Sacrificial Magic by Stacia Kane

off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”
    Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!
    Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”
    “No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.
    Not that it mattered. Anyone in that room already knew they were coming.
    She’d dropped her flashlight but had a cheap plastic lighter in her pocket; she flicked it on, and Monica found the right key and opened the door.
    Empty.
    Well, not empty. It was a classroom. It had classroom things inside it. But it was empty of people, and people were what Chess needed. Her heart would have sunk if she hadn’t been expecting to find no one there, and if she wasn’t still buzzing from adrenaline.
    The adrenaline gave her extra speed to cross the room. That door wasn’t locked. It hit the wall with an echoing bang when she flung it open, when she flung herself into the hall and found nothing but silence. More emptiness. Of course.
    Beulah might be a bitch—well, okay, to be fair, Chess couldn’t yet say that with absolute certainty, just with a lot of it—but she wasn’t stupid. She started opening doors down the right side of the hall, peering into each room, leaving them open so that Chess could look into them as she opened the doors on the left.
    “Where else could they be? Where could they have gone?”
    Beulah shook her head. “Anywhere. The stairs at either end lead to the science hall and the cafeteria. From there they could keep going into the rest of the school, or out to the parking lot. There’s some sort of activity going on in the gym right now, they could slip in there and we’d never know it.”
    Fuck! It was about what she’d expected, but fuck! anyway.
    The adrenaline started to fade, leaving her hands shaky and her chest and head aching. She could take care of that, but … Damn it. She pressed her palm to her forehead for a second, took a deep breath, and headed back into the drama classroom. The odds of her finding anything useful in there were slim to none, but she’d look anyway. At least she could make a note that she’d looked, that she’d—
    How had they known?
    She hadn’t called before heading out, hadn’t told anyone at Mercy Lewis to expect her. Nor, to her knowledge, had anyone at the Church, although of course she’d have to double-check that.
    She hadn’t spoken to anyone when she arrived except Beulah, Monica, and Laurie. Hadn’t seen anyone, and although technically anyone could have seen
her
when she arrived, nothing about her—her scuffed and dusty boots, her black jeans, the faded blue polo she wore over a black long-sleeved T-shirt, or her black-dyed Bettie Page haircut—screamed “Church employee.” Quite the opposite, in fact; she’d deliberately worn street clothes.
    So how had anyone known who she was, to sabotage the catwalk while she was on it? How had someone not only known who she was, but made it into the drama room in time to start fucking with the bolts? Not to mention the wires.
    That suggested a planned attack. More than one person.
    Had it even been aimed at her at all? And if not, what the hell