by Lyn Benedict
She pushed her hands into the water. It gave slowly, cold and sucking. Sylvie shuddered, her certainty slipping. What was she doing? She couldn’t save them if she couldn’t even breathe. If there was anyone left to save.
If they hadn’t died like Demalion.
She shook her head. No. For one thing, if they were all dead, the mermaids would have stopped singing. She could do this. She’d broken spells before. Accidentally, full of rage, or with luck and her little dark voice on her side. She could do it on her own. At will. On purpose. She put her hands back into the water, hunting the magics that held the wall of water in place.
Nausea churned in her gut as she crept up on it; her nerves fired in distaste as she felt out the spell’s hold on the real world—a seaweed tangle of malignant intent netting the water.
The magics slipped through her fingers, defying her urge to pull.
Careful, her little dark voice said. Careful.
Preaching survival.
Risk your life for them? For your enemies? For the dead?
She faltered. It had a point. They were her enemies. How much of this determination to save them was her hoping to save Demalion by proxy? If they were all dead, all trapped below the water—it had been twenty minutes since the wave first broke. And the mermaids’ song had never faltered. Twenty minutes of concentrated ill will.
A new sound impinged on her hearing. A rhythmic percussion traveling through the water, amplifying itself as it came.
Thumpthumpthump.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Thumpthumpthump.
Sylvie didn’t need to know Morse code to recognize that; the pattern was a part of pop culture.
SOS.
She’d never been able to turn away from someone pleading for help.
She delved back into the water, seeking to grab that intangible something. To break it apart. It slipped like a shoal of minnows through her hands, cold and slimy, her grasp slowed by the water.
No, you don’t, she thought at it, and dug in harder, wet to her elbows, scratching her nails through the liquid, snagging that magic. It thrashed like an eel, stung her palms with a near-electrical protest that made her grimace and curse between tight-locked teeth. But she held on, and, millimeter by slick millimeter, she dragged it toward her, through the door, spurred on by the drumbeat SOS.
Just as her wrists breached the glittering surface of the water, her little dark voice spoke again. Wait!
Too late.
She broke the magic’s hold, and the water crashed into the stairwell, sweeping her from her feet, slamming her—pinball style—wall to wall, then plunging her down the stairs.
Sylvie flailed, locked a hand on the guardrail, and hung on for dear life.
WHEN THE FLOOD SUBSIDED, WHEN SHE’D BEEN BATTERED BY CURRENT and cold and the dead agent slamming into her as his corpse swept inexorably by, she uncrimped her hands and staggered to her feet. She felt bruised all over, sodden, cold, more in need of a rescue than a rescuer. But she had to get moving; there was no guarantee that the waters wouldn’t rise to drowning levels again.
She labored up the half flight she’d fallen, headed into the hallway, water swirling about her ankles. She scanned the area swiftly, wondering where the SOS had come from. The first two doors she opened sent more water crashing down, turned corpses into driftwood. The water level, she thought, was rising again. The hiss of water pressing in through the broken windows.
Morgue, she thought. The ISI had a makeshift morgue. She’d been in it. The room had been baffled, had sucked the air into the room when the door closed. Close to soundproof. Maybe close to waterproof.
She tried to remember which door it was—in the refurbished maids’ supply room—and found it, not by memory but by the SOS starting up again, more desperate. She tapped on the door, got voices responding.
“Is there anyone out there? Is it safe to come out?”
“No,” Sylvie said, “Not safe. But safer. Open up.”
“Is that you, Grace?”
“Just open the damned door,” Sylvie snapped.
A furious set of whispers, then the door popped open, revealing four soaked and shivering ISI agents. The room, thankfully, was mostly dry. The water had only been up to their shins, and it flooded out past her.
Sylvie stepped in, shook off like a dog, and looked at them. “Let’s move.”
“Who—”
“That’s Shadows,” the agent in the back of the little huddle answered. She recognized him: John Riordan, the local ISI chief’s son.
