by Lyn Benedict
2
On the Job
FOUR HOURS INTO HER STAKEOUT OF MIAMI’S BAYSIDE MALL, AND Sylvie was cursing Lisse Conrad, Alex, her too-small truck, and mankind’s love of asphalt, which kept the nighttime hours at a balmy ninety-seven degrees. The sun was down; Biscayne Bay was a bare parking lot’s width away; a stiff breeze stirred the air. The night should have been nothing but beautifully cool. Sylvie’s jeans stuck to the leather seat each and every time she shifted, giving the lie to that. Baking from below. Good for pastries, not people.
She shifted, smelled her own salt sweat and the faint drift of night-blooming jasmine. Sticky seat leather or not, boredom and a SOB holster kept her hunting for a comfortable position. Her legs tangled again, confined in the wheel well, unable to stretch completely. She’d tried propping them along the bench seat or on the dash, but both positions left her vulnerable, unable to move quickly if needed.
She was one step away from declaring the night a washout and going home. The matter was police business, really, not hers. Not an unlicensed PI who worked the Magicus Mundi beat.
But if she did, if she started up the engine, let it growl out her frustration as she headed for home, for air-conditioning, for a cool shower and clean sheets; if she quit this case before it had even begun, Alex would be . . . visibly, horribly . . . disappointed in her. Sylvie could face down werewolves, succubi, angels, even a god or two, but Alex? Tell Alex that Sylvie thought the case was tedious and out of her purview, and to hell with making nice with the neighbors who had hired her? No way.
Movement on the access road, the bump-bump of a van’s tires slowing over the speed hump. Sylvie snatched up the binoculars, trained them on the van’s side in time to get the last of their logo vanishing beneath a streetlamp—ITORIAL SERVICES and a dancing mop. She took down the license number, just in case, but unless the police were far more incompetent than she imagined, these were not her guys.
She let her head drop back to the headrest, her list drifting to the floor beneath her feet, her hair snagging in the seat belt. It was a terrible thing to think, but she almost missed the death-and-devastation beat she usually marched to: At least then, she wasn’t bored. Frantic, half out of her mind with anger or fear, and injured—but not bored. The very things she told Alex she wanted to escape. People were contrary to the bone, she thought. Why should she be any different?
Still, she didn’t really mean it. It was just resentment for taking a case she didn’t want. Trying to catch burglars in the act.
Alex had made it more palatable by pointing out all the unusual features of the case, pointing out reasons why Sylvie was exactly the woman for the job. It might be Alex working overtime to draw conclusions, but the case as presented did twig the part of her brain that resonated to magic. It was the illogic of it all.
Sixteen stores, all robbed this summer, all without a single alarm going off. When the workers arrived in the morning, the alarms worked as they were supposed to. The alarm companies’ records said the alarms hadn’t been bypassed or accessed, that no one had come or gone at all. So either there was a conspiracy spanning five alarm companies, sixteen stores, and three insurance agencies, or something trickier was going on.
Sylvie didn’t have objections to a real-world conspiracy; just because she knew magic existed didn’t make it responsible for everything unusual.
However, if it was a conspiracy, it was one that was both too clever and astoundingly stupid. Clever enough to be discreet. Stupid because . . . sixteen stores robbed of stuff. Not cash. Not easy items to fence. Not items that could be used as stepping-stones to more important crimes. Just stuff. The closest they’d come to real money was an independent jewelry store that specialized in antique art deco. Distinctive, but not high-dollar.
It just couldn’t be profitable. It sure as hell shouldn’t have been discreet. One of the stores hit was a coffee shop; they’d been robbed of their espresso machine, a La Pavoni behemoth.
It was far too much effort for far too little reward. But if magic was involved, then maybe the effort changed. Required fewer people, less of a need for profit.
Even if these burglars had managed to rob a whole slew of South Beach stores successfully by using magic, then what? Sylvie was a blunt instrument, more competent at handing out punishment than gathering prosecutable evidence. Most of the people she was sent after ended up dead.
