Gods & Monsters

by Lyn Benedict

  Pushing things, she thought. That restraining order was going to be a sure thing at this rate. But the crowd was tight, and visibility was poor. The only witness was the goth boy, and his pupils were wider, blacker than even the dim club light could account for. Stoned close to insensible.

  “Usually, I warn people to stay away from me and mine,” Sylvie said. “But I’m not giving you that option. I will find a way to rip you out of that body.”

  The goth boy laughed into Patrice’s teased hair, inadvertently pressing Patrice closer to Sylvie and her gun. “So tough,” he giggled. The woman was shaking, fine tremors that traveled through metal and stirred Sylvie’s predatory nature.

  “Not if you’re dead first,” Patrice said. “You’ve been lucky so far. How long do you think you can keep it up?” Her trembling was rage, not fear. Not even rage. Outrage. The rich-old-woman personality coming out, furious that someone would dare question her.

  “Ding-dong, your witch is dead,” Sylvie chanted. “Got a bellyful of pain and died of it.”

  Patrice raised a brow. “What makes you think she was my only option?” She leaned back, let the goth boy support her. She reached up, petted the young man’s pale cheek. “You don’t think I picked Aron here just for his skill with eyeliner. . . .”

  The goth boy smiled, ducked his head again, let the feathery spikes of his hair brush Patrice’s skin. He never took his gaze from Sylvie. “It’s true,” he said. “I’m magic from my head to my tippy-toes.”

  Sylvie said, “I bet I can shoot her before you whip out a spell.”

  “You’re not that stupid,” Patrice said, a smile curving her mouth. It was a smile Sylvie had seen so many times before; Bella Alvarez, her sister’s best friend. There had never been such a level of malevolence behind it, though. “Shoot me, Aron’s good enough to keep me alive. And all these lovely witnesses will see you in jail. Maybe even alongside Odalys.”

  In the perpetual-motion machine that was a nightclub, their careful immobility drew eyes like a mountain set down on a beach. The bouncer, a tattooed Cuban cowboy in a wifebeater, waded in their direction.

  Sylvie holstered her gun as smoothly as possible, but the bouncer picked up his pace; he’d recognized that movement. Sylvie slid her own hands onto Patrice’s curving waist as if they were dancing. Patrice went rigid and still, but Sylvie had found out what she wanted to know. The belly chain wasn’t magically active, wasn’t the thing that kept Patrice safe, no matter the decorative charms.

  “Hey,” Aron said, pulling Patrice out of Sylvie’s grasp, slipping her behind him. “You want to grapple with someone, try me instead.” He insinuated himself into her space, so close she could smell his greasepaint and cologne. Acrid with a strong swell of musk and incense beneath. He closed his hands on her coat, pulled her against him; if the belly chain Patrice wore wasn’t magic, something Aron wore most definitely was. Magic burned against Sylvie’s skin, a ripple of energy as lively as a snake, even through two layers of leather jackets.

  “Get off me,” Sylvie said, her words tangling with Patrice’s, “Let’s get out of here.”

  A puff of laughter in Sylvie’s ear, Aron’s breath oddly hot on her nape. “I hear and obey. See you later, Shadows.”

  Just as the bouncer reached them, Aron backed away, taking Patrice with him, disappearing first into the crowd, then, on a wash of heated tropical air, onto the street. The bouncer glowered at Sylvie, and she held up her hands. “I just want a drink.”

  “No trouble,” he said.

  “Of course not,” Sylvie promised. It was easy enough to make; trouble had just left the building.

  She crunched her ice with growing anger. Self-directed. She hadn’t thought that confrontation through at all. She’d meant to rattle Patrice’s cage, and all she had to show for it was a woman more determined to kill her than ever.

  AN HOUR LATER, SHE WAS STILL IN THE NIGHTCLUB, THOUGH SHE’D moved from the barstool to a booth, propped her legs up on the opposite seat, and dared others to sit down.

  The music throbbed in her ears, loud, discordant, reasonably enjoyable for all that. Some rock fusion; metal in an eastern scale, twisty and rhythmic. Sylvie reminded herself to mention the band to Alex. She sipped her soda—if Aron the witchy goth boy was going to come gunning for her, it was no time for alcohol—and chewed the ice, and tried to decide what to do with herself. Wales was expecting her, but was it fair to take her troubles back to him?

