Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Fucking transformationist necromancer, she thought. Hard enough to kill something that was immortal. Even harder to kill something that could change a weapon’s composition to something useless.

“Kill me, and you’ll be cursed forever,” she rasped out. “Thought you wanted my help.”

Being this close to him set her skin afire with magic, corruption of the natural order. It made her gag, made her recoil.

He lashed out with a bear’s massive paw, claws nearly an afterthought behind the physical power that could break bones with a single blow.

Sylvie kneed him in the jaw, knocked him back, kicked him once more, hearing bones creak beneath her heel, before he wrapped a human hand around her wrist. “Die,” he snarled.

Her blood kindled; her skin burned as if it had been struck with a branding iron. He flung her back, and she curled around her arm, watching the symbol for lead rise on her flesh, scarlet and black, a burn welling up from the inside.

No, she said, you won’t be rid of me that easy.

It wasn’t really her voice, but the thing that lived within her. She gouged at the hot lash of the brand, tore at it, intent on ripping the magic out of her skin if necessary. Blood burst beneath her nails, hot, wet, crimson. Human.

Blood, but not lead.

The fire in her veins, the heat that throbbed at her temples, the fever—they all faded until she was left with the taste of metal in her mouth and a bloody wound on her forearm. She got up, shook her matted, soaked hair back, and stared into his eyes. “Come on. Want to try again?”

Faintly, beneath everything else—the flutter of broken water, his panting, hers—she heard a sound familiar and welcome: a garage door rising, a car engine working at speed. Wales and Maria were nearly gone.

He surged in their direction, and Sylvie, burning adrenaline, picked up a potted palm and hurled it at him, breaking his stride and his jaw. His muzzle was streaked with blood; his teeth were wet with it. His pelt grew gore-clotted.

She’d hurt him more with that than with an entire clip of bullets.

“Give it up,” she said. “Maria’s gone.”

“Replaceable,” he slurred.

He paused, still crouched, still drooling blood and teeth, the first glimmer of something human beneath the monster coating. The first hint of the cleverness she knew he had.

Azpiazu had manipulated her from the start. She’d stumbled over him, and he’d acted quickly, given her an impossible, deadly task—find the god—to keep her out of his way. To give himself space. And he’d used the women as bargaining chips.

His muzzle reshaped itself; ivory teeth sprouted from broken edges.

“You never really wanted my help,” she said. “Your curse is your ticket to immortality.”

He hunched tight; the space between them could be breached with a single leap. His long tongue worked; his jaw pushed back. Beneath the animal snout, he shifted to a human mouth. “Smarter than Lilith,” he said. “No. I never wanted your help. What could I possibly want from you ? An untalented blunt object.”

Sylvie licked her lips. Apparently, they weren’t going to start duking it out again. She couldn’t say she regretted it. Her head ached where he’d slammed her into the glass, and her back throbbed. Blood spilled down her arm, dripped from her nails.

“You wanted to use me to distract a god.”

“A god?” he echoed, a growl in the room.

“I know you. I name you. You’re Eladio Azpiazu. Cursed by the god Tepeyollotl. I know all of this is to avoid him.”

“Not all of it,” he said. “Some of it’s for my pleasure.” His weight shifted. Azpiazu lunged; Sylvie dodged, taking the slash against the thick leather of Zoe’s jacket. A sigil sizzled against the coat, burned hide curling away from his touch.

“Missed me,” she said, her voice clogged with anger. “Want to try it again? Get inside my space? I’ll make you hurt.” Never mind that the room was sparse on weapons; pottery shards would be enough for her at the moment. From the sudden caution in his eyes, animal wariness, the uneasy shift of that massive body, she thought maybe she’d hurt him more in the past five minutes than he’d been hurt in decades.

The thing about immortals was that they got divorced from human experience. From pain. From fear. They felt untouchable as the years piled up behind them. She was reminding him of those things, reminding him that immortal did not equal invulnerable.

And that she had a reputation for killing things.

He sucked in a breath, spun away from her. She let him put the space between them, leaping across the lap pool’s width. He hunkered down beside the pool, ran his fingers through the water, licked the taste of it from his skin, his eyes always on her.

“Don’t overestimate yourself,” Azpiazu said. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. I’m stronger than you can imagine.”

“And yet, you can’t shake the curse,” Sylvie said. “Immortal, yes, but miserable with it.”

He laughed, spittle and blood streaking his chin. “Not for much longer.”

“Yeah? Got big plans? Feel free to share,” Sylvie said.

He swayed foot to foot, lowered his heavy head, looked at her like a wolf studying prey. It made the fine hairs on her neck stand up. Azpiazu was just so . . . wrong. The wolf brow, the human mouth, the bear bulk, the cat claws—a forced-together chimera working against itself.

There was no way in hell he’d want immortality in this guise.

For one thing, he was far too vain. For another, it hampered his magic. All of that energy going just to maintain himself. Like a car with a chronic oil leak.

“Get out, and count yourself lucky,” he said.

“You never needed me, but you didn’t want my attention on you either. You have my undivided attention now. I’ve got you in my sights.”

“Get out,” he snarled once again. This time, Sylvie’s better sense prevailed. She really wasn’t in any shape to take him down. Not and survive.

She straightened, backed out of the room, pausing to scoop up her emptied gun, and watching Azpiazu as long as she could.

Turning her back on the house and striding into the dark felt impossibly difficult, not just for the crawling fear that he was following her, ready to rip out her spine, or slap another sigil on her meant to boil her blood, but because there were four women she was leaving behind.

Saving Maria didn’t seem like enough of a triumph to count the evening as a win. Their recon had been interrupted, their enemy made aware of it. Azpiazu was undoubtedly packing up his remaining harem right now, heading someplace new.

Times like this, she hated the ISI with a passion bordering on obsession. If she could just call them for help. If she could count on them to know what they were doing. If she could trust them to be as interested in saving the victims as in studying the wicked.

Instead, it was her and a cobbled-together crew doing their meager best. Sylvie cast an unfavorable eye on her gun, a dark shadow in the passenger seat. If metal was no good, if Azpiazu’s transformation skills worked fast enough to make bullets benign, she was going to need a different weapon.

TWO CALLS—ONE TO WALES, ONE TO ALEX, TO PASS ON THE NEWS—had her pulling into the Baptist Hospital lot where Wales had taken Maria Ruben. He’d gotten far enough ahead and Maria’s quasi-celebrity status as a missing person had gotten them sucked right in past the emergency room waiting area.

“Here for Maria Ruben,” Sylvie said, slipping past the ER receptionist. Confidence counted here. She hefted her purse as if it were Maria’s, and she was just taking her things to her.