by Lyn Benedict
The women bobbed gently in the water, imprisoned without a cage. Sylvie thought of Maria’s high-strung husband, so lost without his wife, of what Lio would say, and her stomach soured.
Her voice was clipped when she said, “Fine. We’re out of here.”
She took a last, frustrated look at the innocent women she was leaving and stalked off back toward her distant truck. It felt . . . wrong. Like she was walking away from a fight.
Sylvie never ran from a fight. It wasn’t in her blood.
5
Symbology & Sources
RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC SLOWED THEIR DRIVE HOME TO A CRAWL AND helped Sylvie give herself a tension headache from grinding her teeth so hard. But the first time she’d let loose with a volley of profanity and the horn, Wales had gaped, and asked, “Kiss your mother with that mouth? Christ, Shadows. I know sailors who’d balk before saying half of what just came out of—”
“Shut up,” Sylvie said. “I wouldn’t be so pissed if you’d—” She cut herself off; he had done his job. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have the instant solution she wanted.
His jaw was tight when she glanced over, locking back his own need to argue. She’d decided he was right. Silence was golden. Otherwise, she’d be a road-rage statistic.
By the time they made it back to the South Beach office, Sylvie wasn’t a lot happier, but she was calmer.
That lasted until she stepped inside, squinting at the transition from tropical sunlight and soaring sky to fluorescent bulbs and low, dark-painted ceiling. When her eyes adjusted, she found that Alex wasn’t alone.
Alex sat on the reception desk, swinging her feet, and across from her, sitting on the couch, Caridad Valdes-Pedraza was striped in the sunlight that seeped through the miniblinds.
“Get out,” Sylvie said.
Alex said, “Sylvie! Be polite! This is—”
“We met last night,” Sylvie said. “She’s a reporter, Alex.”
Wales growled, pushed past her, and raided her fridge, pulling out an icy bottle of soda. He pressed it to his face, his long neck, the open vee of his worn T-shirt. Alex watched him, belatedly responding to Sylvie.
“Duh.” Alex raised a binder, flipped it open to show a sheaf of paper about twenty pages thick. “She’s doing a story on missing women.”
“Her research is for crap,” Sylvie said.
“Looks good to me,” Alex said.
Caridad had the grace to rise and look shamefaced. “I know I’m intruding,” she said. “But it’s important. You know it is, or you wouldn’t have spent the day in the Everglades.”
“Alex,” Sylvie hissed.
Alex shrugged. “I didn’t tell her. But you’re both sunburned, muddy, and stinky. Hardly a stretch.”
“I know we got off on the wrong foot,” Caridad said. “But give me another chance.”
“Why should I?” Sylvie said. “If you really wanted to help these women, you’d be haunting the police station, not me. You just want the damn story.”
“It’s not like the police will listen to her. Not when she’s talking about monsters,” Alex said. “Besides, think about it this way. You and Cachita find the women, it’s a win-win. You save them, Cachita writes about it—we might get more business.”
“Whose side are you on, Alex?” Sylvie said. Alex shrugged a narrow shoulder.
Wales slumped onto the couch. “Do you really need more business? Ever since I met you, it’s been go, go, go.”
“Sylvie gets bored,” Alex said. “You wouldn’t like her when she’s bored. She does shit like—”
Sylvie coughed, cocked her head in Caridad’s direction, and Alex shut up.
“Cachita,” Alex said. “Maybe you’d better go.” She took in Wales’s scarlet nose and cheeks and dug out the first-aid kit with a resigned huff. “I think we’ve got some aloe gel in here.”
“All right,” Cachita said.
Sylvie thought her jaw might drop. Caridad hadn’t been anywhere that docile the night before. But before her surprise could turn to pleasure, the woman paused, running her nails thoughtfully along the seam of her jeans. “Sylvie, you saw the news report about the monster, right?”
Sylvie closed her eyes. She’d known it wouldn’t be that easy. “What monster?”
Caridad dropped back into the seat she’d just vacated, brought her briefcase up, and popped it open. She dug out her netbook, flipped it open.
“Caridad, I don’t want a PowerPoint presentation,” Sylvie said.
