Lyn Benedict - Lies & Omens

The automatic weapon chattered in silence on Alex’s small screen. The ISI agents, lust-struck, had no time for lust to change to fear. The security glass grew starred and spattered with blood.

On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun, drew a finger through a spray of blood that stippled its face like freckles, and sucked it clean. Then it turned and let itself out. A bar of light—the front door left open—draped over the bodies.

“Savannah,” Alex said. “She killed all of them. Called them up and mowed them down.” She shook her head, shook away the nerves. “There’s no security footage in Dallas. Or Memphis.”

“What about Chicago?”

Alex bit her lip. “You sure you want to see?”

“Play it.”

Same thing. The lobby, familiar to Sylvie. There was the elevator where Demalion had cornered her, argued with her, before chasing her down the street and insinuating himself back into her life. She swallowed.

The beginning of the disaster was more subtle than Savannah’s succubus. So slow, it took Sylvie time to notice. Dust crawled across the lobby floor, a slow ripple of shadow. Accreting.

Not dust.

Sand.

It swirled, trickled upward like a pulled thread, fitting itself into the seams of the building. The agent at the front desk stood, approached, hand on his gun. He reached out toward that tiny spinning thread of sand; it drilled through flesh, through bone—he jerked his hand back, a hole pierced right through, started shouting for help.

Too late.

As if his blood was the catalyst, the thread of spinning sand exploded into a tornado. It devoured the retreating guard, silica slicing him to ribbon. The building shook and blurred. The last glimpse Sylvie had was a pair of shining eyes at the heart of the whirlwind before the camera failed. Not a spell. A creature of some kind.

When Sylvie caught her breath, she could come to only one conclusion.

It’s war, her little dark voice said. Coldness crawled her spine, edged her jaw and cheeks. To say she didn’t like the ISI was like going on record saying that yeah, contracting Ebola was a bad way to spend the weekend. She distrusted them down to her very core. But she didn’t like this. Especially didn’t like the sense of organization behind the attacks.

One thing she’d always counted on was the Magicus Mundi ’s disinterest in uniting against humankind.

So why now?

“It’s a prison,” Alex said. “Was a prison. Savannah. They just opened it. Skeleton staff.”

“That might change things,” Sylvie said.

“You think the Mundi finally woke up and said, enough? I can’t imagine they’d like the idea of being put in cages.”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Never one of her favorite phrases. “If it were the human magic-users attacking, I might be more willing to think that it’s a reaction to the jail. But the Mundi … if they were that easy to catch and cage, don’t you think we’d have a zoo full? I’m not sure they care about us that much. About what we’re doing.”

“That look like disinterest to you?” Alex said.

On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun again, rolled its shoulders and neck with a visible satisfaction. A job well-done.

“It’s too much and not enough,” Sylvie said. “It’s strange. Two different monsters, probably three if we assume Dallas’s gas accident means asphyxiation—something neither of these monsters tried. They don’t cooperate outside their own kind.”

Alex drew her finger along the screen, tracing a pattern made in the shadows of filmed blood.

Sylvie continued thinking aloud. “If they’ve organized enough to make alliances, then why not strike all at once? Why strike day by day? Allowing the ISI to warn their other branches? It’s pointless. And worse, it’s ineffective. The Mundi ’s a lot of things, but it’s brutally efficient.”

“Fear,” Alex said, running her fingers over the keyboard, over the part of the world she could control. “Let them know what’s coming and let them know they can’t stop it. I mean, can they stop it?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Grimaced. Goddammit. She wanted answers. She wanted them now. “Maybe it’s not a war. Maybe it’s revolution. A series of uprisings, each spurred on by the previous one.”

“Like an infection, spreading.” Alex bent her head over the computer. “What can we do?”

Sylvie closed her teeth on another I don’t know , and thought about it. “If it’s an infection, there’ll be a cause. If there’s an uprising, there’s a leader somewhere. Keep plugged in. Keep me informed. I got someplace to be.”

“Chicago?”

Sylvie shook her head. “And do what? Pick through the rubble and hope I strike lucky? If they even let me get that far? No. If he can, Demalion will call us.”

Alex raised her head for the first time in what seemed like ages. Her eyes seemed more shadowed now than when Sylvie had first woken her. “Let me guess. Four ISI agencies down. You’re headed for ground zero. Trying to see if you can get yourself killed protecting people who hate you.”

“Sounds bad when you put it that way,” Sylvie said.

Alex’s smile was perfunctory. “They gassed you, kidnapped you; you had to break out. If they weren’t so scared of your pet Fury, you’d be back in their cells. But you’re going to take the moral high ground and help them?”

“Miami might not even be next on the list,” Sylvie said, “Seems to me, though, that there’s a path being taken. From Savannah? There are two ISI offices in easy lines: DC and Miami. DC has its own building, but here, the ISI offices are in the hotel district. The ISI brought this on themselves but … there are too many innocent bystanders involved. Riordan does it deliberately, hedges his agents ’round with regular people. One floor of agency, fourteen floors of civilians. I don’t have a choice.”

Sylvie left Alex hunched over her laptop, one hand snarled into her short, wild hair, the other clicking through screens that opened and closed with such rapidity that it might as well be arcane magic that guided her. She hoped it was comforting.

Outside, out of Alex’s sight, Sylvie’s shoulders sagged. Her bravado faded. The nighttime air, hot and still, felt charged, electric with change. With chaos. The peace before disaster.

Her tongue felt dry and heavy in her mouth, choking her with the weight of all the anxious words she couldn’t say. It tasted of cooling asphalt, unsweetened by the jasmine nearby.

Her phone was in her hand again, Demalion’s number picked out. She closed the phone without pressing SEND.

Wondered, if he were dead, who would tell her? Not the ISI, who hadn’t connected Adam Wright with Sylvie Lightner. Maybe Adam Wright’s ex-wife would get the call. Maybe then she’d call Sylvie to pass the news on, that the man who’d taken over her husband’s body had lost his own hold on it in the end.

Most likely, it would be Alex, hunting through the casualty roster, refusing to tell her over the phone. Sylvie would have to watch Alex picking the careful words, trying to be gentle, while her face telegraphed every detail. She scrubbed a quick hand across her eyes.

Cowardice, her little dark voice said. To give up before the battle’s even joined.

Sylvie let its contempt steady her. It was right. It so often was. Older and wiser than she was. That genetic leftover from Lilith’s blood. As if Sylvie’s synapses occasionally fired in a different pattern, an older pattern, a memory trail that was laid in before she was born. A memory, given voice.

Demalion wasn’t dead yet. And he’d survived worse. This, whatever it was, hadn’t been aimed specifically at him. He’d survived when the Furies had torn his flesh apart and sent his soul fleeing to the first sanctuary it found: Adam Wright’s body.