by Lyn Benedict
“I can’t intervene,” he said.
“Figures,” she said. “After all, dead humans are good for swelling the soul collections. What do gods do with them anyway?”
Dunne waved; the board vanished. “Nothing I can explain to you. Sylvie, if it comes to it, I will remove Erinya from the earth myself.”
“You said that could start a war in the pantheons.”
“Yes,” he said.
She licked dry lips, tasted fear and the lingering flavor of the cinnamon gum she’d chewed on takeoff. “Seems to me human casualties would be higher if that happened than if you left her be.”
“She’s setting precedent. There are whispers across the heavens, especially from the forgotten gods: If she can walk on earth, attract worshippers, why not the rest of us?”
“Give me a week,” Sylvie said. “Right now, Erinya’s all wrapped up in my client, but Lupe’s not interested. Let me see if I can turn that one way or the other. Get Lupe intrigued or Erinya tired of her new toy.”
“She was created to chase,” Dunne said. “She won’t get bored.”
“Give me a week,” Sylvie repeated. “Please.” She’d deal with Erinya, even if it took a bullet. Miami might lose out that way, but at least the world wouldn’t.
“A week,” he said.
He spoke as if he was considering it, but she chose to leap to her feet, and say, “Great. It’s a deal. Now, can you get me to Dallas? Since you interrupted my flight? I need to take a look at William Graves’s offices.”
He sighed; the office grew storm damp. Her hair rose and danced in the growing electricity. “His office or him?”
“He’s alive?” Guess that answered that. The man was playing possum. The odds of his being the guilty party just went up.
“Yes.”
“Then him, definitely him.”
She collected her backup gun and spare ammo, snagged a chocolate bar from Alex’s desk drawer, and took a giant, sweet mouthful. She needed the sugar rush in the comedown from the confrontation with Dunne. Finally, she took a quick moment to text Demalion that she was fine, would meet them in Dallas. Dunne sighed impatiently. The office twitched with electricity.
“Anytime, Shadows.”
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
“If you don’t mind,” she tacked on, hastily. Better to be polite to the god who was about to fling her through space.
“Not at all,” he said, as falsely polite as she. He flicked his fingers in her direction, and she was gone.
LANDING WAS HARD; LUCKILY, THE FLOOR WAS SOFT. SYLVIE sprawled in the thick grey carpeting, and caught her breath, her bearings. Sofa to her right—chrome legs shining in the sunlight coming through the high windows—glass coffee table to her left. She spared a moment to be grateful she hadn’t landed on it. She clambered to her feet, gun in hand, half-expecting to find Graves or his men drawing down on her. She hadn’t landed quietly. Her ears popped, testament to the storm violence of her travel. She thought she smelled ozone, sharp and sour, in the air, and wondered if she’d traveled by lightning.
The living room was empty of people and stayed that way. She lowered her gun and moved on. A glance out the windows showed that she was sky-high, the ground multiple floors below, a wrinkle of grass and toybox cars. Top-floor apartment, she thought, in some Dallas condo. Judging from the size of the living room, a solid thirty feet by thirty feet, Sylvie assumed it was the penthouse. They were alone up here.
She moved through a sterile kitchen, continuing the mad-scientist theme of the living room—all grey and chrome and glass. His refrigerator doors were transparent, showed neat shelves sparsely filled. A man who wasn’t home often. Or at least, not often enough to cook.
Tension tightened her jaw. She knew Graves was here. She didn’t like Dunne, but she knew his word was good. He’d told her once that he could find any man on earth; she believed him.
So where is Graves?
Her boots rasped against the soft white stone in the foyer; there was dust beneath her feet like a dustpan’s worth of forgotten sweepings. It was gritty to her fingers but softer than sand.
She rubbed her hands clean on Val’s borrowed khakis, and checked the front door. Locks engaged; the security system was on. Where is he?
Sylvie headed down the white-carpeted hallway; caught her sleeve in one of the moving, metal sculptures that lined the walls. It rang like a struck tuning fork, a growing vibration of sound. She damped it with a hasty palm, listened.
A faint sound. A groan. Something that wanted to be urgent but was losing the strength to convey it. Sylvie hurried toward the sound, pushed through the bedroom door, and stopped cold on the threshold.
Dunne had played fair. Told the truth.
Graves was here.
Graves was alive.
But not for much longer.
Truthfully, Sylvie was shocked he was still breathing at all.
He was … His skin was …
It lifted and curled away from him in a thousand little shags, blanched and bloodless. It reminded her of nothing so much as paper birch bark. It made him nearly unrecognizable. His head lolled on the pillow; flakes of him drifted away. “Who—”
Sylvie backed up, repulsed, then shook herself.
“Graves,” she said.
He tried to push himself up; close to death and still fighting. Still furious. A zealot indeed. His bare chest revealed four deep tears, edged in blood, and one shallow one; Sylvie thought of a hand pressing in, four long fingers and a shorter thumb.
“Traitor,” he breathed. His lips cracked bloodlessly. His tongue rasped against teeth made enormous by white gums pulling away. “In the ISI. Good Sisters. Key. Books.”
“What happened?”
“Warn—” He coughed, and his tongue blew away in the gust of his last breath. Sylvie reached out to check his pulse and his chest and neck and head disintegrated beneath her fingers. Not completely. A few curved fragments of bone remained, cradling a withered heart.
His hand fell to his side; his fingers hooked in his pocket, then crumbled likewise. His pants slowly collapsed as his body spilled out at both ends of the fabric.
Something chinked softly. Metal touching metal.
Key, Sylvie thought. His pocket. She reached in gingerly, hoping to God this wasn’t some kind of magical disease, that she wasn’t going to have to test her magical resistance against mundi plague. How would that work, would she lose a finger or two, before her resistance kicked in? She grimaced, tried not to think about it as she sorted through his remains.
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, fli
pped 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 freaks. 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 skyrocke
t, 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 …