by Lyn Benedict
Just when her knuckles began to smart, when she considered breaking in to Alex’s little house, footsteps stumbled in her direction, and Alex mumbled, “Yeah. Coming.” The barking stopped.
She opened the door, leaned on the jamb, and stared at Sylvie with bleary eyes and smudged makeup that made her look like she’d decided to take up boxing. “Syl? It’s really late—”
“It’s urgent,” Sylvie said. “You all right?” She slipped past Alex’s slumped form, stepped into Alex’s living room, and suddenly wanted a real answer to that question.
Alex was obsessively tidy. Always had been. But her home showed signs of disarray. Not a lot—a pile of dishes in the sink, rinsed but not washed, a few pieces of clothing flung over the couch, a tangle of dog fur not immediately vacuumed—just the usual detritus of a day or two left untended. Still, it wasn’t like her.
“Just headachy,” Alex complained. “Had a lot of them of late. I tried to sleep it off.”
“Without taking off your makeup?”
“Syl, this isn’t an interrogation. What do you want?”
“To find out if Dunne was fucking with me,” she said, recalled to her purpose. “Demalion’s in trouble.”
“Fuck,” Alex murmured. She rubbed her face, pushed away the sleepy languor, and said, “Shoot.”
Sylvie filled her in, and Alex’s expression grew miserable. “Demalion’s tough, Syl. He’s survived worse.”
“Sort of,” Sylvie said. “Just … just do your thing. Prove to me that Dunne was being a godly asshole, making me pay for not doing what he wanted.”
“What did he want?”
Sylvie waved a hand, a not-talking-about-it-now gesture. “The facts, Alex? I really want to know whether Dunne’s on the up and up.”
Alex cast a last longing look toward her bedroom and dragged out her computer, blinked lashes gummed with mascara at the bright screen. “Give me a moment.” She flipped the laptop open, held it over her forearm, typed with her free hand, as if she wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.
“I don’t know if we can trust the news. He’s a god—”
“Wasn’t going for the news. Always go to the source,” Alex said. She clicked through increasingly troubling screens, and said, “The ISI. Have a seat. It’s going to take a bit.”
“You think?” Sylvie said. “They started battening down the hatches months ago.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Paranoid, bad-tempered bastards. But I’ve got an in.” Her lips curved into a tight smile. “Demalion’s passwords.”
His name fell into the space between them like a cold front. Alex’s smile wiped itself away, traded for a squirming awkwardness, the taste of premature grief.
Sylvie roughed her voice into working order, said, “He’s not dead yet, and he’s going to kick your ass for snaking his passwords. He’s stupidly loyal to that organization. Keep going.”
It was unnecessary advice. Alex’s fingers had never paused. “I’m hitting their memos to each other. Interoffice warnings. Red alerts, that kind of thing. Chatter’s real. Talk about Dallas, about Chicago, about Memphis.”
“Memphis? What happened in Memphis?”
“Something bad I’m guessing. They’re sending around a list of precautions to be made SOP … Syl.”
“What?”
“Another one just showed up. Savannah,” Alex said.
“There isn’t an ISI branch in Savannah.” Sylvie kept pretty close track of them. They covered twenty-nine American cities.
“Well, not anymore.”
Alex’s jaw tightened, a white sliver in Sylvie’s field of vision. Flickers of light against her skin, and she nodded. “Look at this.” She turned the computer toward Sylvie. “Security video.”
It wasn’t what Sylvie had expected. The ISI tended toward government bland, but this lobby was stark beyond that. She squinted. Was that security glass around the intake desk? Something blurred the men behind it, made them look oddly distant.
When the woman wandered into view, captured the camera’s eye, Sylvie was irritated, trying to piece together the nagging sense that she should know what this place was. Then the woman moved forward and shed her coat like a falling stage curtain. It fell fast and hard, as if it were weighted, but none of the security guards could look away from the woman.
She stretched long and lean and more naked than it seemed possible for someone to be. Her skin drew all attention, gleaming and alive with opalescence, as if milky feathers fluttered beneath her skin. She had bright eyes, supple limbs, a curling mouth as flushed as a fall apple. She held out her arms in invitation.
