Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Cachita blinked, released Sylvie’s arm, put her chin up. “Right. Right. I’m sorry.”

“Erinya,” Sylvie said. “You smell Azpiazu?”

Erinya shook her head, dark hair flying. “Only death.”

Cloaked by spells, Sylvie wondered. Some type of sensory illusion hiding him? It would be well within his abilities and his predilections.

Sylvie looked ahead. From the parking lot, there was only one entrance, one way in. The gardens lay beyond that, but if Azpiazu was set up where Sylvie imagined he’d be—at the main reflecting pool—he was going to see them coming long before they could get to him.

Marco jabbed her with cold fingers at her spine, shoving her forward. A clear urging to move.

Sylvie checked her borrowed guns, reassuring herself that the clips were full. She stepped forward; the ground crumbled at Sylvie’s feet, grass withering where it should have held the soil together. Earthworms lay slack and dry; the ancient sinkhole beside the entry gate shifted, pulling dirt downward. “Eri, the gate?”

Sylvie squeezed out of Erinya’s way, brushed up against a hand-lettered sign on the iron gate: Closed for alligators. She shook her head. Only in Miami was that an excuse. She wondered if they were real gators encroaching on tourist land or some illusion Azpiazu had created. For once in her life, she hoped for magic.

Erinya ripped the entry gate from its hinges, a metallic shriek in the quiet night, and flung the twisted iron into the brush. Leaves fell like rain.

Maybe the stink of rot was no illusion. Maybe everything was dead. Sylvie touched a fallen leaf, and it smeared beneath her fingers, its cellular integrity gone, a pulpy mass of rot.

Not a good sign.

Azpiazu had to be on the very edge of god-transition. Close enough that Tepeyollotl’s power, filtered, warped, changed, was bleeding out through him.

Sylvie headed through, keeping to the trembling stone path, her gun before her.

Five steps in, something enormous hissed and roared out of the bushes, scattering branches and pebbles. Sylvie jerked back, firing directly through Marco. Her hand went cold and numb. Bullets did no good. Not when you were faced with a two-headed bull alligator in full charge.

Sylvie focused on the grey-green-black blur, aimed at the gaping mouth on the right, and realized abruptly what was bothering her beyond the two-headed nightmare of it. The alligator had no eye shine on either head. Four eyes at twilight? Should be full of shine.

“It’s dead,” Cachita said, gagging. “Your Fury was right. Everything’s dead.” Her lips trembled.

It was worse than that. Sylvie got a quick glance of the alligator’s legs as it lumbered toward them for another try. Instead of claws, it had hands. Human-style hands. At least they slowed the gator, buckling and breaking under its weight, made evading it a possibility.

Azpiazu’s fight for shape-shifting integrity was warping the world around him.

Erinya changed form, grew claws and thick scales to rival the alligator’s hide, and attacked with an eldritch screech. The alligator snapped furiously, even as Erinya tore gobbets of dead flesh away, sent reeking bits into the air like piñata stuffing.

Erinya shook the alligator in her mouth until its bones snapped, until it broke, shrieking the entire time.

So much for the element of surprise.

MARCO PRESSED UP AGAINST SYLVIE’S NECK, A COLD, URGENT touch, and she jolted into movement, thinking flashlights. She should have brought flashlights. The alligator had been hard to see, had been lurking just beneath the shadows. What else might be there? Not breathing. Eyes invisible. Soundless until it attacked.

Shoot to kill and don’t worry about what it is, her dark voice suggested, and Sylvie took its advice. Soothing. Simple.

“Erinya, you see all right?”

“Yup,” Erinya agreed. She flicked alligator off her leather jacket and wiped her boots on the gravel path.

“Go first,” Sylvie said. “Clear the path.”

Erinya rolled her eyes. “Bossy. Who’ll watch your back?”

“I watch my own,” Sylvie said. “Cachita, follow her. Not too close.”

Marco drifted by her, an ice-cube shiver along her side. “And Marco does whatever he wants as long as he stays away from Cachita,” Sylvie finished.

It all made her edgy. Erinya was help. Sylvie didn’t have to worry about her, didn’t have to protect her. Cachita, on the other hand, was a liability. Vulnerable and worse. Gateway for a god.

Holding the knife was a nice reassurance that Cachita couldn’t call the god but probably a futile one. Tepeyollotl was paying attention, would come at Cachita’s first whisper of his name, whether she had the knife or not.

Erinya trotted swiftly along the limestone path, heading toward the main garden, sniffing. “I smell blood.”

Sylvie’s heart picked up pace. Convenient that it was already racing when, a moment later, another dead reptile fell heavily across her shoulders.

Dead, but quite active.

The python, twice her length, and as heavy and hard to move as sandbags, wrapped around her shoulders, its two heads hissing, showing a pair of leprous mouths ringed with curved teeth.

“Get off!” she yelled, like it could listen or obey. She shoved at it. Heads hissed and struck, stunning, bruising blows against her thick jacket. Cachita jumped in, wrapped her hands tight around softening scales, grimacing. Erinya cocked her head, decided the zombie snake was too small to interest her, and kept moving.

Sylvie cursed, her hands barely wrapped around two thick throats. Scales slimed off in her hand, rotten and flaking from dead meat. It was even odds for a moment whether she was going to be choked by the snake or by the stink of it. Then Cachita got her hand beneath the heaviest coil, and the two of them levered it off, dropped the python hissing and striking on the pavement.

Sylvie blew off its two heads, panting, wasting ammo, and wondering if it would go hydra on them—regrow and double its heads and attack again. She’d never dealt with zombie animals before. After this, she never wanted to do so again.

Cachita swallowed hard. “Tepeyollotl can’t be worse—”

“Oh yes he can,” Sylvie said. “Right now, we’re dealing with small shit. Warped reptiles.”

“Two-headed zombie reptiles are small shit?”

Sylvie thinned her mouth, nodded brusquely. She didn’t want to get into it. But yeah. Small stuff. Worse, she didn’t even think the zombie reptiles were arranged as deliberate traps. Anger spiked. Outrage at being ignored.

Even though he had taken Wales, taken her ally and friend, even though he knew Sylvie would be coming after him, Azpiazu didn’t care enough to try to stop her. It argued extreme confidence. Sylvie wanted to make him eat that confidence.

Sylvie yanked Cachita back into movement. “Less gawking, more moving.”

“Give me a gun,” Cachita said.

“Should have picked up your own,” Sylvie said.

“Sylvie,” Cachita said. “You have more than one.”

“Fine. You know how to use—”

“Yeah.”

“Just remember who you’re aiming at,” Sylvie said. “We’re fucked enough without friendly fire.”

Any response Cachita would have made was buried under Erinya’s growl, a soft, moaning rattle deep in her throat. Sylvie’d heard that sound once before; a Fury laying eyes on an enemy. Even directed elsewhere, it made the hairs on her neck stand up and take notice.

Azpiazu.

THE GARDENS STRETCHED OUT BELOW THEM, AN EXPANSE OF DARKNESS broken by Azpiazu’s setup. He’d set up his ritual exactly where Sylvie had thought he would: the squaredoff reflecting pool at the base of two stone stairwells leading up to a hilly balustrade.