Gods & Monsters (12 page)

“Yes,” Cachita said.

“What do you want of us? I won’t have my staff ridiculed.”

“We just want to know what they saw,” Sylvie said easily. She leaned up against the edge of a booth, checking first to make sure it was still sturdy. Three long rips in the red leather drew her attention. Claw marks. A cop might interpret them as knife marks if they were inclined to look for an answer that made sense and not for the truth.

The
chink-chink-chink
of swept-up china stopped. Both young men were listening.

“Gloria, it’s all right,” Cachita said. “We won’t hang you out to dry. We just need to know. We think this monster’s kidnapped and killed women, and there’s a woman who never came home last night.”

Sylvie stopped running her fingers through the tears. Cachita hadn’t said anything about that back at the office. She might be making it up—Sylvie thought Cachita was comfortable with saying anything to get her story—but there had been a new woman in the ’Glades today.

“He came in. He exploded,” the boy pushing the broom said. “One moment, a man. The next, fur and teeth.”

“A wolf?” Sylvie said.

“Mezcla,”
the mopper said.
“El monstruo. Gato y oso y lobo y hombre. Como una pesadilla.”

“Con dientes grandes,”
the sweeper said. He stuck his fingers in his mouth, drew his lips back, and snarled.

“A mixture of animals, a nightmare,” Cachita repeated.

Both boys nodded.

“With big teeth.”

That wasn’t right. The
Magicus Mundi
had its share of monsters and chimeras. There were gods who could take any damn shape they wanted. But this . . . Going from human to a patchwork quilt of animals.

It sounded more and more like sorcery to her. False shape-shifting. Something bought with blood and pain and easily warped.

“People screamed,” Gloria said. “I screamed. And he just started flailing, biting, and clawing.” She hesitated, then pushed up her colorful sleeve. Beneath it, her arm was mottled black-and-blue, skin drawn tight beneath stitches. “He grabbed me, dragged me toward the door.” Her breath rattled in her lungs; she folded her arm across her chest, and the boy dropped the mop to lean up against her.

“People were panicking,” she said. “They crashed through the window, and it startled him. I pulled, and he let go. He ran into the street, then ran into the dark. Out of the light. He howled. . . .”

“Una pesadilla, verdad,”
Cachita murmured. “You were very brave. Then and now.”

Gloria shrugged. Unwilling to take praise for simply surviving. She pinned Sylvie with her dark eyes. “Are you a reporter, also?”

“No,” Sylvie said. “I’m a monster-hunter.”

“Bueno,”
Gloria said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Cachita whirled on Sylvie. “What? I come to you with monsters, and you give me shit about being crazy, but her? You just
tell
her you’re a monster-hunter?”

“She didn’t annoy me,” Sylvie said.

Cachita blew her hair out of her face in aggravation. “I’ve been nothing but forthcoming—”

“You didn’t tell me another woman was missing.”

“You didn’t tell me who Maria Ruben was.”

“You’re the one who wants to make nice,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got the motive to share. And so far, you haven’t. You’ve got a list of missing people you could give me.”

“But you won’t let me work on your team. You’d have shut me out tonight if I had let you.”

“It’s for your own protection—”

Cachita’s lips twisted. “You know what? You can get your own ride back. I’ve got things to do.” She clutched her briefcase, headed into the women’s room. Sylvie propped herself on a table and waited.

She wanted to shake the names out of Cachita but thought the woman was reporter enough to bite her lips and keep silent. Didn’t matter. Sylvie had pictures and Detective Adelio Suarez. She could get the names another way.

Cachita came out of the bathroom, dressed to kill—bright green blouse that dipped low in front and cut out in back. She wore a tight black skirt, bright yellow heels; her hair had been tousled into curls. She rocked back a bit when she saw Sylvie, licked newly red lips. Everything about her was designed to draw attention, down to the leopard-print bangles on her wrists.

“Hitting the streets?” Sylvie asked, pure bitchiness, then paused. Cachita had blinked agreement before her mouth said, “It’s none of your business.”

