by Lyn Benedict
“Knowledge obligates you to do something about it,” she said. Across the parking lot, the doorman stepped back, allowing Wright entrance. “Gotta go, Lio.” She disconnected to his “Wait!” and hastened across the asphalt, nodding briefly to the doorman as she joined Wright.
The condominium apartments stretched tall and narrow, and the glass-sided elevator that they rode in gave them a wheeling, sunlit view of the bay. The doorman rode with them in wary silence until they reached nearly to the top floor. Odalys wasn’t a penthouse dweller, lived three floors below that lofty space, but Sylvie bet that she wanted to be. It was part of what made Odalys hard for her to figure.
Sylvie had dealt with voodoo kings who wanted power via infant sacrifice, succubi who wanted revenge, werewolves who were hungry for territory, and, of course, Lilith, who wanted to unseat her god. What she hadn’t dealt with was someone who was utterly money-oriented.
Magic-users often started out trying to gain wealth through magic—witness Zoe—but all too soon they traded that desire for more magic, ever more, until working it became as consuming as any addiction. Sylvie supposed it might be heady, finding that you had the ability to bend reality to your will, to push back the line between the probable, the possible, and the previously inconceivable. But humans weren’t innately magical, not like the natural denizens of the Magicus Mundi, and it always, always went wrong.
If Odalys was truly using magic only as a means for profit . . . Sylvie wasn’t sure if that was more dangerous or less.
From the moment the doorman opened the door into Odalys’s condo, Sylvie knew they were on the wrong track. The apartment smelled stale, the air flat and unstirred by human warmth. Their footfalls, even on the tiled entryway, were absorbed into the silence like water into a dry sponge. Not only was Odalys not at home, but she hadn’t been there for some time. It took at least a week to get that particular dead-air taste, and—Sylvie discreetly brushed her fingers along the top of the leather couch—a thin layer of dust was beginning to bloom, invisible, but slightly sandy against her skin.
“She hasn’t been here for days,” Sylvie said.
The doorman bobbed his head, gelled hair never shifting. “That’s right. I haven’t seen her at all.”
Wright asked about visitors, anyone that the doorman might recognize. Sylvie kept an ear out, listening through the name-dropping. No one really important, a few corporate businessmen, a banker—she noted that name to compare to Caudwell’s money manager. It’d be nice if they were the same man, or at least part of the same firm, another data point to seal the connection between Odalys and the dead women.
She opened the refrigerator—emptied. Cupboards revealed china dishes and silver-plated utensils, but no food. Either Odalys ate out exclusively, or she’d cleaned herself out.
The bedroom was palatial, a wide expanse of space dominated by a luxurious bed overlooking the ocean. The room was color-muted, everything in tones of white and dust, and the drawers and closets, when she opened them, were emptied. Odalys had found somewhere else to live. And knowing her, she had traded up.
Sylvie gnawed her lip, wondering what Odalys considered more livable than an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo apartment with optional maid service and rooftop pool.
Something she doesn’t have to share, her little voice said, always more tuned into the dark side of humanity. Greed begets selfishness.
Someplace illicit also, Sylvie thought. If it was all on the up-and-up, Odalys would have broken her condo lease or sublet it rather than leave it open for dust bunnies to colonize; the same mind that made defective Hands of Glory and found a way to turn a profit on them wouldn’t let real estate lie fallow.
Sylvie shook herself. She was getting ahead of herself. The condo hadn’t been empty for months, a bare week maximum. That was hardly time enough to make assumptions about Odalys’s living situation. Hell, Sylvie had been gone longer from her own apartment, and she hadn’t even stopped the mail.
“She picking up her mail?” Wright said in the background, as if he had been following along with her thoughts.
“She is,” the doorman said. “Though I haven’t seen her do it. But I only work the day shift.”
“How about just giving us a call if she shows up?” Sylvie suggested. Her hand delved into her wallet, short-circuited the “I can’t do that” expression, which turned acquisitive within seconds.
“Really?” she asked. The bills in her hand drew a frown from Wright—jealousy, she diagnosed, from the cop who had to get results the hard way.
