Ghosts & Echoes si-2

  Ghosts & Echoes

  ( Shadows Inquiries - 2 )

  Lyn Benedict

  Sylvie is back from vacation, and all she wants out of life right now is for the Magicus Mundi to leave her alone for a bit. No dead things, no mayhem, no life-and-death struggles. Just because Sylvie managed to take some time off doesn't mean that the Magicus Mundi has to follow her example, though, and it's been piling things up on her doorstep while she was away.

  Still, she can pick and choose her cases, right? Solving a string of burglaries sounds perfect—mind-numbingly boring and mundane. Until you throw in Sylvie's missing sister, a generous helping of necromancy, and a Chicago cop possessed by a disturbingly familiar spirit.

  As the Rolling Stones sang, "You can't always get what you want."

  Ghosts & Echoes

  (The second book in the Shadows Inquiries series)

  Lyn Benedict

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all the people who helped make this book a pleasure to write—long-suffering friends in Miami who helped bring me up-to-date with the city one picture at a time; writing compatriots who took the time to read more than one draft; Caitlin Blasdell, my ever-helpful agent; and Anne Sowards, at Ace, for her advice and support.

  1

  Taking It Easy

  JUST BEFORE 2 P.M., SOUTH BEACH TRAFFIC WAS AS SLOW AS IT EVER got. The sidewalks were white-hot under the June sun, and the only people walking about were red-shouldered, red-nosed tourists going puffy in the heat. The glass storefronts gave back reflections of sunlight, and the palm fronds shivered, seeking a breeze.

  Sylvie idled her battered truck, waiting for a cluster of bathing-suit-clad students to pass in front of her. Once they ambled on by, Sylvie pulled into the alley between her office and Frankie’s Bar.

  She let the truck engine hum and rattle for a moment—two o’clock. She could get away with not going into work, decide it was too late to make it worthwhile, and go home. What was one more day off tacked on to a month of days?

  Maybe one day too many.

  There was a difference between taking time off to get her grief and rage under control and taking time off because she was scared to go back to work. Scared to test her self-control. Scared she might get someone else killed the way she’d gotten Michael Demalion killed.

  The ocean hissed and seethed and slapped at the nearby piers, boats bobbing in the waves, and Sylvie wondered how the ocean could sound so welcoming on Sanibel and so threatening at home.

  You’ve never dropped bodies into the Gulf of Mexico, her little dark voice whispered. Only Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic.

  “Yeah, didn’t miss you,” Sylvie murmured. Home for less than an hour, and her dark-natured backbrain was mouthing off again. Her vacation was definitely over. Time to go see what havoc had been wrought while Alex had been running the store.

  The glass front was smudge-free and shining, the letters reading SHADOWS INQUIRIES crisp-edged and free from salt scour. Sylvie traced the curve of one of them, thought it might have been repainted in her absence. She opened the door, blinked in the contrast of light, from sunny Florida outdoors to dim fluorescence. The scene revealed itself to her in bits: Alex puttering in the dimly lit kitchenette, the German shepherd dozing on the leather couch beneath the window, the front desk piled high with files, the yawning gap of a dark stairwell leading upward to Sylvie’s private office, and the dark scent of coffee vying with cleaning solutions.

  The checkered linoleum, black and white, gleamed in a way that suggested Alex had taken ruthless advantage of Sylvie’s absence to see things set back into place. Even the green-leather couch sported a patch or two, neat joins where the werewolf-clawed furniture had been repaired. That was beyond Alex. Alex had raided petty cash and called for the cleaners.

  And why not? Clean start, a clear heart. Ease back into things. No hurries, no worries, no fuss or muss. Even her little dark voice, that primitive and baser side of her, usually so quick to demand action, only murmured lazy agreement. After a month of inaction, it was in a near stupor, smothered by sun and sand and enough tropical cocktails to keep a frat party happy.

  Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, her business partner, looked up as Sylvie entered. Her expression, serious and a little bored, lightened, and she squealed, “You’re back!” She launched herself in Sylvie’s direction, all long limbs and bright makeup; the computer monitor rocked on the desk as she passed. “And you’re not even burned. I hate you—how the hell?—the way you were lying out, you should be toast. A carcinogen briquette.”

