Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel

by Lyn Benedict

  Utterly graceless, still effective. The man stumbled forward a few steps, and Demalion yanked him further off balance, yanked him directly to the edge of the narrow river and over.

  The witch fell just right, slipped into the river. Sylvie had expected him to get wet, splash hip deep or so, and momentarily lose his bearings, maybe even lose his memories. Demalion moved forward as if he expected the same, expected a chance to wrest his gun away.

  The witch hit the water and sank fast and silent. Disappeared, as if the river were the void it resembled. The surface didn’t even change in its slow, oily rippling. Invulnerability talisman or not, he was gone.

  Sylvie and Demalion exchanged appalled glances that said the same thing: Don’t you fall in!

  The second guard let his gun drop, raised his head sharply. “You’re bleeding, Shadows.”

  She felt the sting along her arm where she’d scraped it as she rolled. It didn’t seem newsworthy, but Yvette looked just as stunned. The guard growled low under his breath, began twitching beneath the skin, growing claws and fur and sprouting teeth.

  Sorcerous shape-shifter, Sylvie diagnosed. Those fuckers were hard to put down; they could take a lot of abuse, and they healed fast. Mix that with a talisman that granted invulnerability, and he was going to be difficult.

  “You killed my men,” Yvette said, “and you didn’t take their talismans? Are you that much of a purist that you’d rather die than wear a magical shield?”

  “Nope. Someone else had better uses for them.” She hoped like hell that Zoe and Lupe were wearing them by now. Hoped they were clearing their path out of here. Hoped they’d have enough sense to flee when Marah gave them the word to do so.

  Yvette’s face tightened, showed fine lines like cracks in porcelain. “Marah Stone. I wondered what had become of her. I hoped she’d join us.”

  “Sorry,” Sylvie said. “She’s got plans. They don’t involve you.”

  Demalion shot steadily at the shape-shifter, a repetitive percussion that echoed and echoed against the walls. The man had thrown down his gun, preferring to kill up close and toothy, as so many of the shifting sorcerers did. He kept stalking Demalion, shaking bullets out of his silvery fur, scattering them like overlarge, metallic fleas.

  Yvette shook her head. “They won’t involve you, either. I thought you’d be better than this, Shadows. You came before me, weak?” Yvette held up her hand, fisted it suddenly and tossed the spell at Sylvie. She jerked away, almost made it out of range. Her left hand didn’t, trailed behind her, and Sylvie yelped as the bones in her hand broke.

  She dodged the next spell that Yvette threw; her hand throbbed and throbbed. She felt it swelling and was thankful that it was her left hand. Not her gun hand.

  Even more thankful that for all of Yvette’s skills, she hadn’t managed to get her hands on anything that belonged to Sylvie. A bonebreak spell was hard enough to dodge, but if Yvette had been able to fine-tune it, to use Sylvie’s stolen hair, fingernails, or clothing to home in on her, there would have been no dodging possible.

  As it was, Sylvie was running out of time.

  Shoot her, her little dark voice shouted.

  She hated those damn invulnerability talismans.

  Yvette lined up another blast, and Sylvie leaped over the river, headed back toward the upright Lethe stone. The spell hit her ankle. The joint protested and swelled. Her bones … held this time, having learned the taste of the spell enough to reject it. Magical antibodies for the win, she thought wildly, though her left hand complained.

  Yvette threw a third blast, stronger still, after Sylvie, reaching her just as she ducked behind the Lethe stone. The spell crashed over it, spilling around the sides to reach her. Sylvie felt the shivery malevolence of it vibrate her bones as it passed.

  Shoot her!

  The werewolf’s outraged howl drew her attention, got her back on her feet, peering around the stone pillar; Demalion had the shape-shifter up off the ground, grimacing as the wolf savaged his hip, clawed at his chest. It had to outweigh him, but he took three laboring steps and tossed the wolf into the river. It clawed at the sides of the stony riverbank, never gained traction, and vanished.

  Demalion staggered, leaned over the water, breathing hard. His blood dripped across the floor. Yvette snarled. She raised her hand, and Demalion raised his head, aware of the danger, but—Sylvie saw he couldn’t move. Too exhausted, too sore, too slow …

  Her heart turned over, sick with dread.

