by Lyn Benedict
“She’s dead?” he asked.
“Yeah, and I got hauled in for questioning—what’s that about?”
Demalion’s voice, even in Wright’s husky tenor, sounded edgy. “Syl, the ISI’s changed. After Chicago, the factions within the agency started getting more . . . outspoken.”
“Let me guess. One faction’s all about putting down the magical threat.”
“Hey, Odalys deserved to be dead—”
“Not arguing that,” Sylvie said. “Really not. But your perky little ISI assassin cut Odalys’s hands off, and that worries me. What, one for the Hand of Glory, and one for a trophy?”
Demalion swore quietly and steadily; Sylvie had the feeling that if he weren’t hanging out at the cop shop, pretending to grab a smoke, he’d be all hissing intensity, his eyes narrowed to angry slits. Finally, he said, “My perky little assassin?”
“That’s what you focus on?”
“It’s the only part that I don’t get,” he said. “I don’t know the assassin. C’mon, Syl, you’re the closest thing I know to an—”
“Five-eight, short dark hair, dark eyes, cheerful personality, and oh . . . red right hand. She seemed to think she knew you.”
“You sure?” Demalion asked. “She said that?”
Sylvie said, “No. Not exactly. She said we could talk about you.”
“Fuck,” Demalion said. “Look, Sylvie, don’t tell them—”
“’Cause I so often talk freely with the ISI,” she snapped.
“It’s not just them,” he said. “I’m making ripples here. Wright’s life doesn’t fit me well. I can’t afford the wrong kind of attention.”
“I thought you were going to court the ISI.”
“On my terms, yeah,” Demalion said. “But it’s not about them. Sylvie, the Furies killed me on the say-so of their god. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to stay dead.”
Sylvie’s stomach dropped. “If Dunne finds out—”
“Don’t use his name,” Demalion said. “Using a name gets a man’s attention. I doubt a god would be less attentive.”
“Hell, I’ve spent all of last night and this morning talking about a god and got nothing. But at least I’m giving him a headache.”
“You’re not trying to summon our mutual—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “An Aztec god. Case.”
“Sounds like your case got complicated.”
“You’ve no idea. My evil sorcerer–slash–serial kidnapper–slash-killer? Also immortal.”
“You managed to beat Lilith,” he said. “You can take him.”
“Hell, Demalion. I’m working for him.” She closed her eyes against the sun, the sting of it penetrating through her eyelids, heating her face. It felt a lot like shame.
“You have a reason for it,” he said.
“Five reasons,” she said. “Maria Ruben. Elena Llosa. Lupe Fernandez. Rita Martinez. Anamaria Garcia. He’s holding them as leverage.”
“You have a plan?”
“Not so much,” she said. “Know how I want it to end. Dead sorcerer at my feet. Five women going home.”
A voice on his end interrupted their chat, a raised shout with Wright’s name tacked into it. Demalion sighed, his breath a gust in her ear. “Work calls.”
“You going to look into the assassin?”
“Not unless you have to have the information right now,” he said. “I’m trying to keep a low profile, and pushing Odalys cost me some cover.”
“Understood,” Sylvie said. She let the connection drop, gnawed at her lip. She had to let it go. Odalys was done and dealt with, and it wasn’t worth risking Demalion.
Another black car pulled into the pickup loop of the drive, a wash of exhaust in her face, and three black suits came out of the hotel to claim it. Sylvie grimaced; she’d nearly forgotten she was sitting in the ISI’s lap.
She called Alex. “Come get me.”
* * *
RATHER THAN WAIT OUTSIDE THE ISI OFFICES, SYLVIE WANDERED down the street, such as it was. The downtown hotels were heavy on business, not so much on amenities. But a mile or so gave her a breathing space between the ISI and her, and brought her to a long-desired cup of coffee at a lone coffee shop that made its money catering to desperate visitors who didn’t want to pay hotel prices for food.
She had finished three cups and a breakfast sandwich, barely tasting any of it, picking at the tangled problem of sorcerer, god, victims. It was like a shell game, but with explosives. If she freed Azpiazu from the curse—he wasn’t trustworthy. Those women would be dead. If she didn’t free him from the curse—he’d burn them out. They’d be dead. She had to free him, but she had to get the women out of his range, first. Which meant Wales, untested spell-work, and a rush job, trying to do it all before Tepeyollotl came hunting.
