by Lyn Benedict
Eleanor waved her upstairs. “About the drugs? Always in trouble.” She speared Sylvie with a pissed-off expression. “But it’s Zoe who gets her there.”
“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “It’s Bella—”
“Believe what you will. Why listen to the maid—”
“Bella upstairs?” Enough of this. She’d come with a purpose. She wouldn’t be sidetracked.
“You won’t listen; why will I tell you anything?” Eleanor shut the door in her face.
Left on her own, Sylvie wandered the cool hallway, looking in on an immaculate kitchen, a living room that had been in Homes and Gardens. She followed the gentle curve of the house, running her hand along buttery yellow walls, as warmly colored as Florida sunshine, and took the tiled stairs upward. Where did a spoiled princess sleep? In the tower room, of course.
The arched dome of the upper hallway had the hush of churches, and dried flowers in the vases only added to the impression. A shimmer of chlorine blue through the plate-glass windows sent dancing shards of sunlight cascading over her skin like spotlights.
Sylvie opened the door to Bella’s room, found it dim and cool, the very thing for an invalid. The blinds were shuttered tight, blocking out the sun. Left to her own devices, Bella would probably sleep past two o’clock.
A whimper reached her ears; the bundle of blankets on the bed thrashed for a moment.
Maybe not. Maybe Bella was going to greet the world after all.
As minutes passed, and all Bella did was groan and whimper, Sylvie lost patience. She leaned against the elaborate footboard, white, wrought-iron scrollwork, sharp and cold against her hands, and kicked the mattress. The bed billowed, startling Sylvie—water bed.
“Wakey, wakeys,” she said.
Bella jerked up, hands clenching tight on the edge of the mattress, panting. She focused on Sylvie with slow awareness—alarm, familiarity, recognition, relaxation. Irritation. Everyone always got to irritation.
“Sylvie? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Need to talk to you.”
“Go away. I’m sick,” Bella said. She flopped back onto the mattress, tugged the blanket over her face.
Sylvie hopped down from the footboard, flipped on the overhead light-and-fan combo. Bella groaned but only hunched deeper into the covers against the sudden brightness.
In the moving air, Sylvie smelled Bella’s sour sweat, and sheets days past due for changing.
“C’mon, Bell—”
“No.”
Sylvie busied herself in the room, snooping openly, certain that would get Bella’s attention. She opened dresser drawers, found a pill bottle in the jeans drawers, another in her closet, a third under her bed, all nearly empty, all with their labels stripped off. She set them on the bedside table, kicked the mattress again. “Bella!”
The girl woke with a muffled shriek, a flailing hand, and Sylvie jerked back. She hadn’t really expected her to fall asleep again. They went through the whole panic-to-recognition cycle once more, then Bella scrubbed at her face with shaking hands. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I keep having the worst nightmares.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Prescription drugs’ll do that to you. Especially if you’re taking them just for fun.”
Bella reached over, swept the bottles off the nightstand and into the Kleenex-riddled trash can with soft thumps and muffled rattles. “Happy now? Take ’em with you when you go.”
The girl did look sick. Bella hung over the side of the bed as if it were too much effort to lie back again; the arm propped against the side of the mattress frame shook, and her skin was greased with milky sweat; her eyes were dilated, the sclera nearly yellow.
Sylvie almost felt sorry for her, but the hand propping her up was capped by nails manicured in high-end silver gloss. The same shade Sylvie had found on the fingernail in the van. Another tick on the confirmation chart, another mark that moved Bella one step further from the “innocent” category.
Sylvie said, “Nightmares, huh?” She hoped she could prompt the girl back into speech, that she hadn’t shut her down completely, but she couldn’t regret her first response, not if it took the drugs out of Bella’s hands.
And Zoe’s.
Still, there was a real likelihood that Sylvie had just found the decoy bottles, all close to empty, just there to make Bella’s mom feel like she was making progress. “Tell me about your nightmares.”
“Going to shrink me?”
“Might slap you,” Sylvie said. “You gave my sister drugs.”
Bella eyed her sidelong and sly, calculating her odds. “Is that what she told you? Such a bitch—”
Sylvie’s face must have done something really forbidding; Bella shut up all at once, then, when she decided to talk again, it was on the topic Sylvie had chosen.
