Gods & Monsters

1 Wrong Place, Wrong Time

FOR ONCE, WHEN PEOPLE STARTED DYING, SYLVIE LIGHTNER WASN’T at ground zero. When things went wrong, really wrong, she was fifteen miles away from the crime scene, haggling with a werewolf bitch over her finder’s fee.

Five days ago, Sylvie had asked Tatya to keep an eye out and a nose up for a woman who’d gone missing from Alligator Alley, figuring she could turn Tatya’s nightly perambulations through the Everglades to good use. Delegation had paid off: Three days later, Maria Ruben was no longer a missing person. Dead, but no longer lost, and that was something. Finding her body could bring its own resolution to the family and was worth every penny.

So Sylvie had met Tatya at the scene, called the cops, and split without waiting for them to show, spooked.

Maria Ruben hadn’t been alone. There were four other dead women, drowned, pushed beneath the duckweed surface of an Everglades lagoon, and left to sway slowly in the dark, stagnant waters. Maria’s short dark hair stuck out like a frightened puffer fish, showing the shock her slack face couldn’t. A pink barrette—cheap plastic butterfly— floated free, trailing a long bronze lock of hair belonging to a woman barely into her twenties.

All of them were young, Maria likely the oldest, and all were Hispanic. Someone had particular tastes. Sylvie swallowed disgust, studied the other three women by the sullen gold of the setting sun. Their ethnicity and ages might match up, but their clothes argued they came from different parts of the city: Maria’s casual business wear; swimsuit and sarong; halter top and skirt; demure blouse and khaki skirt; and one who reminded Sylvie of her sister—a budding fashion plate.

That was the moment Sylvie had called the police. The moment she felt over her head. This was someone’s sister. Sylvie might have a reputation as a vigilante, but she knew when to leave a crime scene the hell alone.

Tatya wanted a finder’s fee for each woman. Sylvie didn’t object on any moral ground—never mind that their agreement only covered Maria Ruben—but finances dictated haggling. Five hundred dollars had been half of the fee Sylvie had charged Maria Ruben’s husband, but $2500 started eating into rent. Sylvie would be willing to take that financial risk, but her business partner, Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, wouldn’t. Sylvie wanted to keep Tatya happy—the werewolf was a good source as well as a quasi friend—so the discussion lasted longer than Sylvie liked, culminating with Sylvie’s writing an IOU for another thousand, payable the next month.

Once the rest of the women were identified, Sylvie could see about spreading around the cost of doing business. There might be a reward or, more likely, a client who’d want her to investigate how their loved one had ended up underwater. Now that she had an in with the local cops, courtesy of her making nice with Detective Adelio Suarez, she could be a useful liaison to a grieving family. And she thought that the police were going to be struggling with this one. The scene had felt . . . charged, a spark in the still, hot air that tasted of the Magicus Mundi.

Maria Ruben’s car had been found abandoned beside the road, the battery run down, the driver’s door hanging open. Her husband had reported his wife’s last words via cell phone, Salvador, you should see this. A two-headed alligator. I’m stopping for pics . . . and nothing more.

Whatever had happened that night had seen Maria Ruben transported nearly fifty miles, her camera bag gone, her forehead marked, and her body left in a crowded and watery grave. It smacked of ritual murder.

Those women hadn’t died natural deaths; that much seemed evident. The question that lingered was—how unnatural had they been?

BACK IN SOUTH MIAMI BEACH, SYLVIE PUT THE KEY IN HER OFFICE door, the phone shrilling on the other side of the glass like a race clock timer counting down. She forced the key to turn, slammed into her office—all haste, no caution, rushing to hear what Suarez had to say about the ’Glades scene, cursing him for calling the office instead of her cell—and fell into a nightmare.

A cobweb brush of sensation lingered and jittered on her skin, the sign of a spell laid over the doorway. A trap she’d bulled right on through.

Stupid, she thought, and froze, trying to control the only thing she still could: herself.

Her office changed around her, warped by powerful magic, an inferno blossoming. The illusion worked all her senses—drowned her vision in flickering flames that crackled and hissed, licked around and out of electrical sockets. She tasted acrid plastic; the chemical burn of it seared her nose and throat. Only furious control kept her from coughing, flailing for air.