“Well, I’m not supposed to—”
“I just want to talk to Odalys.”
The doorman, his eyes on the slide of green, didn’t look like he cared about her reasons. She counted out the money toward him, watched his fingers twitch when she hit two hundred dollars, and held it out to him.
“I do believe in value for my money,” she said. “If I give you this, and you don’t call, I’ll come and take it back.” She shifted her coat aside to show him the waist strap of her holster. She did so like working in Miami, where no one would mistake the nylon webbing for anything but what it was.
“What if I don’t see her?” He licked his lips.
“Look hard,” Sylvie said.
She left him with her card, corralled Wright, and headed out the door. He trotted to keep up with her, and said, “You sure you should be flashing that cash?”
“Might as well be useful,” Sylvie said.
“It’s stolen.”
“The guy’s dead. Not like he’ll object.” Her stomach was sour. Sooner or later, she was going to have to decide how much her sister was to blame for this. How much Odalys was.
“Demalion was dead. I was dead. Bella was dead. People come back,” Wright said.
A slow, evil grin found its way to Sylvie’s lips, chased away that indecision. Bella. She would know where to find Odalys, and since she’d died from taking Odalys’s advice, there’d be no protestations of loyalty. Bella, newly resurrected, was ripe for questioning.
20
Calling on the Dead
SYLVIE PULLED THE TRUCK INTO THE GROVE AGAIN, FELT AS IF IT SETTLED into a groove that she’d been wearing through the city. Wright said, “You think her parents are going to let you just waltz in and talk to their daughter? She died yesterday. They’ll be keeping her close, dialing their lawyer, suing the hospital.”
Sylvie shook her head. “I’d lay money that Bella’s parents are still out of the country. By the time they got the call that Bella was sick to death, then dead, then alive again . . . They’re still traveling. We’ve got a few hours at least.”
“So you think the newly undead daughter of the house is just sitting in there by her lonesome? That’s taking latchkey to an extreme.”
“Nope. She’s not alone. Which is why you’re going to call, represent yourself as a pharmacist at the hospital, and tell Eleanor that Bella left without getting one of her meds.”
Wright eyed her sidelong, leaned up against the passenger’s-side door as if disassociating himself from her. “Fine. But it’s not going to work.”
“It will,” Sylvie said. “Eleanor wants to keep her job, and she didn’t call the doctors until it was too late. She’s going to be strung so tight . . . Bella’s going to get the best care imaginable. Otherwise, the moment her parents come home, Eleanor’s not only kicked to the curb, she’s the scapegoat for Bella’s entire lifetime of neglect.”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, and when he didn’t reach for her phone, she said, “Any day now.”
“You don’t think she’ll be suspicious?”
“I think she’s going to be so freaked-out once you start mentioning staph-resistant strains that she’ll forget.”
Wright shook his head. “So it’s not enough to misrepresent ourselves as hospital employees—which is a crime, you know—we’re going to make her think the girl’s in danger—”
“Just dial, dammit. You keep saying you w
ant to be useful. Be useful! Or pass the body over to Demalion, who would not be giving me this kind of grief.”
Sylvie rolled up the windows, which made the truck cab instantly sticky and hot but kept distinctive car sounds to a minimum.
Ten minutes after Wright made the call, Eleanor scooted out of the house in a shiny little two-door—Mrs. Martinez’s around-town convertible. Yeah, Eleanor would do a lot to keep this job, Sylvie thought.
A knock on the front door yielded no response. Sylvie frowned. She was prepared to lean on the doorbell as long as necessary, but if Bella was sedated, it might be useless.
“Do you hear splashing?” Wright asked, head cocked, eyes narrowed. “You said she had a pool?”
“Dead yesterday, swimming today, you really think?” she asked, but she heard it, too. She walked along the house to the back, found a handy perch—a flowerpot dragged to appropriate proximity—and peered over the concrete wall. Wright pulled himself up, wiry muscles working, and peered over the edge beside her. They shared a speaking look.
Yeah. Bella was feeling all kinds of better.
