. Be Gordon Samms, it tell. Ain’t knowing him, I ain’t.”

“Had some owes,” Terrible said. He stood at her side with his arm around her shoulders, helping to keep her warm. “Lost he some lashers on the card games, were payin slow.”

Bump’s thin reddish eyebrows rose. “Yay? How much?”

“Six hundred, now. Won heself a game on the other night, paid he a hundred then. At the tables all the time, dig, ain’t could stay away.”

Gambling. That was one thing she’d never seen the point of, one addiction she’d never picked up. Good thing, too. She’d really be broke if she had.

Terrible glanced at her, then back at Bump. “Burnjack say him were yellin when him come onto the street, just jumped him on Yellow Pete, started beatin him.”

“Yellow Pete was the dead guy? The dead guy killed by this one, I mean.”

He nodded. “Were a street dealer, dig, down Seventieth.”

“So why was he near my apartment?”

“Ain’t knowing on that one. Could be him live there, maybe gotta dame there, family, ain’t know.”

Right. It didn’t matter anyway, did it? “Does Burnjack know what the ghost was saying? Did he catch any of it?”

“Asked he on that one, too. Said him only caught a word or two, thinkin be a name. Agneta. Agneta Katina. Be a dame, he said.”

Hmm. “Girlfriend? Wife? Daughter?”

“Naw. Ain’t married. Ain’t sure he likes the dames, dig. Never seen him with any.”

“Oughta give Berta the fuckin ask, yay.” Bump poked at the body with the tip of his cane, for no good reason Chess could fathom. “Do her got one onna street that fuckin name? Maybe her got some fuckin knowledge on it.”

Terrible nodded.

Okay, this wasn’t getting them anywhere. She hated to do it, didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t think she had a choice, either. “I need to get his clothes off.”

Bump snorted. “Ain’t had the thinking you into the fuckin dead ones, Ladybird.”

Chess gave that remark the response it deserved—which was none—and reached for the tattered, singed remnants of the shirt on the body.

Terrible was faster. He always was. “Ain’t you do it, Chess. Lemme, aye?”

His eyes caught hers. Warmth rose in her chest, spread through her whole body. Looking into his eyes—into him—was a high she could never get tired of. Bump disappeared, the mutilated corpse on the table before them disappeared, the icy air around them disappeared. It was just the two of them, standing so close the warmth of his body caressed hers.

She reached up to touch his face, meaning to pull it down to hers so she could kiss him, when Bump cleared his throat. Loudly. The moment ended.

“Thinkin we fuckin get on the move this fuckin night? Maybe you quit on the cuddle-ups, get some attention on the fuckin job, yay?”

Asshole.

Terrible reached out for the buttons on the shirt. And fell.

Chess was already moving when his eyes started to roll back in his head, thrusting her arm in front of him over the body. She couldn’t catch him, couldn’t stop him from falling, but she could at least keep him from face-planting into a corpse.

Or she could quit fucking playing around and figure out a way to make it stop happening. Another good idea might be to get her damn head together; she’d felt the magic, she should have known it would affect him. She’d been so busy getting mushy she hadn’t been focusing, and that was a Bad Thing.

He was out for only a second. That was usually the case when he touched something— Wait. What the fuck?

The body on the table—Gordon Samms’s—was empty. The soul inside it was gone. So there shouldn’t be much for the magic to work on, it shouldn’t still feel as strong as it did. Yes, she should feel it, of course, but not that much. And it shouldn’t be strong enough to do that to Terrible.

Nobody spoke as Terrible stood up. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t need him to. The color rising up his neck, the stiffness of his movements, spoke clearly enough, even if she didn’t already have a pretty good idea what he would say.

“Okay,” she said finally, tossing the word into the silence as if it didn’t matter. “So I’m not just feeling residual magic, I guess. Whatever the spell is, it’s still—there’s still a bag on him or something, there’ll be something there. Bump, you have his wallet, did anyone search his other pockets?”

