Gods & Monsters si-3

by Lyn Benedict

  Rustling in the underbrush and a skink oiled out before her, slipping clumsily through the grass, two heads drawing it in different directions. She watched it, struck by the freak show of it, and stepped onto a path that crunched. The gravel was dark and pale at once, as patterned as a copperhead. The paler splotches gave beneath her feet with small cracks and pops until she realized they were skeletal frogs. An entire pond’s worth.

  Dead doves. Now this.

  The last doubt in her mind that she might be blundering into some innocent’s house crumbled.

  Tepeyollotl might not be physically present, but something of him was seeping through the curse—his power fueling it, his power that Azpiazu was warping. God-power spilling out and messing with the world.

  Several acres over, she heard a car pull up, a garage door churn into mechanical life. The neighbors weren’t going to notice anything, focused on the homecoming transition. She wondered if they’d noticed any changes in their own little worlds, or if they’d just shrugged them off.

  Recon, she thought. Take a look, get a grip on the situation, get Wales’s take on it, then come back better informed and armed for bear.

  Or monster.

  The backyard, accessed by a quick climb over a stucco wall, yielded a gardener’s paradise. Sylvie, used to seeing tropical gardens, was still impressed. The air was thick and damp and green sweet fragrant, the walls hidden with rosary pea and hibiscus; orange trees and woody jasmine bushes studded the walkways.

  Wales landed in the grass behind her, grimacing.

  She didn’t think the pained distaste on his face was for his awkward landing. The closer she drew to the house, the less soothing the garden felt. Her little dark voice growled in constant warning, and Sylvie didn’t think it was simple caution about housebreaking.

  The weathered deck creaked gently beneath her steps, her bootheels muffled impacts that echoed in her quickening heartbeat.

  Recon, she reminded herself. A look-see. Nothing more. We aren’t prepared for more.

  The house, seen through a pair of French doors, was dark, caught in that awkward space between being lit by daylight and not quite dark enough to require internal lights. The rooms she saw behind the glass looked as static and unpeopled as a closed movie set.

  And, like a signal from the heavens, the alarm keypad she saw was flashing green green green. Unarmed. Unset. An open invitation.

  Sylvie turned her head, looked sidewise, dropped her lashes, peering through the shadows she made of her vision. There. A glimmer on the glass, within the glass. Like the traceries of fingerprints and skin oils left behind, except that this was a magical symbol. Another tiny proof that made her believe Cachita’s assertion that Azpiazu was the original recipe: He used magic instead of technology at every turn.

  Even the Maudits, proud sorcerers that they were, tended to mix and match.

  Still, her trip to Val’s might have already paid off. Sylvie pulled the ouroboros amulet from around her neck, wrapped the cord around her wrist, and reached for the door handle.

  Wales tugged at her wrist, a silent warning.

  “You see something I don’t, Tex?”

  “You trust the charm that much?”

  “Got to try it out sometime,” she said. “Better now than in a face-to-face, yeah?”

  She jiggled the door handle—locked—and waited.

  No sparks, no magical result, no nothing. The magic made into nothing. The spell not broken but bypassed. Val did good work.

  Wales let out a shaky breath.

  Sylvie pressed close to the glass, looked down. Not even a dead bolt. Just the handle.

  It was a moment’s work and another scrape on her credit card to get the latch to flip. She eased the door open, and the hair on her body stood on edge as the house air washed over her. It carried with it the brittle hush of a sleeping household, the movement of slow, steady breaths.

  “Sense anything?” she asked.

  Wales edged past her, getting himself beyond the ouroboros charm’s reach, then nodded. “Ghost. Someone’s dead.”

  Sylvie frowned. Never good news. When the ratio of innocents to evil sorcerer was six to one, it was definitely bad news.

  She closed the door behind them, easing the latch closed. She slung the ouroboros charm about her neck again, let it dangle on her chest.

  Her breath, let out softly, warmed the air she moved through. Wales hunched tight, shivered. Her own skin goose-bumped.

  The entire house was frigid, the AC working at full capacity. Sylvie moved inward and tasted the hint of something foul and greasy on her tongue. Rot.

  Someone’s dead. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t Maria Ruben.

