by Lyn Benedict
She checked her mirrors, checked the streets, trying to remember what restaurants were open and nearby. Mia Rosa’s, she thought, was only two blocks back. She checked the streets once more, looking for cops, then hung a U-turn. During the day, she wouldn’t have made it. At this hour, it was a little tricky, best done at speed, but definitely possible. Behind her, horns honked loud and long, and too late to be directed at her. She glanced back to see that another car had made the same maneuver, though the woman driving looked a little wild-eyed. Sylvie hmmed thoughtfully, and when she parked the truck, she unlocked the glove box and took out her gun.
She didn’t like being followed.
She especially didn’t like being followed when she had a killer witch after her.
The hostess at the door greeted Sylvie with a stiff smile, a pointed reminder that they were closing at midnight, and sat her among a group of tables with the chairs put up. Subtle, they weren’t. Sylvie didn’t care as long as the food was hot, plentiful, and quick to arrive.
She had just sent the waitress off with her order when the door opened again; the hostess moved to intercept another last-minute diner. Sylvie narrowed her eyes, and the dark-haired woman in the doorway waved at Sylvie and waved off the hostess.
The woman from the hospital parking lot threaded her way through the tables, her ridiculously large bag still hanging from her shoulder and clunking against upended chair legs every few feet. The same woman who’d made a U-turn to keep up with her, pushing her ancient Jeep hard to make enough speed to keep from being t-boned. She homed in on Sylvie, and Sylvie kicked out the chair opposite her. “So, that business with the BMW, was that playacting or wishful thinking?”
“A little of both,” the woman said. “It was a nice car, wasn’t it? And if I had approached you in the lot, you would have walked away.”
“Still might,” Sylvie said. “I don’t like strangers following me.”
“I’m Caridad Valdes-Pedraza,” she said. “And you’re Sylvie Lightner. You’re a PI who’s always on the scene, and I’m a freelance reporter looking for a scoop. I’ve been waiting to see Adelio Suarez; you just came from seeing him. Feels like fate.”
“Fate’s an excuse for people who don’t want to make an effort,” Sylvie said.
“Interesting,” the woman said. “I’d have marked you as believing in destiny.” She hefted her purse to the tabletop, dropped it with a clatter, and pulled out a notebook and a pen.
She scribbled in it, and Sylvie had to ask, “Are you writing that down?”
“Hey,” Caridad said. “I like to take notes on my subjects.”
“I’m not a subject,” Sylvie said. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza—”
“You could call me Caridad if you want. I know the other’s a mouthful.”
Sylvie let her breath out in a steady gust. She wasn’t in the mood. If she hadn’t seen the sullen waitress approaching with her meal, she would have just given up. Walked away. Caridad’s expression was friendly, pert, that of a would-be newscaster. But there was something harder beneath it. Intelligence, ambition, and something deeper still, betrayed in the tension in her jaw: need.
“My friends call me Cachita,” she said. She shot Sylvie a demure glance, one step away from flirtation. It was a good front, a good act, no doubt got her into a lot of conversations with her targets; but it was only an act.
Sylvie made her voice flat, no weakness. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza, we’re not friends, and we’re not going to be friends. I’m going to eat a long-overdue dinner, and you’re not welcome at my table. If you have something to say, say it and go away.”
“Fine,” she said. Caridad sat up straight, pressed her curling hair out of her face, drummed her nails on the table, a quick rumba, and said, “Tell me about the bodies you found in the Everglades.”
“Police made a statement,” Sylvie said. “There were no bodies, only mannequins. It was a trap, and three officers died.”
“You know what police statements are? Sop for reporters too lazy to do their own digging. Too lazy to do anything but print a preapproved story. They trade integrity and a real interview for easy bylines.”
“So you’re what? A crusader for truth?” Sylvie spiced her words with as much mockery as she could manage when she was tired . . . and dammit, the woman was drawing her in.
“Is that a bad thing to aspire to?” Caridad asked. “There’s an awful lot of truth that gets ignored or denied out there. I want to open people’s eyes.”
“Good luck with that,” Sylvie said. “I get paid to find things out, and people still don’t listen.”
