by Lyn Benedict
Sylvie sat next to him on the couch. She was bad at offering comfort, but she could pretend. “Salvador. It’s complicated and strange. I want you to listen to me. Just hear me out.”
“Is she dead?” he asked. His mouth quivered like an old man’s. He twisted the ring on his finger. He and Maria had been married for eight years, been friends since they were twelve. More than half his life was bound up in this woman, and she was . . .
“She’s not dead, yet,” Sylvie said. “I’m going to do my best to save her. But it involves getting her away from a very dangerous situation. I thought the police could help. They can’t. They nearly died, trying.”
“Aliens,” he said, his knee-jerk response to anything extraordinary.
“No,” Sylvie said. “Sorcery.”
“What?” His breath gave out entirely. Sylvie fished his inhaler out of his suit coat pocket, handed it to him, watched him suck in air.
“She’s under a spell,” Sylvie said. “Like . . . Sleeping Beauty. Only not so nice. The spell’s draining her.”
“So break it!”
“I’ve got a specialist working on it,” she said. “We’re doing what we can. I hope we can save her. But, Salvador, you have to understand, it may be too late.”
He turned away from her, put his face in his hands. After a minute, he turned back, all his distress forced back. “You’re . . . you’re telling me the truth. Magic’s real.”
She nodded, wondering if the man who believed in little grey men could accept this in its place, wondering if he’d go running directly to the cops. She doubted it. He hadn’t gotten on too well with them in the first place.
“Is she . . . Is she hurting?” he asked. “You said she’s sleeping?”
“She is.”
“Can I see her?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “It’s not that much like Sleeping Beauty. You can’t kiss her awake. The spell’s fragile. Disrupting it has killed one woman already.”
He nodded, a man used to taking the advice he paid for. An easy client. “So what do I do?”
“Go home. Wait. Pray if you like.”
“We’re atheists,” he muttered.
“Good for you,” she said. “C’mon, Salvador. I’ll walk you to your car.”
When he stood, he did it like an old man, stoop-shouldered, curled around pain, staggering with it. She took his arm and walked him out, biting back the urge to tell him it would be all right. There was no guarantee it would.
* * *
HER APARTMENT COMPLEX, LIT AGAINST THE TWILIGHT, GLIMMERED whitely; the pool gleamed blue, proving once again that dim lighting was the best decorating technique of all. In the uncertain light, the cracks in the stucco, the weeds in the pavement, and the sheer bizarreness of the sculptural accents were easy to overlook.
There was dim light, Sylvie thought, then there was inadequate light. The stairs to her floor were deeply shadowed, the fixture at the base of the stairs dark. She took the first step, felt glass grate beneath her foot, and hesitated. Burned-out bulbs were common around her complex. Broken ones . . . not so much.
Her gun was back in her hand, held close and low to her side—no point in scaring the shit out of her downstairs neighbors if they looked out at the wrong moment. Or worse, courting their questions. College students. So nosy when it was least appropriate.
She took the stairs steadily, without much worry. The stairs were a straight shot up, open on the sides, no room for someone to lurk. A benefit to her apartment complex being built more along the lines of a beachside hotel—a lot of open space. Not a lot of nooks and crannies. Hell, it was one of the reasons she’d chosen to live there in the first place.
The light near her door was out, too.
Overplayed, she thought.
Take out the first light, and it made her careful. Take out a second light, and it stirred the atavistic sense to get in, get safe, get out of the dark. . . . Or run headfirst into a trap. Like an animal herded into a deadfall.
She slowed her steps further, approached her door cautiously.
Trap, her little dark voice agreed. The air was charged, the taste in the air sour and sharp, a roil of nausea in her stomach. A quiver of out-of-place energy. Another spell laid over another door.
She decided she was offended. The same trap? She might have fallen for it once, but not again.
Still, recognizing a trap wasn’t the same as disarming it. A witch’s spell had to be attached to something; if she found the trigger, it’d be pretty much like cutting the power.
