LITMIR.BIZ

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she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.

      Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.

      She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.

      Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.

      And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.

      Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.

      She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”

      They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”

      Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!

      Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”

      “No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.

      Not that it mattered. Anyone in that room already knew they were coming.

      She’d dropped her flashlight but had a cheap plastic lighter in her pocket; she flicked it on, and Monica found the right key and opened the door.

      Empty.

      Well, not empty. It was a classroom. It had classroom things inside it. But it was empty of people, and people were what Chess needed. Her heart would have sunk if she hadn’t been expecting to find no one there, and if she wasn’t still buzzing from adrenaline.

      The adrenaline gave her extra speed to cross the room. That door wasn’t locked. It hit the wall with an echoing bang when she flung it open, when she flung herself into the hall and found nothing but silence. More emptiness. Of course.

      Beulah might be a bitch—well, okay, to be fair, Chess couldn’t yet say that with absolute certainty, just with a lot of it—but she wasn’t stupid. She started opening doors down the right side of the hall, peering into each room, leaving them open so that Chess could look into them as she opened the doors on the left.

      “Where else could they be? Where could they have gone?”

      Beulah shook her head. “Anywhere. The stairs at either end lead to the science hall and the cafeteria. From there they could keep going into the rest of the school, or out to the parking lot. There’s some sort of activity going on in the gym right now, they could slip in there and we’d never know it.”

      Fuck! It was about what she’d expected, but fuck! anyway.

      The adrenaline started to fade, leaving her hands shaky and her chest and head aching. She could take care of that, but … Damn it. She pressed her palm to her forehead for a second, took a deep breath, and headed back into the drama classroom. The odds of her finding anything useful in there were slim to none, but she’d look anyway. At least she could make a note that she’d looked, that she’d—

      How had they known?

      She hadn’t called before heading out, hadn’t told anyone at Mercy Lewis to expect her. Nor, to her knowledge, had anyone at the Church, although of course she’d have to double-check that.

      She hadn’t spoken to anyone when she arrived except Beulah, Monica, and Laurie. Hadn’t seen anyone, and although technically anyone could have seen her when she arrived, nothing about her—her scuffed and dusty boots, her black jeans, the faded blue polo she wore over a black long-sleeved T-shirt, or her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut—screamed “Church employee.” Quite the opposite, in fact; she’d deliberately worn street clothes.

      So how had anyone known who she was, to sabotage the catwalk while she was on it? How had someone not only known who she was, but made it into the drama room in time to start fucking with the bolts? Not to mention the wires.

      That suggested a planned attack. More than one person.

      Had it even been aimed at her at all? And if not, what the hell was the point?

      She grabbed her notebook to scribble all of that down while it was fresh. Especially because now that the shakes and flashbacks were starting—she could feel the way her hand gripped the pen too tightly—and she knew she’d be alone for, oh, four or five hours at least, she planned to head home, crack her pillbox, and try to forget it all as quickly as possible.

      Someone had tried to kill her. Or at least, given the way the catwalk had hit the stage fairly harmlessly, to scare the fuck out of her. Whether they knew she was Church or not, someone had just fucked with her in a particularly unpleasant way. A particularly unpleasant way that wasn’t already on her list of things she took drugs to forget, anyway.

      Unless, of course, someone had made some calls. Both Monica and Beulah had made bathroom or office stops before they headed to the theater, so either of them could have picked up the phone. Laurie could have done so after they left the administration area. Shit. Four hours on the case, two of them spent doing research at Church, and she’d already survived a murder attempt. That didn’t bode well.

      But it boded better than what she saw on the wall, what she found on the wrench lying on the floor nearby. Just two little smears of it. Two little smears of what she hoped was Vaseline or some similar substance, but which the knowledge she’d gotten from her Church training and the knowledge she’d gotten from a lifetime of having everything go wrong every damn time told her was something much worse.

      Ectoplasm.

      After all of that—after inspecting the roof above the theater and finding nothing at all, after finally getting out of the building she was already beginning to hate on more than just general principles—the last thing she expected to see was Lex, leaning against her new car, smoking a cigarette and grinning at her like she had dirty words written on her forehead and he wasn’t about to tell her.

      “Hey there, Tulip. Ain’t usual seeing you this side of town, aye?”

      “What are you doing here?” They shared one of those awkward kiss-hug-or-what moments, ending up kissing on the cheek. Odd, that. She and Lex had never really been cheek-kissers, but since they weren’t kissing anywhere else these days she guessed it was the thing to do.

      Especially since it gave her another few seconds to figure out how to react to his presence there in general. As far as she knew, Lex didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around schools; why would he? He’d gone

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