by Lyn Benedict
“You don’t have to believe me.”
“Right. All I have to do is kill your political rival, a high-ranking government agent. Nice for you. You get one enemy dead, and another on the run, ’cause I’m sure you’re going to be damn free with my name as the killer.”
“That would be a bonus,” Riordan said, “but I’m an honorable man. You play fair, and I keep your name out of it, return your sister. Everyone’s happy and the ISI is safe.” He slid off the table, moved between her and Demalion, a physical show of confidence.
“I’m just supposed to trust you?”
“Demalion. You’ve got the inside scoop. Tell her. What’s my reputation within the ISI?”
“Honest,” Demalion said. “Though it’s hard to see why when you’re blackmailing Sylvie into killing for you. Distrustful, so you research all your agents in scrupulous detail—”
“I’d have uncovered you,” Riordan said. “No matter whose body you stepped into. The point, Shadows, is simple. You play fair. I play fair.”
“When did assassination become fair?” Demalion said. “It’s not the agency way. You think Graves has turned? Report him. Arrest him. Try him. Convict him. You don’t murder him.”
“The result would be the same. It’s treason, what he’s doing, Demalion.”
“I could report you and him to Collier,” Demalion said. “Make your life difficult.”
“That would benefit no one,” Riordan said. “Certainly not you. You think Yvette’s going to be pleased to find she’s been hosting a revenant like you? You think Collier would believe anything you say?
“It wouldn’t benefit Sylvie. She wants her sister. Not even the world. You think Graves would go quietly? No. He’d ruin everything we’ve been working for. Listen, Shadows, you know how I feel about the Magicus Mundi.”
“You don’t like it,” Sylvie said. “You don’t trust it. You think it should be controlled or exiled, kept out of human affairs.”
“You remembered, how charming,” Riordan said. “But why wouldn’t you? You and I might be on opposite sides, Shadows, but I think, big picture, we agree.”
“And Graves? What’s his side?”
“Graves thinks the Magicus Mundi should be exterminated.”
“Yeah? You think he hit his head and got confused about who he hates?”
“Don’t be naïve,” Riordan said. “He’s a zealot. He’ll use any means necessary to reach his goal. If that’s working with monsters to winnow his enemies, so be it. He’ll betray them in the end, just as he betrays us, now.”
“It does double duty,” Demalion said, sounding sick. “He points monsters at the ISI in big splashy kills and gains public attention. Public acclaim for when he decides to make his cause known. He’ll be the hero who fights the monsters. And those in the know who might disagree with him would be dead.”
Riordan nodded along with Demalion’s words. The idea didn’t sit right with Sylvie, but if Demalion thought it was conceivable, she’d have to go with it.
“Except someone’s working overtime erasing public memories,” Sylvie said. “Graves factor that in?”
“No one factored that in,” Riordan said.
“Any ideas on who’s behind it?” Sylvie asked. “Since we’re on the same side and all, right? I know it’s a large and powerful coven that’s well organized—”
“The most likely candidate is Yvette Collier,” Riordan said. He didn’t look pleased to be admitting it.
“No,” Demalion said.
“Why not?” Riordan said. “We all have our specialties in dealing with the Magicus Mundi. Graves is the monster wrangler. Yvette watches the witches. And I deal with the legal aspects.”
Sylvie grimaced. “Less than five years, and you’re all stepping across your lines is what you’re telling me. Graves is using the monsters to dispatch his enemies. Yvette is using witchcraft to thwart Graves’s power play, and you … you’d rather use me than risk your own life or your son’s. So the law is only the law until it endangers you.”
“Just go deal with Graves,” Riordan said. She’d ruffled him, finally. His jaw twitched; his voice deepened, rasped. “Put a rush on it. And as a gesture of good faith on my part, take Demalion with you. Get it done, and your sister will be back home before you know it. Just get the hell out.”
Sylvie bit back all the fight rising up in her. It wouldn’t get her anywhere and might cost her Demalion if Riordan got his back up. “You have a last known for him?”
“Dallas,” Riordan said.
Sylvie and Demalion traded a glance; the likelihood that he was still in Dallas? “Fine,” she said. “I’ll investigate Graves. I don’t promise anything more.”
8
On the Run
IT WAS DAWN OUTSIDE, THE AIR DAMP AND FRAGRANT WITH SALT, the grass shading from black to smudgy green, and the second sunrise Sylvie had seen after a sleepless night. Her truck surged up the last bit of the garage ramp and brought them into morning. At least that, she thought, explained the slight tremble in her gun hand, explained why her emotions were ping-ponging from rage to fear to desperation. Another night gone without sleep. Exhaustion was beating her down.
Sylvie stepped on the gas, and Demalion snapped, “Wait!” She slammed on the brakes, hair-triggered, and nearly gave them both whiplash.
“What?” Sylvie snapped.
She glanced over at him in the uncertain morning light, and felt a chill chase over her skin. Demalion’s eyes were glassy, the pupils shrunk to nothing.
“What is it?” Sylvie said. She scanned the roadway behind and before, one hand slipping from the wheel to her gun.
“Someone’s waiting for you at the canal edge,” Demalion said.
“Friend or foe?”
Demalion shook his head. “Can’t tell.”
“There’s no one there.”
“Not yet.”
Fucking psychics. Sylvie eased forward, and sure enough, just as the truck reached the narrow bridge, a man stepped out from the piling’s shadow. She stopped the truck, got out.
He didn’t look like a threat. He was smaller, slighter than he had appeared on the video feeds. His head barely reached the top of the truck’s cab. All he wore was a pair of low-slung jeans. His feet were bare. Everything about him suggested he was harmless.
But he was the same man Sylvie had seen shrug off the mermaids’ compulsion like it was nothing more than an irritating radio station, the same man who’d been at the site of at least three of the ISI disasters. He was more than he seemed.
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-approaching 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 urgen
cy 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.