Lyn Benedict: Ghosts & Echoes

The hurt had faded, shifted into anger. It looked strange on Wright’s easygoing features, the mobile mouth drawn tight and flat.

“You aren’t even going to ask, are you? You’re just going to think the worst. You assume I pushed Wright into the general’s grasp and saved myself.” His hands were tight on her window frame, his face utterly still.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask, had barely been willing to consider it—except she had been doing nothing but since Demalion said Wright was gone. He raised his hands finally and began walking away.

“Did you?” she asked. Her voice was so low he had to come back toward her to hear the question. The security guards at the booth eyed them cautiously.

Demalion leaned back in, brought his cheek close to hers, his breath warm on her throat. She swallowed hard.

“No,” he said. “I did not. Wright . . . jumped. We were both struggling, both battling, both losing . . . and Wright—he chose to save me.” Demalion sounded as wrecked as she felt.

It took her a moment to get her voice working. “It’s not right. He shouldn’t have had to die,” she said, a bare rasp. “And it’s not fair. But I am glad you’re alive.”

His hands tightened on her shoulders, an embrace disrupted by the door of the truck, his lips brushed hers; then he was gone, disappearing down into the stairwell leading to the terminal. She shifted position a couple of times the better to watch him go. Wright’s spiky blond hair the last thing to disappear.

It shouldn’t have made a difference. Wright shouldn’t have had to make that choice; she shouldn’t have put him in the position to do so. But it did. Knowing that Wright had made the sacrifice unwound the choking suffocation in her chest. His death was her personal failure, but Demalion hadn’t been responsible for it.

She had known Demalion the better part of two years, and in that time he had told her his share of lies. She’d caught him in enough of them that she had recognized one even with Wright’s less-familiar face masking them. This, this was truth. Painful and unwelcome. It hurt Demalion that he had been saved, relegated to helpless bystander, needing protection, stung his pride, maybe even caused him grief. If Sylvie had liked Wright, found him a wholly admirable man, Demalion, with a more intimate view, had known him better. Wright really had been a white knight.

Demalion had a hard road ahead of him, she thought. A life not his own, and his own rolled up and erased by the ISI.

In the meantime, Sylvie had Zoe to watch over— out for, the little dark voice suggested—and a bunch of cases piling up. She’d tried the easy case; maybe she’d see what Alex had in the hard pile. It couldn’t be worse. And tomorrow, she’d meet with Suarez, explain Odalys as best she could, then take him to see the wall of flowers that had once been a coven of would-be satanists. Show him that there was more to the Magicus Mundi than despair and death. There could be justice. There could be hope.