“Doesn’t it just drive you crazy?” Caridad said. “Make you want to shove it down their throats? Me, I get so frustrated, I could scream. I turn in reports, and it’s all, ‘But, Cachita, where’s the point of—’ ”
Sylvie growled, took a breath, and said, “You know something else that drives people crazy? Intrusive reporters. Go away. I have nothing to tell you.”
Caridad leaned back in her seat, took her hands from the table, made herself smaller. Dammit, this reporter was good at reading people, at manipulating her own body language, her meekness only another path to taking control of the conversation, to keep the dialogue open, to derail Sylvie’s anger.
Sylvie felt a wolfish grin stretch her mouth. Maybe that kind of thing worked on regular people, but Sylvie had anger to spare.
Caridad’s eyes narrowed, pale eye shadow crinkling beneath dark brows. “Women have been disappearing from the city. The police aren’t talking about it, and even if they did, they’d be talking about a serial killer. Not a monster. But that’s what it is. You can help me. You found its playground, didn’t you?
“I’ve got sources, Sylvie. They tell me that someone called in five bodies that they found in the Everglades. Another source tells me you left the scene. You’re not police, and you wouldn’t be welcome at a crime scene—so you must have found them. What made you look for them in the first place?”
“Do you really expect me to talk to you?” Sylvie took another bite of her “special”; it was some sort of creamy pasta and seafood, barely lukewarm and sour with her irritation. “You said it. I’m not real popular with the police. You think they’d be happy if I shot my mouth off to a reporter?”
“I think you’re dying to. I do my research, Sylvie. I know my subjects. I know about you. You’ve got to be sick of the injustices, the fact that people are getting away with murder. You could help me.”
Sylvie said, “I usually get paid for helping.”
“I expected better of you,” Caridad said.
“What are you, my mother?” Sylvie said. “The only approval I need is my own.”
She pushed her plate away, appetite gone. Her personal approval rating wasn’t at its all-time best: Her dreams, in what fitful sleep she’d managed since the confrontation with Odalys, had been angry and focused on the one person who’d gotten away clean with murder: Patrice Caudwell, one of Odalys’s revenant ghosts, who’d managed to keep the teenage body Odalys had provided. At least Odalys had had to lawyer up, had her world disrupted. Patrice? She was sipping cafecitos poolside and working on her tan. Impatience and irritation flared; Sylvie stood. Caridad grabbed her wrist, faster than Sylvie had thought she’d be, and a lot more willing to get physical.
“You aren’t listening.”
“You’re not saying much,” Sylvie said. “You want me to piss off the cops by sharing stories out of school. You want me to confirm your theory about a monster who’s stealing women. Even if I played along, then what?” Sylvie shook her head. “Crazy talk’s not going to get you far as a freelancer. You’d be better off peddling predigested stories.”
“I’m disappointed,” Caridad said. “I thought you’d respect the truth. But you’re just another cover-up artist.”
Where the previous attempt at scolding hadn’t stung, this one did.
“Tell me something,” Sylvie said. “You know Maria Ruben?”
Caridad’s e
yes went wide, sensing some sort of chance in the air. She chewed her lip, flipped through her mental files, raised her chin. “Should I?”
Sylvie sighed. Maria Ruben was the missing person most likely to be newsworthy—her husband saw to that with his ranting about alien abduction. If Caridad Valdes-Pedraza hadn’t put her name on her list of missing people, she was no kind of reporter at all and a waste of Sylvie’s time.
When Caridad stood, preparing to follow Sylvie from the restaurant, Sylvie snapped, “Sit. I’m leaving. You’re not.”
“We could be allies, Sylvie,” Caridad said. “Help each other.”
“You sure you want to volunteer? My most recent ally’s in a bed at Jackson Memorial, torn all to hell.”
2
Looking for Trouble
SYLVIE WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, MOUTH DRY, PANTING WITH ANGER, with a headache born of another night of fitful and furious dreams, trying to solve real-world problems in her sleep.
She hated when daytime frustrations bled into her dreams. It could wreck the whole next day.
