Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  WHEN SHE RETURNED TO THE TRUCK, ITS FINISH REFLECTING THE moonlight in white glosses, she found Wright, first-aid kit unopened in his lap, watching the bite on his hand and wrist bleed. His jeans were wet with it, black in the low illumination of the moon, scarlet beneath the hood light when she opened the door. She swore, reached for his pulse, even though she knew—had seen, dammit—that the wound was relatively minor.

  His pulse thrummed beneath her fingers, his skin cool and damp in the swamp air. His blood was sticky under her nails. “Hey!” she snapped, jerking her hand back, rubbing it against her own jeans.

  Wright twitched, turned his hand over, and let a rivulet run down his fingers to spatter all over the seat. Great, she thought, just the thing she needed in her cab the next time the police came to harass her: bloodstains.

  “I’m bleeding,” he said. Amazement, surprise . . . pleasure.

  Her anger vanished, dwindling as quickly as a body falling from a rooftop. Two souls, Tatya had said, and she’d mistaken him for a beast. Two souls in possession of a single scrap of flesh. This was Demalion talking.

  “I would have thought you’d had enough of seeing your blood spilled.”

  He turned his head to look at her, drawn finally from his exploration of mortality. She fumbled for the first-aid kit, propping it open against his hip, and reached blindly for the roll of gauze, the jumbo tube of antibiotics, the antiseptic wash and pads.

  “It hurts,” he said. “Deep down, deeper than the nerves admit. Blood makes the bones ache. Makes them remember what all flesh is born knowing. We will die. We must die. It is our destiny.”

  “Not on my watch,” she said.

  He laughed, a rich bubble of sound made scratchy by Wright’s throat. Sylvie, heart pounding at the familiarity of it, poured antiseptic on his wounds with a callous lack of concern.

  The wild laughter gave way to a yelp; the crazy talk changed to a muttered oath.

  “Hurts, does it,” Sylvie said. “You can pull back from it, the blood, the pain. Let Wright own it. It’s his body.” She sponged the dried and seeping blood away, preparing for the bandages. The punctures were many—werewolf teeth were sharp—but they weren’t deep. Marisol really had been holding back.

  “That an order, Shadows, or a question?” he asked. His breath stirred her hair, moist warmth touching her skin, warmer than the swamp about them. Another sigh. “He let go, you know. Ceded the body to me. He got too scared, sitting in the dark, alone and bleeding in this strange new world, with a wolf standing on the hood of the truck, watching him with burning eyes. He wanted to not see any of it. I spared him that.”

  “We need to talk,” she said. “But not here, not now.”

  “Wolves are hunting,” he said, in agreement. The night felt charged about them, quivering as the predators passed through it. “Wright’s twitchy anyway.”

  “His body,” she murmured.

  He let out a long sigh, and Wright jerked, swore, and said, “God, where’d you come from?”

  “Been here,” she said. She made layers of antibiotic cream and gauze, wound it about the long bones in his palm, covering up the blood.

  “Ghost time, huh,” he said.

  “Yup,” Sylvie said. Down to monosyllables. “Hand. Here. All done.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  His courtesy, ingrained, was a weight on her. Thanking her, when she’d been the one to lead him into the wolves’ den.

  She slapped the first-aid kit back together, pushed it beneath the seat. “Passenger’s seat for you,” she said.

  “And the briefcase?”

  Sylvie paused in climbing into her seat, unrolled another couple of hundred in fifties, held it out toward him. “They’re coming home with me. You don’t have to. This’ll get you a hotel room. Even with a witch’s name, we won’t manage to see her tonight. And I can’t just leave them lying around.”

  It was a con of sorts. A gamble that Wright’s mingled trust-distrust issues would keep him close. Keep Demalion close.

  Her fingers trembled. She didn’t want to make the offer, but she thought if she clutched as tight as she wanted, he’d pull away. She wanted to drag him and Demalion home and keep him. She wanted her second chance. Wanted to keep him safe.

  Too late for that, her little dark voice growled.

  Wright said, “That’s blood money, Sylvie. You might be able to call it a client fee, but I know where it came from.”

  “Then you know more than I do,” she said, but tucked the money away.

