by Lyn Benedict
Why?
Her voice was a wisp, a child’s plaint.
Sylvie smothered guilt. Sooner done, sooner she’ll be released. For once, she and her inner voice agreed.
Wales swallowed, let the hard edge leave his tone. “Jennifer,” he said.
The ghost girl turned her head, and Sylvie decided she preferred the smudgy shimmer the girl had been in the’Glades to this phantasm, whose eyes gleamed with lambent flames. Jennifer shouldn’t have been threatening—lost, scared, dead—but panic lent strength to any creature.
Sylvie shifted on the bed, running over anything she knew on how to banish a ghost. Just in case.
Jennifer shuddered in response to one of Wales’s questions. Like a child, she repeated it, Was I first? No. She and she were there. White eyes under the water, and he pressed me down under the water, a knife blade in my skin, crimson rivers flowing. . . . He gave us to him like a poisoned sweet, and he lodged in our bones. In our blood. We burn.
The fire crackle beneath her smoke skin doused itself, faded into silence. An utter silence. Utter stillness. Death in a smoke shell. A hollow core of memory and pain.
Sylvie shivered. She almost wished the flames were back.
“Do you remember the words he used?” Wales asked. “Can you tell me?”
Wales was dogged; Sylvie gave him that. Still concentrating on the spell that bound the rest of the women. Trying to figure out a way to safely unpick the knot they were in. Still trying to make sense of someone else’s malignancy. But his shoulders were tight, his eyes jittery, and she wondered how long he could hold Jennifer there.
Chains. More chains. Jennifer mourned, turning about in the circle. Trapped. I want to go home. I must. He calls.
Beneath the stillness, a tension. Sylvie thought of tides pulling back before tsunamis, of the silence before an earthquake.
“Wales,” she murmured. “Hurry it up.” Dangerous to interrupt, to divert his attention, but she couldn’t help but feel that time was short. A new sound grew beneath the smoke, something distant, repetitive, vaguely familiar. Something that made her edgy.
“What was his purpose?” Wales said.
The smoke shape turned her palms upward, wordless answer or a confused shrug. The sigils carved into her palms meant the motion could be either.
To hide. To grow strong at our expense. At his. He calls.
Sylvie peered through the haze of ghosts playing fence, tried to see what Wales might be seeing. All it was to her was featureless grey-black, a roil of distress.
“Hide from whom?”
Jennifer flashed in the circle, a rush of smoky movement, crashing up against the hedging ghosts, trying to escape. Her face, built of smoke and terror, was visible through the gaps; her lips moved soundlessly. The word was clear, though.
No. No. No. I don’t want to. . . .
Wales frowned, his face tight and stern. “Tell me,” he commanded. The ghost wept flaming tears.
Sylvie wondered if Alex would still find him sweet now. She didn’t dwell on it. That sound came again, just on the edge of her hearing. A displacement of expelled air. An explosive sigh, but with anger beneath. The bed shivered beneath her. She dropped the pillow, held her hands out before her. Steady as a rock. The trembling wasn’t her. It was something else. Something approaching. Something sniffing them out. Sniffing the ghost out.
A power filter, Wales had said. Power went in, changed, came out again. That kind of thing left a mark on a soul. That kind of thing could make a ghost a tasty morsel for anything powerful enough to sense it.
Another thought crossed her mind, sent her heart into rocketing overdrive. He gave us to him.
It wouldn’t be the first time a sorcerer had bartered with a god for power. If the soul-devourer had given these women’s souls to a god . . . if Wales was keeping Jennifer here when a god was expecting her.
He calls.
“Wales!” Sylvie snapped. “Send her back. Do it now.”
“Just a minute more,” he crooned, equal answer to Sylvie and comfort to the ghost. “Just a moment, now.” He circled the ghost, scribing a circle within the ghost circle, and Sylvie’s nerves seized with a sudden realization.
Wales was inside the ghost circle. Contained as much as the ghost he summoned.
Too late, Jennifer whispered. He comes.
Sylvie rose, paced the outside of the circle in an echo of Wales pacing the inside. The cold barrier of the Hands kept her at bay.
