Gods & Monsters si-3

by Lyn Benedict

  “I’m a reporter, not a vigilante,” Cachita said.

  “You’re stalking the streets, hunting an evil sorcerer with a Taser,” Sylvie said. “What’s your definition of vigilante, again?”

  Cachita flashed a smile, then grew serious. She leaned across the table, and said, “Actually, I came out tonight to find you. Your assistant said she thought you might be here.”

  “Alex’s getting pretty talky around you,” Sylvie said.

  “Maybe I just know how to ask. Oh, don’t get huffy,” Cachita said. “We were getting along so well. Look, I brought you stuff.” She put her purse on the table, a smaller thing than Sylvie had seen her carry before. When she opened it, it held only a few items. The Taser, a wallet, a digital recorder, her smart phone, and a memory stick. She held the memory stick out toward Sylvie, pulled it away when Sylvie reached for it.

  “I’m not giving it to you,” Cachita said. “But I want you to see what’s on it.”

  “The missing women,” Sylvie said. “You going to give me their names now?” She did want that information. Wanted it badly.

  “Come back to my place,” Cachita said. “I’ve got more than their names. I’ve also found a pattern of similarities among the missing women. And some other mysterious murders you might wanna see.”

  “One conspiracy at a time,” Sylvie said.

  Cachita rolled her eyes; the decibels rose exponentially, and Sylvie caved. There’d be no talking in the club.

  Outside, the silence fell over them like a balm. False silence, really. The streets hissed with traffic; the bass followed them onto the street; people hung out beneath streetlamps and talked.

  Sylvie scoped the area, and sighed. “You bring your car?”

  Cachita shook her head. “Took the metrorail.”

  “All right. My truck. Now.”

  Cachita followed Sylvie docilely enough, but her eyes were busy. Sylvie saw the moment she got it; her brows closed in over her nose. “The man from the bar’s following us. He doesn’t look so drunk now. ISI?”

  The woman really was too well-informed for her own good. Sylvie needed to warn her about the dangers of knowing too much; it attracted the wrong kind of attention. But not just then. Sylvie picked up the pace, aware of the probable agent on her tail, imagined she heard the soft slap of his loafers on her shadow.

  She’d seen the gun bulge under his coat back in the bar, hadn’t said anything, Cachita too much a wild card to confide in. While Sylvie had no trouble giving the ISI agents hell, she preferred not to do it around witnesses.

  But she’d kept an eye on him, watched his dark-featured face grow more sober, more openly watchful as Sylvie and Cachita had talked. For an employee of the Internal Surveillance and Investigation agency, he was crap at surveillance, got so engrossed in watching that he forgot to be sneaky.

  Maybe he didn’t need to be, her little dark voice suggested. Not if he was herding her toward something.

  ISI tended to work in teams of two minimum, four more often. That meant there were probably others around.

  Beside her, Cachita was scoping the scene. “They’re Feds. They work in teams, right? You think they’re after you or me?”

  “Don’t know,” Sylvie said. “You do anything they’d be interested in?”

  Cachita shrugged, a nonanswer if Sylvie had ever seen one. From a woman as casually chatty as the reporter, that twigged alarm bells. Sylvie made a mental note. Get Alex to look into Caridad Valdes-Pedraza’s history. Freelance reporter was a job description that could cover a number of sins.

  “Our friend just picked up another friend,” Cachita said. “You think they want to talk to us? Or arrest us?”

  “I’m not in the mood for either,” Sylvie said. “But if I had to say . . . a nice quiet talking-to in an undisclosed location.”

  Cachita tottered along beside her on those ridiculous heels, moving with a quicker stride than Sylvie expected. As they approached Sylvie’s truck, a dark SUV popped its side door. It gaped blackly, an open mouth ready to swallow them up. “Shit,” Sylvie said.

  “I hate them,” Cachita said. “They’ll ruin everything.” The venom in her voice surprised Sylvie, and it showed. Cachita elaborated. “They don’t care about the women, or any of it. They just want to—”

  “Ladies, a minute of your time?”

  “Go to hell,” Sylvie said. His face flushed beneath the streetlamps; Sylvie hadn’t bothered to lower her voice and the passersby on the street were beginning to gawk. Not interfere, of course, but gawk.

