Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

A fish leaped at a hawk’s shadow as it fell over the water, set off a chain reaction. A turtle ducked its head, glided into motion; a snowy egret hunched its neck; a long ripple cut the surface as a water moccasin slid by.

Life.

Sylvie slapped at a mosquito absently.

“They’re gone,” Wales said. He gaped at the water’s surface as if it had betrayed them. As if it were responsible for their disappearance.

Sylvie considered it an evident statement and made no response. It wouldn’t have been polite anyway. Guilt sizzled through her veins, laced with a healthy slug of rage.

“Can you find them again?” she asked.

“I could try—”

“Go for it,” Sylvie said.

Wales said, “I’m not a dog, Sylvie. I don’t jump on command.”

“If I say ‘pretty please’? C’mon, Tex,” she said. “It’s not just for me. Those women need our help.”

Wales said, “I’m not promising anything. Marco’s built to override defenses, magical or otherwise. He’s not meant to hunt necromantic magic.”

“You were the one talking about sympathetic linkage,” Sylvie said. “Can’t you use that?”

“They’re not dead. Marco is. But I’m going to give it a try. You got a pen on you?”

Sylvie dragged one out of her pocket, a half-sized Sharpie that Alex mocked her for carrying, but as Wales started marking alchemical symbols onto Marco’s Hand, Sylvie sent a mental Take that! to Alex’s techno-love that would send Sylvie into the field with a PDA instead of ever-useful pen and paper.

Wales finished the designs, tilted Marco’s grey-skinned palm to show Sylvie the symbol for fusion, repeated twice, one on the palm, one on the back.

“Is it working?”

“Patience?”

“Never had it,” Sylvie said.

Wales closed his eyes. The breeze that passed over him reached Sylvie with the faint chill she was beginning to associate with ghosts added. Despite the humid heat that weighed her bones, she stepped away as best she could, checking her path. When she looked up again, Wales was twenty feet away, blindly following Marco’s urging.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, thought of a will-o’-the-wisp leading men to their deaths, and hastened after him.

Wales set a rapid pace over hummock and limestone, over knotted grass and through muddy puddles that spat frogs at their approach; sweat trickled down Sylvie’s spine, damped the hair at her temples and nape, greased her palm around the handle of her gun. An anhinga rose on a flap of dark wings and something large slid into the water nearby. Alligator, Sylvie thought, and clutched her gun tighter. They were common enough in the city, but the difference between seeing them as you drove by and walking pellmell into their territory made her heart rocket.

It would be a crap way to die; deathrolled in shallow waters, as horrible as anything the Magicus Mundi could dish out.

Wales stopped all at once. Around him, the mosquito cloud flitted away from Marco’s cold presence.

“There,” he said. A breath of air.

Sylvie joined him; beneath their feet the soft ground grew gritty, limestone gravel forming a path—a narrow access road.

On it, wider than the gravel, pressed tightly against the encroaching vegetation, a black van with a man closing the rear door. Sylvie got a glimpse of pallid, limp flesh, and drew her gun.

“Don’t move,” she said, trying to spot his companion. Black van, man in a suit, taking up a crime scene—ISI seemed likely, and they didn’t work alone.

But Wales’s response—tongue-tied pallor—suggested otherwise. He hated the government, but he didn’t fear it.

This was fear.

“It’s him,” Wales stammered. “The sorcerer.”

She jerked her attention back to the man leaning up against the van. “Soul-devourer?” Her gaze centered, picking out a target. His tie, his smoothly shaven throat, the handkerchief in his breast pocket, the space between his dark eyes. He seemed utterly at ease, lounging back as if to allow her all the time in the world to choose her shot. A far cry from the flailing man-monster at the Casa de Dia, all claws and terror.

“I’ve never liked that soubriquet,” the man said. “But it will do for an introduction, I suppose. You are . . .” He tilted his head, doing the strange I talk to spirits that you can’t see thing that was beginning to look familiar. Necromancers.

“None of your business,” she said.

“Sylvie—” Wales said, a near-breathless warning. She could forgive him showing his fear openly, but to use her name when she’d just denied it to the sorcerer—that was something else. She’d expected better of Mr. Paranoia.

“Sylvie?” the sorcerer said. “Shadows, if you’re out here hunting me. The new Lilith.” His tongue came out, quick, oddly reptilian, brushed his lips, retreated. Had there been scales on it? The longer she looked at him, the less convincingly human he seemed.

The more wrong he seemed.

Sylvie wasn’t magically inclined, but she was good at sensing magic, that subtle shift in the feel of the world. Everything about him screamed unnatural , something held together by magic and willpower. The suit he wore bulged rhythmically, as if the flesh it covered was in flux.

Maybe not so controlled, after all.

He pressed himself away from the van, moved toward Sylvie. A wave of wrongness preceded him. She pressed her finger on the trigger, felt the tiniest of gives. “Don’t.”

The sorcerer never stopped smiling, a sliver of white teeth between blood-flushed lips. “Don’t? Don’t what? I’m doing nothing—”

“What are you, five? Stop moving, or I’ll shoot you.”

Wales made a creaky sound of protest, and Sylvie thought briefly about shooting him. “What?” she snapped.

“That’s no good,” Wales said. “The spell—”

“He’s right,” the sorcerer said. “The binding spell works both directions. Should you shoot me, you risk destabilizing it.”

He didn’t need to say more. When Jennifer Costas had been trapped, she’d burned. The five women in the van were equally trapped. Equally at risk.

“A deal, then,” Sylvie said. “You unbind the women from your spell. I don’t shoot you today.”

“Give up my little harem? No. In fact, I’m going to keep them closer than ever.” His lips curled into a smile. He had a disturbingly pretty mouth. It made what he said that much more off-putting. “Too many people were touching them. Like the ancient sultans, I require my women to be mine alone.”

Sylvie’s finger twitched. Wales whispered fiercely, an argument held with someone spectral, and the man on the roadway laughed. “Listen to your ghost, boy. I’m more sorcerer than you want to tangle with.”

“I’m not your boy,” Wales said. “And Marco says you should be dead.” Wales might be thin, scared, and brittle; but he was dangerous for all of that, still a necromancer. The sorcerer obviously agreed; his eyes sparked green-white phosphorescence like an animal’s.

Even with the trigger mostly depressed, Sylvie was too slow, hampered by calculations; protect Wales, endanger the women, or . . . Her voice howled furious protest, drove her finger down on the trigger. Her bullet went hopelessly wide. The sorcerer leaped the distance between Wales and the shore, slapped Wales with a careless hand. Wales spun away, blood spurting from his cheek, his shoulder, spinning into the water. He crawled out, coughing, draped himself over a tuft of grass, and passed out.

Crouching, the sorcerer flexed his hand, showed her an animal’s paw, a cat’s claw, ivory nails curved and wet with blood. “Now that he’s down, perhaps we can talk.”

Her second bullet missed him by millimeters; he rolled with an animal’s grace, rose, and threw sand into the air before him.