Lyn Benedict - Lies & Omens

As long as he could keep murmuring spells. There wasn’t enough air to make her think he could do it for more than another minute, tops.

Sylvie grimaced, peeled the first of the anchors away. Despair got her nothing. Effort might pay off.

She doubted it.

Fear, bright, sharp, nearly overpowering, danced through her veins. She’d done this all wrong. Had been overconfident. Had been stupid.

She was going to pay for it. And she wasn’t ever going to find out if Demalion had survived.

The mermaids’ song—a vibration traveling her skin, the walls, the building—broke off on an awkward screech. Riordan jerked, flailed, sought air that didn’t exist.

The spell on the door weakened.

Sylvie yanked and yanked and tore and scrabbled, using her hand, her feet, her teeth—the taste rank and vile, rotten oysters, scabrous and greasy in her mouth.

The netting tore.

She and Riordan tumbled headfirst into the stairwell; Sylvie gasped for air, lost the breath with impact against the far wall, whooped for air again.

She and Riordan skidded to the next landing and stopped, water streaming over them. Riordan groaned, got to his knees. “The others?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. She forced herself to her feet.

“What happened?”

“Mermaids stopped—” Sylvie frowned. No, they wouldn’t have stopped. Something or someone had stopped them.

Sylvie limped down the stairs, Riordan staggering and sliding after her, scratches livid on his neck where she’d clawed him in her attempts to keep him above the waterline. “Where are we going?”

“Out,” she said.

The lobby’s floodplain was draining out into the streets, draining back into the canal. People were waking all over. Sylvie could hear them screaming.

After the mermaids’ song, it sounded like music.

The screaming took on a new and frantic pitch and Sylvie burst out into the sunshine, squinting, half-blind with exhaustion and sun dazzle.

“Holy mother of God,” Riordan said from behind her. He fell back and sprawled on the concrete, crossing himself.

For once, Sylvie was in complete agreement. She’d seen a lot of things since she’d been made aware of the Magicus Mundi : witches and werewolves, gods and ghosts. But this was a spectacle even for her eyes.

Erinya, in full nonhuman form—a twice-tiger-sized mass of scales, feathers, and talons, and fangs that glistened scarlet in sunlight, her eyes great, empty, burning holes—was dragging a thrashing, writhing sharkish mass out of the canal: gills flaring, flashing red, thrashing tail slicing through the air with a sound like ripping paper, and a screaming maw of teeth under bulging, opalescent eyes.

Mermaids, Sylvie thought numbly, were nothing like in the storybooks.

Erinya dragged the screaming mermaid—God, it must be nearly seventeen feet long—right to Sylvie’s feet and dropped it, then crouched atop it, looking for all the world like a nightmare cat bringing its owner a mouse.

The mermaid’s tail slapped at Erinya, rough scale slicing at the Fury’s hide; its front limbs pushed upward, trying to break the weight from its back. Sylvie found herself staring at its … fingers. Four of them, scaled, jointed like a crab, sharp enough that the concrete was chipping beneath its efforts. Erinya punched it on the back of its oddly flat head, stunning it, then dragged its head back so Sylvie could see its face. Nacreous eyes as large as eggs stared blindly at her, blinking in scarlet membranous tides.

“Want to ask it questions?” Erinya asked.

“Will it understand me?” Sylvie asked. Her hands were shaking. Her voice wasn’t, but it took effort. Years dealing with the Magicus Mundi , and she suddenly realized she’d only just scratched the surface.

The mermaid thrashed, spat out curses in a dozen human languages, with a tongue as pale as a drowned man. “Do I understand? The water carries all words to our hearing. We know more about your world than you do.”

Faced with that promise of understanding, Sylvie fumbled for words. She was under no illusions that the mermaid would talk, even if it could, but she had to try. Had to ask.

“Why attack the ISI?”

“They overreach,” it said. It seemed to have no qualms with confessing. “They think to control what cannot be leashed.”

“And in Chicago? That wasn’t you in Chicago. Or in Savannah. You’re working with the others?”

The mermaid twisted, left wide swaths of its dull scales on the cement; its breathing seemed labored. The water was mostly gone.

“We are ourselves. We don’t mingle.”

“So, not working with. Working for—” Sylvie said.

The mermaid gusted cold air over her feet—contempt.

“You killed my people!” Riordan said. “Why? Tell me, or I’ll see you hung out to dry.”

A for attitude, Sylvie thought. D for common sense. He was too close to that tail, and it slapped him off his feet, back on his ass.

Light flashed.

“We do what needs to be done,” the mermaid said. “Do not think that capturing this one makes a difference. We are the water. And water is everywhere.”

“And you chose to attack now. At the same time as the other attacks. You want me to believe that’s coincidence?”

“We do not mingle.”

If it were possible for something without a human face to sneer, the mermaid was doing it. Sylvie said, “You came up with the idea all on your lonesome?”

“We do not mingle.”

Erinya snarled; blood spouted out of the creature’s flesh. The mermaid shrieked. Then its gills fluttered madly and stopped.

“I wasn’t done,” Sylvie said.

“I was bored. And it was arrogant,” Erinya said. “It wouldn’t have talked.” Erinya turned the heart, a greenish mass the size of a man’s skull, in her hands, eyed it warily. She licked it with a coiling serpentine tongue. Wrinkled her muzzle in reaction. “Fishy.”

She licked it again, this time with a human tongue, a human face. Trying to decide if she liked it with a different set of taste buds.

More flashing lights.

Lightning? An early-morning storm blowing in on the heels of the mermaids’ false tide?

Sylvie turned.

They had an audience. Not much of one—most of the bystanders were microfocused, trying to figure out what had happened to them. But some were gaping at Sylvie. At Erinya, sitting atop a dead mermaid, licking her talons clean of heart’s blood.

“Is that … Is that a shark?” a man asked.

“Does it look like a shark?” Sylvie snapped.

He edged closer, drawn to the strange. “Oh my God. It’s a monster.” He looked up; Erinya smiled, bright and bloody, and he fell back, gaping.

“Riordan!” Sylvie snapped. “Your crowd, I think?”

Sylvie ducked another camera flash, the growing murmur of oh, my God, a thing … in the canals, who caught it, monsters! Blown up by the storm, wasn’t that a freak storm? No, the things made the storm. The other monster stopped it.

Riordan rose shakily to his feet; his clothes were torn where the mermaid’s tail had slapped him. But he was wearing a suit, and people were turning to him for an explanation.

Her problem was figuring out what the hell was going on, and she was no closer now than she had been.

Worse, actually.

Now she understood how little of the Magicus Mundi she really knew. If it hadn’t been for Erinya, she’d be dead.

Sylvie looked back. Erinya had gotten tired of preening over her kill and vanished. Her presence lingered. The sidewalks bloomed with jungle flowers; her beastly footprints smoked in the wet asphalt. A child pointed them out to her mother, talking a mile a minute.

Sylvie wondered abruptly what Erinya had done with the child she saved from drowning.