Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Sylvie rose, paced the outside of the circle in an echo of Wales pacing the inside. The cold barrier of the Hands kept her at bay.

Leave him, her dark voice suggested. Run.

The air hummed, seethed in the room like locusts, something fiercely alive, something terrifyingly hungry.

The entire room trembled around them, a localized earthquake. In the hall, people were beginning to cry out, a hastening of footsteps running for the exits.

And the explosive grunting cough was getting stronger.

God, Sylvie thought. A god, coming to see what was keeping his newly gifted soul.

“Wales!” she shouted. “End the spell!”

Wales’s head came up, only then catching on to his danger. His expression went blank with shock; Jennifer’s burning gaze was tilted upward, terrified, waiting, a huddled creature in the glare of a headlight.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, sucked in willpower, hoped there were enough remnants of Wales’s protective spell on her skin, and reached through the ghost barrier.

Ice and cold and vertigo; her arm went dead to the shoulder, but her hand hit what she was aiming for, closed tightly around Wales’s thin forearm. She leaned back and yanked.

He barreled out of the circle, shouting protest; Sylvie only yanked harder, pulled them both down between the beds. Light exploded into the room after him—the spell breaking on two fronts.

The room shuddered; Sylvie scrabbled for her gun, got Wales between her and the floor, and stared into the heart of the light, trying to see what was coming for them. For Jennifer.

Something clouded the light, a dark mass, the shadow of a god reaching out toward them. The air in the room stung Sylvie’s skin, magic crawling over her body, jangling every nerve all at once. Again, she heard that hungry, moaning grunt.

Jennifer’s ghost blazed with heat, flames rushing outward, crawling the ceiling, the walls, the floor.

Sylvie rolled, trying to angle herself for a shot. Took it. Hit nothing but the wall. Got another roar of complaint.

We’re fucked. Too late to run.

She ducked, curled tight around Wales, choked on ovenhot atmosphere, her ears throbbing with pain as that animal howl went on and on, too loud for human comfort, Jennifer’s shriek mingling with it.

Heat on the back of Sylvie’s neck, a supernatural shadow drifting over her skin, Wales a bony, quivering mass beneath her. Jennifer’s scream cut off like someone had flipped a switch. The heat in the room subsided.

That angry moan sounded again, close enough to rattle her bones. And then . . . nothing. The shaking stopped; the light blinked out; her ears rang tinnily; spots danced before her eyes.

When she was convinced the god was gone, not merely playing with them, she rolled off Wales. He was out, eyes sealed shut, bruising beneath it. Yanking him through the circle hadn’t been a good idea. But it had been the only way. Ending spells, like starting a spell, took time that they hadn’t had.

She manhandled him onto the bed, fell back against his side, and gaped at the room. She expected destruction. Cracked plaster, scorch marks, the like. But there was almost nothing. The mirror over the dresser, glimpsed between stacked-up chair legs, had gone dark, smoked, as if it had gotten a better glance at the intruder than she had and burned from the inside out, incapable of reflecting it back.

A god, she thought again. And they were lucky. It hadn’t manifested completely. Hadn’t done more than cast its shadow on the mundane world. She spared a brief, belated thanks to the god of Justice: When he’d walked the earth, he’d contained his godly strength as best he could. This god didn’t care enough to do so.

She got up on shaky legs, and something crunched beneath her feet. Bone. She let her gaze drop, held through the swinging dizziness that caused, and let her eyes focus slowly. A skeletal hand. One of several.

The Hand of Glory had transformed from a withered, yellow mass of flesh and bone to a hand stripped completely to bone and charred black all the way through. Like Pompeii’s victims had, when she touched the hand, it disintegrated to a crisp pile of brittle ash.

Guess they’d finally found a way to destroy the Hands of Glory in one swoop, Sylvie thought wryly. That could have been useful a week ago. Now it was only a huh and a footnote in the supernatural files her memory kept.

She kicked it aside, away, staggered into the bathroom, ran the water cold and clear in the sink, and scrubbed at her face and nape. She felt more human at once. Another cloth, wetted down, still dripping, came with her back into the main room. She slapped it across Wales’s forehead, watched him flinch with some relief. Just out, then. Not dead.

She folded the comforter—scratchy, floral polyester—around him, cocooning him. He muttered, ducked his face into it, and dislodged the washcloth. He flailed a spastic hand in complaint as water ran down his neck and spine, then gave up, passing out or falling asleep. One or the other.

Sylvie dug her bullet out of the wall where it had lodged, dumped the misshapen thing into her pocket. That was the final straw as far as her own energy levels went. She staggered over to the other bed, face planted in the abused pillow, and was out before she could do more than wonder if housekeeping would wake them in the morning.

SHE WOKE TO HER PHONE RINGING SHRILLY, TO WALES’S GROANING something that might be Make it stop , to fading dreams of someone growling in her ear, and to a body gone stiff and sore. Bastard, she thought. She hoped the gunman’s wound got infected. She’d ill-wish their godly visitor, too, if she had a name to fling her curses toward.

Fumbling an arm across the stretch of clean sheets brought the phone to her hand. She flipped it open, “What?”

“You didn’t call me back,” Lio said.

“Your guard-dog wife hung up on me,” Sylvie said. A moment later, she put her face in her pillow and groaned. She’d intended to talk to Lio, but after she’d inhaled enough caffeine to be reasonably civil, at least to the point of not insulting the man’s wife.

Lio was silent for an angry second, then sighed. “Did you find anything?” He sounded good. Lucid. Impatient. Cop on the mend.

“Found everything,” Sylvie said. She sat up in the bed, shoved her hair out of her face. “It’s complicated.”

“Magic?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Good news, bad news? Good news is the women aren’t actually dead—well, except for the one who burned up—Jennifer Costas was her name, by the way.

“The rest are in mortal danger, but alive. At least if I don’t screw around too much. They’re kind of on a time limit. More good news? I found them again. Bad news? I left them there, and you can’t send anyone out to move them. They have to stay missing until we fix this.”

“What?” All the irritation he’d suppressed earlier came out in one sharp bark. “You what?”

“Look, Lio, I don’t like it either. But right now, I don’t have a choice. I could tell you where the women are, but that would just lead to a repeat of what put you in the hospital.”

They argued for a few minutes longer, repeating the same material— How could she? This was why he didn’t like private investigators. This was why she didn’t like cops. They didn’t understand the risks —until Wales shut her up by hurling a pillow into her face and slinking into the bathroom. “Make coffee,” he snapped, and slammed the door.

Guess he wasn’t suffering too much damage from spell shock, then, if he was lucid, irritable, and hogging the shower.

“Look, Lio,” Sylvie said. “I do have some info you can work on, even from home. I took pictures. If you can match them up with missing people . . . No, I’m not telling you how to do your job.” She tugged at her hair in increasing frustration and finally hung up. They were never going to be easy allies, but dammit, she needed him to keep the cops occupied, to distract the ISI.