Ghosts & Echoes

17 The Hard Lesson

“NOW THAT YOU SEE, NOW THAT YOU KNOW . . . TELL ME, SHADOWS. Do I look like the kind of man who would perpetuate slavery and soul shock? Do I look like I’d pass Hands out to teenagers?”

Sylvie studied Wales, the grubby little room filled with dead men’s Hands, the way the ghost, Marco, slunk back beside him, the hellish light the Hand gave off, the tightly drawn fear on Wright’s face—Demalion’s mind—and let loose. “You just fed your . . . pet a soul snack. Hell yes, you look the type.”

Wales actually had the audacity to look bewildered, flustered. He sputtered, “No, no. That was just for illustration! So you’d see . . . and he’s no good anyway, a real bad guy—”

Sylvie shrugged that off—she and Demalion were too jaded to be able to argue that point effectively—and said, “Well, we’re not. Soul shock and slavery, and you thought it was a good idea to take us down instead of just answering your door. Thought it was great idea to expose us a second time?”

Demalion’s breath seemed loud and rasping, as if he’d caught the rhythm of her stuttering heart. The room felt tight and close, dusty with the scent of mummified flesh. She felt choked on it, on her rage. Zoe had gone to someone like this. Walked into a room stinking of black magic and taken home a souvenir. Put her soul at risk for the promise of cold hard cash.

Wales stiffened; his lanky shape grew more angular. “You came to my door, gun drawn. I was justified. I do what I have to, to survive. You’re no different. Neither’s your dead friend there. I might feed Marco on occasion, but I don’t body snatch for him. I’ve got the moral high ground here, Shadows.”

She hissed in a breath, and Demalion said, “Sylvie,” again. Not a plea this time, but a flat-out command not to pick a fight, not to be herself.

“Prove it,” she said, instead. Her voice was rough, hostile, but it wasn’t a shout. “If you’ve got the moral high ground, offer me your help.” Her fingers tightened on the wrist stump of the Hand she held, nails digging into the flesh. Disgusting and gruesome, but the only outlet she could allow herself.

She didn’t trust him, but like Val, he seemed more than willing to talk about magic, feed her information she needed. While she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it, he could have hurt them; hell, just leaving them passed out in this part of the city would have been a form of passive murder. Instead, he’d brought them in, bound them gently, wakened them with a potion whose contents he willingly listed.

Those actions were discouraging, created doubt in her breast. Wales might be telling her the simple truth. He wasn’t the one passing Hands out to kids. And if that were so, if he were the guardian he claimed to be . . .

“We need your help.”

That shocked Wales rigid in a way all her previous bluster and rage hadn’t. He sidled away from her, all nerves now, no poise. “I don’t get involved with other people’s problems. Not anymore.”

“Sometimes you don’t get a choice,” she said. When his pale face went as ashy as Marco’s ghostly one, she gestured with the Hand she held. “What? You thought you’d show me a little dark magic, and I’d be ready to flee? You’re going to help us. You say you’re not the problem here? Not the necromancer I’m hunting? Fine. Then you’re the help I need.”

Demalion said, “Shadows is a black-and-white woman. You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. I’ve been on both sides with her. It was better on the solution side.”

That made her heart hurt. The solution side had gotten him killed. But he met her eyes squarely and nodded once. A knot that had tied itself around her heart eased: Like her, Demalion would have done nothing different. Relief made her sound friendlier than she felt when she said, “Helping us out would go a long, long way to making me forget that you just sicced your ghost on your neighbor. As an illustration.”

He sighed. “What d’y’all want, then?” Wales asked. He hunched a shoulder, turned his head away from Marco’s whispers.

“First? Put your buddy Marco back in the box or wherever he goes when he’s not looming over you. I’m getting a cramp holding on to Thing here.” She had about reached her limit for grossness, was one step from her fingers betraying her and dropping the loathsome thing.

Marco scowled, but Wales only nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” He carried Marco’s Hand past them, Sylvie and Demalion pivoting to keep watch. Wales puttered about the open kitchen—really not the nesting sort, Sylvie thought; his kitchen consisted of a cardboard box that looked suspiciously full of cereal cartons, a battered cooler, and a spray bottle beside the sink.

The spray bottle yielded a fine, stinking mist that sizzled and spat as it made contact with the Hand of Glory. The hellish flames sank back to a sullen glow, then went out.

Marco disappeared like a screen projection shut off. Wales set the bottle down, the Hand, and refilled the bottle with a carton of milk from the cooler. Farm Stores brand, she noted absently. That fitted. Somehow she had a hard time imagining Wales walking down brightly lit Winn-Dixie aisles, all twitchy-eyed, with a Hand in his wallet pocket.

“Milk douses the flame,” he said.

“So you’ve said. Nature versus unnature.”

“Birth and death,” Demalion contributed, tag-teaming.

“You’re stalling,” Sylvie concluded.

