Ghosts & Echoes si-2

by Lyn Benedict

  He settled back into the seat with the awkwardness of a man who had just insulted his host. Given that, she wasn’t surprised when he cast about for a subject, any subject, and landed on the most obvious.

  “They’re bigger than I thought, not that I ever thought about ’em. Outside of movies anyway. Werewolves, I mean.”

  She started the engine, bumped them back onto the main road, and said, “Dire wolves, actually. The wolf half.” Relief made her expansive—it always did—and these were answers she could give without watching her words.

  “Dire wolves are extinct.”

  “Oh, someone spent time in museums,” she teased.

  He smiled, the first easy and uncomplicated expression she’d seen on him, born of a happy memory. “Jamie’s crazy ’bout the Natural History Museum. He outgrew dinosaurs, but doesn’t care for live animals yet. It’s all mammoth, sabertooth, dire wolf, and a weird obsession with some giant shrew thing that bites.”

  “Dire wolves didn’t go extinct. They just learned to spend more time on two legs than four.”

  “You’re telling me that dire wolves were werewolves.”

  “What, you’d feel better if werewolves were a purely modern phenomenon? Symptom of some strange corruption happening to the world? Sorry. The Magicus Mundi’s been around longer than we have.” She flicked her brights at an approaching car, got the bastards to turn their own down. The scrub brush along the narrow road caught the warring headlights and sparked luminous eyes. “Werewolves have been around for ages. They used to harass mankind a lot. Until mankind harassed back.”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “Am not. Just ’cause you didn’t know doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. Detect for a moment. Why do you think there were so many in the tar pits? What predatory animal blindly follows another into death? You listen to Tatya tell it, the humans rounded them up and drove them into the pits. Ushered in a whole new era of peace founded on mass slaughter.”

  “You know a lot about them.”

  “Occupational hazard,” she said.

  Her mood swung to a grimness she fought to hide. What would he have thought if she’d told him the truth? That she shared an ancestor with the werewolves? That Lilith, mother to vampires, succubi, werewolves, had deigned to have a human child that might carry just as much monster in her blood as the rest? Sylvie had never confessed her ancestry to Demalion, who had iffy ancestry of his own—thanks to his mother the sphinx—she sure as hell wasn’t sharing it with Wright.

  12

  Crystal Clear

  JUGGLING KEYS, THE BRIEFCASE, HER ATTENTION ON WRIGHT, WHO was all but zombie walking in her wake, Sylvie nearly fell into her apartment when the door opened as she touched it. Wright, hand still curved protectively against his chest, followed after her blindly, walking into a situation that had Sylvie reaching for her gun.

  She always locked the door.

  “Just me!” Alex said. She stuck her head out of the kitchenette, waved her hands in surrender, then grinned. It was a far more pleasant surprise than Sylvie had been anticipating, and she felt a little dizzy with the relief. “What’s with the gun?”

  “Door was unlocked and half-open,” Sylvie said. “You need to work on your self-preservation skills. Anything on Zoe?”

  “I locked it, and nope,” Alex said, ducking back into the kitchen. Her voice carried easily across the few feet. “You’re carrying a briefcase full of magical tools designed to open doors. You think?”

  “They’re not lit,” Sylvie said. She set the briefcase down; traded that weight for the intangible weight of her resurgent worry for her sister.

  “Does that make a difference?” Wright asked.

  “It should,” Sylvie said. “Like a loaded gun. You still have to pull the trigger.”

  “Some guns are for crap,” he said. “Ask me how many accidental shootings I’ve seen.” His expression was bleak; bad memories, exhaustion, pain all ganging up on him.

  “Point,” Sylvie said. She nudged the briefcase closer to the door, waited to see if it would open again, spurred just by proximity to the Hands. Maybe they didn’t need to be lit to unlock; maybe the lighting of the Hands was geared toward putting witnesses out. The door latch stayed firm, even with a tug at the knob, and Sylvie groaned. Why didn’t bad things ever come with instruction manuals?

  Alex said, “Stop playing with body parts and come have dinner.”

