by Lyn Benedict
Lourdes, seated beside Adelio on a visitor’s chair, rosary dangling from her fingers, looked up, and the expression on her face convinced Sylvie the woman would be adding Hail Marys for uncharitable thoughts to her postconfession routine next Thursday.
The woman got into Sylvie’s space, pushed her back into the hallway in silent, bulldog outrage. Sylvie, conscious of the damage she’d done this family, allowed herself to lose ground before a woman twice her age and half her size.
She throttled down the angry dark voice inside her that didn’t care for obedience or politeness or anything at all beyond its own survival, and let Lourdes tear her a new one, half in Spanish, half in English, all of it conducted with the careful, quiet fury of a woman who knew exactly how much noise would get unwelcome attention. Eventually, her words trailed off, fell apart under fear and hatred; her last sally was a broken, “You’re a bad person, Shadows. You killed my son, and now you try to kill Lio.”
“If I were such a bad person, would I sit here and listen to you?” Sylvie said. “Let me talk to Lio.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“He can wake up,” Sylvie said, and stepped forward decisively. Lourdes gave ground, then, in a sudden resurgence of fury, spat at Sylvie’s feet.
Sylvie studied the shining spot on the worn linoleum and thought it was lucky Lourdes Suarez was a good Catholic and not a bruja, or Sylvie would be fighting off a curse in the midst of Jackson Memorial’s inpatient wing. Instead, she just stepped around the sputum, marked it as a new low in her life, that a nice little Cuban housewife wanted to spit on her, and pushed her way back into Adelio’s room.
He can wake up, she had said, and it sounded easy then. Not so easy to lean over him, searching for an unscathed place to press gentle fingers. Even washed up, he stank of smoke. His hair was burned to stubble on one side. Not so easy to wake him from blissful unconsciousness into pain. But she needed to know.
She settled for tapping the pillow beside his face, a quick rat-a-tat of fingernails and pressure. He snorted awake, thrashed a bit, then stilled as events caught up with him. Through his puffed eye sockets, the narrow slit and shine of his eyes, she could see him remembering hospital. Remembering Sylvie.
He angled his head on the pillow, trying to get any view of her he could. “Not a bomb,” he said. “I didn’t get hit by shrapnel. The chart is wrong.”
“Okay,” she said. She sat down, hitched the visitor’s seat close, screeking it over the linoleum. “What was it, then?”
“Bear.”
It was a meaningless syllable to her at first, glossolalia brought on by painkillers, then the word clicked. “You were attacked by a bear? At a crime scene swarming with lights and cops?”
It just didn’t make sense. There were bears in northern Florida, but not in the swampy parts of the Everglades. And even those bears were smaller, more peaceful than the western bears.
Adelio let out a long breath, took in another, a careful marshaling of strength. “I know what I saw. I know that it is possible. You told me so yourself when you showed me the orchids that once were people. Transformation—”
He broke off, fumbled a hand toward his stitches, suddenly panicky. Sylvie caught his hand in hers—large, chilled, shaking—and let it go once he’d calmed. Orchids. Transformation . . . After Odalys’s arrest, Sylvie had taken Suarez to the Fairchild Gardens to visit a special collection of orchids, a group of thirteen rare plants that had once been the satanic coven who’d killed his son. Suarez had been skeptical, and Sylvie had spent more time explaining the mechanics of magical transformation as she understood it than she had ever thought she would.
“Am I going to change?”
“Into—”
“A bear?” Suarez’s eyes glinted, shiny with panic. Sylvie felt like she was grasping at water, something that shifted and changed and fled her understanding.
Suarez groaned. She said, “C’mon, Lio, tell it to me from the beginning. One piece at a time. Tatya found the women, I called you, you went out to the ’Glades with a team—”
“Nightmare,” Suarez said. His voice was gravelly with shock and lingering disorientation. “Outdoor crime scenes. A dump site for a serial killer. The Everglades. Takes forever. Just to get the bodies photographed in situ, the scene, and finally out of the water—it got dark. We set up lights, kept working. The helicopter came. Wind everywhere. But not on the water. No waves at all.”
“Not in the lagoon?” That same stillness she and Tatya had noted.
