Gods & Monsters (39 page)

He raised his head, shook the animal from his flesh, shed Tepeyollotl’s punishment like it was nothing at all, a mist of water on a warm day. Around his feet, the grass withered, going blackish at the roots and spreading upward like ink.

“So, Shadows,” he said. “You couldn’t stop me before. Think you have any chance now? I am the god of Death and Change. Be sensible, little Lilith.
Run.
”

VIZCAYA GARDENS WERE TEN ACRES OF MANICURED LANDSCAPES and grottoes, butted up against Biscayne Bay, capped with a turn-of-the-century manor house—it was a spacious place. With Azpiazu exuding energy, bleeding deathly rot into the night, he loomed large enough to her senses that the gardens felt tightly claustrophobic, a tangled jungle of rotting vegetation.

In the background, Cachita’s exhortations had gone hoarse; she was down on her knees, head craned back, arms crossed above her face. Agony in her bones. Still trying to keep that door closed, trying to cage Tepeyollotl with nothing more than the letter of their bargain, that he would come
when
she called. And not before.

“Can’t leave,” Sylvie said. “You’ve got some things I want.”

“What? Them?” Azpiazu gestured at the bespelled women, still challenging Erinya, gestured at Wales’s limp body. “No. They’re mine. They’re going to be my first true souls. The first chosen ones to be part of my godhood.”

Erinya rolled, dislodged the jaguar from her back and neck at the expense of blood and scale and chunks of feathered hide, and flung the squalling, limping cat across the courtyard. The wolf, racing in to take advantage, was slapped hard enough to spin into the reflective pool with a bloody splash and howl. Sylvie winced.

Erinya cocked her head, put her burning gaze on Azpiazu, and growled, “
Your
godhood.”

Azpiazu laughed, and it was a disconcertingly gorgeous sound, a man thrilled with himself and his new lot in life.

Erinya grinned, her lips split wide, wider, widest until the entire lower half of her face seemed comprised of needle teeth. “New gods are fair play. Especially if they don’t have anyone to watch their back.”

Sylvie chimed in. “Who’s feeling like running now?”

“She’s nothing to me,” Azpiazu said. “A flunky for a softhearted—”

Erinya flew at him, talons on all four legs extended, wings curving over her back to end in sharp-edged spikes. Azpiazu stood his ground, and her claws shredded his clothes, but not the skin beneath.

A god.

Sylvie’s little dark voice made itself heard over the tumult, over Cachita’s defiant cries and the thundering groan of the earth, the howls of an angry wolf deprived of prey.
Not a god. Not yet,
her voice whispered.
Not quite yet.
It gifted her with one word further. A word that gave her a tiny flare of hope.

Transitioning,
it said.

Azpiazu might have been immortal, but even an immortal body needed alteration to take full advantage of godhood. To allow him to access the kind of power that would turn a human body, no matter how durable, into ashes and dust.

For a few minutes more, Azpiazu was both god and man. And while Sylvie would pit herself against a god, if needs must, she was happier with a man.

The problem was, Erinya wasn’t making headway. Azpiazu slung her into a tree, smashing it like glass. Erinya staggered, rose up, her skin oddly leprous. As if death were touching an immortal creature.

Sylvie jerked her gaze away. If Azpiazu was transitioning, she still had a shot. He had a weakness. He had to. She just had to figure it out.

But first . . .

A low growl chilled her spine; she turned. The woman-turned-jaguar slunk toward her on three legs, one dragging. Erinya’s idea of not hurting the unwitting left something to be desired. At the moment, with the jaguar dragging hard leftward, with the leg slowing its inevitable course toward Sylvie, she couldn’t regret it.

The bear was still down, still unconscious, the broken bond releasing it from Azpiazu’s order to attack. The wolf whose face Erinya had torn was down. Freed from the binding sigil.

The binding sigil. The thing that bound Azpiazu to the women. Let him control them.

Sigils ran two ways.

Sylvie shifted stance, trying to keep an eye on the jaguar while keeping Azpiazu in her view. He was playing with Erinya, breaking a hind leg, ripping a wing off; her efforts were doing nothing but stripping him of his clothes. The jaguar crouched awkwardly, one leg crooked, her eyes glowing, teeth dripping blood and feathers.

Sylvie bared her teeth and snarled back. The jaguar hesitated, slunk back into the underbrush, gave her breathing space.

Azpiazu’s binding sigil had been carved into each woman’s forehead. For the symbology to work, Azpiazu had to have a matching sigil to influence. Sympathetic magic at its most basic.

Somewhere on his skin, hidden in the darkness, in his fluid movements, in the shadows racing his body, there’d be a sigil to match the one he’d carved onto each woman’s forehead. Onto Wales’s.

That binding link would be the last thing to change, the last piece of him that would be mortal. He was holding on to it, still controlling his “harem.” It would be small, the size of a quarter. Easily overlooked in the dimness of firelight and thundercloud. She couldn’t shoot it. Even if bullets worked on him. Even if she had bullets left.

