Ghosts & Echoes si-2

by Lyn Benedict

  “You’re not listening,” Sylvie said. “Their Hands are real enough to let them walk through burglar alarms and locked doors, to put down anyone in the vicinity for hours. Knockoffs? I don’t think so.” She flipped the latches on the briefcase, yanked the duct tape back, spilling salt, and popped the lid. Demalion took a step back, then wobbled. Sylvie half turned; she knew what was happening, even as it happened. Wright shivered convulsively, his eyes flat and black, but his jaw was set. Taking his body back. Possession trumping his fear of the unknown and the malign.

  He made a series of quick, darting glances about the room. Sylvie figured he was trying to play catch-up on events. Wright seemed confused, but less wary than Demalion had been. Then again, Wright had missed the whole “prisoners of the Ghoul” thing, had missed Wales being all judgmental about ghosts and human bodies, had missed Wales feeding his pet Hand. For all Wright knew, Sylvie, Demalion, and Wales had been sitting around making friends and drinking tea.

  She merely nodded welcome, not wanting to draw Wales’s attention to the changeover. But Wales’s focus was all for the Hands in the briefcase, tangled in their jumbled embrace, fingers linking.

  “Interesting,” he said, expression intent. “One of them is . . . fake? The other . . . not?” He pulled his fingers back without ever touching either Hand, not Bella’s, all spangled silver and fake tattoos, not Zoe’s, faintly crusted with milk from its long immersion.

  “You don’t sound certain,” Sylvie said. She wanted certain. A tiny sprig of hope bloomed in her. Maybe Zoe’s Hand wasn’t real, a knockoff like her faux designer clothing.

  Hope hurts, her little dark voice warned. Hurts being born and hurts dying.

  Wales said, “I can check.” He picked up Bella’s Hand of Glory, made a face at the decorations, and then flipped his lighter out of his pocket.

  Sylvie snapped, “Hey!” just as Bella’s Hand dipped into the flame and failed to light. The silver nail polish blackened and stank.

  Wales said, “Huh.”

  “A little warning!” Sylvie said. “I’ve had all the blackouts I can tolerate for the month.”

  “It’s dead,” he said.

  “It’s a frickin’ Hand cut off a body, yeah,” Wright said, twitchy as always. “I don’t think it takes a whole lotta know-how to figure that it’s dead.”

  “Let me rephrase, then,” Wales said. He studied Wright as he did so. “It looks like a Hand of Glory, but it’s not one. It lacks a ghost. It’s just dead flesh.”

  “It worked earlier,” Sylvie said. “Had a ghost, had a fairly active one. Gave the user all sorts of nightmares, reliving her crimes.”

  “Shouldn’t have done that,” Wales said absently, turning the Hand this way and that, setting the lighter down. “Part of the packaging is to prevent soul seepage. Thankfully. I can’t imagine sharing Marco’s dreams. Sure that’s what was going on? Not just imagination?”

  “Sure enough that we could ID the . . . donor by her memories flooding the kid’s dreams.”

  “Her?”

  “The dead woman?”

  Wales twitched visibly, bobbled the Hand, and only caught it at the last. “It’s a woman’s Hand!” He shot a look back at the other one, and said, “They’re both women’s!”

  Wright and Sylvie traded a long, speaking look with each other. Wright’s expression said, He’s kinda slow, and We’re not paying for this, are we? Sylvie shrugged minutely; she wasn’t sure Wales saw a lot of women, living or dead.

  Wales muttered, “No, no, no. They’re women’s hands, and they’re never women’s hands.”

  “Why not?” Sylvie asked. “Women commit murder, too. They might be a little less likely to hang themselves after, though.” A stray thought occurred. Alex hadn’t said how Patrice Caudwell had died. She would have mentioned something as grisly as an old lady hanging herself. “What happens if they don’t hang? Can they still be bound into the Hands?”

  “No,” Wales said. “No. At least . . . Look. It’s all about symbolism. Hanging yourself, a rope around your neck—it keeps your soul tight to the body. Suicide by gunshot, by bleeding out—”

  “Soul leaves with the blood. But could it be less significant than you think?”

  “That’s not the . . . Tradition dictates men’s Hands. Tradition dictates hanging,” Wales said.