“Cachita, please,” Caridad said. “Here.” She cued up a video. The local news. Morning edition. When people were credulous and not looking for more than sound bites to flavor their coffee.
She must have made a face, because Caridad mirrored it. “So the source is dubious. The report is real. I’ve got the police reports to back it up—”
Sylvie waved a hand irritably. Bad enough she was caving to this nonsense; the least Cachita could do was let her listen in peace. The perky newscaster, some pleasing mixture of black and Latina, leaned forward, pasted a serious expression on her wide-eyed face, and said, “Local patrons of a favorite restaurant claim to have seen a monster coming to dinner. . . .”
Stripped of the mindless banter between anchors, the story was simple, the start of a joke. A man walks into a bar and turns into a monster.
It could have been a joke, but the punch line was bloody. Whatever had happened after that—and the anchors weren’t sure, parroted comments about knives and shattering glass—seven people went to the hospital to have their wounds stitched.
The anchors made inane comments about gang initiations, quoting urban legends about car headlights and homicidal quotas as if they were fact, and Sylvie turned them off. She was thinking about timing.
The police had disturbed the bodies in the swamp on the same night the man pulled his “stunt” in the restaurant. The women had changed shape. So had he.
A thin connection, maybe even no connection. There were werewolves who made their home in the city, and there was nothing to say that one of them hadn’t simply had a temper tantrum. But it was worth checking out.
Caridad smiled, toothy with victory. “I told you.”
“Smug isn’t a good look on you,” Sylvie said.
“I’ve got an appointment to talk to the staff in an hour. You could come.”
Sylvie looked at Wales. “Symbology?”
“Go,” Alex said. “I can help him.” She put a last glide of aloe gel across his cheekbone and smiled.
Wales hesitated, slipping a few more inches between him and Alex, but finally nodded.
With that less than ringing endorsement, Sylvie followed Cachita out into the evening.
* * *
IT WASN’T A LONG DRIVE, NOR AS UNPLEASANT AS SYLVIE HAD feared. With only Sylvie as her audience, a willing one at that, Cachita stopped being so fiercely cheerful. She tuned the radio to a Latin station, all dance beats, drummed along on the steering wheel, and said nothing at all.
Her face in repose was oddly stern. For the first time, Sylvie found herself considering the woman seriously as something other than an ambitious reporter willing to step outside the bounds of the norm in search of a story to call her own.
The restaurant light was turned off, the lot blocked with a sawhorse. Cachita pulled up; Sylvie hopped out, canted it aside, and let Cachita drive past.
She followed on foot, approaching the restaurant slowly. Whatever had happened had broken out at least one of the front windows. A series of plywood sheets was nailed over it.
Sylvie dropped her gaze. The lot was asphalt, sun-baked, the lines worn, and overlaid by tread marks. Nothing animal would have left tracks. There was no real greenery around. To the right of the restaurant, down Aragon Ave, palms studded the sidewalk, and small planters sprouted trees and flowering bushes. To the left, down Merrick, there was a green space shoehorned in between a shopping center’s parking lot and the Casa de Dia’s.
Then again, if it had been a shap
e-shifter, presumably he’d had a car parked somewhere near.
Cachita paused in the doorway, briefcase dangling from her hand. “See something?”
“Just getting a feel for the area,” Sylvie said. She’d hoped for a paw print, cheesy as it seemed. Lio said Maria turned into a bear. A bear print would be a better link than a wolf print.
She spun once more, slowly, looking for security cameras. She didn’t expect to find one, and she didn’t. If there had been cameras, the cops would have had the tapes, then the ISI would have stepped in, and they’d have the restaurant under wraps.
Inside Casa de Dia, the promise made by shattered glass was fulfilled. The restaurant wasn’t quite in shambles, but it was close. A young man in an apron was steadily sweeping up shattered dishes; another was following his smeary path with a mop. Several tables listed to one side, courtesy of broken legs, and a pile of damaged chairs made a strange tangle.
Cachita set down her briefcase on one of the remaining tables and beelined in on the older woman staring over the mess. Her hair was tied back in a long braid, and it whipped around like an angry cat’s tail when she turned on Cachita and Sylvie’s approach.
