Lies & Omens

1 Fall Apart

SYLVIE HAD A WHOLE LIST OF THINGS SHE DISLIKED—MISOGYNIST sorcerers, incompetent drivers, government agents who raided her office illegally, trashed her security, and absconded with her files, lovers who were too busy to call, and cops who weren’t—too many things to really enumerate or rank, but frantic phone calls from her clients were close to the top.

She liked frantic calls even less when things were theoretically under control. Her client, Lupe Fernandez, was supposed to be tucked up safe and sound at her parents’ home.

Lupe’s call had been brief, mostly unintelligible. It had been three minutes of sobbing, shouting, a vibration of mortal terror. When the call had disconnected, mid panicked babble, Sylvie knew something had gone wrong. Knew she hadn’t done her job right.

That was the kind of thought that ruined her morning, sent her scrabbling out of her bed, grabbing at clothes, her gun, her keys, and heading for her truck at a dead run. Not the way she preferred to begin her days. Ideally, they’d start with waking before the alarm went off, having time for a leisurely cup of coffee, a morning jog, or swim if the day was too hot, then a late breakfast at her office, while Alex caught her up on potential clients.

If it were a really good day, when she woke, Demalion would be beside her, lashes dark on his face, the glint of blond stubble in slanting sunlight, sleeping as determinedly as a cat. If it were a good day, she’d get to lean over and nudge him awake, watch his pupils flare and fade as he blinked into morning light.

It hadn’t been a good day for months.

Sylvie laid on the horn, cursed rush-hour traffic, and stomped on the gas, jerking her truck around a multitasking driver who had one hand full of coffee cup, the other full of cell phone, and was failing to steer with his knees.

Her throat was tight, worried about Lupe. The woman had been through so much already. Kidnapped by Azpiazu the soul devourer, used as a magical conduit, finally freed through Sylvie’s actions… only to find she wasn’t as free as everyone thought.

Azpiazu had slapped a shape-shifting spell on his victims as part of his attempt to control his own unmanageable shifting. When Sylvie had killed him and broken the spell that linked him to his victims, she’d thought it was over. Had seen the women home with the sense of a job well-done.

Then Lupe had called her the first full moon after, in total hysterics; the moon rose, and Lupe shifted into a werewolf in her screened-in patio. Reason enough for hysterics, but it had been far worse than that. Lupe hadn’t been alone. Her girlfriend, Jenny, had been curled next to her on the patio swing. Jenny had needed 134 stitches in her face, chest, shoulder, and arm, lost three fingers on her right hand, and gained a cracked skull. She’d nearly bled out before Lupe woke the next morning and called 911.

Unsurprisingly, the two broke up. Jenny didn’t really remember what had happened; the concussion and blood loss saw to that, but at the same time, Lupe said, Jenny was afraid of her.

Lupe was afraid of herself.

Sylvie had taken her out to Tatya and Marisol in the Everglades, two women, two werewolves, who she thought might be willing to help deal with the change. They had been. Again, Sylvie had thought, problem solved. Or at least shelved.

Sunlight lancing through her windshield from the car before her made her squint and wince, and realize she’d torn out of her apartment without grabbing her sunglasses. A small pain, though, compared to what Lupe was going through.

Finding out she was a werewolf was bad and freaky enough—curse-inflicted lycanthropy was insanely rare—but spending the full moon with Tatya and Marisol had proved that Lupe’s problems were larger than that. With Tatya and Marisol at her side, Lupe had been braced to deal with the wolf-change, assured that no one would be hurt this time.

The problem was that Lupe didn’t shift into a wolf. She changed under the moon, wasn’t left a human between two monsters, but she didn’t turn into a wolf either. For her second full moon, Lupe turned into a jaguar, all fury and rage at being caught between the two werewolves. No one came out of that unscathed.

Lupe didn’t heal like Tatya and Marisol did, either; she was left with bloody bite marks that bled and scabbed for weeks. She bore the wounds without complaint, saying Jenny had had it worse.