That seemed like overkill for a bunch of after-hours thieves.
Still, she thought, shifting again, nearly winding herself with the steering wheel, taking the burglary case at least got Alex off her back about the might-be-possessed-cop case. Sylvie might dislike boredom; she also disliked complicated tangles. Give her a clear-cut foe and a lot of ammunition, and she knew where she stood.
She tugged the gun out of her holster with a lot of wiggling and cursing, rested its weight in her palm, settled her finger on the trigger. She sighted along it in the dark, aimed at the far wall of the parking garage, testing to see if the dark voice within stirred again. Testing herself.
Alex said the world needed her, but that didn’t give Sylvie free rein to be nothing but a monster-killer with an increasingly fluid definition of what made a monster.
She holstered the gun, wiped her hands on her shirt. She reached for the dash, kicked the AC and the radio on, a blast of tepid air and hair bands overriding the hissing tide of Biscayne Boulevard traffic. She fluffed her damp hair off her neck and wished for burglars, for anything to distract her from the nearly physical boredom. She should have known better.
Life had a way of granting unconsidered wishes.
A man stepped into the parking lot, a lean silhouette under a distant streetlight, paused, and peered through the gloom. His gaze swept the lot, focused in on her truck, then beelined toward her.
Sylvie rolled up her windows, reached for her gun, wondering why she’d bothered to holster it in the first place. The man’s walk, his stance, his confident attitude—it suggested someone at ease in the dark, righteous in his purpose. Security guard, if she was lucky. Cop, if she wasn’t. Authority figures and her—never a happy combination, and that wasn’t even counting the locals with a personal grudge.
He tapped on the window glass. She showed him her gun, the PI license not worth the paper it was printed on. The gun was distraction enough that people, especially law-type people with a healthy concern for weapons in the hands of civilians, didn’t look too closely at the license.
She supposed sooner or later Alex would suggest she jump through the hoops. Sylvie knew she’d fight her on that one. In the beginning, it had been miserliness, coupled with a desire to stay under the radar, that kept her from applying. Now, her rep made, she had no interest at all in interning for someone else, in going back to school, in asking someone else for permission to be what she already was.
The cop grinned, a flash of teeth in the dark, and leaned against her truck. He pulled a small notepad from his pocket, scribbled on it with a stub of a pencil, then flattened it against the window.
She didn’t want to look at it; he tapped more decisively, and she gave in.
In careful block printing the note read, ALEX SAYS YOU OWE HER. He pulled the pad away, scribbled another word on it, and showed her again. BIG. Underlined twice with an arrow from ALEX SAYS.
Sylvie banged her head on the steering wheel and whimpered.
He waited outside, drumming his fingers on the side of her truck, all firecracker impatience. She gave in, popped the door locks, trying to remember the name on the troubled cop’s file. This guy couldn’t be anyone else.
He clambered in on the passenger’s side, long-limbed and angular, built in lines of wire and sinew. He held out a hand for her to shake. “Ms. Lightner. Sylvie, yeah?”
“You’re Wright,” she said, not taking it.
He pulled his hand back with a what-can-you-do shrug. “I like to think so. Not so sure, of late.” He slouched into place, feet propped on the dash, peering out between his spread kn
ees. “What’re we watching for?”
“None of your business,” Sylvie said, but without temper. For a thirtysomething cop, he radiated boyish earnestness. His blond hair, sticking up in goofy tufts, his ready-to-grin expression—they made her think of a particularly scruffy golden retriever. Amiable, eager, a disaster about to happen.
“Guess not,” he said. Silence fell. She counted silently to five and gave herself bonus points when he only made it to three. “Still, I’m here an’ all—might as well help out.”
“Thought I was supposed to help you,” Sylvie said. She traded the gun for binoculars, took a look at some activity at the far end of the lot—drug deal maybe, two men, their cars mated back to front, leaning out of their driver’s-side windows to talk to each other. After a few minutes, a swap of goods, they both drove off.
“Can you?” he asked. His hands tightened on the back of his neck, fingers stirring new cowlicks into life.
