Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

FOR ONCE, WHEN PEOPLE STARTED DYING, SYLVIE LIGHTNER WASN’T at ground zero. When things went wrong, really wrong, she was fifteen miles away from the crime scene, haggling with a werewolf bitch over her finder’s fee.

Five days ago, Sylvie had asked Tatya to keep an eye out and a nose up for a woman who’d gone missing from Alligator Alley, figuring she could turn Tatya’s nightly perambulations through the Everglades to good use. Delegation had paid off: Three days later, Maria Ruben was no longer a missing person. Dead, but no longer lost, and that was something. Finding her body could bring its own resolution to the family and was worth every penny.

So Sylvie had met Tatya at the scene, called the cops, and split without waiting for them to show, spooked.

Maria Ruben hadn’t been alone. There were four other dead women, drowned, pushed beneath the duckweed surface of an Everglades lagoon, and left to sway slowly in the dark, stagnant waters. Maria’s short dark hair stuck out like a frightened puffer fish, showing the shock her slack face couldn’t. A pink barrette—cheap plastic butterfly— floated free, trailing a long bronze lock of hair belonging to a woman barely into her twenties.

All of them were young, Maria likely the oldest, and all were Hispanic. Someone had particular tastes. Sylvie swallowed disgust, studied the other three women by the sullen gold of the setting sun. Their ethnicity and ages might match up, but their clothes argued they came from different parts of the city: Maria’s casual business wear; swimsuit and sarong; halter top and skirt; demure blouse and khaki skirt; and one who reminded Sylvie of her sister—a budding fashion plate.

That was the moment Sylvie had called the police. The moment she felt over her head. This was someone’s sister. Sylvie might have a reputation as a vigilante, but she knew when to leave a crime scene the hell alone.

Tatya wanted a finder’s fee for each woman. Sylvie didn’t object on any moral ground—never mind that their agreement only covered Maria Ruben—but finances dictated haggling. Five hundred dollars had been half of the fee Sylvie had charged Maria Ruben’s husband, but $2500 started eating into rent. Sylvie would be willing to take that financial risk, but her business partner, Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, wouldn’t. Sylvie wanted to keep Tatya happy—the werewolf was a good source as well as a quasi friend—so the discussion lasted longer than Sylvie liked, culminating with Sylvie’s writing an IOU for another thousand, payable the next month.

Once the rest of the women were identified, Sylvie could see about spreading around the cost of doing business. There might be a reward or, more likely, a client who’d want her to investigate how their loved one had ended up underwater. Now that she had an in with the local cops, courtesy of her making nice with Detective Adelio Suarez, she could be a useful liaison to a grieving family. And she thought that the police were going to be struggling with this one. The scene had felt . . . charged, a spark in the still, hot air that tasted of the Magicus Mundi .

Maria Ruben’s car had been found abandoned beside the road, the battery run down, the driver’s door hanging open. Her husband had reported his wife’s last words via cell phone, Salvador, you should see this. A two-headed alligator. I’m stopping for pics . . . and nothing more.

Whatever had happened that night had seen Maria Ruben transported nearly fifty miles, her camera bag gone, her forehead marked, and her body left in a crowded and watery grave. It smacked of ritual murder.

Those women hadn’t died natural deaths; that much seemed evident. The question that lingered was—how unnatural had they been?

BACK IN SOUTH MIAMI BEACH, SYLVIE PUT THE KEY IN HER OFFICE door, the phone shrilling on the other side of the glass like a race clock timer counting down. She forced the key to turn, slammed into her office—all haste, no caution, rushing to hear what Suarez had to say about the ’Glades scene, cursing him for calling the office instead of her cell—and fell into a nightmare.

A cobweb brush of sensation lingered and jittered on her skin, the sign of a spell laid over the doorway. A trap she’d bulled right on through.

Stupid, she thought, and froze, trying to control the only thing she still could: herself.

Her office changed around her, warped by powerful magic, an inferno blossoming. The illusion worked all her senses—drowned her vision in flickering flames that crackled and hissed, licked around and out of electrical sockets. She tasted acrid plastic; the chemical burn of it seared her nose and throat. Only furious control kept her from coughing, flailing for air.

Heat scalded her every inborne breath, dried her lungs. Her skin prickled, tightened, felt puffed with heat. Stretching a cautious hand forward resulted in blistered fingers.

Even with the memory of the telltale sensation, that cobweb cling across her face and throat, she nearly believed in the illusory fire turning her office into a maze of heavy smoke and hellish light.

Believing in an illusion gave it power.

Illusion could kill if you accepted it as truth.

Her little dark voice fed her a nasty thought: What if the spell is layered over a real fire? What if you burn trying to prove it isn’t real?

That moment of doubt cost her. Smoke choked her, tightened her lungs and throat, scouring her insides; her hair stank of burning. Sylvie fumbled for the door handle, just behind her, so far away, backing up and not finding it. Was she even moving?

Faintly, she heard the ringing of the warning bell on the main desk. A singing chime, growing faster, shriller, an audible sign that magic was saturating the air. It steadied her, gave her a focus. If the bell was still ringing, then the charred wreckage of the desk was illusion. It was all illusion.

And it was centered on her. Even if she fled, the flames would follow.

Meant to send you screaming outside, into traffic or the ocean, that internal voice muttered.

If she didn’t flee? She risked being an anomalous death, a woman dead of smoke inhalation in an untouched office.

This, she thought grimly, was what came of playing by the rules. Of leaving the bad guys alive. If she’d killed Odalys the necromancer instead of seeing her arrested, if she had punished Patrice Caudwell for returning from the dead instead of balking at the complications involved—if, if, if. If Sylvie had disposed of her enemies properly, she wouldn’t be one step from having her lungs ruined by imaginary smoke.

Anger surged. Hell with that. It wasn’t a mistake worth dying for.

She broke the paralysis the illusion had forced her into. The illusion might be cleverly crafted, the mark of a talented if malign witch, but Sylvie refused to yield.

Sylvie’s lips drew tight over her teeth, snarling. Hot air rushed into her mouth, drying it. Three ways to break an illusion spell for a non-magic-user. Kill the caster. Wait the illusion out. Or overwhelm it.

Sylvie would gladly put a bullet in the witch’s brain, but the coward had struck from a distance. Waiting wasn’t an option; not when it was a struggle just to keep breathing, to override her body’s instinctive panic. But the ringing bell on the desk was a protective spell, defensive magic. . . .

She thought cool thoughts about AC, about healthgiving air, about freshwater cascading over her skin, then stepped into the thickest gouts of flames. The fires licked her flesh, gnawed her hands, singed her jeans, her jacket, turned her gun to a hot brand against her back. Sylvie pushed it all aside.