“You the reporter?”
“Yes,” Cachita said.
“What do you want of us? I won’t have my staff ridiculed.”
“We just want to know what they saw,” Sylvie said easily. She leaned up against the edge of a booth, checking first to make sure it was still sturdy. Three long rips in the red leather drew her attention. Claw marks. A cop might interpret them as knife marks if they were inclined to look for an answer that made sense and not for the truth.
The chink-chink-chink of swept-up china stopped. Both young men were listening.
“Gloria, it’s all right,” Cachita said. “We won’t hang you out to dry. We just need to know. We think this monster’s kidnapped and killed women, and there’s a woman who never came home last night.”
Sylvie stopped running her fingers through the tears. Cachita hadn’t said anything about that back at the office. She might be making it up—Sylvie thought Cachita was comfortable with saying anything to get her story—but there had been a new woman in the ’Glades today.
“He came in. He exploded,” the boy pushing the broom said. “One moment, a man. The next, fur and teeth.”
“A wolf?” Sylvie said.
“Mezcla,” the mopper said. “El monstruo. Gato y oso y lobo y hombre. Como una pesadilla.”
“Con dientes grandes,” the sweeper said. He stuck his fingers in his mouth, drew his lips back, and snarled.
“A mixture of animals, a nightmare,” Cachita repeated.
Both boys nodded.
“With big teeth.”
That wasn’t right. The Magicus Mundi had its share of monsters and chimeras. There were gods who could take any damn shape they wanted. But this . . . Going from human to a patchwork quilt of animals.
It sounded more and more like sorcery to her. False shape-shifting. Something bought with blood and pain and easily warped.
“People screamed,” Gloria said. “I screamed. And he just started flailing, biting, and clawing.” She hesitated, then pushed up her colorful sleeve. Beneath it, her arm was mottled black-and-blue, skin drawn tight beneath stitches. “He grabbed me, dragged me toward the door.” Her breath rattled in her lungs; she folded her arm across her chest, and the boy dropped the mop to lean up against her.
“People were panicking,” she said. “They crashed through the window, and it startled him. I pulled, and he let go. He ran into the street, then ran into the dark. Out of the light. He howled. . . .”
“Una pesadilla, verdad,” Cachita murmured. “You were very brave. Then and now.”
Gloria shrugged. Unwilling to take praise for simply surviving. She pinned Sylvie with her dark eyes. “Are you a reporter, also?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “I’m a monster-hunter.”
“Bueno,” Gloria said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Cachita whirled on Sylvie. “What? I come to you with monsters, and you give me shit about being crazy, but her? You just tell her you’re a monster-hunter?”
“She didn’t annoy me,” Sylvie said.
Cachita blew her hair out of her face in aggravation. “I’ve been nothing but forthcoming—”
“You didn’t tell me another woman was missing.”
“You didn’t tell me who Maria Ruben was.”
“You’re the one who wants to make nice,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got the motive to share. And so far, you haven’t. You’ve got a list of missing people you could give me.”
“But you won’t let me work on your team. You’d have shut me out tonight if I had let you.”
“It’s for your own protection—”
Cachita’s lips twisted. “You know what? You can get your own ride back. I’ve got things to do.” She clutched her briefcase, headed into the women’s room. Sylvie propped herself on a table and waited.
She wanted to shake the names out of Cachita but thought the woman was reporter enough to bite her lips and keep silent. Didn’t matter. Sylvie had pictures and Detective Adelio Suarez. She could get the names another way.
Cachita came out of the bathroom, dressed to kill—bright green blouse that dipped low in front and cut out in back. She wore a tight black skirt, bright yellow heels; her hair had been tousled into curls. She rocked back a bit when she saw Sylvie, licked newly red lips. Everything about her was designed to draw attention, down to the leopard-print bangles on her wrists.
“Hitting the streets?” Sylvie asked, pure bitchiness, then paused. Cachita had blinked agreement before her mouth said, “It’s none of your business.”
“Holy shit,” Sylvie said. Pictures of the spellbound women flashed across her memory. All young. All attractive. All Hispanic. “You’re putting yourself out as bait.”
