by Lyn Benedict
“Look, Lio, I don’t like it either. But right now, I don’t have a choice. I could tell you where the women are, but that would just lead to a repeat of what put you in the hospital.”
They argued for a few minutes longer, repeating the same material—How could she? This was why he didn’t like private investigators. This was why she didn’t like cops. They didn’t understand the risks—until Wales shut her up by hurling a pillow into her face and slinking into the bathroom. “Make coffee,” he snapped, and slammed the door.
Guess he wasn’t suffering too much damage from spell shock, then, if he was lucid, irritable, and hogging the shower.
“Look, Lio,” Sylvie said. “I do have some info you can work on, even from home. I took pictures. If you can match them up with missing people . . . No, I’m not telling you how to do your job.” She tugged at her hair in increasing frustration and finally hung up. They were never going to be easy allies, but dammit, she needed him to keep the cops occupied, to distract the ISI.
She threw the phone down on the bed, fisted her hands in the sheets. It just pissed her off. A government agency designed to deal with the supernatural, and they were so bad at it that she couldn’t just tell them where the women were and trust to them to fix the problem. A government agency that was so bad it didn’t even realize how fucked-up it was. They’d poke, and pry, and drag out some low-level witch or psychic who’d preach caution. Then they’d ignore him or her and bull on ahead.
She heard clattering and chatter in the hallways—the maids talking about the shaking last night, talking about crazy guests, and Sylvie took it as a sign. She might not be ready for the day, but it was more than ready for her.
First up, the office and faxing the pics to Lio. He might be pissed at her, but he was homebound, bored, and far too decent a cop to let the information go just because it came from her; he’d look into it.
Wales stumbled out of the bathroom, towel slung around narrow hips and looking like he’d been on a three-week bender. Dripping, he started coffee, leaned over the pot as if caffeine steam was a panacea for what ailed him.
“So what the hell happened?” he asked. He frowned at the charcoal splotches on the carpet, all that was left of the Hands. “Last thing I recall, you were dragging me out midspell. You do like to live dangerously.”
She made grabby fingers at the mug of coffee he poured, and with a growl, he handed it over. “So . . .”
“So, next time listen to me when I say stop the spell,” Sylvie said. “Then you won’t get a magical concussion. Did you get anything more out of the conversation with Jennifer than I did? ’Cause I heard mostly gibberish. Before she got yanked away.” He looked like he was going to demand more answers, answers she wasn’t ready to give yet. Talking about gods before breakfast was just . . . inhumane. She took a deliberate sip of coffee, mmmed happily though the coffee didn’t deserve it.
As an early-morning distraction, it worked.
Wales followed her second sip with a hooded, hungry gaze, then poured himself a cup. “I was closer to her, got some of her memories relayed up close and personal.”
“Ugh,” Sylvie said. “Glad I missed that. Get anything useful to go with the horror show?”
“Yeah,” he said. As usual, he qualified his first positive response. “Maybe. I might be able to peel back at least one layer of the spell.”
“Break the stasis? Kill the spell like you suggested?”
He shook his head. “After losing the Hands? Best I can do is buy the women some time, weaken whatever’s draining them.”
“That’s not nothing,” she said. “You going to be up to a trip to the ’Glades?” Sylvie asked. It wasn’t quite the question she meant. She meant was he up to trying another tricky life-endangering series of spells after the magical backlash he’d suffered last night.
He poured a second cup of coffee, killing the pot, and said, after a long, scalding swallow, “Reckon I’ll find out.”
7
Ill-Met
THE SUN WAS BRIGHT AND HIGH AS THEY SET OUT, EVEN IF THEIR moods weren’t. Their trip to the Everglades had been delayed while Wales took the time to pack up the sad remains of his Hands of Glory, brushing up the ash with careful attention to detail. When she’d raised a brow in inquiry, Wales had said, “Caution always pays off.”
Sylvie had asked, half fearing the answer, “Marco wasn’t one of the ghosts guarding the circle, was he?”
“No,” Wales said. “He’s safe.”
