by Lyn Benedict
Alex said the world needed her, but that didn’t give Sylvie free rein to be nothing but a monster-killer with an increasingly fluid definition of what made a monster.
She holstered the gun, wiped her hands on her shirt. She reached for the dash, kicked the AC and the radio on, a blast of tepid air and hair bands overriding the hissing tide of Biscayne Boulevard traffic. She fluffed her damp hair off her neck and wished for burglars, for anything to distract her from the nearly physical boredom. She should have known better.
Life had a way of granting unconsidered wishes.
A man stepped into the parking lot, a lean silhouette under a distant streetlight, paused, and peered through the gloom. His gaze swept the lot, focused in on her truck, then beelined toward her.
Sylvie rolled up her windows, reached for her gun, wondering why she’d bothered to holster it in the first place. The man’s walk, his stance, his confident attitude—it suggested someone at ease in the dark, righteous in his purpose. Security guard, if she was lucky. Cop, if she wasn’t. Authority figures and her—never a happy combination, and that wasn’t even counting the locals with a personal grudge.
He tapped on the window glass. She showed him her gun, the PI license not worth the paper it was printed on. The gun was distraction enough that people, especially law-type people with a healthy concern for weapons in the hands of civilians, didn’t look too closely at the license.
She supposed sooner or later Alex would suggest she jump through the hoops. Sylvie knew she’d fight her on that one. In the beginning, it had been miserliness, coupled with a desire to stay under the radar, that kept her from applying. Now, her rep made, she had no interest at all in interning for someone else, in going back to school, in asking someone else for permission to be what she already was.
The cop grinned, a flash of teeth in the dark, and leaned against her truck. He pulled a small notepad from his pocket, scribbled on it with a stub of a pencil, then flattened it against the window.
She didn’t want to look at it; he tapped more decisively, and she gave in.
In careful block printing the note read, ALEX SAYS YOU OWE HER. He pulled the pad away, scribbled another word on it, and showed her again. BIG. Underlined twice with an arrow from ALEX SAYS.
Sylvie banged her head on the steering wheel and whimpered.
He waited outside, drumming his fingers on the side of her truck, all firecracker impatience. She gave in, popped the door locks, trying to remember the name on the troubled cop’s file. This guy couldn’t be anyone else.
He clambered in on the passenger’s side, long-limbed and angular, built in lines of wire and sinew. He held out a hand for her to shake. “Ms. Lightner. Sylvie, yeah?”
“You’re Wright,” she said, not taking it.
He pulled his hand back with a what-can-you-do shrug. “I like to think so. Not so sure, of late.” He slouched into place, feet propped on the dash, peering out between his spread knees. “What’re we watching for?”
“None of your business,” Sylvie said, but without temper. For a thirtysomething cop, he radiated boyish earnestness. His blond hair, sticking up in goofy tufts, his ready-to-grin expression—they made her think of a particularly scruffy golden retriever. Amiable, eager, a disaster about to happen.
“Guess not,” he said. Silence fell. She counted silently to five and gave herself bonus points when he only made it to three. “Still, I’m here an’ all—might as well help out.”
“Thought I was supposed to help you,” Sylvie said. She traded the gun for binoculars, took a look at some activity at the far end of the lot—drug deal maybe, two men, their cars mated back to front, leaning out of their driver’s-side windows to talk to each other. After a few minutes, a swap of goods, they both drove off.
“Can you?” he asked. His hands tightened on the back of his neck, fingers stirring new cowlicks into life.
“I haven’t read your file,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on taking your case.”
“Yeah, Alex said you had a thing about cops. She gave me a ton of warnings. Said you could be rough to deal with.”
Sylvie bit back several responses that would have done nothing but prove that point. “I’m listening now.”
He fidgeted in the seat. “Weird to talk about it. I been trying not to think about it too much, y’know? I filled out those forms at your office—you know the forms? It’s sneaky stuff. The questions all look normal unless—”
“Unless your problem is something out of the ordinary,” Sylvie said. “I wrote those forms. But they’re only guide-posts. I like to talk about the situation. Face-to-face with my client. If you want to be my client.”