  “Charming image,” Sylvie said. She evaded the hug, hit the kitchenette, and turned off the snazzy, easy-serve espresso maker a grateful client had given them. She swept the litter of punctured containers into the trash, and the unused pile—scarily smaller—into a cupboard, closed it firmly. “You’re cut off.” Guerro, lounging on the couch, thumped his plumy tail once in what Sylvie swore was gratitude.

  “I’ve been doing the job of two people for the past two weeks. That means I get to drink coffee for two. ’Sides, it’s the good stuff.”

  “Yeah?” Sylvie said. Alex reached into the cupboard, pulled out one of the little pods, and waved it at her. Sylvie sighed. Alex looked more like a grunge barista than an investigator, with her pierced brow, pink Hello Kitty baby tee, and camo cargos falling too long over yellow flip-flops. Sylvie kept meaning to have talks about business dress, but she liked Alex’s irreverent outfits. Besides, they were of a size enough that if important meetings came up, Alex could borrow Sylvie’s spare clothes kept upstairs. The coffee pod bounced under Sylvie’s nose, and she sighed again.

  “Fine, give it,” Sylvie said. She switched the machine back on, but wandered away, and fiddled with the blinds above the battered, green-leather sofa. “Off, Guerro.”

  The dog, sighing heavily, obeyed; Sylvie slung herself onto the sofa and assumed the position she’d practiced so well the past month—on her back, elbow crooked above her eyes, comfy. Alex set the tiny cup on her stomach; Sylvie curled her fingers around its warmth and looked up at the window’s gilt letters shining in the afternoon sunlight. It was good to be home.

  She sipped the coffee—Alex was right; it was tasty stuff—and said, “So. Anything pending?”

  “There’s always something,” Alex said, shoving Sylvie’s legs over and sitting down. “You want interesting, dull but profitable, or all kinds of special? ’Cause, honestly, the special’s piling up a bit.”

  Sylvie kept her smile with a tiny expenditure of effort. Yeah. It always did. The Magicus Mundi never stopped knocking at the real world’s door. At best, it was as persistent and as annoying as the small child playing doorbell pranks and sniggering in the bushes. At worst, it smashed windows, crawled inside, and took lives. Sylvie rarely got called for small problems, mostly because people were too blind to notice anything short of a disaster.

  Sometimes she thought that the conflicts between the two worlds—human and magical—were more recognized than people let on, that it wasn’t blind stupidity, the utter failure to observe what was really happening, but was, instead, a vast conspiracy to deny the Magicus Mundi any toehold in real-world society. After all, if you knew it existed, you had to make laws to deal with it. The world wasn’t doing so hot with the rules it already had.

  She took a slug of her cooling coffee. “So. What’s on offer?”

  “Parents who tried to deprogram their kid—thought he was in a cult, not a coven—now their house is cursed.”

  Sylvie grimaced. “Pass. I’ve pissed off enough witches lately.”

  “A werewolf who wants you to mediate—”

  “Pass,” Sylvie said. “They squabble worse than high-schoolers, and someone always ends up peeing o
n my shoes.”

  “Missing woman, disappeared in the ’Glades. Car found, but no sign of foul play. Husband thinks it was aliens.”

  Sylvie propped herself up on her elbows, the better to convey her exasperation. “Aliens? Magicus Mundi’s bad enough without little green men. Did you give him the Good Shepherd’s number?”

  “You keep it close,” Alex said.

  “Sorry,” Sylvie said. “Any missing persons like that, call him. He does this thing with magical gates—” At Alex’s opening mouth, Sylvie shook her head. “Don’t ask. I don’t know how it works. I’ll get you his number for your files.”

  Alex nodded, grinning. Sylvie closed her eyes, the better to miss that triumphant smile. She still had reservations. There was a distinct difference to Alex’s knowing that Sylvie took on cases that involved the supernatural and Alex helping Sylvie in that world. The Magicus Mundi killed people.