  “Tradition changes—”

  “No,” he said. “No. It’s like prescription meds. You don’t prescribe the same dose to a woman that you do a man. The . . .” He flailed his hands about, reaching for vocabulary they would understand, and finally came up with a word that made Sylvie want to gag. “The recipe to create the Hands is specific. Detailed. Picky. You don’t just change out pieces of it.”

  “Do we care how it got done?” Wright said. “Can’t we just get rid of the things?”

  Sylvie shook her head. “It’s a signature of sorts. Tells me something about the person who made them.” For one thing, Wales’s spluttering was the final step to make her erase him from her list of suspects. His dismay seemed entirely too real, the break with tradition too difficult for him to contemplate.

  “You’re profiling a body snatcher?” Wright said. “Oh, I hate this.”

  “Wales?” she prompted.

  The Ghoul picked up Bella’s Hand again, scratched flakes off the coating, clear with a reddish tinge. “They changed more than the gender,” he said. “This is just . . . wrong. It couldn’t have worked.”

  “It did. End of discussion,” Sylvie said. She had Bella’s dreams, she had the platinum brooch, she had the Navigator and Bayside and her own bouts of unconsciousness as proof.

  “But you just don’t mess around with a formulation to bind a killer spirit!” Wales said. “It’s just too damn risky for the user. The ghost might escape. And then—”

  Sylvie sucked in a breath. “You think that’s what happened? The ghost escaped? Went after Bella . . .” It might explain the girl’s illness. “What does soul consumption look like?”

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” Wales said. “You just die. All at once. Drop dead in your tracks. Your body might breathe for a little bit, your heart beat, but the shock of having a soul ripped out—”

  “The girl I took the Hand from was sick,” Sylvie said.

  “No argument,” Wright muttered.

  Wales shot him another glance and caught on this time. It wasn’t Demalion behind the skin any longer.

  “Sick,” Sylvie said, prodding Wales with her forefinger. His chest was all bone beneath the layers, thin as an anorexic’s. “Could the Hand do that?”

  “No,” Wales said. He rubbed at his chest. “If the ghost got free, the girl would have dropped. At least—there’s something just not right with these Hands. . . .”

  “Okay, you know what? Forget all that. Let me worry about where they came from. Just tell us how to destroy them.”

  Wales tossed Bella’s Hand into the trash. “That one’s done. No ghost? No trouble. The other—”

  He picked up Zoe’s Hand with a wary expression, bit back most of his comments so that all she heard was a mumbled, “Wrong,” and she said, “Well?”

  Her tone was sharp, but she couldn’t help thinking about Bella—ill and in the hospital, and a ghost mysteriously vanished from its prison. Zoe was next on the chopping block.

  “Oh, this one’s active as hell,” Wales said. “I can feel it, even unlit; it’s buzzing, angry and barely contained.” He raised his face, furrowed brow, and upset eyes. “You’ve got to find out who’s making these and stop them. They’re not right. They’re defective. Dangerous. To the user and anyone else.”

  Sylvie said, “I’ll get right on that. If you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear them. You’re right. There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. I try to keep it that way.”

  “There’s a woman on Calle Ocho. Runs a fancy shop like she’s nothing more than a merchant. But she’s the real deal.”

  “She sent us to you,” Wright said.


  “Well then,” Wales said. “I’m tapped out.”

  “Focus, Ghoul. Tell me how to destroy them.”

  “They’re tough,” Wales said. “It’s the binding between the bones and the spirit. You have to destroy one without freeing the other. Otherwise, you’re fighting something that can touch you, hurt you, that you can’t touch. It’s a man boxing hurricane winds on a cliff.”

  “An exorcism?” Wright said. “Gotta be a priest around. Surely one of ’em will believe the threat’s real.”

  Wales said, “An exorcism would work no better on the Hands of Glory than it would work on you.”

  Wright twitched, and Wales continued. “An exorcism is a rite designed to remove a devil or demon from human skin, to send it back to the abyss. A ghost isn’t a devil or a demon. You can’t send it back. You can only send it on. And if it’s not ready to go, then you’re going to have a fight that gets really ugly. A demon’s nothing. It’s not natural to be in human flesh, doesn’t fit. A human spirit? Feels right at home.”