  He smiled.

  Shoot her!

  Sylvie put her remaining shots into Yvette; she had never wanted anyone dead as much this woman who threatened to take Demalion from her. Again. Her anger was a rolling, snake-twisting cloud over her entire body and brain, a spreading, numb rage that reached out and smothered, crushed everything before it. The shots were sharp firecrackers in the sudden darkness, crisp and final.

  Yvette’s fisted hand splayed open. Fell to her side. The bonebreak spell cracked the floor near her feet. Yvette’s other hand fumbled up toward her chest, toward the invulnerability talisman.

  At her touch, while Sylvie’s shots were still echoing, the talisman fell apart, split by Sylvie’s bullets.

  The gun’s not the weapon, Marah had said. You are.

  For the first time, Sylvie understood what that meant. She wasn’t just resistant to magic used against her. She suppressed magic. She killed the unkillable by taking away their magical protection. She made them mortal. Vulnerable. Killable. She was the weapon. Her bullets were the coup de grace. Nothing more.

  Maybe not even that.

  Yvette crumpled, bewilderment frozen on her face. Her last expression. Her plans all come to nothing.

  “Good timing,” Demalion said. He didn’t sound surprised at all.

  She lunged at him, uncertain whether she wanted to kiss him or pummel him senseless. “Bastard,” she snapped. “I thought she was going to kill you.”

  “I knew she wasn’t.”

  Her hands were shaking, both the broken one and the one that held the empty gun. “You’re bleeding all over the place. Do something about that, would you?”

  “I’m all right, Sylvie. I’m all right.” He dragged her close, and she burrowed into him, smelled blood, but his pulse was strong and solid beneath her cheek.

  She shook off her fears and straightened her shoulders. “Yeah. You are.”

  Demalion looked at the liquid flutter of river water, that oily memory sink, and said, “So, I know we don’t trust Yvette’s word, but I’m concerned about the magical backlash. You’re tough, but that’s a century-old spell you’re planning to disrupt—”

  “No,” she said. “Not disrupt. Kill. Put it down. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

  She felt distanced from her own body, its shakes and scrapes and broken bones a thin layer above a solid, untouchable core. It seemed so easy to walk across the room, Demalion’s gun collected on the way. To stand between the two Lethe stones, brought up out of a god’s realm. She took a breath and shot them, one after another.

  Two bullets against two stones that had deflected spells and semiautomatic gunfire, and when her bullets hit—they quavered and rang like breaking bells. The sigils along their sides wisped out like blown candle flames. The water churned furiously, steaming and bubbling, then drained away.

  “Well, that’s that—”

  Sylvie hunched, felt oddly like someone had just punched her in the back of her head. Beside her, Demalion fell to his knees. Her vision bobbled, swamped out by memory.

  THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, SULKING FURIOUSLY. THE FIRST FAMILY VACATION since the brat sister had been born. Her parents were ignoring her to show off Zoe. Sylvie slunk out of the aquarium, blinking at the cloudy sky until she stopped seeing the blue of carefully maintained tanks. The ocean, grey and jagged and wild, beckoned, and she wandered down to the pier, where dockworkers were scraping barnacles off a recently raised boat.

  She sat on a boat cleat and watched their knives work
, scrape and twist and scrape and twist. The salt air was soothing, and there were no crying toddlers. On the other side of the pier, a man sat beneath a beach umbrella, minding three separate fishing rods wedged into the wood slats.

  Then the gulls died.

  They plummeted out of the sky, smacking into the pier in a splay of broken wings and twisted necks. Others slapped her face and hair and shoulders, and she screamed.

  “Oye, muchacha!” the man who’d been fishing from the side of the pier called. “Ven aca! Hurry!” She ran to him, and he tucked her beneath his sunshade umbrella. Birds splatted against it, and she leaned up close to the pole, smelling salt and blood and something cold beneath. Beneath the pier, the waters slapped cold and dark as if a storm were brewing in its depths.

  “Madre de Dios,” he said. Clapped a hand over her eyes. “No mire, muchacha. Don’ look.” She pried his hand away from her face. She wanted to see.

