outer edges of her eyelids, bright red lipstick that bled into the papery skin around her mouth, bright pink spots on her cheeks. She’d even painted a beauty mark over her lip on the right side.
“You ain’t thieves, are you? You don’t look like thieves.” The woman frowned at Terrible, taking in his enormous frame, the black hair still messy from Chess’s hands, the thick mutton chops and hard dark eyes and scars. “Well, maybe he does.”
Chess bit her lip to keep from laughing. Terrible was better at hiding that stuff than she was; when she looked at him, his expression hadn’t changed. She could see it, though, the glint of amusement in his eyes.
Except it wasn’t all funny. It was suspicious, too. Hadn’t he just said nobody lived there? Who the hell was that woman?
“Ain’t been here afore,” he murmured, then, to the woman in a louder voice, “Aye, then. How much you wanting?”
The woman stared him up and down again, then turned to Chess. Chess couldn’t tell if the woman approved or not, but something in her face changed. She turned her back, raising one clawlike hand in an impatient “come on” gesture, and started walking away. The tulle skirts, yellow-gray with age and grime, billowed and shifted in the wind.
“Maybe we should just leave,” Chess said, but Terrible shook his head. Which she’d expected him to do.
“She’s needing to eat, too, dig. Iffen she owns the place, guessing I oughta pay her.”
“She’s creepy.” Damn it. Her body still hummed and throbbed; she wanted to go home. She wanted to dive into the big gray bed with him and stay there until the sun set behind the crumbling buildings across the street.
“Aye.” He dipped his head at the Chevelle. “Can wait in the car, if you’re wanting. Ain’t guessing this’ll take long.”
“And send you off alone with Miss Havisham? I don’t think so.” More like, “No fucking way.” Even knowing he could handle just about anything that might happen—people weren’t terrified of him for no reason—she wouldn’t do that. Not only because he was everything to her, not only because she was mildly curious, and not only because the whole reason she was there with him to begin with was she’d just finished a Debunking case and so they hadn’t gotten to spend much time together in the last few weeks.
It was because warning bells were going off in her head. Something didn’t feel right about this, and the auto graveyard was just the kind of place where witches who liked to play on magic’s bad side would hang out to do that playing, and the woman sure as fuck looked to her like she could be one of those witches. Or like she could be someone who knew those kinds of witches, or even like someone who’d be victimized by those kinds of witches. Terrible could handle any kind of physical attack; Chess didn’t doubt that for a second. But a magical one? That she wasn’t so sure about.
He smiled, getting the reference like she’d known he would; he hadn’t read the book, but she’d told him the story once. “Thinkin she attack me iffen she gets me inside on my alones?”
“Hey, I owe you a prize, is all. I don’t want you to forget.”
He kissed the side of her head, took her hand to start following the woman’s waving skirts back through the aisles of junk. “Ain’t forgetting that one. True thing, Chessiebomb.”
It wasn’t easy keeping up her cheerful mood on the journey. Stacks of dusty metal loomed over them. Cracked windows shifted slightly in the wind and caught the weak sunlight like mosaics of a single color; thick elderly cobwebs waved and shook. It was like being in a horror novel illustrated by Dr. Seuss. And with every step the sound of that dreary song grew louder, boring into her head like a drill-wielding ghost, and Chess felt more and more like something was wrong—not wrong in the someone-else-could-be-in-trouble way, but wrong in the
She held Terrible’s hand tighter. He squeezed back, absently, without looking at her; he was too busy looking around, with his chin up in that way he had that made him look like the predator he was, like he was hunting.
They reached the end of the makeshift hallway and followed the woman around a curve Chess hadn’t noticed before. A stretch of weed-choked gravel extended a few feet beyond the last pitiful dead car, a walkway bordered by a torn and rusted chain link fence. It used to be a fence, at least. All that remained were a few posts and patches, torn steel doilies fighting the breeze.
Down the walkway to the right, in a clearing, sat the house. It was a much bigger house than Chess would have expected, a long ramshackle structure with a sagging roof and a termite-fodder porch hanging off the front. Silence fell the second she saw it; the song had ended, but before Chess had time to be glad, the opening notes played again. A disc on repeat, or a record player starting over and over. The thought of finding that record player and smashing it to pieces grew more tempting by the minute.
But as soon as they stepped onto the patchy dead lawn in front of the house—littered with rusted metal and bald tires and sun-faded chunks of plastic—she forgot about the music. That was magic she felt, crawling up her legs from her feet, wrapping around her in the air. Not strong, no, but magic just the same. Unpleasant magic, too, from the way it itched. Shit. She glanced at Terrible. “You okay?”
“Aye.” He did seem okay, too, which was a relief. Why she expected him to not be—worried that he wouldn’t be—didn’t make sense, considering that the sigil Elder Griffin had helped her design for him had been working just fine, but still. She couldn’t help it. Especially since it was her fault he was so vulnerable to dark magic, her fault because of the sigil she’d carved into him to save his life the night he’d been shot. That the problem seemed to have been solved didn’t make it right.
The woman had already ascended to the wide, unscreened porch, and was standing with the door half- open, looking back at them. “Well, hurry up. We don’t have all day.”
Actually they pretty much did, but whatever. Chess didn’t want to spend it there, and she knew Terrible didn’t either. So she hurried up, and in a few seconds they were climbing the creaking, splintery stairs to the porch.
This got more fucked-up with every step. Paint flaked in huge chunks off the house’s exterior walls, paint the color of rotten egg whites. Dead plants—that might have been just because of the cold, true, but Chess didn’t think so—lined those flaking walls, bare brown sticks below a faded wooden sign that read, “The Hudsons.” The screen on the door was torn.
And beyond it... beyond it was some sort of ode to violated health codes disguised as a kitchen. Water stains and shreds of wallpaper. Filthy hardwood floors sagging with age, the boards so covered in muck that squelching sounds filled the air as they walked. Dirty silver cardboard stars hung from the ceiling—what was that about?—and red ribbons dangled from the cabinets. A stove covered in layers of baked-on food; a sink piled with dishes.
And the smell. Mold and dust that made her sneeze, unwashed bodies, rotting food, and the cloying, nauseating fugue of cheap rose perfume. It made her want to gag almost as much as the thought of the germs and bacteria tap dancing on her skin did. She shuddered.
“Vincent will be back tonight,” the woman—Mrs. Hudson?—informed them, turning right into a hall that stretched, it seemed, the entire length of the house. “It’s our anniversary. Fifty years we’ve been married. I can’t wait to see him again.”
Chess hoped Vincent didn’t have very high hygienic standards. But then, if he was married to this stranger- by-the-second woman, he must already know what sort of state that house was in. Chess had been inside some shitty buildings in her life, but this place went beyond even some of the “homes” she’d lived in as a child.
Mrs. Hudson gestured toward the kitchen table piled with papers and plastic containers and dirty clothes. “You can sit there, if you want.”
Yeah... that wasn’t going to happen. Chess didn’t much feel like sticking to a chair, and she definitely didn’t feel like inviting diseases to set up camp on her clothes. She took a few steps after the woman instead. The magic she felt increased. Still not strong, but still there, and still worrying. Had Mrs. Hudson been doing magic, or did she just have some magical objects—spellbags or whatever—buried in the mountains of junk?
It wouldn’t be unusual if she’d been doing magic; lots of people did, trying or buying little spells or glamours, and the Church encouraged it. Every time some citizen used a spell that worked, it proved the Church’s Truth that magic was real. But most spells done by ordinary people didn’t feel as... complete as whatever it was Chess was feeling. Magic done by non-witches tended to have an unformed sort of feel to it. It was weak.
