by Lyn Benedict
“C’mon, Cachita,” Sylvie said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Cachita asked. “Out’s good, but you lost your tracker. How are we going to find Azpiazu?”
Sylvie laughed. “Cachita. Pay attention. Lassie’s come all this way to tell us Timmy’s down a well. We follow Marco all the way to Azpiazu’s front door. And as a bonus? I don’t owe Erinya my afterlife.”
17
Simple Plans
THEY HAD TO BACKTRACK TO GET TO THE ISI GARAGE, AND IT MADE Sylvie’s nerves prickle every step of the way. Marco was powerful, but he wasn’t an infallible weapon. A single necromancer in the building, or an agent who understood some basic protection spells, and their ghost-shield could be neutralized in a heartbeat.
Cachita’s breath warmed her ear; she was getting too close again, blocking Sylvie’s range of motion, and Sylvie shoved her off.
Marco moved before them, an icy fog shot through with roiling motion, endless hunger, endless appetite. He took out the agents on guard in the garage, leaving Sylvie free to pick and choose among the car keys on the peg board.
She chose a black SUV, wanting as much space between Marco and her as possible while they hunted for Wales. He drifted into the passenger seat, and Cachita crawled into the back without a single protest.
Marco raised an arm, a bar of cold shadow pointing south. Sylvie took the SUV into the twilit streets of Miami, streaks of neon beneath the freeway flickering to life.
Cachita leaned forward, her hands tense around Sylvie’s seat. “You really think the ghost can find Wales?”
The question hurt. A sudden sharp pinch of awareness. She didn’t want to lose Wales. She had grown to like him. Was one long lunch away from calling him friend.
He might be a necromantic Ghoul, but Alex was right: Wales was a good guy.
She forced calmness. “I think Marco’s better than nothing. I think Marco’s the only game in town. I never got a chance to give Erinya Azpiazu’s scent.”
“But I have yours,” Erinya said from the backseat.
Cachita shrieked. Sylvie grappled with the wheel; the SUV slewed just enough to elicit a series of horn blasts and multilingual curses.
“Eri,” Sylvie said. “Don’t. Do. That.”
“Better than Alekta,” Erinya said. “She would have appeared in front of the truck and been surprised when you hit her. Not that it would have stopped her from climbing aboard.” She poked her head forward, shoved Cachita back with a careless hand. “Why do you have a killer’s ghost in your car? Is it for me? Can I eat it?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “He’s our guide to Azpiazu.”
Erinya snarled. “I’m your guide.”
“You’ve been replaced. You took off,” Sylvie said. “And not that I’m not grateful—the ISI’s going to be on my ass enough about one dead agent—but what the hell did you do with Alex?”
“Alex?”
Sylvie stared at her, cold horror crawling down her spine at the utter confusion in Erinya’s voice. If Erinya hadn’t taken Alex, then . . . had they left her in the ISI’s untender care? “My assistant? Blonde? Eros’s chosen—”
“Oh. Her. I took her to Eros. He wouldn’t want her hurt, and I like to make him happy.”
“Of course you do,” Sylvie muttered. Everyone wanted to make the god of Love happy. “Wait. You took her to him? You took her off earth?”
“Just for a little bit. Eros’ll send her back, soon. Probably. Unless he really likes her. He gets bored. Justice is busy busy busy trying to straighten things out up there and fighting with Zeus.”
Sylvie swallowed. “Erinya. The moment we are all done with Azpiazu? You will bring her back. In one piece. Not transformed, enchanted, or lovesick.”
Erinya shrugged. “Whatever.”
Sylvie changed lanes at Marco’s prod, a cold spur into her shoulder that made her fingers tremble as if he’d shocked her. “Jesus, all right. Turn here. I get it.”
Cachita shivered. “Sylvie, we need to hurry.”
“I’m aware,” Sylvie said. There were time strictures all over their little plan. They had to race Azpiazu’s spellwork. They had to race Tepeyollotl’s impatience. On top of it all, sooner or later, the ISI agents would start waking from Marco’s soul shock, and they were going to be pissed. The SUV would be easy enough for them to track, what with the government GPS a standard part of its equipment. “Eri, you still going to be part of this?”
