Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  Sylvie laughed. A little ragged, but laughter nonetheless. “Eloquent as always. But I’ll have you know, I was a saint when I was a teen.”

  “Of course you were,” Alex said. She sighed. “Anything else you want me to do? Once I’ve dropped off Zoe?”

  “Back here and do the computer searches on Odalys.”

  Alex eyed her a moment, sighed, pressed keys at random on her computer keyboard, and said, “So. Just dirt in general? Do you even know her last name?”

  “Nope,” Sylvie said. “’Swhat I pay you for. I’m especially interested in any connection with the murderous old woman we identified.”

  “Tentatively identified,” Alex corrected. “Based on Bella’s dream and a tragedy with a toddler. You know how many kids drown every year?”

  “Do you?”

  Alex grinned, caught out. “Well, there’ve got to be lots, or there wouldn’t be so many PSAs.”

  “Check out smothering victims and old ladies also,” Sylvie said, thinking of the moment when the lich ghost had touched her, shown her a piece of its corrupt spirit. “Zoe’s Hand remembers a dead man in a hospital.”

  “I can do that. What are you going to do while I’m playing chauffeur and research assistant? Bang down Odalys’s doors and start demanding answers . . . ? I was kidding, Sylvie.”

  Sylvie paused at the front door. “But it sounded so good. Alex—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you get Zoe out of here before she figures out the code to the safe?”

  THE GLASSY FRONT OF INVOCAT WAS DARK, FEEDING APPROACHING storm clouds back into the heavy sky. Sylvie squinted, trying to see the sign from her slow-moving truck; a car honked behind her, cut around with a roar of exhaust and aggravation. She found an echo in her own breast. Not only did the store look closed, but there was a lean form sitting on the step, hunched over like an old Cuban porch-sitter, watching the street life go by with a frown and a newspaper. All he needed to blend in was about thirty-five years and a cigar.

  She pulled the truck over, cut the engine; Wright raised his head and waved at her.

  “She’s closed. Running, you think? But how she knew you were coming—”

  “Wales isn’t dead. That might be enough for her,” Sylvie said. “I thought you were staying at the apartment?”

  “No,” he said. “You left me there. But I’m not an ornament. I can move. I have feet and hands, and surprisingly, cold hard cash. Did you know Demalion kept an emergency cache in Miami? I got a cab.”

  “What, he left you a note?” A weird twinge touched her, a tiny taste of something that might be dread.

  Draw the line between the living and the dead, keep it fast, her little dark voice murmured.

  Maybe that was it. Hard enough to bear Demalion’s presence, a constant reminder that she’d failed to save him before, might fail to save him again, but that was a matter of pain, of resurgent grief. Demalion communicating directly with Wright felt . . . dangerous, like Demalion was encroaching, absorbing more of Wright’s life, a single suggestion at a time.

  “Dreams, actually. Apparently we can dream each other. I think a little more practice, and we’ll be able to hold conferences inside my head.” Wright looked up at her, blue eyes sharp with a knowledge he hadn’t earned. “He said you like to ditch people who are trying to help you.”

  She sank down onto the cement step beside him, stretching her legs out before her and studying the patterns her shoelaces made. With her hip, she bumped the newspaper he had folded beside him, and he shifted it closer to his side. “You’re my client.”

  “No,” he said. “You haven’t cashed my check. This is what’s going to happen. My problem isn’t going to be fixed fast or easy. Especially if you’re dealing with this other case. Especially if you want your guy alive. So I’m going to get off my ass and help you with the Hands, with the kids, with Odalys. After that, you’re going to help me. Full focus, nothing else on your plate.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “You and Demalion decided that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He twisted his mouth into a grin. “You going to hold it against us? ’Cause I gotta tell you, it’d be a waste. I mean, you could go sticking your hand in the viper’s nest all on your own—Demalion thought you would; ’swhy I came here—but it’d be nice to have some evidence first, don’t you think?”

  “You’re babbling, Wright,” she said. “I think Demalion’s rotting your brain.” Though it had just been a random crack, it made her stomach clench. If the lich ghost was one of the Ghoul’s takeover spirits, could feed on a soul, what could Demalion do to Wright if he tried?