He blotted Marco’s Hand against his shirt, pocketed it again. Sylvie felt her lip curl, her fingers uncurl, letting the Hand she’d held drop to the floor.

“If you let go while it’s active,” she said, “what happens?”

“Marco knocks me out and eats my soul. Not a nibble, the whole damn thing. Like any slave, he’ll turn on his owner if given the chance.” Wales cocked his head in thought, then added, “Well, maybe Marco wouldn’t. We’ve been through a lot together.”

Sylvie scrubbed her fingers down her jeans repeatedly. Demalion was doing the same.

“Soap?” she asked.

“No running water,” Wales said. “There are Handi Wipes under the sink if you’re squeamish. They’re pretty inert, bacteria-wise, you know.”

“No, I don’t.” Sylvie shifted farther away from the dangling Hands. “That’s why we came to you.”

Wales hesitated. “I’m confused. I assumed you wanted me to find your ghost friend a body of his own.”

“Can you?” Demalion asked.

“No!” Wales said.

Sylvie didn’t like Demalion’s eagerness, said, “Yeah, like even if that was our plan”—and hey, it was the first thought that ended with both Wright and Demalion alive—“we could trust you. We came to do a show-and-tell with Hands of Glory.” She sought out the promised wipes and scoured her fingers; fake floral-scented alcohol had never smelled so good. She tossed the container to Demalion, and he did likewise.

“I’ve shown, I’ve told. You’re still here.” He shifted his hands, crossed his arms above his chest, uncrossed them, hooked fingers into his pockets, shifted again, visibly restraining himself from seeking out Marco’s Hand in some bizarre comfort.

“Not your Hands, our Hands . . . My briefcase. Where’s my briefcase?” It had slipped her mind entirely; surrounded by Hands of Glory, she hadn’t missed the two she’d brought to this party.

“In the hall,” he said. “I didn’t want to mess with it. It looked iffy.”

“Iffy,” she muttered. She took three giant steps—all it took to cross the small living room—griping the whole time. “I’ll tell you what’s iffy. Your future if it’s gone.”

“Sylvie,” Demalion said. “Take a breath.”

“What, you’re on his side? He thinks you’re a squatter looking to move in permanently.”

“How about we all play on the same side?” Demalion asked, but without a lot of hope. He seemed tired, still resting in the chair where he had been bound as if his bones were too heavy to let him rise. Sylvie took another glance, thought he looked grey in Wright’s skin, and shut up. She wondered how long Demalion could hold on to the body—this was the longest she’d seen him manage—wondered if Wright was fighting to recover it.

The front door was crusted with locks—three dead bolts, two chains, all no doubt illegally installed, all sticky with salt-milk brushed over them. The walls, up close, shimmered with a salt wash. She supposed it was hard to lock up properly when you had a roomful of tools designed to open locks.

The last chain slithered free, and she jerked the door open, annoyed when it came at her so fast she nearly clocked herself. All those locks and the door was cheap-ass hollow-core. Made her edgy, especially with 2C still lying sprawled in the hallway. Wales was courting disaster. Magic wasn’t proof against bullets.

The briefcase was still there in the gloom—battered duct tape, the scarf stuffed in between silvery tape, the lumpy crust of salt seeping free, the smell, rotten milk—Sylvie paused in collecting it, her thoughts veering. Zoe’s Hand had been soaked in milk. Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Bella. Hell, Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Sylvie had been. Sylvie wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad. Good, because it meant Zoe was less likely to be affected than Bella. Not soul sick. Bad, because Zoe’s messing with magic made Sylvie’s teeth hurt.

She dragged the briefcase into the room, breaking the staring contest Wales and Demalion were having, and slapped it down on the counter. “Someone is selling Hands of Glory, and there are a group of teenagers using them to play burglar. If it’s not you, then who?”

“Probably no one,” Wales said. “There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. Think it’s the heat. Bodies rot too fast to be used for anything but a splash-and-dash kinda spell.” At Sylvie’s frown, he said, “Uh, splash and dash is a blood harvesting and summoning; happens fast and—”

“I know what it is,” Sylvie snapped. “You’re telling me you think the kids just developed the ability spontaneously? I don’t think so.”

Demalion frowned, started to say something, but shivered instead, fell back into silence.

“Look,” Wales said. “They’re teenagers. They don’t have any access to the real thing, and a lot of little bodegas sell knockoffs, guaranteed gross, but harmless. I think they’re dog paws, partially defleshed.”

“You’re not listening,” Sylvie said. “Their Hands are real enough to let them walk through burglar alarms and locked doors, to put down anyone in the vicinity for hours. Knockoffs? I don’t think so.” She flipped the latches on the briefcase, yanked the duct tape back, spilling salt, and popped the lid. Demalion took a step back, then wobbled. Sylvie half turned; she knew what was happening, even as it happened. Wright shivered convulsively, his eyes flat and black, but his jaw was set. Taking his body back. Possession trumping his fear of the unknown and the malign.

