Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel

by Lyn Benedict

  “No. What about the apartment?” There wasn’t a lot of mess. Braud’s magical shield hadn’t saved him, but it had contained the blood spatter surprisingly well. And since the shield was keyed to the bat-wing amulet, it was keeping the blood spill close to the body.

  “I know someone,” Garza said.

  “Figured as much.” Sylvie shivered. Cops made the best murderers. Or accomplices.

  WHEN SYLVIE HADN’T HEARD FROM GARZA IN A WEEK, WHEN THE finding of Braud’s body passed almost without comment in the press—odd for a wealthy white man with a luxury lifestyle—she bit back her instincts that suggested no news was good news, and called him.

  “Any fallout?” she asked, when he answered.

  “Fallout?”

  “With Braud.”

  “Who is this?”

  Sylvie hung up, frowning. Garza’s confusion sounded real. More, when she’d mentioned Braud, his attention had sharpened as if he’d been investigating Braud’s death. Not covering it up.

  Sylvie figured it was time for a trip back to Key West.

  Hours later, she waved at Detective Raul Garza across a parking lot, and he raised a hand back in the halfhearted way one did when recognition was lacking. She let her hand drop. She wasn’t as surprised as she should have been. Garza had been her fourth stop. Sylvie had visited some of the dance-’til-you-die-cursed clubbers, and none of them recalled anything more complex than someone maybe spiking my drink? One man, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if his feet felt bruised and tender, said he thought that maybe there’d been E going around.

  When she pressed, tried to get them to admit they recalled more, remembered something magical, they’d locked up and stuttered like a skipped record, claimed headaches. She imagined, if she confronted Garza, he’d do the same.

  Her jaw set; she tightened her grip on the steering wheel as she turned the truck for Miami and home.

  The thing was, Sylvie had always known the world was blind to the Magicus Mundi, that people would ignore their own senses to come up with a more “real world” answer. It wasn’t a werewolf that ate the family pet, it was an alligator. Fur? What fur?

  People liked their world’s being safe and sane and sensible. Sylvie had always assumed that the hard cases who denied magic even when it was happening big and bright and undeniable in front of them were willfully blind.

  She’d never considered that they might have been blindfolded by someone or something else.

  Maybe she needed to.

  This wasn’t the first time Sylvie had expected to have real-world fallout from a magical event: After the gods had battled in Chicago, scattering god-power and warping the city, she’d expected to hear endless speculation and theorizing. Instead, there’d been a news report about an inland storm and freak occurrences brought on by panic and strange atmospheric pressures. Strange atmospheric pressures that allowed children to bring nightmares to life, that set buildings to attacking each other, and lifted roadways off the ground like ribbons. Very strange pressures.

  That was the most egregious example, but several hours of research later, Sylvie had compiled a list of should-have-been-noticed events. Chicago, obviously. The cursed bodies she’d found in the Everglades, more locally. And reading between the lines on newspaper accounts and her case files: another half dozen. It seemed like anytime the Magicus Mundi made itself felt with a significant death toll, something or someone swept it under the proverbial rug.

  Sylvie, who believed in honesty, even if she didn’t always practice it, found it insupportable. She couldn’t stop people from pretending the Magicus Mundi didn’t exist. But deliberately blinding them? The world was dangerous enough when you knew the predators existed, even subconsciously. If you weren’t allowed to know? It was like being shoved into a room to take a test without even knowing what the subject was, and if you failed, you died.

  She and her business partner, Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, would have to do some research. Find out who was behind it. Find out why they were doing it. And find out what it would take to stop them.

  1

  Fall Apart

  SYLVIE HAD A WHOLE LIST OF THINGS SHE DISLIKED—MISOGYNIST sorcerers, incompetent drivers, government agents who raided her office illegally, trashed her security, and absconded with her files, lovers who were too busy to call, and cops who weren’t—too many things to really enumerate or rank, but frantic phone calls from her clients were close to the top.

  She liked frantic calls even less when things were theoretically under control. Her client, Lupe Fernandez, was supposed to be tucked up safe and sound at her parents’ home.

  Lupe’s call had been brief, mostly unintelligible. It had been three minutes of sobbing, shouting, a vibration of mortal terror. When the call had disconnected, mid panicked babble, Sylvie knew something had gone wrong. Knew she hadn’t done her job right.

