Ghosts & Echoes (42 page)

He was so still beneath her hands, his warmth like the lining of a shucked-off coat, residual and fading fast.

Faintly, Sylvie could hear people on the street beginning to shout, waking as Strange grew ever closer to Sylvie and Wright and farther from the accident.

She dragged him up, her hands under his shoulders. The air hissed and seethed behind her, and she turned, shielding her throat and face. Heat grazed her shoulder, ran like a rivulet of boiling water down her arm, and leeched onto the inner curve of her elbow.

The salt rings had failed to hold Strange back, Sylvie thought, swaying and sick, her senses all caught up in the tiny point of pain.

No, that wasn’t quite true. The woman’s ghost—glass aura left behind—paced the rings, round and round, as if she were caught within high walls. It was that damned serpentine tongue that had gotten ahead of her and locked onto Sylvie’s flesh. She tried to pry it off, but found it barely
there
to her fingers, some plasmic state between solid and mist.

Their time was running out, she thought. The salt rings were holding, kept her awake, aware, alive, but for how long?

She scrabbled at Wright’s chest, collecting a bare scraping of graveyard dirt in her palm, slapped it over that writhing, stinging tongue, and felt it grow briefly tangible—slimy and muscular—before it decayed beneath her grasp, setting her free.

Sylvie grabbed Wright while Strange paced the circle, while the lich’s tongue slowly re-formed and made cautious sorties back in her direction. She forced his body upright, heavy and emptied of life, propped him against the wall, and started working on buttons. She ripped his shirt off, watched the graveyard dirt scatter downward, catching on his jeans, his shoes, and swore. Sweat sleeked her spine, her hands, made her one-handed grip on him faulty. He tipped, nearly fell.

From the front of the store, she heard a voice. “Hello? Everything all right here?”

Cop,
she thought,
come to see to the fender benders.
Couldn’t walk away from Invocat’s shattered windows.
Curiosity killed the cop,
she thought, and worked faster.

It wasn’t like they were silent; Strange still shrieked, the bone flute howled, and Sylvie panted like a dog, cursing Wright, cursing Demalion with each outborne breath.
Come back, you bastard. Just hold on. Hold on. Work with me here, you fucker,
as she stripped him. Shirt fell, jeans down, shoes unlaced and off.

Caught holding a half-naked corpse . . . Oh, that would be a great way to end this day. Caught in a jail cell while Odalys fed Zoe to Margaret Strange to get the ghost off her own back.

Wright twitched in her grasp, breath sucking in like a bellows, began coughing almost immediately.

“Police officer,” the man called. “I’m coming back—”

Strange’s head rose from where she was studying the ring’s patterns, and she moved back toward the front, seeking an easier meal.

“Syl—” Wright murmured, voice ragged, face worn.

“Shh,” she hissed, making the judgment call. Wright first. Mr. Bad-Timing Cop would have to deal with the ghost himself.

“I’m naked—” he said. “Why?”

“Shut up,” Sylvie said. She slid her arm about his waist; he was all rib cage and jutting spine, hip bones like blades, and she dragged him into the alley. “Besides,” she muttered. “I left you your boxers.”

She shoved him—Wright, Demalion, one or both, god, please both—into the alley, ducked back into the store, and stretched the graveyard-dust-contaminated clothes across the threshold. Hopefully that would buy them time. Unless, of course, Strange went around the front.

How much sentience was left in her? How much of her was pure rage and hunger? Could she plan? Sylvie cursed Wales and cursed herself for not knowing the right questions to have asked.

Sylvie spun Wright about and headed down the alley, dragging him drunkenly after her.

In her pocket, her cell phone rang. She ignored it. With her luck, it was Suarez demanding an update, and when she didn’t answer, he’d probably come after her just in time to die like his son, at the hands of some magical calamity.

At the alley mouth, Wright balked, said, “Can’t go out there like this.”

