Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

Sometimes, in her nightmares, she was child-Demalion’s bully. Sometimes, in her nightmares, she killed him herself. Shot him, hit him, sicced the Furies on him. She shivered, closed her palm around the glass in her hand without looking at it, afraid of seeing that boy’s face in it.

She dropped heavily onto the couch beside Wright. “It’s important to me.”

Wright pressed on the small slice in his palm until the blood welled up over his fingertips. “Glad to hear it.”

“God, you did a number on yourself,” Sylvie said. She hadn’t thought the crystal was that sharp. “Hold on a moment.” She collected her first-aid kit, pulled out the butterfly bandages, and, after wiping the blood away again, fastened them over the curved wound. She traced the edge of the wound with her fingertip, checking that pressure on the rest of his hand wouldn’t be more than the bandages could control. Tracing that small curve, over and over again.

“Ow?” he said. He folded his fingers inward, out of her grip. “Bad bedside manner, Shadows.”

“You’ve no idea,” she muttered. “Last person I patched up wasn’t even a person.”

When she looked up to see if he was shocked silent, or just thinking, her gaze never made it to his face, caught on that curved scar on his chest. She lifted his hand in hers, brought it upward. The curves matched. Like key in lock. She jerked away, trembling. Coincidence? Or the ISI, playing vicious games with her and using Wright? She touched that spot on his chest, that smooth gap in the arc.

He touched her cheek, fingertips cool against her flushed skin. She twitched away.

“Sylvie,” he said. “You look wrecked.”

“Not your problem,” she said. As she rose, she stumbled, and he drew her back, wrapped her in an embrace that shook, as if the weight of her problems and his combined might break him. It would have been easy to push him away, but it was easier still to rest her head in the curve of his neck, his shoulder bony and flat beneath her cheek. Easy to pretend. He smelled of salt and sweat, and she wondered, if she parted her lips, leaned that tiny increment closer, would he taste of the sea beneath her tongue?

She curved her palm over that evocative scar, felt it cool and smooth and incomplete. A fragmentary wound as cool as crystal. She shivered in his arms. Step away, she thought. End this before she did something she’d regret in the name of comfort. But he was warm and alive, and his arms felt good closed on her shoulders, his breath stirring her hair.

She raised her face, and he kissed her. A strange first kiss that felt nothing like new. Slow, familiar, comforting, his tongue dueling gently with hers. The rasp of stubble a gentle friction against her skin, as welcome as a breath of sea air. She shifted closer, slid onto his lap, a knee moving to each side of his hips. His hands caged her waist, spanned her ribs, thumbs rubbing circles in the hollows between bone, all of it familiar. “Shadows,” he whispered against her throat.

She leaned closer still, chasing that elusive sea taste of him, that familiarity. Her hands found their way into his hair, carding the tufts to wilder heights yet. She settled more comfortably across his lap, spread her knees wider to take him closer. His hand slid up her spine, rested heavy at her nape; his fingers curled around the crest of her shoulder, traced familiar patterns, S after S after S , her name drawn on her skin with careful touches.

Just like. . . “Demalion,” she murmured.

“Yes,” he breathed back.

She scrambled away from him, the shock of it heating her face, her throat, her chest. Shame burned in her breast.

“What are you doing—” Her breath failed her, caught tight and muffled by her own welter of conflicting emotion. Anger, as always, came to her rescue. “What the hell? I tell you to give me a name, and you choose that one?”

“I reclaim what’s mine,” he said. He shrugged, a fluid rearrangement of Wright’s stiffly set shoulders, projecting an ease he obviously didn’t feel. His eyes were on her, sandy brows drawn tight; his lips still damp with her breath. “And I remember. You kept that last piece of me safe. And then you gave it back to me. I am, was , Michael Demalion. Want to welcome me home?” Though he smiled at her, it was shaky, hard to hold.

“Demali—” She shook her head, felt like the world spun with it. “It’s not possible. The Furies devour souls.”

“I don’t know how I escaped, but I did,” he said, rose to draw her back into his arms. She resisted, kept from pressing herself back into Wright’s lanky chest, set hands flat against his skin, wanting to believe, wanting not to. If Demalion was a ghost, he was beyond her aid, and this could be nothing but a cruel reminder of what she had lost.

As if the thought proved the facts, Demalion shivered beneath her hands, then he was stepping back, his eyes wide and wild. “Sylvie? What’s—”

She didn’t need the clipped tone to know; the surprise was enough. Wright was back where he belonged.

“Missing time?” she asked.

He nodded once. “What hap . . . No, don’t wanna know. I’m gonna—Can I go get a shower?”

She realized her hands were still on his skin, jerked back. “Go for it.” He slipped away from her like a feral cat, contorting himself to evade her and the couch, before disappearing into the bathroom.

Sylvie collapsed back onto the couch. Could she believe it? She turned possibilities over in her mind like garden rocks, wary of things beneath.

The ISI and a sneak attack? They knew Demalion, but they didn’t know how she and he had fitted together.

Her lips burned; her hands still carried the memory of warmth. She shifted uneasily, and pain spiked her thigh, a sudden snake-strike of unexpected hurt.

Sylvie slapped her hand over the pain and found that curved piece of glass that was all she had held of Demalion. Her blood wetted the edge of it, ran thin and dark into the curved heart of it. Despite the crystal’s gloss, the shine of reflected light, it was oddly empty; the pale glow it had held, that kiss of soul—was gone, reabsorbed.

A broken crystal ball. Such an impossible thing to save a soul, such a contradictory egg—only birthing once its pieces had found the same flesh and become whole.

Her face was wet, the skin tight on her cheeks; her throat ached. She scrubbed salt from her face, her lashes. In the bathroom, she heard Wright swearing, and flinched at the idea of facing him. She couldn’t. Not now. Not when she’d be peering at him, wondering if she could see Demalion in the way Wright moved, not when Wright was the one who needed her help.

The shower cut off, and Sylvie jumped into motion.

She dropped the crystal fragment into the wastebasket, forced determination into a body that wanted to sink under so many emotions: guilt, relief, a spike of joy, despair. Wright was a no-go for the moment. But the magical burglars were just begging for attention. One quick change later—trading her sweatpants for comfort jeans, a little loose in the waist, and an oxford on over the tank top—she collected her gun and realized she’d left the holster in the bathroom that Wright was using as a hidey.

She couldn’t imagine knocking and saying, I know you’re having a freakout that I helped cause, but could I have that holster so I can go out and harass people, and no, you’re not invited. . . . Even her courage had limits. Far easier to shrug on a silvered denim jacket Zoe had left on her last visit: It was fashionable on some model’s runway in a city like Paris, Venice, Hong Kong, and way over the top anywhere else. But it had pockets. Discreet, padded pockets, the perfect thing to secrete a compact gun.