Lies & Omens si-4

by Lyn Benedict

  Alex shook her head, a little smile touching her mouth at the mention of her necromancer boyfriend. “I wish. He’s tangled up in that Alabama mess. Narrowed it down to kids playing at necromancy. Creating sort of their own zombie theme park.” The twist of her mouth was wry. As if she knew it was bad but found it amusing anyway.

  “What is up with that?” Sylvie asked. “I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t a saint when I was a teen, and I know you were all juvie-girl, but c’mon, there’s a difference between raising a little hell and raising the dead.”

  “Getting old there, Sylvie. Complaining about ‘kids these days.’”

  Sylvie pulled her toast out of the oven, juggling it from hand to hand, and stifled any ruder retort when Alex waved a cup of coffee at her.

  Sylvie, feeling as obedient as Alex’s German shepherd, sat down at the breakfast bar, shut up, and applied herself to breakfast. Killer mermaids were definitely a good thing for stimulating the appetite.

  She wolfed down the slice, went back for more, and tossed the crusts to Guerro, sprawled on the couch. He snapped them down, beat his tail against the couch arm, and visibly hoped for more.

  “So the ISI—”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “That’s a postbreakfast conversation.” She wanted a few minutes of peace.

  Alex sat down on the breakfast bar itself, swung long legs. “You can’t save everybody. I mean, they had warning, and they couldn’t save themselves. You can’t beat yourself up for this.”

  “There’s a difference,” Sylvie gritted out, “between not being able to save everybody and not being able to save anybody. Including myself. If Erinya hadn’t taken out the mermaids, I’d be a floater in a magical fish tank.”

  Alex’s mouth turned down. Changed the focus of the subject. Too little, too late. Sylvie felt wired, edgy. “So, you know what you’re going to say? I mean, the news is going to track you down sooner rather than later. Local woman and monster kill another monster.”

  “Guess the cat’s well and truly out of the bag.” Sylvie gnawed her lip, trying to figure out if it was good or bad. If whatever erased magical evidence would act on this event.

  “Yeah, hard to squelch the news vans,” Alex said.

  Exposure had to happen eventually. The human world was expanding, searching, documenting; the Magicus Mundi would be revealed sooner or later. Sylvie had been hoping for that discovery for years. Secrecy allowed all sorts of nastiness to fester, be it government agencies or magical monsters. But this wasn’t among the top ten ways she would have chosen. A monster attacking a major business district in broad daylight, killing US citizens? It was going to go over about as well as a terrorist attack.

  Well, that was what it was, wasn’t it, she thought.

  People were going to freak.

  The only thing average Americans liked more than their illusions was the chance to panic. To find an Other and fear it.

  Sylvie wasn’t fond of the Magicus Mundi—too often, when it and the human world intersected, humans got the worst of it—but she was sure that total terror was not the proper response.

  Maybe, this time, if the reality censors kicked in, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

  She couldn’t believe it even as she thought it.

  Alex, puttering around her kitchen, made an “Aha!” of triumph and waved the TV remote in Sylvie’s direction.

  “Take a look for yourself!” The TV turned on, savagely loud in the tiny apartment; Guerro’s ears went flat, and Alex hastily muted it.

  It wasn’t like they needed sound. BREAKING NEWS scrolled across a bright red bar on the local channel. The scene was the one Sylvie had just left. Waterlogged people, destroyed properties—cars and businesses—palm trees with slimy, glistening trunks and spiky leaves that sparked with lingering beads of water.

  Then the image backtracked, showed a tourist-filmed video that cut away from the palm trees to that sudden, rising wave. The video was image without sound, but Sylvie still heard the roar of that much water displacing itself vividly in her memories. She thought she’d be hearing it for days.

  On-screen, the water slapped the building, slid down, and flooded outward, eating pavement in hungry gulps. The camera eye tilted—the mermaid’s song, Sylvie thought, paralyzing the cameraman into a stupor.

  Through his lens, the landscape surged and fell and foamed, a world of inrushing water.

  The red bar scrolled on relentlessly, reading off disaster tolls. Four dead, multiple injuries—

  Alex said, “That’s not too bad.”