He grimaced but collapsed into stillness—almost still—his fingers kept working at his nape. “I’m possessed. Or something.” His mouth turned down, a fermata of long-held distress, but when he became aware of her scrutiny, he forced a smile. “But hey. Maybe I’m just fuckin’ crazy.” It wasn’t a good smile.
“Possessed by what?” she asked. “Any idea?”
If he said demons, she was out of here. She believed in leaving them strictly to other professionals. Sylvie had faced them down in two incarnations: the succubi—troublesome but not deadly—and the dire hound that had nearly destroyed her. Those were external threats, though; demons that could crawl inside a man, possess him? Those were something far worse, tangling victim and attacker into one single entity. Sylvie tried not to borrow more trouble than she could defeat. Especially not now. Not while she still felt raw.
Still, the odds were good Wright had just seen too many showings of The Exorcist, and he really was “just fuckin’ crazy.” Most problems people struggled with were real-world problems. And, as Sylvie had tried to point out to Alex, cops had a higher percentage of them than most.
“Oh god,” Wright muttered. “Possessed by a what? I didn’t even think about a what! I just thought it was a ghost, you know, some dead guy hanging out. God, what are whats?”
“Ghost? Of a person?” It was unusual enough that for a moment she forgot about the hot night, her discomfort, her boring case, and turned to face him fully.
“Are there other kinds? Dog ghosts? I’m possessed by Lassie?” He grinned, but a void of terror was opening in his hazel eyes.
She hurried to soothe it away. Freaked-out clients were no good. “Your instincts are probably correct.” If he wasn’t crazy. “A ghost. A person. How’d you discover—”
It was a surprisingly tricky question. Somehow it felt like she was asking, Hi, how’d you get that nifty STD?
“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” he said. “No séances, no Ouija boards, and our apartment’s only haunted by the specter of rent increases.” Wright rested his head on his forearms, finally allowing his hair to escape the death grip he’d had on it. He turned his head to look at her, cheek sliding damply along his arm.
“It’s screwing everything up,” he said. “I’m on unpaid leave, and I can’t afford that. I could barely afford the plane fare.”
“Not a local, then?” she asked. She should have known. The accent was wrong, clipped instead of fluid, rapid-fire, a shade too loud, a bit nasal. In south Miami, the cops spoke with liquid accents or lazy drawls, better suited for the languor of the tropics.
“Chicago,” he said, that tiny little chuff at the front of it. He closed his eyes. “Born ’n bred ’n dead. Not a joke. I died.”
“How?” she asked. Her heartbeat quickened, uncomfortable with the invocation of Chicago. She was trying to forget Chicago, trying to forget what she had saved and who she had let die. The whole purpose of her so-called vacation had been to put Chicago behind her, and now Alex foisted Wright on her?
“Docs thought it might be lightning. The whole week was kinda a blur,” he said. “Like being on a bender that you didn’t need drugs for.”
Sylvie’s stomach clenched. She knew what he’d been doing on his “bender.” He’d been looking for a missing god. Her last big case coming back to
haunt her. She wanted to turn him down, no matter that she felt for him. She didn’t want to look back and remember what she had lost.
“How’d you get my name?” she asked. Her voice was rough; his eyes flew open, searching her face. She kept her expression impassive, yielding nothing though her stomach churned. It was a valid question. She might have a reputation as the go-to girl in the field of dealing with the Magicus Mundi, but it was a narrow field. A random cop would have as little luck coming up with her name as a teenager knowing the head of the SATs testing board.
Wright grinned suddenly, wide and white, nearly manic. “Always wanted a chance to say this. Baby, you’re the girl of my dreams. Or in my dreams, at least. But don’t tell my wife. She won’t understand. She doesn’t understand any of it. Can’t say I do either. Why me?”
Sylvie sank down into her seat, ignoring the new line of sweat trickling down her spine. Not heat this time. Nerves. She picked up the binoculars, took another look around the dark lot, trying to think. Just because he came from Chicago. Just because he’d been involved in the god’s mess. Just because he knew her name. None of that made it her responsibility.
