by Lyn Benedict
A key fell into her palm. Small. She’d expected a locker key, or a safety-deposit-box key. Instead, she held a curio cabinet key. Simple. Uncomplicated. The kind of key that could be bypassed entirely with a paper clip.
Graves had thought it worth a dying word.
Sylvie toured the penthouse, found room after room full of white furniture. Nothing that the key fit. Nothing that looked like the books he’d mentioned. No reading material at all though she found several computers and an e-reader.
Graves liked technology.
Sylvie looked at the key again, looked at it more closely.
Smiled.
It was a key, but not the kind she’d thought. There was a glass bead at the tip, with a glimmer of light behind it. It was an electronic key, disguised.
She went back to his bedroom, grimaced at the remains on the bed, and started tossing the room as carefully as she could; she didn’t want to stir up his dust. Really didn’t want to breathe him in.
Behind a wall mirror, she found a safe with a blank black face. She waved the key across it and it popped open, a tiny vacuum dispersing.
A book.
Journal, rather. White leather. The man was compulsive.
Sylvie dragged it out, wondered what was in it that he had felt the need to hide. To bypass his tech toys and commit to paper.
Easy enough to find out.
She sat, gingerly, on the edge of the bed, flipped it open to the first page.
It finally talked today.
It asked for water.
Sylvie grimaced. Nice. A torturer’s diary.
I had it put in the tank, and it shrieked as its torn skin hit the salt water. Hovarth looked squeamish. Weak-willed. I told him to leave. Better not let him come back. The monster’s a seducer. I’d destroy it, but … I need it.
It knows things.
Things I need to know.
Things I will know.
Sylvie flipped ahead, skimmed through accounts that turned her stomach. Mentions of how well electricity traveled through salt water, mentions of food deprivation and sound bombardment and isolation.
Mermaid? Sylvie wondered.
Maybe Marah was right. Maybe Graves did have a way of making monsters obey: He broke them.
It talked again.
It told me that I was so busy worrying about the world, I was missing what was happening in my own house.
It told me there were those who had infiltrated the ISI.
It wouldn’t tell me what. Or who.
It laughed at me.
I left it in the tank for a week without food. Without any water but what surrounded it. In the dark.
I knew it would survive. I could hear it singing to itself at night. It made the weak-minded among us cry. I had to send them away.
That’s one thing the monsters have over us. Survival. Look at Shadows. She keeps surviving. Just a woman. On the outside.
I’d love to get her on my table.
Marah was supposed to bring her to me. Fickle, stupid, bitch. Thinks I don’t see her courting Riordan. Trying to get away from me.
Sylvie flinched. It was one thing to tell Demalion that the ISI wanted her dead and dissected. Another to come across Graves’s eagerness for it.
She slid off the bed, too repulsed to sit near his corpse any longer. Any sympathy she had for his outré death fled. She hoped it had hurt.
Something wrapped fingers like steel hawsers around her ankle and yanked her off her feet. She kicked out, thinking, Stupid, stupid, stupid!
The door had been locked, the apartment sealed. Dunne had dropped her inside and made a locked-room mystery of her presence. Graves had been still alive; his wounds fresh, his body whole. All signs that the monster was still here. Had only retreated to the nearest hiding space as a startled creature would. And she’d blissfully sat down to read on top of it.
The monster under the bed.
Sylvie’s kicking hit something that hissed, that felt like metal jarring her bones. She twisted, got free, her gun drawn, just as the creature scuttled out into the room, as ungainly as a grounded bat, but fast. Sylvie backpedaled with all her might, skidded to the wall, and braced herself for further attack.
It leaped to its feet, revealed itself to be human-shaped, skeletal, with a crumple of burned parchmentlike skin stretching from joint to joint. When it moved, it sounded like paper tearing. Long, bone-bladed fingers jabbed at her, and she jerked aside. Her ankle throbbed and trickled blood.
“Cost me the best part of my meal,” the thing hissed. “The last, labored breath.” A withered tongue flicked.