“People have other things to gape at than your skinny ass,” Sylvie said. For someone so skinny, he was heavy and solid clear through. Her shoulders ached. Peering into the street, she saw the gathered crowd about Odalys’s place. They were gaping; they were shouting; they were . . . falling.

She couldn’t see the ghost in the sunlight, but she could track her by the way people fell, one soul bite at a time. Hopefully, given the sheer number of people in the area, the sheer quickness with which Strange was dealing out unconsciousness, she wasn’t having time to drain any one person of more than a taste of each soul, like some evil-minded sampling party. Miami might be meaner, afterward, a lot of people walking away that much less whole, but they’d be walking, talking, breathing.

Sylvie doubted that Strange would be so cavalier if she got them in her grasp.

Her heart thumped hard. Other way. If they went out the front, they’d be easy prey for Strange. Right now, Strange seemed desperate enough to—

Why hadn’t she taken over any of the females who’d fallen, fed utterly, and forced her spirit into the empty shell? This was Miami, the land of sun and skin. Surely there’d been more than one who’d fit her criteria of young and attractive.

“Why specifically Zoe?” she murmured aloud.

“Money,” he slurred. “Prolly set up so Zoe will inherit it. Like Bella. New body. New life. Old money.”

Sylvie shivered. She’d hoped he’d missed that. That Demalion had missed that. “No fun in being resurrected if you can’t take it with you,” she bit out. “I bet Strange doesn’t know she’s broke.”

He swayed, hard, tipped over, put his hand against the grimy stucco wall for support. “Still naked,” he muttered. “And I stepped in glass.”

“Fine,” she said. “Stay here. I’m going to get the truck.”

His gaze was hurt, and she stamped out her guilt. She wasn’t even sure which one of them she was yelling at and was scared to find out. She ran out of the back alley, looped around; hopefully, by the time she got back to the front of the store, Strange would have moved far enough away that she could collect her truck without collecting the ghost’s attention.

Good plan, she thought, only—

Her truck wasn’t there.

SHE TURNED AND TURNED, TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT. HER TRUCK hadn’t been involved in the accident—no glass littered the area where she had parked. In fact, the empty space where her truck had been was the only slot that would allow egress onto the street without waiting for the tow trucks to remove the tangle of cars.

Odalys,
she thought. In a hurry, needing an escape, and seeing a chance to do Sylvie an injury in the process.

The lich ghost blurred the air like a heat shimmer, a deadly mirage; bystanders stopped to gawk at the ghost as it moved along the sidewalk, and realized their mistake too late. A police officer in a squad car shouted into her radio, shouts about gas and casualties, and only managed to stir panic into the already tense street.

A high whistle rang through the street—
the ghost shrieking again about her promised body?
Sylvie didn’t want to find out. She turned, headed back toward the alley, toward Wright. Half-naked, disoriented or not, he was going to have to brave the streets.

They had to get out of there.

“Shadows!” a hoarse voice called, followed by another piercing whistle. She jerked about, hand going for her gun, even as her hailer scrambled to her side.

She barely recognized him. In his darkened apartment, Wales had been cadaverous, creepy, a horror-movie host. Sunlight washed his skin, gave him life and a veneer of health, picked out reddish lights in his dark hair, made him less of a scarecrow, more a man. He yanked her toward him by the elbow.

She jerked away, and said, “The fuck, Wales?”

“You didn’t destroy the lich ghost when you shot it,” he said.

“You think?” She threw a hand out to encompass the chaos nearby.

“She was weak, trapped in my apartment. I let her out by accident. Didn’t even realize she’d survived until she blew past me when I headed out for a milk run. I followed her here.”

“Great,” Sylvie said. “Nice to see you. Now get the hell out of my—”

“I did some research,” he said, holding her in place. His sallow face brightened, lips twisting upward. “I know how to get rid of a lich ghost.”

She stopped fighting him, feeling a glimmer of relief, hope, eagerness. “Well, get to work. She’s right over there!”

