The ghost opened its ragged lips, keened in pitch with the bone, a high, shrill cry that had Sylvie clutching her ears, nearly clouting herself in the head with her gun. The cry separated into individual sounds, vibrated through her hands, twinging against bone, resonating in the metal parts of her gun until she found herself worrying crazily that they would rattle the bullets enough to explode.

Her skull shook, but as the resonances sank deeper, Strange’s cries shifted to words, full of bile, outrage, entitlement, madness. My body, I’ve waited. I’ve paid and paid, and I want it now.

“Your check bounced,” Odalys snapped, then blanched as the lich ghost’s attention shifted toward her.

Strange’s estate had been embezzled, Sylvie recalled. That explained a lot. Odalys would rather have her own pet baby witch than a blanked-out body for a ghost who couldn’t afford the fee. That was how Zoe had known about the milk. Odalys had told her.

When the broken shards of glass lifted back from the carpet and orbited the lich, shining and molten in the sunlight, Sylvie ducked back behind the curtain. She’d seen enough. She’d heard enough. She wiped the sweat from her cheek, licked her lip where she’d apparently bitten it at the ghost’s first shriek.

“Odalys, are your circles proof against poltergeist activity?” Sylvie asked.

Odalys crowed in sudden triumph; her hand came out of a cloth-edged basket, fisted tight. She grinned at Sylvie. “You stick around and tell me, Shadows. I’ve other plans.”

She whirled and tossed her handful of something—not toward Strange’s ghost and her orbiting glass whirlwind—but straight at Demalion’s chest.

Demalion dropped as if she’d shot him. Dark dust plumed from his chest when he hit the floor, illuminated two wraith-like, glowing shapes twining above him.

“What did you do?”

“Graveyard dirt,” Odalys said. “Reminded his soul, both of them, that he was dead. There’s more of it in the basket if you want to try your hand at holding off Strange. If I were you, though, I’d drag your friend out of here and hope his spirits follow. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe one of them will survive.” Even as she spoke, she threaded her maze of protective rings, heading for the door.

Sylvie growled, holstered her gun, and followed her path. The door, even Odalys, wasn’t her target. Wright’s still form was. She dropped beside him. Beneath her hand, his chest was still, the dust gritty, piercing her blisters and adding blood to his shirt.

Shit, she thought. She rose, ready to tackle Odalys, and the woman tutted, picking up one of the fallen Hands of Glory. “You can chase me. Or you can try to get the dust off him. Your choice.”

She scooped up Sylvie’s satchel, stuffed the two Hands of Glory into it, and waved bye-bye.

Sylvie froze. If Odalys got away, Zoe would find herself gift-wrapped for Strange. Odalys might have wanted Zoe as her apprentice, but with a ghost demanding a body . . . Zoe became expendable.

Leave Wright, the little dark voice said. They both had more time than they were meant to have. You can’t save the dead except at the cost of the living.

He was so still beneath her hands, his warmth like the lining of a shucked-off coat, residual and fading fast.

Faintly, Sylvie could hear people on the street beginning to shout, waking as Strange grew ever closer to Sylvie and Wright and farther from the accident.

She dragged him up, her hands under his shoulders. The air hissed and seethed behind her, and she turned, shielding her throat and face. Heat grazed her shoulder, ran like a rivulet of boiling water down her arm, and leeched onto the inner curve of her elbow.

The salt rings had failed to hold Strange back, Sylvie thought, swaying and sick, her senses all caught up in the tiny point of pain.

No, that wasn’t quite true. The woman’s ghost—glass aura left behind—paced the rings, round and round, as if she were caught within high walls. It was that damned serpentine tongue that had gotten ahead of her and locked onto Sylvie’s flesh. She tried to pry it off, but found it barely there to her fingers, some plasmic state between solid and mist.

Their time was running out, she thought. The salt rings were holding, kept her awake, aware, alive, but for how long?

She scrabbled at Wright’s chest, collecting a bare scraping of graveyard dirt in her palm, slapped it over that writhing, stinging tongue, and felt it grow briefly tangible—slimy and muscular—before it decayed beneath her grasp, setting her free.

Sylvie grabbed Wright while Strange paced the circle, while the lich’s tongue slowly re-formed and made cautious sorties back in her direction. She forced his body upright, heavy and emptied of life, propped him against the wall, and started working on buttons. She ripped his shirt off, watched the graveyard dirt scatter downward, catching on his jeans, his shoes, and swore. Sweat sleeked her spine, her hands, made her one-handed grip on him faulty. He tipped, nearly fell.

From the front of the store, she heard a voice. “Hello? Everything all right here?”

Cop, she thought, come to see to the fender benders. Couldn’t walk away from Invocat’s shattered windows. Curiosity killed the cop, she thought, and worked faster.

It wasn’t like they were silent; Strange still shrieked, the bone flute howled, and Sylvie panted like a dog, cursing Wright, cursing Demalion with each outborne breath. Come back, you bastard. Just hold on. Hold on. Work with me here, you fucker, as she stripped him. Shirt fell, jeans down, shoes unlaced and off.

Caught holding a half-naked corpse . . . Oh, that would be a great way to end this day. Caught in a jail cell while Odalys fed Zoe to Margaret Strange to get the ghost off her own back.

Wright twitched in her grasp, breath sucking in like a bellows, began coughing almost immediately.

“Police officer,” the man called. “I’m coming back—”

Strange’s head rose from where she was studying the ring’s patterns, and she moved back toward the front, seeking an easier meal.

“Syl—” Wright murmured, voice ragged, face worn.

“Shh,” she hissed, making the judgment call. Wright first. Mr. Bad-Timing Cop would have to deal with the ghost himself.

“I’m naked—” he said. “Why?”

“Shut up,” Sylvie said. She slid her arm about his waist; he was all rib cage and jutting spine, hip bones like blades, and she dragged him into the alley. “Besides,” she muttered. “I left you your boxers.”

She shoved him—Wright, Demalion, one or both, god, please both—into the alley, ducked back into the store, and stretched the graveyard-dust-contaminated clothes across the threshold. Hopefully that would buy them time. Unless, of course, Strange went around the front.

How much sentience was left in her? How much of her was pure rage and hunger? Could she plan? Sylvie cursed Wales and cursed herself for not knowing the right questions to have asked.

Sylvie spun Wright about and headed down the alley, dragging him drunkenly after her.

In her pocket, her cell phone rang. She ignored it. With her luck, it was Suarez demanding an update, and when she didn’t answer, he’d probably come after her just in time to die like his son, at the hands of some magical calamity.

At the alley mouth, Wright balked, said, “Can’t go out there like this.”

“People have other things to gape at than your skinny ass,” Sylvie said. For someone so skinny, he was heavy and solid clear through. Her shoulders ached. Peering into the street, she saw the gathered crowd about Odalys’s place. They were gaping; they were shouting; they were . . . falling.

She couldn’t see the ghost in the sunlight, but she could track her by the way people fell, one soul bite at a time. Hopefully, given the sheer number of people in the area, the sheer quickness with which Strange was dealing out unconsciousness, she wasn’t having time to drain any one person of more than a taste of each soul, like some evil-minded sampling party. Miami might be meaner, afterward, a lot of people walking away that much less whole, but they’d be walking, talking, breathing.