by Lyn Benedict
Sylvie stopped the truck, left it skewed in front of the office, heedless of traffic. The blinds had been drawn down; sunlight reflected off the front door, turning it mirror opaque when she needed it to be clear. To give her even that tiny warning as to what she might find.
She put one hand on the holster, another on the latch. Pushed. The door wasn’t locked.
Alex looked up, face pale to her very lips. Her bright makeup looked garish on her bones. “Sylvie—”
Her attention was already drawn elsewhere, to the unexpected presence in the room. Not Azpiazu after all. Erinya. The Fury stood with her back against the wall, her claws leaving deep gouges in the plaster. Curls of paint and plaster dust made bright confetti on her dark boots.
“I didn’t mean to,” Alex blurted. “I’m so sorry. She surprised me, and I was on the phone with him. I said his name.”
Sylvie closed her eyes. Demalion.
Erinya bared all her teeth. “He ghost-jacked a body. Just like Patrice. Trying to escape the inevitable. Where is he, Sylvie?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“I’ll find him myself.”
“Then why are you still here?”
Erinya’s eyes burned bloody and bright; Alex ducked her head and whimpered.
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “That’s right. You aren’t as good at scenting humans as your sister. And his scent’s changed.”
“Tell me.”
“No,” Sylvie said.
“I won’t tell you either, so you can just . . . just . . . go away!” Alex’s defiance—brave, but stupid—started out strong, went shrill when dark feathers spiked along Erinya’s spine, when her head lowered and went bestial.
“Oh god, please!” Alex yelped, and before Sylvie could move to step between them, Erinya backed down. Shook the Fury aspect off, looked . . . chastened.
“I’ll get it out of Sylvie, then,” Erinya said.
“You know you won’t,” Sylvie said.
Erinya threw a chair at the wall; it slammed into the plaster and stuck for a moment, dangling by a leg thrown with enough force to become a spear. When the chair landed, Erinya crashed onto it, shredding the heavy wood and leather to matchsticks.
“You all right?” Sylvie asked Alex. Let Erinya destroy the furniture, keep her occupied. “Not hurt?”
Alex shook her head.
It was an unlooked-for boon. Sylvie had seen Erinya yank information from a woman’s mind, leaving trauma and coma behind. But she hadn’t hurt Alex.
Sylvie doubted it was out of respect for her. “Go home, then. Lock the doors. Be careful, Alex. I thought Azpiazu had come to get you. He still might. He still needs another element to his spell.”
“Atheists,” Alex said, “right? Unclaimed soul. I’m safe, then.”
Erinya snarled, a vibrating hum in her throat something like a growl, something like a swallowed howl. Pure frustration.
Was that why?
Alex believed so deeply that the Fury couldn’t interfere with another god’s worshipper? Sylvie couldn’t believe it. Alex had never been religious, gently mocked those who were.
“She’s marked,” Erinya said.
That said it all. Alex hadn’t chosen to believe; she’d been chosen. And it had happened under Sylvie’s nose.
“Marked?” Sylvie asked. “How. When. Who.” It came out rapid-fire. Furious. Gods were too damned greedy.
“None of your business,” Alex said. Her chin came up. Her color slowly returned.
“Eros,” Erinya said. Slapping back at Alex the only way she could. Spilling her secrets. “He touches something, then he wants to keep it. Greedy boy. When he saved her life, he claimed it for his own.”
“Can I break the mark?”
“I don’t want you to!” Alex snapped. “Okay, Syl? It doesn’t hurt me. It doesn’t hurt anything. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just there. And hey, it’s apparently protecting me.”
“You want to be someone’s possession?”
“We all are, one way or another,” Alex said. Erinya skulked around behind her, trying to get access to the laptop. Abruptly Sylvie realized why Alex hadn’t run from the Fury in the first place. Not just because it was a fool’s instinct to run from a creature who chased. But to stay and protect the data. Demalion’s contact info.
Alex slid the laptop under the desk, shielding it as if Erinya’s setting eyes on it would be enough to give her the information she sought.
All of Sylvie’s borderline rage at Alex fled. Scared nearly witless and still thinking. Still trying to do the right thing. “The mark doesn’t hurt?”
