Unholy Magic by Stacia Kane Read Free Book Online Page B

She didn’t have a choice there, and she was beginning to feel certain she didn’t have a choice here, either.
    “The bonus offering on this case is a tidy one,” he said finally. “Forty thousand dollars.”
    Her car was on its last legs. Her couch sagged. Her jeans were developing holes in the knees. Even with the money she saved getting her pills free from Lex it was hard to make ends meet, hard to afford the pipes and the pills she bought from Bump to keep up appearances and the beer and cigarettes and CDs and … Forty grand bought a lot of time in dreamland.
    She nodded. “I’ll take it.”

Chapter Five
The dead do not offer forgiveness. They do not feel. They do not advance or grow. They remain frozen as they were, save for the replacement of love with hate.
— The Book of Truth , Veraxis, Article 329
    Normally she would have gone up to the library to research Pyle’s address and put in a request for his financial records and employment history, but in this case there was no need. The newspaper clipping and blueprints gave her what she needed to figure out the address, and the financials were already there.
    Besides, Roger Pyle was famous. So famous even Chess knew who he was. He’d parlayed a clever stand-up act into a TV series, and rumor had it he was about to make the move to the big screen. She’d never watched his show, a spoof of a BT religious order, but she didn’t need the pictures in the file to know what he looked like, that was for sure.
    Nor did she need the financial records to know how wealthy he was. Pyle couldn’t be faking a haunting for the money. Even if there were numerous entities in his new house, the most he could hope for would be, what, maybe a couple of hundred thousand? A drop in the bucket for someone like him.
    Still, there were other reasons to fake a haunting, and forty grand was a lot of money for her. She needed it, and she needed to prove he was lying.
    But first … The image of those empty eye sockets haunted her, the image and the knowledge that this would happen again if she didn’t do something about it. Whether it was a ghost or something else, she didn’t know, but the Church’s extensive library was as good a place as any to start finding out.
    Goody Glass squatted behind the desk like a troll on a heath, right down to the malevolent facial expression. With an effort, Chess kept from returning the disdain. Goody Glass had never liked her, not from the first week of training when she’d caught Chess eating crackers—crackers stolen from the kitchens—in the stacks.
    A minor crime, but it wasn’t the crime itself for which the Goody held a grudge. It was the way that discovery had led to a deeper, uglier one: that Chess had stolen the food because she wasn’t used to being fed on a regular schedule, that she had no ancestry, no family. A fairly common situation since Haunted Week, but not for Church employees.
    The Goody’s thick eyebrows rose over her beady eyes. “Art thou working on a case, Miss Putnam?”
    “I am, Goody.” Chess waved the file.
    She got no reply, but she didn’t expect one. Instead, the door to her left clicked and she entered the Restricted Room, charmed as always by the displays of religious artifacts from the past, all sitting beneath the bright lights as if waiting, hoping, that one day they might be useful again, be something more than relics.
    She knew it shouldn’t, but the benevolent smile of the fat golden Buddha in the corner made her feel safer. She smiled in return and set her file and her bag on one of the long, empty wooden tables.
    Beneath the glittering gold cross on the far wall—another symbol of religions past—the Church kept shelves full of magical reference books. Chess knelt in front of them, scanning the titles. Eyes … eyes.
    She’d used eyes before in magic, of course, but only as ingredients in other spells. Salamander eyes were sometimes used in poultices to heal energy deficiencies. Raven eyes