Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“Go get your damn smokes and get back in the car.”

Zoe headed for the door, and Sylvie grabbed her, reeled her in, flailing arms and protest, and crushed her into a hug. She bent her mouth to Zoe’s ear. “I love you, you little bitch. Next time, call me if you get into weird shit, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

Zoe melted against her for a moment, then pushed away. “Yeah. Whatever.” Her lips turned upward, a fragile, half-assed smile. She sauntered out, and underage, without ID, still managed to con a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of the clerk in less than a minute, and headed out into the parking lot.

Demalion slouched against the truck, looking boneless and wiped out. Zoe offered the pack to Demalion, who reached for it with the first graceful movement Sylvie had seen from him since Wright died. He jerked back, fingers short of the paper. He laughed, rusty in his throat. “God, muscle memory exists.”

Sylvie’s good humor faded and faded fast, remembering Wright. “Just get in the car, Demalion.”

“So you’re Demalion?” Zoe said, squinting at him in the lights. “I thought you were, like, dark-haired. Alex said—”

“Bad dye job,” Demalion said. Zoe looked at him, ground out her cigarette only half-smoked, and said, “You’re lying. You’re like them. A ghost. That’s not your body.”

“It is now,” Demalion said.

“I could get you out of it,” Zoe said.

“Get in the damned car,” Sylvie snapped. “Or I’ll leave you two to get acquainted here.”

She pushed at Zoe’s shoulder, watched the girl wince—well, she had been thrashing around pretty hard trying to get free. No half measures for her little sister. Sylvie felt obscurely proud. “Get in the truck.”

Zoe clambered up, Demalion after her. Sylvie went round to the driver’s seat and, faced with the road, put her head on the steering wheel.

“Syl?” Zoe’s voice was a little shrill, a little worried.

Demalion reached across her, put his hand on Sylvie’s nape, and she shuddered. “God. This was supposed to be my easy case.”

His thumb traced her spine, but he said nothing, a wise move since she felt brittle, ready to snap. Then he had to spoil it, by whispering, “Thank you.”

The tears started in her eyes; she knuckled them away fiercely. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare thank me. Wright died!”

Zoe’s eyes were huge, but she slunk back against the seat, stuck between them.

“Would you rather it have been me?” Demalion asked.

“It’s irrelevant,” she said.

“Irrelevant when my lover thinks that a stranger’s surviving is more important—”

“You don’t get it,” she snapped. “Let me simplify it for you. He had dibs. His body. His life. Not yours.”

She ground the truck into gear, pulled into traffic without looking, eliciting a shriek from Zoe and a flurry of honking.

They got several miles before Demalion said, “You know. If you were in the same situation. You would have survived, too.”

“I know,” she said. It was true. She would have fought for it, taken it for her own, a survivor to the last. “But it doesn’t make it right.”

This time the silence lingered. Zoe fell asleep, slumped into Demalion’s side. He put a careful arm about her, steadying her as the truck hit a rough patch of road. “What are you going to do about her?”

“Hands off,” she said. “The ISI can find their own witches. Zoe’s going to remedial witch school with Val. Going to learn why it’s a bad fucking idea to play with power.”

“Not that simple,” he said. “You think she’s been scared off? If she’s anything like you—”

“Just no,” she murmured. “No more. I’m taking her home. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to have to spin some amazing story for Suarez about what happened tonight. I may even have to take him flowers.”

SHE HAD DROPPED ZOE, STILL SLEEPY, STILL STUBBORNLY ASSERTING her independence, back at the empty house after extracting a promise that she’d call if she needed anything. Looking at the rigid set of Zoe’s spine, Sylvie knew she wouldn’t call.

“Lilith’s girls are tough,” Demalion said.

She twitched uneasily. He hadn’t commented when she unmasked her sister and herself. She’d hoped he hadn’t heard it.

“I thought Strange had you for a moment.”

“She did,” Sylvie said. “Couldn’t digest me.”

He frowned, a tiny thing that almost broke her. It wasn’t Wright’s frown, all furrowed brow and pinched eyebrows; it was Demalion’s more familiar expression. A faint inward slant, a tightening of his lips. Oh, he was making himself right at home.

Her apartment was too small, too intimate for the both of them. She wished she’d gone with her first instinct, taken them back to the office, with its aura of business, just business . God, she still had Wright’s check in her petty-cash box.

Sylvie dropped onto her couch, put her face in her hands. Demalion paced around the room, not antsy, but deliberately learning his new skin.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

After two silent circuits of her living room, he said, “Chicago. I’m going back to Chicago.”

“Just like that?” Her skin felt flushed, feverish with exhaustion, with held-back emotion.

Another circuit, and he stopped behind her, his hands resting on the couch back. “You can’t even look at me. Why would I stay?”

She wanted to tell him he was wrong, but the words stuck in her throat. “I failed him, Demalion. I failed him when I could have saved him. But I didn’t want to lose you.”

A puff of air, a bitter laugh. “But you don’t want to keep me, either.”

“You’re not mine to keep,” she said. “Are you? Wright had a life. That has to be broken down and dismantled. Your mother will want to know you’re alive. You have to go.”

“I’ll come back, Shadows. If you want.”

She shuddered. That was the worst of it. She didn’t want him to leave, didn’t want to send him off now that he was back, but she didn’t want to see him either, see Wright’s expressions slowly changed to Demalion’s, his memory erased. If she hadn’t been able to save him, it seemed only fair that she remember him as he was.

“Do you want?” he asked. He was very still behind her; the apartment was quiet, close to dawn, and she felt like she could hear their hearts beating in that silence, carrying on their own communication.

She couldn’t answer him, too conflicted. To say yes, the word burning on her lips, was to admit defeat, to erase Wright. If she said yes now, she wouldn’t let him leave the apartment at all. If she said no, he’d walk out and never look back. Demalion was a practical man at his core.

Silence seemed the only answer. And one he seemed to understand. He leaned forward, kissed her hair. “I’ll arrange for a flight to Chicago.”

THE SKY WAS TURNING GOLD AND PINK, STILL DARKLY SHADED WITH inky blue, when they pulled into airport parking. She stopped the truck, turned off the engine, but made no move to get out.

“You’re not even going to see me off?” he said. He hadn’t sounded hurt in her apartment as he’d made arrangements. Hadn’t seemed anything but calm. But this was a crack in his facade. It wrung an answer out of her.

“I can’t,” she said. Bad enough in the low light of the streetlamps. Seeing Wright’s face with Demalion’s soul in it under the sharp clarity of the airport lights would break her. Make the whole thing seem final, somehow. “I just keep thinking. He’s got a wife,” she said. “A six-year-old boy who likes animals.”

He got out, slammed the door, leaned into the window.