by Lyn Benedict
The room swooped and swayed about her. She dodged the next crashing blow, managed to shift her weight enough to kick Azpiazu square in the drooling, misshapen muzzle.
His jaw slammed shut, teeth severing the lolling tongue. Blood spattered her face, the floor, Azpiazu’s patchy fur.
He howled, a gargle of blood and rage, and Sylvie shoved past him, all plans gone, traded for the basic need to survive this unexpected fight. Survive it long enough for Wales to get Maria away.
Azpiazu lunged after her, knocked her sprawling, crouched over her, growling, salivating. His mottled fur was unmarked; her bullets hadn’t done any good at all. Metal wasn’t going to do the job, she thought. Not in bullet form, not in any form.
Fucking transformationist necromancer, she thought. Hard enough to kill something that was immortal. Even harder to kill something that could change a weapon’s composition to something useless.
“Kill me, and you’ll be cursed forever,” she rasped out. “Thought you wanted my help.”
Being this close to him set her skin afire with magic, corruption of the natural order. It made her gag, made her recoil.
He lashed out with a bear’s massive paw, claws nearly an afterthought behind the physical power that could break bones with a single blow.
Sylvie kneed him in the jaw, knocked him back, kicked him once more, hearing bones creak beneath her heel, before he wrapped a human hand around her wrist. “Die,” he snarled.
Her blood kindled; her skin burned as if it had been struck with a branding iron. He flung her back, and she curled around her arm, watching the symbol for lead rise on her flesh, scarlet and black, a burn welling up from the inside.
No, she said, you won’t be rid of me that easy.
It wasn’t really her voice, but the thing that lived within her. She gouged at the hot lash of the brand, tore at it, intent on ripping the magic out of her skin if necessary. Blood burst beneath her nails, hot, wet, crimson. Human.
Blood, but not lead.
The fire in her veins, the heat that throbbed at her temples, the fever—they all faded until she was left with the taste of metal in her mouth and a bloody wound on her forearm. She got up, shook her matted, soaked hair back, and stared into his eyes. “Come on. Want to try again?”
Faintly, beneath everything else—the flutter of broken water, his panting, hers—she heard a sound familiar and welcome: a garage door rising, a car engine working at speed. Wales and Maria were nearly gone.
He surged in their direction, and Sylvie, burning adrenaline, picked up a potted palm and hurled it at him, breaking his stride and his jaw. His muzzle was streaked with blood; his teeth were wet with it. His pelt grew gore-clotted.
She’d hurt him more with that than with an entire clip of bullets.
“Give it up,” she said. “Maria’s gone.”
“Replaceable,” he slurred.
He paused, still crouched, still drooling blood and teeth, the first glimmer of something human beneath the monster coating. The first hint of the cleverness she knew he had.
Azpiazu had manipulated her from the start. She’d stumbled over him, and he’d acted quickly, given her an impossible, deadly task—find the god—to keep her out of his way. To give himself space. And he’d used the women as bargaining chips.
His muzzle reshaped itself; ivory teeth sprouted from broken edges.
“You never really wanted my help,” she said. “Your curse is your ticket to immortality.”
He hunched tight; the space between them could be breached with a single leap. His long tongue worked; his jaw pushed back. Beneath the animal snout, he shifted to a human mouth. “Smarter than Lilith,” he said. “No. I never wanted your help. What could I possibly want from you? An untalented blunt object.”
Sylvie licked her lips. Apparently, they weren’t going to start duking it out again. She couldn’t say she regretted it. Her head ached where he’d slammed her into the glass, and her back throbbed. Blood spilled down her arm, dripped from her nails.
“You wanted to use me to distract a god.”
“A god?” he echoed, a growl in the room.
“I know you. I name you. You’re Eladio Azpiazu. Cursed by the god Tepeyollotl. I know all of this is to avoid him.”
“Not all of it,” he said. “Some of it’s for my pleasure.” His weight shifted. Azpiazu lunged; Sylvie dodged, taking the slash against the thick leather of Zoe’s jacket. A sigil sizzled against the coat, burned hide curling away from his touch.
