Gods & Monsters

by Lyn Benedict

  Erinya shook the alligator in her mouth until its bones snapped, until it broke, shrieking the entire time.

  So much for the element of surprise.

  MARCO PRESSED UP AGAINST SYLVIE’S NECK, A COLD, URGENT touch, and she jolted into movement, thinking flashlights. She should have brought flashlights. The alligator had been hard to see, had been lurking just beneath the shadows. What else might be there? Not breathing. Eyes invisible. Soundless until it attacked.

  Shoot to kill and don’t worry about what it is, her dark voice suggested, and Sylvie took its advice. Soothing. Simple.

  “Erinya, you see all right?”

  “Yup,” Erinya agreed. She flicked alligator off her leather jacket and wiped her boots on the gravel path.

  “Go first,” Sylvie said. “Clear the path.”

  Erinya rolled her eyes. “Bossy. Who’ll watch your back?”

  “I watch my own,” Sylvie said. “Cachita, follow her. Not too close.”

  Marco drifted by her, an ice-cube shiver along her side. “And Marco does whatever he wants as long as he stays away from Cachita,” Sylvie finished.

  It all made her edgy. Erinya was help. Sylvie didn’t have to worry about her, didn’t have to protect her. Cachita, on the other hand, was a liability. Vulnerable and worse. Gateway for a god.

  Holding the knife was a nice reassurance that Cachita couldn’t call the god but probably a futile one. Tepeyollotl was paying attention, would come at Cachita’s first whisper of his name, whether she had the knife or not.

  Erinya trotted swiftly along the limestone path, heading toward the main garden, sniffing. “I smell blood.”

  Sylvie’s heart picked up pace. Convenient that it was already racing when, a moment later, another dead reptile fell heavily across her shoulders.

  Dead, but quite active.

  The python, twice her length, and as heavy and hard to move as sandbags, wrapped around her shoulders, its two heads hissing, showing a pair of leprous mouths ringed with curved teeth.

  “Get off!” she yelled, like it could listen or obey. She shoved at it. Heads hissed and struck, stunning, bruising blows against her thick jacket. Cachita jumped in, wrapped her hands tight around softening scales, grimacing. Erinya cocked her head, decided the zombie snake was too small to interest her, and kept moving.

  Sylvie cursed, her hands barely wrapped around two thick throats. Scales slimed off in her hand, rotten and flaking from dead meat. It was even odds for a moment whether she was going to be choked by the snake or by the stink of it. Then Cachita got her hand beneath the heaviest coil, and the two of them levered it off, dropped the python hissing and striking on the pavement.

  Sylvie blew off its two heads, panting, wasting ammo, and wondering if it would go hydra on them—regrow and double its heads and attack again. She’d never dealt with zombie animals before. After this, she never wanted to do so again.

  Cachita swallowed hard. “Tepeyollotl can’t be worse—”

  “Oh yes he can,” Sylvie said. “Right now, we’re dealing with small shit. Warped reptiles.”

  “Two-headed zombie reptiles are small shit?”

  Sylvie thinned her mouth, nodded brusquely. She didn’t want to get into it. But yeah. Small stuff. Worse, she didn’t even think the zombie reptiles were arranged as deliberate traps. Anger spiked. Outrage at being ignored.

  Even though he had taken Wales, taken her ally and friend, even though he knew Sylvie would be coming after him, Azpiazu didn’t care enough to try to stop her. It argued extreme confidence. Sylvie wanted to make him eat that confidence.

  Sylvie yanked Cachita back into movement. “Less gawking, more moving.”

  “Give me a gun,” Cachita said.

  “Should have picked up your own,” Sylvie said.

  “Sylvie,” Cachita said. “You have more than one.”

  “Fine. You know how to use—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just remember who you’re aiming at,” Sylvie said. “We’re fucked enough without friendly fire.”

  Any response Cachita would have made was buried under Erinya’s growl, a soft, moaning rattle deep in her throat. Sylvie’d heard that sound once before; a Fury laying eyes on an enemy. Even directed elsewhere, it made the hairs on her neck stand up and take notice.

  Azpiazu.

  THE GARDENS STRETCHED OUT BELOW THEM, AN EXPANSE OF DARKNESS broken by Azpiazu’s setup. He’d set up his ritual exactly where Sylvie had thought he would: the squaredoff reflecting pool at the base of two stone stairwells leading up to a hilly balustrade.

