Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

“If I’d told them,” she said, absently. “How’d you know about—”

  “You didn’t tell them?”

  She moved to derail the argument. “The trash can’s sealed,” she said. “What tipped you off? You said you’re not much for the Magicus Mundi.”

  “I’m not,” Wright said. “The ghost is. Now that he’s more awake, he’s all sorts of busy in my head. And he thinks there’s something very bad in there.”

  “Well, chalk one up for the dead man,” Sylvie muttered, then winced.

  “So why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “You’re a cop,” she said. “If I brought a burglar to you, and said, ‘Hey, here’s your perp, and she and her friends are breaking into stores, pretty as you please, using black magic’—how long do you think you’d keep listening? Before the ghost.”

  Wright slouched back into the seat, pulling his legs up to keep them as far as possible from the trash can, and said, “You’re not even trying. Phone it in, an anonymous tip, and trust that they’ll match the suspects to the stolen merchandise.”

  “Yeah, that might work,” Sylvie said. “Except that the burglars in this case are the kind of people who give the police hives. Make ’em dot every i, cross every t, and it’s still not gonna be enough once the lawyers get involved.”

  “Rich people,” Wright said.

  “Worse,” Sylvie said. “Rich kids.”

  “You should still try—”

  Idealism peeked out of his eyes. An honest man who believed in doing what was right no matter how likely it was to fail.

  “I want the source of their tool, the person who thought it was a slick idea to expose teens to black magic,” Sylvie said. “That’s worse than anything the kids have done.”

  “They couldn’t figure it out themselves?”

  “No,” Sylvie said flatly. “Magic’s not exactly like building a bomb. You can’t just download the plans from the Internet. They had a teacher. A corrupter.”

  “How are you going to find the person?”

  “Got an idea or two,” she said. Zoe. Relying on a teenage network of gossip. She’d done more with less. “Let me do my job, my way. That’s what you’re paying for.”

  He took the hint and stopped talking cops and robbers, ghosts and fears. Instead, he rubbernecked, watched palms towering over the highway, watched the sky wheel from blue to brighter blue, and counted seafood restaurants aloud. It made her grin, even through her worries about him, Demalion, the Hand, Zoe. It also made her hungry.

  Back at the office, Wright and Sylvie stared at the trash can for a moment. He stepped away from the truck, put his hands in his pockets, and whistled aimlessly, blue eyes squinting in the beach sunlight.

  “Cute,” she said. “I wasn’t going to ask you to carry it.” She came round the truck, tucked the trash can beneath her arm, and headed inside.

  When Sylvie entered, pink plastic clutched tight, the warning bell on the main desk began to chime. It rolled in its marble base, metal hissing against stone, a quiet susurrus beneath the steady dinging. Sylvie eyed it warily. If she’d had any doubts that the Hand of Glory was authentic, they were gone now.

  On the bright side, she’d seen the bell do worse. When the Furies had come by, the bell had all but spun out of its orbit. As bad as this was, it was a human-sized problem, not a godly one.

  Alex looked up from the couch where she was sprawled, catching a bit of a nap after her early start. “—the hell?”

  “Bad magic,” Sylvie said. “Don’t touch it. Don’t peek at it. Pretend it’s not here.” She set the trash can down at the far end of the room, as far as she could get it from the kitchenette because she didn’t even want to think of food and it in the same vicinity; her stomach growled and proved her a liar.

  “O—kay, then,” Alex said. She gravitated to the trash can despite all Sylvie’s warnings, and Wright was the one who took her by the arm and urged her away.

  “Trust me,” he said. “I don’t even know what’s in it, but it’s not anything good.”

  Alex recoiled from his touch, then flushed red with embarrassment and shame. Guess Alex wasn’t ready for up and close with a confirmed ghost. Wright’s mouth tightened, his jaw tensed, but he said nothing.

  “Where’d you get it?” Alex asked, rubbing her arm absently where Wright had touched her. “What’s it for? We’re disposing of it, right? Not using it . . .”

  “Alex,” Sylvie snapped. “You think I would?”

  Alex said, “If you thought it was necessary? Yeah. I do.”

