by Lyn Benedict
“Stay alive,” he said. “It’s too weird if no one else in the world knows who I really am.”
“There’s always Alex,” Sylvie said, teasing.
“Alex knows my name. Not me.” His voice was nearly the right pitch now, roughed and deepened with emotion, hushed through the distance. It made her ache.
“I get it,” she said. “Demalion, be careful. You came back from death once. Don’t blow it on some pissant traffic stop.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Go easy with the case, huh? Watch your mouth. Play nice with the necromancer if he’s going to watch your back.”
“Playing nice isn’t as much fun as winning,” she said, and disconnected on his laugh.
6
Delegation and Negotiation
SYLVIE CLATTERED BACK DOWN THE STAIRS AND FOUND ALEX TIDYING up the dinner dishes.
“So?” Alex said. “You talked to him?”
“He’s going to deal with the Odalys issue—”
“Yeah, not what I meant. Did you talk to him?”
“He’s fine,” Sylvie said. “I’m fine.”
“I can’t believe you sent him away. Unless . . . what? Does he not do it for you anymore now that he’s all body swapped? Got something against blonds?”
“Alex!” Sylvie said. “Would you just think before you talk tonight? Wright’s dead. He was flat broke when he died. He’s got a child, a wife who’s working full-time to cover her student loans. Wright died, saving Demalion.”
Her throat hurt, thinking about that close call; she’d been slow, caught up in saving her sister, in fighting Odalys. If it had been left to her, Demalion would have died. Again. “We owe Wright. I can’t do anything to help them out. Demalion thinks he can.”
Alex’s face shuttered; she winced. “Sorry. I didn’t . . . I thought . . . He told me he was trying to get back into the ISI. I thought maybe you’d dumped him for that—”
“I try not to make the same mistakes twice,” Sylvie said. “I don’t like the ISI. I don’t trust them. But I trust him.”
“Good,” Alex said, still quieter than was her usual wont.
Sylvie sighed. “Look, I had to leave those women in the’Glades at the mercy of their abductor. It makes me cranky. And we’re going back tomorrow, and I still know nothing about him. Except that he has a rep as the soul-devourer. It just doesn’t look good.”
“You can take care of it,” Alex said. “This is your world.”
And wasn’t that a lovely thought. That she belonged to the Magicus Mundi. She shook it off, and said, “All right, then. If he is a sorcerer, he’ll have a reputation somewhere. Can you hit up the contact list and see if anyone knows of a sorcerer with a penchant for killing shape-shifters for his own gain? Link it up with alchemy. This guy, if Wales is right, is old-fashioned.”
Alex reached for her computer, heading straight into research mode. Sylvie put a hand on the screen, and said, “Take it home with you.”
Alex met her gaze head-on. “You’re getting me out of the line of fire.”
“It’s getting late,” Sylvie said. “Besides, you can research from home just as easily, and we don’t get a lot of drop-ins. Odalys hit me here once already, and now the bell is dead. I don’t want you caught in the cross fire.”
Alex worried her lip, and said, “If I work from home, you’ll keep in contact?”
“Promise,” Sylvie said. “Go home.”
“You’re not going to sit here all night and play bait, are you? Demalion said I should watch out for you.”
“Demalion has problems of his own to worry about,” Sylvie said. “Don’t encourage him to focus on mine.”
Alex shut the laptop down, pulled the cord, and started packing up. “Sorcerer, alchemy, shape-shifting. Check. You want me to look for more incidents like Cachita found? I mean, I know we’ve been busy, but he can’t have been around here for that long, or we’d have noticed. If we can track where he’s been, maybe we can ID him. I mean, he might be Maudit.”
“Unlikely,” Sylvie said. “The Maudits are bastards, but they’re modern in their habits. I can’t see them going back to alchemical scribblings, even ones that work.” She poked at a peeling sticker of Chibi Cthulhu on Alex’s laptop. “I don’t know, Alex. I got a bad feeling about this one. It’s all so thin.”
“We’ll find him. There’s no way a monster sorcerer goes completely unnoticed. We’ll find him, and you’ll shoot him. End of problem.”
