Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

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 disagreeably 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?”

“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.