Bump shook his head. “Figured on letting you have the fuckin job, dig, you the one got the handle on it.”

It was so cool the way he was always thinking of her. She suppressed the eye-roll and dug around in Gordon’s front pockets, stopping at the left one when she pulled out a spell bag about the size of a walnut. Darkness rolled up her arm in waves. Not good; of course it wasn’t, what did she expect?

She set the bag on the table near his feet, to check when they were done, and kept searching. Nothing else. Just the spell.

So why did his body still radiate magic, why did it still make her tattoos itch and sting the way ghosts did?

Terrible started to reach for Gordon’s shirt buttons again, then stopped. “All cool now?”

“No.” Her first instinct was to grab his hand and pull it back, but not only would he really not like that one bit—how childish did she want to make him look? She didn’t see it that way, but she knew he would—but she didn’t want to touch his skin with anything that had touched that spell. Like her gloves. “There’s something in the body, still.”

His face darkened; he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, still not meeting her eyes.

For a second she considered asking Bump to help her, but … yeah, like that was going to happen. No, lucky Chess got to strip the corpse all by herself.

Naked, it was even more pitiful—and gross, but she’d expected that.

What she hadn’t expected was the faint teeth marks—dog teeth marks, psychopomp teeth marks—on Gordon’s upper thigh. What she hadn’t expected was the familiar milky-blue cast on his skin, the coloring she hadn’t seen on his face and hands because they were mutilated or dirty.

“Oh fuck.” She jerked back, her hand automatically going to cover her mouth; she caught it just in time. “Shit.”

“What?”

Her stomach roiled and shifted. It didn’t matter, she tried to tell herself. Gordon Samms had to die, she’d had no choice, there’d been nothing else she could do. …

That was Fact, and Truth, and she knew it. But her throat still ached as she forced herself to speak. “He was alive. He— I thought it was a ghost stuffed into his body, that he was dead before he attacked Pete, even, but he wasn’t. He was alive. He was still alive.”

Bump and Terrible watched her: Bump with impatience, Terrible with concern, but neither with understanding. Right, of course they wouldn’t know.

“I killed him,” she said. “My psychopomp killed him. He was alive, and my psychopomp ripped out his soul and killed him.”

She would not throw up. She would not cry, either. She hadn’t had a choice. And, as she recovered from her initial panic, she realized that she really hadn’t had a choice. If he was still alive and moving—or at least, if his soul was still in his body and he was moving, what the fuck—after Terrible crushed his throat and head, then there hadn’t been any other way to kill him, and there hadn’t been any way to subdue him, and she’d done the only thing that could be done save for literally chopping him into pieces while he watched.

That made her feel better. Some. But still … she’d used magic to kill someone. She’d used her psychopomp to kill someone, and that was different from using a real weapon to save her life when she was being attacked. Using magic to commit a murder … that was an automatic death sentence.

Of course, so was killing a psychopomp and carving an illegal sigil into someone’s chest to prevent them from dying, and she’d already done those, so what the hell.

The thought almost made her smile—not quite, but almost. At least it loosened her chest enough for her to take a deep breath.

“You right, Chess?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Um, yeah, I’m okay. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out what’s inside him or whatever.”

Bump raised his eyebrows. “Any fuckin place I gots the thinking of where some shit maybe got stuffed into, I ain’t for fuck wanting get my fuckin look-see in.”

Eeww. She hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, I’m not really, either.”

Terrible shifted his weight beside her, his arm touching hers. “I cut he all open, aye? Straight down, we get a look inside.”

“I’ll check his mouth first,” she said, moving to do exactly that. What there was of his mouth; his teeth wobbled at odd angles—the few still remaining did, though she had no idea how many of them he’d had before Terrible used his skull as a footrest—and beneath the skin his jaw felt like gravel in a sack.

It made her job easier. His lips stretched open wide enough for her to fit her latex-covered hand inside; she wiggled her fingers in his throat, swallowing the sympathy gag threatening to rise in her own. The man was dead, after all. She could shove her hand all the way down into his stomach and he wouldn’t feel it or care.