Alex bit her lip, rubbed off some of the foundation at her cheek. A blushy bruise, like the press of a fingertip, lay at the crest of her cheekbone. “Where he kissed me to heal me.”
“It doesn’t hurt?” Sylvie asked again. More intently.
Alex blushed, obscuring the mark altogether. “No. It . . . I get dreams sometimes.”
“Nightmares?”
Erinya scoffed. Alex’s lips curved. “No. Very definitely not nightmares.”
Sylvie raised a brow. “Oh.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. The blush on her cheeks spread downward, and Sylvie turned back to Erinya.
“So you’re sticking around until I give you the information you want, right?”
“Yes,” Erinya said. “I can be patient.”
“Got a mangled chair and a bunch of memories that say otherwise. How ’bout I give you something else to do. We’re hunting a would-be god.”
Erinya laughed. “I should strip-mine your mind, take the information. You refuse to belong to any god. You’re fair game.”
“But not easy game,” Sylvie said. “I kicked you out of my head before. And that was when I didn’t have someone to protect. C’mon, Eri. Help us hunt.”
“No,” Erinya said. “I don’t get what I want? You don’t get what you want.”
She and Sylvie bared teeth at each other in unwilling stalemate.
THE DOOR OPENED, AND CACHITA CAME IN, HEAD DOWN, MUMBLING something urgent, rummaging through her purse, utterly oblivious. Sylvie hung her own head in exasperation. She’d warned Cachita they might be facing Azpiazu, and this was how the woman entered the room?
Cachita looked up, and Sylvie’s disgust faded. Cachita’s eyes had gone from warm brown to panic black. When she brought her hand out of her purse, it came clutching a shark-tooth-shaped dagger, black obsidian, gold handled, and sharp enough that her fingers were already bleeding from brushing up against it.
The blood against the blade changed the feel of the room. Tiny tremors traveled the walls; beneath Sylvie, the floor seemed to rise and fall as if the office were suddenly asea.
“Hey, no!” Sylvie said. Cachita hadn’t come in distracted. Cachita had come in halfway through her Tepeyollotlsummoning ritual. “Cachita, stop it. It’s not Azpiazu! It’s not—”
Too late, really. The room shifted and blurred, took on the thick, heady scent of tropical jungles; a jaguar’s cough roughed the air. Erinya morphed so quickly, Sylvie found herself shoved into the wall to make room for Erinya’s full Fury shape.
Four-legged, big as a bear, long and lean and supple. A creature designed to chase and kill, feathers and scale, beak and teeth and rage. Erinya shrieked defiance. Sylvie clapped hands over her ears, tried to figure out the odds of the coming fight taking out all bystanders.
Gods of different pantheons chose not to interact, a mutual-avoidance pact. Erinya . . . she wasn’t a god. Just a demigod. Sylvie had the sinking suspicion that meant a brawl was inevitable. Erinya was threatened, and a threatened Fury was a violent one. And Tepeyollotl, summoned by his human agent, would come ready to kill. If not Azpiazu, anything that threatened his agent.
Sylvie put one hand on Erinya’s spiky back, felt the scales rip at her palm, and scrambled over Erinya, slamming Cachita into the door, spilling them both through it and onto the curb, scattering the passersby who’d stopped, gawking at the office. Eri
nya’s curses still blistered the air. The front window, already cracked by the bullet, started to chip away, to patter bits of glass downward like hail.
Sylvie clapped a hand over Cachita’s mouth, still moving, though Cachita’s eyes showed the woman had checked out. Around them, people cried out, the hunt for someone to do something.
The sidewalk juddered beneath them, an undulation of concrete as hard on their human skin as shark scale. Sylvie grabbed Cachita’s wrist, shook the knife out of her grip. It skidded away, smoking where Cachita’s blood had touched it.
A woman shrieked as it butted up against her flip-flop, drawing another bead of blood. Sylvie lunged, grabbed the screaming woman’s bottled water, ripped the cap off, and dumped it over the blade. The smoke dwindled, disappeared.
Sylvie held her breath. The trembling in the world slowed but continued.
“Tell him not to come,” Sylvie said. “Tell him you made a mistake.”
Cachita gasped for air, fumbled her way upright, reached for the blade. Sylvie fielded her off. “No. Tell him, Cachita. Tell him we don’t need him now.”
