by Lyn Benedict
Odalys said, “I do know my stuff. Now, are you going to get out of my way, or do you want to see if the next ring snuffs out your protection?”
Sylvie grinned. “Make it easy, why don’t you.” She fired a shot; the noise was oddly muffled, as if all the magic running across the room could silence it. The bullet moved just fine, though, went exactly where she wanted, splintered terrazzo just before Odalys’s feet. The woman jerked.
“If you’re threatening me, all bets are off,” Sylvie said.
Odalys worried a full lip, teeth white against the red stain of her mouth, still not showing the fear Sylvie craved. Finally, she said, “If I leave town, I’m not going alone. I’m taking Zoe.”
Sylvie said, “You’re too late for that. She’s safe—”
“Did you really think Zoe would be content to play dogs-body to a burned-out witch? Do you think your associate even got her there? Zoe’s mastered the basics. She’s quite good at her little oblivion spell. She ditched your associate, let her think her task was done, and came straight to me. Wanting answers. And I told her Bella was alive.”
“Patrice Caudwell is alive. Bella’s dead.” Those were facts. Sylvie could deal with them. She couldn’t even begin to wrap her mind around Zoe.
Odalys raised her hand, delicate bracelet dangling from it, tilted her palm back and forth. “You say potato, I say—”
“ ‘ Give me the money.’ ”
“Well, yes. This is a business, after all.”
“You don’t have Zoe.” Sylvie made it a statement, as if she could make it a fact just by saying so.
“Care to gamble on it?”
It was a lie. Another bluff. She hoped.
But Sylvie couldn’t make herself believe Odalys was telling her anything but the unpalatable truth.
“She’s a winning child,” Odalys said. “Originally, she was nothing but a body for a particularly unsatisfactory client. But she showed unexpected talent. More than that, she showed ambition.” She paced circles within her rings.
Like a bull’s-eye begging for target practice, Sylvie’s little dark voice murmured.
A tiny sting touched her fingertips, a punishing, testing lick of flame. Lost in speculation and suspicion, in fear for Zoe, Sylvie’d slacked her grip on the Hand, with the result that the flame proved itself real-world enough to blister her skin. She fought the instinct to drop it. Her flame-eyed military ghost loomed at her, all but licking his sere, grey lips for a chance at her soul. He seemed more awake by the moment. Their time was running short.
Flaw in my logic, she thought, inching the Hand upward fingertip by fingertip while her skin sizzled. Just because the dead man doesn’t want to start his second life as a woman doesn’t mean he won’t eat my soul.
Demalion moved toward her, and Sylvie hissed at him, channeling pain and effort into a single thought—stay back, stay safe. She worked the Hand into a safer grip; her fingers still ached and stung, but the general’s ghost backed off. All this without lowering her gaze or her gun from Odalys.
Odalys sighed. “For a moment there, I thought you’d be ghost food. Pity. Things would have been easier. You gave me your list of ultimatums. I heard you out. Now it’s your turn to listen to me.
“I am not interested in grudge matches or vendettas. What I want is to continue providing a very exclusive service to those who can afford it—”
“Who can stomach it. Did Patrice Caudwell flinch when you told her she’d have to kill someone?”
“Did you flinch, Shadows?” Odalys shook her head. “Some things just have to be done to move forward. I have no quarrel with you though I’d like my clients to be happy. I propose a deal. You give me those Hands, and I’ll give you enough information for you to realize how much danger you’re in. I saw what you did with Strange’s Hand, Shadows, and you’re not safe.”
Sylvie laughed. “So very generous. No.”
“You’re running out of time. We all are,” Odalys said. She walked her circle once more, and like moons in an orbit, they all pivoted with her—Sylvie angling to keep the gun aimed on her, the Hand casting its light, the ghost following, and Demalion orbiting Sylvie, looking uneasy. In the background, the flute music swelled and stuttered.
Odalys paused, one foot rocking gently on its stiletto heel. “All right, then. Since you think me ungenerous anyway. Here’s the deal. You leave the Hands, you leave the store, and I’ll leave Zoe out of my plans. Send her home to you. It’s a real hardship. I had such plans for that girl.”
