Ghosts & Echoes (6 page)

His voice betrayed a weird sort of hesitance, a thought he wanted to deny. Sylvie recognized it; Lisse Conrad, the art gallery owner, had come to her, and Wright, whose world had expanded recently, was learning a new sort of trepidation—that even things as normal as burglary might have an uncanny side. The Shadows Inquiries’ interview form, with its cloak-and-dagger double talk, had amused him, but this—the possibilities he had to accept—scared him.

“It’s probably nothing more exotic than a well-connected burglar, and my client just picked me by chance,” Sylvie soothed. “More than one alarm company is involved, but an enterprising guy might job-hop, or hell, it might be a team of them, one at each company.”

“True,” he said. “A good way to stay clear of jail is make sure there’s a lot of suspicion to go around.”

It was true, plausible even. Sylvie didn’t believe it. The alarm companies registered people going in or out, recorded the codes they used; as far as the alarm companies were concerned, the stores had closed up shop and stayed closed all night long.

Wright stretched, rolled his head on the headrest, cracking his neck; his shoulders popped next, and Sylvie winced. “Sure you don’t want to go on back to your hotel?”

“Flat broke,” he said. “Near-death experiences are expensive. Even with insurance. Maxed out the credit cards to get here, to pay you, and pawned the wedding ring. What Giselle’s gonna say if I can’t buy it back before she notices—”

Sylvie groaned. A stray indeed. What on earth was she going to do with him? His case really wasn’t the aim-and-shoot kind of thing, easy to accomplish. His case, if he wasn’t delusional, would take time.

There was a hostel not too far away; she could point him there, let him barter a few chores for a bed, but . . . he was her client. Her responsibility.

An engine cut off nearby, a car stopping in the lot. She got the binoculars back up, scanned the area. Cars had been passing by all night, a trickle of steady sound, as familiar a backdrop as the surf, but they hadn’t stopped.

Doors shut severally; feet pattered over asphalt, casual, no attempt to mask the sound. Sylvie couldn’t pinpoint the direction, couldn’t find them in the green glow of the binocs. In the dark, by the sea, sound echoed in as many ripples as the waves.

“The convenience store up the street?” Wright said, slumped low again, sinking into shadows. His voice was a bare murmur, aware of how sound could carry, could betray their watching eyes with a single misplaced word. “Cigarette run?”

“Not enough chatter,” Sylvie said, leaning close to put her words directly in his ear. “I counted four doors. Who rides that many in a car these days?” She had an idea, wanted to see what he came up with.

“Bar-hoppers, teenagers, gangs, and thieves,” Wright said, no hesitation at all. “There a bar nearby?”

“It’s the beach,” Sylvie said. “They grow spontaneously. But we would have heard a beach party before now.”

“Nighttime swimming? Popular with the teens?”

“Pools, everywhere. And the coast here? Sharky.”

Wright grinned, teeth white in the dim confines of the truck, in the slope of shadow he’d made his own. “So we got ourselves something interesting to check out.”

SYLVIE SHIFTED IN HER SEAT, LISTENING FOR THE MIGHT-BE-BURGLARS’ footsteps, trying to pick out their direction, though really, the mall was the only thing around. She found time to say, “No,” to Wright’s hopeful grin. “I have something to check out. You . . . guard the truck.”

“Sylvie,” Wright said, “no one wants this truck. I’m broke and on foot, and
I
don’t want this truck.”

“Shh.” She put her hand up, signaling silence. The echoes were consolidating, becoming distinct. That meant they were close. Sylvie peered over his shoulder and spotted them by movement. Soft-edged forms, their shapes blurred by motion and the diffuse trickle-down glow of the distant streetlamp. She counted five, maybe six, maybe four—they wavered and bled together, little knots of darkness walking companionably close for all their silence. Heading for the mall.

“Not a gang,” she said, half to herself, half-soliciting Wright’s opinion. “They’re grouped too close for machismo.”

Wright nodded. “So, you gonna call the cops?”

“And say what? No, I’m going to watch.” She raised the binoculars again, twisted the zoom, trying to get a better look. They were all slim figures, winnowed by shadow, but the way they walked—at least one of them, she thought, was a girl.

They stopped near the mall, maddeningly just outside the pool of light at the front entrance, turned inward toward each other in a close circle, shielding themselves from the sea wind.

“Cigarette break, y’think?” Wright asked, his hand straying to his own pack.

“Nicotine nerve? Seems unlikely,” Sylvie said. “The burglars I’m looking for have no reason to be nervous.” She got why he thought that—something about the way they hunched their shoulders together, bent over their hands, suggested cigarettes lit against the wind. But it also might be something magical, she realized. She could count them now, four slight figures with their backs to each point of the compass: north, south, east, west. Forget thirteen; that was for covens more interested in politics and in having a ready pool of sacrificial volunteers: For a lot of magics, all you needed were enough people to call the compass.

She put a hand on Wright’s shoulder, pushed him back against the seat; he kept leaning forward, trying to get a look on his own, and interfering with her view. “My case,” she growled. She needed a better look. The slim lines of their bodies argued teenagers, argued that her client had been right; Sylvie had no doubts that teenagers would happily burglarize stores—they were walking hormones, paeans to the id—but the how still eluded her. Most teens didn’t just luck into useful magic. Most teens didn’t know magic existed outside of Harry Potter.

One of the teens shifted, gave her a glimpse of a small yellow flame spurting into existence with a familiar flick, flick, spark. A lighter, and this was nothing more than a cigarette break after all. The tiny flamelet moved, guided toward an outstretched hand.