“Missed me,” she said, her voice clogged with anger. “Want to try it again? Get inside my space? I’ll make you hurt.” Never mind that the room was sparse on weapons; pottery shards would be enough for her at the moment. From the sudden caution in his eyes, animal wariness, the uneasy shift of that massive body, she thought maybe she’d hurt him more in the past five minutes than he’d been hurt in decades.
The thing about immortals was that they got divorced from human experience. From pain. From fear. They felt untouchable as the years piled up behind them. She was reminding him of those things, reminding him that immortal did not equal invulnerable.
And that she had a reputation for killing things.
He sucked in a breath, spun away from her. She let him put the space between them, leaping across the lap pool’s width. He hunkered down beside the pool, ran his fingers through the water, licked the taste of it from his skin, his eyes always on her.
“Don’t overestimate yourself,” Azpiazu said. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. I’m stronger than you can imagine.”
“And yet, you can’t shake the curse,” Sylvie said. “Immortal, yes, but miserable with it.”
He laughed, spittle and blood streaking his chin. “Not for much longer.”
“Yeah? Got big plans? Feel free to share,” Sylvie said.
He swayed foot to foot, lowered his heavy head, looked at her like a wolf studying prey. It made the fine hairs on her neck stand up. Azpiazu was just so . . . wrong. The wolf brow, the human mouth, the bear bulk, the cat claws—a forced-together chimera working against itself.
There was no way in hell he’d want immortality in this guise.
For one thing, he was far too vain. For another, it hampered his magic. All of that energy going just to maintain himself. Like a car with a chronic oil leak.
“Get out, and count yourself lucky,” he said.
“You never needed me, but you didn’t want my attention on you either. You have my undivided attention now. I’ve got you in my sights.”
“Get out,” he snarled once again. This time, Sylvie’s better sense prevailed. She really wasn’t in any shape to take him down. Not and survive.
She straightened, backed out of the room, pausing to scoop up her emptied gun, and watching Azpiazu as long as she could.
Turning her back on the house and striding into the dark felt impossibly difficult, not just for the crawling fear that he was following her, ready to rip out her spine, or slap another sigil on her meant to boil her blood, but because there were four women she was leaving behind.
Saving Maria didn’t seem like enough of a triumph to count the evening as a win. Their recon had been interrupted, their enemy made aware of it. Azpiazu was undoubtedly packing up his remaining harem right now, heading someplace new.
Times like this, she hated the ISI with a passion bordering on obsession. If she could just call them for help. If she could count on them to know what they were doing. If she could trust them to be as interested in saving the victims as in studying the wicked.
Instead, it was her and a cobbled-together crew doing their meager best. Sylvie cast an unfavorable eye on her gun, a dark shadow in the passenger seat. If metal was no good, if Azpiazu’s transformation skills worked fast enough to make bullets benign, she was going to need a different weapon.
* * *
TWO CALLS—ONE TO WALES, ONE TO ALEX, TO PASS ON THE NEWS—had her pulling into the Baptist Hospital lot where Wales had
taken Maria Ruben. He’d gotten far enough ahead and Maria’s quasi-celebrity status as a missing person had gotten them sucked right in past the emergency room waiting area.
“Here for Maria Ruben,” Sylvie said, slipping past the ER receptionist. Confidence counted here. She hefted her purse as if it were Maria’s, and she was just taking her things to her.
“Room fourteen,” the receptionist said. “We’ve got some forms that need—”
“I’ll take ’em,” Sylvie said. Nothing better than a clipboard to prove you had a legit reason to be in the hospital. When she reached out, the nurse’s eyes sharpened, focused, seeing Sylvie as more than just an irritant.
“You’re bleeding.” Seeing her as a potential patient.
Sylvie looked at her arm as if it belonged to someone else. She’d taken the time to bandage it in the truck, but the gouges her nails had left ripping Azpiazu’s sigil apart had reddened the white gauze.
“Not a lot.”
“You come back up here if you decide it needs to be stitched,” he said.
Sylvie nodded. She wouldn’t. It didn’t need sutures. Though it had hurt like hell, when she went to bandage it, the wound was less deep, less severe, than she had thought. Looked no worse than a staple-gun accident, complete with silvery streak that she’d had to peel out.
