Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

Demalion narrowed his brows. “Was he?”

“You were ther—” Sylvie shook her head. Wright had been there for that part, until Demalion, pushy and protective, had clawed his way back to the surface. “Yeah,” she said finally. “He was. First thing tomorrow, I’m going after Odalys.”

They traveled back to Sylvie’s apartment in a silence punctuated only by environmental noise: the thrum of the engines, the hiss of other cars passing—the streets busy even after midnight—the occasional distant siren. Eventually, Sylvie reached for the radio, just to keep herself from saying what needed to be said, smothering the words under mediocre rock.

She wasn’t up for a fight, not while driving, not when she felt the weakness of the argument in her bones. It might be Wright’s body, and Wright should get to use it all the time, but dammit, she was enjoying working with Demalion again.

Still, once she’d pulled the truck into her parking spot, cut the lights, the ignition, she took a breath and turned to her quiet passenger. “You need to let Wright—”

Demalion put a hand over her mouth. “A night? One night. One night’s nothing to him. To me? To us?” He moved his hand away, and before she could say yes or no, he leaned in and kissed her.

She met his kiss, chasing that tempting familiarity in an unfamiliar form, lips soft against hers, stubble rasping against her palm. The kiss ended, but she didn’t pull away, leaned in closer, reclaiming his mouth. Making it all familiar. The way his hands moved, one settling at her left hip, the other closing on her nape like a cat’s teeth. The soft sounds they made together. The words she felt him breathe against her tongue. Missed you. Afraid I’d lost you.

She collapsed into him, all her willpower draining away, her hands questing for skin, for closer contact. Worming her fingers into his shirt, the warmth of his skin, that slick curved scar—Sylvie jerked away, hitting the horn with her elbow and startling herself all over again. Her breath was uneven; her lips stung.

“Syl—”

“No,” she said. “He has so little he can trust right now. If he can’t trust us?”

“He wouldn’t have to know—”

“You do love your secrets, ISI man,” she said. It wasn’t a friendly reminder. They’d first started dating on a lie. That was the thing she had to remember. Demalion might be a good man at heart, but he had been trained by those who were less particular about their ethics. “Let me point out,” she added, “you’re the one who has the most to lose if he decides you’re a threat.”

“Would you help him?” Demalion asked. “Choose him over me?”

Sylvie got out of the truck, slamming the door hard enough to echo along the street. She felt bad for her neighbors: First the horn, now this. She watched Demalion come out the passenger’s-side door, the clawed hood between them, her fingers tight on the metal as if she had been the one to mark it. She waited until she had control of her voice, her temper, her own disappointment and fear. “He’s the one who’s alive. You tell me who I’m supposed to choose.”

Demalion’s eyes widened, but he only nodded, a quick jerk of acknowledgment. She stormed up the stairs, making the slats jounce beneath her steps. She’d reached her apartment door before she heard him begin his own climb.

The apartment was quiet and dark, but Sylvie’s nerves reacted instinctively; she found the gun in her hand before the door was more than a few inches open.

“Burglars?” Demalion said behind her.

One of the pluses of having very little in the way of stuff; her apartment was easy to keep clean and easy to notice when someone else had been in it. Especially since they’d made no effort to hide their visit.

Her living room was a jumble of opened drawers, strewn magazines, books tumbled on the floor, sofa cushions thrown pell-mell about the place.

“No,” she said, reholstered her gun. “Zoe.” The lock hadn’t been broken or otherwise disengaged, and while the existence of Hands of Glory made that a moot point, Sylvie kind of recognized the mess. Or rather, the temper behind it.

“Looking for her cash.”

“Yeah, that’s my thought,” Sylvie said.

“At least you know she’s alive,” he said.

“Alive and pissed,” Sylvie said.

“I think that’s your bloodline’s default mood,” Demalion said, and she whipped around to look at him. Did he know? Had he found out about Lilith?

“I’m more concerned with how she got in,” Sylvie said. He didn’t look like he knew. But this was Demalion. He was good at hiding his emotions, and now he had an extra layer of mask to do it in.

“Key?” He picked up a magazine, smoothed it absently, set it beside the television.

“She doesn’t have one,” Sylvie said. Her throat felt tight, her eyes dry and tired. “But there were four kids at Bayside. God, what if they all have Hands? What if Zoe just borrowed one?” If she’d spent the night attempting to save Zoe from herself, and the girl had just wandered off and put herself right back in danger—

“They’re bonding to the Hands, right?” Demalion asked. “You said that Bella girl did. Doubt they’d lend them out. Don’t borrow trouble.” He slouched back against the wall, scratched at Wright’s incoming stubble. “Think about it. It’s not all that late. If she had come here with a Hand, there’d be paramedics tending to all your neighbors who woke up freaked-out at collapsing in front of their TVs.”

Sylvie sighed, studied the wreckage; it was mostly disarray and not damage. There was that at least. “I keep a spare key at the office. She probably lifted it. Planning to get her stuff back. Even before I stole her cash.”

“You really didn’t give her a key?”

“No,” Sylvie said. “Didn’t give my parents one either.” She met his disbelieving gaze with her own. “What? I deal with weird shit, and sometimes it follows me home. You think I want them to walk into that unexpectedly just ’cause Mom decides to bring me a houseplant? My parents aren’t supernatural entities who can eat intruders.”

“Hey,” Demalion said. “My dad was an archaeologist.”

She met his gaze, and said, “No, he wasn’t. You never met the man. He died hundreds of years before you were born.”

“What the hell, Shadows?”

“Sphinxes gestate extremely slowly. A thousand years or so. I don’t think there was a lot of archaeology being done back then.”

His lips thinned. In Demalion’s body, that expression had been intimidating. In Wright’s, it looked . . . tired. “I hate that you know more about my life than I do,” he said. “Just to get that out there.”

“Not my fault you and your mom don’t communicate.”

His shoulders drooped, and Sylvie felt the instinctive urge to soothe the pain of her hasty words. His taste was still on her lips, and it would be so easy to reach up, pull him down, and kiss his fears away. She shook her head, busied herself picking up the sofa cushions and replacing them. “I’ll get the couch made up for you.”

“Not the bed?”

“Couch,” she said.

She hunted the spare pillow that had been on the couch before recalling that Demalion and she had dragged it back to her bed; nausea swept through her again. She’d been so close to saying yes to Demalion, too close. Then and now.

Couch assembled into a facsimile of a bed again, she left him to it. Stumbling over a scatter of books—Zoe and her brutal sense of fair play at work again. There hadn’t been any hiding place in Sylvie’s bookshelves, but she had dumped Zoe’s books, so Zoe dumped hers—Sylvie homed in on her bed, shoved the pile of searched linens to the floor, and passed out on the bare mattress.