Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“If you’ve been cursed, and you want me to point a gun at whoever did it, make them sorry, make them pay—I’m your girl. If you want me to defend you against an outside force hell-bent on doing damage to you—I can help you there, too. You want me to fix you? I’m not that kind of talent.”

“I don’t care.” Wright looked across at her mulishly, his jaw tight, his hands fisting his baggy pants. “I don’t know your Magicus Mundi , and I don’t want to. But I do know I need you. Just you. I been looking at curanderas, bokors, at self-proclaimed psychics, all that shit I never believed before. I even went to see some upper-class seer in a glass tower.” His hands stopped their kneading, locked tight against each other, knuckles pale in the gloom.

“Anna D?” Sylvie’s breath hitched in her chest. Wright had been searching hard if he found her. The woman was low-profile, the better to hide the fact that though she masqueraded extraordinarily well as human, she wasn’t anything of the sort. Anna D might, in fact, be one of the first of the Magicus Mundi denizens—the ageless sphinx. “Anna D sent you to me?”

It was unbelievable. Anna D was Anna Demalion. The sphinx held long grudges, and Sylvie had gotten Anna D’s all-too-human son killed. Anna D wouldn’t send another mortal man into Sylvie’s hands, not after that.

You can never trust a cat, except to count on cruelty, the little dark voice said. And you can’t trust him.

Wright shook his head. “Never laid eyes on her. Her apartment was empty. She’s split. Just another dead end for me.” His words strangled themselves in his throat, getting tighter and tighter.

“I need you, Sylvie. I did dream you, just days ago. A voice in my head that wasn’t mine. ‘Shadows,’ he said. Said you never back down and you never yield. Cedo Nulli. Woke up in a cold sweat, with fuckin’ Latin in my head. Cedo Nulli. Had to look it up, and it was real. So why not you? Took some time, ’cause I didn’t think about you not bein’ local. But here you are, and here I am.”

She wondered vaguely who had turned down the thermostat on the world. Cold sweats indeed. Her name in his dreams. Cedo Nulli. The tat between her shoulder blades itched. It was all too specific to be coincidence; it had to be design, but whose? None of the prospects pleased. Vengeful sphinx? Manipulative god of Justice? Or some villain she hadn’t even thought of, some enemy made with a single careless action she’d already forgotten?

Maybe Alex’s “be nice to the neighbors” policy had something going for it after all.

She leaned back in her worn seat, settling herself into the groove she’d made over the years, and let her breath out slow and steady. It misted against the windshield, fogging her view.

She should turn him down. Refund his money. Get him and the reminders of Chicago out of her life. They’d both be better off.

Keep your lies for the enemy, her little dark voice said. A fool lies to himself.

Sylvie gritted her teeth. Yeah, she’d never been that good at maintaining self-deception. If she said no, Wright would suffer for it; he’d go blundering after the first person who promised him help. The Magicus Mundi was full of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Trust the wrong person, and, crazy or not, he’d be better off dead. Hell, even if he went at it on his own, hunting a ghost he probably didn’t have, he could end up in trouble. Sylvie had heard more than one story of people attracting the very things they were trying to repel. There was a house in the Grove that hadn’t started out haunted until a young wife had decided it might be. Now the house was abandoned, even by squatters.

Her little dark voice grumbled, always complaining. It might disapprove of her lying to herself, but it didn’t want her to embrace Wright either.

Wright sat perfectly still, at ease to a casual glance. But the cords in his neck were tight, his breathing shallow. Waiting for a much-needed answer was always a bitch.

“All right,” Sylvie said. “All right. I’ll take your case. You think you’ve got a ghost? Tell me about it.”

PUT ON THE SPOT, GIVEN A WILLING AUDIENCE, WRIGHT STALLED LIKE an engine unexpectedly taxed. He drummed his fingers, tapped his heels on the dash, and groaned.

Sylvie licked salt from her lips and started with the tried and true: Ask a specific question to get an answer. It worked on small schoolchildren, and it worked on a man with too much on his mind. “So tell me about dying. Your troubles started after that, right?”

“Yeah,” Wright said. “The docs said lightning, but . . .”

“You don’t think so?”

“I saw enough of it that night for sure. It burned the sky.” His eyes glazed, slowly closed, chasing the memory of a night that he could only barely recall. “There was something else. Like a ball.”

“Ball lightning? Rare,” Sylvie said.

He shook his head without opening his eyes. In the dim light, the shadow of his lashes joined and deepened the bruised sockets. “Not lightning. It glowed. Solidly. Fell out of the sky, chased by something . . . horrible.”

Horrible, she thought. There’d been a lot of that. Monsters and cataclysms. Last she’d heard, Chicago was still mopping up.

Wright shifted in the seat, dropped his feet into the wheel well. He contorted severely, pulled his shirt out of his waistband, and peeled it up toward his shoulders. “Only scar I got was this. No lightning flower, just this . . .”

Grimacing, Sylvie flicked on her flashlight, trying to keep it low in case her burglars showed up. Wright, in its unforgiving beam, was too skinny; his ribs stood out like bars, but the skin was smooth, no Lichtenberg burn, no ferned-out blood vessels. He squeezed his shirt higher and showed her the scar he meant. High up on the right side of his rib cage, just beneath his armpit, a glossy white line etched three-quarters of a circle into his side.

“Had a chunk of glass stuck deep, melted into my skin. That’s why the docs said lightning. To melt glass into skin. They said I was lucky it hadn’t gone through my throat. I thought they were right. Thought I was lucky.”

“Glass,” she said. What kind of glass curved so sharply? A buoy, maybe, blown in from the lake but smaller. Something to fit in a man’s palm. Something egg-sized.

Eggs hatch, she thought grimly. For the first time, she considered his claim seriously. But if this had been an egg, it had been broken before it hit him. She reached out, unreasonably intrigued by the gap in the curve, the absence more fascinating than that smooth scar, the shape provoking.

He lowered his shirt, twitched away from her fingers. “Anyway,” he said. “Woke up in the hospital. Some stitches. Some memory loss. They said I’d be fine. But then I started hearing voices in my head. That’s not ‘fine.’ That’s my story. What’s this one?”

Sylvie blinked. He gestured out the windshield. “Shopping mall. Stakeout. What for?”

His story? He’d barely scratched the surface of it. Survival wasn’t a story in itself. How your life changed afterward was. And his, by his own admission, had changed. She studied him for a long moment, aided by his refusal to notice it.

He stared determinedly ahead of him, brow lowering, squinting, as if by concentrating, he could will an answer out of the distantly lit mall. The night outside the windshield stayed quiet, the breeze a gentle murmur in the palm trees, a ruffled wave on the sea.

Usually, given an audience, people fighting the Magicus Mundi wouldn’t shut up about it. So grateful to know they hadn’t slipped from sanity. Not talking about it . . . Sylvie wondered how much of his fidgeting, his nervousness, might be due to his own doubts about his story. Maybe he was crazy, knew it, and was just latching onto an idea, any idea, that absolved him of fault. If it came from the outside, he couldn’t be held responsible for it.