“I live in hope,” Sylvie said.
She saw Alex out, hit the phone again. Lio wasn’t in the hospital any longer, which was a plus, but it also meant that Lourdes could play gatekeeper a lot more efficiently. She hung up on Sylvie before she’d gotten three words out.
Sylvie sighed, flipped through the images of the women on her phone. They were all youngish, midtwenties. They were all Hispanic. They looked like they would have been healthy if they didn’t look so . . . dead. Made sense in a sorcerous sort of way: If the sorcerer was using them as receptacles for an overabundance of corrupted magical energy, healthy people would last longer.
That they were all women, all attractive women, implied that no matter what the sorcerer’s magical use for them was, he was indulging himself. He wasn’t desperate; he was picking and choosing.
She really hoped Alex was right, and this one could end with a single bullet. The Everglades could hide a dead sorcerer just as well as the ocean could. She and her little dark voice contemplated the idea with a shared hunger that lingered until a car honked outside.
Sylvie flipped the phone closed, rose from the couch, smelled swamp and dirt, and grimaced. So past time for this day to be done.
Unfortunately, the world disagreed. She had just closed and locked the door when she turned to find Salvador Ruben coming up the sidewalk.
“SHADOWS!” HE SAID, HIS VOICE TIGHT WITH STRESS AND NERVES. His suit coat, open, rumpled, flapped as he hurried toward her. He tripped on the curb, stuttered in his question, but didn’t stop. “Wh-what the hell is going on? You said she was . . . You said the cops would call—”
Sylvie held up a finger—give me a moment—unlocked the door, and hauled him back inside her office. “Have a seat,” she said, busied herself with Alex’s ridiculous coffee-maker. He subsided onto the couch, clutching his knees. Anxious but obedient.
She wished the brew time were longer, wished that it required more of her attention: She needed every moment she could get to figure out what she was going to tell him. Maria was alive. That was a plus. But she was close enough to death that giving him hope might simply be cruel.
“Here,” she said, passing him a cup of coffee heavily adulterated with sugar. Good for stress, sugar. He wrapped his hands around it, brought it toward his chest as if the coffee could ward off some internal chill.
“What’s happening?” he asked again. Pleaded. Salvador Ruben was the kind of client she wanted to help most, the ones who might break under the weight of the world without her. “I called the cop you mentioned, but he’s ‘not available,’ and no one knows anything about Maria. Is she dead or not?”
Sylvie sat next to him on the couch. She was bad at offering comfort, but she could pretend. “Salvador. It’s complicated and strange. I want you to listen to me. Just hear me out.”
“Is she dead?” he asked. His mouth quivered like an old man’s. He twisted the ring on his finger. He and Maria had been married for eight years, been friends since they were twelve. More than half his life was bound up in this woman, and she was . . .
“She’s not dead, yet,” Sylvie said. “I’m going to do my best to save her. But it involves getting her away from a very dangerous situation. I thought the police could help. They can’t. They nearly died, trying.”
“Aliens,” he said, his knee-jerk response to anything extraordinary.
“No,” Sylvie said. “Sorcery.”
“What?” His breath gave out entirely. Sylvie fished his inhaler out of his suit coat pocket, handed it to him, wa
tched him suck in air.
“She’s under a spell,” Sylvie said. “Like . . . Sleeping Beauty. Only not so nice. The spell’s draining her.”
“So break it!”
“I’ve got a specialist working on it,” she said. “We’re doing what we can. I hope we can save her. But, Salvador, you have to understand, it may be too late.”
He turned away from her, put his face in his hands. After a minute, he turned back, all his distress forced back. “You’re . . . you’re telling me the truth. Magic’s real.”
She nodded, wondering if the man who believed in little grey men could accept this in its place, wondering if he’d go running directly to the cops. She doubted it. He hadn’t gotten on too well with them in the first place.
“Is she . . . Is she hurting?” he asked. “You said she’s sleeping?”
“She is.”
“Can I see her?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “It’s not that much like Sleeping Beauty. You can’t kiss her awake. The spell’s fragile. Disrupting it has killed one woman already.”