Sylvie had started looking into witches, hoping to find someone who could break the curse. It was a slow, too-slow, process, trying to find a witch with the right ratio of power to trustworthiness, and they’d run out of time. It didn’t help that three months ago, the ISI had helped themselves to Sylvie’s files. The ISI was supposed to deal with the intersection of the Magicus Mundi and the real world, but they had chosen to use the information gleaned from Sylvie’s files to run the few remaining local witches Sylvie could work with out of town. Business as usual with them. They would rather inconvenience Sylvie than do anything productive.

So for the third moon, last night’s moon, Lupe had made her own arrangements. She’d gone to her parents’ home while they were on a buying trip in New York City and locked herself in a zoo-quality cage that she’d set up in the home gym. Obviously, something had gone wrong. Again. Lupe couldn’t seem to catch a break.

Sylvie changed lanes, got off the highway, and hoped Lupe hadn’t killed someone. If that happened, she didn’t know what she’d do.

Put a bullet in her brain, her little dark voice suggested. You kill monsters.

It was true. If she had been coming into the case from the outside, she would have shot Lupe already and fed her bones to the sea. But Lupe was hers. Sylvie had saved her from the sorcerer, and she was responsible for her well-being.

She was forced to a stop outside the gated community’s security station and bit back her impatience. She’d forgotten Lupe’s family had money and the paranoia to go with it. The guard leaned out of his station, eyed her beat-up truck, eyed her, said nothing. “Sylvie Lightner,” she said. “I’m here to see the Fernandezes.”

“Yeah, all right. They got back this morning.”

He waved her on; the security mostly for show. He hadn’t even asked to see her ID. But he’d answered at least part of her question. What had gone wrong? Well, for one thing, Lupe’s parents had come home early.

Sylvie felt her lips thin, press tight. She hit the gas, let her urgency spill out with that last rush to get to the house.

She pulled into the long, curving, palm-shaded driveway, and cut the engine. The stucco facade, golden in the morning sunlight, seemed peaceful, at odds with the shrieking phone call.

The driveway was paved brick and stone, money spent on decoration because it could be, and led her to a double front door with a brass knocker kept well polished. It was cold in her hands despite the growing heat of the morning.

The door opened a bare person width to a middle-aged woman Sylvie didn’t know and presumed was Mrs. Fernandez. Behind her, the house was dim and dark. Quiet.

“I’m Sylvie—”

“It’s in back,” she said as she opened the door. She didn’t look at Sylvie.

“It?” Sylvie didn’t wait for an answer. The woman’s expression told her enough. Fear and distaste and horror all admixed.

Lupe. Her daughter. It.

Sylvie headed for the back of the house, for the exercise room Lupe had mentioned. “I’ll set up there. At least then, if I get loose, I won’t shred the furniture.” Another woman stood in front of the gym door; this woman was younger, her face miserable with fear as she blocked the entrance.

Sylvie said, “I need to go in.”

The woman—not sister, Lupe didn’t have a sister, but maybe sister-in-law?—grabbed at Sylvie’s arm. “She tried to kill him. We had to do it.”

Sylvie shoved past, frightened now for Lupe, expecting to find her dead. It wasn’t that bad. Close, but not that bad. Lupe huddled in the base of the cage, arms wrapped tight around herself, face hidden in her knees. Two men stood outside the cage, their backs to Sylvie but their stance unmistakable. Guns in their hands, aimed at the cage. Blood smell hung in the air, sharp and sweet and strong in the sterile confines of the home gym.

“Hey,” Sylvie said. “Put ’em away. I got this.”

“It tried to kill him,” the younger one said. Lupe’s brother. Sylvie tried to remember his name. Alex, thorough as always, had put together one of her overkill files on Lupe and her family. The brother’s name was in it. Miguel?

“Manuel,” Sylvie said. “Put it away. She’s your sister.”

“It’s an abomination,” Lupe’s father—Alberto—said. “We should kill it.” His words were brutal, his face cold, but his hands wavered.

“Put it away and get out,” Sylvie said, losing patience. Lupe still hadn’t looked up.

“You’ll get rid of it?” Alberto demanded.

“I’ll take care of her,” Sylvie said.

He huffed, jerked his head at his son, and they ceded the ground. Sylvie waited for the adrenaline rushing her system to fade, but it, wiser than she, refused to go.

They could change their minds; they could come back at any moment, worked up all over again, guns firing. Sylvie and Lupe weren’t out yet. Relief was premature.