He made a series of quick, darting glances about the room. Sylvie figured he was trying to play catch-up on events. Wright seemed confused, but less wary than Demalion had been. Then again, Wright had missed the whole “prisoners of the Ghoul” thing, had missed Wales being all judgmental about ghosts and human bodies, had missed Wales feeding his pet Hand. For all Wright knew, Sylvie, Demalion, and Wales had been sitting around making friends and drinking tea.

She merely nodded welcome, not wanting to draw Wales’s attention to the changeover. But Wales’s focus was all for the Hands in the briefcase, tangled in their jumbled embrace, fingers linking.

“Interesting,” he said, expression intent. “One of them is . . . fake? The other . . . not?” He pulled his fingers back without ever touching either Hand, not Bella’s, all spangled silver and fake tattoos, not Zoe’s, faintly crusted with milk from its long immersion.

“You don’t sound certain,” Sylvie said. She wanted certain. A tiny sprig of hope bloomed in her. Maybe Zoe’s Hand wasn’t real, a knockoff like her faux designer clothing.

Hope hurts, her little dark voice warned. Hurts being born and hurts dying.

Wales said, “I can check.” He picked up Bella’s Hand of Glory, made a face at the decorations, and then flipped his lighter out of his pocket.

Sylvie snapped, “Hey!” just as Bella’s Hand dipped into the flame and failed to light. The silver nail polish blackened and stank.

Wales said, “Huh.”

“A little warning!” Sylvie said. “I’ve had all the blackouts I can tolerate for the month.”

“It’s dead,” he said.

“It’s a frickin’ Hand cut off a body, yeah,” Wright said, twitchy as always. “I don’t think it takes a whole lotta know-how to figure that it’s dead.”

“Let me rephrase, then,” Wales said. He studied Wright as he did so. “It looks like a Hand of Glory, but it’s not one. It lacks a ghost. It’s just dead flesh.”

“It worked earlier,” Sylvie said. “Had a ghost, had a fairly active one. Gave the user all sorts of nightmares, reliving her crimes.”

“Shouldn’t have done that,” Wales said absently, turning the Hand this way and that, setting the lighter down. “Part of the packaging is to prevent soul seepage. Thankfully. I can’t imagine sharing Marco’s dreams. Sure that’s what was going on? Not just imagination?”

“Sure enough that we could ID the . . . donor by her memories flooding the kid’s dreams.”

“Her?”

“The dead woman?”

Wales twitched visibly, bobbled the Hand, and only caught it at the last. “It’s a woman’s Hand!” He shot a look back at the other one, and said, “They’re both women’s!”

Wright and Sylvie traded a long, speaking look with each other. Wright’s expression said, He’s kinda slow, and We’re not paying for this, are we? Sylvie shrugged minutely; she wasn’t sure Wales saw a lot of women, living or dead.

Wales muttered, “No, no, no. They’re women’s hands, and they’re never women’s hands.”

“Why not?” Sylvie asked. “Women commit murder, too. They might be a little less likely to hang themselves after, though.” A stray thought occurred. Alex hadn’t said how Patrice Caudwell had died. She would have mentioned something as grisly as an old lady hanging herself. “What happens if they don’t hang? Can they still be bound into the Hands?”

“No,” Wales said. “No. At least . . . Look. It’s all about symbolism. Hanging yourself, a rope around your neck—it keeps your soul tight to the body. Suicide by gunshot, by bleeding out—”

“Soul leaves with the blood. But could it be less significant than you think?”

“That’s not the . . . Tradition dictates men’s Hands. Tradition dictates hanging,” Wales said.

“Tradition changes—”

“No,” he said. “No. It’s like prescription meds. You don’t prescribe the same dose to a woman that you do a man. The . . .” He flailed his hands about, reaching for vocabulary they would understand, and finally came up with a word that made Sylvie want to gag. “The recipe to create the Hands is specific. Detailed. Picky. You don’t just change out pieces of it.”

“Do we care how it got done?” Wright said. “Can’t we just get rid of the things?”

Sylvie shook her head. “It’s a signature of sorts. Tells me something about the person who made them.” For one thing, Wales’s spluttering was the final step to make her erase him from her list of suspects. His dismay seemed entirely too real, the break with tradition too difficult for him to contemplate.

“You’re profiling a body snatcher?” Wright said. “Oh, I hate this.”

“Wales?” she prompted.

The Ghoul picked up Bella’s Hand again, scratched flakes off the coating, clear with a reddish tinge. “They changed more than the gender,” he said. “This is just . . . wrong. It couldn’t have worked.”

“It did. End of discussion,” Sylvie said. She had Bella’s dreams, she had the platinum brooch, she had the Navigator and Bayside and her own bouts of unconsciousness as proof.

“But you just don’t mess around with a formulation to bind a killer spirit!” Wales said. “It’s just too damn risky for the user. The ghost might escape. And then—”

Sylvie sucked in a breath. “You think that’s what happened? The ghost escaped? Went after Bella . . .” It might explain the girl’s illness. “What does soul consumption look like?”