  She followed the scent, followed Wales, wrinkling her nose and wishing that the charm neutralized odors as well as magic. An adult’s rec room, all plush carpet, pool table, wet bar, and HDTV, was ground zero for the meat-rot scent. She gagged, peered into each shadow, and finally found a man’s body shoved out of sight behind the wet bar.

  It had to be Jose Serrano, the home owner, since he was clad in pajamas and slippers; hardly the outfit for a visitor to the house. His ankles were swollen red-black with pooled blood. His eyes were fixed and filmed over, his skin livid and streaked, his entire body contorted. He hadn’t died easy.

  Grimacing, she knelt, turned his hands toward the light.

  “Careful!” Wales said. He hovered behind her, looming over her shoulder.

  “Tex,” she said. “Watch the door, all right? Watch my back, not my back.”

  He huffed, but obeyed, leaving Sylvie to her inspection of the corpse.

  Like a brand on his palm, a sigil charred the skin, wept a substance dull grey and soot black. Sylvie touched it with a fingernail, felt it dent beneath her touch. She scratched at it. It left a silvery streak on the edge of her nail.

  Lead.

  Azpiazu seemed to be a one-trick pony when it came to killing people. But that made sense. Even someone who didn’t believe in magic would still get up and walk away from a man shouting a lot of mumbo jumbo ritual magic.

  Every sorcerer she had met had a single, instinctive offensive spell. Often, it was a paralysis spell; but Azpiazu . . . He hadn’t needed to kill the cops. They’d gone off content. It would have been days before the search for Serrano started up again. He’d killed them because they’d annoyed him.

  And he had to have done it quickly, smoothly, and naturally. A handshake, given that the marks were found on the palms.

  “Sylvie,” Wales warned, just as the glasses in the bar rattled. One shifted far enough that it danced out of its rack; she put a hand up and caught it. It was icy slick, burned her skin.

  “What the hell—”

  “Serrano’s ghost,” Wales said. “He’s pissed—”

  “Tell him we’re here to help!”

  She set the glass down, rubbed the cold off on her jeans, and stood. Ducked the cue ball as it blew directly at her. Her hand tangled briefly in the ouroboros charm, but it had no effect on the items winging in her direction.

  Ghost, right. Not magic.

  Ghosts counted as fucked-up nature on their own. It was only once people started harnessing them that it became magic.

  She dropped back to her knees, wincing. The carpet might be plush, but it wasn’t that thick.

  Wales whispered into the air, more of that not-quite language, and Sylvie dodged a pool cue, caught it as it flew past.

  “Wales! Less coaxing, more commanding!”

  “Not that easy,” Wales snapped. “He’s not exactly a normal ghost.”

  “Sic Marco on him.”

  “He’s a victim here, not the enemy,” Wales said. “And remember, we were trying not to alert Azpiazu—”

  She dropped, rolled, came up on the other side of the pool table, aggravated, and smelling of carpet powder and rot. “Easy for you to say. He’s not chucking stuff at you. C’mon, Tex—”

  Wales let out his breath, stiffened his spine, jammed his hand out into
the room—a flat-palmed Stop! “Enough.”

  A glass and two striped balls dropped midflight. The room, already cold, grew frigid. Frost laced across the flatscreen TV like a shatter mark. “Sylvie, bring me some of his hair.”

  “Serrano’s?” It was a stupid question; she knew it even as it left her lips: Who else’s?

  She twined her fingers in his hair, thick and glossy still; the lead that had filled his blood had killed him too quickly for his hair to show the damage. She yanked, ungentle, uncaring. Serrano was dead, even though his bones creaked, and his head jerked back as if he felt the sting of her hurried fingers, her pinching nails.

  She brought Wales the dark lock, pressed it into his free hand. “Now what?”

  “I show him who’s in charge.”

  Wales held the tuft of hair up, two hands out before him; the halt and a cupped palm, the hair resting in it like an offering. A wisp of smoke rose; Sylvie blinked. She hadn’t seen anything like fire coming near it. The smoke grew higher, lit from beneath with a blue flame that burned like ice, cooling.

