Ghost time imminent, Sylvie thought.

Because she was watching for it, she saw when Wright ceded control to Demalion. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a frown on Wright’s face, a quickening of breath that smoothed out, his brow unwrinkling. A casual hand that reached out for pizza, then veered and picked up one of the smooth quartz globes out of absentminded habit.

No wonder Wright’s wife leaned toward crazy. People talked about possession, and it was Exorcist territory, strange events and violent behavior. Dogs howling in the background and cats hissing and running away.

But this gentle overtaking . . . He met her eyes, and she let out her breath at the desperation in his gaze, the strain. No, she corrected herself, nothing gentle about this at all, at least not from his point of view.

She interrupted Alex’s speculations as to Zoe’s secret activities, which were growing more disturbing by the moment, with a “Go home, Alex. It’s late.”

Alex opened her mouth to protest, but Sylvie flicked a finger toward herself, toward Wright, and Alex capitulated. “I am tired. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Alex let herself out, and Sylvie watched him rolling the crystal about his fingers with a graceful familiarity she doubted Wright could manage. He walked into the living room, walked the crystal along his knuckles at the same time, then held it up and looked through it at her. “I’m sort of surprised. I can’t see a damn thing in crystals any longer. Clairvoyance is apparently all about the flesh and not the soul. I’d tell the ISI—Luci in Research would be fascinated—but it would be . . . awkward to explain.”

“Demalion—” She took two steps toward him and dropped onto her couch. She looked up at him, at that innate stillness he brought to Wright’s twitchiness.

“In the borrowed flesh,” he said.

She let out a shaky breath, then laughed. There were tears on her face when she stopped, slipping hot and wet through the crevices of her fingers. She snuffled against her palms and shuddered. “God.”

“Yeah,” he said. He sat beside her on her too-small couch, smelling like Wright—warm sunlight, antiseptic, sharp after-shave, a hint of smoke—but with his own sandalwood scent beneath. How messed up is that, she thought. Clairvoyance was flesh, but scent was soul.

He leaned against her, slid down, and laid his head in her lap. Her hands fell to his temples, brushed back the damp blond hair with shaking fingers. His shoulders bled warmth into her thighs.

“What am I going to do, Sylvie? What do I do now? I cheated death, but it’s not life either.”

She leaned down, kissed his brow, and said, “I think you have to let go. Tell me what you need to do that kept you here.” She was crying again, a wet splash on the freckled bridge of his nose.

He pushed her away, rose to his feet. “Fuck that. I came to you for help, not for platitudes. Fix this. I want my life back!”

The shock wasn’t as sharp as it could have been. Some part of her had known he wouldn’t want anything as easy as a handful of last words. She’d been stifling the little dark voice all day, all night, and now freed, it crowed in ugly triumph. Dead men are always desperate.

“I don’t know how.”

“Find out!”

The echoes of his shout lingered in her small apartment. He was white around the lips; his hands fisted. “You saved a god. Is one mortal soul too much to hope for?”

She slumped back, resting her weight on the edge of her couch. “I can barely figure out how to help Wright.”

“Help me! You owe me that much. I died. I don’t care about Wright.”

“He’s my client.”

“I sent him to you. That makes me your client.”

“His bank account,” she muttered, stubborn down to her blood and bones.

He dropped to the couch, breathing hard, paused, and regrouped. She watched Wright’s face shift from taut, angry, to something softer, something harder to bear. “You have to help me. Sylvie, please. If my soul goes on, goes to hades—and you know it will; Eros put his fingers all over me, changed me, marked me as his subject—the Furies will spend eternity torturing me. Eternity.”

“Shh,” Sylvie said.

“For something I did for you . . .” His body shook, fine tremors running through Wright’s wiry form like an electric current.

She sat beside him again, tentative. She wasn’t able to offer reassurances. His likely fate was all too real: The Furies had killed him once, tried to devour his soul but failed. In their realm, he’d be easy prey. She had never been very good at offering comfort; platitudes in her mouth were as satisfactory as wax apples to a hungry man.

“I was afraid you’d died also. That I was hunting aid from a dead woman.” His throat was raw; the words came out hoarse. She’d never imagined Demalion stripped down to this level of desperation. Had never wanted to see it. He leaned his face into her neck, and she curled a hand around his nape, her words all smothered under his pain. A puff of air heralded his broken laugh. “I forgot. You survive. You always survive.”

Her hand on his neck tightened to the point it had to be hurting him, but he only pressed closer to her, whispering into her skin. “Take me to bed, Shadows. And tell me everything’s going to be all right.”

13

Mornings After

SYLVIE HAD MEANT TO BE AWAKE AND OUT OF BED BEFORE HE WOKE, but instead, held prisoner too long by her own exhaustion, they woke at the same time and had to suffer through his startled jerk, his quick accounting of the situation: two bodies, one bed, two pairs of jeans, one T-shirt, all on . . . His gaze even raked over the bra strap her T-shirt neck revealed, and it was enough to soothe the worst of the dismay from his eyes.

“I need to call my wife,” he said. He didn’t move. It had been his mouth’s automatic reaction to the rush of guilt and possibility.

Sylvie slid away, rolled up to stare at the ceiling. Early morning again, the sunlight creeping just across the floor, crawling up the side of the bed. For all that she had overslept, it was still only five hours since they . . . since she had gone to bed.

“You know him. Very well,” Wright said, and she kicked out of bed like a swimmer when the gun had gone off.

“I do.” She couldn’t say more. Not while her throat still ached with controlled grief.

He caught her hand, turned her about. She looked down at him in the wreck of her sheets and pulled away. “Coffee.”

She escaped to the kitchen, not looking back. Demalion had been sleek in her arms, a pleasure to ruffle and rouse, but Wright—all bedhead, stubble, his lanky energy banked—was damn pettable, and Sylvie was only human. It had been his mouth she’d kissed last night as they dropped off to sleep, his lean body pressed close against her own, warm even through the doubled layers of denim between them.

She was inhaling her first cup of coffee when he slouched into the room, barefoot, face washed but still stubbled. “You make a habit of sleeping with your clients?”

Sylvie took another swallow and replied as if it were a joke. Honesty would be too much right now, would lead inexorably to Demalion. “Hell, we slept together an hour after we met. ’Course we were under the influence, so to speak. . . .”

He flicked a false grin, all teeth, no amusement, and asked, “Coffee?”

“Mugs are in the cupboard.” Which he knew, having found them and served himself yesterday, but he was being polite, making it clear, maybe unconsciously, that they were strangers to each other.

He busied himself with the coffee, adding a splash of milk that she personally considered a little dubious but passed his sniff test.

She studied the tight line of his back, and said, “Yeah. I know him. Knew him.” She might not be ready for this, but he was falling apart trying to figure it out.