Finding Magic (downside ghosts) by Stacia Kane Page A

wasn’t familiar with passed her on the steps, but that was it.
    Which was why she was able to hear the voices inside Elder Griffin’s office so clearly when she raised her hand to knock.
    Actually, that was a lie. She heard murmurs beyond the door, and one of those murmurs sounded exactly like Elder Griffin saying her name. Her hand froze just before hitting the wood—good thing, too, because it turned out the door hadn’t latched, and that’s why she could hear.
    Shit. What should she do?
    Listening wasn’t the right thing. She knew that.
    But doing the right thing wasn’t exactly her strong suit. Not really possible for her, even; she was a walking wrong thing, wasn’t she?
    So she listened. She inched her head forward, careful to keep from view and
very
careful to keep from accidentally touching the door and opening it, and heard Jillian say, “She’s very standoffish, actually. She’s already made an enemy of Trent.”
    “Oh?”
    “Trent’s not the easiest guy to get along with, but it’s like she’s gone out of her way to be disrespectful to him.”
    Pause. A pause, while Chess’s stomach twisted and her eyes started to burn.
She’d
gone out of her way to be disrespectful to
Trent
? When she’d taken every bit of shit he’d flung at her until just a few hours ago and finally made one single comment in response?
    What the fuck, Jillian? She’d thought … well, she hadn’t thought she and Jillian were becoming friends, because she didn’t want friends, and she especially didn’t want friends who seemed to be only interested in simpering and obsessing over men. But she’d thought there was some kind of
respect
there, that Jillian had at least liked her okay, had valued what she’d contributed so far.
    Apparently not. Good to know. She felt sick.
    Elder Griffin spoke; Chess put Jillian’s betrayal aside—for the moment—to listen. “But you’ve had no problems, aside from her … standoffishness?”
    “I don’t know. I kind of think she resents me, resents having to clear her actions with me. She keeps wanting to go off on her own.”
    “She does not follow directions?”
    “She follows them, she’s just really caught up in her own ideas. I don’t think she sees this as a team effort.”
    “Does not work well with others,” Elder Griffin said.
    “I don’t think so, no. She’s just kind of cold. I tried to engage her, let her know she could talk to me, but she didn’t.”
    “And you feel the connection she discovered between your victims was merely luck.”
    “Well …” Jillian hesitated. “Not entirely. She wanted to look into the New Hope Mission from the beginning, and of course I gave her permission to investigate Mark Pollert. I thought it would placate her, get her to open up a little. So she had some okay instincts there, except I think maybe her fixation on Pollert came from feeling the energy of a sex spell he’d made. She seemed really, well, fixated on that. But—”
    Elder Griffin must have made a sound, or a face, or something. Or maybe the roaring in Chess’s ears simply overwhelmed anything she would have heard, the noise like waves of rage and pain washing over her and drowning out everything else.
    That was it, then. All the hope she’d had, all the hope she’d been building, collapsed into a sodden pile of wasted dreams at her feet. She wasn’t going to create a life for herself, wasn’t going to make something of herself. She couldn’t escape, would never escape. Everyone knew who she really was, what she really was, that she was sick and shriveled and twisted inside, and they could all see it. Even when she thought she was hiding it, they could see it.
    And Jillian actually thought she’d liked that sex spell. That she’d liked feeling what it made her feel, liked having it forced on her.
    Just like the rest of them had. She would never escape.
    Jillian went on, too, digging Chess’s grave deeper with every word. “But Trent and Vaughn would