“I don’t feel anything.” Except tonsils. Ugh.

Terrible pulled out his knife. “Straight down, aye?”

“I guess so.”

The point of the blade slid into Gordon’s flesh and disappeared, moving like a zipper’s tongue from the base of his throat to his groin. Terrible glanced at her. She shook her head.

“Yay, let he have the keeping on he fuckin cock.” Bump grinned. “Ain’t fuckin wanna see that come off nowheres.”

Ah, Bump. Polite as ever.

Silence reigned as Terrible made another cut perpendicular to the first across Gordon’s abdomen. He kept his left hand above the skin, making sure not to touch, but Chess wondered how strongly he felt it, how hard he was fighting against that horrible darkness rising like steam from Gordon’s innards.

He stepped back. “Cool?”

“Yeah, I—yeah.” What was she supposed to do, reach in and start pulling stuff out? Shit, what was she doing, why was she doing this? How the hell had she ended up there, in a freezer, about to shove her hand into a corpse like it was a cereal box and she was looking for a prize?

Did it matter? Addiction led to working for Bump, working for Bump led to falling in love with Terrible, and it would take weeks spent pawing around inside dead bodies to even come close to making her wish she didn’t have him. She guessed all things considered, messing around with body parts was a small price to pay.

That didn’t stop her insides from jerking a warning when her fingers closed around something she was pretty certain was Gordon Samms’s stomach.

“How’s it feelin, Chessie?”

“Really fucking gross,” she managed. “And yeah, still powerful. Can you cut this open?”

That was what did it. When Terrible cut the stomach open so she could see what remained of Gordon’s last meal … she barely made it to the wall before throwing up, humiliated to be doing it in front of Bump, humiliated to be doing it at all, but unable to stop herself.

Terrible’s hand in her hair, gathering it behind her and holding it out of the way. His other hand on her back, rubbing it in slow circles until she finally managed to get herself under control. “’Sall cool, baby, aye? No worryin on it, ’sall cool here.”

She started to raise her hands to her streaming eyes and nose but he stopped her, turning her instead to face him while he wiped her face with a rag he’d gotten from somewhere. It was smudged with motor oil on one side but clean elsewhere. Even if it wasn’t, she would have been grateful. “Thanks.”

“Aye.”

Bump nodded when she returned to the table. “Ain’t fuckin put the blame on you, Ladybird. Fuckin sick, yay.”

What? Had Bump—had Bump just been nice to her?

How the hell was she supposed to feel about that? Ugh. Who cared. She had way more important things to worry about.

Like the fact that as the pile of internal organs—ugh, ugh, ugh—grew, she wasn’t finding any other spell bag, no spell ingredients. But everything felt like ghosts and magic, every part of him she touched. As if the spell was part of him. How could that happen?

“Ain’t finding shit, yay, Ladybird?” Bump shook his head. “Got he all fuckin emptied up, what you fuckin do on the now?”

“I don’t know.” She eased the gloves off, trying but failing to keep the blood off her skin. When she got home, she was going to spend an hour or so in a very hot shower, and maybe Terrible could pour bleach over her every couple of minutes. “I don’t know. Let’s see what’s in the spell bag, I guess.”

She slipped on a fresh pair of gloves and jerked the tip of the iron blade she kept in her pick case through the black stitches at the top of the bag.

The rough edges of the fabric fell open, revealing a—well, damn. The spell was about the size of a walnut because it was a walnut—a large one, but a walnut all the same.

She dug the point of her knife into the crack in the shell and pried it open. Blood oozed out. Thick dark blood, so clotted that for a second it looked like some sort of rotted fruit inside the shell.

Her stomach gave another heave, but she ignored it. Not just because she didn’t want to go through that again but because part of her was honestly fascinated. How the hell had he—the same spell caster, the same man—done that? What the hell was that spell?