Night Hag, her Lilith voice reported. Feeds on suffering. Eats children and leaves dust behind in their beds. Parents think the children have been stolen, then the Night Hag feeds on their suffering for weeks.
Graves wasn’t a child, she thought. He hadn’t been suffering. How had the Night Hag gotten to him?
“You followed Graves home from work,” Sylvie guessed. Fitting fate for a torturer.
“His prisoner’s cries drew me in, but it was gone when I found my way into his labs. His frustration was sweet. I rode home in his bodyguard’s skin, ate him from the inside out, left him dust. Then slid in and sampled Graves slowly; he tasted of rage and panic and blood. You, I’ll kill quickly.”
“No, you won’t.”
The adrenaline had worn off. Sylvie just felt tired. Felt like she had all the time in the world. The Night Hag lunged at her, bony fingers diving for her chest, and Sylvie shot it three times in the chest. Bone splintered and cracked.
The creature looked surprised, as if it hadn’t expected the bullets to affect it at all. Sylvie was getting used to that expression. She liked it. The Night Hag crumbled inward, its bones crunching under the weight of that leathery skin.
Sylvie kicked it away from her as it fell, left it a broken, skeletal nightmare stretched obscenely across a white carpet. Huffed and went back for the journal. She flipped it open to the last entry; if there was ever a time for skipping to the end, it was now.
Her throat was dry; she dragged herself and the journal to the kitchen, pulled a bottle of springwater from the glass-front fridge, and sat at the white-marble counter to read it.
The creature’s escape means nothing. Only proves that one of mine has turned traitor. Hovarth, probably. I think he’s Yvette’s man. Traitor to me, the ISI, the country. Mankind.
Doesn’t matter. One monster free. What can it do? It told me what I needed to know. I’ll stop it. I won’t be beaten by the Good Sisters.
That was it. Sylvie groaned, flipped back and forth, trying to piece together the narrative. Graves’s captive, not surprisingly, ended up responding better to crumbs of kindness: food, fresh water, the faint promise of freedom. A lie—Graves gloated for a page about how desperate the creature must be to believe him. Once it started talking, it had things to say, things that must have made Graves feel like all his paranoia was worth it.
It told me that I had only caught it because it was fleeing a more dangerous foe and stumbled into my net. It told me about the Society of the Good Sisters, told me that they were witches who tried to control monsters, the better to increase their own powers. Then it told me that they had infiltrated my organization.
I did the research. It was right.
The Society is a secret, a rumor, a ghost, but I’m a determined hunter. I found proof. Shreds of history, shreds of evidence. Their motto. Keep the secret world secret. They harvest it, steal its powers to fuel their spells, protect it, hide it from society. They will go to any lengths to hide their resources, including erasing people’s minds.
There was her answer to her memory plagues. Motive and perpetrator laid out in Graves’s cramped penmanship. The Good Sisters. The Encantado had been right.
They are in the ISI working against us, working to increase their power, working to hinder us in our war against the monsters. I’ve found the head of the snake. Yvette Collier and her secretive cabal of witches and fre
aks. Have evidence and photographs to prove it. It shouldn’t be a surprise. You can’t trust magic-users, not when the power they use is dependent on the Magicus Mundi’s existing. Can’t trust them to wipe out the monsters when scavenging power keeps them strong. I told DC that they shouldn’t allow witches in the government. Now I’ll prove it.
Sylvie closed the journal. Graves had never had the chance to prove it. The Night Hag had latched on, followed him home; while he lay trapped and dying, his base had been attacked, his men killed. If the much-scorned Hovarth really had been Yvette’s man, if Yvette was the Society, then the attacks made sense. He released the monster and ran to Yvette, telling her that they had been unmasked.
The Encantado had been right, but so had Riordan. Sylvie’s objections had all been based on Yvette’s being genuinely a member of the ISI. If Yvette wasn’t ISI, then suddenly she became a lot more likely as a suspect. The only suspect.
Infiltrating the ISI had to have been a simple way to keep an eye on their competitor, to make sure that Graves’s xenophobia didn’t win the day. They put in their own man, or woman, and undermined him. Then the ISI accelerated their ten-year plan, was thinking of opening up the Magicus Mundi to public knowledge. Regulating it.
