by Lyn Benedict
Plus it did her heart good to watch the agent being harried by hotel guests, trying to hail cabs and cart luggage in and out, and getting stiffed for tips.
Erinya slurped her coffee, continued her tale, unprompted. “Her daughter was chained up in the pool house, had just given birth. The witch boiled the infant so it could be used for spellwork. Bones and fat, skin and tongue.”
Sylvie’s attention jerked back; her stomach soured.
Erinya leaned forward, hands flat on the table, nails digging in. Her expression was predatory, hungry. “I took her out of the world. She offered the infant’s heart up for power, prayed for a god to attend her, offered her worship. She didn’t specify which god. I was faster than the rest. I was already here. I did good. You should be thanking me. Not telling me to go away. You don’t have the right.” Arrogance rang in Erinya’s voice, echoed across the water, rang against buildings like a trumpet’s call.
People on the street shivered, staggered by the surge.
At Sylvie’s feet, blood-colored flowers pushed through the pavement, spreading petals like opening mouths. Vines twined around them, curled up the table legs. Erinya growled; the jungle slunk back into the concrete.
“Did you let the daughter out of the pool house?”
Erinya blinked, sank back into her seat. Crossed her arms over her chest.
“Did you leave her there, chained in the dark, injured and afraid, grieving, calling for help?”
“… I can go back.”
“You can’t stick around,” Sylvie repeated. “I know your intentions are good, but you’re a god now. You can’t—”
Erinya’s shoulders rounded; she caved inward. “I’m lonely. There’s no one good in my god space. I don’t like it there. I miss my sisters.”
“I thought you were sick of them bossing you around.”
Erinya’s fangs, razor-edged, dented her lower lip. “I miss fighting with my sisters.”
“Then make minions of your own,” Sylvie said. “Make them mouthy. Make them tough enough to stand up to you.”
“I could have you—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “No.”
Silence fell across the table; Erinya’s sulking spread outward. The other patrons in the tiny courtyard let their drinks go, ignored their food.
A bird crashed into the glass storefront with an unpleasant thunk and bounced downward. The man closest to the bird jumped from his table, grabbed the corpse, and brought it to Erinya.
“For you,” he said. His gaze was adoring. His hands, covered by the wings, trembled, giving the dead bird the illusion of imminent flight.
Erinya smiled, her human slipping. Her teeth gleamed like new razors; spotted feathers sprouted from her hair and nape.
“Thank you,” she said. She leaned forward, kissed the man, claiming him for her own; he stepped away, dazed, his mouth bloody where her fangs had scored his skin.
Erinya licked her lips, plucked the bird’s heart out with jagged claws, and ate it in a single bite, lapping at her fingers afterward. The smell of blood was sharp, as metallic as a bullet. Sylvie wondered suddenly if Erinya had killed the witch before or after she’d eaten the infant’s offered heart.
Sylvie shuddered. “You can’t stay.”
“Do you smell that?” Erinya asked, her head coming up, eyes going unfocused.
Sylvie sniffed. She smelled a lot of things. Car exhaust, coffee, the woman two seats over who had decided to go for broke when she slathered on the Giorgio. Erinya’s bloody snack. The scent of salt air, a taste of canal rankness … and something else. Something slight, but pervasive, rippling along beneath everything else, lifting the other scents.
“What is that?”
“Something wet,” Erinya said, shaking herself fastidiously. Catlike. When she’d been just a Fury—just—she’d seemed more doglike. Now that she’d incorporated Tepeyollotl’s powers into her own, her animal aspect, more mythic than real, edged toward cat.
“How about a little more detail?” Sylvie shot a glance toward the ISI. All serene. Annoyingly so. She hated wasting her time.
“Smells old?”
“Old like a Mundi monster? Like the Sphinx?” Sylvie’s heart skipped, equal parts anticipation and pain. Demalion was bright in her mind again, an absence that felt like a weight.
Erinya curled her lips into a satisfied smile. “Old like drowned bones. I know what they are. Mermaids.”
