by Lyn Benedict
“I promise. Good or bad. I’ll tap into the Miami ISI and see if he reports in.”
Sylvie reached the door, turned back. “Wait. What? Alex, there’s no one left. The mermaids killed most of them. Any survivors are going to be scrambling for order, not—”
“Mermaids?” Alex said. The perfect incomprehension in her voice froze Sylvie in her tracks.
“Mermaids,” Sylvie said. She went back, directed Alex’s attention to the TV, to the laptop sliding off her lap, forced her to look at the pages she’d bookmarked. “Conspiracy. Illusion. The ISI taken down a peg or two.”
Alex shook her head. “Don’t shout. My head hurts. I don’t want to look at that.” She turned her face away, closed her laptop, and slid it beneath the couch. Guerro whined, rested his heavy head in her lap. Alex’s fingers tightened in his ruff as if she were falling, and the dog was her only anchor. When she opened her eyes again, her pupils were two separate sizes. A magical concussion.
Sylvie whispered, “Bastards. Bastards, all of them.” This was why she hated witchcraft. It wasn’t bad enough to force an illusion down people’s throats, to make them doubt what they had seen. Somewhere, a group of witches was very busy making people forget they’d ever had doubt at all.
Alex’s breathing was tight and hitched; her face pinched with agony. Sylvie got her off the couch, walked her into her bedroom, saw her put to bed with aspirin that couldn’t really touch the source of the pain—having her brain altered by something unnatural.
Alex curled into her sheets, hid her face in the bright teal pillowcase, passed out. Sylvie shut out the lights and hesitated in the doorway. There was no reason to stay. Alex would wake up without remembering any of it, with only a lingering memory of a killer headache.
But she was young and healthy.
Morning news broadcasts, though, had more than their share of elderly viewers, people who rose from their beds with the sun. How many sudden strokes would there be, or inexplicable heart attacks brought on by magic forcing its way into their brains and rearranging things to suit someone else’s will?
On the TV, the breaking news listed thirty-seven dead and counting in a freak waterspout. NOAA scientists were being harassed for quotes on the “anomalous weather.” Sylvie turned the TV off and headed home, chilled all the way through.
SYLVIE SQUELCHED UP THE CONCRETE RISERS TO HER APARTMENT and left a wet imprint on the doorjamb as she keyed the door open.
Her exhaustion weighed her down; her worries made her leaden, slow to realize she wasn’t alone. She shut the door behind her, flipped the dead bolt, and started shedding clothes. Her Windbreaker slapped the floor, mostly dry, but soggy around the cuffs and hem. Her boots—she toed them off, sent them thudding across the room, where they left dark marks on the white walls.
“So, crappy days all around, huh?”
Sylvie jerked around; her gun stuck in her holster, the nylon deformed by the icy water and the rough and tumble of the morning, but she got it out, leveled it at her uninvited guest.
It didn’t bother her guest at all.
Marah Stone, the ISI assassin, sat cross-legged on Sylvie’s kitchen counter devouring cold soba noodles forked up with her fingers.
“Marah,” Sylvie said. She licked her lip, nervous and unable to hide it. Sylvie had met Marah only twice, in brief meetings where the woman had been carelessly chatty and far too interested in Sylvie’s life. She might have seemed harmless, only Sylvie knew two things about her. One, the strange, mottled birthmark on her arm and hand wasn’t a birthmark, but a curse mark, which made her dangerous. Two, Marah had been the ISI’s solution to an imprisoned witch. She’d ghosted inside, evading guards and convicts with equal ease, and killed the witch without taking any damage to herself.
Sylvie could live with that. She’d killed her own share of magical baddies after all, but Marah had mutilated the body afterward, in a way that just screamed psychopathy.
“Are you even listening to me? God, what a fucking long week this has been. I mean, I dig my way out of a very premature grave, face down a lurking sand wraith with nothing but nerve, haul ass halfway across the country, and you don’t even have a clean fork. What the hell, Shadows. What kind of host are you? I had to load the dishwasher myself.”
“Are those my clothes?” Sylvie asked.