THE HEAVY PADLOCK ON THE CAGE WAS SNAPPED TIGHT, LOCKING Lupe behind bars, a beaten prisoner in her own family home. “Lupe. You have the key?” Sylvie tried to keep her voice steady, but blood smeared the pale tiles surrounding Lupe, a jumbled finger painting in shades of crimson and rust. The woman was injured, maybe seriously. Not dead. Sylvie could see the fine tremors running the angles of her bent elbows and knees, the shaky bellows of her rib cage.

“Lupe. Answer me!”

“… they took it,” Lupe breathed. “Put me back in and took it away.”

Back in. She’d gotten out. Not good.

“Oh, fuck this,” Sylvie said. She looked around, focused on the weight bench and free weights. That would do. She seized up a twenty-five-pound weight, swung it around, and brought it crashing against the padlock. The noise made Lupe scream, and it was echoed in the rest of the house. Sylvie dropped the weight on the broken lock, turned to greet Manuel with her gun raised. “Out!”

He held his hands up, gun pointing toward the ceiling, and backed out. “Your life,” he said. “Your risk.”

Sylvie followed him to the door, locked it behind him, dragged the weight bench in front of it, metal legs screeching over the tile.

“Lupe,” she said. “Come on, what happened?”

“I changed,” Lupe said. Her voice was a husk, ruined and wet. “Sylvie, I can’t live like this.”

“It’s okay—”

“It’s not!” Lupe jerked to her feet, faster than she should have been able to after trying to fold herself into origami. She was in Sylvie’s face almost before Sylvie could blink. Sylvie stiff-armed her in the chest, knocked her back.

“Calm down.”

“Why should I?” Lupe shouted.

Sylvie got her first good look at the woman since she’d entered the room and found herself in reluctant agreement. Why should Lupe calm down when things were so completely, visibly, wrong?

When Lupe had turned wolf that first time, she hadn’t come back unscathed. Her teeth had stayed sharp-edged behind soft lips. When she’d become a jaguar, the shift back to human left her with a swath of spotted skin across her shoulders and back. Whatever she’d shifted into last night had left its own startling and far-too-noticeable mark: Lupe’s irises looked like hammered brass, and her pupils were black slits. They should have looked like special-effects lenses, easy to explain. They didn’t.

Lupe crossed her arms, long, tanned limbs crossing darkly over her white tank top, her white-linen pants. Blood spread scarlet near her rib cage. The shirt was smoked at the center of the bloodstain. A bullet crease. Close range.

Sylvie stepped closer, peeled the shirt up. Lupe winced. Superficial but bloody. Sylvie grabbed a towel from the weight bench, pressed it against the wound. It came away mostly dry. Lupe had bled hard, but she wasn’t going to bleed out. She could wait for first aid. Sylvie threw the towel across the room, a drift of white in a mostly white room. Lupe’s blood was the brightest thing in it.

“They shot you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Lupe said. “The cage didn’t hold me. I almost killed him. Olivia came last night, waiting to welcome them all home. She brought my nephew, Sylvie. Two years old. She thought they were alone in the house, and I … I was loose.”

“How’d you manage that, anyway?” Sylvie asked. The cage was first-rate. The bars were solid steel, none of them more than four inches from each other, closed at bottom and top, and, until Sylvie had smashed the lock, secure.

Lupe blinked dark gold eyes, and Sylvie understood what they reminded her of just as Lupe said, “I turned into a python. A big one. I almost crushed his rib cage. Two years old, and his aunt tried to make him a meal. I knew better, even as I closed my coils, but I couldn’t stop.”

Sylvie swore. It was all wrong. All unexpected. Werewolf was bad, were-jaguar was worse—but Lupe had worn those shapes before while held by Azpiazu. She’d worn bear also. Sylvie had expected that to be the third shift, something big but containable. Not this. Not a reptile who shared nothing with humankind.

Lupe swayed closer; Sylvie smelled sweat, blood, and a musty underlay of old snakeskin. Her stomach turned uneasily.

Careful, her little dark voice warned. She’s dangerous.

Dangerous enough to maul a woman, to take on two wolves, to try to smother and eat a child. A calculating brain with animal instinct.

