Gods & Monsters si-3

by Lyn Benedict

Beyond them, Azpiazu lost control of his human shape, bulked into the mangled chimera, and dragged Wales toward his makeshift altar, the base of the stairs.

  Sylvie rushed forward but found her way blocked. The two women-wolves—Lupe Fernandez and Anamaria Garcia—closest to her turned, heads lowered, eyes trained on her throat.

  Not dead—Sylvie saw their sides heave and flutter—but dead-eyed. Zombies by default if not fact. Rita Martinez rose up, warped, until a bear rose upward to full dismaying bulk, water streaming, red-tinged, like shedding lava.

  Erinya snarled back and pounced just as the fourth woman—Elena Llosa, by default—in jaguar form, lunged at Sylvie. They tumbled over each other, a snarling, taillashing blur of spots and scales. Erinya shook the cat by its scruff, flung it into the far trees. The cat groaned as it landed, tried to stand, sprawled again, shaking its head.

  “Don’t hurt them!” Sylvie shouted. “They’re innocents.” Hard to remember, but under that spotted pelt was a high-school girl. Sylvie should have thought, should have planned better. If the ISI hadn’t snatched her, maybe she would have. She needed tranquilizer darts, not bullets.

  Erinya swapped end to end with the wolves, taking on two at once. Her hindquarters thickened, ran stiff with heavy scale just as one of the wolves tried to hamstring her.

  The bear charged Sylvie, and she turned and ran. What else was there? She wasn’t willing to shoot her—single parent, she remembered—wasn’t willing to just stand still and let the woman kill her either. She leaped upward, snatching at a tree branch, and had it betray her, puffing rottenly loose, dropping her right before the bear.

  Cachita screamed. The cat had staggered to its feet enough to lash out at Cachita. It raked her calf with savage claws, set blood spurting into the night.

  The world started to shake; dirt dancing like water on a hot skillet. Tepeyollotl on his way. Cachita’s blood call enough.

  Sylvie rolled out of the way of the bear’s clumsy first strike, saw that the fur on the heavy brow was patchy, revealing the binding sigil that linked Rita to Azpiazu. She seized a handful of sharp gravel, ignored all common sense, and lunged into the bear’s reach. She scrubbed the gravel over the mark, a tumble of jagged edges, bear’s scalding breath on her skin, and thought if this didn’t work, if it didn’t at least slow the bear, the last thing she was going to see was the spurt of her arteries as her throat was torn out by a woman she was trying to save.

  The world shuddered around her; the cough of an angry jaguar sounded. Bigger, louder than the shadow Erinya had scared off. Tepeyollotl heading to the scene. The bear staggered, and Sylvie forced her focus back.

  Be damn stupid to die because she got distracted.

  She lunged upward, climbed the bear’s thick coat, and slashed. The binding sigil, a silvery leaden mark in the bear’s skin, spat blood. The bear collapsed backward, convulsing, slime and saliva spewing.

  It lay still, sides heaving, and Sylvie counted it a win.

  Or as close as she was going to get. They were both alive. For now.

  She shuddered. The ground trembled with her. But Tepeyollotl . . . wasn’t here yet.

  Gratitude washed over her, even if it was short-lived. She didn’t have time to wonder why. Didn’t have time to think.

  Erinya had put down one of the wolves with a vicious slash that had taken out the sigil by chance, but the jaguar had rejoined the fight, had leaped onto Eri’s back, jaws locked tight on the Fury’s neck.

  A faint sound carried to Sylvie. A voice that had screamed so much it was shredded, but still continuing. “No. No. No.” Cachita was hunched, tight and tiny, her hands flung up above her head, tight with tension, tight with effort, as if she were pushing on a door that was trying to open.

  Holding back the god.

  Sylvie blinked, read the determination in her face. “Cachita . . .”

  “Kill Azpiazu,” Cachita husked. “I can do this. You said it. A spell goes both ways. A door that opens can close.” Tears lined her face like war paint, reflective in the light; her jaw locked tight around her words. Her body shook.

  She couldn’t hold Tepeyollotl for long; it was amazing she could hold him back at all.

  Time was running out. Not just for Cachita. Not just for Sylvie. For the city.

  Erinya and the jaguar tumbled and snarled, a whirlwind of mindless rage. The remaining wolf snapped at any flesh it could reach.

