by Lyn Benedict
“So you’ve said. Nature versus unnature.”
“Birth and death,” Demalion contributed, tag-teaming.
“You’re stalling,” Sylvie concluded.
He blotted Marco’s Hand against his shirt, pocketed it again. Sylvie felt her lip curl, her fingers uncurl, letting the Hand she’d held drop to the floor.
“If you let go while it’s active,” she said, “what happens?”
“Marco knocks me out and eats my soul. Not a nibble, the whole damn thing. Like any slave, he’ll turn on his owner if given the chance.” Wales cocked his head in thought, then added, “Well, maybe Marco wouldn’t. We’ve been through a lot together.”
Sylvie scrubbed her fingers down her jeans repeatedly. Demalion was doing the same.
“Soap?” she asked.
“No running water,” Wales said. “There are Handi Wipes under the sink if you’re squeamish. They’re pretty inert, bacteria-wise, you know.”
“No, I don’t.” Sylvie shifted farther away from the dangling Hands. “That’s why we came to you.”
Wales hesitated. “I’m confused. I assumed you wanted me to find your ghost friend a body of his own.”
“Can you?” Demalion asked.
“No!” Wales said.
Sylvie didn’t like Demalion’s eagerness, said, “Yeah, like even if that was our plan”—and hey, it was the first thought that ended with both Wright and Demalion alive—“we could trust you. We came to do a show-and-tell with Hands of Glory.” She sought out the promised wipes and scoured her fingers; fake floral-scented alcohol had never smelled so good. She tossed the container to Demalion, and he did likewise.
“I’ve shown, I’ve told. You’re still here.” He shifted his hands, crossed his arms above his chest, uncrossed them, hooked fingers into his pockets, shifted again, visibly restraining himself from seeking out Marco’s Hand in some bizarre comfort.
“Not your Hands, our Hands . . . My briefcase. Where’s my briefcase?” It had slipped her mind entirely; surrounded by Hands of Glory, she hadn’t missed the two she’d brought to this party.
“In the hall,” he said. “I didn’t want to mess with it. It looked iffy.”
“Iffy,” she muttered. She took three giant steps—all it took to cross the small living room—griping the whole time. “I’ll tell you what’s iffy. Your future if it’s gone.”
“Sylvie,” Demalion said. “Take a breath.”
“What, you’re on his side? He thinks you’re a squatter looking to move in permanently.”
“How about we all play on the same side?” Demalion asked, but without a lot of hope. He seemed tired, still resting in the chair where he had been bound as if his bones were too heavy to let him rise. Sylvie took another glance, thought he looked grey in Wright’s skin, and shut up. She wondered how long Demalion could hold on to the body—this was the longest she’d seen him manage—wondered if Wright was fighting to recover it.
The front door was crusted with locks—three dead bolts, two chains, all no doubt illegally installed, all sticky with salt-milk brushed over them. The walls, up close, shimmered with a salt wash. She supposed it was hard to lock up properly when you had a roomful of tools designed to open locks.
The last chain slithered free, and she jerked the door open, annoyed when it came at her so fast she nearly clocked herself. All those locks and the door was cheap-ass hollow-core. Made her edgy, especially with 2C still lying sprawled in the hallway. Wales was courting disaster. Magic wasn’t proof against bullets.
The briefcase was still there in the gloom—battered duct tape, the scarf stuffed in between silvery tape, the lumpy crust of salt seeping free, the smell, rotten milk—Sylvie paused in collecting it, her thoughts veering. Zoe’s Hand had been soaked in milk. Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Bella. Hell, Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Sylvie had been. Sylvie wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad. Good, because it meant Zoe was less likely to be affected than Bella. Not soul sick. Bad, because Zoe’s messing with magic made Sylvie’s teeth hurt.
She dragged the briefcase into the room, breaking the staring contest Wales and Demalion were having, and slapped it down on the counter. “Someone is selling Hands of Glory, and there are a group of teenagers using them to play burglar. If it’s not you, then who?”
