Gods & Monsters

by Lyn Benedict

  The tang of chlorine overrode the scent of death and guided her finally in the right direction. For a brief moment, entering the pool room, she found the scene not only peaceful but beautiful. The lap pool was lit softly from below, casting a wavering blue gleam over the ceiling. The women, curled into seated positions, looked more like spa visitors than victims, resting peacefully in a beautiful room.

  Until Sylvie took that next step into the room, saw the lines of strain on their faces, the haggard pallor to Maria Ruben’s skin; then it was all too easy to see the truth. It made Sylvie itchy under the collar, coldly furious.

  Wales swore quietly. “Sylvie, we have to do something.”

  “You’re the necromancer.”

  Wales closed his eyes, listening to Marco, listening to his own instincts. Sylvie watched him, seething with impatience and a slow, guttering anger. There had to be a way. Something she could do to free them. She’d walked away once and had been regretting it ever since.

  Kill the sorcerer, the little dark voice said. No sorcerer, no curse, no deflection spell.

  Hell, it would be the best of all worlds. Kill Azpiazu, and she wouldn’t need to worry about Tepeyollotl’s making the scene . . . or maybe she would. Gods could be cranky about having their punishments interrupted.

  Worth the risk.

  The water rippled, a tiny movement disturbing its glassine smoothness. Maria Ruben was quivering. Tremors so small that they seemed more felt than seen.

  Maria Ruben’s time was up.

  “Think fast, Tex,” Sylvie said. “I’m going in.”

  “What? Sylvie—”

  “We don’t have time. Maria’s in trouble, and Azpiazu will be returning to harvest her soul.”

  Wales nodded. “Give me three minutes. Let me see if I can start wearing down the spell defenses. Keep them from shifting or flaming out, at the least.” His eyes rolled back in his head, blind to anything but the power he was calling on. Sylvie shuddered. Shuddered again when he sliced into his hand and walked the perimeter of the lap pool, dripping his blood into the water, unerringly on target. Marco whispering directions to him, or magic at work?

  Her curiosity got stomped hard when Wales began whispering into the room, nonsense words, broken syllables that somehow, upon repetition, crawled inside her head and translated themselves.

  I am death the slowing drum the lassitude of bone I enfold all and I am death the clinging shroud the beetles’ breath the clock wound down . . .

  She tuned him out in self-defense, waited for him to finish his slow circuit around the pool. The moment he did, she darted into action, clawing at the ouroboros about her neck. If Maria was about to die anyway, yanking her from the binding spell seemed like a worthwhile risk. The snake-scale necklace scratched her skin, snagged her hair, but Sylvie tugged it off, held the cord wide, and dropped it over Maria Ruben’s head. The result was instantaneous.

  The room hummed; the water bubbled as if someone had suddenly nuked it to boiling. Maria Ruben’s eyes flew open, her mouth gasped, the tendons in her neck stood out like hawsers. Sylvie grabbed her shoulders, pulled—

  The woman was heavy, as stiff in her arms as a corpse in full rigor; the other women were moving, too, eyes opening without awareness behind them, their skin flowing . . . sluggishly, like raw clay softening in the water.

  Time ran short.

  Azpiazu had to know, had to feel it. He would have felt Maria destabilizing, would already be on his way. One unbalanced binding spell, and somewhere Azpiazu was losing control of his shape, showing the world the monster he was on the inside.

  Maria’s breath shivered coldly on Sylvie’s cheek, a brush of soundless words. Help me. Help me. The ouroboros around her neck tarnished from bright gold to something hot and dull, the magic being sucked from it. Overwhelmed.

  She was going to lose Maria, Sylvie thought sickly. All the ouroboros was doing was bringing her back to awareness of her suffering and impending death. The sigil on Maria’s forehead began to seep blood at the cut edges.

  Wales dropped down beside her, hauled Maria out, muttering a spell that sounded like the hissing of snakes and pounded against Sylvie’s body like the tide. Pushing, pressing. Sylvie felt like she was drowning and forced herself to let it slide by her, let it reach Wales’s target.

  Maria.

