Gods & Monsters

7 Ill-Met

THE SUN WAS BRIGHT AND HIGH AS THEY SET OUT, EVEN IF THEIR moods weren’t. Their trip to the Everglades had been delayed while Wales took the time to pack up the sad remains of his Hands of Glory, brushing up the ash with careful attention to detail. When she’d raised a brow in inquiry, Wales had said, “Caution always pays off.”

Sylvie had asked, half fearing the answer, “Marco wasn’t one of the ghosts guarding the circle, was he?”

“No,” Wales said. “He’s safe.”

Safe, Sylvie thought. Not the first word she’d use to describe Marco. Not even the tenth. But it was a little like the affection between a boy and his snarling, mangy junkyard dog—not something you wanted to come between.

“Good,” Sylvie lied. Marco might be a useful tool, but he made her nervous.

Wales had merely shrugged, finished tidying ash into the plastic laundry bag supplied by the hotel, and headed for the truck.

Then she broached the subject again. It wasn’t that she cared—as far as she was concerned, the Hands of Glory were abominations—but an upset necromancer just seemed like a bad idea. “They’re at peace now,” she said. “Not slaves any longer. You got ’em away from the CIA, took care of them, and—”

“Jesus,” Wales said, “I ain’t mourning them. I’m freaking the fuck out. We could have been killed last night.”

Sylvie clicked her mouth shut and turned her attention back to the blacktop unrolling beneath her tires. They were out of the city proper already, had seen an alligator or two sliding into watery ditches alongside the road. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Should be,” he muttered. “You got any idea of what it was that came for us? ’Cause I’ve dealt with death guardians before, creatures that hold the souls of the dead to their proper planes, but that wasn’t—”

“I think it was a god,” Sylvie said.

“God,” Wales said.

“Yup,” Sylvie said.

He stared into the sun dazzle reflecting off the watery ditches alongside the road. “Any particular god?”

“An angry one?” Sylvie said. At his flat look, she elaborated. “I don’t know. One that doesn’t care overmuch for keeping a low profile. Not one of the big ones, or we’d be a smear on the wall that the maids would be quitting over. Still, its shadow did enough damage, don’t you think?”

“Don’t know. Missed most of it,” Wales said.

“Hopefully, you won’t get another chance,” Sylvie said. “Gods on earth are bad news. They’re . . . disruptive just by their presence. Monsters and cataclysms. A hurricane in Chicago—”

“That was a god?” he interrupted.

“Yeah,” she said. “Several, actually. Political infighting. The smaller ones—the demigods—aren’t so bad in comparison. They fuck things up when they’re down here, but not to that scale. Mostly, they just get people killed.”

“Gods? I don’t want to play anymore,” he said. “I like my life.”

“Then you’re smarter than the soul-devourer,” she said.

He cocked his head at her, frowning as if he almost remembered what she was talking about.

“One of the things Jennifer said,” Sylvie explained. “That she’d been given to him. That he was coming for her.”

Wales groaned. “Stupid, arrogant bastard. Made a deal with a god. Bartering for borrowed power from a god to take out an enemy. I really, really want to leave town.”

“Tough it up, Tex,” she said. “You drew the short straw. I need you.”

“Lucky, lucky me,” he whispered.

“Just . . . try to stay under its radar,” Sylvie said. “Keep a low profile for a while. No ghost summoning.”

“Not a problem,” Wales said.

GPS pointed out they were there, and Sylvie pulled the truck off the road, coasting to a bumpy halt on the dead-end access road.

Wales looked out into the heat shimmer, clutched his satchel tight, and licked his lips. He opened the truck door but didn’t get out. Sylvie walked around the truck, looked in at him.

“You up for this?” Sylvie asked.

“Don’t got a choice,” Wales said. “We can’t leave them there again. I’ve got to try.”

Sylvie grabbed his satchel, slung it over her shoulder, gritted her teeth, and bore it as the edge of it pressed up against her bruises. She was tough. Wales . . . wasn’t. The sun had driven out some of his pallor, but he still held himself like he hurt.

He was right, though. They didn’t have a choice.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, SYLVIE DROPPED THE SATCHEL INTO THE mud, heart sinking even faster than the bag.

This was the place; she could still see the flattened grass where she had skidded yesterday and gone to her knees. A long streak of turned earth, the tread of her boot.

A fish leaped at a hawk’s shadow as it fell over the water, set off a chain reaction. A turtle ducked its head, glided into motion; a snowy egret hunched its neck; a long ripple cut the surface as a water moccasin slid by.

Life.

Sylvie slapped at a mosquito absently.

“They’re gone,” Wales said. He gaped at the water’s surface as if it had betrayed them. As if it were responsible for their disappearance.