Heat scalded her every inborne breath, dried her lungs. Her skin prickled, tightened, felt puffed with heat. Stretching a cautious hand forward resulted in blistered fingers.

Even with the memory of the telltale sensation, that cobweb cling across her face and throat, she nearly believed in the illusory fire turning her office into a maze of heavy smoke and hellish light.

Believing in an illusion gave it power.

Illusion could kill if you accepted it as truth.

Her little dark voice fed her a nasty thought: What if the spell is layered over a real fire? What if you burn trying to prove it isn’t real?

That moment of doubt cost her. Smoke choked her, tightened her lungs and throat, scouring her insides; her hair stank of burning. Sylvie fumbled for the door handle, just behind her, so far away, backing up and not finding it. Was she even moving?

Faintly, she heard the ringing of the warning bell on the main desk. A singing chime, growing faster, shriller, an audible sign that magic was saturating the air. It steadied her, gave her a focus. If the bell was still ringing, then the charred wreckage of the desk was illusion. It was all illusion.

And it was centered on her. Even if she fled, the flames would follow.

Meant to send you screaming outside, into traffic or the ocean, that internal voice muttered.

If she didn’t flee? She risked being an anomalous death, a woman dead of smoke inhalation in an untouched office.

This, she thought grimly, was what came of playing by the rules. Of leaving the bad guys alive. If she’d killed Odalys the necromancer instead of seeing her arrested, if she had punished Patrice Caudwell for returning from the dead instead of balking at the complications involved—if, if, if. If Sylvie had disposed of her enemies properly, she wouldn’t be one step from having her lungs ruined by imaginary smoke.

Anger surged. Hell with that. It wasn’t a mistake worth dying for.

She broke the paralysis the illusion had forced her into. The illusion might be cleverly crafted, the mark of a talented if malign witch, but Sylvie refused to yield.

Sylvie’s lips drew tight over her teeth, snarling. Hot air rushed into her mouth, drying it. Three ways to break an illusion spell for a non-magic-user. Kill the caster. Wait the illusion out. Or overwhelm it.

Sylvie would gladly put a bullet in the witch’s brain, but the coward had struck from a distance. Waiting wasn’t an option; not when it was a struggle just to keep breathing, to override her body’s instinctive panic. But the ringing bell on the desk was a protective spell, defensive magic. . . .

She thought cool thoughts about AC, about healthgiving air, about freshwater cascading over her skin, then stepped into the thickest gouts of flames. The fires licked her flesh, gnawed her hands, singed her jeans, her jacket, turned her gun to a hot brand against her back. Sylvie pushed it all aside.

The bell rang on, her guiding beacon. Sylvie moved by memory and sound, trusting her will above her body and mind. Control. Calm.

She slammed her hand down on the bell—agitated metal quivering against her skin, cool stone containing it, and the unyielding strength of the desk beneath. Her world erupted in an entirely new wave of heat/pain/magic. The offensive and defensive magics warred, her body the battlefield, the choice of weapon—fire. Pain ran liquid through her body; her blood sizzled as if it boiled within her.

Her hair streamed upward, rising like smoke, her eyes blind to both illusion and reality—completely vulnerable; then it was over, and she stood panting and aching in her office, on a balmy and peaceful South Beach evening, the only scent of fire in the air that of the restaurants searing freshly caught fish and shrimp. The warning bell was slagged silver in a cracked marble bowl, and beneath them, the desk was crocodile-scaled with char.

Wonderful. Just after she learned she had a powerful witch gunning for her, she destroyed the one piece of magic that would warn her of an attack.

She just wondered who it was that wanted her dead. The list was regrettably long—the sorcerous Maudits community; the ISI, America’s government spook squad; even a miffed Greek god or two. If Sylvie had to choose, though, she’d pick Odalys Hargrove, the necromancer she’d managed to get slapped behind bars two days ago. Odalys wasn’t the type to suffer in silence. Sylvie had managed, with the help of the Ghoul, to prevent Odalys from fulfilling her vicious business plan: destroying teenagers’ souls and selling the newly emptied bodies to hungry ghosts looking for a new lease on life. Odalys was exactly the type to have contingency plans lying around.

