Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  “You put a circle of protection on me,” she said. “Forget that? I might not go down easy. In fact, I guarantee it.” It was more than bravado; it was fact. She’d been hit three times by the Hands’ spell. Each time, it took longer to take effect, courtesy of Lilith’s bloodline, she supposed. She could take out the Ghoul before she went down.

  “You forget about your fragile friend?”

  “Sylvie,” Demalion said. Just her name. It wasn’t a plea, but it fell on her ears like one. She’d gotten him killed once. Would she do it again, for the satisfaction of beating up a necromancer who didn’t seem as deadly as advertised?

  She swallowed the screaming urge to fight, to not bow her head to any yoke at all, and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Fine, then. Tell me why you’re not something I should put down like a rabid dog. Tell me why you’re so misunderstood. But you can do it while I untie him.”

  Without waiting for the Ghoul’s okay, she put her back to him, bent over Demalion, got his wrists freed. He whispered, “Careful, Shadows.”

  She shrugged. She was getting the measure of Tierney Wales now. He was a runner, not a fighter, a little paranoid. Probably with reason. And he was either cat-curious or desperately lonely. Otherwise, she and Demalion would have woken to a gutted, abandoned apartment and another dead end.

  Wales said, “I only knocked you out so you wouldn’t do anything hasty. I heard you’re good at hasty.”

  “So you zapped us with a Hand of Glory?”

  Wales leaned against the front door. “What do you want, Shadows?”

  “To find out who’s selling Hands of Glory to kids.”

  “Not me,” he said. It might have been more convincing if he weren’t still hand in Hand with his favored talisman.

  “Circumstance, evidence, and word of mouth suggest otherwise.”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. It’s . . . vile. Look, do you even really know what these are?”

  Demalion inserted himself into the conversation, his tone laconic, cooling Sylvie’s temper. “The Hand of Glory is the left or sinister hand of a murderer, severed after death by hanging, treated magically to create a burglar’s or assassin’s tool.”

  “Technically, that’s accurate enough,” Wales said. “But it’s so much more, so much worse. You know how it works?”

  Sylvie said, “Do we need to?”

  “I’m curious,” Demalion said.

  “What, we’re all friends now?”

  “You should never turn down information,” Wales said, eyes serious. “You never know when you’ll be called on to know it.”

  She gaped at them, then threw her hands up in the air and dropped into the seat she had so recently been tied to.

  “Fine. Enlighten me.”

  “Enlighten us,” Demalion whispered, and Sylvie thought, Oh . . . necromancy, the power to control death. No wonder Demalion was intrigued.

  How was she going to save Wright and Demalion both? She hadn’t had an idea yet. Time-share agreements didn’t work all that well when it was a piece of real estate on a beach; time-sharing a body seemed doomed to failure.

  “. . . hold that,” Wales said, and it was Demalion’s reaction—total withdrawal—that brought her attention back to the here and now. Stupid to relax her guard, but she was beginning to believe the Ghoul meant it when he said he wasn’t going to hurt them. He seemed leery of confrontation. But paranoid and skittish didn’t preclude turning a profit by farming out dangerous tools out for children to use.

  “Hell no,” Demalion said.

  “Look, just reach up and take a Hand. You, too, Shadows.”

  Sylvie’s lips curled in instinctive disgust. The living shouldn’t make nice with the dead. It just wasn’t healthy.

  Wales pulled a lighter from the his pocket, and Sylvie said, “Put it down. Now.”

  “It’s all right,” Wales said. “It’s all right. You want to know what the Hands are? I could talk theory all night, or I could just show you.”

  Demalion said, “No way in hell am I touching those things.”

  Wales said, “Then you can pass right on out again. Holding one brings you partly into their world, keeps you safe.”

  “Safe?” Sylvie thought that was an impossible choice of word. Like there could be anything safe about communing with the dead. Still, Wales was pretty hot on the lighter, so she reached up, gingerly grasping the Hand nearest to her. It felt—not as bad as she had expected, dry and stiff in her hand, its fingers falling into the spaces between her own.