“My nightmares are all the same,” Bella said, and if she started off belligerent, she faded to plain scared. “I’m doing something . . . horrible.”
Sylvie took a seat on the end of the bed. “Tell me?”
Bella dragged her knees up to her chest with much billowing and shifting of the bed. Her legs stuck out of the bottom of her Victoria’s Secret pj’s, skinny even for a girl who took fashion cues from Barbie dolls. “I keep killing a boy. A little boy.” She glanced up at Sylvie, added hastily, “In my dreams. It’s not real.”
“Didn’t think it was,” Sylvie said mildly. One of the regrettable truths of her job was that she met a lot of killers.
Bella was a lot of things—spoiled, vain, grasping—but Sylvie didn’t get a whiff of killer from her. Not yet. Sylvie knew how slippery a slope it could be.
“How does it happen? Always the same way?”
It was just a dream. It shouldn’t be important. Except . . . magic had a cost. The benign magics, or what passed for benign, cost the user effort, concentration, energy, time, left them drained, ready to eat a gator, burp, and take a nap. The bad stuff corrupted, unless the user was very, very careful, and had a whipping boy to soak up the worst of it. It was the sole reason power junkies like the Maudits took apprentices—not to share knowledge but to protect their own skins.
If Bella had screwed around with big, bad magic—and the fingernail argued that she had—she’d first feel the corruption in her soul, and one’s soul had its own way of making its complaints felt.
“I’m sitting by a pool in my chair, and this toddler comes wandering up to me, smiling, and I just . . . shove him. He falls into the pool, starts kicking, but he’s too little, y’know? Like water wings little.” Bella buried her face in her knees, her words, muffled, distorted, kept on. “He gets to the edge anyway, hanging there, and I push him off with the net until he doesn’t come up anymore; he’s red-faced, and trying to scream, but his mouth’s full of water. And his mom’s just inside the house, and she doesn’t have a clue what I’ve done. I wake up when I hear her scream.”
Ugly enough, Sylvie thought, for a one-time nightmare. As a recurrent theme? Yeah, that might make a girl . . . uncomfortable. Bella looked up at her expectantly, and Sylvie thought, Oh, analysis later. Comfort now. Bella wanted to be told it was all right, that she was all right, that everything was going to be fine.
Thing was, Sylvie was crap at that, and not sure her sympathies should be wasted on Bella anyway. After all, she was one of the most likely suspects for leaving her and Wright dead to the world last night.
Bella shifted, and her pillow shifted with her, giving Sylvie a quick glance at something in the bed with Bella. She pounced. Bella squeaked as Sylvie pushed her aside, yanked up the pillow, and recoiled.
She did slap Bella then. “You little idiot!”
Bella held her reddening cheek, gaining a hint of healthy color, and held her tongue, her eyes growing wary. As any girl might who was found sleeping with a severed hand beneath her pillow.
Sylvie wasn’t surprised, even as she was repulsed. She’d been anticipating something of the kind ever since she’d found the fingernail. While there was a d
isagreeably large number of spells that used human ingredients, she could think of only a few that would apply to the thieves’ needs: enabling burglary and removing witnesses.
The severed, withered hand on the white sheets, tucked neatly beneath Bella’s pillow like some horrifying offering to a fairy best not imagined, was missing a single fingernail.
The worst part, Sylvie thought numbly, wasn’t that it was there in her bed, wasn’t that it was a dead hand, gruesomely preserved, used to appease a bored girl’s bad-girl dreams, but that it had been decorated like it was of no more import than a cell phone or iPod. Besides the silvery polish, there were Cracker Jack rings forced over the dried knuckles, and little fake tattoos of thorns and hearts peeling from the pallid skin.
She seized Bella’s arm as the girl attempted to sidle around her, and the motion released the anchor on her voice. “Black magic and burglary not enough of a kick? You had to desecrate the dead?”
7
Evidence to Hand
“I DIDN’T DO IT!” SUCH A REFLEXIVE LIE OUT OF A TEEN’S MOUTH. Sylvie had no patience for it.