  That was the kind of thought that ruined her morning, sent her scrabbling out of her bed, grabbing at clothes, her gun, her keys, and heading for her truck at a dead run. Not the way she preferred to begin her days. Ideally, they’d start with waking before the alarm went off, having time for a leisurely cup of coffee, a morning jog, or swim if the day was too hot, then a late breakfast at her office, while Alex caught her up on potential clients.

  If it were a really good day, when she woke, Demalion would be beside her, lashes dark on his face, the glint of blond stubble in slanting sunlight, sleeping as determinedly as a cat. If it were a good day, she’d get to lean over and nudge him awake, watch his pupils flare and fade as he blinked into morning light.

  It hadn’t been a good day for months.

  Sylvie laid on the horn, cursed rush-hour traffic, and stomped on the gas, jerking her truck around a multitasking driver who had one hand full of coffee cup, the other full of cell phone, and was failing to steer with his knees.

  Her throat was tight, worried about Lupe. The woman had been through so much already. Kidnapped by Azpiazu the soul devourer, used as a magical conduit, finally freed through Sylvie’s actions… only to find she wasn’t as free as everyone thought.

  Azpiazu had slapped a shape-shifting spell on his victims as part of his attempt to control his own unmanageable shifting. When Sylvie had killed him and broken the spell that linked him to his victims, she’d thought it was over. Had seen the women home with the sense of a job well-done.

  Then Lupe had called her the first full moon after, in total hysterics; the moon rose, and Lupe shifted into a werewolf in her screened-in patio. Reason enough for hysterics, but it had been far worse than that. Lupe hadn’t been alone. Her girlfriend, Jenny, had been curled next to her on the patio swing. Jenny had needed 134 stitches in her face, chest, shoulder, and arm, lost three fingers on her right hand, and gained a cracked skull. She’d nearly bled out before Lupe woke the next morning and called 911.

  Unsurprisingly, the two broke up. Jenny didn’t really remember what had happened; the concussion and blood loss saw to that, but at the same time, Lupe said, Jenny was afraid of her.

  Lupe was afraid of herself.

  Sylvie had taken her out to Tatya and Marisol in the Everglades, two women, two werewolves, who she thought might be willing to help deal with the change. They had been. Again, Sylvie had thought, problem solved. Or at least shelved.

  Sunlight lancing through her windshield from the car before her made her squint and wince, and realize she’d torn out of her apartment without grabbing her sunglasses. A small pain, though, compared to what Lupe was going through.

  Finding out she was a werewolf was bad and freaky enough—curse-inflicted lycanthropy was insanely rare—but spending the full moon with Tatya and Marisol had proved that Lupe’s problems were larger than that. With Tatya and Marisol at her side, Lupe had been braced to deal with the wolf-change, assured that no one would be hurt this time.

  The problem was that Lupe didn’t shift into a wolf. She changed under the moon, wasn’t left a human between two monsters, but she didn�
��t turn into a wolf either. For her second full moon, Lupe turned into a jaguar, all fury and rage at being caught between the two werewolves. No one came out of that unscathed.

  Lupe didn’t heal like Tatya and Marisol did, either; she was left with bloody bite marks that bled and scabbed for weeks. She bore the wounds without complaint, saying Jenny had had it worse.

  Sylvie had started looking into witches, hoping to find someone who could break the curse. It was a slow, too-slow, process, trying to find a witch with the right ratio of power to trustworthiness, and they’d run out of time. It didn’t help that three months ago, the ISI had helped themselves to Sylvie’s files. The ISI was supposed to deal with the intersection of the Magicus Mundi and the real world, but they had chosen to use the information gleaned from Sylvie’s files to run the few remaining local witches Sylvie could work with out of town. Business as usual with them. They would rather inconvenience Sylvie than do anything productive.

  So for the third moon, last night’s moon, Lupe had made her own arrangements. She’d gone to her parents’ home while they were on a buying trip in New York City and locked herself in a zoo-quality cage that she’d set up in the home gym. Obviously, something had gone wrong. Again. Lupe couldn’t seem to catch a break.