“It’s the curse, isn’t it,” Lupe said. “The curse that Azpiazu suffered. Now it’s on me.”

Sylvie thought of a slew of platitudes but chose not to lie. “Looks like.”

Lupe’s legs gave out; she dropped to the floor as fluidly as if she had gone serpentine again. “Why me?”

The question wasn’t an accusation, but it felt like one. The other women who’d survived being Azpiazu’s prisoners—Maria, Rita, Anamaria, Elena—had come out of it untouched except for nightmare memories and scarred foreheads where the binding sigils had been.

The binding sigil had held them prisoner to Azpiazu’s will. Sylvie and her cohorts had disrupted the sigils on the other four, magically or physically. She remembered gouging at Rita in bear form, her marked forehead the only part of her still human. Sylvie had slashed the sigil with a sharp stone and her nails.

But Lupe, during the final battle, had been wounded and retreated beneath a bush. Her sigil had never been disrupted. It hadn’t mattered. The spell had broken when Azpiazu died. It should have been a nonissue.

“We went back,” Sylvie said, half in realization, half in explanation. “We dispersed the last traces of Azpiazu from the site to make sure he couldn’t come back as a vengeful ghost. You still had the sigil whole on your skin. It acted like a beacon for those traces.”

Lupe’s skin was unmarked now. Her forehead where the sigil had been was as smooth as marble. The other women bore scars. Sylvie imagined the sigil groaning beneath the sudden weight of the curse and sinking through skin and bone, making itself at home somewhere in Lupe’s body like a migrating bullet.

“So you did this to me?”

Excuses leaped to Sylvie’s lips: She hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have happened. Azpiazu had started it. It was Tepeyollotl’s curse. “Yes.”

“What are you going to do to fix it?” Lupe said. “I’ve lost my girlfriend, I’ve fucked up my classes, and my parents want me dead. I mean, they haven’t been happy with me since I hooked up with Jenny, but … they really want me dead, Sylvie.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I noticed.”

Lupe’s face crumpled as if she’d hoped Sylvie would protest, would tell her pretty lies about her parents just being scared, bullet crease aside. She scrubbed at her eyes, but the snake taint in them seemed to prevent tears from forming.

“We’ll fix it,” Sylvie said. “We’ll find a witch who’ll figure out a way—”

“That’s what you tried last month,” Lupe said. “I’m still fucked. And it’s getting worse.”

“Witches are a little scarce on the ground right now,” Sylvie admitted. The witches with any real power had been leaving Miami in waves, fleeing Sylvie’s gun, fleeing the ISI, fleeing the new god that was making Miami her home. The new god that Sylvie had helped create. Erinya had been a demigodling, a servant to the god of Justice—dangerous, but containable—until Sylvie had used Erinya to defeat the soul devourer’s grab at godhood. Erinya got the shiny prize instead, becoming a full god, independent and unstoppable. Worst of all, instead of retreating from the real world in proper godly protocol, she insisted on sticking around.

Gods in the real world were always a disaster waiting to happen. They were pure power, and like a human shedding skin cells, shedding breath, gods shed scraps of power wherever they lingered. Witches could use that power, collect it for their own, but it was a risky habit. A god’s power was more likely to burn out a witch’s ability entirely than it was to recharge it.

Once Erinya had started making her presence felt, Sylvie’s favorite go-to witch, Val Cassavetes, had disappeared somewhere in Italy, and taken Sylvie’s witchy sister, Zoe, with her. She couldn’t even rely on family.

The witches who were left? Scavengers who hoped to grow fat on the god’s shed leavings. Untalented, untutored. Untrustworthy. Too small to be of interest to the ISI or too skilled at going to ground. The kind of witch who’d be just as glad to kill Lupe and use her bones for spell ingredients.

“Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “We’ll beat this. I’ll broaden the search. I’ll find a way to break this curse.” The words felt empty in her mouth, fragments of faint hope. She wasn’t a spell-breaker. Point her in the direction of the spellcaster, and she’d take him or her out of the picture, break the curse through brute force. But Azpiazu was three months dead, and the god who’d laid the original curse was a powerless shell who’d retreated to a realm Sylvie couldn’t reach.

