by Lyn Benedict
“Not yours anymore,” Sylvie said, ducked Zoe’s smack, hugged her baby sister tight, and took off.
She had barely made it back onto the road out of Key Biscayne when Alex called. Sylvie, dealing with tight traffic, let it ring to voice mail. But Alex called right back, and with a groan, Sylvie found the nearest shoulder—a sloping sandy patch of straggly grass way too close to a watery ditch—and pulled over.
“What?”
“I think I’ve found Azpiazu,” Alex said. There was triumph in her voice, and fear.
“Tell me,” Sylvie said.
“I called Lio about the two dead patrol cops. They were found near the dumped van, near the golf course. And in the center of all that—a lot of nice houses.”
“You called Lio?”
“It was easier than trying to piece together decent info from the skimpy news reports. He’s annoyed with you. Not me.”
“Whatever,” Sylvie said, and bit her lip. Dammit, Zoe’s teenage speech pattern was as contagious as chicken pox. “What did he say?”
“The two cops died, officially of poisoning. Unofficially? Lio says that the coroner says they died from having molten lead replace their blood.”
“Jesus.” She shuddered. That would be one hellish death. She fingered the ouroboros amulet in her pocket and reluctantly pulled it over her head. If Azpiazu could do that, she couldn’t afford to be squeamish about using magical protection. “What connects it to Azpiazu?”
“Sigils on their hands,” Alex said. “The alchemical symbol for lead. It’s transmutation. What with the women in the Everglades having sigils on their faces, and what he did to your gun, I thought it must be linked.”
“Sounds like,” Sylvie said. A heavy truck whizzed by, buffeting her in its wake.
“One of the last things the patrolmen did was check up on a missing person. A magazine editor for StyleMiami didn’t show up to work a couple of days ago. When he missed a meeting, his coworkers called the police, and they sent a patrol car out to check his house.”
“And?”
“Patrolmen reported that he was there, just down with the flu. But, Sylvie, they didn’t take a picture or ask for ID. It was just a courtesy check. After that, they died.”
“You think Azpiazu took his place. His house.”
“You’re the one who said he might do something like that.”
“I did,” Sylvie agreed. “I just didn’t expect him to be so—”
“Stupid? Blatant?”
“Arrogant,” Sylvie said.
“Sorcerer.”
Sylvie sighed. “Your point. Got an address for me? Or are the police swarming the scene?”
“They’re still trying to figure out what kind of freak accident replaces a man’s blood with metal. You’ve got a head start. And, Syl? The StyleMiami guy, Serrano, his house backs up pretty damn close to the golf course where the dead doves were.”
Sylvie looked at the clock in the dash, squinting in the sunlight. A couple of hours until sundown. If she could roust Wales from his sulk, collect him, the Hand of Glory—maybe they could sneak into Azpiazu’s lair. Maybe he’d have come up with something special to free the women, something to pick apart the spells that held them. If Azpiazu could move them without breaking the spell into a flaming disaster, maybe Wales could do the same. Like a bomb, picked apart in precisely the right order. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
She wanted certainty.
12
In the Monster’s Lair
AN HOUR LATER, SYLVIE, WITH A NERVOUS AND SULLEN WALES AT HER side, drove into Serrano’s neighborhood. No wonder the police had been so willing to make a house call. Serrano lived on the distant edge of a golf course. The neighborhood was nice, professionally landscaped, spacious plats, two-story houses, expensive but not too expensive. Uppermiddle-class; the kind of area where people still called the police instead of their private lawyers.
Sylvie had been concerned that it would be a gated community, but it was one of the holdouts—a wealthy neighborhood that didn’t want to masquerade as an island resort. She took a last look at the real-estate paper in her hand: Jose Serrano’s house listed an indoor lap pool. She sighed.
“Think we’re wasting our time?” Wales said.
“Trying to figure our approach. If Serrano’s home sick, like the cops reported, breaking in is a no-go. And using Marco to sneak us in—”
“If he’s really ill, I wouldn’t chance it,” Wales said. “Marco’s bites take a lot out of you.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Even if it is Azpiazu there, waking Marco is a risk,” Wales said. “Azpiazu’s familiar with necromantic magic.”