For the Good Sisters, who seemed to farm the magical world, it would mean sharing their resources. If the rest of the world knew about magic, everyone would be poking at it. The number of witches would skyrocket, as all the would-be latent talents suddenly gave it a go. Boys and girls like Zoe.
Until they killed themselves messing with power they weren’t ready for, her little voice said.
Until equilibrium was reached, Sylvie responded. Every system, no matter how chaotic, eventually settled. Humans were adaptable, and they learned fast. Look at the technology—science had gone from Model Ts to the moon, from the inklings of genetics to DNA mapping, from the first snowy TV to the ubiquitous Internet. They’d kick and fuss and panic and slowly make space for the new knowledge.
Sylvie wouldn’t have to fight alone any longer. When something went wrong in the Magicus Mundi, people would be able to defend against it. They’d know what they were dealing with.
It wouldn’t be the end of things, only a new beginning. A beginning that the Good Sisters opposed to the extent that they were willing to wipe out government agencies, to wound or kill civilians to keep from happening.
Why wouldn’t they? When they could erase their own tracks, what would stop them?
The Encantado couldn’t get close enough.
It left her and Demalion. And Marah and Riordan. If they could be trusted. They wanted Graves dead, but Riordan, at least, had suspected Yvette of manipulating memory. He didn’t seem to mind, but that was when he thought Yvette was working her spells on behalf of the ISI.
She needed to tell him. He’d want proof. The journal was a start. Graves had mentioned photos and files. Sylvie checked the computers, found each of them required a password to enter. She groaned. She didn’t have time for this. Maybe Alex would be feeling better and could crack whatever security the paranoid Graves had put on his machines.
A glance at her watch showed her the flight from Miami to Dallas should be landing any moment now. She needed to get there, pick Demalion up. And Marah. The eternal, unwelcome afterthought.
Sylvie packed up the journal, the two laptops—one ISI issue, one personal use—and the external drive she’d found in the locked drawer beneath. It hadn’t been a very good lock.
For the hell of it, she packed up his weapon—standard-issue Glock—and ammo. It left her with quite a pile. She stared at the keys on the kitchen counter and thought, in for a penny …
Besides, Graves was dead. He didn’t need his car any longer.
When she left the apartment, stepping over the dust pile that had been an unfortunate ISI bodyguard, the alarm went off. She cursed and clattered down the stairwell, trying for haste without dropping any of her armful of things.
Twelve floors later, Sylvie came out into the parking garage and thought, penthouse apartment. Graves would have a prime parking spot. She waved the key fob at the closest spots, and a slate grey SUV chugged to life.
She should have time to pick up Demalion and Marah and make new plans before the car was reported stolen. Any cops who responded to the alarm’s going off would be far more occupied with the two bodies left in the apartment—Graves’s half-disintegrated corpse and the unearthly Night Hag.
11
The Good Sister & the God
SYLVIE HAD JUST MANAGED TO MAKE HER WAY INTO THE DALLAS/ Fort Worth terminal, remembering at the last that, no matter how much she liked her gun, she couldn’t get it inside without causing a major fuss. She left it in Graves’s glove box, along with his Glock; she chose to carry the laptops with her, stuffed into a single, overstretched laptop case.
Two small children raced past, screaming and fighting, their mother chasing after, shouting vainly for them to behave. Amusement and relief sparked in Sylvie’s chest. Those were the children that had been fighting on the plane in the seats before her. At least, Dunne’s travel express had spared her three plus hours of whining children.
Her gaze left them, scanned for Demalion; for once, she didn’t have to remind herself to look for blond instead of brunette. It seemed her brain had finally accepted Demalion in the new form. Defaulted to it in her memory.
While looking for them, she grew tense. One suited man lingering in a terminal was nothing. A businessman traveling. But one suited man lingering in a terminal trying to not look at another suited man … it could be a potential hookup, but Sylvie knew better, even before she saw them avoid looking at two more suits. The ISI net was laid out.