  Demalion, grimacing, had done the same. It looked—Sylvie bit back a nervous laugh—like the train to hell, she thought, where instead of looped canvas straps, there were human hands. “Hurry it up, Wales.”

  Her little dark voice was hissing doubts; if she was going to do this, it had better be soon, before instinct overrode her intellect.

  Wales lit the Hand, a single illuminated point of flame streaming out to catch the thumb. Then the flame hopped side to side, until the entire Hand streamed flame toward the ceiling and took the color out of the world, turning everything shade grey, corpse white, rot black. A figure stepped out of Wales’s shadow, a transparent ghost with hollowed eye sockets. Black tears stood out on his cheeks, etched in ink, vivid against the ghost flesh.

  “This is Marco,” Wales said. “He was hanged in his cell five years ago, his hand cut off, his spirit enslaved. I didn’t ask for it. Neither did he.” “Who would?” Demalion asked, revulsion in his voice.

  “You’d be surprised,” Wales said. “Some old-time thieving families planned on it—a legacy for their kids.”

  Demalion shuddered; in the ghost light cast by the Hand, Demalion’s skin—pale-washed and shimmering—echoed the shudder, one step out of rhythm, one moment too late. Wright’s spirit, clinging fast to his body, Sylvie thought, and feeling the horror a single beat behind.

  “Fascinating,” Sylvie said. “I don’t care about the history. What about the rest of your collection? I count eighteen Hands here, Ghoul. You didn’t ask for them either? They just . . . came to you?”

  “Same situation. Different names. I took them away from those who made ’em. They might have been felons, bad men while alive, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be sentenced and bound to a prison after their death. Our government thought they did. I disagreed. I won.”

  “The ISI did this?” Sylvie asked. She shot an accusing glance at Demalion, forgetting for a heartbeat of time that he was no longer her rival, and dead besides. Seeing Wright’s body instead of Demalion’s felt like a jolt of electricity.

  “CIA and Texas jailers. ISI’s real? The secret Secret Agency? I thought they were propagan—” Wales followed her gaze, frowned at Demalion. “Are you a spook, spook? There’s something off about you.” He squinted closer, his ghostly companion whispered in his ear, and Wales’s expression got tight. “You’ve got a ghost of your own bound to you. You’re haunted.”

  “Never mind about him,” Sylvie said. Wales’s attention refused to be drawn away. A hobbyist faced with a new species, he wasn’t about to let Demalion’s puzzle remain unsolved.

  “There’s lots of types of ghosts,” the Ghoul said absently. “Shouldn’t be surprising. Dead will always outnumber the living, after all.” He circled Demalion, Marco following him like a pale shadow. “But I’ve found they fall into three categories: intangibles, tangibles, and takeovers.”

  “Can we spare the lecture for some time when I’m not holding a body part?” Sylvie asked. Now that she’d seen Marco, she kept getting nervy twitches of realizing there was a ghost attached to the Hand of Glory she held also—unseen, inactive, but there.

  Wales ignored her, still pacing circles around Demalion, his narrow face abstracted, Marco his faithful shadow. “Intangibles,” he said. “Common as dirt. Covers ghosts who are images on repeat, voices in the dark, cold spots, apparitions. Common, easily dismissed. No big deal. They barely recognize us at all.”

  He stroked through the air
near Demalion’s face, and Demalion and Wright’s pale shade shied away.

  “Tangibles, on the other hand . . . well, they’re tangibles. Where the trouble starts. They can see us, and they can touch us. Poltergeists throwing lamps, things that alter the world—houses that run blood out of electrical sockets, that kinda thing—and ghostly servants like the Hands of Glory, who open doors and attack witnesses.” He broke off, which was all to the good, Sylvie thought, since her flesh was beginning to crawl. She knew the dead shouldn’t interact with the living; she didn’t need a list of how many ways they could.

  Wales stared at Demalion, suspicion in his eyes. “Did you kill him? Is that why you’ve got his ghost stuck to your skin like a burr?”

  “No,” Demalion said.