  Around Azpiazu, the world bent and shuddered, drawing inward. Sylvie could sense it like a sound out of human range, a stressed vibrato that made her skin tingle, made her want to duck her head and howl like a frightened animal.

  One more soul, one more taste of filtered god-power . . . and she’d be front and center at a god’s birth. Wales would be that last bite, the final thing that filled Azpiazu to bursting and beyond.

  But Azpiazu had Wales draped over his lap, his knife held lax between paws, watching. Waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  A skiff of frigid air slicked her skin, welcome in the putrid heat. Marco blew past her, strong and furious, filled with energy stolen from the ISI agents’ souls, heading straight for the sorcerer. Marco crackled with determination; his ghostly skin rippled and flashed as he moved, like the firelight on the water.

  He hadn’t bothered to help Erinya or Sylvie or Cachita. But Wales was his.

  Sylvie tried to grab Marco as he passed, understanding all at once why Azpiazu had waited. Why he hadn’t sacrificed Wales while Sylvie and Erinya fought the bespelled women. Why he had broken a lifetime of habitual misogyny.

  Marco’s attack was a calamity waiting to happen. A miscalculation that was going to cost them everything. Sylvie lunged forward, but her grasping at Marco was literally grasping at air. She fell, scraping her knees in the dirt, got her head up in time to see Marco rush against Azpiazu, enveloping him like fog.

  Marco tried to take a bite out of Azpiazu, tried to put the sorcerer into soul shock, and Azpiazu only threw Wales’s limp body aside, laughing; his arms went wide, allowing Marco to come closer.

  Marco ignored her calling him back, moved forward even more aggressively.

  Azpiazu drove his knife into Marco’s ghostly shape. Instead of passing harmlessly through him, steel through smoke, it pinned him like an overlarge butterfly. Marco jerked, light and color flashing within him, a shimmering oil slick comprised of more than a dozen stolen pieces of soul. Azpiazu grinned, baring sharp teeth, and turned the blade, baring the necromantic sigils carved into the steel blade.

  Azpiazu might just be the most adaptable villain she’d ever faced.

  How long had he been planning this? Since he first saw Marco’s handiwork in the Everglades? The soul-nipped cops, and realized that if he took a soul-eating ghost, it was more bang for his buck? When he realized that Marco would defend Wales to the death.

  Wales wasn’t the final soul Azpiazu needed. A necromantic soul might be a powerful one, but it could fight back. Death, a familiar battlefield.

  Marco’s ghost, on the other hand . . .

  Marco was not only vulnerable; his was a soul completely suited for Azpiazu, a serial killer and a misogynist. And to make his soul even more palatable?

  When Azpiazu took Marco, he laid claim not only to the ghost, but to the ISI agents lying senseless in their white halls, their souls nipped and made a temporary part of Marco.

  Sylvie raised her gun, emptied the clip into Azpiazu, not trying to hurt—she knew that was impossible—but trying to distract. To disrupt the ritual. To stop Azpiazu from taking those threshold souls.

  The bullets were less than useful. They actively worked against them. Marco, pinned by a magically infused sacrificial knife, had gone tangible enough that each bullet danced him like a puppet, tore him into shreds.

  Azpiazu sighed, and all that humming energy in the air, the electrostatic charge that danced over them all, an unseen aurora, shifted and settled over Azpiazu’s shoulders like a mantle, drawn in by Azpiazu’s easy absorption of Marco’s s
oul.

  He raised his head, shook the animal from his flesh, shed Tepeyollotl’s punishment like it was nothing at all, a mist of water on a warm day. Around his feet, the grass withered, going blackish at the roots and spreading upward like ink.

  “So, Shadows,” he said. “You couldn’t stop me before. Think you have any chance now? I am the god of Death and Change. Be sensible, little Lilith. Run.”

  18

  Two Gods, No Waiting

  VIZCAYA GARDENS WERE TEN ACRES OF MANICURED LANDSCAPES and grottoes, butted up against Biscayne Bay, capped with a turn-of-the-century manor house—it was a spacious place. With Azpiazu exuding energy, bleeding deathly rot into the night, he loomed large enough to her senses that the gardens felt tightly claustrophobic, a tangled jungle of rotting vegetation.

  In the background, Cachita’s exhortations had gone hoarse; she was down on her knees, head craned back, arms crossed above her face. Agony in her bones. Still trying to keep that door closed, trying to cage Tepeyollotl with nothing more than the letter of their bargain, that he would come when she called. And not before.

