Ghosts & Echoes si-2

by Lyn Benedict

  Usually, given an audience, people fighting the Magicus Mundi wouldn’t shut up about it. So grateful to know they hadn’t slipped from sanity. Not talking about it . . . Sylvie wondered how much of his fidgeting, his nervousness, might be due to his own doubts about his story. Maybe he was crazy, knew it, and was just latching onto an idea, any idea, that absolved him of fault. If it came from the outside, he couldn’t be held responsible for it.

  “You have to talk if you want help,” Sylvie said. “I’m not a mind reader, and I’m not patient. I’m trying, but it’s a bad fit.”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “Just—not tonight.”

  Exhaustion burred his voice, gave it a cat-rasp.

  She nodded, and he slumped forward, hands spidering over the dash restlessly, a release of some tight-held tension. It was for more than backing off the topic; it was for the thought that she was going to help him, make it all better. He looked at her with trust and hope, and they settled heavily on her shoulders. Michael Demalion had trusted her with his life, and Rafael Suarez before him. They were both dead now. Dead of trusting her.

  “Theft,” she said.

  He shot her a puzzled glance for the non sequitur, then nodded as understanding caught up with him. “Internal or break-in?” The rough edge to his voice smoothed as he continued. “This place been hit before, or they expecting it to be hit? Pretty ritzy clients for you, huh?”

  “The Bayside merchants are not my clients,” Sylvie said. “And don’t ask me who is; I won’t tell you.”

  “I can keep a secret,” he said. He found a shaky grin, drew a looping X over his heart. “Hope to die.”

  “So not cute,” she said, though her lips tugged upward. She reached up, adjusted the dome light switch to off, and opened her door, letting her leg dangle out the crack. The swirl of cooler air felt good; her stretched-out leg muscle felt even better. She wiggled her toes in her sneaker—mindless bliss. She checked her watch again. Just headed toward midnight. Three hours left that she owed her client. It was the biz; for whatever reason, most crime happened before 3:00 a.m.

  Even bad guys had bedtimes.

  “You don’t need to wait,” Sylvie said. “I’ll be here for a while longer. Go on to your hotel. Alex’ll start working your case in the morning.”

  It was going to be a research nightmare. If he was crazy, they would be chasing their tails, and if the ghost was real? Identifying a single ghost from Chicago? After the gods had stirred everything up? Wright would have to talk.

  He slumped farther into his seat, looked up at her through sandy lashes. “I’d rather have you on the case.”

  “Didn’t say I wasn’t going to be involved. Don’t get huffy. Alex is my researcher.”

  He propped his feet back on the dash and fidgeted, blocking her view.

  “Go home already,” she said.

  “Nah,” he said. “You want me here.” He slouched a little more firmly, tilting his knees out of her line of sight, making the old leather creak and complain. “ I can spell you so you don’t have to pee in a cup. I like being useful.”

  “There’s a fine line between useful and distracting,” she said. “You’re right on it.”

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No fun at all,” he said. “Seriously, I’m good at my job. I can help. I want to help. Let me help.”

  “White knight with a badge,” she muttered. It wasn’t a compliment, though he tipped his head toward her as if he’d heard one. That kind of zeal could get a man killed.

  Sylvie’s phone buzzed in her pocket, a quiet interruption in the night. She flipped it open, glad of an excuse to avoid his gaze, and brought the phone to her ear after a quick glance at the caller ID.

  “Dad,” she said. “You’re up late. What’s wrong?”

  “You’ve got Zoe for a week,” he said without any preamble, harried and only half-attentive.

  “What? No, one night. I thought you said one night,” she said. The burglars looked like a no-show tonight, which meant more stakeouts, more man-hours, and Wright—she didn’t know how his case might play out, if it was even a real problem and not some psychological scar.

  She tuned back in to hear her father sigh. “. . . listening? The CIMAS presentation snuck up on us; we’ve got three days in Mexico City to present your mother’s new model for tracking climatic variability and hurricanes. We’ll be gone a week, and I don’t want Zoe staying in the house on her own.”