It felt like a loser’s game.
Alex pulled up. Sylvie left the air-conditioned coffee shop, hotfooted it over the sun-soaked cement between the door and Alex’s car.
She slammed in, grateful for the heavy window tint. Alex got them moving again, and said, “Your truck?”
“Outside Lio’s house unless he’s feeling pissy and had it towed.”
“I thought you two had made nice,” Alex said.
“Temporary setback,” Sylvie said. She propped her feet on the dash. “You have time to check out anything else on Azpiazu?”
“The original or the—”
“All the same man,” Sylvie said. “Or so Cachita tells me.”
“You believe her? Little while ago, you were saying her research was crap.”
Sylvie studied the road unfolding before her, conscious of Alex’s darting glances in her direction. “It’s like this,” she said finally. “I don’t have any real proof. What I do have is a sorcerer who feels . . . off. Who practices old magic like it’s natural, and who’s entirely too confident even for a sorcerer. If he’s been cursed with immortality—there has to be a god. Hell, given the way my luck runs—I should just plan for code red every single morning and save myself the time and wasted optimism.”
Alex took a turn a little too fast; Sylvie swayed in the seat belt’s grasp, thumped the door, steadied herself. “It would explain some things,” Alex said. “While I’ve been looking for the sorcerer, hunting for anything that can be attributed to him—shape-shifting stories, missing women, attacks on women, that kind of thing—I’ve found a lot of weird shit going on. Miami’s bubbling, Sylvie. It’s like the frog in the boiling water. We didn’t notice because it’s happening gradually. But . . . there are different types of events.”
“You break it down into categories?” Sylvie asked. It was a rhetorical question. Of course Alex had. She might look scattered, act scattered, but she was ruthlessly organized. Sylvie’d been in the girl’s apartment. Alex alphabetized her CDs, her DVDs, her bookshelves, her spice racks, her pantry, her refrigerator. Her enormous array of cosmetics was Velcroed to a makeshift color wheel that took up a wall of the bathroom.
“There was the attack at Casa de Dia, a few other sudden man-to-monster sightings. One about every fifteen to twenty days, discarding the de Dia attack, which was triggered by the cops breaking the spell. A woman went missing after each episode.”
Sylvie swallowed. That was bad news. If Azpiazu lost control of his shape when his deflective spell broke down, then the regularity of it suggested that the burnout of his human components took less than a month. Maria Ruben had been missing for a little more than two weeks. Her time was running out.
“So that’s Azpiazu,” Sylvie said. “Cachita told me about some locked-room murders.”
“Oh, Cachita said . . .” Alex griped. “I’m not enough for you?” At Sylvie’s look, she dropped it. “The decapitations? Yeah, nasty. They’re on my list. But they’re not Azpiazu.”
“No,” Sylvie agreed. “Not the god, either. Forcible decapitation isn’t much in their line of things.”
Alex lifted a shoulder. “Voodoo vengeance, maybe. Those people hurt kid
s, Sylvie. That’s a pretty strong taboo. And their cases were public knowledge. But . . . maybe. Indirectly. You said in Chicago that with the Greek gods roaming around, all sorts of people suddenly grew powers. Might be something like that. A would-be crusader who suddenly has the ability to make it happen.”
“By the time that was happening, Chicago was really zippy,” Sylvie said. “Magical hurricanes, transformations all over the place. We would have noticed.”
“True,” Alex said. “So I’ll slap an unknown on that one. Also? Two cops found dead in their patrol car. News is keeping things pretty quiet, but something sounds weird about it.”
“Keep following it,” Sylvie said, “and the decaps. That might end up on my desk if it goes on too long.”
“Other than that,” Alex said, “we’ve got some Fortean stuff happening, small scale. A woman who claimed the cats at the animal shelter started talking. Localized earthquakes—”
“Been there,” Sylvie said, thinking abruptly of Wales and his struggle to hold Jennifer Costas’s ghost. “You heard from Wales?”
