by Lyn Benedict
“Gods? I don’t want to play anymore,” he said. “I like my life.”
“Then you’re smarter than the soul-devourer,” she said.
He cocked his head at her, frowning as if he almost remembered what she was talking about.
“One of the things Jennifer said,” Sylvie explained. “That she’d been given to him. That he was coming for her.”
Wales groaned. “Stupid, arrogant bastard. Made a deal with a god. Bartering for borrowed power from a god to take out an enemy. I really, really want to leave town.”
“Tough it up, Tex,” she said. “You drew the short straw. I need you.”
“Lucky, lucky me,” he whispered.
“Just . . . try to stay under its radar,” Sylvie said. “Keep a low profile for a while. No ghost summoning.”
“Not a problem,” Wales said.
GPS pointed out they were there, and Sylvie pulled the truck off the road, coasting to a bumpy halt on the dead-end access road.
Wales looked out into the heat shimmer, clutched his satchel tight, and licked his lips. He opened the truck door but didn’t get out. Sylvie walked around the truck, looked in at him.
“You up for this?” Sylvie asked.
“Don’t got a choice,” Wales said. “We can’t leave them there again. I’ve got to try.”
Sylvie grabbed his satchel, slung it over her shoulder, gritted her teeth, and bore it as the edge of it pressed up against her bruises. She was tough. Wales . . . wasn’t. The sun had driven out some of his pallor, but he still held himself like he hurt.
He was right, though. They didn’t have a choice.
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, SYLVIE DROPPED THE SATCHEL INTO THE mud, heart sinking even faster than the bag.
This was the place; she could still see the flattened grass where she had skidded yesterday and gone to her knees. A long streak of turned earth, the tread of her boot.
A fish leaped at a hawk’s shadow as it fell over the water, set off a chain reaction. A turtle ducked its head, glided into motion; a snowy egret hunched its neck; a long ripple cut the surface as a water moccasin slid by.
Life.
Sylvie slapped at a mosquito absently.
“They’re gone,” Wales said. He gaped at the water’s surface as if it had betrayed them. As if it were responsible for their disappearance.
Sylvie considered it an evident statement and made no response. It wouldn’t have been polite anyway. Guilt sizzled through her veins, laced with a healthy slug of rage.
“Can you find them again?” she asked.
“I could try—”
“Go for it,” Sylvie said.
Wales said, “I’m not a dog, Sylvie. I don’t jump on command.”
“If I say ‘pretty please’? C’mon, Tex,” she said. “It’s not just for me. Those women need our help.”
Wales said, “I’m not promising anything. Marco’s built to override defenses, magical or otherwise. He’s not meant to hunt necromantic magic.”
“You were the one talking about sympathetic linkage,” Sylvie said. “Can’t you use that?”
“They’re not dead. Marco is. But I’m going to give it a try. You got a pen on you?”
Sylvie dragged one out of her pocket, a half-sized Sharpie that Alex mocked her for carrying, but as Wales started marking alchemical symbols onto Marco’s Hand, Sylvie sent a mental Take that! to Alex’s techno-love that would send Sylvie into the field with a PDA instead of ever-useful pen and paper.
Wales finished the designs, tilted Marco’s grey-skinned palm to show Sylvie the symbol for fusion, repeated twice, one on the palm, one on the back.
“Is it working?”
“Patience?”
“Never had it,” Sylvie said.
Wales closed his eyes. The breeze that passed over him reached Sylvie with the faint chill she was beginning to associate with ghosts added. Despite the humid heat that weighed her bones, she stepped away as best she could, checking her path. When she looked up again, Wales was twenty feet away, blindly following Marco’s urging.
Sylvie gritted her teeth, thought of a will-o’-the-wisp leading men to their deaths, and hastened after him.
Wales set a rapid pace over hummock and limestone, over knotted grass and through muddy puddles that spat frogs at their approach; sweat trickled down Sylvie’s spine, damped the hair at her temples and nape, greased her palm around the handle of her gun. An anhinga rose on a flap of dark wings and something large slid into the water nearby. Alligator, Sylvie thought, and clutched her gun tighter. They were common enough in the city, but the difference between seeing them as you drove by and walking pellmell into their territory made her heart rocket.
