City of Ghosts by Stacia Kane Read Free Book Online Page A

the Black Squad were a bunch of crazy-tough motherfuckers, or Lauren Abrams was dumb as dirt. Chess knew which theory she preferred.
    “It was here.” Lauren made a circle with her hand, waving it over an area about a foot square. Well, that was all the space that had been needed. It hadn’t been laid-out corpses in those photos. More of a … pile, really.
    Lauren pulled a heavy silver flashlight out of the backpack slung over her shoulder and switched it on. The patch of ground flew into colorless focus, cast spiky shadows against the crooked boards of the wall behind.
    Shit. Chess had two choices. Go stick her hand in what was certain to be a raging pool of nasty energy floating above the lit-up spot, or look like a total pussy. And given those options, touching horrible death energy sounded positively appealing.
    Tingles ran up her hands, slipping over the new scars on her wrists. In the stark light from the flash the patterns beneath her skin were black; they shifted and curled with the spot’s energy, and she felt it like fingernails tickling her.
    Darkness lurked there too, a slow chuckle beneath the surface. But not like she would have expected, not at all. This didn’t feel like death magic, or even really like serious black magic. It felt like the kind of curse Church students tried out on one another: forgetfulness or clumsiness spells, charms to temporarily confuse the tongue so the bespelled victim couldn’t speak clearly. Spells that wore off in ten or fifteen minutes. Harmless shit.
    But piles of bloody body parts, carved with Lamaru symbols … That was not harmless. Nothing the Lamaru did was harmless.
    So what the fuck was going on?
    Lauren seemed to feel it too, the wrongness of it. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Even if they committed the murder elsewhere and just left the parts here, the energy would be darker.”
    “Are you sure it was here that they found it?”
    “This is where they told me. It’s in the pictures too, so it’s got to—”
    Every hair on Chess’s body jumped to attention. She’d just started to spin around when red light splashed across them, across the walls, turning Lauren’s hair into a river of blood around her face.
    The circle stood in the middle of the intersection, deep red fire, swirled with icy-hot black energy. Chess’s stomach jerked. It was darkness in that circle, darkness and misery and despair, and whatever was inside would deliver more of it the second it was unleashed. She knew it. Knew it even before the squealing started.
    A pig. Not from the slaughterhouse, but closer, right on top of them, right across the street.
    The Lamaru had been waiting for them. How the fuck had they known?
    Lauren’s eyes widened; the whites gleamed red around black pupils the size of BBs. Chess only caught a glimpse of them, of the other woman’s terrified face, before she dropped to her knees and ripped her bag open. Running to the car and getting the fuck out of there was tempting, but she couldn’t consider it. Didn’t consider it. There were people in those empty building shells, people hiding and watching, and if she was right about what was going on behind that wall of evil, she’d be condemning every one of them to a messy death, and she had more than enough on her miserable conscience as it was without adding that.
    She also had graveyard dirt. Good. Wolfsbane, she always had that, and for the last few months she’d carried melidia as well. Iron filings she’d picked up to replenish her supply—excellent. She glanced at Lauren and unwilling respect tickled in her chest. The other woman was in motion, setting up a small firedish, lighting a long wooden match off a striking strip on her shoe. Clever, that.
    “Lauren! Lauren, what have you got?” She had to yell; the squealing had intensified. Not just one pig—one sow, if she was right, oh shit please let her not be right. More than one.
    Lauren opened her right hand; three brownish leaves