Lies & Omens si-4

by Lyn Benedict

  “Would defeat the purpose of a safe room,” she agreed, and waved him off.

  He stopped at Alex’s desk, flashed a smile, and offered to buy her lunch. Alex turned him down but sent him away with a smile. Sylvie shook her head and tuned out the flirty conversation.

  She peered into the narrow corridor that Emmanuel had excavated beneath the stairwell. She hated that they needed the room at all, but Alex had been agitating for one for months. After the ISI had tear-gas-bombed the office, Sylvie decided Alex was right.

  Ideally, it would be a magical safe room as well, a place to store dangerous talismans or to hide from magical attackers, but that would require a trustworthy witch to build the proper shields.

  A shift in the air, the scent of blood and antiseptic, and she turned to find Lupe at her side, peering over her shoulder. Her lips were pulled tight over her teeth, outlining the jut of her canines. “That for me?”

  “If it comes to that.”

  “Guess it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.” Lupe crossed her arms tight over Sylvie’s borrowed sweatshirt. She shifted foot to foot. “You sure it’ll hold me?”

  “Long as you don’t turn into a swarm of mosquitoes,” Sylvie said.

  Lupe grinned without amusement. “Right now, I’m not ruling it out.”

  Sylvie shot Alex a help glance. She was out of anything even remotely approaching comfort. Alex slid out from behind her desk, put a careful hand on Lupe’s sleeve, and said, “You want to get in on our lunch order? I mean, I don’t know much about shape-shifting, but it seems like hungry work.”

  Lupe followed Alex’s lead docilely enough, even as she protested that she was too stressed to think about food. Sylvie took the opportunity to duck up to her office.

  She left the door open, keeping an ear out for Lupe and Alex, and let her shoulders slump. She didn’t like Lupe’s changes. The curse was bad enough, but she really didn’t like the level of violence that went with the changes. She needed a witch, and she needed one now.

  Even if a witch couldn’t break the curse, maybe one could ameliorate the worst effects.

  Sylvie ran through her usual contacts in her mind, trying to figure out who was speaking to her this month, who was too busy to talk, and finally just admitted the truth to herself. There was only one person she was going to call.

  She pushed back her rolling chair, propped her sneakered feet against the scarred wood desk, and dialed.

  “Sylvie,” Demalion said. Picked up on the first ring. And didn’t that make her skin warm embarrassingly even though she knew the quickness was dictated more by proximity than desire. She’d caught him at a good time.

  “Got a moment?”

  “You’ve got trouble?”

  “When don’t I?” Despite the truth in that, she felt her voice relaxing. It had been three months since he’d taken his new body back to Chicago, three months that should have stretched the relationship between them to the breaking point. Instead, it had given them something they’d never known they had needed. Distance and the time to talk.

  “Truth,” he said. “I think you wouldn’t know what to do with a vacation if you had one.”

  “You could come down early and find out,” she said.

  His voice roughed itself into a huff of not-quite-amusement. “Would if I could.”

  “Oh, damn,” she said. “I know that tone. You’re not coming next week.” Disappointment sat sourly in her stomach. Time to talk was all well and good, but she missed being able to touch him. His resurrection from the dead and his departure had happened so close together that some nights she woke sweating, thinking he was only a voice on the other end of her line. A ghost she couldn’t let go.

  It had been difficult enough to let him go when he was determined to repay a dead man for giving Demalion back his life, when he had gone back to Chicago to fix what was broken in Wright’s life. It hadn’t taken too long for Wright’s wife to smell a rat, to come to the correct but improbable answer that the man wandering around in her husband’s body was no longer her husband. Once she figured it out, she took her son and the money Demalion offered and fled the city. Sylvie had hoped Demalion would return at that point. Instead, he’d rejoined the ISI under Adam Wright’s name. That had been a harder pill to swallow. No debt owing there, just ambition and an ideology Sylvie didn’t share.

  Still, they were making it work.

  She pushed away from the desk, spun to stare at her filing cabinets, assessing. Even without Lupe’s case, she had too many small irons in the fire to go to him.

