by Lyn Benedict
Even if she’d been willing to buy into his appearance, the fact remained: He was enough of a threat that he triggered Demalion’s visions.
“What do you want?” she said. “This isn’t a good time.”
“What happened to the Mora?” he asked. His voice, even pitched low to carry only to her ears, held the same powerful resonance as an opera singer’s.
“I killed her.”
“Fuck,” he muttered, and Sylvie knew he was mundi, not a witch, by the way the obscenity sounded wrong in his mouth. A language poorly learned. Imitation of humanity. But not of it.
He looked human. About five-eight, slightly olive skin tone, curly dark hair dripping water to his narrow shoulders. His eyes were dark enough that it was hard to tell pupil from iris, and his irritation creased his forehead in all the human ways. But his hair was damp; his jeans were sodden, and if she looked closely, his nose seemed more for show than for breathing, a beak with dents for nostrils instead of actual breathing apparatus.
“What’d you want with her? To congratulate her on a job well-done?”
“I was hoping she’d lead me to whoever sent her out to kill your kind. I wanted to know if she was coerced or coaxed. Now, I can’t. You killed her.”
“Trust me, she wasn’t in the mood to chat.”
“Sylvie.” Demalion jerked his head toward the ISI. “Riordan’s watching. Should we have this meeting here?”
“Fuck,” Sylvie echoed, but kept her attention tight on the monster masquerading as a man. “You think she’d have talked to you?”
“Everyone talks to me. Even you.”
Sylvie twitched and realized unhappily that it was true. On the ISI’s lawn, her enemies behind her, Riordan’s goad driving her onward, exhaustion fluttering in her chest, and she had stopped to chat. “What the hell are you?” Her gun hand—when had she lowered it?—started to rise.
“Don’t shoot. I need to know what the Mora said to you. But not here. Not now. Your man is right.”
Sylvie darted a glance over her shoulder and twitched when she felt the invasion of her personal space; she jumped back, but the stranger had laid a hand, smooth as silk, utterly uncallused, on her sternum. She swung at him, too slow, but he was already backing away. “I’ll find you,” he said. “Now that I’ve got the feel of you, I’ll find you.”
He took three quick steps, leaped into the watery ditch beside the roadway, attached to one of the Miami canals. Sylvie got a quick glimpse of something smooth and torpedo-shaped speeding through the shallow water, the jut of a not-quite fin. A dolphin?
“Crap,” Sylvie said. She clambered back into the truck, gunned it, and pulled out of the drive with a screech. “Like we don’t have enough going on.”
* * *
SYLVIE DIDN’T RELAX UNTIL SHE GOT THE TRUCK OFF THE MORE deserted frontage roads and into denser morning traffic.
She wanted to get back to her office. Needed her things—spare clips, cash—and she needed some safe space to sleep: where Riordan couldn’t rush her into killing Graves; where Marah couldn’t swan in at will; where Erinya couldn’t come calling with tales of bloody hearts and dead witches.
“Riordan won’t hurt Zoe,” Demalion said, attempting reassurance.
Sylvie nodded. She believed him, but there were a lot of levels of harm: Being held prisoner was its own kind of hurt. “Your psychic skills can’t home in on her?”
“I wish I could,” Demalion said. He sounded sincere.
Sylvie tightened her hands on the wheel, said, “I know you hate talking about this. But you’re clairvoyant. You should be able to see where she is—”
“Was clairvoyant. Then I died. Came back normal. Powerless.”
“You’re not powerless now,” she said. “You used it to survive the sand wraith, to warn the ISI about the Mora. You’ve been really quiet about how you managed that. Makes a girl wonder what it took to recover that ability.” She tried not to let her voice tighten. She kept her own secrets; he should be allowed his.
“Why do you always think the worst of me?” he said. “What do you think I did?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
“I told you my mother wasn’t happy with me, right? That she’s avoiding my calls? How much do you know about the sibyls of ancient Greece?”
Sylvie took a hand off the wheel, scrubbed at her face. Exhaustion was warring with adrenaline and winning.
“Syl?”
