She wondered vaguely who had turned down the thermostat on the world. Cold sweats indeed. Her name in his dreams.
Cedo Nulli.
The tat between her shoulder blades itched. It was all too specific to be coincidence; it had to be design, but whose? None of the prospects pleased. Vengeful sphinx? Manipulative god of Justice? Or some villain she hadn’t even thought of, some enemy made with a single careless action she’d already forgotten?
Maybe Alex’s “be nice to the neighbors” policy had something going for it after all.
She leaned back in her worn seat, settling herself into the groove she’d made over the years, and let her breath out slow and steady. It misted against the windshield, fogging her view.
She should turn him down. Refund his money. Get him and the reminders of Chicago out of her life. They’d both be better off.
Keep your lies for the enemy,
her little dark voice said.
A fool lies to himself.
Sylvie gritted her teeth. Yeah, she’d never been that good at maintaining self-deception. If she said no, Wright would suffer for it; he’d go blundering after the first person who promised him help. The
Magicus Mundi
was full of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Trust the wrong person, and, crazy or not, he’d be better off dead. Hell, even if he went at it on his own, hunting a ghost he probably didn’t have, he could end up in trouble. Sylvie had heard more than one story of people attracting the very things they were trying to repel. There was a house in the Grove that hadn’t started out haunted until a young wife had decided it might be. Now the house was abandoned, even by squatters.
Her little dark voice grumbled, always complaining. It might disapprove of her lying to herself, but it didn’t want her to embrace Wright either.
Wright sat perfectly still, at ease to a casual glance. But the cords in his neck were tight, his breathing shallow. Waiting for a much-needed answer was always a bitch.
“All right,” Sylvie said. “All right. I’ll take your case. You think you’ve got a ghost? Tell me about it.”
3
The Particulars of the Case
PUT ON THE SPOT, GIVEN A WILLING AUDIENCE, WRIGHT STALLED LIKE an engine unexpectedly taxed. He drummed his fingers, tapped his heels on the dash, and groaned.
Sylvie licked salt from her lips and started with the tried and true: Ask a specific question to get an answer. It worked on small schoolchildren, and it worked on a man with too much on his mind. “So tell me about dying. Your troubles started after that, right?”
“Yeah,” Wright said. “The docs said lightning, but . . .”
“You don’t think so?”
“I saw enough of it that night for sure. It burned the sky.” His eyes glazed, slowly closed, chasing the memory of a night that he could only barely recall. “There was something else. Like a ball.”
“Ball lightning? Rare,” Sylvie said.
He shook his head without opening his eyes. In the dim light, the shadow of his lashes joined and deepened the bruised sockets. “Not lightning. It glowed. Solidly. Fell out of the sky, chased by something . . . horrible.”
Horrible,
she thought. There’d been a lot of that. Monsters and cataclysms. Last she’d heard, Chicago was still mopping up.
Wright shifted in the seat, dropped his feet into the wheel well. He contorted severely, pulled his shirt out of his waistband, and peeled it up toward his shoulders. “Only scar I got was this. No lightning flower, just this . . .”
Grimacing, Sylvie flicked on her flashlight, trying to keep it low in case her burglars showed up. Wright, in its unforgiving beam, was too skinny; his ribs stood out like bars, but the skin was smooth, no Lichtenberg burn, no ferned-out blood vessels. He squeezed his shirt higher and showed her the scar he meant. High up on the right side of his rib cage, just beneath his armpit, a glossy white line etched three-quarters of a circle into his side.
“Had a chunk of glass stuck deep, melted into my skin. That’s why the docs said lightning. To melt glass into skin. They said I was lucky it hadn’t gone through my throat. I thought they were right. Thought I was lucky.”
“Glass,” she said. What kind of glass curved so sharply? A buoy, maybe, blown in from the lake but smaller. Something to fit in a man’s palm. Something egg-sized.
Eggs hatch,
she thought grimly. For the first time, she considered his claim seriously. But if this had been an egg, it had been broken before it hit him. She reached out, unreasonably intrigued by the gap in the curve, the absence more fascinating than that smooth scar, the shape provoking.