Sylvie considered it an evident statement and made no response. It wouldn’t have been polite anyway. Guilt sizzled through her veins, laced with a healthy slug of rage.

“Can you find them again?” she asked.

“I could try—”

“Go for it,” Sylvie said.

Wales said, “I’m not a dog, Sylvie. I don’t jump on command.”

“If I say ‘pretty please’? C’mon, Tex,” she said. “It’s not just for me. Those women need our help.”

Wales said, “I’m not promising anything. Marco’s built to override defenses, magical or otherwise. He’s not meant to hunt necromantic magic.”

“You were the one talking about sympathetic linkage,” Sylvie said. “Can’t you use that?”

“They’re not dead. Marco is. But I’m going to give it a try. You got a pen on you?”

Sylvie dragged one out of her pocket, a half-sized Sharpie that Alex mocked her for carrying, but as Wales started marking alchemical symbols onto Marco’s Hand, Sylvie sent a mental Take that! to Alex’s techno-love that would send Sylvie into the field with a PDA instead of ever-useful pen and paper.

Wales finished the designs, tilted Marco’s grey-skinned palm to show Sylvie the symbol for fusion, repeated twice, one on the palm, one on the back.

“Is it working?”

“Patience?”

“Never had it,” Sylvie said.

Wales closed his eyes. The breeze that passed over him reached Sylvie with the faint chill she was beginning to associate with ghosts added. Despite the humid heat that weighed her bones, she stepped away as best she could, checking her path. When she looked up again, Wales was twenty feet away, blindly following Marco’s urging.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, thought of a will-o’-the-wisp leading men to their deaths, and hastened after him.

Wales set a rapid pace over hummock and limestone, over knotted grass and through muddy puddles that spat frogs at their approach; sweat trickled down Sylvie’s spine, damped the hair at her temples and nape, greased her palm around the handle of her gun. An anhinga rose on a flap of dark wings and something large slid into the water nearby. Alligator, Sylvie thought, and clutched her gun tighter. They were common enough in the city, but the difference between seeing them as you drove by and walking pellmell into their territory made her heart rocket.

It would be a crap way to die; deathrolled in shallow waters, as horrible as anything the Magicus Mundi could dish out.

Wales stopped all at once. Around him, the mosquito cloud flitted away from Marco’s cold presence.

“There,” he said. A breath of air.

Sylvie joined him; beneath their feet the soft ground grew gritty, limestone gravel forming a path—a narrow access road.

On it, wider than the gravel, pressed tightly against the encroaching vegetation, a black van with a man closing the rear door. Sylvie got a glimpse of pallid, limp flesh, and drew her gun.

“Don’t move,” she said, trying to spot his companion. Black van, man in a suit, taking up a crime scene—ISI seemed likely, and they didn’t work alone.

But Wales’s response—tongue-tied pallor—suggested otherwise. He hated the government, but he didn’t fear it.

This was fear.

“It’s him,” Wales stammered. “The sorcerer.”

She jerked her attention back to the man leaning up against the van. “Soul-devourer?” Her gaze centered, picking out a target. His tie, his smoothly shaven throat, the handkerchief in his breast pocket, the space between his dark eyes. He seemed utterly at ease, lounging back as if to allow her all the time in the world to choose her shot. A far cry from the flailing man-monster at the Casa de Dia, all claws and terror.

“I’ve never liked that soubriquet,” the man said. “But it will do for an introduction, I suppose. You are . . .” He tilted his head, doing the strange I talk to spirits that you can’t see thing that was beginning to look familiar. Necromancers.

“None of your business,” she said.

“Sylvie—” Wales said, a near-breathless warning. She could forgive him showing his fear openly, but to use her name when she’d just denied it to the sorcerer—that was something else. She’d expected better of Mr. Paranoia.

“Sylvie?” the sorcerer said. “Shadows, if you’re out here hunting me. The new Lilith.” His tongue came out, quick, oddly reptilian, brushed his lips, retreated. Had there been scales on it? The longer she looked at him, the less convincingly human he seemed.

The more wrong he seemed.

Sylvie wasn’t magically inclined, but she was good at sensing magic, that subtle shift in the feel of the world. Everything about him screamed unnatural, something held together by magic and willpower. The suit he wore bulged rhythmically, as if the flesh it covered was in flux.

Maybe not so controlled, after all.

He pressed himself away from the van, moved toward Sylvie. A wave of wrongness preceded him. She pressed her finger on the trigger, felt the tiniest of gives. “Don’t.”

The sorcerer never stopped smiling, a sliver of white teeth between blood-flushed lips. “Don’t? Don’t what? I’m doing nothing—”

“What are you, five? Stop moving, or I’ll shoot you.”

