Chess eating crackers—crackers stolen from the kitchens—in the stacks.
A minor crime, but it wasn’t the crime itself for which the Goody held a grudge. It was the way that discovery had led to a deeper, uglier one: that Chess had stolen the food because she wasn’t used to being fed on a regular schedule, that she had no ancestry, no family. A fairly common situation since Haunted Week, but not for Church employees.
The Goody’s thick eyebrows rose over her beady eyes. “Art thou working on a case, Miss Putnam?”
“I am, Goody.” Chess waved the file.
She got no reply, but she didn’t expect one. Instead, the door to her left clicked and she entered the Restricted Room, charmed as always by the displays of religious artifacts from the past, all sitting beneath the bright lights as if waiting, hoping, that one day they might be useful again, be something more than relics.
She knew it shouldn’t, but the benevolent smile of the fat golden Buddha in the corner made her feel safer. She smiled in return and set her file and her bag on one of the long, empty wooden tables.
Beneath the glittering gold cross on the far wall—another symbol of religions past—the Church kept shelves full of magical reference books. Chess knelt in front of them, scanning the titles. Eyes…eyes.
She’d used eyes before in magic, of course, but only as ingredients in other spells. Salamander eyes were sometimes used in poultices to heal energy deficiencies. Raven eyes could be dried and powdered and used in protection spells. But she’d never heard of human eyes being used for anything of the sort, much less being used in sex magic, and she had a feeling the eyes were more than simply spell ingredients anyway.
Finally she grabbed a couple of books and sat down with them. The first was a slim volume on sight magic; she had hopes for it, but it related more to psychic visions and spells for out-of-body investigating. That sort of thing was done by the Black Squad, Church government employees, as opposed to regular Church employees like Chess. They handled crimes mundane and magical, the breaking of legal codes as well as moral, whereas Chess dealt pretty much exclusively with the crime of fake hauntings—“conspiracy to commit spectral fraud,” was the official term—and with banishing the ghosts if they did exist.
The second book offered a little more information. It opened with a quote she’d heard before, about eyes as windows to the soul, and studied that idea from the perspective of magic.
Perhaps that was what the glyph meant, the sigil branded into Daisy’s skin and marked on the wall behind her? Chess pulled out her camera to examine the image from the night before, her mouth instinctively tightening at the sight of that horrible fallen face. She scrolled through the images until she found the one she wanted.
It didn’t look like a face at all, not really. Faces weren’t shaped like triangles. But the symmetry of it suggested it could be a face, or perhaps another body part. Terrible had said that Daisy’s was the first female body found, that not much had been left of the second victim—Little Tag, if she remembered. Was it possible someone was building a new body, a vessel for a lost soul?
Such things were rare, of course. She’d only heard of it happening, had never been faced with such a crime or even the faintest evidence of one. But eyes deteriorated quickly when not frozen; if they were indeed being used to give sight to an earthbound spirit, that spirit’s companion or Bindmate or whatever would need a fresh supply.
More deaths.
She pulled the sleeves of her red sweater over her hands and hugged herself, but the chill slithering up her body had nothing to do with the air in the room. Ghosts didn’t care who they killed; last night’s experience with Annabeth Whitman would have been a sharp reminder of that if she’d needed one. But the ghost’s summoner, the one who kept it earthbound, who fed it energy…
It shouldn’t have surprised her. Didn’t she know better than almost anyone what sort of filth humans were capable of? But it did, every time, a sort of weary, miserable surprise that someone out there had found a new way to create pain.
She flipped through the rest of the book but didn’t find much else, barely enough to fill a page in her notebook. She’d talk to Terrible about it later, he might have some ideas, might know more that would help. Probably would, in fact.
With a sigh she reshelved the books and checked the clock at the far end of the room. Almost noon. She’d have to look through the Church’s rune and sigil libraries another time—she already knew she’d never seen the glyph before.
One more place to check. Goody Glass frowned at her as she left the Restricted Room and headed for the long wall of files in the regular library. Chess ignored her.
The files contained—or were supposed to contain, as almost everyone forgot to update them half the time—all the information about every haunting or suspected haunting in Triumph City, about every building, every vacant lot.
And the files at the end…those were full of worse things than hauntings. Here lived the executed criminals and those who’d died of natural causes, both before and after Haunted Week. As she’d just discussed with Elder Griffin, murder scenes carried their own resonance; victims often hung around, trapped in the moment of their death, just as murderers often attempted to recreate their crimes.
Whoever the Cryin Man was, he’d be here, if they had any information at all.
The picture she found when she opened the file nearly made her drop the whole thing. As it was, she gasped loud enough for Goody Glass to give her a disapproving frown.
The Cryin Man—aka Charles Remington—had murdered ten prostitutes, all in the area that now covered Downside, back in the early nineteenth century.
And he’d taken their eyes. The photograph on the top of the stack of yellowed documents could have been the one on the memory chip in Chess’s camera, from the ragged, sawing cuts to the ice crystals forming in the coagulated blood. The poor woman.
Fuck. Just what she needed. A murderous ghost, come back for another round. So much for not getting too deeply involved in this one.
Her first glimpse of Pyle’s house—or rather, of the white stone wall surrounding it—did nothing to dispel her concerns or take her mind off the uneasy waiting sensation she’d had ever since she photocopied that file. The wall, broken by a wooden gate, hid the building itself but allowed a glimpse of treetops and the crest of a gray slate roof. Chess pulled up before the gate and rolled down her window, shoving Charles Remington, his victims, and Daisy out of her head. Time to work.
A mechanical voice emanated from a small steel box. “Name and business, please?”
“Cesaria Putnam, from the Church. I’ve come about your haunting.”
The gate glided out of the way and she drove through.
No, money was probably not a concern for Pyle. White walls, interrupted by shining windows, stretched wide across the winter-dead lawn. The house stood between naked trees, branches jutting aggressively like arms trying to hold it back. It might have been graceful, even beautiful, in summer, when the grass was green and the leaves softened the sharp edges. Now it simply stared at her with dozens of blank eyes, daring her to discover its secrets.
Chess followed the curving drive along the front—it seemed to have been designed so those approaching were forced to watch the building for as long as possible, or vice versa—until she reached a gleaming guard shack.
A second guard stepped out, clad in bulky dark-green trousers and a jacket of the same color that turned his shoulders into mountains. Not as big as Terrible, but not far off. A hat turned his features into a generic authoritarian blank, and he carried a clipboard like a weapon.
“Miss Putnam?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
His blue eyes ran over every detail of her face, impersonally, as though she were a sculpture he was going to have to draw from memory later. Finally he gave her a short nod. “Pull your car around there.”