by Lyn Benedict
Then Lupe had called her the first full moon after, in total hysterics; the moon rose, and Lupe shifted into a werewolf in her screened-in patio. Reason enough for hysterics, but it had been far worse than that. Lupe hadn’t been alone. Her girlfriend, Jenny, had been curled next to her on the patio swing. Jenny had needed 134 stitches in her face, chest, shoulder, and arm, lost three fingers on her right hand, and gained a cracked skull. She’d nearly bled out before Lupe woke the next morning and called 911.
Unsurprisingly, the two broke up. Jenny didn’t really remember what had happened; the concussion and blood loss saw to that, but at the same time, Lupe said, Jenny was afraid of her.
Lupe was afraid of herself.
Sylvie had taken her out to Tatya and Marisol in the Everglades, two women, two werewolves, who she thought might be willing to help deal with the change. They had been. Again, Sylvie had thought, problem solved. Or at least shelved.
Sunlight lancing through her windshield from the car before her made her squint and wince, and realize she’d torn out of her apartment without grabbing her sunglasses. A small pain, though, compared to what Lupe was going through.
Finding out she was a werewolf was bad and freaky enough—curse-inflicted lycanthropy was insanely rare—but spending the full moon with Tatya and Marisol had proved that Lupe’s problems were larger than that. With Tatya and Marisol at her side, Lupe had been braced to deal with the wolf-change, assured that no one would be hurt this time.
The problem was that Lupe didn’t shift into a wolf. She changed under the moon, wasn’t left a human between two monsters, but she didn’t turn into a wolf either. For her second full moon, Lupe turned into a jaguar, all fury and rage at being caught between the two werewolves. No one came out of that unscathed.
Lupe didn’t heal like Tatya and Marisol did, either; she was left with bloody bite marks that bled and scabbed for weeks. She bore the wounds without complaint, saying Jenny had had it worse.
Sylvie had started looking into witches, hoping to find someone who could break the curse. It was a slow, too-slow, process, trying to find a witch with the right ratio of power to trustworthiness, and they’d run out of time. It didn’t help that three months ago, the ISI had helped themselves to Sylvie’s files. The ISI was supposed to deal with the intersection of the Magicus Mundi and the real world, but they had chosen to use the information gleaned from Sylvie’s files to run the few remaining local witches Sylvie could work with out of town. Business as usual with them. They would rather inconvenience Sylvie than do anything productive.
So for the third moon, last night’s moon, Lupe had made her own arrangements. She’d gone to her parents’ home while they were on a buying trip in New York City and locked herself in a zoo-quality cage that she’d set up in the home gym. Obviously, something had gone wrong. Again. Lupe couldn’t seem to catch a break.
Sylvie changed lanes, got off the highway, and hoped Lupe hadn’t killed someone. If that happened, she didn’t know what she’d do.
Put a bullet in her brain, her little dark voice suggested. You kill monsters.
It was true. If she had been coming into the case from the outside, she would have shot Lupe already and fed her bones to the sea. But Lupe was hers. Sylvie had saved her from the sorcerer, and she was responsible for her well-being.
She was forced to a stop outside the gated community’s security station and bit back her impatience. She’d forgotten Lupe’s family had money and the paranoia to go with it. The guard leaned out of his station, eyed her beat-up truck, eyed her, said nothing. “Sylvie Lightner,” she said. “I’m here to see the Fernandezes.”
“Yeah, all right. They got back this morning.”
He waved her on; the security mostly for show. He hadn’t even asked to see her ID. But he’d answered at least part of her question. What had gone wrong? Well, for one thing, Lupe’s parents had come home early.
Sylvie felt her lips thin, press tight. She hit the gas, let her urgency spill out with that last rush to get to the house.
She pulled into the long, curving, palm-shaded driveway, and cut the engine. The stucco facade, golden in the morning sunlight, seemed peaceful, at odds with the shrieking phone call.
The driveway was paved brick and stone, money spent on decoration because it could be, and led her to a double front door with a brass knocker kept well polished. It was cold in her hands despite the growing heat of the morning.
The door opened a bare person width to a middle-aged woman Sylvie didn’t know and presumed was Mrs. Fernandez. Behind her, the house was dim and dark. Quiet.