SYLVIE CHECKED THE CLOCK ABSENTLY—10:00 P.M.—THEN TOOK A second, disbelieving look. Fury rose all over again. That ridiculous attack had cost her nearly an hour. An hour trapped in battle with her own senses. An hour gone. An hour . . . in which she hadn’t heard anything at all from Lio.

Since she’d given him the heads-up on the bodies in the ’Glades close to two hours ago, she felt justified in her impatience.

While she doubted she’d have heard the phone ring, neither her cell nor her office phone had any messages, though the office phone’s caller ID listed the call she’d missed as from Salvador Ruben, his nightly check-in on her progress.

Until today, Sylvie had had none to report. Now that she did, she had to wait on Suarez.

She said, “Dammit,” aloud, and the dry rasp of it hurt. She leaned against the kitchenette counter, drank straight from the sink faucet. Lukewarm water had rarely tasted so sweet. She wiped at her damp mouth and cheek, thinking dark thoughts about police cooperation.

Detective Adelio Suarez would still have Maria Ruben as a missing person without Sylvie’s help. He’d better not be cutting her out of the loop. Their relationship was supposed to be a two-way street, dammit.

The phone rang again, and she snatched it up, hoping it was Suarez continuing his habit of calling the office first. He was one of the long line of people who’d rather talk to Alex than Sylvie.

“Ms. Lightner?”

Sylvie cursed herself for not checking the ID. Salvador Ruben. The last person she needed to talk to just then. “Mr. Ruben—”

“Have you heard from your friend yet? Did she find anything? Did she find Maria?” Sylvie imagined that Ruben would have a nice voice when it wasn’t pitched high with stress and hope. Now it quivered with so much tension, she felt her back and neck lock up in sympathy.

She let out a careful, soundless breath, stared out at the soothing flow of South Beach traffic, the glow of headlights and taillights, the glitter against the dark. She could lie, tell him she hadn’t found anything, let the cops break the news; but he was her client. She had a responsibility to tell him the truth. Or at least as much of it as she could without jeopardizing the police investigation. “Mr. Ruben. It’s not good—”

“Oh god,” he said, reading her tone accurately. “Is she dead? Did someone do something to her?”

“Yes,” Sylvie said. “I expect you’ll be contacted by the police soon.”

“You’re sure?” he asked. “You saw her? It was her? The picture I gave you wasn’t very good. Maybe it’s someone else. . . .” A last hope thinned his voice, turned it to a whispered prayer, a man asking for a miracle.

Sylvie had dealt with gods; she knew miracles didn’t come cheap.

“The police will answer your questions,” she said.

“But you’ll keep looking? For whoever did this thing?”

Sylvie hesitated. She shouldn’t. It was a police matter now, not hers. But something about the scene nagged at her, left her with the same jittery discomfort in her bones that came from being around inimical magic. “I will.”

It took her another few minutes to verify that he wasn’t alone, that he had a friend who could wait with him for the news. For the inevitable call that would shatter his world. A few minutes of evasion, not telling him exactly what had happened to his wife.

They felt like the longest few minutes of her life.

She set the receiver down, crossed to the couch, and slumped onto it with a creak of stressed leather. The air vent above cooled her skin, her agitated nerves. She wasn’t good at patience. She wasn’t good at offering comfort. She wished that Alex or Demalion had been around to take that call. But Alex was done for the day, and Demalion was . . . finding himself in Chicago, trying to see what he could salvage of his old life in the new skin he wore.

Sylvie kicked at the armrest, a brief spurt of frustration, then dug out her cell phone.

Suarez wasn’t getting off the hook so easily; if he wouldn’t call her, she’d call him. She couldn’t make him pick up, though. It went straight to voice mail.

“Call me, Lio,” she said. “I’ve got a client who’s waiting on official word about his wife.”

The ceiling above her striped light, dark, light with passing cars; the plate-glass window beside her grew cooler as the day’s heat faded. Sylvie flipped the phone, checked the time again. Almost ten thirty. She’d spent most of the day on the road, meeting Tatya, then taking an ATV down bumpy trails and hiking through saw-grass paths, then doing it all in reverse; she’d have to find out when Alex left. It might give her a vague idea of when the illusion trap had been laid. If it was after working hours, the odds of a witness dropped.