A darker thought touched her. Maybe the god of Justice was involved, trying to push Sylvie in a direction she didn’t want to go. She didn’t work in the cause of justice; she simply helped individuals with problems. She wasn’t the god’s good little soldier, and she thought he’d understood that.
“Hey,” Wright said. He reached out, a movement in her periphery; she jerked away, let the binoculars drop rather than let him take them from her. “Don’t turn me away. You don’t wanna help. I get that. Don’t know why, but I get it. Thing is, I need your help.”
“I don’t think I’m what you need,” Sylvie said. “I work the Magicus Mundi beat, but I’m a blunt instrument. I don’t do magic, and I don’t diagnose magical ailments.”
“Magicus . . .” he prompted.
“Mundi,” she finished, thinking, dammit, she knew better than to wave unfamiliar terms around in front of a cop. “It’s the world that runs along with ours. It’s where the . . . stuff comes from. And no, it’s not an actual place; more like an overlay.”
“You think that’s what happened? Something from there got inside me?” All fidgets again, zipping the seat belt between his fingers, avoiding her eyes.
He wanted to be possessed. To be haunted. To have the simple explanation, impossible as it was. Sylvie wondered how scared you had to be of being mentally ill to prefer the idea of a ghost, and bit back her first response. “I don’t know. It’s beside the point. I can’t help you. You want an actual witch or someone like that. A curandera or houdon.
“If you’ve been cursed, and you want me to point a gun at whoever did it, make them sorry, make them pay—I’m your girl. If you want me to defend you against an outside force hell-bent on doing damage to you—I can help you there, too. You want me to fix you? I’m not that kind of talent.”
“I don’t care.” Wright looked across at her mulishly, his jaw tight, his hands fisting his baggy pants. “I don’t know your Magicus Mundi, and I don’t want to. But I do know I need you. Just you. I been looking at curanderas, bokors, at self-proclaimed psychics, all that shit I never believed before. I even went to see some upper-class seer in a glass tower.” His hands stopped their kneading, locked tight against each other, knuckles pale in the gloom.
“Anna D?” Sylvie’s breath hitched in her chest. Wright had been searching hard if he found her. The woman was low-profile, the better to hide the fact that though she masqueraded extraordinarily well as human, she wasn’t anything of the sort. Anna D might, in fact, be one of the first of the Magicus Mundi denizens—the ageless sphinx. “Anna D sent you to me?”
It was unbelievable. Anna D was Anna Demalion. The sphinx held long grudges, and Sylvie had gotten Anna D’s all-too-human son killed. Anna D wouldn’t send another mortal man into Sylvie’s hands, not after that.
You can never trust a cat, except to count on cruelty, the little dark voice said. And you can’t trust him.
Wright shook his head. “Never laid eyes on her. Her apartment was empty. She’s split. Just another dead end for me.” His words strangled themselves in his throat, getting tighter and tighter.
“I need you, Sylvie. I did dream you, just days ago. A voice in my head that wasn’t mine. ‘Shadows,’ he said. Said you never back down and you never yield. Cedo Nulli. Woke up in a cold sweat, with fuckin’ Latin in my head. Cedo Nulli. Had to look it up, and it was real. So why not you? Took some time, ’cause I didn’t think about you not bein’ local. But here you are, and here I am.”
She wondered vaguely who had turned down the thermostat on the world. Cold sweats indeed. Her name in his dreams. Cedo Nulli. The tat between her shoulder blades itched. It was all too specific to be coincidence; it had to be design, but whose? None of the prospects pleased. Vengeful sphinx? Manipulative god of Justice? Or some villain she hadn’t even thought of, some enemy made with a single careless action she’d already forgotten?
Maybe Alex’s “be nice to the neighbors” policy had something going for it after all.
She leaned back in her worn seat, settling herself into the groove she’d made over the years, and let her breath out slow and steady. It misted against the windshield, fogging her view.
She should turn him down. Refund his money. Get him and the reminders of Chicago out of her life. They’d both be better off.
Keep your lies for the enemy, her little dark voice said. A fool lies to himself.
