City of Ghosts by Stacia Kane Page B

blood and not red paint coating them, still dripping slowly down. The scrap of threadbare carpet on the floor was soaked with it; the heaped garbage bags in a corner were slick with it; a couple of ragged blankets slumped sodden against the wall.
    It took her a second to find the bodies in that sea of blood, but they were there. At least … the parts were. They were scattered across the floor as if some careless child had been playing with them and grew tired of the amusement; a leg here, an arm there, a torso, a head …
    Her stomach lurched again. Desperately she swallowed, hard, forcing down the saliva that suddenly filled her mouth. Too much, this was too much, everywhere she looked she saw an empty staring eye or a horrible sharp piece of white bone protruding from shriveling flesh—
    Terrible’s hand, hard and warm on the back of her neck, wrestled her out onto the landing. An open window there, a blank hole in the smoke-colored wall; he thrust her head through it, forced her into the cool fresh air. She filled her lungs, heard them like bellows in her chest. Blinked furiously, trying to clear her vision of the spots obscuring it.
    Slowly she came back to herself. At least enough to realize they weren’t alone on the landing. Muffled sounds, like someone speaking in another room, floated through the stillness and became audible as her breathing slowed.
    She spun around. No one there. But Terrible had evidently heard it too; his cautious gaze scanned every inch of the landing while she checked the ceiling. He barely looked better than she felt, and she wondered if he’d hustled her to the window purely for her benefit or because it provided him with a good excuse to get some air himself.
    To the right of the stairs, across from the blood-filled deathchamber, another entrance loomed. There, sheets of newspaper covered the windows and blocked the light, rattled ominously in the breeze.
    Still the voice. Wordless. Muffled. She realized what it was and jumped forward, only to be caught by his hard arm across her chest. He shook his head. So he realized it too, then. Knew what was in that room. Knew they’d found either a survivor or a murderer.
    She watched him poke his head cautiously into the gloom and look both ways. He motioned her forward with a quick twitch of his fingers.
    No blood in that room. Graffiti covered the walls instead; fuzzy shapes dotted the floor.
    One of them moved.
    Chess jerked back. Kind of a stupid thing to do, really; she could see what it was—who it was—even as her feet moved without her. But the tension in the air crawled all over her body, the memory of that blood-filled room refused to leave her head, and she could still feel the weight of Terrible’s hand on the back of her neck.
    “Right, now, little one.” Terrible held his left hand up by his shoulder, palm facing the huddled figure on the floor. His right sneaked behind his back; Chess watched it wrap around the handle of his knife. Just in case. “Ain’t nobody hurt you, aye? Whyn’t you get on up, we—”
    The person—the woman—raised her eyes. Chess looked into them and saw what Terrible couldn’t possibly see: the dark glee of black magic. Felt its aura slam into her like a freight train, felt her skin grow hot and her brain expand in her head.
    Two other shapes materialized, grew from what looked like bundles of cloth on the floor into people. Two men, two witches. Two murderers, interrupted before they finished whatever they were planning to do with all that blood and energy in the next room.
    The woman on the floor ripped the tape off her mouth and leapt to her feet in one smooth, too-fast movement. A fetish dangled from her hand; Chess saw it and screamed.
    Terrible spun toward the wall, trying, Chess assumed, to get his back against it. Along the way he grabbed her arm and practically wrenched it out of its socket attempting to force her behind him.
    She wouldn’t go. Couldn’t go. Because the thing that