  Sylvie could smell Ciro’s pizza warming in the oven, and she steeled herself in case the pizza was merely Alex leading up to wanting something new for the office. Like the ergonomic chair she’d been leaving strategic pictures of on her desk, the fridge, Sylvie’s office door.

  “I figured you’d need it,” she said. “Tatya always takes it out of—” She looked over Sylvie’s shoulder and her gentle air of self-satisfaction faded. “What happened to you?”

  “Got bit,” Wright said shortly, made a U-turn out of the kitchen, and disappeared into the bathroom. He shut the door with a solid thunk, and a moment later, the shower started up.

  “You let him get bitten?” Alex followed in his path, like she meant to follow him directly into the bathroom and investigate the wound closer.

  “Too close to the moon,” Sylvie said. “Their nerves were jangled. And they didn’t like that he had two souls.”

  Alex flung herself onto Sylvie’s couch, propped her feet up on the arm, and said, “Tatya could tell? What’d she have to say? Did she recognize—”

  “Tatya never met Demalion,” Sylvie said. “Though she said he smelled like cat.” She dragged the pizza out of the oven, the cardboard box crisp with heat, the scent of garlic and cheese overwhelming. She set it down on the edge of the coffee table and went back for napkins, pepper flakes, and powdered cheese.

  Alex frowned. “But Demalion wasn’t—”

  Sylvie nodded once, and Alex’s eyes got big. “You never said!”

  “He was human,” Sylvie said. “At least . . . ninety percent human. His mother isn’t.” Sylvie shoved Alex’s feet off the armrest, sat there instead, propping her own feet on the coffee table. The new decoration, a bowl filled with a dozen crystal balls of varying sizes—courtesy of Alex’s overkill shopping—reflected a hundred tiny Sylvies back at her. Lures she didn’t think she’d need after all. The moment Wright relaxed, stopped clinging to his control, Demalion would surface.

  “So you’re going to tell Wright now? I keep crap secrets. I’m scared I’ll slip.” Alex shot a glance at the closed door, the water still running, and lowered her voice anyway.

  Sylvie passed Alex her untouched slice of pizza, and said, “Don’t bluff badly if you’re going to bluff. You keep secrets every day, or you wouldn’t work for me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex said. She flipped the new slice of pizza on top of her first, eating them like pie, clear enough signs that Alex understood the answer would be some variant of “very soon, maybe even imminent.”

  “As soon as I’ve talked to Demalion. That way I’ve got the full scoop to pass on to Wright.” It made her head hurt, the idea of taking words from Wright’s mouth and reciting them back for his ears.

  The running water cut off; Alex’s pizza oozed a piece of cheese and tomato to her lap with a wet plop. Alex ignored it. “I should stick around. Watch your back. Demalion was kind of a bastard, no offense.”

  “So am I. Go home and look for any robberies that broke the pattern we know. Look for Hand-aided thefts.”

  The door to the bathroom opened; Wright slouched out, jeans-clad, bare-chested, all ribs and shadows, the curved white scar on his rib cage as clear as moonlight on white gravel.

  “Pizza?” he said. There was hope in his voice, and relief, as if the world couldn’t be that bad, no matter that it held ghosts, werewolves, and black magic, not if there was still pizza.

  Sylvie twitched her gaze away from his chest, from that little gap in the scar. She wanted to press her lips to it, taste that tiny space that had been a gap in Demali
on’s soul. She peeled cheese from her crust and looked away. “It’s not Chicago deep-dish, but it’s tasty,” Sylvie said. “Come and get it.” Wright. She had to remember Wright in all of this. Her client. No matter whom he was housing within his skin.

  He padded into the kitchenette, helped himself to an actual plate and a soda before he took a couple of slices, careful of his bandaged hand. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside the coffee table with the easy grace of a parent who had a young child. The enthusiasm on his face faded after a few bites, and Sylvie didn’t think it was the pizza not being up to his standard.

  Alex, ignoring Sylvie’s earlier admonition to go home, mangled another slice of pizza in her constant quest to eat the cheese first, and said, “When I couldn’t find Zoe, I stopped looking for her and looked for her boyfriend.”

