by Lyn Benedict
“Oh, please,” Zoe said. “Like she’d bother. She makes me clean up my own messes.” She smiled shakily at the young policeman who knelt to untie her hand and ankles. “Besides, I didn’t do anything. It was all them. Some freaky type of pyramid scheme where they got paid for bringing in new would-be burglars. She’s all about the freaky initiation rites—”
Sylvie tuned her sister out, focusing instead on Suarez, on Demalion still testing his balance with as much success as a newborn colt.
“Nothing to add, Wright?” Suarez asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Demalion said. “The blonde’s your man. Sylvie tried to save our asses. Drugs and corpses. Freaky initiation rites, indeed. I blame TV. Too many shows about secret societies—”
Tried to save.
He might not have meant it, but it resonated like a body blow, reverberating in her bones. She held her hands out to Adelio; they looked worse than they were, bloody and shaking, clotting thickly where she’d collected dirt and salt in the wounds. “Can we do this someplace else?” she asked.
Suarez toed over a dark, soft splotch on the concrete; it flopped like a decayed frog—one of the Hands of Glory, gone to rot now that the animating ghost was gone.
“Tío—” Felipe Suarez said. “There’s no mark on the bodies.” He stopped talking as Adelio held up a decisive hand.
“If I send you home, will you come to the station tomorrow without fail to file your report? I’m already on a limb here.”
She shivered at the thought. Another report on her failure. To sit across from Lio, to look him in the eyes and tell him a lie about how she’d saved Wright . . .
“Lightner? We can do this at the station. Now, and all night long, if you’d prefer. You have a lawyer, right? I hear they’re expensive if you get them out of bed to tell them—”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Tomorrow.” So close to tears, she’d promise him anything if he’d just give her the time to put herself back together, to figure out if she was drowning in relief or guilt.
“What?” Felipe protested. “We’re not just letting them leave—”
“We can . . . trust her,” Adelio said. “She’ll be in.” The knowledge of her debt to him, that IOU he had brushed aside, lingered in his face. He was sure of her.
She wasn’t even sure of herself at the moment. What she’d done, what she’d wanted to happen. If Wright had been in charge of the body, would it have been Demalion who was taken by the general’s appetite? Had her decision to let Demalion steer the body made Wright vulnerable?
Adelio gestured them onward, let the light from the house lead her forward. Demalion came to stand at her side, listing badly; gritting her teeth, she provided a shoulder. She couldn’t look at him. Too much guilt. Too much relief. Too much.
Adelio spoke quietly to Zoe, who was rubbing feeling back into her legs. Trust me, Sylvie thought, with all that entailed. It made her want to cry. That simple phrase that augured forgiveness.
Felipe held his hand out to Zoe, but before their hands linked—cop’s square hand, glint of gold in the light, Zoe’s blood-shadowed fingers—Sylvie snapped, “Don’t touch her.”
He recoiled; Zoe said, “Nice. He was just helping me, since you couldn’t be bothered—” But the look in her eyes was all about hunger and disappointment, an old and ugly expression on her young face. Sylvie shuddered, took Demalion along for the ride. Zoe had defeated Strange, had been drenched in ghostly blood; had she absorbed something with it?
Demalion whispered, “Trouble?” in her ear, a warm breath, a concern he wanted to share with her. She jerked away from him. Wright was dead, but it was hard to remember that when Demalion was walking around in his skin. She couldn’t allow herself to forget, couldn’t just accept it with wholehearted gladness. Wright was dead.
25
Postmortem
THE OFFICERS KEPT PACE WITH HER, SHOOTING HER RESENTFUL glances. They’d no doubt prefer her cuffed and in the back of a cruiser. Instead, they backed their cruisers away from her truck, allowed her to squeeze both Demalion and Zoe into the cab with her, and drive off, as if she’d just been visiting a party that had gotten out of hand. She stopped at the side of the road, just out of sight of the driveway, and waited.
“What are we doing?” Zoe asked. “I want to go home.” There was a tremble in her voice. Even Ms. Brat had a limit, and she’d reached hers.