  The woman gasped, breathed in harshly as if she’d been drowned and just had the water punched from her lungs. “What—”

  “Let’s go, let’s go—” Wales said.

  “The others—”

  “He’s here—”

  A growl traveled through the room, a vibration that had Sylvie dropping the argument, and spinning around, trading Maria’s jerking flesh for the hard steel of her gun. She rolled back, making space and taking aim—the trigger juddered beneath her finger.

  “Run, Wales!” on an outborne breath, panted between shots.

  He did his best to obey, burdened by Maria’s slack weight.

  A series of perfectly placed shots on an easy target: Azpiazu twisted to monster form, a distorted patchwork of predators, wolf teeth and bear bulk and long, lashing cat tail, claws leaving marks in the tile, coming straight for her. She put the entire clip into his chest.

  Azpiazu didn’t even slow; her gun clicked on empty.

  He howled, turned one gold eye, one black on Wales’s retreating form, crouched to spring. His first lunge after Wales coincided with a sudden hiss in the air, a window shattering and spilling glass in a storm toward him.

  Marco, defending his master.

  Azpiazu rocked back, shook glass off like a spill of sharp-edged raindrops.

  Sylvie grabbed the warning bell out of her pocket and threw that in his face. It rang wildly, raised a cascade of sparks, but Azpiazu batted it away with a savage paw.

  The bell served its purpose, though, bringing Azpiazu’s attention back on her and let Wales vanish to safety, Maria slung any which way over his bony shoulders. Sylvie scrabbled for a weapon, found metal to hand—freestanding towel rack—and slammed it into his chest and side. The metal crumbled beneath the impact.

  She rolled away from the next attack, splashed into the pool, flailed away from the women who reached for her with slow-forming claws. As she clambered back out, a heavy paw slapped her between the shoulder blades.

  Numbness, crashing pain. Dizzy speed. Sylvie slammed into the wall, as spread-eagled and ungainly as a landed starfish, breathless, blackness hovering.

  She crashed to the tile, got her hands down in time to prevent her from cracking her skull, but her back screamed protest.

  Six inches higher, and he would have broken her neck.

  “Mine!” Azpiazu’s voice was a guttural thing, a wolf’s snarl, a cat’s scream, a bear’s grunt.

  “No,” Sylvie said, her voice inaudible. Didn’t matter. She heard it in her head, felt it in her throat. Maria Ruben wasn’t his. Not anymore.

  The room swooped and swayed about her. She dodged the next crashing blow, managed to shift her weight enough to kick Azpiazu square in the drooling, misshapen muzzle.

  His jaw slammed shut, teeth severing the lolling tongue. Blood spattered her face, the floor, Azpiazu’s patchy fur.

  He howled, a gargle of blood and rage, and Sylvie shoved past him, all plans gone, traded for the basic need to survive this unexpected fight. Survive it long enough for Wales to get Maria away.

  Azpiazu lunged after her, knocked her sprawling, crouched over her, growling, salivating. His mottled fur was unmarked; her bullets hadn’t done any good at all. Metal wasn’t going to do the job, she thought. Not in bullet form, not in any form.

  Fucking transformationist necromancer, she thought. Hard enough to kill something that was immortal. Even harder to kill something that could change a weapon’s composition to something useless.

  “Kill me, and you’ll be cursed forever,” she rasped out. “Thought you wanted my help.”

  Being this close to him set her skin afire with magic, corruptio
n of the natural order. It made her gag, made her recoil.

  He lashed out with a bear’s massive paw, claws nearly an afterthought behind the physical power that could break bones with a single blow.

  Sylvie kneed him in the jaw, knocked him back, kicked him once more, hearing bones creak beneath her heel, before he wrapped a human hand around her wrist. “Die,” he snarled.

  Her blood kindled; her skin burned as if it had been struck with a branding iron. He flung her back, and she curled around her arm, watching the symbol for lead rise on her flesh, scarlet and black, a burn welling up from the inside.

  No, she said, you won’t be rid of me that easy.

  It wasn’t really her voice, but the thing that lived within her. She gouged at the hot lash of the brand, tore at it, intent on ripping the magic out of her skin if necessary. Blood burst beneath her nails, hot, wet, crimson. Human.