“Holy shit,” Sylvie said. Pictures of the spellbound women flashed across her memory. All young. All attractive. All Hispanic. “You’re putting yourself out as bait.”

Cachita raised her chin, tossed her hair out of her face. “If the cops won’t, I will. I want him found.”

“And what if you do find him,” Sylvie said. “Or more to the point, what if he finds you? Then what? You’ll whip out your pen and write at him?”

“Better than doing nothing,” Cachita said. “You could always come with me. Lurk in the shadows. Ready to run to my rescue. Oh wait. I’d have to pay you first, wouldn’t I?”

They had attracted an audience, and Sylvie grabbed Cachita’s arm. Tried to. The woman evaded her. Sylvie finally threw up her hands in defeat. “Fine.”

It was irrelevant, really, she thought with a pang of guilty relief. Five women to power the spell, and there were five women she’d left behind. If Mr. Monster was the sorcerer, then Cachita could play monster chum all she wanted, and he wouldn’t bite.

It wasn’t much—there were all-too-human monsters out there—but Cachita was right. It was none of Sylvie’s business. It still felt a little like leaving the spellbound women behind, that guilty discomfort twitching in her veins, when she went outside and called a cab.

THE OFFICE WAS BRIGHTLY LIT AGAINST THE NIGHT WHEN SYLVIE entered, and even better—it smelled of dinner. She sniffed, trying to be discreet, and Alex grinned. “Cuban sandwiches, black beans, and rice. Yours is in the fridge.”

“Thank you,” Sylvie said.

“Petty cash paid for it,” Alex said. She dangled the key to the tiny lockbox from her fingertips, then dropped it back into the desk drawer, kicked back, and put her feet up.

Wales was draped across the couch, barricaded behind the enormous screen of his laptop. Sylvie drifted over, peered behind it. “You know, that’s pushing the definition of laptop,” she said. “Any luck? I’d expected to find you surrounded by occult books by now. You haven’t even cracked a box? Dinner that exciting?” Despite herself, she couldn’t help but let her gaze drift between Alex and Wales suggestively.

Alex laughed.

Wales went scarlet. “I’m a man on the move, Shadows. It’s all in the hard drive. Every occult book I’ve ever laid hands on is scanned in this baby. When you’re wanted by the CIA, you might not get time to pack.”

Sylvie eyed the boxes still piled about the office. “So what’s all this, then?”

“Nonessentials,” he said. “Just because I can winnow all my necessities to one bag doesn’t mean I don’t like having other stuff.”

Alex headed into the kitchenette, dished up Sylvie’s food, and nuked it.

Sylvie swallowed, belated hunger catching up with her.

She snagged it out of the microwave before the timer had run down, ate rice and beans while they were still lukewarm, and said, “So, Tex, the symbols?”

“They’re old,” Wales said. “It’s a strange thing, magic. Trends occur in it, too. This is an old form of symbology. I’ve got two alchemical symbols—” He turned the computer screen toward her, highlighted the images, etched in skin.

“The thing that looks like a calligraphic F on a plain attached to a lowercase y? That’s fusion. This one? The tilted V with loops? Purification.”

“What about the lumpy swastika-looking thing,” Sylvie said.

“It’s not a swastika; it’s a lauburu,” he said. “It’s a Basque symbol, but it’s older than that. It’s a little hard to be sure, but given context—shape-shifting—I’m going to assume it’s Paracelsus’s symbol for animal healing.”

Sylvie frowned. “Purification and healing—”

“Yeah,” Wales said. “I think our sorcerer’s sick.”

“He put women into magical comas and left them in the Everglades. We knew he was sick,” Sylvie said. “Sorcerers tend toward depressingly good health, though. Sick could mean cursed.” It would fit with the man that Gloria and her sons had seen—a sorcerer who lost control of his borrowed skills at shape-shifting.

Alex said, “Tell her about the eye.”

“The bull’s-eye with a line through it,” Sylvie said. “The one Maria Ruben has on her forehead?”

“It’s pretty basic,” Wales said. “It’s a blinding spell. To keep his deeds hidden.”

