Ghosts & Echoes (20 page)

Guess Zoe found the entrance to her hidey-hole too confining. Sylvie should have thought as much, given how tightly she’d had to squeeze her hand into the hole. Like the monkey with its hand in the jar, Zoe wouldn’t be able to withdraw anything she dropped into the hole.

Sylvie pulled back the molding, and, wiping her hand on her jeans, she reached in, cringing at the idea of touching whatever it had been again.

Her questing fingers found the smooth edge of a plate—no, casserole dish—and a thick stench of something rotting. She pulled it out, grimacing proactively, and found it worthy of every nauseated expression she could pull.

Did Zoe have a Hand of Glory? Oh yes.

A long, slim hand, narrow at the wrist, long-nailed, swollen knuckles, spotted here and there with liver marks. Another old woman’s hand.

Impossible as it seemed, two teenage girls had collected a pair of rare talismans that sorcerers would kill for.

Where Bella had decorated hers with little girl sparkles and gauded it up with fake jewelry, Zoe had drowned hers. The rank smell in the room, clogging Sylvie’s sinuses, wasn’t the Hand but the spoiled and spoiling milk it floated in, layers of it, poured repeatedly over the Hand, judging by the yellowed crust along the side of the dish. Sylvie couldn’t figure that at first, too taken aback by the way the Hand slid and surfaced beneath the clotting milk. Then a tiny memory twinged. Milk could be used in purification rituals. The milk, the spell circle—Zoe was clever enough to try to avoid Bella’s illness. She was trying to mediate the effect of the Hand on her soul. But Sylvie knew the spell circle was inert, just paint and pattern; what were the odds that the milk was doing any good?

Wright gagged and triggered Sylvie’s own reflex. They raced each other out of the room, and the air outside smelled sweet, clean, safe; the world seemed brighter.

She leaned up against the hallway wall, temper simmering. How could Zoe do it? How could she have brought this into her parents’ house?

“Sylvie,” Wright said, “we gotta call the cops. If Bella won’t talk to the police, your sister probably will. It’ll get her off the hook for the worst of it.”

“Is the worst of it the money, the stolen property, or the necromancy? Give it up, Wright. I
am
the police for things like this.” She closed her eyes.

The little dark voice within her had been shrieking ever since Sylvie touched that clammy flesh, that inadvertent finger brush, and it wanted what it always wanted: someone to pay, to fix things that couldn’t be fixed.

Lilith’s voice, carried down to her in her blood, railing against those who would stop her. For the first time, Sylvie wondered how much of that blood Zoe had inherited, the mingling of their ancestors, Lilith the disobedient and Cain the murderer. Enough to crave power? Enough to be dangerous? Enough to be
damned
?

The voice calmed, grew slow and certain.
Some people forfeit their right to be saved.

Not Zoe. Sylvie wasn’t going to give up on her.

“Bring me the trash can,” Sylvie said.

Wright dithered. “
The
trash can, right? The pink one?”

“Yup,” Sylvie said. “Might as well keep them in the same place.”

He grimaced. “All right, but you’re putting it in there. And I get to drive this time. I’m not paying to ride around with severed body parts in my lap.”

HE RETURNED WITH THE WASTEBASKET HELD AS FAR FROM HIM AS possible just as she was tucking a note into the hole in the mattress. She’d been to the point with it.
You’re in so much trouble. Come see me.

She peeled off a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, putting them into her jeans pocket, before wrapping the rest of the bills back into their rubber band.

“That’s not yours,” he said.

“Not Zoe’s either.”

“That’s my point. Someone lost that. They’ll be wanting it back.”

“I don’t ask where my clients get the money to pay me.”

“Zoe’s not your client.”

“Yes,” Sylvie said, “she is. And I’m billing her up front.”

She shut him up by approaching him with the sodden Hand, tipping it gently into the trash can on top of the other, amid a splash of sour milk. Wright, who hadn’t seen the first one, went green as the two hands nestled together, one bloated and blanched, one gnarled and sere.