Wales made a creaky sound of protest, and Sylvie thought briefly about shooting him. “What?” she snapped.

“That’s no good,” Wales said. “The spell—”

“He’s right,” the sorcerer said. “The binding spell works both directions. Should you shoot me, you risk destabilizing it.”

He didn’t need to say more. When Jennifer Costas had been trapped, she’d burned. The five women in the van were equally trapped. Equally at risk.

“A deal, then,” Sylvie said. “You unbind the women from your spell. I don’t shoot you today.”

“Give up my little harem? No. In fact, I’m going to keep them closer than ever.” His lips curled into a smile. He had a disturbingly pretty mouth. It made what he said that much more off-putting. “Too many people were touching them. Like the ancient sultans, I require my women to be mine alone.”

Sylvie’s finger twitched. Wales whispered fiercely, an argument held with someone spectral, and the man on the roadway laughed. “Listen to your ghost, boy. I’m more sorcerer than you want to tangle with.”

“I’m not your boy,” Wales said. “And Marco says you should be dead.” Wales might be thin, scared, and brittle; but he was dangerous for all of that, still a necromancer. The sorcerer obviously agreed; his eyes sparked green-white phosphorescence like an animal’s.

Even with the trigger mostly depressed, Sylvie was too slow, hampered by calculations; protect Wales, endanger the women, or . . . Her voice howled furious protest, drove her finger down on the trigger. Her bullet went hopelessly wide. The sorcerer leaped the distance between Wales and the shore, slapped Wales with a careless hand. Wales spun away, blood spurting from his cheek, his shoulder, spinning into the water. He crawled out, coughing, draped himself over a tuft of grass, and passed out.

Crouching, the sorcerer flexed his hand, showed her an animal’s paw, a cat’s claw, ivory nails curved and wet with blood. “Now that he’s down, perhaps we can talk.”

Her second bullet missed him by millimeters; he rolled with an animal’s grace, rose, and threw sand into the air before him.

The world erupted into a scouring riot of sand devils stinging her flesh, stirring into her lungs, her eyes—she blinked furiously, let the voice chastise her into seeing the truth. It was an illusion, only an illusion.

And she didn’t give in to illusion.

She cleared her sight, found the sorcerer within arm’s distance. She threw herself backward, avoided the claws coming at her face, but his other hand, seemingly human, struck her gun. It crumbled beneath her grip, the metal gone friable, pattering into the sand.

Not an illusion this time.

She kicked back, got herself out of his reach, panting, reaching for a fist-sized stone, for a branch, for anything she could use against him.

He breathed hard, contorted, his entire shape changing, warping. Cloth ripped, that fancy suit giving at the seams. Going monster. Maybe she’d hit him, or maybe the spell was weakened by whatever he’d done to allow the women to be moved.

She surged to her feet. Grabbed Wales’s shoulder, tried to drag him to his feet. If she could get him to the van, get behind the wheel—

The sorcerer leaped between her and the van, more monster than man, bulked to twice his original size, mouth distended by teeth better suited to a saber-tooth, piebald fur of different lengths and textures poking through. He drooled, growled, blocked her path. There just wasn’t room on the narrow road, and Wales was deadweight in her grip, a reminder of how hard the sorcerer could hit.

He sucked in a breath that sounded like the final rale of a dying man, then slowly, painfully, returned to human form. He patted his hair, smoothing it into place, a tiny vanity.

“I don’t like the deal you offered,” he said. It started out distorted, as alien as a voice synthesizer, and ended the same smooth baritone he’d had before. His internals slower to recover from shape-shifting than his externals? Or was it vanity again, the sorcerer’s priority. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme, she supposed, but it helped cement in her mind the kind of man he was.

“I don’t like dealing with sorcerers,” she said. “You’re lucky it was as generous as it was.”

“Still, you’re open to dealing,” he said. “Which is more than you could say about the first Lilith. That woman was rabid in her focus.”

“Maybe she just didn’t like men who used power as a weapon to oppress innocents,” Sylvie said. Her voice was strung tight; nothing good ever came of being compared to Lilith. Much less being called the new Lilith. “I think you’ll find I have more than a few things in common with her. I don’t kowtow, I don’t play nice, and I have a bad attitude.”

“And you were created to kill the unkillable. Believe me, I know what you’re capable of. I’m depending on it.” He seemed wary and tense behind that ever-present smirk. He rolled his shoulders; his skin rolled with them, a blurring of his features, an unnatural distortion that turned her stomach. She’d seen werewolves shift; she’d seen the furies shift shape. They had been alien and strange, but they had their own beauty. This—whatever it was that roiled his skin—was nothing but ugliness. He managed to hold back the monster this time.

