“Shadows,” he said, his voice thick and slow, fighting his way to coherency. But in the one word, she heard enough to know this was Demalion waking.

Demalion. Not Wright. A good thing in this case. Demalion, after all, had experience with the Magicus Mundi and the people in it. Would be less prone to panic. And panic was still on the table. Sylvie’s eyes were adjusting, and there were . . . things dangling in the air. . . .

“Give us some light?” Demalion bitched. “We’re not mushrooms.” Cranky. Guess Wright’s purely human vision wasn’t enough for Demalion’s taste.

Wales hesitated; he walked the steps between them twice over, thin fingers testing her bonds, though he didn’t seem to be bothered that she had gotten her hand nearly through one of the loops.

“Yeah, all right. But be calm.”

His movement stirred the still air in the apartment, and Sylvie smelled old rot and spice, turned milk, and the thick, organic, just-this-side-of-unpleasant scent of tallow, and she swallowed hard. “Turn on the lights. Turn them on now.”

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I mean, it is, but not for the reasons—”

“Now!” she snapped. She yanked her hand free, leaving a thin layer of skin behind in the rope’s coil.

A single light bloomed, lower than she had expected—a table lamp on the floor, its yellowed shade turning the light it cast into something like firelight. Shadows loomed above them. As did other things.

“A little more light. I like to see who I’m dealing with,” she said, to keep her mouth from filling with nauseated saliva. Her eyes continued to pick out details in their surroundings. Strange shapes dangled spiderlike from the ceiling.

Her free hand slipped down into the shadows of the chair, but her holster was empty, her gun gone.

Wales walked past her; a second lamp sputtered into life, fitful and fluorescent. When it stabilized, she saw that her first impression had been right. Withered, human hands hung on thongs looped over hooks in the ceiling. They dangled, fingers down, just below head height as if they were prepared to grab intruders by the throat.

The ropes she tugged against slacked all at once, and she lunged out of her chair. Wales sidestepped her, nimbly dancing up into and over the chair she had just vacated, putting it between them. “Don’t you get hasty. It’s not what you think.” “No?” she said. Her breath was fast but steady. In the light, he wasn’t much to look at—thin-boned and skinny with it, bags under his eyes, a rat’s nest of hair and shapeless clothing. She might even have an inch or two on him.

All her muscles tensed, ready to pounce, but Wales yanked a grisly Hand from his pocket, held it up. “Don’t you make me use it again. It’s not good for any of us.”

“You put a circle of protection on me,” she said. “Forget that? I might not go down easy. In fact, I guarantee it.” It was more than bravado; it was fact. She’d been hit three times by the Hands’ spell. Each time, it took longer to take effect, courtesy of Lilith’s bloodline, she supposed. She could take out the Ghoul before she went down.

“You forget about your fragile friend?”

“Sylvie,” Demalion said. Just her name. It wasn’t a plea, but it fell on her ears like one. She’d gotten him killed once. Would she do it again, for the satisfaction of beating up a necromancer who didn’t seem as deadly as advertised?

She swallowed the screaming urge to fight, to not bow her head to any yoke at all, and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Fine, then. Tell me why you’re not something I should put down like a rabid dog. Tell me why you’re so misunderstood. But you can do it while I untie him.”

Without waiting for the Ghoul’s okay, she put her back to him, bent over Demalion, got his wrists freed. He whispered, “Careful, Shadows.”

She shrugged. She was getting the measure of Tierney Wales now. He was a runner, not a fighter, a little paranoid. Probably with reason. And he was either cat-curious or desperately lonely. Otherwise, she and Demalion would have woken to a gutted, abandoned apartment and another dead end.

Wales said, “I only knocked you out so you wouldn’t do anything hasty. I heard you’re good at hasty.”

“So you zapped us with a Hand of Glory?”

Wales leaned against the front door. “What do you want, Shadows?”

“To find out who’s selling Hands of Glory to kids.”

“Not me,” he said. It might have been more convincing if he weren’t still hand in Hand with his favored talisman.

“Circumstance, evidence, and word of mouth suggest otherwise.”

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. It’s . . . vile. Look, do you even really know what these are?”

Demalion inserted himself into the conversation, his tone laconic, cooling Sylvie’s temper. “The Hand of Glory is the left or sinister hand of a murderer, severed after death by hanging, treated magically to create a burglar’s or assassin’s tool.”

“Technically, that’s accurate enough,” Wales said. “But it’s so much more, so much worse. You know how it works?”

Sylvie said, “Do we need to?”

“I’m curious,” Demalion said.

“What, we’re all friends now?”

“You should never turn down information,” Wales said, eyes serious. “You never know when you’ll be called on to know it.”

She gaped at them, then threw her hands up in the air and dropped into the seat she had so recently been tied to.

“Fine. Enlighten me.”

“Enlighten us,” Demalion whispered, and Sylvie thought, Oh . . . necromancy, the power to control death. No wonder Demalion was intrigued.

How was she going to save Wright and Demalion both? She hadn’t had an idea yet. Time-share agreements didn’t work all that well when it was a piece of real estate on a beach; time-sharing a body seemed doomed to failure.

“. . . hold that,” Wales said, and it was Demalion’s reaction—total withdrawal—that brought her attention back to the here and now. Stupid to relax her guard, but she was beginning to believe the Ghoul meant it when he said he wasn’t going to hurt them. He seemed leery of confrontation. But paranoid and skittish didn’t preclude turning a profit by farming out dangerous tools out for children to use.

“Hell no,” Demalion said.

“Look, just reach up and take a Hand. You, too, Shadows.”

Sylvie’s lips curled in instinctive disgust. The living shouldn’t make nice with the dead. It just wasn’t healthy.

Wales pulled a lighter from the his pocket, and Sylvie said, “Put it down. Now.”

“It’s all right,” Wales said. “It’s all right. You want to know what the Hands are? I could talk theory all night, or I could just show you.”

Demalion said, “No way in hell am I touching those things.”

Wales said, “Then you can pass right on out again. Holding one brings you partly into their world, keeps you safe.”

“Safe?” Sylvie thought that was an impossible choice of word. Like there could be anything safe about communing with the dead. Still, Wales was pretty hot on the lighter, so she reached up, gingerly grasping the Hand nearest to her. It felt—not as bad as she had expected, dry and stiff in her hand, its fingers falling into the spaces between her own.

Demalion, grimacing, had done the same. It looked—Sylvie bit back a nervous laugh—like the train to hell, she thought, where instead of looped canvas straps, there were human hands. “Hurry it up, Wales.”

Her little dark voice was hissing doubts; if she was going to do this, it had better be soon, before instinct overrode her intellect.

Wales lit the Hand, a single illuminated point of flame streaming out to catch the thumb. Then the flame hopped side to side, until the entire Hand streamed flame toward the ceiling and took the color out of the world, turning everything shade grey, corpse white, rot black. A figure stepped out of Wales’s shadow, a transparent ghost with hollowed eye sockets. Black tears stood out on his cheeks, etched in ink, vivid against the ghost flesh.