by Lyn Benedict
The ground at her feet was growing dark and damp. They were leaving the ridge of the ATV trail, and the water level was rising. The saturated soil had taken on an oily sheen, contaminated by the explosion. It made the footing more slippery than it should have been, like a tattered carpet laid over grease. The bird cry of voices stabilized, became the sporadic chatter of men and women trying to piece together a puzzle they didn’t understand, frustrated outbursts that allowed single words to drift in Sylvie’s direction.
Not finding any signs of a bomb.
Is that an alligator tooth?
Should have brought a porta potty.
Wales said, “So, what’s the plan?” His voice was a whisper, and even then, she twitched at the sound of it. The sense of being watched was still strong and sharp in her blood.
But there was nothing in any direction that she could see. The slough ahead of them, ground ceding to water. The hammock to their distant left, a low smudge of trees on the horizon, crackling with birds.
Be careful, her little dark voice murmured. Some things don’t need eyes to see.
Sylvie shut it down. One paranoid companion per expedition was enough. Another last glance—saw grass, hammock, slough, the seeping track behind them, and sounds of life everywhere: frogs, birds, the rustle of quick lizards. Maybe there had been something or someone watching. Something that had been still enough not to spook the wildlife. Or maybe it had been and gone, and the only spectators they needed to worry about were the police.
Stay careful.
“You getting anything at all?” she asked, keeping her voice to a hush. “You picking up anything death-magical?”
“From this distance? No.”
“So we wait for the cops to leave, then.” Sylvie hesitated. Waiting had sounded okay in her office, but in the actual ’Glades? For one thing, they weren’t that well hidden, not by the landscape, anyway. But if they retreated, they could miss any narrow window of opportunity that might present itself.
“They look pretty damned entrenched to me. I’m not really in love with the idea of waiting until past dark to do my look around.”
“You and me both,” Sylvie said. The idea of lingering out there, exposed in the tall grass, was bad enough in daylight. In the dark? “We’ve got to get closer.”
“All right,” he said.
He drew out Marco’s Hand and his lighter, and Sylvie said, “Wait, what?”
“What’d you think I was going to do?” Wales asked. “Put on a suit and pretend to be a cop? Sorry. I got just one spell that’ll get us up close.”
Sylvie growled. “You want me to ignore the fact that lighting up Marco is going to result in soul shock for people who already feel fragile? Some of those cops are cleaning up bits of their colleagues.”
Wales shrugged. “Then you should have brought a different type of witch,” he said. “One who could send them off chasing a will-o’-the-wisp or give them the compulsion to go back to the station. But you pissed off the local witches, and now you’ve just got me.”
You could have called on Zoe, Sylvie’s little dark voice whispered.
That was enough to steel her spine. Bad enough her little sister had gotten a yen for practicing magic, worse that she showed talent enough she had to be trained, worst of all would be Sylvie’s encouraging her.
Two types of pragmatism warred in her, and, finally, she just shook it all off. “You light Marco, and I go down, too. I’ve had enough soul shock for a while.”
Wales frowned. “There is that.” He set Marco’s Hand down on the grass, fumbled through his pockets some more. Sylvie kept a close eye on the Hand of Glory. Last thing they needed was some random raccoon running off with it. Problem with nature. It was always lurking, always hungry.
“Ah,” Wales said, drew out a pocketknife, a convenience-store special, the kind that lived in plastic bins beside the dollar lighters. “Blood’ll do it.”
“Yours or mine?” she murmured, but the question was already answered. Wales dragged the thin, brittle blade across the heel of his hand, left a bloody smile slowly forming. He wiped the blade on his jeans, shoved it back into his pocket, then dipped his fingers into the blood.
“Hold still,” he said, brought his fingers toward her face.
She shied back. “Blood goes where exactly?”
“On your skin,” Wales said. “So Marco knows you’re part of me.”
“Marco was licking your blood earlier—”
“He won’t lick this,” Wales said. “Trust me.”