She found Room 14, the curtain drawn across the glass but the door open. The bed was empty, and Wales was pacing in the quiet.
He turned, and his expression was pure surprised relief, eyebrows up, mouth slack but shifting toward a smile. “You got out alive.”
“Took some doing,” she said.
“Azpiazu?”
“Alive. Evil. Up to something. How’s Maria?”
“She made it here,” he said. “They rushed her up to a real room. Can we get out of here? I’ve already fended off more questions than I know how to answer.” He jolted toward the door, then back toward the bed as if tethered. Sylvie knew what held him. There was a certain weight that came with rescuing someone. A responsibility. Wales had carried Maria out of Azpiazu’s lair, and he couldn’t let go, no matter how much his paranoia urged him to flee.
Down the hall, just past the swinging doors, a pair of police officers consulted with a nurse, who pointed toward Room 14, toward Sylvie and Wales. “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Let’s go.” These cops weren’t here for them; even if a doctor had called them about Maria, they’d shown too quickly. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t stop and interrogate, given the chance.
She stepped out of the room, her bandaged arm crossed over her chest, head ducked. Wales put an arm about her waist, quick on the uptake. The best way to leave an ER unnoticed? Look like any other patient who’d been treated.
They met Salvador Ruben rushing in as they were rushing out—he homed in on Sylvie like a tracking dog. “Your assistant called. She said. She said . . .”
“Maria’s alive,” Sylvie said. “Weak, but alive. Go see her.” His attention veered toward the intake desk, and Sylvie and Wales slipped away.
They got out into the lot, and Wales dithered. “Serrano’s car?”
“Leave it,” Sylvie said. “Not the first car I’ve abandoned in the hospital lot.”
He hotfooted forward through the lot, came back when he didn’t see her truck right off, and took off again. Sylvie seized his sleeve on his second twitchy search, and said, “That way,” gesturing.
When he nodded once and set off at a rapid pace that she was hard-pressed to keep up with, she said, “Hey, you okay, Tex? What? Hospital too ghosty for you?”
He didn’t respond, only hovered around her truck until she opened the door for him. Once the hospital lights shone bright in her rearview mirror, he finally answered.
“Maria died, Sylvie. I shoved her spirit back in her body. I’m kind of freaked-out. I’m not sure whether that makes me a healer or if she’s a revenant.”
“Breathe,” Sylvie said. “Her heart was beating; she was breathing, right? The doctors weren’t running around in a panic freaking out about zombies? She’s alive. You saved her, Tex. That’s a win.”
“Did I save her? I’m not all that sure I did. Azpiazu’s marks are all over her body. Her face, her palms, her feet, her heart . . . What’s to prevent him from reaching out and killing her for pride and—”
“For one thing, he’s got to move the rest of his harem and find a replacement,” Sylvie said. “We fucked up our recon, but we also fucked up his night. He’s going to be a busy monster.”
“But Maria—”
“We’ve done what we can. Is the ouroboros charm still with her?”
“She’s not wearing it, but it should be in the same room.”
“That’ll help,” Sylvie said. She said it mostly to watch Wales lose some of that vibrating tension that made her feel like his spine might start rattling at any moment. “Focus, Tex, I’ve got questions. Azpiazu’s got bigger things in mind than just controlling the curse Tepeyollotl laid on him. I think he’s got some idea of how to break it, and without the curse holding his attention . . .”
Wales leaned his head against the passenger window, staring blankly at the stream of headlights. “Without the curse, he’ll be more powerful. He’s had decades spent fighting magic, decades spent in chains.”
“Yeah. He’ll be raring to go,” Sylvie said. “Thing is, I think there’s something more going on. You have any ideas?”
Wales closed his eyes. “There’s something about the way he’s set up this curse-block, power-exchange spell. It’s . . . complex. Bizarrely so. Even beyond the whole sleight of hand required to use Tepeyollotl’s power to gain immunity from the curse.”
“Explain,” she said.
