by Lyn Benedict
The binding sigil had held them prisoner to Azpiazu’s will. Sylvie and her cohorts had disrupted the sigils on the other four, magically or physically. She remembered gouging at Rita in bear form, her marked forehead the only part of her still human. Sylvie had slashed the sigil with a sharp stone and her nails.
But Lupe, during the final battle, had been wounded and retreated beneath a bush. Her sigil had never been disrupted. It hadn’t mattered. The spell had broken when Azpiazu died. It should have been a nonissue.
“We went back,” Sylvie said, half in realization, half in explanation. “We dispersed the last traces of Azpiazu from the site to make sure he couldn’t come back as a vengeful ghost. You still had the sigil whole on your skin. It acted like a beacon for those traces.”
Lupe’s skin was unmarked now. Her forehead where the sigil had been was as smooth as marble. The other women bore scars. Sylvie imagined the sigil groaning beneath the sudden weight of the curse and sinking through skin and bone, making itself at home somewhere in Lupe’s body like a migrating bullet.
“So you did this to me?”
Excuses leaped to Sylvie’s lips: She hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have happened. Azpiazu had started it. It was Tepeyollotl’s curse. “Yes.”
“What are you going to do to fix it?” Lupe said. “I’ve lost my girlfriend, I’ve fucked up my classes, and my parents want me dead. I mean, they haven’t been happy with me since I hooked up with Jenny, but … they really want me dead, Sylvie.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I noticed.”
Lupe’s face crumpled as if she’d hoped Sylvie would protest, would tell her pretty lies about her parents just being scared, bullet crease aside. She scrubbed at her eyes, but the snake taint in them seemed to prevent tears from forming.
“We’ll fix it,” Sylvie said. “We’ll find a witch who’ll figure out a way—”
“That’s what you tried last month,” Lupe said. “I’m still fucked. And it’s getting worse.”
“Witches are a little scarce on the ground right now,” Sylvie admitted. The witches with any real power had been leaving Miami in waves, fleeing Sylvie’s gun, fleeing the ISI, fleeing the new god that was making Miami her home. The new god that Sylvie had helped create. Erinya had been a demigodling, a servant to the god of Justice—dangerous, but containable—until Sylvie had used Erinya to defeat the soul devourer’s grab at godhood. Erinya got the shiny prize instead, becoming a full god, independent and unstoppable. Worst of all, instead of retreating from the real world in proper godly protocol, she insisted on sticking around.
Gods in the real world were always a disaster waiting to happen. They were pure power, and like a human shedding skin cells, shedding breath, gods shed scraps of power wherever they lingered. Witches could use that power, collect it for their own, but it was a risky habit. A god’s power was more likely to burn out a witch’s ability entirely than it was to recharge it.
Once Erinya had started making her presence felt, Sylvie’s favorite go-to witch, Val Cassavetes, had disappeared somewhere in Italy, and taken Sylvie’s witchy sister, Zoe, with her. She couldn’t even rely on family.
The witches who were left? Scavengers who hoped to grow fat on the god’s shed leavings. Untalented, untutored. Untrustworthy. Too small to be of interest to the ISI or too skilled at going to ground. The kind of witch who’d be just as glad to kill Lupe and use her bones for spell ingredients.
“Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “We’ll beat this. I’ll broaden the search. I’ll find a way to break this curse.” The words felt empty in her mouth, fragments of faint hope. She wasn’t a spell-breaker. Point her in the direction of the spellcaster, and she’d take him or her out of the picture, break the curse through brute force. But Azpiazu was three months dead, and the god who’d laid the original curse was a powerless shell who’d retreated to a realm Sylvie couldn’t reach.
Lupe grimaced, all pointed teeth and animal distress, and said, “You’d better hurry. I’m running out of normal.” As if to prove her point, she went from her crouch to a leap that took her to the top of the cage, then to the high window and through it. She left a bloody smear on the sill as her wound broke open again with the exertion.