  “Nice,” Sylvie said, but there wasn’t much bite in it. For one thing, Alex was right. Sylvie did all sorts of things she would prefer not to do if it was needed. Wright was looking all manner of appalled and doing a crap job of hiding it.

  “Zoe swing by for her toys yet?” A stupid question, but it distracted Wright, and Sylvie needed to voice her fear. Zoe had slipped out after hours last night, and teenagers could patch up broken relationships so easily. Bonding over burglary and black magic? Until she saw Zoe in her office, unharmed and untouched by the Magicus Mundi, Sylvie wasn’t going to be happy.

  Sylvie tried to think back, to attach shapes to those barely glimpsed figures from last night. Had Zoe been among them?

  Alex shook her head. “She’s still MIA.”

  “Was Zoe the jailbait masquerading as a fashion plate?” Wright asked.

  “Is Zoe my baby sister, you mean?” Sylvie said. Her tone warned him off the topic.

  He took a step back, held his hands up. “No offense meant.”

  Hands landed on her shoulders, and Alex banged her head gently against her back, her gel-spiked hair stiff against Sylvie’s nape. “Sylvie . . . curb the instincts. Take a breath. Tell me about the trash can. Your sister’s an alley cat. Deal with it. She’ll come back after she’s gotten bored with her new boyfriend.”

  Sylvie sighed. If they’d been alone, she might have told Alex everything; Bella, the burglaries, the Hand, her fears for Zoe, and Demalion’s return. But Wright was listening. Typical, she thought. When she hadn’t wanted to talk, she and Alex had been alone, and now that the words burned to be loosed, she had to swallow them.

  “I need to find Zoe, and soon,” she said. Stripping Zoe of her cell phone may have been good as punishment, but not practical. No. Reach out and smack someone held an undeniable appeal right now. What the hell was Zoe thinking?

  “Give me a list of names, and I’ll canvass her friends.”

  Sylvie said, “Start with Ariel Goldbach.”

  Wright slouched into the kitchenette, peered into the cupboards, beat-up sneakers squeaking on the terrazzo. “I don’t see the deal here. She’s what? Sixteen? Seventeen? She a druggie? That why you’re so hot to find her?”

  “She’s my responsibility,” Sylvie said, flatly. “Like you.”

  He frowned; his fidgety body went still as his mind went active. Calculating, putting random pieces together in a way that shouldn’t mean anything. “Don’t suppose she’s a rich kid?” He glanced back at the trash can.

  Goddamn cops with goddamned intuitive leaps.

  “No,” she said. It was the truth, in a narrow, tunnel-vision manner. Clients had the privilege of lying to her; if she lied to them, it was bad for business. “Anything going on here, Alex?”

  “Conrad wants to hear your progress.”

  Sylvie rolled her eyes. “Client discretion?”

  Alex sighed. “You don’t like her anyway.”

  “Not the point,” Sylvie said.

  “You could give her the burglar’s name,” Wright said. “She might like that.”

  “You found out already?” Alex grinned, wide and white, flashing as brightly as her diamante nose stud. “See, I told you it was a cake case.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Sylvie said.

  Wright said, “It could be.”

  “Doing things my way, remember?”

  Wright sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said, “Yeah, yeah, yo
u’re the boss. But I don’t see what you’re gonna do. You took their toy away. What else can you do to them? It’s time for us to do our thing. Arrest the bad guys.”

  Sylvie said, “They won’t be able to keep them. And, no, I don’t have a plan yet. But I’ll think of something.”

  The bell rang on and on in the silence that fell between them, Wright struggling hard to not confront, not contradict. Finally, he just shook his head, and said, “There should be some type of law. Someone who knows and can do something about it. Someone with government backing.”

  “There’s the ISI,” Alex said.

  “Then why aren’t—”

  “Because they’re dicks,” Sylvie said. “Short answer. If all else fails, I’ll drop them a note.”

  She yanked off her Windbreaker, dropped it over the alarm bell, still shivering in its marble bowl; she wished she could move it to the closet for the time being, but it had been bonded to the desk. Some spells seemed to be more math than magic. Val Cassavetes, her witchy friend, had spent hours figuring the angles to make sure the warning bell covered the office door to door, floor to ceiling, then she’d pragmatically laid down a tube’s worth of super glue once she had it to her specifics.