Sylvie’s mouth dried. The men behind the desk, behind the security glass, jerked to their feet.
It wasn’t a woman. Wasn’t a man, either. But it encapsulated the most appealing of both.
A succubus.
The men opened the door—it was security glass hemming them in—stepped out. Other men and women came out of the depths of the building, clustered around the succubus’s lithe form.
“Is that—”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Succubus. But what it’s doing…
Sylvie didn’t understand it. Even if the succubus meant them harm, which it had to—no other reason for it to walk into the lion’s den—it couldn’t feed on all of them at the same time, and once it started to feed, it couldn’t keep perfect control.
The man closest to the succubus reached out, brushed shaking fingers over the perfect, pristine cheekbone. The succubus’s smile darkened. It bent smoothly, picked up its coat, revealed the weapon in it.
Sylvie sucked in a shocked breath.
This wasn’t feeding. This wasn’t hunger. This was slaughter.
The automatic weapon chattered in silence on Alex’s small screen. The ISI agents, lust-struck, had no time for lust to change to fear. The security glass grew starred and spattered with blood.
On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun, drew a finger through a spray of blood that stippled its face like freckles, and sucked it clean. Then it turned and let itself out. A bar of light—the front door left open—draped over the bodies.
“Savannah,” Alex said. “She killed all of them. Called them up and mowed them down.” She shook her head, shook away the nerves. “There’s no security footage in Dallas. Or Memphis.”
“What about Chicago?”
Alex bit her lip. “You sure you want to see?”
“Play it.”
Same thing. The lobby, familiar to Sylvie. There was the elevator where Demalion had cornered her, argued with her, before chasing her down the street and insinuating himself back into her life. She swallowed.
The beginning of the disaster was more subtle than Savannah’s succubus. So slow, it took Sylvie time to notice. Dust crawled across the lobby floor, a slow ripple of shadow. Accreting.
Not dust.
Sand.
It swirled, trickled upward like a pulled thread, fitting itself into the seams of the building. The agent at the front desk stood, approached, hand on his gun. He reached out toward that tiny spinning thread of sand; it drilled through flesh, through bone—he jerked his hand back, a hole pierced right through, started shouting for help.
Too late.
As if his blood was the catalyst, the thread of spinning sand exploded into a tornado. It devoured the retreating guard, silica slicing him to ribbon. The building shook and blurred. The last glimpse Sylvie had was a pair of shining eyes at the heart of the whirlwind before the camera failed. Not a spell. A creature of some kind.
When Sylvie caught her breath, she could come to only one conclusion.
It’s war, her little dark voice said. Coldness crawled her spine, edged her jaw and cheeks. To say she didn’t like the ISI was like going on record saying that yeah, contracting Ebola was a bad way to spend the weekend. She distrusted them down to her very core. But she didn’t like this. Especially didn’t like the sense of organization behind the attacks.
One thing she’d always c
ounted on was the Magicus Mundi’s disinterest in uniting against humankind.
So why now?
“It’s a prison,” Alex said. “Was a prison. Savannah. They just opened it. Skeleton staff.”
“That might change things,” Sylvie said.
“You think the Mundi finally woke up and said, enough? I can’t imagine they’d like the idea of being put in cages.”
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Never one of her favorite phrases. “If it were the human magic-users attacking, I might be more willing to think that it’s a reaction to the jail. But the Mundi … if they were that easy to catch and cage, don’t you think we’d have a zoo full? I’m not sure they care about us that much. About what we’re doing.”
“That look like disinterest to you?” Alex said.
On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun again, rolled its shoulders and neck with a visible satisfaction. A job well-done.
“It’s too much and not enough,” Sylvie said. “It’s strange. Two different monsters, probably three if we assume Dallas’s gas accident means asphyxiation—something neither of these monsters tried. They don’t cooperate outside their own kind.”
Alex drew her finger along the screen, tracing a pattern made in the shadows of filmed blood.