“I can’t—”
“All spells run in two directions,” Sylvie snapped. “A door opens, but it also closes.”
She looked at their audience, some familiar faces—her mercantile neighbors more aggravated than frightened—and some not. A cop car turned onto the street.
“Fuck,” Sylvie muttered. She dragged Cachita to her feet, dragged her and the blade inside, shoved Cachita straight into Erinya. “Look!”
Cachita did. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she went down as if Sylvie had coldcocked her.
“Fuck,” Sylvie said again. There was a . . . hole . . . forming in the ceiling of her office, a place where the earthquake warp was strongest. Where Tepeyollotl was investigating Cachita’s call. She drew her gun.
Erinya leaped upward, slashing, biting, shrieking at the gap. Sylvie’s heart rocketed. This was all going to see them turned into meaty gobbets of godly cat chow. She couldn’t see Alex, could barely see Cachita; all her instincts insisted she keep Erinya in her view.
A good thing, too, as her barbed tail lashed across the space Sylvie had just vacated.
Sylvie rolled, grabbed Cachita, shook her back to consciousness.
“What—what is that?” Cachita asked.
“That is less trouble than the god you’ve called,” Sylvie shouted. “Send him back!”
Tepeyollotl shimmered partway into existence—a world-warping blur of cat and man, spots and gold, sweltering heat and jungle scent and growling. Where his body touched, smoke rose.
Sylvie felt his presence like a scalding wind and shuddered. The worst part of it all was that this was just a precursor. Some type of scout—a thinned-out shadow of the god; Tepeyollotl responding only halfheartedly to Cachita’s aborted call.
Still didn’t mean his shadow wouldn’t kill them.
Erinya charged him, fearless, furious.
The sound they made as they collided wasn’t anything as simple as two bodies in motion; their collision rang like imperfect metal just before it shattered. Cachita sobbed; Sylvie crouched low, gun clenched uselessly in her hand.
It was over as fast as it had begun. Tepeyollotl protested once more, a petulant roar of surprise and pain, and disappeared. Erinya spat out a piece of hide large enough to make a coat. It smoked and stank like burning blood and herbs.
Erinya’s tail lashed and lashed; her back rolled in waves of spikes.
A gentle touch wrapped itself around Sylvie’s wrist; she jerked and found Alex creeping up beside her. Unharmed. Eyes wild and wide, but unharmed.
“Alex—”
“We don’t need a closet,” Alex breathed out. “We need a safe room. Magically and physically reinforced. I don’t care if we empty the savings account.”
“Agreed,” Sylvie said.
“All right, then,” Alex said. She slumped against Sylvie’s side. “You gonna do something about that?”
“That” being the Fury, still smashing the office furniture to bits, still climbing the walls, gouging holes in the terrazzo, in the ceiling struts, snarling, drooling bloody spittle across the floor.
“She’s pissed at me already,” Sylvie said. “I think we’re going to sit here and let her work her way down to sane again.”
Cachita whimpered. “Can we run?”
“Last thing we’d do,” Sylvie said. “Sit tight, Cachita.”
“What is it?” Cachita whispered. She shrank back when Erinya whipped her head around to look at them all, then huffed in disgust.
Cachita put her hand over her mouth, trying to hide even her breath. The tiny cuts on her hands left blood on her cheeks. Erinya looked like she wanted to investigate, slunk off the wall, crept across the floor, claws screeking, and Sylvie said, “Uh-uh, Eri. You got lucky. You surprised the god. Don’t bring him back by trying to eat his chosen one, okay?”
The front door swung open; a patrol officer put his head in, saying, “Everything all righ—Holy fuck!”
Erinya pounced, pinned him between her front paws, and Sylvie said, “Eri, please!”
The Fury tasted the man’s neck, hesitated, breathing heat and hunger that Sylvie could feel all the way across the room. Then she pushed him back. “Go away, good man.” The patrolman took the dismissal as the command it was and ran.
A virtuous cop, Sylvie thought. Nice. The relaxation rolling through her body was making her dazed with it.
Erinya shook her entire body, shedding agitation like a dog shedding water, slowly dwindled inward, until there was nothing but a crouching goth girl snarling, incongruous in human-shaped vocal cords.