He lowered his shirt, twitched away from her fingers. “Anyway,” he said. “Woke up in the hospital. Some stitches. Some memory loss. They said I’d be fine. But then I started hearing voices in my head. That’s not ‘fine.’ That’s my story. What’s this one?”
Sylvie blinked. He gestured out the windshield. “Shopping mall. Stakeout. What for?”
His story? He’d barely scratched the surface of it. Survival wasn’t a story in itself. How your life changed afterward was. And his, by his own admission, had changed. She studied him for a long moment, aided by his refusal to notice it.
He stared determinedly ahead of him, brow lowering, squinting, as if by concentrating, he could will an answer out of the distantly lit mall. The night outside the windshield stayed quiet, the breeze a gentle murmur in the palm trees, a ruffled wave on the sea.
Usually, given an audience, people fighting the
Magicus Mundi
wouldn’t shut up about it. So grateful to know they hadn’t slipped from sanity. Not talking about it . . . Sylvie wondered how much of his fidgeting, his nervousness, might be due to his own doubts about his story. Maybe he was crazy, knew it, and was just latching onto an idea, any idea, that absolved him of fault. If it came from the outside, he couldn’t be held responsible for it.
“You have to talk if you want help,” Sylvie said. “I’m not a mind reader, and I’m not patient. I’m trying, but it’s a bad fit.”
“Not tonight,” he said. “Just—not tonight.”
Exhaustion burred his voice, gave it a cat-rasp.
She nodded, and he slumped forward, hands spidering over the dash restlessly, a release of some tight-held tension. It was for more than backing off the topic; it was for the thought that she was going to help him, make it all better. He looked at her with trust and hope, and they settled heavily on her shoulders. Michael Demalion had trusted her with his life, and Rafael Suarez before him. They were both dead now. Dead of trusting her.
“Theft,” she said.
He shot her a puzzled glance for the non sequitur, then nodded as understanding caught up with him. “Internal or break-in?” The rough edge to his voice smoothed as he continued. “This place been hit before, or they expecting it to be hit? Pretty ritzy clients for you, huh?”
“The Bayside merchants are not my clients,” Sylvie said. “And don’t ask me who is; I won’t tell you.”
“I can keep a secret,” he said. He found a shaky grin, drew a looping
X
over his heart. “Hope to die.”
“So not cute,” she said, though her lips tugged upward. She reached up, adjusted the dome light switch to off, and opened her door, letting her leg dangle out the crack. The swirl of cooler air felt good; her stretched-out leg muscle felt even better. She wiggled her toes in her sneaker—mindless bliss. She checked her watch again. Just headed toward midnight. Three hours left that she owed her client. It was the biz; for whatever reason, most crime happened before 3:00 a.m.
Even bad guys had bedtimes.
“You don’t need to wait,” Sylvie said. “I’ll be here for a while longer. Go on to your hotel. Alex’ll start working your case in the morning.”
It was going to be a research nightmare. If he was crazy, they would be chasing their tails, and if the ghost was real? Identifying a single ghost from Chicago? After the gods had stirred everything up? Wright would have to talk.
He slumped farther into his seat, looked up at her through sandy lashes. “I’d rather have you on the case.”
“Didn’t say I wasn’t going to be involved. Don’t get huffy. Alex is my researcher.”
He propped his feet back on the dash and fidgeted, blocking her view.
“Go home already,” she said.
“Nah,” he said. “You want me here.” He slouched a little more firmly, tilting his knees out of her line of sight, making the old leather creak and complain. “ I can spell you so you don’t have to pee in a cup. I like being useful.”
“There’s a fine line between useful and distracting,” she said. “You’re right on it.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Yes,” she said.
“No fun at all,” he said. “Seriously, I’m good at my job. I can help. I want to help. Let me help.”
“White knight with a badge,” she muttered. It wasn’t a compliment, though he tipped his head toward her as if he’d heard one. That kind of zeal could get a man killed.
Sylvie’s phone buzzed in her pocket, a quiet interruption in the night. She flipped it open, glad of an excuse to avoid his gaze, and brought the phone to her ear after a quick glance at the caller ID.
“Dad,” she said. “You’re up late. What’s wrong?”
“You’ve got Zoe for a week,” he said without any preamble, harried and only half-attentive.
