by Lyn Benedict
Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Alex. Call him. See if he can get a word to the ISI gossip chain; see if they can be bothered to take an interest. Maybe we can make her their problem. Wales, I’m going to say this once more. Leave this topic alone.”
“He came to you for help,” Wales pushed.
Sylvie said, “I did what I could.” Her throat felt tight, a little ragged, but the conviction shone through, surprising even her. The guilt she’d been afraid of for days crumbled. It was true. She could grieve for Adam Wright’s death; she could be uncomfortable seeing his body walking around with a new owner; but ultimately Wright had chosen to die as he’d lived: helping people.
If she could summon his spirit back from whatever afterlife he’d found, she thought that Wright’s regrets would be sharp but few. It might be self-serving thinking—Wales clearly believed she was to blame—but Sylvie was going to cling to it. She was tired of grief and guilt.
“So, monsters and dead things that kill cops. You ready, Ghoul?”
Alex said, “Call Suarez first. He wanted to talk to you. Wouldn’t leave the message with me. You might let him know that I’m in on the big stuff; it makes message taking a lot easier.”
“Hey,” Sylvie said. “Caution’s a nice trait. ’Sides, you ever think that it wasn’t you he was worried about but whoever might have been listening in on his end? Cop who talks about magic like a real thing might get a bad reputation pretty quick.”
She dialed as she spoke, hoping that Suarez’s call meant he was out of the hospital, hoping he’d be more lucid, could give her more to go on. She was willing to go out to the Everglades and play monster-hunter, but she’d prefer all the information she could get.
The phone clicked over. Lourdes answered. Sylvie bit her lip, and said, “Adelio Suarez, please,” hoping if she kept it short, kept it professional, there’d be a chance that the woman wouldn’t recognize her voice. Lourdes sighed but passed the phone over.
“Shadows?” Lio asked. “Are you at the site?”
His voice was sharper than it had been yesterday, less blurred by shock, pain, or drugs. Agitated, though. Sylvie regretted calling; she knew how this was going to go. Cop stuck in bed when there were problems to solve—he wanted to backseat drive.
“Not yet,” Sylvie said. “Did you remember anything else?”
“Make sure you’re not seen. By the cops, or the damn strange suits that showed up. And the press is swarming, so stay out of their way also.”
“Lio—”
“And don’t use my name if you get caught, or call on me for help. Odalys’s lawyer is screaming, and my name’s not what it should—”
“Suarez! I get it. Call me if you have something new to tell me.”
“Tell me what you find.” Suarez got out a final demand just before Sylvie disconnected. Her nerves felt stung and jostled; she loathed being treated like an idiot, like a subordinate. Lio needed to remember he was her client, not her boss.
“Do you need any stuff before we head out?” Sylvie asked Wales. He jerked as if she’d caught him doing something other than eyeing Alex sidelong, then flushed brick red across his pale cheekbones.
“Stuff?” he asked.
Alex grinned, and Sylvie reminded herself to have the talk with Alex. No dating necromancers. She took another, more objective look at Wales. No dating necromancers even if they were halfway to good-looking by daylight.
“Magical tools?” Sylvie said. “To help at the scene?”
“Now, see, let’s chat about that for a bit. What exactly do you want me to do?” He held up a hand, said, “Not that I’m saying I won’t help. I just want to know what you expect of me.”
Sylvie sat on the desktop, swung her feet for a second, thinking. It was a fair question. “To be honest, Wales, that depends on what you can do. At bare minimum, I’d like you to take a look at the scene and see if you can sense and/or identify whether necromancy was used and what its purpose was.”
He frowned, twisted his hands over, stared at his knuckles. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”
“Special equipment?”
“Just me. And Marco.”
“Marco?” Alex asked.
Sylvie said, “You want to show her Marco?”
Wales rose abruptly and went outside, stood squinting up at the sun.
Alex wrinkled her brow, gnawed her lip. “So what’d I say?”
“Marco’s his pet ghost,” Sylvie said. “He carries Marco’s Hand around in his pocket.”
“His . . . Oh,” Alex said. Her lips tightened. She pushed her coffee cup away from her as if the cream and sugar had gone bad.