Marah licked her lips clean of brown sauce, wiped her fingers—again—on a very familiar pair of jeans. “Mine smelled really bad. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I mind,” Sylvie said. “I mind a lot.”
“Ungracious,” Marah said. “I even brought you the mother of all hostess gifts. Thought you’d be pleased. But no, I get bitched at for borrowing your clothes, eating some really, frankly, mediocre takeout, and a gun in my fucking face!”
Sylvie stepped back, holstered the gun, raised her hands, a my-bad, sorry gesture.
Simple rule to stay alive by: Don’t piss off the assassin.
If Marah had wanted her dead, she’d be dead. Which meant this was exactly what she claimed it was. A visit.
Marah’s marked hand slowly unclenched from where it was white-knuckled around the bowl, visibly backing away from the urge to throw it at Sylvie.
“Fine,” Sylvie said. “You’ve had a bad day. So have I. Let’s not take it out on each other. I’m going to go take a nap. You can…
Get out of my house.
“… occupy yourself.”
“I’d take a shower first, if I were you,” Marah said. The last vestiges of temper in her face faded, shifted to a maddening smirk. “I left your hostess gift in there.”
Sylvie belatedly realized that the noise she heard in the background was not the leftover aural trauma of the mermaids’ watery attack, not even the homely sound of the dishwasher churning its slow way through its cycle, but the shower running.
The splash of the water was muted, not just crashing down on tile and curtain; something intercepted the spray.
Sylvie felt her nerves jangle, tighten. What an assassin considered a hostess gift might be something she really didn’t want.
“Brought it all the way from Chicago,” Marah said.
Sylvie’s attention jerked.
“Chicago?” Her voice was hungry, vulnerable.
“I told you I had a crappy day, told you I had to dig my way out. Never said I was alone. I wanted to go straight to a nice hotel with a Jacuzzi and complimentary robes, but no, he insisted on coming here—”
Sylvie, heart in her mouth, headed for the bathroom, half-terrified, half-hopeful. Marah wouldn’t have, couldn’t have brought her a corpse. She might be dangerous, but she was mercenary enough to want something from Sylvie. And Sylvie would owe her one for this.
Even though the crash and sputter of water made Sylvie’s gut churn, she couldn’t stop herself. A hand on the doorknob, her pulse ricocheting in her throat, and she flung the door open.
“Hey, Stone, a little privacy? Near death and a road trip doesn’t make us that close—”
Demalion stuck his head out from the curtain, blond hair damp and darkened, slicked to his skull, bruising on his cheek, his shoulder, but alive… His lips parted, moved silently. Sylvie.
Sylvie crashed into the shower stall with him; his arms tightened around her even as she slid and slipped on the soapy tile, trying to get closer.
Alive.
She was laughing, wild, triumphant. Surprised.
Though she’d talked a good game with Alex, she’d been most of the way convinced to thinking him dead. She clutched him closer, the sleek, wet warmth of him making her think of selkie lovers, bit his shoulder, trying to hang on.
“Sylvie,” he murmured, dragged her mouth up to his. Laughed low and hungry in his throat when she whined at having to release him from her teeth. “Too much time with werewolves?”
“Shut up,” she said and smothered that laughter with her breath. She pressed closer, bare feet unsteady on slick tiles, hanging her weight from his shoulders. He caught her aro
und the waist, snagging her belt loops, holding her tight, holding her up.
Sylvie, who normally relegated shower sex to something best left in the movies, felt his hands pressing into the small of her back, the dip of fingertips tracing heat beneath her waistband, and thought, The hell with it. She pulled away, grabbed the hem of her tee, and eeled out of it, all awkward elbows and jutting angles in the small space.
He caught her wrists while they were overhead, leaned in, pressed her back against the cool tiles. She arched into him, hissing, and he kissed her wrists, her palms, his breath as heated as the water splashing her skin.
“Clothes in the shower, Sylvie, really?” He ducked his head; the light in his eyes familiar even in Wright’s paler shade, making it no surprise when the next kiss hovered at her mouth without connecting before descending to her throat, the rasp of his stubbled chin waking a thousand tiny nerve endings to singing pleasure.