“Can’t kill another god’s chosen,” Erinya said. “Even if the god wants him dead. Can’t hunt Demalion, ’cause you won’t tell me where he is.” She slumped back into the shadows of the car, the very picture of a teen who’d been unfairly grounded.
“I’m sure there’ll be things you can fight,” Sylvie said. “Stick around?” She took the next road Marco suggested, irritated at the slowness of his navigation. For all she knew, he was taking her the slowest route possible. But short of pulling the car over and trying that memory merge again, she didn’t know another way.
Wales had been beneath the water. Not deep. Tiles at his back, slimed with algae that tore under his struggles. The water just above his reaching hand. Not a swimming pool, not a natural pond. Large enough for five adults. Isolated.
She studied the roads they were on, the slow changeover from full city skyscrapers to smaller shops and slower streets. To old-fashioned streetlamps and shady walks. Coconut Grove.
And water everywhere. Biscayne Bay butted up against the seawalls there. But he wasn’t in salt water; his eyes hadn’t been stinging. Not the ocean.
Erinya cocked her head, sniffed the air, and Sylvie said, “Eri? You getting something?”
Erinya sucked her lower lip into her mouth, pouting as if she were nothing more than the twentysomething goth girl she appeared. “You gonna come work for Dunne if I tell you?”
“I think I’ll just wait for Marco,” Sylvie said. Safer, but less informative. Erinya twitched, ran her claws down the leather seats, fidgeted. Sylvie hid a grin. Erinya wanted to tell. All Sylvie had to do was wait.
“Close to the sea,” Erinya said. “Something’s twisted. Something’s rotten. Cruel. I can taste prey and fear.”
“Azpiazu,” Sylvie said.
Marco pressed closer just as a familiar landmark began to appear on Sylvie’s left. Vizcaya Gardens.
Sylvie choked back a laugh. It fit in a terrible way. Lots of water features, shallow ponds, lots of archaic luxury. She just wondered what he’d done with the tourists. Here was hoping he’d set up after hours.
She pulled the SUV to a halt, let her strange passengers unload into the tree-dark lot—Erinya bounding out, animal grace in a human form, Cachita clambering out on shaky limbs, and Marco oozing through the door.
Sylvie hadn’t been to Vizcaya since her high-school days, remembered it as a green expanse of blind grottos and ponds, of stone stairways and carefully patterned gardens. A safe place to play.
Now, while the sky purpled about them, closing them into darkness, the gardens felt anything but safe. The air pressed close to her skin, dark, hot, humid like an animal’s fetid breath. Hungry and predatory, giving her the sense of something larger moving behind the darkness.
The gardens themselves felt dead, suffocating in silence and stillness. There were none of the sounds Sylvie expected from tropical night settling in—no frog creaking, no bird wings rustling as they perched and preened, no owls calling through the dark—only silence and weight.
Erinya sniffed the air, wrinkled her nose. “It smells like rot.”
“What does?”
“Everything,” Erinya said.
Cachita shivered and her shiver was echoed by the world, a tremble in the gravel pathway they stood on.
“Hold it together,” Sylvie said. “You lose it, we get Tepeyollotl’s attention.” She wanted Cachita to wait in the car, to stay out of the conflict, stay calm. Given the way Cachita clutched Sylvie’s sleeve, leaving her behind would only send her into panic faster.
&nbs
p; “Cachita!” Sylvie snapped. “C’mon. I expect more from the woman who was trolling the streets for a sorcerer armed only with a Taser.”
Cachita blinked, released Sylvie’s arm, put her chin up. “Right. Right. I’m sorry.”
“Erinya,” Sylvie said. “You smell Azpiazu?”
Erinya shook her head, dark hair flying. “Only death.”
Cloaked by spells, Sylvie wondered. Some type of sensory illusion hiding him? It would be well within his abilities and his predilections.
Sylvie looked ahead. From the parking lot, there was only one entrance, one way in. The gardens lay beyond that, but if Azpiazu was set up where Sylvie imagined he’d be—at the main reflecting pool—he was going to see them coming long before they could get to him.
Marco jabbed her with cold fingers at her spine, shoving her forward. A clear urging to move.
Sylvie checked her borrowed guns, reassuring herself that the clips were full. She stepped forward; the ground crumbled at Sylvie’s feet, grass withering where it should have held the soil together. Earthworms lay slack and dry; the ancient sinkhole beside the entry gate shifted, pulling dirt downward. “Eri, the gate?”
