by Lyn Benedict
10
Can’t Go Home Again
FACED WITH WRIGHT’S ACCUSATION, SYLVIE DID WHAT SHE HAD vowed never to do: She lied to her client. She did it quickly, smoothly, without ever taking her eyes off the midday traffic. “I might know witches, even a werewolf or two, but I draw the line at hanging out with the dead.”
She didn’t make the mistake of glancing over to see if he believed her. If she was going to lie, dammit, she was going to do it well.
He sighed, a long, drawn-out breath that argued he was less a cigarette addict than Sylvie had thought. “I don’t think I believe you.” His voice wasn’t angry, a quiet statement. “Maybe I should find someone else. Someone who’ll take slave labor since I’ve given you the last of my cash.”
She did look at him then, took in the wry twist to his mouth and knew he was seriously considering it.
“Don’t joke about that,” Sylvie said. It came out too fast, too earnest. Too telling.
He turned an incredulous and unhappy gaze on her. “You’re shitting me.”
“You go up to a witch or a sorcerer and throw yourself on their mercy . . . you won’t see much in the way of it. Most people are petty, self-centered, and greedy; it’s how we’re wired. We act nice, get along because we have to. Maybe one in . . . six, to be generous, is a truly good person. For the rest of us? Power, as they say, corrupts. If you give the average person an ability beyond the norm? It only lets their inner desires out to play.”
Wright shook his head. “I don’t believe that—”
“Think about it this way. Your boy, Jamie, right? You had to teach him to share. Teach him to play nice. If he’d been able to shape the world around him, get whatever he wanted, how well do you think those lessons would have taken?”
Silence from the passenger’s side of the truck for a block, two, and Sylvie had to glance his way. He’d been waiting for it. “You’ve blown right past cynicism and headed for misanthropy. You’re wrong, though. People are social creatures. They pull together.”
“Crusader,” she said again. “Guess that explains the badge.”
“Now who’s naïve?” he asked with an unhappy grin. “There are far too many people with the badge who don’t give a fuck. But they’re mostly sitting behind desks.”
Guess she didn’t have to wonder if he was a little bitter about still being a beat cop. No wonder he was tagging along so willingly, so eager to offer solutions to her problems; he had dreams of being a detective.
She sighed, reached across the cab, and rested her palm on his shoulder. “I’m not expecting you to trust me completely. You’re a cop. I know better than to ask for total trust. But I will get you back to your family. Just give me a little time.”
“Time, I don’t mind. Hell, I wouldn’t be helping you hunt your sister down if I was counting the minutes. Trust. I can do that, too. But I can’t do both at the same time, Sylvie. I’m not that patient. I’m not that laid-back. So be careful what you’re asking of me. Choose.”
She licked her lips. Fair enough. Trust, she could live without. It wasn’t like he was armed, and if he didn’t harbor severe doubts about trusting others with his problem, she hadn’t done her job well enough. But time? That she needed. Time to find Zoe, time to find a new witch to deal with the Hand of Glory leaking corruption all over her truck, time to talk to Demalion, find out what he needed. Time, as always, was not her ally.
* * *
A HALF HOUR’S DRIVE TOOK THEM INTO THE PINECREST SUBURBS, TO Sylvie’s parents’ small house on an oak-shaded street. Sylvie pulled the truck into the drive.
“Wait here. I’ll be back.” The need to find Zoe had reached near-painful levels in her blood. If Val wouldn’t wave her wand for her, Sylvie’d have to go back to basics: legwork and serendipity.
“Time, not trust, remember,” he said. “You’ve been doing too much behind my back. I’m coming with you.”
And didn’t that sound familiar. Demalion had been like that. Dogging her steps, growling the whole time.
She stopped by the side of the house, rested her hand against where peeling stucco and lichen grey brick met. “Well? Lock the truck behind you.”
He caught up with her as she ducked under an oleander’s low-hanging branches, dodged around a humming air-conditioning unit, and climbed over a locked gate.
“You got something against knocking?”
“I’m trying to sneak up on Zoe on the off chance that she’s here and just ignoring the phone.” She rattled the gate, and he clambered over after her, long legs making an easy job of it.