Safe, Sylvie thought. Not the first word she’d use to describe Marco. Not even the tenth. But it was a little like the affection between a boy and his snarling, mangy junkyard dog—not something you wanted to come between.
“Good,” Sylvie lied. Marco might be a useful tool, but he made her nervous.
Wales had merely shrugged, finished tidying ash into the plastic laundry bag supplied by the hotel, and headed for the truck.
Then she broached the subject again. It wasn’t that she cared—as far as she was concerned, the Hands of Glory were abominations—but an upset necromancer just seemed like a bad idea. “They’re at peace now,” she said. “Not slaves any longer. You got ’em away from the CIA, took care of them, and—”
“Jesus,” Wales said, “I ain’t mourning them. I’m freaking the fuck out. We could have been killed last night.”
Sylvie clicked her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the blacktop unrolling beneath her tires. They were out of the city proper already, had seen an alligator or two sliding into watery ditches alongside the road. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Should be,” he muttered. “You got any idea of what it was that came for us? ’Cause I’ve dealt with death guardians before, creatures that hold the souls of the dead to their proper planes, but that wasn’t—”
“I think it was a god,” Sylvie said.
“God,” Wales said.
“Yup,” Sylvie said.
He stared into the sun dazzle reflecting off the watery ditches alongside the road. “Any particular god?”
“An angry one?” Sylvie said. At his flat look, she elaborated. “I don’t know. One that doesn’t care overmuch for keeping a low profile. Not one of the big ones, or we’d be a smear on the wall that the maids would be quitting over. Still, its shadow did enough damage, don’t you think?”
“Don’t know. Missed most of it,” Wales said.
“Hopefully, you won’t get another chance,” Sylvie said. “Gods on earth are bad news. They’re . . . disruptive just by their presence. Monsters and cataclysms. A hurricane in Chicago—”
“That was a god?” he interrupted.
“Yeah,” she said. “Several, actually. Political infighting. The smaller ones—the demigods—aren’t so bad in comparison. They fuck things up when they’re down here, but not to that scale. Mostly, they just get people killed.”
“Gods? I don’t want to play anymore,” he said. “I like my life.”
“Then you’re smarter than the soul-devourer,” she said.
He cocked his head at her, frowning as if he almost remembered what she was talking about.
“One of the things Jennifer said,” Sylvie explained. “That she’d been given to him. That he was coming for her.”
Wales groaned. “Stupid, arrogant bastard. Made a deal with a god. Bartering for borrowed power from a god to take out an enemy. I really, really want to leave town.”
“Tough it up, Tex,” she said. “You drew the short straw. I need you.”
“Lucky, lucky me,” he whispered.
“Just . . . try to stay under its radar,” Sylvie said. “Keep a low profile for a while. No ghost summoning.”
“Not a problem,” Wales said.
GPS pointed out they were there, and Sylvie pulled the truck off the road, coasting to a bumpy halt on the dead-end access road.
Wales looked out into the heat shimmer, clutched his satchel tight, and licked his lips. He opened the truck door but didn’t get out. Sylvie walked around
the truck, looked in at him.
“You up for this?” Sylvie asked.
“Don’t got a choice,” Wales said. “We can’t leave them there again. I’ve got to try.”
Sylvie grabbed his satchel, slung it over her shoulder, gritted her teeth, and bore it as the edge of it pressed up against her bruises. She was tough. Wales . . . wasn’t. The sun had driven out some of his pallor, but he still held himself like he hurt.
He was right, though. They didn’t have a choice.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, SYLVIE DROPPED THE SATCHEL INTO THE mud, heart sinking even faster than the bag.
This was the place; she could still see the flattened grass where she had skidded yesterday and gone to her knees. A long streak of turned earth, the tread of her boot.
A fish leaped at a hawk’s shadow as it fell over the water, set off a chain reaction. A turtle ducked its head, glided into motion; a snowy egret hunched its neck; a long ripple cut the surface as a water moccasin slid by.
Life.
Sylvie slapped at a mosquito absently.
“They’re gone,” Wales said. He gaped at the water’s surface as if it had betrayed them. As if it were responsible for their disappearance.