Sylvie continued thinking aloud. “If they’ve organized enough to make alliances, then why not strike all at once? Why strike day by day? Allowing the ISI to warn their other branches? It’s pointless. And worse, it’s ineffective. The Mundi’s a lot of things, but it’s brutally efficient.”
“Fear,” Alex said, running her fingers over the keyboard, over the part of the world she could control. “Let them know what’s coming and let them know they can’t stop it. I mean, can they stop it?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Grimaced. Goddammit. She wanted answers. She wanted them now. “Maybe it’s not a war. Maybe it’s revolution. A series of uprisings, each spurred on by the previous one.”
“Like an infection, spreading.” Alex bent her head over the computer. “What can we do?”
Sylvie closed her teeth on another I don’t know, and thought about it. “If it’s an infection, there’ll be a cause. If there’s an uprising, there’s a leader somewhere. Keep plugged in. Keep me informed. I got someplace to be.”
“Chicago?”
Sylvie shook her head. “And do what? Pick through the rubble and hope I strike lucky? If they even let me get that far? No. If he can, Demalion will call us.”
Alex raised her head for the first time in what seemed like ages. Her eyes seemed more shadowed now than when Sylvie had first woken her. “Let me guess. Four ISI agencies down. You’re headed for ground zero. Trying to see if you can get yourself killed protecting people who hate you.”
“Sounds bad when you put it that way,” Sylvie said.
Alex’s smile was perfunctory. “They gassed you, kidnapped you; you had to break out. If they weren’t so scared of your pet Fury, you’d be back in their cells. But you’re going to take the moral high ground and help them?”
“Miami might not even be next on the list,” Sylvie said, “Seems to me, though, that there’s a path being taken. From Savannah? There are two ISI offices in easy lines: DC and Miami. DC has its own building, but here, the ISI offices are in the hotel district. The ISI brought this on themselves but … there are too many innocent bystanders involved. Riordan does it deliberately, hedges his agents ’round with regular people. One floor of agency, fourteen floors of civilians. I don’t have a choice.”
Sylvie left Alex hunched over her laptop, one hand snarled into her short, wild hair, the other clicking through screens that opened and closed with such rapidity that it might as well be arcane magic that guided her. She hoped it was comforting.
Outside, out of Alex’s sight, Sylvie’s shoulders sagged. Her bravado faded. The nighttime air, hot and still, felt charged, electric with change. With chaos. The peace before disaster.
Her tongue felt dry and heavy in her mouth, choking her with the weight of all the anxious words she couldn’t say. It tasted of cooling asphalt, unsweetened by the jasmine nearby.
Her phone was in her hand again, Demalion’s number picked out. She closed the phone without pressing SEND.
Wondered, if he were dead, who would tell her? Not the ISI, who hadn’t connected Adam Wright with Sylvie Lightner. Maybe Adam Wright’s ex-wife would get the call. Maybe then she’d call Sylvie to pass the news on, that the man who’d taken over her husband’s body had lost his own hold on it in the end.
Most likely, it would be Alex, hunting through the casualty roster, refusing to tell her over the phone. Sylvie would have to watch Alex picking the careful words, trying to be gentle, while her face telegraphed every detail. She scrubbed a quick hand across her eyes.
Cowardice, her little dark voice said. To give up before the battle’s even joined.
Sylvie let its contempt steady her. It was right. It so often was. Older and wiser than she was. That genetic leftover from Lilith’s blood. As if Sylvie’s synapses occasionally fired in a different pattern, an older pattern, a memory trail that was laid in before she was born. A memory, given voice.
Demalion wasn’t dead yet. And he’d survived worse. This, whatever it was, hadn’t been aimed specifically at him. He’d survived when the Furies had torn his flesh apart and sent his soul fleeing to the first sanctuary it found: Adam Wright’s body.
She had better things to do with her time than mourn him prematurely.