  Before he could make apologies, she said, “Hey, you heard anything about memory modification?”

  “Magical?”

  “Would I ask otherwise?”

  Demalion hesitated, thinking about it. “Individual or big picture? Are we talking Chicago?”

  “That and others.”

  “No,” Demalion said. “You know, it’s weird, now that you mention it. I just sort of accepted it. People don’t like to look beyond the ordinary.”

  “This is true,” Sylvie said. “To my everlasting chagrin. You know how many of my clients wait until things are holy-fuck bad instead of coming in at first trouble?”

  “You and the doctors. You really think there’s something there? Something you want me to look into?”

  “If you’ve got time.”

  “That’s the problem,” Demalion said. “Yvette is running us all kinds of ragged. Trying to get everything in place to impress whoever it is who funds us. Apparently, there was some type of … incident.”

  She could hear the air quotes through the phone, and said, “Let me guess. Someone served the big boss shrimp, and he’s allergic?”

  “Hell if I know,” Demalion said. “Seriously, Syl. She’s got things locked down tight. It’s all need-to-know, and I’m a new hire as far as Yvette’s concerned. Her inner circle is so busy that none of us low-levels have even laid eyes on them for days. But it’s all trickling down.”

  “Things like that do,” Sylvie said.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a day off. God, I don’t know when I’ll even catch up on my sleep.” If it hadn’t been for his nearly tangible frustration, she might have shared hers.

  “You have any idea what’s going on?”

  “Big picture, yeah,” Demalion said on a sigh. “Political infighting. Yvette, Riordan, and Graves are all duking it out to be the new head of the ISI. They’re all hell-bent on impressing the money man with their dedication and efficiency.”

  Sylvie grimaced. She knew Riordan. Wouldn’t have liked him even if he hadn’t been the one who had sent a SWAT team armed with tear gas into her office to collect her. He was too prone to attacking the little guys and leaving the big threats to sort themselves out.

  “What happened to the old head?”

  “Gods in Chicago,” Demalion said. “They found a charred pelvis and skull in his office. Typed it for DNA. He’s toast. It just took a while for the paperwork to go through.”

  “So Riordan’s down here, posturing at me. Yvette’s making your life difficult. What’s Graves doing?”

  “Nothing good, I bet. Man’s a bastard. I worked for him for two months when I first came out here. Bad temper. Bad attitude. Distrustful.”

  “Sounds like typical ISI to me.”

  “Syl—”

  “All right, all right. No job bashing.”

  “Graves hightailed it down to Texas after Yvette stole the Chicago office out from under him. He’s pissed. Been making our lives hard by accusing this office of all sorts of things. Magical misconduct, mostly. He’s heard rumors that Yvette is a witch.”

  “Is she?”

  “Yeah,” Demalion said. “Makes sense if you think about it. Who better to deal with the Magicus Mundi than someone who can step in and out of it.”

  “I do all right,” Sylvie said.

  “Yeah, don’t try to pretend you’re ordinary.”

  “So Graves doesn’t like witche
s.”

  “Witches, psychics, half-breed monsters.”

  “Not a fan of yours, then,” Sylvie said. It was more than just a comment; it was an invitation to confession. There were some things they’d talked about endlessly. Demalion’s difficulty in adjusting to his new body. Demalion’s relief when Wright’s wife figured out that the man in her apartment might look like her husband but wasn’t, and left him. Demalion’s careful plan to rejoin the ISI without tipping them off that he had been with them before. He wanted to work for them, not be studied by them.

  The one topic made conspicuous by its absence was Demalion’s clairvoyance. He’d been born with it, a genetic gift from his inhuman mother, and he’d died with it. Sylvie wanted to know if he’d managed to reshape Wright’s body to bring it with him, and he wasn’t talking.

  Lupe’s voice rose sharply downstairs, but after a reactive jerk to her feet, Sylvie diagnosed the sound as brittle laughter, not a threat.