There was a sweet spot Sylvie herself had taken advantage of when breaking into businesses. That gap of time between people heading home and heading out to dinner. If she were the witch, she’d have laid her trap then.

Of course, if Sylvie were the witch, she’d have sent goons in to take Sylvie out while she struggled with the illusion. Sylvie believed in being thorough.

She forced herself off the couch and folded the phone away, fighting the urge to redial Suarez. The kitchenette light flickered, bringing to mind that there were leftover enchiladas in the little fridge, just the thing for a bite before she went home to her apartment and its perennially-in-need-of-groceries kitchen.

While she nuked the enchiladas, munching absently on the cold corn chips stored in the fridge to avoid attracting palmetto bugs, she clicked on the local news. The microwave dinged, but she didn’t notice.

Breaking news and local news, and it was full of streaming lights, red and blue, and searchlights shining down on flames against a grey-green backdrop.

Everglades, she thought. Guess Suarez hadn’t called because he was too busy dodging the media.

There hadn’t been flames when she left.

The news bar across the bottom of the screen made her heart jolt: Three policemen killed in Everglades.

She hit the volume, listened to the newscast, trying to filter the controlled hysterics of the news anchor for actual fact—everything was urgent these days; everything was imminent doom on Channel 7. As far as she could tell, it was her crime scene, but what had changed? When she and Tatya had been there, it was as quiet as death; there hadn’t even been mosquito hum in the air. Now the newscasters mentioned bombs and ambushes in a single breath, followed it with a totally inane recap of how many helicopters were circling the scene, and a self-referential media report.

Sylvie muted the set, hit redial on her cell phone. “Lio. Give me a call if you’re all right—” Stupid message, but she felt the need to try something more than just waiting to see if the news anchors would broadcast the names of the dead.

Her office phone rang again, and Sylvie grabbed it, chanting Be Lio, be Lio in her head.

“Shadows Inquiries,” she said.

There was silence on the line, a silence of words, not breath. She heard a rasp of controlled air, a clogged sound that might be a stifled sob, and her hand tightened on the receiver. “It’s Sylvie. Who is this?”

“. . . Lio wants you,” the woman said, just when Sylvie was about to reluctantly let the line go dead again. “You come. You see him. Then you get away from my family.”

“Lourdes,” Sylvie said. Adelio Suarez’s wife. She skipped the questions rising to her lips—Was Lio all right? Was he hurt? What happened?—and homed in on the information she needed right at this moment. “Where are you?”

“Jackson Memorial,” Lourdes spat, and slammed the phone down.

SYLVIE LOOKED IN ON ADELIO AND WINCED EVEN AS RELIEF STARTED trickling into her system. He wasn’t in critical care, didn’t have anything her TV-trained eyes would assess as indicators of serious injury—no cannula, no morphine pump, no looming machinery surrounding the bed. But he didn’t look good, either. Both his eyes were so swollen that they made one bruised lump across the sharp bridge of his nose. A long row of stitches lined his jaw, and there was enough stitchwork, still shiny with recent cleaning, on his arms to make her think of quilt patches. The hospital room, clean as it was, smelled of smoke and blood.

Lourdes, seated beside Adelio on a visitor’s chair, rosary dangling from her fingers, looked up, and the expression on her face convinced Sylvie the woman would be adding Hail Marys for uncharitable thoughts to her postconfession routine next Thursday.

The woman got into Sylvie’s space, pushed her back into the hallway in silent, bulldog outrage. Sylvie, conscious of the damage she’d done this family, allowed herself to lose ground before a woman twice her age and half her size.

She throttled down the angry dark voice inside her that didn’t care for obedience or politeness or anything at all beyond its own survival, and let Lourdes tear her a new one, half in Spanish, half in English, all of it conducted with the careful, quiet fury of a woman who knew exactly how much noise would get unwelcome attention. Eventually, her words trailed off, fell apart under fear and hatred; her last sally was a broken, “You’re a bad person, Shadows. You killed my son, and now you try to kill Lio.”

“If I were such a bad person, would I sit here and listen to you?” Sylvie said. “Let me talk to Lio.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“He can wake up,” Sylvie said, and stepped forward decisively. Lourdes gave ground, then, in a sudden resurgence of fury, spat at Sylvie’s feet.

