Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel (35 page)

“Eri, I need more than that. I need a place name. An address. Is Demalion thinking anything?”

“Huh,” Erinya said, “Thinking about you. He’s annoyed. Thought you’d be there by now.”

“Great,” Sylvie said. “Just what I need. More guilt. Tell him I’d get there if he’d been a little more clear about where there is!”

“San Francisco,” Erinya said.

“Oh, fuck,” Sylvie said. Worst-case scenario. High population density, close quarters, and just for funsies, on a fault line. Forget involving Erinya. Forget instantaneous god-travel. It was overrated anyway. They could fly the normal way. And then hunt for witches in a big city. And Lupe would be no problem with TSA, and Sylvie’s guns would be checked without comment. …

Sylvie gritted her teeth. Why couldn’t Val have a private plane and a pilot on staff?

Erinya gloated. “You
need
me. You don’t trust me. But you need me. You think any other god will come to your call? I’ve been gracious and generous, and you should be
grateful
. I’ll take us all there, and we’ll slaughter them to the last witch.”

“I’m going to get my guns,” Sylvie said. What was the point in arguing? She’d gambled. She’d lost. Dunne wasn’t going to help. Erinya was. Sylvie just hoped she could live with the aftermath.

She found Zoe hiding out in the guest room, still less jungle than the other rooms, and said, “You ready?”

“Is she coming with us?”

“Afraid so. I can’t make her not come.”

“You resist her pretty well,” Zoe said.

“Yeah? I don’t think you’ve got the grounds to judge that,” Sylvie said.

“You talk to her like she’s your equal, not something that will rip your heart out and give it wings so she can chase it better. And you did it in a towel. Besides, this is your room, right? Where you slept? It’s mostly human.”

“That’s because of me?”

“Your mark’s all over it,” Zoe said.

“Great. When she’s taken over the world, I can offer my services as a redecorator. What did you say to her anyway? You really hacked her off?”

Zoe fluffed a pillow and grinned. “Yeah. It worked better than I thought.”

Sylvie dragged out Demalion’s shirt, left behind, put it on over another one of Val’s tees, and another pair of slightly-too-tight khakis. “That’s not an answer.”

“Oh, I hit on Lupe. Walked right up to her in front of Erinya and Alex and kissed her cheek and told her that her scales were pretty and I bet they’d feel good against my skin.”

Sylvie choked on an inborn breath, and wheezed. “It’s amazing you’re not dead!”

“You said she wouldn’t hurt me. You were right.”

Sylvie closed her mouth on a slew of protests, all made useless now. But she decided that she was going to have one last little talk with Erinya about not injuring Zoe, even by freak accident. She might even waste some bullets to make sure Erinya listened. Bad enough she was going into battle worrying about thousands of faceless strangers; she didn’t need to spend the entire time sick with dread that Erinya would put Zoe in harm’s way.

She calmed herself, loaded her weapons, and thought, she had a plan, she had allies—even dangerous ones— and she had a goal. Everything else was distraction.

Mission-Minded

THEY RECONVENED IN THE LIVING ROOM BY UNSPOKEN AGREEMENT. Zoe, following in Sylvie’s wake, was more subdued than Sylvie liked, but as she glanced around, it was far better than Lupe’s false bravado and Alex’s nervous concern.

Sylvie checked her guns again, her spare ammo, said, “Eri. If I need more bullets—”

“You won’t,” Erinya said.

Sylvie decided to take that as a vote of confidence, not another invitation to argument: She was remembering why she had worked alone for so long. Too much at stake. Too many viewpoints.

“Then let’s go,” she said. “Nice and easy. Try to bring us in quietly?”

“Teach your mother to suck eggs,” Erinya snapped, and flung out her arms. Sylvie winced, anticipating pain, that strange menacing chaos of Erinya’s realm. But all she felt was hideous itching as power crawled over her skin, seeking to make her part of it. A faint whimper suggested that Zoe was having real difficulties keeping from sampling that magic, and just as Sylvie thought she was going to
have to halt the whirlwind of movement to save her sister, they slammed to a painful halt.

