“No,” she said, and Sylvie sighed.
“C’mon, Meredith, I’m on your side, remember? I believe you. Just tell me what you found, and I’ll get out of your hair. As a bonus? Your car won’t take road trips without you anymore.”
Originally, she had planned to find the vehicle and follow it to see if she could catch the people behind the burglaries. But with that little bit of dead flesh in her pocket, her plan had changed. High-schoolers or not—and Sylvie was inclined to believe the connection, tenuous as it was—they needed to be stopped immediately if they were messing around with magic like this.
Meredith fidgeted, and Sylvie said, “What was it?”
“A piece of jewelry.”
“Show me,” Sylvie said.
Meredith shook her head. “I gave it away. It was just some ticky-tacky skinny dog pin. It wasn’t even gold.”
Sylvie sighed. The brooch was on the list that Conrad had given Alex: one antique art deco silver greyhound. Gone faster than a real one round a track. Still, confirmation was confirmation. “Let me out. I’ve got things to do.”
“You said you’d stop them from stealing my car,” Meredith said.
“Do you have to be anywhere today?” Sylvie said.
Meredith shook her head. Sylvie’s first instinct was to shoot out the tires, but Meredith seemed the kind of woman who might be . . . upset with such black-and-white practicality, might react by calling the police. Sylvie had had enough of them for one day.
Self-control, Sylvie remembered. Taking it easy. She’d forgotten how to interact with ordinary people, with people she wasn’t trying to intimidate or kill.
“My suggestion? Park it elsewhere—your husband’s workplace—or if you’re feeling hard-core? Let the air out of the tires and call AAA when you need to get going. They’ll move on to easier marks, ’cause these kids—it’s all about easy.”
“What good is it if it’s not ready the minute I need it?” Meredith scowled, unhappy with Sylvie’s solution, but she coded in the release for the garage door. It rose smoothly, letting in warm sunlight and the green scent of newly cut grass, all the more pleasant for having been in a space that smelled of oil, metal, and corruption.
Sylvie shrugged as she stepped out. “Your decision, either way.”
“I could get my husband to sit up, hire a security service. . . .”
“I wouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “Best not to corner people you know nothing about. If you can divert their attention, that’s good. Confronting them? You won’t like where that ends up.”
It might end with her husband or the security guard passed out on the garage floor. It might end with someone steering the SUV over their unconscious bodies. Sylvie didn’t know how deep the sleep was, whether its victim could wake, but given the way she and Wright had gone down, poleaxed into unconsciousness, she could easily imagine the worst, that this magical sleep was deep enough that there’d be no fighting back.
She waved Meredith off, said, “I’m going to go talk to Bella Martinez now. Move the car. If you don’t, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if it goes wandering again.”
Meredith turned with a huff. The garage door rolled down after her. Another person ignoring perfectly good advice.
Sylvie rolled her shoulders, flapped the edges of her jacket, dispersing the heat trapped against her skin. A man, scraping grass clippings into the mower, froze, and Sylvie dropped the back of her jacket down over the gun. She waved at him and kept moving. Nothing to see here. Just a girl with a gun, common enough. Though maybe not in the Grove.
Sylvie walked up the long drive to Bella’s house, scuffing her feet in the gravel, enjoying the shade, and dawdling. There wasn’t going to be any good news here. Even if she hadn’t been darkening the Martinezes’ door, hunting glory-seeking burglars, she’d still be bearing the bad news of Bella’s pharmaceutical forays.
She climbed the limestone stairs to a shallow, tiled porch, framed by wrought-iron pillars wound about with jasmine, and rang the doorbell. She didn’t have to wait long; the Martinezes’ housekeeper opened the door, an old frown on a young face. She had always looked worried on the occasions Sylvie had seen her, so she tried not to feel responsible.
“I’m Zoe’s sister,” Sylvie said. She tested names in her head. Surely she could remember one woman’s name—this was her job, to recall the details that others forgot. Something old-fashioned. Ethel, Edwina . . .
“She’s not here.” Her voice carried a tinge of an accent, vaguely French, and Sylvie smiled. She remembered now. Eleanor. Haitian, working her way through med school at UM after her scholarship ran out. Eleanor’s dark fingers curled around the door, her arm a polite bar.