“Ain’t lookin so fuckin bad.” Bump leaned over the table, peering down. “Fuckin small, yay?”

“But really strong.” Were those clots in the blood, or was something else in there? “Blood … I think it might be corpse blood, like from a murder victim, or maybe menstrual blood. When someone’s using blood like that in a spell, they’re not fucking around.”

Of all the things she could have done without that day, having to say “menstrual” to Bump was—okay, not the biggest or the most important, no, but it was certainly on the list. Not because she was embarrassed; she wasn’t. She just didn’t want to have to discuss anything remotely related to the female reproductive system with him.

Sure enough, he grinned. “Yay, seen me some of that blood fuckin turn dames into—”

“There’s hair in there,” she interrupted, holding one of the hairs up with her gloved index finger and thumb. “See? It’s been tied in knots, too. I wonder if it’s his.”

It probably was. The fingernail clipping she found might have been, too. But the rat’s eye, the three sharply bent pins, the tiny pieces of eggshell and feather, the ball of cobwebs and wax—and were those fish scales?—definitely were not.

By the time she’d finished laying it all out in an orderly if grisly row, her neck ached. As did her head, because she had a pretty good idea what those ingredients were for, what the spell did. “I think that’s it.”

“Aye?” Terrible reached over, offering her a drag off his smoke. She took it. “What’s on with the blood, then?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s clotted, old, you know?”

“Naw, that ain’t it.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Too thick, leastaways what I’m thinkin. Old blood don’t get … rough like that, dig? Gets thicker, aye, an darker, but not like that.”

Well, she guessed he would know. Yeah, she’d seen lots of spilled blood in her life, but she probably hadn’t paid as much attention to it, had a chance to observe it as time passed, the way he had. “Yeah? You think something’s mixed into it?”

He shrugged. “Ain’t can say on that one. But that ain’t usual blood.”

“It feels kind of grainy.” She rubbed it between her fingers.

“Ain’t should.”

“Shit. I have no idea how to analyze it or whatever.”

“Ain’t you got you a fuckin lab, up you Church? They got the fuckin skills run it all through, yay?”

She stared at him for a second. “Sure, Bump, how about if I head on in there and ask if they’ll test the blood from a spell I found on the body of a man I killed with my psychopomp? That’ll be no problem at all.”

He hunched his shoulders a little, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Were only giving the fuckin ask, yay, no needing to get all fuckin rumbly-sharp on it.”

She glanced at Terrible, whose features were arranged into the carefully blank look he always had when she bickered with Bump. He’d been wearing that look more and more lately, hadn’t he?

Something to worry about later. “It might be some sort of powdered herb in there, or … well, almost anything can be powdered. Bones, animal parts—I don’t know how to figure it out, really. But whatever it is, this is a fuck of a spell.”

“Know what the purpose is?”

“Yeah, I think so. The hair, the fingernail clippings—it’s a binding spell. A control spell. I don’t know for sure how it works or how magic got inside him like that, but I think the spell is the reason why he killed Yellow Pete and attacked us. The spell made him do it.”

Terrible considered that for a second. “Be why he ain’t died, too?”

She nodded, the realization taking shape in her mind as she spoke. “His soul—if the soul is under that much control, I mean, if it’s been so strongly ordered to carry out a particular task, it’ll force the body to keep going. Like, you know how under hypnosis, people can be injured without feeling it?”

“Aye.”

“That’s kind of like what this is. His soul isn’t his own, it’s powered by someone else, which means his body is powered by someone else. So it doesn’t matter what happens to his body. As long as it can move, it will.”

They were silent for a minute, absorbing that. With every passing second the implications grew worse; with every passing second the blood on her gloves looked darker, more threatening.

Terrible finally spoke. “So whoever made that spell got heself a killer ain’t can be killed, aye? Got heself a weapon can be used anyplace.”

She nodded.

Bump raised his eyebrows, tilted his head. “Damn, then, Ladybird. Lookin like you got some fuckin tough work coming, catchin em all.”