  A small boat drifted toward the pier, and even from the distance, Sylvie could see that something was wrong. The people were lying on the deck. Like the birds. All loose and empty. The air was cold.

  The boat collided with the pier, shaking her world; one of the bodies on the deck slid down, giving her a clear view of the body’s glazed eyes, as blank as the dead gulls’. Her stomach hurt. The fisherman rushed to the boat, along with others. Sylvie, gaping at the side of the yacht, saw a shining mist slide out through a closed porthole, curling around and around in the sky like one of the eels she’d seen in the aquarium, except they’d been just fish in water. This … The dockworkers shouted and jerked back; the fisherman swore in Spanish.

  It was a monster. And it had human-shaped eyes. It coiled lazily, looked at her, and she felt her breathing stop; she crouched small and hoped it wouldn’t keep looking at her. She thought, the monster got aboard that boat, and it looked at the people on it, like she looked at the fish in the aquarium, and the people died.

  Its eye was glittering and red. The air was frigid; she couldn’t stop shivering. All around her, the pier was quiet.

  The monster slid back into the water and fish bobbed to the surface, silver bellies up, as it passed. A thin wake cut against the waves and disappeared into the deeper sea.

  A minute later, sound and warmth crashed over her again, her mother shaking her, “We were worried, Sylvie, you can’t just walk away—oh God no, don’t look at them, you don’t need to see that—” and dragging her away from the dock, from the dead people on the boat.

  “There was a monster,” Sylvie told her mother.

  “No such thing as monsters,” her mother said. “Come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Sylvie had gone, glad to be warm, glad to be safe, glad even to see her dumb little sister. She knew that her mother was wrong. It was a monster. She’d seen it.

  The next day she went back to the pier, slipping away when her mother went to get them lunch and her father was trying to get Zoe to stop shrieking. It was closed off, yellow tape where the boat still bumped against the dock. Sylvie kicked at the gravel, studied the area.

  A dark-haired woman ducked under the tape, walked out to the pier. She wasn’t a policewoman; she was wearing a long, narrow skirt and lots of strange jewelry. Sylvie bit her lip, followed her. The woman turned when Sylvie approached. Her eyes were dark and hard and she didn’t look nice at all. She looked interesting.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see where the monster was,” Sylvie said. “The papers didn’t say anything about it. It said they all died from drugs. I don’t get it. The fisherman saw it. The dockworkers saw it. Why didn’t they say so?”

  “Because people are willfully blind,” the woman said. She turned back to stare out at the sea. Her lips curled. “They want to pretend dangerous things don’t exist.”

  “Like the eel-monster thing.”

  “Water spirit,” the woman said. “A genus loci, do you know what that is?”

  “No,” Sylvie said. The woman shrugged, didn’t explain what that meant. Silence fell, then the woman spoke again.

  “They picked it up in the Bermuda Triangle. It gets bored sometimes. That makes it cruel and destructive.”

  “It killed people because it was bored?”

  “You’re young. The world is new for you,” the woman said. “You have no idea how boring things can get when you’re my age. You have to make your own amusements where you can.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To be amused? People died.”

  “Aren’t you the junior moralizer?” the woman said. “But not law-abiding. You’re going to get in trouble if they see you behind the tape.”

  “I’m a kid,” Sylvie said. “They’ll just send me home to my parents. They might arrest you.”

  “Not likely,” she said. She turned, put her back to the water. “So. Little moralizer. When you go home, and you’re back with your little friends. What are you going to tell them? That you saw a monster? Or will you lie and tell them what the newspaper said?”

  “Why would I tell them anything at all?” Sylvie asked. “They won’t believe me if I do, and I’m not going to lie. I know what I saw.”

  The woman’s hand was on Sylvie’s cheek suddenly; Sylvie jerked, but the woman was strong, her nails curling beneath Sylvie’s chin, scratching, hurting.

  “You’re an interesting kid,” the woman said. “But I bet you forget. Go home, get away from the scene, think it’s a dream. A nightmare. Five years from now, and you’ll be shrugging and telling yourself you were an imaginative kid.”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “I won’t forget.”

