Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel (23 page)

Alex said, “Are you really going to kill Graves on Riordan’s say-so?”

“Demalion filled you in, then?” Sylvie said. “I don’t know. If Graves
is
the one siccing monsters on the world? Probably. I’m just not sure. Something about the whole mess doesn’t sit right. But I can’t think straight. I’m making bad choices. Careless choices. There’s a hotel in Homestead that’s proof of that.” At least two dead men, car wrecks, witnesses to a monster-brawl, and she really doubted Erinya had tidied the jungle away without Sylvie to harass her into doing it.

Demalion rolled up a minute later in an enormous, gas-guzzling Escalade, big enough to hold them all and ostentatious enough to be unnoticeable in Val’s fancy driveway.

Erinya transferred Lupe’s unconscious shape into the back bench seat, strapped her in with careful precision, and said, “When can I see her again?”

“Later,” Sylvie said. “We’re trying to fix her. I don’t suppose you—”

“Fix her? She’s wonderful,” Erinya said.

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Never mind. Eri, can you do one more favor for me? Get rid of the truck?” If they left it here, bloodstained and battered, the cops would be looking for her, either as victim or as a criminal. She didn’t have time for it.

Erinya waved a hand; Sylvie’s truck dissolved. It stung, watching it go. She’d loved that damn thing, battered as it was.

If she was immortal, if Marah was right, then it’d only be one of a thousand things she’d lose in her eternal life.

She stood there, shivering in the garage, blaming blood loss, until Alex tucked her into the second seat and shut the door on her. Alex took the passenger seat, and Demalion drove them smoothly into the afternoon.

Regrouping

LUXURY HAD ITS PLACE, SYLVIE THOUGHT AS SHE SETTLED MORE comfortably in the leather seat. The motor hummed quietly, the ride was smooth, and the car was pleasantly dim in the midday heat. Sylvie fumbled out her cell phone, found it cracked through, and said, “Alex. Phone?”

“Calling Val?” Alex asked, passing her phone back.

“Yeah. Her estate isn’t going to be much of a safe haven if it kills us as we try to get in.”

Demalion grunted from the driver’s seat. “We’ve had enough near-death moments today. I’m forbidding any more of them. My nerves can’t take it.”

“Aw, poor baby,” Alex teased.

Demalion’s glance toward her was not amused.

Sylvie ignored the start of their bickering and dialed Val. Usually, Val refused to answer Sylvie’s calls, but Sylvie was betting that with Zoe AWOL, Val would answer, no matter the time. Sylvie turned her watch, thought, actually her timing wasn’t that bad. Ischia was about six hours ahead. Dinnertime.

“Sylvie,” Val said.

She sounded so calm and competent that Sylvie felt
strange, choking tears rise in her throat. “God, Val, I need your help.”

The line hummed between them for a long moment, then Val said, “What do you need?”

Ten minutes and copious notes later, Sylvie disconnected from Val, feeling better about their strained relationship than she had in ages. Nothing like knowing that your friend—no matter how justifiably pissed off—wasn’t going to leave you high and dry when your life was on the line.

Sylvie passed one part of the list to Alex, said, “We’re going to need to make a stop for supplies.”

Alex nodded.

Behind Sylvie, Lupe stirred and moaned, and Sylvie peered over the seat back. Lupe’s eyelashes fluttered, her hand flailed weakly. Her nails, Sylvie noted, were deep blue-black, another transformation that had failed to erase itself. Sylvie just hoped that the venom hadn’t made the transition back to human along with the claws. Lupe’s temper was far too dangerous.

“What happened?” Lupe said.

“Too much to explain. But hey,” Sylvie said dryly, “you made a friend.”

“I dreamed about a monster,” Lupe whispered. “Her teeth in my throat.”

“Her heart in your hands,” Sylvie said. “Her name is Erinya. She likes you.”

“It was real?” Lupe asked. “I dreamed I killed a man.” When Sylvie didn’t deny it, she turned her face away, toward the dark leather seat, hiding from reality, and nothing Sylvie said after that could draw her into speech again.

Finally, Sylvie just slumped back in her seat and closed her eyes. Not sleeping. Not yet. But she could rest her eyes.

Demalion kept the SUV running while Alex grabbed items on Val’s list and on hers, tearing through one magic bodega and one gun shop with an efficiency Sylvie envied.

Sylvie wanted to go in with Alex, keep an eye on her, make sure she got everything on the list, but she couldn’t leave Lupe unattended. The woman seemed wrung out,
unable to move, much less shift shape and rampage some more, but better not to take the chance.

Alex returned, laden down with bags, and passed Sylvie the Taser. “Here,” she murmured with a sidelong glance at Lupe. “It’s got a charged battery, and the cartridges are loaded.”

Sylvie folded it against her side like the world’s oddest security blanket and let herself drowse. Soon enough, she smelled the sea, heard the city traffic stop echoing off concrete facades, disappearing out over the waves. She opened her eyes, and they were passing the Seaquarium and the Rosenstiel School, opened her eyes again, and Demalion was pulling up to Val’s driveway gate.

He stopped the SUV and she slid-tumbled out the side door; she keyed in the passcode Val had given her, and the gate rumbled into motion, pulling back. She put her hand up—wait—and went back for the bag of magical supplies. Nothing too exotic—a white feather, some salt, a few white pebbles polished to a dull gleam, a handful of red chalk. Seemed hard to believe that was all it was going to take to carve a doorway through Val’s wards.

Val had said that Zoe would be the best to do the spell; that since Zoe had lived there, even briefly, the spellwork would be like turning a key. For anyone else, Val said, it was going to take brute willpower.