  Blood, but not lead.

  The fire in her veins, the heat that throbbed at her temples, the fever—they all faded until she was left with the taste of metal in her mouth and a bloody wound on her forearm. She got up, shook her matted, soaked hair back, and stared into his eyes. “Come on. Want to try again?”

  Faintly, beneath everything else—the flutter of broken water, his panting, hers—she heard a sound familiar and welcome: a garage door rising, a car engine working at speed. Wales and Maria were nearly gone.

  He surged in their direction, and Sylvie, burning adrenaline, picked up a potted palm and hurled it at him, breaking his stride and his jaw. His muzzle was streaked with blood; his teeth were wet with it. His pelt grew gore-clotted.

  She’d hurt him more with that than with an entire clip of bullets.

  “Give it up,” she said. “Maria’s gone.”

  “Replaceable,” he slurred.

  He paused, still crouched, still drooling blood and teeth, the first glimmer of something human beneath the monster coating. The first hint of the cleverness she knew he had.

  Azpiazu had manipulated her from the start. She’d stumbled over him, and he’d acted quickly, given her an impossible, deadly task—find the god—to keep her out of his way. To give himself space. And he’d used the women as bargaining chips.

  His muzzle reshaped itself; ivory teeth sprouted from broken edges.

  “You never really wanted my help,” she said. “Your curse is your ticket to immortality.”

  He hunched tight; the space between them could be breached with a single leap. His long tongue worked; his jaw pushed back. Beneath the animal snout, he shifted to a human mouth. “Smarter than Lilith,” he said. “No. I never wanted your help. What could I possibly want from you? An untalented blunt object.”

  Sylvie licked her lips. Apparently, they weren’t going to start duking it out again. She couldn’t say she regretted it. Her head ached where he’d slammed her into the glass, and her back throbbed. Blood spilled down her arm, dripped from her nails.

  “You wanted to use me to distract a god.”

  “A god?” he echoed, a growl in the room.

  “I know you. I name you. You’re Eladio Azpiazu. Cursed by the god Tepeyollotl. I know all of this is to avoid him.”

  “Not all of it,” he said. “Some of it’s for my pleasure.” His weight shifted. Azpiazu lunged; Sylvie dodged, taking the slash against the thick leather of Zoe’s jacket. A sigil sizzled against the coat, burned hide curling away from his touch.

  “Missed me,” she said, her voice clogged with anger. “Want to try it again? Get inside my space? I’ll make you hurt.” Never mind that the room was sparse on weapons; pottery shards would be enough for her at the moment. From the sudden caution in his eyes, animal wariness, the uneasy shift of that massive body, she thought maybe she’d hurt him more in the past five minutes than he’d been hurt in decades.

  The thing about immortals was that they got divorced from human experience. From pain. From fear. They felt untouchable as the years piled up behind them. She was reminding him of those things, reminding him that immortal did not equal invulnerable.

  And that she had a reputation for killing things.

  He sucked in a breath, spun away from her. She let him put the space between them, leaping across the lap pool’s width. He hunkered down beside the pool, ran his fingers through the water, licked the taste of it from his skin, his eyes always on her.

  “Don’t overestimate yourself,” Azpiazu said. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. I’m stronger than you can imagine.”

  “And yet, you can’t shake the curse,” Sylvie said. “Immortal, yes, but miserable with it.”

  He laughed, spittle and blood streaking his chin. “Not for much longer.”

  “Yeah? Got big plans? Feel free to share,” Sylvie said.

  He swayed foot to foot, lowered his heavy head, looked at her like a wolf studying prey. It made the fine hairs on her neck stand up. Azpiazu was just so . . . wrong. The wolf brow, the human mouth, the bear bulk, the cat claws—a forced-together chimera working against itself.

  There was no way in hell he’d want immortality in this guise.

  For one thing, he was far too vain. For another, it hampered his magic. All of that energy going just to maintain himself. Like a car with a chronic oil leak.

  “Get out, and count yourself lucky,” he said.

  “You never needed me, but you didn’t want my attention on you either. You have my undivided attention now. I’ve got you in my sights.”