“You think he can take Marco from you?”
Wales shook his head. “No. Marco’s mine, for good or ill. But using necromantic magic in his vicinity? It’ll be like ringing an alarm bell.”
“Will Marco be able to knock him out?”
“Doubt it,” Wales said. “You’ve gotten resistant to him with exposure. I’d imagine an immortal necromancer would be a sight more resistant than you.”
“Then we’re stuck playing cat burglar,” Sylvie said. “And if Serrano’s home?”
“You’re a fast liar,” Wales said. “I’ll leave the talking to you.”
“Thanks,” she muttered. But she didn’t see another option.
If this was an information misfire—if Serrano really was inside, sick with the flu, and the cops had brushed up against Azpiazu elsewhere—she couldn’t afford to break a window and climb inside. She had enough of a reputation with the cops that she didn’t want to add a B and E charge, especially since she was armed. That kind of thing could be difficult, if not impossible, to shake. Her life plans didn’t include a detour for jail time.
Sylvie touched the ouroboros at her breastbone, tapped the warning bell in her jacket pocket, and headed around the back of the house, Wales a clumsy afterthought.
One thing she’d had proved to her over and over again in this career path was that people’s idea of security was often more for show than fact. They made a big deal about locking the front door, the windows, put up security gates and signs, then left their back doors unlocked, unguarded, or shielded from all watchful eyes.
It made no sense to her, but the nicer the estate and surroundings, the more likely the homeowners fell into that kind of carelessness. They thought that privacy and space equaled safety when, in truth, what they mostly meant were no witnesses.
The lawn, thick and vividly green, denting beneath her boots, made her steps as soundless as if she were walking on pillows. Behind her, Wales swore softly as he tripped over a sprinkler head.
The twilight moving in made her as close to invisible as a human could be without magical intervention, turned the world into moving columns of grey, purple, black. Her red jacket sucked in light, turned dark and shadowed, better than camo prints.
Rustling in the underbrush and a skink oiled out before her, slipping clumsily through the grass, two heads drawing it in different directions. She watched it, struck by the freak show of it, and stepped onto a path that crunched. The gravel was dark and pale at once, as patterned as a copperhead. The paler splotches gave beneath her feet with small cracks and pops until she realized they were skeletal frogs. An entire pond’s worth.
Dead doves. Now this.
The last doubt in her mind that she might be blundering into some innocent’s house crumbled.
Tepeyollotl might not be physically present, but something of him was seeping through the curse—his power fueling it, his power that Azpiazu was warping. God-power spilling out and messing with the world.
Several acres over, she heard a car pull up, a garage door churn into mechanical life. The neighbors weren’t going to notice anything, focused on the homecoming transition. She wondered if they’d noticed any changes in their own little worlds, or if they’d just shrugged them off.
Recon, she thought. Take a look, get a grip on the situation, get Wales’s take o
n it, then come back better informed and armed for bear.
Or monster.
The backyard, accessed by a quick climb over a stucco wall, yielded a gardener’s paradise. Sylvie, used to seeing tropical gardens, was still impressed. The air was thick and damp and green sweet fragrant, the walls hidden with rosary pea and hibiscus; orange trees and woody jasmine bushes studded the walkways.
Wales landed in the grass behind her, grimacing.
She didn’t think the pained distaste on his face was for his awkward landing. The closer she drew to the house, the less soothing the garden felt. Her little dark voice growled in constant warning, and Sylvie didn’t think it was simple caution about housebreaking.
The weathered deck creaked gently beneath her steps, her bootheels muffled impacts that echoed in her quickening heartbeat.
Recon, she reminded herself. A look-see. Nothing more. We aren’t prepared for more.
The house, seen through a pair of French doors, was dark, caught in that awkward space between being lit by daylight and not quite dark enough to require internal lights. The rooms she saw behind the glass looked as static and unpeopled as a closed movie set.
