Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

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 write 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.