  “Can’t leave,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got some things I want.”

  “What? Them?” Azpiazu gestured at the bespelled women, still challenging Erinya, gestured at Wales’s limp body. “No. They’re mine. They’re going to be my first true souls. The first chosen ones to be part of my godhood.”

  Erinya rolled, dislodged the jaguar from her back and neck at the expense of blood and scale and chunks of feathered hide, and flung the squalling, limping cat across the courtyard. The wolf, racing in to take advantage, was slapped hard enough to spin into the reflective pool with a bloody splash and howl. Sylvie winced.

  Erinya cocked her head, put her burning gaze on Azpiazu, and growled, “Your godhood.”

  Azpiazu laughed, and it was a disconcertingly gorgeous sound, a man thrilled with himself and his new lot in life.

  Erinya grinned, her lips split wide, wider, widest until the entire lower half of her face seemed comprised of needle teeth. “New gods are fair play. Especially if they don’t have anyone to watch their back.”

  Sylvie chimed in. “Who’s feeling like running now?”

  “She’s nothing to me,” Azpiazu said. “A flunky for a softhearted—”

  Erinya flew at him, talons on all four legs extended, wings curving over her back to end in sharp-edged spikes. Azpiazu stood his ground, and her claws shredded his clothes, but not the skin beneath.

  A god.

  Sylvie’s little dark voice made itself heard over the tumult, over Cachita’s defiant cries and the thundering groan of the earth, the howls of an angry wolf deprived of prey. Not a god. Not yet, her voice whispered. Not quite yet. It gifted her with one word further. A word that gave her a tiny flare of hope.

  Transitioning, it said.

  Azpiazu might have been immortal, but even an immortal body needed alteration to take full advantage of godhood. To allow him to access the kind of power that would turn a human body, no matter how durable, into ashes and dust.

  For a few minutes more, Azpiazu was both god and man. And while Sylvie would pit herself against a god, if needs must, she was happier with a man.

  The problem was, Erinya wasn’t making headway. Azpiazu slung her into a tree, smashing it like glass. Erinya staggered, rose up, her skin oddly leprous. As if death were touching an immortal creature.

  Sylvie jerked her gaze away. If Azpiazu was transitioning, she still had a shot. He had a weakness. He had to. She just had to figure it out.

  But first . . .

  A low growl chilled her spine; she turned. The woman-turned-jaguar slunk toward her on three legs, one dragging. Erinya’s idea of not hurting the unwitting left something to be desired. At the moment, with the jaguar dragging hard leftward, with the leg slowing its inevitable course toward Sylvie, she couldn’t regret it.

  The bear was still down, still unconscious, the broken bond releasing it from Azpiazu’s order to attack. The wolf whose face Erinya had torn was down. Freed from the binding sigil.

  The binding sigil. The thing that bound Azpiazu to the women. Let him control them.

  Sigils ran two ways.

  Sylvie shifted stance, trying to keep an eye on the jaguar while keeping Azpiazu in her view. He was playing with Erinya, breaking a hind leg, ripping a wing off; her efforts were doing nothing but stripping him of his clothes. The jaguar crouched awkwardly, one leg crooked, her eyes glowing, teeth dripping blood and feathers.

  Sylvie bared her teeth and snarled back. The jaguar hesitated, slunk back into the underbrush, gave her breathing space.

  Azpiazu’s binding sigil had been carved into each woman’s forehead. For the symbology to work, Azpiazu had to have a matching sigil to influence. Sympathetic magic at its most basic.

  Somewhere on his skin, hidden in the darkness, in his fluid movements, in the shadows racing his body, there’d be a sigil to match the one he’d carved onto each woman’s forehead. Onto Wales’s.

  That binding link would be the last thing to change, the last piece of him that would be mortal. He was holding on to it, still controlling his “harem.” It would be small, the size of a quarter. Easily overlooked in the dimness of firelight and thundercloud. She couldn’t shoot it. Even if bullets worked on him. Even if she had bullets left.

  But if she could wake Wales, he might have magical means to help. She crept toward him, trying to keep Azpiazu from noticing. Playing with Erinya just wasn’t holding his attention the way it should, though Erinya was doing her bloody best.

  The jaguar lunged out from the underbrush; Sylvie dodged the killing blow but still tumbled backward, hitting the ground with a painful, breath-stealing thud.

