Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

Wales said, “Huh.”

“A little warning!” Sylvie said. “I’ve had all the blackouts I can tolerate for the month.”

“It’s dead,” he said.

“It’s a frickin’ Hand cut off a body, yeah,” Wright said, twitchy as always. “I don’t think it takes a whole lotta know-how to figure that it’s dead.”

“Let me rephrase, then,” Wales said. He studied Wright as he did so. “It looks like a Hand of Glory, but it’s not one. It lacks a ghost. It’s just dead flesh.”

“It worked earlier,” Sylvie said. “Had a ghost, had a fairly active one. Gave the user all sorts of nightmares, reliving her crimes.”

“Shouldn’t have done that,” Wales said absently, turning the Hand this way and that, setting the lighter down. “Part of the packaging is to prevent soul seepage. Thankfully. I can’t imagine sharing Marco’s dreams. Sure that’s what was going on? Not just imagination?”

“Sure enough that we could ID the . . . donor by her memories flooding the kid’s dreams.”

“Her?”

“The dead woman?”

Wales twitched visibly, bobbled the Hand, and only caught it at the last. “It’s a woman’s Hand!” He shot a look back at the other one, and said, “They’re both women’s!”

Wright and Sylvie traded a long, speaking look with each other. Wright’s expression said, He’s kinda slow , and We’re not paying for this, are we? Sylvie shrugged minutely; she wasn’t sure Wales saw a lot of women, living or dead.

Wales muttered, “No, no, no. They’re women’s hands, and they’re never women’s hands.”

“Why not?” Sylvie asked. “Women commit murder, too. They might be a little less likely to hang themselves after, though.” A stray thought occurred. Alex hadn’t said how Patrice Caudwell had died. She would have mentioned something as grisly as an old lady hanging herself. “What happens if they don’t hang? Can they still be bound into the Hands?”

“No,” Wales said. “No. At least . . . Look. It’s all about symbolism. Hanging yourself, a rope around your neck—it keeps your soul tight to the body. Suicide by gunshot, by bleeding out—”

“Soul leaves with the blood. But could it be less significant than you think?”

“That’s not the . . . Tradition dictates men’s Hands. Tradition dictates hanging,” Wales said.

“Tradition changes—”

“No,” he said. “No. It’s like prescription meds. You don’t prescribe the same dose to a woman that you do a man. The . . .” He flailed his hands about, reaching for vocabulary they would understand, and finally came up with a word that made Sylvie want to gag. “The recipe to create the Hands is specific. Detailed. Picky. You don’t just change out pieces of it.”

“Do we care how it got done?” Wright said. “Can’t we just get rid of the things?”

Sylvie shook her head. “It’s a signature of sorts. Tells me something about the person who made them.” For one thing, Wales’s spluttering was the final step to make her erase him from her list of suspects. His dismay seemed entirely too real, the break with tradition too difficult for him to contemplate.

“You’re profiling a body snatcher?” Wright said. “Oh, I hate this.”

“Wales?” she prompted.

The Ghoul picked up Bella’s Hand again, scratched flakes off the coating, clear with a reddish tinge. “They changed more than the gender,” he said. “This is just . . . wrong. It couldn’t have worked.”

“It did. End of discussion,” Sylvie said. She had Bella’s dreams, she had the platinum brooch, she had the Navigator and Bayside and her own bouts of unconsciousness as proof.

“But you just don’t mess around with a formulation to bind a killer spirit!” Wales said. “It’s just too damn risky for the user. The ghost might escape. And then—”

Sylvie sucked in a breath. “You think that’s what happened? The ghost escaped? Went after Bella . . .” It might explain the girl’s illness. “What does soul consumption look like?”

“It doesn’t look like anything,” Wales said. “You just die. All at once. Drop dead in your tracks. Your body might breathe for a little bit, your heart beat, but the shock of having a soul ripped out—”

“The girl I took the Hand from was sick,” Sylvie said.

“No argument,” Wright muttered.

Wales shot him another glance and caught on this time. It wasn’t Demalion behind the skin any longer.

“Sick,” Sylvie said, prodding Wales with her forefinger. His chest was all bone beneath the layers, thin as an anorexic’s. “Could the Hand do that?”

“No,” Wales said. He rubbed at his chest. “If the ghost got free, the girl would have dropped. At least—there’s something just not right with these Hands. . . .”

“Okay, you know what? Forget all that. Let me worry about where they came from. Just tell us how to destroy them.”

Wales tossed Bella’s Hand into the trash. “That one’s done. No ghost? No trouble. The other—”

He picked up Zoe’s Hand with a wary expression, bit back most of his comments so that all she heard was a mumbled, “Wrong,” and she said, “Well?”

Her tone was sharp, but she couldn’t help thinking about Bella—ill and in the hospital, and a ghost mysteriously vanished from its prison. Zoe was next on the chopping block.

“Oh, this one’s active as hell,” Wales said. “I can feel it, even unlit; it’s buzzing, angry and barely contained.” He raised his face, furrowed brow, and upset eyes. “You’ve got to find out who’s making these and stop them. They’re not right. They’re defective. Dangerous. To the user and anyone else.”

Sylvie said, “I’ll get right on that. If you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear them. You’re right. There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. I try to keep it that way.”

“There’s a woman on Calle Ocho. Runs a fancy shop like she’s nothing more than a merchant. But she’s the real deal.”

“She sent us to you,” Wright said.

“Well then,” Wales said. “I’m tapped out.”

“Focus, Ghoul. Tell me how to destroy them.”

“They’re tough,” Wales said. “It’s the binding between the bones and the spirit. You have to destroy one without freeing the other. Otherwise, you’re fighting something that can touch you, hurt you, that you can’t touch. It’s a man boxing hurricane winds on a cliff.”

“An exorcism?” Wright said. “Gotta be a priest around. Surely one of ’em will believe the threat’s real.”

Wales said, “An exorcism would work no better on the Hands of Glory than it would work on you.”

Wright twitched, and Wales continued. “An exorcism is a rite designed to remove a devil or demon from human skin, to send it back to the abyss. A ghost isn’t a devil or a demon. You can’t send it back. You can only send it on. And if it’s not ready to go, then you’re going to have a fight that gets really ugly. A demon’s nothing. It’s not natural to be in human flesh, doesn’t fit. A human spirit? Feels right at home.”

Wright sagged back against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, gripping his shoulders. “So there’s nothing you can do.”

“Nothing I can do for you, no,” Wales said. “All the spells I know are about binding ghosts tighter to flesh. Milk and salt bind them. Put them to sleep,” Wales said. He took another glance at Zoe’s Hand, added, “Usually.”

“Sleep’s not the same as gone,” Sylvie said. “C’mon, Wales, you’ve got to have a way.”

“Age and entropy do it—the longest-used Hand of Glory was only active for three hundred years.”

“Only—” Wright muttered.

“Not an option,” Sylvie said. “You’re telling me that as much as you loathe the slavery forced onto these spirits, you haven’t been looking for a way to break the spell? To send those spirits on?” She gestured broadly, taking in the Hands still hanging from the ceiling, the room, the neighborhood, his entire life. “This is what you’re going to do forever? Truck the Hands around, keeping anyone from using them? That’s not a life. That’s a holding pattern.”