“Still, I believe we can find a way to agree,” he said. “You want the women freed? I want to be freed.”

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘freed’?”

“I want you to break a curse for me. I’m not unreasonable. Just doing the best I can to stay alive.” His teeth were too long, forcing his lip into a false pout. He shook his head, turned purely human again.

“I’d be more likely to spit on you,” she said. “I don’t care about your curse. I bet you deserve it.”

Wales groaned, drawing her attention. His long limbs flailed briefly.

“You all right there, Tex?”

“I’m facedown in a swamp,” he muttered. “You get the bad guy yet?”

“Working on it,” Sylvie said. Working on it with no gun, no nothing.

“Work faster.” He pushed himself up to a crouch; his face was swelling, and blood masked his jaw and mouth. Daylight didn’t erase the horror-movie look. She winced.

The sorcerer growled. “You will pay attention to me.”

“Only if you say something I want to hear,” Sylvie said. “Release the women, and I might be willing to take your case. You know. Maybe next year. Maybe not.”

He growled, fury twisting his handsome face into a gargoyle’s mask. “If you don’t help me, those women are ash. The curse you don’t care about will ensure that. Do I have your attention now? If you want to save them, you’ll have to save me first.”

The sorcerer had enough sense to finally dim his smile when she didn’t immediately shoot him down. Enough sense to try to hide his triumph when she said, “A curse,” in a bid for more information. She wasn’t going to work for him. But she needed to know what she was up against.

A few feet from her, Wales sat up, his expression full of furious focus, even while his eyes were glazing over. That blow the sorcerer had dealt him had been a hard one, enough to knock him out. Concussion, she diagnosed. She was just lucky he wasn’t puking his guts out. Instead, he was doing his best to follow along, doing his best to help her out. Wales was tougher than she’d given him credit for.

“Get on with it. Tell me about the curse. Tell me what it is.” Her teeth wanted to chatter; she felt cold to her bones. She wanted to blame it on Marco, but there was a lacy pattern of frost forming over the puddle that Wales was sitting in. And the blood on his lacerated cheek was fading, wiped away in careful, invisible strokes. Marco was otherwise occupied.

“It starts, as so many of these things do, with an accident. I killed the wrong man.”

“He tripped and fell on your spell?”

That wash of anger on his face again, and he hissed, “Don’t you presume to judge me, Lilith. If you had no blood on your hands, you wouldn’t be fit to be her successor.”

“But you’re the one who needs something from me. I get to judge,” she said. “Deal with it.”

“I killed a man with a powerful friend,” the sorcerer said. “He cursed me.”

“If he cursed you,” Wales said, “why are the women the ones getting hurt?” He was tracking better than Sylvie had thought, enough that he wasn’t going to let the sorcerer slip that one by.

“I am a shape-shifter,” the sorcerer declared. “I have the power to alter my shape, to take on the guise of a bear, a wolf, a great cat.”

Sylvie scoffed. “Liar. You’re no shape-shifter, and I’m not that new to this game. You’re a human sorcerer who stole the power by killing true shape-shifters. So tell me, which one had the powerful friend? Bear, wolf, cat?”

He ignored her. “The cowardly sorcerer refused to fight me face-to-face. Instead, he cursed me with the inability to control my form. I am become a monster.”

“Ugly, too,” Sylvie said. She grinned when his face went scarlet. If he needed her, she could make him sorry for it.

His lip drew up, and he took a deliberate step toward Wales. “I might require your aid, but his—” He held up his human hand in threat. Should have been less intimidating than the bloodstained claws, but Sylvie’s disintegrated gun argued that even a single touch could be deadly.

“Fine,” Sylvie said. “Cut to the chase. What do you want me to do? Find this sorcerer of yours and bring you his head?”

A hot light burned behind his eyes, a hunger she could feel. Wales hissed, a warning sound that she didn’t need. The sorcerer made her want to pump his skull so full of bullets that it could be used as a rattle.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, “but it would be enjoyable. All you need to do is . . . convince him to lift the curse. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how to convince him.” He gave her a long once-over, gaze traveling toes to crown, and leered.

She shuddered. He hadn’t. The disgust in her belly, the twitching of her trigger finger argued he had. She’d met a lot of bad guys, but this one was winning in the sheer skeeze factor.

Wales staggered upright, sagged, a sad scarecrow in unyielding daylight. “You’re using the women to deflect the curse. To keep your shape stable. Mostly stable.”

“I am,” he said. “You’re cleverer than I thought, little necromancer. But I could still rip out your throat before you muster a single defense. I’m refraining as a show of good faith.”

Sylvie said, “We get it. You’re bad. You’re scary. Tell me where to find this other sorcerer. What I have to do to break the curse.”