“You’re the reason we’re out here,” Sylvie said. “You don’t get to make demands.” Unfair, she knew. She’d have come for the other teens, come to deal with Odalys and the Hands no matter what, but she wasn’t feeling forgiving.
They waited in the silence until Sylvie saw what she had waited for. Some tight knot in her chest eased as the cruiser drove by, Odalys a prisoner in the backseat. With three wealthy families about to get the bad news, ready to look for someone to blame, jail was the most likely outcome.
Wright, she thought, would have been pleased. The real world triumphing over the forces of the Magicus Mundi.
“She was going to kill you, Sylvie, and she didn’t think I’d care.” Zoe stared after the cruiser with bruised shock settling into her face, aging her.
“How long do you think jail will hold her?” Demalion asked.
“First parole hearing, she’s out of there, if she even gets convicted,” Sylvie said.
Beside her, Zoe stiffened, shivered. “She’s going to be so mad.”
Sylvie leaned into Zoe briefly, shoulder to shoulder, a nonverbal message of reassurance. “The ISI watches police reports, right?”
Demalion shrugged, muscles still stiff, an awkward hunch and drop instead of his usual fluid shift. “If the body count’s high enough. Strange enough. If the police mark the death off as drug-related, they won’t pay much attention.”
“So no help from that quarter,” Sylvie said. “Not a surprise.”
“What’s the ISI?” Zoe asked.
“None of your business,” Sylvie said. It lacked bite; at least Zoe was around to ask annoying questions. Alive, well, and whiny. Sylvie had never liked that irritating pitch in her sister’s voice before, but she kept thinking about Bella and the stranger in her skin. Zoe could have been erased, a murderous stranger in her body, her bed, her house, just biding her time. Sylvie shivered.
Odalys had to be watched. And Bella—Patrice Caudwell, rather—she had to be dealt with also. There was considerable mopping up yet to do.
She put the truck in gear, started them down the dark highway. Never enough lights in the Keys, and what there were only made the darkness more present. Demalion traded a glance with her over Zoe’s bent head. The girl fingered the shadow traceries on her arm with obsessive focus, the swirls, loops, and splashes the ghost’s blood had left behind.
When they had reached the city, Zoe said, “Will you stop the truck, please?” It was small and polite; her face was pallid even in the reflected taillights, her eyes sunken.
Sylvie pulled over to the nearest convenience store, let Zoe out. Zoe crawled over Demalion, too frantic to wait for him to gain control of his new limbs. He caught at her when she tripped, nearly fell. She pulled away and threw up in the garbage can, clinging to the plastic rim with shaking fingers.
“Hey, easy,” Demalion said, staggering out of the truck like a three-day drunkard.
Sylvie shoved him back toward it. “Sit. My sister.”
She ran a hand over Zoe’s back; the girl shook. Her voice shook also. “She tried to kill me, Sylvie.”
“So you’ve learned you can’t trust magic-users,” Sylvie said. “You through? Let’s get you cleaned up.” With a stay-there wave of her hand, she left Demalion guarding her truck and ushered Zoe inside. The fluorescent light was unkind to the both of them; Zoe looked dead white, ghastly grey against the bright flush of her lips. The mirrored shelves told Sylvie she looked like she’d lost a brawl in a mud pit.
She ignored the clerk’s stare, sent Zoe into the bathroom, and leaned against the door. Still standing guard. St
ill distrustful that Zoe was safe. It could have gone otherwise so easily. If Zoe hadn’t been so strong-willed, if she had been like her friends, she’d be dead and gone, another hole in Sylvie’s life. Lilith’s blood, waking to power, such a small thing to save her.
Then again, it had saved Sylvie, too.
Didn’t mean Sylvie regretted killing Lilith, though. The woman had been a menace. Immortal and crazy-obsessive wasn’t a good look on anyone.
Long minutes passed lost to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the Slushee machine, the scent of burning coffee and old hot dogs, and, finally, Sylvie tapped on the door. “Zo?”
“It won’t come off,” Zoe said, muffled by the closed door.
