by Lyn Benedict
“You did what?” Sylvie said.
Alex looked up from her amused memories and blinked. “Um.”
Sylvie took a deep breath, ready to shout, caught sight of Wales’s smirk, and let her breath out. When she did speak, it was far more moderately than her original intention. “So instead of working at home where it’s safe, you went out and chased a dead girl around.”
“I did work at home. Then I hit a dead end, decided to clear my mind, and since you got up in Patrice’s face yesterday—yes, Tierney tattled—”
Sylvie blinked again. When the hell had Alex had time to squeeze in a chat with Wales? But she should know better than to underestimate Alex’s ability to gather information.
“—so I figured you couldn’t follow her around, and she doesn’t know me, so, I sat outside her house and followed her to the coffee shop—”
“Where she hit on a goth boy, got it,” Sylvie said.
“Cute one, too, if you like that type. Long, lanky, the kind of bony shoulder blades that make me think of wings.” Alex’s gaze was resting on Wales’s clavicle, visible through the thin shirt.
Wales’s cheeks darkened steadily, but he said nothing, only hunched his shoulders and made himself small. At least embarrassment had eclipsed his anger.
“Great,” Sylvie said. “She’s got the new life, and now she’s slumming it.”
“Can’t be slumming it too bad,” Alex said. “Not if he’s buying five-dollar coffees and ten-dollar pastries. And they’re planning on clubbing tonight at Caballero, so there goes another chunk of change.”
Sylvie shook her head, disgusted. Patrice offended her on a very simple level. She’d stolen a new life and was doing nothing new with it, tracing the same self-indulgent lifestyle she’d had before.
You could still shoot her, the little dark voice suggested.
Rather than listen to it, Sylvie headed back downstairs.
The sunlight seeped in through the closed blinds, thin lines of brilliant gold that exposed every dust mote in the office and made her sanctuary into a prison of shadowy bars.
Sylvie yanked the blinds open, blinked in the glare, and sent a rude gesture in the direction of the ISI nursing their coffees at the crowded pastry shop across the street. They wanted to watch? Let them.
It was going to be another scorcher. Sylvie hoped Patrice’s goth boy melted and ruined her day. Hell with it, she hoped Patrice melted.
Likelihood was, the only one who’d be suffering from the heat was Sylvie. Odds were, she’d be out pounding the pavement for hours, looking for the black van that the sorcerer had used to take the women away. She envied the cops and their ability to just slap an APB or BOLO or whatever acronym floated their boat on a vehicle.
The idea made her thirsty just thinking on it. She raided the fridge, cracked a water bottle, took a healthy slug of cold—
The pain surprised her. It was sudden, all-encompassing, breathtaking. Like knives lodging in her throat, her stomach, her chest. She let out a strangled cry and found blood speckling her lips. She thrust the bottle away, though she knew it wasn’t to blame.
A spell. Finding its target.
No.
A curse.
Her throat itched, ached, and burned. She couldn’t breathe through the agony of it, found herself crumpling forward, losing all control of her body save the most important one.
She wouldn’t cough. Wouldn’t cry out. Whatever the spell was, it was tearing the hell out of her throat.
Her hands were wet, icy with spilled water.
She tried not to breathe. Not to move. Not to make it worse.
This wasn’t illusion. This would kill her whether she believed it was happening or not. Her unaccountable resistance to magic could only last so long. Blood blossomed hot, slippery in her throat.
Footsteps came down the stairs so fast they were nearly falling. Alex shrieked, high and distorted, Wales’s shouting back, all but incomprehensible, torn between fast words and the Texan drawl.
“Hold on, Sylvie,” he said. Or she thought he said.
Icy fingers threw her backward, pressed her down. She clawed up, felt only fog, malevolence.
“Don’t fight him,” Wales said. “He’s trying to help.”
Cold fog iced over her lips; something that tasted of rot, of cold, clotted blood. Marco, she thought, and was amazed that she still had energy to be squeamish.
Marco sealed her mouth with his, blew death and ice into her chest. She stopped breathing. No. She didn’t stop. He stopped her. Killed her. The deadly cold in her lungs spread outward. Her hands struck at nothing; the pain in her chest and belly fought back.