Sylvie dropped deep into warm, salty waters, rife with seaweed. She flailed upward, got a breath of air, grabbed out, and brought Zoe, coughing and spitting, to the surface alongside her. Lupe rose up a moment later, startled but unharmed. Water beaded off her scales. “Did we overshoot?”

“We never left,” Sylvie said looking up at the Rickenbacker Causeway from below. A furious, screeching howl ripped through the air, and all over the water, pelicans surged into ungainly flight, silvery fish dodged to the depths.

Erinya hadn’t made the leap off the island.

“She’s trapped,” Zoe said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think she can leave the island. There’s something shielding it.”

“That would be me,” Dunne said. He settled on the waves before Sylvie, cross-legged, jeans staying dry despite the wave roll. “Your cage? Does it meet with your approval? It’s temporary. I can get away with it for only a while. Call it a practical joke between old friends.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “It does. Did you leave Alex on the inside? ’Cause Erinya’s going to be furious.”

“Eros sent her home.”

Lupe shot Sylvie a betrayed glance, and Sylvie ignored it. “Can you send us to San Francisco?”

Dunne flashed inhuman, a great grey swirl of wind and storm, and the water around them grew jagged and as rough as sharks’ teeth. Sylvie wished she hadn’t thought about sharks. Or, God,
mermaids
. “You’re asking for a lot of favors for a woman who’s not even marked as mine.”

“Sorry. My soul is my own.”

Zoe shivered, said, “Look, I get that Sylvie’s difficult, but we’re wet and going to get tired of treading water and we really need your help. So if you want us to grovel… she grimaced. “Okay, we won’t. But I’ll say please?”

“Oh, God,” Dunne said, and it was so strange to hear that
word out of his mouth that Sylvie forgot to tread water. A slap of salty water going into her lungs reminded her. She surfaced in time to hear the rest of it. “… just like your sister, aren’t you? Fine. Go. Kill witches. I’m through with you.”

The water rose up around them like a waterspout, then it wasn’t water at all. Sylvie had time to think she’d really angered him—this ride was rougher even than Erinya’s, a far cry from the hiccup when he’d sent her to Dallas—before she lost any thought beyond trying to hold on to her allies. The hardest thing to believe was that she’d volunteered for this. The travel wasn’t instantaneous; it felt endless. Cold and stormy, roiling with momentum and power. It scoured as it shoved them before it, left them blind. She gritted her teeth, determined to endure.

Zoe screamed suddenly, sharp and as brilliant as a stroke of lightning. A moment later, the storm around them eased a notch. As if the power was flowing into something else. As if it were burning through a witch. Sylvie shouted and cursed and flailed and made no headway against the power inexorably rolling them onward. Killing her sister.

They dropped hard, and Lupe snarled furiously, snapping out at everything around her—no humanity in her. Sylvie dodged her and scanned the area, taking it in, in frantic Zoe-absent chunks: nighttime sea falling away blackly and steeply to her left. Sand and stone beneath her, roughing up her skin beneath her khakis. The dark tangle that was Lupe in the night. And, finally, a white glimmer that turned out to be Zoe’s blouse. Her sister was hunched tight in the shelter of a massive rock.

Sylvie scrambled to her feet, fell, scrambled up again.

This,
her Lilith voice said,
is why you don’t involve family. And why you don’t rely on witches. They’re both too fragile for the job.

“Fuck off,” Zoe said, turning to glare at Sylvie. “You know you’ve got a rude-ass voice in your head?”

“Uh—” Sylvie stopped.

Zoe wasn’t dead, hurt, or even burned out. Power was
crackling off of her, rolling around and around the Cain mark on her forearm and hand. When Sylvie reached out cautiously, actual sparks launched in her direction. She withdrew her hand fast.

Zoe admired the silvery, stormy halo flowing over her arm, watched that stolen power spill back and forth as she tilted her arm. It lit up the dark night like she had wrapped moonlight around her skin.

“Guess this mark is good for something. Dunne’s power should have overwhelmed me, fried me. Hell, I probably could have taken on Erinya.”