  “Get out,” he snarled once again. This time, Sylvie’s better sense prevailed. She really wasn’t in any shape to take him down. Not and survive.

  She straightened, backed out of the room, pausing to scoop up her emptied gun, and watching Azpiazu as long as she could.

  Turning her back on the house and striding into the dark felt impossibly difficult, not just for the crawling fear that he was following her, ready to rip out her spine, or slap another sigil on her meant to boil her blood, but because there were four women she was leaving behind.

  Saving Maria didn’t seem like enough of a triumph to count the evening as a win. Their recon had been interrupted, their enemy made aware of it. Azpiazu was undoubtedly packing up his remaining harem right now, heading someplace new.

  Times like this, she hated the ISI with a passion bordering on obsession. If she could just call them for help. If she could count on them to know what they were doing. If she could trust them to be as interested in saving the victims as in studying the wicked.

  Instead, it was her and a cobbled-together crew doing their meager best. Sylvie cast an unfavorable eye on her gun, a dark shadow in the passenger seat. If metal was no good, if Azpiazu’s transformation skills worked fast enough to make bullets benign, she was going to need a different weapon.

  TWO CALLS—ONE TO WALES, ONE TO ALEX, TO PASS ON THE NEWS—had her pulling into the Baptist Hospital lot where Wales had taken Maria Ruben. He’d gotten far enough ahead and Maria’s quasi-celebrity status as a missing person had gotten them sucked right in past the emergency room waiting area.

  “Here for Maria Ruben,” Sylvie said, slipping past the ER receptionist. Confidence counted here. She hefted her purse as if it were Maria’s, and she was just taking her things to her.

  “Room fourteen,” the receptionist said. “We’ve got some forms that need—”

  “I’ll take ’em,” Sylvie said. Nothing better than a clipboard to prove you had a legit reason to be in the hospital. When she reached out, the nurse’s eyes sharpened, focused, seeing Sylvie as more than just an irritant.

  “You’re bleeding.” Seeing her as a potential patient.

  Sylvie looked at her arm as if it belonged to someone else. She’d taken the time to bandage it in the truck, but the gouges her nails had left ripping Azpiazu’s sigil apart had reddened the white gauze.

  “Not a lot.”

  “You come back up here if you decide it needs to be stitched,” he said.

  Sylvie nodded. She wouldn’t. It didn’t need s
utures. Though it had hurt like hell, when she went to bandage it, the wound was less deep, less severe, than she had thought. Looked no worse than a staple-gun accident, complete with silvery streak that she’d had to peel out.

  She found Room 14, the curtain drawn across the glass but the door open. The bed was empty, and Wales was pacing in the quiet.

  He turned, and his expression was pure surprised relief, eyebrows up, mouth slack but shifting toward a smile. “You got out alive.”

  “Took some doing,” she said.

  “Azpiazu?”

  “Alive. Evil. Up to something. How’s Maria?”

  “She made it here,” he said. “They rushed her up to a real room. Can we get out of here? I’ve already fended off more questions than I know how to answer.” He jolted toward the door, then back toward the bed as if tethered. Sylvie knew what held him. There was a certain weight that came with rescuing someone. A responsibility. Wales had carried Maria out of Azpiazu’s lair, and he couldn’t let go, no matter how much his paranoia urged him to flee.

  Down the hall, just past the swinging doors, a pair of police officers consulted with a nurse, who pointed toward Room 14, toward Sylvie and Wales. “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Let’s go.” These cops weren’t here for them; even if a doctor had called them about Maria, they’d shown too quickly. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t stop and interrogate, given the chance.

  She stepped out of the room, her bandaged arm crossed over her chest, head ducked. Wales put an arm about her waist, quick on the uptake. The best way to leave an ER unnoticed? Look like any other patient who’d been treated.

  They met Salvador Ruben rushing in as they were rushing out—he homed in on Sylvie like a tracking dog. “Your assistant called. She said. She said . . .”

  “Maria’s alive,” Sylvie said. “Weak, but alive. Go see her.” His attention veered toward the intake desk, and Sylvie and Wales slipped away.

  They got out into the lot, and Wales dithered. “Serrano’s car?”