Lies & Omens si-4

by Lyn Benedict

  “No,” she said. “Not disrupt. Kill. Put it down. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

  She felt distanced from her own body, its shakes and scrapes and broken bones a thin layer above a solid, untouchable core. It seemed so easy to walk across the room, Demalion’s gun collected on the way. To stand between the two Lethe stones, brought up out of a god’s realm. She took a breath and shot them, one after another.

  Two bullets against two stones that had deflected spells and semiautomatic gunfire, and when her bullets hit—they quavered and rang like breaking bells. The sigils along their sides wisped out like blown candle flames. The water churned furiously, steaming and bubbling, then drained away.

  “Well, that’s that—”

  Sylvie hunched, felt oddly like someone had just punched her in the back of her head. Beside her, Demalion fell to his knees. Her vision bobbled, swamped out by memory.

  * * *

  THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, SULKING FURIOUSLY. THE FIRST FAMILY VACATION since the brat sister had been born. Her parents were ignoring her to show off Zoe. Sylvie slunk out of the aquarium, blinking at the cloudy sky until she stopped seeing the blue of carefully maintained tanks. The ocean, grey and jagged and wild, beckoned, and she wandered down to the pier, where dockworkers were scraping barnacles off a recently raised boat.

  She sat on a boat cleat and watched their knives work, scrape and twist and scrape and twist. The salt air was soothing, and there were no crying toddlers. On the other side of the pier, a man sat beneath a beach umbrella, minding three separate fishing rods wedged into the wood slats.

  Then the gulls died.

  They plummeted out of the sky, smacking into the pier in a splay of broken wings and twisted necks. Others slapped her face and hair and shoulders, and she screamed.

  “Oye, muchacha!” the man who’d been fishing from the side of the pier called. “Ven aca! Hurry!” She ran to him, and he tucked her beneath his sunshade umbrella. Birds splatted against it, and she leaned up close to the pole, smelling salt and blood and something cold beneath. Beneath the pier, the waters slapped cold and dark as if a storm were brewing in its depths.

  “Madre de Dios,” he said. Clapped a hand over her eyes. “No mire, muchacha. Don’ look.” She pried his hand away from her face. She wanted to see.

  A small boat drifted toward the pier, and even from the distance, Sylvie could see that something was wrong. The people were lying on the deck. Like the birds. All loose and empty. The air was cold.

  The boat collided with the pier, shaking her world; one of the bodies on the deck slid down, giving her a clear view of the body’s glazed eyes, as blank as the dead gulls’. Her stomach hurt. The fisherman rushed to the boat, along with others. Sylvie, gaping at the side of the yacht, saw a shining mist slide out through a closed porthole, curling around and around in the sky like one of the eels she’d seen in the aquarium, except they’d been just fish in water. This … The dockworkers shouted and jerked back; the fisherman swore in Spanish.

  It was a monster. And it had human-shaped eyes. It coiled lazily, looked at her, and she felt her breathing stop; she crouched small and hoped it wouldn’t keep looking at her. She thought, the monster got aboard that boat, and it looked at the people on it, like she looked at the fish in the aquarium, and the people died.

  Its eye was glittering and red. The air was frigid; she couldn’t stop shivering. All around her, the pier was quiet.

  The monster slid back into the water and fish bobbed to the surface, silver bellies up, as it passed. A thin wake cut against the waves and disappeared into the deeper sea.

  A minute later, sound and warmth crashed over her again, her mother shaking her, “We were worried, Sylvie, you can’t just walk away—oh God no, don’t look at them, you don’t need to see that—” and dragging her away from the dock, from the dead people on the boat.

  “There was a monster,” Sylvie told her mother.

  “No such thing as monsters,” her mother said. “Come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Sylvie had gone, glad to be warm, glad to be safe, glad even to see her dumb little sister. She knew that her mother was wrong. It was a monster. She’d seen it.

  The next day she went back to the pier, slipping away when her mother went to get them lunch and her father was trying to get Zoe to stop shrieking. It was closed off, yellow tape where the boat still bumped against the dock. Sylvie kicked at the gravel, studied the area.

