by Lyn Benedict
Instead, she had Wales, muttering darkly about defective Hands, running on instinct, and being all too protective of his own favored collection of Hands.
So it was come back later, or go on in, making it fast. If they got in quick enough, maybe the spells on the shop walls would contain the Hands, keep the passersby from falling prey to them.
Maybe not.
Sylvie bit her lip and dithered. Invocat’s dark windows reflected her uncertain gaze, and she sucked in a breath.
Traffic wasn’t going that fast.
Odalys was killing people. For profit.
Priority made.
Sylvie grabbed Wright, tugged him down the sidewalk, her purse swinging by her side. “Let’s try for the alley. The Hands might take care of witnesses, but not until they’re lit.”
“This is not a good idea,” Wright said. “Just call the cops, Sylvie. Suarez seems willing to believe you.”
She sighed. Wright was a masochist. He would insist on coming out when laws were on the line. Demalion, at least, wouldn’t argue for the cops’ presence, and he knew better than to suggest the ISI.
As if Wright sensed her aggravation, he sighed, and said, “Demalion, you want to take this one?”
“Always,” Demalion answered himself in a different cadence. “B and E’s my bread and butter.”
She shivered. That was just creepy. She didn’t like the closeness, the ease with which they shifted control. She didn’t like Wright ceding to Demalion so often either. As much as she craved Demalion’s company, it was best if he stayed an awkward intruder in Wright’s skin and not something closer to natural. In the meantime, she made a mental note to be very careful what she said, since she couldn’t be sure who was listening.
Did they even have secrets from each other at this point?
She was glad to turn her attention to the task at hand. The back door to Invocat was green metal in a white-stucco wall, scarred and dented from careless trash collection in the alley, with no visible lock at all. Sheltered as they were between bins, Sylvie said, “Guess we’ll find out how well these work. Let’s hope we don’t get any more half-starved liches.”
“You think that’s likely?”
“Zoe’s Hand was in milk. These have been tucked up right and tight with souls to munch on. They shouldn’t be that hungry.”
Demalion took a breath, frowning, worried, then twisted Wright’s mobile features into an impish grin. “Hey, Shadows, got milk?”
“Funny man,” she said. “And yes, two pints in the bag.”
She set her bag down, trying to avoid any of the obvious puddles in the humped and furrowed asphalt, and steeled herself. She hated this. She hated magic, hated the need for it. But Bella’s body was walking around without her in it. She hated that more.
Hated the thought that the Hands weren’t defective as Wales had suggested, as she had believed—practice attempts for the real thing—but were deliberately designed for malignity. It was the only explanation.
Patrice Caudwell, old and wheelchair-bound, dying by inches, suddenly broke routine and killed a toddler. Why?
To allow her spirit to be kept from the afterworld.
At the same time, Caudwell was dispersing cash, Odalys got a five-million-dollar payment—for what?
For Odalys to find her a new body. A young, pretty one, brought up with all the comforts, in good health, and pleasantly close to independence, comfortably close to claiming a fortune just waiting for her. It would explain disinheriting her children, her grandchildren. Patrice Caudwell was taking it all with her.
Sylvie pulled the first Hand from her satchel. A man’s Hand, the one she’d taken from Trey.
Sex-linked, she thought, closing her eyes. Of course they were. If each “defective” Hand was a person willing to kill for a second chance at life . . . the person probably wanted to keep to the same gender. But if she and Demalion used the “wrong” Hand and had no tie to it, that might add a little layer of protection.
Keeping that in mind, she fished for the Hand Jaz had been carrying. A delicate woman’s hand, obviously elderly, the joints swelled and twisted, the skin thickened, sallow even beneath the wax and wither. She passed it to Demalion. “Last chance to go sit in the truck.”
“No,” he said.
She swallowed. “I did get you killed last time.” It hurt to say it, here in the Miami alley, sun-warmed stench and all.
“Light it.” He held the Hand out to her, the nails clawed and waxy, and shimmying a little. Transmitting a nervousness he wouldn’t admit to. She pushed it away.
“Give me a moment,” she snapped. She juggled the man’s Hand, her satchel, and dug up Zoe’s lighter.
