The front door was crusted with locks—three dead bolts, two chains, all no doubt illegally installed, all sticky with salt-milk brushed over them. The walls, up close, shimmered with a salt wash. She supposed it was hard to lock up properly when you had a roomful of tools designed to open locks.

The last chain slithered free, and she jerked the door open, annoyed when it came at her so fast she nearly clocked herself. All those locks and the door was cheap-ass hollow-core. Made her edgy, especially with 2C still lying sprawled in the hallway. Wales was courting disaster. Magic wasn’t proof against bullets.

The briefcase was still there in the gloom—battered duct tape, the scarf stuffed in between silvery tape, the lumpy crust of salt seeping free, the smell, rotten milk—Sylvie paused in collecting it, her thoughts veering. Zoe’s Hand had been soaked in milk. Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Bella. Hell, Zoe wasn’t as clueless as Sylvie had been. Sylvie wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad. Good, because it meant Zoe was less likely to be affected than Bella. Not soul sick. Bad, because Zoe’s messing with magic made Sylvie’s teeth hurt.

She dragged the briefcase into the room, breaking the staring contest Wales and Demalion were having, and slapped it down on the counter. “Someone is selling Hands of Glory, and there are a group of teenagers using them to play burglar. If it’s not you, then who?”

“Probably no one,” Wales said. “There aren’t a lot of necromancers in Miami. Think it’s the heat. Bodies rot too fast to be used for anything but a splash-and-dash kinda spell.” At Sylvie’s frown, he said, “Uh, splash and dash is a blood harvesting and summoning; happens fast and—”

“I know what it is,” Sylvie snapped. “You’re telling me you think the kids just developed the ability spontaneously? I don’t think so.”

Demalion frowned, started to say something, but shivered instead, fell back into silence.

“Look,” Wales said. “They’re teenagers. They don’t have any access to the real thing, and a lot of little bodegas sell knockoffs, guaranteed gross, but harmless. I think they’re dog paws, partially defleshed.”

“You’re not listening,” Sylvie said. “Their Hands are real enough to let them walk through burglar alarms and locked doors, to put down anyone in the vicinity for hours. Knockoffs? I don’t think so.” She flipped the latches on the briefcase, yanked the duct tape back, spilling salt, and popped the lid. Demalion took a step back, then wobbled. Sylvie half turned; she knew what was happening, even as it happened. Wright shivered convulsively, his eyes flat and black, but his jaw was set. Taking his body back. Possession trumping his fear of the unknown and the malign.

He made a series of quick, darting glances about the room. Sylvie figured he was trying to play catch-up on events. Wright seemed confused, but less wary than Demalion had been. Then again, Wright had missed the whole “prisoners of the Ghoul” thing, had missed Wales being all judgmental about ghosts and human bodies, had missed Wales feeding his pet Hand. For all Wright knew, Sylvie, Demalion, and Wales had been sitting around making friends and drinking tea.

She merely nodded welcome, not wanting to draw Wales’s attention to the changeover. But Wales’s focus was all for the Hands in the briefcase, tangled in their jumbled embrace, fingers linking.

“Interesting,” he said, expression intent. “One of them is . . . fake? The other . . . not?” He pulled his fingers back without ever touching either Hand, not Bella’s, all spangled silver and fake tattoos, not Zoe’s, faintly crusted with milk from its long immersion.

“You don’t sound certain,” Sylvie said. She wanted certain. A tiny sprig of hope bloomed in her. Maybe Zoe’s Hand wasn’t real, a knockoff like her faux designer clothing.

Hope hurts, her little dark voice warned. Hurts being born and hurts dying.

Wales said, “I can check.” He picked up Bella’s Hand of Glory, made a face at the decorations, and then flipped his lighter out of his pocket.

Sylvie snapped, “Hey!” just as Bella’s Hand dipped into the flame and failed to light. The silver nail polish blackened and stank.

Wales said, “Huh.”

“A little warning!” Sylvie said. “I’ve had all the blackouts I can tolerate for the month.”

“It’s dead,” he said.

“It’s a frickin’ Hand cut off a body, yeah,” Wright said, twitchy as always. “I don’t think it takes a whole lotta know-how to figure that it’s dead.”

“Let me rephrase, then,” Wales said. He studied Wright as he did so. “It looks like a Hand of Glory, but it’s not one. It lacks a ghost. It’s just dead flesh.”

“It worked earlier,” Sylvie said. “Had a ghost, had a fairly active one. Gave the user all sorts of nightmares, reliving her crimes.”

“Shouldn’t have done that,” Wales said absently, turning the Hand this way and that, setting the lighter down. “Part of the packaging is to prevent soul seepage. Thankfully. I can’t imagine sharing Marco’s dreams. Sure that’s what was going on? Not just imagination?”

“Sure enough that we could ID the . . . donor by her memories flooding the kid’s dreams.”

“Her?”

“The dead woman?”

Wales twitched visibly, bobbled the Hand, and only caught it at the last. “It’s a woman’s Hand!” He shot a look back at the other one, and said, “They’re both women’s!”

Wright and Sylvie traded a long, speaking look with each other. Wright’s expression said, He’s kinda slow, and We’re not paying for this, are we? Sylvie shrugged minutely; she wasn’t sure Wales saw a lot of women, living or dead.

Wales muttered, “No, no, no. They’re women’s hands, and they’re never women’s hands.”

“Why not?” Sylvie asked. “Women commit murder, too. They might be a little less likely to hang themselves after, though.” A stray thought occurred. Alex hadn’t said how Patrice Caudwell had died. She would have mentioned something as grisly as an old lady hanging herself. “What happens if they don’t hang? Can they still be bound into the Hands?”

“No,” Wales said. “No. At least . . . Look. It’s all about symbolism. Hanging yourself, a rope around your neck—it keeps your soul tight to the body. Suicide by gunshot, by bleeding out—”

“Soul leaves with the blood. But could it be less significant than you think?”

“That’s not the . . . Tradition dictates men’s Hands. Tradition dictates hanging,” Wales said.

“Tradition changes—”

“No,” he said. “No. It’s like prescription meds. You don’t prescribe the same dose to a woman that you do a man. The . . .” He flailed his hands about, reaching for vocabulary they would understand, and finally came up with a word that made Sylvie want to gag. “The recipe to create the Hands is specific. Detailed. Picky. You don’t just change out pieces of it.”

“Do we care how it got done?” Wright said. “Can’t we just get rid of the things?”

Sylvie shook her head. “It’s a signature of sorts. Tells me something about the person who made them.” For one thing, Wales’s spluttering was the final step to make her erase him from her list of suspects. His dismay seemed entirely too real, the break with tradition too difficult for him to contemplate.

“You’re profiling a body snatcher?” Wright said. “Oh, I hate this.”

“Wales?” she prompted.

The Ghoul picked up Bella’s Hand again, scratched flakes off the coating, clear with a reddish tinge. “They changed more than the gender,” he said. “This is just . . . wrong. It couldn’t have worked.”

“It did. End of discussion,” Sylvie said. She had Bella’s dreams, she had the platinum brooch, she had the Navigator and Bayside and her own bouts of unconsciousness as proof.

“But you just don’t mess around with a formulation to bind a killer spirit!” Wales said. “It’s just too damn risky for the user. The ghost might escape. And then—”

Sylvie sucked in a breath. “You think that’s what happened? The ghost escaped? Went after Bella . . .” It might explain the girl’s illness. “What does soul consumption look like?”