“Necromancer,” Sylvie said. “Not a clean magic. Something to remember, Alex.” She pushed off the desk, ambled out into the sunlight after Wales, and left Alex with something to think about.
Necromancy left a bad taste in Sylvie’s mouth, more so than any of the other branches of human magics she’d come across. It seemed . . . cannibalistic in a way the other branches didn’t. Witchcraft and sorcery were all about turning the world to suit yourself. Necromancy was about the unhealthy mingling of life and death, going so far as to elevate the dead above the living.
Sylvie climbed into her truck and found Wales waiting for her, Marco’s Hand in his lap. The sight of it—withered and dried flesh drawn up tight over muscle turned to jerky, the fingers curled tight against the palm, the nails rusty gold with the remnant of old flames—made her already tightened jaw clench until her teeth creaked.
“So, new deal with Marco. Anything I need to know about that?”
“Marco and I can interact at will now,” Wales said. “He doesn’t sleep anymore. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Jesus, Wales. Does that mean he can soul-bite people at will? I can’t let—”
“No, no.” Wales shook his head in extra emphasis. “I still light him up for that. Just . . . he’s around now. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
Sylvie licked her lips, tasted cool air on her tongue, and wondered with a shudder if the chill was Marco’s influence or her laboring air conditioner. “You must have been crazy lonely when you thought that mod up,” she said, and got a glare in response.
“Look,” she said. “You didn’t approve of Odalys’s modifying the Hands. What am I supposed to think when you start messing around in the same—”
“I’m not her,” Wales said. “I know what I’m doing.” And that was the first taste of sorcerous arrogance he’d ever given off. Pride in his abilities. Interesting.
Sylvie pulled the truck out into traffic, and said, “So you’re more powerful than you like to let on. That’s fair. I understand the urge to fly under the radar. Got a question for you, though. Can you yank a possessing ghost out of a body?”
“Thought you didn’t blame your man—Demalion, was it?”
“Not him,” Sylvie said. “Odalys had one success. There’s a teenage body walking around Coconut Grove with an old murderer in her skin.”
“Double-souled?”
“No, the original’s gone. Devoured.”
“So, you just want to drop her dead in her tracks? But you’ll let your boyfriend keep his new body?”
“He didn’t kill anyone to get it. Look, can you do it or not?”
Wales shrugged. “Depends. A soul that’s crossed death shouldn’t fit all that well in living flesh. But it adapts. Like a new organ, rejection’s a risk, especially in the beginning.”
“Can you eyeball that? Get me an idea of how fragile she is?”
“I ain’t killing her,” Wales said. “I got some sense of self-preservation. I don’t want the cops coming up with my name when they’ve got a body they can’t explain.”
Sylvie said, “Fine.” She could work on changing his mind later. Hell, he’d been angry on Wright’s behalf—how much angrier would he be once he saw Bella? Or the body that had been Bella. Wales was a man and a Texan at that. Young, attractive . . . murdered? She bet Bella would push all his
buttons.
“All right. We’re going to give the cops and the press a little bit longer to get out of the Everglades. We’re going to swing by and visit Patrice. If I’m paying you a consulting fee for the day, I’m going to get my money’s worth.”
* * *
SYLVIE PULLED UP JUST AS PATRICE WAS LETTING HERSELF OUT OF her house. It was worthy of a photo shoot, the young woman in a sheer sundress on a picturesque front stoop, all smoothed Mexican-tile steps, wrought-iron banister, and flowering bougainvillea.
Patrice saw Sylvie’s truck and hesitated, her hand on the door latch. Then she closed the door behind her, stepped out into the sunlit day, and turned her face up as if to bask in it, a gloat that she was alive to enjoy the day. Silver hoops dangled from her ears, small rubies glinting at the bottoms of the curves.
Sylvie climbed out of the truck; Patrice cocked one hip, leaned up against the banister, and waited for Sylvie to reach her.
“Shadows,” she said, taking the battle directly to Sylvie. “I could have a restraining order taken out against you.”