Whatever Sylvie would have answered with—bile, capitulation, bargaining, or even a bullet—she was distracted by the ambient flute music’s changing. It grew louder, more discordant, rapid-fire, the notes bleeding into one another like a single, sustained scream, the shriek of a damned soul.
“What is that?” Sylvie shouted. But she already had guessed the answer. Odalys’s own version of a supernatural alarm. She spotted it in a dim corner of the room, a hanging, vibrating pale stick—no, a long bone, with holes augured through.
“Demalion,” she said. “Get out. Get out now!”
If Sylvie and Demalion had invaded Odalys’s storefront, carrying the lit Hands of Glory powered by malevolent lich ghosts, and the alarm had only whispered—Sylvie really didn’t want to meet what made it shriek.
Demalion shook his head, refusing to go; his free hand sought a gun he wasn’t carrying.
“Sorry,” Odalys said. “Time’s up. She’s found us.” Her eyes were wild, her gestures choppy and ungraceful. She made one wave of her hand, a fierce, slashing version of the slower movements she’d made earlier. This time the salt ring expanded with the concussive force of a hurricane tide; scouring Sylvie’s ankles even through the denim of her jeans, her socks. The outermost salt ring blew past them all, created a new curve at the very edges of the room.
The lich ghosts wavered and went out, clawing ineffectually at the air as if it had suddenly become toxic to them. The Hands of Glory snuffed themselves out, hellish firelight sinking into the sere flesh in a moment, leaving Sylvie and Demalion defenseless against whatever approached.
22
Dead Come Calling
DEFENSELESS? NEVER THAT, THE LITTLE DARK VOICE SAID. SYLVIE tossed her Hand to Demalion—it might have been blown out, but it didn’t mean she was meekly going to let Odalys take it—and leveled the gun. Demalion dropped the Hands by his feet, and said, “What’s coming?”
“Something you freed,” Odalys said. “You really should have stayed out of my business.”
Outside the store, cars screeched to a metal-grinding halt.
Odalys ignored the crash, went back to ransacking her own storeroom. Baskets fell, scattering candles, herbs, twists of paper stained strange colors by their contents.
The bone flute increased its shrilling, pitch rising until the lightbulbs rattled in their sockets. Glass cracked like a gunshot, but not here, not in the back room. It was the front windows, those broad expanses, that were giving way.
Sylvie traversed the salt rings, moving through them like a beginner’s labyrinth, wondering if the center rings were safer than the exterior ones, if she should urge Demalion forward and never mind that it would put him closer to Odalys. Odalys wasn’t the immediate threat here, too occupied with her own tasks. Whatever it was that made bone scream was.
Something she had set free? Maybe bullets hadn’t been the solution to the lich ghost after all. Maybe she’d broken the binding, not the spirit.
“Margaret Strange,” Sylvie said.
The dead had played dead.
Her skin goosefleshed and chilled.
“For god’s sake,” Odalys swore. “Don’t say her name. Don’t draw her to us. She’s crazy.”
“Whose fault is that?” Sylvie said.
“Not mine,” Odalys said. “Everything would have been just fine if her bankers hadn’t embezzled from her. I barely got my deposit out of her.”
“Sylvie,” Demalion said. “Can we get gone?” Sweat stoo
d out on his face; his skin tinged toward grey.
She wanted to say yes, sure, and get them the hell out of there, but . . . she wanted to take Odalys with them, and short of shooting her—in her shop, on a busy street—she had no ideas.
The drape between the back room and the storefront swayed, beads clacking, a warning as ominous as a rattlesnake. Sylvie parted the beads, poked her head through, gun first, and swore. Cars were wrecked in the street beyond Invocat’s storefront, slewed across the lanes of traffic; people lay in the road as if they’d dropped when they had gone to help.
That, Sylvie thought, her blood going cold, her fingers tightening on her gun, wasn’t just any accident. That was soul shock, courtesy of the lich ghost. She saw it now, a shadow in the sunlight, a ripple pressed against the cracked glass.
The front window shattered, the ultimate crack racing side to side through all the spiderweb damage the ghost had already inflicted. The shards scattered with force, sliding across the floor with an evil hiss, coming at her, and the ghost flowing after, stirring the glass that had stopped moving.