“They’re both left hands.”

“Sinister,” Sylvie said. “In magic, the left hand is the sinister hand.”

“That means two women are dead, not just one.
Two.
”

“You see my concern,” Sylvie said. She took advantage of his dismay and snagged the driver’s seat. Like she would have let him drive. Her truck.

She backed the truck into the traffic and headed out, plotting the routes to Zoe’s closest friends. If Zoe was this involved, they didn’t have time to wait for her to come back on her own.

Belatedly, she looked over at Wright, frowning at the trash can, and fought back the urge to reassure him that this wouldn’t take too long. Time or trust, he’d asked. She’d chosen time. She wasn’t going to apologize for it, no matter that possession trumped burglary. Demalion was already dead, Wright was alive and well, but Zoe was at risk.

SYLVIE’S OFFICE WAS REGRETTABLY EMPTY WHEN SHE AND WRIGHT returned, unevenly sunburned from their two-hour hunt-and-seek through Miami traffic. Her frustration felt as bright and hot as the red burn on her forearm. Every place they’d stopped had been a dead end. No one had seen Zoe. Rather, no one had admitted to seeing her, and most of Zoe’s friends had been in the wind themselves. Sylvie had been stuck talking to maids, random parents, and in one case a poolboy who grinned wide and white at the mention of Zoe’s name.

The office did nothing to assuage her frustration; the door unlocked to an empty room. No Alex, and no Zoe. No one to greet them save for the alarm bell. It began chiming before Sylvie could finish carting the trash can back inside the office, and she muttered, “Give me a break.”

She waved at Conrad, standing in the gallery doorway across the street, looking aggravated. Sylvie could see her point. So far, all Conrad had gotten out of her today—besides a set of grandiose promises—was the sight of Sylvie moving a trash can from her truck to office to truck and back again.

Sylvie set the can down next to the main desk, though the bell rang more shrilly for it; Wright winced and chose to sit outside on the stoop like one of the old men in the Cuban district, keeping a weather eye on all those who passed. He dragged his cigarettes out of his pocket, battered and flattened, and lit one up. Sylvie shut the door on the stink of it.

Ignoring the bell’s desperate chiming, she headed upstairs for the wall safe and deposited the cash she’d confiscated from Zoe. Thinking of the evening still ahead, she kept out a few more bills to add to her own wallet. Good advice rarely came cheap.

After a moment’s thought, she unlocked her filing cabinet and dug the unused briefcase out of the back. It wasn’t really her style; she leaned more toward canvas satchels and large purses. But it would be a damn sight easier than carting around a trash can secured by paper and peeling tape. She laid in a thick pad of newspaper on both sides, then, grimacing, reached into the trash can and transferred just the Hands, leaving her with a plastic wastebasket full of soured milk.

A quick trip downstairs to the sink let her scrub her hands clean; it took two washings with antibacterial soap, and she still thought she could smell spoiled milk on her skin, a stinking reminder that Zoe was in over her head. She’d done what she could hunting Zoe, didn’t have time to drive aimlessly around the city.

Forget giving Zoe back her cell phone. Sylvie wanted the girl microchipped with her very own GPS tracking device. Her parents would understand.

Rafael,
Sylvie thought. She didn’t dwell on his loss much these days, cruel as it sounded. He’d been avenged, and Demalion’s death had overwhelmed the earlier loss. But thinking of Zoe in magical trouble, probably oblivious to exactly how much trouble, Sylvie recalled her grief, Adelio’s grief, and imagined that pain reaching out toward her parents.

Back upstairs, out of hearing of the warning bell, she dialed the old number, still in Alex’s records, and got a groggy male voice—Detective Adelio Suarez catnapping before his shift.
“¿Sí?”

“Lio, it’s Shadows.”

Before Rafael had died, he’d dragged her home with him, saw her fed on his mama’s
ropa vieja
,
refritos
, and fresh tortillas in a kitchen that smelled of cumin and hot skillets. The last time she’d seen Rafael’s mother, Lourdes had spat at Sylvie’s feet.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. A man gathering himself. The last time she’d called directly was to tell him Rafael had died.

