by Lyn Benedict
He took another bite of his hamburger, chewed, and said, “True, and he’s too thin. I don’t know how he survives Chicago winters. He’s not a vegetarian, do you think? Or what if he has allergies? I should find out if I’m going to be taking my share of the meals.”
“You’re not going to be inside him long enough for it to matter,” Sylvie said. She started the truck up again, worry canceling out that brief surge of desire. “Don’t get cozy.”
“The Ghoul didn’t have any . . . decent suggestions.” Demalion slanted a long, low glance at her. In the dim glow of a distant streetlamp, the one not broken, his eyes looked more like Demalion’s than Wright’s. “You think he’s on the level? He’s far too close to his Marco to make me think he’s as firm in his convictions as he says. He could be our guy.”
Sylvie shook her head, getting a brief smear of traffic light and oncoming headlights for her pain. “He’s not our guy.”
“Really. You just know that.” Demalion crumpled his food wrappers, bagged them neatly, and dropped them in the narrow gap behind the bench seat in lieu of a trash can.
“Nice,” she said. “Odalys is our guy.”
“What?” he said. Sylvie normally would have given herself a point for eliciting that precise tone of exasperation, doubt, and surprise, but she was just tired.
Apparently, fighting for your soul really took it out of you.
“Why would you think—”
“Location, location, location,” Sylvie said, flippant though there was a low, familiar roil of anger in her belly. It might seem sudden to Demalion, but she’d been puzzling at it ever since they’d set foot in the tenement. Was Wales their necromancer and if not, why not, and if he wasn’t, then who? Once Odalys crossed her mind as a possibility, it wouldn’t be dismissed, only expanded upon.
Odalys? Tatya had pinpointed her as a necromancer, and Sylvie had allowed herself to be distracted by the superficial. Odalys had lied to her more than once in the conversation, lies that Sylvie had caught her in. How many lies had she missed? Had she been manipulated?
Her little dark voice pointed out that Odalys had sent Sylvie to Wales, sent her primed to kill him, had called him Ghoul. Odalys scared of Wales? Hell, Sylvie had no magical talent at all, and she wasn’t the slightest bit scared of the man. Wary, but not scared. A witch with real talent? No. Odalys had feigned her fear, turned Sylvie’s visit into a chance for Odalys to remove her necromantic rival. Corporate takeover, small-scale, with a gun.
She said as much to Demalion, and when he looked thoughtful, she added, “Plus, think about this. These are teenagers we’re talking about. Innocents in regard to black magic. They don’t jump headfirst into the deep end. They’re brats, not scholars. Odalys runs a store, on a major street. Wales lives in nowhere land.”
Demalion frowned at the dash. “How much did I miss while Wright was in control?”
“A critical lot,” Sylvie said. “Wales is not our guy. And given a choice between the two known necromancers in the area, given a choice between creepy-ass Wales in an Opa-locka tenement or Odalys . . . If you were a teenage fashionista, who’d be your pick?”
“Just like that?”
“I can tell you, straight up, that if Wales even got within ten feet of Bella’s crowd, they’d be hitting 911 on their cell phones. No, if these kids are getting Hands, they’re getting them from Odalys.”
Demalion sighed. “Maybe Wales cleans up well. Maybe he meets them elsewhere.”
“Much as I approve of playing devil’s advocate,” Sylvie said, “this isn’t the time. It’s personality as much as anything else. Wales is a shut-in freak who has trouble with thinking outside the box. Odalys is a go-getting merchant. Odalys is all about the money.”
“You think she’s the manufacturer as well as the seller? That she knows the Hands are defective?”
“Creation and knowing are the same thing here. If she was just the merchant, if she’d just got some bad stock, she’d send it back and demand a refund from the makers. She’s a businesswoman, maybe the only true thing she told us. She wouldn’t endanger her client base if she could salvage her profit any other way. But if she made them . . .” Sylvie said. “Think about it. You’ve just made really powerful tools. Only you did something wrong. They’re dangerous to the wielder as well as the bystander. You can’t use them without risking your own soul. Destroying them is problematic. So what do you do? You sell them and try again. Sell them to teenagers who are too self-centered to ask why anyone would sell them a tool worth more than the cash they pay.”
