Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“You’re babbling, Wright,” she said. “I think Demalion’s rotting your brain.” Though it had just been a random crack, it made her stomach clench. If the lich ghost was one of the Ghoul’s takeover spirits, could feed on a soul, what could Demalion do to Wright if he tried?

“I didn’t come straight here,” he said. “I stopped by your parents’ house first.”

“You what ?”

“Evidence,” he said. “Of the concrete and nonmagical kind. We were sloppy when we tossed your sister’s room, just looking for weird shit. I went back to see if I could find out where the weird shit came from.”

“And?” She should have thought of that herself. If it hadn’t been Zoe at stake, she might have.

He patted the newspaper beside him, shifted it, and revealed a book. One of the innocuous teen witch manuals, heavy on fashion and style, light on practice, that Zoe had had on her shelf.

“You were all about Odalys when we were here, back-room chats and big ideas, but I was in the shop. She uses these gummed labels on her stock. Pale blue. Unusual. Pretentious. Probably pricey. No wonder she charges so much for candles.”

“You have a point to make, presumably,” Sylvie said, still brittle, though she knew where he was going with this. She shifted uncomfortably on the concrete, flipped off a pair of skateboarding preteens who were gawking at them.

Wright opened the book, turned the flap to face her.

Gummed label. Pale blue.

“So?” Wright said. “Do I get to play or what?”

Sylvie bit back the truth, that Wright’s detecting was too little, too late, that she’d already connected Odalys and Zoe from her sister’s own mouth. But Wright wanted to be a detective. Wanted to be useful.

“Welcome aboard,” she said. Sylvie rose, peered into the glass door. A faint shimmer greeted her, a prismatic sheen that raised marching goose bumps across her arms, her back, her nape. Yeah, not breaking into the shop. Not when there was obviously a magical defense system up and running. Cops were bad enough. Being lobotomized, paralyzed, or fed to some magical monster would be worse, and besides, fighting it off would bring the cops, making it a lose-lose.

“Want to help me track down Bella’s friends?”

“Hell yeah,” he said. She held out her hand and pulled him to his feet, just as the first raindrops spattered the cement about them.

“All right. But I drive.”

A LITTLE BIT OF EFFORT WITH ZOE’S CONFISCATED PHONE AND A REVERSE directory yielded the address of the third member of Bella’s little coterie: Jasmyn Tsang, another likely Hand owner. If Bella was the queen bee, then Jaz was the cheerleader and boy bait.

Like Bella’s, Jasmyn’s parents were out of town—on business, on vacation, on some part of their life that didn’t require the presence of a teenager. The housekeeper let Wright and Sylvie in without question or any hint of interest, an old-fashioned maid: stout, black hair in a tight bun, wearing a determined expression as well as a uniform. The vacuum roared in another room, waiting for her return. She let Sylvie get Jasmyn’s name out before cutting her off, and saying, “She and her friends are in the pool house, where I don’t clean. Out the back.” With that, she turned around and went back to her vacuuming.

They followed the scent of chlorine through rooms still dark and unlit, though it was nearly midday. The kitchen was sterile, smelled of bleach and polished metal, and nothing whatsoever of food.

Wright glanced around and opened the refrigerator. “Yeah,” he said. “What I thought. Don’t any of you eat at home?”

“Jeez, don’t let that dragon catch you snooping,” Sylvie said, then shrugged. “Besides, it’s not like you do any better. You probably memorized all the takeout within a five-mile radius of your—”

“Maybe Demalion lives on takeout. We cook. We don’t want Jamie to be a fast-food junkie.”

“Just shut the door,” she said. “We’re not the food police.”

Beyond the sliding glass doors, the pool flashed momentary sunlight into the house, a slow pavane of water rippling in the light breeze. Sylvie pushed the door open; beyond the rectangular pool edged in creamy, pitted limestone and blue-checked tile, a small outbuilding nestled between ferns and potted key lime trees. Bamboo shades hid the inside from their sight, something that made Wright twitch nervously, as if he felt he should be approaching it, gun drawn.

“Easy,” she said. “If we’re lucky, which we deserve to be, her friends will be the rest of the team. Last thing we want to do is startle them and find ourselves sleeping facedown in the pool.”

“You think she’d try that? Here, in her home?”

“Depends on whether she’s heard about Bella or not,” Sylvie said. She headed toward the pool house, jumped when the dolphin statues at the head of the pool spurted on and turned the pool into fluttering waves of sound.

At the pool house, she slid the door open without knocking, surprising three teenagers in a half-dressed huddle on a futon in the center of a frantically cluttered room.

At the heart of their huddle . . . Sylvie moved on instinct, snatching up the three Hands in their midst, jumbling them into a tangle of stiff fingers and withered flesh, before they could be used against her.

Jasmyn shrieked. The boy nearest the door tried to run, hobbled by jeans undone at the waist and sliding downward. Wright snagged him by the seat of those jeans, yanked them up, and slung the boy back toward the futon. “Siddown,” Wright said. The boy staggered and sat.

A bit abrupt, a bit aggressive, but Sylvie looked around the room, mentally ticking off items from the stolen list, including the pool table and the painting that Lisse Conrad had listed as Three Nudes Dance . Yeah, Wright was entitled to come all cop on them.

Sylvie, looking at the painting, thought that dance wasn’t the right word for that contortion of body parts. It looked a tiny bit familiar—the positions Jaz and the boys had been aiming for when Sylvie and Wright broke up their fun.

“Name?” Wright asked.

“Trey,” jeans boy said. He was peak-faced and freckled, wearing a gem-encrusted Rolex taken from the South Beach jewelers.

“You don’t have to answer him,” the other boy said. Beefy, blond-haired, dark-eyed, built along the lines of a football player. He found his shirt, pulled it on over his head, and sat back, arms crossed over his chest.

“I’ll call the cops,” Jasmyn whispered. She shivered in her bra top and skirt, and Sylvie thought that if the football player had been thinking or had any manners at all, he would have offered her the shirt. Jasmyn’s was flung to the far side of the pool table. Wright reached out a long arm and snagged it, tossed it to the girl.

“You do that, and you’ll be stuck explaining to Detective Suarez what nice children like you are doing with severed body parts,” Sylvie said. “You’ll be explaining why your fingerprints are in stores across South Beach, in nonpublic areas.”

Jasmyn subsided into her cushion, looking confused and unhappy. The football player shot an angry glance up at Sylvie, and said, “You won’t turn us in. Not unless you want Zoe to take the fall, too. I know who you are. Know what you do. She pointed your office out to us, told us to steer clear. That you didn’t have anything worth stealing.”

Sylvie closed off the instant wash of anger, kept her tone brusque and impersonal. Authoritative. “Don’t mouth off, kid. You’re an amateur. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to take the Hands, and you’re going to say thank you for saving our miserable lives so that we don’t have to die like Bella. If you’re extremely cooperative, and tell me what I want to know, I might give you time enough to return the stolen merchandise to the shops before I call the cops.”