by Lyn Benedict
All the time in the world, her Lilith voice murmured.
For the first time, that soothed.
Alex calmed. “Okay. Okay.”
“Lupe said you were looking into Riordan.”
Alex winced, but nodded. “Dominick Riordan. Head of the Miami ISI. In charge of studying the legal ramifications of … of … the Magicus Mundi.” She spat the last two words out, panting. She tightened her jaw. “Just about him. It’s just about him. I can remember about him.” Talking herself away from all the memories connected to Riordan that the Society had erased or rewritten. “Oh God, Syl, it’s hard. It hurts. Riordan … He’s fast-track. He’s smart. He’s careful. He’s scrupulous. He’s a good guy. I mean, for a fed. He’s given everything to his job. He has no life outside it, no friends … no family.”
Her breath caught, eased. She looked up at Sylvie, clutched her hands. “Sylvie. He has no son. He just thinks he does. How do you get control of an incorruptible agent?”
“Plant a spy he’ll trust,” Sylvie said. John Riordan. Dominick Riordan’s son. The man she’d saved from the mermaids. The man she’d thought a witch. He was. Guess that meant Riordan Sr. wasn’t Society after all. His so-called son was. It meant something else, as well. She tried to keep the anxiety off her face, but felt her expression freeze along with her blood. Alex picked up on it, anyway. Her face crumpled back toward tears.
“God, Sylvie. Riordan’s son has Zoe. I should have called you sooner. I should have—”
“You did your best,” Sylvie said. “Really.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Alex said. “If something happens to Zoe—”
“Hey,” Sylvie said. “The Good Sisters are collecting people. Not killing them. Yvette took Demalion and Marah. She could have killed them. She went for the kidnap. She wants them alive. They’ll be okay. I have time. Maybe Riordan’s son will give Zoe back. To keep his cover, he’ll have to be obedient to Riordan’s deal.” She tried, fiercely, to believe any of it.
Alex nodded along with her, but even as she did, a frown crawled across her face. “Who’s Yvette? Do I know … Oh God, have I forgotten her, too?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sylvie said.
Alex eyed her distrustfully, but finally nodded. “All right.”
“Get some sleep. Real sleep. In a bed,” Sylvie said. When Alex staggered off obediently, Sylvie confiscated the laptop, studied the open files on Riordan’s life, the identity search Alex had set in motion on his not-son—no wonder her memory was failing so fast. The only image she had of so-called Riordan Jr was the altered film of the mermaid’s attack. Just looking at it would set her off. Sylvie added the computer to her heap of Graves’s stolen tech. She had hoped that Alex could hack Graves’s computers, ID the rest of the Society agents in the country, figure out where they were based.
Maybe Sylvie could do it herself. Alex had programs to crack passwords. Sylvie opened the laptops, looked at the blank password fields. The programs were slow. She didn’t have time.
All the information she could want on the Good Sisters and it was as inaccessible as if it had died with Graves. Sylvie closed the lids. She couldn’t even ask Riordan to deal with it. The man harbored one Society spy in his ranks; there might be more. She looked at the files Alex had brought up on Riordan’s false son, and grimaced.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Lupe asked. “I thought she’d had a stroke, at first. But then she was convulsing. It didn’t make medical sense. Another reason I didn’t call the ambulance.”
“Relax,” Sylvie said. “You did the right thing.”
Lupe stared at the door Alex had retreated through. “Can you fix her? She’s really scared.”
“If I can break Yvette’s memory spell, I think so.”
“You haven’t broken the spell on me,” Lupe said, her voice low and quiet. As if she regretted saying it even as the words crossed her lips.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Lupe,” Sylvie admitted.
Lupe grimaced. “So fucking unfair. You finally find all these powerful witches, and they’re bad guys.” Scales ran her skin, the beast within her threatening to surface. Sylvie tensed, then Erinya slipped into the room soundlessly, chased the scales away with a brush of her hand.
“We’ll devour their hearts,” Erinya murmured into Lupe’s tangled hair. “We’ll make them all pay.”