Val Cassavetes liked cobwebs. Easy to overlook, easy to leave behind. It was a classic, and probably what had gotten Sylvie the day before.
Miami was full of spiders.
But it could also be a spill of sand or a scratched pebble. She swept her gaze over the door, the frame. Cobwebs, dust, clumps of mud. She wasn’t exactly house-proud, and it was coming back to bite her.
She pulled off her Windbreaker, ran it around the frame, cleared everything out of her path—there was a scatter of sparks, a hiss like a snake slipping by. She swore, slapped at her calf with her Windbreaker. Spell backlash—
The wood frame above her head splintered.
Sylvie whirled, tried to drop the Windbreaker from around her fist, tried to get her gun back up.
The gunman was closer than she thought he’d be, coming out of her next-door neighbor’s apartment. She slammed her door open, slammed it tight, latched it, gun in hand, breathed hard.
It wouldn’t hold. Not long enough for the police anyway.
Illusion spell plus bullets, she thought. Who said the bad guys couldn’t learn?
A back window might give her an escape route—if she didn’t break her leg on the landing.
The door burst open, right off the hinges, a rocket of wood that slammed into her shoulder, spun her gun out of her hand. He loomed in the doorway, looking as surprised as she felt about the broken door. Cheap material, or spell taint—she didn’t know. Didn’t have time to care.
She lunged forward, not for her gun, but for his knees. If he fell just right, she’d have him out of her apartment and even better—over the railing.
He grunted as she tackled him, snarled a hand in her hair, trying for balance, only succeeded in falling forward, the opposite direction she wanted. His weight crashed down on her, the heat and sweat and fear-stink of him. Sylvie squirmed beneath him, her goal crystal clear—
Get his gun.
She wasn’t a trained fighter, but she was strong, determined, and fought dirty. In the distance, she could hear her neighbor screaming. She got his gun hand beneath her body, cringing and praying that his finger had slipped from the trigger. He punched, aiming for her kidneys, hitting her hip, and she gouged hard at the nerves in his forearm.
He rolled, trying to expose her belly, to get his hand free, and she dug her nails in and raked, felt skin gum up the space beneath her nails . . . The gun wobbled in his grip; his breath went out in a hiss. She got the gun free, jerking it from his loosening grasp with a crack that she thought might be his finger.
They sprang apart. Sylvie twitched the gun into a proper grip. He canted a glance at the destroyed door, at her gun a few feet away from him; he looked like he was about to make a judgment call. Could he finish the job before the police arrived?
Sylvie made a judgment call of her own.
She pulled the trigger. He crashed backward—finally out of her apartment. She followed him, gun ready. If he wasn’t down, she’d have no problem shooting him again.
Dark blood bubbled through his T-shirt. Not arterial, but not insignificant. His eyes were closed, his features drawn tight with pain and shock, aging him.
Now that she had a chance to assess instead of react, she thought he was of the same ilk that had attacked Wales: youngish, dressed to blend in, but without even a protective charm to his name. Guess that might have broken the illusion if she’d been trapped in it.
Her downstairs neighbor, a college student nam
ed Javier, staggered up the stairs. Beer night with his buds, she thought. And yeah, there was the milling of footsteps beneath, young men who weren’t sure they wanted to get involved beyond calling 911.
He gaped at her. “You all right? He all right?” He didn’t wait for an answer but looked down at the gunman. “Should we try to stop the bleeding or something?”
“If you want,” Sylvie said. “He attacked me. I’m not feeling forgiving enough to play paramedic.”
Javier dithered, and she said, “Why don’t you check on Christina? He came out of her apartment.” She jerked her chin in that direction, and he obeyed. Shocked but willing. A good kid.
Sylvie crouched down beside the gunman. “Who sent you?”
He groaned, turned his head, his breathing labored and thick.
“Confession’s good for the soul,” she said. “Think about it. You wake up in the hospital, talk to the cops. Of course, if you talk to me, your odds of reaching the hospital alive go up.” She tapped the gun muzzle against his shoulder; his eyes widened.