Sylvie gritted her teeth. Yeah, she’d never been that good at maintaining self-deception. If she said no, Wright would suffer for it; he’d go blundering after the first person who promised him help. The Magicus Mundi was full of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Trust the wrong person, and, crazy or not, he’d be better off dead. Hell, even if he went at it on his own, hunting a ghost he probably didn’t have, he could end up in trouble. Sylvie had heard more than one story of people attracting the very things they were trying to repel. There was a house in the Grove that hadn’t started out haunted until a young wife had decided it might be. Now the house was abandoned, even by squatters.
Her little dark voice grumbled, always complaining. It might disapprove of her lying to herself, but it didn’t want her to embrace Wright either.
Wright sat perfectly still, at ease to a casual glance. But the cords in his neck were tight, his breathing shallow. Waiting for a much-needed answer was always a bitch.
“All right,” Sylvie said. “All right. I’ll take your case. You think you’ve got a ghost? Tell me about it.”
3
The Particulars of the Case
PUT ON THE SPOT, GIVEN A WILLING AUDIENCE, WRIGHT STALLED LIKE an engine unexpectedly taxed. He drummed his fingers, tapped his heels on the dash, and groaned.
Sylvie licked salt from her lips and started with the tried and true: Ask a specific question to get an answer. It worked on small schoolchildren, and it worked on a man with too much on his mind. “So tell me about dying. Your troubles started after that, right?”
“Yeah,” Wright said. “The docs said lightning, but . . .”
“You don’t think so?”
“I saw enough of it that night for sure. It burned the sky.” His eyes glazed, slowly closed, chasing the memory of a night that he could only barely recall. “There was something else. Like a ball.”
“Ball lightning? Rare,” Sylvie said.
He shook his head without opening his eyes. In the dim light, the shadow of his lashes joined and deepened the bruised sockets. “Not lightning. It glowed. Solidly. Fell out of the sky, chased by something . . . horrible.”
Horrible, she thought. There’d been a lot of that. Monsters and cataclysms. Last she’d heard, Chicago was still mopping up.
Wright shifted in the seat, dropped his feet into the wheel well. He contorted severely, pulled his shirt out of his waistband, and peeled it up toward his shoulders. “Only scar I got was
this. No lightning flower, just this . . .”
Grimacing, Sylvie flicked on her flashlight, trying to keep it low in case her burglars showed up. Wright, in its unforgiving beam, was too skinny; his ribs stood out like bars, but the skin was smooth, no Lichtenberg burn, no ferned-out blood vessels. He squeezed his shirt higher and showed her the scar he meant. High up on the right side of his rib cage, just beneath his armpit, a glossy white line etched three-quarters of a circle into his side.
“Had a chunk of glass stuck deep, melted into my skin. That’s why the docs said lightning. To melt glass into skin. They said I was lucky it hadn’t gone through my throat. I thought they were right. Thought I was lucky.”
“Glass,” she said. What kind of glass curved so sharply? A buoy, maybe, blown in from the lake but smaller. Something to fit in a man’s palm. Something egg-sized.
Eggs hatch, she thought grimly. For the first time, she considered his claim seriously. But if this had been an egg, it had been broken before it hit him. She reached out, unreasonably intrigued by the gap in the curve, the absence more fascinating than that smooth scar, the shape provoking.
He lowered his shirt, twitched away from her fingers. “Anyway,” he said. “Woke up in the hospital. Some stitches. Some memory loss. They said I’d be fine. But then I started hearing voices in my head. That’s not ‘fine.’ That’s my story. What’s this one?”
Sylvie blinked. He gestured out the windshield. “Shopping mall. Stakeout. What for?”
His story? He’d barely scratched the surface of it. Survival wasn’t a story in itself. How your life changed afterward was. And his, by his own admission, had changed. She studied him for a long moment, aided by his refusal to notice it.
He stared determinedly ahead of him, brow lowering, squinting, as if by concentrating, he could will an answer out of the distantly lit mall. The night outside the windshield stayed quiet, the breeze a gentle murmur in the palm trees, a ruffled wave on the sea.