Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“Don’t touch him,” she said.

“Just waking him up. ’Less you want privacy for our chat.” His fingers gleamed wetly. Under the weight of her gaze, he said, “It’s nothing harmful. Just milk to drive back the flame and salt to draw the boundaries. Did you ever wonder about the stories?”

Texas, Alex had said. Tierney Wales had come from Texas, and yeah, there was a distinctive twang to their captor’s voice, the slow, drawn-out syllables as if they had nothing more strenuous before them than a pleasant chat. Made him sound more confident than she thought he was.

The knots holding her to the chair weren’t all that tight—sloppy work. It couldn’t have been the result of haste. She and Wright had been dead to the world. “Stories?” she asked, even as part of her brain was reminding her that engaging with madmen was a losing proposition.

“Dairymaids and kitchen girls. It’s always one or the other. Knowledge gets itself coded and passed down in scary stories. The ones left awake when the burglars come calling with the Hands of Glory are the milkmaids and the kitchen tweenies. The girls with milk on their skins. Babies, too, sometimes. If they fed recently. Guess maybe the nursing mothers. It’s nature and birth against unnature and death. . . . Your friend’s sure taking his own sweet time, isn’t he?”

“If he’s hurt, I’ll take your damn Hand of Glory and make you choke on it.”

“You couldn’t get close enough,” he said. “Trust me on that. You’re hardly the first who’s come gunning for me, Shadows.”

“You know me?”

“I make it a habit to know the local players. I knew you’d come a-knock, knock, knocking on my door sooner or later, ready to run me out of town.”

“Can you blame me?”

“Oh, I’m trouble, all right. I get that. But I don’t have to be your trouble, if you’re sensible ’bout things,” he said. He laughed shortly, bent back over Wright, patted his cheek.

Her vision was adapting; there was a tight line of tension in his spine that she didn’t think was purely for having two people tied up in his apartment. His next slap was a little louder. “C’mon, fella. Sleepyheads miss all the pancakes.”

As worried as she was, she still found pleasure in adding to his evident stress. “You know, he died recently. His soul is fragile. And he’s had the Hands used on him twice already.”

“Shit,” Wales said. “Shit, that’s not good.” His voice tightened, the drawl disappearing.

“What do you care?” she asked.

“I don’t hurt people.”

“You and Colt. Utterly blameless. Not your fault if people misuse your products.”

Wright snorted suddenly, a sharply indrawn breath, then jerked in place. His chair screek ed as it shifted beneath him.

Sylvie jerked her head in his direction, trying to peer into the darkness. “Wright?”

“Shadows,” he said, his voice thick and slow, fighting his way to coherency. But in the one word, she heard enough to know this was Demalion waking.

Demalion. Not Wright. A good thing in this case. Demalion, after all, had experience with the Magicus Mundi and the people in it. Would be less prone to panic. And panic was still on the table. Sylvie’s eyes were adjusting, and there were . . . things dangling in the air. . . .

“Give us some light?” Demalion bitched. “We’re not mushrooms.” Cranky. Guess Wright’s purely human vision wasn’t enough for Demalion’s taste.

Wales hesitated; he walked the steps between them twice over, thin fingers testing her bonds, though he didn’t seem to be bothered that she had gotten her hand nearly through one of the loops.

“Yeah, all right. But be calm.”

His movement stirred the still air in the apartment, and Sylvie smelled old rot and spice, turned milk, and the thick, organic, just-this-side-of-unpleasant scent of tallow, and she swallowed hard. “Turn on the lights. Turn them on now.”

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I mean, it is, but not for the reasons—”

“Now!” she snapped. She yanked her hand free, leaving a thin layer of skin behind in the rope’s coil.

A single light bloomed, lower than she had expected—a table lamp on the floor, its yellowed shade turning the light it cast into something like firelight. Shadows loomed above them. As did other things.

“A little more light. I like to see who I’m dealing with,” she said, to keep her mouth from filling with nauseated saliva. Her eyes continued to pick out details in their surroundings. Strange shapes dangled spiderlike from the ceiling.

Her free hand slipped down into the shadows of the chair, but her holster was empty, her gun gone.

Wales walked past her; a second lamp sputtered into life, fitful and fluorescent. When it stabilized, she saw that her first impression had been right. Withered, human hands hung on thongs looped over hooks in the ceiling. They dangled, fingers down, just below head height as if they were prepared to grab intruders by the throat.

The ropes she tugged against slacked all at once, and she lunged out of her chair. Wales sidestepped her, nimbly dancing up into and over the chair she had just vacated, putting it between them. “Don’t you get hasty. It’s not what you think.” “No?” she said. Her breath was fast but steady. In the light, he wasn’t much to look at—thin-boned and skinny with it, bags under his eyes, a rat’s nest of hair and shapeless clothing. She might even have an inch or two on him.

All her muscles tensed, ready to pounce, but Wales yanked a grisly Hand from his pocket, held it up. “Don’t you make me use it again. It’s not good for any of us.”

“You put a circle of protection on me,” she said. “Forget that? I might not go down easy. In fact, I guarantee it.” It was more than bravado; it was fact. She’d been hit three times by the Hands’ spell. Each time, it took longer to take effect, courtesy of Lilith’s bloodline, she supposed. She could take out the Ghoul before she went down.

“You forget about your fragile friend?”

“Sylvie,” Demalion said. Just her name. It wasn’t a plea, but it fell on her ears like one. She’d gotten him killed once. Would she do it again, for the satisfaction of beating up a necromancer who didn’t seem as deadly as advertised?

She swallowed the screaming urge to fight, to not bow her head to any yoke at all, and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Fine, then. Tell me why you’re not something I should put down like a rabid dog. Tell me why you’re so misunderstood. But you can do it while I untie him.”

Without waiting for the Ghoul’s okay, she put her back to him, bent over Demalion, got his wrists freed. He whispered, “Careful, Shadows.”

She shrugged. She was getting the measure of Tierney Wales now. He was a runner, not a fighter, a little paranoid. Probably with reason. And he was either cat-curious or desperately lonely. Otherwise, she and Demalion would have woken to a gutted, abandoned apartment and another dead end.

Wales said, “I only knocked you out so you wouldn’t do anything hasty. I heard you’re good at hasty.”

“So you zapped us with a Hand of Glory?”

Wales leaned against the front door. “What do you want, Shadows?”

“To find out who’s selling Hands of Glory to kids.”

“Not me,” he said. It might have been more convincing if he weren’t still hand in Hand with his favored talisman.

“Circumstance, evidence, and word of mouth suggest otherwise.”

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. It’s . . . vile. Look, do you even really know what these are?”

Demalion inserted himself into the conversation, his tone laconic, cooling Sylvie’s temper. “The Hand of Glory is the left or sinister hand of a murderer, severed after death by hanging, treated magically to create a burglar’s or assassin’s tool.”