—— CHAPTER TWO ——
Callie cranked the car key in the ignition for the third time, her shaking hands more to blame for the car not starting than the vehicle itself. She tapped the gas pedal and the engine finally turned over. The lemon on wheels was running, and she still had $200 in her bank account. It was almost enough to convince her this evening had been a success.
The Soul Charmer’s store was less than a ten-minute drive from her apartment, but she wasn’t ready to head home yet. She needed time to accept what she’d done. Time to understand what she was about to do over the next two weeks. Being cooped up in her bare-bones apartment with scant furnishings would only amplify her anxiety like a Feng Shui echo. Her extended family was reliable, but she couldn’t call any of them to visit. The closest cousin was sixty miles away and her brother … well, he was obviously unavailable as well. Wallowing and recounting her mistakes was simply safer outside of her one-bedroom. She hooked a left on Agua Fria and headed toward the Plaza.
Under the midday sun, Gem City’s Plaza lived up to the town’s name. The vibrant jewel tones of painted tiles set into the walls of each storefront sparkled under natural light. But the sun had set hours ago. Tourists were tucked back away into their hotels with their authentic chimineas lit in every room to counter the cool desert night air. The sparse streetlights made it difficult for the uninitiated to spot when dusk shifted to pitch black in the empty spaces. Transient men and women meandered the streets. Those who were truly homeless tucked in by store entrances to make camp for the night.
Callie drove the unreasonably slow speed limit, but still had to slam her brakes as a twenty-something woman ran out into the street. The woman’s braided pigtails bounced against the woven poncho she wore, the kind sold at every rural roadside stand within a two-hundred-mile radius. She yelled out to another unseen hitchhiker friend, and then stashed the screwdriver she held in her hand in her right pocket. The hitchhiker—Callie could spot them a mile away—was why Gem City couldn’t have nice things. Callie didn’t need to spot the missing tile in front of Gem Jewelers to know the poncho girl had pilfered it. She might be destined to be a thief, but she wasn’t about to go advertising it.
At least they didn’t touch the Basilica. The church kept their grounds covered in lush, green lawn. The city didn’t enforce water restrictions when it came to the Cortean Catholic church. Callie hit the adjacent stoplight, and spent the next minute and a half next to the bronze statue of Saint Catalina. Three LED spotlights revealed her soft cheekbones and flowing skirt. Others in town might have looked at the statue and thought of Catalina’s story, of her martyrdom, of her quiet strength. But Callie remembered the time Josh tried to convince Father Duncan he wanted to pick Catalina as his saint name. The priest had taken on all the attributes of a turnip, vaguely purple and puffed out at the sides. A few years later Callie chose Catalina as her own saint name, in Josh’s honor.
A couple blocks from home, she pulled into a convenience store parking lot. All the chaos of the day had blocked out her mundane responsibilities. She had laundry to do, but no detergent to make that happen. Her building hadn’t stocked the soap vending machine in seven months. She didn’t have quarters anyway. She stepped out of the car and onto a scrap of yellow police tape with the standard “DO NOT CROSS” verbiage. It fluttered in the cool October breeze.
The shop’s cashier, Callie remembered from the newspaper headlines, had found a severed arm around the side of the store two days earlier. The matching body had been discovered seven blocks over, behind a street taco shop. No arrests, but the whispers that Ford was behind it were growing louder.
They hadn’t bothered to remove the tape yet. Callie shouldn’t have been surprised. Chalk outlines only disappeared when it rained or snowed. The locals didn’t often bring out a hose to wash it away.
So much for calming her nerves before going home. She thought about popping a Xanax when she got home, about how nice it would be to blank her anxiety for a few hours. But that was something Josh would do, and she wasn’t like him. Not like that. Besides, if she was going to save her brother, she needed to keep her own shit together.
Even if that meant a night of laundry, followed by tossing and turning.
Callie had been serving breakfast and lunch to the elderly at Cedar Retirement Home for eight months, and she mostly didn’t hate it.
The people were all right, if you didn’t mind cynical reminiscing over lifetimes of bad decisions, along with a whole lot of gallows humor. Both had been standard operating procedure for Callie since the age of nine.
