by Lyn Benedict
“I do.” She couldn’t say more. Not while her throat still ached with controlled grief.
He caught her hand, turned her about. She looked down at him in the wreck of her sheets and pulled away. “Coffee.”
She escaped to the kitchen, not looking back. Demalion had been sleek in her arms, a pleasure to ruffle and rouse, but Wright—all bedhead, stubble, his lanky energy banked—was damn pettable, and Sylvie was only human. It had been his mouth she’d kissed last night as they dropped off to sleep, his lean body pressed close against her own, warm even through the doubled layers of denim between them.
She was inhaling her first cup of coffee when he slouched into the room, barefoot, face washed but still stubbled. “You make a habit of sleeping with your clients?”
Sylvie took another swallow and replied as if it were a joke. Honesty would be too much right now, would lead inexorably to Demalion. “Hell, we slept together an hour after we met. ’Course we were under the influence, so to speak. . . .”
He flicked a false grin, all teeth, no amusement, and asked, “Coffee?”
“Mugs are in the cupboard.” Which he knew, having found them and served himself yesterday, but he was being polite, making it clear, maybe unconsciously, that they were strangers to each other.
He busied himself with the coffee, adding a splash of milk that she personally considered a little dubious but passed his sniff test.
She studied the tight line of his back, and said, “Yeah. I know him. Knew him.” She might not be ready for this, but he was falling apart trying to figure it out.
“Yeah?” he said.
“His name was Michael Demalion. He was a white knight, too. You would have liked him.”
Lie, she thought—half the time Sylvie hadn’t been sure she liked him; Demalion was too wily a player of politics for her tastes—but it eased his shoulders, let him take a deeper breath.
“How did this happen?” he asked. “I still don’t get how this happened. Why me?”
“You were there,” she said. “That’s the easy answer. Wrong place at the right time. The harder answer? Demalion . . .” She hesitated, trying to pick her words, find an explanation for something she didn’t understand the mechanics of herself. Finally, she said, “Demalion wasn’t entirely human to begin with, and by the time he died, he was a little less human than he had been before. Maybe it gave him an escape route that regular people don’t have. A way to cling to life.”
“What—” Wright started, as much at a loss for words as she. “What was he?”
“Government agent,” Sylvie said, just to be difficult. Demalion had been too human, too fragile, and had cared too much about the human world to be labeled anything but human, no matter that his mother was the ageless sphinx.
“What?”
“The agency that looks into the Magicus Mundi? He worked for them.”
Relief washed his face. “So why did he send me to you?” A sudden blush hot on his face, stippling his neck. “Besides the obvious—” He gestured back toward the rumpled sheets. “Let’s go talk to them.”
“Let’s not,” Sylvie said. She wanted to kick herself. He was a cop. Fond of departments and regulations, felt secure in the bureaucracy even if he bitched about it. “Look, Demalion was a good guy. The people he worked for? Not so much. They’d rather study you than help you, and really? They’d rather have Demalion back. Even if he’s in your body.”
“Like you wouldn’t? You’re his girlfriend, right?” He jerked away from her, the kitchen too small to contain them both. He paced circles in her living room.
Sylvie shrugged off the label. “You’re my client,” she said. “Demalion’s . . . not. I won’t lie. I’d love to find a way to save you both. I intend to try. But I won’t sacrifice you to save him.”
Wright searched her face; she did her best to allow it, to keep confidence in her expression and not discomfort, not worry. Finally, he nodded. “I . . . believe you.” By his expression, those had been hard words to say. He rubbed the werewolf bite, the scabs that dotted his palm, wrist, and fingers, prodding a more tangible source of pain.
“It might prolong the situation,” she said. Honesty, once begun, was hard to stop. “Saving both of you.” If she could. But hell, Demalion was right. She had faced off against worse situations. She’d helped reconstruct a god. Surely she could find a way to resurrect a ghost.
“How’d he die?” Wright asked, an apparent non sequitur. Sylvie understood it. He wanted reassurance, to know that this was a good man’s ghost. Sylvie was more than willing to give it.