  Sylvie changed lanes, got off the highway, and hoped Lupe hadn’t killed someone. If that happened, she didn’t know what she’d do.

  Put a bullet in her brain, her little dark voice suggested. You kill monsters.

  It was true. If she had been coming into the case from the outside, she would have shot Lupe already and fed her bones to the sea. But Lupe was hers. Sylvie had saved her from the sorcerer, and she was responsible for her well-being.

  She was forced to a stop outside the gated community’s security station and bit back her impatience. She’d forgotten Lupe’s family had money and the paranoia to go with it. The guard leaned out of his station, eyed her beat-up truck, eyed her, said nothing. “Sylvie Lightner,” she said. “I’m here to see the Fernandezes.”

  “Yeah, all right. They got back this morning.”

  He waved her on; the security mostly for show. He hadn’t even asked to see her ID. But he’d answered at least part of her question. What had gone wrong? Well, for one thing, Lupe’s parents had come home early.

  Sylvie felt her lips thin, press tight. She hit the gas, let her urgency spill out with that last rush to get to the house.

  She pulled into the long, curving, palm-shaded driveway, and cut the engine. The stucco facade, golden in the morning sunlight, seemed peaceful, at odds with the shrieking phone call.

  The driveway was paved brick and stone, money spent on decoration because it could be, and led her to a double front door with a brass knocker kept well polished. It was cold in her hands despite the growing heat of the morning.

  The door opened a bare person width to a middle-aged woman Sylvie didn’t know and presumed was Mrs. Fernandez. Behind her, the house was dim and dark. Quiet.

  “I’m Sylvie—”

  “It’s in back,” she said as she opened the door. She didn’t look at Sylvie.

  “It?” Sylvie didn’t wait for an answer. The woman’s expression told her enough. Fear and distaste and horror all admixed.

  Lupe. Her daughter. It.

  Sylvie headed for the back of the house, for the exercise room Lupe had mentioned. “I’ll set up there. At least then, if I get loose, I won’t shred the furniture.” Another woman stood in front of the gym door; this woman was younger, her face miserable with fear as she blocked the entrance.

  Sylvie said, “I need to go in.”

  The woman—not sister, Lupe didn’t have a sister, but maybe sister-in-law?—grabbed at Sylvie’s arm. “She tried to kill him. We had to do it.”

  Sylvie shoved past, frightened now for Lupe, expecting to find her dead. It wasn’t that bad. Close, but not that bad. Lupe huddled in the base of the cage, arms wrapped tight around herself, face hidden in her knees. Two men stood outside the cage, their backs to Sylvie but their stance unmistakable. Guns in their hands, aimed at the cage. Blood smell hung in the air, sharp and sweet and strong in the sterile confines of the home gym.

  “Hey,” Sylvie said. “Put ’em away. I got this.”

  “It tried to kill him,” the younger one said. Lupe’s brother. Sylvie tried to remember his name. Alex, thorough as always, had put together one of her overkill files on Lupe and her family. The brother’s name was in it. Miguel?

  “Manuel,” Sylvie said. “Put it away. She’s your sister.”

  “It’s an abomination,” Lupe’s father—Alberto—said. “We should kill it.” His words were brutal, his face cold, but his hands wavered.

  “Put it away and get out,” Sylvie said, losing patience. Lupe still hadn’t looked up.

  “You’ll get rid of it?” Alberto demanded.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Sylvie said.

  He huffed, jerked his head at his son, and they ceded the ground. Sylvie waited for the adrenaline rushing her system to fade, but it, wiser than she, refused to go.

  They could change their minds; they could come back at any moment, worked up all over again, guns firing. Sylvie and Lupe weren’t out yet. Relief was premature.

  THE HEAVY PADLOCK ON THE CAGE WAS SNAPPED TIGHT, LOCKING Lupe behind bars, a beaten prisoner in her own family home. “Lupe. You have the key?” Sylvie tried to keep her voice steady, but blood smeared the pale tiles surrounding Lupe, a jumbled finger painting in shades of crimson and rust. The woman was injured, maybe seriously. Not dead. Sylvie could see the fine tremors running the angles of her bent elbows and knees, the shaky bellows of her rib cage.

  “Lupe. Answer me!”

  “… they took it,” Lupe breathed. “Put me back in and took it away.”