She sparked it. The flame was nearly transparent in the sunlit day, sullen orange at the base, streaming into invisibility. Demalion took a deep breath and thrust the withered Hand forward into the flame.
It caught, and Sylvie hastened to light her own; it burned with a hellish glow, all soot smudge and smoldering coals even in the midst of daylight. Her own flesh tried to shrink back, utterly repulsed, trying to minimize contact. In sunlight, the associated ghosts were thinned and vaporous, bare shimmers in the air. But there was something that moved restlessly within their shades, and she thought of the lich ghost’s hungry, barbed tongue with a shudder. Better to see it or better not to be distracted by the threat? It seemed a lose-lose.
The little dark voice growled within her, expressing its displeasure with the entire situation.
“Now we go in?” he said.
“Now we go in.”
“Cautious like a drunk stuntman,” he said, an old tease that she chose to let slide.
The door opened into an alcove, curtained off by heavy drapes. In the suddenly dim light, the ghosts sprang into sharp-edged definition, as neatly as if someone had flipped the switch to the horror channel. Sylvie’s ghost revealed himself to be a stiff-backed man with a brush cut and eyes that glowed magnesium white against his corpse pallor, against the slow ripple of red flame around the fingers she held. His tongue flickered out briefly, tasted the air, and withdrew, a separate tide of hunger.
Demalion’s ghost, tiny, Asian, malevolent, slumped in beside them, and Sylvie shivered at her proximity. Demalion himself looked pale, even in the bloody light, and Sylvie hoped that she’d gotten it right; that the lich ghosts housed in these Hands of Glory wanted not just any body but the perfect one. Wright’s body, scrawny, male, already possessed, should be safe from her attentions.
They seemed thinner, somehow, than Strange’s lich ghost, less hungry. But then, they hadn’t been stored in milk, locked away in the dark; they’d been taken out and fed. Even then, their mouths gaped, showed slow, serpentine movement behind pale teeth. Sylvie clutched the wrist stump tighter like the lifeline it was, but it was a fragile lifeline at best. She recalled Wales’s discourse on energy—the more she and Demalion used the Hands, the hungrier, the more wakeful the ghosts would get. In and out was going to be key.
Behind the drapes, faint music ghosted, something slow, hollow, mournful. A languid, atonal flute. Accompanying it, like a small percussive undercurrent, a series of tiny click, click, clicks. Someone moving about in high heels.
Sylvie nodded once at Demalion, and he slipped by her, holding his own ghost light high and behind him, keeping it away from the drapes. She pulled her gun, juggled the flaming Hand, and prepared herself.
Demalion seized the drape, keeping out of her line of fire, and yanked it back. Across the room, Odalys finished up the last curve of her protective circle with a practiced gesture.
Her expression showed surprise, but more—it betrayed relief. Sylvie fought the urge to double-check their backs. If Odalys was preparing for an invasion, and it wasn’t Sylvie she was expecting . . .
After another silent moment, Odalys raised a perfectly groomed brow, and said, “Make yourselves at home, children. I’ll just be going.”
“Not going to happen,” Sylvie said. She gestured gently,
urging Demalion back. He slipped beyond the drape; she heard the back door close, shutting them in with Odalys, keeping their confrontation out of view.
“No?” Odalys turned in her circle, admiring it.
It was poured thick and bright, not pure salt given the way it flickered and shone in the Hands’ uneven light. Crystal quartz or mica mixed in, Sylvie thought, but to what purpose? Protective circles were old magic; the recipe wasn’t something that changed. That Odalys had done so worried her.
“No,” Sylvie said, projecting a surety she didn’t feel. “For you to leave us, you’d have to leave the circle first. And you might have some talisman to protect you from the ghosts, but can you really trust them? Since you tinkered with the formulas?”
“That horrible Ghoul,” Odalys said. She shifted from one high-heeled foot to another, but it didn’t seem like agitation, only boredom. “I suppose he managed to convince you he was on the side of the angels, then got talky.” She sighed hugely. “You don’t live up to your reputation, Shadows. You were supposed to shoot first.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a temper and a hair trigger,” Sylvie said. “But you know what really defines me? Hating to be manipulated.”