Sylvie considered it an evident statement and made no response. It wouldn’t have been polite anyway. Guilt sizzled through her veins, laced with a healthy slug of rage.
“Can you find them again?” she asked.
“I could try—”
“Go for it,” Sylvie said.
Wales said, “I’m not a dog, Sylvie. I don’t jump on command.”
“If I say ‘pretty please’? C’mon, Tex,” she said. “It’s not just for me. Those women need our help.”
Wales said, “I’m not promising anything. Marco’s built to override defenses, magical or otherwise. He’s not meant to hunt necromantic magic.”
“You were the one talking about sympathetic linkage,” Sylvie said. “Can’t you use that?”
“They’re not dead. Marco is. But I’m going to give it a try. You got a pen on you?”
Sylvie dragged one out of her pocket, a half-sized Sharpie that Alex mocked her for carrying, but as Wales started marking alchemical symbols onto Marco’s Hand, Sylvie sent a mental Take that! to Alex’s techno-love that would send Sylvie into the field with a PDA instead of ever-useful pen and paper.
Wales finished the designs, tilted Marco’s grey-skinned palm to show Sylvie the symbol for fusion, repeated twice, one on the palm, one on the back.
“Is it working?”
“Patience?”
“Never had it,” Sylvie said.
Wales closed his eyes. The breeze that passed over him reached Sylvie with the faint chill she was beginning to associate with ghosts added. Despite the humid heat that weighed her bones, she stepped away as best she could, checking her path. When she looked up again, Wales was twenty feet away, blindly following Marco’s urging.
Sylvie gritted her teeth, thought of a will-o’-the-wisp leading men to their deaths, and hastened after him.
Wales set a rapid pace over hummock and limestone, over knotted grass and through muddy puddles that spat frogs at their approach; sweat trickled down Sylvie’s spine, damped the hair at her temples and nape, greased her palm around the handle of her gun. An anhinga rose on a flap of dark wings and something large slid into the water nearby. Alligator, Sylvie thought, and clutched her gun tighter. They were common enough in the city, but the difference between seeing them as you drove by and walking pellmell into their territory made her heart rocket.
It would be a crap way to die; deathrolled in shallow waters, as horrible as anything the Magicus Mundi could dish out.
Wales stopped all at once. Around him, the mosquito cloud flitted away from Marco’s cold presence.
“There,” he said. A breath of air.
Sylvie joined him; beneath their feet the soft ground grew gritty, limestone gravel forming a path—a narrow access road.
On it, wider than the gravel, pressed tightly against the encroaching vegetation, a black van with a man closing the rear door. Sylvie got a glimpse of pallid, limp flesh, and drew her gun.
“Don’t move,” she said, trying to spot his companion. Black van, man in a suit, taking up a crime scene—ISI seemed likely, and they didn’t work alone.
But Wales’s response—tongue-tied pallor—suggested otherwise. He hated the government, but he didn’t fear it.
This was fear.
“It’s him,” Wales stammered. “The sorcerer.”
She jerked her attention back to the man leaning up against the van. “Soul-devourer?” Her gaze centered, picking out a target. His tie, his smoothly shaven throat, the handkerchief in his breast pocket, the space between his dark eyes. He seemed utterly at ease, lounging back as if to allow her all the time in the world to choose her shot. A far cry from the flailing man-monster at the Casa de Dia, all claws and terror.
“I’ve never liked that soubriquet,” the man said. “But it will do for an introduction, I suppose. You are . . .” He tilted his head, doing the strange I talk to spirits that you can’t see thing that was beginning to look familiar. Necromancers.
“None of your business,” she said.
“Sylvie—” Wales said, a near-breathless warning. She could forgive him showing his fear openly, but to use her name when she’d just denied it to the sorcerer—that was something else. She’d expected better of Mr. Paranoia.
“Sylvie?” the sorcerer said. “Shadows, if you’re out here hunting me. The new Lilith.” His tongue came out, quick, oddly reptilian, brushed his lips, retreated. Had there been scales on it? The longer she looked at him, the less convincingly human he seemed.