Sylvie, thinking of the armed men outside the weight room, thought Lupe had the right idea, and clambered awkwardly, humanly, after her.
WITH NO PLACE ELSE COMING TO MIND, SYLVIE DROVE LUPE AND herself to the Shadows Inquiries office, ushering Lupe in ahead of her. Lupe’s bare feet were soundless on the dusty terrazzo floor, and Alex, wielding a broom with determination, grimaced as she splashed sawdust over Lupe’s feet.
“Crap. Sorry, Lupe,” Alex said.
Lupe raised her head; Alex sucked in a breath and retreated to the sanctuary of her desk. The lanky blonde looked uncharacteristically flustered, but Sylvie understood. There was something particularly horrifying about watching Lupe grow less human each month.
“There are some spare clothes upstairs,” Sylvie said, disrupting the awkward moment.
Lupe headed for the stairs and came face-to-face with the workman coming out from beneath them. He dropped his toolbox, and Lupe turned back to Sylvie, fury and humiliation on every distorted line of her face. Her throat mottled darkly with passing spots. “Fix this, Shadows.”
The carpenter, kneeling over his spilled tools, crossed himself as Lupe stomped upstairs. Sylvie said, “How’s the safe room coming, Emmanuel? We’re going to need it a little sooner than I thought.”
“What’s wrong with her?” he said. His dark eyes jittered over hers; then he looked up the stairs as if his gaze could drag Lupe back down and pin her in place until he understood the inexplicable.
“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Sylvie said. She kept her tone friendly but didn’t bother with an excuse. She was tired of helping the world blind itself to the Magicus Mundi. Let him worry and wonder.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m taking lunch. I’ll have the room finished by this evening. Just need to finish up the ventilation system. Can’t have you suffocating in there.”
“Would defeat the purpose of a safe room,” she agreed, and waved him off.
He stopped at Alex’s desk, flashed a smile, and offered to buy her lunch. Alex turned him down but sent him away with a smile. Sylvie shook her head and tuned out the flirty conversation.
She peered into the narrow corridor that Emmanuel had excavated beneath the stairwell. She hated that they needed the room at all, but Alex had been agitating for one for months. After the ISI had tear-gas-bombed the office, Sylvie decided Alex was right.
Ideally, it would be a magical safe room as well, a place to store dangerous talismans or to hide from magical attackers, but that would require a trustworthy witch to build the proper shields.
A shift in the air, the scent of blood and antiseptic, and she turned to find Lupe at her side, peering over her shoulder. Her lips were pulled tight over her teeth, outlining the jut of her canines. “That for me?”
“If it comes to that.”
“Guess it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.” Lupe crossed her arms tight over Sylvie’s borrowed sweatshirt. She shifted foot to foot. “You sure it’ll hold me?”
“Long as you don’t turn into a swarm of mosquitoes,” Sylvie said.
Lupe grinned without amusement. “Right now, I’m not ruling it out.”
Sylvie shot Alex a help glance. She was out of anything even remotely approaching comfort. Alex slid out from behind her desk, put a careful hand on Lupe’s sleeve, and said, “You want to get in on our lunch order? I mean, I don’t know much about shape-shifting, but it seems like hungry work.”
Lupe followed Alex’s lead docilely enough, even as she protested that she was too stressed to think about food. Sylvie took the opportunity to duck up to her office.
She left the door open, keeping an ear out for Lupe and Alex, and let her shoulders slump. She didn’t like Lupe’s changes. The curse was bad enough, but she really
didn’t like the level of violence that went with the changes. She needed a witch, and she needed one now.
Even if a witch couldn’t break the curse, maybe one could ameliorate the worst effects.
Sylvie ran through her usual contacts in her mind, trying to figure out who was speaking to her this month, who was too busy to talk, and finally just admitted the truth to herself. There was only one person she was going to call.
She pushed back her rolling chair, propped her sneakered feet against the scarred wood desk, and dialed.