  Still, maybe that was good enough. Before she could put her hasty and crappy plan into action, Cachita stamped her foot suddenly, a sharp clack like gunfire echoing into the night.

  The man drew his gun, jumpy, and the crowd mood shifted.

  “We’re over with,” Cachita shrilled. “I told you and told you! I’m with Sylvie now, and you’ll just have to—I got a restraining order. You’re not supposed to get this close. Someone call the cops!”

  Cell phones sprouted everywhere, and most of them were probably just filming so that people’s Twitter feeds could be enlivened by someone else’s drama.

  Sylvie smirked at the suddenly wary ISI; they were screwed. Demalion had had the same problem when she’d met him. Secret agencies weren’t allowed to just flash badges. She draped an arm around Cachita’s heaving shoulders, shoved her toward the truck.

  Sylvie opened the passenger door, slid across, dragged Cachita in after her. Key in the ignition, and Sylvie got the hell out of there before the ISI could really regroup. Cachita had been loud. And quite a capable actress.

  Cachita flung herself up onto the seat beside her, grinning. “Take a left up at the light.”

  Sylvie huffed but did. Guess she was going to see what Cachita had to show her.

  Cachita looked back over her shoulder. “Who would have thought?”

  “‘Thought’?” Sylvie prompted, watching the traffic ebb and surge around them, a smear of red taillights and dark asphalt. She didn’t see the ISI.

  “They’re not really very good at their jobs, are they?” Cachita asked.

  “They’re big believers in retreating to fight again,” Sylvie said. “They’ll be back. We’re not done with trouble, yet.”

  9

  The Girl Reporter and the God

  CACHITA LIVED IN AN OLD TWENTIES-ERA HOUSE, ALL CURVED stucco arches and rounded corners, and the cracked tiles were soft and sandy beneath Sylvie’s shoes. Cachita’s heels made small gritty rasps as she led the way in. Sudden movement drew Sylvie’s attention: In the tiny, overgrown garden, a cat streaked after a pallid gecko that made the mistake of touching ground.

  As she watched, more sinuous forms took shape, slinking curls of shadows; every bush seemed to have a cat beneath it.

  “My neighbor’s a cat lady,” Cachita said. She seemed embarrassed. “So of course, her cats use my yard as their litter box. If I were the house-proud type, I’d be on the phone to the landlord so fast—”

  She flipped on the light, gestured Sylvie inside, and shut the door behind them. Paper rustled with their entrance, and Sylvie blinked.

  Cachita might be computer savvy, but she loved her paper. The living-room wall was a shaggy mess of printouts stapled directly into the stucco.

  Definitely not the house-proud type, Sylvie thought with a hidden grin. Then she saw the subject of the files, and her smile faded. There were easily two hundred sheets stapled on top of each other, next to each other, overlapping, underpinned, a combination of photographs and text, and one entire row seemed dedicated to Sylvie herself.

  Cachita even had a photograph of her, scowling into a paper cup of coffee. Sylvie recognized that moment; she’d ordered an Americano and been given a mocha. It was the morning she’d taken Detective Lio Suarez to see what had become of his son’s killers. She’d been tense and cranky and apparently careless enough to miss someone snapping candids.

  “Don’t get weird,” Cachita said. “I’m not a stalke
r. I just believe in knowing my subjects.”

  “I thought you were concerned with the missing women,” Sylvie said. “Not a PI.”

  “Hey, you’ve got a rep,” Cachita said. “You think I’d just walk up to you without knowing what to expect?” She tapped a cluster of papers, six deep, and said, “Testimonials, of a sort.”

  Sylvie yanked them from the wall, folded them tight, and shoved them into her bag. “Leave me out of your surveillance,” she said.

  “Paranoid,” Cachita said. “Leave that alone and look at this.” She kicked off her shoes, padded over to her laptop, and plugged in the memory stick.

  Sylvie took a couple of steps toward her, then froze. A picture and a name. Jennifer Costas. A high-school glamour shot, all soft focus and dreamy smile. Sylvie thought of Jennifer screaming, burning beneath a god’s touch, and looked away.

  Guess her research wasn’t that bad after all.