Sylvie studied the shining spot on the worn linoleum and thought it was lucky Lourdes Suarez was a good Catholic and not a bruja, or Sylvie would be fighting off a curse in the midst of Jackson Memorial’s inpatient wing. Instead, she just stepped around the sputum, marked it as a new low in her life, that a nice little Cuban housewife wanted to spit on her, and pushed her way back into Adelio’s room.

He can wake up, she had said, and it sounded easy then. Not so easy to lean over him, searching for an unscathed place to press gentle fingers. Even washed up, he stank of smoke. His hair was burned to stubble on one side. Not so easy to wake him from blissful unconsciousness into pain. But she needed to know.

She settled for tapping the pillow beside his face, a quick rat-a-tat of fingernails and pressure. He snorted awake, thrashed a bit, then stilled as events caught up with him. Through his puffed eye sockets, the narrow slit and shine of his eyes, she could see him remembering hospital. Remembering Sylvie.

He angled his head on the pillow, trying to get any view of her he could. “Not a bomb,” he said. “I didn’t get hit by shrapnel. The chart is wrong.”

“Okay,” she said. She sat down, hitched the visitor’s seat close, screeking it over the linoleum. “What was it, then?”

“Bear.”

It was a meaningless syllable to her at first, glossolalia brought on by painkillers, then the word clicked. “You were attacked by a bear? At a crime scene swarming with lights and cops?”

It just didn’t make sense. There were bears in northern Florida, but not in the swampy parts of the Everglades. And even those bears were smaller, more peaceful than the western bears.

Adelio let out a long breath, took in another, a careful marshaling of strength. “I know what I saw. I know that it is possible. You told me so yourself when you showed me the orchids that once were people. Transformation—”

He broke off, fumbled a hand toward his stitches, suddenly panicky. Sylvie caught his hand in hers—large, chilled, shaking—and let it go once he’d calmed. Orchids. Transformation . . . After Odalys’s arrest, Sylvie had taken Suarez to the Fairchild Gardens to visit a special collection of orchids, a group of thirteen rare plants that had once been the satanic coven who’d killed his son. Suarez had been skeptical, and Sylvie had spent more time explaining the mechanics of magical transformation as she understood it than she had ever thought she would.

“Am I going to change?”

“Into—”

“A bear?” Suarez’s eyes glinted, shiny with panic. Sylvie felt like she was grasping at water, something that shifted and changed and fled her understanding.

Suarez groaned. She said, “C’mon, Lio, tell it to me from the beginning. One piece at a time. Tatya found the women, I called you, you went out to the ’Glades with a team—”

“Nightmare,” Suarez said. His voice was gravelly with shock and lingering disorientation. “Outdoor crime scenes. A dump site for a serial killer. The Everglades. Takes forever. Just to get the bodies photographed in situ, the scene, and finally out of the water—it got dark. We set up lights, kept working. The helicopter came. Wind everywhere. But not on the water. No waves at all.”

“Not in the lagoon?” That same stillness she and Tatya had noted.

Suarez shifted a shoulder. “Like glass, smothered ripples. They started loading the first body—

“Maria?” Sylvie asked.

“No,” Lio breathed. “La rubia, the blond woman, in the swimsuit. Closest to the shore—

“She burned, Shadows. Burned like rocket fuel. Blue and white flames, red flames, so hot, and they had her loaded. The forensic team burned . . . and then so did the bird. That’s what exploded. The helicopter. Not a bomb. The helicopter and the pilot and the forensic team.” Wetness streaked from one eye. Sylvie let him rest, but when she thought he might get lost in mourning his dead, she pushed again.

“Magic?” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to recall the scene she had left. Tried to remember why she had been nervous there, why she had thought Lio would be calling for her advice. She was a city girl at heart; her visits into the Everglades had been school field trips to Anhinga Trail to count animal species, and the more recent excursions to see Tatya. But even without familiarity, she had marked the lagoon as too quiet. The lagoon had had the shaky, stretched feel of a world altered by force, and the wildlife had fled before that metaphysical earthquake, leaving deadness behind. So yeah, maybe magic. But it hadn’t struck her as a spell waiting to happen. Hell, she wouldn’t have called Suarez out if that had been the case. She would have called a witch to clear the area first. Magical SWAT. Something.

