Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

She wouldn’t cough. Wouldn’t cry out. Whatever the spell was, it was tearing the hell out of her throat.

Her hands were wet, icy with spilled water.

She tried not to breathe. Not to move. Not to make it worse.

This wasn’t illusion. This would kill her whether she believed it was happening or not. Her unaccountable resistance to magic could only last so long. Blood blossomed hot, slippery in her throat.

Footsteps came down the stairs so fast they were nearly falling. Alex shrieked, high and distorted, Wales’s shouting back, all but incomprehensible, torn between fast words and the Texan drawl.

“Hold on, Sylvie,” he said. Or she thought he said.

Icy fingers threw her backward, pressed her down. She clawed up, felt only fog, malevolence.

“Don’t fight him,” Wales said. “He’s trying to help.”

Cold fog iced over her lips; something that tasted of rot, of cold, clotted blood. Marco, she thought, and was amazed that she still had energy to be squeamish.

Marco sealed her mouth with his, blew death and ice into her chest. She stopped breathing. No. She didn’t stop. He stopped her. Killed her. The deadly cold in her lungs spread outward. Her hands struck at nothing; the pain in her chest and belly fought back.

Her bones were ice, too cold even to shiver.

In the background, Alex sobbed.

Just when Sylvie thought she must be encased in ice, a new cold pressed into her belly, so frozen it burned. So cold, that if she’d been breathing, she’d have expected to see ice.

Her lungs ached; her vision dimmed, but she saw the impossible. A floating clump of red-smeared pins rising through the skin of her stomach. Passing through her flesh, held in Marco’s invisible fist.

She blacked out.

When she came to, the lips on hers were warm, breathing life, not death, and shaking with fear. “C’mon, Sylvie,” Alex whispered. “C’mon.”

Sylvie’s heart gave a giant lurch, stuttering, then pounding furiously, shaking her lungs into action. She coughed, felt pain, tasted copper, but nothing like before, and curled onto her side. Alex slumped beside her, rubbing her spine.

“Tierney sent the ghost after the witch,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “Said Marco’s gonna force-feed her the pins. God, Sylvie—”

“’S okay,” Sylvie breathed. It wasn’t.

Pins. That was ugly magic, a far cry from the illusions she’d been attacked with earlier. Hell, she preferred the gunman to this. And she didn’t know how it had been triggered. Line of sight? A poppet? A triggered spell attached to the bottle she’d so carelessly picked up?

She hadn’t expected Odalys to try something so messy and violent. Something inexplicable enough to rouse serious attention. Something so old-fashioned. Odalys was a modern witch.

For the first time in a long while, Sylvie felt in over her head. She was crazy to do what she did. To face off against the Magicus Mundi with a gun and nothing more. She was going to have to cave, have to crawl to Val and Zoe and get the defensive magics back on the shop and their homes.

“Don’t talk,” Alex said. “He’s pulling the truck around. We’re going to take you to the ER. The ghost got the pins out, but—”

“’S okay,” Sylvie whispered again. This time it was. She felt . . . all right. Like crap. Sore. Like her throat and lungs and stomach had all been sandblasted. Like she could brush forever and never be rid of the taste of Marco’s tongue moving between her teeth. But nowhere near the kind of pain she expected from shredded tissues.

“Help me up,” she said.

Alex shook her head, mulish. Still trembling. Sylvie reconsidered. Alex didn’t look like she could get herself off the floor, much less aid Sylvie.

Sylvie rolled forward, going from her side, tucking her knees, and ended up in a half crouch, half-kneeling position, her hands braced before her.

Alex squeaked in worry.

Sylvie hung her head for a second, let the blood rearrange itself in her body, then pressed upward. Yeah. She was going to be fine. She knew it because the little dark voice was snarling, ready to make someone pay. Her blood thrummed with rage.

Wales had acted fast enough, and she’d not panicked, and Marco, disgusting and deadly though his touch was, had been gentle. Alex looked up at her, her makeup smeared, and shaking hard enough for the both of them, and Sylvie thought that feeling okay wasn’t going to keep her from a hospital trip.

Wales came barreling back through the door, rocked back when he saw Sylvie on her feet. Mutely, he handed her a wax doll, the length of her palm, blurred with his sweaty agitation. The doll might be formless, but the braided strands of hair atop the waxen head were brown. Were hers. A silver shadow lingered in the poppet’s chest; she nudged it out—a final pin pulling free—and felt an answering twinge in her body.

“I’ll melt it down for you,” Wales said.

She spat out a last mouthful of blood, a scarlet splotch on the white and black linoleum, and said, “Thanks.” She pinched the tiny braid off the doll, rolled it between her fingers, and finally stuck it in her pocket. Just to be safe.

“Truck’s running,” Wales said.

“The witch?”

“Dead,” he said. “The ISI’s having a conniption fit over it. Apparently, she was seated in the café next to them. A nice little abuela with a bagful of knitting.”

“Hospital now, talk later,” Alex said.

Wales nodded, bobbleheaded, gave Sylvie another wild-eyed glance, and dragged them both into the cab of the truck.

Sylvie resigned her afternoon to hospital paperwork and a careful explanation. A witch cursed me and transported pins into my stomach wasn’t going to go over well with the docs.

Alex shivered against her in the close confines of the truck cab, and Wales put his foot down on the gas. Sylvie, sandwiched between them, closed her eyes, the better not to see Wales’s truly frightening driving skills, and to focus. Now that the first flush of triumph had slowed, she felt nearly as freaked-out as Alex looked.

She was fine. She shouldn’t be.

SYLVIE MANAGED TO BARTER DOWN THE HOSPITAL IN EXCHANGE FOR a friendly clinic. Getting X-rayed, probed, and told she was a lucky woman took the better part of five hours. She was honestly surprised to find Wales still hovering nervously in the parking lot. With the ISI in play, his own injuries, a dead witch on his conscience—she’d expected him to be a vapor trail on the horizon.

Instead, he was slumped down low behind the steering wheel, studying any car in the lot that looked suspicious. A plus for the clinic over the hospital, Sylvie thought. The ISI drove high-end sedans, carefully maintained.

Sylvie clambered into the truck, said, “What’d you do with Alex?”

“Took her home, came back,” he said. “You’re running low on gas.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly. It was marred by a fit of coughing. She checked her palm. No blood. She wouldn’t have said no to a lozenge.

“Where to?” Wales asked.

Sylvie paused. “Did the witch say anything? Say who sent her?”

“You didn’t say a lot with your belly full of pins. Neither did she. She just died. Marco killed her.” He swallowed hard. “ I killed her. Didn’t even think about it. I was just . . . angry and tired. I could have told Marco to drop the pins. I’m not that guy, Shadows.”

“This world brings it out in all of us,” Sylvie said. “Can’t say I’m sorry. Not about the witch, anyway. How’d you know what to do?”

“Poppet magic,” Wales said. “Had a brief resurgence in popularity in Texas some years back. Had a grudge against a cattle ranch. Drained the cows. Lamed the workers. Finally, fed the owner a bellyful of death, and the ranch died with him. That’s witchcraft, mind you, your cleaner magic.”