  “Watch your back,” Sylvie said. “Political infighting can get ugly and violent fast.”

  “I think Graves is more focused on Yvette than me. She’s his target. Everything he hates in one tidy package. A high-ranking woman, a rival, and a witch.”

  “Graves sounds like a peach.”

  Demalion said, “Hey, Sylvie—”

  “Yeah?” The tentative sound to his voice made her wary, made her tense up as his pitch went tighter, higher, noticeable only because she’d gotten to know this new form of his voice so well.

  “I don’t know that it matters, but Yvette and I—”

  Sylvie went cold, flushed hot, read that little pause too clearly. “What, you hooked up with your boss? I guess she’s convenient.”

  “No!” Demalion said. “Not currently. Then. Years ago. Before she was up in the ranks. Before you. Way before you. When I was a different man. I just thought it was something you should know.”

  Sylvie sighed. Just what she needed. An irrational reason to add to the rational reason she already had for disliking the woman: a government agent who was keeping her lover from visiting her. “Some things you should keep to yourself. Does she know? You said she’s a witch. Will she recognize you?”

  “She looks at me funny every now and then.”

  “Just great,” Sylvie said. “Hope you had an amicable breakup, or you’ll be on the damn dissection table before you know it.”

  “She wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t she? It would be a great way to get Graves off her back. To show him that she wasn’t a crazy Magicus Mundi wannabe.”

  “You’re ridiculously cynical—”

  “You’re ridiculously trusting for a government suit.”

  An argument hummed along the wires between them, ready to break out, and Sylvie wrenched them to a new topic. “I called because I need some info,” she said.

  “Anything.”

  And that right there was why he kept her on her toes. How he could go from defending the ISI to implicitly agreeing to give her information out of their files if she asked… Sylvie thought the inner workings of Demalion’s mind might always be a mystery to her. Either he was the king of compartmentalization, or he judged and scaled every moment and every request.

  Or, of course, he still had his psychic abilities, and knew what she was going to ask, knew it wouldn’t tax his relationship with the ISI.

  She waited, let the space stretch between them. But Demalion was too cagey to be caught out that easily. “Should I be worried that you’re taking a long time to ask? Trying to think of the perfect way to phrase it?”

  “You seen your mother recently?”

  “Why do you ask?” The hesitation in his voice was enough to tell her that psychic or not, he hadn’t foreseen that question.

  “It’s just a question. One with an easy answer, I thought.” She spun her desk chair ’round. Now he had her doing it, overthinking every word.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and closed, Alex heading out on a food run. Lupe’s footsteps were soft on the terrazzo, but Sylvie, listening to Demalion’s breath in her ear, could hear when Lupe’s pacing faltered, when she sank onto the couch with creak of leather and the soft gasps of someone fighting tears.

  “Sylvie—”

  Sylvie lost interest in the game. “I was hoping she could find me a reliable witch. One with a healthy slug of power and a good attitude. One who will make house calls. I’ve got a client with one hell of a nasty curse.”

  “I’ll give her a call, but don’t count on anything. She’s—”

  “Still holding a grudge against me?” It was fair enough. Sylvie had gotten Demalion killed, bad enough for any mother. When that mother was the Sphinx and had spent a thousand years gestating the only child she’d have? Sylvie counted herself lucky Anna Demalion hadn’t slaughtered her.

  “And me,” Demalion said. “I asked her to do something she didn’t want to do. She’s been ignoring my calls ever since. I don’t think a human in trouble is going to get her to break her silence.”

  “Well, fuck,” Sylvie said. “What about the ISI? You keep records, right? Of known witches in the country?”

  “Mostly the ones who leave a trail of dead behind them,” Demalion reminded her. “I could bring Yvette in on it if it’s urgent. She’s pretty damn skilled at what she does.”

  Sylvie choked back her gut reaction, a profane and profound negative. She thought about it, turned the idea around from different angles, and decided her gut instinct was absolutely right. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “She can probably help—”

  “Michael, no. It’s not a matter of ability,” Sylvie said. “I think you’d see that. For one thing, my client can’t afford ISI scrutiny right now. They’d lock her up and worry about the cure later.”