Her gaze lasered into the canal. Sylvie almost protested. Mermaids?
The canal waters rose like a tsunami and slammed into the ISI building.
* * *
THE SOUND OF IT WAS BREATHTAKING, A SOUND THAT HIT LIKE A body blow—the crash and thunder of pouring water, the gunshot cracking of glass, the screech of metal as cars were shoved aside. Beneath it all, another noise. Something wild and inhuman, like whale song fed through a broken autotuner.
Sylvie, on her feet, water rolling toward her, found herself with her head cocked just like Erinya, trying to focus on that sound. How many of them? Where were they?
All around her, people did the same, but without purpose. Just stood and listened to that alien song beneath the chaos. Ignoring the sheeting, foaming water rising, tugging at their feet, slapping up against legs like angry fish tails, spilling into shops.
No one reacted at all.
“Mermaids sing the sea,” Erinya said. “Coax men into the water, drown them, lick the despairing froth from their lungs like a delicacy. But if the men don’t jump. If they can’t be coaxed…
“The mermaids bring the sea to them,” Sylvie said. For being surrounded by water, her mouth felt desert dry.
A little boy tugged curiously at his mother’s hand, looked around, the beginnings of distress on his face. His hands flew, asking questions no one answered. No one noticed.
He squatted, slapped at the water reaching for his mother, crying. The water, darker than it should be, slapped back. The boy fell backward, limbs flailing, and went under.
The water was shallow on the ground, but the boy didn’t rise.
“Eri—”
Erinya was already moving, surging through the waves; the waves jerked back, cleared a path. Erinya, shape-shifting as she moved, never set a paw to the water, dancing above it. She jerked the boy out of the froth with her teeth, flung him toward her back. The boy, showing more sense than Sylvie had expected, clung tight to Erinya’s spiky feathers. Erinya vanished, and Sylvie was left, the only waking person in the mermaids’ murderous nightmare.
Water cascaded down the ISI building, peeling stucco away in foaming, chalky ribbons. Sylvie put a hand on her gun, cast another glance at the dark canal waters. The mermaids were there, had to be. But they might as well have been on the moon for all she could get to them. If she was going to help the ISI, she’d have to do it one victim at a time.
Erinya would have been more helpful here, she thought. Never mind saving the child. But that was logic, that was reason, that was fear at being hopelessly outclassed. A gun did her no good if she couldn’t get the bullets to her targets.
Really, she was grateful that Erinya was still child-focused, still protective. That Dunne-programmed core of her—avenge crimes done to children—had been untouched by her change in god status.
Sylvie swallowed, anxiety like the taste of dry metal in her mouth, and headed toward the ISI building. Ground zero.
It was hard to think, hard to hear with the roar of the water, but her little dark voice was an internal sound, something even deafness wouldn’t allow her to escape.
Be grateful to Lilith, it growled. Be grateful to me; without me, you’d be just another victim waiting for death to roll in with the tide.
Water roared in her ears until they rang with the echoes of it, a waterfall that wrapped itself—rising and falling and rising again—around the ISI hotel, as tightly as a strangling vine.
One of the dark SUVs lifted off the asphalt, was swept swiftly into the canal waters, its glossy finish going dull as t
he water rose up to envelop it.
Something supple and quick rose out of the water, cracking the windshield with a single hard tail-lash, and vanished back into the darkness. It had been matte grey-beige, as rubber-plastic as a shark. Sylvie was left with the impression of rolling teeth and black eyes before the SUV sank, the men inside doing nothing at all as they were drowned.
Fuck, Sylvie thought. Fuck it all.
Water danced in the air before her, making breathing a chore, trying to filter out the rainbow shards of suspended droplets, flung into the air with such violence that they seemed like projectiles.
The main glass door was sheeted with water, crashing and foaming; dirty water roiled behind it—a blurry, ominous shadow.