“What? It came that way? Don’t think I’m stupid, Bella. A Hand of Glory is black magic. Not something you treat like a toy.”
Bella lunged for the Hand. Before Sylvie could decide if it was an offensive gesture—if she meant to use the Hand against Sylvie—or just a desire to hide it again, Bella’s movement fell short. She dropped to the floor, gasping for breath, her hands clawing against the cream-colored tiling, nails catching in the grout.
Sylvie dropped beside her, got the girl untangled from her own legs, straightened out her breathing path, and held her up. “Bella, just breathe.”
The girl wheezed and shuddered; Sylvie thought of yelling for Eleanor, but this wasn’t anything as common as an asthma attack.
Sylvie rubbed the girl’s back, the thin cotton unpleasantly damp with sweat, and said, “Take it easy.”
Bella sucked in a breath, a thin, thready gasp, but at least it was going the right direction. “Good,” Sylvie said. “Another.”
Once Bella was breathing steadily, in and out, instead of that rasping one-way exhalation, Sylvie left her there on the floor. She turned out the trash can, scattering pill bottles and tissues, and used the pillow to push the Hand into the trash can. The thumb hooked briefly on the rim and had to be shaken down with a scrabbling thunk.
“That’s mine,” Bella said weakly.
“I count two hands on your body,” Sylvie said. “I’ll give it back when you’re missing one. Christ, no sense at all. Keeping it under your pillow! You’d be safer with a loaded gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.” She snagged a magazine that was peeking out from beneath the bed, slapped it over the top of the trash can, sparing herself the sight of the Hand. Her churning gut thanked her.
Bella slouched against the side of the bed, wrapped her arm around the iron footboard, and draped herself on it. “I’m supposed to keep it close. Keep it tuned to me. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise, it won’t let you open locked doors, bypass alarms, and steal shit that you don’t want to save up your allowance for?” Sylvie hated magic in general; benign or not, it altered reality. And this . . . this was very far from benign. She might not have seen one before in the flesh, so to speak, but knew the gist of the legend, knew how dangerous it was.
Bella was resting her head on it nightly, using it biweekly. It was the ease that had seduced her, no doubt. Bella would never have shifted gears from Grove princess to cat burglar except that magic made it . . . easy.
Bella raised startled brown eyes, and Sylvie snapped, “I told you. Don’t think I’m stupid. I know what you and yours are up to. And I want names. Is it the whole princess pack? Jaz, Ari, your boyfriends du jour?”
Bella took refuge in a long bout of coughing, hand shaking artistically over her mouth. Sylvie bent down before her, gripped the girl’s wrists, and said, “You were worried about keeping it tuned to you? Don’t worry. You’re tuned in good and tight. A Hand of Glory is the hand of a murderer. You dream of death? It’s not your dream. It’s her memory.”
The girl shook her head, buried her face in the bedspread, which smelled like sour desperation and illness and decay. Sylvie yanked her back, gripped her shoulders tight enough that she was causing bruises. Distantly, she knew she could be in real trouble for this; manhandling this girl, sick as she was, was perilously close to assault, for all that it felt more like a particularly difficult intervention.
Still, she regained enough control not to shake her as she wanted. “Bella. The Hand. Where’d you get it? How many of you have used it? You? Your friends? Zoe?”
Bella gasped out, “It was a game, Sylvie, a game.”
“Not a good one,” Sylvie said. “That Hand represents two dead people. You’re trafficking in human misery. And murder.”
The girl had the poor taste to roll her eyes, and Sylvie bit her lip hard, clenched her fists tight against her own jeans, sucked air so that she didn’t offer to show the girl what human misery really meant. A moment later, she was glad she’d held back. The eye roll, contrary to teenage habit, was Bella passing out, not passing judgment on the inexplicable concerns of stick-in-the-mud adults.
Sylvie looked at the girl sprawled on the floor, stick arms and legs in pink cotton, and snarled. How the hell they thought she’d get better like this . . . People shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, ignore them, turn them into grasping, stupid, spoiled brats, then just abandon them.
She yanked the dirty sheets off the bed, threw them into the hall, found another clean set in a discreet linen closet, and made the bed in angry jerks that made the whole process that much harder as the mattress billowed and shifted, fighting back. That done, she tapped Bella’s cheek until the girl blinked awake. “In bed.”