  In the arctic mist blooming from Wales’s hand, the ghosts took on a visible shape. Marco’s looming, hollow-eyed presence, familiar, inimical, shoulder to shoulder with his necromantic partner. And Serrano. Or what Sylvie assumed to be Serrano. At first she thought his ghost had been cleaved in two, mutilated even after death—she knew Azpiazu was no respecter of the dead. Then she saw him more clearly. Not a ghost split in two, not a mutilated ghost, but a mutated one. One body, dividing midtorso to stretch two necks upward, two heads, one flushed dark with rage, one blanched with fear.

  “What the fuck—”

  “Your time is spent; your life is gone to dust and ash. I bind you and dismiss you from this plane,” Wales said.

  Serrano twitched and faded in chunks, left leg, angry face, torso, until the only ghost left was Marco. Wales closed his fist, let ashes dribble out, streaks against his bony hand, and sighed.

  “That was ugly,” he said.

  “What was that?” Sylvie said. The frigid air faded to something approaching warmth by comparison. She doubted the room temperature made it to sixty.

  Wales shrugged. “Harder to dismiss than he should have been? Something warped his ghost, broke him into—”

  “I saw,” she reminded him. “Ghost schizophrenia?” She remembered the double-headed skink outside, twitching and jerking its way forward, and surreptitiously ran her fingers along the line of her neck.

  “Azpiazu’s magic.” Wales shoved his hands into his pockets, closed his body up, shoulders turned inward, chin tilted down. Thoughtful. Worried. “I think . . . I want to see that binding spell again.”

  “Why we’re here,” Sylvie said. She shook off the chill that the room, Serrano, Wales’s magic working had left in her bones, and headed back into the hallway.

  Bedrooms, bathrooms were likely toward the back, more public rooms toward the front of the house. If she were a lap pool, where would she—

  She opened doors gingerly, as if she’d open one to Azpiazu leering at her. As if he’d have done nothing while Wales cleaned ghostly house for him.

  Each door opened revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Her nervousness grew. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, each innocuous room bringing her one step closer to the loaded chamber.

  The tang of chlorine overrode the scent of death and guided her finally in the right direction. For a brief moment, entering the pool room, she found the scene not only peaceful but beautiful. The lap pool was lit softly from below, casting a wavering blue gleam over the ceiling. The women, curled into seated positions, looked more like spa visitors than victims, resting peacefully in a beautiful room.

  Until Sylvie took that next step into the room, saw the lines of strain on their faces, the haggard pallor to Maria Ruben’s skin; then it was all too easy to see the truth. It made Sylvie itchy under the collar, coldly furious.

  Wales swore quietly. “Sylvie, we have to do something.”

  “You’re the necromancer.”

  Wales closed his eyes, listening to Marco, listening to his own instincts. Sylvie watched him, seething with impatience and a slow, guttering anger. There had to be a way. Something she could do to free them. She’d walked away once and had been regretting it ever since.

  Kill the sorcerer, the little dark voice said. No sorcerer, no curse, no deflection spell.

  Hell, it would be the best of all worlds. Kill Azpiazu, and she wouldn’t need to worry about Tepeyollotl’s making the scene . . . or maybe she would. Gods could be cranky about having their punishments interrupted.

  Worth the risk.

  The water rippled, a tiny movement disturbing its glassine smoothness. Maria Ruben was quivering. Tremors so small that they seemed more felt than seen.

  Maria Ruben’s time was up.

  “Think fast, Tex,” Sylvie said. “I’m going in.”

  “What? Sylvie—”

  “We don’t have time. Maria’s in trouble, and Azpiazu will be returning to harvest her soul.”

  Wales nodded. “Give me three minutes. Let me see if I can start wearing down the spell defenses. Keep them from shifting or flaming out, at the least.” His eyes rolled back in his head, blind to anything but the power he was calling on. Sylvie shuddered. Shuddered again when he sliced into his hand and walked the perimeter of the lap pool, dripping his blood into the water, unerringly on target. Marco whispering directions to him, or magic at work?

  Her curiosity got stomped hard when Wales began whispering into the room, nonsense words, broken syllables that somehow, upon repetition, crawled inside her head and translated themselves.

  I am death the slowing drum the lassitude of bone I enfold all and I am death the clinging shroud the beetles’ breath the clock wound down . . .