  The front door opened; Wright yielded the way to Lisse Conrad. With her came one of the people Sylvie wanted to see least. Detective Adelio Suarez. Sylvie bit back a frustrated sigh. Plans, so easy to make, so easy to disrupt. She should have locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, but generally her office wasn’t client central.

  “I saw you come in,” Conrad said. “Your truck is . . . noticeable.” A faint sneer on her lips. Sylvie wondered if the expression would grow more dismissive or less if the woman knew what had caused the rents in the metal.

  “Easy to find at the airport,” Sylvie agreed. She veiled her aggravation behind a toothy smile and watched Conrad turn away.

  The woman swept past her on a wave of floral perfume, and Adelio Suarez followed as if he were a hound on scent. He paused to say, “Did you enjoy your joke? Sending us to harass nice families about a burglary charge?”

  “’Cause nice families never have secrets,” Sylvie said. “The list was legit.”

  Zoe might be part of that list, she thought with a sudden pang, and didn’t so much backtrack as sidle around the point. “But there’s a lot of information that goes nowhere in this biz. You know that.”

  Suarez studied her, and said, “Someday, we’re going to have a talk, Shadows, about exactly what your biz consists of. Someday soon.”

  “I love to talk, though I’m picky who I do it with.” She swept her gaze around the office; it hadn’t reached crowded, but it was getting there. Lisse Conrad perched on the arm of the couch, attempting to avoid dog fur. Wright was playing least in sight, standing in the shadow of the kitchenette, watching them all with speculative eyes. Suarez was . . . way too close into her personal space. She took a giant step back, nearly tripped over Alex, and rebounded off the edge of the desk.

  This was ridiculous. For a moment, she wished she were in Chicago again, hunting an impossible-to-find foe, with nothing and no one to distract her.

  No one but Demalion.

  She blindly reached across the desk, collected a thick handful of small bills from the cash box, and said, “Wright! You wanted breakfast? How ’bout lunch. There’s a shrimp stand down the way—follow the gulls. Get three orders to go.”

  Inelegant and obvious, but it worked. Wright took the money, even if he did so only to come close enough to whisper, “You should tell them.” His breath brushed her neck; his hand tightened about hers and the money. She flashed back to his lips on hers, on her throat, and jerked away.

  “I’m not fond of shoulds,” she said. She didn’t bother to lower her voice. He backed away, hands up, the human form of showing the belly.

  “Do you think your . . . secretary could do something about that noise?” Conrad asked. She leaned her cheek into her hand, rubbed her temple, wincing as the bell continued to chime.

  “Defective cell phone,” Sylvie said. “Nothing to do but wait for the battery to die.” She relented. “Why don’t you go up to my private office. I’ll be up in a moment, as soon as I see Adelio out.”

  The detective barked laughter. “I’ll go. I can take a hint. But I will catch up with you.” The door shut behind him, leaving Alex and Sylvie alone in the office.

  Sylvie lowered her voice. “Alex, I need to talk to you. Let me get rid of Conrad. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Conrad’s your client,” Alex reminded her. “Try not to turf her out like you did Suarez, huh? She’s paying us.”

  “So’s Wright,” Sylvie said.

  Alex’s brows raised. “I knew you were hiding something. You didn’t want the case last night, and this morning you’re all grabby, dog in the manger. What’s going on?”

  Sylvie shot a quick glance up the stairs, a quick one toward the door, and pulled Alex closer. “Just watch Wright when he comes back. Tell me if you see it. You knew him, too.”

  “Knew who? His ghost?”

  Sylvie nodded, feeling sick and giddy at once, as if this secret, held for such a short time, had festered. Even hinting at the truth made her think of lancing poisons from a wound, that squeamish combination of horror and relief.

  Alex’s eyes went wide as she proved that she knew far too much about the way Sylvie’s mind worked. “You think it’s—”

  “Not think,” Sylvie said. “Know. It’s Demalion.” Even at a whisper, the name exploded into the room like a bomb. Alex collapsed back onto the couch as if her knees had been cut out from under her.