“Uh,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Mythic history ascribes their abilities to various gods speaking through them, but that’s not really the way it worked.”
Sylvie remembered arguing with Dunne about that while she was hunting for his lover. “The gods aren’t precognitive. At least, most of them aren’t. They can see possibilities, but it’s more like men playing chess. Experience and familiarity. But the Sphinx can see the future.”
“Yeah,” he said. “One of the few beings who can see it clearly.”
“She made the sibyls.”
“Her bite carries a venom that can alter human abilities.”
“So you found your mom, convinced her it was you, and then what, asked her to rewrite your DNA?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
“And for that, she’s not talking to you? Come on, Michael, I’m too fucking tired to beat around the bush. What did you do?”
“It was risky. Her venom kills more often than it changes. I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks.”
Sylvie’s hand flew off the wheel again, grabbed his shoulder. “Idiot. Wright died to save you, and you…
She shut her mouth, felt one step away from hyperventilating, thought back to when he’d first returned to Chicago. “Those two weeks where you were ‘unreachable’? You were fucking dealing with the venom. Dying, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t die.”
Sylvie let out her breath; it rushed out on a shaky stream. She counted to ten, sucked in more air, and said, “Fine. Fine. You didn’t die, and I’ll crash the truck if we fight now. So, give me the short answer. You have psychic powers, but you can’t find Zoe.”
“I have limited abilities,” he said. “They’re all tied in to precognition and threat. I could tell you when to dodge a bullet. I can tell you that we’ve got a car wreck in our future.”
“What?” She whipped a look at him, wondering if that was an example or a prophecy.
He shrugged, apparently not sure himself.
Sylvie’s phone rang shrilly in her jacket pocket, thrown over the back of the seat. “Get that,” she said. “Maybe it’s Zoe.”
“It’s not,” he said, before he even reached her jacket.
“So your talent’s good for crushing hope,” she muttered. “Figures.”
Demalion fumbled for the phone, dragging her jacket up from behind the seats. “It’s not an ISI number,” he said, before hitting speaker.
An agitated man started talking before Demalion could say more than, “Yes?”
“Who’s this? Wait, never mind. Tell that bitch, Shadows, that she needs to come pick up whatever it is she left in my hotel. It’s freaking the fuck out, and the doors aren’t going to hold it.”
“I’ll be there, Toro,” Sylvie said, raising his voice so he could hear. “Stay away from the doors.”
“You owe me another $500 for this, Shadows.”
“Only if my client is still present and in one piece when I get there. It’ll be… Sylvie checked her dashboard clock, tried to calculate distance, traffic, endless variables that flitted through her weary mind like elusive, darting bats. “It’ll be as soon as I can make it,” she snapped, jerking her hand across her throat, and Demalion cut the connection.
“Sylvie,” he said. “Do we have time for this?”
“No choice,” she said. Toro was a lot of things, but jumpy he wasn’t. If he was concerned, there was reason. She pulled the truck over into the nearest convenience-store parking lot, nearly sideswiped a fast-approachi
ng Mercedes that she just hadn’t seen, and thought, Car wreck in her future. Right.
She got out of the truck, staggered into the store, bought an energy drink that looked to be made entirely of caffeine and sugar, grabbed a pack of Tums to go with it, and returned to the truck on the passenger side. “You drive.”
“Where am I going?”
“Siesta-Sleep Hotel in Homestead, and hurry.” She folded herself into the passenger seat, found it warmed by his skin, and nearly dropped off then and there. Instead, she buckled the belt down, and chugged her drink and two of the antacids.
“You left your client there? Jesus, Sylvie. What’d she do, try to stiff you on your fee? That place has cockroaches the size of scorpions—”
“Drive, Demalion,” she said, closed her eyes, and tried to think of yet another place to keep Lupe.
* * *
SHE WOKE WHEN DEMALION BRAKED HARD, TIRES PROTESTING, AND she woke up angry. Fucking Lupe couldn’t even control herself for one damn day. Weak-natured, she thought, then felt something in her head click over. That wasn’t her. That was the Lilith-voice making itself felt, though more quietly than usual.