It would be a crap way to die; deathrolled in shallow waters, as horrible as anything the Magicus Mundi could dish out.
Wales stopped all at once. Around him, the mosquito cloud flitted away from Marco’s cold presence.
“There,” he said. A breath of air.
Sylvie joined him; beneath their feet the soft ground grew gritty, limestone gravel forming a path—a narrow access road.
On it, wider than the gravel, pressed tightly against the encroaching vegetation, a black van with a man closing the rear door. Sylvie got a glimpse of pallid, limp flesh, and drew her gun.
“Don’t move,” she said, trying to spot his companion. Black van, man in a suit, taking up a crime scene—ISI seemed likely, and they didn’t work alone.
But Wales’s response—tongue-tied pallor—suggested otherwise. He hated the government, but he didn’t fear it.
This was fear.
“It’s him,” Wales stammered. “The sorcerer.”
She jerked her attention back to the man leaning up against the van. “Soul-devourer?” Her gaze centered, picking out a target. His tie, his smoothly shaven throat, the handkerchief in his breast pocket, the space between his dark eyes. He seemed utterly at ease, lounging back as if to allow her all the time in the world to choose her shot. A far cry from the flailing man-monster at the Casa de Dia, all claws and terror.
“I’ve never liked that soubriquet,” the man said. “But it will do for an introduction, I suppose. You are . . .” He tilted his head, doing the strange I talk to spirits that you can’t see thing that was beginning to look familiar. Necromancers.
“None of your business,” she said.
“Sylvie—” Wales said, a near-breathless warning. She could forgive him showing his fear openly, but to use her name when she’d just denied it to the sorcerer—that was something else. She’d expected better of Mr. Paranoia.
“Sylvie?” the sorcerer said. “Shadows, if you’re out here hunting me. The new Lilith.” His tongue came out, quick, oddly reptilian, brushed his lips, retreated. Had there been scales on it? The longer she looked at him, the less convincingly human he seemed.
The more wrong he seemed.
Sylvie wasn’t magically inclined, but she was good at sensing magic, that subtle shift in the feel of the world. Everything about him screamed unnatural, something held together by magic and willpower. The suit he wore bulged rhythmically, as if the flesh it covered was in flux.
Maybe not so controlled, after all.
He pressed himself away from the van, moved toward Sylvie. A wave of wrongness preceded him. She pressed her finger on the trigger, felt the tiniest of gives. “Don’t.”
The sorcerer never stopped smiling, a sliver of white teeth between blood-flushed lips. “Don’t? Don’t what? I’m doing nothing—”
“What are you, five? Stop moving, or I’ll shoot you.”
Wales made a creaky sound of protest, and Sylvie thought briefly about shooting him. “What?” she snapped.
“That’s no good,” Wales said. “The spell—”
“He’s right,” the sorcerer said. “The binding spell works both directions. Should you shoot me, you risk destabilizing it.”
He didn’t need to say more. When Jennifer Costas had been trapped, she
’d burned. The five women in the van were equally trapped. Equally at risk.
“A deal, then,” Sylvie said. “You unbind the women from your spell. I don’t shoot you today.”
“Give up my little harem? No. In fact, I’m going to keep them closer than ever.” His lips curled into a smile. He had a disturbingly pretty mouth. It made what he said that much more off-putting. “Too many people were touching them. Like the ancient sultans, I require my women to be mine alone.”
Sylvie’s finger twitched. Wales whispered fiercely, an argument held with someone spectral, and the man on the roadway laughed. “Listen to your ghost, boy. I’m more sorcerer than you want to tangle with.”
“I’m not your boy,” Wales said. “And Marco says you should be dead.” Wales might be thin, scared, and brittle; but he was dangerous for all of that, still a necromancer. The sorcerer obviously agreed; his eyes sparked green-white phosphorescence like an animal’s.
