Lyn Benedict - Lies & Omens

“Let’s go,” Sylvie said, and ignored Zoe’s muttered, “Finally!” as she squeezed into the shed. She felt the quiver of angry magic as she passed. Zoe winced; her grip tightened on the door edge. It moaned like a living thing beneath her hands. Sylvie thought it said a lot about the Good Sisters that even a spell as simple as a hidden door felt malevolent.

“Lupe, come on!”

Lupe was longer than the shed was, and her tail took forever to tuck in; her fur smoked as she brushed the shimmering, twisting door frame. The moment Zoe released the door, it slammed shut and left them in darkness.

The shed, when explored, yielded another door and beyond it a steep downward ramp, leading beneath the B&B main building.

Sylvie blew out her breath. Luck, both good and bad. Since the Good Sisters had set up shop underground, the intervening earth had muffled their ingress. Once Sylvie’s group was inside, that same earth would prevent anyone from hearing what happened to them if it all went wrong.

“Watch your backs down there,” Sylvie said. “One way in probably means one way out. Lupe, stick with Zoe. And for God’s sake, use your sense of smell. If you can’t smell the monster, don’t attack it.”

“You shot, too,” Lupe growled. The words were thick in her inhuman throat.

“Well,” Sylvie said, “better safe than sorry. And I don’t have your senses. Some of these witches leash monsters, remember. Stick close to Zoe.”

She shot another thought Zoe’s way, the warning that Lupe might turn on them and Zoe would need to be prepared and could she be prepared to take someone like Lupe down?

Zoe nodded once.

Sylvie thought maybe this mind reading wasn’t such bad idea after all, and turned her back on Zoe’s smirk. The ramp was stone on all sides, floor, walls, ceilings, lit every few feet by prosaic LED adhesive lights, battery powered. The stone was smooth beneath her shoes, worn down with age. The main building was at least a hundred years old, but the tunnel was older still.

Zoe pointed at a worn symbol chipped into the wall, blurred with age and erosion. A pentagram. “Sylvie. Think they were here first?”

Sylvie ran her fingers over it, and said, “I think it wouldn’t surprise me at all. The Good Sisters obviously believe in the long game, or they wouldn’t have bothered infiltrating the ISI.”

The tunnel lightened ahead. Sylvie estimated they were about thirty feet below the surface and about fifty feet in. The underdwelling, whatever it would prove to be, was more than a simple cellar to the hotel above.

Animal instinct made her want to walk faster, to reach the light sooner, to step out of the dank stone tunnel. But something about the quality of the light ahead, the faint shift and flicker of it, made her heart beat faster.

She held up a hand, pausing them.

“They’re waiting for us.”

That was what the shift and flicker was—people between them and the light, trying to remain still. Failing.

“An ambush?”

“Let me draw their fire,” Sylvie said. “I’m going first. I’ve got the gun, and I’ve got some immunity to magic.”

“If they have weapons?”

“Then I’ll wish I’d asked Dunne for a bulletproof vest,” Sylvie muttered.

Zoe’s lips twisted, but she swallowed her instinctive urge to argue.

Sylvie checked her gun, contemplated changing out the clip before going in, but didn’t want them to get impatient and come after them while she was reloading, functionally disarmed. She gripped her gun tight—four bullets left in this clip. She could do a lot with that—and headed through the doorway at speed.

If Demalion wasn’t somewhere in this building, she’d have gone in shooting blind.

Ten witches waited for them in the open room, a blur of suited figures, male and female, arrayed in two rows, six up close, four farther back; Sylvie got off one shot before the first spell surge hit her, saw one suited figure spin around with the force of it. Not a killing shot, dammit, but the woman stayed down. For now.

Magic crawled over her skin like fire ants, nailed her with a spell that sank in and wrapped her body like a clammy, all-encompassing shroud—cold, growing colder, tasting of clay and stone and death. It sucked heat from her skin, her heart, her breath.

Life-draining spell, Sylvie identified. Didn’t matter. She had life to spare. She pushed through the paralysis the spell encouraged, blinked eyelashes that seemed weighted by sand, and sighted for the next shot. Careful, her voice warned. Three bullets left.

This time, her shot was effectively lethal. The witch in the center collapsed silently, no time even for a shout. Sylvie had hit her square between the eyes.

Two bullets, she told it. Nine witches still alive.

Nine witches blocking a doorway behind them. There could be more of the Good Sisters waiting beyond it. There probably were. Yvette wasn’t one of the opponents facing them. Sylvie’s shots had to count.

The life-draining spell didn’t slacken. Wrong witch.

Sylvie growled, heard Lupe echo it before leaping out of the tunnel; chameleon-like, her bright, poisonous colors had dulled, left her dark and sleek, hard to see in the dim, underground chambers.

Lupe looked like a monster, but she killed like a cat in a pack of birds, slashing wildly, doing as much damage as possible before picking a specific target to kill and eat. She scattered three witches with bloody gouges to their thighs and calves, torsos and hips. One man fell with a shriek, rolled beneath Lupe’s weight and claws. Blood glossed the dark stone floor, sinking into crevices; his voice gurgled to a stop.

The other two slapped spells on each other, stopping their bleeding.

After that, Sylvie lost track of things for a bit, bombarded by spells that made her skin burn or freeze or feel like it was going to shatter. Illusions rushed the room—collapsing ceilings and panicking clouds of bats, the stink of burning sulfur and too little air.

But nothing crashed into her, and nothing slowed her breathing. Illusion, just illusion, her Lilith voice whispered over and over, breaking the hold the spells tried to lay on her.

Some spells weren’t illusion, Sylvie thought, as she ducked a lash of impossibly scarlet flame.

The next fiery lash wasn’t aimed at her, but Lupe and Zoe. Zoe held firm; showed the Good Sisters what a shielding spell should really be able to do.

With the witches’ focus split over three targets, Sylvie figured out fast who held the life-draining spell on her—the fiftyish woman with hard, green eyes. Sylvie met that challenging gaze and fired directly at her. The bullet veered in defiance of all natural law and disappeared. One bullet wasted. One bullet left.

Invulnerability talisman, Sylvie thought. This witch was one step up from the ones she’d killed outside, probably the leader of this little coven. Made sense. Ten here, plus the three outside. Witches did like their traditions.

Sylvie fought against the life-draining spell, tried to peel herself out of it, even as the struggle exhausted her, made her feel like the air she breathed was full of sand and sharp edges. She felt years being whisked away from her with each labored breath.

“Why aren’t you dead?” the coven leader shouted. She looked irritated, outraged, even as she directed the other witches with clipped phrases in a language that meant nothing to Sylvie. Zoe seemed to understand just fine, and countered each attempt. She made it look easy, but Sylvie saw the trembling strain in Zoe’s corded neck and braced legs.

“Because I hate to oblige you,” Sylvie snapped. “Tell your goons to leave my sister alone.”

“Only when she’s dead.”