Pressing up against the entry, Sylvie was soaked to the skin in a second as she forced the door open. The motion sensor had given up the battle at the first impact, seizing up. As she forded her way in, she cast a last glance back to see if Erinya might have returned, and caught a glimpse of another person moving among the bespelled. Dark-eyed, peak-faced, and frowning, he raised a hand toward her as if he might draw her back. His hair curled sleek and wet along his face, dripped like seaweed.
She shook her head. Witch or whatever—she was committed now. He was on his own.
The lobby was more peaceful than she’d expected, having had horror-movie images of bloated bodies suspended in seething waters stuck in her head. The lobby had been mostly empty when the waves struck, the clerks slumped over the desk, their legs bobbing in the water. The hotel security—ISI agent—seemed the only casualty, floating facedown in the water, jacket flaring wide, exposing his gun. A few guests, seated on lobby furniture, drifted, staring and uncaring through the room, bumping up against walls, unmoored from the earth.
Sylvie flipped the guard, but one glance was enough to tell her he was dead past reviving, skin already softening, bloating in the water.
She stripped him of his keycards, left him floating. Sylvie waded toward the stairs and the cascade of water coming down, a shattering amount of noise in the concrete confines of the stairwell. She gritted her teeth, wished for earplugs, thought she was never going to find the ripple of water soothing again, and headed upward. The mermaid song—penetrating concrete, steel, glass—followed, resonating in the walls as if the rebar that supported the building acted as enormous tuning forks.
Sylvie might be immune to the song’s effects, but it set her nerves on edge.
The ISI had the fourth floor all to itself. Four flights wasn’t much normally, but climbing through cataracts?
She was sweating hard with nerves and exertion by the time she made it to the fourth-floor door. Water flowed sluggishly out beneath the rim, and condensation beaded cold and foggy on the steel fire door. Sylvie ran the card through the scanner, hoping that the glowing red light meant it still worked.
The door beeped, shorted out, but the lock popped. Sylvie, braced for a flood, found herself staring into a magical aquarium. Water glimmered and lapped at the door but didn’t do more than seep through at the edges. If she’d had any doubt that the mermaids had total control of their element, that wavering pool, a damp inch from her face, removed it.
The people below, the people dying on the streets, the people on the other floors—they were all incidental. The mermaids intended the ISI to drown. And the only thing she could think to do was remove the mermaids’ targets and change their focus.
Here was her horror-movie moment. Through the water, made cloudy by loose papers drifting into the hall, by stirred carpet dust, she made out bodies. A man bumped up against the hallway ceiling, swaying in a killing tide, his tie drifting, his gun holster empty, the gun itself sunk into the waving anemone plush of the carpet.
She pushed her hands into the water. It gave slowly, cold and sucking. Sylvie shuddered, her certainty slipping. What was she doing? She couldn’t save them if she couldn’t even breathe. If there was anyone left to save.
If they hadn’t died like Demalion.
She shook her head. No. For one thing, if they were all dead, the mermaids would have stopped singing. She could do this. She’d broken spells before. Accidentally, full of rage, or with luck and her little dark voice on her side. She could do it on her own. At will. On purpose. She put her hands back into the water, hunting the magics that held the wall of water in place.
Nausea churned in her gut as she crept up on it; her nerves fired in distaste as she felt out the spell’s hold on the real world—a seaweed tangle of malignant intent netting the water.
The magics slipped through her fingers, defying her urge to pull.
Careful, her little dark voice said. Careful.
Preaching survival.
Risk your life for them? For your enemies? For the dead?
She faltered. It had a point. They were her enemies. How much of this determination to save them was her hoping to save Demalion by proxy? If they were all dead, all trapped below the water—it had been twenty minutes since the wave first broke. And the mermaids’ song had never faltered. Twenty minutes of concentrated ill will.
A new sound impinged on her hearing. A rhythmic percussion traveling through the water, amplifying itself as it came.
Thumpthumpthump.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Thumpthumpthump.
Sylvie didn’t need to know Morse code to recognize that; the pattern was a part of pop culture.
SOS.
She’d never been able to turn away from someone pleading for help.