  “I didn’t come straight here,” he said. “I stopped by your parents’ house first.”

  “You what?”

  “Evidence,” he said. “Of the concrete and nonmagical kind. We were sloppy when we tossed your sister’s room, just looking for weird shit. I went back to see if I could find out where the weird shit came from.”

  “And?” She should have thought of that herself. If it hadn’t been Zoe at stake, she might have.

  He patted the newspaper beside him, shifted it, and revealed a book. One of the innocuous teen witch manuals, heavy on fashion and style, light on practice, that Zoe had had on her shelf.

  “You were all about Odalys when we were here, back-room chats and big ideas, but I was in the shop. She uses these gummed labels on her stock. Pale blue. Unusual. Pretentious. Probably pricey. No wonder she charges so much for candles.”

  “You have a point to make, presumably,” Sylvie said, still brittle, though she knew where he was going with this. She shifted uncomfortably on the concrete, flipped off a pair of skateboarding preteens who were gawking at them.

  Wright opened the book, turned the flap to face her.

  Gummed label. Pale blue.

  “So?” Wright said. “Do I get to play or what?”

  Sylvie bit back the truth, that Wright’s detecting was too little, too late, that she’d already connected Odalys and Zoe from her sister’s own mouth. But Wright wanted to be a detective. Wanted to be useful.

  “Welcome aboard,” she said. Sylvie rose, peered into the glass door. A faint shimmer greeted her, a prismatic sheen that raised marching goose bumps across her arms, her back, her nape. Yeah, not breaking into the shop. Not when there was obviously a magical defense system up and running. Cops were bad enough. Being lobotomized, paralyzed, or fed to some magical monster would be worse, and besides, fighting it off would bring the cops, making it a lose-lose.

  “Want to help me track down Bella’s friends?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. She held out her hand and pulled him to his feet, just as the first raindrops spattered the cement about them.

  “All right. But I drive.”

  19

  The Kids Are Not All Right

  A LITTLE BIT OF EFFORT WITH ZOE’S CONFISCATED PHONE AND A REVERSE directory yielded the address of the third member of Bella’s little coterie: Jasmyn Tsang, another likely Hand owner. If Bella was the queen bee, then Jaz was the cheerleader and boy bait.

  Like Bella’s, Jasmyn’s parents were out of town—on business, on vacation, on some part of their life that didn’t require the presence of a teenager. The housekeeper let Wright and Sylvie in without question or any hint of interest, an old-fashioned maid: stout, black hair in a tight bun, wearing a determined expression as well as a uniform. The vacuum roared in another room, waiting for her return. She let Sylvie get Jasmyn’s name out before cutting her off, and saying, “She and her friends are in the pool house, where I don’t clean. Out the back.” With that, she turned around and went back to her vacuuming.

  They followed the scent of chlorine through rooms still dark and unlit, though it was nearly midday. The kitchen was sterile, smelled of bleach and polished metal, and nothing whatsoever of food.

  Wright glanced around and opened the refrigerator. “Yeah,” he said. “What I thought. Don’t any of you eat at home?”

  “Jeez, don’t le
t that dragon catch you snooping,” Sylvie said, then shrugged. “Besides, it’s not like you do any better. You probably memorized all the takeout within a five-mile radius of your—”

  “Maybe Demalion lives on takeout. We cook. We don’t want Jamie to be a fast-food junkie.”

  “Just shut the door,” she said. “We’re not the food police.”

  Beyond the sliding glass doors, the pool flashed momentary sunlight into the house, a slow pavane of water rippling in the light breeze. Sylvie pushed the door open; beyond the rectangular pool edged in creamy, pitted limestone and blue-checked tile, a small outbuilding nestled between ferns and potted key lime trees. Bamboo shades hid the inside from their sight, something that made Wright twitch nervously, as if he felt he should be approaching it, gun drawn.

  “Easy,” she said. “If we’re lucky, which we deserve to be, her friends will be the rest of the team. Last thing we want to do is startle them and find ourselves sleeping facedown in the pool.”