Leave him, her dark voice suggested. Run.
The air hummed, seethed in the room like locusts, something fiercely alive, something terrifyingly hungry.
The entire room trembled around them, a localized earthquake. In the hall, people were beginning to cry out, a hastening of footsteps running for the exits.
And the explosive grunting cough was getting stronger.
God, Sylvie thought. A god, coming to see what was keeping his newly gifted soul.
“Wales!” she shouted. “End the spell!”
Wales’s head came up, only then catching on to his danger. His expression went blank with shock; Jennifer’s burning gaze was tilted upward, terrified, waiting, a huddled creature in the glare of a headlight.
Sylvie gritted her teeth, sucked in willpower, hoped there were enough remnants of Wales’s protective spell on her skin, and reached through the ghost barrier.
Ice and cold and vertigo; her arm went dead to the shoulder, but her hand hit what she was aiming for, closed tightly around Wales’s thin forearm. She leaned back and yanked.
He barreled out of the circle, shouting protest; Sylvie only yanked harder, pulled them both down between the beds. Light exploded into the room after him—the spell breaking on two fronts.
The room shuddered; Sylvie scrabbled for her gun, got Wales between her and the floor, and stared into the heart of the light, trying to see what was coming for them. For Jennifer.
Something clouded the light, a dark mass, the shadow of a god reaching out toward them. The air in the room stung Sylvie’s skin, magic crawling over her body, jangling every nerve all at once. Again, she heard that hungry, moaning grunt.
Jennifer’s ghost blazed with heat, flames rushing outward, crawling the ceiling, the walls, the floor.
Sylvie rolled, trying to angle herself for a shot. Took it. Hit nothing but the wall. Got another roar of complaint.
We’re fucked. Too late to run.
She ducked, curled tight around Wales, choked on ovenhot atmosphere, her ears throbbing with pain as that animal howl went on and on, too loud for human comfort, Jennifer’s shriek mingling with it.
Heat on the back of Sylvie’s neck, a supernatural shadow drifting over her skin, Wales a bony, quivering mass beneath her. Jennifer’s scream cut off like someone had flipped a switch. The heat in the room subsided.
That angry moan sounded again, close enough to rattle her bones. And then . . . nothing. The shaking stopped; the light blinked out; her ears rang tinnily; spots danced before her eyes.
When she was convinced the god was gone, not merely playing with them, she rolled off Wales. He was out, eyes sealed shut, bruising beneath it. Yanking him through the circle hadn’t been a good idea. But it had been the only way. Ending spells, like starting a spell, took time that they hadn’t had.
She manhandled him onto the bed, fell back against his side, and gaped at the room. She expected destruction. Cracked plaster, scorch marks, the like. But there was almost nothing. The mirror over the dresser, glimpsed between stacked-up chair legs, had gone dark, smoked, as if it had gotten a better glance at the intruder than she had and burned from the inside out, incapable of reflecting it back.
A god, she thought again. And they were lucky. It hadn’t manifested completely. Hadn’t done more than cast its shadow on the mundane world. She spared a brief, belated thanks to the god of Justice: When he’d walked the earth, he’d contained his godly strength as best he could. This god didn’t care enough to do so.
She got
up on shaky legs, and something crunched beneath her feet. Bone. She let her gaze drop, held through the swinging dizziness that caused, and let her eyes focus slowly. A skeletal hand. One of several.
The Hand of Glory had transformed from a withered, yellow mass of flesh and bone to a hand stripped completely to bone and charred black all the way through. Like Pompeii’s victims had, when she touched the hand, it disintegrated to a crisp pile of brittle ash.
Guess they’d finally found a way to destroy the Hands of Glory in one swoop, Sylvie thought wryly. That could have been useful a week ago. Now it was only a huh and a footnote in the supernatural files her memory kept.
She kicked it aside, away, staggered into the bathroom, ran the water cold and clear in the sink, and scrubbed at her face and nape. She felt more human at once. Another cloth, wetted down, still dripping, came with her back into the main room. She slapped it across Wales’s forehead, watched him flinch with some relief. Just out, then. Not dead.