He touched her cheeks, two quick strokes and a squiggle, some symbol she couldn’t see; the temperature of her body, the heat of the day, was such that she didn’t feel the dampness at first, only smelled the old-penny copper of it.
Then it started to trickle sluggishly down her skin, nothing like sweat, sticky and already going rank. She had to force herself to hold still for the next two touches, marking her forehead and chin. No point in doing this half-assed, and she really didn’t like the idea of having her soul munched on by a ghost who wasn’t all that fond of her.
The last time she’d seen Marco—more than just his remnant Hand—he’d gotten in her face and told her he killed women like her.
If there was anything that would break the deal between Wales and his pet ghost, it would probably be her: Recidivism was more than just a word, after all, and while alive, Marco had made a habit of killing women.
She was trusting Wales on two fronts here—that he knew what he was doing and that his word was good—and that made her nearly as edgy as the hunt they were on. She watched him, her vision narrowing until the flick of the lighter, his long, pale fingers, and bony knuckles, the quick and tiny spill of sparks, got eaten by the wash of the Hand of Glory coming alight.
The last time she’d seen Marco, they’d been confined and close in a single room. The last time she’d seen ghosts, they’d been focused on their victims. Both events left her utterly unprepared for the speed of Marco now.
Her breath went out in a rush, and Marco breezed through the small crowd of policemen and technicians, bending close, sending them into unconsciousness with a kiss—a bite—before they could even realize something was happening.
Marco moved like wind, a grey shape in the air, unfettered by human requirements of energy or space. He blew through the equipment, set one machine to shrieking an alarm, and took out the technician before she had time to turn her head. The woman crumpled, face-first, and Wales hissed in disapproval.
“What is it?” Sylvie said.
“Hurry up, hurry up!” Wales muttered more to himself than her, then broke, running with graceless haste through the slough, going knee deep in places, forcing his way through, leaving a muddy wake. Sylvie, finding a drier path, finally saw what Wales, with his greater height, had seen: The female technician was facedown in the water.
Marco hadn’t changed at all since his death. Sylvie wished she could be surprised.
4
Magic and Monsters
SYLVIE PICKED UP HER PACE, FELT THE SAW GRASS LASH AGAINST her legs, heard the low hum of it rasping against her clothes; she got there as Wales manhandled the woman out of the water, checked her airways.
“She all right?” And wasn’t that a careful distinction of all right? Was the soul-shocked woman still breathing? Morals and the Magicus Mundi didn’t line up all that well.
“She is,” Wales said. Marco shrugged, an insincere oops. “They all are,” he said, nodding decisively as if saying it made it so.
“Yeah, let’s just do this,” Sylvie said. She directed her attention to the scene, trying to splice the two images together in her mind. When she’d been there last, it was a peaceful scene—minus the dead women, naturally—glimmering waters, green duckweed, saw grass stretching out toward the sloughs and the hammocks.
Now there was char everywhere, scraps of metal in the process of being collected; scorched grass, oily water, the detritus of investigation, and a double handful of droppe
d cops. Sylvie wandered over to the collected evidence bags, reading labels. Might as well start there.
There were two men fallen near the bags, dressed in Fed-standard suits, in Fed-standard colors—one blue, one black. Miami detectives had more sense, wore khakis and short-sleeved polo shirts. Sylvie pulled out the first man’s ID: Dennis Kent, ISI. She burned his face into her memory. Odds were, she’d be seeing him again. Dark hair, grey flecked, a Roman nose. Soft hands.
The second man—dirty blond, smooth-skinned, a babe in the woods—was Nick O’Neal, and definitely the junior of the pair.
Strange suits, indeed. Lio’s rumor mill had been right.
But these two looked more like an exploratory team than the first wave of an ISI incursion. Someone wanting to make sure that this was worth their time. Sylvie grimaced.