“Gave him a call,” Alex said. “I was going to invite him to breakfast. He didn’t pick up, though. You think I came on too strong?”
“I think eating meals with necromancers is a really good diet plan,” Sylvie said with a shudder. “Alex—”
“Don’t date the help? I know. It’s just. It’s nice to meet a cute guy who already knows about the Magicus Mundi. Makes it easier to talk freely. Makes it less likely that he’ll go to the restroom and never come back.”
“You tell your dates?”
“I don’t like to lie,” Alex said. “If I lie, then he can lie, and I can’t even be pissed about it. Anyway, small earthquakes. People hearing strange sounds in the dark. If there are UFOs, these are USOs. Unidentified screaming objects. A lot of 911 calls that lead nowhere. Feral-cat attacks. Weird shit like that. Only noticeable in aggregate. Cachita tell you about those?”
“Nope,” Sylvie said. “You’re still the champ. Let me know if we start heading toward a rain of toads.”
“Flock of slaughtered ringneck doves?” Alex said. “The golf course was a mess.”
“Like that, yeah.” Sylvie leaned her head on her hands. They were nearing Lio’s, the highway giving way to residential streets, and she said, “Okay. This is the deal. We’ve got to find Azpiazu and the women. Immortal sorcerer or not, he’s also a man. And a man has needs.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Food, shelter, that kind of thing. But it’s a damn big city, Syl.”
“We’ve got three options as I see it. Profile Azpiazu. Find him where he finds his women. Problem with that—”
“He won’t hunt until one of the women is dead,” Alex finished. “Hardly the result we want.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Option two is to track Azpiazu by magic. Given that he’s managing to keep a god off his trail?”
“Option three?”
“Back to the material needs. He’s not on the grid. He has no existence in the eyes of society. He’s not going to have a credit card, a bank, or a mailing address for catalogs. If Cachita’s sources are right, Azpiazu’s a loner to end all loners.”
“If she’s right,” Alex said.
Alex’s jealous mutter sparked a loose thought into place. Sylvie’s hands tightened on her knees. She interrupted her own instructions to veer to new ones. “Alex. Look into Cachita. Look deep.”
“Yeah?” Alex grinned.
“Cachita is very sure of herself. But a little careless. She claimed she found out Azpiazu’s name and history from the sorcerous community.”
“I didn’t find anything,” Alex said.
“Nor did Wales. From the same source. In fact, he told me they didn’t know anything beyond the soul-devourer nonsense. And if he couldn’t find it, and you couldn’t, Cachita didn’t either. At least not from those sources. She’s desperate, though; who knows where she’s really getting her info.”
“Desperate for the story? Jeez, she can find a new one that isn’t picking over other people’s bones.”
“Her cousin, Elena Valdes, is among the missing, presumed dead.”
“Oh,” Alex said. She studied the road, the ever-present excuse of traffic to help hide her blush.
“Just look into her,” Sylvie said. “As for Azpiazu. He is a loner, but he has . . . let’s call them dependents.”
“The women,” Alex said.
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “They need water. And privacy. Someplace he can close off and control.”
“A private pool,” Alex said. “Probably indoors. No neighbors to notice. Sylvie? Maybe he left them out in the open as bait? You said he was looking for you. Maybe he made you find him?”
“Doesn’t matter at this point,” Sylvie said. “He’s got to be squatting somewhere.” She closed her eyes, recalled their meeting. Azpiazu had dressed for the occasion. Expensive suit, tie, fancy shoes, manicure. Well-groomed. “He’s a sorcerer, which means he’s most likely a pretentious fuck. Wants the finer things in life and can take them at will. He’ll be squatting someplace nice. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’d killed someone for their house. You find anything on the black van he was driving?” She spoke faster as she saw Lio’s house growing larger in the windshield.
Things were far too awkward for Sylvie and Alex to hang around outside Lio’s place and talk business. Sylvie sighed. All the drama of a breakup and none of the fun.
“Stolen, dumped,” Alex said, picking up some of Sylvie’s conversational urgency. “But hey. Not too far from the golf course.”
“Where the doves were killed?”
