Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

He recoiled; Zoe said, “Nice. He was just helping me, since you couldn’t be bothered—” But the look in her eyes was all about hunger and disappointment, an old and ugly expression on her young face. Sylvie shuddered, took Demalion along for the ride. Zoe had defeated Strange, had been drenched in ghostly blood; had she absorbed something with it?

Demalion whispered, “Trouble?” in her ear, a warm breath, a concern he wanted to share with her. She jerked away from him. Wright was dead, but it was hard to remember that when Demalion was walking around in his skin. She couldn’t allow herself to forget, couldn’t just accept it with wholehearted gladness. Wright was dead.

THE OFFICERS KEPT PACE WITH HER, SHOOTING HER RESENTFUL glances. They’d no doubt prefer her cuffed and in the back of a cruiser. Instead, they backed their cruisers away from her truck, allowed her to squeeze both Demalion and Zoe into the cab with her, and drive off, as if she’d just been visiting a party that had gotten out of hand. She stopped at the side of the road, just out of sight of the driveway, and waited.

“What are we doing?” Zoe asked. “I want to go home.” There was a tremble in her voice. Even Ms. Brat had a limit, and she’d reached hers.

“You’re the reason we’re out here,” Sylvie said. “You don’t get to make demands.” Unfair, she knew. She’d have come for the other teens, come to deal with Odalys and the Hands no matter what, but she wasn’t feeling forgiving.

They waited in the silence until Sylvie saw what she had waited for. Some tight knot in her chest eased as the cruiser drove by, Odalys a prisoner in the backseat. With three wealthy families about to get the bad news, ready to look for someone to blame, jail was the most likely outcome.

Wright, she thought, would have been pleased. The real world triumphing over the forces of the Magicus Mundi .

“She was going to kill you, Sylvie, and she didn’t think I’d care. ” Zoe stared after the cruiser with bruised shock settling into her face, aging her.

“How long do you think jail will hold her?” Demalion asked.

“First parole hearing, she’s out of there, if she even gets convicted,” Sylvie said.

Beside her, Zoe stiffened, shivered. “She’s going to be so mad.”

Sylvie leaned into Zoe briefly, shoulder to shoulder, a nonverbal message of reassurance. “The ISI watches police reports, right?”

Demalion shrugged, muscles still stiff, an awkward hunch and drop instead of his usual fluid shift. “If the body count’s high enough. Strange enough. If the police mark the death off as drug-related, they won’t pay much attention.”

“So no help from that quarter,” Sylvie said. “Not a surprise.”

“What’s the ISI?” Zoe asked.

“None of your business,” Sylvie said. It lacked bite; at least Zoe was around to ask annoying questions. Alive, well, and whiny. Sylvie had never liked that irritating pitch in her sister’s voice before, but she kept thinking about Bella and the stranger in her skin. Zoe could have been erased, a murderous stranger in her body, her bed, her house, just biding her time. Sylvie shivered.

Odalys had to be watched. And Bella—Patrice Caudwell, rather—she had to be dealt with also. There was considerable mopping up yet to do.

She put the truck in gear, started them down the dark highway. Never enough lights in the Keys, and what there were only made the darkness more present. Demalion traded a glance with her over Zoe’s bent head. The girl fingered the shadow traceries on her arm with obsessive focus, the swirls, loops, and splashes the ghost’s blood had left behind.

When they had reached the city, Zoe said, “Will you stop the truck, please?” It was small and polite; her face was pallid even in the reflected taillights, her eyes sunken.

Sylvie pulled over to the nearest convenience store, let Zoe out. Zoe crawled over Demalion, too frantic to wait for him to gain control of his new limbs. He caught at her when she tripped, nearly fell. She pulled away and threw up in the garbage can, clinging to the plastic rim with shaking fingers.

“Hey, easy,” Demalion said, staggering out of the truck like a three-day drunkard.

Sylvie shoved him back toward it. “Sit. My sister.”

She ran a hand over Zoe’s back; the girl shook. Her voice shook also. “She tried to kill me, Sylvie.”

“So you’ve learned you can’t trust magic-users,” Sylvie said. “You through? Let’s get you cleaned up.” With a stay-there wave of her hand, she left Demalion guarding her truck and ushered Zoe inside. The fluorescent light was unkind to the both of them; Zoe looked dead white, ghastly grey against the bright flush of her lips. The mirrored shelves told Sylvie she looked like she’d lost a brawl in a mud pit.

She ignored the clerk’s stare, sent Zoe into the bathroom, and leaned against the door. Still standing guard. Still distrustful that Zoe was safe. It could have gone otherwise so easily. If Zoe hadn’t been so strong-willed, if she had been like her friends, she’d be dead and gone, another hole in Sylvie’s life. Lilith’s blood, waking to power, such a small thing to save her.

Then again, it had saved Sylvie, too.

Didn’t mean Sylvie regretted killing Lilith, though. The woman had been a menace. Immortal and crazy-obsessive wasn’t a good look on anyone.

Long minutes passed lost to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the Slushee machine, the scent of burning coffee and old hot dogs, and, finally, Sylvie tapped on the door. “Zo?”

“It won’t come off,” Zoe said, muffled by the closed door.

Sylvie went in, found Zoe sudsed up to the elbow and water spilled all over the sink and floor. Sylvie grabbed a handful of rough paper towels, wetted them, and washed the soap off; Zoe stood frighteningly passive under her ministrations as if she hoped Sylvie could do what she couldn’t. But when Sylvie finished washing the lather away, the stain was still there, like some tribal tattoo whose edges had been softened by time.

“Great,” Zoe muttered. “People are going to think I’m some grunge loser druggie. They’re going to be wondering if I have piercings!”

Sylvie found a stiff smile. “Don’t be melodramatic. It’s hardly the end of the world. Just a scar. And scars are the price we pay for surviving.”

“Now who’s being melodramatic?” Zoe sulked. “Now what?”

“That’s up to you. I’ve got Demalion to deal with, and I’m tired. You’ve proved you can survive on your own. What do you want me to do with you?”

The little dark voice tried to answer the question for Zoe, a slink of aggression, the paranoid precaution of a killer. It’s the mark of Cain; best be rid of her before—

Sylvie said, “Don’t have all night, Zo,” ruthlessly impatient, not with her sister but with her own dark self that wanted to steal her triumph. Zoe was alive. Zoe was safe. Everything else was irrelevant.

“Fine,” Zoe said. The shock was clearing from her face; her shoulders, which had been held so stiff and tight since Strange’s death, began to lower, soften. “I want a pack of cigarettes. I want it now. Then I want you to take me home so I can smoke in peace. And tomorrow I want you to give me my money back so I can start looking into scar removal. If lasers can blast a tattoo to smithereens, they can get rid of this . . . thing.” She held her arm out at length and sneered at it. “I won’t be marked by her.”

“You don’t want to come home with me? You’ll be okay on your own?”

“I killed a ghost that was trying to eat me. I think I can babysit myself.”

Sylvie swallowed hard. It hurt, but it was true. She forked over a damp fifty-dollar bill from her wallet. Zoe eyed it with irritation. “You’ve been spending my money?”