Lupe grimaced, all pointed teeth and animal distress, and said, “You’d better hurry. I’m running out of normal.” As if to prove her point, she went from her crouch to a leap that took her to the top of the cage, then to the high window and through it. She left a bloody smear on the sill as her wound broke open again with the exertion.

Sylvie, thinking of the armed men outside the weight room, thought Lupe had the right idea, and clambered awkwardly, humanly, after her.

WITH NO PLACE ELSE COMING TO MIND, SYLVIE DROVE LUPE AND herself to the Shadows Inquiries office, ushering Lupe in ahead of her. Lupe’s bare feet were soundless on the dusty terrazzo floor, and Alex, wielding a broom with determination, grimaced as she splashed sawdust over Lupe’s feet.

“Crap. Sorry, Lupe,” Alex said.

Lupe raised her head; Alex sucked in a breath and retreated to the sanctuary of her desk. The lanky blonde looked uncharacteristically flustered, but Sylvie understood. There was something particularly horrifying about watching Lupe grow less human each month.

“There are some spare clothes upstairs,” Sylvie said, disrupting the awkward moment.

Lupe headed for the stairs and came face-to-face with the workman coming out from beneath them. He dropped his toolbox, and Lupe turned back to Sylvie, fury and humiliation on every distorted line of her face. Her throat mottled darkly with passing spots. “Fix this, Shadows.”

The carpenter, kneeling over his spilled tools, crossed himself as Lupe stomped upstairs. Sylvie said, “How’s the safe room coming, Emmanuel? We’re going to need it a little sooner than I thought.”

“What’s wrong with her?” he said. His dark eyes jittered over hers; then he looked up the stairs as if his gaze could drag Lupe back down and pin her in place until he understood the inexplicable.

“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Sylvie said. She kept her tone friendly but didn’t bother with an excuse. She was tired of helping the world blind itself to the Magicus Mundi. Let him worry and wonder.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m taking lunch. I’ll have the room finished by this evening. Just need to finish up the ventilation system. Can’t have you suffocating in there.”

“Would defeat the purpose of a safe room,” she agreed, and waved him off.

He stopped at Alex’s desk, flashed a smile, and offered to buy her lunch. Alex turned him down but sent him away with a smile. Sylvie shook her head and tuned out the flirty conversation.

She peered into the narrow corridor that Emmanuel had excavated beneath the stairwell. She hated that they needed the room at all, but Alex had been agitating for one for months. After the ISI had tear-gas-bombed the office, Sylvie decided Alex was right.

Ideally, it would be a magical safe room as well, a place to store dangerous talismans or to hide from magical attackers, but that would require a trustworthy witch to build the proper shields.

A shift in the air, the scent of blood and antiseptic, and she turned to find Lupe at her side, peering over her shoulder. Her lips were pulled tight over her teeth, outlining the jut of her canines. “That for me?”

“If it comes to that.”

“Guess it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.” Lupe crossed her arms tight over Sylvie’s borrowed sweatshirt. She shifted foot to foot. “You sure it’ll hold me?”

“Long as you don’t turn into a swarm of mosquitoes,” Sylvie said.

Lupe grinned without amusement. “Right now, I’m not ruling it out.”

Sylvie shot Alex a help glance. She was out of anything even remotely approaching comfort. Alex slid out from behind her desk, put a careful hand on Lupe’s sleeve, and said, “You want to get in on our lunch order? I mean, I don’t know much about shape-shifting, but it seems like hungry work.”

Lupe followed Alex’s lead docilely enough, even as she protested that she was too stressed to think about food. Sylvie took the opportunity to duck up to her office.

She left the door open, keeping an ear out for Lupe and Alex, and let her shoulders slump. She didn’t like Lupe’s changes. The curse was bad enough, but she really didn’t like the level of violence that went with the changes. She needed a witch, and she needed one now.

Even if a witch couldn’t break the curse, maybe one could ameliorate the worst effects.

Sylvie ran through her usual contacts in her mind, trying to figure out who was speaking to her this month, who was too busy to talk, and finally just admitted the truth to herself. There was only one person she was going to call.

She pushed back her rolling chair, propped her sneakered feet against the scarred wood desk, and dialed.