“I’m Sylvie—”
“It’s in back,” she said as she opened the door. She didn’t look at Sylvie.
“It?” Sylvie didn’t wait for an answer. The woman’s expression told her enough. Fear and distaste and horror all admixed.
Lupe. Her daughter. It.
Sylvie headed for the back of the house, for the exercise room Lupe had mentioned. “I’ll set up there. At least then, if I get loose, I won’t shred the furniture.” Another woman stood in front of the gym door; this woman was younger, her face miserable with fear as she blocked the entrance.
Sylvie said, “I need to go in.”
The woman—not sister, Lupe didn’t have a sister, but maybe sister-in-law?—grabbed at Sylvie’s arm. “She tried to kill him. We had to do it.”
Sylvie shoved past, frightened now for Lupe, expecting to find her dead. It wasn’t that bad. Close, but not that bad. Lupe huddled in the base of the cage, arms wrapped tight around herself, face hidden in her knees. Two men stood outside the cage, their backs to Sylvie but their stance unmistakable. Guns in their hands, aimed at the cage. Blood smell hung in the air, sharp and sweet and strong in the sterile confines of the home gym.
“Hey,” Sylvie said. “Put ’em away. I got this.”
“It tried to kill him,” the younger one said. Lupe’s brother. Sylvie tried to remember his name. Alex, thorough as always, had put together one of her overkill files on Lupe and her family. The brother’s name was in it. Miguel?
“Manuel,” Sylvie said. “Put it away. She’s your sister.”
“It’s an abomination,” Lupe’s father—Alberto—said. “We should kill it.” His words were brutal, his face cold, but his hands wavered.
“Put it away and get out,” Sylvie said, losing patience. Lupe still hadn’t looked up.
“You’ll get rid of it?” Alberto demanded.
“I’ll take care of her,” Sylvie said.
He huffed, jerked his head at his son, and they ceded the ground. Sylvie waited for the adrenaline rushing her system to fade, but it, wiser than she, refused to go.
They could change their minds; they could come back at any moment, worked up all over again, guns firing. Sylvie and Lupe weren’t out yet. Relief was premature.
* * *
THE HEAVY PADLOCK ON THE CAGE WAS SNAPPED TIGHT, LOCKING Lupe behind bars, a beaten prisoner in her own family home. “Lupe. You have the key?” Sylvie tried to keep her voice steady, but blood smeared the pale tiles surrounding Lupe, a jumbled finger painting in shades of crimson and rust. The woman was injured, maybe seriously. Not dead. Sylvie could see the fine tremors running the angles of her bent elbows and knees, the shaky bellows of her rib cage.
“Lupe. Answer me!”
“… they took it,” Lupe breathed. “Put me back in and took it away.”
Back in. She’d gotten out. Not good.
“Oh, fuck this,” Sylvie said. She looked around, focused on the weight bench and free weights. That would do. She seized up a twenty-five-pound weight, swung it around, and brought it crashing against the padlock. The noise made Lupe scream, and it was echoed in the rest of the house. Sylvie dropped the weight on the broken lock, turned to greet Manuel with her gun raised. “Out!”
He held his hands up, gun pointing toward the ceiling, and backed out. “Your life,” he said. “Your risk.”
Sylvie followed him to the d
oor, locked it behind him, dragged the weight bench in front of it, metal legs screeching over the tile.
“Lupe,” she said. “Come on, what happened?”
“I changed,” Lupe said. Her voice was a husk, ruined and wet. “Sylvie, I can’t live like this.”
“It’s okay—”
“It’s not!” Lupe jerked to her feet, faster than she should have been able to after trying to fold herself into origami. She was in Sylvie’s face almost before Sylvie could blink. Sylvie stiff-armed her in the chest, knocked her back.
“Calm down.”
“Why should I?” Lupe shouted.
Sylvie got her first good look at the woman since she’d entered the room and found herself in reluctant agreement. Why should Lupe calm down when things were so completely, visibly, wrong?