  The woman’s mouth turned down; displeasure at being contradicted or at the state of the world, Sylvie didn’t know. “They always do. They like to be blind. They think it makes them safe. It doesn’t. How can we be safe when he cares nothing for us?”

  “Sylvie!” her mother shouted.

  Sylvie jerked away, left the woman behind, even as the woman’s grip left scratches on her cheek and chin. She rubbed at the welts and shivered. The woman was wrong. She wasn’t going to forget.

  SYLVIE HAD FORGOTTEN. IT HADN’T BEEN HER CHOICE. THE CORRECTIVE had taken it. Now, it had given it back.

  Sylvie raised her head, saw that the black waters of the Corrective had gone clear and clean, no longer muddied by stolen memories.

  “Lilith,” she said. Touched her cheek as if the scratches would still be there. “That was Lilith.”

  Demalion was curled up near the edge of the water; he looked as shell-shocked as she felt. “There was a vampire in my neighborhood,” he told Sylvie. “It killed three of my friends when I was in elementary school. I forgot, even though I saw it. Touched it. This skeletal, verminous thing that grabbed me, and was going to bite me, and then … it smelled me and ran. Smelled Sphinx. He called me sphinxlet and threw me against the alley wall. How could I forget that?”

  Sylvie looked back at the clear water, and said, “God. A hundred years. A hundred years of stolen memories. Anything big enough to make the news. Anything big enough to reveal the Magicus Mundi. The Good Sisters have been erasing it. Rewriting memories. We just gave them all back. All at once.”

  “Shit,” he said. “What did we do?”

  Sylvie licked her lips, felt an unaccountable giggle in her throat. Well, she’d always bitched about keeping the Mundi a secret. “We pulled off the blinders. Pulled back the curtain. Jesus, Demalion. I think we changed the world. Or at least, perception of it.”

  18

  Getting Gone

  SYLVIE AND DEMALION SPENT A FEW EXTRA MINUTES WALKING THE edges of the dead Corrective spell, Sylvie looking for any remaining cloudiness, Demalion watching her back. Unlike Pandora’s box, this world-changer had emptied itself completely. Even as she walked the perimeter of the crossed loops, the water began to evaporate, revealing a smooth stone groove only two feet deep.

  Neither of the witches’ bodies, wolf or man, was there. They had been taken.

  “Thi
nk there’s going to be chaos?” Demalion asked.

  “When isn’t there? People never react well.”

  “I don’t know,” Demalion said. “Some of the memories won’t have people to return to. A hundred-plus years? Some people are long dead.”

  “Not all of them. Not even most of them, I’d bet. Population goes up. So do the number of incidents. Yvette said they’d been getting more dependent on it.”

  Demalion grimaced, ceding the point. Sylvie winced. Her broken hand cramped and burned. She lifted it to her opposite shoulder, rested her wrist there, tried to slow the swelling.

  “Syl. I remember the vampire. But I also don’t remember it. I remember being at home, instead of the alley, watching TV, instead of being grabbed by a child-killing vampire. Double memories. False and real. You’re always complaining about people choosing to be blind. Maybe things won’t change. Maybe they’ll just think they had vivid dreams about a real-world event.”

  “Until they realize other people had the same dreams. The Good Sisters specialized in big magic scenarios. Like the sand wraith in Chicago, the mermaids in Miami.” Sylvie leaned up, kissed his cheek, tasting splash-back blood from the wound in his shoulder. “You’re such an optimist. Unless you can take a look ahead with your handy-dandy psychic skills and tell me that the world just says, Oh, all right, monsters, I’m going to prepare for the worst. And stock up on ammo.”

  Despite her words, she did feel a little bit better. Demalion was partly correct. People did like to ignore the evidence before their eyes, even at the expense of their own memories. Things were going to change, had already changed, but maybe the change would be gradual enough that it wouldn’t be a cultural apocalypse.

  Maybe.

  A lot depended on the Corrective itself. The spell had affected more than memories—had been the Corrective it was named. It had altered data files, video feed, Internet content, and paper reports, as well as human memory. Magical white-out par excellence. The question was, when people’s memories were returned, what happened to the documentation?