Sylvie squeezed out of Erinya’s way, brushed up against a hand-lettered sign on the iron gate: Closed for alligators. She shook her head. Only in Miami was that an excuse. She wondered if they were real gators encroaching on tourist land or some illusion Azpiazu had created. For once in her life, she hoped for magic.
Erinya ripped the entry gate from its hinges, a metallic shriek in the quiet night, and flung the twisted iron into the brush. Leaves fell like rain.
Maybe the stink of rot was no illusion. Maybe everything was dead. Sylvie touched a fallen leaf, and it smeared beneath her fingers, its cellular integrity gone, a pulpy mass of rot.
Not a good sign.
Azpiazu had to be on the very edge of god-transition. Close enough that Tepeyollotl’s power, filtered, warped, changed, was bleeding out through him.
Sylvie headed through, keeping to the trembling stone path, her gun before her.
Five steps in, something enormous hissed and roared out of the bushes, scattering branches and pebbles. Sylvie jerked back, firing directly through Marco. Her hand went cold and numb. Bullets did no good. Not when you were faced with a two-headed bull alligator in full charge.
Sylvie focused on the grey-green-black blur, aimed at the gaping mouth on the right, and realized abruptly what was bothering her beyond the two-headed nightmare of it. The alligator had no eye shine on either head. Four eyes at twilight? Should be full of shine.
“It’s dead,” Cachita said, gagging. “Your Fury was right. Everything’s dead.” Her lips trembled.
It was worse than that. Sylvie got a quick glance of the alligator’s legs as it lumbered toward them for another try. Instead of claws, it had hands. Human-style hands. At least they slowed the gator, buckling and breaking under its weight, made evading it a possibility.
Azpiazu’s fight for shape-shifting integrity was warping the world around him.
Erinya changed form, grew claws and thick scales to rival the alligator’s hide, and attacked with an eldritch screech. The alligator snapped furiously, even as Erinya tore gobbets of dead flesh away, sent reeking bits into the air like piñata stuffing.
Erinya shook the alligator in her mouth until its bones snapped, until it broke, shrieking the entire time.
So much for the element of surprise.
* * *
MARCO PRESSED UP AGAINST SYLVIE’S NECK, A COLD, URGENT touch, and she jolted into movement, thinking flashlights. She should have brought flashlights. The alligator had been hard to see, had been lurking just beneath the shadows. What else might be there? Not breathing. Eyes invisible. Soundless until it attacked.
Shoot to kill and don’t worry about what it is, her dark voice suggested, and Sylvie took its advice. Soothing. Simple.
“Erinya, you see all right?”
“Yup,” Erinya agreed. She flicked alligator off her leather jacket and wiped her boots on the gravel path.
“Go first,” Sylvie said. “Clear the path.”
Erinya rolled her eyes. “Bossy. Who’ll watch your back?”
“I watch my own,” Sylvie said. “Cachita, follow her. Not too close.”
Marco drifted by her, an ice-cube shiver along her side. “And Marco does whatever he wants as long as he stays away from Cachita,” Sylvie finished.
It all made her edgy. Erinya was help. Sylvie didn’t have to worry about her, didn’t have to protect her. Cachita, on the other hand, was a liability. Vulnerable and worse. Gateway for a god.
Holding the knife was a nice reassurance that Cachita couldn’t call the god but probably a futile one. Tepeyollotl was paying attention, would come at Cachita’s first whisper of his name, whether she had the knife or not.
Erinya trotted swiftly along the limestone path, heading toward the main garden, sniffing. “I smell blood.”
Sylvie’s heart picked up pace. Convenient that it was already racing when, a moment later, another dead reptile fell heavily across her shoulders.
Dead, but quite active.
The python, twice her length, and as heavy and hard to move as sandbags, wrapped around her shoulders, its two heads hissing, showing a pair of leprous mouths ringed with curved teeth.
“Get off!” she yelled, like it could listen or obey. She shoved at it. Heads hissed and struck, stunning, bruising blows against her thick jacket. Cachita jumped in, wrapped her hands tight around softening scales, grimacing. Erinya cocked her head, decided the zombie snake was too small to interest her, and kept moving.
