Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

“Magic’s not that different, branch to branch,” Wales said. “Sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. We’re all built of the same thing. We just . . . specialize.”

“Is that a yes?” Sylvie said.

“It’s a maybe. Don’t make me theorize without evidence.”

“Now you sound like a witch,” she said.

He stalked along, squelching, his jeans collecting dust and mud, and finally said, “So, let me guess. A witch told you about magic. Painted witchcraft as team Good. Let me tell you what. It’s all the same at the core. Greedy scavengers stealing power, growing stronger every year they survive, and rearranging the world to suit themselves.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie said. “So why isn’t there a word for a good necromancer? Everything else has a good versus bad. White witch. Mambo. Shaman.”

“Because we don’t need the ego stroke. Deal with death enough, and you’d be surprised how little you care for human approval. I think you’d understand that. Besides, good, bad, benign, malign—it’s all about who’s making the judgment.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “Enslaving the dead’s a magnitude worse than a witch’s glamour.”

“Even if the witch spells someone to fall in love? Erases their self-will? It’s not just the stuff of novels, Shadows. Witches talk a good game, but they use the same magic we do. And let me tell you. Witches do far more damage than your average necromancer. Yeah, we can turn a man into a zombie, keep him as a servant until he falls to pieces, but it’s really not all that useful. They take effort to create, they’re hard to control—too stupid to really get complex ideas across—and they can’t communicate even if they aren’t dumb as a sack of bricks. Brain death really means something, y’know.

“And in the time that a necromancer does that? Your average witch will have sold, traded, or dealt out enough spells to destroy a dozen men. Witches like their comforts. Or has your friend Cassavetes never used magic to get her point across?”

Sylvie shrugged, wanting to deny it, but she couldn’t. Val was, or had been—before her powers got nuked—all about the little irritants. Sylvie had seen her whisper a confusion spell through the phone when an unlucky solicitor had dialed her one time too many. Val had said the spell was temporary.

Wales said, “I knew a priest once who made awesome zombies. Mixed in a witch’s poppet spell, broke out his own teeth, and bound them into the zombies’ skulls. It was like he had an entire group of servants who responded to his every whim.”

“So, what, that makes it worth the effort?” Sylvie said. “That how you made your new deal with Marco? Tied a bit of yourself into him?”

Wales shuddered. “No. A thousand nos. The priest I mentioned? That witch spell was based on the law of similarity. Like to like. It let him control ’em with minimal effort. Problem was he drew that similarity so tight it went both ways. He started to rot.”

“Gross,” Sylvie said.

“At least he only injured himself,” Wales said. “Your average witch could do that to any man on the street.”

“Careful,” Sylvie said. “You make your point sharp enough, you’ll end up impaled on it.”

When he paused, she said, “I already distrust magic-users. You really want me to have another reason to tar you all with the same brush? Keep comparing yourself to the Maudits and bad cess witches. Give me a reason to go after—”

Sylvie stopped midthreat, shaking it off. Wales wasn’t a witch, but he just might be as clever as Val at getting his own way. Locked in their argument over semantics, they’d headed absently back toward her truck.

She had other ideas.

“The ghost girl,” she said.

“Jennifer,” he said.

She waved off the name. She knew it, but who the girl had been was currently less important than what she was now. “Can you get her to track the other women?”

Wales opened his mouth, caught her expression, and sighed. “Yeah. Probably. If she’s not too afraid.”

“So. Do it.”

Wales scrubbed at his face, at his wayward hair, and said, “Yeah, okay. It’s just weird.”

“You were talking to her before,” Sylvie pointed out.

“In the place she died. That’s like . . . going to interview someone at their home. This is like cuffing them and bringing them down to the station. She’s going to be unhappy.”

Sylvie said, “Talk, talk, talk. Not getting it done.” Briskness was best, the only antidote to Wales’s dwelling on a fear that wasn’t his.

He sank down to a spider-legged crouch; his shadow drew away from him, spraddled long and dark over the grasses and waters. He scraped charcoal from his boot tread, piled the chunky ash and soot into Marco’s turned-up palm, folded himself over the Hand, whispering, his breath stirring the dust and ash. “Marco, bring her here.”

A spur of glacial cold racked Sylvie’s bones for a millisecond, then passed through her, leaving her with a taste of danger in her mouth and a rocketing heart. Wales shrugged uncomfortably. “Marco doesn’t care for you overmuch,” he said.

“He’s not the only one,” Sylvie said. “Just keep him under control.”

The brush of cold came back; this time she sidestepped the majority of it. She was a quick learner if nothing else.

“Is she here?”

Wales ignored her, head cocked slightly, gaze turned inward, lips moving in soundless speech, coaxing, commanding. He shivered, either for being bracketed between ghosts or for fighting off Jennifer Costas’s fear.

“Wales,” Sylvie said. “Her pain. Not yours. Her fear. Not ours.”

Wales nodded, head up, gaze following something invisible to Sylvie. If she squinted hard, concentrated, she thought she saw a shimmer walking ahead of him, something like a blur of smudgy heat. Jennifer Costas.

A coolness in the air—the lurking Marco—got her moving also, thinking wryly that this was the single most gruesome game of hot’n’cold she had ever played, directed by ghosts in the search for bespelled women.

WITH THE GHOSTS GUIDING THEM, THEY CAREFULLY MOVED OFF THE track into the pure wilderness. Sylvie tried to pick her way over the grassiest ridges, tried to stay out of the water. At least she didn’t have to worry about animal life—the ghosts were better than hounds at flushing game. Everything fled before them. Anhingas rose up on dark wings, clacking beaks. Snakes oiled through the grass, left dark wakes on the water like miniature sea serpents.

Only the mosquitoes stayed persistent. She slapped another one from her cheek, drawn there by the bloody symbols Wales had put on her skin. She lifted her shoulder, rubbed at the stickiest spot, and left smears on her clothes.

“Don’t suppose she has a time frame,” Sylvie said. The sun was high and hot, would stay that way for hours yet. Didn’t mean she wanted to spend the entire day in the swamp.

“Look on the bright side,” Wales said. “At least we’re off the radar for Odalys and her crew.”

“Small comfort,” Sylvie said. “Very small.”

Wales grinned, surrounded by ghosts and utterly at ease. Necromancers were just plain different from regular people.

“You just want to shoot something,” he said.

“It is cathartic,” she agreed.

She slipped off the next hummock, splashed down into dark water to her calf. Shaking water out of her shoes, she thought, Yeah, shooting things was better than this.

Between one breath and the next, her irritation fled. Her spine tightened up; her skin went clammy. She wanted to blame Marco for it, a ghostly bump and run, but Wales had gone just as rigid.

She drew her gun, the rasp of it leaving the holster loud in the sudden silence. Wales, beside her, was whispering into the wind, or Marco’s ear, or Jennifer’s, seeking reassurance or explanation.