“Hey, Junior. Want out? We need to go now. I broke the spell but only briefly. If they put it back up while I’m inside the barrier? We’re all dead.”
“We’re safe here,” another agent said. “We can wait.”
“For who?” Sylvie said. “Your security? They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
John’s teeth set; he shoved past the other agents. Sylvie braced herself for a fight, either physical or verbal. The look on his face was pure rage. But he only gained her side, and said, “Let’s go, people.”
Being the boss’s son has its perks, Sylvie thought. The three remaining agents fell in line like good little ducklings.
Sylvie opened the door again. Looked out. A wet hallway shouldn’t look that intimidating. But the water had risen noticeably in the few minutes they’d debated, moved faster, in purposeful ripples and rills as if snakes undulated beneath the surface. The hallway smelled like the sea, and it stretched out like a football field. The morgue had been nearly at the blind end of the hall, two hundred feet of enemy territory.
“Elevators?” John suggested.
“No,” Sylvie said. “We’d have to pry them open first.”
“First?” he said.
“You don’t listen well, do you. You think water floods one floor of a hotel naturally?” Sylvie asked. “There’s a spell calling the water. And there’s a spell holding the water in place. The better to drown you with.”
One of the agents said, “What’s that sound?” His lean face was tight with longing; green eyes drifted closed, the better to focus on the thin threads of the song he heard.
“I don’t hear anythi… wait. Yeah. What is that?” And there went agent number two. His heavyset body slowed, eased, relaxed.
The third agent, showing some sense, stuck his fingers in his ears, looking wild-eyed. It seemed to help, at least a little.
“Shit,” Sylvie muttered. Fucking mermaids. She yanked the door closed, dragging it through the rising waters. “Junior. Earplugs?”
He shook off his own stillness more easily than she’d expected. The other men were close to catatonic. “Earplugs?”
“Cotton balls, paper towels, rags, anything?”
Sylvie glanced around, but the room was as empty as a broken eggshell. White and wet and useless.
He opened his mouth to ask, then shook himself, started ripping fabric from his shirtsleeve. Shoved the first scraps at the agent with his fingers in his ears. The others followed suit. Makeshift. Sylvie hoped it’d buy them enough time. If they all froze on her, they were dead.
Sylvie took a big breath, hoping that if the spell lock was restored—which she had to assume it was, given the rising water—that she could disarm it again and do so from the inside.
“Close the door behind us,” Riordan said to the other agents. “If we can’t get out, we can retreat.”
They nodded, and Sylvie kept her mouth closed. She wasn’t going to burst their bubble, but if the water filled the hallway again, that door might as well be glued shut. Water pressure would ensure it. The doorway opened out.
Riordan’s jaw clenched, released; he cast a sidelong glance her way, and she raised a brow. He knew.
“Move,” Sylvie said.
They waded into the hallway, the last agent forcing the door closed through the frigid water.
It hadn’t been that cold before.
On her way in, the water had been chilly, water from below the sun�
�s reach, but this… this was icy. Deep-sea icy. Abyssal-plain icy. It leached heat and energy, set her teeth to chattering. It swallowed light, turned the hallway to rolling shadows and splashes. Worst of all, the water reached above her knee.
“What’s happening?” Riordan asked, as they headed into the hallway. Two hundred feet to go.
“You tell me. What’d you all do to piss off the Mundi so bad?”
“I don’t know,” he said. His teeth chattered. “I don’t even know what’s attacking us. The Maudits?”
“Mermaids,” Sylvie said.
One hundred eighty feet. The water reached midthigh.
A new sound penetrated the hallway, a low moan, the complaint of masonry giving way. Doors burst behind them, before them, spilling icy torrents into the hall. Fingers-in-his-ears shouted, stopped cold, changed trajectory.
Riordan reached for him, but the man forded the water, waist high and rising, to catch the body cresting the surface. Long hair streaming out, as red as undersea corals, falsely alive. “Grace!” he shouted.
“Jack!” Riordan shouted. “Leave her.”