“Tease,” she said, tangling her hands in his hair—different, she cataloged. Demalion’s hair used to feel like mink to her, back when he was original recipe. Now, it felt like raw silk, equal parts coarse and soft. Different, but wonderful.
He popped the button on her pants; she released his hair to help shimmy them off her hips. Both of them were breathless with effort and desire by the time the clinging fabric was peeled off, abandoned on the floor of the shower stall.
His hands closed on her hips, wordlessly urging her closer, tighter. She tried to climb him, cracked her knee against the tile, and swore, staggering backward, losing that brief press of connection. Missing it immediately. She whined in frustration—but that was shower sex for you, bumps and bruises and awkward clinches that broke just when they were getting really good, terrible footing, and someone’s back always got slapped up against the chilly tiles.
Her tongue tangling with his, tasting heat and the bitterness of soapy foam, Sylvie thought, awkward or not, she wouldn’t trade this moment for all the silk sheets and scented candles in the world.
At last braced, balanced, they rocked against each other, trading breathless frustration for laughter, and finally for a pleasure that had their voices cracking against the ceramic tiles, saw them sprawling in the morass of water and discarded clothes that soaked the floor. Her shampoo bottle had tipped, overlaying the scent of sex and the sea in the room with a lashing of citrus foam.
Sylvie kicked feebly at her pants, unblocked the drain, and put her head back to Demalion’s shoulder and listened to the gurgle of water receding. In a moment, she was going to get up, shake this lassitude from her veins, drag Demalion with her to the bedroom, and never mind the assassin in the living room.
He stroked her wet hair, smoothing it from the wild kinks and curls it had worked its way into. “I should check in with the locals.”
Sylvie stiffened, rolled away from him. “About that.”
He propped himself up on his elbows. “What?”
“You haven’t been watching the news.”
He rolled up to sit cross-legged. He looked tired suddenly, and past the first flush of their reunion, she saw dark bruises on his arms, his hands, his shins. Marah’s words came back to her—had to dig out of a premature grave—mixed with the memory of the collapsed ISI building in Chicago.
“The Miami ISI, too?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Mermaids.”
He shoved his hair out of his face, scrubbed a hand over a jaw rough with stubble. “Mermaids. Fuck. What the hell is going on?”
“Don’t know,” Sylvie said. She shrugged. “Beyond my pay grade. I got my ass kicked and for nothing. I’m sitting this one out. I’ve got a client who needs me more than the ISI does.”
He stiffened all over, and said, “Are you shitting me? You’re sitting this one out? My coworkers died, crushed or ripped apart by a sand wraith, and you’re sitting this one out? What, just because we’re government, we don’t rate?”
Wow, she thought. Forty minutes, give or take, and they were at odds again.
Gunfire in the next room derailed their argument. Four shots, quickly fired, and a roar of something inhuman. They scrambled for the towel—the last towel; Sylvie grabbed Demalion’s discarded shirt, draped over her sink, yanked it on, and bolted for the living room, Demalion crying out for her to Be careful!
HER FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT HER LIVING ROOM HAD GOTTEN A HELL of a lot smaller, filled with Erinya’s inhuman shape. Her second thought, even less useful than the first, was to wonder if Erinya had grown. Her front feet, talons extended, crushed Marah face-first into the western wall of Sylvie’s living room; Erinya’s tail lashed against the eastern wall, knocking magazines and books from the shelves. She bulked twice as large as a tiger, scented the room with pissed-off animal musk and the cloying, damp weight of ancient jungles. Black porcupine spikes, tipped in scarlet and gold, rose from her back and nape, jutting upward in threat.
The carpet beneath her hind claws slowly transformed to loam, vines twining out of the listing bookshelf.
Lost in gaping, in yanking Demalion’s shirt around her, it took her a moment to understand that there were words beneath the guttural rolling growl emanating from Erinya.
“Where is she? What have you done to Sylvie?”
“I’m here,” Sylvie said. Her voice sounded thin against the vastness of Erinya’s anger, but it was enough. Erinya’s head turned; her nose wrinkled and flared, scenting her.
“You smell like old cat. Like him.”