“That’s the one. It might mean something. If the god is looking for him, maybe he’s closer—”
“Let’s hope not,” Sylvie said.
Alex pulled up behind Sylvie’s truck. “Okay. I’ll hunt Azpiazu. Look up Cachita. What about you?”
“I’m going to talk to Val. Wales is good. But Val is better. Even if her magic’s still burned out, she’s got a hell of a lot of experience under her belt. Maybe I can convince them to work together—”
“When Hell’s a skating rink, maybe,” Alex said.
“She can’t stay mad forever,” Sylvie said. “It’s juvenile, and Val prides herself on her civility. Besides, we need a new bell. I don’t want any more sneak attacks at the office, and I’d like to go home sometime this century.”
Alex reached out and grabbed Sylvie’s wrist just as Sylvie opened the passenger door, holding her in place. “Syl.”
“Just say it,” Sylvie said, when Alex stared at her, trying to convey something in blinks of multicolored eye shadow and violet mascara.
“Val hates gods. She’s scared to death of them. You going to warn her that there’s one headed our way?”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “But after I get her to talk to me. Once I mention a god, she’ll be hightailing it for the Azores.”
Alex let her go, leaned her face on the steering wheel. “You ever think you might get back to being friends if you didn’t manipulate her?”
“Oh look, we’re here,” Sylvie said, pointedly. She escaped Alex’s car, and Sylvie juggled her keys in her hand before giving in and heading up Lio’s front path. She knocked on the door, heard a grunt and a groan of effort that told her what she wanted to know, and considered just leaving. But she was already in Lio’s bad books; she didn’t want to add playing ding-dong-ditch to his list of her sins.
The door opened; he leaned on the frame and just looked down at her, face stubbled and tired, a frown settling in.
“Just checking they brought you back in one piece,” Sylvie said. “That’s all.”
She walked away, and he didn’t call her back. She hadn’t expected it. Not today.
Alex was right; it was hard to find people who knew about the Magicus Mundi, harder still to find people you liked in it. Damn near impossible to find reliable allies.
She really needed to get back on Val’s good side.
1
1
Gods and Powers
THE GATES TO THE CASSAVETES ESTATE WERE LOCKED, A SCROLLWORK of wrought iron that encompassed several discreet protective wards. Behind that, a long white drive stretched forward surrounded by plush grass and tall, swaying palms.
Pretty.
Except when you were on the wrong side of the gate. Sylvie rolled down her window, reached out gingerly for the intercom. Last time she tried to talk to Val, it had been all aversion magic and sparks and burned fingers. She steeled herself, hit the TALK button, and said, “Hey, Val, you home? I really need a face-to-face.”
She waited for the sparks, the magical anger, the rejection; instead, the intercom buzzed and the gate pulled back with a rumble of gears.
Sylvie put her car hastily into drive, headed up the long limestone driveway. She parked her truck, felt more than heard the massive front door open—a little gap in the protective cocoon of magics woven over the house. When she looked up, it wasn’t Val silhouetted in the doorway but Zoe.
“Hey,” Zoe said. She seemed subdued. She’d been that way ever since Odalys had tried to erase her soul. “Glad you came.”
“Yeah.” Sylvie felt like crap. She hadn’t come to check up on Zoe, only to ask for help. Her gaze dropped; Zoe shifted her arm behind her, too late for Sylvie to miss the reddish stain that washed her sister’s skin from fingertip to forearm.
“Val’s taking us out of the country,” Zoe said, and distracted Sylvie from wondering what exactly the stain meant, what her baby sister and an assassin could have in common.
“No. What? Why? Do Mom and Dad know?” The AC, working full tilt, made her shiver with longing.
Zoe looked over her shoulder, checked that the hallway was clear, and ushered Sylvie in. The door frame shivered and rang around her, a bell felt in her bones. Sylvie said, “What was that?”
Zoe bit her lip. “Dammit. Val’s gonna be pissed.”
“Her default position when it comes to me,” Sylvie said. “What was that? I’ve had a lot of magic bounced off my skin in the past two days. Not really in the mood for something more.”
“It’s a red alert,” Val said, looming up behind Zoe. “What are you doing here?”