  Something slammed into her kidney with the near-familiar pain of a gun crushed between her body and the ground. But she’d discarded all the guns once they’d emptied.

  She kicked the jaguar in the chest, kicked hard at the damaged leg, and the cat screamed and retreated for easier prey. Sylvie rolled, put her hand on the source of the pain, and found Cachita’s knife. Metal handle.

  Obsidian blade.

  The jaguar, burdened by Azpiazu’s will, kept fighting, turned her attention toward the only remaining prey. Cachita. Still contorted, face grey with exhaustion, still chanting, No no no, still locked in her struggle with Tepeyollotl.

  “Erinya!” Sylvie said. “Protect her—”

  “Not fair,” Erinya gasped, even as she moved Cachita’s direction with a horrible, broken stagger. She was ragged, savaged nearly past mending. “You’ll hunt without me.” Azpiazu let her run, then grabbed her remaining wing, and dragged her back. Playing.

  A single moment. That was all it took. Erinya spun, clawing; Sylvie lunged after the jaguar, but was too slow.

  * * *

  CACHITA SCREAMED, HER VOICE SPIRALING UPWARD, THEN RIPPED into silence. The jaguar’s jaws closed down hard on Cachita’s straining neck, white teeth going black with arterial blood.

  Azpiazu’s jaguar had broken the wildly uneven stalemate between Cachita and her god. No agreement could hold through one party’s being mauled. The jaguar shook Cachita; she dropped limply, eyes empty and dead.

  The world shook; trees shattered all around them, earthquakes and rot mingling with disastrous results. The reflective pool cracked, let stagnant water grease the stones around them.

  Azpiazu stopped stalking Erinya, paused, waiting for his chance at the god who’d given him so much, waiting for Tepeyollotl to see what he’d become. That wicked smile was on his face once more, the bubble of laughter in his throat.

  “You are enjoying yourself way too much,” Sylvie said.

  Tepeyollotl breathed himself into the world, an enormous concussive force that knocked her sprawling, knocked the breath from her lungs. Her ears stung as if wasps had crawled inside and attacked. When she touched them, her fingers came away wet with blood.

  Erinya’s despairing moan was a fractured whisper in Sylvie’s trau
matized hearing.

  Enough.

  They were going to lose.

  They were going to lose everything.

  Beneath Tepeyollotl’s looming arrival, Cachita’s body faded, drifted to smoke. Obliterated. Dead without even a body to mark where she had fallen.

  Sylvie wasn’t going to lose anyone else. Not the women. Not Wales. Not even Erinya. She clutched the obsidian knife with white knuckles.

  Tepeyollotl slunk down from the raised balcony, his heavy bulk overwhelming the wide, stone stairs. His smoky shadow flowed before him like a river, eating away at the stone, a destructive, intangible river. The earth trembled and rippled. Trees fell with the sound of torn fabric, of reality altering in the reflection of the god’s anger.

  A sharp avalanche heralded an entire wall sliding down, hitting the shaking ground and puddling outward. Sylvie nearly lost her footing all over again, and, in regaining it, made the mistake of looking at Tepeyollotl. She couldn’t look away.

  Tepeyollotl was the shattered remnant of Tezcatlipoca, Cachita had said. The god moving ponderously through the world looked shattered. He was four times human size, his flesh scarred and battered and studded with what looked like broken glass. Some of his skin wasn’t human flesh at all but a tattered and decaying jaguar pelt, equal parts black spots and char. It sagged unhealthily. He crawled on all fours, yellowed nails curling over his massive fingers, sharp enough to leave gouges in stone; his eyes were blood-red from lash to lash, and scars ran down his cheeks and throat.

  Despite his bulk, his bones jutted, pressing against the jaguar pelt, against flesh that seemed parchment thin, in angular, agonizing protrusions. He raised his head, sniffed the air, nose wrinkling, human mouth drawing up into a cat’s whiskered cheek pads. His huge tongue was white-spined. A single lick would flay a man.

  Still blind to Azpiazu.

  That last bit of mortality, that binding sigil, hiding him. His only weakness saving him from his enemy.

  Tepeyollotl’s bloody gaze locked on Sylvie. His lips peeled back. He coughed, a jungle cat’s hunting call. It rattled her bones, raised the hairs all over her body. It was all she could do not to retreat to basic mammal instinct and curl up, hoping to be unseen.