Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

“It doesn’t hurt?” Sylvie asked again. More intently.

Alex blushed, obscuring the mark altogether. “No. It . . . I get dreams sometimes.”

“Nightmares?”

Erinya scoffed. Alex’s lips curved. “No. Very definitely not nightmares.”

Sylvie raised a brow. “Oh.”

“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. The blush on her cheeks spread downward, and Sylvie turned back to Erinya.

“So you’re sticking around until I give you the information you want, right?”

“Yes,” Erinya said. “I can be patient.”

“Got a mangled chair and a bunch of memories that say otherwise. How ’bout I give you something else to do. We’re hunting a would-be god.”

Erinya laughed. “I should strip-mine your mind, take the information. You refuse to belong to any god. You’re fair game.”

“But not easy game,” Sylvie said. “I kicked you out of my head before. And that was when I didn’t have someone to protect. C’mon, Eri. Help us hunt.”

“No,” Erinya said. “I don’t get what I want? You don’t get what you want.”

She and Sylvie bared teeth at each other in unwilling stalemate.

THE DOOR OPENED, AND CACHITA CAME IN, HEAD DOWN, MUMBLING something urgent, rummaging through her purse, utterly oblivious. Sylvie hung her own head in exasperation. She’d warned Cachita they might be facing Azpiazu, and this was how the woman entered the room?

Cachita looked up, and Sylvie’s disgust faded. Cachita’s eyes had gone from warm brown to panic black. When she brought her hand out of her purse, it came clutching a shark-tooth-shaped dagger, black obsidian, gold handled, and sharp enough that her fingers were already bleeding from brushing up against it.

The blood against the blade changed the feel of the room. Tiny tremors traveled the walls; beneath Sylvie, the floor seemed to rise and fall as if the office were suddenly asea.

“Hey, no!” Sylvie said. Cachita hadn’t come in distracted. Cachita had come in halfway through her Tepeyollotlsummoning ritual. “Cachita, stop it. It’s not Azpiazu! It’s not—”

Too late, really. The room shifted and blurred, took on the thick, heady scent of tropical jungles; a jaguar’s cough roughed the air. Erinya morphed so quickly, Sylvie found herself shoved into the wall to make room for Erinya’s full Fury shape.

Four-legged, big as a bear, long and lean and supple. A creature designed to chase and kill, feathers and scale, beak and teeth and rage. Erinya shrieked defiance. Sylvie clapped hands over her ears, tried to figure out the odds of the coming fight taking out all bystanders.

Gods of different pantheons chose not to interact, a mutual-avoidance pact. Erinya . . . she wasn’t a god. Just a demigod. Sylvie had the sinking suspicion that meant a brawl was inevitable. Erinya was threatened, and a threatened Fury was a violent one. And Tepeyollotl, summoned by his human agent, would come ready to kill. If not Azpiazu, anything that threatened his agent.

Sylvie put one hand on Erinya’s spiky back, felt the scales rip at her palm, and scrambled over Erinya, slamming Cachita into the door, spilling them both through it and onto the curb, scattering the passersby who’d stopped, gawking at the office. Erinya’s curses still blistered the air. The front window, already cracked by the bullet, started to chip away, to patter bits of glass downward like hail.

Sylvie clapped a hand over Cachita’s mouth, still moving, though Cachita’s eyes showed the woman had checked out. Around them, people cried out, the hunt for someone to do something .

The sidewalk juddered beneath them, an undulation of concrete as hard on their human skin as shark scale. Sylvie grabbed Cachita’s wrist, shook the knife out of her grip. It skidded away, smoking where Cachita’s blood had touched it.

A woman shrieked as it butted up against her flip-flop, drawing another bead of blood. Sylvie lunged, grabbed the screaming woman’s bottled water, ripped the cap off, and dumped it over the blade. The smoke dwindled, disappeared.

Sylvie held her breath. The trembling in the world slowed but continued.

“Tell him not to come,” Sylvie said. “Tell him you made a mistake.”

Cachita gasped for air, fumbled her way upright, reached for the blade. Sylvie fielded her off. “No. Tell him, Cachita. Tell him we don’t need him now.”

“I can’t—”

“All spells run in two directions,” Sylvie snapped. “A door opens, but it also closes.”

She looked at their audience, some familiar faces—her mercantile neighbors more aggravated than frightened—and some not. A cop car turned onto the street.

“Fuck,” Sylvie muttered. She dragged Cachita to her feet, dragged her and the blade inside, shoved Cachita straight into Erinya. “Look!”

Cachita did. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she went down as if Sylvie had coldcocked her.

“Fuck,” Sylvie said again. There was a . . . hole . . . forming in the ceiling of her office, a place where the earthquake warp was strongest. Where Tepeyollotl was investigating Cachita’s call. She drew her gun.

Erinya leaped upward, slashing, biting, shrieking at the gap. Sylvie’s heart rocketed. This was all going to see them turned into meaty gobbets of godly cat chow. She couldn’t see Alex, could barely see Cachita; all her instincts insisted she keep Erinya in her view.

A good thing, too, as her barbed tail lashed across the space Sylvie had just vacated.

Sylvie rolled, grabbed Cachita, shook her back to consciousness.

“What—what is that?” Cachita asked.

“ That is less trouble than the god you’ve called,” Sylvie shouted. “Send him back!”

Tepeyollotl shimmered partway into existence—a world-warping blur of cat and man, spots and gold, sweltering heat and jungle scent and growling. Where his body touched, smoke rose.

Sylvie felt his presence like a scalding wind and shuddered. The worst part of it all was that this was just a precursor. Some type of scout—a thinned-out shadow of the god; Tepeyollotl responding only halfheartedly to Cachita’s aborted call.

Still didn’t mean his shadow wouldn’t kill them.

Erinya charged him, fearless, furious.

The sound they made as they collided wasn’t anything as simple as two bodies in motion; their collision rang like imperfect metal just before it shattered. Cachita sobbed; Sylvie crouched low, gun clenched uselessly in her hand.

It was over as fast as it had begun. Tepeyollotl protested once more, a petulant roar of surprise and pain, and disappeared. Erinya spat out a piece of hide large enough to make a coat. It smoked and stank like burning blood and herbs.

Erinya’s tail lashed and lashed; her back rolled in waves of spikes.

A gentle touch wrapped itself around Sylvie’s wrist; she jerked and found Alex creeping up beside her. Unharmed. Eyes wild and wide, but unharmed.

“Alex—”

“We don’t need a closet,” Alex breathed out. “We need a safe room. Magically and physically reinforced. I don’t care if we empty the savings account.”

“Agreed,” Sylvie said.

“All right, then,” Alex said. She slumped against Sylvie’s side. “You gonna do something about that?”

“That” being the Fury, still smashing the office furniture to bits, still climbing the walls, gouging holes in the terrazzo, in the ceiling struts, snarling, drooling bloody spittle across the floor.

“She’s pissed at me already,” Sylvie said. “I think we’re going to sit here and let her work her way down to sane again.”

Cachita whimpered. “Can we run?”

“Last thing we’d do,” Sylvie said. “Sit tight, Cachita.”

“What is it?” Cachita whispered. She shrank back when Erinya whipped her head around to look at them all, then huffed in disgust.