“I haven’t read your file,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on taking your case.”
“Yeah, Alex said you had a thing about cops. She gave me a ton of warnings. Said you could be rough to deal with.”
Sylvie bit back several responses that would have done nothing but prove that point. “I’m listening now.”
He fidgeted in the seat. “Weird to talk about it. I been trying not to think about it too much, y’know? I filled out those forms at your office—you know the forms? It’s sneaky stuff. The questions all look normal unless—”
“Unless your problem is something out of the ordinary,” Sylvie said. “I wrote those forms. But they’re only guide-posts. I like to talk about the situation. Face-to-face with my client. If you want to be my client.”
He grimaced but collapsed into stillness—almost still—his fingers kept working at his nape. “I’m possessed. Or something.” His mouth turned down, a fermata of long-held distress, but when he became aware of her scrutiny, he forced a smile. “But hey. Maybe I’m just fuckin’ crazy.” It wasn’t a good smile.
“Possessed by what?” she asked. “Any idea?”
If he said demons, she was out of here. She believed in leaving them strictly to other professionals. Sylvie had faced them down in two incarnations: the succubi—troublesome but not deadly—and the dire hound that had nearly destroyed her. Those were external threats, though; demons that could crawl inside a man, possess him? Those were something far worse, tangling victim and attacker into one single entity. Sylvie tried not to borrow more trouble than she could defeat. Especially not now. Not while she still felt raw.
Still, the odds were good Wright had just seen too many showings of The Exorcist, and he really was “just fuckin’ crazy.” Most problems people struggled with were real-world problems. And, as Sylvie had tried to point out to Alex, cops had a higher percentage of them than most.
“Oh god,” Wright muttered. “Possessed by a what? I didn’t even think about a what! I just thought it was a ghost, you know, some dead guy hanging out. God, what are whats?”
“Ghost? Of a person?” It was unusual enough that for a moment she forgot about the hot night, her discomfort, her boring case, and turned to face him fully.
“Are there other kinds? Dog ghosts? I’m possessed by Lassie?” He grinned, but a void of terror was opening in his hazel eyes.
She hurried to soothe it away. Freaked-out clients were no good. “Your instincts are probably correct.” If he wasn’t crazy. “A ghost. A person. How’d you discover—”
It was a surprisingly tricky question. Somehow it felt like she was asking, Hi, how’d you get that nifty STD?
“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” he said. “No séances, no Ouija boards, and our apartment’s only haunted by the specter of rent increases.” Wright rested his head on his forearms, finally allowing his hair to escape the death grip he’d had on it. He turned his head to look at her, cheek sliding damply along his arm.
“It’s screwing everything up,” he said. “I’m on unpaid leave, and I can’t afford that. I could barely afford the plane fare.”
“Not a local, then?” she asked. She should have known. The accent was wrong, clipped instead of fluid, rapid-fire, a shade too loud, a bit nasal. In south Miami, the cops spoke with liquid accents or lazy drawls, better suited for the languor of the tropics.
“Chicago,” he said, that tiny little chuff at the front of it. He closed his eyes. “Born ’n bred ’n dead. Not a joke. I died.”
“How?” she asked. Her heartbeat quickened, uncomfortable with the invocation of Chicago. She was trying to forget Chicago, trying to forget what she had saved and who she had let die. The whole purpose of her so-called vacation had been to put Chicago behind her, and now Alex foisted Wright on her?
“Docs thought it might be lightning. The whole week was kinda a blur,” he said. “Like being on a bender that you didn’t need drugs for.”
Sylvie’s stomach clenched. She knew what he’d been doing on his “bender.” He’d been looking for a missing god. Her last big case coming back to haunt her. She wanted to turn him down, no matter that she felt for him. She didn’t want to look back and remember what she had lost.
“How’d you get my name?” she asked. Her voice was rough; his eyes flew open, searching her face. She kept her expression impassive, yielding nothing though her stomach churned. It was a valid question. She might have a reputation as the go-to girl in the field of dealing with the Magicus Mundi, but it was a narrow field. A random cop would have as little luck coming up with her name as a teenager knowing the head of the SATs testing board.