She folded the comforter—scratchy, floral polyester—around him, cocooning him. He muttered, ducked his face into it, and dislodged the washcloth. He flailed a spastic hand in complaint as water ran down his neck and spine, then gave up, passing out or falling asleep. One or the other.
Sylvie dug her bullet out of the wall where it had lodged, dumped the misshapen thing into her pocket. That was the final straw as far as her own energy levels went. She staggered over to the other bed, face planted in the abused pillow, and was out before she could do more than wonder if housekeeping would wake them in the morning.
* * *
SHE WOKE TO HER PHONE RINGING SHRILLY, TO WALES’S GROANING something that might be Make it stop, to fading dreams of someone growling in her ear, and to a body gone stiff and sore. Bastard, she thought. She hoped the gunman’s wound got infected. She’d ill-wish their godly visitor, too, if she had a name to fling her curses toward.
Fumbling an arm across the stretch of clean sheets brought the phone to her hand. She flipped it open, “What?”
“You didn’t call me back,” Lio said.
“Your guard-dog wife hung up on me,” Sylvie said. A moment later, she put her face in her pillow and groaned. She’d intended to talk to Lio, but after she’d inhaled enough caffeine to be reasonably civil, at least to the point of not insulting the man’s wife.
Lio was silent for an angry second, then sighed. “Did you find anything?” He sounded good. Lucid. Impatient. Cop on the mend.
“Found everything,” Sylvie said. She sat up in the bed, shoved her hair out of her face. “It’s complicated.”
“Magic?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Good news, bad news? Good news is the women aren’t actually dead—well, except for the one who burned up—Jennifer Costas was her name, by the way.
“The rest are in mortal danger, but alive. At least if I don’t screw around too much. They’re kind of on a time limit. More good news? I found them again. Bad news? I left them there, and you can’t send anyone out to move them. They have to stay missing until we fix this.”
“What?” All the irritation he’d suppressed earlier came out in one sharp bark. “You what?”
“Look, Lio, I don’t like it either. But right now, I don’t have a choice. I could tell you where the women are, but that would just lead to a repeat of what put you in the hospital.”
They argued for a few minutes longer, repeating the same material—How could she? This was why he didn’t like private investigators. This was why she didn’t like cops. They didn’t understand the risks—until Wales shut her up by hurling a pillow into her face and slinking into the bathroom. “Make coffee,” he snapped, and slammed the door.
Guess he wasn’t suffering too much damage from spell shock, then, if he was lucid, irritable, and hogging the shower.
“Look, Lio,” Sylvie said. “I do have some info you can work on, even from home. I took pictures. If you can match them up with missing people . . . No, I’m not telling you how to do your job.” She tugged at her hair in increasing frustration and finally hung up. They were never going to be easy allies, but dammit, she needed him to keep the cops occupied, to distract the ISI.
She threw the phone down on the bed, fisted her hands in the sheets. It just pissed her off. A government agency designed to deal with the supernatural, and they were so bad at it that she couldn’t just tell them where the women were and trust to them to fix the problem. A government agency that was so bad it didn’t even realize how fucked-up it was. They’d poke, and pry, and drag out some low-level witch or psychic who’d preach caution. Then they’d ignore him or her and bull on ahead.
She heard clattering and chatter in the hallways—the maids talking about the shaking last night, talking about crazy guests, and Sylvie took it as a sign. She might not be ready for the day, but it was more than ready for her.
First up, the office and faxing the pics to Lio. He might be pissed at her, but he was homebound, bored, and far too decent a cop to let the information go just because it came from her; he’d look into it.
Wales stumbled out of the bathroom, towel slung around narrow hips and looking like he’d been on a three-week bender. Dripping, he started coffee, leaned over the pot as if caffeine steam was a panacea for what ailed him.
“So what the hell happened?” he asked. He frowned at the charcoal splotches on the carpet, all that was left of the Hands. “Last thing I recall, you were dragging me out midspell. You do like to live dangerously.”
