Lyn Benedict: Ghosts & Echoes

“None of your business,” Sylvie said, but without temper. For a thirtysomething cop, he radiated boyish earnestness. His blond hair, sticking up in goofy tufts, his ready-to-grin expression—they made her think of a particularly scruffy golden retriever. Amiable, eager, a disaster about to happen.

“Guess not,” he said. Silence fell. She counted silently to five and gave herself bonus points when he only made it to three. “Still, I’m here an’ all—might as well help out.”

“Thought I was supposed to help you,” Sylvie said. She traded the gun for binoculars, took a look at some activity at the far end of the lot—drug deal maybe, two men, their cars mated back to front, leaning out of their driver’s-side windows to talk to each other. After a few minutes, a swap of goods, they both drove off.

“Can you?” he asked. His hands tightened on the back of his neck, fingers stirring new cowlicks into life.

“I haven’t read your file,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on taking your case.”

“Yeah, Alex said you had a thing about cops. She gave me a ton of warnings. Said you could be rough to deal with.”

Sylvie bit back several responses that would have done nothing but prove that point. “I’m listening now.”

He fidgeted in the seat. “Weird to talk about it. I been trying not to think about it too much, y’know? I filled out those forms at your office—you know the forms? It’s sneaky stuff. The questions all look normal unless—”

“Unless your problem is something out of the ordinary,” Sylvie said. “I wrote those forms. But they’re only guide-posts. I like to talk about the situation. Face-to-face with my client. If you want to be my client.”

He grimaced but collapsed into stillness—almost still—his fingers kept working at his nape. “I’m possessed. Or something.” His mouth turned down, a fermata of long-held distress, but when he became aware of her scrutiny, he forced a smile. “But hey. Maybe I’m just fuckin’ crazy.” It wasn’t a good smile.

“Possessed by what?” she asked. “Any idea?”

If he said demons, she was out of here. She believed in leaving them strictly to other professionals. Sylvie had faced them down in two incarnations: the succubi—troublesome but not deadly—and the dire hound that had nearly destroyed her. Those were external threats, though; demons that could crawl inside a man, possess him? Those were something far worse, tangling victim and attacker into one single entity. Sylvie tried not to borrow more trouble than she could defeat. Especially not now. Not while she still felt raw.

Still, the odds were good Wright had just seen too many showings of The Exorcist , and he really was “just fuckin’ crazy.” Most problems people struggled with were real-world problems. And, as Sylvie had tried to point out to Alex, cops had a higher percentage of them than most.

“Oh god,” Wright muttered. “Possessed by a what ? I didn’t even think about a what! I just thought it was a ghost, you know, some dead guy hanging out. God, what are whats ?”

“Ghost? Of a person?” It was unusual enough that for a moment she forgot about the hot night, her discomfort, her boring case, and turned to face him fully.

“Are there other kinds? Dog ghosts? I’m possessed by Lassie?” He grinned, but a void of terror was opening in his hazel eyes.

She hurried to soothe it away. Freaked-out clients were no good. “Your instincts are probably correct.” If he wasn’t crazy. “A ghost. A person. How’d you discover—”

It was a surprisingly tricky question. Somehow it felt like she was asking, Hi, how’d you get that nifty STD?

“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” he said. “No séances, no Ouija boards, and our apartment’s only haunted by the specter of rent increases.” Wright rested his head on his forearms, finally allowing his hair to escape the death grip he’d had on it. He turned his head to look at her, cheek sliding damply along his arm.

“It’s screwing everything up,” he said. “I’m on unpaid leave, and I can’t afford that. I could barely afford the plane fare.”

“Not a local, then?” she asked. She should have known. The accent was wrong, clipped instead of fluid, rapid-fire, a shade too loud, a bit nasal. In south Miami, the cops spoke with liquid accents or lazy drawls, better suited for the languor of the tropics.

“Chicago,” he said, that tiny little chuff at the front of it. He closed his eyes. “Born ’n bred ’n dead. Not a joke. I died.”

“How?” she asked. Her heartbeat quickened, uncomfortable with the invocation of Chicago. She was trying to forget Chicago, trying to forget what she had saved and who she had let die. The whole purpose of her so-called vacation had been to put Chicago behind her, and now Alex foisted Wright on her?

“Docs thought it might be lightning. The whole week was kinda a blur,” he said. “Like being on a bender that you didn’t need drugs for.”

Sylvie’s stomach clenched. She knew what he’d been doing on his “bender.” He’d been looking for a missing god. Her last big case coming back to haunt her. She wanted to turn him down, no matter that she felt for him. She didn’t want to look back and remember what she had lost.

“How’d you get my name?” she asked. Her voice was rough; his eyes flew open, searching her face. She kept her expression impassive, yielding nothing though her stomach churned. It was a valid question. She might have a reputation as the go-to girl in the field of dealing with the Magicus Mundi , but it was a narrow field. A random cop would have as little luck coming up with her name as a teenager knowing the head of the SATs testing board.

Wright grinned suddenly, wide and white, nearly manic. “Always wanted a chance to say this. Baby, you’re the girl of my dreams. Or in my dreams, at least. But don’t tell my wife. She won’t understand. She doesn’t understand any of it. Can’t say I do either. Why me?”

Sylvie sank down into her seat, ignoring the new line of sweat trickling down her spine. Not heat this time. Nerves. She picked up the binoculars, took another look around the dark lot, trying to think. Just because he came from Chicago. Just because he’d been involved in the god’s mess. Just because he knew her name. None of that made it her responsibility.

A darker thought touched her. Maybe the god of Justice was involved, trying to push Sylvie in a direction she didn’t want to go. She didn’t work in the cause of justice; she simply helped individuals with problems. She wasn’t the god’s good little soldier, and she thought he’d understood that.

“Hey,” Wright said. He reached out, a movement in her periphery; she jerked away, let the binoculars drop rather than let him take them from her. “Don’t turn me away. You don’t wanna help. I get that. Don’t know why, but I get it. Thing is, I need your help.”

“I don’t think I’m what you need,” Sylvie said. “I work the Magicus Mundi beat, but I’m a blunt instrument. I don’t do magic, and I don’t diagnose magical ailments.”

“Magicus . . .” he prompted.

“Mundi,” she finished, thinking, dammit, she knew better than to wave unfamiliar terms around in front of a cop. “It’s the world that runs along with ours. It’s where the . . . stuff comes from. And no, it’s not an actual place; more like an overlay.”

“You think that’s what happened? Something from there got inside me?” All fidgets again, zipping the seat belt between his fingers, avoiding her eyes.

He wanted to be possessed. To be haunted. To have the simple explanation, impossible as it was. Sylvie wondered how scared you had to be of being mentally ill to prefer the idea of a ghost, and bit back her first response. “I don’t know. It’s beside the point. I can’t help you. You want an actual witch or someone like that. A curandera or houdon.