Marah squirmed, got her gun up, and shot Erinya beneath the chin, point-blank. The concussion of it filled the room and overflowed, much like Erinya herself. Demalion shouted in surprise, but Sylvie was just waiting for the aftermath.
She’d shot Erinya herself once upon a time, multiple bullets tearing into the demigod’s immortal skin; the Fury had shaken the bullets off, healed the wound in minutes.
This time, amped up to full god status, the bullet only bloomed against her jaw, flattening out like a flower, and dropping to the carpet.
“Eri!” Sylvie shouted. “Stop it!”
The cops were going to be called. The last thing they needed was a clueless, trigger-panicky cop added to this bizarre domestic dispute.
Erinya’s spiked hackles settled but hissed and rattled against her nape like a nest of angry snakes. “I came to see you, and she shot me. Can I kill her?”
Truthfully, Sylvie was stunned that Marah was still breathing. The assassin was tough; even now, she looked pissed instead of afraid, had her body braced in such a way that Erinya’s strangling grip was uncomfortable, not breath-stealing.
“Sylvie!” Demalion said, clutching his towel in one hand, a gun in the other. “For God’s sake, tell her not to!”
Sylvie jerked into speech. “Don’t kill her, Erinya.” At least, not now.
Erinya glared past Sylvie at Demalion, then calmed as if she’d read Sylvie’s thoughts. She probably had.
She dropped Marah, shifted direction, leaped over the breakfast bar, and yanked open the fridge. “You never let me do anything.”
Demalion slipped past Sylvie, helped Marah up from the floor. The woman rubbed her throat thoughtfully.
“What were you thinking?” Sylvie said to her.
“Hey, lay off,” Demalion said. Marah coughed when she tried to contribute to her own defense.
Sylvie refused to feel bad. What kind of idiot took on a monster like Erinya with a gun?
We do, her little dark voice said.
That’s different, she shot back. We’re different.
“You okay?” Demalion asked. He tugged Marah as far from Erinya as possible in the small space.
“Not a problem,” Marah said. Her gaze never left Erinya, shrunk back down to human size, human shape. “You often host gods in your apartment, Sylvie?”
“I host all sorts of unexpected guests,” Sylvie said.
“I don’t like her,” Erinya said. She pulled a steak out of the fridge, a monster hunk of beef that Sylvie knew hadn’t been in the
re. “Make me dinner?”
“Be a big girl. Put it in the oven yourself,” Sylvie said. “How about Marah promises not to shoot you again, and you don’t squish her like a bug. And, Eri? Can you get rid of the jungle?”
Her apartment was unrecognizable, and Sylvie, dreading the moment her neighbors called the cops, couldn’t help but be distracted by the new plant life turning her apartment into a conservatory. She batted a flowering vine away from her face with unnecessary vigor. It left a dusting of rusty pollen all over her hand.
Marah and Demalion had their heads bent close together, and it made Sylvie nervous. Demalion, on his own, she trusted to the ends of the earth. Demalion, with the ISI at his side? A little less.
“I wouldn’t want anyone to kill my family either,” Erinya said. “But if you had to, I’d forgive you. You’d forgive me, right?”
Sylvie said, “What are you talking about?”
Erinya shoved the steak into the oven—it flared scarlet with fire inside, and Sylvie closed her eyes. Erinya was a god, she reminded herself. Wouldn’t burn the apartment down. Even if she’d turned the oven interior into a fiery pit of some kind. Erinya wasn’t exactly up on electricity.
“Family. Her. You.”
Marah coughed again. It sounded a little like a laugh. “Told you we should have had a chat. Months ago, I told you. Properly get to know each other. You know. Hey, I’m Marah Stone. I’m not just the ISI cleanup crew. I’m your cousin on your great-great-great-whatever side.”
“Bullshit,” Sylvie said.
Demalion’s face reflected her own surprise, and Sylvie felt a flare of shameful relief that he didn’t know Marah well enough to know that.
“Truth. But she wants to kill me,” Erinya continued, hauling the steak out, barely warmed. She put it on a platter, looked at it without any hunger, and said, more quietly, “They all want to kill me.”
“She’s ISI,” Sylvie said. “Kinda their raison d’être.”