“What do you want?”

“I need a favor—”

He began to laugh.

She spoke over it, dropping her words into pauses. She wasn’t really sure it was laughter and not tears, was glad of the forced space the phones allowed. “My sister’s in trouble. I just want you and yours to keep an eye out for her. If you find her, bring her to me.”

“And why would I do this for you?”

“I’ll owe you a favor,” she said. “That might not sound like much—”

“I don’t want a favor,” he said. “I want what I have always wanted. Answers.”

“Find her, bring her home to me, and you can have them for the asking,” she said. Her heart thudded in her chest. “But it’s off the record, and it’s just you and me.”

The phone clicked down, a ghostly silence on his end, then her screen showed CALL TERMINATED. Sylvie thought, hoped,
feared
, that was a yes.

Goddammit, Zoe.
Just what she’d always wanted: to owe a cop a favor.

She clattered downstairs, the bell growing louder as she descended, her frustration growing with the sound. Her cake case was nothing but trouble.

Alex was back; her spiky bright hair catching sunlight outside. She stood on the stoop but was held back from entering. Wright leaned against the front door, his palm flat against the glass, his arm and body caging Alex. Alex had her head ducked; Wright’s lips moved rapidly, talking up a storm.

A murmur carried through the glass, an unintelligible vibration. Alex raised her head, and her eyes were wide, the whites showing all around the irises. Sylvie snarled, headed for the door, for Wright—and the scene changed all at once. Wright, gesturing with his free hand, nearly stubbed himself in the face with the tip of his cigarette, and flinched. The cigarette tumbled; Wright slumped.

Alex yanked the door open, slid inside, and shut it in Wright’s face. She stumbled inward, jumped when she saw Sylvie looming, then looked relieved.

“What was that about?” Sylvie said. “Do I need to have a talk with Wright about respecting the staff—”

Alex held up a hand. “Fine. You were right. Utterly right. It’s Demalion in there, the bastard.”

“Bastard’s pretty harsh,” Sylvie objected. It was weak, buried beneath the relief that she wasn’t going to have to fight Alex on this.

“You’ve called him worse before you lionized him after his death. He’s ISI, Sylvie. And he chose to convince me of who he was by reciting their file on me. Did you know they had a file on me?”

“Demalion wanted to hire you,” Sylvie said.

Alex shuddered. “Me? Work for dicks in suits? Just no.”

Silence fell between them. Sylvie watched Wright pacing on the front stoop, phone back in his hand—comfort-calling his wife, his son. Reminding himself of who he was.

“Did he say what he wanted?” Sylvie asked. She tried not to feel the itch of envy that Demalion had spoken to Alex when Sylvie had been waiting all day for a single word. That would be both pathetic and counterproductive.

“Demalion?”

“Of
course
, Demalion,” Sylvie said. “I know what Wright wants.”

Alex bit her lip, that quick, sideways nip that meant she was biting back hard or hurtful questions—Sylvie heard them anyway, read them off Alex’s expressive face.
Did she care? With Demalion’s wishes also in the picture?

“Speaking of Wright,” Alex said, “I gather you haven’t told him. About Demalion. Why not?”

“Maybe you made me doubt?” Sylvie said.

“Crappy excuse, Syl.”

“I will. Soon.”

Alex narrowed her gaze, but Sylvie moved past her and stuck her head out the door. “Wright! Stop sucking on the cancer sticks, or I’ll be sending you back to your wife with black lung.”

Wright jerked, his fingers in the packet, then said, resignedly, “I quit last year. Before all this . . . started.” He tucked the packet away, followed her back inside. “You two done with your confab?”

“Hey, you could have joined us. You were on the phone.”

Alex was poking at the bell, trying to interrupt the chime, and licking blistered fingers for her efforts. “Is it just me, or is this getting louder?”