The agent dropped her, but it cost him something; his pace slowed, his gaze dragging him backward. It slowed him, slowed them all.
Sylvie gritted her teeth, kept moving. They didn’t have time to waste on argument.
One hundred forty feet.
“Mermaids,” Riordan said. “Mermaids.”
His lips were blue; Sylvie assumed hers must be likewise. She knew her steps were slowing, dragging through the water. Movement was an act of will, a heavy shift of hip and numb leg, left, then right. Leaning forward. Simply trying not to topple in. Keeping her hands raised above water, awkward strain on her shoulders.
“Fuck,” Riordan said. “Why the hell can’t the water flow toward the door?”
Sylvie forced her lips into a grimace. It was meant to be a smile. “Think there’s enough bodysurfing going on in here, already,” she said. His face darkened. Graveyard humor. Never an ISI trait.
“Shit.” The curse slipped free. Behind Riordan, the count had changed.
They were down to three. Jack was gone, drifting back to join with his dead partner. Lost in the dark waters, lost silently, lost among the jetsam of floating bodies.
One hundred feet. Only halfway there.
Riordan turned. Sylvie grabbed his arm, dug her nails in, and yanked. “No. We stop. We die.” As if her words were carried by water, as if her pointing out that there were still living agents was overheard, the mermaid song kicked up to a new, angry volume. The water jumped and bubbled with its force.
The two ISI agents stopped cold, faces slackening.
Sylvie shivered, loss biting as hard as the cold. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save them. The water was an icy hand at her heart. The distant door glimmered, water rising unnaturally to fill the gap.
Riordan, thank God, was still alert. “Grab one of them,” Sylvie snapped. She wrapped her numb arm around the nearest agent and dragged him after her, saw that Riordan was doing the same to the other. Eighty feet left.
She’d save anyone she could. If she could get the door opened again—
The agent writhed in her grip like seaweed being torn from the seafloor, went slick and slippery in her arms. Her nails drew blood, a warmer, rosy drift in the gelid water. She couldn’t hold him. The water was actively dragging him out of her arms, fighting her.
“I can’t hold on. Help me,” Riordan gasped. He went under as if he’d been yanked downward. A sinuous ripple of faster water suggested that was exactly what had happened. The mermaids were getting more and more precise in their song. A cold coil of water wrapped around her thigh, impossibly colder than the rest of the water, altered by magic. It tugged; she clawed at it with one hand, feeling the same spell that had been stretched over the doorway—the mermaids’ song given physical shape and intent.
The agent in her arms slipped free of her one-handed grasp. The water rope rose out of the water, lashed around her waist, and dragged her under. She fought the riptide, felt the purpose behind it, and finally, clawing and kicking, got her head up and out of the water, sucking in great gasps of air.
She’d lost ground. A hundred feet to the door.
Warm skin brushed hers, and she yanked, came up with Riordan, sputtering, breathing. Alive.
His face was fierce, her grip on her hands brutal. “Don’t let go.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“God, won’t they stop singing!” he said.
He was still aware, still fighting. It looked like it hurt him, though; his face contorted with effort.
“Watch our backs,” she said. “We can’t afford to get sucked under again. Even if we survive it, we can’t lose the time.”
Her feet were floating, rising above the carpet; she grabbed at the molding on the hallway wall, scraped her way forward, kicking off from doorjambs. Riordan was close to a deadweight on her back, all his energy going to fighting the song, to keeping an eye out for a single ripple of water in an entire hallway of moving waves.
Leave him, her little dark voice said.
No, she thought.
Forty feet.
He’s a witch, her voice said. Or he wouldn’t be able to fight off the song.
All the more reason to save his ass. She needed a witch who owed her one.
Twenty.
The door. Sylvie clung to the jamb, forced Riordan’s weight between her and it, kept him floating, contained. Looked back.
No sign of the others.
She clawed for that magic netting; the thing she’d torn so easily before. As before, it tried to elude her grip. As before, she caged it in her hands anyway, guided not by physical sensation—her hands were utterly numb, useless meat—but by the revulsion that magic woke in her blood.