SYLVIE WOKE, BENT IN HALF, THE BINOCULARS PRESSING PAINFULLY into her abdomen, and a deadweight on her back. Her head ached, and as she forced herself up, hands sweating and white-knuckled on her thighs, sliding Wright off her back, something in her body protested. It tasted like the leftover backwash of faded adrenaline, hot and sour, left her trembling. She felt as if she’d been cored, hollowed out, gutted like a fish, and thrown back.

She wiped sweat from her face, her hands barely under her control. Wright’s face was slack, his mouth loose; his skin seemed grey. Marks of exhaustion made his closed eyes look like the black pits of a skull in the low light. Sylvie put a hand to his parted lips, felt his breath warm her palm, and slumped back, her momentary panic over.

But what the hell had happened?

The mall, she remembered. The burglars. Her job.

She glanced toward the mall, a serene pool of light in the darkness, glanced at her watch. Forty minutes had gone by while she . . . what? Slept?

She pushed that aside for the moment—forty minutes. If they’d gone in, they might still be there. From Alex’s reports, it didn’t seem like they were quick-grab artists, snatching at whatever small valuables came to hand. Not when they had taken paintings that measured six feet by eight and pool tables on their previous outings.

She checked Wright’s pulse, wondering if she could leave him safely, or if she should be dragging him to the ER. She had recovered. She still felt shivery and sick, but her brain was ticking over. The thin skin of his wrist throbbed reassuringly under her fingers, then twitched as Wright fumbled his way into wakefulness.

“Shadows—” he murmured. “Are we dreaming?” His hand curled around hers, completing a circuit. His pulse beat against hers, warmed her flesh, slick with fear sweat.

She hesitated. Were they? The world felt disconnected, pulled away, oddly unreal. Like a dream. Her hand cramped, nerves firing to life where it had been bent at an unhealthy angle. Pain.

“We’re not dreaming,” she said.

“Not dreaming,” he echoed. His words were slurred, slow. He pulled away from her, ran a hand along the dash. “Where—” He tried to peer out the window, banged his head on the glass. “Ow.”

“Yeah,” she said, her word drawled out as long as his, but far more certain. Even in her dreams, she knew how to be decisive. And hadn’t she decided? This was no dream, though it might be some type of nightmare. There’d been magic used on them. Inimical stuff. Clinging to her mind and body. “You’re staying in the truck.”

He looked at her, frowning. “But—”

“No. It’s not safe. You sit tight. I’m going to see what’s happened. It has to have been some kind of sleep spell that hit us. No one got close enough for it to be gas.”

“So paranoid,” he said, but he slumped back against the seat gratefully. His face was drawn tight with shadow and fatigue. The spell had hit him harder.

Sylvie was briefly, annoyingly grateful for her family lineage. Lilith might have been a dangerous, power-mad anarchist with aspirations toward godhood, but she gave good genes. Sylvie was resistant to a lot of magic.

“Just stay here, okay?” She slid out of the truck on his complaining mutter and let the door slip closed, careful not to let the sound of its shutting carry.

Her body felt shocked, her muscles shaky, but she warmed with each movement she took until she felt more solid, more awake, less like a sleepwalker.

Watch yourself,
the little dark voice said. Like her, it was weaker than normal. Tiny fingers of dread crawled along her spine, stroked her nape, set her to shivering even in the sultry night air. She reached for her holster, took the gun in hand, and let the weight soothe her.

Now
she felt like herself.

She hesitated, wobbling foot to foot, torn between destinations. Head for the mall, where she might catch them in the act? Then what? There were four of them, armed with a magic that had put her out once, silently and swiftly. One encounter had left her vision blurry around the edges, her head swimming. Courting a second encounter with only a gun would be risky at best.

The voice whispered,
Shoot fast enough, and their magics won’t matter.

This is not the Wild West, Sylvie reminded herself. Besides, she had a groggy cop in her car, and one thing she knew about cops was that gunfire tended to wake them up. And wake them up cranky.

She chose her second option. Make a quick sortie around the parking lot and nearby street, hunting the car the burglars arrived in. A license plate would go a long way to helping her out; even if they escaped tonight, she’d have a start at tracking them down.

Footsteps sounded behind her, cat-soft, a little uneven, and she spun, gun raised. Wright’s hand caught her wrist, a single moment of physical lucidity, and tilted the gun barrel away from him. His face was sober and still, his emotions masked for the first time since she had met him. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “It’s only me.”

She swallowed. Him, yes, but disoriented from the spell still? His pupils were blown in the low light, his voice gone husky. His hand on her wrist trembled but stayed tight. He seemed more a sleepwalker than her talkative client.

“I told you to stay in the truck,” she said. She could smell his sweat in the breeze: salt and fatigue, the acridity of fear held tight; she could smell the gun oil she’d used last night. He leaned an increment closer to her as if to join in on the scent parade, his mouth hovering near her ear.

“But then who would watch your back? Who would take your orders?”

She jerked free of him, twisting sharply against the thumb joint, and he stepped back, wordless and waiting for her reply.

Her heart thumped unevenly in her chest. Anger, pain, a raw spot unexpectedly touched; inevitably, Wright’s words had taken her to Demalion, to his compliance with her wishes, to his death.

She turned away from him. She wasn’t going to think about it. Couldn’t think about it. Not and do her job. “I’m looking for their car. You do whatever the hell you want.”

He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets and walked alongside her, slinkier than she had expected, given his prior twitchiness. “There are a lot of cars,” he pointed out.

“It’ll be a four-door. We heard that. And it won’t be on my list.” She finagled the sheet of paper, folded in eighths, out of her pocket. “These are the cars that were in the area when I started surveillance.”

“Organized,” he said. She would have bristled, but he didn’t attach any judgment to the word, not surprise or skepticism or amusement. Just a fact. She still wanted to explain, in small sentences, that this was her job—of course she was organized and good at it. It wasn’t the kind of job that suffered fools.