“Don’t get cocky. She would have chewed out your throat. Just be glad it saved your life,” Sylvie said. She studied their environment with a less panicked and more analytical gaze. “I think it also got us dropped too early. Dunne’s precise with power expenditure. No more, no less than is needed. Part of his no-carbon-footprint god style.”

“Well, crap,” Zoe said. “I’m really ready to take on those Society bitches.” Her lips were curling into a hungry smile. “I’ve been studying and studying and studying, and now I’ve got a chance to—”

You’re going to have to watch her,
her little voice suggested.
She’s corrupted from that much power.

She’s high,
Sylvie countered.

“Shut up!” Zoe snapped. “I am not corrupted. I am not high. I am energized. I am in control. Perfect control.”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“Yeah. A spell I always wanted to try.”

“And you tried it
now
? Are you going to do anything useful with it or just going to pick fights with my brain?”

“Lupe’s eating a seagull,” Zoe said. “Worry about how useful she’s going to be.”

“What?” Lupe said, looming out of the dark on three legs at the sound of her name, the mangled bird dangling from her right front claws. “Where are we?”

“San Francisco,” Sylvie said. If Zoe had sucked in enough of Dunne’s power that he’d dropped them in the
wrong city, she’d be more than … energized; she’d be a glowing trail of embers across the sky, mark of Cain or no.

“We’ve got to be close,” Zoe said. She waved her glowing hand before her as if it could illuminate their path.

“There’s
nothing
around us,” Lupe said. Her nose wrinkled; her tongue flicked out, tasted the air.

“What, just because you can’t smell it? Witches wash, you know,” Zoe said.

Sylvie left them bickering and started walking. She had her gun; the bullets had made the trip safely with her. Her sister had made the trip. Lupe had made the trip, and, despite Sylvie pulling a fast one on Erinya, she seemed willing to fight at Sylvie’s side. All systems were go, and Demalion was waiting for his rescue.

The ground sloped away from her feet, made each step forward an experiment in faith and discomfort. Each step jarred, and the rocky substrate shifted. But the sea cliff was at her back, and there was a hint of asphalt in the darkness. A minute’s walk revealed the slash of car headlights passing by and, a minute after that, the long black ribbon of a California highway slipping downhill.

Zoe joined her, not slip-sliding on the rough terrain at all courtesy of her own glow. Lupe followed in her wake.

“Now what,” Lupe said. “Do we even have an idea of where we’re going? Are all your cases this slipshod? How do you get anything done?” That angry edge was vibrating in her voice again. Erinya’s presence had tamed it somewhat. Sylvie couldn’t wait to find a witch to point Lupe’s bad temper at.

“I admit I’ve been slow about this,” Sylvie said. “The Good Sisters have infiltrated the ISI. San Francisco’s an ISI city. I am betting that we’ll find the entire coven tucked up at ISI home base.” She should have realized it was likely the moment Yvette took Marah and Demalion; they’d need a place to stash them—and the ISI buildings were all equipped with holding cells. Plus, she should have recognized the classic witchy arrogance. That a group of witches who had infiltrated the ISI easily and thoroughly would
deepen the insult by running the spell that allowed them to expand their power out of the ISI bastion.

The irritation of knowing she’d been stupid itched beneath her skin. She could have gone directly from Dallas, attacked them on her own. She could handle a group of witches; she’d tackled gods.

“Going it alone would have been stupid,” Zoe said. “You don’t even know how many of them are there. That’s not even counting the monsters they might be controlling.”

Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Undo that mind-reading spell. Now.”

“No,” Zoe said. “It wasn’t a whim, Syl. We’re about to head into enemy territory. This way, I can keep up with you. Even if we get separated.”

Sylvie couldn’t argue with that. That was sound planning.

Zoe grinned, said, “You’re going to find out I’m all sorts of useful.” After picking up a scrap of broken wood and two small stones, Zoe stepped onto the empty roadway. She laid down the stones, laid the scrap across them, and whispered, “Catch and hold.”

A wash of silvery light, the burning itch of magic, and the road was suddenly barricaded with a police-grade roadblock. Zoe sauntered back and said, “Next car that stops, we take.”