“He calls himself Tepé.”

“And he lives where?” Sylvie said. “I’m not leaving you loose in my city while I run your errands.”

“He’ll be here soon. He follows me. Always just out of my sight. Gloating. This spell you think is so cruel . . . is the only way I’ve found to weaken him.”

“Nice to know you hold your life so high that you’ll use innocents as a shield,” Sylvie said. “You’re not making me want to do you any favors.”

“Every time I change without intent, without control, it’s as if acid is poured beneath my skin. I burn. . . .”

“Not feeling sorry for you. Just so you know.”

He gritted his teeth; his jaw deformed on one side, thrust forward; his cheek twisted and sprouted whiskers before slipping back to GQ smoothness. “Make no mistake, Lilith. I am in control here. It’s a devil’s bargain I offer you. But you cannot afford to say no. These women will wither and die. Tepé’s curse is strong, and they are human. Help me. Save them. If you delay too long, they will die, and I’ll be forced to find replacements.

“Think of that, if nothing else. Me, loose in your city. Can you protect every woman who meets my needs? It’s an enormous city, Shadows. Do we have a deal?”

“How do I contact you?”

“You don’t. Break the curse, and I’ll vanish as I came. The women will wake and return home. Always assuming you were quick enough that they survive.”

“I know your rep,” Sylvie said. “Soul-devourer. You’ve left a trail of bodies.”

“You’ll just have to take it on trust,” he said. He slipped alongside the van, climbed inside.

Sylvie yanked Wales around. “Can you do anything right now? Can you help those women? Wake them? If so, do it!”

Wales shook his head, nearly tilted over, and Sylvie clutched his shirt in her fists as the soul-devourer drove away, his “harem” still intact. Swaying, Wales put a hand to his head, and said, “Can we get the hell out of here?”

“God, yes,” Sylvie muttered. She wanted away with a force that nearly sickened her. Away from the scene of her defeat. Away from the sorcerer’s unclean magic. Away from her agreement to aid him.

It wasn’t quite the rapid retreat Wales wanted. She made him sit first, studied his pupils—reactive, the same size, able to follow her fingertip—and declared him hardheaded.

“I’ve heard that before,” he drawled.

The blood was mostly gone, courtesy of Marco’s cleanup, and what was left, Wales mopped at with the edge of his sleeve. The gash on his cheek had coagulated; the one on his shoulder was glued shut with fabric. The two in between were reddened lines on the thin skin of his throat—a reminder of mercy. The sorcerer could have ripped Wales’s throat open, and from the way he fingered those small tears, Wales knew it.

SYLVIE LET WALES INTO THE SOUTH BEACH OFFICE, GESTURING HIM ahead, and already looking over her shoulder. Attempted murder tended to make her a little paranoid. Wales, of course, lived in a state of controlled paranoia.

She shut the door; he was peering out through the blinds, his mouth drawn tight. He looked tired, strung-out; he’d dozed fitfully most of the way back, jerking awake every so often, eyes frightened, hands flailing. It all argued that it hadn’t been sleep that held him last night but simple unconsciousness. Two days in her company, and she’d worked him into a frazzle.

Alex wouldn’t be happy.

“You know you got men scoping your shop? They’re not subtle.” His voice was pitched low, as if he feared being overheard.

Sylvie took a look, miniblinds spread around her fingers, and sighed. “There’s the ISI. Figures. They don’t hunt the bad-guy sorcerer, no. They come and camp on my doorstep. They’re cheats. Something bad happens, they like to try to copy off my test paper.”

“I didn’t sign up to deal with the government,” Wales said, still in that same half mumble. Trying to avoid a parabolic mike.

“Untwist your panties, Tex,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got Marco, remember? They get too close, you disappear.”

She let the gap in the blinds shut, kept the sign on the door to CLOSED, and headed upstairs, fighting the urge to stomp her feet like a child. She hadn’t missed the ISI and their spying one bit.

Her little dark voice said, You should have taken care of Odalys yourself.

They would have been back, no matter what, she argued with it.

Think they were watching when you were attacked? Watching and waiting to see if you’d take care of the assassin yourself? Watching while the assassin held your blameless neighbor hostage?

“Wales!” she snapped. “Stop gawking at them and start some coffee.”

“Not the boss of me,” he shot back. But she heard him drop the blinds with a snap.

Her upstairs office was a mess. Leftover paperwork from the previous case, still incomplete for more than just the time it would take to code things properly. If the ISI was on her ass again, it was more important than ever to keep her case files innocuous, cloak the magical in the mundane.

But these files were also waiting on Odalys, on Patrice, on justice to be done. Sylvie dumped the files into her drawer and rested her head on her hands. It was hard to start the hunt for this mysterious Tepé when she knew the one benefiting from her actions would be the soul-devourer.

