by Lyn Benedict
Her voice was shrieking warning; this was not how any confrontation with a bad-magic witch was supposed to go.
“Kill her now, Aron.”
Aron hesitated, his eyes bright on Sylvie’s, amused still. “What do you think, Shadows? You think you can get to her before I get to you?” There was a hunger in his voice, a fierce vibration that suggested this was what he’d wanted all along: some type of cage match that he could enjoy.
“I can try,” Sylvie said, moving even as she spoke, heading straight for Patrice. Hesitation was fatal, no matter the situation. She aimed—sighting at Patrice’s startled face—pulled the trigger. The sound was loud, louder than their voices had been. It cracked the illusion around them. The tourists scattered like a flock of wild birds, still blind to the players, but not to the danger. One of them cried out, clapped a hand over her calf.
Bullet wound.
Patrice simpered at Sylvie, but her eyes showed the whites all around. Her hand clutched nervously at one of her oversized earrings.
Protection charm.
Deflection.
Sylvie had just shot the tourist.
Fuck.
But Patrice had betrayed herself with that one gesture—showing Sylvie where her protection lay. Sylvie tackled Patrice, slapped her hand over the earring, and yanked at it.
It didn’t come off; the flesh around it didn’t yield. Invulnerability, then.
Aron began to whisper, his husky voice drawing tighter, lighter, and strangely familiar. A chant. A spell. Something. It lacked the focused energy she had come to expect from magical workings, but it diverted the attention Sylvie’s shot had drawn.
Patrice squalled like a skinned cat, shrieking Aron’s name. He broke off the chant and threw himself into the battle.
He wasn’t a witch, Sylvie realized abruptly, taking the brunt of his weight across her shoulders as she twisted away. She elbowed him sharply in the nose, and he jerked back.
Holding back, she thought. Playing with her? Or . . .
He wasn’t an enemy.
Or was he?
There was real rage in his eyes. It didn’t seem directed at her, though. Didn’t seem directed at all, just free-floating fury.
She slipped free from his grasp, his hands like steel but failing to close tightly enough on her bones. Patrice scrambled toward the sidewalk, through the grass; lizards and a quick black scuttling scorpion fled her.
Sylvie slammed into the girl, using her longer reach, her heavier weight, knelt on the woman’s back. Patrice screeched and clawed, tore gouges in Sylvie’s wrists, but Sylvie undid the clasp on the earring and yanked it away.
Patrice screamed loud and long, shrill enough to make Sylvie recoil. The woman staggered upright and ran. Aron caught her in three swift strides.
“I paid you!” she shrieked.
“Someone else hired me first,” he said. His hands closed over her neck and face; he drew her close as if to kiss her, then wrenched.
A wet, gristly sound and Patrice’s body dropped, knees folding, torso slapping wetly into the grass. Her head, eyes still fluttering, fell a moment later. Aron licked blood off of his fingers and turned back toward Sylvie.
Definitely not a witch, not even a sorcerer, Sylvie thought. Her heart raced; her gun was tight in her hands.
“Gonna shoot me? Again?”
A Power in the city as well as a god. A Power that was looking at Sylvie expectantly. Eagerly. Hungry down to the core. She thought she recognized it. Impossible as it seemed.
“No praise?” he said. “I did it for you.”
She licked dry lips, studied the gothy clothing, the simmering hunger, and took refuge in words. “Seems to me, I did more than my fair share. I got the charm off.”
“I could have done it,” he said. “But I thought you’d want to participate. You like your vengeance, Sylvie.”
“I’m not the one yanking heads off in a public park. With children present.”
“Children should know that monsters can be killed,” Aron said. “Patrice killed two children for her selfish purposes, an infant and that girl whose body she wore. But if it makes you happy, I’ll keep her invisible until you clean her up.”
“Me?”
“I cleaned up after you in Chicago.”
If Sylvie had any lingering doubts about who Aron was, they were fading fast. Especially when he slumped, crossed his arms across his narrow chest, and sulked, spiky black hair loosening and settling like storm clouds over his brow. “You don’t even recognize me, do you.”
“I do,” Sylvie said.
“Yeah?”