  Torches marked the stone surround of the pool, cast bloody light over the darkness, over the shapes drifting in the waters, over Azpiazu’s hunched and inhuman form. The firelight reddened the stone stairs, made Sylvie think of Tepeyollotl’s reign and human sacrifices in such numbers that the stairs to the altars ran dark and wet with blood.

  Azpiazu raised his head and snarled. She steadied her gun, studied the distance. Thirty feet or so. Easily in range.

  She sighted along the barrel, aimed.

  He didn’t even bother to get out of her way, just laughed as she sent one, two, three shots in his direction. Didn’t even jerk as they touched him. In her earlier confrontation, she hadn’t seen how he’d survived what should have been lethal heart shots. Here, lit by torches, with the hiss of magic in the air, she did. The bullets rusted, crumbled as they touched him, dusted his fur with powder. Ineffective.

  Her little dark voice echoed Erinya’s growl.

  “Eri, can you?” Sylvie asked.

  “No,” the Fury said. Her body quivered with the urge to hunt, long shivers rattling her spines. “He’s still the god’s chosen. His god’s whipping boy. But . . . soon.”

  Soon would be too late. By the time Azpiazu was free from Tepeyollotl’s claim, he’d be a god.

  “Shadows,” Azpiazu said. “Come to watch?”

  He dragged one of the bodies out of the water—long, lanky, too thin to be anyone but Wales.

  Cachita stepped up beside her, fired with a satisfying competence. Not at Azpiazu directly, but at the stone coping. Ricochets spattered sharp shards of limestone and old coral, and Azpiazu flinched. “Get away from him.”

  “Tepeyollotl’s agent,” Azpiazu said. “I felt you sniffing around on my tail. If I’d known you were so attractive, I might have let you catch up with me sooner, so I could carve out your heart and soul from your living flesh.”

  Sylvie and Cachita fired as one, aiming at the stone, and Azpiazu gestured sharply. The women rose from the water, a living shield; Sylvie jerked her gun up.

  As the water streamed over their skin, limned scarlet and orange, the women changed shape, growing monstrous. Snarling. Preparing to defend their captor.

  Beyond them, Azpiazu lost control of his human shape, bulked into the mangled chimera, and dragged Wales toward his makeshift altar, the base of the stairs.

  Sylvie rushed forward but found her way blocked. The two women-wolves—Lupe Fernandez and Anamaria Garcia—closest to her turned, heads lowered, eyes trained on her throat.

  Not dead—Sylvie saw their sides heave and flutter—but dead-eyed. Zombies by default if not fact. Rita Martinez rose up, warped, until a bear rose upward to full dismaying bulk, water streaming, red-tinged, like shedding lava.

  Erinya snarled back and pounced just as the fourth woman—Elena Llosa, by default—in jaguar form, lunged at Sylvie. They tumbled over each other, a snarling, taillashing blur of spots and scales. Erinya shook the cat by its scruff, flung it into the far trees. The cat groaned as it landed, tried to stand, sprawled again, shaking its head.

  “Don’t hurt them!” Sylvie shouted. “They’re innocents.” Hard to remember, but under that spotted pelt was a high-school girl. Sylvie should have thought, should have planned better. If the ISI hadn’t snatched her, maybe she would have. She needed tranquilizer darts, not bullets.

  Erinya swapped end to end with the wolves, taking on two at once. Her hindqua
rters thickened, ran stiff with heavy scale just as one of the wolves tried to hamstring her.

  The bear charged Sylvie, and she turned and ran. What else was there? She wasn’t willing to shoot her—single parent, she remembered—wasn’t willing to just stand still and let the woman kill her either. She leaped upward, snatching at a tree branch, and had it betray her, puffing rottenly loose, dropping her right before the bear.

  Cachita screamed. The cat had staggered to its feet enough to lash out at Cachita. It raked her calf with savage claws, set blood spurting into the night.

  The world started to shake; dirt dancing like water on a hot skillet. Tepeyollotl on his way. Cachita’s blood call enough.