She opened the safe, took out the newest backup gun, and sorted her feelings out by loading it.

There was a sudden burst of conversation below, the rattle of the door closing, then Alex wandered upstairs, sipping coffee from Etienne’s.

“Working from home?” Sylvie said. “I know you’re here a lot, but home’s the thing that has an actual bed in it.”

“Got a futon, not a bed,” Alex said. “Besides, practice what you preach, Syl. I was just driving by, and I saw your truck.”

“Just driving by?”

“Okay, so I bet myself one of Etienne’s beignets that you’d be in.” She held up her free hand, then deliberately brushed powdered sugar onto her jeans. “So Tierney seems kinda pissy today. And hurt. I told him I’d get the first-aid kit, but he sent me up here, instead.”

“ISI’s back,” Sylvie said. “He doesn’t like the government overmuch. Go home, Alex.”

“Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

“Phone, e-mail—”

“Oh, but face-to-face is more fun.” She draped her lanky self over the spare chair, kicked her flip-flops off, and hooked her feet in the rungs. “Are you going to ask?”

“Alex,” Sylvie said. “We met the soul-devourer. I’m not in the mood.”

Alex stiffened all over. “What happened? Is that how Tierney got hurt? What did he want?”

“He wants me to work for him,” Sylvie said. She filled Alex in; by the end of it, she was pacing the room, angry and sick all over again. “He’s holding the women as hostages. He said they get closer to death the longer I take. Wales agrees.”

“You can’t work for him,” Alex said, focusing in with her usual talent for rubbing salt in the wound. “He’s the bad guy.”

“I have to work for him. But I’ll make him choke on it before I’m done. For me to do that, I need to know who he is. Where he came from. What his weaknesses are.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “Okay, I can maybe help—” She pulled out her laptop, flipped it open, and said, “I did some preliminary research. I skipped the soul-devourer part. Tierney’s right. That’s a giant dead end. The necromantic community knows he exists but nothing else about him. Hell, turns out they weren’t even sure it was a man, just defaulted to it. So I went back to the simple facts. What you and Tierney got from the symbols: old-fashioned magic, Basque magic, a linkage to alchemy.”

“Alchemy? He disintegrated my gun with a touch.”

“Oh yeah,” Alex said, eyes lighting with wholly inappropriate enthusiasm. “Alchemy’s all about the transformation of one thing to another. Bet your gun didn’t just disintegrate; bet it became some other type of metal first—”

“Alex. He disintegrated my gun. Tell me you got something,” Sylvie said.

“Not something,” Alex said. “But something that might lead to something. A nineteenth-century man they called the Basque Alchemist. Eladio Azpiazu. Supposedly he had the power of a wolf, and he scared his neighbors so bad that rather than drive him out, the town picked up and moved.”

“Nineteenth century? Not our guy, Alex.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Alex said. “It’s like the Maudits. They seek out apprentices—”

“You say apprentice; I say slave,” Sylvie murmured, but she got the gist. “You think it’s a lineage. A pattern of teaching.”

“Yeah, and a strict one if this modern sorcerer is still using the same techniques as his ancestor. That’d be like me still using quill and ink. It works, but there are better methods now. Why should magic be any different?”

“Anything else?” Sylvie asked. “I’m greedy.”

“One ring-a-ding prize maybe,” Alex said. “I farmed out some of the research. I thought, if the town moved, that would leave a record. Or if the town just disappeared. I know a grad student at UM, a local history buff. She looked into it, confirmed that there was a town that disappeared, and this is the important part—one of the key reasons people left? A series of grisly murders where people were found with their hearts torn out. Sound like the soul-devourer? I’d say that our modern sorcerer was following the family line all the way down.”

“Alex, you’re amazing,” Sylvie said.

“So what’s my prize?”

“More research,” Sylvie said. “Look into his enemy. A sorcerer called Tepé. Tepé cursed him but good. An enmity that strong should draw notice.”

Alex sighed. “Good work makes more work. So damn true.”

Sylvie said, “I strongly doubt that’s his real name, anyway. Sounds more like a handle than a given name. Like . . .” She raised her head. “Like the Ghoul.”

Wales flipped her off as he joined them. He leaned against the doorjamb, and Sylvie waved him in. The landing was narrow, the stairs were steep, and Wales still didn’t look any too steady on his feet.

Alex moved to get out of her seat, and Wales shook his head. His earlier fear had given way to a sullen sort of irritation. He had come upstairs, Sylvie thought, to pick a fight. Give himself a reason to storm out of the office and the city.

Usually, when people wanted a fight, Sylvie was willing to oblige. Not today. She turned her back on Wales, took her seat again, tried for calm. “You going back to the hotel?” she asked.

