Ghosts & Echoes (14 page)

The severed, withered hand on the white sheets, tucked neatly beneath Bella’s pillow like some horrifying offering to a fairy best not imagined, was missing a single fingernail.

The worst part, Sylvie thought numbly, wasn’t that it was there in her bed, wasn’t that it was a dead hand, gruesomely preserved, used to appease a bored girl’s bad-girl dreams, but that it had been decorated like it was of no more import than a cell phone or iPod. Besides the silvery polish, there were Cracker Jack rings forced over the dried knuckles, and little fake tattoos of thorns and hearts peeling from the pallid skin.

She seized Bella’s arm as the girl attempted to sidle around her, and the motion released the anchor on her voice. “Black magic and burglary not enough of a kick? You had to desecrate the dead?”

“I DIDN’T DO IT!” SUCH A REFLEXIVE LIE OUT OF A TEEN’S MOUTH. Sylvie had no patience for it.

“What? It came that way? Don’t think I’m stupid, Bella. A Hand of Glory is black magic. Not something you treat like a toy.”

Bella lunged for the Hand. Before Sylvie could decide if it was an offensive gesture—if she meant to
use
the Hand against Sylvie—or just a desire to hide it again, Bella’s movement fell short. She dropped to the floor, gasping for breath, her hands clawing against the cream-colored tiling, nails catching in the grout.

Sylvie dropped beside her, got the girl untangled from her own legs, straightened out her breathing path, and held her up. “Bella, just breathe.”

The girl wheezed and shuddered; Sylvie thought of yelling for Eleanor, but this wasn’t anything as common as an asthma attack.

Sylvie rubbed the girl’s back, the thin cotton unpleasantly damp with sweat, and said, “Take it easy.”

Bella sucked in a breath, a thin, thready gasp, but at least it was going the right direction. “Good,” Sylvie said. “Another.”

Once Bella was breathing steadily, in and out, instead of that rasping one-way exhalation, Sylvie left her there on the floor. She turned out the trash can, scattering pill bottles and tissues, and used the pillow to push the Hand into the trash can. The thumb hooked briefly on the rim and had to be shaken down with a scrabbling
thunk
.

“That’s mine,” Bella said weakly.

“I count two hands on your body,” Sylvie said. “I’ll give it back when you’re missing one. Christ, no sense at all. Keeping it under your pillow! You’d be safer with a loaded gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.” She snagged a magazine that was peeking out from beneath the bed, slapped it over the top of the trash can, sparing herself the sight of the Hand. Her churning gut thanked her.

Bella slouched against the side of the bed, wrapped her arm around the iron footboard, and draped herself on it. “I’m supposed to keep it close. Keep it tuned to me. Otherwise—”

“Otherwise, it won’t let you open locked doors, bypass alarms, and steal shit that you don’t want to save up your allowance for?” Sylvie hated magic in general; benign or not, it altered reality. And this . . . this was very far from benign. She might not have seen one before in the flesh, so to speak, but knew the gist of the legend, knew how dangerous it was.

Bella was resting her head on it nightly, using it biweekly. It was the ease that had seduced her, no doubt. Bella would never have shifted gears from Grove princess to cat burglar except that magic made it . . . easy.

Bella raised startled brown eyes, and Sylvie snapped, “I told you. Don’t think I’m stupid. I know what you and yours are up to. And I want names. Is it the whole princess pack? Jaz, Ari, your boyfriends du jour?”

Bella took refuge in a long bout of coughing, hand shaking artistically over her mouth. Sylvie bent down before her, gripped the girl’s wrists, and said, “You were worried about keeping it tuned to you? Don’t worry. You’re tuned in good and tight. A Hand of Glory is the hand of a murderer. You dream of death? It’s not your dream. It’s her
memory
.”

The girl shook her head, buried her face in the bedspread, which smelled like sour desperation and illness and decay. Sylvie yanked her back, gripped her shoulders tight enough that she was causing bruises. Distantly, she knew she could be in real trouble for this; manhandling this girl, sick as she was, was perilously close to assault, for all that it felt more like a particularly difficult intervention.