  “She’s seventeen,” Sylvie said, but remembering the drugs, the smokes, the cash, the attitude . . . Sylvie’s objection lacked force. “I guess. But what am I going to do with her?”

  “Put her to work for you?” her father suggested.

  “Did you forget what I do?” Sylvie said. Bitter amusement touched her. Hadn’t she decided to keep her sister at arm’s length? Now she was supposed to let Zoe shadow her for a week?

  “Hell, Sylvie, I haven’t known what you were doing since you were sixteen. Two daughters is too much for any man.”

  Sylvie closed her eyes. “Fine. I’ll think of something.”

  Wright squirmed in his seat, tapped her elbow, and jerked his head toward the mall. Sylvie peered over his shoulder. The janitorial van was packing up. Sylvie snapped her fingers, pointed at the notepad half-beneath his thigh. He wrote down the time, the license number, a quick description of the staff in more of that careful block print, a man used to making sure his reports were legible.

  He mouthed useful at her, and she disconnected with more speed than courtesy and found Wright watching her.

  “Family problems?”

  “You gonna help me with them, too?” Sylvie said. “Go, get some rest. You could be the poster boy for jet lag.”

  “Rather stick around—”

  “Go home,” Sylvie said.

  “Does that tone work on stray dogs? ’Cause that could be really useful on the beat. You’d be surprised how many cops get bit. It’s not always big bad dogs either. One of my partners got his ass handed to him by a Maltese I swear was rabid.”

  She hovered between pure frustration—one good push, and he’d be out of the truck, sprawled on the asphalt—and a stuttering desire to laugh. Insane, haunted, or something in between, he was entertaining company. God help her, but she just might like him. While she dithered, he snagged the binoculars from her feet and turned them on the mall. “That a light?”

  She snatched the binoculars back, peered through them, and said, “Not the kind we care about.”

  “What are we looking for?” he said.

  Sylvie sucked in a breath, ready to shout, then, all at once, gave in. He wanted to be helpful. Needed to be helpful. Fine. Two sets of eyes were better than one. If Wright did anything she didn’t approve of, she could ditch his case. He might push and test and talk, but ultimately, she was in charge.

  “Robberies,” she said. “After hours, no alarm. Bayside’s the most likely target tonight. These guys are not stealthy in their planning. Execution, yes. Planning, no. They’ve just been running along the coast.”

  “Inside job? Do all the stores have the same alarm co—”

  “Nope,” Sylvie said.

  “Insurance fraud? Sometimes those things just spread. Like a copycat kill.”

  “The insurance companies are beginning to squawk, but they’d be screaming blue murder if they thought they were being swindled outright.”

  Wright frowned, pulled out a cigarette, and tucked it away again at her look. “So what are you going on?”

  “The path they’re taking. The merchant who hired me said she had more than her share of teenage looky-loos in the days before the thefts.”

  “Weekend boredom settling in?”

  “She doesn’t have the kind of business that gets the teens excited. Too pricey, too dull for their blood.”

  Wright insinuated himself into her space, reading over her shoulder. “An art gallery?”

  “Hey,” she snapped. “You want
her reading your file? Watch it.”

  He shrugged. “I’m a cop. You can trust me to keep things confidential. Where else have they hit?”

  Sylvie slid the list over to him. He twisted his mouth, touched the cigarette pack again, and sighed. “I get the cell-phone store, the jewelry store, but luggage? That doesn’t sound like teens. Maybe someone used the kids to case the place.”

  “Good luck getting teenagers to do anything you want them to,” Sylvie said. “I assumed the luggage was taken to carry the loot. I’ve got bigger questions than who. Right now, I’m working on how.”

  Wright stiffened in the seat, his kneecap knocking against the passenger’s-side door as if he’d tried to put space between them. He tilted his head back against the headrest, baring the long line of his throat and chin, faint stubble illuminated by the streetlights. “They came to you for help. To you.”

  His voice betrayed a weird sort of hesitance, a thought he wanted to deny. Sylvie recognized it; Lisse Conrad, the art gallery owner, had come to her, and Wright, whose world had expanded recently, was learning a new sort of trepidation—that even things as normal as burglary might have an uncanny side. The Shadows Inquiries’ interview form, with its cloak-and-dagger double talk, had amused him, but this—the possibilities he had to accept—scared him.

