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.
The severed, withered hand on the white sheets, tucked neatly beneath Bella’s pillow like some horrifying offering to a fairy best not imagined, was missing a single fingernail.
The worst part, Sylvie thought numbly, wasn’t that it was there in her bed, wasn’t that it was a dead hand, gruesomely preserved, used to appease a bored girl’s bad-girl dreams, but that it had been decorated like it was of no more import than a cell phone or iPod. Besides the silvery polish, there were Cracker Jack rings forced over the dried knuckles, and little fake tattoos of thorns and hearts peeling from the pallid skin.
She seized Bella’s arm as the girl attempted to sidle around her, and the motion released the anchor on her voice. “Black magic and burglary not enough of a kick? You had to desecrate the dead?”
7
Evidence to Hand
“I DIDN’T DO IT!” SUCH A REFLEXIVE LIE OUT OF A TEEN’S MOUTH. Sylvie had no patience for it.
“What? It came that way? Don’t think I’m stupid, Bella. A Hand of Glory is black magic. Not something you treat like a toy.”
Bella lunged for the Hand. Before Sylvie could decide if it was an offensive gesture—if she meant to use the Hand against Sylvie—or just a desire to hide it again, Bella’s movement fell short. She dropped to the floor, gasping for breath, her hands clawing against the cream-colored tiling, nails catching in the grout.
Sylvie dropped beside her, got the girl untangled from her own legs, straightened out her breathing path, and held her up. “Bella, just breathe.”
The girl wheezed and shuddered; Sylvie thought of yelling for Eleanor, but this wasn’t anything as common as an asthma attack.
Sylvie rubbed the girl’s back, the thin cotton unpleasantly damp with sweat, and said, “Take it easy.”
Bella sucked in a breath, a thin, thready gasp, but at least it was going the right direction. “Good,” Sylvie said. “Another.”
Once Bella was breathing steadily, in and out, instead of that rasping one-way exhalation, Sylvie left her there on the floor. She turned out the trash can, scattering pill bottles and tissues, and used the pillow to push the Hand into the trash can. The thumb hooked briefly on the rim and had to be shaken down with a scrabbling thunk.
“That’s mine,” Bella said weakly.
“I count two hands on your body,” Sylvie said. “I’ll give it back when you’re missing one. Christ, no sense at all. Keeping it under your pillow! You’d be safer with a loaded gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.” She snagged a magazine that was peeking out from beneath the bed, slapped it over the top of the trash can, sparing herself the sight of the Hand. Her churning gut thanked her.
Bella slouched against the side of the bed, wrapped her arm around the iron footboard, and draped herself on it. “I’m supposed to keep it close. Keep it tuned to me. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise, it won’t let you open locked doors, bypass alarms, and steal shit that you don’t want to save up your allowance for?” Sylvie hated magic in general; benign or not, it altered reality. And this . . . this was very far from benign. She might not have seen one before in the flesh, so to speak, but knew the gist of the legend, knew how dangerous it was.