Sylvie went in, found Zoe sudsed up to the elbow and water spilled all over the sink and floor. Sylvie grabbed a handful of rough paper towels, wetted them, and washed the soap off; Zoe stood frighteningly passive under her ministrations as if she hoped Sylvie could do what she couldn’t. But when Sylvie finished washing the lather away, the stain was still there, like some tribal tattoo whose edges had been softened by time.
“Great,” Zoe muttered. “People are going to think I’m some grunge loser druggie. They’re going to be wondering if I have piercings!”
Sylvie found a stiff smile. “Don’t be melodramatic. It’s hardly the end of the world. Just a scar. And scars are the price we pay for surviving.”
“Now who’s being melodramatic?” Zoe sulked. “Now what?”
“That’s up to you. I’ve got Demalion to deal with, and I’m tired. You’ve proved you can survive on your own. What do you want me to do with you?”
The little dark voice tried to answer the question for Zoe, a slink of aggression, the paranoid precaution of a killer. It’s the mark of Cain; best be rid of her before—
Sylvie said, “Don’t have all night, Zo,” ruthlessly impatient, not with her sister but with her own dark self that wanted to steal her triumph. Zoe was alive. Zoe was safe. Everything else was irrelevant.
“Fine,” Zoe said. The shock was clearing from her face; her shoulders, which had been held so stiff and tight since Strange’s death, began to lower, soften. “I want a pack of cigarettes. I want it now. Then I want you to take me home so I can smoke in peace. And tomorrow I want you to give me my money back so I can start looking into scar removal. If lasers can blast a tattoo to smithereens, they can get rid of this . . . thing.” She held her arm out at length and sneered at it. “I won’t be marked by her.”
“You don’t want to come home with me? You’ll be okay on your own?”
“I killed a ghost that was trying to eat me. I think I can babysit myself.”
Sylvie swallowed hard. It hurt, but it was true. She forked over a damp fifty-dollar bill from her wallet. Zoe eyed it with irritation. “You’ve been spending my money?”
“Go get your damn smokes and get back in the car.”
Zoe headed for the door, and Sylvie grabbed her, reeled her in, flailing arms and protest, and crushed her into a hug. She bent her mouth to Zoe’s ear. “I love you, you little bitch. Next time, call me if you get into weird shit, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”
Zoe melted against her for a moment, then pushed away. “Yeah. Whatever.” Her lips turned upward, a fragile, half-assed smile. She sauntered out, and underage, without ID, still managed to con a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of the clerk in less than a minute, and headed out into the parking lot.
Demalion slouched against the truck, looking boneless and wiped out. Zoe offered the pack to Demalion, who reached for it with the first graceful movement Sylvie had seen from him since Wright died. He jerked back, fingers short of the paper. He laughed, rusty in his throat. “God, muscle memory exists.”
Sylvie’s good humor faded and faded fast, remembering Wright. “Just get in the car, Demalion.”
“So you’re Demalion?” Zoe said, squinting at him in the lights. “I thought you were, like, dark-haired. Alex said—”
“Bad dye job,” Demalion said. Zoe looked at him, ground out her cigarette only half-smoked, and said, “You’re lying. You’re like them. A ghost. That’s not your body.”
“It is now,” Demalion said.
“I could get you out of it,” Zoe said.
“Get in the damned car,” Sylvie snapped. “Or I’ll leave you two to get acquainted here.”
She pushed at Zoe’s shoulder, watched the girl wince—well, she had been thrashing around pretty hard trying to get free. No half measures for her little sister. Sylvie felt obscurely proud. “Get in the truck.”
Zoe clambered up, Demalion after her. Sylvie went round to the driver’s seat and, faced with the road, put her head on the steering wheel.
“Syl?” Zoe’s voice was a little shrill, a little worried.
Demalion reached across her, put his hand on Sylvie’s nape, and she shuddered. “God. This was supposed to be my easy case.”
His thumb traced her spine, but he said nothing, a wise move since she felt brittle, ready to snap. Then he had to spoil it, by whispering, “Thank you.”
The tears started in her eyes; she knuckled them away fiercely. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare thank me. Wright died!”
