Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

It was a moment’s work and another scrape on her credit card to get the latch to flip. She eased the door open, and the hair on her body stood on edge as the house air washed over her. It carried with it the brittle hush of a sleeping household, the movement of slow, steady breaths.

“Sense anything?” she asked.

Wales edged past her, getting himself beyond the ouroboros charm’s reach, then nodded. “Ghost. Someone’s dead.”

Sylvie frowned. Never good news. When the ratio of innocents to evil sorcerer was six to one, it was definitely bad news.

She closed the door behind them, easing the latch closed. She slung the ouroboros charm about her neck again, let it dangle on her chest.

Her breath, let out softly, warmed the air she moved through. Wales hunched tight, shivered. Her own skin goose-bumped.

The entire house was frigid, the AC working at full capacity. Sylvie moved inward and tasted the hint of something foul and greasy on her tongue. Rot.

Someone’s dead. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t Maria Ruben.

She followed the scent, followed Wales, wrinkling her nose and wishing that the charm neutralized odors as well as magic. An adult’s rec room, all plush carpet, pool table, wet bar, and HDTV, was ground zero for the meat-rot scent. She gagged, peered into each shadow, and finally found a man’s body shoved out of sight behind the wet bar.

It had to be Jose Serrano, the home owner, since he was clad in pajamas and slippers; hardly the outfit for a visitor to the house. His ankles were swollen red-black with pooled blood. His eyes were fixed and filmed over, his skin livid and streaked, his entire body contorted. He hadn’t died easy.

Grimacing, she knelt, turned his hands toward the light.

“Careful!” Wales said. He hovered behind her, looming over her shoulder.

“Tex,” she said. “Watch the door, all right? Watch my back, not my back .”

He huffed, but obeyed, leaving Sylvie to her inspection of the corpse.

Like a brand on his palm, a sigil charred the skin, wept a substance dull grey and soot black. Sylvie touched it with a fingernail, felt it dent beneath her touch. She scratched at it. It left a silvery streak on the edge of her nail.

Lead.

Azpiazu seemed to be a one-trick pony when it came to killing people. But that made sense. Even someone who didn’t believe in magic would still get up and walk away from a man shouting a lot of mumbo jumbo ritual magic.

Every sorcerer she had met had a single, instinctive offensive spell. Often, it was a paralysis spell; but Azpiazu . . . He hadn’t needed to kill the cops. They’d gone off content. It would have been days before the search for Serrano started up again. He’d killed them because they’d annoyed him.

And he had to have done it quickly, smoothly, and naturally. A handshake, given that the marks were found on the palms.

“Sylvie,” Wales warned, just as the glasses in the bar rattled. One shifted far enough that it danced out of its rack; she put a hand up and caught it. It was icy slick, burned her skin.

“What the hell—”

“Serrano’s ghost,” Wales said. “He’s pissed—”

“Tell him we’re here to help!”

She set the glass down, rubbed the cold off on her jeans, and stood. Ducked the cue ball as it blew directly at her. Her hand tangled briefly in the ouroboros charm, but it had no effect on the items winging in her direction.

Ghost, right. Not magic.

Ghosts counted as fucked-up nature on their own. It was only once people started harnessing them that it became magic.

She dropped back to her knees, wincing. The carpet might be plush, but it wasn’t that thick.

Wales whispered into the air, more of that not-quite language, and Sylvie dodged a pool cue, caught it as it flew past.

“Wales! Less coaxing, more commanding!”

“Not that easy,” Wales snapped. “He’s not exactly a normal ghost.”

“Sic Marco on him.”

“He’s a victim here, not the enemy,” Wales said. “And remember, we were trying not to alert Azpiazu—”

She dropped, rolled, came up on the other side of the pool table, aggravated, and smelling of carpet powder and rot. “Easy for you to say. He’s not chucking stuff at you. C’mon, Tex—”

Wales let out his breath, stiffened his spine, jammed his hand out into the room—a flat-palmed Stop! “Enough.”

A glass and two striped balls dropped midflight. The room, already cold, grew frigid. Frost laced across the flatscreen TV like a shatter mark. “Sylvie, bring me some of his hair.”

“Serrano’s?” It was a stupid question; she knew it even as it left her lips: Who else’s?

She twined her fingers in his hair, thick and glossy still; the lead that had filled his blood had killed him too quickly for his hair to show the damage. She yanked, ungentle, uncaring. Serrano was dead, even though his bones creaked, and his head jerked back as if he felt the sting of her hurried fingers, her pinching nails.

She brought Wales the dark lock, pressed it into his free hand. “Now what?”

“I show him who’s in charge.”

Wales held the tuft of hair up, two hands out before him; the halt and a cupped palm, the hair resting in it like an offering. A wisp of smoke rose; Sylvie blinked. She hadn’t seen anything like fire coming near it. The smoke grew higher, lit from beneath with a blue flame that burned like ice, cooling.

In the arctic mist blooming from Wales’s hand, the ghosts took on a visible shape. Marco’s looming, hollow-eyed presence, familiar, inimical, shoulder to shoulder with his necromantic partner. And Serrano. Or what Sylvie assumed to be Serrano. At first she thought his ghost had been cleaved in two, mutilated even after death—she knew Azpiazu was no respecter of the dead. Then she saw him more clearly. Not a ghost split in two, not a mutilated ghost, but a mutated one. One body, dividing midtorso to stretch two necks upward, two heads, one flushed dark with rage, one blanched with fear.

“What the fuck—”

“Your time is spent; your life is gone to dust and ash. I bind you and dismiss you from this plane,” Wales said.

Serrano twitched and faded in chunks, left leg, angry face, torso, until the only ghost left was Marco. Wales closed his fist, let ashes dribble out, streaks against his bony hand, and sighed.

“That was ugly,” he said.

“What was that?” Sylvie said. The frigid air faded to something approaching warmth by comparison. She doubted the room temperature made it to sixty.

Wales shrugged. “Harder to dismiss than he should have been? Something warped his ghost, broke him into—”

“I saw,” she reminded him. “Ghost schizophrenia?” She remembered the double-headed skink outside, twitching and jerking its way forward, and surreptitiously ran her fingers along the line of her neck.

“Azpiazu’s magic.” Wales shoved his hands into his pockets, closed his body up, shoulders turned inward, chin tilted down. Thoughtful. Worried. “I think . . . I want to see that binding spell again.”

“Why we’re here,” Sylvie said. She shook off the chill that the room, Serrano, Wales’s magic working had left in her bones, and headed back into the hallway.

Bedrooms, bathrooms were likely toward the back, more public rooms toward the front of the house. If she were a lap pool, where would she—

She opened doors gingerly, as if she’d open one to Azpiazu leering at her. As if he’d have done nothing while Wales cleaned ghostly house for him.

Each door opened revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Her nervousness grew. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, each innocuous room bringing her one step closer to the loaded chamber.