Unholy Magic by Stacia Kane

behind her desk, her black bonnet neatly tied beneath her pointed, whiskery chin. Sometimes Chess wondered exactly how old the woman was; she hadn’t visibly aged a day in the nine years Chess had been with the Church, as if she’d become a septuagenarian in early middle age and stayed there.
    “Good morrow.” The Goody reached for her pen, poised it over her log. “Have you a message, or are you here to see a prisoner?”
    “A prisoner.”
    “Name and date of death?”
    Chess told her.
    “Sign here, please.”
    While Chess scrawled her name the Goody took a pale blue velvet robe from a hook. “You’ll need to put this on. You visited the prison during training? Very well. You may leave your clothing and effects in the dressing room there. I’ll call the elevator for you.”
    Chess’s fingers shook as she unlaced her boots. She did not want to do this. She glanced over her shoulder, checked the closed door for holes and saw none. Good. A chance to shove a couple of pills down her throat, hope they calmed her nerves a little before she got on the elevator. Showing any sort of emotion—especially fear—to the dead was a huge mistake. To show it to imprisoned spirits, trapped in iron cages, subjected to punishments, was like slicing open a vein and waving it around in front of a starving tiger. Not a good idea.
    She pushed the image from her mind and focused on the black chalk she pulled from her bag, focused on putting power into the sigils she drew on her forehead and right cheek, on choosing which of her unfinished tattoos to activate by completing. Most of her tattoos were done, but a few were too powerful to keep active all the time.
    By the time she was done marking, her entire body felt warm and tingling with power. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet, but it didn’t matter; she knew they would, and she knew she could do this. This was her job. This was the one thing in the world she was good at, and she refused to be afraid.
    The robe smelled faintly of incense and smoke, comforting smells because they reminded her of Church and of … well, she didn’t know why smoke would be comforting, but it was just the same. It made her feel safe, as if the thin napped fabric was armor. Which in a way it was.
    Goody Chambers handed her a file folder—Remington’s file—and a bag of graveyard dirt. “It’s only generic, but it will help if there’s a problem.”
    “Thanks.” Chess had some melidia as well, which she tucked into one of the robe’s pockets. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do.
    “You have fifteen minutes,” the Goody informed her as she held the elevator door open. “After that we sound the alarm.”
    Chess nodded. “Thanks.”
    “Good luck. Facts are Truth.”
    “Facts are Truth,” Chess replied, and the elevator door slammed shut, leaving her alone to descend deep below the surface of the earth, to the realm of the criminal dead.
    Silence prevailed in the City of Eternity, expectant, pained silence like the hush before the guillotine blade falls. Occasionally metal clanked against metal, echoing in the empty space.
    Prison Ten was not the City, though, and the first indication of that difference was the blast of heat from the roaring fires, the sizzle of ectoplasm on hot coals. Chess was grateful for the thin robe; her regular clothes would have been soaked with sweat in minutes. Ghosts hated heat and disliked fire. Chess wasn’t particularly fond of them either, but if the ghosts down here could take their punishment, so could she. Especially since after she’d checked whether Remington was in here, she could leave.
    The iron walkway rattled under her feet as she made her way into the prison, a cavern so large she couldn’t see where it ended. Across the red-hot expanse, bottomless and spiked with flames, all she saw were ghosts, hanging from the ceiling in iron cages through which mild electrical currents ran, forcing them into solid form and making escape impossible—or more