“Sylvie,” Demalion said. Picked up on the first ring. And didn’t that make her skin warm embarrassingly even though she knew the quickness was dictated more by proximity than desire. She’d caught him at a good time.
“Got a moment?”
“You’ve got trouble?”
“When don’t I?” Despite the truth in that, she felt her voice relaxing. It had been three months since he’d taken his new body back to Chicago, three months that should have stretched the relationship between them to the breaking point. Instead, it had given them something they’d never known they had needed. Distance and the time to talk.
“Truth,” he said. “I think you wouldn’t know what to do with a vacation if you had one.”
“You could come down early and find out,” she said.
His voice roughed itself into a huff of not-quite-amusement. “Would if I could.”
“Oh, damn,” she said. “I know that tone. You’re not coming next week.” Disappointment sat sourly in her stomach. Time to talk was all well and good, but she missed being able to touch him. His resurrection from the dead and his departure had happened so close together that some nights she woke sweating, thinking he was only a voice on the other end of her line. A ghost she couldn’t let go.
It had been difficult enough to let him go when he was determined to repay a dead man for giving Demalion back his life, when he had gone back to Chicago to fix what was broken in Wright’s life. It hadn’t taken too long for Wright’s wife to smell a rat, to come to the correct but improbable answer that the man wandering around in her husband’s body was no longer her husband. Once she figured it out, she took her son and the money Demalion offered and fled the city. Sylvie had hoped Demalion would return at that point. Instead, he’d rejoined the ISI under Adam Wright’s name. That had been a harder pill to swallow. No debt owing there, just ambition and an ideology Sylvie didn’t share.
Still, they were making it work.
She pushed away from the desk, spun to stare at her filing cabinets, assessing. Even without Lupe’s case, she had too many small irons in the fire to go to him.
Before he could make apologies, she said, “Hey, you heard anything about memory modification?”
“Magical?”
“Would I ask otherwise?”
Demalion hesitated, thinking about it. “Individual or big picture? Are we talking Chicago?”
“That and others.”
“No,” Demalion said. “You know, it’s weird, now that you mention it. I just sort of accepted it. People don’t like to look beyond the ordinary.”
“This is true,” Sylvie said. “To my everlasting chagrin. You know how many of my clients wait until things are holy-fuck bad instead of coming in at first trouble?”
“You and the doctors. You really think there’s something there? Something you want me to look into?”
“If you’ve got time.”
“That’s the problem,” Demalion said. “Yvette is running us all kinds of ragged. Trying to get everything in place to impress whoever it is who funds us. Apparently, there was some type of … incident.”
She could hear the air quotes through the phone, and said, “Let me guess. Someone served the big boss shrimp, and he’s allergic?”
“Hell if I know,” Demalion said. “Seriously, Syl. She’s got things locked down tight. It’s all need-to-know, and I’m a new hire as far as Yvette’s concerned. Her inner circle is so busy that none of us low-levels have even laid eyes on them for days. But it’s all trickling down.”
“Things like that do,” Sylvie said.
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a day off. God, I don’t know when I’ll even catch up on my sleep.” If it hadn’t been for his nearly tangible frustration, she might have shared hers.
“You have any idea what’s going on?”
“Big picture, yeah,” Demalion said on a sigh. “Political infighting. Yvette, Riordan, and Graves are all duking it out to be the new head of the ISI. They’re all hell-bent on impressing the money man with their dedication and efficiency.”
Sylvie grimaced. She knew Riordan. Wouldn’t have liked him even if he hadn’t been the one who had sent a SWAT team armed with tear gas into her office to collect her. He was too prone to attacking the little guys and leaving the big threats to sort themselves out.
“What happened to the old head?”
“Gods in Chicago,” Demalion said. “They found a charred pelvis and skull in his office. Typed it for DNA. He’s toast. It just took a while for the paperwork to go through.”
“So Riordan’s down here, posturing at me. Yvette’s making your life difficult. What’s Graves doing?”
“Nothing good, I bet. Man’s a bastard. I worked for him for two months when I first came out here. Bad temper. Bad attitude. Distrustful.”