Even with the trigger mostly depressed, Sylvie was too slow, hampered by calculations; protect Wales, endanger the women, or . . . Her voice howled furious protest, drove her finger down on the trigger. Her bullet went hopelessly wide. The sorcerer leaped the distance between Wales and the shore, slapped Wales with a careless hand. Wales spun away, blood spurting from his cheek, his shoulder, spinning into the water. He crawled out, coughing, draped himself over a tuft of grass, and passed out.
Crouching, the sorcerer flexed his hand, showed her an animal’s paw, a cat’s claw, ivory nails curved and wet with blood. “Now that he’s down, perhaps we can talk.”
Her second bullet missed him by millimeters; he rolled with an animal’s grace, rose, and threw sand into the air before him.
The world erupted into a scouring riot of sand devils stinging her flesh, stirring into her lungs, her eyes—she blinked furiously, let the voice chastise her into seeing the truth. It was an illusion, only an illusion.
And she didn’t give in to illusion.
She cleared her sight, found the sorcerer within arm’s distance. She threw herself backward, avoided the claws coming at her face, but his other hand, seemingly human, struck her gun. It crumbled beneath her grip, the metal gone friable, pattering into the sand.
Not an illusion this time.
She kicked back, got herself out of his reach, panting, reaching for a fist-sized stone, for a branch, for anything she could use against him.
He breathed hard, contorted, his entire shape changing, warping. Cloth ripped, that fancy suit giving at the seams. Going monster. Maybe she’d hit him, or maybe the spell was weakened by whatever he’d done to allow the women to be moved.
She surged to her feet. Grabbed Wales’s shoulder, tried to drag him to his feet. If she could get him to the van, get behind the wheel—
The sorcerer leaped between her and the van, more monster than man, bulked to twice his original size, mouth distended by teeth better suited to a saber-tooth, piebald fur of different lengths and textures poking through. He drooled, growled, blocked her path. There just wasn’t room on the narrow road, and Wales was deadweight in her grip, a reminder of how hard the sorcerer could hit.
He sucked in a breath that sounded like the final rale of a dying man, then slowly, painfully, returned to human form. He patted his hair, smoothing it into place, a tiny vanity.
“I don’t like the deal you offered,” he said. It started out distorted, as alien as a voice synthesizer, and ended the same smooth baritone he’d had before. His internals slower to recover from shape-shifting than his externals? Or was it vanity again, the sorcerer’s priority. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme, she supposed, but it helped cement in her mind the kind of man he was.
“I don’t like dealing with sorcerers,” she said. “You’re lucky it was as generous as it was.”
“Still, you’re open to dealing,” he said. “Which is more than you could say about the first Lilith. That woman was rabid in her focus.”
“Maybe she just didn’t like men who used power as a weapon to oppress innocents,” Sylvie said. Her voice was strung tight; nothing good ever came of being compared to Lilith. Much less being called the new Lilith. “I think you’ll find I have more than a few things in common with her. I don’t kowtow, I don’t play nice, and I have a bad attitude.”
“And you were created to kill the unkillable. Believe me, I know what you’re capable of. I’m depending on it.” He seemed wary and tense behind that ever-present smirk. He rolled his shoulders; his skin rolled with them, a blurring of his features, an unnatural distortion that turned her stomach. She’d seen werewolves shift; she’d seen the furies shift shape. They had been alien and strange, but they had their own beauty. This—whatever it was that roiled his skin—was nothing but ugliness. He managed to hold back the monster this time.
“Still, I believe we can find a way to agree,” he said. “You want the women freed? I want to be freed.”
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘freed’?”
“I want you to break a curse for me. I’m not unreasonable. Just doing the best I can to stay alive.” His teeth were too long, forcing his lip into a false pout. He shook his head, turned purely human again.
“I’d be more likely to spit on you,” she said. “I don’t care about your curse. I bet you deserve it.”
Wales groaned, drawing her attention. His long limbs flailed briefly.
“You all right there, Tex?”
“I’m facedown in a swamp,” he muttered. “You get the bad guy yet?”
“Working on it,” Sylvie said. Working on it with no gun, no nothing.