Just great, she thought. All she needed. To have it go stealth, make it even harder for her to resist its brutal pragmatism.
“Good nap?”
“Not long enough.” She looked out along the streets, said, “Make a left.”
“I know where we’re going.”
“So go there faster,” she said. That drumbeat urgency in her blood was the only thing keeping her moving. It kept a clock running down, the time she was wasting. Time she could be using to deal with a world going wonky under the weight of Erinya’s presence, of Dunne’s expectations, of the witchy manipulations.
Demalion pulled into the hotel lot, found a space in a mostly empty lot. He wasn’t wrong about the hotel’s ambiance; it did run toward rat and roach more than bed and bath, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Stay here,” Sylvie said. “I need you to keep the truck running.”
Sylvie headed out of the truck. She’d left Lupe in Room 213, sulking and none too pleased with her environment. Then again, as far as Lupe was concerned, everything in her life had been on a downward slide since the moment she was kidnapped by Azpiazu.
Given that and the manager’s call, Sylvie was less than surprised to find her knock answered by a crash and a strange animal sound. Something large, she thought, since the floorboards creaked as Lupe paced toward the door. Exactly what shape Lupe had taken, Sylvie couldn’t tell. The animal protest that traveled through the door was like nothing she’d heard before. Something like a snake rattle, like a cat’s purr, but high-pitched.
Tranquilizer gun. She should have invested in a tranquilizer gun. Another thing to set Alex on. God, Alex. She should have warned her about the ISI, told her to get someplace safe. Was there anyplace safe? Sylvie’s head spun.
She leaned on the door frame, tried to muster patience. “Lupe. It’s Sylvie.”
The door jolted as Lupe crashed into it; the thick wood bowed outward, and the rattling shriek made Sylvie wince. Up close, the sound could cut glass. Or shatter it.
“What the fuck did you leave in there?” the manager said, joining her.
“Give me the key,” Sylvie said. “Go away.”
Toro passed her the key, backed up a few feet. Sylvie eyed him, knew he was hoping to get something on her that would net him some more cash, and thought, Fuck it. She was sick of playing censor. If he wanted to see, let him. The ISI wouldn’t like it, and that was reason enough to let it happen. She waited until she heard Lupe retreat, then keyed the door open a crack. Peered inside.
“What is it? What do you see?” he asked, leaning forward.
Trouble.
Serious trouble.
Not only had Lupe changed independent of the lunar cycle, but there was absolutely no way this change could be passed off as normal. No “zoo escapee” excuse was going to cover this.
Lupe raised her head; a long forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air. Tasting Sylvie’s presence. The mane of feathers around her neck shifted and fluffed. She shrieked again, and lashed her long, tawny tail. She sprang forward, and Sylvie slammed the door just in time to avoid a clawed paw.
“I’m going to need a nonlethal weapon,” she told him. “A Taser, stun gun, or a tranq gun. Something.”
He looked at her blankly, and she said, “Get me one.”
“Shadows, I don’t know what you—”
“Toro, your hotel clients are 90 percent violent offenders of one kind or another. You’re telling me you don’t have an entire armory in your office?”
“I got an Uzi?”
“If I wanted to shoot her, I’d use my gun,” Sylvie snapped. She knew she was being irrational, that most of her anger was self-directed—she just didn’t have things under control.
“I got roofies.”
Sylvie grimaced. She hated the people she interacted with sometimes. “Fine. Get me a handful and a steak.”
“Five dollars each—”
“Toro, I could walk away and leave her to you. Make her your problem.”
“Fine,” he said, and slunk off.
Sylvie shuddered. She was so going to call Suarez and sic him on Toro. There was sketchy, and then there was sketchy.
Demalion joined her on the second-floor balcony, ignoring her scowl. “I left the motor running. What’s taking so long?”
Lupe hiss-purred through the door, and Demalion said, “What is that?”
“My client,” Sylvie said. “She’s having a bad day.”
Toro returned with a handful of pills going chalky and damp in his hand, and a steak a couple of days past fresh. Sylvie could smell him coming.