“Sounds like typical ISI to me.”
“Syl—”
“All right, all right. No job bashing.”
“Graves hightailed it down to Texas after Yvette stole the Chicago office out from under him. He’s pissed. Been making our lives hard by accusing this office of all sorts of things. Magical misconduct, mostly. He’s heard rumors that Yvette is a witch.”
“Is she?”
“Yeah,” Demalion said. “Makes sense if you think about it. Who better to deal with the Magicus Mundi than someone who can step in and out of it.”
“I do all right,” Sylvie said.
“Yeah, don’t try to pretend you’re ordinary.”
“So Graves doesn’t like witches.”
“Witches, psychics, half-breed monsters.”
“Not a fan of yours, then,” Sylvie said. It was more than just a comment; it was an invitation to confession. There were some things they’d talked about endlessly. Demalion’s difficulty in adjusting to his new body. Demalion’s relief when Wright’s wife figured out that the man in her apartment might look like her husband but wasn’t, and left him. Demalion’s careful plan to rejoin the ISI without tipping them off that he had been with them before. He wanted to work for them, not be studied by them.
The one topic made conspicuous by its absence was Demalion’s clairvoyance. He’d been born with it, a genetic gift from his inhuman mother, and he’d died with it. Sylvie wanted to know if he’d managed to reshape Wright’s body to bring it with him, and he wasn’t talking.
Lupe’s voice rose sharply downstairs, but after a reactive jerk to her feet, Sylvie diagnosed the sound as brittle laughter, not a threat.
“Watch your back,” Sylvie said. “Political infighting can get ugly and violent fast.”
“I think Graves is more focused on Yvette than me. She’s his target. Everything he hates in one tidy package. A high-ranking woman, a rival, and a witch.”
“Graves sounds like a peach.”
Demalion said, “Hey, Sylvie—”
“Yeah?” The tentative sound to his voice made her wary, made her tense up as his pitch went tighter, higher, noticeable only because she’d gotten to know this new form of his voice so well.
“I don’t know that it matters, but Yvette and I—”
Sylvie went cold, flushed hot, read that little pause too clearly. “What, you hooked up with your boss? I guess she’s convenient.”
“No!” Demalion said. “Not currently. Then. Years ago. Before she was up in the ranks. Before you. Way before you. When I was a different man. I just thought it was something you should know.”
Sylvie sighed. Just what she needed. An irrational reason to add to the rational reason she already had for disliking the woman: a government agent who was keeping her lover from visiting her. “Some things you should keep to yourself. Does she know? You said she’s a witch. Will she recognize you?”
“She looks at me funny every now and then.”
“Just great,” Sylvie said. “Hope you had an amicable breakup, or you’ll be on the damn dissection table before you know it.”
“She wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t she? It would be a great way to get Graves off her back. To show him that she wasn’t a crazy Magicus Mundi wannabe.”
“You’re ridiculously cynical—”
“You’re ridiculously trusting for a government suit.”
An argument hummed along the wires between them, ready to break out, and Sylvie wrenched them to a new topic. “I called because I need some info,” she said.
“Anything.”
And that right there was why he kept her on her toes. How he could go from defending the ISI to implicitly agreeing to give her information out of their files if she asked… Sylvie thought the inner workings of Demalion’s mind might always be a mystery to her. Either he was the king of compartmentalization, or he judged and scaled every moment and every request.
Or, of course, he still had his psychic abilities, and knew what she was going to ask, knew it wouldn’t tax his relationship with the ISI.
She waited, let the space stretch between them. But Demalion was too cagey to be caught out that easily. “Should I be worried that you’re taking a long time to ask? Trying to think of the perfect way to phrase it?”
“You seen your mother recently?”
“Why do you ask?” The hesitation in his voice was enough to tell her that psychic or not, he hadn’t foreseen that question.
“It’s just a question. One with an easy answer, I thought.” She spun her desk chair ’round. Now he had her doing it, overthinking every word.