Her bones were ice, too cold even to shiver.
In the background, Alex sobbed.
Just when Sylvie thought she must be encased in ice, a new cold pressed into her belly, so frozen it burned. So cold, that if she’d been breathing, she’d have expected to see ice.
Her lungs ached; her vision dimmed, but she saw the impossible. A floating clump of red-smeared pins rising through the skin of her stomach. Passing through her flesh, held in Marco’s invisible fist.
She blacked out.
When she came to, the lips on hers were warm, breathing life, not death, and shaking with fear. “C’mon, Sylvie,” Alex whispered. “C’mon.”
Sylvie’s heart gave a giant lurch, stuttering, then pounding furiously, shaking her lungs into action. She coughed, felt pain, tasted copper, but nothing like before, and curled onto her side. Alex slumped beside her, rubbing her spine.
“Tierney sent the ghost after the witch,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “Said Marco’s gonna force-feed her the pins. God, Sylvie—”
“’S okay,” Sylvie breathed. It wasn’t.
Pins. That was ugly magic, a far cry from the illusions she’d been attacked with earlier. Hell, she preferred the gunman to this. And she didn’t know how it had been triggered. Line of sight? A poppet? A triggered spell attached to the bottle she’d so carelessly picked up?
She hadn’t expected Odalys to try something so messy and violent. Something inexplicable enough to rouse serious attention. Something so old-fashioned. Odalys was a modern witch.
For the first time in a long while, Sylvie felt in over her head. She was crazy to do what she did. To face off against the Magicus Mundi with a gun and nothing more. She was going to have to cave, have to crawl to Val and Zoe and get the defensive magics back on the shop and their homes.
“Don’t talk,” Alex said. “He’s pulling the truck around. We’re going to take you to the ER. The ghost got the pins out, but—”
“’S okay,” Sylvie whispered again. This time it was. She felt . . . all right. Like crap. Sore. Like her throat and lungs and stomach had all been sandblasted. Like she could brush forever and never be rid of the taste of Marco’s tongue moving between her teeth. But nowhere near the kind of pain she expected from shredded tissues.
“Help me up,” she said.
Alex shook her head, mulish. Still trembling. Sylvie reconsidered. Alex didn’t look like she could get herself off the floor, much less aid Sylvie.
Sylvie rolled forward, going from her side, tucking her knees, and ended up in a half crouch, half-kneeling position, her hands braced before her.
Alex squeaked in worry.
Sylvie hung her head for a second, let the blood rearrange itself in her body, then pressed upward. Yeah. She was going to be fine. She knew it because the little dark voice was snarling, ready to make someone pay. Her blood thrummed with rage.
Wales had acted fast enough, and she’d not panicked, and Marco, disgusting and deadly though his touch was, had been gentle. Alex looked up at her, her makeup smeared, and shaking hard enough for the both of them, and Sylvie thought that feeling okay wasn’t going to keep her from a hospital trip.
Wales came barreling back through the door, rocked back when he saw Sylvie on her feet. Mutely, he handed her a wax doll, the length of her palm, blurred with his sweaty agitation
. The doll might be formless, but the braided strands of hair atop the waxen head were brown. Were hers. A silver shadow lingered in the poppet’s chest; she nudged it out—a final pin pulling free—and felt an answering twinge in her body.
“I’ll melt it down for you,” Wales said.
She spat out a last mouthful of blood, a scarlet splotch on the white and black linoleum, and said, “Thanks.” She pinched the tiny braid off the doll, rolled it between her fingers, and finally stuck it in her pocket. Just to be safe.
“Truck’s running,” Wales said.
“The witch?”
“Dead,” he said. “The ISI’s having a conniption fit over it. Apparently, she was seated in the café next to them. A nice little abuela with a bagful of knitting.”
“Hospital now, talk later,” Alex said.
Wales nodded, bobbleheaded, gave Sylvie another wild-eyed glance, and dragged them both into the cab of the truck.
Sylvie resigned her afternoon to hospital paperwork and a careful explanation. A witch cursed me and transported pins into my stomach wasn’t going to go over well with the docs.
