Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

“Magic?” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to recall the scene she had left. Tried to remember why she had been nervous there, why she had thought Lio would be calling for her advice. She was a city girl at heart; her visits into the Everglades had been school field trips to Anhinga Trail to count animal species, and the more recent excursions to see Tatya. But even without familiarity, she had marked the lagoon as too quiet. The lagoon had had the shaky, stretched feel of a world altered by force, and the wildlife had fled before that metaphysical earthquake, leaving deadness behind. So yeah, maybe magic. But it hadn’t struck her as a spell waiting to happen. Hell, she wouldn’t have called Suarez out if that had been the case. She would have called a witch to clear the area first. Magical SWAT. Something.

Maybe Lourdes was right. Maybe Sylvie was to blame for this.

“Can’t tell about the fire,” Suarez murmured. “God only knows. Could have been an incendiary inside her. But I don’t think so. Not with the bear.”

“Yeah, the bear,” Sylvie said. “I’m still not—”

“I was in the water, thigh deep, worried that a gator was going to take me off at the knee, when the fire started. I tried to get to them, then I saw the body move before me.”

“The burning—”

“The other one. The one closest to me. The wildlife photographer. Your client’s wife. Maria Ruben. I thought—she was alive. I reached for her, and she changed. All claws, and teeth, and fur. Charging me. Her claws . . .”

His hand flailed at his stitches again, and Sylvie got it this time. “The dead woman changed into a bear?” It was so hard not to sound skeptical. Even knowing about the Magicus Mundi , even knowing about shape-shifters.

Shape-shifters didn’t play dead very well—too much animal. But they also didn’t come back from the dead.

“Am I going to change—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “It doesn’t work like that. Either it’s a genetic ability, or it’s a sorcerous one. It’s not a disease.”

Given that there was death involved, Sylvie assumed sorcery. True shape-shifters were creatures at least partially bound by natural law: They lived, they bred true, they died if you killed them, and they stayed dead. Beyond that—Maria Ruben was straight-up human. Had been, at any rate.

The wild card might be the tiny percentage of shape-shifters that were curse-related, but those were rare enough that she felt comfortable erasing them from the map of possibilities. Didn’t take too many generations of magic-users to learn that cursing your enemies to change them into beasts was more of an “oops” than a “ha!” Witches and sorcerers could make a tasty meal for a pissed-off shifter with a grudge.

Lio was quiet, more of those silent tears streaking his cheeks. Relief, this time, she diagnosed.

“They all changed,” he whispered finally. “Wolves and a big cat with a lashing tail.”

“The bodies?”

“Their eyes in the fires. Shone.”

“What happened to them?”

“We were dying,” Lio said. “Jorgé was screaming—haven’t heard men scream like that. Since the Gulf.”

Sylvie caught his hand in hers again, held it tight until the shaking eased.

“Los monstruos,” he said. His eyes closed, shields against the intolerable. Bruises on bruises. Emotional and physical. “They left us there.”

“ ‘Left,’ ” Sylvie parroted. It was an odd choice of words. Didn’t seem to apply to a group of fleeing animals.

“Retreated,” he said. “All the same direction.”

No matter how she questioned Lio, she doubted she’d get much more sense out of him. His skin was grey, beaded with sweat. His throat worked, holding back sickness, pain, fear. She didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened in the ’Glades; but then, the real question was, did she need to? She’d investigated other cases with less to go on.

“Sylvie,” Adelio said. “Find out. The only bodies in evidence now are police. Find out what happened, and stop it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you have a plan?” he pushed, unwilling to take her word.

“Monster hunting,” Sylvie said. “I’m waiting until morning, and I’m taking magical backup.”

Dead women who changed shape? Dead women who came back to life? Sounded like necromantic magic. Luckily, she had a new acquaintance who liked to pal around with death magic. Tierney Wales, the Opa-locka Ghoul, was going to find himself rousted bright and early for a field trip.

SYLVIE MADE HER WAY ACROSS THE CROWDED PARKING LOT—hospitals always seemed to be doing a booming business no matter the hour—homing in on her truck and its clawed hood gleaming beneath a streetlamp. She thought of Suarez and his patchwork of sutured flesh with regret. He was going to scar as badly as her truck.

Footsteps sounded behind her, quick-moving, and she turned, always on alert, but saw only a woman searching for her keys in a cavernous leopard-print bag. Disorganized, Sylvie thought. The woman had the common sense to move quickly through the quiet lot but not enough planning to pull her keys ahead of time. She was asking to be mugged. Especially while leaning up against a steely grey BMW.

One of the sheep, her little dark voice suggested, dependent on a careless shepherd.

Hush, Sylvie thought at it. Bad enough when it preached misanthropy; it made her downright nervous when it started to verge on theology. The voice was the leftover bit of Lilith’s genetic legacy carried down through generations, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. Sylvie had killed Lilith when they met; she didn’t need to keep Lilith’s madness alive in her own blood.

Sylvie left the hospital behind with the usual diesel cough from her truck and a belated protest from her stomach, which chose that moment to remember the abandoned enchiladas. Burned women, hospital visits, dead cops—part of being a pro meant it didn’t even faze her appetite. Not anymore. Which, considering the rate that the Magicus Mundi was invading Sylvie’s day-to-day life, was a good thing. She’d have starved otherwise.

She checked her mirrors, checked the streets, trying to remember what restaurants were open and nearby. Mia Rosa’s, she thought, was only two blocks back. She checked the streets once more, looking for cops, then hung a U-turn. During the day, she wouldn’t have made it. At this hour, it was a little tricky, best done at speed, but definitely possible. Behind her, horns honked loud and long, and too late to be directed at her. She glanced back to see that another car had made the same maneuver, though the woman driving looked a little wild-eyed. Sylvie hmmed thoughtfully, and when she parked the truck, she unlocked the glove box and took out her gun.

She didn’t like being followed.

She especially didn’t like being followed when she had a killer witch after her.

The hostess at the door greeted Sylvie with a stiff smile, a pointed reminder that they were closing at midnight, and sat her among a group of tables with the chairs put up. Subtle, they weren’t. Sylvie didn’t care as long as the food was hot, plentiful, and quick to arrive.

She had just sent the waitress off with her order when the door opened again; the hostess moved to intercept another last-minute diner. Sylvie narrowed her eyes, and the dark-haired woman in the doorway waved at Sylvie and waved off the hostess.

The woman from the hospital parking lot threaded her way through the tables, her ridiculously large bag still hanging from her shoulder and clunking against upended chair legs every few feet. The same woman who’d made a U-turn to keep up with her, pushing her ancient Jeep hard to make enough speed to keep from being t-boned. She homed in on Sylvie, and Sylvie kicked out the chair opposite her. “So, that business with the BMW, was that playacting or wishful thinking?”