  Wright sagged back against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, gripping his shoulders. “So there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Nothing I can do for you, no,” Wales said. “All the spells I know are about binding ghosts tighter to flesh. Milk and salt bind them. Put them to sleep,” Wales said. He took another glance at Zoe’s Hand, added, “Usually.”

  “Sleep’s not the same as gone,” Sylvie said. “C’mon, Wales, you’ve got to have a way.”

  “Age and entropy do it—the longest-used Hand of Glory was only active for three hundred years.”

  “Only—” Wright muttered.

  “Not an option,” Sylvie said. “You’re telling me that as much as you loathe the slavery forced onto these spirits, you haven’t been looking for a way to break the spell? To send those spirits on?” She gestured broadly, taking in the Hands still hanging from the ceiling, the room, the neighborhood, his entire life. “This is what you’re going to do forever? Truck the Hands around, keeping anyone from using them? That’s not a life. That’s a holding pattern.”

  “I have a method,” Wales said. “But I designed it around traditional Hands of Glory, the traditional ones. Don’t know how it would work on this one.”

  “Can’t we just give it a try?” Sylvie asked.

  Wales shook his head. “Not without knowing more about this Hand, about its ghost. I could free it . . . her . . . instead of destroying her, and she’d go after me, maybe her previous master—”

  “That’s not an acceptable risk,” Sylvie said.

  “Hey, the user knew what he was getting into when he used the Hand in the first place,” Wales said. “Spare your sympathy for someone who deserves it.”

  “Teenagers,” she hissed. “Kids. They make dumb-ass choices all the time, and society protects them from it.”

  Wales nodded but looked less than convinced. It made Sylvie want to snatch the Hand back, keep it close to her, risk or no risk. Bad enough Zoe was out and about, doing god knew what. Sylvie didn’t want to imagine her dead in some alley, victim of the Ghoul’s puritanical streak.

  She swallowed. “Tell me something, Wales. How does mastery work? If I took that Hand? Lit it? Would I be its master? Would it be my soul at stake and not . . . not hers?”

  Wales and Wright shared one expression: stunned dismay.

  Wright got his words out first. “Syl, you can’t!”

  Sylvie shook her head. “Wales, an answer?”

  “Possession is most of the law,” he said. “You light it, you own it. At least until the next person picks it up.”

  “And the ghost would be able to talk? Like Marco? She might be able to give me info on who made her?”

  Wales said, “That’s total conjecture. It took Marco a year to talk to me, and I never left him drenched in milk. It’s risky.”

  “Why? I light it, I’m her master, right? You said as much.”

  “But these Hands are wrong. . . .”

  “Where’s your spirit of adventure?” she said.

  “I’m a researcher,” Wales said. “Not a risk-taker.”

  “Well, welcome to my world,” Sylvie said. She held out her hand, snapped her fingers. Gimme.

  Wright made an odd, tight-throated groan, a protest from within, looking startled even as it rattled his teeth. Demalion, making himself felt. Sylvie hadn’t thought there was any overlap, hadn’t thought Demalion could see the world when Wright was in control; she knew Wright couldn’t when Demalion was dominant. But then, Demalion’s senses had always been just a little . . . more than human.

  The Ghoul was looking slinky, like any moment now, he’d be out the door, and she’d be out her guide. Sylvie snatched up the Hand from the table, went briefly dizzy with the touch—Wales had been right. It buzzed with magic. With malevolence. But she’d laid her hands on gods, and what was one ghost-possessed Hand to that?

  “Risky? Fine. Make it safer. You got salt. Build me a ring. And I’ll light her up inside it. You can hold Marco close, and Wright can—”

  “I’m not touching anything dead.”

  “Demalion wasn’t so squeamish,” she said.

  His attention shifted to his hands with a grimace. If he’d been as young as his son, Jamie, she thought he’d be doing the cootie dance, complete with flailing hands. Any other time, and she might have been amused. She went back to her staredown with Wales, trying to make him see she was doing this, make him see she expected him to help her.

  Zoe was out on the streets of Miami, somewhere. Sylvie hadn’t been able to find her, couldn’t see her safe and sound. But she could do this. She could take the ghost’s attention away from Zoe. Try to break whatever bond existed between them. That was worth any risk.