  “They haven’t gotten inside the hotel yet,” Sylvie said. “The death toll will go up.”

  “There you are.”

  It was true; horrible, but true. A new video, a better video shot by a professional hand, showed Sylvie and Riordan stumbling out of the hotel lobby, looking so much the worse for wear. Riordan’s face going grey and gaping—

  seeing Erinya and the mermaid

  —the camera pivoted sharply, chasing whatever he was gaping at.

  Sylvie winced, anticipating.

  The images on TV… blinked. Gold light flickered and flared so quick it was only an impression that Sylvie took away rather than something she consciously saw. She leaned closer. “Did you see that?”

  “See what? Oh, what the hell—” Alex said.

  On-screen, Erinya, dressed in her gothy human form, ran up to Sylvie, grabbed her hand, and drew her down the street to where a thrashing tiger shark took up immense quantities of pavement.

  “That didn’t happen,” Sylvie said.

  “It was different before,” Alex said.

  “Turn up the volume.”

  “… freak waterspout touching down in the city, today, washing up wildlife, and causing an unknown number of fatalities …

  “It was different,” Alex said again. “I mean, it was you and Erinya, but Erinya was all—”

  “I know,” Sylvie said. “I was there, remember?”

  Alex flipped stations, chasing news but finding only more of the same. “It’s a cover-up,” she said. “I can’t believe it! I mean, how effective do they think that’ll be? I TiVoed it the first time. I can’t have been the only one.”

  “Alex,” Sylvie said. “Show me the recording you made. Wait, no. Watch the screen. Do you see that?”

  Alex squinted, focused, shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re wanting me to see.”

  “Image flickers,” Sylvie said. “Goes gold for a second. A break in the image. Reality before it. Rewrite after it.”

  “Photoshop?”

  “Too fast,” Sylvie murmured. To splice in an image of Sylvie, an image of Erinya—human form—put them in motion, change out the mermaid for the shark, do it seamlessly enough that it didn’t blur or warp the rest of their surroundings, the light and shadows? It wasn’t possible in the time they’d had. At least, not by conventional methods.

  She wanted to be surprised, but wasn’t. The whole mess was confirmation of her theory that someone, somewhere was censoring reality.

  Alex clicked over to the recording, and played it. “No, no way.”

  It was the same as the currently airing clip.

  “How the hell—” Alex said. “Wait. That flicker you see, that I don’t… This is that memory thing you’ve been researching. Alteration of public perception. How? Magical Photoshop?”

  “Witchcraft, I think,” Sylvie said. “Illusion’s one of their favorite tools.”

  “What about a god hiding things?” Alex said. “Gods seem to want earth to keep chugging along in blissful ignorance.”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “But I can’t see a god doing this. For one thing, we’re too damn small. Too fragile in comparison. Plus, there’s all the godly politics. This is affecting everyone. No matter who they worship.”

  Alex hmmed in response, already bent over her laptop, clicking away, her green-painted nails bright against the silver keys. “Yeah. I’m not the only one. Others saw the change. They’re calling foul
. Conspiracy sites are popping up fast. What do you think the memory wiper is going to do about them?”

  “I don’t know. Without knowing who or why, I can’t predict their actions,” Sylvie said. “Witchcraft covers anything from the Maudits to Val’s research coven in Ischia, and they all have different motives.”

  She looked at the television clips again, playing disaster porn nonstop, and said, “More than one witch. A coven. That’s an awful lot of reality to paint over. But I can’t believe it’s a local coven, not with all the hunting I’ve been doing for a single witch with a decent grip on power. A task like this? I don’t know. It feels … big. Organized.”

  Alex opened her mouth, shut it again. It didn’t matter. Sylvie had heard the thought clearly. It was the same one in her mind. Wonder if Demalion had discovered anything. Before.

  “So… any word?” Sylvie went to the window, fiddled with the fraying edge of the batik curtain, wrapped her fingers in scarlet, green, and gold, and thought of macaws bursting into flight.

  “Yes and no,” Alex said. “Good news? He wasn’t on the list of the dead, not as Wright, not as Demalion. Wasn’t on the injury list either. Bad news? No one’s heard from him.”