  Back in. She’d gotten out. Not good.

  “Oh, fuck this,” Sylvie said. She looked around, focused on the weight bench and free weights. That would do. She seized up a twenty-five-pound weight, swung it around, and brought it crashing against the padlock. The noise made Lupe scream, and it was echoed in the rest of the house. Sylvie dropped the weight on the broken lock, turned to greet Manuel with her gun raised. “Out!”

  He held his hands up, gun pointing toward the ceiling, and backed out. “Your life,” he said. “Your risk.”

  Sylvie followed him to the door, locked it behind him, dragged the weight bench in front of it, metal legs screeching over the tile.

  “Lupe,” she said. “Come on, what happened?”

  “I changed,” Lupe said. Her voice was a husk, ruined and wet. “Sylvie, I can’t live like this.”

  “It’s okay—”

  “It’s not!” Lupe jerked to her feet, faster than she should have been able to after trying to fold herself into origami. She was in Sylvie’s face almost before Sylvie could blink. Sylvie stiff-armed her in the chest, knocked her back.

  “Calm down.”

  “Why should I?” Lupe shouted.

  Sylvie got her first good look at the woman since she’d entered the room and found herself in reluctant agreement. Why should Lupe calm down when things were so completely, visibly, wrong?

  When Lupe had turned wolf that first time, she hadn’t come back unscathed. Her teeth had stayed sharp-edged behind soft lips. When she’d become a jaguar, the shift back to human left her with a swath of spotted skin across her shoulders and back. Whatever she’d shifted into last night had left its own startling and far-too-noticeable mark: Lupe’s irises looked like hammered brass, and her pupils were black slits. They should have looked like special-effects lenses, easy to explain. They didn’t.

  Lupe crossed her arms, long, tanned limbs crossing darkly over her white tank top, her white-linen pants. Blood spread scarlet near her rib cage. The shirt was smoked at the center of the bloodstain. A bullet crease. Close range.

  Sylvie stepped closer, peeled the shirt up. Lupe winced. Superficial but bloody. Sylvie grabbed a towel from the weight bench, pressed it again
st the wound. It came away mostly dry. Lupe had bled hard, but she wasn’t going to bleed out. She could wait for first aid. Sylvie threw the towel across the room, a drift of white in a mostly white room. Lupe’s blood was the brightest thing in it.

  “They shot you?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Lupe said. “The cage didn’t hold me. I almost killed him. Olivia came last night, waiting to welcome them all home. She brought my nephew, Sylvie. Two years old. She thought they were alone in the house, and I … I was loose.”

  “How’d you manage that, anyway?” Sylvie asked. The cage was first-rate. The bars were solid steel, none of them more than four inches from each other, closed at bottom and top, and, until Sylvie had smashed the lock, secure.

  Lupe blinked dark gold eyes, and Sylvie understood what they reminded her of just as Lupe said, “I turned into a python. A big one. I almost crushed his rib cage. Two years old, and his aunt tried to make him a meal. I knew better, even as I closed my coils, but I couldn’t stop.”

  Sylvie swore. It was all wrong. All unexpected. Werewolf was bad, were-jaguar was worse—but Lupe had worn those shapes before while held by Azpiazu. She’d worn bear also. Sylvie had expected that to be the third shift, something big but containable. Not this. Not a reptile who shared nothing with humankind.

  Lupe swayed closer; Sylvie smelled sweat, blood, and a musty underlay of old snakeskin. Her stomach turned uneasily.

  Careful, her little dark voice warned. She’s dangerous.

  Dangerous enough to maul a woman, to take on two wolves, to try to smother and eat a child. A calculating brain with animal instinct.

  “It’s the curse, isn’t it,” Lupe said. “The curse that Azpiazu suffered. Now it’s on me.”

  Sylvie thought of a slew of platitudes but chose not to lie. “Looks like.”

  Lupe’s legs gave out; she dropped to the floor as fluidly as if she had gone serpentine again. “Why me?”

  The question wasn’t an accusation, but it felt like one. The other women who’d survived being Azpiazu’s prisoners—Maria, Rita, Anamaria, Elena—had come out of it untouched except for nightmare memories and scarred foreheads where the binding sigils had been.