She made grabby fingers at the mug of coffee he poured, and with a growl, he handed it over. “So . . .”
“So, next time listen to me when I say stop the spell,” Sylvie said. “Then you won’t get a magical concussion. Did you get anything more out of the conversation with Jennifer than I did? ’Cause I heard mostly gibberish. Before she got yanked away.” He looked like he was going to demand more answers, answers she wasn’t ready to give yet. Talking about gods before breakfast was just . . . inhumane. She took a deliberate sip of coffee, mmmed happily though the coffee didn’t deserve it.
As an early-morning distraction, it worked.
Wales followed her second sip with a hooded, hungry gaze, then poured himself a cup. “I was closer to her, got some of her memories relayed up close and personal.”
“Ugh,” Sylvie said. “Glad I missed that. Get anything useful to go with the horror show?”
“Yeah,” he said. As usual, he qualified his first positive response. “Maybe. I might be able to peel back at least one layer of the spell.”
“Break the stasis? Kill the spell like you suggested?”
He shook his head. “After losing the Hands? Best I can do is buy the women some time, weaken whatever’s draining them.”
“That’s not nothing,” she said. “You going to be up to a trip to the ’Glades?” Sylvie asked. It wasn’t quite the question she meant. She meant was he up to trying another tricky life-endangering series of spells after the magical backlash he’d suffered last night.
He poured a second cup of coffee, killing the pot, and said, after a long, scalding swallow, “Reckon I’ll find out.”
7
Ill-Met
THE SUN WAS BRIGHT AND HIGH AS THEY SET OUT, EVEN IF THEIR moods weren’t. Their trip to the Everglades had been delayed while Wales took the time to pack up the sad remains of his Hands of Glory, brushing up the ash with careful attention to detail. When she’d raised a brow in inquiry, Wales had said, “Caution always pays off.”
Sylvie had asked, half fearing the answer, “Marco wasn’t one of the ghosts guarding the circle, was he?”
“No,” Wales said. “He’s safe.”
Safe, Sylvie thought. Not the first word she’d use to describe Marco. Not even the tenth. But it was a little like the affection between a boy and his snarling, mangy junkyard dog—not something you wanted to come between.
“Good,” Sylvie lied. Marco might be a useful tool, but he made her nervous.
Wales had merely shrug
ged, finished tidying ash into the plastic laundry bag supplied by the hotel, and headed for the truck.
Then she broached the subject again. It wasn’t that she cared—as far as she was concerned, the Hands of Glory were abominations—but an upset necromancer just seemed like a bad idea. “They’re at peace now,” she said. “Not slaves any longer. You got ’em away from the CIA, took care of them, and—”
“Jesus,” Wales said, “I ain’t mourning them. I’m freaking the fuck out. We could have been killed last night.”
Sylvie clicked her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the blacktop unrolling beneath her tires. They were out of the city proper already, had seen an alligator or two sliding into watery ditches alongside the road. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Should be,” he muttered. “You got any idea of what it was that came for us? ’Cause I’ve dealt with death guardians before, creatures that hold the souls of the dead to their proper planes, but that wasn’t—”
“I think it was a god,” Sylvie said.
“God,” Wales said.
“Yup,” Sylvie said.
He stared into the sun dazzle reflecting off the watery ditches alongside the road. “Any particular god?”
“An angry one?” Sylvie said. At his flat look, she elaborated. “I don’t know. One that doesn’t care overmuch for keeping a low profile. Not one of the big ones, or we’d be a smear on the wall that the maids would be quitting over. Still, its shadow did enough damage, don’t you think?”
“Don’t know. Missed most of it,” Wales said.
“Hopefully, you won’t get another chance,” Sylvie said. “Gods on earth are bad news. They’re . . . disruptive just by their presence. Monsters and cataclysms. A hurricane in Chicago—”
“That was a god?” he interrupted.
“Yeah,” she said. “Several, actually. Political infighting. The smaller ones—the demigods—aren’t so bad in comparison. They fuck things up when they’re down here, but not to that scale. Mostly, they just get people killed.”