Still, she regained enough control not to shake her as she wanted. “Bella. The Hand. Where’d you get it? How many of you have used it? You? Your friends?
Zoe?
”

Bella gasped out, “It was a game, Sylvie, a
game
.”

“Not a good one,” Sylvie said. “That Hand represents two dead people. You’re trafficking in human misery. And murder.”

The girl had the poor taste to roll her eyes, and Sylvie bit her lip hard, clenched her fists tight against her own jeans, sucked air so that she didn’t offer to show the girl what human misery really meant. A moment later, she was glad she’d held back. The eye roll, contrary to teenage habit, was Bella passing out, not passing judgment on the inexplicable concerns of stick-in-the-mud adults.

Sylvie looked at the girl sprawled on the floor, stick arms and legs in pink cotton, and snarled. How the hell they thought she’d get better like this . . . People shouldn’t be allowed to have kids, ignore them, turn them into grasping, stupid, spoiled brats, then just abandon them.

She yanked the dirty sheets off the bed, threw them into the hall, found another clean set in a discreet linen closet, and made the bed in angry jerks that made the whole process that much harder as the mattress billowed and shifted, fighting back. That done, she tapped Bella’s cheek until the girl blinked awake. “In bed.”

Bella eyed her warily but crawled to the side of her bed, and Sylvie pushed her up into it. “Where did you get the Hand of Glory, Bella?”

Her only response was a sigh as the girl turned her face into the clean linens, and no manner of name-calling or shaking would wake the girl again. Lips tight, Sylvie put a glass of water beside the bed, scrubbed her hands clean in the girl’s bathroom, and gave it up as a bad job. Why waste time badgering a sick girl who either fainted or obstructed? Any more shouting, and the cops might get called. Her jaw ached, and she forced herself to stop clenching her teeth.

Was this why Zoe had stopped hanging out with Bella? She’d said Bella was all screwed up. . . . Sylvie needed to have a talk with her baby sister about when you needed to call for outside help. When a problem was too big simply to walk away from. When a problem could get people
killed
.

Bella’s breath rasped in her throat; she whimpered and thrashed. The nightmare again, hopefully muted now that the Hand was gone from her bed.

If Bella couldn’t or wouldn’t give Sylvie the information, maybe Zoe could point her in the right direction. Teenagers were relentless in information gathering. If Zoe knew enough to declare Bella all screwed up, maybe she knew who had gotten her there.

Sylvie gave her hands a last scrub. Just moving the sheets that the Hand had been resting on made her want to wash and wash, but any germs that survived the preservation were long gone, and any magical taint that had attached to her couldn’t be washed away with anything as simple as soap.

She stared at the trash can balefully and considered options.

Ten minutes later, Sylvie walked out the front door, irritated and worried enough that when Eleanor gawked at her—and who wouldn’t gawk at a visitor carrying out a trash can that had a magazine duct-taped over the top—she merely snapped, “You know, for a med student, you’re ignoring one hell of a sick kid. Call a doctor, huh?”

She walked back to her truck, slapped the trash can in the well of the passenger’s seat, and drove off, every nerve firing. She felt like she was driving a car that someone had loosed a snake into—unseen, but feared in her every anticipatory sinew.

Zoe didn’t answer when Sylvie dialed her cell, and Sylvie sighed, remembering she’d taken the phone away from her. In retrospect, a really bad idea. A girl should be able to call for help. Then again, if Zoe had just stayed put . . .

Sylvie dialed her parents’ phone, got the answering machine there, too. She left a terse, tight message for Zoe to call her at once, considered driving home and continuing the Zoe hunt. It was before noon, though. Zoe wasn’t much of an early riser. Wherever she’d washed up last night, she was probably still there, still sleeping the smug sleep of a teenager who’d gotten away with ignoring parental guidelines.

She could wait a few hours, see if Zoe called in, came by, acted like a reasonable person. Bella sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere, and Sylvie had taken their toy away.

At a red light, she leaned forward, rested her head on the steering wheel, and sighed. All reasonable, but there was some cold, scared part of her that kept pointing out that Zoe probably had been involved. Teenagers rarely backed off without trying something first. They had to learn things the hard way. Zoe had likely touched the Hand, at least once.