“Erinya,” Sylvie named her. The youngest of the Fury trio that worked for Dunne. She was rewarded with a quick smile that bared those vampiric veneers again. Wait. Not veneers after all, not if this was the Fury.
“Took you long enough. I thought you’d know me at the club. I even rubbed up against you, and you couldn’t tell? I came when you called, and you weren’t there. You didn’t even leave me instructions! I had to figure out what you summoned me for all on my own.”
“Cut me some slack,” Sylvie said. “I thought Dunne destroyed you. I saw him devour you when he needed your strength.”
“He absorbed us,” Aron said. “And when he didn’t need us any longer, he spat us back out. Refined us, he said. I hunt specific types of murderers now.”
“Child-killers,” Sylvie said. Of course. It explained the other murders in the city. All people who’d killed children.
Erinya grinned. “It’s a fertile field to play in. Alekta couldn’t wrap her mind around change, so she’s still dealing with matricides, patricides, families gone bad. And Magdala got stuck with crimes committed against society. Bo-ring, just like her.”
“Reshaped you, too,” Sylvie said. “Guess he always wanted a boy?”
“What? This? No,” Aron-Erinya said. “I thought Patrice would like it, and I wanted to get close to her, wanted to draw out the hunt. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Do you like this shape?”
Sylvie opened her mouth to say something in response to Erinya’s violent and unsubtle flirtations and failed. She forgave herself; there was a lot to process—that through a scratchy symbol drawn on a doorstep based on instructions Sylvie’d given herself in a dream, she’d called Erinya down to Miami. That there was anything to call . . . the Furies not gone.
A brief spurt of terror touched her. Demalion. If the Furies were alive and hunting, Demalion’s safety was precarious.
“Refined, my ass,” Sylvie muttered finally. “It’s your body, your choice. My preference is irrelevant.”
“Doesn’t have to be,” Aron said. He shook all over like a wet dog, flipped gender. Took on the more familiar form, the punk gothette. It really wasn’t that much of a change. Aron had been long and lean, androgynous. So was Erinya. “So. The body?”
Sylvie’s head ached. She looked down at the blood-spattered grass. Bella Alvarez hadn’t been a big girl. It wouldn’t be much effort to cart her body away. Or they could just leave her. An unsolved murder, committed impossibly in broad daylight.
Even if the murder hadn’t happened practically in her backyard, Bella/Patrice could be linked to Sylvie easily enough through Lio. And Lio thought poorly enough of her at the moment that he might do something rash, something like talking to the ISI. If Bella disappeared, Lio’d be unhappy but unable to get the justice system rolling.
Sylvie said, “You get the body. I’ll get the head.”
Erinya shifted foot to foot. “But I did all the work.”
“I’m the one who summoned you to do it,” Sylvie said. “Cleanup’s part of the job.”
“Fine,” Erinya said. She bent, scooped up the body; blood dribbled down her shoulder. “Where’s your truck?”
Sylvie said, “Give me your jacket.”
“Again?” Erinya dropped the body, shrugged off the jacket. “You’re hard on my clothes, Sylvie. It’s a good thing I like you.”
>
“It’s a good thing you like bloodstains,” Sylvie said. She spread the jacket on the ground, toed Patrice’s head into the center, and made a neat bundle of it. “Can’t you just magic her away?”
“Not and keep us invisible,” Erinya said. “I’m not really good at the magic part. I’m good at the killing-things part.”
“Yeah, I get you,” Sylvie said. Her mouth stung; she realized she was smiling, straining her split lip. Smiling over a dead body. She stopped.
Erinya sighed. “I’m going to ask Dunne to make you a Fury when you die. You and I can hunt forever. I know he worries about what he should do with you.”
“Nothing,” Sylvie said, “I’m not his.”
“You fight for justice,” Erinya said. “You could be his, no matter your lineage. When it came to it, when you asked for help, for vengeance . . . you drew the scales of justice on Patrice’s doorstep.”
“Tell you what,” Sylvie said. “We move the body now. And God and Dunne can fight over my soul when I’m dead.”
“But that could be such a very long time,” Erinya said.
“Not the way my life is going,” Sylvie said.