  At his disapproving expression, she said, “Enough attitude. You may doubt my morals; god knows you wouldn’t be the first, but I’m honest enough.”

  “Still not going to a hotel,” he said. “You’ve got me on your couch until I’m better.” She turned her face toward the windshield, hid her relieved smile with a sweep of hair, and relaxed. She had him. She had both of them.

  He settled back into the seat with the awkwardness of a man who had just insulted his host. Given that, she wasn’t surprised when he cast about for a subject, any subject, and landed on the most obvious.

  “They’re bigger than I thought, not that I ever thought about ’em. Outside of movies anyway. Werewolves, I mean.”

  She started the engine, bumped them back onto the main road, and said, “Dire wolves, actually. The wolf half.” Relief made her expansive—it always did—and these were answers she could give without watching her words.

  “Dire wolves are extinct.”

  “Oh, someone spent time in museums,” she teased.

  He smiled, the first easy and uncomplicated expression she’d seen on him, born of a happy memory. “Jamie’s crazy ’bout the Natural History Museum. He outgrew dinosaurs, but doesn’t care for live animals yet. It’s all mammoth, sabertooth, dire wolf, and a weird obsession with some giant shrew thing that bites.”

  “Dire wolves didn’t go extinct. They just learned to spend more time on two legs than four.”

  “You’re telling me that dire wolves were werewolves.”

  “What, you’d feel better if werewolves were a purely modern phenomenon? Symptom of some strange corruption happening to the world? Sorry. The Magicus Mundi’s been around longer than we have.” She flicked her brights at an approaching car, got the bastards to turn their own down. The scrub brush along the narrow road caught the warring headlights and sparked luminous eyes. “Werewolves have been around for ages. They used to harass mankind a lot. Until mankind harassed back.”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “Am not. Just ’cause you didn’t know doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. Detect for a moment. Why do you think there were so many in the tar pits? What predatory animal blindly follows another into death? You listen to Tatya tell it, the humans rounded them up and drove them into the pits. Ushered in a whole new era of peace founded on mass slaughter.”

  “You know a lot about them.”

  “Occupational hazard,” she said.

  Her mood swung to a grimness she fought to hide. What would he have thought if she’d told him the truth? That she shared an ancestor with the werewolves? That Lilith, mother to vampires, succubi, werewolves, had deigned to have a human child that might carry just as much monster in her blood as the rest? Sylvie had never confessed her ancestry to Demalion, who had iffy ancestry of his own—thanks to his mother the sphinx—she sure as hell wasn’t sharing it with Wright.

  12

  Crystal Clear

  JUGGLING KEYS, THE BRIEFCASE, HER ATTENTION ON WRIGHT, WHO was all but zombie walking in her wake, Sylvie nearly fell into her apartment when the door opened as she touched it. Wright, hand still curved protectively against his chest, followed after her blindly, walking into a situation that had Sylvie reaching for her gun.

  She always locked the door.

  “Just me!” Alex said. She stuck her head out of the kitchenette, waved her hands in surrender, then grinned. It was a far more pleasant surprise than Sylvie had been anticipating, and she felt
a little dizzy with the relief. “What’s with the gun?”

  “Door was unlocked and half-open,” Sylvie said. “You need to work on your self-preservation skills. Anything on Zoe?”

  “I locked it, and nope,” Alex said, ducking back into the kitchen. Her voice carried easily across the few feet. “You’re carrying a briefcase full of magical tools designed to open doors. You think?”

  “They’re not lit,” Sylvie said. She set the briefcase down; traded that weight for the intangible weight of her resurgent worry for her sister.

  “Does that make a difference?” Wright asked.

  “It should,” Sylvie said. “Like a loaded gun. You still have to pull the trigger.”

  “Some guns are for crap,” he said. “Ask me how many accidental shootings I’ve seen.” His expression was bleak; bad memories, exhaustion, pain all ganging up on him.

  “Point,” Sylvie said. She nudged the briefcase closer to the door, waited to see if it would open again, spurred just by proximity to the Hands. Maybe they didn’t need to be lit to unlock; maybe the lighting of the Hands was geared toward putting witnesses out. The door latch stayed firm, even with a tug at the knob, and Sylvie groaned. Why didn’t bad things ever come with instruction manuals?

