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incredibly strong new spell—not likely, as the kind of power Chess felt wasn’t the kind just anyone could project—her murderer had definitely been human.
    Red Berta shoved someone forward, one of the hookers standing in the circle. The girl stumbled on her teetery shoes and righted herself, but not before Chess saw how high she was.
    “I hadda go get somethin,” the girl mumbled, swaying in place.
    “You left Daisy alone to die.” Red Berta fixed her with a glare that would have made a sober person quake. At almost six feet tall, Berta wasn’t someone to mess with. She’d been a showgirl before Haunted Week—Haunted Week and an attack from a razor-wielding ghost. Berta had survived. Her looks had not.
    Chess stood and glanced at Terrible’s impassive face, then back at the girl. “Did you see anything? When you got back?”
    “Bettin she saw lotsa things,” someone whispered in the back. “Flowers an puppies floatin upward the sky, aye?”
    “Saw the spook.” The girl hugged herself. “Saw it disappear when I come back.”
    “You saw the ghost?”
    “Aye.”
    “What did it look like?”
    “Wearin a hat.”
    Fear rippled through the crowd as everyone took a step back. “She seen the Cryin Man. Cryin Man wear a hat.”
    Before Chess could reply, Berta spoke up. “Terrible.” She nodded across the street.
    Chess followed the look with the slow sinking feeling of someone whose night had just gone from worse to deadly.
    Slobag’s men watched them from the alley.

Chapter Three
Violence is the worst of humanity’s foibles, and the least necessary. The Church protects you from the need to perform such acts; there is no excuse for violent behavior in modern society.
— The Book of Truth , Laws, Article 347
    It wasn’t a large crowd. Five, perhaps six men stood in the shadows, caught by the firelight. They didn’t move when all faces turned toward them. Somehow that stillness was more threatening than sharpening machetes or playing with guns would have been, as if they knew beyond a doubt there would be no reliable defense against their attack.
    Then Terrible stepped forward, lifting the bottom of his bowling shirt so the diamond-patterned handle of his knife showed. Chess tried not to respond. On his opposite hip the brushed steel butt of a gun reflected the watery moonlight. When had he started carrying a gun? Usually he didn’t, at least not so obviously.
    Next to Chess, Berta reached up and extracted what looked like a machete from the crimson bird’s nest of her hair. In an instant the mood changed from terrified sadness to hot rage. Excitement. Butterfly knives opened in a blur of metal, zippers gave way so sharpened nail files and pipes could be pulled from cheap nylon purses. One of the girls flicked open an ivory-handled straight razor that had to be a hundred years old. Nobody spoiled for a fight like a group of Downside hookers around the corpse of one of their own.
    Slobag’s men didn’t move. Fuck! What was she supposed to do here? Slobag’s men were Lex’s men, and she doubted he’d take too kindly to her fighting with them, no matter how much he liked having her in his bed. On the other hand, Terrible was her friend, and the people around her were—well, they were his friends, or his to protect, anyway.
    Not to mention the dead body turning to ice on the pavement at her feet.
    “Chess,” Terrible said, his lips barely moving. He held his head like he was sniffing the air for prey. “Whyn’t you head back into yon alley, aye? Get yourself offen the street.”
    “I have my knife.”
    “Naw, naw. Get on out. Ain’t your fight.”
    Wasn’t going to be a fight at all, if she had anything to say about it. She held up her hand, intending to pat him on the back or arm, something to show her thanks, but she dropped it before it reached him. It would only be a distraction.
    Instead she pulled her phone out of her bag as she picked her way through the black alley. Things rustled and