“Yeah,” Erinya agreed. “You should be more careful. Tepeyollotl’s skulking around, and he’s a real bastard god. If he hates you, you get your heart ripped out. If he loves you, you get your heart ripped out. Oh! You should take Patrice’s invulnerability charm. It’s not as good as Lilith’s was. It’s only a temporary one, but it’ll help you.”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Those things have hidden costs. I wear it, and someone else suffers, right? Like the tourist who got clipped by a bullet meant for Patrice?”
“Could have been a bad ricochet,” Erinya said. “Guns are no fun. Always best to fight teeth to teeth.”
“That’s not an answer,” Sylvie said.
“Always so suspicious,” Erinya pouted.
“Am I right?”
“Fine. Yes. The talisman would bounce your injuries, your death, to someone else.”
“No,” Sylvie said.
“But you’re more fun than other people,” Erinya said. “You’re sneaky and you’re dangerous and you brought me good sport. A ghost that changed bodies to escape death. I didn’t know humans could do that.”
Sylvie’s breath stuttered in her chest; she stumbled. Patrice’s head squelched nastily inside the jacket. Erinya paused, predatory instincts firing. “Sylvie?” It was a growl.
“Tripped,” Sylvie said.
Erinya’s dark-eyed gaze narrowed; her eyes burned out, leaving black pits in her head. Her hair shifted and spiked toward feathers, losing control of the quasi-human form and taking on the pure aspect of Fury. Sylvie jerked her eyes away, focused them on the safer sight of the lumpy jacket in her arms, growing steadily damper and darker. Looking a Fury in the eyes led to nightmares at best, madness at worst.
Her day was too full for either option.
“You smell like . . . secrets,” Erinya said, keeping pace with her. Her feet on the pavement were clawed; leathery boots shifted into sinewy legs and strong paws.
“It’s my job,” Sylvie said. “Lots of secrets.”
Warmth along the side of her face, and the pinprick of needle teeth closing gently, warningly, along her nape. Sylvie stopped. Her heart rocketed. Erinya would be tasting fear, along with sweat and adrenaline and secrecy.
Sylvie dropped Patrice’s head, punched Erinya in the muzzle as hard as she could. Her knuckles split; the skin of her neck stung as Erinya’s teeth were jarred free.
“Get off me,” Sylvie said. She drew her gun, turned to face the monster. “Look, Eri, I’m probably happier than I should be that you’re not gone, not dead. That doesn’t mean I won’t do my best to make you that way if needed.”
“Something . . . important,” Erinya said. She turned her head this way and that, that strange nightmare creature, half dog, half bird, all hunger. Her forked tongue tasted the air, cleaned the thin smear of Sylvie’s blood from her curving teeth. “I’ll find out.”
“You know what?” Sylvie said. “Leave the body. I’ll take care of it. You, go back to Dunne.”
Erinya laughed, shifting back toward her human guise. Her smile had no warmth in it. “You’re not the boss of me, Sylvie.”
“I summoned you; doesn’t that count?”
“That’s the trouble with calling in mercenaries,” Erinya said. “They’re hard to control. They like to be paid. Give me something, and I’ll leave your secrets alone.”
“And here I thought you were on a god-given mission,” Sylvie said. She picked up Patrice’s head again, grimacing at the splotch it had left on the pavement, and headed for the truck. She focused her thoughts on practical matters, tried to soothe the worry from her mind and body. Erinya’s senses were sharper than any animal’s, and she coupled that with rudimentary mind reading. Sylvie thought hard about whether she’d left the tarp in the truck lockbox, whether the olive fabric would be enough to hide stains, whether the tide was right to drop a body, and when all of those didn’t ease the suspicion on Erinya’s face, she went for the sure shot. She thought of Patrice, dead. Sylvie’s own guilty satisfaction that Patrice wasn’t going to prosper. That her enemy was destroyed.
A sated smile curved Erinya’s lips; her lashes came down, changing anger to pleasure. “I did good.”
“Yeah, you did,” Sylvie said. She gave the praise without hesitation. For one thing, a happy Erinya was an Erinya less likely to pry. For another . . . Well, it had been a job neatly done.