“What? No, one night. I thought you said one night,” she said. The burglars looked like a no-show tonight, which meant more stakeouts, more man-hours, and Wright—she didn’t know how his case might play out, if it was even a real problem and not some psychological scar.
She tuned back in to hear her father sigh. “. . . listening? The CIMAS presentation snuck up on us; we’ve got three days in Mexico City to present your mother’s new model for tracking climatic variability and hurricanes. We’ll be gone a week, and I don’t want Zoe staying in the house on her own.”
“She’s seventeen,” Sylvie said, but remembering the drugs, the smokes, the cash, the attitude . . . Sylvie’s objection lacked force. “I guess. But what am I going to do with her?”
“Put her to work for you?” her father suggested.
“Did you forget what I do?” Sylvie said. Bitter amusement touched her. Hadn’t she decided to keep her sister at arm’s length? Now she was supposed to let Zoe shadow her for a week?
“Hell, Sylvie, I haven’t known what you were doing since you were sixteen. Two daughters is too much for any man.”
Sylvie closed her eyes. “Fine. I’ll think of something.”
Wright squirmed in his seat, tapped her elbow, and jerked his head toward the mall. Sylvie peered over his shoulder. The janitorial van was packing up. Sylvie snapped her fingers, pointed at the notepad half-beneath his thigh. He wrote down the time, the license number, a quick description of the staff in more of that careful block print, a man used to making sure his reports were legible.
He mouthed
useful
at her, and she disconnected with more speed than courtesy and found Wright watching her.
“Family problems?”
“You gonna help me with them, too?” Sylvie said. “Go, get some rest. You could be the poster boy for jet lag.”
“Rather stick around—”
“Go home,” Sylvie said.
“Does that tone work on stray dogs? ’Cause that could be really useful on the beat. You’d be surprised how many cops get bit. It’s not always big bad dogs either. One of my partners got his ass handed to him by a Maltese I swear was rabid.”
She hovered between pure frustration—one good push, and he’d be out of the truck, sprawled on the asphalt—and a stuttering desire to laugh. Insane, haunted, or something in between, he was entertaining company. God help her, but she just might like him. While she dithered, he snagged the binoculars from her feet and turned them on the mall. “That a light?”
She snatched the binoculars back, peered through them, and said, “Not the kind we care about.”
“What are we looking for?” he said.
Sylvie sucked in a breath, ready to shout, then, all at once, gave in. He wanted to be helpful. Needed to be helpful. Fine. Two sets of eyes were better than one. If Wright did anything she didn’t approve of, she could ditch his case. He might push and test and talk, but ultimately, she was in charge.
“Robberies,” she said. “After hours, no alarm. Bayside’s the most likely target tonight. These guys are not stealthy in their planning. Execution, yes. Planning, no. They’ve just been running along the coast.”
“Inside job? Do all the stores have the same alarm co—”
“Nope,” Sylvie said.
“Insurance fraud? Sometimes those things just spread. Like a copycat kill.”
“The insurance companies are beginning to squawk, but they’d be screaming blue murder if they thought they were being swindled outright.”
Wright frowned, pulled out a cigarette, and tucked it away again at her look. “So what are you going on?”
“The path they’re taking. The merchant who hired me said she had more than her share of teenage looky-loos in the days before the thefts.”
“Weekend boredom settling in?”
“She doesn’t have the kind of business that gets the teens excited. Too pricey, too dull for their blood.”
Wright insinuated himself into her space, reading over her shoulder. “An art gallery?”
“Hey,” she snapped. “You want her reading your file? Watch it.”
He shrugged. “I’m a cop. You can trust me to keep things confidential. Where else have they hit?”
Sylvie slid the list over to him. He twisted his mouth, touched the cigarette pack again, and sighed. “I get the cell-phone store, the jewelry store, but luggage? That doesn’t sound like teens. Maybe someone used the kids to case the place.”
“Good luck getting teenagers to do anything you want them to,” Sylvie said. “I assumed the luggage was taken to carry the loot. I’ve got bigger questions than who. Right now, I’m working on
how
.”
Wright stiffened in the seat, his kneecap knocking against the passenger’s-side door as if he’d tried to put space between them. He tilted his head back against the headrest, baring the long line of his throat and chin, faint stubble illuminated by the streetlights. “They came to you for help. To you.”