He nodded, a man used to taking the advice he paid for. An easy client. “So what do I do?”
“Go home. Wait. Pray if you like.”
“We’re atheists,” he muttered.
“Good for you,” she said. “C’mon, Salvador. I’ll walk you to your car.”
When he stood, he did it like an old man, stoop-shouldered, curled around pain, staggering with it. She took his arm and walked him out, biting back the urge to tell him it would be all right. There was no guarantee it would.
HER APARTMENT COMPLEX, LIT AGAINST THE TWILIGHT, GLIMMERED whitely; the pool gleamed blue, proving once again that dim lighting was the best decorating technique of all. In the uncertain light, the cracks in the stucco, the weeds in the pavement, and the sheer bizarreness of the sculptural accents were easy to overlook.
There was dim light, Sylvie thought, then there was inadequate light. The stairs to her floor were deeply shadowed, the fixture at the base of the stairs dark. She took the first step, felt glass grate beneath her foot, and hesitated. Burned-out bulbs were common around her complex. Broken ones . . . not so much.
Her gun was back in her hand, held close and low to her side—no point in scaring the shit out of her downstairs neighbors if they looked out at the wrong moment. Or worse, courting their questions. College students. So nosy when it was least appropriate.
She took the stairs steadily, without much worry. The stairs were a straight shot up, open on the sides, no room for someone to lurk. A benefit to her apartment complex being built more along the lines of a beachside hotel—a lot of open space. Not a lot of nooks and crannies. Hell, it was one of the reasons she’d chosen to live there in the first place.
The light near her door was out, too.
Overplayed, she thought.
Take out the first light, and it made her careful. Take out a second light, and it stirred the atavistic sense to get in, get safe, get out of the dark. . . . Or run headfirst into a trap. Like an animal herded into a deadfall.
She slowed her steps further, approached her door cautiously.
Trap, her little dark voice agreed. The air was charged, the taste in the air sour and sharp, a roil of nausea in her stomach. A quiver of out-of-place energy. Another spell laid over another door.
She decided she was offended. The same trap? She might have fallen for it once, but not again.
Still, recognizing a trap wasn’t the same as disarming it. A witch’s spell had to be attached to something; if she found the trigger, it’d be pretty much like cutting the power.
Val Cassavetes liked cobwebs. Easy to overlook, easy to leave behind. It was a classic, and probably what had gotten Sylvie the day before.
Miami was full of spiders.
But it could also be a spill of sand or a scratched pebble. She swept her gaze over the door, the frame. Cobwebs, dust, clumps of mud. She wasn’t exactly house-proud, and it was coming back to bite her.
She pulled off her Windbreaker, ran it around the frame, cleared everything out of her path—there was a scatter of sparks, a hiss like a snake slipping by. She swore, slapped at her calf with her Windbreaker. Spell backlash—
The wood frame above her head splintered.
Sylvie whirled, tried to drop the Windbreaker from around her fist, tried to get her gun back up.
The gunman was closer than she thought he’d be, coming out of her next-door neighbor’s apartment. She slammed her door open, slammed it tight, latched it, gun in hand, breathed hard.
It wouldn’t hold. Not long enough for the police anyway.
Illusion spell plus bullets, she thought. Who said the bad guys couldn’t learn?
A back window might give her an escape route—if she didn’t break her leg on the landing.
The door burst open, right off the hinges, a rocket of wood that slammed into her shoulder, spun her gun out of her hand. He loomed in the doorway, looking as surprised as she felt about the broken door. Cheap material, or spell taint—she didn’t know. Didn’t have time to care.
She lunged forward, not for her gun, but for his knees. If he fell just right, she’d have him out of her apartment and even better—over the railing.
He grunted as she tackled him, snarled a hand in her hair, trying for balance, only succeeded in falling forward, the opposite direction she wanted. His weight crashed down on her, the heat and sweat and fear-stink of him. Sylvie squirmed beneath him, her goal crystal clear—
Get his gun.