She led him, still griping, around the back of the house. “Watch your step. There are some loose bricks under the soil. They’ll trip you up if you’re not careful.”
Sylvie jimmied open the sliding glass door, going unerringly to the one that didn’t have an elbow bar, and let them both inside.
“Don’t you have keys?”
“Don’t come by often enough to keep the keys on my ring,” Sylvie said.
She listened to the house, wondering if she was lucky, if Zoe had dragged her butt home and sacked out for the afternoon. The silence echoed, unbroken by anything but the air-conditioning. No quiet murmur of music; no steady breathing.
Silence, yes, but peaceful? The air felt charged, made her think of stalled storm fronts and ambushes. Beside her, Wright briskly rubbed his arms though the air conditioner was set close to eighty degrees. She agreed with the sentiment; a shudder ran down her shoulders and spine. A purely psychic chill permeated the walls.
She led the way into the back of the house, found that Zoe had locked her bedroom door.
Either she was home after all, or she had enough to hide that she was locking her door as a matter of course.
Sylvie knocked once, just to be sure. “Zo?”
Hearing nothing, she pulled the knob up and twisted sharply. The old lock disengaged. Wright raised a brow. “Your parents must have had a hell of a time keeping you home.”
“It was my room first,” she said. “There are perks to tossing a house you know well.”
She slipped in, half-expecting to trip over the piles of clothes that had always shrouded the floor when she lived there, a defense against having to share a room with a toddler fourteen years her junior. Enough mess meant her parents had kept Zoe out except at bedtime, afraid the toddler would make a meal of buttons, coins, and leftover candy wrappers.
Zoe kept the room immaculate.
Despite that, the room smelled . . . foul.
Dead rat in the walls? Florida was fun that way. Or something else?
“Smell that?” she asked Wright.
“Oh yeah. I thought girls’ rooms were supposed to smell like perfume and makeup, not . . . that,” he said, but kept to the other side of the doorway, eyes downturned, studying his shoes.
She felt like urging him in, saying that a teenage girl’s room wasn’t that bad, that nothing would bite, but the longer she stood there, the less certain she was that her reassurance would be right.
While she stood, indecisive, the sense of wrongness grew stronger, a tingle in her bones like the harbinger of an earthquake. The hope she had been clinging to, that Zoe was out of the loop, innocent in all of Bella’s black magic, crumbled. Zoe’s room felt like Bella’s, the air greased and cold and trembling with the aftershocks of bad magic. Zoe was involved. Her rift with Bella had come too late.
Sylvie shook off the dismay. Enough was enough. She still needed to find a witch—to dispose of the Hand—and the only people she trusted to direct her toward a local witch were tricky if anyone approached them at the wrong time. Best to get a move on. Zoe’s room was twelve by twelve. It couldn’t take that long to search. Longer if she worried about making a mess. She didn’t.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Anything to tell me where she might go,” Sylvie said.
“Yeah,” Wright said dryly. “You’re ransacking her bed, not checking her day planner. Or does she w
rite her schedule on her sheets?”
Sylvie paused, the linens drooping from her hand in snowy drifts. What was she doing? Her sister’s laptop sat across the room, the day planner in its files . . . and she’d started with the bed.
Looking for a Hand, her dark voice acknowledged what Sylvie didn’t want to. Just like at Bella’s.
It wasn’t likely. Hands of Glory were rare things, dangerous things. Expensive things. Bella had had one, and Zoe shared things with Bella. Best-case scenario—Sylvie’d find nothing—the miasma in the room only leftovers from Bella’s visiting Zoe and dragging the Hand of Glory along for the ride. But Bella rarely visited Zoe. Zoe always went to Bella’s. Bella’s Hand wouldn’t have been here.
She squared her shoulders, let the sheets fall, and gave Wright a bit of unasked-for truth. “The girl I took the talisman from is Zoe’s friend. I need to find out if Zoe’s involved.”
“If she is,” Wright asked, slouching against the doorjamb, his shoulders tight, “you gonna cover up her part in it?”