Suarez shifted a shoulder. “Like glass, smothered ripples. They started loading the first body—
“Maria?” Sylvie asked.
“No,” Lio breathed. “La rubia, the blond woman, in the swimsuit. Closest to the shore—
“She burned, Shadows. Burned like rocket fuel. Blue and white flames, red flames, so hot, and they had her loaded. The forensic team burned . . . and then so did the bird. That’s what exploded. The helicopter. Not a bomb. The helicopter and the pilot and the forensic team.” Wetness streaked from one eye. Sylvie let him rest, but when she thought he might get lost in mourning his dead, she pushed again.
“Magic?” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to recall the scene she had left. Tried to remember why she had been nervous there, why she had thought Lio would be calling for her advice. She was a city girl at heart; her visits into the Everglades had been school field trips to Anhinga Trail to count animal species, and the more recent excursions to see Tatya. But even without familiarity, she had marked the lagoon as too quiet. The lagoon had had the shaky, stretched feel of a world altered by force, and the wildlife had fled before that metaphysical earthquake, leaving deadness behind. So yeah, maybe magic. But it hadn’t struck her as a spell waiting to happen. Hell, she wouldn’t have called Suarez out if that had been the case. She would have called a witch to clear the area first. Magical SWAT. Something.
Maybe Lourdes was right. Maybe Sylvie was to blame for this.
“Can’t tell about the fire,” Suarez murmured. “God only knows. Could have been an incendiary inside her. But I don’t think so. Not with the bear.”
“Yeah, the bear,” Sylvie said. “I’m still not—”
“I was in the water, thigh deep, worried that a gator was going to take me off at the knee, when the fire started. I tried to get to them, then I saw the body move before me.”
“The burning—”
“The other one. The one closest to me. The wildlife photographer. Your client’s wife. Maria Ruben. I thought—she was alive. I reached for her, and she changed. All claws, and teeth, and fur. Charging me. Her claws . . .”
His hand flailed at his stitches again, and Sylvie got it this time. “The dead woman changed into a bear?” It was so hard not to sound skeptical. Even knowing about the Magicus Mundi, even knowing about shape-shifters.
Shape-shifters didn’t play dead very well—too much animal. But they also didn’t come back from the dead.
“Am I going to change—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “It doesn’t work like that. Either it’s a genetic ability, or it’s a sorcerous one. It’s not a disease.”
Given that there was death involved, Sylvie assumed sorcery. True shape-shifters were creatures at least partially bound by natural law: They lived, they bred true, they died if you killed them, and they stayed dead. Beyond that—Maria Ruben was straight-up human. Had been, at any rate.
The wild card might be the tiny percentage of shape-shifters that were curse-related, but those were rare enough that she felt comfortable erasing them from the map of possibilities. Didn’t take too many generations of magic-users to learn that cursing your enemies to change them into beasts was more of an “oops” than a “ha!” Witches and sorcerers could make a tasty meal for a pissed-off shifter with a grudge.
Lio was quiet, more of those silent tears streaking his cheeks. Relief, this time, she diagnosed.
“They all changed,” he whispered finally. “Wolves and a big cat with a lashing tail
.”
“The bodies?”
“Their eyes in the fires. Shone.”
“What happened to them?”
“We were dying,” Lio said. “Jorgé was screaming—haven’t heard men scream like that. Since the Gulf.”
Sylvie caught his hand in hers again, held it tight until the shaking eased.
“Los monstruos,” he said. His eyes closed, shields against the intolerable. Bruises on bruises. Emotional and physical. “They left us there.”
“ ‘Left,’ ” Sylvie parroted. It was an odd choice of words. Didn’t seem to apply to a group of fleeing animals.
“Retreated,” he said. “All the same direction.”
No matter how she questioned Lio, she doubted she’d get much more sense out of him. His skin was grey, beaded with sweat. His throat worked, holding back sickness, pain, fear. She didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened in the ’Glades; but then, the real question was, did she need to? She’d investigated other cases with less to go on.
“Sylvie,” Adelio said. “Find out. The only bodies in evidence now are police. Find out what happened, and stop it.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do you have a plan?” he pushed, unwilling to take her word.