  He’d already killed for her once today.

  She kept remembering him rubbing bruises into life beneath his eyes, that tired and shell-shocked brittleness to his voice. I killed her.

  Wales had lost a lot when he started working in the Magicus Mundi; today, she’d helped him lose another piece of innocence. He needed some downtime to deal with it. She couldn’t give him much time—they had to break the women free—but she could give him a single night.

  “Sylvie,” Cachita said. Shouted really, over the screaming, jangling guitar solo.

  Sylvie looked up at Cachita. The woman was dressed to be sorcerer bait again, this time in a short white halter dress with a leopard-print belt. Gold jewelry. Red heels. Sylvie heard Zoe drawling, ta-cky, in her head, and bit back a grin.

  Cachita pointed at Sylvie’s feet, and Sylvie reluctantly tugged them back, opening up the other side of the booth. Cachita plopped down into it with a sigh more seen than heard. A man followed her to the table, some local businessman drowning his sorrows, his tie loosened, his suit jacket rumpled. He tried to squeeze in beside Cachita, and Sylvie propped her feet back up, blocking him from taking a seat.

  “Aw, c’mon, I’ll buy you drinks,” he grumbled.

  “Sorry,” Sylvie said. “No room.” She tipped her glass at him, and he stomped away. He retreated across the room, leaned back against the bar, and watched them. Cachita crossed her arms protectively across her chest.

  “Pig,” she said, then shook her head.

  The band switched over to a softer tune, and Cachita said, “The problem with attempting to lure out a sorcerer with a taste for young women is that you also catch a bunch of mundane assholes.”

  “What would you do with the sorcerer if you ran into him?” Sylvie asked, her mind still dwelling on her failed attempt to scare Patrice.

  Cachita smiled, her expression going wicked. “Taser him. I’ve been reading up. Sorcerers can be shot if you’re fast enough. So I figure they can be electrified.”

  Sylvie reluctantly gave Cachita some credit. It was an ingenious idea. It might even work. The sorcerer might have a bulletproof shield of some type, but a Taser might be a loophole. Nonlethal. Maybe something that would penetrate the magical defenses.

  “Then what?” she asked. “Say it worked?”

  “I’d call you and say, ‘Hey, Sylvie, got a sorcerer all trussed up.’”

  Sylvie laughed. “Nice way to deal with your problem.”

  “I’m a reporter, not a vigilante,” Cachita said.

  “You’re stalking the streets, hunting an evil sorcerer with a Taser,” Sylvie said. “What’s your definition of vigilante, again?”

  Cachita flashed a smile, then grew serious. She leaned across the table, and said, “Actually, I came out tonight to find you. Your assistant said she thought you might be here.”

  “Alex’s getting pretty talky around you,” Sylvie said.

  “Maybe I just know how to ask. Oh, don’t get huffy,” Cachita said. “We were getting along so well. Look, I brought you stuff.” She put her purse on the table, a smaller thing than Sylvie had seen her carry before. When she opened it, it held only a few items. The Taser, a wallet, a digital recorder, her smart phone, and a memory stick. She held the memory stick out toward Sylvie, pulled it away when Sylvie reached for it.

  “I’m not giving it to you,” Cachita said. “But I want you to see what’s on it.”

  “The missing women,” Sylvie said. “You going to give me their names now?” She did want that information. Wanted it badly.<
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  “Come back to my place,” Cachita said. “I’ve got more than their names. I’ve also found a pattern of similarities among the missing women. And some other mysterious murders you might wanna see.”

  “One conspiracy at a time,” Sylvie said.

  Cachita rolled her eyes; the decibels rose exponentially, and Sylvie caved. There’d be no talking in the club.

  Outside, the silence fell over them like a balm. False silence, really. The streets hissed with traffic; the bass followed them onto the street; people hung out beneath streetlamps and talked.

  Sylvie scoped the area, and sighed. “You bring your car?”

  Cachita shook her head. “Took the metrorail.”

  “All right. My truck. Now.”

  Cachita followed Sylvie docilely enough, but her eyes were busy. Sylvie saw the moment she got it; her brows closed in over her nose. “The man from the bar’s following us. He doesn’t look so drunk now. ISI?”