“I’m sure as hell not letting her take the fall for the rest of them,” Sylvie snapped. Wright frowned but stayed silent.
Zoe’s room was cleaner, smaller, and less luxurious than Bella’s. It held her bed, a desk, papers neatly stacked and paper-clipped beside her laptop, a single, crowded bookshelf, a CD/DVD stand, and a spare table, crammed into the last available space and holding a modestly sized TV and DVD combo. If Zoe was racking up the stolen goods, she wasn’t storing them here.
On her way to the closet, the bookshelf caught her eye; something about the jutting spines of the books looked . . . wrong.
They were too close to the edge of the shelf; the bookshelf was one Sylvie had had as a teen, and she knew how deep it was. She’d had enough space to put picture frames in front of her books, assorted knickknacks. Sylvie gritted her teeth and started pulling books. Behind innocuous leftovers of English-class book assignments—Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, Maugham—she found another layer of books, pressed along the back of the shelf, unseen unless all the front books were removed. She stacked them up, feeling more grim by the moment.
Magic books.
Harmless for the most part, mass-market-produced soft-covers designed to release one’s “inner powers.” Even the Crowley books were ultimately harmless, though they said nasty things about those who read them. Sylvie still didn’t like finding them. Liked less that Zoe felt the need to hide them.
“What are they?” Wright said, from the doorway.
“Come and see,” she said. “Or are you going to tell me there’s a reason you’re hovering outside?”
“It feels bad,” he said.
“To you or . . .” she trailed off.
“My blackout buddy?”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Does he have an idea of where it feels worst? Maybe save me some time? We’ve got places to go, people to see. Sisters to find, ground, and scare straight.”
He waved in her direction. “Bookshelf, I guess.”
She turned around, looked at the emptied shelves, and sighed. “Not helpful.”
The closet was a dead loss. Zoe’s clothes filled the niche wall to wall, ironed and tidy, her shoes lined neatly beneath. Even her school uniforms looked pressed. Maybe not surprising. Zoe wouldn’t risk anything messing up her clothes.
Sylvie checked the toes of shoes, just in case, then sat back, hands on her haunches, looking around. Magic books were pretty common purchases for a subset of teenagers who felt powerless in the adult world and were still young enough to believe that magic could make everything better.
In Sylvie’s experience, magic, real magic, only made things worse. At best, it helped fix things other magics had put wrong.
None of what she’d found accounted for the stink of magic in the air.
She groaned as she stood; her knees complained. Too much time squished in her truck, not enough time hitting the pool. She gathered up the sheets, gave Wright an aggravated look. “Gonna help?”
He took a few steps in, hesitated, and she sighed. Client, she reminded herself. Clients didn’t have to make beds.
A moment later, even that thought deserted her. Running her hand along the side of the bed against the wall, she found a stiff spot in the soft mattress edge, stiff, square, and too even not to be deliberate.
She pulled the mattress out, found that Zoe had opened the mattress up in a space about four inches by four inches, and glued it down again. “You have a pocketknife?” she asked Wright.
“I flew commercial.” He took a breath, walked into the room, pulled a pair of scissors from Zoe’s desk, and passed them to her. He leaned over her shoulder, ran fingers over the mattress insertion, and said, “I see why you worry. Most kids hide things. But not this well.”
The glue was difficult, bonded to the poly-fabric sides, resistant to prying, and finally Sylvie just stabbed the sharp edge of the scissor through and started sawing.
The fabric off, Sylvie bent and peered in; something bulky and multiedged nested in the spring coils. The side of another book, maybe, one more dangerous than her other collection. The minute her reaching fingers touched it, though, she knew what it was, the soft-rough texture, the narrow shape. Money. A whole lot of it.
Feeling sick, she dragged the stack into the watery sunlight. Even here, her sister was meticulous; little Post-it tabs had been inserted, a running total.
“What is it?” Wright asked. When he saw, his face tightened. “That’s what—fifty thousand dollars?”