Alex shivered against her in the close confines of the truck cab, and Wales put his foot down on the gas. Sylvie, sandwiched between them, closed her eyes, the better not to see Wales’s truly frightening driving skills, and to focus. Now that the first flush of triumph had slowed, she felt nearly as freaked-out as Alex looked.
She was fine. She shouldn’t be.
8
Bad Guys
SYLVIE MANAGED TO BARTER DOWN THE HOSPITAL IN EXCHANGE FOR a friendly clinic. Getting X-rayed, probed, and told she was a lucky woman took the better part of five hours. She was honestly surprised to find Wales still hovering nervously in the parking lot. With the ISI in play, his own injuries, a dead witch on his conscience—she’d expected him to be a vapor trail on the horizon.
Instead, he was slumped down low behind the steering wheel, studying any car in the lot that looked suspicious. A plus for the clinic over the hospital, Sylvie thought. The ISI drove high-end sedans, carefully maintained.
Sylvie clambered into the truck, said, “What’d you do with Alex?”
“Took her home, came back,” he said. “You’re running low on gas.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. It was marred by a fit of coughing. She checked her palm. No blood. She wouldn’t have said no to a lozenge.
“Where to?” Wales asked.
Sylvie paused. “Did the witch say anything? Say who sent her?”
“You didn’t say a lot with your belly full of pins. Neither did she. She just died. Marco killed her.” He swallowed hard. “I killed her. Didn’t even think about it. I was just . . . angry and tired. I could have told Marco to drop the pins. I’m not that guy, Shadows.”
“This world brings it out in all of us,” Sylvie said. “Can’t say I’m sorry. Not about the witch, anyway. How’d you know what to do?”
“Poppet magic,” Wales said. “Had a brief resurgence in popularity in Texas some years back. Had a grudge against a cattle ranch. Drained the cows. Lamed the workers. Finally, fed the owner a bellyful of death, and the ranch died with him. That’s witchcraft, mind you, your cleaner magic.”
“Charming,” Sylvie said.
She leaned her cheek against the air-cooled window, closed her eyes.
“Something wrong?” Wales asked. He sounded about ready to drag her back inside the clinic.
“Just . . . surprised I guess. Pins and poppets are messy and old-fashioned. Odalys likes lethal. But she also likes subtle. Low-profile.”
“She’s in jail,” Wales said. “And she’s a snob. That kind of woman loses friends fast. She might not have a lot of choice for allies.”
It made sense. Made the inexplicable less so. “Hey, Tex?”
“Yeah?”
“Get out of my seat.”
Once they’d traded places, Sylvie said, “Hotel for you?”
“Not like I have anyplace else to be. Not like I need to find a new apartment or anything.”
“You don’t want to look for one now, anyway,” Sylvie said. “Wait a few days. The ISI’s attention span isn’t that long if you’re not me.” She found a sudden laugh in her throat, black humor forcing its way out.
He shot her a questioning glance.
“Just . . . I always knew they’d sit and watch while I died. Lazy bastards.” Her stomach ached dully, kept her amusement brief and bleak. She hoped that Demalion had managed to get the word out. Her life would be just that much easier if she didn’t have to worry about Odalys’s attempts to kill her every few hours or so. Sylvie didn’t mind a challenge, but she had five women depending on her.
“Don’t suppose you know any defensive magic,” Sylvie said.
Wales shook his head. “Marco mostly takes care of that for me. Shouldn’t have pissed off your witchy friend.”
Sylvie chewed on her lip. She was bad at groveling. Even if she went to Zoe instead of Val, there was no guarantee that Zoe had learned enough magic to make herself useful.
Once she’s brought in, her little dark voice suggested, it can’t be undone.
She turned her attention to the traffic. No. No to groveling. No to asking her baby sister for aid. For now, she’d rely on the simplest method of survival. Keep moving. Make herself hard to predict, hard to hit.
Steer clear of the office, her home. Wales was going to have a bunk mate in his hotel-room squat. As if tuned in to her thoughts, he said, “If you come knocking tonight, bring dinner.”