Twelve hours ago, Lupe would have shied from that idea. Now, her snake eyes gleamed with a certain eagerness. Sylvie was losing her completely, even if Erinya was keeping her form more or less stable.
“Erinya, you healed me,” Sylvie said. “Can you heal Alex? Chase the spell out of her mind?”
“Thought you weren’t going to ask anything more of me,” Erinya said. She leaned back, let Lupe take her weight.
“Can you do it?”
“You aren’t claimed by any god,” Erinya said. “Alex is marked. If I do it, Dunne will know. I don’t want to—”
Lupe shoved her forward. Erinya whirled, hair flaring out into spikes. Lupe’s arms grew multicolored scaly armor; her teeth lengthened, dripped venom.
Sylvie reached for her gun, but the two women only had eyes for each other.
“Do you know what I was before all this?” Lupe spat. “I was a physical-therapy student.”
It seemed a non sequitur, and Erinya looked impatient. Lupe lashed out, scratched four lines across Erinya’s throat. “Pay attention, Eri.”
“I always pay attention,” Erinya said. The vines creeping along the wall bloomed with dark flowers, set small stinging insects into the air. Her irritation making itself felt.
“I was going to help people,” Lupe said. “I was going to teach them to regain control of their bodies—ironic, seeing where I’ve ended up. When I think about it? When I remember what I was, what I wanted to be, what my dreams were? I go crazy. This is my nightmare. I’ve lost control of everything I used to own instinctively. My body. My mind. I was supposed to be helping people. Now I’m killing them.”
Erinya moved forward, reaching out, and Lupe lashed out with her claws again, etched another four lines over Erinya’s throat. Like the first set, they healed at once, but Erinya hesitated.
“It’s Alex’s nightmare,” Sylvie said. She got what Lupe was trying to say. “She’s all about knowledge. It defines who she is, what she does, how she interacts with the world. You take it away from her—”
“And there’s nothing left,” Lupe finished. “You helped me. You made me not want to die. You can help her. Don’t you stand there and do nothing if you can do something.”
“But Dunne,” Erinya wailed. “If I heal her, Dunne will know, and he’ll—”
“Do it anyway,” Sylvie said.
“Please,” Lupe said.
Erinya reached for her again, and this time Lupe allowed Erinya’s touch. Erinya shifted uncomfortably like a cat at the vet’s, but sighed. “When she wakes up,” Erinya said. “I need her awake to find the broken bits.”
“Thank you,” Sylvie said. It was one weight off her shoulder. Maybe two. Erinya was telling the truth. Healing another god’s devotee was a definite infraction in the godly rules. It might be the thing that got the gods to come to a consensus. Alex’s god—Eros—was mostly hands off, but he wouldn’t like another god’s mark on his worshipper. Still, in Sylvie’s admittedly biased heart, Alex’s cure was worth the risk to Erinya.
“So what are you going to do?” Lupe said.
Sylvie walked down the hall, peered in on Alex, curled in her tight, uncomfortable ball, the memory witches plaguing her even into her dreams, and hesitated.
“I’ve got this,” Lupe said. “I can watch over her.”
Sylvie shivered. It was one thing to leave Alex in charge of Lupe, with strict instructions to call Erinya and run like hell if something went wrong. Another to leave Alex at the mercy of two monsters. Lupe and Erinya had good intentions. …
Lupe said, “You have to deal with the witches. You have
to get your sister. You have to trust that we can step in and take up the slack.”
Her Lilith voice protested any giving up of control, but the thing was, Lupe was right. She had to trust these two. They were all she had.
Sylvie looked back at the house as she left and wondered how it had come to this. Sylvie had spent years fighting the Mundi; now the monsters were her only allies.
12
Unmasking
AN HOUR LATER, SHE WAS BACK IN HER OFFICE, WAITING FOR RIORDAN to meet her, Zoe in tow. Their phone call had been short. Sylvie had dialed, said, “Graves is dead. Bring me Zoe. At my office.” She didn’t want to give him any reason to renege on his deal. She could hit him with all the truths—that Graves had died at a monster’s hand, that Graves was a scapegoat, that Riordan’s son was no such thing—when he got there.