“Sixty-three thousand four hundred fifty-two dollars, to be precise.” Sylvie’s voice was rough. She sat heavily on the mattress, put her head in her hands. No way was Zoe innocent in the burglaries. Guess while the other children were racking up toys, Zoe was planning her financial future.
She bit back all the curses on her lips, bit back the scream building in her chest. She felt oddly betrayed, and she knew that was unfair. Zoe had no idea that Sylvie spent most of her days trying to prevent magic from getting into innocent hands, into the wrong hands, into dangerous hands. It still felt like a deliberate slap, like Zoe had gone out of her way to upset her.
Rage churned in her belly. How stupid was Zoe? Did she really believe she could get something for nothing? It was the biggest lie magic offered. Until now, Sylvie had assumed her sister was smart.
Smart enough to take cash instead of stolen property, the little dark voice said. Smart enough to let Bella own the Hand. Smart enough to let her bear the brunt of the danger.
Sylvie shivered, but her brain kicked back into gear. Smart enough to let Bella have the Hand? Except that didn’t explain the cash. None of the reports had mentioned that much cash going missing.
* * *
WRIGHT STAYED THANKFULLY SILENT, AND SYLVIE RAISED HER HEAD, still thinking. “The bookshelf, you said?”
Zoe was better at hiding things than Sylvie had thought; she might have overlooked something. Had to have. The burglary reports she had were all about things being taken; the cash amount stolen was minimal, maybe ten thousand for the entire string of stores. Zoe might be working on her own, which meant there were other stores that hadn’t been flagged as part of the pattern, and in turn that meant . . .
Given that Bella had clung to the Hand, slept with it beneath her pillow, decorated it, made it her own, Sylvie couldn’t imagine her letting Zoe use it without her.
Sylvie yanked the books back off the shelves, then pulled the heavy oak bookcase forward with a grunt of effort. It tipped, tilted toward her, creaking, and she knew she had something. Bright colors adorned the back of the shelves: sigils and symbols, a spell circle in multiple shades of nail polish.
Whatever its purpose was, it wasn’t active. Sylvie knew the feel of live magic. Either the spell was finished or had never worked at all. Given the general feel of the room, the miasma that had Wright shifting foot to foot, edging back toward the door, she assumed it had failed from the start.
“Help me,” she said. She
’d hemmed herself in with books, with the tangle of sheets at her feet, and the bookshelf, while not overly heavy, was more than she could lift straight up by herself.
Face set, he grabbed hold, and they lifted it out of the way.
A spell circle was usually designed to keep something under control, either outside the circle barrier or trapped within.
Nothing beyond the polish on the bookshelf. Sylvie turned her attention to the wall and the rat odor in the air. A test sniff made her certain it centered in the immediate area. Demalion’s instincts, even filtered through Wright, were good. But where was it?
“Electric socket,” he said. “It’s behind the case; she can’t plug things into it. They make lockboxes to fit.”
“Pretty small, though,” Sylvie said, and had to acknowledge that she was looking for a piece of a corpse, no matter how unlikely it was that teenagers would have two Hands of Glory. Bella’s Hand had been woman-sized, the fingers stiffly spread out, making it spiderish and bigger than its mass accounted for. Add the length of the wrist bone, and it wouldn’t fit just anywhere.
“Not for cash,” he said.
“That’s not what I’m looking for.” Sylvie tapped at the socket and was rewarded with a shiver of plaster. She used the scissor blade to loosen the tiny screw, careful not to nip her fingers. The socket cover came off easily, and Wright said, “Anything there?”
“Nothing at all,” she said. “No box, no wires, nothing.” She steeled herself, reached her hand in and down, the way the angle wanted her to go. Something softly unpleasant touched her skin, yielding and clammy, clinging to her fingers. She jerked back, kneed the wall, and the baseboard popped loose.
Guess Zoe found the entrance to her hidey-hole too confining. Sylvie should have thought as much, given how tightly she’d had to squeeze her hand into the hole. Like the monkey with its hand in the jar, Zoe wouldn’t be able to withdraw anything she dropped into the hole.
Sylvie pulled back the molding, and, wiping her hand on her jeans, she reached in, cringing at the idea of touching whatever it had been again.