Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Marco’s attack was a calamity waiting to happen. A miscalculation that was going to cost them everything. Sylvie lunged forward, but her grasping at Marco was literally grasping at air. She fell, scraping her knees in the dirt, got her head up in time to see Marco rush against Azpiazu, enveloping him like fog.

Marco tried to take a bite out of Azpiazu, tried to put the sorcerer into soul shock, and Azpiazu only threw Wales’s limp body aside, laughing; his arms went wide, allowing Marco to come closer.

Marco ignored her calling him back, moved forward even more aggressively.

Azpiazu drove his knife into Marco’s ghostly shape. Instead of passing harmlessly through him, steel through smoke, it pinned him like an overlarge butterfly. Marco jerked, light and color flashing within him, a shimmering oil slick comprised of more than a dozen stolen pieces of soul. Azpiazu grinned, baring sharp teeth, and turned the blade, baring the necromantic sigils carved into the steel blade.

Azpiazu might just be the most adaptable villain she’d ever faced.

How long had he been planning this? Since he first saw Marco’s handiwork in the Everglades? The soul-nipped cops, and realized that if he took a soul-eating ghost, it was more bang for his buck? When he realized that Marco would defend Wales to the death.

Wales wasn’t the final soul Azpiazu needed. A necromantic soul might be a powerful one, but it could fight back. Death, a familiar battlefield.

Marco’s ghost, on the other hand . . .

Marco was not only vulnerable; his was a soul completely suited for Azpiazu, a serial killer and a misogynist. And to make his soul even more palatable?

When Azpiazu took Marco, he laid claim not only to the ghost, but to the ISI agents lying senseless in their white halls, their souls nipped and made a temporary part of Marco.

Sylvie raised her gun, emptied the clip into Azpiazu, not trying to hurt—she knew that was impossible—but trying to distract. To disrupt the ritual. To stop Azpiazu from taking those threshold souls.

The bullets were less than useful. They actively worked against them. Marco, pinned by a magically infused sacrificial knife, had gone tangible enough that each bullet danced him like a puppet, tore him into shreds.

Azpiazu sighed, and all that humming energy in the air, the electrostatic charge that danced over them all, an unseen aurora, shifted and settled over Azpiazu’s shoulders like a mantle, drawn in by Azpiazu’s easy absorption of Marco’s soul.

He raised his head, shook the animal from his flesh, shed Tepeyollotl’s punishment like it was nothing at all, a mist of water on a warm day. Around his feet, the grass withered, going blackish at the roots and spreading upward like ink.

“So, Shadows,” he said. “You couldn’t stop me before. Think you have any chance now? I am the god of Death and Change. Be sensible, little Lilith. Run. ”

VIZCAYA GARDENS WERE TEN ACRES OF MANICURED LANDSCAPES and grottoes, butted up against Biscayne Bay, capped with a turn-of-the-century manor house—it was a spacious place. With Azpiazu exuding energy, bleeding deathly rot into the night, he loomed large enough to her senses that the gardens felt tightly claustrophobic, a tangled jungle of rotting vegetation.

In the background, Cachita’s exhortations had gone hoarse; she was down on her knees, head craned back, arms crossed above her face. Agony in her bones. Still trying to keep that door closed, trying to cage Tepeyollotl with nothing more than the letter of their bargain, that he would come when she called. And not before.

“Can’t leave,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got some things I want.”

“What? Them?” Azpiazu gestured at the bespelled women, still challenging Erinya, gestured at Wales’s limp body. “No. They’re mine. They’re going to be my first true souls. The first chosen ones to be part of my godhood.”

Erinya rolled, dislodged the jaguar from her back and neck at the expense of blood and scale and chunks of feathered hide, and flung the squalling, limping cat across the courtyard. The wolf, racing in to take advantage, was slapped hard enough to spin into the reflective pool with a bloody splash and howl. Sylvie winced.

Erinya cocked her head, put her burning gaze on Azpiazu, and growled, “ Your godhood.”

Azpiazu laughed, and it was a disconcertingly gorgeous sound, a man thrilled with himself and his new lot in life.

Erinya grinned, her lips split wide, wider, widest until the entire lower half of her face seemed comprised of needle teeth. “New gods are fair play. Especially if they don’t have anyone to watch their back.”

Sylvie chimed in. “Who’s feeling like running now?”

“She’s nothing to me,” Azpiazu said. “A flunky for a softhearted—”

Erinya flew at him, talons on all four legs extended, wings curving over her back to end in sharp-edged spikes. Azpiazu stood his ground, and her claws shredded his clothes, but not the skin beneath.

A god.

Sylvie’s little dark voice made itself heard over the tumult, over Cachita’s defiant cries and the thundering groan of the earth, the howls of an angry wolf deprived of prey. Not a god. Not yet, her voice whispered. Not quite yet. It gifted her with one word further. A word that gave her a tiny flare of hope.

Transitioning, it said.

Azpiazu might have been immortal, but even an immortal body needed alteration to take full advantage of godhood. To allow him to access the kind of power that would turn a human body, no matter how durable, into ashes and dust.

For a few minutes more, Azpiazu was both god and man. And while Sylvie would pit herself against a god, if needs must, she was happier with a man.

The problem was, Erinya wasn’t making headway. Azpiazu slung her into a tree, smashing it like glass. Erinya staggered, rose up, her skin oddly leprous. As if death were touching an immortal creature.

Sylvie jerked her gaze away. If Azpiazu was transitioning, she still had a shot. He had a weakness. He had to. She just had to figure it out.

But first . . .

A low growl chilled her spine; she turned. The woman-turned-jaguar slunk toward her on three legs, one dragging. Erinya’s idea of not hurting the unwitting left something to be desired. At the moment, with the jaguar dragging hard leftward, with the leg slowing its inevitable course toward Sylvie, she couldn’t regret it.

The bear was still down, still unconscious, the broken bond releasing it from Azpiazu’s order to attack. The wolf whose face Erinya had torn was down. Freed from the binding sigil.

The binding sigil. The thing that bound Azpiazu to the women. Let him control them.

Sigils ran two ways.

Sylvie shifted stance, trying to keep an eye on the jaguar while keeping Azpiazu in her view. He was playing with Erinya, breaking a hind leg, ripping a wing off; her efforts were doing nothing but stripping him of his clothes. The jaguar crouched awkwardly, one leg crooked, her eyes glowing, teeth dripping blood and feathers.

Sylvie bared her teeth and snarled back. The jaguar hesitated, slunk back into the underbrush, gave her breathing space.

Azpiazu’s binding sigil had been carved into each woman’s forehead. For the symbology to work, Azpiazu had to have a matching sigil to influence. Sympathetic magic at its most basic.

Somewhere on his skin, hidden in the darkness, in his fluid movements, in the shadows racing his body, there’d be a sigil to match the one he’d carved onto each woman’s forehead. Onto Wales’s.

That binding link would be the last thing to change, the last piece of him that would be mortal. He was holding on to it, still controlling his “harem.” It would be small, the size of a quarter. Easily overlooked in the dimness of firelight and thundercloud. She couldn’t shoot it. Even if bullets worked on him. Even if she had bullets left.