  The woman really was too well-informed for her own good. Sylvie needed to warn her about the dangers of knowing too much; it attracted the wrong kind of attention. But not just then. Sylvie picked up the pace, aware of the probable agent on her tail, imagined she heard the soft slap of his loafers on her shadow.

  She’d seen the gun bulge under his coat back in the bar, hadn’t said anything, Cachita too much a wild card to confide in. While Sylvie had no trouble giving the ISI agents hell, she preferred not to do it around witnesses.

  But she’d kept an eye on him, watched his dark-featured face grow more sober, more openly watchful as Sylvie and Cachita had talked. For an employee of the Internal Surveillance and Investigation agency, he was crap at surveillance, got so engrossed in watching that he forgot to be sneaky.

  Maybe he didn’t need to be, her little dark voice suggested. Not if he was herding her toward something.

  ISI tended to work in teams of two minimum, four more often. That meant there were probably others around.

  Beside her, Cachita was scoping the scene. “They’re Feds. They work in teams, right? You think they’re after you or me?”

  “Don’t know,” Sylvie said. “You do anything they’d be interested in?”

  Cachita shrugged, a nonanswer if Sylvie had ever seen one. From a woman as casually chatty as the reporter, that twigged alarm bells. Sylvie made a mental note. Get Alex to look into Caridad Valdes-Pedraza’s history. Freelance reporter was a job description that could cover a number of sins.

  “Our friend just picked up another friend,” Cachita said. “You think they want to talk to us? Or arrest us?”

  “I’m not in the mood for either,” Sylvie said. “But if I had to say . . . a nice quiet talking-to in an undisclosed location.”

  Cachita tottered along beside her on those ridiculous heels, moving with a quicker stride than Sylvie expected. As they approached Sylvie’s truck, a dark SUV popped its side door. It gaped blackly, an open mouth ready to swallow them up. “Shit,” Sylvie said.

  “I hate them,” Cachita said. “They’ll ruin everything.” The venom in her voice surprised Sylvie, and it showed. Cachita elaborated. “They don’t care about the women, or any of it. They just want to—”

  “Ladies, a minute of your time?”

  “Go to hell,” Sylvie said. His face flushed beneath the streetlamps; Sylvie hadn’t bothered to lower her voice and the passersby on the street were beginning to gawk. Not interfere, of course, but gawk.

  Still, maybe that was good enough. Before she could put her hasty and crappy plan into action, Cachita stamped her foot suddenly, a sharp clack like gunfire echoing into the night.

  The man drew his gun, jumpy, and the crowd mood shifted.

  “We’re over with,” Cachita shrilled. “I told you and told you! I’m with Sylvie now, and you’ll just have to—I got a restraining order. You’re not supposed to get this close. Someone call the cops!”

  Cell phones sprouted everywhere, and most of them were probably just filming so that people’s Twitter feeds could be enlivened by someone else’s drama.

  Sylvie smirked at the suddenly wary ISI; they were screwed. Demalion had had the same problem when she’d met him. Secret agencies weren’t allowed to just flash badges. She draped an arm around Cachita’s heaving shoulders, shoved her toward the truck.

  Sylvie opened the passenger door, slid across, dragged Cachita in after her. Key in the ignition, and Sylvie got the hell out of there before the ISI could really regroup. Cachita had been loud. And quite a capable actress.

  Cachita flung herself up onto the seat beside her, grinning. “Take a left up at the light.”

  Sylvie huffed but did. Guess she was going to see what Cachita had to show her.

  Cachita looked back over her shoulder. “Who would have thought?”

  “‘Thought’?” Sylvie prompted, watching the traffic ebb and surge around them, a smear of red taillights and dark asphalt. She didn’t see the ISI.

  “They’re not really very good at their jobs, are they?” Cachita asked.

  “They’re big believers in retreating to fight again,” Sylvie said. “They’ll be back. We’re not done with trouble, yet.”

  9

  The Girl Reporter and the God

  CACHITA LIVED IN AN OLD TWENTIES-ERA HOUSE, ALL CURVED stucco arches and rounded corners, and the cracked tiles were soft and sandy beneath Sylvie’s shoes. Cachita’s heels made small gritty rasps as she led the way in. Sudden movement drew Sylvie’s attention: In the tiny, overgrown garden, a cat streaked after a pallid gecko that made the mistake of touching ground.