Maybe Lourdes was right. Maybe Sylvie was to blame for this.

“Can’t tell about the fire,” Suarez murmured. “God only knows. Could have been an incendiary inside her. But I don’t think so. Not with the bear.”

“Yeah, the bear,” Sylvie said. “I’m still not—”

“I was in the water, thigh deep, worried that a gator was going to take me off at the knee, when the fire started. I tried to get to them, then I saw the body move before me.”

“The burning—”

“The other one. The one closest to me. The wildlife photographer. Your client’s wife. Maria Ruben. I thought—she was alive. I reached for her, and she changed. All claws, and teeth, and fur. Charging me. Her claws . . .”

His hand flailed at his stitches again, and Sylvie got it this time. “The dead woman changed into a bear?” It was so hard not to sound skeptical. Even knowing about the Magicus Mundi, even knowing about shape-shifters.

Shape-shifters didn’t play dead very well—too much animal. But they also didn’t come back from the dead.

“Am I going to change—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “It doesn’t work like that. Either it’s a genetic ability, or it’s a sorcerous one. It’s not a disease.”

Given that there was death involved, Sylvie assumed sorcery. True shape-shifters were creatures at least partially bound by natural law: They lived, they bred true, they died if you killed them, and they stayed dead. Beyond that—Maria Ruben was straight-up human. Had been, at any rate.

The wild card might be the tiny percentage of shape-shifters that were curse-related, but those were rare enough that she felt comfortable erasing them from the map of possibilities. Didn’t take too many generations of magic-users to learn that cursing your enemies to change them into beasts was more of an “oops” than a “ha!” Witches and sorcerers could make a tasty meal for a pissed-off shifter with a grudge.

Lio was quiet, more of those silent tears streaking his cheeks. Relief, this time, she diagnosed.

“They all changed,” he whispered finally. “Wolves and a big cat with a lashing tail.”

“The bodies?”

“Their eyes in the fires. Shone.”

“What happened to them?”

“We were dying,” Lio said. “Jorgé was screaming—haven’t heard men scream like that. Since the Gulf.”

Sylvie caught his hand in hers again, held it tight until the shaking eased.

“Los monstruos,” he said. His eyes closed, shields against the intolerable. Bruises on bruises. Emotional and physical. “They left us there.”

“ ‘Left,’ ” Sylvie parroted. It was an odd choice of words. Didn’t seem to apply to a group of fleeing animals.

“Retreated,” he said. “All the same direction.”

No matter how she questioned Lio, she doubted she’d get much more sense out of him. His skin was grey, beaded with sweat. His throat worked, holding back sickness, pain, fear. She didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened in the ’Glades; but then, the real question was, did she need to? She’d investigated other cases with less to go on.

“Sylvie,” Adelio said. “Find out. The only bodies in evidence now are police. Find out what happened, and stop it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you have a plan?” he pushed, unwilling to take her word.

“Monster hunting,” Sylvie said. “I’m waiting until morning, and I’m taking magical backup.”

Dead women who changed shape? Dead women who came back to life? Sounded like necromantic magic. Luckily, she had a new acquaintance who liked to pal around with death magic. Tierney Wales, the Opa-locka Ghoul, was going to find himself rousted bright and early for a field trip.

SYLVIE MADE HER WAY ACROSS THE CROWDED PARKING LOT—hospitals always seemed to be doing a booming business no matter the hour—homing in on her truck and its clawed hood gleaming beneath a streetlamp. She thought of Suarez and his patchwork of sutured flesh with regret. He was going to scar as badly as her truck.

Footsteps sounded behind her, quick-moving, and she turned, always on alert, but saw only a woman searching for her keys in a cavernous leopard-print bag. Disorganized, Sylvie thought. The woman had the common sense to move quickly through the quiet lot but not enough planning to pull her keys ahead of time. She was asking to be mugged. Especially while leaning up against a steely grey BMW.

One of the sheep, her little dark voice suggested, dependent on a careless shepherd.

