Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

The question— Is something there? —hovered on her lips, unasked. The answer was evident. The thick heat of the day had gone unwholesome, unhealthy. Sylvie licked her lips and tasted something in the air, something foul and earthy like a poorly skinned hide left out to cure.

Her palm sweated on her gun; she changed hands and wiped the other against her jeans.

Wales said, “We’re close.”

“You think?”

He shot her a pissy look, which she gave back in spades, and he shrugged a single shoulder in reluctant agreement. “To our left. Magic. A lot of it.”

“Necromancy?”

“Not exactly,” Wales said. His face creased in concentration; his eyes closed as if he could get the feel of the area better with one sense cut off. Sylvie, thinking of dead cops and bespelled women, preferred to keep her eyes open, watchful. “It’s not not-necromancy either. I don’t . . . I don’t like it. Marco doesn’t like it. And Jennifer—she’s so scared. I’m letting her go now.”

Jennifer wasn’t the only one scared; Wales’s voice wavered. He tucked his hands into his pockets, tangling Marco’s dead fingers in his own.

Sylvie felt the trembling echo of his fear in her own bones, transmitted like a virus. This, this was why she preferred to work alone. It was hard enough to face the Magicus Mundi on her own; she didn’t need someone to infect her with their fears.

“We could go back,” he said.

“Or hey, we could do the job I brought you here for? Investigate?”

“We don’t even know what we’re walking into,” he said. “I like caution. Caution is good.”

“Caution had me calling the cops last night,” she said. “Caution killed Jennifer Costas and three policemen. Injured a friend of mine. This job doesn’t reward caution.”

She took a steady breath, refusing to choke under the weight of whatever saturated the air. She had resisted aversion charms made by one of the best witches in the state; she could withstand this growing miasma of fear and wrongness. She let her breath out, pushed Wales’s fear out of her bones, and took the first step toward trouble.

The next one was easier.

Wales followed on the fourth step, so tense that she felt his presence like a live wire, something to be wary of, something that could lash out, unexpectedly, in any direction.

“Are we getting closer?”

When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder, irritated that she had to do so—the ground before them was growing marshy again, treacherous.

He nodded stiffly. “Straight on.”

Straight on, like there was even a path. Sylvie soldiered onward, stepped into a deceptive puddle, and found herself suddenly knee deep, a plume of mud swirling through the previously still water.

Wales said, his voice tight and small, “Marco says we’re close.”

“Well, if Marco says so.” She shifted her grip on her gun. Didn’t know if she would need it. So far, the day was quiet. Creepy and fraught with magical tension, but quiet. But then, that was how it had been yesterday, and Lio had been mauled.

Her skin goose-bumped. She didn’t know if she should use the gun, even if attacked. Odds were, any attackers would be the shape-changed women, not the wildlife that fled their path.

But she knew herself and knew that she would shoot in a heartbeat. If necessary. She hoped it wouldn’t be.

Water slipped into her jeans, nearly blood temperature, and wicked upward, filling her senses with swamp. A vibration in the water ahead sent ripples stroking slowly back her direction.

Sylvie squinted against sun gleaming off the water. There was something up ahead, a paler patch in the water, the sway of something that wasn’t reed. “Wales,” she breathed, and picked up her pace, still scanning the area but moving off to investigate that pallid gleam. Sand maybe?

Given that Wales looked as happy to be in the water as a house cat, she doubted it was anything so natural.

Sylvie hastened the last ten feet, her pulse echoing in her ears, her breath in her chest, and splashed forward. She stilled, staring down at the choppy water, trying to see. She could reach through the water, touch . . . but even the kaleidoscope image she could piece together looked distressingly like flesh. If she reached, would she end with cold flesh in her hands?

Or worse, if this was one of the women, would touching her break the spell in the wrong way? Create another burst of lethal flame, boiling her and Wales alive?

Wales said, “Sylvie?”

“I found . . . something,” Sylvie said.

“So did I,” Wales said. He waded a gentle circle around her and the lagoon. His mouth drew tight. “You said there were five women?”

“Were five. Now four.”

“Five,” he said.

“What?”

“ I count five. A pentagram. Jennifer’s been replaced.”

Sylvie waded over to him, following his path, dismay overriding the cold dread in her bones. She studied each face, blurred by water, trying to pick out which one was new.

Six women and only two names known. One of them elicited from the woman’s ghost. Her city had enough problems without women being dragged into the ’Glades and turned into mannequins.

The bodies swayed gently in place, as if tethered. Despite Wales’s assurance that they lived, they looked dead. Abused and dead. Grimacing, Sylvie reached into the water. Blood temperature near the surface, cooler and subtly slimy deeper down. Beside her, Wales hissed out a warning breath.

“Easy, Tex,” she murmured. “I’m just getting a closer look.”

“Just be careful,” he said. “I think the water is an insulator. Like silk. Magically inert. Pun aside, it might be a dampening field. Helps maintain the stasis they’re in.”

Sylvie nodded. “What if I keep most of the body beneath the surface?”

“Why mess with them at all?”

“Pictures,” she said. “I know Maria Ruben. The others are still unidentified.” She grasped the woman’s shoulders from behind, her palms pressing flat against clammy shoulder blades. The woman—girl, really—felt dead. Heavy and inert, unpleasantly limp, free from rigor. Her blond hair slithered over Sylvie’s forearms like a swath of clinging weed. She swallowed hard and gently raised the woman’s face; the water rolled back, baring open contact-green eyes with fixed pupils. A symbol was carved into her forehead, blanched white and bloodless. The skin furrowed.

“Do you know this symbol?” Sylvie asked.

“No,” he said, after a glance.

Sylvie braced the woman’s shoulder against her hip, took out her camera, and clicked. One down.

“That’s enough,” Wales said. “Put her back.”

“Sense something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s a yes-or-no question,” she said. “Do you sense something?”

“Yes, then. Don’t know what. But something’s paying attention. Do the others fast.”

“You could help. You’re the necromancer. You’re the one who’s supposed to be grappling with corpses.”

“That’s the point, Shadows. They’re not corpses, remember?”

“Picky, picky,” she said. She repeated the picture taking with the other women, careful not to raise them too high, careful to get clear shots, not only of their faces, too pale, too slack, but the symbol on each of their foreheads.

She stared down at Maria Ruben’s dark eyes, the color of the mud beneath her, and said, “Maria doesn’t look too good.”

“There’s a good?”

Sylvie said, “There’s definitely a bad.” Maria looked . . . withered. Dry. Even in the water’s embrace, her skin looked parched. Her mouth looked chapped, the edges split. Her fingertips looked charred; reddish black streaks climbing her hands. More symbols nestled in her upturned palms.