Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel (43 page)

Demalion said, “Earth to Sylvie? UCLA just started a new scientific study on ESP.”

“Yeah?” she said. She braced her cast-encased hand against the edge of the board and stuck a tiny pin in an already crowded spot. The universities, as a whole, were reacting in two ways: sheer, unbridled fascination or utter refusal to accept the magical world. That was all right. They weren’t the ones she was worried about. Not really.

She was worried about the churches. It was one thing to believe in your gods, to get proof that your gods were real, concrete,
tangible
. To have your faith proved fact. It was a whole other type of shock to realize that
other
people’s gods were just as real. Right now, the religious groups were being very, very quiet. It made her nervous. The whole world made her nervous, hence the board—Alex’s idea to keep them up to date, trying to predict trouble spots.

“Apparently, someone at UCLA was going back through old studies and found out that the reports had—”

“Changed,” Sylvie finished. “Proved that psychic powers were possible?”

“Guess whatever it was was definitive enough. The new scientists are a group of geneticists.”

Sylvie grimaced. “Urgh. That … I don’t like that. They go too far down that road in this environment, and we’ll have genetic scans made mandatory. The government’s already strung tight.” There were seventeen red pins in DC. Each of them represented another blip on the radar, another constituent group who’d managed to get an audience with their senator or congressman for something that once would have branded them lunatic fringe.

“Tell me about it,” Demalion said. He sounded strung tight himself. She stopped putting pins in the corkboard and looked at him. “Marah’s been calling.”

“Marah tracked you down?”

Sylvie had been expecting it. Partly because Marah was just that determined. Partly because Sylvie and her allies hadn’t gone far.

Sylvie had left her South Beach office behind—not that there was much left of it—and found them discreet office space in Hialeah. It wasn’t the beach, but it had everything she needed, including a lot of escape routes. Hialeah was a transport city.

Originally, Sylvie’s intention was to pack up her business, her partner, her sister, and Demalion and get out of Florida for good. It would have been the wise thing to do. But Erinya was still her mess. She couldn’t walk away from that. Right now, Erinya was playing nice, making a nest out of her small world for herself and Lupe. If that changed, it would be Sylvie walking up the causeway, with her gun in hand.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Lupe had come over for lunch a day ago, and she was happy, healthy, and bringing a peace offering from Erinya—a slew of carnivorous plants in pretty pots. Sylvie had passed them off to Alex with a grimace.

Erinya hadn’t forgotten Sylvie’s and Dunne’s treachery, but … as Lupe said, “She’s occupied. We’ve got worshippers finding their way to us, daily. Supplicants asking for
vengeance and aid.” Lupe had ducked her head when Sylvie asked how vengeance played out with Erinya trapped. Lupe hadn’t needed to answer after that.

Lupe was dealing out punishment in Erinya’s name.

Demalion sighed. “Marah’s trying for the hard sell. Pushing guilt. I don’t think she’s even capable of feeling guilt.” He stepped away from the desk, stretched out the kinks in his back. His shirt rose, revealing smooth flesh where there had been stitches.

Another benefit to the Sphinx toxin treatment. He healed better now. Sylvie would be lying if she said it didn’t ease her mind. But healing wasn’t where her thoughts went as she watched the small, subtle play of flat muscle over his hips. He caught her gaze and grinned, slow and wicked. “Call it a day? Head home?”

“Don’t think about it,” Alex said, from the front room, eavesdropping automatically. “I swear. I’m
this
close to getting into Graves’s files.”

“You’ve been saying that for days,” Sylvie said. She almost,
almost
opened her mouth and teased Alex about losing her touch. Then she recalled Alex, unhappy and scared and losing her mind, and shifted direction. “You’re just cranky ’cause Tex is out doing fieldwork.”

“You sent him to Georgia.”