  Sylvie moved to the next picture—unfamiliar—and the next—familiar. She compared the woman to her memory and made a match. Lupe Fernandez, one of the spellbound women. A college student at Miami Dade Community College, according to Cachita’s notes, in the nursing program. Lupe grinned in her photo, an arm slung around another girl, both of them wearing rainbow beads.

  She looked at the wall again. If each row was a woman—

  She swallowed. There were far more than five women missing. And Cachita hadn’t had Maria Ruben on her list.

  Christ, her city was under siege, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  “The first one, Ana Cortez, disappeared two months ago,” Cachita said. Sylvie studied the picture, but it was unfamiliar. If Azpiazu’s descendant had taken her, she was dead and gone already, her body sunk somewhere in the Everglades, alligator food.

  “How many?”

  Cachita lifted a shoulder. “There are seventeen women who’ve gone missing in the city that I know of. Out of those, thirteen seem like they might be related to this bastard. There’s a type he goes for.”

  “Young, Hispanic, female.”

  “Atheist. At least, most of them.”

  She gestured at a cluster of photographs. Sylvie picked out three more familiar faces: Anamaria Garcia, student teacher; Rita Martinez, bartender, single parent—a secondary photo of a young girl was stapled beneath; and Jennifer Costas’s replacement, stolen just the night before, Elena Llosa. The girl was ridiculously young, made Sylvie think of Zoe. Her hand fell to her cell phone in her pocket, but she refrained. What would she say? “Just thinking about you”? “Hoping you’re careful”? At best, she’d get a huff of irritation. At worst, a pissed-off teenager asserting her independence.

  “Atheist,” Sylvie said. That was unusual. Most of Miami’s Hispanic population were brought up in a dozen shades of religious. Everything from holiday devotions to daily prayers. Young women who were atheist enough to make it a real point in their lives were not that common.

  It made sense, though, went with Jennifer Costas’s ghostly lament. If Azpiazu was bartering with the women’s souls for a god’s aid, the women would have to be atheist. A god stealing another god’s follower was more than a divine faux pas; it was an act of war that could ripple through the pantheons.

  “I was hoping to find a smoking gun, something I could use to warn his next targets. But atheists are still a huge pool,” Cachita said. “No way to get the word out, no way to home in on his next victim. And with this many, I have to assume there are going to be more.”

  Sylvie looked back at the older “missings” and shuddered. Cachita had found thirteen that fit the sorcerer’s need. “He’s burning through them. They’re not lasting long enough.”

  “Burning—”

  Sylvie bit her lip, and Cachita said, “Please, Sylvie. I need to know what he’s doing.”

  “Why do you care so much?” Sylvie said. “You a Magicus Mundi junkie? Can’t get enough of magical mayhem?”

  Cachita yanked a photo from the older column; the staple stayed behind, a shiny scar in the soft plaster. Sylvie stared at it, and reluctantly took the slick paper. She let her gaze drift down. Elena Valdes.

  Valdes.

  Elena Valdes.

  Caridad Valdes-Pedraza.

  Sister? Cousins?

  It was a common enough name, but Cachita’s face was clenched tight, all her confidence washed away and replaced by misery. “She’s been gone for seven weeks. I think she’s dead. I know she’s dead. She wouldn’t leave her family otherwise. You said he’s burning through them?”

  Sylvie closed her eyes. Fuck, but she hated giving out bad news. “The sorcerer’s cursed. He’s using the women to control his curse. Binding them into the spell. Filtering the inimical power. The curse comes in, strikes the women, and he pulls out enough cleaned-up power to control his shape-shifting. But it’s hard on them, and eventually, they . . .”

  They didn’t just die. He killed them. Took their hearts, devoured their souls. But why? How did that match with the assumption that he was offering their souls to the god?

  It didn’t.

  Soul-devourer, Wales had said. He dealt with the dead. He’d be familiar with the leftovers after a god took a soul. No one called that soul-devouring. That was just the natural state of things.

  The sorcerer was doing more than just bartering the women’s souls.

  Sylvie’s stomach churned with fury. She was working for this son of a bitch. Helping him when he’d already killed more women than she could save.

  “Is that how he’s doing it?” Cachita murmured. “That bastard.”

  Her body was one tight shiver of emotion. Sylvie couldn’t read it, but it looked painful. Cachita might be a crusader for truth, but that didn’t mean truth couldn’t hurt her.