“So why don’t you? Afraid your new parents wouldn’t understand? How’s that working out for you . . . Bella? You all still a happy family? Or do they get it, deep down, that you’re not their daughter? You’re the woman who killed her.” Sylvie’s voice was thin and tight, a thread of rage well controlled. Patrice could in fact have a restraining order signed out; the Alvarezes were rich, well connected, played golf with an entire courtroom’s worth of judges and lawyers.
Wales stepped out of the truck, impatient, graceless, drawing Patrice’s attention. Patrice stiffened all over as if she recognized Wales. Or at least the threat he might pose to a newly embodied ghost. She relaxed when Wales lounged back against the side of the truck, squinting at her.
“You know,” Sylvie said, “you’re a cliché, Patrice. An old woman clinging to youth, and really? A dress that short? At your age?”
Patrice growled, a rattle in her throat that sounded like Death given voice and nothing like a teenager.
“Having trouble keeping up the part?” Sylvie asked. “You’re not a good actor. How’s the body fitting? Chafing? Coming loose around the edges?”
“Is that your plan?” Patrice said. “Shake me from my flesh? It is mine. I’ve taken precautions to keep my soul in this flesh. This very lovely flesh. So your pet necromancer can’t do squat. I don’t think I ever enjoyed my body this much before. When I was a teen, it was the thirties. Good girls didn’t get spray tans, hair extensions, bikini waxes. . . . And the cosmetics are to die for.” She pulled a lipstick from her pocket, glossed her lips, and blew a kiss at Sylvie.
She shot a quick glance at Wales, who dropped his chin in a reluctant nod. Patrice was telling the truth. She’d stolen that body, and now she’d strung it tight with antitheft security.
Her temper flared as red-hot as the lipstick. Sylvie snatched it away from Patrice, then found herself possessed by a wicked inspiration. “Trusting to magic to protect you? Let’s see what it can do against this.” She sketched a bloody symbol with the lipstick across the yellow enamel paint of the front door. A rough, enigmatic image, two flat circles, two attached triangles, a line binding them together. Patrice drew back, her breath slipping through clenched teeth as if waiting for an axe to fall.
When nothing happened except Sylvie throwing the ruined lipstick at her feet, Patrice laughed. “What’s that supposed to do?”
“You’ll find out,” Sylvie said. “Watch your back, Patrice. I will be.”
She turned, dragged Wales away from his brow-wrinkled contemplation of the lipstick sigil, and drove them off.
It was a mile or so down the road that he spoke. “So what all was that about? What’d you try to bring down on her head?”
“Nothing at all,” Sylvie gritted out. “It was a bluff. She just pissed me off. If I can’t kill her, and you can’t evict her—”
He shook his head. “She’s wrapped up good and tight in some type of protection spell. I don’t have the magic to even slow her down.”
“Then the least I can do is scare her, maybe make her day run rough.”
“A bluff?”
“It’s a petty victory,” Sylvie said. “I know that.” God, did she know that; her internal voice was still demanding bloodshed, hadn’t been appeased at all. Its appetite had only been sharpened by the brief fear on Patrice’s face. “Sometimes,” she told Wales. “Sometimes, just making’em flinch feels good.”
Another several miles, and he said, “Are you sure it was random? It’s just . . . It kind of struck me familiar like. Something I’ve seen before.”
Her hands tightened on the wheel. It felt familiar to her, too. Not the look of it, but the creation, the motion of it. It mimicked the blade work her little dark voice had guided her through in her dream.
“Probably,” Sylvie agreed. “It’s not like I wander around memorizing random magical sigils. It’s probably some company’s logo. I’ve probably just invoked the wrath of Starbucks on her ass.”
Wales’s lips twitched, creased in a smile. “Starbucks is a curse all on its own.”
* * *
BY THE TIME THEY MADE IT OUT TO THE EVERGLADES, THE SUN WAS AT full zenith, and the road before them was smudgy with heat mirage. Sylvie wondered if it was the idea of slogging through the heat of the day or a fear of the unknown that made Wales relax into a tiny smile when the nearest access point to the crime scene was still jammed with cars—cops and press alike.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Sylvie said, driving by. “We’re going around back. The route Tatya took me.” She cast another glance over her shoulder at the huddle of press drinking sodas out of their cars, AC cranked high, and thought maybe Cachita had a point. Reporters should be like Kipling’s mongoose, filled with the need to “Go and find out.”