The more wrong he seemed.
Sylvie wasn’t magically inclined, but she was good at sensing magic, that subtle shift in the feel of the world. Everything about him screamed unnatural, something held together by magic and willpower. The suit he wore bulged rhythmically, as if the flesh it covered was in flux.
Maybe not so controlled, after all.
He pressed himself away from the van, moved toward Sylvie. A wave of wrongness preceded him. She pressed her finger on the trigger, felt the tiniest of gives. “Don’t.”
The sorcerer never stopped smiling, a sliver of white teeth between blood-flushed lips. “Don’t? Don’t what? I’m doing nothing—”
“What are you, five? Stop moving, or I’ll shoot you.”
Wales made a creaky sound of protest, and Sylvie thought briefly about shooting him. “What?” she snapped.
“That’s no good,” Wales said. “The spell—”
“He’s right,” the sorcerer said. “The binding spell works both directions. Should you shoot me, you risk destabilizing it.”
He didn’t need to say more. When Jennifer Costas had been trapped, she’d burned. The five women in the van were equally trapped. Equally at risk.
“A deal, then,” Sylvie said. “You unbind the women from your spell. I don’t shoot you today.”
“Give up my little harem? No. In fact, I’m going to keep them closer than ever.” His lips curled into a smile. He had a disturbingly pretty mouth. It made what he said that much more off-putting. “Too many people were touching them. Like the ancient sultans, I require my women to be mine alone.”
Sylvie’s finger twitched. Wales whispered fiercely, an argument held with someone spectral, and the man on the roadway laughed. “Listen to your ghost, boy. I’m more sorcerer than you want to tangle with.”
“I’m not your boy,” Wales said. “And Marco says you should be dead.” Wales might be thin, scared, and brittle; but he was dangerous for all of that, still a necromancer. The sorcerer obviously agreed; his eyes sparked green-white phosphorescence like an animal’s.
Even with the trigger mostly depressed, Sylvie was too slow, hampered by calculations; protect Wales, endanger the women, or . . . Her voice howled furious protest, drove her finger down on the trigger. Her bullet went hopelessly wid
e. The sorcerer leaped the distance between Wales and the shore, slapped Wales with a careless hand. Wales spun away, blood spurting from his cheek, his shoulder, spinning into the water. He crawled out, coughing, draped himself over a tuft of grass, and passed out.
Crouching, the sorcerer flexed his hand, showed her an animal’s paw, a cat’s claw, ivory nails curved and wet with blood. “Now that he’s down, perhaps we can talk.”
Her second bullet missed him by millimeters; he rolled with an animal’s grace, rose, and threw sand into the air before him.
The world erupted into a scouring riot of sand devils stinging her flesh, stirring into her lungs, her eyes—she blinked furiously, let the voice chastise her into seeing the truth. It was an illusion, only an illusion.
And she didn’t give in to illusion.
She cleared her sight, found the sorcerer within arm’s distance. She threw herself backward, avoided the claws coming at her face, but his other hand, seemingly human, struck her gun. It crumbled beneath her grip, the metal gone friable, pattering into the sand.
Not an illusion this time.
She kicked back, got herself out of his reach, panting, reaching for a fist-sized stone, for a branch, for anything she could use against him.
He breathed hard, contorted, his entire shape changing, warping. Cloth ripped, that fancy suit giving at the seams. Going monster. Maybe she’d hit him, or maybe the spell was weakened by whatever he’d done to allow the women to be moved.
She surged to her feet. Grabbed Wales’s shoulder, tried to drag him to his feet. If she could get him to the van, get behind the wheel—
The sorcerer leaped between her and the van, more monster than man, bulked to twice his original size, mouth distended by teeth better suited to a saber-tooth, piebald fur of different lengths and textures poking through. He drooled, growled, blocked her path. There just wasn’t room on the narrow road, and Wales was deadweight in her grip, a reminder of how hard the sorcerer could hit.
He sucked in a breath that sounded like the final rale of a dying man, then slowly, painfully, returned to human form. He patted his hair, smoothing it into place, a tiny vanity.