Sylvie slapped at the light-blocking blinds, got a quick view of bright, morning sunlight—past time to get up. Time to go get Wales, go look for trouble in the swamps.
She thunked back against her pillow, crooked her arm over her face.
She’d slept like crap, and, while she was tempted to blame late-night indigestion caused by bad pasta, she knew it was all her own doing. Most of the time, she was glad of her own stubborn determination to see a problem through to the bitter end. Most of the time. That same determination turned ugly when the villains went free. When her youngest employee, Rafael Suarez, had died, her dreams had been nothing but her brain chewing on the injustice of it, a hundred different revenge scenarios, ways she could find them and make them pay; she hadn’t actually slept well until his killers had been dealt with.
In the aftermath of the Odalys mess, she’d expected to sleep poorly. Four teenagers had died. Her sister had nearly died. And the mess with Demalion and Wright was nightmare fodder all on its own. Two ghosts, one body; only Wright’s unexpected sacrifice had led to Demalion’s survival. For which she was grateful down to her toes, but it needed adjusting to. How did you deal with your lover walking around in another man’s body, when everything that should have been familiar was strange? Sylvie was still trying to work that one out.
She’d gotten a bit of breathing room when Demalion retreated back to Chicago with his own plans and goals. First, he told her carefully, aware that it was going to be a sore point, he wanted to rejoin the ISI, wanted to be recruited all over again. Sylvie was too glad to have him back to argue.
Besides, his second goal was one she agreed with. Demalion wanted to make sure Wright’s wife and son were taken care of. “No pension for his death,” Demalion had said, “not while I’m wearing his skin.”
How that translated to his pretending to be Wright for a time, Sylvie wasn’t sure. She had ideas of her own. Demalion had grown up without knowing his father. He didn’t want Jamie Wright to do the same.
Sylvie closed her eyes again, trying to figure the damage. Worse to think your father abandoned you? Or worse to see him turned into a stranger?
She started to drift off, dipped into her dreamscape again, and jerked awake, breath fast in her lungs. Again with the violence. Right back where she’d left off the first time. Trying to kill Patrice.
Her dreams had been chaotic things—vivid, distorted images and a strange, wild growling, the scent of blood and corruption. The dreams centered on Sylvie tracking Patrice Caudwell through the city, scouring the dreamscape for sight of Bella Alvarez, the teenager whose body Patrice had taken for her own. But Patrice proved as tricky to deal with in dreams as she was in the real world— Sylvie emptied clip after clip of bullets into her smug face, but the woman refused to die.
That was when her dreams had gone weirder, when a voice rasped over her shoulder, a hand closed over hers, felt but not seen. Like this, her little dark voice said. For vengeance. Like this. Her gun shifted to a blade, her hand guided along a bloody pattern as Patrice fell apart before it.
It had been deeply satisfying in her dreams, less so when she was awake and faced with the reality of the situation. Bella Alvarez’s death was only on the tally Sylvie kept; as far as the police were concerned, the girl was alive and well.
She would have to do something about Patrice. Pity the world was determined to keep her otherwise occupied.
It wouldn’t take long to shoot her, leave her dying in the body she killed for, her little dark voice suggested. Sylvie swallowed back the rage before it could really get started, accepted the thought instead of arguing all the reasons shooting Patrice would be problematic, and moved on with a mental wrench. It was Alex’s idea—a plan to defang the danger that lurked beneath Sylvie’s skin.
A plan to tame you, the voice growled, and Sylvie had a harder time shaking it back: It was true. She had promised Alex she’d try it, but she thought it was doomed to failure. The little dark voice, Lilith’s rage at the status quo, had survived generations and generations; Sylvie didn’t think it could be shut off and ignored like a kindergarten bully. Alex said the voice was part of Sylvie, and therefore hers to control. Sylvie agreed because it was always easier to agree with Alex; but in all honesty, the voice felt separate, a piece of her but not part of the whole. Something extra.
As opinionated as the voice was, it wasn’t always right, and it didn’t make allowances for real-world considerations. Shoot Patrice in Bella’s body and do what with the body, the inevitable investigation? At the moment, it was just too much risk.