The lich ghost was bent in half, a muddy blur in the air, crouched above a fallen body.
Snacking,
Sylvie thought; then the blur whipped around, and another person fell. Strange was a glutton.

Wales slewed around, shaking his head. “Haven’t got the ingredients with me.”

“Useless,” Sylvie said. “Utterly useless.”

He dangled car keys in front of her face. “Useless? Your overburdened and underdressed friend’s already in my car. Want a ride?”

Sylvie turned a last look on the scene, watching people felled, knowing more police would be arriving any moment, feeding themselves into the ghost. And all she had was a gun. She was the useless one here.

“Get us out of here,” she said, and guilt swamped her. For the first time ever, she thought that the ISI—that paranoid and secretive agency—might be onto something with their plans. If they could figure out a way to introduce the
Magicus Mundi
into the world with laws already in place for controlling it, scenes like this might not happen. Instead of the police, there’d be people like Wales, but better prepared.

The best she could hope for was that Strange would remember Odalys and leave once the area calmed.

His sedan was an ancient Corolla, more parts rust than paint, but it purred when it ran.

Wright lay curled in the backseat, his skin sleek with sweat. He was shivering in fine tremors.

“Soul shock,” Wales diagnosed. “Doubled.”

“They both in there?” she asked.

“As far as I can tell,” he said. “Can’t last, you know.”

“More pressing problems,” she said.

He shook his head, all tangled hair and cheekbones like knife blades. “I don’t even want to know.”

“My goddamn sister—”

The thought, the hope, was as sharp as a blade. Sylvie scrambled for her cell phone, dialed Alex. “Tell me you got Zoe safely into Val’s care.”

“Zoe? You found her? Where?” Alex asked.

Sylvie slapped the phone closed. Christ. She was
worse
than useless. She’d made bad decision after bad decision this week, not least of which was sending Alex off with Zoe. But she hadn’t thought Zoe would or even
could
use that oblivion spell, thought it mostly bravado.

“Your sister?” Wales asked.

“My sister’s decided to go hang out with the necromancer who sold her skin to Strange.” Sylvie banged her head against the dash and groaned.

The back of the car echoed her. A hangover groan, followed by a wiry arm flailing into awareness. Wright dragged himself up in the backseat, hung himself over her shoulder, and said, “You’re going to need those brain cells, Shadows. We’ve got to do something about that ghost thing.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Sylvie said. Self-loathing scalded her throat.

“Follow Odalys,” Wales said. “You said Odalys promised it a body? It’s gonna keep hounding her until she makes good on that promise. Loan sharks are more forgiving than the dead when it comes to debt.”

“And then what?” Sylvie said. “Shoot Strange? Didn’t work so well before.”

“Graveyard dirt mixed with salt,” Wales said. “A handful of that—”

“Yeah, familiar with it,” Sylvie said. “It slowed her. Didn’t stop her. Nearly killed Wright.”

Wales furrowed his brow, hunched tighter over the steering wheel. “Then it’s just as good I didn’t have the stuff on me, or we’d all be lyin’ in the street while she played sippystraw with our souls.”

“Useless,”
Sylvie said again.

“Don’t take it to heart,” Demalion said. It had to be Demalion. “Frustration makes her vicious.”

“Good thing I think better that way,” Sylvie said. “Odalys stole my truck.”

Wales shot her a wide-eyed glance. “Why does that sound like good news?”

“It’s distinctive,” Sylvie said. She was dialing Suarez even as she spoke. “Lio? It’s Sylvie. I need to report my truck stolen. Can you get eyes out for it? Also? Zoe’s gone again.”

He growled in her ear. “I am not your sister’s keeper, Shadows. I brought her to you once. Where’d your truck get taken from?”

“Calle Ocho, Invocat. Odalys Hargrove stole it. And she’s . . . dangerous, Lio. The source of our problems. You arrest her, and things get better, fast.”