“It doesn’t look like anything,” Wales said. “You just die. All at once. Drop dead in your tracks. Your body might breathe for a little bit, your heart beat, but the shock of having a soul ripped out—”

“The girl I took the Hand from was sick,” Sylvie said.

“No argument,” Wright muttered.

Wales shot him another glance and caught on this time. It wasn’t Demalion behind the skin any longer.

“Sick,” Sylvie said, prodding Wales with her forefinger. His chest was all bone beneath the layers, thin as an anorexic’s. “Could the Hand do that?”

“No,” Wales said. He rubbed at his chest. “If the ghost got free, the girl would have dropped. At least—there’s something just not right with these Hands. . . .”

“Okay, you know what? Forget all that. Let me worry about where they came from. Just tell us how to destroy them.”

Wales tossed Bella’s Hand into the trash. “That one’s done. No ghost? No trouble. The other—”

He picked up Zoe’s Hand with a wary expression, bit back most of his comments so that all she heard was a mumbled, “Wrong,” and she said, “Well?”

Her tone was sharp, but she couldn’t help thinking about Bella—ill and in the hospital, and a ghost mysteriously vanished from its prison. Zoe was next on the chopping block.

“Oh, this one’s active as hell,” Wales said. “I can feel it, even unlit; it’s buzzing, angry and barely contained.” He raised his face, furrowed brow, and upset eyes. “You’ve got to find out who’s making these and stop them. They’re not right. They’re defective. Dangerous. To the user and anyone else.”

Sylvie said, “I’ll get right on that. If you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear them. You’re right. There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. I try to keep it that way.”

“There’s a woman on Calle Ocho. Runs a fancy shop like she’s nothing more than a merchant. But she’s the real deal.”

“She sent us to you,” Wright said.

“Well then,” Wales said. “I’m tapped out.”

“Focus, Ghoul. Tell me how to destroy them.”

“They’re tough,” Wales said. “It’s the binding between the bones and the spirit. You have to destroy one without freeing the other. Otherwise, you’re fighting something that can touch you, hurt you, that you can’t touch. It’s a man boxing hurricane winds on a cliff.”

“An exorcism?” Wright said. “Gotta be a priest around. Surely one of ’em will believe the threat’s real.”

Wales said, “An exorcism would work no better on the Hands of Glory than it would work on you.”

Wright twitched, and Wales continued. “An exorcism is a rite designed to remove a devil or demon from human skin, to send it back to the abyss. A ghost isn’t a devil or a demon. You can’t send it back. You can only send it on. And if it’s not ready to go, then you’re going to have a fight that gets really ugly. A demon’s nothing. It’s not natural to be in human flesh, doesn’t fit. A human spirit? Feels right at home.”

Wright sagged back against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, gripping his shoulders. “So there’s nothing you can do.”

“Nothing I can do for you, no,” Wales said. “All the spells I know are about binding ghosts tighter to flesh. Milk and salt bind them. Put them to sleep,” Wales said. He took another glance at Zoe’s Hand, added, “Usually.”

“Sleep’s not the same as gone,” Sylvie said. “C’mon, Wales, you’ve got to have a way.”

“Age and entropy do it—the longest-used Hand of Glory was only active for three hundred years.”

“Only—” Wright muttered.

“Not an option,” Sylvie said. “You’re telling me that as much as you loathe the slavery forced onto these spirits, you haven’t been looking for a way to break the spell? To send those spirits on?” She gestured broadly, taking in the Hands still hanging from the ceiling, the room, the neighborhood, his entire life. “This is what you’re going to do forever? Truck the Hands around, keeping anyone from using them? That’s not a life. That’s a holding pattern.”

“I have a method,” Wales said. “But I designed it around traditional Hands of Glory, the traditional ones. Don’t know how it would work on this one.”

“Can’t we just give it a try?” Sylvie asked.

Wales shook his head. “Not without knowing more about this Hand, about its ghost. I could free it . . . her . . . instead of destroying her, and she’d go after me, maybe her previous master—”

“That’s not an acceptable risk,” Sylvie said.

“Hey, the user knew what he was getting into when he used the Hand in the first place,” Wales said. “Spare your sympathy for someone who deserves it.”

“Teenagers,” she hissed. “Kids. They make dumb-ass choices all the time, and society protects them from it.”

Wales nodded but looked less than convinced. It made Sylvie want to snatch the Hand back, keep it close to her, risk or no risk. Bad enough Zoe was out and about, doing god knew what. Sylvie didn’t want to imagine her dead in some alley, victim of the Ghoul’s puritanical streak.

She swallowed. “Tell me something, Wales. How does mastery work? If I took that Hand? Lit it? Would I be its master? Would it be my soul at stake and not . . . not hers?”

Wales and Wright shared one expression: stunned dismay.

Wright got his words out first. “Syl, you can’t!”