  “Carter,” Sylvie said. She shot a glance at Wright, caught him looking away. It would have been high-school behavior except he was visibly uncomfortable, edgy in his skin, and cop enough to realize he’d been the subject of conversation. Again. No, Wright wasn’t a happy camper.

  “Carson,” Alex said.

  “Whatever,” Sylvie said, just to annoy Alex. To see if she could get Wright to relax, just a little bit. She was tense enough for all of them. She wanted, needed, to talk to Demalion, and Wright’s careful control barred the way.

  “Whatever’s actually exactly it,” Alex said.

  “What?” Wright said. “Does she make sense to you?”

  “Sometimes,” Sylvie said. “Not at the moment.”

  “There is no Carson. Not in her cell-phone history anyway, and I ask you: What high-school girl doesn’t call her boyfriend at least once a day?” Alex grinned.

  “So either he doesn’t exist, or she’s calling him from another phone? I don’t like either of those options,” Sylvie said. Phones with a specific purpose were the purview of drug dealers, prostitutes, and stalker-type boyfriends. Or, maybe, a necromancer.

  “I choose option A,” Alex said. “I talked to some of her school friends, emphasis on the school, less on the friends—seems Zoe’s been making herself unpopular of late—but no one’s ever met Carson or even heard what school he goes to. He’s an excuse, not a person. A reason for her to blow her friends off and go off on her own. Zoe’s up to something, and I don’t think she wants to share. Maybe your out-of-pattern robberies?”

  “Shit,” Sylvie muttered, but it fitted with her loose conjectures about the money. A thought struck her. “You found her friends? I didn’t have any luck.”

  “You’re an authority figure, Syl. They see you and scatter. I talked to as many of ’em as I could scrounge up.” Alex bent her head, flicked pepperoni to one side of her plate.

  Sylvie said, “Something you’re not telling me?”

  “Her friends are kinda . . . not.” Alex scowled. “I mean, I remember high school, but god, these kids are little shits. They were ready to blame her for anything as long as I didn’t get them in trouble. They said she—” Alex cut off all at once, went back to dissecting her pizza.

  “Said what?” Sylvie asked.

  “Just the usual teenage crap,” Alex said. “You know, she’s a bitch, and all that.”

  Oh, there was more, Sylvie could tell. The question was, did she want to hear it? Alex sure didn’t want to tell it. She closed her eyes, felt a warm hand reach out to her, fingers twining with hers, offering silent support. “Anything that sounded Mundi-related? Freak, witch, crazy? Any of those thrown her way?”

  Alex shook her head.

  Sylvie was trying to figure out if that was good, bad, indifferent, when Wright’s fingers twitched in hers, and he jerked back, looking embarrassed. He opened his mouth, ready to proffer explanations, apologies, then looked perplexed. He went back to his pizza, his brow furrowed.

  Ghost time imminent, Sylvie thought.

  Because she was watching for it, she saw when Wright ceded control to Demalion. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a frown on Wright’s face, a quickening of breath that smoothed out, his brow unwrinkling. A casual hand that reached out for pizza, then veered and picked up one of the smooth quartz globes out of absentminded habit.

  No wonder Wright’s wife leaned toward crazy. People talked about possession, and it was Exorcist territory, strange events and violent behavior. Dogs howling in the background and cats hissing and running away.

  But this gentle overtaking . . . He met her eyes, and she let out her breath at the desperation in his gaze, the strain. No, she corrected herself, nothing gentle about this at all, at least not from his point of view.

  She interrupted Alex’s speculations as to Zoe’s secret activities, which were growing more disturbing by the moment, with a “Go home, Alex. It’s late.”

  Alex opened her mouth to protest, but Sylvie flicked a finger toward herself, toward Wright, and Alex capitulated. “I am tired. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Alex let herself out, and Sylvie watched him rolling the crystal about his fingers with a graceful familiarity she doubted Wright could manage. He walked into the living room, walked the crystal along his knuckles at the same time, then held it up and looked through it at her. “I’m sort of surprised. I can’t see a damn thing in crystals any longer. Clairvoyance is apparently all about the flesh and not the soul. I’d tell the ISI—Luci in Research would be fascinated—but it would be . . . awkward to explain.”