  A dark-haired woman ducked under the tape, walked out to the pier. She wasn’t a policewoman; she was wearing a long, narrow skirt and lots of strange jewelry. Sylvie bit her lip, followed her. The woman turned when Sylvie approached. Her eyes were dark and hard and she didn’t look nice at all. She looked interesting.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see where the monster was,” Sylvie said. “The papers didn’t say anything about it. It said they all died from drugs. I don’t get it. The fisherman saw it. The dockworkers saw it. Why didn’t they say so?”

  “Because people are willfully blind,” the woman said. She turned back to stare out at the sea. Her lips curled. “They want to pretend dangerous things don’t exist.”

  “Like the eel-monster thing.”

  “Water spirit,” the woman said. “A genus loci, do you know what that is?”

  “No,” Sylvie said. The woman shrugged, didn’t explain what that meant. Silence fell, then the woman spoke again.

  “They picked it up in the Bermuda Triangle. It gets bored sometimes. That makes it cruel and destructive.”

  “It killed people because it was bored?”

  “You’re young. The world is new for you,” the woman said. “You have no idea how boring things can get when you’re my age. You have to make your own amusements where you can.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To be amused? People died.”

  “Aren’t you the junior moralizer?” the woman said. “But not law-abiding. You’re going to get in trouble if they see you behind the tape.”

  “I’m a kid,” Sylvie said. “They’ll just send me home to my parents. They might arrest you.”

  “Not likely,” she said. She turned, put her back to the water. “So. Little moralizer. When you go home, and you’re back with your little friends. What are you going to tell them? That you saw a monster? Or will you lie and tell them what the newspaper said?”

  “Why would I tell them anything at all?” Sylvie asked. “They won’t believe me if I do, and I’m not going to lie. I know what I saw.”

  The woman’s hand was on Sylvie’s cheek suddenly; Sylvie jerked, but the woman was strong, her nails curling beneath Sylvie’s chin, scratching, hurting.

  “You’re an interesting kid,” the woman said. “But I bet you forget. Go home, get away from the scene, think it’s a dream. A nightmare. Five years from now, and you’ll be shrugging and telling yourself you were an imaginative kid.”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “I won’t forget.”

  The woman’s mouth turned down; displeasure at being contradicted or at the state of the world, Sylvie didn’t know. “They always do. They like to be blind. They think it makes them safe. It doesn’t. How can we be safe when he cares nothing for us?”

  “Sylvie!” her mother shouted.

  Sylvie jerked away, left the woman behind, even as the woman’s grip left scratches on her cheek and chin. She rubbed at the welts and shivered. The woman was wrong. She wasn’t going to forget.

  * * *

  SYLVIE HAD FORGOTTEN. IT HADN’T BEEN HER CHOICE. THE CORRECTIVE had taken it. Now, it had given it back.

  Sylvie raised her head, saw that the black waters of the Corrective had gone clear and clean, no longer muddied by stolen memories.

  “Lilith,” she said. Touched her cheek as if the scratches would still be there. “That was Lilith.”

  Demalion was curled up near the edge of the water; he looked as shell-shocked as she felt. “There was a vampire in my neighborhood,” he tol
d Sylvie. “It killed three of my friends when I was in elementary school. I forgot, even though I saw it. Touched it. This skeletal, verminous thing that grabbed me, and was going to bite me, and then … it smelled me and ran. Smelled Sphinx. He called me sphinxlet and threw me against the alley wall. How could I forget that?”

  Sylvie looked back at the clear water, and said, “God. A hundred years. A hundred years of stolen memories. Anything big enough to make the news. Anything big enough to reveal the Magicus Mundi. The Good Sisters have been erasing it. Rewriting memories. We just gave them all back. All at once.”

  “Shit,” he said. “What did we do?”

  Sylvie licked her lips, felt an unaccountable giggle in her throat. Well, she’d always bitched about keeping the Mundi a secret. “We pulled off the blinders. Pulled back the curtain. Jesus, Demalion. I think we changed the world. Or at least, perception of it.”