Sylvie shook her head. “Wales, an answer?”

“Possession is most of the law,” he said. “You light it, you own it. At least until the next person picks it up.”

“And the ghost would be able to talk? Like Marco? She might be able to give me info on who made her?”

Wales said, “That’s total conjecture. It took Marco a year to talk to me, and I never left him drenched in milk. It’s risky.”

“Why? I light it, I’m her master, right? You said as much.”

“But these Hands are wrong. . . .”

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” she said.

“I’m a researcher,” Wales said. “Not a risk-taker.”

“Well, welcome to my world,” Sylvie said. She held out her hand, snapped her fingers. Gimme.

Wright made an odd, tight-throated groan, a protest from within, looking startled even as it rattled his teeth. Demalion, making himself felt. Sylvie hadn’t thought there was any overlap, hadn’t thought Demalion could see the world when Wright was in control; she knew Wright couldn’t when Demalion was dominant. But then, Demalion’s senses had always been just a little . . . more than human.

The Ghoul was looking slinky, like any moment now, he’d be out the door, and she’d be out her guide. Sylvie snatched up the Hand from the table, went briefly dizzy with the touch—Wales had been right. It buzzed with magic. With malevolence. But she’d laid her hands on gods, and what was one ghost-possessed Hand to that?

“Risky? Fine. Make it safer. You got salt. Build me a ring. And I’ll light her up inside it. You can hold Marco close, and Wright can—”

“I’m not touching anything dead.”

“Demalion wasn’t so squeamish,” she said.

His attention shifted to his hands with a grimace. If he’d been as young as his son, Jamie, she thought he’d be doing the cootie dance, complete with flailing hands. Any other time, and she might have been amused. She went back to her staredown with Wales, trying to make him see she was doing this, make him see she expected him to help her.

Zoe was out on the streets of Miami, somewhere. Sylvie hadn’t been able to find her, couldn’t see her safe and sound. But she could do this. She could take the ghost’s attention away from Zoe. Try to break whatever bond existed between them. That was worth any risk.

Wales sighed. “Fine. But yeah, you’re going in a ring. And Marco’s coming back, and your guy’s going to have to hold Hands with a dead man.”

Wright backed away, disgust and fear chasing themselves across his face, and while Sylvie’s first instinct was to order him to pick up the damn Hand and hold on, a cooler thought pointed out that he was her client, too. Not just a burden.

“The salt will contain the effect?”

“Not completely,” the Ghoul said. He didn’t sound worried. “But as before, claiming mastery of the other Hands will bring us into sync with it, make us family. Make us not-food.” He grinned at Wright, teeth surprisingly white and bright in his sallow face. “It’s like being a kid again. As long as you hold on to Daddy’s hand, you’re protected. But we’ll be lighting them all this time.”

“Great,” Wright said. Whether it was the Ghoul’s none-too-subtle name-calling, or just fatalism, he bent and picked up the Hand Demalion had dropped earlier.

Sylvie took up Zoe’s Hand of Glory, still tacky with milk, and Wales began making a single-occupant safety zone around her. The circle was barely wider than her outstretched arms, but better that than to run out of salt halfway through and have to brush it into shape; doing that risked adding in impurities. Sucked to have a spell get botched for a misplaced piece of carpet lint.

Wales chucked his lighter in just as he poured the last of the salt; she caught it and took a steady breath. Her skin crawled like a thousand ants were making themselves at home. She really, really didn’t want to do this. The Hand flared hot and furious at the first touch of the flame, shot fiery cinders toward the ceiling, before it settled to a steady hellish blaze. And Sylvie wasn’t alone in the circle any longer.

A woman blurred into shape, stiff and straight with age; her white hair streamed out around her, caught in the heated draft made by the flames. Unlike Marco’s hollow-eyed form, this ghost’s eyes glittered beneath her brows. And unlike Marco, equal parts menacing and drifting, she rocketed from confusion to sheer rage in a millisecond, drew herself up even straighter, hair streaming, and shrieked. Translucent teeth bulged like rat fangs, and her tongue elongated, rolled out, questing, utterly serpentine.

Sylvie’s every hair on her body stood up, screaming in silence for her to get out, to run, to flee.

Instead, she got one finger in her ear, trying to shake off that bone-rattle cry, sharper than a stooping hawk, and thrust the Hand as far from her as she could.

“Wales? A little help?”

The ghost shrieked again, still wordless, and every latch in the room snapped open. Wales tried to get Marco’s Hand lit with trembling fingers, and Wright was on his knees. Something lashed across her skin, gelid, sinuous, painful; the ghost’s tongue licked and stung and struck, forked at the tip, barbed the length of it. It drew her close, pulled at something beneath her skin.

“I lit you,” Sylvie gritted out. “Obey me.”

The tongue coiled around her skin again, questing for her soul, left frostbite and dizziness in its wake, and Sylvie thought she was going to die here, stuck in a circle with a ghost that refused to be mastered.