Demalion said, “You’re basing your theory on two meetings with two very different people and tangential knowledge of Zoe’s friends. It wouldn’t stand up as evidence.”
“I’m not the ISI. I can make the decision. It’s enough for me to go on,” Sylvie said. “Besides. Wales was genuinely shocked that the Hands had been women’s.”
Demalion narrowed his brows. “Was he?”
“You were ther—” Sylvie shook her head. Wright had been there for that part, until Demalion, pushy and protective, had clawed his way back to the surface. “Yeah,” she said finally. “He was. First thing tomorrow, I’m going after Odalys.”
They traveled back to Sylvie’s apartment in a silence punctuated only by environmental noise: the thrum of the engines, the hiss of other cars passing—the streets busy even after midnight—the occasional distant siren. Eventually, Sylvie reached for the radio, just to keep herself from saying what needed to be said, smothering the words under mediocre rock.
She wasn’t up for a fight, not while driving, not when she felt the weakness of the argument in her bones. It might be Wright’s body, and Wright should get to use it all the time, but dammit, she was enjoying working with Demalion again.
Still, once she’d pulled the truck into her parking spot, cut the lights, the ignition, she took a breath and turned to her quiet passenger. “You need to let Wright—”
Demalion put a hand over her mouth. “A night? One night. One night’s nothing to him. To me? To us?” He moved his hand away, and before she could say yes or no, he leaned in and kissed her.
She met his kiss, chasing that tempting familiarity in an unfamiliar form, lips soft against hers, stubble rasping against her palm. The kiss ended, but she didn’t pull away, leaned in closer, reclaiming his mouth. Making it all familiar. The way his hands moved, one settling at her left hip, the other closing on her nape like a cat’s teeth. The soft sounds they made together. The words she felt him breathe against her tongue. Missed you. Afraid I’d lost you.
She collapsed into him, all her willpower draining away, her hands questing for skin, for closer contact. Worming her fingers into his shirt, the warmth of his skin, that slick curved scar—Sylvie jerked away, hitting the horn with her elbow and startling herself all over again. Her breath was uneven; her lips stung.
“Syl—”
“No,” she said. “He has so little he can trust right now. If he can’t trust us?”
“He wouldn’t have to know—”
“You do love your secrets, ISI man,” she said. It wasn’t a friendly reminder. They’d first started dating on a lie. That was the thing she had to remember. Demalion might be a good man at heart, but he had been trained by those who were less particular about their ethics. “Let me point out,” she added, “you’re the one who has the most to lose if he decides you’re a threat.”
“Would you help him?” Demalion asked. “Choose him over me?”
Sylvie got out of the truck, slamming the door hard enough to echo along the street. She felt bad for her neighbors: First the horn, now this. She watched Demalion come out the passenger’s-side door, the clawed hood between them, her fingers tight on the metal as if she had been the one to mark it. She waited until she had control of her voice, her temper, her own disappointment and fear. “He’s the one who’s alive. You tell me who I’m supposed to choose.”
Demalion’s eyes widened, but he only nodded, a quick jerk of
acknowledgment. She stormed up the stairs, making the slats jounce beneath her steps. She’d reached her apartment door before she heard him begin his own climb.
The apartment was quiet and dark, but Sylvie’s nerves reacted instinctively; she found the gun in her hand before the door was more than a few inches open.
“Burglars?” Demalion said behind her.
One of the pluses of having very little in the way of stuff; her apartment was easy to keep clean and easy to notice when someone else had been in it. Especially since they’d made no effort to hide their visit.
Her living room was a jumble of opened drawers, strewn magazines, books tumbled on the floor, sofa cushions thrown pell-mell about the place.
“No,” she said, reholstered her gun. “Zoe.” The lock hadn’t been broken or otherwise disengaged, and while the existence of Hands of Glory made that a moot point, Sylvie kind of recognized the mess. Or rather, the temper behind it.
“Looking for her cash.”
“Yeah, that’s my thought,” Sylvie said.
“At least you know she’s alive,” he said.
“Alive and pissed,” Sylvie said.
