Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Plus, this way she could keep an eye on Wales. He might be more competent than he had pretended to be on their first meeting, but dealing with ghosts just made her skin crawl.

Dead things should stay that way, her dark voice commented.

Demalion, Sylvie rebutted. The dark voice sulked and slunk away.

Wales took a breath, flipped out his lighter, and Sylvie coughed. “Smoke detector?”

He clambered up with a shame-faced wince and yanked the wires. “Thanks.”

“Had enough excitement for tonight,” Sylvie said. “Hate to add hotel evac to the list.” She dragged a pillow to her chest, curled around it; the bruising ribs on her side appreciated the support. She felt like a tween on a sleepover—all they needed was a Ouija board and some Gummi Bears to replicate her seventh-grade birthday party—and patted her gun for moral support.

Wales lit a small brazier of herbs; they didn’t stink as strongly as the pennyroyal did, but they made a strange smoky trail that coiled not-quite-aimlessly through the circle of Hands. Where the smoke brushed up against the Hands, ghosts shimmered in grim outlines.

Yeah, this was going to be ugly. Drag a dead girl’s soul back through the ether, interrogate her, study her, and slap her in the center of a hard-eyed ghost ring of murdered ex-cons.

Wales tossed a piece of jewelry into the brazier; it sank under herbs so fast that Sylvie only had time to register the gold shine of it. It looked like a pendant charm.

He rattled off a long stream of words that could have been anything, a quick blur of vowels barely contained by a consonant here and there. Alex would have been making zombie-language references—all groan and moan and tongueless words. Whatever it was, it raised the fine hairs on Sylvie’s arms, made her clutch the pillow tighter.

Not fear, she told herself. Discomfort. It didn’t sound like something people should say.

The smoke reacted to it, eddying back from the edges of the magical ghost circle, twining up Wales’s legs, creeping through the air like a snake tracking a rat’s scent.

“Jennifer Costas,” Wales said. Back to English, and it should have been a relief. But the Texas drawl was gone from his voice; he sounded crisp and hard and clean. It was a tone a stage actor would envy, meant for carrying cleanly to the rearmost seats. It was a sound to wake the dead.

“Jennifer,” Wales said again.

The smoke thickened, bunched like a swallowing snake, pulling at something Sylvie couldn’t see.

Belatedly, she wondered if she’d see anything at all, or if she’d be stuck watching Wales talk to more invisible people, trying to read success or failure in his body language.

Fire crackled in the smoke, a sullen flicker like a banked fire being poked. Sylvie thought of Jennifer Costas, burned up in a spell backlash, and found herself whispering the closest thing to a prayer she was capable of. Please, let her not spend the afterlife eternally burning.

It depended, she supposed, on whichever god had laid claim to her soul. Some were more merciful than others. Some were indifferent. And some were downright cruel.

The smoke closed in, engulfed the flame, giving shape to the intangible. Jennifer Costas was formed out of smoke and distant fires, her long hair like fiber optics, glowing dully at the ends, drifting.

Why?

Her voice was a wisp, a child’s plaint.

Sylvie smothered guilt. Sooner done, sooner she’ll be released. For once, she and her inner voice agreed.

Wales swallowed, let the hard edge leave his tone. “Jennifer,” he said.

The ghost girl turned her head, and Sylvie decided she preferred the smudgy shimmer the girl had been in the’Glades to this phantasm, whose eyes gleamed with lambent flames. Jennifer shouldn’t have been threatening—lost, scared, dead—but panic lent strength to any creature.

Sylvie shifted on the bed, running over anything she knew on how to banish a ghost. Just in case.

Jennifer shuddered in response to one of Wales’s questions. Like a child, she repeated it, Was I first? No. She and she were there. White eyes under the water, and he pressed me down under the water, a knife blade in my skin, crimson rivers flowing. . . . He gave us to him like a poisoned sweet, and he lodged in our bones. In our blood. We burn.

The fire crackle beneath her smoke skin doused itself, faded into silence. An utter silence. Utter stillness. Death in a smoke shell. A hollow core of memory and pain.

Sylvie shivered. She almost wished the flames were back.

“Do you remember the words he used?” Wales asked. “Can you tell me?”

Wales was dogged; Sylvie gave him that. Still concentrating on the spell that bound the rest of the women. Trying to figure out a way to safely unpick the knot they were in. Still trying to make sense of someone else’s malignancy. But his shoulders were tight, his eyes jittery, and she wondered how long he could hold Jennifer there.

Chains. More chains. Jennifer mourned, turning about in the circle. Trapped. I want to go home. I must. He calls.

Beneath the stillness, a tension. Sylvie thought of tides pulling back before tsunamis, of the silence before an earthquake.

“Wales,” she murmured. “Hurry it up.” Dangerous to interrupt, to divert his attention, but she couldn’t help but feel that time was short. A new sound grew beneath the smoke, something distant, repetitive, vaguely familiar. Something that made her edgy.

“What was his purpose?” Wales said.

The smoke shape turned her palms upward, wordless answer or a confused shrug. The sigils carved into her palms meant the motion could be either.

To hide. To grow strong at our expense. At his. He calls.

Sylvie peered through the haze of ghosts playing fence, tried to see what Wales might be seeing. All it was to her was featureless grey-black, a roil of distress.

“Hide from whom?”

Jennifer flashed in the circle, a rush of smoky movement, crashing up against the hedging ghosts, trying to escape. Her face, built of smoke and terror, was visible through the gaps; her lips moved soundlessly. The word was clear, though.

No. No. No. I don’t want to. . . .

Wales frowned, his face tight and stern. “Tell me,” he commanded. The ghost wept flaming tears.

Sylvie wondered if Alex would still find him sweet now. She didn’t dwell on it. That sound came again, just on the edge of her hearing. A displacement of expelled air. An explosive sigh, but with anger beneath. The bed shivered beneath her. She dropped the pillow, held her hands out before her. Steady as a rock. The trembling wasn’t her. It was something else. Something approaching. Something sniffing them out. Sniffing the ghost out.

A power filter, Wales had said. Power went in, changed, came out again. That kind of thing left a mark on a soul. That kind of thing could make a ghost a tasty morsel for anything powerful enough to sense it.

Another thought crossed her mind, sent her heart into rocketing overdrive. He gave us to him.

It wouldn’t be the first time a sorcerer had bartered with a god for power. If the soul-devourer had given these women’s souls to a god . . . if Wales was keeping Jennifer here when a god was expecting her.

He calls.

“Wales!” Sylvie snapped. “Send her back. Do it now.”

“Just a minute more,” he crooned, equal answer to Sylvie and comfort to the ghost. “Just a moment, now.” He circled the ghost, scribing a circle within the ghost circle, and Sylvie’s nerves seized with a sudden realization.

Wales was inside the ghost circle. Contained as much as the ghost he summoned.

Too late, Jennifer whispered. He comes.