Sylvie felt a little low on brute willpower, but there wasn’t another alternative. She knelt on the smooth black asphalt of the drive, in the shadow of the SUV, and took a deep breath. She wasn’t a witch. She’d used spells once or twice. Always paid for it. Magic made her sick. Part of her Lilith bloodline. The same thing that made her resistant to magic punished her for using it. She expected it would only get worse. Lilith, at the end, hadn’t been able to cast even the simplest of spells.

She marked four of the pebbles—one for each of them—with a symbol that Val swore meant
benign
. Sylvie just hoped the stone couldn’t tell the truth. They were a ragtag crew who meant no harm to Val, but she wouldn’t call any
of them benign. Even Alex wouldn’t fit that description to a witch’s gaze since she was marked by Eros, the god of Love, and was burdened with an active and malevolent memory curse.

“Sylvie, do you need help?” Alex asked.

Sylvie shook her head. “Go back to the SUV. If I can’t shift the spell right, it could get ugly.”

Alex made a face but did as she was bid.

Sylvie plunged into spellwork with nausea growing in her chest, her heart throbbing. By the time she rose from her knees—the asphalt swallowing the chalk down, preparing to listen to her commands—the feather weighed her wrist down as if it were made of lead. She raised the feather, raised the wards with it, and nearly collapsed under the weight of something intangible but impossibly heavy. The world seemed to sway around her, as if she were peeling back the sky. The wards lifted, and she jerked a shoulder forward. Demalion, watching for her signal, moved the SUV through the ward. The feather vibrated in Sylvie’s hand, and she hung on to it with nothing but a last burst of determination.

The moment the SUV was through, she let the feather drop. It burned as it fell, disappeared into ash, and the wards snapped back around them. A witch might have seen something spectacular in it. Sylvie only felt the wrongness of the world being forced away. She stumbled, fell forward, and Demalion caught her.

“Just a little bit more,” he said.

Once they were through the perfectly mundane alarm on the door, Sylvie headed for the nearest bedroom on autopilot. She’d been up for sixty-plus hours, fought four pitched battles, and dealt with more chaos than even she could handle. Not to mention being shot and healed.

The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the ocean, and Sylvie gave the spectacular view a cursory glance, making sure no one was lurking. Then she spilled face-first onto the bed. It felt like heaven.

She was vaguely aware of Demalion tugging her one way then another, peeling off clothes and shoes, sliding her
under sheets, but mostly she was aware of the yawning darkness in her brain. The dreamworld waiting for her. She had a moment to hope that the Mora’s taint hadn’t left a mark; the last thing she wanted was to find her sleep interrupted by nightmares.

Then she was gone.

IT WAS TWILIGHT WHEN SHE WOKE, DEMALION A WARM PRESENCE wrapped around her, his arm heavy across her ribs. The waves outside had gone phosphorescent around the edges. Sylvie felt struck stupid and boneless with exhaustion, but the world was making itself known again: Her brain started churning out worry for Zoe, worry about what had been done with Lupe, where Alex was.

What was coming out of the waves.

She struggled out of Demalion’s grip—sleeping, the man folded up like origami and took his partners with him—and stepped soft-footedly toward the windows. She expected it to be a hallucination brought on by tiredness and exertion, but the closer she got, the more real it looked. A man—slim-shouldered, dark-haired—rising out of the sea.

He was too far away to make out any expression, but his impatience seemed to reach out toward her, passing through the air and the glass, beating against her skin.
Come out and talk to me. Don’t make me wait.

A coercion charm of some kind. Sylvie felt it fluttering against her nerves, urging her toward movement. She could push it off, but truth was, she had her own eagerness adding to it. She wanted to know what the hell he was. How he was involved.

Sylvie reached for her pants, but they smelled so much of blood and char and sweat that she let them fall, too repulsed to worry about modesty. She picked up her gun and went out to meet the intruder in a tank top and her boyshorts. Hell, she had swimsuits that covered a lot less, and at least both the tank and underwear were black.

She walked down the lawn, the earth warm beneath her
feet, the grass cool as it soaked up the evening breezes. Her bare feet were cat-silent as she walked, the faint rustling masked by the sway and rattle of palm fronds. He spotted her coming, raised his head, and scowled, taking in the gun held loosely in her hand.

She stopped a healthy twenty feet from the shore—no way was she approaching him in his own environment—still within the wards. He waited, scowl darkening, his arms crossed over his chest. She shook her head, snapping his hold on her. Not happening. If he wanted to talk, he’d have to come to her.

He slogged up the sandy shore, and when he was within speaking distance, she asked, “How’d you find me?”

“I have your sense in my skin,” he said. “I can track you.”

“Charming,” she said. She remembered that now, the feel of his hand on her skin. His other shape a dolphin … she tried to recall old field trips to Seaquarium, recall old marine biology classes. Dolphins had some type of electrosensing ability, didn’t they?

“On better days, you’d be surprised how charming I can be,” he said. He smiled, his teeth white and sharp beneath the jut of his nose. A predator’s grin. He lingered at the very edge of the ward, as if he could sense it as easily as she could. Probably easier. He wasn’t human; he lived in the currents of magic.

“You got a name?” she asked. “Since you managed to cop a feel, I think I deserve a name.” She supposed she should be asking him what he wanted, but she thought, just once, she’d start with the easy stuff.

He sighed, a strange half-whistled sound, widened his smile. It still looked toothily insincere. “Women. They always want a name.” Something seethed beneath his skin; she thought she recognized it. Anger.