Gods & Monsters (18 page)

“I killed a man with a powerful friend,” the sorcerer said. “He cursed me.”

“If he cursed
you
,” Wales said, “why are the women the ones getting hurt?” He was tracking better than Sylvie had thought, enough that he wasn’t going to let the sorcerer slip that one by.

“I am a shape-shifter,” the sorcerer declared. “I have the power to alter my shape, to take on the guise of a bear, a wolf, a great cat.”

Sylvie scoffed. “Liar. You’re no shape-shifter, and I’m not that new to this game. You’re a human sorcerer who stole the power by killing true shape-shifters. So tell me, which one had the powerful friend? Bear, wolf, cat?”

He ignored her. “The cowardly sorcerer refused to fight me face-to-face. Instead, he cursed me with the inability to control my form. I am become a monster.”

“Ugly, too,” Sylvie said. She grinned when his face went scarlet. If he needed her, she could make him sorry for it.

His lip drew up, and he took a deliberate step toward Wales. “I might require your aid, but his—” He held up his human hand in threat. Should have been less intimidating than the bloodstained claws, but Sylvie’s disintegrated gun argued that even a single touch could be deadly.

“Fine,” Sylvie said. “Cut to the chase. What do you want me to do? Find this sorcerer of yours and bring you his head?”

A hot light burned behind his eyes, a hunger she could feel. Wales hissed, a warning sound that she didn’t need. The sorcerer made her want to pump his skull so full of bullets that it could be used as a rattle.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, “but it would be enjoyable. All you need to do is . . . convince him to lift the curse. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how to convince him.” He gave her a long once-over, gaze traveling toes to crown, and leered.

She shuddered. He hadn’t. The disgust in her belly, the twitching of her trigger finger argued he had. She’d met a lot of bad guys, but this one was winning in the sheer skeeze factor.

Wales staggered upright, sagged, a sad scarecrow in unyielding daylight. “You’re using the women to deflect the curse. To keep your shape stable. Mostly stable.”

“I am,” he said. “You’re cleverer than I thought, little necromancer. But I could still rip out your throat before you muster a single defense. I’m refraining as a show of good faith.”

Sylvie said, “We get it. You’re bad. You’re scary. Tell me where to find this other sorcerer. What I have to do to break the curse.”

“He calls himself Tepé.”

“And he lives where?” Sylvie said. “I’m not leaving you loose in my city while I run your errands.”

“He’ll be here soon. He follows me. Always just out of my sight. Gloating. This spell you think is so cruel . . . is the only way I’ve found to weaken him.”

“Nice to know you hold your life so high that you’ll use innocents as a shield,” Sylvie said. “You’re not making me want to do you any favors.”

“Every time I change without intent, without control, it’s as if acid is poured beneath my skin. I burn. . . .”

“Not feeling sorry for you. Just so you know.”

He gritted his teeth; his jaw deformed on one side, thrust forward; his cheek twisted and sprouted whiskers before slipping back to
GQ
smoothness. “Make no mistake, Lilith. I am in control here. It’s a devil’s bargain I offer you. But you cannot afford to say no. These women will wither and die. Tepé’s curse is strong, and they are human. Help me. Save them. If you delay too long, they will die, and I’ll be forced to find replacements.

“Think of that, if nothing else. Me, loose in your city. Can you protect every woman who meets my needs? It’s an enormous city, Shadows. Do we have a deal?”

“How do I contact you?”

“You don’t. Break the curse, and I’ll vanish as I came. The women will wake and return home. Always assuming you were quick enough that they survive.”

“I know your rep,” Sylvie said. “Soul-devourer. You’ve left a trail of bodies.”

“You’ll just have to take it on trust,” he said. He slipped alongside the van, climbed inside.

Sylvie yanked Wales around. “Can you do anything right now? Can you help those women? Wake them? If so, do it!”