“Work faster.” He pushed himself up to a crouch; his face was swelling, and blood masked his jaw and mouth. Daylight didn’t erase the horror-movie look. She winced.
The sorcerer growled. “You will pay attention to me.”
“Only if you say something I want to hear,” Sylvie said. “Release the women, and I might be willing to take your case. You know. Maybe next year. Maybe not.”
He growled, fury twisting his handsome face into a gargoyle’s mask. “If you don’t help me, those women are ash. The curse you don’t care about will ensure that. Do I have your attention now? If you want to save them, you’ll have to save me first.”
The sorcerer had enough sense to finally dim his smile when she didn’t immediately shoot him down. Enough sense to try to hide his triumph when she said, “A curse,” in a bid for more information. She wasn’t going to work for him. But she needed to know what she was up against.
A few feet from her, Wales sat up, his expression full of furious focus, even while his eyes were glazing over. That blow the sorcerer had dealt him had been a hard one, enough to knock him out. Concussion, she diagnosed. She was just lucky he wasn’t puking his guts out. Instead, he was doing his best to follow along, doing his best to help her out. Wales was tougher than she’d given him credit for.
“Get on with it. Tell me about the curse. Tell me what it is.” Her teeth wanted to chatter; she felt cold to her bones. She wanted to blame it on Marco, but there was a lacy pattern of frost forming over the puddle that Wales was sitting in. And the blood on his lacerated cheek was fading, wiped away in careful, invisible strokes. Marco was otherwise occupied.
“It starts, as so many of these things do, with an accident. I killed the wrong man.”
“He tripped and fell on your spell?”
That wash of anger on his face again, and he hissed, “Don’t you presume to judge me, Lilith. If you had no blood on your hands, you wouldn’t be fit to be her successor.”
“But you’re the one who needs something from me. I get to judge,” she said. “Deal with it.”
“I killed a man with a powerful friend,” the sorcerer said. “He cursed me.”
“If he cursed you,” Wales said, “why are the women the ones getting hurt?” He was tracking better than Sylvie had thought, enough that he wasn’t going to let the sorcerer slip that one by.
“I am a shape-shifter,” the sorcerer
declared. “I have the power to alter my shape, to take on the guise of a bear, a wolf, a great cat.”
Sylvie scoffed. “Liar. You’re no shape-shifter, and I’m not that new to this game. You’re a human sorcerer who stole the power by killing true shape-shifters. So tell me, which one had the powerful friend? Bear, wolf, cat?”
He ignored her. “The cowardly sorcerer refused to fight me face-to-face. Instead, he cursed me with the inability to control my form. I am become a monster.”
“Ugly, too,” Sylvie said. She grinned when his face went scarlet. If he needed her, she could make him sorry for it.
His lip drew up, and he took a deliberate step toward Wales. “I might require your aid, but his—” He held up his human hand in threat. Should have been less intimidating than the bloodstained claws, but Sylvie’s disintegrated gun argued that even a single touch could be deadly.
“Fine,” Sylvie said. “Cut to the chase. What do you want me to do? Find this sorcerer of yours and bring you his head?”
A hot light burned behind his eyes, a hunger she could feel. Wales hissed, a warning sound that she didn’t need. The sorcerer made her want to pump his skull so full of bullets that it could be used as a rattle.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, “but it would be enjoyable. All you need to do is . . . convince him to lift the curse. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how to convince him.” He gave her a long once-over, gaze traveling toes to crown, and leered.
She shuddered. He hadn’t. The disgust in her belly, the twitching of her trigger finger argued he had. She’d met a lot of bad guys, but this one was winning in the sheer skeeze factor.
Wales staggered upright, sagged, a sad scarecrow in unyielding daylight. “You’re using the women to deflect the curse. To keep your shape stable. Mostly stable.”
“I am,” he said. “You’re cleverer than I thought, little necromancer. But I could still rip out your throat before you muster a single defense. I’m refraining as a show of good faith.”
Sylvie said, “We get it. You’re bad. You’re scary. Tell me where to find this other sorcerer. What I have to do to break the curse.”
“He calls himself Tepé.”