She lounged poolside, her hair slicked back, her bikini damp. Footprints darkened the tiles around the pool, a track of her path. Bella leaned back in her chair, stretched a lazy arm up toward the afternoon sun, all serpentine angles and smooth, tanned skin.
Wright dropped back down to the scrubby dirt between the jacaranda bushes, and said, “So, now what?”
“Now we go in,” Sylvie said. His face screwed up as he looked up at her, sun dazzle behind her. She got the skepticism loud and clear even through the wrinkled nose and squint.
“Over the wall?”
Sylvie hopped down from the flowerpot, and shook her head. “Through the gate. You don’t think they let the pool man tromp through their house, do you?”
They walked around back until they found the gate, Sylvie thankful that it was the dead hour before three o’clock. There was a reason most home burglaries happened mid-afternoon. Fewer witnesses.
The wrought-iron gate opened soundlessly, and the cement was smooth beneath her sneakers. Wright stayed there, keeping a lookout. Sylvie got within twenty feet of Bella before the girl realized she was there. She yelped, nearly fell off the lounger, then said, “What the hell do you want?”
“Just a couple of questions,” Sylvie said. “Eleanor said we could come round back.”
The girl shrugged, drawing her towel up to cover herself, then letting it slide back to her waist when she saw Wright looking at her from the gate.
“I’m supposed to be resting,” she said. “Make it quick. But don’t think a home visit is going to stop my parents from suing your hospital.”
Sylvie rocked back, her footing suddenly uneven as if a sinkhole were devouring the concrete.
This was it; this was the tipping point. Sylvie pasted a bright smile on her face, suitable for some hospital social-worker lackey. Blandly unthreatening. It worked. Bella looked bored and utterly lacking in recognition.
Sylvie didn’t pride herself on it—she knew it was a flaw when she needed to be unnoticed—but she tended toward notoriety. People remembered her, maybe not fondly, but they remembered her.
For Bella to be drawing a blank—
Well, it was intriguing. . . .
Kill it, her little dark voice said. The hairs on her neck rose. The girl before them might be vain, spoiled, and sadly stupid, but she was just a girl. Except her little voice was rarely wrong. Bad-tempered, evil-natured, but rarely wrong.
The girl crossed her arms over her chest, drummed her nails against her shoulders. Sylvie narrowed her gaze. Bella’s fingernails were blue at the base, the curved white moons as leaden as a stormy sky.
“I’m waiting for your apology,” Bella said. “Do you know how dreadful it is to wake up in a morgue?”
The cadence of her voice was subtly wrong. If Sylvie hadn’t been spent the past few days a reluctant audience for the Demalion-and-Wright show, listening to the slip and slide of personality through shared flesh, she might not have twigged to it. But she had, and Bella . . . didn’t sound like herself. Not just out of sorts, because of drugs, illness, trauma. Like an entirely other person. And there was a ghost gone missing. Patrice Caudwell’s Hand of Glory had gone inactive without notice.
It all made Sylvie sick with suspicion.
“Some people might be grateful they woke up at all,” Sylvie said, keeping her voice steady. “To get that precious second chance. You can squawk all you want about hospital error, but they know death when they see it.”
“Gratitude,” Bella said. She mouthed the word like she was unfamiliar with it. Then she sighed. “You’re not with the hospital, are you? She sent you. What does she want? She knows it will take a month or so for me to be able to access my accounts.”
“Just a reminder to be grateful,” Sylvie said. Her mouth was dry. She was getting the outlines of it now, but she needed more. She wondered how long she could keep . . . Bella talking.
“Gratitude implies something was unearned. A gift. I paid dearly for this opportunity. I intend to make the most of it, so she will just have to be patient.”
“If Odalys allows it,” Sylvie said. “After all, even if the hospital didn’t recognize it, you died of what she did to you. A black-magic OD.”
Mistake, she thought, even as she let the words slide free. A misstep. She’d talked about Bella’s experience. Bella’s death. Not hers.
Bella’s face went flat, expressionless; her arm shot out, and next thing Sylvie knew she was dodging the aluminum pool pole aimed at her face.