Sylvie cursed, her hands barely wrapped around two thick throats. Scales slimed off in her hand, rotten and flaking from dead meat. It was even odds for a moment whether she was going to be choked by the snake or by the stink of it. Then Cachita got her hand beneath the heaviest coil, and the two of them levered it off, dropped the python hissing and striking on the pavement.
Sylvie blew off its two heads, panting, wasting ammo, and wondering if it would go hydra on them—regrow and double its heads and attack again. She’d never dealt with zombie animals before. After this, she never wanted to do so again.
Cachita swallowed hard. “Tepeyollotl can’t be worse—”
“Oh yes he can,” Sylvie said. “Right now, we’re dealing with small shit. Warped reptiles.”
“Two-headed zombie reptiles are small shit?”
Sylvie thinned her mouth, nodded brusquely. She didn’t want to get into it. But yeah. Small stuff. Worse, she didn’t even think the zombie reptiles were arranged as deliberate traps. Anger spiked. Outrage at being ignored.
Even though he had taken Wales, taken her ally and friend, even though he knew Sylvie would be coming after him, Azpiazu didn’t care enough to try to stop her. It argued extreme confidence. Sylvie wanted to make him eat that confidence.
Sylvie yanked Cachita back into movement. “Less gawking, more moving.”
“Give me a gun,” Cachita said.
“Should have picked up your own,” Sylvie said.
“Sylvie,” Cachita said. “You have more than one.”
“Fine. You know how to use—”
“Yeah.”
“Just remember who you’re aiming at,” Sylvie said. “We’re fucked enough without friendly fire.”
Any response Cachita would have made was buried under Erinya’s growl, a soft, moaning rattle deep in her throat. Sylvie’d heard that sound once before; a Fury laying eyes on an enemy. Even directed elsewhere, it made the hairs on her neck stand up and take notice.
Azpiazu.
* * *
THE GARDENS STRETCHED OUT BELOW THEM, AN EXPANSE OF DARKNESS broken by Azpiazu’s setup. He’d set up his ritual exactly where Sylvie had thought he would: the squaredoff reflecting pool at the base of two stone stairwells leading up to a hilly balustrade.
Torches marked the stone surround of the pool, cast bloody light over the darkness
, over the shapes drifting in the waters, over Azpiazu’s hunched and inhuman form. The firelight reddened the stone stairs, made Sylvie think of Tepeyollotl’s reign and human sacrifices in such numbers that the stairs to the altars ran dark and wet with blood.
Azpiazu raised his head and snarled. She steadied her gun, studied the distance. Thirty feet or so. Easily in range.
She sighted along the barrel, aimed.
He didn’t even bother to get out of her way, just laughed as she sent one, two, three shots in his direction. Didn’t even jerk as they touched him. In her earlier confrontation, she hadn’t seen how he’d survived what should have been lethal heart shots. Here, lit by torches, with the hiss of magic in the air, she did. The bullets rusted, crumbled as they touched him, dusted his fur with powder. Ineffective.
Her little dark voice echoed Erinya’s growl.
“Eri, can you?” Sylvie asked.
“No,” the Fury said. Her body quivered with the urge to hunt, long shivers rattling her spines. “He’s still the god’s chosen. His god’s whipping boy. But . . . soon.”
Soon would be too late. By the time Azpiazu was free from Tepeyollotl’s claim, he’d be a god.
“Shadows,” Azpiazu said. “Come to watch?”
He dragged one of the bodies out of the water—long, lanky, too thin to be anyone but Wales.
Cachita stepped up beside her, fired with a satisfying competence. Not at Azpiazu directly, but at the stone coping. Ricochets spattered sharp shards of limestone and old coral, and Azpiazu flinched. “Get away from him.”
“Tepeyollotl’s agent,” Azpiazu said. “I felt you sniffing around on my tail. If I’d known you were so attractive, I might have let you catch up with me sooner, so I could carve out your heart and soul from your living flesh.”
Sylvie and Cachita fired as one, aiming at the stone, and Azpiazu gestured sharply. The women rose from the water, a living shield; Sylvie jerked her gun up.
As the water streamed over their skin, limned scarlet and orange, the women changed shape, growing monstrous. Snarling. Preparing to defend their captor.