  “The third type?” Sylvie said. She didn’t like Wales’s attention on Demalion, on Wright. Didn’t like the anticipatory look on Marco’s ghostly face that suggested Wales might sic Marco on them if he felt inclined. She itched for her gun, shifted uncomfortably in her seat, wished she could just force the words out of his throat. She’d been a fool to let Wales light that Hand; he’d gained control the moment he did.

  Wales studied her a moment; he knew she wanted to divert his attention, and he turned back to Demalion with a flicker of a smile. “Takeovers. Rare. Deadly. Liches, dead spirits yoked to living flesh, created by magic, sent out as assassins. Possessing spirits—the desperate dead who’ll steal your flesh for their own—”

  He looked at Demalion again, studied Wright’s pale overlay, and stiffened. “That’s not your body. You’re not the haunted. You’re the haunt.”

  Demalion growled, “I don’t think you’ve got the moral grounds to complain. I’m sharing this body. Temporarily. You’ve got a roomful of trapped spirits.”

  “Possessing spirits,” Wales said, “are dangerous and delusional. There’s no reasoning with ’em, no matter how sweet they talk.”

  Demalion stared steadily back at him. “You’re wrong.”

  “Hard words from a necromancer,” Sylvie said. “And I don’t recall asking your opinion.”

  “You came to me,” Wales said. “I’m telling you things—”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “You’re making us a part of things. You’re flaunting your powers, your unnatural ally, and you’re making judgment calls you’re not qualified to make. And you’re still the most likely suspect I’ve got for passing out Hands of Glory to teenagers.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Wales said, shifting to defensiveness. “I’m not a necromancer. I’m a researcher, a . . . curator, at worst.”

  “A curator with a booming gift shop.”

  “Damn you, no!” he snapped. Marco drifted forward, stood before her with a considering expression. He leaned closer, and his lips moved, showed teeth as grey as needles; cold air bloomed and faded on her skin. I killed bitches like you. The words crystallized in her mind, bypassing her ears entirely, as icy cold as his presence.

  The little dark voice roared through her, Never like me.

  Marco retreated like an icy fog, leaning into Wales’s side once more.

  Sylvie didn’t like that at all; it argued a symbiosis between the living and the dead, made Wales more dangerous, made her look at all the Hands dangling stiffly and imagine their ghosts active and malevolent.

  She and Wales studied each other a long moment, and Wales caved first. “I wanted you to see behind the Hands. So you’d understand. But if you care so little for words—” He strode to the door, opened it in a clatter of locks, and Marco slid into the hallway like killing frost. Sylvie jerked to her feet. “What are you—”

  “Better look, or I’ll have to send him out twice,” the Ghoul said, his expression bleak. “The guy in 2C comes home every night this time, comes home to count the cash he took off of people at gunpoint. I take the cash from him when I can. I don’t live in luxury, but still, I’ve got expenses.”

  Demalion said, “You can’t—”

  Wales overrode Demalion’s complaint, and Sylvie heard the faint footfalls weaving up the stairs between the junk. She opened her mouth, but had nothing to say—call out a warning to an armed man who’d probably shoot first? Ask Wales nicely not to do . . . whatever it was he was doing? She didn’t even have the vocabulary for that.

  “When I light the Hand, I direct the ghost’s action, but he gets paid, too.”

  The robber stepped into the second-floor hallway, a machine pistol tucked precariously into his belt, and Marco swarmed him. Even as the man fell, Marco leaned in like a vampire, pulling at the falling man’s chest.

  “When the Hands put you down,” Wales continued inexorably, “it’s nothing so benign as sleep. It’s a type of shock. It’s what happens when a ghost takes a bite of your soul.”

  17

  The Hard Lesson

  “NOW THAT YOU SEE, NOW THAT YOU KNOW . . . TELL ME, SHADOWS. Do I look like the kind of man who would perpetuate slavery and soul shock? Do I look like I’d pass Hands out to teenagers?”

  Sylvie studied Wales, the grubby little room filled with dead men’s Hands, the way the ghost, Marco, slunk back beside him, the hellish light the Hand gave off, the tightly drawn fear on Wright’s face—Demalion’s mind—and let loose. “You just fed your . . . pet a soul snack. Hell yes, you look the type.”