  “We have a lead on him,” Sylvie said. She didn’t mention that she’d met the sorcerer. The shame of it lingered in her skin. She was helping him. But not for any longer than necessary. If Wales could break the spell. If they could free the women. If she could put a bullet in his brain. “There’s a sorcerous Basque lineage—”

  “Eladio Azpiazu,” Cachita said. “I know.”

  “How’d you find that name?” Sylvie said. “Alex tell you?” Bad enough that Alex had told Cachita where to find her. To share case info?

  Cachita said, “You’re standing in the middle of weeks of research. Do you think I need to crib info from your assistant? I have my sources. You made yourself unpopular with the sorcerous community, and Alex is well-known as your girl Friday. I’m an unknown. They talked to me.”

  “Share,” Sylvie said. She pulled out a chair from the dining-room table; the wood scraped unpleasantly along the tile and made her tight nerves wind tighter. Cachita folded herself onto it, resting her hands on the heavy arms of the chair, leaned her head back.

  “They say,” Cachita said, “that the Eladio Azpiazu who’s around now is the same Eladio Azpiazu who was around then. That there’s only ever been one of him. A murderous power-hungry monster who experimented on and took the heart of every shape-shifter that crossed his path. The soul-devourer.”

  “It’s not the same man,” Sylvie said. “It might be the same name.” Sorcerers weren’t immortal. They weren’t even particularly long-lived. Their lifestyle tended to be hard on them, and their apprentices usually turned against them.

  “They say it is,” Cachita said. “They say he got cursed by another sorcerer; that all his stolen power would backfire and make him the monster forever. A punishment he richly deserved—” Her voice dropped to a growl. “And now he’s pushing it off onto innocents!” The wall of photos should have withered beneath the heat of her gaze.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Sylvie said. “Think about it, Cachita. If sorcerers could grant immortality, don’t you think they’d apply it to themselves first? Not their enemies.”

  Cachita’s angry gaze shifted. “I’m telling you the truth,” she snapped. Then she let out her breath. “Sorry. That’s what they told me.”

  “Did
they tell you anything about the sorcerer who cursed him? Tepé?”

  Cachita chewed her lip, white teeth denting red gloss, taking on a bit of the color. “They say . . . They say that he cursed Azpiazu in the eighteen hundreds.”

  Sylvie frowned. That couldn’t be true either. Not if Azpiazu expected her to deal with Tepé in modern day. Sylvie might have gaps in her mundi education, but that was one thing she was certain of: Immortality was bestowed by the gods, and only by the gods. Even the Sphinx wasn’t immortal. Only impossibly long-lived.

  Cachita looked up from beneath dark lashes, and said, “They say that Tepeyollotl cursed him because Azpiazu took his last acolyte.”

  Sylvie went abruptly cold. Acolyte wasn’t a regular word in the sorcerous community. Apprentice. Follower. Novice. Yes.

  Acolyte was a godly word.

  And Tepeyollotl was a far cry from the simple and fairly mundane Tepé. Sylvie knew that name from Mesoamerican history. Tepeyollotl was an Aztec god.

  No wonder Azpiazu had been coy about his enemy. No wonder he had recruited her. The new Lilith. The one who could kill the unkillable. She hadn’t been drafted to break a curse, no matter his claims. Azpiazu expected her to kill a god.

  * * *

  SYLVIE PULLED OUT ANOTHER HEAVY CHAIR AND DROPPED INTO IT. Tepeyollotl. A god.

  She put her face in her hands. Going up against a sorcerer could be difficult enough. But a god . . .

  “Sylvie?” Cachita said. She squeaked when Sylvie jerked to her feet, started pacing the room. The movement felt good, eased the shake in her bones. A god.

  Maybe she didn’t have to approach him as an enemy.

  Yeah, right, her little voice growled. He’s not going to care about five mortal women.

  Depressingly true. It was like one of those damn SAT analogies. God is to man as man is to insect. Interaction was based on either ignoring the lesser creature, controlling it, or, occasionally, swatting it.

  Still. He cared enough about a mortal to curse Azpiazu in the first place, Sylvie thought. Assuming Cachita’s thirdhand story had truth to it. Tepeyollotl might care that Azpiazu had found a loophole in his punishment.