Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

“From this distance? No.”

“So we wait for the cops to leave, then.” Sylvie hesitated. Waiting had sounded okay in her office, but in the actual ’Glades? For one thing, they weren’t that well hidden, not by the landscape, anyway. But if they retreated, they could miss any narrow window of opportunity that might present itself.

“They look pretty damned entrenched to me. I’m not really in love with the idea of waiting until past dark to do my look around.”

“You and me both,” Sylvie said. The idea of lingering out there, exposed in the tall grass, was bad enough in daylight. In the dark? “We’ve got to get closer.”

“All right,” he said.

He drew out Marco’s Hand and his lighter, and Sylvie said, “Wait, what?”

“What’d you think I was going to do?” Wales asked. “Put on a suit and pretend to be a cop? Sorry. I got just one spell that’ll get us up close.”

Sylvie growled. “You want me to ignore the fact that lighting up Marco is going to result in soul shock for people who already feel fragile? Some of those cops are cleaning up bits of their colleagues.”

Wales shrugged. “Then you should have brought a different type of witch,” he said. “One who could send them off chasing a will-o’-the-wisp or give them the compulsion to go back to the station. But you pissed off the local witches, and now you’ve just got me.”

You could have called on Zoe, Sylvie’s little dark voice whispered.

That was enough to steel her spine. Bad enough her little sister had gotten a yen for practicing magic, worse that she showed talent enough she had to be trained, worst of all would be Sylvie’s encouraging her.

Two types of pragmatism warred in her, and, finally, she just shook it all off. “You light Marco, and I go down, too. I’ve had enough soul shock for a while.”

Wales frowned. “There is that.” He set Marco’s Hand down on the grass, fumbled through his pockets some more. Sylvie kept a close eye on the Hand of Glory. Last thing they needed was some random raccoon running off with it. Problem with nature. It was always lurking, always hungry.

“Ah,” Wales said, drew out a pocketknife, a convenience-store special, the kind that lived in plastic bins beside the dollar lighters. “Blood’ll do it.”

“Yours or mine?” she murmured, but the question was already answered. Wales dragged the thin, brittle blade across the heel of his hand, left a bloody smile slowly forming. He wiped the blade on his jeans, shoved it back into his pocket, then dipped his fingers into the blood.

“Hold still,” he said, brought his fingers toward her face.

She shied back. “Blood goes where exactly?”

“On your skin,” Wales said. “So Marco knows you’re part of me.”

“Marco was licking your blood earlier—”

“He won’t lick this,” Wales said. “Trust me.”

He touched her cheeks, two quick strokes and a squiggle, some symbol she couldn’t see; the temperature of her body, the heat of the day, was such that she didn’t feel the dampness at first, only smelled the old-penny copper of it.

Then it started to trickle sluggishly down her skin, nothing like sweat, sticky and already going rank. She had to force herself to hold still for the next two touches, marking her forehead and chin. No point in doing this half-assed, and she really didn’t like the idea of having her soul munched on by a ghost who wasn’t all that fond of her.

The last time she’d seen Marco—more than just his remnant Hand—he’d gotten in her face and told her he killed women like her.

If there was anything that would break the deal between Wales and his pet ghost, it would probably be her: Recidivism was more than just a word, after all, and while alive, Marco had made a habit of killing women.

She was trusting Wales on two fronts here—that he knew what he was doing and that his word was good—and that made her nearly as edgy as the hunt they were on. She watched him, her vision narrowing until the flick of the lighter, his long, pale fingers, and bony knuckles, the quick and tiny spill of sparks, got eaten by the wash of the Hand of Glory coming alight.

The last time she’d seen Marco, they’d been confined and close in a single room. The last time she’d seen ghosts, they’d been focused on their victims. Both events left her utterly unprepared for the speed of Marco now.

Her breath went out in a rush, and Marco breezed through the small crowd of policemen and technicians, bending close, sending them into unconsciousness with a kiss— a bite —before they could even realize something was happening.

Marco moved like wind, a grey shape in the air, unfettered by human requirements of energy or space. He blew through the equipment, set one machine to shrieking an alarm, and took out the technician before she had time to turn her head. The woman crumpled, face-first, and Wales hissed in disapproval.

“What is it?” Sylvie said.

“Hurry up, hurry up !” Wales muttered more to himself than her, then broke, running with graceless haste through the slough, going knee deep in places, forcing his way through, leaving a muddy wake. Sylvie, finding a drier path, finally saw what Wales, with his greater height, had seen: The female technician was facedown in the water.

Marco hadn’t changed at all since his death. Sylvie wished she could be surprised.

SYLVIE PICKED UP HER PACE, FELT THE SAW GRASS LASH AGAINST her legs, heard the low hum of it rasping against her clothes; she got there as Wales manhandled the woman out of the water, checked her airways.

“She all right?” And wasn’t that a careful distinction of all right ? Was the soul-shocked woman still breathing? Morals and the Magicus Mundi didn’t line up all that well.

“She is,” Wales said. Marco shrugged, an insincere oops . “They all are,” he said, nodding decisively as if saying it made it so.

“Yeah, let’s just do this,” Sylvie said. She directed her attention to the scene, trying to splice the two images together in her mind. When she’d been there last, it was a peaceful scene—minus the dead women, naturally—glimmering waters, green duckweed, saw grass stretching out toward the sloughs and the hammocks.

Now there was char everywhere, scraps of metal in the process of being collected; scorched grass, oily water, the detritus of investigation, and a double handful of dropped cops. Sylvie wandered over to the collected evidence bags, reading labels. Might as well start there.

There were two men fallen near the bags, dressed in Fed-standard suits, in Fed-standard colors—one blue, one black. Miami detectives had more sense, wore khakis and short-sleeved polo shirts. Sylvie pulled out the first man’s ID: Dennis Kent, ISI. She burned his face into her memory. Odds were, she’d be seeing him again. Dark hair, grey flecked, a Roman nose. Soft hands.

The second man—dirty blond, smooth-skinned, a babe in the woods—was Nick O’Neal, and definitely the junior of the pair.

Strange suits, indeed. Lio’s rumor mill had been right.

But these two looked more like an exploratory team than the first wave of an ISI incursion. Someone wanting to make sure that this was worth their time. Sylvie grimaced.

Using the Hand of Glory on them would probably go a long way to convincing them that this was ISI-interesting. Couldn’t win for losing, sometimes.

In the background, Wales held a furious, whispered conversation with Marco, a series of snake hisses on the breeze. Sylvie tipped her head, let the air cool her skin, drying the blood on her face until the streaks pulled uncomfortably. She reached up to scratch, then saw Marco studying her, his hollow eyes eager even from twenty feet away, and dropped her hands. Yeah, better not.