  Wales actually had the audacity to look bewildered, flustered. He sputtered, “No, no. That was just for illustration! So you’d see . . . and he’s no good anyway, a real bad guy—”

  Sylvie shrugged that off—she and Demalion were too jaded to be able to argue that point effectively—and said, “Well, we’re not. Soul shock and slavery, and you thought it was a good idea to take us down instead of just answering your door. Thought it was great idea to expose us a second time?”

  Demalion’s breath seemed loud and rasping, as if he’d caught the rhythm of her stuttering heart. The room felt tight and close, dusty with the scent of mummified flesh. She felt choked on it, on her rage. Zoe had gone to someone like this. Walked into a room stinking of black magic and taken home a souvenir. Put her soul at risk for the promise of cold hard cash.

  Wales stiffened; his lanky shape grew more angular. “You came to my door, gun drawn. I was justified. I do what I have to, to survive. You’re no different. Neither’s your dead friend there. I might feed Marco on occasion, but I don’t body snatch for him. I’ve got the moral high ground here, Shadows.”

  She hissed in a breath, and Demalion said, “Sylvie,” again. Not a plea this time, but a flat-out command not to pick a fight, not to be herself.

  “Prove it,” she said, instead. Her voice was rough, hostile, but it wasn’t a shout. “If you’ve got the moral high ground, offer me your help.” Her fingers tightened on the wrist stump of the Hand she held, nails digging into the flesh. Disgusting and gruesome, but the only outlet she could allow herself.

  She didn’t trust him, but like Val, he seemed more than willing to talk about magic, feed her information she needed. While she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it, he could have hurt them; hell, just leaving them passed out in this part of the city would have been a form of passive murder. Instead, he’d brought them in, bound them gently, wakened them with a potion whose contents he willingly listed.

  Those actions were discouraging, created doubt in her breast. Wales might be telling her the simple truth. He wasn’t the one passing Hands out to kids. And if that were so, if he were the guardian he claimed to be . . .

  “We need your help.”

  That shocked Wales rigid in a way all her previous bluster and rage hadn’t. He sidled away from her, all nerves now, no poise. “I don’t get involved with other people’s problems. Not anymore.”

  “Sometimes you don’t get a choice,” she said. When his pale face went as ashy as Marco’s ghostly one, she gestured with the Hand she held. “What? You thought you’d show me a little dark magic, and I’d be ready to flee? You’re going to help us. You say you’re not the problem here? Not the
necromancer I’m hunting? Fine. Then you’re the help I need.”

  Demalion said, “Shadows is a black-and-white woman. You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. I’ve been on both sides with her. It was better on the solution side.”

  That made her heart hurt. The solution side had gotten him killed. But he met her eyes squarely and nodded once. A knot that had tied itself around her heart eased: Like her, Demalion would have done nothing different. Relief made her sound friendlier than she felt when she said, “Helping us out would go a long, long way to making me forget that you just sicced your ghost on your neighbor. As an illustration.”

  He sighed. “What d’y’all want, then?” Wales asked. He hunched a shoulder, turned his head away from Marco’s whispers.

  “First? Put your buddy Marco back in the box or wherever he goes when he’s not looming over you. I’m getting a cramp holding on to Thing here.” She had about reached her limit for grossness, was one step from her fingers betraying her and dropping the loathsome thing.

  Marco scowled, but Wales only nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” He carried Marco’s Hand past them, Sylvie and Demalion pivoting to keep watch. Wales puttered about the open kitchen—really not the nesting sort, Sylvie thought; his kitchen consisted of a cardboard box that looked suspiciously full of cereal cartons, a battered cooler, and a spray bottle beside the sink.

  The spray bottle yielded a fine, stinking mist that sizzled and spat as it made contact with the Hand of Glory. The hellish flames sank back to a sullen glow, then went out.

  Marco disappeared like a screen projection shut off. Wales set the bottle down, the Hand, and refilled the bottle with a carton of milk from the cooler. Farm Stores brand, she noted absently. That fitted. Somehow she had a hard time imagining Wales walking down brightly lit Winn-Dixie aisles, all twitchy-eyed, with a Hand in his wallet pocket.

  “Milk douses the flame,” he said.