“Unless you have something else you want me to do today. Boss,” he said.

“Better leave the necromancy be for a bit,” Sylvie said. Wished she hadn’t the minute the last word left her mouth.

“You think?” he snapped. “Want to tell me to not play in traffic, too? Or hey, how about not shooting up?”

“You look tired is all. Not in shape to watch your back.”

Wales shot her a grin that was all teeth, offense, and not a lot of humor. “Guess it’s a good thing I got Marco for that.”

In a hasty attempt to disrupt the argument ready to break out, Alex said, “I checked out Patrice on the way here. She was macking on some goth boy at a coffee shop.” She huffed under her breath, said, “You have to be really dedicated to work full goth gear before 9:00 a.m. Of course, later in the day it’s too hot for that much guyliner—”

“You did what?” Sylvie said.

Alex looked up from her amused memories and blinked. “Um.”

Sylvie took a deep breath, ready to shout, caught sight of Wales’s smirk, and let her breath out. When she did speak, it was far more moderately than her original intention. “So instead of working at home where it’s safe, you went out and chased a dead girl around.”

“I did work at home. Then I hit a dead end, decided to clear my mind, and since you got up in Patrice’s face yesterday—yes, Tierney tattled—”

Sylvie blinked again. When the hell had Alex had time to squeeze in a chat with Wales? But she should know better than to underestimate Alex’s ability to gather information.

“—so I figured you couldn’t follow her around, and she doesn’t know me, so, I sat outside her house and followed her to the coffee shop—”

“Where she hit on a goth boy, got it,” Sylvie said.

“Cute one, too, if you like that type. Long, lanky, the kind of bony shoulder blades that make me think of wings.” Alex’s gaze was resting on Wales’s clavicle, visible through the thin shirt.

Wales’s cheeks darkened steadily, but he said nothing, only hunched his shoulders and made himself small. At least embarrassment had eclipsed his anger.

“Great,” Sylvie said. “She’s got the new life, and now she’s slumming it.”

“Can’t be slumming it too bad,” Alex said. “Not if he’s buying five-dollar coffees and ten-dollar pastries. And they’re planning on clubbing tonight at Caballero, so there goes another chunk of change.”

Sylvie shook her head, disgusted. Patrice offended her on a very simple level. She’d stolen a new life and was doing nothing new with it, tracing the same self-indulgent lifestyle she’d had before.

You could still shoot her, the little dark voice suggested.

Rather than listen to it, Sylvie headed back downstairs.

The sunlight seeped in through the closed blinds, thin lines of brilliant gold that exposed every dust mote in the office and made her sanctuary into a prison of shadowy bars.

Sylvie yanked the blinds open, blinked in the glare, and sent a rude gesture in the direction of the ISI nursing their coffees at the crowded pastry shop across the street. They wanted to watch? Let them.

It was going to be another scorcher. Sylvie hoped Patrice’s goth boy melted and ruined her day. Hell with it, she hoped Patrice melted.

Likelihood was, the only one who’d be suffering from the heat was Sylvie. Odds were, she’d be out pounding the pavement for hours, looking for the black van that the sorcerer had used to take the women away. She envied the cops and their ability to just slap an APB or BOLO or whatever acronym floated their boat on a vehicle.

The idea made her thirsty just thinking on it. She raided the fridge, cracked a water bottle, took a healthy slug of cold—

The pain surprised her. It was sudden, all-encompassing, breathtaking. Like knives lodging in her throat, her stomach, her chest. She let out a strangled cry and found blood speckling her lips. She thrust the bottle away, though she knew it wasn’t to blame.

A spell. Finding its target.

No.

A curse.

Her throat itched, ached, and burned. She couldn’t breathe through the agony of it, found herself crumpling forward, losing all control of her body save the most important one.

She wouldn’t cough. Wouldn’t cry out. Whatever the spell was, it was tearing the hell out of her throat.

Her hands were wet, icy with spilled water.

She tried not to breathe. Not to move. Not to make it worse.

This wasn’t illusion. This would kill her whether she believed it was happening or not. Her unaccountable resistance to magic could only last so long. Blood blossomed hot, slippery in her throat.

Footsteps came down the stairs so fast they were nearly falling. Alex shrieked, high and distorted, Wales’s shouting back, all but incomprehensible, torn between fast words and the Texan drawl.

“Hold on, Sylvie,” he said. Or she thought he said.

Icy fingers threw her backward, pressed her down. She clawed up, felt only fog, malevolence.

“Don’t fight him,” Wales said. “He’s trying to help.”

Cold fog iced over her lips; something that tasted of rot, of cold, clotted blood. Marco, she thought, and was amazed that she still had energy to be squeamish.