Using the Hand of Glory on them would probably go a long way to convincing them that this was ISI-interesting. Couldn’t win for losing, sometimes.
In the background, Wales held a furious, whispered conversation with Marco, a series of snake hisses on the breeze. Sylvie tipped her head, let the air cool her skin, drying the blood on her face until the streaks pulled uncomfortably. She reached up to scratch, then saw Marco studying her, his hollow eyes eager even from twenty feet away, and dropped her hands. Yeah, better not.
She put their IDs back, flipped through the evidence bags.
“You sense anything? Find anything?” Sylvie asked. She was coming up blank, blanker, blankest. Yesterday, the landscape had held that strange charge to the air, the sense that magic had been used, had altered reality. Today, it was just heat, breeze, sun, water, smoke, oil. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. She slapped at a mosquito that made a heat-slow sortie at her exposed wrist and pulled her sleeves back down.
“Nothing much,” Wales said. “Bit of a ghost presence. The dead cops. The burned woman. But they’re only traces, and they’re fading fast. They’re so far gone, holding ’em back’d be nothing but an act of cruelty.”
“You could do that?” Sylvie asked. “Pull them back?” That made her twitchy. It wasn’t just that he could keep them there, but that Wales—scarecrow klutz of a man—could pull their souls away from whatever gods lay waiting to claim them.
“Could. Won’t,” Wales said. “They can’t tell me much more than they already have, whispering about confusion and being lost.”
“You can hear them?”
Wales turned away from the empty space he was studying so intently that she knew he saw more than she could. “You don’t know much about necromancy, do you, Shadows?”
“Never needed to,” she said.
Wales hmmed thoughtfully, then spotted an open cooler of drinks, ice sparking against the sun, and said, “Thirsty?”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said, caught the icy soda he tossed her way with relief, set the can against her nape. “So we’re done here?”
“Nothing of death magic happened here,” Wales said. “At least, nothing powerful enough to linger. And you said five dead women? That should have lingered.” He raised the can to his lips, lowered it without taking a drink. “You sure they were dead?”
“They were underwater,” she said, but she was thinking of different angles. “They weren’t breathing, weren’t moving.”
“Did you try to revive—”
“Wales, I took a look and got the hell gone.”
He gnawed his lower lip, knelt among the charred rubble that had been a police ’copter. He tilted his head as if he were listening.
“They weren’t dead,” he said.
Something slow and miserable churned in her belly, a flutter of guilt and professional embarrassment. She hadn’t even checked. She’d just seen the surface of things. And she knew better than to take things at face value.
“They weren’t dead,” he said again, and if she hadn’t known better, she’d have assumed he was rubbing salt in the wound. But it was an echo in his voice, patiently repeating something he heard. Something a ghost was sharing.
He stood, staggered a little, and said, “Okay. The burned woman is the only one of the five women who is actually dead. Jennifer Costas.”
“Could I have—”
He shook his head. “No. Jennifer burnt up because the spell binding them broke. It feels like a contingency plan of some sort. A magical if-then command. The others?”
“Fled,” Sylvie said. “According to my witness, they got up and walked away.”
“But Jennifer was restrained,” Wales said, turning as if he could see the helicopter that her body had been strapped into. “Trapped.”
“She was the only one who burned,” Sylvie said. “If the spell broke—”
“She was the only one who couldn’t get free,” Wales said. He paced back and forth, raising clouds of soot, stumbling over metal fragments, making his mark on the scene. There would be no pretending that they hadn’t been there. “She tried. Twisting. Tangled. Hot like spell fire in her veins. It’s strange magic, Sylvie. I don’t get it, and she only knows what she felt.”
“Necromancy?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s death in it. Sacrificial death of some kind, but old.” A shudder ran through his body. His eyes unfocused, listening. “She’s so afraid. She’s dead, and she’s still afraid it could get worse. She’s . . . It’s all . . . hunger and torn hearts and fear in her mind.” His voice gave out, going thready, then silent.