Cachita shook harder. Sylvie said, “Caridad Valdes-Pedraza? Meet Erinya. One of the Eumenides. A Fury. And if you think she’s dangerous? If you think she’s piss-your-pants scary? You’d be right. But you know what she isn’t? She’s not even a full god. Think about that before you shout for Tepeyollotl again. Think about how much worse it would be to deal with a full god in a rage. That’s what you’re wanting to bring down to earth.”
THE OFFICE WASN’T QUIET YET: TOO FULL OF THEIR RAPID BREATHS, OF the ringing patter of falling glass, and furniture breaking down further under its own weight. Even the walls were creaking, settling as if Tepeyollotl’s earthquaking appearance had left them perched above a sinkhole.
“It’s too late,” Cachita said, finally, her voice a rasp. “I’ve called him. He’s primed now. He’ll be checking in.”
“Then we need to get Azpiazu sorted before—”
“Deal with me first,” Erinya said, interrupting them. “I want Demalion.”
“I want peace and quiet,” Sylvie said. “I want supernatural guests who don’t shred my workplace.”
Erinya slung herself into Sylvie’s personal space, a smooth lunge and crouch, black-painted lips peeling back to show red gums and sharp white teeth. “I want Demalion dead.”
“He died,” Sylvie said. “You killed him.”
“He didn’t stay that way. His soul should be languishing, tormented for his misdeeds.”
“Then go hunt for him and leave us alone,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got bigger problems.”
“I’ll help you,” Erinya said abruptly. “This Azpiazu. I can find him for you. And you’ll give me Demalion—”
“I won’t,” Sylvie said.
“I could take it from you.”
“You could try,” Sylvie growled.
Alex and Cachita protested at the same time, their fright like a dash of cold water to her own rising temper.
“Let’s make a deal,” Sylvie said. “I won’t give you Demalion. But . . . I can make it worth your while.”
Erinya gave Sylvie her back, heading toward the door, bootheels clicking.
“Erinya,” Sylvie said. “Dunne can have me when I die. I’ll hunt with you.”
Alex squeaked, and Sylvie slashed her hand down, shutting off further protest from without and within. Her little dark voic
e was a drowning cry of objections. Negotiations didn’t work with interruptions.
The Fury stopped in her tracks. “You’ll be a Fury?” She came back toward Sylvie, all slink and hunger and quivering hope. She got close enough to sniff reluctant sincerity from Sylvie’s flesh and mind, but hesitated. “When you die . . . That could be such a very long time away.”
“You’re immortal. Be patient,” Sylvie said.
“You’re the new Lilith,” Erinya said. More objections. “The Christian God might have plans—”
Alex looked intrigued, and Sylvie grimaced. She didn’t want Alex poking into the “new Lilith” business. Not until Sylvie’d had the time to do some investigating on her own.
“I make my own choices,” Sylvie said. “Always have.”
Erinya rolled her shoulders as if settling the idea into her skin.
“Would you help us for that? Help us kill Azpiazu?”
“I can’t,” Erinya said. “Find him, okay, yeah. But he’s Tepeyollotl’s chosen. I can’t just step in between them and rip his head off any more than I could shake the truth out of your girl.”
Sylvie said, “I’m not sure I want to give my soul over for tracking abilities. I can find Azpiazu on my own.”
“Mortals have time constraints.”
“I can work fast—”
“Sylvie!” Alex interrupted their bargaining. Her hands were tight on Sylvie’s forearm. “Sylvie, listen!”
The street outside had grown quiet. No more bystander noise. No traffic. No cops. Nothing. All the hairs on Sylvie’s body stood up. “Something’s coming.”
“Hunters,” Erinya said. “Human hunters.”
The remnants of the plate-glass window shattered as a smoking cylinder crashed through it, streaming . . .
“Tear gas?” Sylvie gasped out. Regretted it as the movement of her breath brought the gas billowing into her face. It was like inhaling an angry jellyfish. Her nose stung, her mouth burned, her eyes spat tears in a vain attempt to soothe the irritation. She coughed, clenched her hands by her sides, controlling the urge to rub at the burn, to scrub it off her skin. She knew it wouldn’t work.