And, like a signal from the heavens, the alarm keypad she saw was flashing green green green. Unarmed. Unset. An open invitation.
Sylvie turned her head, looked sidewise, dropped her lashes, peering through the shadows she made of her vision. There. A glimmer on the glass, within the glass. Like the traceries of fingerprints and skin oils left behind, except that this was a magical symbol. Another tiny proof that made her believe Cachita’s assertion that Azpiazu was the original recipe: He used magic instead of technology at every turn.
Even the Maudits, proud sorcerers that they were, tended to mix and match.
Still, her trip to Val’s might have already paid off. Sylvie pulled the ouroboros amulet from around her neck, wrapped the cord around her wrist, and reached for the door handle.
Wales tugged at her wrist, a silent warning.
“You see something I don’t, Tex?”
“You trust the charm that much?”
“Got to try it out sometime,” she said. “Better now than in a face-to-face, yeah?”
She jiggled the door handle—locked—and waited.
No sparks, no magical result, no nothing. The magic made into nothing. The spell not broken but bypassed. Val did good work.
Wales let out a shaky breath.
Sylvie pressed close to the glass, looked down. Not even a dead bolt. Just the handle.
It was a moment’s work and another scrape on her credit card to get the latch to flip. She eased the door open, and the hair on her body stood on edge as the house air washed over her. It carried with it the brittle hush of a sleeping household, the movement of slow, steady breaths.
“Sense anything?” she asked.
Wales edged past her, getting himself beyond the ouroboros charm’s reach, then nodded. “Ghost. Someone’s dead.”
Sylvie frowned. Never good news. When the ratio of innocents to evil sorcerer was six to one, it was definitely bad news.
She closed the door behind them, easing the latch closed. She slung the ouroboros charm about her neck again, let it dangle on her chest.
Her breath, let out softly, warmed the air she moved through. Wales hunched tight, shivered. Her own skin goose-bumped.
The entire house was frigid, the AC working at full capacity. Sylvie moved inward and tasted the hint of something foul and greasy on her tongue. Rot.
Someone’s dead. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t Maria Ruben.
She followed the scent, followed Wales, wrinkling her nose and wishing that the charm neutralized odors as well as magic. An adult’s rec room, all plush carpet, pool table, wet bar, and HDTV, was ground zero for the meat-rot scent. She gagged, peered into each shadow, and finally found a man’s body shoved out of sight behind the wet bar.
It had to be Jose Serrano, the home owner, since he was clad in pajamas and slippers; hardly the outfit for a visitor to the house. His ankles were swollen red-black with pooled blood. His eyes were fixed and filmed over, his skin livid and streaked, his entire body contorted. He hadn’t died easy.
Grimacing, she knelt, turned his hands toward the light.
“Careful!” Wales said. He hovered behind her, looming over her shoulder.
“Tex,” she said. “Watch the door, all right? Watch my back, not my back.”
He huffed, but obeyed, leaving Sylvie to her inspection of the corpse.
Like a brand on his palm, a sigil charred the skin, wept a substance dull grey and soot black. Sylvie touched it with a fingernail, felt it dent beneath her touch. She scratched at it. It left a silvery streak on the edge of her nail.
Lead.
Azpiazu seemed to be a one-trick pony when it came to killing people. But that made sense. Even someone who didn’t believe in magic would still get up and walk away from a man shouting a lot of mumbo jumbo ritual magic.
Every sorcerer she had met had a single, instinctive offensive spell. Often, it was a paralysis spell; but Azpiazu . . . He hadn’t needed to kill the cops. They’d gone off content. It would have been days before the search for Serrano started up again. He’d killed them because they’d annoyed him.
And he had to have done it quickly, smoothly, and naturally. A handshake, given that the marks were found on the palms.
“Sylvie,” Wales warned, just as the glasses in the bar rattled. One shifted far enough that it danced out of its rack; she put a hand up and caught it. It was icy slick, burned her skin.
“What the hell—”
“Serrano’s ghost,” Wales said. “He’s pissed—”
“Tell him we’re here to help!”