“Sylvie,” Demalion said. Picked up on the first ring. And didn’t that make her skin warm embarrassingly even though she knew the quickness was dictated more by proximity than desire. She’d caught him at a good time.

“Got a moment?”

“You’ve got trouble?”

“When don’t I?” Despite the truth in that, she felt her voice relaxing. It had been three months since he’d taken his new body back to Chicago, three months that should have stretched the relationship between them to the breaking point. Instead, it had given them something they’d never known they had needed. Distance and the time to talk.

“Truth,” he said. “I think you wouldn’t know what to do with a vacation if you had one.”

“You could come down early and find out,” she said.

His voice roughed itself into a huff of not-quite-amusement. “Would if I could.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “I know that tone. You’re not coming next week.” Disappointment sat sourly in her stomach. Time to talk was all well and good, but she missed being able to touch him. His resurrection from the dead and his departure had happened so close together that some nights she woke sweating, thinking he was only a voice on the other end of her line. A ghost she couldn’t let go.

It had been difficult enough to let him go when he was determined to repay a dead man for giving Demalion back his life, when he had gone back to Chicago to fix what was broken in Wright’s life. It hadn’t taken too long for Wright’s wife to smell a rat, to come to the correct but improbable answer that the man wandering around in her husband’s body was no longer her husband. Once she figured it out, she took her son and the money Demalion offered and fled the city. Sylvie had hoped Demalion would return at that point. Instead, he’d rejoined the ISI under Adam Wright’s name. That had been a harder pill to swallow. No debt owing there, just ambition and an ideology Sylvie didn’t share.

Still, they were making it work.

She pushed away from the desk, spun to stare at her filing cabinets, assessing. Even without Lupe’s case, she had too many small irons in the fire to go to him.

Before he could make apologies, she said, “Hey, you heard anything about memory modification?”

“Magical?”

“Would I ask otherwise?”

Demalion hesitated, thinking about it. “Individual or big picture? Are we talking Chicago?”

“That and others.”

“No,” Demalion said. “You know, it’s weird, now that you mention it. I just sort of accepted it. People don’t like to look beyond the ordinary.”

“This is true,” Sylvie said. “To my everlasting chagrin. You know how many of my clients wait until things are holy-fuck bad instead of coming in at first trouble?”

“You and the doctors. You really think there’s something there? Something you want me to look into?”

“If you’ve got time.”

“That’s the problem,” Demalion said. “Yvette is running us all kinds of ragged. Trying to get everything in place to impress whoever it is who funds us. Apparently, there was some type of … incident.”

She could hear the air quotes through the phone, and said, “Let me guess. Someone served the big boss shrimp, and he’s allergic?”

“Hell if I know,” Demalion said. “Seriously, Syl. She’s got things locked down tight. It’s all need-to-know, and I’m a new hire as far as Yvette’s concerned. Her inner circle is so busy that none of us low-levels have even laid eyes on them for days. But it’s all trickling down.”

“Things like that do,” Sylvie said.

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a day off. God, I don’t know when I’ll even catch up on my sleep.” If it hadn’t been for his nearly tangible frustration, she might have shared hers.

“You have any idea what’s going on?”

“Big picture, yeah,” Demalion said on a sigh. “Political infighting. Yvette, Riordan, and Graves are all duking it out to be the new head of the ISI. They’re all hell-bent on impressing the money man with their dedication and efficiency.”

Sylvie grimaced. She knew Riordan. Wouldn’t have liked him even if he hadn’t been the one who had sent a SWAT team armed with tear gas into her office to collect her. He was too prone to attacking the little guys and leaving the big threats to sort themselves out.

“What happened to the old head?”

“Gods in Chicago,” Demalion said. “They found a charred pelvis and skull in his office. Typed it for DNA. He’s toast. It just took a while for the paperwork to go through.”

“So Riordan’s down here, posturing at me. Yvette’s making your life difficult. What’s Graves doing?”

“Nothing good, I bet. Man’s a bastard. I worked for him for two months when I first came out here. Bad temper. Bad attitude. Distrustful.”

“Sounds like typical ISI to me.”

“Syl—”

“All right, all right. No job bashing.”

“Graves hightailed it down to Texas after Yvette stole the Chicago office out from under him. He’s pissed. Been making our lives hard by accusing this office of all sorts of things. Magical misconduct, mostly. He’s heard rumors that Yvette is a witch.”