Sylvie had hoped for a more subtle way to kill Patrice. She’d hoped for something that could pass for a medical condition. As far as the world was concerned, Bella Alvarez had already had one serious medical episode. But, once Patrice had started throwing witches Sylvie’s way, it could only end violently.
Erinya slung the body into the back of the truck without even a shrug of effort, wrapped it with the tarp, and climbed into the cab humming tunelessly. Sylvie shivered. It was a human thing to do, and it sounded nothing like human at all. She put the truck into gear and headed out.
Erinya stayed with her long enough to see Patrice’s body slip beneath the deep waters, weighted down with broken concrete and rebar, before vanishing. Sylvie hoped the Fury had gone back to Dunne, to Olympus, to anyplace other than Miami. She didn’t even let a wisp of Chicago cross her mind. Erinya’s disappearance was a bullet dodged. Made Sylvie crazy, though. If she hadn’t been carrying that dangerous secret, she might have been able to recruit Erinya to fight against Azpiazu.
Sylvie ran the truck through a car wash, rinsing off any blood that might have seeped into the back, and called it done.
14
Mirror Mirror
SEEN IN FULL DAYLIGHT, CACHITA’S HOUSE SEEMED ALL THE MORE out of place in what was otherwise a nice old neighborhood. Sylvie parked the truck in front of the massively overgrown lawn, scattering lizards and spotted cats. Feeling eyes on her, she turned. Cachita’s next-door neighbor stood in the doorway, staring over at Sylvie. When she realized she had Sylvie’s attention, she beckoned imperiously.
Sylvie gritted her teeth but adjusted her path. The woman, dressed neatly in jeans and a silk shell, looked like the type to get difficult if thwarted. Sylvie wasn’t in the mood for difficult. She forded the grass and stepped onto the neighbor’s close-clipped lawn.
“Are you with the city?” the woman asked. She was younger than Sylvie had thought. In her fifties, not the seventies she had imagined when Cachita had mentioned her cat-crazy neighbor.
“Nope,” Sylvie said. “Just visiting.”
“She’s your friend?” The woman’s mouth wrinkled in disgust.
“Not that either,” Sylvie said.
“Well, tell her I’ve called the city. She needs to get her house cleaned up. It’s an eyesore. It’s always been an eyesore, but we were assured the new tenant was going to fix it up.”
“Your cats seem to be enjoying it,” Sylvie said. “Isn’t there some li
mit to how many you’re allowed?”
The woman’s brows rose sky-high. “My cats? They’re not mine. They came with her.”
Sylvie absorbed that with a spark of strangely potent anger, nodded once, and stalked off the woman’s lawn.
“Where are you going? I’m not done.”
“Don’t care,” Sylvie said. She stormed up Cachita’s front path, pounded on the door. When there was no answer, she studied the warped front door, the gap that let AC bleed out. She kicked hard just beside the latch; the door groaned. She shifted her weight, braced herself better, and kicked again. The latch ripped through the humidity-rotted wood frame, and the door slammed open.
Sylvie kicked it shut behind her, found Cachita scrambling out of her bedroom, Taser in hand, bare feet, and panicked.
Recognition blossomed as Sylvie snapped on the overhead light, but her expression stayed wary.
“Did you lie about absolutely everything?” Sylvie asked. “Even your goddamned cats?”
Cachita’s shoulders drew tight, then dropped. She said, “You going to shoot me? Or you going to wait for answers?”
“You’re the one with the Taser,” Sylvie said.
“You’re the one with the gun,” Cachita said. Her eyes flickered downward.
Sylvie followed her gaze. One thing Cachita was right about. Sylvie didn’t even remember unholstering the gun.
Fallout from killing Patrice, from hanging out with a Fury. Her temper burned hotter and faster than usual. And that was saying something.
“How ’bout we both put our toys away,” Cachita said. Her voice quivered.
Another act? Or honest fear? Sylvie hated that she didn’t know. “You first.”
Cachita bit her lip, running calculations.
“I’ve got the gun,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got the advantage here.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got nosy neighbors.”
“Put it down,” Sylvie said.
Cachita sighed, let the Taser drop. “Happy?”
“Not even close.” Sylvie gestured Cachita closer, edged around her, picked up and pocketed the Taser; only then did she holster the gun.