The salt circle was only salt. She could step out of it, fall out of it, but she’d drag the ghost free also. Free to attack the others in the room.

Two dead souls and a necromancer, her little dark voice said. Not a loss.

Sylvie stutter-stepped, dodged the ghost as she charged; she pivoted and felt the edge of her sneaker grit against the salt. “Wales!”

“Working on it!”

She panted, near panic—the Ghoul was right; the dead and the living shouldn’t interact—and told her inner voice to shut up, that she wasn’t saving herself at the cost of their lives, and hell, she wasn’t even sure their deaths would save her.

They might.

Distracted by her own adrenaline, by fighting her own desire to survive at any cost, she was too slow to dodge the next blow, and the ghost reeled her in, the tongue burning about her waist, caught her by the shoulders, and pressed against her. Sylvie went rigid in horror and repulsion, clawed at the intangible, then . . .

Cold.

Shock.

Cold.

Breathless.

Pressing.

Not breathing.

Something pressing on her face, through her mouth, through her nose, smothering her, and though she tried to drag it off with her free hand, all she did was claw her own skin bloody. The ghost was untouchable.

Implacable.

Sylvie, vision swirling, got a strange overlay. A hospital ceiling. White perforated tiles, stiff-bleached sheets, needles in her arms, and a smiling woman putting a pillow over her face. She kicked and struggled, and her voice said, It’s not your death you’re remembering.

She sucked in a thread of air, rank with dead flesh, but sweet in her lungs. Sucked in another, cold as the clay as she fought it through the ghost’s efforts to smother her. That hungry tongue, so like a succubus’s, lashed and stung and struck, but . . . couldn’t penetrate deeper than her skin. Couldn’t plug itself in. Couldn’t devour her soul. Holding the Hand gave her at least that much protection.

“You killed him,” she said. An old man in a hospital bed, his arms knobby and white-furred. Not her. Him. Like Bella’s dreams, it was a vision of the past. The ghost’s memory. Not hers.

“Of course I did,” the ghost said, a cold kiss in her veins. “A life’s such a little thing when it’s not your own. Where is my vessel?”

“Get off me, and I’ll tell you.” Like she could. She didn’t even know what the hell the ghost was talking about. But she’d say anything to get that cold invasion out of her bones. Was it like this for Wright? Did Demalion feel like this to him? How had he held on for so long?

The ghost withdrew to the very edge of the spell circle. Beyond her, Wales fumbled his spray bottle, Marco’s flaming Hand, and Wright’s slack form. The Hand of Glory that Wright was supposed to be mastering was slipping from his lax grip. On my own, Sylvie thought, gritting her teeth. Just like always.

She scraped up a little salt and tried to put out the flames with it. Shortsighted. She should have brought the milk carton in with her.

The ghost shrieked and attacked again, not slowed at all by the salt; the rat teeth chittered near her ear. Cold lanced through her arm; Sylvie’s fingers spasmed; she dropped the flaming Hand, and that snake-tongue lashed around and sank through her ribs.

It was a bright burst of pain, frigid and sharp, and she had the distinct and unpleasant sensation of feeling her heart miss a beat. Her vision was gone, just like that, that vertigo from before coming back, stronger than ever. She’d thought she was immune to this?

On her knees, and when had that happened, and her ears ringing, her lungs aching—was she still breathing?—and something being drawn out of her. No, she thought, no. Not like this.

Then human hands clamped down, hard and hot on her shoulders, the circle broken, the ghost whipping away from her, freed and exultant for a shared heartbeat as the tongue withdrew from its attack on Sylvie’s soul.

A moment later, the raging shriek started up again—thin, high, wavering. Nails against the chalkboard of her bones.

When Sylvie’s vision cleared, the shakiness faded; she found herself in Wales’s arms, Marco encircling him, in some horrifying parody of a three-way embrace. Wright slumped against the wall, the Hand in his lap alight, and a looming ghost sheltering him, a dead ex-con so large he almost had to be called Tiny.

The woman’s ghost battered at the walls, bounced back, wailed, hit the door with no better result. In Sylvie’s ear, Wales said, “Paranoia comes in handy. As does concern for the neighbors. My home’s a ghost trap.”

“We’re inside the trap,” Sylvie muttered back. “We’re here and we’re tasty and I’m out of ideas. You got anything?”

“She’s a lich ghost,” Wales said.

“A what?” Sylvie shook her head, regretted it when the dizziness swung back around. “No. Never mind. Lesson later. Fix the problem now.”

“Which one?” He shivered against her back; his hands trembled, bare against her flesh.

Bare.

Marco’s ghostly arms were wrapped tight around Wales. But Wales—

She wasn’t the only one who’d dropped the Hand of Glory. In the center of the room, a fallen Hand burned, slow and sullen. It wasn’t the lich ghost’s, streaming fire toward the stucco ceiling. It was Marco’s.