When Lupe had turned wolf that first time, she hadn’t come back unscathed. Her teeth had stayed sharp-edged behind soft lips. When she’d become a jaguar, the shift back to human left her with a swath of spotted skin across her shoulders and back. Whatever she’d shifted into last night had left its own startling and far-too-noticeable mark: Lupe’s irises looked like hammered brass, and her pupils were black slits. They should have looked like special-effects lenses, easy to explain. They didn’t.
Lupe crossed her arms, long, tanned limbs crossing darkly over her white tank top, her white-linen pants. Blood spread scarlet near her rib cage. The shirt was smoked at the center of the bloodstain. A bullet crease. Close range.
Sylvie stepped closer, peeled the shirt up. Lupe winced. Superficial but bloody. Sylvie grabbed a towel from the weight bench, pressed it against the wound. It came away mostly dry. Lupe had bled hard, but she wasn’t going to bleed out. She could wait for first aid. Sylvie threw the towel across the room, a drift of white in a mostly white room. Lupe’s blood was the brightest thing in it.
“They shot you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Lupe said. “The cage didn’t hold me. I almost killed him. Olivia came last night, waiting to welcome them all home. She brought my nephew, Sylvie. Two years old. She thought they were alone in the house, and I … I was loose.”
“How’d you manage that, anyway?” Sylvie asked. The cage was first-rate. The bars were solid steel, none of them more than four inches from each other, closed at bottom and top, and, until Sylvie had smashed the lock, secure.
Lupe blinked dark gold eyes, and Sylvie understood what they reminded her of just as Lupe said, “I turned into a python. A big one. I almost crushed his rib cage. Two years old, and his aunt tried to make him a meal. I knew better, even as I closed my coils, but I couldn’t stop.”
Sylvie swore. It was all wrong. All unexpected. Werewolf was bad, were-jaguar was worse—but Lupe had worn those shapes before while held by Azpiazu. She’d worn bear also. Sylvie had expected that to be the third shift, something big but containable. Not this. Not a reptile who shared nothing with humankind.
Lupe swayed closer; Sylvie smelled sweat, blood, and a musty underlay of old snakeskin. Her stomach turned uneasily.
Careful, her little dark voice warned. She’s dangerous.
Dangerous enough to maul a woman, to take on two wolves, to try to smother and eat a child. A calculating brain with animal instinct.
“It’s the curse, isn’t it,” Lupe said. “The curse that Azpiazu suffered. Now it’s on me.”
Sylvie thought of a slew of platitudes but chose not to lie. “Looks like.”
Lupe’s legs gave out; she dropped to the floor as fluidly as if she had gone serpentine again. “Why me?”
The question wasn’t an accusation, but it felt like one. The other women who’d survived being Azpiazu’s prisoners—Maria, Rita, Anamaria, Elena—had come out of it untouched except for nightmare memories and scarred foreheads where the binding sigils had been.
The binding sigil had held them prisoner to Azpiazu’s will. Sylvie and her cohorts had disrupted the sigils on the other four, magically or physically. She remembered gouging at Rita in bear form, her marked forehead the only part of her still human. Sylvie had slashed the sigil with a sharp stone and her nails.
But Lupe, during the final battle, had been wounded and retreated beneath a bush. Her sigil had never been disrupted. It hadn’t mattered. The spell had broken when Azpiazu died. It should have been a nonissue.
“We went back,” Sylvie said, half in realization, half in explanation. “We dispersed the last traces of Azpiazu from the site to make sure he couldn’t come back as a vengeful ghost. You still had the sigil whole on your skin. It acted like a beacon for those traces.”
Lupe’s skin was unmarked now. Her forehead where the sigil had been was as smooth as marble. The other women bore scars. Sylvie imagined the sigil groaning beneath the sudden weight of the curse and sinking through skin and bone, making itself at home somewhere in Lupe’s body like a migrating bullet.
“So you did this to me?”
Excuses leaped to Sylvie’s lips: She hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have happened. Azpiazu had started it. It was Tepeyollotl’s curse. “Yes.”
“What are you going to do to fix it?” Lupe said. “I’ve lost my girlfriend, I’ve fucked up my classes, and my parents want me dead. I mean, they haven’t been happy with me since I hooked up with Jenny, but … they really want me dead, Sylvie.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I noticed.”