  Alex said, “Stop playing with body parts and come have dinner.”

  Sylvie could smell Ciro’s pizza warming in the oven, and she steeled herself in case the pizza was merely Alex leading up to wanting something new for the office. Like the ergonomic chair she’d been leaving strategic pictures of on her desk, the fridge, Sylvie’s office door.

  “I figured you’d need it,” she said. “Tatya always takes it out of—” She looked over Sylvie’s shoulder and her gentle air of self-satisfaction faded. “What happened to you?”

  “Got bit,” Wright said shortly, made a U-turn out of the kitchen, and disappeared into the bathroom. He shut the door with a solid thunk, and a moment later, the shower started up.

  “You let him get bitten?” Alex followed in his path, like she meant to follow him directly into the bathroom and investigate the wound closer.

  “Too close to the moon,” Sylvie said. “Their nerves were jangled. And they didn’t like that he had two souls.”

  Alex flung herself onto Sylvie’s couch, propped her feet up on the arm, and said, “Tatya could tell? What’d she have to say? Did she recognize—”

  “Tatya never met Demalion,” Sylvie said. “Though she said he smelled like cat.” She dragged the pizza out of the oven, the cardboard box crisp with heat, the scent of garlic and cheese overwhelming. She set it down on the edge of the coffee table and went back for napkins, pepper flakes, and powdered cheese.

  Alex frowned. “But Demalion wasn’t—”

  Sylvie nodded once, and Alex’s eyes got big. “You never said!”

  “He was human,” Sylvie said. “At least . . . ninety percent human. His mother isn’t.” Sylvie shoved Alex’s feet off the armrest, sat there instead, propping her own feet on the coffee table. The new decoration, a bowl filled with a dozen crystal balls of varying sizes—courtesy of Alex’s overkill shopping—reflected a hundred tiny Sylvies back at her. Lures she didn’t think she’d need after all. The moment Wright relaxed, stopped clinging to his control, Demalion would surface.

  “So you’re going to tell Wright now? I keep crap secrets. I’m scared I’ll slip.” Alex shot a glance at the closed door, the water still running, and lowered her voice anyway.

  Sylvie passed Alex her untouched slice of pizza, and said, “Don’t bluff badly if you’re going to bluff. You keep secrets every day, or you wouldn’t work for me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex said. She flipped the new slice of pizza on top of her first, eating them like pie, clear enough signs that Alex understood the answer would be some variant of “very soon, maybe even imminent.”

  “As soon as I’ve talked to Demalion. That way I’ve got the full scoop to pass on to Wright.” It made her head hurt, the idea of taking words from Wright’s mouth and reciting them back for his ears.

  The running water cut off; Alex’s pizza oozed a piece of cheese and tomato to her lap with a wet plop. Alex ignored it. “I should stick around. Watch your back. Demalion was kind of a bastard, no offense.”

  “So am I. Go home and look for any robberies that broke the pattern we know. Look for Hand-aided thefts.”

  The door to the bathroom opened; Wright slouched out, jeans-clad, bare-chested, all ribs and shadows, the curved white scar on his rib cage as clear as moonlight on white gravel.

  “Pizza?” he said. There was hope in his voice, and relief, as if the world couldn’t be that bad, no matter that it held ghosts, werewolves, and black magic, not if there was still pizza.

  Sylvie twitched her gaze away from his chest, from that little gap in the scar. She wanted to press her lips to it, taste that tiny space that had been a gap in Demalion’s soul. She peeled cheese from her crust and looked away. “It’s not Chicago deep-dish, but it’s tasty,” Sylvie said. “Come and get it.” Wright. She had to remember Wright in all of this. Her client. No matter whom he was housing within his skin.

  He padded into the kitchenette, helped himself to an actual plate and a soda before he took a couple of slices, careful of his bandaged hand. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside the coffee table with the easy grace of a parent who had a young child. The enthusiasm on his face faded after a few bites, and Sylvie didn’t think it was the pizza not being up to his standard.

  Alex, ignoring Sylvie’s earlier admonition to go home, mangled another slice of pizza in her constant quest to eat the cheese first, and said, “When I couldn’t find Zoe, I stopped looking for her and looked for her boyfriend.”