“I think I might be late,” she said. Odalys was out of her reach; she had no leads on how to find the soul-devourer, much less fight him. Tepé was still an utter blank, and maybe not even in town yet. But Patrice was, and Sylvie—thanks to Alex—knew where the woman planned to spend her evening.
She dropped Wales off at the hotel, headed to her parents’ home. If she was going out, and her apartment was a potential minefield, she was raiding Zoe’s closet.
An hour later, she looked into the mirror, grimaced, and called it the best of the lot. Black slacks, boot cut, the hem ripped loose to make up for the extra inch or two Sylvie had on Zoe. One of her sister’s tank tops—black, shiny, stretchy, but not too strappy. Sturdy enough in a fight.
She found a leather jacket lurking in the back of her sister’s color-coded, season-sorted closet, and pulled it out with an appreciative smile. Not Zoe’s usual taste at all. The leather was dark red, but the cut skewed motorcycle instead of fashion plate. Sylvie shrugged it on, strapped the SOB holster back on, checked the look, and called it done.
Caught in the fragrance of her sister’s room—Chanel and cosmetics and the tiniest lingering hint of rot from her sister’s foray into necromancy—it suddenly felt intolerable that she hadn’t spoken to Zoe. Hell, she hadn’t even heard back from Val about her warning.
She dialed Zoe, got voice mail, and called Val, expecting more of the same. Surprisingly, Val picked up. “Your sister’s fine,” she said. “I confiscated her phone so she’d stop texting her boyfriend while I was trying to explain magic to her.”
“Of course she was,” Sylvie said. “Where’d she find this one—”
“Sylvie. Stop calling. She’s fine. Stop calling.” Val disconnected. Apparently, answering the phone didn’t mean Val and she were friends again, just shared a weird sort of custody over Zoe.
An hour later, she was parking her truck on the streets outside Caballero. It was early still, as these things went, but she’d prefer to be in already when Patrice came.
She forked over a cover charge and headed in. Caballero had started out as a gay club but had changed over, slowly but surely, to a goth dive with a steady flow of European-styled heavy metal. Patrice was definitely slumming. Rich girls like Bella Alvarez, even while underage, frequented high-end clubs with long lines and bouncers that were there primarily to play fashion police. Rich girls like Bella Alvarez went to clubs where the clothes were Miu Miu, not Hot Topic.
At
Caballero, Sylvie got waved in without even a sneer for her scuffed-up Docs. She found a decent vantage point and waited. She saw the goth boy Alex had mentioned first; he was hard to miss, even in a like-minded crowd. His hair, dead black, was plumed off his skull in a series of fluffy spikes that seemed more akin to feathers than human hair. Dead white skin, red stripe across his eyes—she almost missed Patrice tucked into his side. He felt her attention, winked, and nipped Patrice’s neck with cheesy white vampire veneers. He worried at the ruby beads on her earring, and Patrice frowned.
Sylvie’s hatred for Patrice kicked up another notch. Patrice had cheated death, and now she played with would-be vampires.
Patrice pushed him off with an irritated hand, saw Sylvie, and locked up.
Sylvie slunk toward Patrice, taking advantage of the crowd hemming her in, and grinned, trying to show as many teeth as Patrice’s pet goth did. For some reason, Patrice didn’t find the effect as pleasing in Sylvie’s mouth.
She clawed at her goth boy’s leather jacket, jerked backward, and Sylvie’s smile faltered. This was more than concern. It was shock and panic.
It was surprise that Sylvie was alive.
It was awareness that she shouldn’t be.
It was fear.
Sylvie laughed, loud and free and angry. “I blamed Odalys for it all, you know,” she said. “The magical attacks as well as the physical. But it was you who set the witch on me, wasn’t it. Tell me, were the pins your idea? Did you want to make me hurt?”
Goth boy laughed. “I like her, Bella my Bella. She’s fierce. Can we bring her home with us tonight?” He ran black-painted nails up under Patrice’s lacy black blouse, showed Sylvie that Patrice wore a belly chain, strung with silver charms. Magical or mundane?
Patrice slapped at his hands, her nails raking his skin, pinned by the crowd that held her in Sylvie’s space. She backed up, and Sylvie closed the space between them, got her gun out, pressed it just under the curve of Patrice’s rib cage.