  “My cell phone’s fucked,” Sylvie said. “Waterlogged.” The words were rote; she was concentrating on the peculiar sensation of relief trickling through her blood. She’d expected the worst.

  “I’ve got a spare,” Alex said. “There’s a box.” She waved vaguely toward her kitchen, toward a dusty box on top of the refrigerator.

  Sylvie pulled the box toward her, peered in. “Alex?”

  Alex waved a hand. “My father came by, gave them to me. You know, kind of like some families taking their kid out to dinner. Mine just hands out burner phones and reminds me that The Man is watching. Take one. You can at least call people on it instead of having to leg it all over Miami.”

  “What do you think I’m about to do?” Sylvie asked.

  Alex looked up from the computer where she was bookmarking conspiracy sites like a fiend for later response, and tilted her head. “Hunting down the brainwashy witches? Calling to get the scoop from Val and Zoe? I mean, what good is it, having a witchy little sister, if she can’t—”

  “I’m going home,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t slept. And the witches aren’t the problem. They’re just covering up the problem.” The sun streaming through the kitchen window seemed heavy and bright, but it also seemed distant. She felt cold and dark and empty. Grief, she thought. The relief that trickled through her wasn’t enough to chase it away.

  She closed her eyes, was suddenly back there in the cold waters, watching people watching the water without panic even as they drowned. She’d seen a lot of terrible things, but that was going to make it into her nightmares.

  “Are you okay? You want me to drive you?”

  She shook the memory off, and said, “No, stay here, stay online, see if you can get a better idea of how far the illusion goes. I mean, the video is step one. What happened to the newscasters who put the real one on? Did they forget? We can figure out a lot about the witches who did this by how they treat the people who saw the truth.

  “Miami’s pretty low on bad-cess witches at the moment. They’re keeping a low profile if they’re around at all. They’ve got to know Erinya’s hunting them. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t in danger from this. Charm, coerce, kill. Right now, someone’s playing at charm, at illusion. We want to keep it on that level. Illusion spells are ugly, coercion spells are worse.”

  “Hey, Syl,” Alex said. “You look wrecked. Go home. Get some sleep.”

  Sylvie scrubbed her face with her hands; her hair dripped down her neck and face, smelled like the churned bottom of a canal—fishy and rank. She grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. Just … call me, Alex. If you find out about Demalion. Call me at once. Good or bad. Limbo’s killing me.”

  “I promise. Good or bad. I’ll tap into the Miami ISI and see if he reports in.”

  Sylvie reached the door, turned back. “Wait. What? Alex, there’s no one left. The mermaids killed most of them. Any survivors are going to be scrambling for order, not—”

  “Mermaids?” Alex said. The perfect incomprehension in her voice froze Sylvie in her tracks.

  “Mermaids,” Sylvie said. She went back, directed Alex’s attention to the TV, to the laptop sliding off her lap, forced her to look at the pages she’d bookmarked. “Conspiracy. Illusion. The ISI taken down a peg or two.”

  Alex shook her head. “Don’t shout. My head hurts. I don’t want to look at that.” She turned her face away, closed her laptop, and slid it beneath the couch. Guerro whined, rested his heavy head in her lap. Alex’s fingers tightened in his ruff as if she were falling, and the dog was her only anchor. When she opened her eyes again, her pupils were two separate sizes. A magical concussion.

  Sylvie whispered, “Bastards. Bastards, all of them.” This was why she hated witchcraft. It wasn’t bad enough to force an illusion down people’s throats, to make them doubt what they had seen. Somewhere, a group of witches was very busy making people forget they’d ever had doubt at all.

  Alex’s breathing was tight and hitched; her face pinched with agony. Sylvie got her off the couch, walked her into her bedroom, saw her put to bed with aspirin that couldn’t really touch the source of the pain—having her brain altered by something unnatural.

  Alex curled into her sheets, hid her face in the bright teal pillowcase, passed out. Sylvie shut out the lights and hesitated in the doorway. There was no reason to stay. Alex would wake up without remembering any of it, with only a lingering memory of a killer headache.