“I think that’s your bloodline’s default mood,” Demalion said, and she whipped around to look at him. Did he know? Had he found out about Lilith?
“I’m more concerned with how she got in,” Sylvie said. He didn’t look like he knew. But this was Demalion. He was good at hiding his emotions, and now he had an extra layer of mask to do it in.
“Key?” He picked up a magazine, smoothed it absently, set it beside the television.
“She doesn’t have one,” Sylvie said. Her throat felt tight, her eyes dry and tired. “But there were four kids at Bayside. God, what if they all have Hands? What if Zoe just borrowed one?” If she’d spent the night attempting to save Zoe from herself, and the girl had just wandered off and put herself right back in danger—
“They’re bonding to the Hands, right?” Demalion asked. “You said that Bella girl did. Doubt they’d lend them out. Don’t borrow trouble.” He slouched back against the wall, scratched at Wright’s incoming stubble. “Think about it. It’s not all that late. If she had come here with a Hand, there’d be paramedics tending to all your neighbors who woke up freaked-out at collapsing in front of their TVs.”
Sylvie sighed, studied the wreckage; it was mostly disarray and not damage. There was that at least. “I keep a spare key at the office. She probably lifted it. Planning to get her stuff back. Even before I stole her cash.”
“You really didn’t give her a key?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Didn’t give my parents one either.” She met his disbelieving gaze with her own. “What? I deal with weird shit, and sometimes it follows me home. You think I want them to walk into that unexpectedly just ’cause Mom decides to bring me a houseplant? My parents aren’t supernatural entities who can eat intruders.”
“Hey,” Demalion said. “My dad was an archaeologist.”
She met his gaze, and said, “No, he wasn’t. You never met the man. He died hundreds of years before you were born.”
“What the hell, Shadows?”
“Sphinxes gestate extremely slowly. A thousand years or so. I don’t think there was a lot of archaeology being done back then.”
His lips thinned. In Demalion’s body, that expression had been intimidating. In Wright’s, it looked . . . tired. “I hate that you know more about my life than I do,” he said. “Just to get that out there.”
“Not my fault you and your mom don’t communicate.”
His shoulders drooped, and Sylvie felt the instinctive urge to soothe the pain of her hasty words. His taste was still on her lips, and it would be so easy to reach up, pull him down, and kiss his fears away. She shook her head, busied herself picking up the sofa cushions and replacing them. “I’ll get the couch made up for you.”
“Not the bed?”
“Couch,” she said.
She hunted the spare pillow that had been on the couch before recalling that Demalion and she had dragged it back to her bed; nausea swept through her again. She’d been so close to saying yes to Demalion, too close. Then and now.
Couch assembled into a facsimile of a bed again, she left him to it. Stumbling over a scatter of books—Zoe and her brutal sense of fair play at work again. There hadn’t been any hiding place in Sylvie’s bookshelves, but she had dumped Zoe’s books, so Zoe dumped hers—Sylvie homed in on her bed, shoved the pile of searched linens to the floor, and passed out on the bare mattress.
She woke partially when her cell phone buzzed against her hip. Swatting at it, still half-dreaming of clutching ghosts, brought her to full wakefulness. The room was watery with grey light, the first diffuse glow of morning approaching, and Sylvie thumbed the call through without even looking at it.
“What.”
“Shadows. Got your sister.” Lio. Zoe.
She jerked upright, pushed her hair out of her face, coughed her voice to full capability. “What?”
“I’m bringing her to your office on my way off shift. If you’re not there, Little Miss can spend her time in juvie until you bail her out.”
“What she’d do?”
“Other than use language that shocked even an old cop? Showed up too damn close to another burglary. See you soon, Shadows.” He disconnected while she was still speaking; she’d done the same to him more than a dozen times. Payback was a bitch.
* * *
AS SHE DROVE, SYLVIE CHECKED THE CLOCK AGAIN. STILL TOO EARLY to call Alex and ask her to do research. She called anyway, got her voice mail, and left a long report of the previous night’s events. Something nagged at her, and freed of the worry about Zoe’s immediate safety, of Demalion’s tempting company, of Wright’s scared eyes, she was able to pinpoint it.