“If I say saving the world, it sounds improbable, doesn’t it? He died because he did something that had to be done . . . and if it didn’t save the world, it was as close as men can come.”
“He’s not human?” Arms clutched his chest, and worry, fear, discomfort chased themselves across his face.
“His father was. His mother isn’t. She . . . misses him. A lot. Her only child dead.”
“His mother . . .” he said. Nearly under his breath. Was this manipulation or information? Sylvie felt she’d crossed the line in her desire to make him see that Demalion wasn’t someone to fear or despise. Wasn’t something you just got rid of, termites in his house, a parasite in his skin.
“Yeah,” she said. “Kinda a bitch, but she doted on him. You’re going to make her very happy.”
He flickered a ragged smile. “Every man’s purpose. To make a woman happy.”
Sylvie couldn’t grin. Not now that she thought about it. He’d been so close to danger, all unknowing. He had hunted for Anna D, and if the ISI couldn’t be trusted with Wright’s well-being, Anna D was less trustworthy still. She’d have stripped Wright’s body of his own soul to save her son’s, probably before Wright had finished explaining himself.
Wright had been lucky. How sad was that, that Sylvie was his best hope, and even she had a vested interest in his ghost’s survival.
Resurrection, the little dark voice said. No good can come of it. Death is final.
Sylvie took the coffee mug from his hands—he hadn’t taken a single sip of it—and poured it down the drain, pouring him a fresh one.
There was a distinct knocking on her door, an authoritative pound, pound, pound, and she groaned.
“Cops,” they said at the same moment. The peephole gave her a closer view of Adelio Suarez’s dark-stubbled throat, his solid chin. Even distorted by the peephole, Suarez’s face was tired and grim, and Sylvie flashed back to standing on Suarez’s porch, soaked with fear sweat and failure, wanting him to hear about Rafael from her and not the police. She thought Zoe, on a despairing note, and opened the door.
She shooed Wright back toward the bedroom. Gesturing his objections, he went.
Suarez, when she opened the door, slipped in with an agility surprising in such a solid man. When she turned around, he was eyeing the coffee mugs on the counter.
“Company, so early?”
“Not your business,” she said. Her nerves twanged. Was he making sure there was someone to be with her? Had he found Zoe? Had he found her dead? “Get to it. Is she . . . is she dead?”
“Haven’t found her,” he said.
She shuddered as if he had given her the best of news.
“Any coffee left?” he asked.
“Caffeine, at the end of your shift? Lourdes will have your hide,” she said. She poured him a cup anyway, her hands shaking. Adrenaline rushed beneath her skin, wanting out. This thing with Demalion was eating at her; she wanted to be shaking answers out of someone, anyone. Zoe was out there, robbing banks or something, wading in the murky waters of black magic. Sylvie didn’t want to play favor for favor now. Her gratitude that he hadn’t brought her the worst of news went only so far.
She gritted her teeth and thought of the politest way to give him the bum’s rush.
He hooked a chair out from her tiny kitchen table, plunked himself down into it.
“Sit, Shadows.”
Her back
stiffened. “Shouldn’t you be out looking for Zoe?”
“You want me on the streets, doing your job, then listen to me for a change.”
“You always say the same damn things. I’ve got a short attention span.”
He pushed a chair out toward her, its wooden feet screeking across the pale linoleum, leaving marks. “Sit.”
Wrong way to get my attention, she thought. But he couldn’t know how deep disobedience ran in her blood. Still, he was helping her with Zoe. . . . She sat.
“I lifted a bunch of fingerprints from the Lincoln Navigator,” he said. “No matches yet, though Meredith Alvarez gave me a name. As well as a stolen brooch she just happened to run across.”
“I thought you’d decided that was a dead end, that I’d sent you all on a snipe hunt.” She swallowed hard, took a gulp of her own cooling coffee to ease the constriction in her throat. This stupid case—she’d be glad to be rid of it, to sic Suarez on the kids, except Zoe was one of them. And Zoe didn’t have a high-powered legal retainer on her side. It made Sylvie brittle-tempered.