Wright grinned suddenly, wide and white, nearly manic. “Always wanted a chance to say this. Baby, you’re the girl of my dreams. Or in my dreams, at least. But don’t tell my wife. She won’t understand. She doesn’t understand any of it. Can’t say I do either. Why me?”
Sylvie sank down into her seat, ignoring the new line of sweat trickling down her spine. Not heat this time. Nerves. She picked up the binoculars, took another look around the dark lot, trying to think. Just because he came from Chicago. Just because he’d been involved in the god’s mess. Just because he knew her name. None of that made it her responsibility.
A darker thought touched her. Maybe the god of Justice was involved, trying to push Sylvie in a direction she didn’t want to go. She didn’t work in the cause of justice; she simply helped individuals with problems. She wasn’t the god’s good little soldier, and she thought he’d understood that.
“Hey,” Wright said. He reached out, a movement in her periphery; she jerked away, let the binoculars drop rather than let him take them from her. “Don’t turn me away. You don’t wanna help. I get that. Don’t know why, but I get it. Thing is, I need your help.”
“I don’t think I’m what you need,” Sylvie said. “I work the Magicus Mundi beat, but I’m a blunt instrument. I don’t do magic, and I don’t diagnose magical ailments.”
“Magicus . . .” he prompted.
“Mundi,” she finished, thinking, dammit, she knew better than to wave unfamiliar terms around in front of a cop. “It’s the world that runs along with ours. It’s where the . . . stuff comes from. And no, it’s not an actual place; more like an overlay.”
“You think that’s what happened? Something from there got inside me?” All fidgets again, zipping the seat belt between his fingers, avoiding her eyes.
He wanted to be possessed. To be haunted. To have the simple explanation, impossible as it was. Sylvie wondered how scared you had to be of being mentally ill to prefer the idea of a ghost, and bit back her first response. “I don’t know. It’s beside the point. I can’t help you. You want an actual witch or someone like that. A curandera or houdon.
“If you’ve been cursed, and you want me to point a gun at whoever did it, make them sorry, make them pay—I’m your girl. If you want me to defend you against an outside force hell-bent on doing damage to you—I can help you there, too. You want me to fix you? I’m not that kind of talent.”
“Anna D?” Sylvie’s breath hitched in her chest. Wright had been searching hard if he found her. The woman was low-profile, the better to hide the fact that though she masqueraded extraordinarily well as human, she wasn’t anything of the sort. Anna D might, in fact, be one of the first of the Magicus Mundi denizens—the ageless sphinx. “Anna D sent you to me?”
It was unbelievable. Anna D was Anna Demalion. The sphinx held long grudges, and Sylvie had gotten Anna D’s all-too-human son killed. Anna D wouldn’t send another mortal man into Sylvie’s hands, not after that.
You can never trust a cat, except to count on cruelty, the little dark voice said. And you can’t trust him.
Wright shook his head. “Never laid eyes on her. Her apartment was empty. She’s split. Just another dead end for me.” His words strangled themselves in his throat, getting tighter and tighter.
“I need you, Sylvie. I did dream you, just days ago. A voice in my head that wasn’t mine. ‘Shadows,’ he said. Said you never back down and you never yield. Cedo Nulli. Woke up in a cold sweat, with fuckin’ Latin in my head. Cedo Nulli. Had to look it up, and it was real. So why not you? Took some time, ’cause I didn’t think about you not bein’ local. But here you are, and here I am.”
She wondered vaguely who had turned down the thermostat on the world. Cold sweats indeed. Her name in his dreams. Cedo Nulli. The tat between her shoulder blades itched. It was all too specific to be coincidence; it had to be design, but whose? None of the prospects pleased. Vengeful sphinx? Manipulative god of Justice? Or some villain she hadn’t even thought of, some enemy made with a single careless action she’d already forgotten?