“Look at the map!” Sylvie said. “There are pins all over Georgia! I have to know why. And there’s only so much that facts can tell me. I want to know the feel of the—”

Their room-to-room argument was disrupted by the front door opening. The bell—a Zoe special—rang once, then twice: short bright
dings
that told Sylvie that it was a human coming in, and an armed one. Zoe had spelled the door chimes to alert them to a lot of different combinations since she couldn’t be there to do it herself. Val had whisked Zoe back to Ischia. Sylvie’s parents, appalled and newly aware of the dangers of the world, had thought Val offered the safest alternative.

Sylvie couldn’t really argue. Look what Zoe had done under Sylvie’s supervision.

This time, the chimes’ special tones were irrelevant. Sylvie recognized the man coming in. “Detective Garza.”

“You’re a hard woman to find,” he said. He gave Demalion a quick once-over, noting the gun at his hip, then, like everyone else who’d made their way to their new office, fell silent before the map.

“Those are all … what are those?”

“People interacting with or reacting to the
Magicus Mundi
,” Sylvie said.

Garza let out a sigh that was more groan than breath. “I killed a man and covered it up, then I forgot about it.”

“You had help,” Sylvie said. “I helped you kill him; the Good Sisters made you forget.”

“Can I help you?” The question burst out of Garza’s mouth, raw. Needy.

Garza paced, thrust his hands into his pocket, looked embarrassed; Demalion left the room, closed the door behind him.

“That’s not usually the way this goes,” Sylvie said. “People ask
me
for help, not if I need—”

“Look. I can’t do this,” Garza said. “I go to work every day, and I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. We got memos from above. Telling us to stay away from Key Biscayne—it’s not even in our jurisdiction.
Someone
sent down a list of likely monsters we might run into. Ways to identify witches, werewolves, even vampires. But no one really knows anything. It’s not enough. I feel like I can’t do my job right because I don’t know enough.”

“You used to do just fine—”

“I know better, now. I don’t want to wait for more memos, Shadows. I want to be there, on the front line, be the one figuring this out. Not waiting for it to be a problem that crosses my path—”

Sylvie held up a hand, opened the door. “Demalion. Can I have your phone?”

He blinked but tossed it in her direction. She caught it awkwardly with her good hand, then set it down to poke through his call history. Garza vibrated with impatience.

Sylvie found the number she was looking for, hit redial. Garza said, “Shadows!”

Wait,
she mouthed. When Marah picked up, her voice was triumphant. “Demalion, I knew you’d—”

“Sorry, just me. I’ve got a deal for you.”

“What kind of deal?” Marah sounded suspicious.

“Simple. Stop trying to recruit Demalion.”

“That’s not a deal—”

“If you’ll let me finish, I’ll make it worth your while. This is Detective Raul Garza. He wants a job. On the front line. He wants to know all about the
Magicus Mundi
. He ID’d a
Maudit
sorcerer as a criminal before the
Magicus Mundi
gossip started.” Sylvie passed him the phone.

A few minutes of impromptu job interview later, Garza handed the phone back to Sylvie, looking far more at ease than he had when he came in.

“I still want Demalion,” Marah said into Sylvie’s ear. “Do you know how useful foretelling can be in politics? I’m a professional assassin, and I tell you, I was not prepared for the cutthroat tactics.”

“I’m hanging up, Marah,” Sylvie said.

“I get what I want,” Marah said, before disconnecting.

Sylvie, despite herself, despite Marah’s cheerful tone, found her blood running cold. In the front of the office, Alex gave a sudden shriek of triumph as Graves’s files gave up their secrets.

SYLVIE STOOD ON THE RIVER’S EDGE AND THREW THE WREATH OF pale flowers onto its sluggish surface. She waited for the bait to work while the water lapped up over the white petals, slowly dragging them downward.

It was quiet around her, almost peaceful here on the isolated river basin. Made her nervous. She shot a glance back toward the roadway, toward the bulk of the rental jeep, and a moving shape that was Demalion, pacing around the vehicle. He didn’t think coming to Brazil was a good idea, thought it took them too far off their turf.