Hush, Sylvie thought at it. Bad enough when it preached misanthropy; it made her downright nervous when it started to verge on theology. The voice was the leftover bit of Lilith’s genetic legacy carried down through generations, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. Sylvie had killed Lilith when they met; she didn’t need to keep Lilith’s madness alive in her own blood.

Sylvie left the hospital behind with the usual diesel cough from her truck and a belated protest from her stomach, which chose that moment to remember the abandoned enchiladas. Burned women, hospital visits, dead cops—part of being a pro meant it didn’t even faze her appetite. Not anymore. Which, considering the rate that the Magicus Mundi was invading Sylvie’s day-to-day life, was a good thing. She’d have starved otherwise.

She checked her mirrors, checked the streets, trying to remember what restaurants were open and nearby. Mia Rosa’s, she thought, was only two blocks back. She checked the streets once more, looking for cops, then hung a U-turn. During the day, she wouldn’t have made it. At this hour, it was a little tricky, best done at speed, but definitely possible. Behind her, horns honked loud and long, and too late to be directed at her. She glanced back to see that another car had made the same maneuver, though the woman driving looked a little wild-eyed. Sylvie hmmed thoughtfully, and when she parked the truck, she unlocked the glove box and took out her gun.

She didn’t like being followed.

She especially didn’t like being followed when she had a killer witch after her.

The hostess at the door greeted Sylvie with a stiff smile, a pointed reminder that they were closing at midnight, and sat her among a group of tables with the chairs put up. Subtle, they weren’t. Sylvie didn’t care as long as the food was hot, plentiful, and quick to arrive.

She had just sent the waitress off with her order when the door opened again; the hostess moved to intercept another last-minute diner. Sylvie narrowed her eyes, and the dark-haired woman in the doorway waved at Sylvie and waved off the hostess.

The woman from the hospital parking lot threaded her way through the tables, her ridiculously large bag still hanging from her shoulder and clunking against upended chair legs every few feet. The same woman who’d made a U-turn to keep up with her, pushing her ancient Jeep hard to make enough speed to keep from being t-boned. She homed in on Sylvie, and Sylvie kicked out the chair opposite her. “So, that business with the BMW, was that playacting or wishful thinking?”

“A little of both,” the woman said. “It was a nice car, wasn’t it? And if I had approached you in the lot, you would have walked away.”

“Still might,” Sylvie said. “I don’t like strangers following me.”

“I’m Caridad Valdes-Pedraza,” she said. “And you’re Sylvie Lightner. You’re a PI who’s always on the scene, and I’m a freelance reporter looking for a scoop. I’ve been waiting to see Adelio Suarez; you just came from seeing him. Feels like fate.”

“Fate’s an excuse for people who don’t want to make an effort,” Sylvie said.

“Interesting,” the woman said. “I’d have marked you as believing in destiny.” She hefted her purse to the tabletop, dropped it with a clatter, and pulled out a notebook and a pen.

She scribbled in it, and Sylvie had to ask, “Are you writing that down?”

“Hey,” Caridad said. “I like to take notes on my subjects.”

“I’m not a subject,” Sylvie said. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza—”

“You could call me Caridad if you want. I know the other’s a mouthful.”

Sylvie let her breath out in a steady gust. She wasn’t in the mood. If she hadn’t seen the sullen waitress approaching with her meal, she would have just given up. Walked away. Caridad’s expression was friendly, pert, that of a would-be newscaster. But there was something harder beneath it. Intelligence, ambition, and something deeper still, betrayed in the tension in her jaw: need.

“My friends call me Cachita,” she said. She shot Sylvie a demure glance, one step away from flirtation. It was a good front, a good act, no doubt got her into a lot of conversations with her targets; but it was only an act.

Sylvie made her voice flat, no weakness. “Ms. Valdes-Pedraza, we’re not friends, and we’re not going to be friends. I’m going to eat a long-overdue dinner, and you’re not welcome at my table. If you have something to say, say it and go away.”

“Fine,” she said. Caridad sat up straight, pressed her curling hair out of her face, drummed her nails on the table, a quick rumba, and said, “Tell me about the bodies you found in the Everglades.”

“Police made a statement,” Sylvie said. “There were no bodies, only mannequins. It was a trap, and three officers died.”

“You know what police statements are? Sop for reporters too lazy to do their own digging. Too lazy to do anything but print a preapproved story. They trade integrity and a real interview for easy bylines.”