“So you haven’t found Zoe. But you came here anyway? To do what? Collect on the favor? To thank me for putting you on the right track?” She was getting shrill, knew it, but seemed unable to stop it. If Demalion had broken down last night, she was doing so here and now, with a cop for a witness. Sometimes, she hated her life.
She lunged out of her chair, started another pot brewing just to give her something to do. His eyes on her back made her itch the entire time, and she turned, pressing her back against the edge of the Formica counter, using that thin line of discomfort as a vital focus point.
“Are you playing offense or defense, Shadows?” He leaned back in his chair, dark eyes lingering on her throat, where she knew her pulse was visible. “It makes a man wonder what you have to hide.”
Her heart thumped; the bitter black coffee she’d gulped churned in her stomach.
“I spoke with Lisse Conrad, who admitted to hiring you. She said you knew where some of the stolen property was but wouldn’t tell her. She thinks you’re working a kickback, splitting the reward with the finder.”
“Bitch,” Sylvie muttered. “I should have charged her more.”
“We tracked you to the Alvarezes,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, hadn’t objected at all. “This time, she decided to talk to us. She gave us the story about her car, and a piece of jewelry.”
“What’s your point?” she asked. “I’m glad you got the brooch back, glad you got a lead. Now I can hand the entire damn thing off to you. It’s not like I don’t have other cases going.”
“Your Chicago cop? UFOs in the Everglades?”
“I have you to thank for that showing up on my doorstep? Remind me to send you a fruit basket.” Her surprise did what nothing else had, got her mind off the panicked Zoe track. If he’d had something on her sister, he would have mentioned it by now.
He tipped sugar into his coffee, stirred it by rotating the cup. “I sent her case to you for a reason.”
He pushed the chair at her again, and she leaned back against the counter, put her foot on the chair rung. Her apartment, dammit, no matter that he seemed determined to play the host.
“To annoy me?” The chair nudged her foot, and she moved out of range, put her back to him, and banged a skillet onto the stove. Never mind that her fridge held only a single slice of leftover pizza in it, and nothing else.
It wasn’t that she was looking for a way to renege on their deal. She had promised him answers; she would honor that—as soon as he found Zoe—but it wasn’t going to be as simple as telling him what had happened. Explaining the satanists’ fate was going to require showing as well, and that would eat time. Add in the minutes, hours, days, lost to making him believe her? She just didn’t have that kind of time.
He rose, his shifting weight making the floor creak, and she turned. His eyes, like his son’s, were mismatched, one greenish, one brown. It made her uneasy to look at them—older, wiser, the eyes Rafael should have had, if he hadn’t started his love affair with black-magic masochism.
Zoe, she thought with a lurch, could end the same way.
He leaned in, resting his hand beside hers on the counter. “I’m not stupid, Shadows. Very few cops are. We see things in the city most people never imagine. We see the very worst of human nature. But there are other things we see. Things I think you have seen.” He leaned closer still, coffee on his breath, and too much awareness in his eyes. “Things I think you’ve killed.”
She shoved him back, thinking this was what came of asking him for a favor. “Get it through your head. I didn’t kill the so-called satanists who killed Rafael, though by god, I wish I had.”
The ugly truth in her voice drove him back a step, then Wright was there in the opening between living room and kitchen, trying for casual, but his spine and shoulders stiff, saying, “Heard pots and pans. We eating breakfast in? Only I thought we had an appointment.”
“Time got away from me. Sorry,” she said. “If you’ll excuse us, Lio?”
Suarez stepped away from her, studied Wright head to toe, and said, “Well, you do take care of your clients, don’t you?”
“Beneath you,” she said. “The door’s that way. Go find Zoe, and we’ll talk.”
“We’ll talk now, Shadows. You’re just going to have to be late.”
“I can’t imagine you have anything to say that interests me,” she said. She headed toward her bedroom and a change of clothes.
Wright’s widening eyes gave her warning, and she blocked Suarez’s attempt to grab her shoulder with a supple torso twist, came around and seized his thick wrist in her hand, nails one step from drawing blood. “I really don’t have time for this,” she said.