She delved back into the water, seeking to grab that intangible something. To break it apart. It slipped like a shoal of minnows through her hands, cold and slimy, her grasp slowed by the water.
No, you don’t, she thought at it, and dug in harder, wet to her elbows, scratching her nails through the liquid, snagging that magic. It thrashed like an eel, stung her palms with a near-electrical protest that made her grimace and curse between tight-locked teeth. But she held on, and, millimeter by slick millimeter, she dragged it toward her, through the door, spurred on by the drumbeat SOS.
Just as her wrists breached the glittering surface of the water, her little dark voice spoke again. Wait!
Too late.
She broke the magic’s hold, and the water crashed into the stairwell, sweeping her from her feet, slamming her—pinball style—wall to wall, then plunging her down the stairs.
Sylvie flailed, locked a hand on the guardrail, and hung on for dear life.
* * *
WHEN THE FLOOD SUBSIDED, WHEN SHE’D BEEN BATTERED BY CURRENT and cold and the dead agent slamming into her as his corpse swept inexorably by, she uncrimped her hands and staggered to her feet. She felt bruised all over, sodden, cold, more in need of a rescue than a rescuer. But she had to get moving; there was no guarantee that the waters wouldn’t rise to drowning levels again.
She labored up the half flight she’d fallen, headed into the hallway, water swirling about her ankles. She scanned the area swiftly, wondering where the SOS had come from. The first two doors she opened sent more water crashing down, turned corpses into driftwood. The water level, she thought, was rising again. The hiss of water pressing in through the broken windows.
Morgue, she thought. The ISI had a makeshift morgue. She’d been in it. The room had been baffled, had sucked the air into the room when the door closed. Close to soundproof. Maybe close to waterproof.
She tried to remember which door it was—in the refurbished maids’ supply room—and found it, not by memory but by the SOS starting up again, more desperate. She tapped on the door, got voices responding.
“Is there anyone out there? Is it safe to come out?”
“No,” Sylvie said, “Not safe. But safer. Open up.”
“Is that you, Grace?”
“Just open the damned door,” Sylvie snapped.
A furious set of whispers, then the door popped open, revealing four soaked and shivering ISI agents. The room, thankfully, was mostly dry. The water had only bee
n up to their shins, and it flooded out past her.
Sylvie stepped in, shook off like a dog, and looked at them. “Let’s move.”
“Who—”
“That’s Shadows,” the agent in the back of the little huddle answered. She recognized him: John Riordan, the local ISI chief’s son.
“Hey, Junior. Want out? We need to go now. I broke the spell but only briefly. If they put it back up while I’m inside the barrier? We’re all dead.”
“We’re safe here,” another agent said. “We can wait.”
“For who?” Sylvie said. “Your security? They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
John’s teeth set; he shoved past the other agents. Sylvie braced herself for a fight, either physical or verbal. The look on his face was pure rage. But he only gained her side, and said, “Let’s go, people.”
Being the boss’s son has its perks, Sylvie thought. The three remaining agents fell in line like good little ducklings.
Sylvie opened the door again. Looked out. A wet hallway shouldn’t look that intimidating. But the water had risen noticeably in the few minutes they’d debated, moved faster, in purposeful ripples and rills as if snakes undulated beneath the surface. The hallway smelled like the sea, and it stretched out like a football field. The morgue had been nearly at the blind end of the hall, two hundred feet of enemy territory.
“Elevators?” John suggested.
“No,” Sylvie said. “We’d have to pry them open first.”
“First?” he said.
“You don’t listen well, do you. You think water floods one floor of a hotel naturally?” Sylvie asked. “There’s a spell calling the water. And there’s a spell holding the water in place. The better to drown you with.”
One of the agents said, “What’s that sound?” His lean face was tight with longing; green eyes drifted closed, the better to focus on the thin threads of the song he heard.
“I don’t hear anythi… wait. Yeah. What is that?” And there went agent number two. His heavyset body slowed, eased, relaxed.