Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“I have a method,” Wales said. “But I designed it around traditional Hands of Glory, the traditional ones. Don’t know how it would work on this one.”

“Can’t we just give it a try?” Sylvie asked.

Wales shook his head. “Not without knowing more about this Hand, about its ghost. I could free it . . . her . . . instead of destroying her, and she’d go after me, maybe her previous master—”

“That’s not an acceptable risk,” Sylvie said.

“Hey, the user knew what he was getting into when he used the Hand in the first place,” Wales said. “Spare your sympathy for someone who deserves it.”

“Teenagers,” she hissed. “Kids. They make dumb-ass choices all the time, and society protects them from it.”

Wales nodded but looked less than convinced. It made Sylvie want to snatch the Hand back, keep it close to her, risk or no risk. Bad enough Zoe was out and about, doing god knew what. Sylvie didn’t want to imagine her dead in some alley, victim of the Ghoul’s puritanical streak.

She swallowed. “Tell me something, Wales. How does mastery work? If I took that Hand? Lit it? Would I be its master? Would it be my soul at stake and not . . . not hers?”

Wales and Wright shared one expression: stunned dismay.

Wright got his words out first. “Syl, you can’t!”

Sylvie shook her head. “Wales, an answer?”

“Possession is most of the law,” he said. “You light it, you own it. At least until the next person picks it up.”

“And the ghost would be able to talk? Like Marco? She might be able to give me info on who made her?”

Wales said, “That’s total conjecture. It took Marco a year to talk to me, and I never left him drenched in milk. It’s risky.”

“Why? I light it, I’m her master, right? You said as much.”

“But these Hands are wrong. . . .”

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” she said.

“I’m a researcher,” Wales said. “Not a risk-taker.”

“Well, welcome to my world,” Sylvie said. She held out her hand, snapped her fingers. Gimme.

Wright made an odd, tight-throated groan, a protest from within, looking startled even as it rattled his teeth. Demalion, making himself felt. Sylvie hadn’t thought there was any overlap, hadn’t thought Demalion could see the world when Wright was in control; she knew Wright couldn’t when Demalion was dominant. But then, Demalion’s senses had always been just a little . . . more than human.

The Ghoul was looking slinky, like any moment now, he’d be out the door, and she’d be out her guide. Sylvie snatched up the Hand from the table, went briefly dizzy with the touch—Wales had been right. It buzzed with magic. With malevolence. But she’d laid her hands on gods, and what was one ghost-possessed Hand to that?

“Risky? Fine. Make it safer. You got salt. Build me a ring. And I’ll light her up inside it. You can hold Marco close, and Wright can—”

“I’m not touching anything dead.”

“Demalion wasn’t so squeamish,” she said.

His attention shifted to his hands with a grimace. If he’d been as young as his son, Jamie, she thought he’d be doing the cootie dance, complete with flailing hands. Any other time, and she might have been amused. She went back to her staredown with Wales, trying to make him see she was doing this, make him see she expected him to help her.

Zoe was out on the streets of Miami, somewhere. Sylvie hadn’t been able to find her, couldn’t see her safe and sound. But she could do this. She could take the ghost’s attention away from Zoe. Try to break whatever bond existed between them. That was worth any risk.

Wales sighed. “Fine. But yeah, you’re going in a ring. And Marco’s coming back, and your guy’s going to have to hold Hands with a dead man.”

Wright backed away, disgust and fear chasing themselves across his face, and while Sylvie’s first instinct was to order him to pick up the damn Hand and hold on, a cooler thought pointed out that he was her client, too. Not just a burden.

“The salt will contain the effect?”

“Not completely,” the Ghoul said. He didn’t sound worried. “But as before, claiming mastery of the other Hands will bring us into sync with it, make us family. Make us not-food.” He grinned at Wright, teeth surprisingly white and bright in his sallow face. “It’s like being a kid again. As long as you hold on to Daddy’s hand, you’re protected. But we’ll be lighting them all this time.”

“Great,” Wright said. Whether it was the Ghoul’s none-too-subtle name-calling, or just fatalism, he bent and picked up the Hand Demalion had dropped earlier.

Sylvie took up Zoe’s Hand of Glory, still tacky with milk, and Wales began making a single-occupant safety zone around her. The circle was barely wider than her outstretched arms, but better that than to run out of salt halfway through and have to brush it into shape; doing that risked adding in impurities. Sucked to have a spell get botched for a misplaced piece of carpet lint.

Wales chucked his lighter in just as he poured the last of the salt; she caught it and took a steady breath. Her skin crawled like a thousand ants were making themselves at home. She really, really didn’t want to do this. The Hand flared hot and furious at the first touch of the flame, shot fiery cinders toward the ceiling, before it settled to a steady hellish blaze. And Sylvie wasn’t alone in the circle any longer.

A woman blurred into shape, stiff and straight with age; her white hair streamed out around her, caught in the heated draft made by the flames. Unlike Marco’s hollow-eyed form, this ghost’s eyes glittered beneath her brows. And unlike Marco, equal parts menacing and drifting, she rocketed from confusion to sheer rage in a millisecond, drew herself up even straighter, hair streaming, and shrieked. Translucent teeth bulged like rat fangs, and her tongue elongated, rolled out, questing, utterly serpentine.

Sylvie’s every hair on her body stood up, screaming in silence for her to get out, to run, to flee.

Instead, she got one finger in her ear, trying to shake off that bone-rattle cry, sharper than a stooping hawk, and thrust the Hand as far from her as she could.

“Wales? A little help?”

The ghost shrieked again, still wordless, and every latch in the room snapped open. Wales tried to get Marco’s Hand lit with trembling fingers, and Wright was on his knees. Something lashed across her skin, gelid, sinuous, painful; the ghost’s tongue licked and stung and struck, forked at the tip, barbed the length of it. It drew her close, pulled at something beneath her skin.

“I lit you,” Sylvie gritted out. “Obey me.”

The tongue coiled around her skin again, questing for her soul, left frostbite and dizziness in its wake, and Sylvie thought she was going to die here, stuck in a circle with a ghost that refused to be mastered.

The salt circle was only salt. She could step out of it, fall out of it, but she’d drag the ghost free also. Free to attack the others in the room.

Two dead souls and a necromancer, her little dark voice said. Not a loss.

Sylvie stutter-stepped, dodged the ghost as she charged; she pivoted and felt the edge of her sneaker grit against the salt. “Wales!”

“Working on it!”

She panted, near panic—the Ghoul was right; the dead and the living shouldn’t interact—and told her inner voice to shut up, that she wasn’t saving herself at the cost of their lives, and hell, she wasn’t even sure their deaths would save her.

They might.

Distracted by her own adrenaline, by fighting her own desire to survive at any cost, she was too slow to dodge the next blow, and the ghost reeled her in, the tongue burning about her waist, caught her by the shoulders, and pressed against her. Sylvie went rigid in horror and repulsion, clawed at the intangible, then . . .