“Whatever,” Odalys said. If Sylvie had any lingering doubts that Odalys was involved up to her sculpted cheekbones with the teenagers, that dismissive verbal twitch would have erased them.
The ghost beside her flowed forward, the long, barbed tongue striking in at Odalys, and was repelled by the salt ring. “Remember yourself, General,” Odalys snapped, then, without a pause, turned on Sylvie. “I could attack your spirit-vulnerable friend. I know more spells than you can imagine for dispersing souls.”
Sylvie said, “Looks to me like all your ingredients are on the wrong side of your shield.”
“Looks to me like you’re the ones with the time constraint,” Odalys said. “How long do you think they’ll stay quiet? When I could wake them into a feeding frenzy?”
Bluff, Sylvie thought, but she just couldn’t be certain. Magic wasn’t all that dissimilar to psychiatry; a lot of it depended on belief. She dared a quick glance back to make sure Demalion wasn’t in distress.
A quiet rush of air, the soft crash of a wave sounded in the room. Sylvie whirled back around, leaving a faint arc of firelight in her wake, and found that Odalys’s salt ring had spawned itself. A second, more thinly drawn circle had joined the first, its diameter a full foot wider. Odalys took a step forward, one step closer to the exit. One step closer to Sylvie, her gun, and the lich ghost, and she didn’t seem concerned at all.
That kind of self-confidence was rarely unearned.
That kind of self-confidence deserved to be shot down. Sylvie tightened her grip on her pistol, more than willing to do the job. But her neck prickled; she felt the weight of Demalion’s need on her back. Could she shoot Odalys down in cold blood? Yes. Pragmatism was an important part of the Magicus Mundi. The squeamish fell fast.
But could she do it in front of a man whose future might depend on what they could learn from Odalys? When she still needed answers? Needed to know how deep the danger ran, how widespread Odalys’s plan had been.
Reluctantly, she eased off the trigger, irritated beyond measure that Odalys hadn’t even flinched.
“Fancy,” Sylvie said, her voice a little rough. “You adapted the spell.”
“A little bit of sea foam in the salt, a little bit of ground glass . . . and it flows like water at my will. Very useful.” Odalys smiled. “All those traditionalists, never bothering to improve on things.”
“Improve it enough to stop bullets?” Sylvie asked. “This is how it’s going to go. I won’t shoot you. But you’ll pack up, disable your little bonding activity with these Hands, freeing Jaz and her friends, freeing Zoe, and any others you may have going. Then you’re going to get the hell out of my city.”
Odalys laughed. “Oh, Sylvie, really. Is this your new friend’s influence? I’m surprised you aren’t threatening me with arrest.”
“I might be having a soft moment,” Sylvie said, “but I’m not stupid. And you know? I don’t even think it’s softness. I think I’m just not in the mood to clean blood off my shoes.”
Odalys shook her head, made a tiny gesture, and the salt ring washed forward again, creating a third circle, one large enough that it stung Sylvie’s ankles like blown sand. Sylvie’s ghost—the general?—blew backward; the Hand’s glow flickered in her grasp, fires thinning. Sylvie took a giant step back, scuffed a hole in the salt ring. Her sneaker, still damp from the pool, left a wet streak on the terrazzo. She was ready for Odalys to be done with. If that meant letting her own creations take a bite, so be it. Sylvie could always call them off later.
The salt ring shivered around her heel, beneath her instep, and rippled back into place as if it were water pouring into a channel. Her ghost pressed back against the drape, trying to escape it.
“Careful, Sylvie,” Demalion warned. Unnecessary. She knew it would be bad if the flame went out, would leave her vulnerable to the ghosts. They wouldn’t laze through that: It’d be the equivalent of blood in the water. Hungry or not, the sharks would bite.
Odalys said, “I do know my stuff. Now, are you going to get out of my way, or do you want to see if the next ring snuffs out your protection?”
Sylvie grinned. “Make it easy, why don’t you.” She fired a shot; the noise was oddly muffled, as if all the magic running across the room could silence it. The bullet moved just fine, though, went exactly where she wanted, splintered terrazzo just before Odalys’s feet. The woman jerked.
“If you’re threatening me, all bets are off,” Sylvie said.