Suarez said, “Señora Alvarez said you left her with the impression that Isabella Martinez was the thief, or one of them. She said you went inside and spoke to the girl. Is she involved? Mrs. Alvarez believes it so.”
He held up a hand in Wright’s direction; without looking at Wright, Sylvie knew the conflict written on his face—defend Sylvie or defer to the local police.
“Ask Bella”—and that was a slip she could ill afford: familiarity with a suspect—“if you’re so curious.”
“Her parents are in the Bahamas on business. We’re waiting for the family lawyers to get in touch with them, then with us. But the Martinezes’ housekeeper says you went through there like a house on fire. Lots of shouting, and you took something away. Something I doubt was stolen goods. Tell me what it was.”
“I’m not the sharing type,” Sylvie said. She reined in her brittle control, dropped her hands first to her sides, then slid them behind her back, trying to look less confrontational. It might work better, she thought, watching his eyes narrow, if she wasn’t known for carrying a SOB holster.
His hands fisted at his sides, then relaxed. “Tell me one thing, Shadows. Tell me my instincts are right. That this burglary is more than it seems. More like the UFO abduction. Something that needs your skill set. Give me that, at least, and I’ll back off until you call.”
Sylvie could give him that. She nodded once. “Stay out of it, Suarez. It’s not safe.”
“All right. I’m gone for now. I’ll bring your sister back. Then we’ll talk.”
Wright winced as the man bumped the briefcase on his way out, tipping it over. Sylvie, who knew it was locked, was more sanguine, at least until it hit the tile and popped open a tiny bit, releasing the scent of spoiled milk and dead flesh into the room. Luckily, it coincided with Suarez’s opening the apartment door on a wash of fresh summer air.
She saw him to the open stairwell, then pounced on the briefcase with a muttered curse that was more bluster than emotion. This was a problem she could solve. “Wright!”
“Yeah,” he said.
“There’s a roll of duct tape in the drawer next to the fridge. Get it? Oh, and the salt.”
Wright, heading for the tape, paused. “Salt?”
“Yeah. I should have done it yesterday, but I’m not a witch. Don’t think like one.”
He brought her the tape, the salt dispenser. She shook it thoughtfully, wondering if she had enough.
“Hold that end,” she said, passing him tape. She popped the lid on the shaker, exposed the sticky side of the tape, and laid down a thin line of salt along its length.
“Protective magic,” she said. “A lot of things don’t like salt. Gunpowder works, too, but it’s an expensive habit and tends to go bang at bad moments.”
She wound the leather case with three ugly rows of duct tape, thinking legend was apparently less than complete if the Hands could affect locks on their lonesome. First her door, now the briefcase.
“So we’re taking them to the witch, right? ’Cause I’m beginning to get ideas of them crawling across the floor all on their own. And my dreams were crappy.”
Sylvie paused. “Specifically crappy? Like Bella’s dream about the dead kid?”
“Just”—he waved his hands, trying to catch the impossible words he needed to describe it—“nasty. Busy. Like I could hear people talking about really horrible things next door.”
“Tell me sooner next time,” Sylvie said. “These are dangerous artifacts, and you’ll be more susceptible to their corruption than me. Not judgment. Just fact. You died once. You have a . . . passenger. You’ve got a gap in your defenses.”
He shrugged, though it was tight. “So what? Your boyfriend Demalion’s like . . . a common cold? Weakening my immune system? You think the witch can help with that?”
“I’m hoping she can help with a lot of things,” Sylvie said. “Not least, getting rid of these Hands.”
14
The Retail Witch
ODALYS’S SHOP, ADDRESS BETTER DEFINED BY ALEX’S GOOGLEFU, turned out to be nothing like Sylvie had expected. She thought of magic shops, and she thought dark, dim, and claustrophobic—a showman’s tent, a bloody basement ritual, an abandoned house. At best, she had thought the shop would be new-age incense and candles, plastic bead curtains, and velvet draping—all the trappings of bell, book, and candle.