“Hurry,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. If he was a witch, he wasn’t a helpful one. His urgency raised hers to a painful level. She clawed faster.
This time, though, the netting refused to tear. She hung her entire weight on those magical bindings, kicked against the doorjamb, her face underwater, her breath bubbling out of her. It glowed under the water, with an icy bioluminescence, thick, anchored at a dozen points, fifty points, more …
That rope of water reached out again, wrapped her leg tight to Riordan’s, geared up to pull them away from the door. Her chest heaved; her lungs burned. She didn’t have time to fight it, too. Riordan slipped from between her and the door, his lips parting, whispering spells, whispering let us go, let us go. She could feel the shiver of intent, and it seemed to be working, at least minimally. The water trying to pull them down faded, gave her just that much more time to fight with the seal on the door.
As long as he could keep murmuring spells. There wasn’t enough air to make her think he could do it for more than another minute, tops.
Sylvie grimaced, peeled the first of the anchors away. Despair got her nothing. Effort might pay off.
She doubted it.
Fear, bright, sharp, nearly overpowering, danced through her veins. She’d done this all wrong. Had been overconfident. Had been stupid.
She was going to pay for it. And she wasn’t ever going to find out if Demalion had survived.
The mermaids’ song—a vibration traveling her skin, the walls, the building—broke off on an awkward screech. Riordan jerked, flailed, sought air that didn’t exist.
The spell on the door weakened.
Sylvie yanked and yanked and tore and scrabbled, using her hand, her feet, her teeth—the taste rank and vile, rotten oysters, scabrous and greasy in her mouth.
The netting tore.
She and Riordan tumbled headfirst into the stairwell; Sylvie gasped for air, lost the breath with impact against the far wall, whooped for air again.
She and Riordan skidded to the next landing and stopped, water streaming over them. Riordan groaned, got to his knees. “The others?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. She forced he
rself to her feet.
“What happened?”
“Mermaids stopped—” Sylvie frowned. No, they wouldn’t have stopped. Something or someone had stopped them.
Sylvie limped down the stairs, Riordan staggering and sliding after her, scratches livid on his neck where she’d clawed him in her attempts to keep him above the waterline. “Where are we going?”
“Out,” she said.
The lobby’s floodplain was draining out into the streets, draining back into the canal. People were waking all over. Sylvie could hear them screaming.
After the mermaids’ song, it sounded like music.
The screaming took on a new and frantic pitch and Sylvie burst out into the sunshine, squinting, half-blind with exhaustion and sun dazzle.
“Holy mother of God,” Riordan said from behind her. He fell back and sprawled on the concrete, crossing himself.
For once, Sylvie was in complete agreement. She’d seen a lot of things since she’d been made aware of the Magicus Mundi: witches and werewolves, gods and ghosts. But this was a spectacle even for her eyes.
Erinya, in full nonhuman form—a twice-tiger-sized mass of scales, feathers, and talons, and fangs that glistened scarlet in sunlight, her eyes great, empty, burning holes—was dragging a thrashing, writhing sharkish mass out of the canal: gills flaring, flashing red, thrashing tail slicing through the air with a sound like ripping paper, and a screaming maw of teeth under bulging, opalescent eyes.
Mermaids, Sylvie thought numbly, were nothing like in the storybooks.
Erinya dragged the screaming mermaid—God, it must be nearly seventeen feet long—right to Sylvie’s feet and dropped it, then crouched atop it, looking for all the world like a nightmare cat bringing its owner a mouse.
The mermaid’s tail slapped at Erinya, rough scale slicing at the Fury’s hide; its front limbs pushed upward, trying to break the weight from its back. Sylvie found herself staring at its … fingers. Four of them, scaled, jointed like a crab, sharp enough that the concrete was chipping beneath its efforts. Erinya punched it on the back of its oddly flat head, stunning it, then dragged its head back so Sylvie could see its face. Nacreous eyes as large as eggs stared blindly at her, blinking in scarlet membranous tides.