  18

  Getting Gone

  SYLVIE AND DEMALION SPENT A FEW EXTRA MINUTES WALKING THE edges of the dead Corrective spell, Sylvie looking for any remaining cloudiness, Demalion watching her back. Unlike Pandora’s box, this world-changer had emptied itself completely. Even as she walked the perimeter of the crossed loops, the water began to evaporate, revealing a smooth stone groove only two feet deep.

  Neither of the witches’ bodies, wolf or man, was there. They had been taken.

  “Think there’s going to be chaos?” Demalion asked.

  “When isn’t there? People never react well.”

  “I don’t know,” Demalion said. “Some of the memories won’t have people to return to. A hundred-plus years? Some people are long dead.”

  “Not all of them. Not even most of them, I’d bet. Population goes up. So do the number of incidents. Yvette said they’d been getting more dependent on it.”

  Demalion grimaced, ceding the point. Sylvie winced. Her broken hand cramped and burned. She lifted it to her opposite shoulder, rested her wrist there, tried to slow the swelling.

  “Syl. I remember the vampire. But I also don’t remember it. I remember being at home, instead of the alley, watching TV, instead of being grabbed by a child-killing vampire. Double memories. False and real. You’re always complaining about people choosing to be blind. Maybe things won’t change. Maybe they’ll just think they had vivid dreams about a real-world event.”

  “Until they realize other people had the same dreams. The Good Sisters specialized in big magic scenarios. Like the sand wraith in Chicago, the mermaids in Miami.” Sylvie leaned up, kissed his cheek, tasting splash-back blood from the wound in his shoulder. “You’re such an optimist. Unless you can take a look ahead with your handy-dandy psychic skills and tell me that the world just says, Oh, all right, monsters, I’m going to prepare for the worst. And stock up on ammo.”

  Despite her words, she did feel a little bit better. Demalion was partly correct. People did like to ignore the evidence before their eyes, even at the expense of their own memories. Things were going to change, had already changed, but maybe the change would be gradual enough that it wouldn’t be a cultural apocalypse.

  Maybe.

  A lot depended on the Corrective itself. The spell had affected more than memories—had been the Corrective it was named. It had altered data files, video feed, Internet content, and paper reports, as well as human memory. Magical white-out par excellence. The question was, when people’s memories were returned, what happened to the documentation?

  Were there, even now, video files slowly changing back? Where a mangy coyote running down a Texas county road suddenly grew spikes and saber-tooth fangs and became more obviously the chupacabra? Where blubbery pieces of dead whales washed up on a shoreline slowly lengthened and twisted and became the sea serpent it had been before the Corrective hit?

  Were there old newspapers with wild accounts of magical events, with conclusive photographs reshaping themselves on microfiche, in the recycling bins, in the landfills?

  Zoe would know.

  Now that she’d thought of Zoe again, the anxiety was sharp in her chest. She’d survived. Demalion had survived. Her sister? Sylvie gave Demalion’s gun back to him. He raised a brow. “You don’t want it?”

  She readjusted her broken hand, using her good hand to brace the elbow on her bad arm, to keep it upraised. Still throbbed and complained. “I trust you to take out any stragglers we missed.”

  Demalion ushered her toward the door, looked back once at the cavernous room. “Amazing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s still standing,” he said. “That’s a first for you, isn’t it? Leaving something other than wreckage behind—”

  She kicked at him, and he laughed, a little wild. A little giddy. “Shut up,” she muttered. “Or you’ll be sleeping on the couch.”

  “Your apartment’s probably under surveillance. We’ll be sleeping in a hotel.”

  “Then you’ll be sleeping on the floor,” she said.

  Rediscovering the bodies of Kent and his team drove the laughter from her voice. Yeah. She might have left the building standing, but she’d done bloody damage to the people defending it. She looked at Kent’s waxy face, the gore that made a void of his throat and jaw, and couldn’t regret it. It was war. She’d won.

  The treacherous curtains were peaceful and motionless, and she forced herself to recall that Marah had passed through them unscathed. It still made her nerves flare to brush up against them. But they behaved as curtains should, and she took her good hand from its task of makeshift sling, and yanked the curtains down as they passed through. No more magical booby traps.