“Probably no one,” Wales said. “There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. Think it’s the heat. Bodies rot too fast to be used for anything but a splash-and-dash kinda spell.” At Sylvie’s frown, he said, “Uh, splash and dash is a blood harvesting and summoning; happens fast and—”
“I know what it is,” Sylvie snapped. “You’re telling me you think the kids just developed the ability spontaneously? I don’t think so.”
Demalion frowned, started to say something, but shivered instead, fell back into silence.
“Look,” Wales said. “They’re teenagers. They don’t have any access to the real thing, and a lot of little bodegas sell knockoffs, guaranteed gross, but harmless. I think they’re dog paws, partially defleshed.”
“You’re not listening,” Sylvie said. “Their Hands are real enough to let them walk through burglar alarms and locked doors, to put down anyone in the vicinity for hours. Knockoffs? I don’t think so.” She flipped the latches on the briefcase, yanked the duct tape back, spilling salt, and popped the lid. Demalion took a step back, then wobbled. Sylvie half turned; she knew what was happening, even as it happened. Wright shivered convulsively, his eyes flat and black, but his jaw was set. Taking his body back. Possession trumping his fear of the unknown and the malign.
He made a series of quick, darting glances about the room. Sylvie figured he was trying to play catch-up on events. Wright seemed confused, but less wary than Demalion had been. Then again, Wright had missed the whole “prisoners of the Ghoul” thing, had missed Wales being all judgmental about ghosts and human bodies, had missed Wales feeding his pet Hand. For all Wright knew, Sylvie, Demalion, and Wales had been sitting around making friends and drinking tea.
She merely nodded welcome, not wanting to draw Wales’s attention to the changeover. But Wales’s focus was all for the Hands in the briefcase, tangled in their jumbled embrace, fingers linking.
“Interesting,” he said, expression intent. “One of them is . . . fake? The other . . . not?” He pulled his fingers back without ever touching either Hand, not Bella’s, all spangled silver and fake tattoos, not Zoe’s, faintly crusted with milk from its long immersion.
“You don’t sound certain,” Sylvie said. She wanted certain. A tiny sprig of hope bloomed in her. Maybe Zoe’s Hand wasn’t real, a knockoff like her faux designer clothing.
Hope hurts, her little dark voice warned. Hurts being born and hurts dying.
Wales said, “I can check.” He picked up Bella’s Hand of Glory, made a face at the decorations, and then flipped his lighter out of his pocket.
Sylvie snapped, “Hey!” just as Bella’s Hand dipped into the flame and failed to light. The silver nail polish blackened and stank.
Wales said, “Huh.”
“A little warning!” Sylvie said. “I’ve had all the blackouts I can tolerate for the month.”
“It’s dead,” he said.
“It’s a frickin’ Hand cut off a body, yeah,” Wright said, twitchy as always. “I don’t think it takes a whole lotta know-how to figure that it’s dead.”
“Let me rephrase, then,” Wales said. He studied Wright as he did so. “It looks like a Hand of Glory, but it’s not one. It lacks a ghost. It’s just dead flesh.”
“It worked earlier,” Sylvie said. “Had a ghost, had a fairly active one. Gave the user all sorts of nightmares, reliving her crimes.”
“Shouldn’t have done that,” Wales said absently, turning the Hand this way and that, setting the lighter down. “Part of the packaging is to prevent soul seepage. Thankfully. I can’t imagine sharing Marco’s dreams. Sure that’s what was going on? Not just imagination?”
“Sure enough that we could ID the . . . donor by
her memories flooding the kid’s dreams.”
“Her?”
“The dead woman?”
Wales twitched visibly, bobbled the Hand, and only caught it at the last. “It’s a woman’s Hand!” He shot a look back at the other one, and said, “They’re both women’s!”
Wright and Sylvie traded a long, speaking look with each other. Wright’s expression said, He’s kinda slow, and We’re not paying for this, are we? Sylvie shrugged minutely; she wasn’t sure Wales saw a lot of women, living or dead.
Wales muttered, “No, no, no. They’re women’s hands, and they’re never women’s hands.”
“Why not?” Sylvie asked. “Women commit murder, too. They might be a little less likely to hang themselves after, though.” A stray thought occurred. Alex hadn’t said how Patrice Caudwell had died. She would have mentioned something as grisly as an old lady hanging herself. “What happens if they don’t hang? Can they still be bound into the Hands?”