“So you’re what? A crusader for truth?” Sylvie spiced her words with as much mockery as she could manage when she was tired . . . and dammit, the woman was drawing her in.

“Is that a bad thing to aspire to?” Caridad asked. “There’s an awful lot of truth that gets ignored or denied out there. I want to open people’s eyes.”

“Good luck with that,” Sylvie said. “I get paid to find things out, and people still don’t listen.”

“Doesn’t it just drive you crazy?” Caridad said. “Make you want to shove it down their throats? Me, I get so frustrated, I could scream. I turn in reports, and it’s all, ‘But, Cachita, where’s the point of—’ ”

Sylvie growled, took a breath, and said, “You know something else that drives people crazy? Intrusive reporters. Go away. I have nothing to tell you.”

Caridad leaned back in her seat, took her hands from the table, made herself smaller. Dammit, this reporter was good at reading people, at manipulating her own body language, her meekness only another path to taking control of the conversation, to keep the dialogue open, to derail Sylvie’s anger.

Sylvie felt a wolfish grin stretch her mouth. Maybe that kind of thing worked on regular people, but Sylvie had anger to spare.

Caridad’s eyes narrowed, pale eye shadow crinkling beneath dark brows. “Women have been disappearing from the city. The police aren’t talking about it, and even if they did, they’d be talking about a serial killer. Not a monster. But that’s what it is. You can help me. You found its playground, didn’t you?

“I’ve got sources, Sylvie. They tell me that someone called in five bodies that they found in the Everglades. Another source tells me you left the scene. You’re not police, and you wouldn’t be welcome at a crime scene—so you must have found them. What made you look for them in the first place?”

“Do you really expect me to talk to you?” Sylvie took another bite of her “special”; it was some sort of creamy pasta and seafood, barely lukewarm and sour with her irritation. “You said it. I’m not real popular with the police. You think they’d be happy if I shot my mouth off to a reporter?”

“I think you’re dying to. I do my research, Sylvie. I know my subjects. I know about you. You’ve got to be sick of the injustices, the fact that people are getting away with murder. You could help me.”

Sylvie said, “I usually get paid for helping.”

“I expected better of you,” Caridad said.

“What are you, my mother?” Sylvie said. “The only approval I need is my own.”

She pushed her plate away, appetite gone. Her personal approval rating wasn’t at its all-time best: Her dreams, in what fitful sleep she’d managed since the confrontation with Odalys, had been angry and focused on the one person who’d gotten away clean with murder: Patrice Caudwell, one of Odalys’s revenant ghosts, who’d managed to keep the teenage body Odalys had provided. At least Odalys had had to lawyer up, had her world disrupted. Patrice? She was sipping cafecitos poolside and working on her tan. Impatience and irritation flared; Sylvie stood. Caridad grabbed her wrist, faster than Sylvie had thought she’d be, and a lot more willing to get physical.

“You aren’t listening.”

“You’re not saying much,” Sylvie said. “You want me to piss off the cops by sharing stories out of school. You want me to confirm your theory about a monster who’s stealing women. Even if I played along, then what?” Sylvie shook her head. “Crazy talk’s not going to get you far as a freelancer. You’d be better off peddling predigested stories.”

“I’m disappointed,” Caridad said. “I thought you’d respect the truth. But you’re just another cover-up artist.”

Where the previous attempt at scolding hadn’t stung, this one did.

“Tell me something,” Sylvie said. “You know Maria Ruben?”

Caridad’s eyes went wide, sensing some sort of chance in the air. She chewed her lip, flipped through her mental files, raised her chin. “Should I?”

Sylvie sighed. Maria Ruben was the missing person most likely to be newsworthy—her husband saw to that with his ranting about alien abduction. If Caridad Valdes-Pedraza hadn’t put her name on her list of missing people, she was no kind of reporter at all and a waste of Sylvie’s time.

When Caridad stood, preparing to follow Sylvie from the restaurant, Sylvie snapped, “Sit. I’m leaving. You’re not.”

“We could be allies, Sylvie,” Caridad said. “Help each other.”

“You sure you want to volunteer? My most recent ally’s in a bed at Jackson Memorial, torn all to hell.”