Wales shook his head, nearly tilted over, and Sylvie clutched his shirt in her fists as the soul-devourer drove away, his “harem” still intact. Swaying, Wales put a hand to his head, and said, “Can we get the hell out of here?”

“God, yes,” Sylvie muttered. She wanted away with a force that nearly sickened her. Away from the scene of her defeat. Away from the sorcerer’s unclean magic. Away from her agreement to aid him.

It wasn’t quite the rapid retreat Wales wanted. She made him sit first, studied his pupils—reactive, the same size, able to follow her fingertip—and declared him hardheaded.

“I’ve heard that before,” he drawled.

The blood was mostly gone, courtesy of Marco’s cleanup, and what was left, Wales mopped at with the edge of his sleeve. The gash on his cheek had coagulated; the one on his shoulder was glued shut with fabric. The two in between were reddened lines on the thin skin of his throat—a reminder of mercy. The sorcerer could have ripped Wales’s throat open, and from the way he fingered those small tears, Wales knew it.

SYLVIE LET WALES INTO THE SOUTH BEACH OFFICE, GESTURING HIM ahead, and already looking over her shoulder. Attempted murder tended to make her a little paranoid. Wales, of course, lived in a state of controlled paranoia.

She shut the door; he was peering out through the blinds, his mouth drawn tight. He looked tired, strung-out; he’d dozed fitfully most of the way back, jerking awake every so often, eyes frightened, hands flailing. It all argued that it hadn’t been sleep that held him last night but simple unconsciousness. Two days in her company, and she’d worked him into a frazzle.

Alex wouldn’t be happy.

“You know you got men scoping your shop? They’re not subtle.” His voice was pitched low, as if he feared being overheard.

Sylvie took a look, miniblinds spread around her fingers, and sighed. “There’s the ISI. Figures. They don’t hunt the bad-guy sorcerer, no. They come and camp on my doorstep. They’re cheats. Something bad happens, they like to try to copy off my test paper.”

“I didn’t sign up to deal with the government,” Wales said, still in that same half mumble. Trying to avoid a parabolic mike.

“Untwist your panties, Tex,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got Marco, remember? They get too close, you disappear.”

She let the gap in the blinds shut, kept the sign on the door to CLOSED, and headed upstairs, fighting the urge to stomp her feet like a child. She hadn’t missed the ISI and their spying one bit.

Her little dark voice said,
You should have taken care of Odalys yourself.

They would have been back, no matter what, she argued with it.

“Wales!” she snapped. “Stop gawking at them and start some coffee.”

“Not the boss of me,” he shot back. But she heard him drop the blinds with a snap.

Her upstairs office was a mess. Leftover paperwork from the previous case, still incomplete for more than just the time it would take to code things properly. If the ISI was on her ass again, it was more important than ever to keep her case files innocuous, cloak the magical in the mundane.

But these files were also waiting on Odalys, on Patrice, on justice to be done. Sylvie dumped the files into her drawer and rested her head on her hands. It was hard to start the hunt for this mysterious Tepé when she knew the one benefiting from her actions would be the soul-devourer.

She opened the safe, took out the newest backup gun, and sorted her feelings out by loading it.

There was a sudden burst of conversation below, the rattle of the door closing, then Alex wandered upstairs, sipping coffee from Etienne’s.

“Working from home?” Sylvie said. “I know you’re here a lot, but home’s the thing that has an actual bed in it.”

“Got a futon, not a bed,” Alex said. “Besides, practice what you preach, Syl. I was just driving by, and I saw your truck.”

“Just driving by?”

“Okay, so I bet myself one of Etienne’s beignets that you’d be in.” She held up her free hand, then deliberately brushed powdered sugar onto her jeans. “So Tierney seems kinda pissy today. And hurt. I told him I’d get the first-aid kit, but he sent me up here, instead.”

“ISI’s back,” Sylvie said. “He doesn’t like the government overmuch. Go home, Alex.”

“Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

“Phone, e-mail—”

“Oh, but face-to-face is more fun.” She draped her lanky self over the spare chair, kicked her flip-flops off, and hooked her feet in the rungs. “Are you going to ask?”

“Alex,” Sylvie said. “We met the soul-devourer. I’m not in the mood.”

Alex stiffened all over. “What happened? Is that how Tierney got hurt? What did he want?”

“He wants me to work for him,” Sylvie said. She filled Alex in; by the end of it, she was pacing the room, angry and sick all over again. “He’s holding the women as hostages. He said they get closer to death the longer I take. Wales agrees.”

“You can’t work for him,” Alex said, focusing in with her usual talent for rubbing salt in the wound. “He’s the bad guy.”

“I have to work for him. But I’ll make him choke on it before I’m done. For me to do that, I need to know who he is. Where he came from. What his weaknesses are.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “Okay, I can maybe help—” She pulled out her laptop, flipped it open, and said, “I did some preliminary research. I skipped the soul-devourer part. Tierney’s right. That’s a giant dead end. The necromantic community knows he exists but nothing else about him. Hell, turns out they weren’t even sure it was a man, just defaulted to it. So I went back to the simple facts. What you and Tierney got from the symbols: old-fashioned magic, Basque magic, a linkage to alchemy.”

“Alchemy? He disintegrated my gun with a touch.”

“Oh yeah,” Alex said, eyes lighting with wholly inappropriate enthusiasm. “Alchemy’s all about the transformation of one thing to another. Bet your gun didn’t just disintegrate; bet it became some other type of metal first—”

“Alex. He
disintegrated
my
gun
. Tell me you got something,” Sylvie said.

“Not something,” Alex said. “But something that might lead to something. A nineteenth-century man they called the Basque Alchemist. Eladio Azpiazu. Supposedly he had the power of a wolf, and he scared his neighbors so bad that rather than drive him out, the town picked up and moved.”

“
Nineteenth
century? Not our guy, Alex.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Alex said. “It’s like the
Maudits
. They seek out apprentices—”

“You say apprentice; I say slave,” Sylvie murmured, but she got the gist. “You think it’s a lineage. A pattern of teaching.”

“Yeah, and a strict one if this modern sorcerer is still using the same techniques as his ancestor. That’d be like me still using quill and ink. It works, but there are better methods now. Why should magic be any different?”

“Anything else?” Sylvie asked. “I’m greedy.”

“One ring-a-ding prize maybe,” Alex said. “I farmed out some of the research. I thought, if the town moved, that would leave a record. Or if the town just disappeared. I know a grad student at UM, a local history buff. She looked into it, confirmed that there was a town that disappeared, and this is the important part—one of the key reasons people left? A series of grisly murders where people were found with their hearts torn out. Sound like the soul-devourer? I’d say that our modern sorcerer was following the family line all the way down.”

“Alex, you’re amazing,” Sylvie said.

“So what’s my prize?”

“More research,” Sylvie said. “Look into his enemy. A sorcerer called Tepé. Tepé cursed him but good. An enmity that strong should draw notice.”

Alex sighed. “Good work makes more work. So damn true.”

Sylvie said, “I strongly doubt that’s his real name, anyway. Sounds more like a handle than a given name. Like . . .” She raised her head. “Like the Ghoul.”

Wales flipped her off as he joined them. He leaned against the doorjamb, and Sylvie waved him in. The landing was narrow, the stairs were steep, and Wales still didn’t look any too steady on his feet.

Alex moved to get out of her seat, and Wales shook his head. His earlier fear had given way to a sullen sort of irritation. He had come upstairs, Sylvie thought, to pick a fight. Give himself a reason to storm out of the office and the city.

Usually, when people wanted a fight, Sylvie was willing to oblige. Not today. She turned her back on Wales, took her seat again, tried for calm. “You going back to the hotel?” she asked.