Odalys worried a full lip, teeth white against the red stain of her mouth, still not showing the fear Sylvie craved. Finally, she said, “If I leave town, I’m not going alone. I’m taking Zoe.”
Sylvie said, “You’re too late for that. She’s safe—”
“Did you really think Zoe would be content to play dogs-body to a burned-out witch? Do you think your associate even got her there? Zoe’s mastered the basics. She’s quite good at her little oblivion spell. She ditched your associate, let her think her task was done, and came straight to me. Wanting answers. And I told her Bella was alive.”
“Patrice Caudwell is alive. Bella’s dead.” Those were facts. Sylvie could deal with them. She couldn’t even begin to wrap her mind around Zoe.
Odalys raised her hand, delicate bracelet dangling from it, tilted her palm back and forth. “You say potato, I say—”
“ ‘ Give me the money.’ ”
“Well, yes. This is a business, after all.”
“You don’t have Zoe.” Sylvie made it a statement, as if she could make it a fact just by saying so.
“Care to gamble on it?”
It was a lie. Another bluff. She hoped.
But Sylvie couldn’t make herself believe Odalys was telling her anything but the unpalatable truth.
“She’s a winning child,” Odalys said. “Originally, she was nothing but a body for a particularly unsatisfactory client. But she showed unexpected talent. More than that, she showed ambition.” She paced circles within her rings.
Like a bull’s-eye begging for target practice, Sylvie’s little dark voice murmured.
A tiny sting touched her fingertips, a punishing, testing lick of flame. Lost in speculation and suspicion, in fear for Zoe, Sylvie’d slacked her grip on the Hand, with the result that the flame proved itself real-world enough to blister her skin. She fought the instinct to drop it. Her flame-eyed military ghost loomed at her, all but licking his sere, grey lips for a chance at her soul. He seemed more awake by the moment. Their time was running short.
Flaw in my logic, she thought, inching the Hand upward fingertip by fingertip while her skin sizzled. Just because the dead man doesn’t want to start his second life as a woman doesn’t mean he won’t eat my soul.
Demalion moved toward her, and Sylvie hissed at him, channeling pain and effort into a s
ingle thought—stay back, stay safe. She worked the Hand into a safer grip; her fingers still ached and stung, but the general’s ghost backed off. All this without lowering her gaze or her gun from Odalys.
Odalys sighed. “For a moment there, I thought you’d be ghost food. Pity. Things would have been easier. You gave me your list of ultimatums. I heard you out. Now it’s your turn to listen to me.
“I am not interested in grudge matches or vendettas. What I want is to continue providing a very exclusive service to those who can afford it—”
“Who can stomach it. Did Patrice Caudwell flinch when you told her she’d have to kill someone?”
“Did you flinch, Shadows?” Odalys shook her head. “Some things just have to be done to move forward. I have no quarrel with you though I’d like my clients to be happy. I propose a deal. You give me those Hands, and I’ll give you enough information for you to realize how much danger you’re in. I saw what you did with Strange’s Hand, Shadows, and you’re not safe.”
Sylvie laughed. “So very generous. No.”
“You’re running out of time. We all are,” Odalys said. She walked her circle once more, and like moons in an orbit, they all pivoted with her—Sylvie angling to keep the gun aimed on her, the Hand casting its light, the ghost following, and Demalion orbiting Sylvie, looking uneasy. In the background, the flute music swelled and stuttered.
Odalys paused, one foot rocking gently on its stiletto heel. “All right, then. Since you think me ungenerous anyway. Here’s the deal. You leave the Hands, you leave the store, and I’ll leave Zoe out of my plans. Send her home to you. It’s a real hardship. I had such plans for that girl.”
Whatever Sylvie would have answered with—bile, capitulation, bargaining, or even a bullet—she was distracted by the ambient flute music’s changing. It grew louder, more discordant, rapid-fire, the notes bleeding into one another like a single, sustained scream, the shriek of a damned soul.
“What is that?” Sylvie shouted. But she already had guessed the answer. Odalys’s own version of a supernatural alarm. She spotted it in a dim corner of the room, a hanging, vibrating pale stick—no, a long bone, with holes augured through.