Lyn Benedict - Lies & Omens

Zoe screamed suddenly, sharp and as brilliant as a stroke of lightning. A moment later, the storm around them eased a notch. As if the power was flowing into something else. As if it were burning through a witch. Sylvie shouted and cursed and flailed and made no headway against the power inexorably rolling them onward. Killing her sister.

They dropped hard, and Lupe snarled furiously, snapping out at everything around her—no humanity in her. Sylvie dodged her and scanned the area, taking it in, in frantic Zoe-absent chunks: nighttime sea falling away blackly and steeply to her left. Sand and stone beneath her, roughing up her skin beneath her khakis. The dark tangle that was Lupe in the night. And, finally, a white glimmer that turned out to be Zoe’s blouse. Her sister was hunched tight in the shelter of a massive rock.

Sylvie scrambled to her feet, fell, scrambled up again.

This, her Lilith voice said, is why you don’t involve family. And why you don’t rely on witches. They’re both too fragile for the job.

“Fuck off,” Zoe said, turning to glare at Sylvie. “You know you’ve got a rude-ass voice in your head?”

“Uh—” Sylvie stopped.

Zoe wasn’t dead, hurt, or even burned out. Power was crackling off of her, rolling around and around the Cain mark on her forearm and hand. When Sylvie reached out cautiously, actual sparks launched in her direction. She withdrew her hand fast.

Zoe admired the silvery, stormy halo flowing over her arm, watched that stolen power spill back and forth as she tilted her arm. It lit up the dark night like she had wrapped moonlight around her skin.

“Guess this mark is good for something. Dunne’s power should have overwhelmed me, fried me. Hell, I probably could have taken on Erinya.”

“Don’t get cocky. She would have chewed out your throat. Just be glad it saved your life,” Sylvie said. She studied their environment with a less panicked and more analytical gaze. “I think it also got us dropped too early. Dunne’s precise with power expenditure. No more, no less than is needed. Part of his no-carbon-footprint god style.”

“Well, crap,” Zoe said. “I’m really ready to take on those Society bitches.” Her lips were curling into a hungry smile. “I’ve been studying and studying and studying, and now I’ve got a chance to—”

You’re going to have to watch her, her little voice suggested. She’s corrupted from that much power.

She’s high, Sylvie countered.

“Shut up!” Zoe snapped. “I am not corrupted. I am not high. I am energized. I am in control. Perfect control.”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“Yeah. A spell I always wanted to try.”

“And you tried it now ? Are you going to do anything useful with it or just going to pick fights with my brain?”

“Lupe’s eating a seagull,” Zoe said. “Worry about how useful she’s going to be.”

“What?” Lupe said, looming out of the dark on three legs at the sound of her name, the mangled bird dangling from her right front claws. “Where are we?”

“San Francisco,” Sylvie said. If Zoe had sucked in enough of Dunne’s power that he’d dropped them in the wrong city, she’d be more than … energized; she’d be a glowing trail of embers across the sky, mark of Cain or no.

“We’ve got to be close,” Zoe said. She waved her glowing hand before her as if it could illuminate their path.

“There’s nothing around us,” Lupe said. Her nose wrinkled; her tongue flicked out, tasted the air.

“What, just because you can’t smell it? Witches wash, you know,” Zoe said.

Sylvie left them bickering and started walking. She had her gun; the bullets had made the trip safely with her. Her sister had made the trip. Lupe had made the trip, and, despite Sylvie pulling a fast one on Erinya, she seemed willing to fight at Sylvie’s side. All systems were go, and Demalion was waiting for his rescue.

The ground sloped away from her feet, made each step forward an experiment in faith and discomfort. Each step jarred, and the rocky substrate shifted. But the sea cliff was at her back, and there was a hint of asphalt in the darkness. A minute’s walk revealed the slash of car headlights passing by and, a minute after that, the long black ribbon of a California highway slipping downhill.

Zoe joined her, not slip-sliding on the rough terrain at all courtesy of her own glow. Lupe followed in her wake.

“Now what,” Lupe said. “Do we even have an idea of where we’re going? Are all your cases this slipshod? How do you get anything done?” That angry edge was vibrating in her voice again. Erinya’s presence had tamed it somewhat. Sylvie couldn’t wait to find a witch to point Lupe’s bad temper at.

“I admit I’ve been slow about this,” Sylvie said. “The Good Sisters have infiltrated the ISI. San Francisco’s an ISI city. I am betting that we’ll find the entire coven tucked up at ISI home base.” She should have realized it was likely the moment Yvette took Marah and Demalion; they’d need a place to stash them—and the ISI buildings were all equipped with holding cells. Plus, she should have recognized the classic witchy arrogance. That a group of witches who had infiltrated the ISI easily and thoroughly would deepen the insult by running the spell that allowed them to expand their power out of the ISI bastion.

The irritation of knowing she’d been stupid itched beneath her skin. She could have gone directly from Dallas, attacked them on her own. She could handle a group of witches; she’d tackled gods.

“Going it alone would have been stupid,” Zoe said. “You don’t even know how many of them are there. That’s not even counting the monsters they might be controlling.”

Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Undo that mind-reading spell. Now.”

“No,” Zoe said. “It wasn’t a whim, Syl. We’re about to head into enemy territory. This way, I can keep up with you. Even if we get separated.”

Sylvie couldn’t argue with that. That was sound planning.

Zoe grinned, said, “You’re going to find out I’m all sorts of useful.” After picking up a scrap of broken wood and two small stones, Zoe stepped onto the empty roadway. She laid down the stones, laid the scrap across them, and whispered, “Catch and hold.”

A wash of silvery light, the burning itch of magic, and the road was suddenly barricaded with a police-grade roadblock. Zoe sauntered back and said, “Next car that stops, we take.”

Sylvie wanted to disapprove. Her parents would want her to disapprove—carjacking was not a skill set her family aspired to—but looking at her sister, at Lupe lurking slick and deadly in the shadows, she couldn’t feel anything but pleased.

IT TOOK SYLVIE AN HOUR TO TRACK DOWN THE ISI BUILDING IN San Francisco, and it was an enormously long hour. Zoe and Lupe, in combination, made hellish car companions, especially when the car that Zoe had liberated from a spell-stunned driver was small enough that Lupe and Zoe, divided by front and back seat, were still in constant physical contact, a fact that pleased neither of them.

As Zoe said, sliding into Lupe’s outspread tail when Sylvie took a curve more quickly than the car was really capable of, “Erinya’s going to be pissed enough that she’s trapped. I don’t need Lupe going back smelling like I’ve been rubbing up against her all night long.”

Sylvie wanted to snap at them to shut the hell up, to just stop, to impress upon them how serious this whole matter was, but Zoe had to know. She was jacked in to Sylvie’s brain after all. Knew the constant flashes of terror that she was suffering—not for herself, but for Alex, for Demalion. What if she wasn’t fast enough, good enough? What if Demalion was already dead? The ISI seemed to have nothing on the Society of the Good Sisters when it came to magical experimentation. Demalion, having died once, was a curiosity they’d be dying to take apart.