“No,” Wales said. “No. At least . . . Look. It’s all about symbolism. Hanging yourself, a rope around your neck—it keeps your soul tight to the body. Suicide by gunshot, by bleeding out—”
“Soul leaves with the blood. But could it be less significant than you think?”
“That’s not the . . . Tradition dictates men’s Hands. Tradition dictates hanging,” Wales said.
“Tradition changes—”
“No,” he said. “No. It’s like prescription meds. You don’t prescribe the same dose to a woman that you do a man. The . . .” He flailed his hands about, reaching for vocabulary they would understand, and finally came up with a word that made Sylvie want to gag. “The recipe to create the Hands is specific. Detailed. Picky. You don’t just change out pieces of it.”
“Do we care how it got done?” Wright said. “Can’t we just get rid of the things?”
Sylvie shook her head. “It’s a signature of sorts. Tells me something about the person who made them.” For one thing, Wales’s spluttering was the final step to make her erase him from her list of suspects. His dismay seemed entirely too real, the break with tradition too difficult for him to contemplate.
“You’re profiling a body snatcher?” Wright said. “Oh, I hate this.”
“Wales?” she prompted.
The Ghoul picked up Bella’s Hand again, scratched flakes off the coating, clear with a reddish tinge. “They changed more than the gender,” he said. “This is just . . . wrong. It couldn’t have worked.”
“It did. End of discussion,” Sylvie said. She had Bella’s dreams, she had the platinum brooch, she had the Navigator and Bayside and her own bouts of unconsciousness as proof.
“But you just don’t mess around with a formulation to bind a killer spirit!” Wales said. “It’s just too damn risky for the user. The ghost might escape. And then—”
Sylvie sucked in a breath. “You think that’s what happened? The ghost escaped? Went after Bella . . .” It might explain the girl’s illness. “What does soul consumption look like?”
“It doesn’t look like anything,” Wales said. “You just die. All at once. Drop dead in your tracks. Your body might breathe for a little bit, your heart beat, but the shock of having a soul ripped out—”
“The girl I took the Hand from was sick,” Sylvie said.
“No argument,” Wright muttered.
Wales shot him another glance and caught on this time. It wasn’t Demalion behind the skin any longer.
“Sick,” Sylvie said, prodding Wales with her forefinger. His chest was all bone beneath the layers, thin as an anorexic’s. “Could the Hand do that?”
“No,” Wales said. He rubbed at his chest. “If the ghost got free, the girl would have dropped. At least—there’s something just not right with these Hands. . . .”
“Okay, you know what? Forget all that. Let me worry about where they came from. Just tell us how to destroy them.”
Wales tossed Bella’s Hand into the trash. “That one’s done. No ghost? No trouble. The other—”
He picked up Zoe’s Hand with a wary expression, bit back most of his comments so that all she heard was a mumbled, “Wrong,” and she said, “Well?”
Her tone was sharp, but she couldn’t help thinking about Bella—ill and in the hospital, and a ghost mysteriously vanished from its prison. Zoe was next on the chopping block.
“Oh, this one’s active as hell,” Wales said. “I can feel it, even unlit; it’s buzzing, angry and barely contained.” He raised his face, furrowed brow, and upset eyes. “You’ve got to find out who’s making these and stop them. They’re not right. They’re defective. Dangerous. To the user and anyone else.”
Sylvie said, “I’ll get right on that. If you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear them. You’re right. There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. I try to keep it that way.”
“There’s a woman on Calle Ocho. Runs a fancy shop like she’s nothing more than a merchant. But she’s the real deal.”
“She sent us to you,” Wright said.
“Well then,” Wales said. “I’m tapped out.”
“Focus, Ghoul. Tell me how to destroy them.”
“They’re tough,” Wales said. “It’s the binding between the bones and the spirit. You have to destroy one without freeing the other. Otherwise, you’re fighting something that can touch you, hurt you, that you can’t touch. It’s a man boxing hurricane winds on a cliff.”
“An exorcism?” Wright said. “Gotta be a priest around. Surely one of ’em will believe the threat’s real.”