Cachita raised her chin, tossed her hair out of her face. “If the cops won’t, I will. I want him found.”
“And what if you do find him,” Sylvie said. “Or more to the point, what if he finds you? Then what? You’ll whip out your pen and write at him?”
“Better than doing nothing,” Cachita said. “You could always come with me. Lurk in the shadows. Ready to run to my rescue. Oh wait. I’d have to pay you first, wouldn’t I?”
They had attracted an audience, and Sylvie grabbed Cachita’s arm. Tried to. The woman evaded her. Sylvie finally threw up her hands in defeat. “Fine.”
It was irrelevant, really, she thought with a pang of guilty relief. Five women to power the spell, and there were five women she’d left behind. If Mr. Monster was the sorcerer, then Cachita could play monster chum all she wanted, and he wouldn’t bite.
It wasn’t much—there were all-too-human monsters out there—but Cachita was right. It was none of Sylvie’s business. It still felt a little like leaving the spellbound women behind, that guilty discomfort twitching in her veins, when she went outside and called a cab.
* * *
THE OFFICE WAS BRIGHTLY LIT AGAINST THE NIGHT WHEN SYLVIE entered, and even better—it smelled of dinner. She sniffed, trying to be discreet, and Alex grinned. “Cuban sandwiches, black beans, and rice. Yours is in the fridge.”
“Thank you,” Sylvie said.
“Petty cash paid for it,” Alex said. She dangled the key to the tiny lockbox from her fingertips, then dropped it back into the desk drawer, kicked back, and put her feet up.
Wales was draped across the couch, barricaded behind the enormous screen of his laptop. Sylvie drifted over, peered behind it. “You know, that’s pushing the definition of laptop,” she said. “Any luck? I’d expected to find you surrounded by occult books by now. You haven’t even cracked a box? Dinner that exciting?” Despite herself, she couldn’t help but let her gaze drift between Alex and Wales suggestively.
Alex laughed.
Wales went scarlet. “I’m a man on the move, Shadows. It’s all in the hard drive. Every occult book I’ve ev
er laid hands on is scanned in this baby. When you’re wanted by the CIA, you might not get time to pack.”
Sylvie eyed the boxes still piled about the office. “So what’s all this, then?”
“Nonessentials,” he said. “Just because I can winnow all my necessities to one bag doesn’t mean I don’t like having other stuff.”
Alex headed into the kitchenette, dished up Sylvie’s food, and nuked it.
Sylvie swallowed, belated hunger catching up with her.
She snagged it out of the microwave before the timer had run down, ate rice and beans while they were still lukewarm, and said, “So, Tex, the symbols?”
“They’re old,” Wales said. “It’s a strange thing, magic. Trends occur in it, too. This is an old form of symbology. I’ve got two alchemical symbols—” He turned the computer screen toward her, highlighted the images, etched in skin.
“The thing that looks like a calligraphic F on a plain attached to a lowercase y? That’s fusion. This one? The tilted V with loops? Purification.”
“What about the lumpy swastika-looking thing,” Sylvie said.
“It’s not a swastika; it’s a lauburu,” he said. “It’s a Basque symbol, but it’s older than that. It’s a little hard to be sure, but given context—shape-shifting—I’m going to assume it’s Paracelsus’s symbol for animal healing.”
Sylvie frowned. “Purification and healing—”
“Yeah,” Wales said. “I think our sorcerer’s sick.”
“He put women into magical comas and left them in the Everglades. We knew he was sick,” Sylvie said. “Sorcerers tend toward depressingly good health, though. Sick could mean cursed.” It would fit with the man that Gloria and her sons had seen—a sorcerer who lost control of his borrowed skills at shape-shifting.
Alex said, “Tell her about the eye.”
“The bull’s-eye with a line through it,” Sylvie said. “The one Maria Ruben has on her forehead?”
“It’s pretty basic,” Wales said. “It’s a blinding spell. To keep his deeds hidden.”
“It doesn’t work, then,” Sylvie said. “Tatya found them, I found them, the cops found them, we found them again.” She traded the rice for the sandwich, wanting to bite and rend at something. Even when she thought they’d gotten a clue, it was useless. “Are you sure you’re interpreting it right?”