She wasn’t a trained fighter, but she was strong, determined, and fought dirty. In the distance, she could hear her neighbor screaming. She got his gun hand beneath her body, cringing and praying that his finger had slipped from the trigger. He punched, aiming for her kidneys, hitting her hip, and she gouged hard at the nerves in his forearm.
He rolled, trying to expose her belly, to get his hand free, and she dug her nails in and raked, felt skin gum up the space beneath her nails . . . The gun wobbled in his grip; his breath went out in a hiss. She got the gun free, jerking it from his loosening grasp with a crack that she thought might be his finger.
They sprang apart. Sylvie twitched the gun into a proper grip. He canted a glance at the destroyed door, at her gun a few feet away from him; he looked like he was about to make a judgment call. Could he finish the job before the police arrived?
Sylvie made a judgment call of her own.
She pulled the trigger. He crashed backward—finally out of her apartment. She followed him, gun ready. If he wasn’t down, she’d have no problem shooting him again.
Dark blood bubbled through his T-shirt. Not arterial, but not insignificant. His eyes were closed, his features drawn tight with pain and shock, aging him.
Now that she had a chance to assess instead of react, she thought he was of the same ilk that had attacked Wales: youngish, dressed to blend in, but without even a protective charm to his name. Guess that might have broken the illusion if she’d been trapped in it.
Her downstairs neighbor, a college student named Javier, staggered up the stairs. Beer night with his buds, she thought. And yeah, there was the milling of footsteps beneath, young men who weren’t sure they wanted to get involved beyond calling 911.
He gaped at her. “You all right? He all right?” He didn’t wait for an answer but looked down at the gunman. “Should we try to stop the bleeding or something?”
“If you want,” Sylvie said. “He attacked me. I’m not feeling forgiving enough to play paramedic.”
Javier dithered, and she said, “Why don’t you check on Christina? He came out of her apartment.” She jerked her chin in that direction, and he obeyed. Shocked but willing. A good kid.
Sylvie crouched down beside the gunman. “Who sent you?”
He groaned, turned his head, his breathing labored and thick.
“Confession’s good for the soul,” she said. “Think about it. You wake up in the hospital, talk to the cops. Of course, if
you talk to me, your odds of reaching the hospital alive go up.” She tapped the gun muzzle against his shoulder; his eyes widened.
“I don’t—”
Sylvie said, “I’m not playing. And you didn’t know what you were getting into. I’ve killed worse than you and gone to sleep with a smile—”
“Odalys,” he said. “I used to smuggle things into the country for her. She asked me to do this.”
“Good,” she said. “Just remember to tell that to the cops when they ask.”
She dropped the gun when the police lights flashed into the lot and resigned herself to another couple of hours before she got that shower she wanted.
MIDNIGHT HAD COME AND GONE BEFORE SHE WAS DONE ANSWERING the police questions. Judicious use of Adelio Suarez’s name, and the clear evidence against the gunman—a shattered door, the traumatized neighbor who’d unwillingly hosted the bastard until Sylvie got home—meant Sylvie got to answer questions in the dubious comfort of her own apartment.
She gave the police a list of every possible place she could be reached in the near future and waved them goodbye. Ten minutes after that, she helped apartment maintenance nail plywood sheets over the gaping hole in the door and headed back out into the night.
Alex would open her doors to Sylvie; but then, the options were sharing her couch with the German shepherd who drooled or the futon with Alex, who kicked and twitched, as active in her sleep as she was during the day.
She called Wales. “Tell me you snuck into a hotel room with two beds.”
He groaned protest but gave her the address and room number.
Thirty minutes later, she was pulling into one of the Holiday Inn Expresses that dotted the Florida landscape. Tapping on his door yielded a grumble and a series of oddly careful footsteps.
He opened the door, leaned across it, blocking her entrance, and said, “I could have been sleeping, y’know.”
“What kind of necromancer sleeps at night? Isn’t that against union rules or something?” she asked. She squeezed in, blinked in the dimness, took in the scent of old tallow and spices. Not the usual hotel scent. Wales had been playing with the occult in the dark like the good, creepy Ghoul he was. “Tell me the room has a coffeepot.”