Sylvie watched long enough to confirm that it was Margaret Strange and wondered how she’d slipped Wales’s ghost trap of an apartment. Wondered if Wales was still alive.
Sylvie canted a look over her shoulder. Demalion stood resolutely at the back door, keeping Odalys from escape. She might be witch enough to have her defensive spells ready, but her offensive ones seemed lacking. Good for them, bad for her.
The ghost opened its ragged lips, keened in pitch with the bone, a high, shrill cry that had Sylvie clutching her ears, nearly clouting herself in the head with her gun. The cry separated into individual sounds, vibrated through her hands, twinging against bone, resonating in the metal parts of her gun until she found herself worrying crazily that they would rattle the bullets enough to explode.
Her skull shook, but as the resonances sank deeper, Strange’s cries shifted to words, full of bile, outrage, entitlement, madness. My body, I’ve waited. I’ve paid and paid, and I want it now.
“Your check bounced,” Odalys snapped, then blanched as the lich ghost’s attention shifted toward her.
Strange’s estate had been embezzled, Sylvie recalled. That explained a lot. Odalys would rather have her own pet baby witch than a blanked-out body for a ghost who couldn’t afford the fee. That was how Zoe had known about the milk. Odalys had told her.
When the broken shards of glass lifted back from the carpet and orbited the lich, shining and molten in the sunlight, Sylvie ducked back behind the curtain. She’d seen enough. She’d heard enough. She wiped the sweat from her cheek, licked her lip where she’d apparently bitten it at the ghost’s first shriek.
“Odalys, are your circles proof against poltergeist activity?” Sylvie asked.
Odalys crowed in sudden triumph; her hand came out of a cloth-edged basket, fisted tight. She grinned at Sylvie. “You stick around and tell me, Shadows. I’ve other plans.”
She whirled and tossed her handful of something—not toward Strange’s ghost and her orbiting glass whirlwind—but straight at Demalion’s chest.
Demalion dropped as if she’d shot him. Dark dust plumed from his chest when he hit the floor, illuminated two wraith-like, glowing shapes twining above him.
“What did you do?”
“Graveyard dirt,” Odalys said. “Reminded his soul, both of them, that he was dead. There’s more of it in the basket if you want to try your hand at holding off Strange. If I were you, though, I’d drag your friend out of here and hope his spirits follow. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe one of them will survive.” Even as she spoke, she threaded her maze of protective rings, heading for the door.
Sylvie growled, holstered her gun, and followed her path. The door, even Odalys, wasn’t her target. Wright’s still form was. She dropped beside him. Beneath her hand, his chest was still, the dust gritty, piercing her blisters and adding blood to his shirt.
Shit, she thought. She rose, ready to tackle Odalys, and the woman tutted, picking up one of the fallen Hands of Glory. “You can chase me. Or you can try to get the dust off him. Your choice.”
She scooped up Sylvie’s satchel, stuffed the two Hands of Glory into it, and waved bye-bye.
Sylvie froze. If Odalys got away, Zoe would find herself gift-wrapped for Strange. Odalys might have wanted Zoe as her apprentice, but with a ghost demanding a body . . . Zoe became expendable.
Leave Wright, the little dark voice said. They both had more time than they were meant to have. You can’t save the dead except at the cost of the living.
He was so still beneath her hands, his warmth like the lining of a shucked-off coat, residual and fading fast.
Faintly, Sylvie could hear people on the street beginning to shout, waking as Strange grew ever closer to Sylvie and Wright and farther from the accident.
She dragged him up, her hands under his shoulders. The air hissed and seethed behind her, and she turned, shielding her throat and face. Heat grazed her shoulder, ran like a rivulet of boiling water down her arm, and leeched onto the inner curve of her elbow.
The salt rings had failed to hold Strange back, Sylvie thought, swaying and sick, her senses all caught up in the tiny point of pain.
No, that wasn’t quite true. The woman’s ghost—glass aura left behind—paced the rings, round and round, as if she were caught within high walls. It was that damned serpentine tongue that had gotten ahead of her and locked onto Sylvie’s flesh. She tried to pry it off, but found it barely there to her fingers, some plasmic state between solid and mist.