She was poking at the phone, realizing that the other person she needed to call, she couldn’t. The Encantado, who had given her the Society info in the first place, who had asked her for her help in identifying the witch in charge of the monster wranglers, hadn’t given her any way to get in contact with him. Her mouth twisted. He hadn’t expected her to succeed.
It figured, though. He had been pretty grudging about her involvement in the first place. It just rankled. She’d lay bets that Riordan’s fake son was the local monster wrangler. She didn’t think the Encantado had it right: There wasn’t just one of them. Look how ragged dolphin boy had run himself, just trying to catch up. One human in charge of all that chaos? Far more believable to think that the Society had trigger witches in each ISI city.
The door opened, and Sylvie jerked her attention up, hand falling to her gun. It wasn’t Riordan. Wasn’t even Riordan’s fake son.
Detective Adelio Suarez. Showing the cop-sense of timing, arriving when she absolutely didn’t want him. He was unshaven, though, looked sloppy for the first time since she’d met him. He was grey with exhaustion, slow with stress.
“I thought if I had someone posted on your office, you’d show up sooner or later,” he said.
“I’m meeting the ISI head here in a few minutes.”
“Then I’m staying,” he said. “They’re supposed to protect us against magic, right? They’re not doing their job.”
“Lot of your men down?” Sylvie said.
“Enough that we’ve all been called in to work double shifts,” Suarez said. “The phones keep ringing, people reporting they’ve been hit by the plague. We don’t have people to send out.”
“Plague?”
Surprise lightened his exhaustion, sparked interest in his eyes. “You haven’t been following the news?”
“Lio, I’ve been slung from a moving airplane to Miami to Dallas and back again just since 6:00 A.M. And today’s a better day than yesterday. Alex usually keeps me abreast of the news when I’m deep in a case.”
“Why isn’t she?”
“The witches fucked with her memory—”
“That’s the plague I’m talking about, Shadows. You and I know it’s witches. But there are news reports on every channel talking about the upswing in sudden-onset dementia. They think it’s catching, and people are panicking.”
Sylvie groaned. “Dammit. Dammit.” She should have stayed in Dallas, should have prioritized catching Yvette, but Alex was hurt, and Zoe was missing, and Demalion had nodded, had all but sent her away. He had a plan of his own, but she had left him … She just felt stretched beyond capacity.
A dark SUV pulled up outside, disgorged Riordan. He looked harried; he pushed his way into her office, already criticizing her. “… just got off the phone with Collier. She said you released the Fury in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport? People died, Shadows.”
“Yeah, but does anyone remember it,” Sylvie snapped back. “She drove me to it. Where’s Zoe?”
On the street, the dark SUV pulled away. Circling the block, probably, doing their part for air pollution.
“I needed surety that I would walk away from this meeting. She’s with my people.”
“Your people, or your son?” Sylvie asked.
In the same moment, Suarez said, “Your agency kidnapped her sister? This isn’t communist Cuba. There are rules—”
“There are no rules,” Riordan said. “They’re all broken, and I’m just trying to pick up enough of the pieces to glue us all back together.”
“By sending me out to kill people. By kidnapping my sister. By condoning memory magic.”
Riordan’s aristocratic face closed off. Suarez grumbled deep in his chest, rested a hand on his service weapon. Sylvie was belatedly glad he was there.
“We have a real problem, I agree,” Sylvie said. “But I’m not sure it’s centered where you think it is. You’re blaming the monsters. You’re blaming Graves. You’re listening to the wrong people.”
“Right now,” he said, “I’m listening to you. You killed Graves, so obviously you judged him guilty—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “I didn’t. But he’s dead all right. Been dying for days. Not behind the attacks.
“My problem is, he managed to identify the villain of the piece, but I don’t know if you’re part of the solution. Yvette Collier, the woman you just talked to … She’s not ISI. Never has been. Her loyalty’s to something older. The Society of the Good Sisters.”
Sylvie paused, waiting for denial, for Riordan to declare the Good Sisters a magical urban legend as Marah had done, but, she’d forgotten bureaucracy—knowledge was doled out in increments, and only the upper-ups knew the score.