“Monster hunting,” Sylvie said. “I’m waiting until morning, and I’m taking magical backup.”
Dead women who changed shape? Dead women who came back to life? Sounded like necromantic magic. Luckily, she had a new acquaintance who liked to pal around with death magic. Tierney Wales, the Opa-locka Ghoul, was going to find himself rousted bright and early for a field trip.
* * *
SYLVIE MADE HER WAY ACROSS THE CROWDED PARKING LOT—hospitals always seemed to be doing a booming business no matter the hour—homing in on her truck and its clawed hood gleaming beneath a streetlamp. She thought of Suarez and his patchwork of sutured flesh with regret. He was going to scar as badly as her truck.
Footsteps sounded behind her, quick-moving, and she turned, always on alert, but saw only a woman searching for her keys in a cavernous leopard-print bag. Disorganized, Sylvie thought. The woman had the common sense to move quickly through the quiet lot but not enough planning to pull her keys ahead of time. She was asking to be mugged. Especially while leaning up against a steely grey BMW.
One of the sheep, her little dark voice suggested, dependent on a careless shepherd.
Hush, Sylvie thought at it. Bad enough when it preached misanthropy; it made her downright nervous when it started to verge on theology. The voice was the leftover bit of Lilith’s genetic legacy carried down through generations, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. Sylvie had killed Lilith when they met; she didn’t need to keep Lilith’s madness alive in her own blood.
Sylvie left the hospital behind with the usual diesel cough from her truck and a belated protest from her stomach, which chose that moment to remember the abandoned enchiladas. Burned women, hospital visits, dead cops—part of being a pro meant it didn’t even faze her appetite. Not anymore. Which, considering the rate that the Magicus Mundi was invading Sylvie’s day-to-day life, was a good thing. She’d have starved otherwise.
She checked her mirrors, checked the streets, trying to remember what restaurants were open and nearby. Mia Rosa’s, she thought, was only two blocks back. She checked the streets once more, looking for cops, then hung a U-turn. During the day, she wouldn’t have made it. At this hour, it was a little tricky, best done at speed, but definitely possible. Behind her, horns honked loud and long, and too late to be directed at her. She glanced back to see that another car had made the same maneuver, though the woman driving looked a little wild-eyed. Sylvie hmmed thoughtfully, and when she parked the truck, she unlocked the glove box and took out her gun.
She didn’t like being followed.
She especially didn’t like being followed when she had a killer witch after her.
The hostess at the door greeted Sylvie with a stiff smile, a pointed reminder that they were closing at midnight, and sat her among a group of tables with the chairs put up. Subtle, they weren’t. Sylvie didn’t care as long as the food was hot, plentiful, and quick to arrive.
She had just sent the waitress off with her order when the door opened again; the hostess moved to intercept another last-minute diner. Sylvie narrowed her eyes, and the dark-haired woman in the doorway waved at Sylvie and waved off the hostess.
The woman from the hospital parking lot threaded her way through the tables, her ridiculously large bag still hanging from her shoulder and clunking against upended chair legs every few feet. The same woman who’d made a U-turn to keep up with her, pushing her ancient Jeep hard to make enough speed to keep from being t-boned. She homed in on Sylvie, and Sylvie kicked out the chair opposite her. “So, that business with the BMW, was that playacting or wishful thinking?”
“A little of both,” the woman said. “It was a nice car, wasn’t it? And if I had approached you in the lot, you would have walked away.”
“Still might,” Sylvie said. “I don’t like strangers following me.”
“I’m Caridad Valdes-Pedraza,” she said. “And you’re Sylvie Lightner. You’re a PI who’s always on the scene, and I’m a freelance reporter looking for a scoop. I’ve been waiting to see Adelio Suarez; you just came from seeing him. Feels like fate.”
“Fate’s an excuse for people who don’t want to make an effort,” Sylvie said.
“Interesting,” the woman said. “I’d have marked you as believing in destiny.” She hefted her purse to the tabletop, dropped it with a clatter, and pulled out a notebook and a pen.
She scribbled in it, and Sylvie had to ask, “Are you writing that down?”
“Hey,” Caridad said. “I like to take notes on my subjects.”