Patrice, as little as Sylvie liked it, could wait for Sylvie to come up with a plan. It was simple math. One known murderess roaming free, sampling the joys of being flesh once more, or shape-shifting dead women who could and would kill cops.
Showered, dressed in time-smoothed khakis, boots, and a long-sleeved green T-shirt, she faced the day, knowing that as soon as the dampness from the shower left her skin, sweat would start. But if she was going to be hiking through the ’Glades again, covering up was a necessity. Snakebite, saw grass, and sunburn were a miserable trifecta.
She grabbed a couple of protein bars from the back of the cupboard, made sure she had an extra clip in her bag, and clattered down the concrete risers. That early, the parking lot beside the complex was a tangle of people leaving for work, jockeying for the single exit onto the highway. Sylvie munched her protein bar—mmm, sandy—and bided her time.
Her cell phone rang as she was reaching the main entrance to the Palmetto Expressway, and she fumbled it to her ear. “Yeah, Alex.”
“You’re not at work,” her partner said. “I brought coffee and everything.”
“Not at the office,” Sylvie said, “but I’m working. You catch the news last night? That bomb in the Everglades?”
“. . . You’re not a cop, Sylvie.”
“And it wasn’t a bomb,” Sylvie said. “Five dead women, one of whom burst into flame hot enough to blow up a helicopter, and another turned into a bear—”
“Okay, okay, it’s definitely your case,” Alex said. “What can I do?”
“Hunker down and get ready for company. Seriously, Alex, this whole bomb cover story is thin. Lio thought they’d have Feds descending on them for the bodies in the’Glades—serial killer in a national park. But once this happened—”
“ISI,” Alex said. “Those bastards.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. The Internal Surveillance and Investigations agents were never fun to have around. They coupled the usual government-agency attitude with levels of manipulation and secrecy that made them about as trustworthy as the average con man. They talked a good game about controlling the Magicus Mundi, but people still ended up dead. “That’s one of the reasons I’m headed out to the scene today. I want to get there before they do.”
Alex let out an exasperated sigh that Sylvie nearly felt through the phone. “Sylvie. The scene’s going to be swa
rming with cops and press, and even if it’s not—dead shape-shifters who can’t be all that dead if they’re tearing into people? I don’t like you going alone.”
“Didn’t say I was going alone,” Sylvie said. “I’m picking up Tierney Wales on the way out of town.”
“The Ghoul? Like that’s any better—”
“Later, Alex,” Sylvie said. “Actually, wait—you want to look up monster myths in the Everglades? Just on the off chance that I’m dealing with something more monster, less magic.”
“Swamp apes, chupacabras, three-tailed gators,” Alex said. “Cryptozoology? Be still my heart.” The words were delivered flat, deadpan, but Sylvie thought there might be a genuine thread of excitement in Alex’s tone. Alex did so love the out of the ordinary.
“Just don’t get sucked too much into monster geekdom.”
Alex sighed. “Fine, fine. You sure about the Ghoul? I thought he was small-potatoes magic, a collector, not backup material.”
Sylvie changed lanes, slipping around an obstructionist driver puttering along in the fast lane, garnering curses and blaring horns. It was getting too hard to hear Alex chattering away.
“I think Tierney Wales is a lot smarter and a lot more sneaky than I gave him credit for,” Sylvie said. “At least, I’m hoping so. I don’t have a lot of credit left with the local witches, and I need a researcher.”
“And you think you’ve got credit with him?”
Sylvie hung up on Alex, content in the knowledge that she could blame it on traffic later. She doubted Wales would be glad to see her, but she thought she could still make him see things her way.
PARKING IN OPA-LOCKA DURING THE DAY WAS NO LESS NERVE-wracking than parking at night. Young men hung out on the corners, too bored, too restless, too angry to be anything but a threat. And they were far less dangerous than the watchers she couldn’t see. Sylvie parked as close as she could to Wales’s apartment, bumping the truck up over the broken curb and bringing it to a halt in the scrub grass and gravel. She showed off her holster as she swung herself out of the truck cab, moved with purpose and intent, and, though the men catcalled her briefly, they didn’t rouse themselves to more.
