Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel

by Lyn Benedict

  The water before her glossed suddenly, rolled as something slid just beneath the surface. The sinking wreath bobbed again, and the Encantado surged out of the water, shifting from dolphin to human as he did. White petals stuck to his sleek skin, and his dark eyes were languorous.

  “You called for me—” He trailed off. The pleasant anticipation on his face faded to wary irritation. “Shadows. What do you want?”

  “Come up here. Come out of the water,” she said.

  He touched the flowers over his shoulders, testing them. There wasn’t a spell laid over them. Only tradition. He shrugged and walked up the bank to stand before her.

  “What do you want?”

  “Mostly, just to talk.”

  “Mostly,” he said. “I don’t like mostly.”

  “You played me,” she said. “From the beginning.”

  If she’d thought he’d deny it, she would have been wrong. He smiled, showing sharp teeth. “You listened to me. Believed me. Even behind your magical wards, my words reached you. Because you wanted to listen.”

  Sylvie said, “You fed me a lot of things I was primed to hear. That the ISI was morally corrupt—which Graves most definitely was. That there were other forces working within the ISI, even gave me a name. The Society of the Good Sisters. You told me they were the ones running the Corrective. That was true.”

  “So you wanted to thank me?”

  “You also told me that Yvette’s people were the ones running the monster attacks. You … encouraged me to believe it. That’s the problem with being me. I’m resistant to magic. But first I have to experience it before I can shake it off. You … enchanted me. Just a bit. Just enough.

  “You told me that the Good Sisters could leash the monsters as weapons. That they were the ones setting the attacks.

  “You know what? They couldn’t. None of them could. Not even Merrow. I should have known right then. I saw Merrow when the mermaids tried to drown him. He wasn’t controlling them. He couldn’t control them. He could barely hold them off long enough for us to escape. You sold me that lie, and I believed it. The worst-case scenario. You sold it to Graves also, drove him mad with the possibilities.”

  His placid face twisted hard at the mention of the dead ISI agent.

  “How did he catch you, anyway? Did you stay ashore too long with some woman? Or did you plan to be captured?”

  The Encantado said, “You think I wanted to be caught?”

  “I don’t know; I only get to judge by the results. The results are a lot of dead humans,” Sylvie said. “You ended up in his torture chambers. I thought his notes referred to a mermaid, but it was you. You told him things. Held out long enough to make it believable, and then you sent him, a paranoid man, after enemies inside his own organization. That’s one way to disable an enemy.”

  He turned back toward the water; Sylvie caught his wrist with her bad hand, her fingertips scrabbling over the warm-rubber feel of his flesh.

  “But that wasn’t enough. You escaped. Then you coaxed the sand wraith, using your abilities to inspire belief, to go with you to Chicago, and you told it to destroy the ISI there. It obeyed. The Encantado. The strongest of the Magicus Mundi seducers. Then you moved on, and you did it again. Johnny-on-the-spot. You told me you were a Magicus Mundi troubleshooter. Trying to figure out who was controlling the monsters. A good cover story that explained your presence at all the scenes.”

  “You believed me,” he said. “So eager to think that maybe we were just like you. That we cared about murder. It wasn’t murder. It was extermination.”

  “When I stopped the mermaids, killed the Mora, you had to redirect me, to get me out of your playground. So you sent me after the Good Sisters, another set of your enemies.”

  “You went off like a firecracker. Funny,” he said. “You wanted to believe that the humans were the bad guys, and my kind the innocent tools. Check your allegiances, Shadows.”

  “I know my allegiances,” she said. She brought her good hand up, aimed the gun between his eyes. This close, she’d blow his skull to pulp.

  He twitched. “What, you want me to tell you my motives, the whole of my plan? You’ve caught me—”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “I don’t care about your plans. They stop today with you. I have one question left. And I want an answer.”

  “Put the gun down,” he said. Compulsion rang through his voice; a clarion call to the back part of her mind.

  She kept the gun steady, her voice even. She was in control here, and from the shock on his face, he was beginning to realize it.

  “One question,” she said. “Why did Marah Stone free you from Graves’s torture chamber?”

  Graves’s files had shown that clearly enough. Two shocks in a row for Sylvie. That the monster Graves had been tormenting for answers hadn’t been the mermaid she assumed, but the Encantado—her bias had blinded her. Graves had called the Encantado it, he had called the Encantado creature, and Sylvie, who’d already met the Encantado, thought of him as he and man.

  The second shock had been the familiar form of Marah Stone releasing him, Cain-marked hand held protectively before her as he exited the tank on shaky legs. They had paused to speak to each other for nearly five minutes before Marah stepped back and watched him leave.

  It hadn’t been the much-maligned Hovarth. It had been Marah. A woman with some degree of magical resistance. A woman who’d done nothing but benefit from the chaos.

  The video-feed quality was too bad to read the truth off their lips. Sylvie needed to know. Had the Encantado called Marah down, his seductive voice reaching out through the late-night building, mostly empty, and found her, heart and head full of desires for power, overriding the Cain mark as smoothly as he had evaded Sylvie’s own protective instincts? Or had Marah known he was there and gone down looking for a tool she could use?