  They hissed down like a rain of snakes, coiled limply across the floor. Sylvie eyed them warily, tried not to turn her back on them as they hustled—her wincing, him limping—across the ruined pentagram and back to the antechamber.

  It was empty of life, and Sylvie’s heart turned over. Bodies littered the floor, bloody or burned beyond recognition. Panic shivered through her, the cold coil of rage—she shouldn’t have trusted Marah.

  Demalion’s eyes flicked over each body just as hers did, each of them racing to disprove her fear. He said, “Zoe’s not here.”

  A yellow spark of light illuminated the dark tunnel they’d come through, and Zoe’s voice, ragged and exhausted, said, “That’s ’cause we got the hell out of Dodge in case you brought the roof down. Marah said you probably would.”

  “Zo—” Sylvie raced across the room, caught her sister up, one-handed, smelled char and fire, not just from the lighter Zoe hastily clicked shut.

  “Did you do it?” Zoe asked. “Break the Corrective?”

  Sylvie leaned back. “None of your memories changed?”

  “Should they have?”

  “Only if you ran into something big and magical before, I guess.”

  Weariness was settling onto her like a shroud. The earth above their head seemed suddenly oppressive, crushing her with its darkness and chill. Demalion caught her around the waist as she sagged. He groaned as he did so, and she forced herself to stiffen her spine, carry herself. He was wounded, too.

  “Come on,” Zoe said. “Let’s get the hell out of here before someone comes to investigate.”

  “Investigate what?” Sylvie muttered.

  “Your part of the fight might have been quiet—at least, we didn’t hear it. But ours was not. We set off the ISI alarm above. Marah’s up there shutting it down.”

  “And Lupe?” Sylvie said, following her sister’s voice through the dark tunnel.

  “She’s … okay,” Zoe said.

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “She’s not sure.”

  Sylvie stepped out into a thick fogbank tinted with dawnlight, pink and gold and palest violet. It was almost a physical relief after the closed-in dark and blood of the underground base. Two shapes swirled out of the mist and joined them. Marah Stone, a long, lean figure—the only one of them who was moving smoothly. Behind her … it had to be Lupe. Back in human shape. Completely human. D
own to her fingertips.

  “Lupe,” Sylvie said. “You’re—”

  “I was killing them. They decided the best way to fight me was to make me normal again.” Lupe’s voice was blank where it should have been exultant. The bad guys had done what Sylvie couldn’t. What Lupe had wanted for so long. Given her back her human life. Maybe it was just too much, all at once.

  Sylvie had a bad feeling about it, though, remembering Lupe fierce and savage and powerful. That kind of feeling was addictive.

  “Marah,” Demalion said. “Transport?”

  “SUV’s waiting,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I know a place we can clean up.”

  * * *

  MARAH’S PLACE TURNED OUT TO BE A SKETCHY-LOOKING PRIVATE clinic surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Inside, Marah waved the doctor over without a word. The doctor took one look at the lot of them, bruised, broken, bleeding, and simply nodded. He whisked Sylvie away for X-rays of her hand before she could do more than blink in the bright fluorescents. The smell of burned coffee was strong, and she managed to convince him to give her a cup right after he shot her full of some powerful painkiller.

  “I’m immobilizing your hand,” he said. “Just to get you to your next destination. You’re going to need surgery and pins. There are twenty-seven bones in your hand. Thirteen of them are broken.”

  “Feels like it,” she said. Inwardly, she was thinking, only thirteen? Another thing to thank her magical resistance for.

  He sent her back into the room Marah had commandeered. Sylvie got her first real look at her team. Demalion’s lacerations weren’t as bad as she’d feared. He’d managed to do more than just lift that sorcerous werewolf up; he’d held him away from his body as best he could. Eight jagged claw marks scored his side and shoulder, but they were fairly shallow; a series of deep punctures at his hip marked where the wolf had bitten down. A crew-cut woman who looked like she belonged in army greens drew another line of sutures through his flesh.

  Demalion met Sylvie’s eyes and nodded. I’m okay.

  Zoe drew her attention next by the simple gasp she let out. She stared at Sylvie’s swaddled hand, braced from every angle possible. “Oh God, what happened?”