“Wales,” she breathed. “Is that—”

“Don’t,” he said, shivering kicking up a notch. “Don’t question it. I’m not.”

If Marco was loose, why wasn’t Wales dead? Why wasn’t she? Had Marco just not noticed? Or was he honestly trying to protect Wales?

Either way, it was a situation that felt too fragile to linger. Near Wright, the spray bottle lay tipped on its side, the nozzle broken, a puddle of milk seeping slowly into the carpet.

They had to be rid of the lich ghost before she got tired of clawing at the walls and came back for them. Had to get that Hand extinguished. She touched Wales’s arms gently, two pats, getting his attention, asking for release, gesturing toward the cooler, a whole ten feet away. It looked like a huge distance when she took into account the hungry ghosts in the room.

Wales eased himself away from her, and out of his arms, out of Marco’s—it felt like a spotlight was shining on her flesh, marking her as a target. She thought about saying, “No, on second thought, you do it. . . .” But she was stronger than Wales, less scared, more angry, and Wright was looking at her from across the room with eyes full of hope and fear. He’d trusted her instincts, and she’d been wrong.

The risk was hers to take.

She’d crossed only a few feet of the floor when the ghosts attacked. The lich ghost swooped in, fury and frustration distorting her face, and Wright’s ex-con, lumbering even in death, snapping at her with his teeth. Cold and vertigo chased themselves across her body, and she fumbled forward, catching the cooler by sheer determination and momentum. It tipped in her grip, spilling a carton toward her—nearly empty—and something much more precious.

Her gun.

She underhanded the milk carton in Wales’s direction, trusting him to use it to best effect, and grabbed her gun. Wales splashed milk over the lich ghost’s Hand, but it wasn’t working, wasn’t slowing the flames or the ghostly woman that emanated from it. The lich ghost and Tiny were duking it out. The lich ghost’s barbed tongue pierced the yardbird’s chest, seeking the soul.

“Too bad he’s dead already,” Sylvie said, but apparently there were levels and levels of dead she had yet to learn. Lich ghosts could apparently feed on anything. Tiny swirled away, diminished from within, sucked up in bizarre silence.

The room was quiet for a moment, then there was the quiet sizzle of Wright’s protecting Hand going out, of Wright slumping into the deadly lethargy. Unprotected. And the lich ghost still moved.

Sylvie spun around, gun in hand, and fired four shots into the lich ghost’s Hand, blowing it out of the remnant of the salt circle and against the wall. Gobbets of flesh spattered, bone cracked, and the lich ghost went out like a light.

Wales slid forward and poured milk over Marco’s slow-burning Hand.

“Is that it?” Sylvie asked. “Is it dead now? Did bullets do it?”

“No,” Wales said. “She’s only retreated. I can feel it still buzzing.” He stood shakily, a better man than her—she didn’t have any intention of getting off the floor anytime soon. Her wrists, her forearm, her pant leg were stippled in white where the barbed tongue had touched and burned with cold.

Wales dipped his fingers in the salt, wet them with the last of the milk, and made his way over to Wright, sketching shapes across his face.

“Is he all right? Both of them?”

“I don’t know,” Wales said. “Wouldn’t it be better if his possessor was gone?”

“No,” Sylvie said. She slid along the wall a little, got closer to Wright, wrapped her hand about his wrist. There was a pulse. “So, you said lich ghost. That wasn’t on your list of types. What is it?”

“A myth,” he said. His voice shook. “A lich is half spirit, half flesh. A spirit bound and forced to animate something dead. A rotting corpse with a spirit trapped within. The grisliest form of immortality. They’re flesh, and they feed on flesh. A zombie with a brain. But they’re easy enough to banish, a handful of salt will sever the unnatural bond.”

“You said lich ghost,” Sylvie said. “That’s different?” Wright’s hand twitched; she folded it in her own, rubbed his long fingers, trying to push warmth back into them.

“Obviously,” Wales said. “Or it would have fallen apart the moment you spilled salt on it. Look, we are far past my comfort level. Anything I tell you is, at best, a guess.”

Sylvie patted Wright’s hand, slowly rolled herself up to a crouch, the better to catch his flighty gaze with her own. “I need your guesses. They’re better than what I’ve got. So. Lich ghost.”

“A lich ghost, according to rumor, is an accident. A spirit anchored to a scrap of flesh, disincarnate. No body of its own. Doomed to madness and endless hunger. To keep their souls whole, they have to feed.”

“They don’t eat flesh,” Sylvie said. She started to pace the room, her anxiety level too high to let her sit still. Her body protested, sore and shaky with fading adrenaline, but her brain pushed it on.

“They can’t,” Wales said. “Not equipped. Most of them starve and howl and kill people in the attempt. It’s like some bastard mix of Glory and lich, and I don’t know how it happened. Don’t even know how you could screw the spells up badly enough to create the monster . . . It’s a nightmare. I mean, the Hands of Glory are static tools. They expend and devour energy in the same proportion. A lich ghost is all hunger, all the time, and they eat souls. Legend says the only people who can survive lich ghosts are immortals and gods.”