“I don’t—”
Sylvie said, “I’m not playing. And you didn’t know what you were getting into. I’ve killed worse than you and gone to sleep with a smile—”
“Odalys,” he said. “I used to smuggle things into the country for her. She asked me to do this.”
“Good,” she said. “Just remember to tell that to the cops when they ask.”
She dropped the gun when the police lights flashed into the lot and resigned herself to another couple of hours before she got that shower she wanted.
* * *
MIDNIGHT HAD COME AND GONE BEFORE SHE WAS DONE ANSWERING the police questions. Judicious use of Adelio Suarez’s name, and the clear evidence against the gunman—a shattered door, the traumatized neighbor who’d unwillingly hosted the bastard until Sylvie got home—meant Sylvie got to answer questions in the dubious comfort of her own apartment.
She gave the police a list of every possible place she could be reached in the near future and waved them goodbye. Ten minutes after that, she helped apartment maintenance nail plywood sheets over the gaping hole in the door and headed back out into the night.
Alex would open her doors to Sylvie; but then, the options were sharing her couch with the German shepherd who drooled or the futon with Alex, who kicked and twitched, as active in her sleep as she was during the day.
She called Wales. “Tell me you snuck into a hotel room with two beds.”
He groaned protest but gave her the address and room number.
Thirty minutes later, she was pulling into one of the Holiday Inn Expresses that dotted the Florida landscape. Tapping on his door yielded a grumble and a series of oddly careful footsteps.
He opened the door, leaned across it, blocking her entrance, and said, “I could have been sleeping, y’know.”
“What kind of necromancer sleeps at night? Isn’t that against union rules or something?” she asked. She squeezed in, blinked in the dimness, took in the scent of old tallow and spices. Not the usual hotel scent. Wales had been playing with the occult in the dark like the good, creepy Ghoul he was. “Tell me the room has a coffeepot.”
“Yeah.”
She lingered in the little square space beyond the door, trying to figure if she really wanted Wales for a roommate. Even for a night. If it had been a suite, maybe. “You know, if you’re going to sneak into a hotel, why not pick something nicer?”
“Reservations,” he said. “Theirs, not mine. I took this room out of the system, but at an expensive hotel, someone would throw a stink. More odds of discovery.”
“Surprisingly sensible,” she said. “Do you still have clean towels?”
He flipped on the light, looking at her. “D’you have a black eye?”
She touched her face; it wasn’t particularly tender. “Just dirt, I think. Bruised ribs, shoulder, and hip, though. Odalys sent one of her bullyboys to my home. Kicked my door in.”
“You shoot him, too?” Wales grinned.
“Yeah.”
He stopped smiling. “Seriously? I thought your rep was all about shooting monsters. Not people. That’s two in one day, Sylvie.”
“I’ve learned to make exceptions,” she said. Sylvie ducked under his arm and trespassed. She stopped two steps later and looked at the room. Basic layout—two beds, dresser, TV, a table, and two chairs—except Wales had spent some time rearranging. The chairs were piled on the dresser, a tangle of legs, and the table was squished into the narrow space between the second bed and the wall, clearing a space near the window.
He’d also let the Hands out of their box. He’d made a circle of them, palms up, and stippled them with some pungent herbal ash that made Sylvie’s nose wrinkle and her lungs itch as she approached.
“Pennyroyal,” he said. “Helps ward off curses. Be a hell of a thing if I went to all that trouble to get Jennifer back here, and it killed me.”
“I thought you were going to talk to her, not drag her back. Just talk.”
Wales shifted, antsy under his skin. “I wish. If I were wanting to know about her past, what her favorite color was, her best memory—I’d just ask. But death’s traumatic as hell no matter how it happens. We don’t like to have our toys taken from us, and life’s about the biggest toy there is.”
“And trauma leads to muddled thinking,” Sylvie interrupted.
“Especially when what you’re wanting to ask about is their death. Then it’s all metaphor and scrambled words. Like talking to someone who got their Happy Meal with a side order of LSD. If I want to learn anything from her death, she’s gotta come back. And that requires more than a bit of thought.”