  We kill people, the dark voice that haunted her said abruptly, like a drunk startled awake to join a conversation. Sylvie counted to ten under her breath, thought of waves stroking the beach, and the voice subsided, still conjugating the ways she had, did, and would again, kill people. Some genetic legacies were purely good. Some were more complicated.

  An enhanced survival trait like the voice in the back of her mind might keep her alive, but it also liked to dwell on blood.

  Opening her eyes, she caught Alex making the “sneaky face,” biting her lip, frowning slightly, the face she made when she was about to try to convince Sylvie to do something.

  “Don’t spin it or sell it. Just tell me,” Sylvie said. “What’s the case?”

  “There’s a cop—”

  Sylvie was already shaking her head; her hair rasped across her shoulders with each shake.

  “He’s having an identity crisis, strange dreams, voices in his head, all that; he thinks he’s possessed or haunted.”

  “Psychiatrist, psychologist, priest, or rabbi,” Sylvie said. “Anyone but me. That it?”

  Alex slapped the notepad onto the desk. “He needs help.”

  “Not the kind I can give. Anything else on offer?”

  “What do you want?” Alex said. “Might be easier to narrow down what you do like in a case. Your dislikes apparently fill a phone book.”

  “Don’t snap at me,” Sylvie said. “Cops have big problems and bad attitudes. I don’t want big problems. What I want? No dead things, no mayhem, no weeping relatives, missing people, long-lost loves, and just in case you missed it the first time, no life-and-death struggles.” She thumped the couch for emphasis, raising dog hair, dust, and the scent of coconut oil from long-ago sun-lotion spillage. Guerro thrust his head under her hand, and she petted his ears absently, aware, very aware, of Alex studying her. Judging her.

  “Okay,” Alex said, and put humor in her tone, a deliberate step away from touchy subjects. “Slacker Sylvie. Who’da thought?”

  Sylvie flipped her off, though the tight knot in her belly was already easing. Part of the reason she hated it when Alex tried manipulation games was that she was so damn good at them. She set her feet down, gave the couch back to the dog, and stretched. “Let me know if something good comes in. Something nice. Clinical. Easy.”

  “Like what?”

  “Surprise me. Until then, you know where I’ll be.”

  “Upstairs, making sure I didn’t screw up the books, dooming us to bankruptcy, auditors, and ultimate penury.”

  “Bingo,” Sylvie said. She went around the desk and climbed the narrow stairs wedged between the little kitchenette and bathroom. Her office door creaked ominously when she opened it, and she yelled back down, “Stellar job with the WD-40, Alex.”

  A rude mutter floated upward, and she shut the door, smiling. Her desk waited, nice, neat, only one file in the center position, a man’s name written on the tab. Adam Wright. She flipped it open. Yup. The Cop with Issues.

  Sylvie slid it to the side and opened the right-hand drawer. She tugged the gun out, rested its weight in her palm, settled her finger on the trigger. She sighted along it, aimed at the stress crack in the far wall’s stucco. “Bang,” she whispered. The little dark voice roused, waiting to see what bled.

  Sylvie was afraid that, despite a month off doggedly avoiding conflict of even the tiniest kind, she was exactly the same as before. Aggressive. Belligerent. A trigger-happy trouble magnet prone to holding grudges. And still, no matter how she tried to pretend, she was still The Murderer’s Child. The descendant of Cain, the first murderer, and Lilith, the disobedient.

  Lilith the dead, the dark voice purred.

  Yes, Sylvie answered back, wordlessly. Yes.

  She and the dark voice shared a moment of utter satisfaction before she tamped her vicious pleasure down. Her ancestry gave her a few useful perks: healthy paranoia, boundless determination, and a sense of self that refused to roll over even for the most powerful of magical denizens. On the downside, it brought an array of character flaws: cynicism, overconfidence, and an easily roused rage at life’s inequities, at abusive systems, at anything that presumed to call itself an authority.

  It had been a peculiar sort of wake-up call to realize that Lilith and she shared a personal motto: Cedo Nulli. I yield to none. Lilith’s refusal to obey her god had burned so deep and so long that it entered her bloodline and came out in Sylvie’s. All unknowing, Sylvie had tattooed the motto on her skin the first moment it occurred to her to do so.