She set the glass down, rubbed the cold off on her jeans, and stood. Ducked the cue ball as it blew directly at her. Her hand tangled briefly in the ouroboros charm, but it had no effect on the items winging in her direction.
Ghost, right. Not magic.
Ghosts counted as fucked-up nature on their own. It was only once people started harnessing them that it became magic.
She dropped back to her knees, wincing. The carpet might be plush, but it wasn’t that thick.
Wales whispered into the air, more of that not-quite language, and Sylvie dodged a pool cue, caught it as it flew past.
“Wales! Less coaxing, more commanding!”
“Not that easy,” Wales snapped. “He’s not exactly a normal ghost.”
“Sic Marco on him.”
“He’s a victim here, not the enemy,” Wales said. “And remember, we were trying not to alert Azpiazu—”
She dropped, rolled, came up on the other side of the pool table, aggravated, and smelling of carpet powder and rot. “Easy for you to say. He’s not chucking stuff at you. C’mon, Tex—”
Wales let out his breath, stiffened his spine, jammed his hand out into the room—a flat-palmed Stop! “Enough.”
A glass and two striped balls dropped midflight. The room, already cold, grew frigid. Frost laced across the flatscreen TV like a shatter mark. “Sylvie, bring me some of his hair.”
“Serrano’s?” It was a stupid question; she knew it even as it left her lips: Who else’s?
She twined her fingers in his hair, thick and glossy still; the lead that had filled his blood had killed him too quickly for his hair to show the damage. She yanked, ungentle, uncaring. Serrano was dead, even though his bones creaked, and his head jerked back as if he felt the sting of her hurried fingers, her pinching nails.
She brought Wales the dark lock, pressed it into his free hand. “Now what?”
“I show him who’s in charge.”
Wales held the tuft of hair up, two hands out before him; the halt and a cupped palm, the hair resting in it like an offering. A wisp of smoke rose; Sylvie blinked. She hadn’t seen anything like fire coming near it. The smoke grew higher, lit from beneath with a blue flame that burned like ice, cooling.
In the arctic mist blooming from W
ales’s hand, the ghosts took on a visible shape. Marco’s looming, hollow-eyed presence, familiar, inimical, shoulder to shoulder with his necromantic partner. And Serrano. Or what Sylvie assumed to be Serrano. At first she thought his ghost had been cleaved in two, mutilated even after death—she knew Azpiazu was no respecter of the dead. Then she saw him more clearly. Not a ghost split in two, not a mutilated ghost, but a mutated one. One body, dividing midtorso to stretch two necks upward, two heads, one flushed dark with rage, one blanched with fear.
“What the fuck—”
“Your time is spent; your life is gone to dust and ash. I bind you and dismiss you from this plane,” Wales said.
Serrano twitched and faded in chunks, left leg, angry face, torso, until the only ghost left was Marco. Wales closed his fist, let ashes dribble out, streaks against his bony hand, and sighed.
“That was ugly,” he said.
“What was that?” Sylvie said. The frigid air faded to something approaching warmth by comparison. She doubted the room temperature made it to sixty.
Wales shrugged. “Harder to dismiss than he should have been? Something warped his ghost, broke him into—”
“I saw,” she reminded him. “Ghost schizophrenia?” She remembered the double-headed skink outside, twitching and jerking its way forward, and surreptitiously ran her fingers along the line of her neck.
“Azpiazu’s magic.” Wales shoved his hands into his pockets, closed his body up, shoulders turned inward, chin tilted down. Thoughtful. Worried. “I think . . . I want to see that binding spell again.”
“Why we’re here,” Sylvie said. She shook off the chill that the room, Serrano, Wales’s magic working had left in her bones, and headed back into the hallway.
Bedrooms, bathrooms were likely toward the back, more public rooms toward the front of the house. If she were a lap pool, where would she—
She opened doors gingerly, as if she’d open one to Azpiazu leering at her. As if he’d have done nothing while Wales cleaned ghostly house for him.
Each door opened revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Her nervousness grew. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, each innocuous room bringing her one step closer to the loaded chamber.