Wales said, “An exorcism would work no better on the Hands of Glory than it would work on you.”
Wright twitched, and Wales continued. “An exorcism is a rite designed to remove a devil or demon from human skin, to send it back to the abyss. A ghost isn’t a devil or a demon. You can’t send it back. You can only send it on. And if it’s not ready to go, then you’re going to have a fight that gets really ugly. A demon’s nothing. It’s not natural to be in human flesh, doesn’t fit. A human spirit? Feels right at home.”
Wright sagged back against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, gripping his shoulders. “So there’s nothing you can do.”
“Nothing I can do for you, no,” Wales said. “All the spells I know are about binding ghosts tighter to flesh. Milk and salt bind them. Put them to sleep,” Wales said. He took another glance at Zoe’s Hand, added, “Usually.”
“Sleep’s not the same as gone,” Sylvie said. “C’mon, Wales, you’ve got to have a way.”
“Age and entropy do it—the longest-used Hand of Glory was only active for three hundred years.”
“Only—” Wright muttered.
“Not an option,” Sylvie said. “You’re telling me that as much as you loathe the slavery forced onto these spirits, you haven’t been looking for a way to break the spell? To send those spirits on?” She gestured broadly, taking in the Hands still hanging from the ceiling, the room, the neighborhood, his entire life. “This is what you’re going to do forever? Truck the Hands around, keeping anyone from using them? That’s not a life. That’s a holding pattern.”
“I have a method,” Wales said. “But I designed it around traditional Hands of Glory, the traditional ones. Don’t know how it would work on this one.”
“Can’t we just give it a try?” Sylvie asked.
Wales shook his head. “Not without knowing more about this Hand, about its ghost. I could free it . . . her . . . instead of destroying her, and she’d go after me, maybe her previous master—”
“That’s not an acceptable risk,” Sylvie said.
“Hey, the user knew what he was getting into when he used the Hand in the first place,” Wales said. “Spare your sympathy for someone who deserves it.”
“Teenagers,” she hissed. “Kids. They make dumb-ass choices all the time, and society protects them from it.”
Wales nodded but looked less than convinced. It made Sylvie want to snatch the Hand back, keep it close to her, risk or
no risk. Bad enough Zoe was out and about, doing god knew what. Sylvie didn’t want to imagine her dead in some alley, victim of the Ghoul’s puritanical streak.
She swallowed. “Tell me something, Wales. How does mastery work? If I took that Hand? Lit it? Would I be its master? Would it be my soul at stake and not . . . not hers?”
Wales and Wright shared one expression: stunned dismay.
Wright got his words out first. “Syl, you can’t!”
Sylvie shook her head. “Wales, an answer?”
“Possession is most of the law,” he said. “You light it, you own it. At least until the next person picks it up.”
“And the ghost would be able to talk? Like Marco? She might be able to give me info on who made her?”
Wales said, “That’s total conjecture. It took Marco a year to talk to me, and I never left him drenched in milk. It’s risky.”
“Why? I light it, I’m her master, right? You said as much.”
“But these Hands are wrong. . . .”
“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” she said.
“I’m a researcher,” Wales said. “Not a risk-taker.”
“Well, welcome to my world,” Sylvie said. She held out her hand, snapped her fingers. Gimme.
Wright made an odd, tight-throated groan, a protest from within, looking startled even as it rattled his teeth. Demalion, making himself felt. Sylvie hadn’t thought there was any overlap, hadn’t thought Demalion could see the world when Wright was in control; she knew Wright couldn’t when Demalion was dominant. But then, Demalion’s senses had always been just a little . . . more than human.
The Ghoul was looking slinky, like any moment now, he’d be out the door, and she’d be out her guide. Sylvie snatched up the Hand from the table, went briefly dizzy with the touch—Wales had been right. It buzzed with magic. With malevolence. But she’d laid her hands on gods, and what was one ghost-possessed Hand to that?
“Risky? Fine. Make it safer. You got salt. Build me a ring. And I’ll light her up inside it. You can hold Marco close, and Wright can—”
“I’m not touching anything dead.”
“Demalion wasn’t so squeamish,” she said.