  Sylvie rolled out of the way of the bear’s clumsy first strike, saw that the fur on the heavy brow was patchy, revealing the binding sigil that linked Rita to Azpiazu. She seized a handful of sharp gravel, ignored all common sense, and lunged into the bear’s reach. She scrubbed the gravel over the mark, a tumble of jagged edges, bear’s scalding breath on her skin, and thought if this didn’t work, if it didn’t at least slow the bear, the last thing she was going to see was the spurt of her arteries as her throat was torn out by a woman she was trying to save.

  The world shuddered around her; the cough of an angry jaguar sounded. Bigger, louder than the shadow Erinya had scared off. Tepeyollotl heading to the scene. The bear staggered, and Sylvie forced her focus back.

  Be damn stupid to die because she got distracted.

  She lunged upward, climbed the bear’s thick coat, and slashed. The binding sigil, a silvery leaden mark in the bear’s skin, spat blood. The bear collapsed backward, convulsing, slime and saliva spewing.

  It lay still, sides heaving, and Sylvie counted it a win.

  Or as close as she was going to get. They were both alive. For now.

  She shuddered. The ground trembled with her. But Tepeyollotl . . . wasn’t here yet.

  Gratitude washed over her, even if it was short-lived. She didn’t have time to wonder why. Didn’t have time to think.

  Erinya had put down one of the wolves with a vicious slash that had taken out the sigil by chance, but the jaguar had rejoined the fight, had leaped onto Eri’s back, jaws locked tight on the Fury’s neck.

  A faint sound carried to Sylvie. A voice that had screamed so much it was shredded, but still continuing. “No. No. No.” Cachita was hunched, tight and tiny, her hands flung up above her head, tight with tension, tight with effort, as if she were pushing on a door that was trying to open.

  Holding back the god.

  Sylvie blinked, read the determination in her face. “Cachita . . .”

  “Kill Azpiazu,” Cachita husked. “I can do this. You said it. A spell goes both ways. A door that opens can close.” Tears lined her face like war paint, reflective in the light; her jaw locked tight around her words. Her body shook.

  She couldn’t hold Tepeyollotl for long; it was amazing she could hold him back at all.

  Time was running out. Not just for Cachita. Not just for Sylvie. For the city.

  Erinya and the jaguar tumbled and snarled, a whirlwind of mindless rage. The remaining wolf snapped at any flesh it could reach.

  Around Azpiazu, the world bent and shuddered, drawing inward. Sylvie could sense it like a sound out of human range, a stressed vibrato that made her skin tingle, made her want to duck her head and howl like a frightened animal.

  One more soul, one more taste of filtered god-power . . . and she’d be front and center at a god’s birth. Wales would be that last bite, the final thing that filled Azpiazu to bursting and beyond.

  But Azpiazu had Wales draped over his lap, his knife held lax between paws, watching. Waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  A skiff of frigid air slicked her skin, welcome in the putrid heat. Marco blew past her, strong and furious, filled with energy stolen from the ISI agents’ souls, heading straight for the sorcerer. Marco crackled with determination; his ghostly skin rippled and flashed as he moved, like the firelight on the water.

  He hadn’t bothered to help Erinya or Sylvie or Cachita. But Wales was his.

  Sylvie tried to grab Marco as he passed, understanding all at once why Azpiazu had waited. Why he hadn’t sacrificed Wales while Sylvie and Erinya fought the bespelled women. Why he had broken a lifetime of habitual misogyny.

  Marco’s attack was a calamity waiting to happen. A miscalculation that was going to cost them everything. Sylvie lunged forward, but her grasping at Marco was literally grasping at air. She fell, scraping her knees in the dirt, got her head up in time to see Marco rush against Azpiazu, enveloping him like fog.

  Marco tried to take a bite out of Azpiazu, tried to put the sorcerer into soul shock, and Azpiazu only threw Wales’s limp body aside, laughing; his arms went wide, allowing Marco to come closer.

  Marco ignored her calling him back, moved forward even more aggressively.

  Azpiazu drove his knife into Marco’s ghostly shape. Instead of passing harmlessly through him, steel through smoke, it pinned him like an overlarge butterfly. Marco jerked, light and color flashing within him, a shimmering oil slick comprised of more than a dozen stolen pieces of soul. Azpiazu grinned, baring sharp teeth, and turned the blade, baring the necromantic sigils carved into the steel blade.

  Azpiazu might just be the most adaptable villain she’d ever faced.

