Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Sylvie looked at the clock in the dash, squinting in the sunlight. A couple of hours until sundown. If she could roust Wales from his sulk, collect him, the Hand of Glory—maybe they could sneak into Azpiazu’s lair. Maybe he’d have come up with something special to free the women, something to pick apart the spells that held them. If Azpiazu could move them without breaking the spell into a flaming disaster, maybe Wales could do the same. Like a bomb, picked apart in precisely the right order. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

She wanted certainty.

AN HOUR LATER, SYLVIE, WITH A NERVOUS AND SULLEN WALES AT HER side, drove into Serrano’s neighborhood. No wonder the police had been so willing to make a house call. Serrano lived on the distant edge of a golf course. The neighborhood was nice, professionally landscaped, spacious plats, two-story houses, expensive but not too expensive. Uppermiddle-class; the kind of area where people still called the police instead of their private lawyers.

Sylvie had been concerned that it would be a gated community, but it was one of the holdouts—a wealthy neighborhood that didn’t want to masquerade as an island resort. She took a last look at the real-estate paper in her hand: Jose Serrano’s house listed an indoor lap pool. She sighed.

“Think we’re wasting our time?” Wales said.

“Trying to figure our approach. If Serrano’s home sick, like the cops reported, breaking in is a no-go. And using Marco to sneak us in—”

“If he’s really ill, I wouldn’t chance it,” Wales said. “Marco’s bites take a lot out of you.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Even if it is Azpiazu there, waking Marco is a risk,” Wales said. “Azpiazu’s familiar with necromantic magic.”

“You think he can take Marco from you?”

Wales shook his head. “No. Marco’s mine, for good or ill. But using necromantic magic in his vicinity? It’ll be like ringing an alarm bell.”

“Will Marco be able to knock him out?”

“Doubt it,” Wales said. “You’ve gotten resistant to him with exposure. I’d imagine an immortal necromancer would be a sight more resistant than you.”

“Then we’re stuck playing cat burglar,” Sylvie said. “And if Serrano’s home?”

“You’re a fast liar,” Wales said. “I’ll leave the talking to you.”

“Thanks,” she muttered. But she didn’t see another option.

If this was an information misfire—if Serrano really was inside, sick with the flu, and the cops had brushed up against Azpiazu elsewhere—she couldn’t afford to break a window and climb inside. She had enough of a reputation with the cops that she didn’t want to add a B and E charge, especially since she was armed. That kind of thing could be difficult, if not impossible, to shake. Her life plans didn’t include a detour for jail time.

Sylvie touched the ouroboros at her breastbone, tapped the warning bell in her jacket pocket, and headed around the back of the house, Wales a clumsy afterthought.

One thing she’d had proved to her over and over again in this career path was that people’s idea of security was often more for show than fact. They made a big deal about locking the front door, the windows, put up security gates and signs, then left their back doors unlocked, unguarded, or shielded from all watchful eyes.

It made no sense to her, but the nicer the estate and surroundings, the more likely the homeowners fell into that kind of carelessness. They thought that privacy and space equaled safety when, in truth, what they mostly meant were no witnesses.

The lawn, thick and vividly green, denting beneath her boots, made her steps as soundless as if she were walking on pillows. Behind her, Wales swore softly as he tripped over a sprinkler head.

The twilight moving in made her as close to invisible as a human could be without magical intervention, turned the world into moving columns of grey, purple, black. Her red jacket sucked in light, turned dark and shadowed, better than camo prints.

Rustling in the underbrush and a skink oiled out before her, slipping clumsily through the grass, two heads drawing it in different directions. She watched it, struck by the freak show of it, and stepped onto a path that crunched. The gravel was dark and pale at once, as patterned as a copperhead. The paler splotches gave beneath her feet with small cracks and pops until she realized they were skeletal frogs. An entire pond’s worth.

Dead doves. Now this.

The last doubt in her mind that she might be blundering into some innocent’s house crumbled.

Tepeyollotl might not be physically present, but something of him was seeping through the curse—his power fueling it, his power that Azpiazu was warping. God-power spilling out and messing with the world.

Several acres over, she heard a car pull up, a garage door churn into mechanical life. The neighbors weren’t going to notice anything, focused on the homecoming transition. She wondered if they’d noticed any changes in their own little worlds, or if they’d just shrugged them off.

Recon, she thought. Take a look, get a grip on the situation, get Wales’s take on it, then come back better informed and armed for bear.

Or monster.

The backyard, accessed by a quick climb over a stucco wall, yielded a gardener’s paradise. Sylvie, used to seeing tropical gardens, was still impressed. The air was thick and damp and green sweet fragrant, the walls hidden with rosary pea and hibiscus; orange trees and woody jasmine bushes studded the walkways.

Wales landed in the grass behind her, grimacing.

She didn’t think the pained distaste on his face was for his awkward landing. The closer she drew to the house, the less soothing the garden felt. Her little dark voice growled in constant warning, and Sylvie didn’t think it was simple caution about housebreaking.

The weathered deck creaked gently beneath her steps, her bootheels muffled impacts that echoed in her quickening heartbeat.

Recon, she reminded herself. A look-see. Nothing more. We aren’t prepared for more.

The house, seen through a pair of French doors, was dark, caught in that awkward space between being lit by daylight and not quite dark enough to require internal lights. The rooms she saw behind the glass looked as static and unpeopled as a closed movie set.

And, like a signal from the heavens, the alarm keypad she saw was flashing green green green. Unarmed. Unset. An open invitation.

Sylvie turned her head, looked sidewise, dropped her lashes, peering through the shadows she made of her vision. There. A glimmer on the glass, within the glass. Like the traceries of fingerprints and skin oils left behind, except that this was a magical symbol. Another tiny proof that made her believe Cachita’s assertion that Azpiazu was the original recipe: He used magic instead of technology at every turn.

Even the Maudits , proud sorcerers that they were, tended to mix and match.

Still, her trip to Val’s might have already paid off. Sylvie pulled the ouroboros amulet from around her neck, wrapped the cord around her wrist, and reached for the door handle.

Wales tugged at her wrist, a silent warning.

“You see something I don’t, Tex?”

“You trust the charm that much?”

“Got to try it out sometime,” she said. “Better now than in a face-to-face, yeah?”

She jiggled the door handle—locked—and waited.

No sparks, no magical result, no nothing. The magic made into nothing. The spell not broken but bypassed. Val did good work.

Wales let out a shaky breath.

Sylvie pressed close to the glass, looked down. Not even a dead bolt. Just the handle.