  “It’s probably nothing more exotic than a well-connected burglar, and my client just picked me by chance,” Sylvie soothed. “More than one alarm company is involved, but an enterprising guy might job-hop, or hell, it might be a team of them, one at each company.”

  “True,” he said. “A good way to stay clear of jail is make sure there’s a lot of suspicion to go around.”

  It was true, plausible even. Sylvie didn’t believe it. The alarm companies registered people going in or out, recorded the codes they used; as far as the alarm companies were concerned, the stores had closed up shop and stayed closed all night long.

  Wright stretched, rolled his head on the headrest, cracking his neck; his shoulders popped next, and Sylvie winced. “Sure you don’t want to go on back to your hotel?”

  “Flat broke,” he said. “Near-death experiences are expensive. Even with insurance. Maxed out the credit cards to get here, to pay you, and pawned the wedding ring. What Giselle’s gonna say if I can’t buy it back before she notices—”

  Sylvie groaned. A stray indeed. What on earth was she going to do with him? His case really wasn’t the aim-and-shoot kind of thing, easy to accomplish. His case, if he wasn’t delusional, would take time.

  There was a hostel not too far away; she could point him there, let him barter a few chores for a bed, but . . . he was her client. Her responsibility.

  An engine cut off nearby, a car stopping in the lot. She got the binoculars back up, scanned the area. Cars had been passing by all night, a trickle of steady sound, as familiar a backdrop as the surf, but they hadn’t stopped.

  Doors shut severally; feet pattered over asphalt, casual, no attempt to mask the sound. Sylvie couldn’t pinpoint the direction, couldn’t find them in the green glow of the binocs. In the dark, by the sea, sound echoed in as many ripples as the waves.

  “The convenience store up the street?” Wright said, slumped low again, sinking into shadows. His voice was a bare murmur, aware of how sound could carry, could betray their watching eyes with a single misplaced word. “Cigarette run?”

  “Not enough chatter,” Sylvie said, leaning close to put her words directly in his ear. “I counted four doors. Who rides that many in a car these days?” She had an idea, wanted to see what he came up with.

  “Bar-hoppers, teenagers, gangs, and thieves,” Wright said, no hesitation at all. “There a bar nearby?”

  “It’s the beach,” Sylvie said. “They grow spontaneously. But we would have heard a beach party before now.”

  “Nighttime swimming? Popular with the teens?”

  “Pools, everywhere. And the coast here? Sharky.”

  Wright grinned, teeth white in the dim confines of the truck, in the slope of shadow he’d made his own. “So we got ourselves something interesting to check out.”

  4

  Will-o’-the-Wisp

  SYLVIE SHIFTED IN HER SEAT, LISTENING FOR THE MIGHT-BE-BURGLARS’ footsteps, trying to pick out their direction, though really, the mall was the only thing around. She found time to say, “No,” to Wright’s hopeful grin. “I have something to check out. You . . . guard the truck.”

  “Sylvie,” Wright said, “no one wants this truck. I’m broke and on foot, and I don’t want this truck.”

  “Shh.” She put her hand up, signaling silence. The echoes were consolidating, becoming distinct. That meant they were close. Sylvie peered over his shoulder and spotted them by movement. Soft-edged forms, their shapes blurred by motion and the diffuse trickle-down glow of the distant streetlamp. She counted five, maybe six, maybe four—they wavered and bled together, little knots of darkness walking companionably close for all their silence. Heading for the mall.

  “Not a gang,” she said, half to herself, half-soliciting Wright’s opinion. “They’re grouped too close for machismo.”

  Wright nodded. “So, you gonna call the cops?”

  “And say what? No, I’m going to watch.” She raised the binoculars again, twisted the zoom, trying to get a better look. They were all slim figures, winnowed by shadow, but the way they walked—at least one of them, she thought, was a girl.

  They stopped near the mall, maddeningly just outside the pool of light at the front entrance, turned inward toward each other in a close circle, shielding themselves from the sea wind.

