Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

She put their IDs back, flipped through the evidence bags.

“You sense anything? Find anything?” Sylvie asked. She was coming up blank, blanker, blankest. Yesterday, the landscape had held that strange charge to the air, the sense that magic had been used, had altered reality. Today, it was just heat, breeze, sun, water, smoke, oil. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. She slapped at a mosquito that made a heat-slow sortie at her exposed wrist and pulled her sleeves back down.

“Nothing much,” Wales said. “Bit of a ghost presence. The dead cops. The burned woman. But they’re only traces, and they’re fading fast. They’re so far gone, holding ’em back’d be nothing but an act of cruelty.”

“You could do that?” Sylvie asked. “Pull them back?” That made her twitchy. It wasn’t just that he could keep them there, but that Wales—scarecrow klutz of a man—could pull their souls away from whatever gods lay waiting to claim them.

“Could. Won’t,” Wales said. “They can’t tell me much more than they already have, whispering about confusion and being lost.”

“You can hear them?”

Wales turned away from the empty space he was studying so intently that she knew he saw more than she could. “You don’t know much about necromancy, do you, Shadows?”

“Never needed to,” she said.

Wales hmmed thoughtfully, then spotted an open cooler of drinks, ice sparking against the sun, and said, “Thirsty?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said, caught the icy soda he tossed her way with relief, set the can against her nape. “So we’re done here?”

“Nothing of death magic happened here,” Wales said. “At least, nothing powerful enough to linger. And you said five dead women? That should have lingered.” He raised the can to his lips, lowered it without taking a drink. “You sure they were dead?”

“They were underwater,” she said, but she was thinking of different angles. “They weren’t breathing, weren’t moving.”

“Did you try to revive—”

“Wales, I took a look and got the hell gone.”

He gnawed his lower lip, knelt among the charred rubble that had been a police ’copter. He tilted his head as if he were listening.

“They weren’t dead,” he said.

Something slow and miserable churned in her belly, a flutter of guilt and professional embarrassment. She hadn’t even checked. She’d just seen the surface of things. And she knew better than to take things at face value.

“They weren’t dead,” he said again, and if she hadn’t known better, she’d have assumed he was rubbing salt in the wound. But it was an echo in his voice, patiently repeating something he heard. Something a ghost was sharing.

He stood, staggered a little, and said, “Okay. The burned woman is the only one of the five women who is actually dead. Jennifer Costas.”

“Could I have—”

He shook his head. “No. Jennifer burnt up because the spell binding them broke. It feels like a contingency plan of some sort. A magical if-then command. The others?”

“Fled,” Sylvie said. “According to my witness, they got up and walked away.”

“But Jennifer was restrained,” Wales said, turning as if he could see the helicopter that her body had been strapped into. “Trapped.”

“She was the only one who burned,” Sylvie said. “If the spell broke—”

“She was the only one who couldn’t get free,” Wales said. He paced back and forth, raising clouds of soot, stumbling over metal fragments, making his mark on the scene. There would be no pretending that they hadn’t been there. “She tried. Twisting. Tangled. Hot like spell fire in her veins. It’s strange magic, Sylvie. I don’t get it, and she only knows what she felt.”

“Necromancy?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s death in it. Sacrificial death of some kind, but old.” A shudder ran through his body. His eyes unfocused, listening. “She’s so afraid. She’s dead, and she’s still afraid it could get worse. She’s . . . It’s all . . . hunger and torn hearts and fear in her mind.” His voice gave out, going thready, then silent.

Sylvie waited. He was motionless, as if listening to the dead allowed him to take on some of their deathly calm. A moment passed, with his tight breathing and the distant slurp of moving water the only sounds.

He shook it off all at once, body moving from ghost languor to his more normal hunched shoulders and twitchy nerves. “It’s . . . necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft and . . . it’s a tangle of magics. It’s layered, and it’s really ugly.”

“So the other four women are . . . what? In some type of magical suspended animation?”

“They were,” he said. “Until Jennifer was pulled from the water.”

“Lio said the other women changed shape.”

“See!” Wales gesticulated broadly, pointing at nothing but his own aggravation and confusion. “That doesn’t fit either. Shape-shifting’s not necromancy; it’s closer to biology.”

“And you said you didn’t know anything about shape-shifters,” Sylvie said.

“So I hear things. So what?”

She let that slide. Wales wanted to keep his breadth of knowledge on a need-to-know basis? She could live with that. For now. There were other, more pressing problems. “How would that work?”

He shrugged. “Suspended animation? Hell, maybe it wasn’t magic at all, just more of the government fucking around in our lives, using us as—”

“Wales,” Sylvie snapped. “Take off the tinfoil hat and focus. It wasn’t pure necromancy, fine. I believe you. Can we get out of here now? Let these people recover before a snapping turtle starts nipping off fingers?”

Wales nodded. “Yeah. Good point.”

They backtracked to the ATV trail, Wales sticking to drier ground this time, and once they’d reached a point where the grass would cover their presence, Wales brought out a little packet, tipped it into the stagnant waters. Sylvie watched the water go the color of old bone, swirling white and cream, and said, “Powdered milk?”

“Don’t knock it; it works,” Wales said, and dipped Marco’s flaming Hand. “And a hell of a lot easier to cart around.”

It was one of the things she hated about magic. It made these rules for itself—the purity of milk could put out an evil flame—and then bent or broke them at the user’s will. Grocery-store milk? Powdered milk? Where was the purity in that? But it was working.

Marco faded away. Behind them there was silence, then shouting, as alarmed police found themselves waking, groggy and scared. Sylvie bit her lip as she and Wales moved away. The ISI would understand what had happened even if the police didn’t. Odds were, they’d come looking to her for answers first.

She hadn’t thought this through at all well, had let her eagerness to clear the debt she owed Lio send her rushing out to the scene, and for what? They hadn’t found anything. No monsters. No dead girls. Hell, if Wales was right—her stomach lurched once again.

“They’re alive ,” Sylvie said. “Christ. I could have saved them if I’d called a witch instead of the cops yesterday. I freaked out, saw the scene, and thought I didn’t want to be found near it. I fucked up.”

Wales, thankfully, didn’t say anything, a veteran of the kind of second-guessing that paranoia bred. After another moment, Sylvie said, “So, can you help the women? If we find them? Even though it’s not necromancy?”

Bitterness laced her question, made it accusing, blaming the nearest magic-user for the actions of another. Wales blinked, paused in his steps, and she flipped a hand at him in apology.

Just . . . why did it always have to come down to magic? What had happened to the days of point and shoot, and problem solved? At this rate, she was going to have to have a full-time witch around, and Sylvie just didn’t trust them that much. Not Wales. Not Val. Hell, not even Zoe, whose first actions in the Magicus Mundi had been shortsighted at best.