He sighed, and said, “You sure about this? It’s not wise.”
“Client wants what the client wants,” Sylvie said. It was easiest to think of Suarez that way. She owed him a favor; he had things he wanted explained. Therefore: client. Though she’d better set Alex on to a bunch of the littler cases—spouse shadowing, background checks, and the like—or they wouldn’t have enough money to pay Wales and Tatya, not to mention the rent and themselves.
Bright side was, keeping Alex out and about made her less a sitting duck should the nameless witch make another attempt on the office and Sylvie. Downside, Alex would bitch. She hated doing research on the run.
Sylvie turned off the main road two miles farther on, trading asphalt for dirt and limestone gravel, a sandy, weedy stretch of lane just wide enough for her truck.
“They won’t notice us coming ’round the back?” Wales asked, found his own answer as the track they were on curved abruptly, taking them away from the scene of the crime. Sylvie continued the drive for another few minutes until she spotted the tiny yellow flag planted near the base of some scrub.
She pulled the truck over and cut the engine; it gave a diesel cough and left them in silence. “ATV track. We’ll have to walk it, but it should bring us up pretty close, then we can just wait for them to clear out.”
He whined in his seat, and she said, “I brought snacks?”
He opened the door, and said, “Hope you brought water. Hot as fuck out there.”
“A Texas boy complaining about the heat?” Sylvie said.
“A Texas boy smart enough to make a career in Web design. Indoors. You know. Before.”
Before the Magicus Mundi stuck its fingers into his life, changed his path.
“There’s water in the lockbox; never travel without it.” She chucked the keys at him. “Come on, Tex.”
“Tex?”
“You rather I go back to calling you Ghoul?”
The walk they took was quiet, almost pleasant—the scuff of their shoes in the trail dust, carefully carved along what passed for high ground in the ’Glades. Wales wasn’t a chatterer, just slunk along beside her, studying the landscape—
all grey-green and gold—with the curiosity of a man who spent the better part of his life between four walls. There was water moving nearby, some slow tidal wash created by something moving through the river marsh. Turtle, maybe a soft-shelled slider, all push and glide. Her school field trips were years and an entire world away.
Even the heat wasn’t too bad, not yet; Sylvie felt her bones relax like caramel beneath the sunlight’s weight.
It took her long minutes to realize that the sun wasn’t doing its job any longer, that despite the peace and quiet and the pressing warmth that urged languor, the muscles along her spine were slowly tightening, the sweat-damp hair at her nape prickling.
Beside her, Wales’s head was up, looking around with more intent than before. No longer a tourist in a strange world but prey sensing a predator. His lips moved silently, some conversation not meant for her ears. Meant for his ghost companion, maybe.
Sylvie swallowed, her throat dry with more than heat and exertion. The sounds about them—plop of water, rustling grass, the cry of distant birds—just reminded her of how much was unseen around them. She settled a hand on her gun, the other locked tight around a water bottle, and tried not to think about alligators or panthers or any other predators that might be out there.
“Wales?” she said.
He shook his head briefly, and she wasn’t sure if it was in response to her implied question or if he was still focused on Marco and hadn’t heard her at all.
Sylvie checked her mental map. They were nearing the crime scene; some of the bird-cry sound might actually be human voices twisted by distance and the wind over the water. She licked her lips, thought, Go back? Give up because she got spooked? She felt like something was watching them—so what? That was the state of the world. Nature was nosy.
She stiffened her shoulders, twist-tied her empty water bottle to a belt loop to get her hands free. “Pick up the pace,” she said, and moved on. She didn’t give up, and she didn’t turn tail without good reason. Sometimes, not even then.
They smelled the scene before they saw it, Wales wrinkling his nose against the stinging, acrid scent of burned metal and gasoline. Sylvie thought that was darkly funny. The Ghoul, thinking a little bit of char was bad? Then the breeze shifted and brought the underlying scent to her—burned flesh. She dropped her gaze and concentrated on breathing, trying not to think of the cops who had died.