  Maybe, if Sylvie had never involved herself in the Magicus Mundi, that spark of Lilith, that little dark voice that preached survival and dissension, would never have roused. It made her twitchy, made her wake at nights wondering what she had loosed into her psyche.

  Alex tapped on the door and came in; her face tightened as she saw the gun, a dark splotch on the weathered pine. Sylvie flipped the file folder open to cover it, and Alex said, “You’re going to take Wright’s case?”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “Did you need something?”

  “Your dad called earlier. I forgot. Zoe’s coming over. She’s grounded or something, and you’re supposed to watch her.”

  “What?” Sylvie asked. “Now?”

  “Yeah,” Alex said.

  “All right, then. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.”

  Alex nodded and headed back downstairs. Sylvie rolled up the thin file on the troubled cop and chucked it after her. “Take that, too!”

  Desk cleared of imminent problems, she sat back to enjoy the peace. With Zoe on the way, it would be short-lived.

  Sylvie sighed. She shouldn’t begrudge her sister her attention. She hadn’t seen her for a month, barely saw her before that. This year had been hell for family responsibilities; she was up for the bad-sister award. Zoe had called her several times, but Sylvie had always had other things to do. First, it had been relocating werewolves, then Rafael’s dying, followed by the whole Chicago clusterfuck and Demalion—

  Her hands tightened, made empty, impotent fists. Her shoulders knotted. Sylvie let her breath out, as steadily as the tide, dropped her shoulders, rolled her neck. The monthlong retreat was supposed to have put an end to that kind of tension. Dwelling on all the ways she was a screwup wasn’t helping.

  She had to give herself at least one virtue point: When she’d made her impromptu retreat to Sanibel, she’d invited Zoe to join her. Zoe had been tempted. Gnawed her lip, eagerness in her eyes, but her best friend, Bella, had clutched her round the neck and laughingly told Sylvie that she couldn’t take her Zoe away, that they had school finals, plus a special project due.

  Zoe, reluctantly, had agreed.

  Sylvie had been as relieved as she’d been disappointed. She’d forgotten about school. These days, high school was barely a blip on her radar. Her parents would not have been pleased if Zoe’s junior-year finals took second place to a meaningless vacation. So she’d taken Alex instead. Alex had lasted a bare week before boredom sent her back to Miami’s faster-paced days.

  But Sylvie was back now, and there
weren’t any cases on deck, so Zoe could come first. Hell, if Alex honored her wishes—if the new cases fitted her new criteria—there’d be time enough to spend with her sister. Last summer for it, really. Zoe was headed into senior year, and all her plans revolved around her friends and college, a future Sylvie couldn’t even imagine. A normal life.

  Sylvie leaned back in her desk chair, fighting a tinge of envy. She’d had that kind of future planned out once, had been on the right path—college, a business degree almost within her grasp. Then a friend from her high-school days came to her with an impossible story—her husband was trying to sacrifice their child to gain immortality—that turned out to be true. Sylvie’s normal future had never materialized.

  Spend too much time with Zoe, and you’ll blight hers, the little dark voice murmured. It sounded almost sad as it dished out unpalatable truth. Zoe was observant, determined, clever; she’d find out about the Magicus Mundi if she spent any real time with Sylvie. And the genes were the same. If Zoe got a good look into the Magicus Mundi, what might wake in her? Her own dark voice? Her own bloody determination? A violent life to rival Sylvie’s?

  New plan, Sylvie thought. Forget about the crazy lunch tour they had launched in an attempt to eat at every restaurant in Miami. Forget about the late-night phone calls where Zoe giggled and dished gossip that Sylvie could barely follow. Forget it all and fuck sisterhood. Keep Zoe at a safe distance.

  Yeah, that was going to go over well. Zoe didn’t need a magical wake-up call to be determined. She’d been born that way.

  The quiet below was broken. The front door banged open, Guerro barked, and Alex’s voice rose up the stairs, faintly muffled by the closed door. “Sylvie?”

  A walk-in? Zoe earlier than anticipated? Sylvie pushed herself to her feet, grabbed the Hurricanes Windbreaker hanging over the back of her chair, tucking the gun into its pocket. Just in case.