  How long had he been planning this? Since he first saw Marco’s handiwork in the Everglades? The soul-nipped cops, and realized that if he took a soul-eating ghost, it was more bang for his buck? When he realized that Marco would defend Wales to the death.

  Wales wasn’t the final soul Azpiazu needed. A necromantic soul might be a powerful one, but it could fight back. Death, a familiar battlefield.

  Marco’s ghost, on the other hand . . .

  Marco was not only vulnerable; his was a soul completely suited for Azpiazu, a serial killer and a misogynist. And to make his soul even more palatable?

  When Azpiazu took Marco, he laid claim not only to the ghost, but to the ISI agents lying senseless in their white halls, their souls nipped and made a temporary part of Marco.

  Sylvie raised her gun, emptied the clip into Azpiazu, not trying to hurt—she knew that was impossible—but trying to distract. To disrupt the ritual. To stop Azpiazu from taking those threshold souls.

  The bullets were less than useful. They actively worked against them. Marco, pinned by a magically infused sacrificial knife, had gone tangible enough that each bullet danced him like a puppet, tore him into shreds.

  Azpiazu sighed, and all that humming energy in the air, the electrostatic charge that danced over them all, an unseen aurora, shifted and settled over Azpiazu’s shoulders like a mantle, drawn in by Azpiazu’s easy absorption of Marco’s soul.

  He raised his head, shook the animal from his flesh, shed Tepeyollotl’s punishment like it was nothing at all, a mist of water on a warm day. Around his feet, the grass withered, going blackish at the roots and spreading upward like ink.

  “So, Shadows,” he said. “You couldn’t stop me before. Think you have any chance now? I am the god of Death and Change. Be sensible, little Lilith. Run.”

  18

  Two Gods, No Waiting

  VIZCAYA GARDENS WERE TEN ACRES OF MANICURED LANDSCAPES and grottoes, butted up against Biscayne Bay, capped with a turn-of-the-century manor house—it was a spacious place. With Azpiazu exuding energy, bleeding deathly rot into the night, he loomed large enough to her senses that the gardens felt tightly claustrophobic, a tangled jungle of rotting vegetation.

  In the background, Cachita’s exhortations had gone hoarse; she was down on her knees, head craned back, arms crossed above her face. Agony in her bones. Still trying to keep that door closed, trying to cage Tepeyollotl with nothing more than the letter of their bargain, that he would come when she called. And not before.

  “Can’t leave,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got some things I want.”

  “What? Them?” Azpiazu g
estured at the bespelled women, still challenging Erinya, gestured at Wales’s limp body. “No. They’re mine. They’re going to be my first true souls. The first chosen ones to be part of my godhood.”

  Erinya rolled, dislodged the jaguar from her back and neck at the expense of blood and scale and chunks of feathered hide, and flung the squalling, limping cat across the courtyard. The wolf, racing in to take advantage, was slapped hard enough to spin into the reflective pool with a bloody splash and howl. Sylvie winced.

  Erinya cocked her head, put her burning gaze on Azpiazu, and growled, “Your godhood.”

  Azpiazu laughed, and it was a disconcertingly gorgeous sound, a man thrilled with himself and his new lot in life.

  Erinya grinned, her lips split wide, wider, widest until the entire lower half of her face seemed comprised of needle teeth. “New gods are fair play. Especially if they don’t have anyone to watch their back.”

  Sylvie chimed in. “Who’s feeling like running now?”

  “She’s nothing to me,” Azpiazu said. “A flunky for a softhearted—”

  Erinya flew at him, talons on all four legs extended, wings curving over her back to end in sharp-edged spikes. Azpiazu stood his ground, and her claws shredded his clothes, but not the skin beneath.

  A god.

  Sylvie’s little dark voice made itself heard over the tumult, over Cachita’s defiant cries and the thundering groan of the earth, the howls of an angry wolf deprived of prey. Not a god. Not yet, her voice whispered. Not quite yet. It gifted her with one word further. A word that gave her a tiny flare of hope.

  Transitioning, it said.

  Azpiazu might have been immortal, but even an immortal body needed alteration to take full advantage of godhood. To allow him to access the kind of power that would turn a human body, no matter how durable, into ashes and dust.

  For a few minutes more, Azpiazu was both god and man. And while Sylvie would pit herself against a god, if needs must, she was happier with a man.