  “You think she’d try that? Here, in her home?”

  “Depends on whether she’s heard about Bella or not,” Sylvie said. She headed toward the pool house, jumped when the dolphin statues at the head of the pool spurted on and turned the pool into fluttering waves of sound.

  At the pool house, she slid the door open without knocking, surprising three teenagers in a half-dressed huddle on a futon in the center of a frantically cluttered room.

  At the heart of their huddle . . . Sylvie moved on instinct, snatching up the three Hands in their midst, jumbling them into a tangle of stiff fingers and withered flesh, before they could be used against her.

  Jasmyn shrieked. The boy nearest the door tried to run, hobbled by jeans undone at the waist and sliding downward. Wright snagged him by the seat of those jeans, yanked them up, and slung the boy back toward the futon. “Siddown,” Wright said. The boy staggered and sat.

  A bit abrupt, a bit aggressive, but Sylvie looked around the room, mentally ticking off items from the stolen list, including the pool table and the painting that Lisse Conrad had listed as Three Nudes Dance. Yeah, Wright was entitled to come all cop on them.

  Sylvie, looking at the painting, thought that dance wasn’t the right word for that contortion of body parts. It looked a tiny bit familiar—the positions Jaz and the boys had been aiming for when Sylvie and Wright broke up their fun.

  “Name?” Wright asked.

  “Trey,” jeans boy said. He was peak-faced and freckled, wearing a gem-encrusted Rolex taken from the South Beach jewelers.

  “You don’t have to answer him,” the other boy said. Beefy, blond-haired, dark-eyed, built along the lines of a football player. He found his shirt, pulled it on over his head, and sat back, arms crossed over his chest.

  “I’ll call the cops,” Jasmyn whispered. She shivered in her bra top and skirt, and Sylvie thought that if the football player had been thinking or had any manners at all, he would have offered her the shirt. Jasmyn’s was flung to the far side of the pool table. Wright reached out a long arm and snagged it, tossed it to the girl.

  “You do that, and you’ll be stuck explaining to Detective Suarez what nice children like you are doing with severed body parts,” Sylvie said. “You’ll be explaining why your fingerprints are in stores across South Beach, in nonpublic areas.”

  Jasmyn subsided into her cushion, looking confused and unhappy. The football player shot an angry glance up at Sylvie, and said, “You won’t turn us in. Not unless you want Zoe to take the fall, too. I know who you are. Know what you do. She pointed your office out to us, told us to steer clear. That you didn’t have anything worth stealing.”

  Sylvie closed off the instant wash of anger, kept her tone brusque and impersonal. Authoritative. “Don’t mouth off, kid. You’re an amateur. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to take the Hands, and you’re going to say thank you for saving our miserable lives so that we don’t have to die like Bella. If you’re extremely cooperative, and tell me what I want to know, I might give you time enough to return the stolen merchandise to the shops before I call the cops.”

  “Bella?” Jasmyn gasped. “Did it really kill Bella? She was having such horrible dreams. Oh god, Matteo, my dreams . . .” She reached out and clutched the football player’s hand.

  “Jaz,” Matteo said, leaning closer. “Don’t panic. She’s just winding us—”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said, overriding Mister-know-it-all. “Your toys are dangerous. Every single time you light them, you show a hungry ghost the way to your soul. And, not that you care—but the people who pass out? They’re not going quietly into sleep, either.”

  Trey paled, his freckles standing out like burn spatters. “We didn’t know—”

  “You didn’t ask,” Sylvie snapped. “You were bored and greedy, and she offered you a shiny new toy. Congratulations. You killed your friend. Let’s work on not killing you. Where did you meet with Odalys? Her shop? Or does she have another place she does business at?”

  Jasmyn put her face in Matteo’s shoulder, wrinkled his shirt with her tightening grasp. She shook her head, dark hair slipping glassily over her back. “I can’t tell—”

  “You can,” Sylvie said. “You must.”

  “Just the shop,” Trey whispered. “Always the shop. It was . . . it was okay, you know? Seemed so cool. All that real world around us and this . . . magic . . . in the middle of it all.” His face blotched like he might start to cry. “You’re helping Zoe, right? You’ll help us? I can pay.”