“It doesn’t work, then,” Sylvie said. “Tatya found them, I found them, the cops found them, we found them again.” She traded the rice for the sandwich, wanting to bite and rend at something. Even when she thought they’d gotten a clue, it was useless. “Are you sure you’re interpreting it right?”

“You’re missing the point, Shadows. That blinding spell ain’t aimed at us. It’s a specific blinding spell. Our sorcerer’s got an enemy.”

Sylvie blew out a breath. She couldn’t tell if that was good news or bad. The enemy of her enemy was her friend. But that only worked in black-and-white worlds. In the real world, there were endless permutations of evil.

The sorcerer who had abducted, enchanted, and bound the women was evil—that, she didn’t doubt. The man he feared?

“What’s the last symbol?” she asked. “The linked ovals.”

“Transformation,” he said. He traced the lightly sketched symbols with his finger, his nails ragged, bloody at the edges. He’d been chewing them, internal anxiety clawing its way out.

“Problem?”

He twitched, opened his mouth, let it close. Fidgeted. Alex leaned closer, said, “What is it? You can tell us. Even if it’s weird.”

“Not one of your clients,” Wales reminded her.

“Then don’t play coy,” Sylvie said. “My clients always hide things from me. Or try to. What’s rocking your world?”

“Two things,” Wales said. “I think I know what he’s doing. Broad strokes at least. Not the why, not even the specifics, but—”

“Tex—”

“It’s like a power filter,” he said. “Transformation. The power that’s coming in isn’t the same as what he’s getting from it.”

“Like a plant,” Alex said. “Turning carbon dioxide to oxygen.”

“More like money laundering,” Wales said. “Turning power that’s actively trying to injure him into power he can use to protect himself. Using the women’s lives as filters. He’ll have one of these sigils carved into his own skin, the better to link himself to them. To feed off them.”

Sylvie grimaced. “Ugly.”

“It gets worse. I think I know who’s doing it. Except I never thought he was real. He’s a sorcerer’s bogeyman. The soul-devourer.”

“The soul-devourer?” Sylvie repeated. “You’ve seen this before?”

“Not this; if it were this, I would have said at the scene. But it reminded me of something. Got back, started looking at the symbols, and it twigged. There was a kill zone in the Louisiana bayou. A pile of women’s bodies found, their hearts torn out. Some local sorcerers took a look but said they couldn’t even summon the murdered women’s ghosts. That their souls were—”

“Devoured, got it,” Sylvie said.

“I remember that,” Alex said. “That was just after Katrina. They thought it was a serial killer.”

“Serial killer, sorcerer, potato, potahto,” Sylvie said. “Where’s the link, Tex? Our women aren’t dead.”

“There were symbols carved into the flesh,” Wales said. “The police started asking around. And in Louisiana, they don’t make any nonsense about asking the magical folk. If this binding spell is truly a filtering system, the last step would be to kill the women.”

“And steal, bind, or devour their souls,” Sylvie said, flatly. Her shoulders felt heavy, her breath leaden. She loathed magic. Loathed necromancy, which denied the dead even their final rest. “Don’t suppose you can fix it, now that you’ve recognized it? Can you call for help from the others in the community? Your
good
necromancers?”

“They’d be more like to never speak to me again if I brought them to the soul-devourer’s attention. And if I mess with his spell, believe me, I’ll be a shining beacon for him.”

“Can you do it? Unbind the women before they wither away or get dragged off to have their hearts yanked out?”

Wales lifted a single shoulder, his gaze avoiding both Sylvie and Alex. “No. Maybe? I might be able to slip each of them out of the binding. Thing is, breaking the stasis doesn’t mean I can free them from the power pouring into them. Or the power from changing within them. Those symbols were carved into their skins. They’re black holes for the power.”

“I’m lost,” Alex said. “Who’s pouring all the power into them? Why?”

“It’s a curse,” Sylvie said.

Wales raised his head, caught by surprise, and his eyes were wary and wide. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s my thought. The blinding spell? The soul-devourer is putting some serious effort into hiding his presence. Which implies—”