“I’m not a subject,” Sylvie said. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza—”
“You could call me Caridad if you want. I know the other’s a mouthful.”
Sylvie let her breath out in a steady gust. She wasn’t in the mood. If she hadn’t seen the sullen waitress approaching with her meal, she would have just given up. Walked away. Caridad’s expression was friendly, pert, that of a would-be newscaster. But there was something harder beneath it. Intelligence, ambition, and something deeper still, betrayed in the tension in her jaw: need.
“My friends call me Cachita,” she said. She shot Sylvie a demure glance, one step away from flirtation. It was a good front, a good act, no doubt got her into a lot of conversations with her targets; but it was only an act.
Sylvie made her voice flat, no weakness. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza, we’re not friends, and we’re not going to be friends. I’m going to eat a long-overdue dinner, and you’re not welcome at my table. If you have something to say, say it and go away.”
“Fine,” she said. Caridad sat up straight, pressed her curling hair out of her face, drummed her nails on the table, a quick rumba, and said, “Tell me about the bodies you found in the Everglades.”
“Police made a statement,” Sylvie said. “There were no bodies, only mannequins. It was a trap, and three officers died.”
“You know what police statements are? Sop for reporters too lazy to do their own digging. Too lazy to do anything but print a preapproved story. They trade integrity and a real interview for easy bylines.”
“So you’re what? A crusader for truth?” Sylvie spiced her words with as much mockery as she could manage when she was tired . . . and dammit, the woman was drawing her in.
“Is that a bad thing to aspire to?” Caridad asked. “There’s an awful lot of truth that gets ignored or denied out there. I want to open people’s eyes.”
“Good luck with that,” Sylvie said. “I get paid to find things out, and people still don’t listen.”
“Doesn’t it just drive you crazy?” Caridad said. “Make you want to shove it down their throats? Me, I get so frustrated, I could scream. I turn in reports, and it’s all, ‘But, Cachita, where’s the point of—’ ”
Sylvie g
rowled, took a breath, and said, “You know something else that drives people crazy? Intrusive reporters. Go away. I have nothing to tell you.”
Caridad leaned back in her seat, took her hands from the table, made herself smaller. Dammit, this reporter was good at reading people, at manipulating her own body language, her meekness only another path to taking control of the conversation, to keep the dialogue open, to derail Sylvie’s anger.
Sylvie felt a wolfish grin stretch her mouth. Maybe that kind of thing worked on regular people, but Sylvie had anger to spare.
Caridad’s eyes narrowed, pale eye shadow crinkling beneath dark brows. “Women have been disappearing from the city. The police aren’t talking about it, and even if they did, they’d be talking about a serial killer. Not a monster. But that’s what it is. You can help me. You found its playground, didn’t you?
“I’ve got sources, Sylvie. They tell me that someone called in five bodies that they found in the Everglades. Another source tells me you left the scene. You’re not police, and you wouldn’t be welcome at a crime scene—so you must have found them. What made you look for them in the first place?”
“Do you really expect me to talk to you?” Sylvie took another bite of her “special”; it was some sort of creamy pasta and seafood, barely lukewarm and sour with her irritation. “You said it. I’m not real popular with the police. You think they’d be happy if I shot my mouth off to a reporter?”
“I think you’re dying to. I do my research, Sylvie. I know my subjects. I know about you. You’ve got to be sick of the injustices, the fact that people are getting away with murder. You could help me.”
Sylvie said, “I usually get paid for helping.”
“I expected better of you,” Caridad said.
“What are you, my mother?” Sylvie said. “The only approval I need is my own.”
She pushed her plate away, appetite gone. Her personal approval rating wasn’t at its all-time best: Her dreams, in what fitful sleep she’d managed since the confrontation with Odalys, had been angry and focused on the one person who’d gotten away clean with murder: Patrice Caudwell, one of Odalys’s revenant ghosts, who’d managed to keep the teenage body Odalys had provided. At least Odalys had had to lawyer up, had her world disrupted. Patrice? She was sipping cafecitos poolside and working on her tan. Impatience and irritation flared; Sylvie stood. Caridad grabbed her wrist, faster than Sylvie had thought she’d be, and a lot more willing to get physical.