“You think she’s one of the Society?” Riordan said, shaking his head.
“She’s a ringer,” Sylvie said. “Joined up, just so she could suss out the competition. Apparently, the ISI goals of study, contain, control, are not the Society’s goals. She’s been turned from a sleeping agent into a saboteur. She’s taking out the competition, using witchcraft learned in the Society to leash monsters, then, she’s using the memory spells to clean up after herself.”
“No,” Riordan denied.
“Sounds sensible to me,” Suarez chimed in, and Riordan ignored him after a brief, why are you even here, glance.
“Yvette’s driven and yes, magically talented, and yes, she’s surrounded herself with other magically talented agents, but … no. I can believe she’s behind the memory plagues, but she’s just trying to help by making people forget something they’re not ready to accept—”
Suarez slammed his hand down on the table, cut Riordan off, and sent papers cascading to the floor. “Take a look around, Agent Riordan. Does this city look like it’s being helped? The hospitals are overflowing.”
Sylvie said, “She doesn’t give a shit about the regular people. She’s not protecting them. She’s protecting herself and the magical resources. Did she tell you that? Witches are scavengers, you know. They’re born with the ability to manipulate power, but the power’s not theirs. It’s shed by the Magicus Mundi. By the gods, by the monsters, by the very things Graves wanted to eradicate. No wonder they went after him first.
“Yvette Collier is your enemy, Riordan. Not Graves. While you were blaming him for the attacks, he was at his penthouse apartment having his life suctioned out of him by milliliters. He’s dead. I didn’t kill him. The Night Hag did. Yvette knew about it. Let it happen. Graves was a vocal opponent of magic. She wanted him dead. Want more proof? Circumstantial to be sure, but thought-provoking. Her agents helped Graves’s prisoner escape before the attack. She didn’t want to kill monsters. Just men.
“And, Riordan, pay attention, this is where it gets personal. She keeps tabs on the players in the ISI, close tabs. Graves’s aide turned out to be hers. She’s got one close to you, too.”
Riordan shook his head. “They’re all ISI agents, and we vet them all. I vet my personal staff yet another time. Their loyalty is to me.”
“Almost all of your personal staff,” Sylvie said. She almost felt bad for the man. He was clinging to his convictions, but his grip was shaky. What sh
e was about to show him wasn’t so much something that would pry his fingers free as blow up the ground he clung to completely.
She pulled Alex’s laptop up, set it on the desk between them. Opened it. Riordan glanced at it, looked harder. Suarez leaned in and studied it, too.
“That’s my son.”
“No. It’s not,” Sylvie said. “He’s a Society witch, not even an American citizen. He was born in Victoria, British Columbia. His name is John Merrow. It’s all there.”
“No,” Riordan said. “It’s a trick. It’s just a picture.”
“You know witches, right?” Sylvie said. “They always end up with descriptive street names, pointing you toward their specialty. Like my necromantic friend, the Ghoul. Merrow’s street name is Simon Says. He’s not your son. Never has been. You just believed him when he said so. He’s Yvette’s spy.
“Don’t feel bad. He fooled me, too. I never questioned whether he was more than he seemed, not even when he didn’t fall prey to the mermaids’ singing. He’s been playing the long game.”
Riordan said nothing but shook his head again, started to stand.
“Sit down,” Sylvie said.
Suarez pushed him back. “Your agency. Your fault. You listen.”
“Here’s your file, hacked recently by Alex. Before she lost her mind. Before Yvette’s memory plague made her curl up and wish she were dead. This is your life, Dominick Riordan. One ex-wife. No children.”
He put shaking hands over his face, shuddered. Belief settling into his skin.
“That sinking feeling you have right now? That sense that you can’t trust your own brain? That’s what the city’s feeling. I want my sister back now. I want Yvette’s current location, and I want you to give me all the backup I need to take her down.”
Riordan looked up, his face blanched white. He jerked to his feet, yanked off his watch, and crushed it underfoot. “He was listening.”
“You came in wired?”
“You’re dangerous,” Riordan said. “Of course, I came in wired.”