Unholy Magic by Stacia Kane

anyway. And if Arden wasn’t home …
    “I haven’t seen Arden’s room yet.” She turned to the girl. “Would you mind showing me before I go? That way you can be there while I look at it, it’s less like an invasion of privacy.”
    Arden didn’t look convinced, but led Chess down the hall to the second door on the left—odd, wasn’t it, that her room wasn’t directly opposite her parents’?—and opened it.
    Dark curtains on the windows turned the room into a cave. Chess picked her way across the floor, through the colorless, limp shapes of discarded clothing, and pulled the curtains. It only took a second to pop the wire out of the security alarm to disable it, and to unlock the window itself. It might be detected, sure, but it at least increased her odds of getting in easily when she came back later. She palmed the wire as she turned around.
    The room was … just a room. Posters of pop stars covered the walls—apparently Arden was not into movie stars, which wasn’t much of a surprise considering what her father did for a living—and clothes and schoolbooks covered every available surface. A sparkly pink cell phone and matching laptop sat on an ornate white desk, which was itself almost hidden by stickers and pictures and scribbled phone numbers.
    The rest of the room was dark blue and yellow, a surprising choice, but one Chess imagined Arden hadn’t made herself.
    More clothes exploded from the closet, and Chess suspected from the anxious sidelong glances the girl kept giving the half-closed door that she had something hidden in there as well, but there was no point in trying to find out what. Not when she could look the next night with a lot more ease.
    She gave Arden’s yellow bathroom a cursory glance—staying well away from the sinks—and made her goodbyes, taking with her Roger Pyle’s business card and a burning desire never to return.
    Merritt was nowhere to be seen as she climbed into her car and pulled away from the garage. They’d searched the vehicle—expertly, but she knew they’d done it. She could smell them, sense them, hard hands rifling through her belongings, feeling around beneath her seats.
    The wooden gate crept open for her once again and she was gone, speeding down the road, managing to get out of sight of the walls before she had to pull over and take her pills.

Chapter Seven
Worse still are those who commit the ultimate evil, who bind themselves unto the dead. No good can come of such an act; at the end of it lies only misery.
— The Book of Truth , Rules, Article 37
    “He could have made the brand, yeah,” she said, as Terrible slid the car up on the curb. The Johnny Cash CD cut off with the ignition, leaving too-loud silence in its wake. “It’s not something ghosts normally do, but it’s possible. Or he could have found it, or—I don’t know. It had to have happened right before she died, but I have no idea why.”
    “He brand them dames before?”
    “No. At least it wasn’t in the file, and there were—there were pictures.” More dead faces to add to the gallery that already followed her: Randy Duncan, Brain—the teenager she’d failed to protect a few months back … Brain’s pale little face refused to leave her. She’d had to put her new bed in a different location, against the opposite wall. Every time she walked into her bedroom she’d seen the shade of that still, wide-eyed figure, silent and cold on her old bed.
    “So he pick up new tricks, aye, in the City?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    He accepted this without comment and left the car, the removal of his weight lifting his side by several inches. Chess waited in the still-warm interior until he came around and opened her door for her, a habit of his she’d gotten used to.
    Without the dead body on the ground, the street somehow managed to feel even more threatening than it had the night before. More empty. Daisy was gone, and already forgotten, as if by dying she’d erased