Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

Without wanting to, she remembered Wales’s comment that no good ever came of mingling life with death. While she wanted to be thrilled that Bella had recovered, it only raised sick dread in her stomach. “She taking visitors?”

“Ask her lawyers,” Suarez said. “She’s sure not talking to me. It seems to be a common thing these days. Me asking questions and getting shut out.”

“You can’t unknow things,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes aphorisms are right. Ignorance is bliss.”

“My son died. His killers have vanished. You tell me they transformed, which means nothing to me. And all the help I get from the bosses is a warning to drop it. I’ve got teenage cat burglars from high-class families waltzing through walls and alarms, dropping dead and coming back to life. Tell me, Shadows, how is this bliss?”

“Knowledge obligates you to do something about it,” she said. Across the parking lot, the doorman stepped back, allowing Wright entrance. “Gotta go, Lio.” She disconnected to his “Wait!” and hastened across the asphalt, nodding briefly to the doorman as she joined Wright.

The condominium apartments stretched tall and narrow, and the glass-sided elevator that they rode in gave them a wheeling, sunlit view of the bay. The doorman rode with them in wary silence until they reached nearly to the top floor. Odalys wasn’t a penthouse dweller, lived three floors below that lofty space, but Sylvie bet that she wanted to be. It was part of what made Odalys hard for her to figure.

Sylvie had dealt with voodoo kings who wanted power via infant sacrifice, succubi who wanted revenge, werewolves who were hungry for territory, and, of course, Lilith, who wanted to unseat her god. What she hadn’t dealt with was someone who was utterly money-oriented.

Magic-users often started out trying to gain wealth through magic—witness Zoe—but all too soon they traded that desire for more magic, ever more, until working it became as consuming as any addiction. Sylvie supposed it might be heady, finding that you had the ability to bend reality to your will, to push back the line between the probable, the possible, and the previously inconceivable. But humans weren’t innately magical, not like the natural denizens of the Magicus Mundi , and it always, always went wrong.

If Odalys was truly using magic only as a means for profit . . . Sylvie wasn’t sure if that was more dangerous or less.

From the moment the doorman opened the door into Odalys’s condo, Sylvie knew they were on the wrong track. The apartment smelled stale, the air flat and unstirred by human warmth. Their footfalls, even on the tiled entryway, were absorbed into the silence like water into a dry sponge. Not only was Odalys not at home, but she hadn’t been there for some time. It took at least a week to get that particular dead-air taste, and—Sylvie discreetly brushed her fingers along the top of the leather couch—a thin layer of dust was beginning to bloom, invisible, but slightly sandy against her skin.

“She hasn’t been here for days,” Sylvie said.

The doorman bobbed his head, gelled hair never shifting. “That’s right. I haven’t seen her at all.”

Wright asked about visitors, anyone that the doorman might recognize. Sylvie kept an ear out, listening through the name-dropping. No one really important, a few corporate businessmen, a banker—she noted that name to compare to Caudwell’s money manager. It’d be nice if they were the same man, or at least part of the same firm, another data point to seal the connection between Odalys and the dead women.

She opened the refrigerator—emptied. Cupboards revealed china dishes and silver-plated utensils, but no food. Either Odalys ate out exclusively, or she’d cleaned herself out.

The bedroom was palatial, a wide expanse of space dominated by a luxurious bed overlooking the ocean. The room was color-muted, everything in tones of white and dust, and the drawers and closets, when she opened them, were emptied. Odalys had found somewhere else to live. And knowing her, she had traded up.

Sylvie gnawed her lip, wondering what Odalys considered more livable than an eighteen-hundred-square-foot condo apartment with optional maid service and rooftop pool.

Something she doesn’t have to share, her little voice said, always more tuned into the dark side of humanity. Greed begets selfishness.

Someplace illicit also, Sylvie thought. If it was all on the up-and-up, Odalys would have broken her condo lease or sublet it rather than leave it open for dust bunnies to colonize; the same mind that made defective Hands of Glory and found a way to turn a profit on them wouldn’t let real estate lie fallow.

Sylvie shook herself. She was getting ahead of herself. The condo hadn’t been empty for months, a bare week maximum. That was hardly time enough to make assumptions about Odalys’s living situation. Hell, Sylvie had been gone longer from her own apartment, and she hadn’t even stopped the mail.

“She picking up her mail?” Wright said in the background, as if he had been following along with her thoughts.

“She is,” the doorman said. “Though I haven’t seen her do it. But I only work the day shift.”

“How about just giving us a call if she shows up?” Sylvie suggested. Her hand delved into her wallet, short-circuited the “I can’t do that” expression, which turned acquisitive within seconds.

“Really?” she asked. The bills in her hand drew a frown from Wright—jealousy, she diagnosed, from the cop who had to get results the hard way.

“Well, I’m not supposed to—”

“I just want to talk to Odalys.”

The doorman, his eyes on the slide of green, didn’t look like he cared about her reasons. She counted out the money toward him, watched his fingers twitch when she hit two hundred dollars, and held it out to him.

“I do believe in value for my money,” she said. “If I give you this, and you don’t call, I’ll come and take it back.” She shifted her coat aside to show him the waist strap of her holster. She did so like working in Miami, where no one would mistake the nylon webbing for anything but what it was.

“What if I don’t see her?” He licked his lips.

“Look hard,” Sylvie said.

She left him with her card, corralled Wright, and headed out the door. He trotted to keep up with her, and said, “You sure you should be flashing that cash?”

“Might as well be useful,” Sylvie said.

“It’s stolen.”

“The guy’s dead. Not like he’ll object.” Her stomach was sour. Sooner or later, she was going to have to decide how much her sister was to blame for this. How much Odalys was.

“Demalion was dead. I was dead. Bella was dead. People come back,” Wright said.

A slow, evil grin found its way to Sylvie’s lips, chased away that indecision. Bella. She would know where to find Odalys, and since she’d died from taking Odalys’s advice, there’d be no protestations of loyalty. Bella, newly resurrected, was ripe for questioning.

SYLVIE PULLED THE TRUCK INTO THE GROVE AGAIN, FELT AS IF IT SETTLED into a groove that she’d been wearing through the city. Wright said, “You think her parents are going to let you just waltz in and talk to their daughter? She died yesterday. They’ll be keeping her close, dialing their lawyer, suing the hospital.”

Sylvie shook her head. “I’d lay money that Bella’s parents are still out of the country. By the time they got the call that Bella was sick to death, then dead, then alive again . . . They’re still traveling. We’ve got a few hours at least.”

“So you think the newly undead daughter of the house is just sitting in there by her lonesome? That’s taking latchkey to an extreme.”