Sylvie said, “Legends are nothing more than old gossip given weight. C’mon, Wales. A human created them out of human flesh and spirit. A human should be able to destroy them.”

Wright jerked, woke all at once, and crawled toward Sylvie, cursing the entire time, moving through English, Spanish, Latin, and something Sylvie thought might be cat for all the guttural hissing that went with it. It finally resolved into a single complaint as he collapsed against her side. “Fucking Wales and his fucking safe enough.” Demalion shot Wales a poisonous glance, and said, “You okay, Shadows?”

“You?”

“I asked first,” he said.

She considered it. She felt like crap. Her body ached. Her temper was foul. Wright had nearly died, and Wales was utterly freaked-out. But the lich-ghost Hand was quiet and contained, and that could only be a win. No more snacking on Zoe’s soul.

“Not too bad,” she said.

“Lich ghost,” Wales murmured on autopilot.

“Can we go home, then?” Demalion asked. “I want a shower. I’ve been playing with corpses, and I’m covered with milk. I’m never going to be clean again.”

“Finicky as a cat,” she said, but stroked his arm in soothing motions. He linked his fingers with hers, ran his gaze over the marks on her arms. They were fading slowly, frost white going to burn pink and back to tan. They ached.

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Yeah. Let’s go home. Wales, you’ll dispose of the Hands for us, right?”

“What?” Wales said. “No!” His shoulders spiked; his drawl disappeared for clipped fury. “You fuck up my evening, drag me into this, nearly get us all killed, and now I’m supposed to take out your trash?”

“It’s not like there’s not enough shit on my plate. I don’t have time to mess around with disposal when I still have to find out who made them. And if they’ve made more. Unless you want to take that task on.”

Wales paced a quick, tight circle. “Fine. I’ll do it. You don’t have a clue anyway.”

“You said the one’s dead, and the other’s got a hole blown through it,” Sylvie said. “How hard can it be?”

“You don’t listen. I told you. To destroy the flesh is simple. But if you just fuck up the flesh, the ghost gets loose. I’ve got a method for the regular Hands. I bind the souls tight, squeeze them down into the bone, then I dissect them. It’s a spiritual vivisection. It’s not gentle. And it’s not pleasant for any of us.”

Sylvie thought of Zoe, hiding the Hand in her wall, that lich ghost in her house with her parents. She had no reservations. “They’re murderers.”

“So are you,” Wales said. “Marco knows one when he sees one. That’s what he whispered to me the whole time I was trying to shield you. ‘Let her go. She’s a killer. She’ll kill you. . . .’ ”

“Nice,” Sylvie said. “Glad a dead murderer sees fit to make judgment. I know what I am, Wales. But I don’t kill toddlers and little old men. I kill monsters.”

“You’re protecting one,” Wales said. He gestured at her huddle with Demalion, their shoulders pressed tight together, their fingers still twined.

“He’s not anything like the ghosts we’ve just removed,” Sylvie said. “He’s a benign and temporary possession—”

“There’s no such animal,” Wales said. “I’m sorry.”

Demalion jerked. His mouth twisted, so much more mobile in Wright’s flesh, and crossed his arms over his chest. Sylvie shivered as his warmth left her side.

“Some things aren’t meant to be shared,” Wales continued, each word one she had already known. Already told herself. “And mixing living and the dead . . . it confuses everything.” He leaned closer to Demalion, reached out. Demalion slapped his hand away—so instinctive he might not even know why. But Sylvie knew. She remembered the god of Love reshaping his human flesh to be something other.

Wales didn’t try to get any closer, only studied him. “There’s a touch of death on both of you.”

“It’s Wright’s body,” Sylvie said. “Look, we didn’t come here for this, but is there any way to give Wright his body back and keep Demalion’s soul in the land of the living?”

“Oh yeah,” Wales said. “Your friend already knows how to do it. Done it once already. Wait for someone to die, and move in when the soul vacates. Of course, that usually means lingering in terminal wards of the hospital, and those bodies are wrecked or rotting, so hey, just enough time to say good-bye. Or maybe he’ll be lucky and find a coma victim whose brain matter isn’t too scrambled. Most likely, though, he’ll find a body he likes, debase and destroy the soul in it, and move on in. See, no problem at all.”

Sylvie’s lips parted. “Bastard.”

“I’m honest,” Wales said. “I’ve heard you prefer that to pretty words.”

Demalion tightened his lips, said nothing at all, only headed for the door, his stride tightly controlled.

Sylvie gritted her teeth; the door slammed behind him. “There’s got to be another option.”

Wales picked up Marco’s Hand again, just holding it in his own. It seemed to give him an extra jolt of courage. “People always want what they can’t have,” he said.

“Most of the time, they’re not trying hard enough,” Sylvie said, and left him alone with his ghosts.