“Ritual,” Wales said. “It’s all in how you’re taught. Me? I don’t use a lot of ritual, you might have noticed. ’Cause really? I’m a mundane with a skill for improvising. The more I tried to train, the worse I got. For someone like Eladio Azpiazu? An alchemist first? It’s all about ritual.”
“You’re the one who was bitching that it was too complicated—”
Wales sighed. “True ’nough. And I think I phrased it wrong. Magical rituals are like . . . statements of intent. I have a poppet, I have an enemy. I want my enemy to suffer the same fate as this poppet. Yeah?”
“That’s 101,” Sylvie said. “Skip ahead.”
“So touchy,” he muttered. “Depending on your nerve and your skills, you can layer your rituals. Like . . . oh, a witch who wants you to see an illusion. That’s almost always a two-part spell. The illusion they want you to fall prey to, and a stay-in-place layered beneath. After all, an illusion is a fragile thing, really. If they anchor it directly to you . . . it loses plausibility. I mean, say they curse you to see a—”
“Fire?” Sylvie asked.
“Yeah,” Wales said. “That’s a good one.”
“Not really,” Sylvie said.
Wales was undeterred. “So you walk in a place, and it’s suddenly on fire. You run, right? I mean, hell, it’s not even human nature; it’s faster than that. It’s animal instinct. Flee. So that’s wasted energy on the witch’s part if you just walk away. But if they attached it directly to you, so it followed you—”
“You start to doubt it,” Sylvie said. “Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“People like their real-world rules,” Wales said. “Things that tell us the sun rises in the east, the moon waxes and wanes, and the entire world cannot be on fire. So the witch slaps an anchoring spell beneath the illusion spell. A stick-around suggestion.”
“Cobwebs,” Sylvie said. “They like to put illusion spells on cobwebs.”
“Exactly!” Wales nearly bounced in the seat beside her, a researcher getting to share his passion. Springs creaked, audible even over the steady growl of the engine. “And that’s ritual in itself. A stay-put spell on something sticky. Helps them layer the spells, helps them keep it sharp, keep it safe.”
“So Azpiazu’s layering his rituals, which means he’s layering his .
. . intent?”
Azpiazu’s name dragged all that excitement right back out of Wales’s body. He slumped. “That fucker. I don’t know what the hell his intent is. The binding spell is part of it, but it’s overkill. Even for a god. Why not just deflect the power coming at him? Some of the sigils I saw on Maria . . . they almost looked like magical lightning rods, like they were meant to draw the magic in.”
“You said he was filtering it.”
“And he is. To control his shape, I thought, and to fuel his spells so he can keep controlling it. A sort of magical loop that I don’t even know how he got started. He would have needed some kind of boost. . . .” He trailed off, then his mouth twisted. “I can’t think of any good ways.”
“Soul-devouring,” Sylvie said. “Any boost from that?”
“And that,” Wales said. “That’s another layer. Another ritual. It has nothing to do with deflecting Tepeyollotl. I don’t know why he’s doing it. Humans don’t need souls.”
“You use them to sneak into hotels,” Sylvie said.
Wales shifted. “Not the same thing. Ghosts aren’t souls. Ghosts are the dead, personality warts and all. Souls are . . . They’re pure. Distilled.”
“Powerful?”
Wales shrugged. “Not to us. A soul doesn’t want. Can’t bribe them or make them afraid. They don’t care about the living.”
“But he devours them—”
“Devour. It’s only a word. He’s doing something to them; I just don’t know what. Souls are god business, not human.”
Sylvie said, “Maybe it’s just an act of contempt. You know, he’s taking Tepeyollotl’s would-be people, using them to counteract the curse, then destroying souls that would have been the god’s? Azpiazu’s bastard enough for that type of spitefulness.”
“I don’t know,” Wales said. “I don’t. But we have to stop him, Sylvie. Before he takes someone else. Before he finishes.”
“You’re my best hope for that,” she said. “You figure out what his goals are. How necromancy and alchemy and god-avoiding works out to something good for him. So we can turn it bad. Work fast, Tex. I think we’ve got a deadline, and I’m not sure if it’s Azpiazu’s or the god’s.”