Sylvie moved smoothly toward a coffee kiosk, then kept moving until she was behind a pillar. They didn’t notice, all their attention trained on the exiting passengers. Sylvie dialed Demalion hastily, hoping he had been quick to turn his phone back on.
“Sylvie,” he said, “Nice disappearing act you pulled. Think you can stay disappeared?”
“They’re waiting for you—”
Demalion and Marah crested the curve, and Sylvie bit off the heartfelt curse she wanted to emit. She wasn’t that far away from the ISI herself.
“I know they are,” Demalion said. A woman that Sylvie had not marked as ISI peeled herself out of a chair and strode over. Late forties, a face like a beautiful blade—all sharpness and intent—and cropped, tight curls. Unlike the rest of the ISI, she wore a dress in a eye-catching teal.
Marah tensed all over, and the woman laid a hand on her arm. The movement looked gentle, a casual touch, but Marah sagged beneath it. The suits moved in and gripped her arms tight.
“What’s the point of having psychic abilities if you don’t use them!” Sylvie said.
“I did. This is the best-case scenario,” he said. His gaze swept the concourse briefly, lit on hers for the barest moment of contact, then swept on. “This way leaves bread crumbs—”
The witch—she had to be a witch, a strong one, to affect Marah with a touch—took the phone from Demalion’s hand.
“Sylvie,” the woman said. Her voice was as sonorous and warm as a viola. “Will you join us?”
“Yvette,” Sylvie said. Really, the woman could be no one else. Even if she weren’t the witch in charge, she looked like Demalion’s type: strength before prettiness. “I don’t think so. I’m still in Miami.”
“The first time we get to talk, and you tell me a lie? Not a good start, I’m afraid. I’ve cast a seeking spell. It won’t be long before we find you.”
“Finding isn’t catching,” Sylvie said.
She grabbed another look at Demalion; he’d shouldered aside one of the agents, a red-haired man, and was holding Marah up himself. Stupid, Sylvie thought, he wouldn’t be able to move quickly if he got the chance. Then again, though Demalion had flaws, stupidity was not one of them. He didn’t think they were in immediate danger; burdening himself was a signal to her that she should flee
without guilt.
Something brushed over her skin, as damp and breathless like a dog’s nose, all snuffling curiosity—Yvette’s spell.
“I feel you now,” Yvette said. “You’re close, aren’t you? You’re watching us.”
“You think?” Sylvie shifted with the crowd’s tide, let the seeking spell fall off her. She mingled with a group of stewards moving quickly through the concourse, heading for the hotel shuttles. Time to go.
“You took the high road, borrowed a god’s power to bring you to Dallas. Riordan has you searching for Graves. I bet you found him. How was he? Dead yet?”
“You knew the Night Hag was there?”
“Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving man,” Yvette said. “I know you’ll agree.”
“If I don’t, you and your Good Sisters will erase the memory of it.”
Yvette’s breath caught, the tiniest of tells.
“Surprised, yet?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re not getting out of here, Sylvie. My people are at all the exits. You’re not armed. We are.”
Sylvie let Yvette have the last word, disconnected. The witch was right—Sylvie could see other agents lurking near doors, made the mistake of meeting eyes with one of them. The man’s hand dropped to his gun, then he came after her, close enough that she could see an earpiece. What one knew, they all knew.
Fuck.
She could just let them catch her, trust that among Demalion, Marah, and herself they could get free and make Yvette’s life miserable. Demalion had suggested she disappear, though. More psychic premonition?
She had to trust him and his instincts. She had to get out, stay free. She starting dialing. “Alex? Is Erinya still outside?”
A pause on the line, then Lupe said, “No. She’s inside.”
Sylvie went cold. “Why are you answering Alex’s phone? Why is Erinya inside?”
“Because Alex fell over and starting foaming at the mouth.”
“Did you do it?” Sylvie remembered those poisonous nails, the touch-me-not colors that lurked beneath Lupe’s skin, wondered if Alex had called Erinya for help.