  As she watched, more sinuous forms took shape, slinking curls of shadows; every bush seemed to have a cat beneath it.

  “My neighbor’s a cat lady,” Cachita said. She seemed embarrassed. “So of course, her cats use my yard as their litter box. If I were the house-proud type, I’d be on the phone to the landlord so fast—”

  She flipped on the light, gestured Sylvie inside, and shut the door behind them. Paper rustled with their entrance, and Sylvie blinked.

  Cachita might be computer savvy, but she loved her paper. The living-room wall was a shaggy mess of printouts stapled directly into the stucco.

  Definitely not the house-proud type, Sylvie thought with a hidden grin. Then she saw the subject of the files, and her smile faded. There were easily two hundred sheets stapled on top of each other, next to each other, overlapping, underpinned, a combination of photographs and text, and one entire row seemed dedicated to Sylvie herself.

  Cachita even had a photograph of her, scowling into a paper cup of coffee. Sylvie recognized that moment; she’d ordered an Americano and been given a mocha. It was the morning she’d taken Detective Lio Suarez to see what had become of his son’s killers. She’d been tense and cranky and apparently careless enough to miss someone snapping candids.

  “Don’t get weird,” Cachita said. “I’m not a stalker. I just believe in knowing my subjects.”

  “I thought you were concerned with the missing women,” Sylvie said. “Not a PI.”

  “Hey, you’ve got a rep,” Cachita said. “You think I’d just walk up to you without knowing what to expect?” She tapped a cluster of papers, six deep, and said, “Testimonials, of a sort.”

  Sylvie yanked them from the wall, folded them tight, and shoved them into her bag. “Leave me out of your surveillance,” she said.

  “Paranoid,” Cachita said. “Leave that alone and look at this.” She kicked off her shoes, padded over to her laptop, and plugged in the memory stick.

  Sylvie took a couple of steps toward her, then froze. A picture and a name. Jennifer Costas. A high-school glamour shot, all soft focus and dreamy smile. Sylvie thought of Jennifer screaming, burning beneath a god’s touch, and looked away.

  Guess her research wasn’t that bad after all.

  Sylvie moved to the next picture—unfamiliar—and the next—familiar. She compared the woman to her memory and made a match. Lupe Fernandez, one of the spellbound women. A college
student at Miami Dade Community College, according to Cachita’s notes, in the nursing program. Lupe grinned in her photo, an arm slung around another girl, both of them wearing rainbow beads.

  She looked at the wall again. If each row was a woman—

  She swallowed. There were far more than five women missing. And Cachita hadn’t had Maria Ruben on her list.

  Christ, her city was under siege, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  “The first one, Ana Cortez, disappeared two months ago,” Cachita said. Sylvie studied the picture, but it was unfamiliar. If Azpiazu’s descendant had taken her, she was dead and gone already, her body sunk somewhere in the Everglades, alligator food.

  “How many?”

  Cachita lifted a shoulder. “There are seventeen women who’ve gone missing in the city that I know of. Out of those, thirteen seem like they might be related to this bastard. There’s a type he goes for.”

  “Young, Hispanic, female.”

  “Atheist. At least, most of them.”

  She gestured at a cluster of photographs. Sylvie picked out three more familiar faces: Anamaria Garcia, student teacher; Rita Martinez, bartender, single parent—a secondary photo of a young girl was stapled beneath; and Jennifer Costas’s replacement, stolen just the night before, Elena Llosa. The girl was ridiculously young, made Sylvie think of Zoe. Her hand fell to her cell phone in her pocket, but she refrained. What would she say? “Just thinking about you”? “Hoping you’re careful”? At best, she’d get a huff of irritation. At worst, a pissed-off teenager asserting her independence.

  “Atheist,” Sylvie said. That was unusual. Most of Miami’s Hispanic population were brought up in a dozen shades of religious. Everything from holiday devotions to daily prayers. Young women who were atheist enough to make it a real point in their lives were not that common.

  It made sense, though, went with Jennifer Costas’s ghostly lament. If Azpiazu was bartering with the women’s souls for a god’s aid, the women would have to be atheist. A god stealing another god’s follower was more than a divine faux pas; it was an act of war that could ripple through the pantheons.