Lupe’s face crumpled as if she’d hoped Sylvie would protest, would tell her pretty lies about her parents just being scared, bullet crease aside. She scrubbed at her eyes, but the snake taint in them seemed to prevent tears from forming.
“We’ll fix it,” Sylvie said. “We’ll find a witch who’ll figure out a way—”
“That’s what you tried last month,” Lupe said. “I’m still fucked. And it’s getting worse.”
“Witches are a little scarce on the ground right now,” Sylvie admitted. The witches with any real power had been leaving Miami in waves, fleeing Sylvie’s gun, fleeing the ISI, fleeing the new god that was making Miami her home. The new god that Sylvie had helped create. Erinya had been a demigodling, a servant to the god of Justice—dangerous, but containable—until Sylvie had used Erinya to defeat the soul devourer’s grab at godhood. Erinya got the shiny prize instead, becoming a full god, independent and unstoppable. Worst of all, instead of retreating from the real world in proper godly protocol, she insisted on sticking around.
Gods in the real world were always a disaster waiting to happen. They were pure power, and like a human shedding skin cells, shedding breath, gods shed scraps of power wherever they lingered. Witches could use that power, collect it for their own, but it was a risky habit. A god’s power was more likely to burn out a witch’s ability entirely than it was to recharge it.
Once Erinya had started making her presence felt, Sylvie’s favorite go-to witch, Val Cassavetes, had disappeared somewhere in Italy, and taken Sylvie’s witchy sister, Zoe, with her. She couldn’t even rely on family.
The witches who were left? Scavengers who hoped to grow fat on the god’s shed leavings. Untalented, untutored. Untrustworthy. Too small to be of interest to the ISI or too skilled at going to ground. The kind of witch who’d be just as glad to kill Lupe and use her bones for spell ingredients.
“Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “We’ll beat this. I’ll broaden the search. I’ll find a way to break this curse.” The words felt empty in her mouth, fragments of faint hope. She wasn’t a spell-breaker. Point her in the direction of the spellcaster, and she’d take him or her out of the picture, break the curse through brute force. But Azpiazu was three months dead, and the god who’d laid the original curse was a powerless shell who’d retreated to a realm Sylvie couldn’t reach.
Lupe grimaced, all pointed teeth and animal distress, and said, “You’d better hurry. I’m running out of normal.” As if to prove her point, she went from her crouch to a leap that took her to the top of the cage, then to the high window and through it. She left a bloody smear on the sill as
her wound broke open again with the exertion.
Sylvie, thinking of the armed men outside the weight room, thought Lupe had the right idea, and clambered awkwardly, humanly, after her.
* * *
WITH NO PLACE ELSE COMING TO MIND, SYLVIE DROVE LUPE AND herself to the Shadows Inquiries office, ushering Lupe in ahead of her. Lupe’s bare feet were soundless on the dusty terrazzo floor, and Alex, wielding a broom with determination, grimaced as she splashed sawdust over Lupe’s feet.
“Crap. Sorry, Lupe,” Alex said.
Lupe raised her head; Alex sucked in a breath and retreated to the sanctuary of her desk. The lanky blonde looked uncharacteristically flustered, but Sylvie understood. There was something particularly horrifying about watching Lupe grow less human each month.
“There are some spare clothes upstairs,” Sylvie said, disrupting the awkward moment.
Lupe headed for the stairs and came face-to-face with the workman coming out from beneath them. He dropped his toolbox, and Lupe turned back to Sylvie, fury and humiliation on every distorted line of her face. Her throat mottled darkly with passing spots. “Fix this, Shadows.”
The carpenter, kneeling over his spilled tools, crossed himself as Lupe stomped upstairs. Sylvie said, “How’s the safe room coming, Emmanuel? We’re going to need it a little sooner than I thought.”
“What’s wrong with her?” he said. His dark eyes jittered over hers; then he looked up the stairs as if his gaze could drag Lupe back down and pin her in place until he understood the inexplicable.
“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Sylvie said. She kept her tone friendly but didn’t bother with an excuse. She was tired of helping the world blind itself to the Magicus Mundi. Let him worry and wonder.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m taking lunch. I’ll have the room finished by this evening. Just need to finish up the ventilation system. Can’t have you suffocating in there.”