  Wales sighed. “Fine. But yeah, you’re going in a ring. And Marco’s coming back, and your guy’s going to have to hold Hands with a dead man.”

  Wright backed away, disgust and fear chasing themselves across his face, and while Sylvie’s first instinct was to order him to pick up the damn Hand and hold on, a cooler thought pointed out that he was her client, too. Not just a burden.

  “The salt will contain the effect?”

  “Not completely,” the Ghoul said. He didn’t sound worried. “But as before, claiming mastery of the other Hands will bring us into sync with it, make us family. Make us not-food.” He grinned at Wright, teeth surprisingly white and bright in his sallow face. “It’s like being a kid again. As long as you hold on to Daddy’s hand, you’re protected. But we’ll be lighting them all this time.”

  “Great,” Wright said. Whether it was the Ghoul’s none-too-subtle name-calling, or just fatalism, he bent and picked up the Hand Demalion had dropped earlier.

  Sylvie took up Zoe’s Hand of Glory, still tacky with milk, and Wales began making a single-occupant safety zone around her. The circle was barely wider than her outstretched arms, but better that than to run out of salt halfway through and have to brush it into shape; doing that risked adding in impurities. Sucked to have a spell get botched for a misplaced piece of carpet lint.

  Wales chucked his lighter in just as he poured the last of the salt; she caught it and took a steady breath. Her skin crawled like a thousand ants were making themselves at home. She really, really didn’t want to do this. The Hand flared hot and furious at the first touch of the flame, shot fiery cinders toward the ceiling, before it settled to a steady hellish blaze. And Sylvie wasn’t alone in the circle any longer.

  A woman blurred into shape, stiff and straight with age; her white hair streamed out around her, caught in the heated draft made by the flames. Unlike Marco’s hollow-eyed form, this ghost’s eyes glittered beneath her brows. And unlike Marco, equal parts menacing and drifting, she rocketed from confusion to sheer rage in a millisecond, drew herself up even straighter, hair streaming, and shrieked. Translucent teeth bulged like rat fangs, and her tongue elongated, rolled out, questing, utterly serpentine.

  Sylvie’s every hair on her body
stood up, screaming in silence for her to get out, to run, to flee.

  Instead, she got one finger in her ear, trying to shake off that bone-rattle cry, sharper than a stooping hawk, and thrust the Hand as far from her as she could.

  “Wales? A little help?”

  The ghost shrieked again, still wordless, and every latch in the room snapped open. Wales tried to get Marco’s Hand lit with trembling fingers, and Wright was on his knees. Something lashed across her skin, gelid, sinuous, painful; the ghost’s tongue licked and stung and struck, forked at the tip, barbed the length of it. It drew her close, pulled at something beneath her skin.

  “I lit you,” Sylvie gritted out. “Obey me.”

  The tongue coiled around her skin again, questing for her soul, left frostbite and dizziness in its wake, and Sylvie thought she was going to die here, stuck in a circle with a ghost that refused to be mastered.

  The salt circle was only salt. She could step out of it, fall out of it, but she’d drag the ghost free also. Free to attack the others in the room.

  Two dead souls and a necromancer, her little dark voice said. Not a loss.

  Sylvie stutter-stepped, dodged the ghost as she charged; she pivoted and felt the edge of her sneaker grit against the salt. “Wales!”

  “Working on it!”

  She panted, near panic—the Ghoul was right; the dead and the living shouldn’t interact—and told her inner voice to shut up, that she wasn’t saving herself at the cost of their lives, and hell, she wasn’t even sure their deaths would save her.

  They might.

  Distracted by her own adrenaline, by fighting her own desire to survive at any cost, she was too slow to dodge the next blow, and the ghost reeled her in, the tongue burning about her waist, caught her by the shoulders, and pressed against her. Sylvie went rigid in horror and repulsion, clawed at the intangible, then . . .

  Cold.

  Shock.

  Cold.

  Breathless.

  Pressing.

  Not breathing.

  Something pressing on her face, through her mouth, through her nose, smothering her, and though she tried to drag it off with her free hand, all she did was claw her own skin bloody. The ghost was untouchable.