That nagging worry and the occasional
thump
of the Hand sliding around in its container made the drive back to her apartment—twenty-six miles of morning traffic and random road workers—more of an ordeal than she wanted to admit. Too many horror movies, she told herself. The Hand was a latent danger, not likely to claw its way free and take her by the throat. The problem with that consoling thought was she’d seen monsters that horror movies hadn’t considered.

She took the final corner to her apartment, winced as the Hand skidded within its prison, a sere scrabble that sounded deliberate, and pulled into her parking slot with a rush of relieved breath. The truck door slammed behind her before she’d consciously decided to move, her key already turning the lock.

Fine. She didn’t want to take it into her apartment anyway. She could leave it there, could be content that the teens wouldn’t be burglarizing anyplace else. Without the Hand, they’d have to deal with alarms and locks like any other would-be thief. That would be way too risky for them. Never mind that using black magic was a magnitude of risk higher. Now that she’d stopped them, prevention dealt with, she could take her time to decide on punishment. She leaned back against the warm steel of her truck, fingers absently rubbing at the claw marks.

Abruptly, she recalled Wright, left hiding out in her bathroom. This was the problem with compartmentalization. Sometimes, remembering what you’d set aside felt like being blindsided all over again.

It was past time to face Wright. Problem was, she still didn’t have the first clue of what to say. It was all emotions beating in her blood when she thought of him, of Demalion, of inappropriate kisses and borrowed bodies.

Her front door opened above her, Wright coming out to overlook the parking area, phone to his ear. He scanned the lot absently, as if he’d been doing it so often that when his eyes caught her, he twitched, nearly dropping the phone.

She froze; he waved at her, all cheery attention getting, and a quick toothy grin, then bent his attention back to the phone with an expression moving from pleased to irritated.

Wright was one of the most expressive men she had ever met, hunching shoulders, wild gestures, a voice that angled sharper and sharper. For him to greet her with a smile and a wave, after this morning’s incident . . .

He didn’t remember it. Or decided to let it go. Hell, from his point of view, what had happened? A little lost time, coming back to himself with Sylvie’s hands on his shoulders. For all she knew, he might think he had been trying to fugue-walk off the balcony, and she had put a stop to it.

The relief was bitter and strong and made her knees weak. If he didn’t remember, she didn’t have to explain that his ghost was all her doing. That the ghost occupying his skin and thoughts had come to Sylvie for something that had nothing to do with Wright. Knowing Demalion, it might be something as simple and as devastating as getting out his final wishes.

He’d tried to find Anna D, hadn’t he? His mother. It made too much sense.

Sylvie climbed the stairs slowly, rising as Wright’s voice rose.

“Jeez, Giselle, I told you. I’m in Miami. No, not on vacation. I
swear
. . . .”

He ran a hand through his hair, re-creating tufts that had disappeared with his shower; his grey T-shirt was damp at his nape. “No, I’m not staying at a hotel. You checked the credit cards? Giselle, I told you—”

He bumped his head against the balcony post, once, twice; a chip of red paint flecked off into his hair. “This is not a vacation! What does it matter who I’m staying with . . . ? No, I’m not staying with Sylvie.” He hunched a shoulder, half turned, his voice going harried.

Sylvie leaned against her open door, eavesdropping blatantly. Her name, his mouth. Interesting that his wife seemed to have more concerns about the company he was keeping than his health and condition. Demalion must have been keeping a pretty low profile, even in a confused and fragmentary state.

“—talk to Jamie? C’mon, I just want to say hi.”

Sylvie listened as his voice went soft and warm. A son, she remembered Alex saying. A very young one by the simple questions Wright was asking.
You played with a dog? Was it a big dog?

Guilt shifted uneasily in her belly. A tiny spur reminding her that Wright’s case affected more than him; Demalion’s hold on Wright could injure a family. Wright was her client. Not Demalion.

But if he only wanted a chance for closure, for last words, a slower end to his murder, then maybe the possession was a problem that could take care of itself. Shepherd Wright around, keep him safe, while Demalion did what he needed to do, now that he remembered who he had been, now that he’d collected his last bit of soul.

Wright held up a single finger—just a moment—as she reached the top of the stairs. Sylvie brushed by him, heading for the AC in her apartment and another quiet moment to herself.