She wasn’t the only one. The door shuddered again in the jamb, the hinges jolting. Toro crushed the pills into the steak, and Sylvie took it with one hand. It took more concentration than she expected to hang on to the slimy, heavy mass, and that was the beginning of the end.
She took her eyes off the crack in the door to focus on the meat’s getting away from her. Demalion stiffened like he’d been electrocuted and swept her down to the concrete walkway, scraping her arm, numbing her elbow, and knocking the breath from her.
Lupe’s claws closed on empty air, and she leaped down to the parking lot. In the sunlight, she was a beautiful monster. She had a huge catlike body, tawny and stippled with tropical bird colors, blue, green, red. A ruff of bright feathers stood out around her serpentine head like an Elizabethan collar, and the scales on that massive snake head glimmered with an oily green sheen. Like a poison-arrow frog, everything about her screamed toxic.
“Lupe!” Sylvie yelled, hanging over the edge of the balcony. She hurled the steak down in front of her. It landed with a wet, messy splat and spread out across the concrete like a rooftop jumper.
Lupe flickered a skink blue tongue at the steak, then dismissed it.
“No, no, no,” Sylvie muttered, scrambled to her feet, and headed downstairs, Demalion shouting behind her. Maybe if she could get Lupe into her truck, the situation could be salvaged.
Traffic on the road outside the hotel suddenly bottlenecked as first one driver, then another, saw Lupe and slammed on the brakes, and got rear-ended for their pains. Horns filled the air, and Lupe let out her freaky howl-shriek again and headed straight for the traffic in a ground-eating lope Sylvie couldn’t hope to beat. Maybe with the truck, but the road was blocked.
Her breath seesawed in her chest, panic striking hard and deep. Lupe was going to get killed. Or kill someone. Or both. And it would be her fault.
Sylvie raised her gun, belatedly thinking even a flesh wound would slow her down, be better than this, but there were too many people around, and Lupe was so fast. …
Sylvie closed her eyes, shut out Demalion shouting at Toro, the sounds of panic and excitement on the street, the sounds of Lupe’s life being destroyed step by step. There had to be something she could do.
W
hether it was exhaustion or panic or the catastrophe about to happen, she could only think of one thing that might work.
“Erinya!” she shouted. “Erinya!”
Her breath felt like it was torn from her, and she didn’t even know if it would work. If Erinya was listening. And if she was, if she’d come.
Lupe gained the roadway and the stopped cars, lunged atop them, and flared her neck feathers. Her clawed feet crashed through a windshield, and the carpoolers inside hurled themselves out, one man clutching a bloody shoulder.
A second later, he was convulsing in the street; Lupe was, apparently, as toxic as she looked.
Demalion said, “Shoot her. Sylvie. You don’t have a choice. She’s killing people.”
Sylvie lined up the shot, blinking sweat out of her eyes, her vision blurring. She scrubbed her face, scented the lingering aroma of putrid meat on her skin, and gagged. The gun shook in her hands.
Demalion took the gun from her, aimed, and Lupe dropped between the cars, showing that, animal or not, she still recognized danger. Sylvie got a glimpse of that snaky head peering at them beneath the SUV she’d just trashed and had only a moment to realize that Lupe was coming for them at speed.
Demalion held his ground, took the shot—head shot, too high. The scales furrowed back, exposed thick bone—another scar for Sylvie’s client should she survive turning human again—but Lupe didn’t even slow.
Sylvie swiped her gun back, holstered it, and shoved Demalion toward the truck.
“Lupe,” she said. “Lupe.” Like the name was a spell to return her to herself.
Lupe slowed in her advance, tilted her head. Listening, Sylvie hoped.
“C’mon, Lupe. You don’t want to kill anyone, right? You don’t want to hurt anyone else. Remember how bad you felt when Jenny—”
The chattering blast of Toro’s Uzi cut through her words, sent her seeking ground, seeking safety. Lupe leaped, slashed at Toro with a casual paw, and sliced flesh to the bone. He screamed in pain and kept screaming.