“Is she?”

“Yeah,” Demalion said. “Makes sense if you think about it. Who better to deal with the Magicus Mundi than someone who can step in and out of it.”

“I do all right,” Sylvie said.

“Yeah, don’t try to pretend you’re ordinary.”

“So Graves doesn’t like witches.”

“Witches, psychics, half-breed monsters.”

“Not a fan of yours, then,” Sylvie said. It was more than just a comment; it was an invitation to confession. There were some things they’d talked about endlessly. Demalion’s difficulty in adjusting to his new body. Demalion’s relief when Wright’s wife figured out that the man in her apartment might look like her husband but wasn’t, and left him. Demalion’s careful plan to rejoin the ISI without tipping them off that he had been with them before. He wanted to work for them, not be studied by them.

The one topic made conspicuous by its absence was Demalion’s clairvoyance. He’d been born with it, a genetic gift from his inhuman mother, and he’d died with it. Sylvie wanted to know if he’d managed to reshape Wright’s body to bring it with him, and he wasn’t talking.

Lupe’s voice rose sharply downstairs, but after a reactive jerk to her feet, Sylvie diagnosed the sound as brittle laughter, not a threat.

“Watch your back,” Sylvie said. “Political infighting can get ugly and violent fast.”

“I think Graves is more focused on Yvette than me. She’s his target. Everything he hates in one tidy package. A high-ranking woman, a rival, and a witch.”

“Graves sounds like a peach.”

Demalion said, “Hey, Sylvie—”

“Yeah?” The tentative sound to his voice made her wary, made her tense up as his pitch went tighter, higher, noticeable only because she’d gotten to know this new form of his voice so well.

“I don’t know that it matters, but Yvette and I—”

Sylvie went cold, flushed hot, read that little pause too clearly. “What, you hooked up with your boss? I guess she’s convenient.”

“No!” Demalion said. “Not currently. Then. Years ago. Before she was up in the ranks. Before you. Way before you. When I was a different man. I just thought it was something you should know.”

Sylvie sighed. Just what she needed. An irrational reason to add to the rational reason she already had for disliking the woman: a government agent who was keeping her lover from visiting her. “Some things you should keep to yourself. Does she know? You said she’s a witch. Will she recognize you?”

“She looks at me funny every now and then.”

“Just great,” Sylvie said. “Hope you had an amicable breakup, or you’ll be on the damn dissection table before you know it.”

“She wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t she? It would be a great way to get Graves off her back. To show him that she wasn’t a crazy Magicus Mundi wannabe.”

“You’re ridiculously cynical—”

“You’re ridiculously trusting for a government suit.”

An argument hummed along the wires between them, ready to break out, and Sylvie wrenched them to a new topic. “I called because I need some info,” she said.

“Anything.”

And that right there was why he kept her on her toes. How he could go from defending the ISI to implicitly agreeing to give her information out of their files if she asked… Sylvie thought the inner workings of Demalion’s mind might always be a mystery to her. Either he was the king of compartmentalization, or he judged and scaled every moment and every request.

Or, of course, he still had his psychic abilities, and knew what she was going to ask, knew it wouldn’t tax his relationship with the ISI.

She waited, let the space stretch between them. But Demalion was too cagey to be caught out that easily. “Should I be worried that you’re taking a long time to ask? Trying to think of the perfect way to phrase it?”

“You seen your mother recently?”

“Why do you ask?” The hesitation in his voice was enough to tell her that psychic or not, he hadn’t foreseen that question.

“It’s just a question. One with an easy answer, I thought.” She spun her desk chair ’round. Now he had her doing it, overthinking every word.

Downstairs, the front door opened and closed, Alex heading out on a food run. Lupe’s footsteps were soft on the terrazzo, but Sylvie, listening to Demalion’s breath in her ear, could hear when Lupe’s pacing faltered, when she sank onto the couch with creak of leather and the soft gasps of someone fighting tears.

“Sylvie—”

Sylvie lost interest in the game. “I was hoping she could find me a reliable witch. One with a healthy slug of power and a good attitude. One who will make house calls. I’ve got a client with one hell of a nasty curse.”