  “She’s dangerous, then?” Demalion asked. “Sylvie. You take on some crap clients.”

  “Regardless,” she said. “No on Yvette. Besides which, if you don’t want her to associate your new life as Adam Wright with Demalion? Don’t point out that we’re on good enough terms to help each other. Good way to blow your new and secret identity right out of the water.”

  “She might know—”

  “And you want to confirm it? You trust her that much?” Sylvie heard the ugly edge in her voice and winced. It wasn’t about jealousy. It was about the basics. Yvette Collier had two strikes against her. She was a government agent, and she was a witch. Both of those made her someone to distrust.

  “Syl, the ISI is not your enemy.”

  “Did you forget they tear-gassed me and tried to make me vanish?”

  Demalion said, “If they wanted you gone, they’d have done a better job.”

  “Not your best rebuttal ever, just so you know,” she said. “They’ve been keeping a careful distance, I’ll admit it, but it’s not because they want to make nice. They’re scared of me. Every time they get close to me, their agents end up dead or damaged. That caution won’t hold forever. “

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “You’re drinking the Kool-Aid. You want to believe they’re the good guys, and I admit, their goals sound good. Study, research, integration of the Magicus Mundi with the human world … but what government group ever sticks that close to its charter?”

  “At least they have one,” Demalion said. “Your charter is all over the place. You’ve got the luxury of taking things on a case-by-case basis. We’re the government. We don’t.”

  “Fine,” Sylvie said. Her cell phone creaked in her hand, plastic protesting her grip. “Just do me a favor. I bet they’ve got files on me—”

  “You know we do. The new Lilith. Of course, we do. Not that they say much. We don’t know what the new Lilith is.…

  “Don’t look to me for answers,” Sylvie said, irritated at his fishing. “But I bet the ISI recommendations aren’t to wait until they figure me out. ISI’s not much for live and let live. You want to believe in them, fine. Just realize that, sooner or later, you’re going to have to pic
k a side. Them or me.”

  She disconnected with an angry stab of the END button, hit it so decisively that the phone not only truncated the call but shut itself down. Sylvie let out her breath in a shaky gust.

  The new Lilith.

  She’d been letting it slide, letting the words be nothing but another soubriquet people slapped on her. Loud-mouthed bitch. Shadows. L’enfant de meurtrier. The new Lilith.

  Hiding from reality doesn’t change it, her little dark voice purred.

  All right then, she thought. One goal, two reasons. Find a witch who was either trustworthy or clued in enough to the currents of the Mundi to make the risk worthwhile. Use the witch to cure or calm Lupe’s problem. Then use the witch to find out if being the new Lilith meant anything beyond the general resistance to magic and a potentially increased life span. Do all of it without letting the ISI spy on her business.

  She grimaced and tossed her cell phone onto her desk, where it landed with a clatter. Finding a witch was going to take time.

  We have time, the voice in her head suggested.

  She might have time. More time than Sylvie could imagine if her fears were accurate.

  Immortality loomed before her like a void, endless, pointless, terrifying. She closed her mind to it. She might have time.

  Lupe didn’t.

  2

  Unwelcome News

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT AND STARTING TO STORM BY THE TIME SYLVIE made it back to her apartment. The flash and crash of the night suited her mood well enough. Three days spent hunting witches for Lupe, and she’d managed to chase down a single reference to a brujo who specialized in shape-shifting curses and cures. It had been a long shot for a lot of reasons, most especially because he was supposed to live in Orlando. Sylvie knew it was unfair, but she couldn’t take a Mouse-City witch seriously.

  He’d been the real deal, though. He’d also been long gone when she got there, chased out of the city by the Green Swamp werewolf pack, who didn’t like a witch encroaching near their territory. It had been a long drive for nothing. He hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  She shrugged off her jacket, removed her holster, looked at the empty shelves of her fridge, and called for Thai. If only all her problems could be solved that easily.