Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

She pulled the mattress out, found that Zoe had opened the mattress up in a space about four inches by four inches, and glued it down again. “You have a pocketknife?” she asked Wright.

“I flew commercial.” He took a breath, walked into the room, pulled a pair of scissors from Zoe’s desk, and passed them to her. He leaned over her shoulder, ran fingers over the mattress insertion, and said, “I see why you worry. Most kids hide things. But not this well.”

The glue was difficult, bonded to the poly-fabric sides, resistant to prying, and finally Sylvie just stabbed the sharp edge of the scissor through and started sawing.

The fabric off, Sylvie bent and peered in; something bulky and multiedged nested in the spring coils. The side of another book, maybe, one more dangerous than her other collection. The minute her reaching fingers touched it, though, she knew what it was, the soft-rough texture, the narrow shape. Money. A whole lot of it.

Feeling sick, she dragged the stack into the watery sunlight. Even here, her sister was meticulous; little Post-it tabs had been inserted, a running total.

“What is it?” Wright asked. When he saw, his face tightened. “That’s what—fifty thousand dollars?”

“Sixty-three thousand four hundred fifty-two dollars, to be precise.” Sylvie’s voice was rough. She sat heavily on the mattress, put her head in her hands. No way was Zoe innocent in the burglaries. Guess while the other children were racking up toys, Zoe was planning her financial future.

She bit back all the curses on her lips, bit back the scream building in her chest. She felt oddly betrayed, and she knew that was unfair. Zoe had no idea that Sylvie spent most of her days trying to prevent magic from getting into innocent hands, into the wrong hands, into dangerous hands. It still felt like a deliberate slap, like Zoe had gone out of her way to upset her.

Rage churned in her belly. How stupid was Zoe? Did she really believe she could get something for nothing? It was the biggest lie magic offered. Until now, Sylvie had assumed her sister was smart.

Smart enough to take cash instead of stolen property, the little dark voice said . Smart enough to let Bella own the Hand. Smart enough to let her bear the brunt of the danger.

Sylvie shivered, but her brain kicked back into gear. Smart enough to let Bella have the Hand? Except that didn’t explain the cash. None of the reports had mentioned that much cash going missing.

WRIGHT STAYED THANKFULLY SILENT, AND SYLVIE RAISED HER HEAD, still thinking. “The bookshelf, you said?”

Zoe was better at hiding things than Sylvie had thought; she might have overlooked something. Had to have. The burglary reports she had were all about things being taken; the cash amount stolen was minimal, maybe ten thousand for the entire string of stores. Zoe might be working on her own, which meant there were other stores that hadn’t been flagged as part of the pattern, and in turn that meant . . .

Given that Bella had clung to the Hand, slept with it beneath her pillow, decorated it, made it her own, Sylvie couldn’t imagine her letting Zoe use it without her.

Sylvie yanked the books back off the shelves, then pulled the heavy oak bookcase forward with a grunt of effort. It tipped, tilted toward her, creaking, and she knew she had something. Bright colors adorned the back of the shelves: sigils and symbols, a spell circle in multiple shades of nail polish.

Whatever its purpose was, it wasn’t active. Sylvie knew the feel of live magic. Either the spell was finished or had never worked at all. Given the general feel of the room, the miasma that had Wright shifting foot to foot, edging back toward the door, she assumed it had failed from the start.

“Help me,” she said. She’d hemmed herself in with books, with the tangle of sheets at her feet, and the bookshelf, while not overly heavy, was more than she could lift straight up by herself.

Face set, he grabbed hold, and they lifted it out of the way.

A spell circle was usually designed to keep something under control, either outside the circle barrier or trapped within.

Nothing beyond the polish on the bookshelf. Sylvie turned her attention to the wall and the rat odor in the air. A test sniff made her certain it centered in the immediate area. Demalion’s instincts, even filtered through Wright, were good. But where was it?

“Electric socket,” he said. “It’s behind the case; she can’t plug things into it. They make lockboxes to fit.”

“Pretty small, though,” Sylvie said, and had to acknowledge that she was looking for a piece of a corpse, no matter how unlikely it was that teenagers would have two Hands of Glory. Bella’s Hand had been woman-sized, the fingers stiffly spread out, making it spiderish and bigger than its mass accounted for. Add the length of the wrist bone, and it wouldn’t fit just anywhere.

“Not for cash,” he said.

“That’s not what I’m looking for.” Sylvie tapped at the socket and was rewarded with a shiver of plaster. She used the scissor blade to loosen the tiny screw, careful not to nip her fingers. The socket cover came off easily, and Wright said, “Anything there?”

“Nothing at all,” she said. “No box, no wires, nothing.” She steeled herself, reached her hand in and down, the way the angle wanted her to go. Something softly unpleasant touched her skin, yielding and clammy, clinging to her fingers. She jerked back, kneed the wall, and the baseboard popped loose.

Guess Zoe found the entrance to her hidey-hole too confining. Sylvie should have thought as much, given how tightly she’d had to squeeze her hand into the hole. Like the monkey with its hand in the jar, Zoe wouldn’t be able to withdraw anything she dropped into the hole.

Sylvie pulled back the molding, and, wiping her hand on her jeans, she reached in, cringing at the idea of touching whatever it had been again.

Her questing fingers found the smooth edge of a plate—no, casserole dish—and a thick stench of something rotting. She pulled it out, grimacing proactively, and found it worthy of every nauseated expression she could pull.

Did Zoe have a Hand of Glory? Oh yes.

A long, slim hand, narrow at the wrist, long-nailed, swollen knuckles, spotted here and there with liver marks. Another old woman’s hand.

Impossible as it seemed, two teenage girls had collected a pair of rare talismans that sorcerers would kill for.

Where Bella had decorated hers with little girl sparkles and gauded it up with fake jewelry, Zoe had drowned hers. The rank smell in the room, clogging Sylvie’s sinuses, wasn’t the Hand but the spoiled and spoiling milk it floated in, layers of it, poured repeatedly over the Hand, judging by the yellowed crust along the side of the dish. Sylvie couldn’t figure that at first, too taken aback by the way the Hand slid and surfaced beneath the clotting milk. Then a tiny memory twinged. Milk could be used in purification rituals. The milk, the spell circle—Zoe was clever enough to try to avoid Bella’s illness. She was trying to mediate the effect of the Hand on her soul. But Sylvie knew the spell circle was inert, just paint and pattern; what were the odds that the milk was doing any good?

Wright gagged and triggered Sylvie’s own reflex. They raced each other out of the room, and the air outside smelled sweet, clean, safe; the world seemed brighter.

She leaned up against the hallway wall, temper simmering. How could Zoe do it? How could she have brought this into her parents’ house?

“Sylvie,” Wright said, “we gotta call the cops. If Bella won’t talk to the police, your sister probably will. It’ll get her off the hook for the worst of it.”