* * *
NEXT MORNING FOUND HER SITTING IN ALEX’S JEEP OUTSIDE THE hotel that housed the ISI while dawn pushed back the skyline, spreading reflected pinks and pale blues in the dark, slow, canal waters alongside the street. Her anxiety had dulled to a background simmer in her brain, an occasional skip to her breath when she thought of where Demalion might be, why he hadn’t called. Boredom had always been a good cure for terror.
Sylvie yawned into her hand, thought about moving the Jeep again to keep ahead of the ticket-happy police who patrolled the hotel district. It was tricky, though. She wasn’t the only watcher. She’d seen more than one agency SUV with suspicious shadows behind tinted glass. Keeping an eye on their perimeter.
She rolled down the window, sucked in a breath of Miami at morning when it was clean and green. The ISI surveillance made watching their HQ that much more difficult; she had to evade their eyes as well as the traffic cops while staying in close proximity. Really, she should have just slumped low, let the tickets accrete on the windshield, and let them assume the car was abandoned.
Alex would have bitched, though, and with the ISI on alert, odds were the Jeep would have been towed at first ticketing.
Sylvie squirmed; Alex’s fabric seat covers wrinkled beneath her, creating uncomfortable ridges. She missed her truck and its leather seats and her stock of canned drinks and snacks. But Alex’s Jeep wasn’t bright red with a werewolf-clawed hood. Sylvie loved her truck, but it was the very opposite of subtle.
A gull wheeled out of the dark, white feathers reflecting the sun, heading for the docks and the fishermen chopping chum for a day on the water. Sylvie thought of those men, weathered by sun, stubble-faced, shirtless, wielding cleavers with one hand and slurping coffee with the other, and decided the ISI could fend for itself long enough for her to grab breakfast and a bathroom break.
* * *
SYLVIE WANTED REAL FOOD BUT COMPROMISED ON A STARBUCKS and took a seat outside, slanting her gaze down the street, where she could keep an eye on the art-deco front of the ISI hotel. The streets trickled to life; first, men and women heading to work, clogging the roads, bleary-eyed and cranky, their radios blaring NPR, Spanish talk radio, the shock jocks. When that rush passed, the early tourists began emerging from the hotels, equally bleary-eyed, but smiling or fussing and juggling maps and children.
Sylvie finished her first coffee, went back for a refill, and found the second seat at her outside table occupied when she returned. Erinya’s boot scuffed at
the sandy concrete; the other leg was tucked up beneath her. Her collarbone and cheekbones stood out like ridges under her skin, as if being a god was whittling her away.
She looked up as Sylvie approached, her eyes as black and starved as a starless night, and said, “I want coffee, too. And a croissant.”
Sylvie turned on her heel and went back inside, resisting the urge to point out that Erinya could create any breakfast she wanted. It was better for everyone involved if she kept her godly powers unexplored. Gods shed enough as it was, warping the world by their very presence, unless they were very big on self-control.
Through the window, Sylvie watched Erinya testing her fingernails against the tabletop. Wood peeled back as easily as torn paper. Erinya used the slivers to pick at the mortar in the window seam, then dropped those stony chips into Sylvie’s coffee, smirking.
Yeah.
Erinya was a lot of things. Self-controlled? Not so much.
Sylvie’s mouth tightened. Little as she liked it, Dunne was right about that. Erinya couldn’t keep coming around. The world, as it was, couldn’t withstand her.
Sylvie collected Erinya’s food and rejoined her. She waited until the erstwhile Fury had a mouthful of pastry to say, “You can’t stay here, you know. You’re damaging the world.”
Erinya laughed. “The world’s ruined already. I’m making it better. I killed a witch last night.”
“You did,” Sylvie said, flatly. She needed a witch and couldn’t find one to save Lupe’s life, and Erinya was picking them off like low-hanging fruit.
Her attention veered back toward the ISI building as a crowd of people moved toward the entrance. Today, there was a doorman. An agent masquerading as a servant. She had to grin at the sight. Those bastards. Thought they were so clever, basing themselves out of a hotel, figuring no one would look for them there. Now they had to reap what they’d sown: They expected an attack and couldn’t lock down without drawing exactly the kind of attention they didn’t want.