  “Demalion—” She took two steps toward him and dropped onto her couch. She looked up at him, at that innate stillness he brought to Wright’s twitchiness.

  “In the borrowed flesh,” he said.

  She let out a shaky breath, then laughed. There were tears on her face when she stopped, slipping hot and wet through the crevices of her fingers. She snuffled against her palms and shuddered. “God.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He sat beside her on her too-small couch, smelling like Wright—warm sunlight, antiseptic, sharp after-shave, a hint of smoke—but with his own sandalwood scent beneath. How messed up is that, she thought. Clairvoyance was flesh, but scent was soul.

  He leaned against her, slid down, and laid his head in her lap. Her hands fell to his temples, brushed back the damp blond hair with shaking fingers. His shoulders bled warmth into her thighs.

  “What am I going to do, Sylvie? What do I do now? I cheated death, but it’s not life either.”

  She leaned down, kissed his brow, and said, “I think you have to let go. Tell me what you need to do that kept you here.” She was crying again, a wet splash on the freckled bridge of his nose.

  He pushed her away, rose to his feet. “Fuck that. I came to you for help, not for platitudes. Fix this. I want my life back!”

  The shock wasn’t as sharp as it could have been. Some part of her had known he wouldn’t want anything as easy as a handful of last words. She’d been stifling the little dark voice all day, all night, and now freed, it crowed in ugly triumph. Dead men are always desperate.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Find out!”

  The echoes of his shout lingered in her small apartment. He was white around the lips; his hands fisted. “You saved a god. Is one mortal soul too much to hope for?”

  She slumped back, resting her weight on the edge of her couch. “I can barely figure out how to help Wright.”

  “Help me! You owe me that much. I died. I don’t care about Wright.”

  “He’s my client.”

  “I sent him to you. That makes me your client.”

  “His bank account,” she muttered, stubborn down to her blood and bones.

  He dropped to the couch, breathing hard, paused, and regrouped. She watched Wright’s face shift from taut, angry, to something softer, something harder to bear. “You have to help me. Sylvie, please. If my soul goes on, goes to hades—and you know it will; Eros put his fingers all over me, changed me, marked me as his subject—the Furies will spend eternity torturing me. Eternity.”

  “Shh,” Sylvie said.

  “For something
I did for you . . .” His body shook, fine tremors running through Wright’s wiry form like an electric current.

  She sat beside him again, tentative. She wasn’t able to offer reassurances. His likely fate was all too real: The Furies had killed him once, tried to devour his soul but failed. In their realm, he’d be easy prey. She had never been very good at offering comfort; platitudes in her mouth were as satisfactory as wax apples to a hungry man.

  “I was afraid you’d died also. That I was hunting aid from a dead woman.” His throat was raw; the words came out hoarse. She’d never imagined Demalion stripped down to this level of desperation. Had never wanted to see it. He leaned his face into her neck, and she curled a hand around his nape, her words all smothered under his pain. A puff of air heralded his broken laugh. “I forgot. You survive. You always survive.”

  Her hand on his neck tightened to the point it had to be hurting him, but he only pressed closer to her, whispering into her skin. “Take me to bed, Shadows. And tell me everything’s going to be all right.”

  13

  Mornings After

  SYLVIE HAD MEANT TO BE AWAKE AND OUT OF BED BEFORE HE WOKE, but instead, held prisoner too long by her own exhaustion, they woke at the same time and had to suffer through his startled jerk, his quick accounting of the situation: two bodies, one bed, two pairs of jeans, one T-shirt, all on . . . His gaze even raked over the bra strap her T-shirt neck revealed, and it was enough to soothe the worst of the dismay from his eyes.

  “I need to call my wife,” he said. He didn’t move. It had been his mouth’s automatic reaction to the rush of guilt and possibility.

  Sylvie slid away, rolled up to stare at the ceiling. Early morning again, the sunlight creeping just across the floor, crawling up the side of the bed. For all that she had overslept, it was still only five hours since they . . . since she had gone to bed.

  “You know him. Very well,” Wright said, and she kicked out of bed like a swimmer when the gun had gone off.