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It does.” The one meant Marah was what she seemed. An opportunist who took a mistake she’d made and twisted it until she landed on her feet. Mercenary, morally suspect, but understandable.

  The other meant Marah was a long-range-planning murderous bitch who made Graves look like an amateur. Two hundred fifty-seven ISI agents had died in the attacks. Sixty civilians. And Marah didn’t even have the fragile excuse of the ISI hunting her kind.

  The one was politics. The other … was psychopathy.

  “Yes,” the Encantado said. “I see that it does.” His dark eyes bore down on her, made her wonder if he had rudimentary mind-reading abilities.

  He bared all his teeth, and said, “I don’t have an answer for you.”

  “Find one,” Sylvie said.

  He shrugged, and the wreath slipped over shoulders going narrower, less human, shifting back to dolphin. “Sorry. I only know my part. I killed your kind, and I loved it. I’m content. I taught my people how to fight back in a more effective way. It’s funny,” he said again. “Your world is running all over itself, trying to make rules to contain us. To make us play nice. We have no interest in your rules or your wants.”

  She shot him in the thigh, knocked him to the muddy ground; he made no real attempt to escape it, only laughed as she stood over him. His laugh sounded nothing like human, a chattering sweep of sound, but the curve to his mouth, the glint in his eyes gave his amusement away, even as he clutched at the bloody wound.

  “Tell you this,” he breathed. “Take it as warning or whatever you want. You don’t make Cain’s line feel slighted. Not if you want to live.” He rolled up to his feet, lunged for her, teeth snapping, and she shot him in the head. Right between the eyes as if her sights had never left that spot.

  He collapsed, dead, at her feet.

  She toed him back into the river, let the water take him down, and headed back up the long slope to Demalion.

  “Get an answer?” he asked. His mouth was tight and hard. He’d taken the security feed of Marah and the Encantado together worse than she had. But then, she had neve
r really trusted Marah, and he had trusted Marah with his life. With his precious agency.

  “She couldn’t have planned it,” he said, for the third or fourth time today. “She nearly got killed in Chicago along with me. If they were allies—”

  “Being allies doesn’t make them friends,” Sylvie said. “One conversation between them, and death and disaster afterward. I don’t think they told each other a lot of details in that time. He may not have known she was headed to Chicago.”

  Demalion grimaced, gestured her into the car. “So what do we do? No proof that she wasn’t under his compulsion. You said he enchanted you—Marah’s not as strong.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. For a phrase she hated, it was beginning to feel all too familiar. “I do know that we have to move on from this. Monsters and gods and witches aside, Marah’s the one to watch. And we helped put her in power.”

  Demalion started the car, the long drive back home. Sylvie rested her gun on her lap and watched the landscape go by. Trees and road and eventually houses and cities. It all looked so normal. But beneath the surface, everything had changed. She wasn’t sure how it was going to work out.

  Sylvie’s phone rang, startling her. She’d assumed they were out of range, but it was Alex, working some type of technological miracle.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “How’s your Portuguese?” Alex asked.

  “Nonexistent,” Sylvie said. She laid the phone on the dash between her and Demalion, put it on speaker, caught it when it nearly slid off the dash as Demalion bounced them over a rough section of not-quite-road.

  “Demalion?” Alex said.

  “I can do Portuguese,” he said. “What’s going on, Alex?”

  “The Brazilian government knows you’re in the country; they’d like to speak to you.”

  “Why?” Sylvie asked warily. It had been a pain in the ass to get here, harder to arrange for weapons. It was well and good for Marah to say Sylvie didn’t need guns, but Sylvie felt better with one. Didn’t mean she wanted to explain why she was running around with an illegally purchased, illegally carried gun to the Brazilian police.

  “They, apparently, have a magical snake infestation. They think, that since you’re already in the country—”

  Demalion spoke over Sylvie’s sigh. “Are they paying? How magical?”

  “Very well,” Alex said. “Very magical. The snakes are apparently prone to sprouting legs and running up walls. It’s a whole, big mess.”

  Sylvie looked across the seat at Demalion. He grinned at her. “What do you say?”

  “This is going to be how it is, isn’t it. Our life. Chasing snakes—”

  “And getting paid,” Demalion pointed out. “You like that.”

  “You like that. Missing your government paycheck?”

  “Not in the least,” he said. “Missing being hunted by the government?”

  “Maybe a little,” she said.

  Alex groaned. “Stop flirting. Jeez. To think I wanted Demalion to come work with us.”

  “We’ll take the snakes,” Sylvie said. “Hey, spreading goodwill, right?”

  “God, this is going to be a disaster—”

  Sylvie disconnected, tucked the phone back in her pocket, and leaned back in the jeep’s seat. This was how it was going to be. Bickering with Demalion. Being bossed around by Alex. Hunting magical snakes that would no doubt turn out to be venomous.

  Demalion steered the jeep out of the jungle and back onto the sunlit roadway; Sylvie pulled down her sunglasses and smiled. She could live with this.