Bella eyed her warily but crawled to the side of her bed, and Sylvie pushed her up into it. “Where did you get the Hand of Glory, Bella?”
Her only response was a sigh as the girl turned her face into the clean linens, and no manner of name-calling or shaking would wake the girl again. Lips tight, Sylvie put a glass of water beside the bed, scrubbed her hands clean in the girl’s bathroom, and gave it up as a bad job. Why waste time badgering a sick girl who either fainted or obstructed? Any more shouting, and the cops might get called. Her jaw ached, and she forced herself to stop clenching her teeth.
Was this why Zoe had stopped hanging out with Bella? She’d said Bella was all screwed up. . . . Sylvie needed to have a talk with her baby sister about when you needed to call for outside help. When a problem was too big simply to walk away from. When a problem could get people killed.
Bella’s breath rasped in her throat; she whimpered and thrashed. The nightmare again, hopefully muted now that the Hand was gone from her bed.
If Bella couldn’t or wouldn’t give Sylvie the information, maybe Zoe could point her in the right direction. Teenagers were relentless in information gathering. If Zoe knew enough to declare Bella all screwed up, maybe she knew who had gotten her there.
Sylvie gave her hands a last scrub. Just moving the sheets that the Hand had been resting on made her want to wash and wash, but any germs that survived the preservation were long gone, and any magical taint that had attached to her couldn’t be washed away with anything as simple as soap.
She stared at the trash can balefully and considered options.
Ten minutes later, Sylvie walked out the front door, irritated and worried enough that when Eleanor gawked at her—and who wouldn’t gawk at a visitor carrying out a trash can that had a magazine duct-taped over the top—she merely snapped, “You know, for a med student, you’re ignoring one hell of a sick kid. Call a doctor, huh?”
She walked back to her truck, slapped the trash can in the well of the passenger’s seat, and drove off, every nerve firing. She felt like she was driving a car that someone had loosed a snake into—unseen, but feared in her every anticipatory sinew.
Zoe didn
’t answer when Sylvie dialed her cell, and Sylvie sighed, remembering she’d taken the phone away from her. In retrospect, a really bad idea. A girl should be able to call for help. Then again, if Zoe had just stayed put . . .
Sylvie dialed her parents’ phone, got the answering machine there, too. She left a terse, tight message for Zoe to call her at once, considered driving home and continuing the Zoe hunt. It was before noon, though. Zoe wasn’t much of an early riser. Wherever she’d washed up last night, she was probably still there, still sleeping the smug sleep of a teenager who’d gotten away with ignoring parental guidelines.
She could wait a few hours, see if Zoe called in, came by, acted like a reasonable person. Bella sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere, and Sylvie had taken their toy away.
At a red light, she leaned forward, rested her head on the steering wheel, and sighed. All reasonable, but there was some cold, scared part of her that kept pointing out that Zoe probably had been involved. Teenagers rarely backed off without trying something first. They had to learn things the hard way. Zoe had likely touched the Hand, at least once.
That nagging worry and the occasional thump of the Hand sliding around in its container made the drive back to her apartment—twenty-six miles of morning traffic and random road workers—more of an ordeal than she wanted to admit. Too many horror movies, she told herself. The Hand was a latent danger, not likely to claw its way free and take her by the throat. The problem with that consoling thought was she’d seen monsters that horror movies hadn’t considered.
She took the final corner to her apartment, winced as the Hand skidded within its prison, a sere scrabble that sounded deliberate, and pulled into her parking slot with a rush of relieved breath. The truck door slammed behind her before she’d consciously decided to move, her key already turning the lock.
Fine. She didn’t want to take it into her apartment anyway. She could leave it there, could be content that the teens wouldn’t be burglarizing anyplace else. Without the Hand, they’d have to deal with alarms and locks like any other would-be thief. That would be way too risky for them. Never mind that using black magic was a magnitude of risk higher. Now that she’d stopped them, prevention dealt with, she could take her time to decide on punishment. She leaned back against the warm steel of her truck, fingers absently rubbing at the claw marks.