Unholy Magic by Stacia Kane

could be dried and powdered and used in protection spells. But she’d never heard of human eyes being used for anything of the sort, much less being used in sex magic, and she had a feeling the eyes were more than simply spell ingredients anyway.
    Finally she grabbed a couple of books and sat down with them. The first was a slim volume on sight magic; she had hopes for it, but it related more to psychic visions and spells for out-of-body investigating. That sort of thing was done by the Black Squad, Church government employees, as opposed to regular Church employees like Chess. They handled crimes mundane and magical, the breaking of legal codes as well as moral, whereas Chess dealt pretty much exclusively with the crime of fake hauntings—”conspiracy to commit spectral fraud,” was the official term—and with banishing the ghosts if they did exist.
    The second book offered a little more information. It opened with a quote she’d heard before, about eyes as windows to the soul, and studied that idea from the perspective of magic.
    Perhaps that was what the glyph meant, the sigil branded into Daisy’s skin and marked on the wall behind her? Chess pulled out her camera to examine the image from the night before, her mouth instinctively tightening at the sight of that horrible fallen face. She scrolled through the images until she found the one she wanted.
    It didn’t look like a face at all, not really. Faces weren’t shaped like triangles. But the symmetry of it suggested it could be a face, or perhaps another body part. Terrible had said that Daisy’s was the first female body found, that not much had been left of the second victim—Little Tag, if she remembered. Was it possible someone was building a new body, a vessel for a lost soul?
    Such things were rare, of course. She’d only heard of it happening, had never been faced with such a crime or even the faintest evidence of one. But eyes deteriorated quickly when not frozen; if they were indeed being used to give sight to an earthbound spirit, that spirit’s companion or Bindmate or whatever would need a fresh supply.
    More deaths.
    She pulled the sleeves of her red sweater over her hands and hugged herself, but the chill slithering up her body had nothing to do with the air in the room. Ghosts didn’t care who they killed; last night’s experience with Annabeth Whitman would have been a sharp reminder of that if she’d needed one. But the ghost’s summoner, the one who kept it earthbound, who fed it energy …
    It shouldn’t have surprised her. Didn’t she know better than almost anyone what sort of filth humans were capable of? But it did, every time, a sort of weary, miserable surprise that someone out there had found a new way to create pain.
    She flipped through the rest of the book but didn’t find much else, barely enough to fill a page in her notebook. She’d talk to Terrible about it later, he might have some ideas, might know more that would help. Probably would, in fact.
    With a sigh she reshelved the books and checked the clock at the far end of the room. Almost noon. She’d have to look through the Church’s rune and sigil libraries another time—she already knew she’d never seen the glyph before.
    One more place to check. Goody Glass frowned at her as she left the Restricted Room and headed for the long wall of files in the regular library. Chess ignored her.
    The files contained—or were supposed to contain, as almost everyone forgot to update them half the time—all the information about every haunting or suspected haunting in Triumph City, about every building, every vacant lot.
    And the files at the end … those were full of worse things than hauntings. Here lived the executed criminals and those who’d died of natural causes, both before and after Haunted Week. As she’d just discussed with Elder Griffin, murder scenes carried their own resonance; victims often hung around, trapped in the moment of their death, just as