“Plus backup, or are you just using the Hands as ashtrays?”
Wales snorted. “Martha Stewart would have my hide. Nah, they’re going to be a fence of sorts. Hem her in. In case she tries to escape.”
Sylvie edged past the piled-up furniture, crawled onto one of the beds. Necromancy. A lovely way to victimize the dead. But they needed more to go on. As if he had had this same argument with himself, Wales said, “If she could understand what was at stake, she’d want to help us. Save the other women.”
“That’s sweet,” Sylvie said. “But I’ve always found that human nature involves a lot of ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine.’ ”
Wales cracked a thin smile. “Truth. Are you gonna hang around for this shindig?”
“Nowhere else to go,” Sylvie said. The bed was comfortable beneath her. She might have won her battle with her attacker, been checked over by the EMTs and pronounced okay, but her side ached, her hands ached, and she thought there might still be splinters in her hair from the bullet hitting the door frame. Here was good. Even if it meant playing witness to coercive magic.
Plus, this way she could keep an eye on Wales. He might be more competent than he had pretended to be on their first meeting, but dealing with ghosts just made her skin crawl.
Dead things should stay that way, her dark voice commented.
Demalion, Sylvie rebutted. The dark voice sulked and slunk away.
Wales took a breath, flipped out his lighter, and Sylvie coughed. “Smoke detector?”
He clambered up with a shame-faced wince and yanked the wires. “Thanks.”
“Had enough excitement for tonight,” Sylvie said. “Hate to add hotel evac to the list.” She dragged a pillow to her chest, curled around it; the bruising ribs on her side appreciated the support. She felt like a tween on a sleepover—all they needed was a Ouija board and some Gummi Bears to replicate her seventh-grade birthday party—and patted her gun for moral support.
Wales lit a small brazier of herbs; they didn’t stink as strongly as the pennyroyal did, but they made a strange smoky trail that coiled not-quite-aimlessly through the circle of Hands. Where the smoke brushed up against the Hands, ghosts shimmered in grim outlines.
Yeah, this was going to be ugly. Drag a dead girl’s soul back through the ether, interrogate her, study her, and slap her in
the center of a hard-eyed ghost ring of murdered ex-cons.
Wales tossed a piece of jewelry into the brazier; it sank under herbs so fast that Sylvie only had time to register the gold shine of it. It looked like a pendant charm.
He rattled off a long stream of words that could have been anything, a quick blur of vowels barely contained by a consonant here and there. Alex would have been making zombie-language references—all groan and moan and tongueless words. Whatever it was, it raised the fine hairs on Sylvie’s arms, made her clutch the pillow tighter.
Not fear, she told herself. Discomfort. It didn’t sound like something people should say.
The smoke reacted to it, eddying back from the edges of the magical ghost circle, twining up Wales’s legs, creeping through the air like a snake tracking a rat’s scent.
“Jennifer Costas,” Wales said. Back to English, and it should have been a relief. But the Texas drawl was gone from his voice; he sounded crisp and hard and clean. It was a tone a stage actor would envy, meant for carrying cleanly to the rearmost seats. It was a sound to wake the dead.
“Jennifer,” Wales said again.
The smoke thickened, bunched like a swallowing snake, pulling at something Sylvie couldn’t see.
Belatedly, she wondered if she’d see anything at all, or if she’d be stuck watching Wales talk to more invisible people, trying to read success or failure in his body language.
Fire crackled in the smoke, a sullen flicker like a banked fire being poked. Sylvie thought of Jennifer Costas, burned up in a spell backlash, and found herself whispering the closest thing to a prayer she was capable of. Please, let her not spend the afterlife eternally burning.
It depended, she supposed, on whichever god had laid claim to her soul. Some were more merciful than others. Some were indifferent. And some were downright cruel.
The smoke closed in, engulfed the flame, giving shape to the intangible. Jennifer Costas was formed out of smoke and distant fires, her long hair like fiber optics, glowing dully at the ends, drifting.