LITMIR.BIZ

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doing anything by a tap on the door, the turn of the knob. “Gloria?”

      A man. Gloria’s boyfriend, or—no, her husband. Relief probably wasn’t the right thing for Chess to feel upon realizing she no longer had to touch Gloria, but she felt it anyway. And really, when had she ever felt the right thing?

      “Matt!”

      They hugged. They blocked the door. Damn. That would have been the perfect moment to slip out of the way, too. All that naked emotion … it made Chess feel like her hands and feet were too big, her arms and legs too long. Awkward and uncomfortable, like she was being forced to observe things that were none of her business. Which she supposed technically she was.

      Thankfully, Jillian poked her head around the door a minute later. “There you are. Come on, I want to show you something.”

      Chess angled herself past the weeping Warings—or whatever their last name was; maybe Gloria wasn’t a Waring anymore, since she was married—and followed Jillian down the short hall to the master bedroom. A decent-sized room, heavy on ruffles, taupe, and rose, with bowls of potpourri all over the dressers and the desk and the shelves of the TV cabinet. It smelled like a cinnamon stick had thrown up in there; how had they slept in that air? It made Chess’s nose and throat itch.

      Jillian opened a window, giving Chess a half smile as she did. “Pretty awful, huh?”

      Chess nodded.

      “We probably won’t find much up here—well, actually, we’re pretty sure we won’t. Like Trent said, ghosts are opportunity killers, and we’ve got a couple on the loose here. But we generally have a look around, just to rule out the idea that the victims were Summoning on their own, or whatever. Even good investigators can miss things, so we try to be really careful. You want to start in the closet there?”

      “Yeah, sure, but … what am I looking for?”

      “Anything unusual. Anything magical—they’ll probably have stuff like sleep-safes or luck charms or whatever, maybe some sex magic. Just bring those out here so we can have a look. And of course if anything seems really strange, let me know before you touch it.”

      Jillian pulled a white wad from her bag, which when she held it out proved to be a pair of latex gloves, cloudy with powder. “Here, put these on. And you should pick up a box at the Church store and always keep a pair or two with you. You’d be amazed how often they come in handy.”

      Chess snapped on the gloves, hating the medicinal smell and texture and the way they made her hands feel trapped. It was a good idea, though, she had to admit. Or it would be, if she ended up doing some kind of work where she might come in contact with magical items.

      Weird to be thinking of her future as something she chose, and not something that she was either forced into or did because she had no other options. Three years since the Church had found her, three years since they’d approved her scholarship and she’d left the Corey Home, and the idea still hit her sometimes, hard and fast like a pissed-off foster father’s blow to her head and leaving her almost as stunned: She might have an actual future. She would have an actual future, if she managed not to fuck it up.

      Jillian pulled a little velvet bag out from under the Warings’ bed. “See? It’s a—oh, no, just some rings. Huh. Anyway, go ahead and start in the closet, and let me know if you see anything weird or interesting or whatever.”

      Chess nodded and crossed the dull tan carpet to the walk-in closet. The Warings’ clothing was about as adventurous as their bedroom. Lots of earth tones and pastels, the colors nervous people wore so they could hide. Everything cut rather loose, so it seemed, but then Chess hadn’t really seen how big the Warings were, considering that they’d been chopped into pieces.

      Ugh, and she was going through their things. Like some kind of ghoul. Those people were dead, they’d been taken to the City of Eternity below the earth to live forever and they’d never be back, and there she was judging their clothing choices. It would have made her sick if she didn’t already know—had known for years—that she was a bad person, a twisted one with filth and darkness in her soul.

      She shut her eyes for a second, squeezing the thought from her head, and got back to work. Lots of pictures, boxes and boxes of them. Jewelry boxes, shoes, bags of fabric and craft stuff, a low white box … Oh, shit. “Jillian.”

      “Yeah?”

      “Come look at this.”

      Jillian appeared in the doorway, her hair shining beneath the overhead light. “Yeah, what’s—oh. Wow. Is there a license in there for that stuff?”

      “I don’t know, I haven’t touched it. Should I?”

      Jillian nodded. Chess reached into the box and lifted the Bible sealed in heavy plastic, the framed sampler embroidered with a quote from same under a large cross, a couple of pictures of Jesus. She’d never seen anything like it before—well, of course she had, the Church had plenty of artifacts of the old religions in the Archives, in the Restricted Room and the museums and—she’d seen that sort of thing before, was the point. But never like that, never in someone’s actual home. Certainly the kinds of houses where she’d grown up—the kinds of people she’d grown up with—weren’t really the type who would have cared about religion even if it wasn’t illegal.

      But the Warings’ items were in fact legal; Chess found the license at the bottom of the box. She’d definitely never seen one of those before. “It’s made out to the Warings and the New Hope Mission.”

      “Huh.” Jillian scanned the document, set it back in the box. “Well, I guess they were religious. I bet Gloria’s too young to remember it, though. She was born in ninety-two, so she would have been five for Haunted Week. That’s pretty young to really remember stuff like that.”

      “Should we ask her?”

      Jillian shrugged. “Maybe later. It’s not a big deal. Lots of people were religious before and wanted to keep a few things from it. We see it fairly often. As long as it’s licensed it’s okay.”

      “So should I set it aside, make a note or something?”

      “Nah, don’t worry about it. Keep looking.”

      About half an hour later Chess had found two small luck charms—ones she was pleased to note that she identified right away, even though they hadn’t covered all the permutations in class yet, ha!—some house-dedication supplies, and four protection spells, which seemed excessive, but what did she know. Behind them sat another bag, a small red velvet one. Shit. She knew what that probably was.

      She glanced toward the bedroom, where Jillian was going through drawers. Jillian would come pick the thing up for her if she asked. And she could ask. She was only eighteen, only a student; she could ask.

      Except that asking would make her look like a pussy. Asking would be the kind of thing Jillian might report back, with a sorrowful “I don’t think Cesaria is ready” sort of comment thrown in.

      Asking would be like admitting that something was wrong with her. That she was terrified; that she had reason to be terrified. That she wasn’t normal.

      So she didn’t ask. She gritted her teeth and reached for the thing. Maybe the gloves would help protect her, maybe they’d form some kind of barrier against—

      Or maybe the gloves wouldn’t do a damn thing, or at least not enough. Energy crawled up her arm, greedy sex energy eager to find a home. Someone else’s sex energy, forcing itself upon her, insinuating itself across her skin and down into her belly, lower down, dancing a slow cruel path through her body and making her heart kick in her chest.

      That wasn’t just the sex, either. That was panic, the bright painful cry of it in her soul, making her eyes sting. Shit, she couldn’t—couldn’t handle that, couldn’t do it, not in that strange claustrophobic room with its cloying too-warm air. It was too much, too much for her, hard hands on her skin, holding her down, her lungs fighting for oxygen, she had to—

      She

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