Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Lio and Janssen broke off their staring contest when she opened the door. Janssen’s face twisted into a scowl. Lio’s didn’t warm much either; in fact, he looked downright angry. “You done playing, Shadows? ’Cause Lourdes is going to be frantic.”

“Yeah, we’re going,” Sylvie said.

Janssen said, “No, you’re not—”

Riordan just shook his head. “Yeah, she is.”

Lio pushed himself up out of his seat; the table creaked beneath his palms. Still hurting, still sore. Sylvie reached to give him some support, and he jerked away from her touch, headed slowly out the door.

“Are you giving us a ride back?” Sylvie asked. “Or do I bill you for the cab fare?”

“I’ll get you a driver,” Riordan muttered. “Don’t get used to it, Shadows. I’m still going to . . .” He trailed off.

“You’re not very good at being threatening,” Sylvie said. “Work on it.”

Sylvie made her way back out toward the front of the hotel, found Lio there, blinking and swaying in the sunlight, and reached to steady him again. He shook her off. “Don’t touch me.”

“What’s your problem?” Sylvie asked. “I should be the pissy one. You’re the guy who turned me in to the ISI.”

“You killed Odalys,” Lio said.

“I did not,” she said. “Christ, Lio, she was in jail.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” he muttered. He paced, forcing some fluidity into sore limbs, gone stiff with his hospital stay, and the no-doubt bed rest that Lourdes would have prescribed. “Janssen said the killer took her hands. That she was tortured before she died. You did that?”

“I didn’t,” Sylvie said. “You have a hearing problem? I don’t kill people.”

“No,” he said. “Maybe not directly. You have pagan gods do it for you.” His voice broke, and in the crack it left, Sylvie saw fear.

She should have expected it. She had expected it days ago, back when she first started to explain the Magicus Mundi to him, had seen a glimmer of panic in his hospital bed, but this—this was the corrosive terror that meant he wasn’t going to cope. He’d wanted to know, and the knowledge was going to break him.

She’d made a mistake telling him.

Into the silence, Lio said, “This is a democratic country. There’s a contract that we keep faith with. We arrest people, we try them, we find them guilty or we acquit them. They are sentenced. Their punishment takes their time and their freedom, or a death that we make simple and clean. We don’t torture for punishment or for proof. We don’t sentence people before their trials. An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. Vengeance destroys what makes us human.”

Sylvie growled. “You were pleased enough that your son’s killers were destroyed. You are a hypocrite, Lio.”

“Perhaps I am. But I didn’t sentence them. You did.”

A black SUV pulled up, smooth as silk, into the roadway before them; a dark-haired woman in a suit got out, and said, “So where am I taking you?” The question was directed at both of them, but the woman’s focus was all on Sylvie.

“You’re taking him home,” Sylvie said. “I’ll find my own ride.” Best to give Suarez some space, some time to calm down. He’d lived through a Castro Cuba, earned citizenship by fighting in the Gulf, worked his way up the ranks in the Miami police. He was a tough bastard.

“Damn,” she said. “I was hoping we could chat.”

Lio eased himself into the passenger seat, closed the door with a solid thud. The driver lingered, standing on the curb, waiting for Sylvie’s response. Sylvie blinked; she hadn’t thought the woman’s attention was anything more than ISI attitude.

“Doubt we have anything to talk about,” Sylvie said. She badly wanted to be out of there, away from the ISI. And this suit in particular was beginning to set off alarm bells. It wasn’t the woman’s poise or confidence, wasn’t the tough-girl vibe that made Sylvie convinced the woman was a brawler and a gunfighter. It was that she acted like she knew Sylvie.

“We could start with the favor I did for you. Or we could talk about Michael Demalion,” she said. “But if you won’t, you won’t.” She saluted Sylvie briefly, a quick twist of her fingers near her brows, a casual gesture that should have been mocking. But the woman’s hand, drawn to Sylvie’s attention, looked . . . bloodstained. A mottled, muddy crimson wash over her knuckles and palm, rising upward to her wrist and beyond.

It wasn’t a birthmark or skin ailment. Sylvie had seen that mark before, and recently.

“Wait,” Sylvie said.

“Too late,” the woman said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll get together at some point.”

The agent climbed into the SUV and disappeared into the steady stream of traffic. Sylvie, despite wanting to get away from the ISI, found herself meandering gently to the nearest bench and dropping into it. The metal slats were soothingly warm through her clothes, and she leaned back. Her head was going to burst. Ducks squabbled on the green surface of the nearby canal.

Too much information—murdered Odalys, Tepeyollotl, the need to find Azpiazu, Azpiazu’s theoretical immortality, the falling-out with Lio, and now this ISI mind game?

Murderer, her little dark voice whispered, belatedly identifying the female ISI agent. Not by name, but by profession.

Even if she hadn’t mentioned Demalion and a favor in the same breath, Sylvie would have known. She’d done some quiet research on her own since Zoe’s incident, since that same magical scar showed up on her sister’s flesh, trying to figure out what that scar meant. Rumors proliferated—the only clear truths she could grasp were that the scarring was rare and only blossomed on specialized killers. What made them special, no one knew.

Sylvie plucked at the gaps in the bench, drew lines between the bars, bridging the eternally distant, and gave in to impulse. She called Demalion.

It rang, but he didn’t answer. She disconnected before Wright’s voice mail could pick up, waited.

Her phone buzzed. “Shadows,” she said.

“Sorry, honey,” Demalion said.

“You’re at work,” she said. “And not alone. They think it’s your wife calling?”

“Seemed easiest,” Demalion said.

“You got the word out on Odalys?” she asked.

“Took some careful maneuvering, but I did find a willing ear,” he said.

“Did you know they’d kill her?”

The radio sounds in the background, the tangle of voices, and the clatter of movement through a crowded room kept her from demanding an answer when he went silent. Her patience paid off; the background noise changed to wind and distant murmuring. “Taking a cigarette break?”

“She’s dead?” he asked.

“Yeah, and I got hauled in for questioning—what’s that about?”

Demalion’s voice, even in Wright’s husky tenor, sounded edgy. “Syl, the ISI’s changed. After Chicago, the factions within the agency started getting more . . . outspoken.”

“Let me guess. One faction’s all about putting down the magical threat.”

“Hey, Odalys deserved to be dead—”

“Not arguing that,” Sylvie said. “Really not. But your perky little ISI assassin cut Odalys’s hands off, and that worries me. What, one for the Hand of Glory, and one for a trophy?”

Demalion swore quietly and steadily; Sylvie had the feeling that if he weren’t hanging out at the cop shop, pretending to grab a smoke, he’d be all hissing intensity, his eyes narrowed to angry slits. Finally, he said, “My perky little assassin?”

“That’s what you focus on?”

“It’s the only part that I don’t get,” he said. “I don’t know the assassin. C’mon, Syl, you’re the closest thing I know to an—”