Lyn Benedict: Lies & Omens

For my mother,

who is oddly fond of Sylvie’s bad behavior

As always, there are many people who should be thanked for helping me bring this book to completion: the local Wednesday Night Writers, who had to hear more of my plot-wrangling than they ever wanted; Barb Webb, who kept a stick handy; and, of course, Caitlin Blasdell and Anne Sowards, who’ve both helped Sylvie run amok through the world.

“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS,” DETECTIVE RAUL GARZA SAID AGAIN. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Afternoon sunlight spilled hot and heavy through the windshield and the open windows. The faux-leather seats had gone sticky and soft, as irritating as his incessant finger drumming. Garza scowled at the world from beneath his mirrored sunglasses.

He wasn’t the only one. Sylvie Lightner had been sitting beside him in the unmarked car for the past three hours. In that period, he’d expressed his doubts about their purpose no fewer than ten times. A frustrated scream built in her chest.

Coming to Key West to help Garza hadn’t been her idea, and it sure as hell wasn’t something she’d do for fun. For work, on the other hand—as Miami’s go-to girl for dealing with the supernatural nasties, this kind of moment was all too common, right down to the thinly veiled dislike Garza showed her. Made sense. Sylvie had so many strikes against her that it was hard to pick out which one bothered him the most. Unlicensed PI with a reputation for trouble? A vigilante who took care of problems the police didn’t want to acknowledge? A woman with a liking for large-caliber weaponry, a smart mouth, and something dangerous in her blood? Or maybe Garza had caught wind of her change in reputation. It had been bad before. The Magicus Mundi —the supernatural world that mingled with the mortal one—had called her L’enfant du meurtrier , The Murderer’s Child.

Now they knew her as the New Lilith. The dark heir to an immortal woman who had wanted to make war on her god. If Sylvie’s reputation had been bad before, now it was abysmal. She was unpopular with everyone. Witches. Monsters. Law enforcement. And nosy and controlling government agencies like Internal Surveillance and Investigation, who would rather blame her for the magical problems than deal with them on their own. No one liked her; they all treated her with suspicion and fear.

Sylvie didn’t understand it. It wasn’t like being the new Lilith had done much to change her beyond increasing her innate resistance to inimical magic.

Beyond making us immortal, her little dark voice said. She ignored it. She often did. It was another genetic legacy, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. It had its uses, not least its desire to survive, but it also was a little like having the world’s most cynical and angry roommate living in her head. She hoped it was wrong about the immortality thing; on the off chance it wasn’t, she’d started trying to play nice. Forever was a terribly long time to be friendless.

With that thought recurring to her more and more frequently, she had begun to treasure her few allies. So when Detective Adelio Suarez, her only friend in the Miami PD, asked for her help, the answer had to be yes. Suarez had told her that Garza had a major problem, her type of problem. Magical malfeasance with a rising body count.

“I must be out of my mind,” Garza said, reaching for the ignition.

“Six dead men, three dead women in a nightclub two weeks ago,” Sylvie reminded him. “Another eight down for the count last night, in hospital on IVs, still twitching. It’s a classic dance-’til-death curse.”

“I don’t believe in curses,” Garza said. He sat back, took his hand from the keys. Sighed. Spoke again. “I don’t want to believe in curses.”

“Hey,” Sylvie said. “You believed in them enough to pick out the bad guy.”

She opened the file folder in her lap again, though she’d memorized most of it. Marcel Braud. Twenty-seven years old. He looked bad on paper. Spoiled, rich, a history of smaller crimes: shoplifting, DUIs, and the habit of getting high and beating up his girlfriends. But he was sober now.

Sober enough to use black magic?

The first victim was his ex-girlfriend. The people who died were the ones who’d danced with her, or in her immediate orbit. Last night, the first one to fall under the curse was his current girlfriend, who Braud had accused of cheating. No matter which way Garza added it up, the culprit seemed the same. Braud.

Garza had told Sylvie that Braud, when brought in for questioning, hadn’t done much to deny it, only smirked and asked what Garza thought he could do about it.

Which led to this. Sitting outside Braud’s Key West condo waiting for their chance to go inside without witnesses. Garza’s jaw kept jumping. She couldn’t blame him. He was well out of his comfort zone.

She was in hers.

“Let’s go,” she said, as the neighbor pulled out and left the tiny parking lot quiet. The midday dead zone.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, but followed her out of the car. “You sure about this?”

“He’s killing people,” Sylvie said.

“I meant … what’s protecting us from him?”

“Me.”

Garza watched her unholster her weapon, and visibly, carefully said nothing about a civilian drawing a gun like she meant to use it.

Sylvie tapped on Braud’s door, and when he opened it, she stuck her gun in his face and let herself in.

Garza shut the door hastily behind them.

“What is this?” Braud said, looking past Sylvie and her weapon. “Garza? You again? I’ll have your job.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “You won’t.”

She’d come prepared to scare him senseless, to take away any magic he’d gathered. Until this very moment, she’d assumed he had possession of some malignant magical tool that could be removed from his custody. But there was a chain around his neck with a too-familiar bat-wing pendant. Part identification, part magical amplification.

He was Maudit .

His magic was inborn.

The energy in the room shivered, fluxed cold, pulling away from them like an icy wave washing out to sea. Beside her, Garza shouted, his voice scaling up in panic.

Sylvie’s skin crawled; Braud smirked.

“Stop,” she said. Normally, she wouldn’t have bothered with that much warning, but she had a cop beside her. Her resistance to magic meant she could afford that momentary hesitation.

Garza, his face a rictus of pain, raised his gun and shot. Sylvie jerked aside; the air before Braud shimmered like an oil slick and let the flattened bullets slip down to ping hotly against the tile floor.

“Shadows!” Garza gasped. His face was blistering, tiny seeping pustules.

Braud jerked at hearing her identified, turned to look at her. Garza gasped in what sounded like relief as Braud’s focus split between them.

Braud repeated, “Shadows.”

Cold air rushed past her, sucking all the chill toward him. Heat sparked around her, stung her skin with points of fire. One of the Maudit top-ten favorites for removing an enemy: the immolation spell.

Sylvie stepped forward, ignored his increasingly desperate spell casting, ignored the heat that couldn’t seep beneath her skin, couldn’t boil her blood the way it was doing to Garza’s. She sent a bullet toward Braud’s skull.

A glimmer of that opalescent shield eddied between her bullet and his brains, then disappeared all at once, letting her shot hit home between his eyes.