The trouble was, despite the Ghoul’s assumptions, Sylvie wasn’t all that sure the Hands were defective.
Odalys was competent at lying, at projecting what she wanted to, at running her business just under the radar. It was hard to imagine that competence didn’t spread to her magic. Hard to imagine that a lich ghost—rare monster that it was—could be created by accident.
Harder still to imagine her wasting time and money creating more than one defective Hand. Given Bella’s illness, that soul sickness, Sylvie felt sure that her Hand of Glory had held a lich ghost as well.
One might be a mistake. More than that? Was deliberate.
There was something else the Hands were meant to do.
Hell, maybe it was some type of return policy. Sell the Hands cheaply knowing you’d get them back when the user wigged out at getting sick. Or maybe they were defective. Maybe she was assigning too much ability to the woman; after all, people overstated their abilities all the time.
Sylvie just didn’t believe it. There was a pattern she was missing. Two Hands, both defective. Both women’s hands. Both old women’s hands. Why? Women committed murders; she was proof enough of that. But old women? Bella’s dreams had shown Patrice Caudwell old and murderous. Sylvie’s own trial with Zoe’s Hand had been much the same: a murder committed with gnarled hands.
She’d be interested to see what Alex could dig up on the defunct lich ghost’s past.
* * *
ADELIO SUAREZ’S UNMARKED CRUISER WAS PARKED OUTSIDE HER office when she arrived; Lio himself sat on the bumper, smoking a thin cigar and drinking convenience-store coffee. Her gaze skimmed him, focused in on the sulking teen locked in the backseat of the cruiser.
“She’s okay?” Sylvie asked.
“You know, I only smoke these things when I’ve got something to celebrate,” he told her. “I’ve been saving this one.”
“Catching a teenage runaway that much a coup?” she said.
“Shadows, don’t make me ask. Tell me about Rafi. Tell me about his killers.”
Sylvie let out a breath. “You wired?” She didn’t think he was, and hell, even if he was, what would the tapes prove but that she was crazy.
/> “I play fair,” he said. “Tell me.”
Zoe banged on the window, made demanding gestures at Sylvie, and Sylvie gestured Lio away. Sat on a bench where she could keep an eye on her sister but still have the relief of knowing Zoe couldn’t hear her. Couldn’t know what Sylvie had done.
“You believe in magic?” she asked. “All those things you’ve seen on duty that you can’t explain.”
“I believe in evil,” he said.
“It’s not the same thing,” she said. “Much as I sometimes think it is. Look, the long and short of it is, the satanists are gone. Transformed by magic into something harmless.”
“You telling me you’re a bruja?”
“Hell no,” Sylvie said. “I’m telling you I farmed the task out. I couldn’t do it myself. Didn’t have the right skill set. But he did.” The words were stark, oddly easy to say after all the effort she’d put into not telling him. Maybe because she knew, deep down, how he’d react.
Lio groaned and put his head in his hands. “This is bullshit, Shadows. Bullshit.” His cigar fell to the concrete, smoldered slowly. “I trusted your word.”
Sylvie said, “There’s not going to be the kind of satisfaction you’re after, Lio. I can’t take you to a secret grave, can’t show you their bones. There’s not going to be anything you recognize as justice, but Rafi’s death has been paid for. I promise you.” Cold comfort for a man who didn’t understand how far-reaching magic could be.
“How do you mean, transformed?” he said.
“You know what I mean,” Sylvie said. “No longer human. They weren’t worthy of it.”
He shook his head, sighed. “No lo creo. No te creo.” He rose, stared back at the car, at Zoe slouched as low as possible in the backseat in case any of the early-morning tourists or joggers saw her.
Sylvie said, “You don’t want to. You want to be part of the normal world. To be blind to the rest of it. I can understand that. But I’ve been honest with you. If you change your mind, call me. I’ll show you what became of them though I doubt it’ll give you the closure you want or need.”
She touched his arm a last time, and stood. “Thank you for finding Zoe.” She licked her lips, hating to do it, but hating the despair on his face. “I made a deal with you. You didn’t find it satisfactory. I don’t usually offer rain checks. But I owe you one.”