Unfortunately, keeping busy chopping vegetables to help Louisa with food preparation wasn’t enough to keep her mind off the deal she’d made with the Soul Charmer. She’d woken up with a wicked case of regret. Just what had Josh gotten her into?
Louisa broke into Callie’s thoughts. “Father Domingo asked about you.”
Her distraction must have been obvious, because Louisa didn’t usually mention church so early in the morning. Callie’s boss’s grey hair was wound in a sharp bun, letting light catch her gold cross pendant.
“Nice of him,” Callie muttered. New Mexico had become Cortean Catholicism’s strongest foothold in North America more than a century ago, and now the faith had unyielding public devotion throughout Gem City. In the church’s eyes, purity and piety were equal, and keeping one’s soul light enough—not weighed down by sin—to “rise to Heaven” was the paramount goal of any regular churchgoer. Callie attended services with Lou once a month. It kept the general judgment levels of those around her low—she wasn’t a bad person, but she wasn’t a true believer either—and it made Louisa happy. Callie did what she could to make Lou happy.
“I told him you’ve been taking your mom to service elsewhere, and he said he hoped you were finding time for confession.”
She hadn’t confessed to a cleric in five years. The Charmer had said her soul was still pure, so she guessed she hadn’t done anything to fuck things up too royally. Watching Josh sink to dismal depths had Callie less worried about her own afterlife than others in Gem City. Not that she’d ever admit it. “The church near my house is growing on me,” she lied.
Dropping in on Father Gonzales hadn’t been on her to-do list. Off the books, he encouraged his congregation to leverage soul magic. Soul magic was real, he acknowledged, which was rare enough for any cleric to say publicly. Confessing the use of magic was required, he clarified each time, but whenever she took her mom to his services, Father Gonzales preached reaching heaven by any means necessary. It made sense, then, that all but a handful of people in their state subscribed to a religion founded by a conquistador.
Callie wasn’t too superior to say she didn’t know people who had used the Charmer’s services before, and she wasn’t classy enough to pretend she’d never been in that neighborhood. However, in the decade since the Soul Charmer had set up shop and soul magic became known outside the back alley crowd, she’d never once thought she’d find herself using his services, let alone working for the snake. No matter what loophole Father Gonzales gave his congregation, it was no secret that bad things happened to people who borrowed souls.
Besides, a pristine soul didn’t wash away consequences. Her cousin Kristi was proof enough.
She shook her head at the memory and almost sliced into her index finger with the bulky chef’s knife. Kristi had a nasty husband. No bones to be made about it. She’d also had a sense of finality about marriage: once you’re in it, you’re in it, and there’s no getting out. Callie thought it was a rather fatalistic way to look at a union that’s supposed to be born of love. Then again, Callie was twenty-two and had no intention of getting married.
Callie’s cousin, though, took the shit seriously. Well, the part about never leaving. She yearned for romance (or, more specifically, good sex), and when she realized she wasn’t ever going to get it from her husband, she took matters into her own hands, and rented a soul to cheat on him. It wasn’t staining their relationship, she’d argued. Yes, God cared about her soul and yes, she should avoid sinning, but if she committed adultery using someone else’s soul, she was golden, right?
Callie had never seen the logic, but how could she argue when Father Gonzales basically condoned it? As far as reasons to rent out someone else’s soul, Kristi’s purpose was mild. From stories, Callie knew most people used rented souls for exacting revenge, violence, and murder. Still, it always ended badly. Even if one was out just to get laid.
The idea of a swapped soul might have spared Kristi the wrath of God—though Callie wasn’t quite buying that, regardless of the Church’s stance—but it hadn’t done a damn thing to stop her husband from shattering both her orbital bones and literally caving in Kristi’s face when he caught her in the act. She swore the adultery was on someone else’s soul. While it assuaged her guilt, it was more than a year before the surgeons had her back solid. They didn’t have the money for full reconstruction, though. Kristi had blown all her savings on souls from the rental service she’d spotted in the back pages of a free newspaper: the Soul Charmer.
Real world consequences followed soul rental. Callie’s slices into the onion became forceful chops. The clack of the blade against the wooden board grew louder as she focused on making each movement a prayer she’d stay whole. Her eyes began to water from her sloppy style with the onion.
That’s what she told herself.