“That’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really just wanted to have a word or two with Bella.”
“She’s sick.”
“Hungover?”
“Sick,” Eleanor repeated.
Sylvie leaned against the doorjamb, wistfully thinking of the cooler air inside; if she could get past the door, Eleanor would have to offer her coffee, a seat, a chance to soak up the AC. “Eleanor, I really do need to talk to Bella.” She pulled the pill bottle out of her purse and shook it.
Eleanor swore, a long ripple of Creole, snatched the bottle from Sylvie’s hand, and headed back into the house, trailing a plaintive cry, “They’re going to get me expelled.”
Sylvie took inattention for invitation and followed, her sneakers soundless on the smooth Mexican tile. “Get you expelled?” she asked. Scuffling noises came from down the hall, so she headed that way, found Eleanor ransacking her own room, loosing her temper on the only things in the house that belonged to her. She finally threw a book across the room, sat down on the bed, and put her face in her hands.
“You’re not dealing to her,” Sylvie said.
“Does it matter where she’s getting the shit? There’s a poor med student in the house, and the daughter’s got pills enough to give away. Who will be blamed? Tell me.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I still need to talk to Bella.”
Eleanor waved her upstairs. “About the drugs? Always in trouble.” She speared Sylvie with a pissed-off expression. “But it’s Zoe who gets her there.”
“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “It’s Bella—”
“Believe what you will. Why listen to the maid—”
“Bella upstairs?” Enough of this. She’d come with a purpose. She wouldn’t be sidetracked.
“You won’t listen; why will I tell you anything?” Eleanor shut the door in her face.
Left on her own, Sylvie wandered the cool hallway, looking in on an immaculate kitchen, a living room that had been in
Homes and Gardens
. She followed the gentle curve of the house, running her hand along buttery yellow walls, as warmly colored as Florida sunshine, and took the tiled stairs upward. Where did a spoiled princess sleep? In the tower room, of course.
The arched dome of the upper hallway had the hush of churches, and dried flowers in the vases only added to the impression. A shimmer of chlorine blue through the plate-glass windows sent dancing shards of sunlight cascading over her skin like spotlights.
Sylvie opened the door to Bella’s room, found it dim and cool, the very thing for an invalid. The blinds were shuttered tight, blocking out the sun. Left to her own devices, Bella would probably sleep past two o’clock.
A whimper reached her ears; the bundle of blankets on the bed thrashed for a moment.
Maybe not. Maybe Bella was going to greet the world after all.
As minutes passed, and all Bella did was groan and whimper, Sylvie lost patience. She leaned against the elaborate footboard, white, wrought-iron scrollwork, sharp and cold against her hands, and kicked the mattress. The bed billowed, startling Sylvie—water bed.
“Wakey, wakeys,” she said.
Bella jerked up, hands clenching tight on the edge of the mattress, panting. She focused on Sylvie with slow awareness—alarm, familiarity, recognition, relaxation. Irritation. Everyone always got to irritation.
“Sylvie? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Need to talk to you.”
“Go away. I’m sick,” Bella said. She flopped back onto the mattress, tugged the blanket over her face.
Sylvie hopped down from the footboard, flipped on the overhead light-and-fan combo. Bella groaned but only hunched deeper into the covers against the sudden brightness.
In the moving air, Sylvie smelled Bella’s sour sweat, and sheets days past due for changing.
“C’mon, Bell—”
“No.”
Sylvie busied herself in the room, snooping openly, certain that would get Bella’s attention. She opened dresser drawers, found a pill bottle in the jeans drawers, another in her closet, a third under her bed, all nearly empty, all with their labels stripped off. She set them on the bedside table, kicked the mattress again. “Bella!”
The girl woke with a muffled shriek, a flailing hand, and Sylvie jerked back. She hadn’t really expected her to fall asleep again. They went through the whole panic-to-recognition cycle once more, then Bella scrubbed at her face with shaking hands. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I keep having the worst nightmares.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Prescription drugs’ll do that to you. Especially if you’re taking them just for fun.”
Bella reached over, swept the bottles off the nightstand and into the Kleenex-riddled trash can with soft
thump
s and muffled
rattle
s. “Happy now? Take ’em with you when you go.”