“I’ll give her a call, but don’t count on anything. She’s—”

“Still holding a grudge against me?” It was fair enough. Sylvie had gotten Demalion killed, bad enough for any mother. When that mother was the Sphinx and had spent a thousand years gestating the only child she’d have? Sylvie counted herself lucky Anna Demalion hadn’t slaughtered her.

“And me,” Demalion said. “I asked her to do something she didn’t want to do. She’s been ignoring my calls ever since. I don’t think a human in trouble is going to get her to break her silence.”

“Well, fuck,” Sylvie said. “What about the ISI? You keep records, right? Of known witches in the country?”

“Mostly the ones who leave a trail of dead behind them,” Demalion reminded her. “I could bring Yvette in on it if it’s urgent. She’s pretty damn skilled at what she does.”

Sylvie choked back her gut reaction, a profane and profound negative. She thought about it, turned the idea around from different angles, and decided her gut instinct was absolutely right. “No. Absolutely not.”

“She can probably help—”

“Michael, no. It’s not a matter of ability,” Sylvie said. “I think you’d see that. For one thing, my client can’t afford ISI scrutiny right now. They’d lock her up and worry about the cure later.”

“She’s dangerous, then?” Demalion asked. “Sylvie. You take on some crap clients.”

“Regardless,” she said. “No on Yvette. Besides which, if you don’t want her to associate your new life as Adam Wright with Demalion? Don’t point out that we’re on good enough terms to help each other. Good way to blow your new and secret identity right out of the water.”

“She might know—”

“And you want to confirm it? You trust her that much?” Sylvie heard the ugly edge in her voice and winced. It wasn’t about jealousy. It was about the basics. Yvette Collier had two strikes against her. She was a government agent, and she was a witch. Both of those made her someone to distrust.

“Syl, the ISI is not your enemy.”

“Did you forget they tear-gassed me and tried to make me vanish?”

Demalion said, “If they wanted you gone, they’d have done a better job.”

“Not your best rebuttal ever, just so you know,” she said. “They’ve been keeping a careful distance, I’ll admit it, but it’s not because they want to make nice. They’re scared of me. Every time they get close to me, their agents end up dead or damaged. That caution won’t hold forever. “

“You’re paranoid.”

“You’re drinking the Kool-Aid. You want to believe they’re the good guys, and I admit, their goals sound good. Study, research, integration of the Magicus Mundi with the human world … but what government group ever sticks that close to its charter?”

“At least they have one,” Demalion said. “Your charter is all over the place. You’ve got the luxury of taking things on a case-by-case basis. We’re the government. We don’t.”

“Fine,” Sylvie said. Her cell phone creaked in her hand, plastic protesting her grip. “Just do me a favor. I bet they’ve got files on me—”

“You know we do. The new Lilith. Of course, we do. Not that they say much. We don’t know what the new Lilith is.…

“Don’t look to me for answers,” Sylvie said, irritated at his fishing. “But I bet the ISI recommendations aren’t to wait until they figure me out. ISI’s not much for live and let live. You want to believe in them, fine. Just realize that, sooner or later, you’re going to have to pick a side. Them or me.”

She disconnected with an angry stab of the END button, hit it so decisively that the phone not only truncated the call but shut itself down. Sylvie let out her breath in a shaky gust.

The new Lilith.

She’d been letting it slide, letting the words be nothing but another soubriquet people slapped on her. Loud-mouthed bitch. Shadows. L’enfant de meurtrier. The new Lilith.

Hiding from reality doesn’t change it, her little dark voice purred.

All right then, she thought. One goal, two reasons. Find a witch who was either trustworthy or clued in enough to the currents of the Mundi to make the risk worthwhile. Use the witch to cure or calm Lupe’s problem. Then use the witch to find out if being the new Lilith meant anything beyond the general resistance to magic and a potentially increased life span. Do all of it without letting the ISI spy on her business.

She grimaced and tossed her cell phone onto her desk, where it landed with a clatter. Finding a witch was going to take time.

We have time, the voice in her head suggested.

She might have time. More time than Sylvie could imagine if her fears were accurate.

Immortality loomed before her like a void, endless, pointless, terrifying. She closed her mind to it. She might have time.

Lupe didn’t.