  She tuned him out in self-defense, waited for him to finish his slow circuit around the pool. The moment he did, she darted into action, clawing at the ouroboros about her neck. If Maria was about to die anyway, yanking her from the binding spell seemed like a worthwhile risk. The snake-scale necklace scratched her skin, snagged her hair, but Sylvie tugged it off, held the cord wide, and dropped it over Maria Ruben’s head. The result was instantaneous.

  The room hummed; the water bubbled as if someone had suddenly nuked it to boiling. Maria Ruben’s eyes flew open, her mouth gasped, the tendons in her neck stood out like hawsers. Sylvie grabbed her shoulders, pulled—

  The woman was heavy, as stiff in her arms as a corpse in full rigor; the other women were moving, too, eyes opening without awareness behind them, their skin flowing . . . sluggishly, like raw clay softening in the water.

  Time ran short.

  Azpiazu had to know, had to feel it. He would have felt Maria destabilizing, would already be on his way. One unbalanced binding spell, and somewhere Azpiazu was losing control of his shape, showing the world the monster he was on the inside.

  Maria’s breath shivered coldly on Sylvie’s cheek, a brush of soundless words. Help me. Help me. The ouroboros around her neck tarnished from bright gold to something hot and dull, the magic being sucked from it. Overwhelmed.

  She was going to lose Maria, Sylvie thought sickly. All the ouroboros was doing was bringing her back to awareness of her suffering and impending death. The sigil on Maria’s forehead began to seep blood at the cut edges.

  Wales dropped down beside her, hauled Maria out, muttering a spell that sounded like the hissing of snakes and pounded against Sylvie’s body like the tide. Pushing, pressing. Sylvie felt like she was drowning and forced herself to let it slide by her, let it reach Wales’s target.

  Maria.

  The woman gasped, breathed in harshly as if she’d been drowned and just had the water punched from her lungs. “What—”

  “Let’s go, let’s go—” Wales said.

  “The others—”

  “He’s here—”

  A growl traveled through the room, a vibration that had Sylvie dropping the argument, and spinni
ng around, trading Maria’s jerking flesh for the hard steel of her gun. She rolled back, making space and taking aim—the trigger juddered beneath her finger.

  “Run, Wales!” on an outborne breath, panted between shots.

  He did his best to obey, burdened by Maria’s slack weight.

  A series of perfectly placed shots on an easy target: Azpiazu twisted to monster form, a distorted patchwork of predators, wolf teeth and bear bulk and long, lashing cat tail, claws leaving marks in the tile, coming straight for her. She put the entire clip into his chest.

  Azpiazu didn’t even slow; her gun clicked on empty.

  He howled, turned one gold eye, one black on Wales’s retreating form, crouched to spring. His first lunge after Wales coincided with a sudden hiss in the air, a window shattering and spilling glass in a storm toward him.

  Marco, defending his master.

  Azpiazu rocked back, shook glass off like a spill of sharp-edged raindrops.

  Sylvie grabbed the warning bell out of her pocket and threw that in his face. It rang wildly, raised a cascade of sparks, but Azpiazu batted it away with a savage paw.

  The bell served its purpose, though, bringing Azpiazu’s attention back on her and let Wales vanish to safety, Maria slung any which way over his bony shoulders. Sylvie scrabbled for a weapon, found metal to hand—freestanding towel rack—and slammed it into his chest and side. The metal crumbled beneath the impact.

  She rolled away from the next attack, splashed into the pool, flailed away from the women who reached for her with slow-forming claws. As she clambered back out, a heavy paw slapped her between the shoulder blades.

  Numbness, crashing pain. Dizzy speed. Sylvie slammed into the wall, as spread-eagled and ungainly as a landed starfish, breathless, blackness hovering.

  She crashed to the tile, got her hands down in time to prevent her from cracking her skull, but her back screamed protest.

  Six inches higher, and he would have broken her neck.

  “Mine!” Azpiazu’s voice was a guttural thing, a wolf’s snarl, a cat’s scream, a bear’s grunt.

  “No,” Sylvie said, her voice inaudible. Didn’t matter. She heard it in her head, felt it in her throat. Maria Ruben wasn’t his. Not anymore.