Sylvie waited. He was motionless, as if listening to the dead allowed him to take on some of their deathly calm. A moment passed, with his tight breathing and the distant slurp of moving water the only sounds.
He shook it off all at once, body moving from ghost languor to his more normal hunched shoulders and twitchy nerves. “It’s . . . necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft and . . . it’s a tangle of magics. It’s layered, and it’s really ugly.”
“So the other four women are . . . what? In some type of magical suspended animation?”
“They were,” he said. “Until Jennifer was pulled from the water.”
“Lio said the other women changed shape.”
“See!” Wales gesticulated broadly, pointing at nothing but his own aggravation and confusion. “That doesn’t fit either. Shape-shifting’s not necromancy; it’s closer to biology.”
“And you said you didn’t know anything about shape-shifters,” Sylvie said.
“So I hear things. So what?”
She let that slide. Wales wanted to keep his breadth of knowledge on a need-to-know basis? She could live with that. For now. There were other, more pressing problems. “How would that work?”
He shrugged. “Suspended animation? Hell, maybe it wasn’t magic at all, just more of the government fucking around in our lives, using us as—”
“Wales,” Sylvie snapped. “Take off the tinfoil hat and focus. It wasn’t pure necromancy, fine. I believe you. Can we get out of here now? Let these people recover before a snapping turtle starts nipping off fingers?”
Wales nodded. “Yeah. Good point.”
They backtracked to the ATV trail, Wales sticking to drier ground this time, and once they’d reached a point where the grass would cover their presence, Wales brought out a little packet, tipped it into the stagnant waters. Sylvie watched the water go the color of old bone, swirling white and cream, and said, “Powdered milk?”
“Don’t knock it; it works,” Wales said, and dipped Marco’s flaming Hand. “And a hell of a lot easier to cart around.”
It was one of the things she hated about magic. It made these rules for itself—the purity of milk could put out an evil flame—and then bent or broke them at the user’s will. Grocery-store milk? Powdered milk? Where was the purity in that? But it was working.
Marco faded away. Behind them there was silence, then shouting, as alarmed police found themselves waking, groggy and scared. Sylvie bit her lip as she and Wales moved away. The ISI would understand what had happened even if the police didn’t. Odds were, they’d come look
ing to her for answers first.
She hadn’t thought this through at all well, had let her eagerness to clear the debt she owed Lio send her rushing out to the scene, and for what? They hadn’t found anything. No monsters. No dead girls. Hell, if Wales was right—her stomach lurched once again.
“They’re alive,” Sylvie said. “Christ. I could have saved them if I’d called a witch instead of the cops yesterday. I freaked out, saw the scene, and thought I didn’t want to be found near it. I fucked up.”
Wales, thankfully, didn’t say anything, a veteran of the kind of second-guessing that paranoia bred. After another moment, Sylvie said, “So, can you help the women? If we find them? Even though it’s not necromancy?”
Bitterness laced her question, made it accusing, blaming the nearest magic-user for the actions of another. Wales blinked, paused in his steps, and she flipped a hand at him in apology.
Just . . . why did it always have to come down to magic? What had happened to the days of point and shoot, and problem solved? At this rate, she was going to have to have a full-time witch around, and Sylvie just didn’t trust them that much. Not Wales. Not Val. Hell, not even Zoe, whose first actions in the Magicus Mundi had been shortsighted at best.
“Magic’s not that different, branch to branch,” Wales said. “Sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. We’re all built of the same thing. We just . . . specialize.”
“Is that a yes?” Sylvie said.
“It’s a maybe. Don’t make me theorize without evidence.”
“Now you sound like a witch,” she said.
He stalked along, squelching, his jeans collecting dust and mud, and finally said, “So, let me guess. A witch told you about magic. Painted witchcraft as team Good. Let me tell you what. It’s all the same at the core. Greedy scavengers stealing power, growing stronger every year they survive, and rearranging the world to suit themselves.”