Marco sealed her mouth with his, blew death and ice into her chest. She stopped breathing. No. She didn’t stop. He stopped her. Killed her. The deadly cold in her lungs spread outward. Her hands struck at nothing; the pain in her chest and belly fought back.

Her bones were ice, too cold even to shiver.

In the background, Alex sobbed.

Just when Sylvie thought she must be encased in ice, a new cold pressed into her belly, so frozen it burned. So cold, that if she’d been breathing, she’d have expected to see ice.

Her lungs ached; her vision dimmed, but she saw the impossible. A floating clump of red-smeared pins rising through the skin of her stomach. Passing through her flesh, held in Marco’s invisible fist.

She blacked out.

When she came to, the lips on hers were warm, breathing life, not death, and shaking with fear. “C’mon, Sylvie,” Alex whispered. “C’mon.”

Sylvie’s heart gave a giant lurch, stuttering, then pounding furiously, shaking her lungs into action. She coughed, felt pain, tasted copper, but nothing like before, and curled onto her side. Alex slumped beside her, rubbing her spine.

“Tierney sent the ghost after the witch,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “Said Marco’s gonna force-feed her the pins. God, Sylvie—”

“’S okay,” Sylvie breathed. It wasn’t.

Pins. That was ugly magic, a far cry from the illusions she’d been attacked with earlier. Hell, she preferred the gunman to this. And she didn’t know how it had been triggered. Line of sight? A poppet? A triggered spell attached to the bottle she’d so carelessly picked up?

She hadn’t expected Odalys to try something so messy and violent. Something inexplicable enough to rouse serious attention. Something so old-fashioned. Odalys was a modern witch.

For the first time in a long while, Sylvie felt in over her head. She was crazy to do what she did. To face off against the Magicus Mundi with a gun and nothing more. She was going to have to cave, have to crawl to Val and Zoe and get the defensive magics back on the shop and their homes.

“Don’t talk,” Alex said. “He’s pulling the truck around. We’re going to take you to the ER. The ghost got the pins out, but—”

“’S okay,” Sylvie whispered again. This time it was. She felt . . . all right. Like crap. Sore. Like her throat and lungs and stomach had all been sandblasted. Like she could brush forever and never be rid of the taste of Marco’s tongue moving between her teeth. But nowhere near the kind of pain she expected from shredded tissues.

“Help me up,” she said.

Alex shook her head, mulish. Still trembling. Sylvie reconsidered. Alex didn’t look like she could get herself off the floor, much less aid Sylvie.

Sylvie rolled forward, going from her side, tucking her knees, and ended up in a half crouch, half-kneeling position, her hands braced before her.

Alex squeaked in worry.

Sylvie hung her head for a second, let the blood rearrange itself in her body, then pressed upward. Yeah. She was going to be fine. She knew it because the little dark voice was snarling, ready to make someone pay. Her blood thrummed with rage.

Wales had acted fast enough, and she’d not panicked, and Marco, disgusting and deadly though his touch was, had been gentle. Alex looked up at her, her makeup smeared, and shaking hard enough for the both of them, and Sylvie thought that feeling okay wasn’t going to keep her from a hospital trip.

Wales came barreling back through the door, rocked back when he saw Sylvie on her feet. Mutely, he handed her a wax doll, the length of her palm, blurred with his sweaty agitation. The doll might be formless, but the braided strands of hair atop the waxen head were brown. Were hers. A silver shadow lingered in the poppet’s chest; she nudged it out—a final pin pulling free—and felt an answering twinge in her body.

“I’ll melt it down for you,” Wales said.

She spat out a last mouthful of blood, a scarlet splotch on the white and black linoleum, and said, “Thanks.” She pinched the tiny braid off the doll, rolled it between her fingers, and finally stuck it in her pocket. Just to be safe.

“Truck’s running,” Wales said.

“The witch?”

“Dead,” he said. “The ISI’s having a conniption fit over it. Apparently, she was seated in the café next to them. A nice little abuela with a bagful of knitting.”

“Hospital now, talk later,” Alex said.

Wales nodded, bobbleheaded, gave Sylvie another wild-eyed glance, and dragged them both into the cab of the truck.

Sylvie resigned her afternoon to hospital paperwork and a careful explanation. A witch cursed me and transported pins into my stomach wasn’t going to go over well with the docs.

Alex shivered against her in the close confines of the truck cab, and Wales put his foot down on the gas. Sylvie, sandwiched between them, closed her eyes, the better not to see Wales’s truly frightening driving skills, and to focus. Now that the first flush of triumph had slowed, she felt nearly as freaked-out as Alex looked.

She was fine. She shouldn’t be.