Wright shouted; Sylvie dodged the next strike. Bella jabbed fiercely. The net crashed into Sylvie’s rib cage, hard enough to knock the wind from her, hard enough to send her plummeting backward into the pool. Gasping vainly for air, she found herself with a mouthful of bitterly sharp water, searing her sinuses, and rolling inexorably down her throat.
She splashed to the surface, flailing for air, for the edge of the pool, and found the net slapped down on her head, clammy and wet. She ducked instinctively and got another gasped breath of water scalding her throat.
This was a stupid way to go, she thought, killed off by a ghost-possessed teenager riding a self-preservation rush and with a bad habit of drowning people. But Sylvie wasn’t a toddler; she hit bottom, oriented herself, and pushed upward. Breath could wait for just a little longer.
She surfaced to the welcome sound of Bella shrieking, to the blurred image of Wright pinning the girl to the lounge. He rose to help Sylvie, and Bella lunged at him.
“Hold her,” Sylvie managed to gasp out, spitting water out on each word. Her throat felt raw.
Wright pushed the girl back again, and she screamed—her voice, high, thin, furious, slowly forming into words, surprisingly lacking in profanity for a teenager. But then, she wasn’t really a teen any longer. . . .
“Get your hands off me! Police! Help!”
Sylvie hung raggedly on the pool’s coping, and spat water. “Okay, forget her, Wright. Let’s get out of here.”
“Getting mixed messages,” he snapped. Bella slashed at his face with her nails, and he shoved her again, sent her reeling back. The lounge chair, battered by their struggle, collapsed, tangling Bella in it.
Sylvie beached herself on the tiles beyond the pool, forced herself to hands and knees, and Wright got his hands under her shoulders and tugged. She staggered out after him, spitting water, sneezing.
Drowning worked for her before, her little dark voice suggested.
Pity the toddler hadn’t had backup, she thought.
Her truck was a red haven in an eye-stinging wash of green trees and grass. Wright slung himself into the driver’s seat, snapped his fingers in her face. “Keys.”
“Manners,” she said, but forked them over, fumbling them out of the sodden weight of her jeans.
He jerked the car into gear with a grinding complaint that she flinched at, but got them moving in the right direction. Awa
y. It ate at her to just drive off and leave Patrice Caudwell living it up in a new body, but now was not the time. She preferred to hit the bad guys when they weren’t expecting it.
“So we learn anything worth getting hauled in on assault charges for?” he asked.
“Oh hell yeah,” she said. She thought it was Wright. Hoped it was. She leaned back against the headrest, let the long shivers work their way free of her spine.
He merged into traffic with a quick jerk, banging her head against the window, and she snarled. Her sodden hair left trails on the glass, droplets rolling down like tears or rain. “So, what’s the deal? What just happened?”
Sylvie shook her head, unwilling to talk about it. Unwilling for Demalion to hear. She didn’t want to distrust Demalion, wanted to help him, save him, but . . . not like this. This wasn’t hanging about in a cancer ward. This wasn’t playing salvage with a body in a coma. This was . . . murder from beyond the grave.
“Tell me,” he said. “I don’t want to work blind.”
Two cops in one, she thought and not a chance in hell of keeping this from him. Either of them.
“Bella’s dead,” she said. Coming at the answer obliquely.
“Seemed damned lively to me,” Wright said. “Got the scratches to prove it. Helping you, Sylvie? It’s hard on the hide.”
She grimaced, hoped it passed for a smile. It was hard when suspicion was burning into certainty in her blood. She’d expected Wright to recognize it, after the Ghoul’s lecture on takeover spirits, after his own experiences, but trees for the forest and all that. He looked at Bella through clouded glass and missed his own reflection in it.
The girl was back from the dead, yes, but it wasn’t Bella Martinez.
“That’s it,” he said. “Bella’s dead? That’s all I get?”
Her throat burned, chlorine still raw in it, and she coughed again as the air-conditioning clicked on. Reached out and slapped it off.
“Fine,” he said. “Bella’s dead. What next?”