The girl did look sick. Bella hung over the side of the bed as if it were too much effort to lie back again; the arm propped against the side of the mattress frame shook, and her skin was greased with milky sweat; her eyes were dilated, the sclera nearly yellow.
Sylvie almost felt sorry for her, but the hand propping her up was capped by nails manicured in high-end silver gloss. The same shade Sylvie had found on the fingernail in the van. Another tick on the confirmation chart, another mark that moved Bella one step further from the “innocent” category.
Sylvie said, “Nightmares, huh?” She hoped she could prompt the girl back into speech, that she hadn’t shut her down completely, but she couldn’t regret her first response, not if it took the drugs out of Bella’s hands.
And Zoe’s.
Still, there was a real likelihood that Sylvie had just found the decoy bottles, all close to empty, just there to make Bella’s mom feel like she was making progress. “Tell me about your nightmares.”
“Going to shrink me?”
“Might slap you,” Sylvie said. “You gave my sister drugs.”
Bella eyed her sidelong and sly, calculating her odds. “Is that what she told you? Such a bitch—”
Sylvie’s face must have done something really forbidding; Bella shut up all at once, then, when she decided to talk again, it was on the topic Sylvie had chosen.
“My nightmares are all the same,” Bella said, and if she started off belligerent, she faded to plain scared. “I’m doing something . . . horrible.”
Sylvie took a seat on the end of the bed. “Tell me?”
Bella dragged her knees up to her chest with much billowing and shifting of the bed. Her legs stuck out of the bottom of her Victoria’s Secret pj’s, skinny even for a girl who took fashion cues from Barbie dolls. “I keep killing a boy. A little boy.” She glanced up at Sylvie, added hastily, “In my dreams. It’s not real.”
“Didn’t think it was,” Sylvie said mildly. One of the regrettable truths of her job was that she met a lot of killers.
Bella was a lot of things—spoiled, vain, grasping—but Sylvie didn’t get a whiff of killer from her. Not yet. Sylvie knew how slippery a slope it could be.
“How does it happen? Always the same way?”
It was just a dream. It shouldn’t be important. Except . . . magic had a cost. The benign magics, or what passed for benign, cost the user effort, concentration, energy, time, left them drained, ready to eat a gator, burp, and take a nap. The bad stuff
corrupted
, unless the user was very, very careful, and had a whipping boy to soak up the worst of it. It was the sole reason power junkies like the
Maudits
took apprentices—not to share knowledge but to protect their own skins.
If Bella had screwed around with big, bad magic—and the fingernail argued that she had—she’d first feel the corruption in her soul, and one’s soul had its own way of making its complaints felt.
“I’m sitting by a pool in my chair, and this toddler comes wandering up to me, smiling, and I just . . . shove him. He falls into the pool, starts kicking, but he’s too little, y’know? Like water wings little.” Bella buried her face in her knees, her words, muffled, distorted, kept on. “He gets to the edge anyway, hanging there, and I push him off with the net until he doesn’t come up anymore; he’s red-faced, and trying to scream, but his mouth’s full of water. And his mom’s just inside the house, and she doesn’t have a clue what I’ve done. I wake up when I hear her scream.”
Ugly enough, Sylvie thought, for a one-time nightmare. As a recurrent theme? Yeah, that might make a girl . . . uncomfortable. Bella looked up at her expectantly, and Sylvie thought,
Oh, analysis later. Comfort now.
Bella wanted to be told it was all right, that she was all right, that everything was going to be fine.
Thing was, Sylvie was crap at that, and not sure her sympathies should be wasted on Bella anyway. After all, she was one of the most likely suspects for leaving her and Wright dead to the world last night.
Bella shifted, and her pillow shifted with her, giving Sylvie a quick glance at something in the bed with Bella. She pounced. Bella squeaked as Sylvie pushed her aside, yanked up the pillow, and recoiled.
She did slap Bella then. “You little
idiot
!”
Bella held her reddening cheek, gaining a hint of healthy color, and held her tongue, her eyes growing wary. As any girl might who was found sleeping with a severed hand beneath her pillow.
Sylvie wasn’t surprised, even as she was repulsed. She’d been anticipating something of the kind ever since she’d found the fingernail. While there was a disagreeably large number of spells that used human ingredients, she could think of only a few that would apply to the thieves’ needs: enabling burglary and removing witnesses.