Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

“Room fourteen,” the receptionist said. “We’ve got some forms that need—”

“I’ll take ’em,” Sylvie said. Nothing better than a clipboard to prove you had a legit reason to be in the hospital. When she reached out, the nurse’s eyes sharpened, focused, seeing Sylvie as more than just an irritant.

“You’re bleeding.” Seeing her as a potential patient.

Sylvie looked at her arm as if it belonged to someone else. She’d taken the time to bandage it in the truck, but the gouges her nails had left ripping Azpiazu’s sigil apart had reddened the white gauze.

“Not a lot.”

“You come back up here if you decide it needs to be stitched,” he said.

Sylvie nodded. She wouldn’t. It didn’t need sutures. Though it had hurt like hell, when she went to bandage it, the wound was less deep, less severe, than she had thought. Looked no worse than a staple-gun accident, complete with silvery streak that she’d had to peel out.

She found Room 14, the curtain drawn across the glass but the door open. The bed was empty, and Wales was pacing in the quiet.

He turned, and his expression was pure surprised relief, eyebrows up, mouth slack but shifting toward a smile. “You got out alive.”

“Took some doing,” she said.

“Azpiazu?”

“Alive. Evil. Up to something. How’s Maria?”

“She made it here,” he said. “They rushed her up to a real room. Can we get out of here? I’ve already fended off more questions than I know how to answer.” He jolted toward the door, then back toward the bed as if tethered. Sylvie knew what held him. There was a certain weight that came with rescuing someone. A responsibility. Wales had carried Maria out of Azpiazu’s lair, and he couldn’t let go, no matter how much his paranoia urged him to flee.

Down the hall, just past the swinging doors, a pair of police officers consulted with a nurse, who pointed toward Room 14, toward Sylvie and Wales. “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Let’s go.” These cops weren’t here for them; even if a doctor had called them about Maria, they’d shown too quickly. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t stop and interrogate, given the chance.

She stepped out of the room, her bandaged arm crossed over her chest, head ducked. Wales put an arm about her waist, quick on the uptake. The best way to leave an ER unnoticed? Look like any other patient who’d been treated.

They met Salvador Ruben rushing in as they were rushing out—he homed in on Sylvie like a tracking dog. “Your assistant called. She said. She said . . .”

“Maria’s alive,” Sylvie said. “Weak, but alive. Go see her.” His attention veered toward the intake desk, and Sylvie and Wales slipped away.

They got out into the lot, and Wales dithered. “Serrano’s car?”

“Leave it,” Sylvie said. “Not the first car I’ve abandoned in the hospital lot.”

He hotfooted forward through the lot, came back when he didn’t see her truck right off, and took off again. Sylvie seized his sleeve on his second twitchy search, and said, “That way,” gesturing.

When he nodded once and set off at a rapid pace that she was hard-pressed to keep up with, she said, “Hey, you okay, Tex? What? Hospital too ghosty for you?”

He didn’t respond, only hovered around her truck until she opened the door for him. Once the hospital lights shone bright in her rearview mirror, he finally answered.

“Maria died, Sylvie. I shoved her spirit back in her body. I’m kind of freaked-out. I’m not sure whether that makes me a healer or if she’s a revenant.”

“Breathe,” Sylvie said. “Her heart was beating; she was breathing, right? The doctors weren’t running around in a panic freaking out about zombies? She’s alive. You saved her, Tex. That’s a win.”

“Did I save her? I’m not all that sure I did. Azpiazu’s marks are all over her body. Her face, her palms, her feet, her heart . . . What’s to prevent him from reaching out and killing her for pride and—”

“For one thing, he’s got to move the rest of his harem and find a replacement,” Sylvie said. “We fucked up our recon, but we also fucked up his night. He’s going to be a busy monster.”

“But Maria—”

“We’ve done what we can. Is the ouroboros charm still with her?”

“She’s not wearing it, but it should be in the same room.”

“That’ll help,” Sylvie said. She said it mostly to watch Wales lose some of that vibrating tension that made her feel like his spine might start rattling at any moment. “Focus, Tex, I’ve got questions. Azpiazu’s got bigger things in mind than just controlling the curse Tepeyollotl laid on him. I think he’s got some idea of how to break it, and without the curse holding his attention . . .”

Wales leaned his head against the passenger window, staring blankly at the stream of headlights. “Without the curse, he’ll be more powerful. He’s had decades spent fighting magic, decades spent in chains.”

“Yeah. He’ll be raring to go,” Sylvie said. “Thing is, I think there’s something more going on. You have any ideas?”

Wales closed his eyes. “There’s something about the way he’s set up this curse-block, power-exchange spell. It’s . . . complex. Bizarrely so. Even beyond the whole sleight of hand required to use Tepeyollotl’s power to gain immunity from the curse.”

“Explain,” she said.

“Ritual,” Wales said. “It’s all in how you’re taught. Me? I don’t use a lot of ritual, you might have noticed. ’Cause really? I’m a mundane with a skill for improvising. The more I tried to train, the worse I got. For someone like Eladio Azpiazu? An alchemist first? It’s all about ritual.”

“You’re the one who was bitching that it was too complicated—”

Wales sighed. “True ’nough. And I think I phrased it wrong. Magical rituals are like . . . statements of intent. I have a poppet, I have an enemy. I want my enemy to suffer the same fate as this poppet. Yeah?”

“That’s 101,” Sylvie said. “Skip ahead.”

“So touchy,” he muttered. “Depending on your nerve and your skills, you can layer your rituals. Like . . . oh, a witch who wants you to see an illusion. That’s almost always a two-part spell. The illusion they want you to fall prey to, and a stay-in-place layered beneath. After all, an illusion is a fragile thing, really. If they anchor it directly to you . . . it loses plausibility. I mean, say they curse you to see a—”

“Fire?” Sylvie asked.

“Yeah,” Wales said. “That’s a good one.”

“Not really,” Sylvie said.

Wales was undeterred. “So you walk in a place, and it’s suddenly on fire. You run, right? I mean, hell, it’s not even human nature; it’s faster than that. It’s animal instinct. Flee. So that’s wasted energy on the witch’s part if you just walk away. But if they attached it directly to you, so it followed you—”

“You start to doubt it,” Sylvie said. “Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“People like their real-world rules,” Wales said. “Things that tell us the sun rises in the east, the moon waxes and wanes, and the entire world cannot be on fire. So the witch slaps an anchoring spell beneath the illusion spell. A stick-around suggestion.”

“Cobwebs,” Sylvie said. “They like to put illusion spells on cobwebs.”

“Exactly!” Wales nearly bounced in the seat beside her, a researcher getting to share his passion. Springs creaked, audible even over the steady growl of the engine. “And that’s ritual in itself. A stay-put spell on something sticky. Helps them layer the spells, helps them keep it sharp, keep it safe.”

“So Azpiazu’s layering his rituals, which means he’s layering his . . . intent?”