  “Cigarette break, y’think?” Wright asked, his hand straying to his own pack.

  “Nicotine nerve? Seems unlikely,” Sylvie said. “The burglars I’m looking for have no reason to be nervous.” She got why he thought that—something about the way they hunched their shoulders together, bent over their hands, suggested cigarettes lit against the wind. But it also might be something magical, she realized. She could count them now, four slight figures with their backs to each point of the compass: north, south, east, west. Forget thirteen; that was for covens more interested in politics and in having a ready pool of sacrificial volunteers: For a lot of magics, all you needed were enough people to call the compass.

  She put a hand on Wright’s shoulder, pushed him back against the seat; he kept leaning forward, trying to get a look on his own, and interfering with her view. “My case,” she growled. She needed a better look. The slim lines of their bodies argued teenagers, argued that her client had been right; Sylvie had no doubts that teenagers would happily burglarize stores—they were walking hormones, paeans to the id—but the how still eluded her. Most teens didn’t just luck into useful magic. Most teens didn’t know magic existed outside of Harry Potter.

  One of the teens shifted, gave her a glimpse of a small yellow flame spurting into existence with a familiar flick, flick, spark. A lighter, and this was nothing more than a cigarette break after all. The tiny flamelet moved, guided toward an outstretched hand.

  * * *

  SYLVIE WOKE, BENT IN HALF, THE BINOCULARS PRESSING PAINFULLY into her abdomen, and a deadweight on her back. Her head ached, and as she forced herself up, hands sweating and white-knuckled on her thighs, sliding Wright off her back, something in her body protested. It tasted like the leftover backwash of faded adrenaline, hot and sour, left her trembling. She felt as if she’d been cored, hollowed out, gutted like a fish, and thrown back.

  She wiped sweat from her face, her hands barely under her control. Wright’s face was slack, his mouth loose; his skin seemed grey. Marks of exhaustion made his closed eyes look like the black pits of a skull in the low light. Sylvie put a hand to his parted lips, felt his breath warm her palm, and slumped back, her momentary panic over.

  But what the hell had happened?

  The mall, she remembered. The burglars. Her job.

  She glanced toward the mall, a serene pool of light in the darkness, glanc
ed at her watch. Forty minutes had gone by while she . . . what? Slept?

  She pushed that aside for the moment—forty minutes. If they’d gone in, they might still be there. From Alex’s reports, it didn’t seem like they were quick-grab artists, snatching at whatever small valuables came to hand. Not when they had taken paintings that measured six feet by eight and pool tables on their previous outings.

  She checked Wright’s pulse, wondering if she could leave him safely, or if she should be dragging him to the ER. She had recovered. She still felt shivery and sick, but her brain was ticking over. The thin skin of his wrist throbbed reassuringly under her fingers, then twitched as Wright fumbled his way into wakefulness.

  “Shadows—” he murmured. “Are we dreaming?” His hand curled around hers, completing a circuit. His pulse beat against hers, warmed her flesh, slick with fear sweat.

  She hesitated. Were they? The world felt disconnected, pulled away, oddly unreal. Like a dream. Her hand cramped, nerves firing to life where it had been bent at an unhealthy angle. Pain.

  “We’re not dreaming,” she said.

  “Not dreaming,” he echoed. His words were slurred, slow. He pulled away from her, ran a hand along the dash. “Where—” He tried to peer out the window, banged his head on the glass. “Ow.”

  “Yeah,” she said, her word drawled out as long as his, but far more certain. Even in her dreams, she knew how to be decisive. And hadn’t she decided? This was no dream, though it might be some type of nightmare. There’d been magic used on them. Inimical stuff. Clinging to her mind and body. “You’re staying in the truck.”

  He looked at her, frowning. “But—”

  “No. It’s not safe. You sit tight. I’m going to see what’s happened. It has to have been some kind of sleep spell that hit us. No one got close enough for it to be gas.”

  “So paranoid,” he said, but he slumped back against the seat gratefully. His face was drawn tight with shadow and fatigue. The spell had hit him harder.