Sylvie couldn’t blame him, but the trip had been necessary. A month had passed since Alex had cracked the encryption on Graves’s files. A month since that triumph had turned to worry and set Sylvie on the hunt.

Everyone was hunting, it seemed like. Hunting for answers, for safety, for a way to stop or control the changes. All across the world, people were being drawn into the
Magicus Mundi
’s influence as surely as the wreath continued to sink.

Marah’s ISI was on everyone’s lips; last Sylvie had heard, before she set off on this river hunt, eight separate ambassadors from European countries had come to learn from the ISI. As if the ISI was an example of anything but what
not
to do …

Sylvie still worried most about the religious groups. The schisms were fast and ugly—people wanting peace, wanting communion with the gods, wanting wars to glorify their gods’ names and smite the unbelievers. And people were listening to them. A lot harder to dismiss a man who declared the gods were speaking to him when Key Biscayne had an entirely-too-tangible god that could be visited, prayed to, worshipped. The Church of Wrath was growing exponentially.

Sylvie had already killed two gods who were nothing of the sort—only a jumped-up
Maudit
sorcerer and a necromancer who resurrected the dead. Taking advantage of the climate. Sylvie had managed to get herself on television once again, lecturing the would-be believers about the differences between gods and men, and why blind faith was no good for either. She had ended up being asked to consult on cases all over the US. She was flavor of the month; but when she could, she sent Demalion out to play nice instead of her. After years of keeping an unofficial profile, her sudden notoriety was nerve-racking.

A mosquito hummed at her ear, and she swatted it away, wincing as the cast on her hand caught her hair and tugged a few strands free. She was healing fast, but not inhumanly so. A mixed blessing. She might be the new Lilith, an immortal woman, but at least she was still human.

Demalion, not so much.

Hospitals and doctors were being subpoenaed all across the country by the ISI, trying to winkle out any
Mundi
living in their midst. The witches, Sylvie thought, had been the tipping point. The world seemed to accept the idea of monsters—after all, maps had declared
HERE BE MONSTERS
for centuries
. Monsters were upsetting but part of the collective unconscious.

Witches, though, scared the fuck out of people. Made them realize that maybe they
couldn’t
tell the monsters at a glance. Made them pull apart from each other instead of growing closer in the face of the
Magicus Mundi
. And then, someone let slip about werewolves and succubi and all the shape-shifting things that looked human but weren’t, and the rare half-breeds …

Martial law had looked like a possibility for a few fraught weeks, then things settled back into a panicky détente, while the government passed law after hasty law about creatures and things they knew next to nothing about.

The water before her glossed suddenly, rolled as something slid just beneath the surface. The sinking wreath bobbed again, and the Encantado surged out of the water, shifting from dolphin to human as he did. White petals stuck to his sleek skin, and his dark eyes were languorous.

“You called for me—” He trailed off. The pleasant anticipation on his face faded to wary irritation. “Shadows. What do you want?”

“Come up here. Come out of the water,” she said.

He touched the flowers over his shoulders, testing them. There wasn’t a spell laid over them. Only tradition. He shrugged and walked up the bank to stand before her.

“What do you want?”

“Mostly, just to talk.”

“Mostly,” he said. “I don’t like mostly.”

“You played me,” she said. “From the beginning.”

If she’d thought he’d deny it, she would have been wrong. He smiled, showing sharp teeth. “You
listened
to me. Believed me. Even behind your magical wards, my words reached you. Because you
wanted
to listen.”

Sylvie said, “You fed me a lot of things I was primed to hear. That the ISI was morally corrupt—which Graves most definitely was. That there were other forces working within the ISI, even gave me a name. The Society of the Good Sisters. You told me they were the ones running the Corrective. That was true.”

“So you wanted to thank me?”