  But she was young and healthy.

  Morning news broadcasts, though, had more than their share of elderly viewers, people who rose from their beds with the sun. How many sudden strokes would there be, or inexplicable heart attacks brought on by magic forcing its way into their brains and rearranging things to suit someone else’s will?

  On the TV, the breaking news listed thirty-seven dead and counting in a freak waterspout. NOAA scientists were being harassed for quotes on the “anomalous weather.” Sylvie turned the TV off and headed home, chilled all the way through.

  * * *

  SYLVIE SQUELCHED UP THE CONCRETE RISERS TO HER APARTMENT and left a wet imprint on the doorjamb as she keyed the door open.

  Her exhaustion weighed her down; her worries made her leaden, slow to realize she wasn’t alone. She shut the door behind her, flipped the dead bolt, and started shedding clothes. Her Windbreaker slapped the floor, mostly dry, but soggy around the cuffs and hem. Her boots—she toed them off, sent them thudding across the room, where they left dark marks on the white walls.

  “So, crappy days all around, huh?”

  Sylvie jerked around; her gun stuck in her holster, the nylon deformed by the icy water and the rough and tumble of the morning, but she got it out, leveled it at her uninvited guest.

  It didn’t bother her guest at all.

  Marah Stone, the ISI assassin, sat cross-legged on Sylvie’s kitchen counter devouring cold soba noodles forked up with her fingers.

  “Marah,” Sylvie said. She licked her lip, nervous and unable to hide it. Sylvie had met Marah only twice, in brief meetings where the woman had been carelessly chatty and far too interested in Sylvie’s life. She might have seemed harmless, only Sylvie knew two things about her. One, the strange, mottled birthmark on her arm and hand wasn’t a birthmark, but a curse mark, which made her dangerous. Two, Marah had been the ISI’s solution to an imprisoned witch. She’d ghosted inside, evading guards and convicts with equal ease, and killed the witch without taking any damage to herself.

  Sylvie could live with that. She’d killed her own share of magical baddies after all, but Marah had mutilated the body afterward, in a way that just screamed psychopathy.

  “Are you even listening to me? God, what a fucking long week this has been. I mean, I dig my way out of a very premature grave, face down a lurking sand wraith wi
th nothing but nerve, haul ass halfway across the country, and you don’t even have a clean fork. What the hell, Shadows. What kind of host are you? I had to load the dishwasher myself.”

  “Are those my clothes?” Sylvie asked.

  Marah licked her lips clean of brown sauce, wiped her fingers—again—on a very familiar pair of jeans. “Mine smelled really bad. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “I mind,” Sylvie said. “I mind a lot.”

  “Ungracious,” Marah said. “I even brought you the mother of all hostess gifts. Thought you’d be pleased. But no, I get bitched at for borrowing your clothes, eating some really, frankly, mediocre takeout, and a gun in my fucking face!”

  Sylvie stepped back, holstered the gun, raised her hands, a my-bad, sorry gesture.

  Simple rule to stay alive by: Don’t piss off the assassin.

  If Marah had wanted her dead, she’d be dead. Which meant this was exactly what she claimed it was. A visit.

  Marah’s marked hand slowly unclenched from where it was white-knuckled around the bowl, visibly backing away from the urge to throw it at Sylvie.

  “Fine,” Sylvie said. “You’ve had a bad day. So have I. Let’s not take it out on each other. I’m going to go take a nap. You can…

  Get out of my house.

  “… occupy yourself.”

  “I’d take a shower first, if I were you,” Marah said. The last vestiges of temper in her face faded, shifted to a maddening smirk. “I left your hostess gift in there.”

  Sylvie belatedly realized that the noise she heard in the background was not the leftover aural trauma of the mermaids’ watery attack, not even the homely sound of the dishwasher churning its slow way through its cycle, but the shower running.

  The splash of the water was muted, not just crashing down on tile and curtain; something intercepted the spray.

  Sylvie felt her nerves jangle, tighten. What an assassin considered a hostess gift might be something she really didn’t want.

  “Brought it all the way from Chicago,” Marah said.

  Sylvie’s attention jerked.