Their time was running out, she thought. The salt rings were holding, kept her awake, aware, alive, but for how long?
She scrabbled at Wright’s chest, collecting a bare scraping of graveyard dirt in her palm, slapped it over that writhing, stinging tongue, and felt it grow briefly tangible—slimy and muscular—before it decayed beneath her grasp, setting her free.
Sylvie grabbed Wright while Strange paced the circle, while the lich’s tongue slowly re-formed and made cautious sorties back in her direction. She forced his body upright, heavy and emptied of life, propped him against the wall, and started working on buttons. She ripped his shirt off, watched the graveyard dirt scatter downward, catching on his jeans, his shoes, and swore. Sweat sleeked her spine, her hands, made her one-handed grip on him faulty. He tipped, nearly fell.
From the front of the store, she heard a voice. “Hello? Everything all right here?”
Cop, she thought, come to see to the fender benders. Couldn’t walk away from Invocat’s shattered windows. Curiosity killed the cop, she thought, and worked faster.
It wasn’t like they were silent; Strange still shrieked, the bone flute howled, and Sylvie panted like a dog, cursing Wright, cursing Demalion with each outborne breath. Come back, you bastard. Just hold on. Hold on. Work with me here, you fucker, as she stripped him. Shirt fell, jeans down, shoes unlaced and off.
Caught holding a half-naked corpse . . . Oh, that would be a great way to end this day. Caught in a jail cell while Odalys fed Zoe to Margaret Strange to get the ghost off her own back.
Wright twitched in her grasp, breath sucking in like a bellows, began coughing almost immediately.
“Police officer,” the man called. “I’m coming back—”
Strange’s head rose from where she was studying the ring’s patterns, and she moved back toward the front, seeking an easier meal.
“Syl—” Wright murmured, voice ragged, face worn.
“Shh,” she hissed, making the judgment call. Wright first. Mr. Bad-Timing Cop would have to deal with the ghost himself.
“I’m naked—” he said. “Why?”
“Shut up,” Sylvie said. She slid her arm about his waist; he was all rib cage and jutting spine, hip bones like blades, and she dragged him into the alley. “Besides,” she muttered. “I left you your boxers.”
She shoved him—Wright, Demalion, one or both, god, please both—into the alley, ducked back into
the store, and stretched the graveyard-dust-contaminated clothes across the threshold. Hopefully that would buy them time. Unless, of course, Strange went around the front.
How much sentience was left in her? How much of her was pure rage and hunger? Could she plan? Sylvie cursed Wales and cursed herself for not knowing the right questions to have asked.
Sylvie spun Wright about and headed down the alley, dragging him drunkenly after her.
In her pocket, her cell phone rang. She ignored it. With her luck, it was Suarez demanding an update, and when she didn’t answer, he’d probably come after her just in time to die like his son, at the hands of some magical calamity.
At the alley mouth, Wright balked, said, “Can’t go out there like this.”
“People have other things to gape at than your skinny ass,” Sylvie said. For someone so skinny, he was heavy and solid clear through. Her shoulders ached. Peering into the street, she saw the gathered crowd about Odalys’s place. They were gaping; they were shouting; they were . . . falling.
She couldn’t see the ghost in the sunlight, but she could track her by the way people fell, one soul bite at a time. Hopefully, given the sheer number of people in the area, the sheer quickness with which Strange was dealing out unconsciousness, she wasn’t having time to drain any one person of more than a taste of each soul, like some evil-minded sampling party. Miami might be meaner, afterward, a lot of people walking away that much less whole, but they’d be walking, talking, breathing.
Sylvie doubted that Strange would be so cavalier if she got them in her grasp.
Her heart thumped hard. Other way. If they went out the front, they’d be easy prey for Strange. Right now, Strange seemed desperate enough to—
Why hadn’t she taken over any of the females who’d fallen, fed utterly, and forced her spirit into the empty shell? This was Miami, the land of sun and skin. Surely there’d been more than one who’d fit her criteria of young and attractive.
“Why specifically Zoe?” she murmured aloud.