  “Carter,” Sylvie said. She shot a glance at Wright, caught him looking away. It would have been high-school behavior except he was visibly uncomfortable, edgy in his skin, and cop enough to realize he’d been the subject of conversation. Again. No, Wright wasn’t a happy camper.

  “Carson,” Alex said.

  “Whatever,” Sylvie said, just to annoy Alex. To see if she could get Wright to relax, just a little bit. She was tense enough for all of them. She wanted, needed, to talk to Demalion, and Wright’s careful control barred the way.

  “Whatever’s actually exactly it,” Alex said.

  “What?” Wright said. “Does she make sense to you?”

  “Sometimes,” Sylvie said. “Not at the moment.”

  “There is no Carson. Not in her cell-phone history anyway, and I ask you: What high-school girl doesn’t call her boyfriend at least once a day?” Alex grinned.

  “So either he doesn’t exist, or she’s calling him from another phone? I don’t like either of those options,” Sylvie said. Phones with a specific purpose were the purview of drug dealers, prostitutes, and stalker-type boyfriends. Or, maybe, a necromancer.

  “I choose option A,” Alex said. “I talked to some of her school friends, emphasis on the school, less on the friends—seems Zoe’s been making herself unpopular of late—but no one’s ever met Carson or even heard what school he goes to. He’s an excuse, not a person. A reason for her to blow her friends off and go off on her own. Zoe’s up to something, and I don’t think she wants to share. Maybe your out-of-pattern robberies?”

  “Shit,” Sylvie muttered, but it fitted with her loose conjectures about the money. A thought struck her. “You found her friends? I didn’t have any luck.”

  “You’re an authority figure, Syl. They see you and scatter. I talked to as many of ’em as I could scrounge up.” Alex bent her head, flicked pepperoni to one side of her plate.

  Sylvie said, “Something you’re not telling me?”

  “Her friends are kinda . . . not.” Alex scowled. “I mean, I remember high school, but god, these kids are little shits. They were ready to blame her for anything as long as I didn’t get them in trouble. They said she—” Alex cut off all at once, went back to dissecting her pizza.

  “Said what?” Sylvi
e asked.

  “Just the usual teenage crap,” Alex said. “You know, she’s a bitch, and all that.”

  Oh, there was more, Sylvie could tell. The question was, did she want to hear it? Alex sure didn’t want to tell it. She closed her eyes, felt a warm hand reach out to her, fingers twining with hers, offering silent support. “Anything that sounded Mundi-related? Freak, witch, crazy? Any of those thrown her way?”

  Alex shook her head.

  Sylvie was trying to figure out if that was good, bad, indifferent, when Wright’s fingers twitched in hers, and he jerked back, looking embarrassed. He opened his mouth, ready to proffer explanations, apologies, then looked perplexed. He went back to his pizza, his brow furrowed.

  Ghost time imminent, Sylvie thought.

  Because she was watching for it, she saw when Wright ceded control to Demalion. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a frown on Wright’s face, a quickening of breath that smoothed out, his brow unwrinkling. A casual hand that reached out for pizza, then veered and picked up one of the smooth quartz globes out of absentminded habit.

  No wonder Wright’s wife leaned toward crazy. People talked about possession, and it was Exorcist territory, strange events and violent behavior. Dogs howling in the background and cats hissing and running away.

  But this gentle overtaking . . . He met her eyes, and she let out her breath at the desperation in his gaze, the strain. No, she corrected herself, nothing gentle about this at all, at least not from his point of view.

  She interrupted Alex’s speculations as to Zoe’s secret activities, which were growing more disturbing by the moment, with a “Go home, Alex. It’s late.”

  Alex opened her mouth to protest, but Sylvie flicked a finger toward herself, toward Wright, and Alex capitulated. “I am tired. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Alex let herself out, and Sylvie watched him rolling the crystal about his fingers with a graceful familiarity she doubted Wright could manage. He walked into the living room, walked the crystal along his knuckles at the same time, then held it up and looked through it at her. “I’m sort of surprised. I can’t see a damn thing in crystals any longer. Clairvoyance is apparently all about the flesh and not the soul. I’d tell the ISI—Luci in Research would be fascinated—but it would be . . . awkward to explain.”