Zoe’s eyes were huge, but she slunk back against the seat, stuck between them.
“Would you rather it have been me?” Demalion asked.
“It’s irrelevant,” she said.
“Irrelevant when my lover thinks that a stranger’s surviving is more important—”
“You don’t get it,” she snapped. “Let me simplify it for you. He had dibs. His body. His life. Not yours.”
She ground the truck into gear, pulled into traffic without looking, eliciting a shriek from Zoe and a flurry of honking.
They got several miles before Demalion said, “You know. If you were in the same situation. You would have survived, too.”
“I know,” she said. It was true. She would have fought for it, taken it for her own, a survivor to the last. “But it doesn’t make it right.”
This time the silence lingered. Zoe fell asleep, slumped into Demalion’s side. He put a careful arm about her, steadying her as the truck hit a rough patch of road. “What are you going to do about her?”
“Hands off,” she said. “The ISI can find their own witches. Zoe’s going to remedial witch school with Val. Going to learn why it’s a bad fucking idea to play with power.”
“Not that simple,” he said. “You think she’s been scared off? If she’s anything like you—”
“Just no,” she murmured. “No more. I’m taking her home. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to have to spin some amazing story for Suarez about what happened tonight. I may even have to take him flowers.”
SHE HAD DROPPED ZOE, STILL SLEEPY, STILL STUBBORNLY ASSERTING her independence, back at the empty house after extracting a promise that she’d call if she needed anything. Looking at the rigid set of Zoe’s spine, Sylvie knew she wouldn’t call.
“Lilith’s girls are tough,” Demalion said.
She twitched uneasily. He hadn’t commented when she unmasked her sister and herself. She’d hoped he hadn’t heard it.
“I thought Strange had you for a moment.”
“She did,” Sylvie said. “Couldn’t digest me.”
He frowned, a tiny thing that almost broke her. It wasn’t Wright’s frown, all furrowed brow and pinched eyebrows; it was Demalion’s more familiar expression. A faint inward slant, a tightening of his lips. Oh, he was making himself right at home.
Her apartment was too small, too intimate for the both of them. She wished she’d gone with her first instinct, taken them back to the office, with its aura of business, just business . God, she still had Wright’s check in her petty-cash box.
Sylvie dropped onto her couch, put her face in her hands. Demalion paced around the room, not antsy, but deliberately learning his new skin.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
After two silent circuits of her livin
g room, he said, “Chicago. I’m going back to Chicago.”
“Just like that?” Her skin felt flushed, feverish with exhaustion, with held-back emotion.
Another circuit, and he stopped behind her, his hands resting on the couch back. “You can’t even look at me. Why would I stay?”
She wanted to tell him he was wrong, but the words stuck in her throat. “I failed him, Demalion. I failed him when I could have saved him. But I didn’t want to lose you.”
A puff of air, a bitter laugh. “But you don’t want to keep me, either.”
“You’re not mine to keep,” she said. “Are you? Wright had a life. That has to be broken down and dismantled. Your mother will want to know you’re alive. You have to go.”
“I’ll come back, Shadows. If you want.”
She shuddered. That was the worst of it. She didn’t want him to leave, didn’t want to send him off now that he was back, but she didn’t want to see him either, see Wright’s expressions slowly changed to Demalion’s, his memory erased. If she hadn’t been able to save him, it seemed only fair that she remember him as he was.
“Do you want?” he asked. He was very still behind her; the apartment was quiet, close to dawn, and she felt like she could hear their hearts beating in that silence, carrying on their own communication.
She couldn’t answer him, too conflicted. To say yes, the word burning on her lips, was to admit defeat, to erase Wright. If she said yes now, she wouldn’t let him leave the apartment at all. If she said no, he’d walk out and never look back. Demalion was a practical man at his core.
Silence seemed the only answer. And one he seemed to understand. He leaned forward, kissed her hair. “I’ll arrange for a flight to Chicago.”
THE SKY WAS TURNING GOLD AND PINK, STILL DARKLY SHADED WITH inky blue, when they pulled into airport parking. She stopped the truck, turned off the engine, but made no move to get out.