  “Shut up, Trey,” Matteo said. “Shut up, shut up!”

  Trey sighed, crawled over, and leaned into Jasmyn’s lap. A puppy pile of teenage thieves. Sylvie wanted to smack them all.

  Wright sighed. “Silence is never a good response to a crime,” he said, so much the cop. “Cooperation works better.”

  Matteo swallowed. “Look, I get it. But you need to get this. She’s dangerous, and I don’t think we want to piss her off.”

  “She said she could boil our brains in our skull,” Jasmyn said. “With a thought!”

  “And you believed her?” Wright said. “I mean, do you really think that’s possible?” As a belated aside, he raised a shoulder and an eyebrow in question.

  Sylvie nodded once. His face fell; he scrubbed his hand over his face. Yeah, it was possible. Not with a single thought, no, but what was voodoo but the powers of the mind over a distant body? And a necromancer knew a lot about death, including ways to cause it.

  But it was easier with a focus. Fear went only so far toward ensuring obedience. Blood was the simplest and best way to control others. Give a witch your blood, you might as well give them your life.

  “She ask for anything from you?” Sylvie asked.

  “Other than 10K for the Hands? All the cash from the first ten burglaries?” Matteo said. He shook his head.

  Trey whispered, “We thought we were getting a deal. Thought we could do anything.”

  “She said we were her chosen ones, specially selected,” Jaz said. Wrongheaded pride still lingered in her voice.

  Sylvie sighed. God, Odalys had them coming and going. Profit on selling the defective Hands, profit on the risk the kids took. Sylvie wondered grimly if Odalys had found a way to profit from the original deaths. That sparked an idea in her. If Odalys was all about the money, then tracking her through her bank accounts might be the best way to go.

  In the interim, though, she had three kids convinced their heads would explode. Blood might be the best way to ensure obedience, but blood was also difficult to keep, and difficult to obtain.

  “Did she give you anything?” Sylvie asked, then shook her head at her own shortsightedness. “Sell you anything else? At a discount? Jewelry, crystals, anything at all? Something you’d keep near you? A good-luck charm maybe?”

  It was the simplest spell out there for a witch wanting to keep control. An all-seeing eye, a window to their lives—it didn’t require a lot of power, and was impressive as hell to those who didn
’t know how it worked, didn’t understand they were wearing the equivalent of a magical bug. Odalys could listen in, impress the teens with her knowledge, with her gaze upon them.

  Jasmyn raised her wrist, her fingers leaving Trey’s gingery curls, a bracelet glittering about her wrist, silver with a silver-capped crystal charm dangling from it. “Like this?”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Throw it away. Throw anything she gave you away. And then I suggest you get out of town.”

  “My parents have a house in—”

  Sylvie said, “Jesus, do you not understand what I’m telling you? She’s spying on you. How about you save your planning for once you’ve gotten rid of her toys. A little common sense, please!”

  “Sylvie,” Wright said from behind her, and he sounded wrecked, voice hoarse, vying between two cadences. She turned, and watched something dangle and spin from his fingers—the gravestone necklace that Odalys had pressed on them. To help Wright with his problem. She’d wondered if he’d picked it up again, but hadn’t thought it worth worrying about.

  Never take a gift from a witch, her voice reminded her. Too little, too late.

  No wonder Odalys had run; she’d sent Sylvie to hunt the Ghoul—Wales—and instead Sylvie had come out from that with a dubious ally and a fresh new suspicion of Odalys. Hell, if she’d been tuned in at the right moment, she’d know exactly what Sylvie thought of her.

  Sylvie closed her eyes. Time had just drawn tighter; whether or not Odalys paid attention to her little burglars, she was paying attention to Sylvie and Wright.

  Wright said, “Now can we call the cops?”

  As a way to thwart Odalys, it would be pretty good. Get the kids someplace physically safe, get them evading questions, and Odalys would have to spend her time on her exit strategy and not on Sylvie. “Yeah,” she murmured, over the teens’ instant protests. Matteo said, “You said you’d give us time!”