  She looked up at Sylvie, her eyes all shocked pupil, her voice very gentle. “Sylvie. Grief can really fuck you up. Guilt and grief together can get downright Shakespearean. All blood and delusions . . . Demalion coming back? It’s not possible.”

  Sylvie laughed. “Alex. Look at my life and tell me what is and isn’t possible. I’ve dealt with werewolves, witches, gods, and immortal, amoral ancestors who wanted to storm heaven. What’s one ghost finding his way back compared to all of that?”

  8

  Something Blue

  ANYTHING ALEX WOULD HAVE SAID IN RESPONSE WAS DERAILED AS, upstairs, the door to Sylvie’s office opened and closed with a bang, a clear sign that Lisse Conrad was getting impatient. Sylvie growled. “That woman’s such a—”

  “Client,” Alex said, jumping onto the escape hatch of the conversation without her usual subtlety. “She’s our client. Go deal with her.” She rose from the couch, filled with a manic energy.

  Sylvie imagined if she didn’t go upstairs, Alex would try to shove her up the treads. “Fine, but don’t think you’re being subtle.”

  “Go, go!”

  Less irritated than she let on, she took to the stairs. Alex didn’t want to think about it, fine. Alex wanted to think Sylvie was crazy. Not fine, but Sylvie could disabuse her of that easily enough the moment Demalion showed up again.

  Sylvie let herself into her private office with her game face on: a little irritated, easy to shade toward neutral or to critical judgment. Her private office was usually off-limits to the clients, so she hadn’t bothered with any attempt at décor. She’d scrounged the filing cabinets, the desk, the standing fans from UM’s redecorating sales, and it showed. Her office looked like a particularly shabby dorm room, right down to the ratty futon behind the door.

  The single window didn’t let in much light, being an alley view of the bar wall next door, and what sunlight came in was fractured, dancing prismatically along the linoleum, split by chips in the glass from the time Sylvie had found herself body-slammed into it by a pissed-off sorcerer.

  Lisse Conrad sat in Sylvie’s desk chair, pushed back from the desk, her spine straight and her hands crossed neatly on her lap. In her shoes, Sylvie would have taken the opportunity to snoop. File drawers beckoned; the computer was right there—locked, of course, and coded besides, but right there.

  Normally, Sylvie wou
ld make a point of removing the woman from her seat—she was in control here, not Conrad, no matter which way the money ran—but she wanted to be done with this. “I have a lead. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Suarez. I’ve found one of the burglars, but I’m holding out for the rest. I’d like to wrap this up all neat and tight before we go to the police.”

  “The longer it takes, the less likely we are to regain our belongings,” Conrad said. “For the chain stores, that doesn’t mean much. It’s just money. For businesses like mine, like the people I represent, it means a lot more.”

  “They’re not selling them,” Sylvie said. “Nothing’s shown up on the market. It’s being kept, so your chances of getting your belongings back are better than usual. But not if we let the police blunder in too soon. These aren’t your usual burglars.”

  “What—they’re . . . magical?” Conrad said. Her expression was guarded. “You think I didn’t want you here because you were an investigator? I didn’t want you here because you have a strange reputation, Ms. Lightner, and rumor has it, you believe some strange things.”

  Sylvie said, “I’ve investigated people who thought they could do magic.” Another truth—the false-alarm file existed for a reason—but the bigger truth left unsaid. “It’s Miami. When you live in an exotic city, your rumors have to be more exotic still. Did you hear the one that said I killed vampires? That one’s my favorite. Me and Buffy, saving the world.”

  The woman shook her head, pale hair barely moving. No patience at all. “You have a plan?”

  “Why keep a single minnow when you can use it as baitfish? I know one of the players; I’ll link her to others and net them all at once.” Sounded good to her, and by the relaxing of Conrad’s shoulders, good to her also.

  “Time frame?”

  “Soon,” Sylvie said. “Best for all concerned. Oh, and ask your jeweler friend what his policy is on rewards.”

  “We’re paying you already—”

  “His art deco greyhound got picked up by a bystander. She said she got rid of it. I’m not so sure. We can probably get her to cough it up with a little bit of cash. She doesn’t know the actual value.”