But if she could wake Wales, he might have magical means to help. She crept toward him, trying to keep Azpiazu from noticing. Playing with Erinya just wasn’t holding his attention the way it should, though Erinya was doing her bloody best.

The jaguar lunged out from the underbrush; Sylvie dodged the killing blow but still tumbled backward, hitting the ground with a painful, breath-stealing thud.

Something slammed into her kidney with the near-familiar pain of a gun crushed between her body and the ground. But she’d discarded all the guns once they’d emptied.

She kicked the jaguar in the chest, kicked hard at the damaged leg, and the cat screamed and retreated for easier prey. Sylvie rolled, put her hand on the source of the pain, and found Cachita’s knife. Metal handle.

Obsidian blade.

The jaguar, burdened by Azpiazu’s will, kept fighting, turned her attention toward the only remaining prey. Cachita. Still contorted, face grey with exhaustion, still chanting,
No no no
, still locked in her struggle with Tepeyollotl.

“Erinya!” Sylvie said. “Protect her—”

“Not fair,” Erinya gasped, even as she moved Cachita’s direction with a horrible, broken stagger. She was ragged, savaged nearly past mending. “You’ll hunt without me.” Azpiazu let her run, then grabbed her remaining wing, and dragged her back. Playing.

A single moment. That was all it took. Erinya spun, clawing; Sylvie lunged after the jaguar, but was too slow.

CACHITA SCREAMED, HER VOICE SPIRALING UPWARD, THEN RIPPED into silence. The jaguar’s jaws closed down hard on Cachita’s straining neck, white teeth going black with arterial blood.

Azpiazu’s jaguar had broken the wildly uneven stalemate between Cachita and her god. No agreement could hold through one party’s being mauled. The jaguar shook Cachita; she dropped limply, eyes empty and dead.

The world shook; trees shattered all around them, earthquakes and rot mingling with disastrous results. The reflective pool cracked, let stagnant water grease the stones around them.

Azpiazu stopped stalking Erinya, paused, waiting for his chance at the god who’d given him so much, waiting for Tepeyollotl to see what he’d become. That wicked smile was on his face once more, the bubble of laughter in his throat.

“You are enjoying yourself way too much,” Sylvie said.

Tepeyollotl breathed himself into the world, an enormous concussive force that knocked her sprawling, knocked the breath from her lungs. Her ears stung as if wasps had crawled inside and attacked. When she touched them, her fingers came away wet with blood.

Erinya’s despairing moan was a fractured whisper in Sylvie’s traumatized hearing.

Enough.

They were going to lose.

They were going to lose
everything
.

Beneath Tepeyollotl’s looming arrival, Cachita’s body faded, drifted to smoke. Obliterated. Dead without even a body to mark where she had fallen.

Sylvie wasn’t going to lose anyone else. Not the women. Not Wales. Not even Erinya. She clutched the obsidian knife with white knuckles.

Tepeyollotl slunk down from the raised balcony, his heavy bulk overwhelming the wide, stone stairs. His smoky shadow flowed before him like a river, eating away at the stone, a destructive, intangible river. The earth trembled and rippled. Trees fell with the sound of torn fabric, of reality altering in the reflection of the god’s anger.

A sharp avalanche heralded an entire wall sliding down, hitting the shaking ground and puddling outward. Sylvie nearly lost her footing all over again, and, in regaining it, made the mistake of looking at Tepeyollotl. She couldn’t look away.

Tepeyollotl was the shattered remnant of Tezcatlipoca, Cachita had said. The god moving ponderously through the world
looked
shattered. He was four times human size, his flesh scarred and battered and studded with what looked like broken glass. Some of his skin wasn’t human flesh at all but a tattered and decaying jaguar pelt, equal parts black spots and char. It sagged unhealthily. He crawled on all fours, yellowed nails curling over his massive fingers, sharp enough to leave gouges in stone; his eyes were blood-red from lash to lash, and scars ran down his cheeks and throat.

Despite his bulk, his bones jutted, pressing against the jaguar pelt, against flesh that seemed parchment thin, in angular, agonizing protrusions. He raised his head, sniffed the air, nose wrinkling, human mouth drawing up into a cat’s whiskered cheek pads. His huge tongue was white-spined. A single lick would flay a man.

Still blind to Azpiazu.

That last bit of mortality, that binding sigil, hiding him. His only weakness saving him from his enemy.

Tepeyollotl’s bloody gaze locked on Sylvie. His lips peeled back. He coughed, a jungle cat’s hunting call. It rattled her bones, raised the hairs all over her body. It was all she could do not to retreat to basic mammal instinct and curl up, hoping to be unseen.

“Should have run, Shadows,” Azpiazu said. He held his hands out before him; oily darkness dripped from each palm. It flowed outward toward her like tar, spreading rot.

God of Death, indeed. And if he was accessing his new powers, her time was running short.

Sylvie lunged forward, dragged Wales’s deadweight out of the path of the rot, picked up the necromantic blade in her free hand. She kept the obsidian one behind her back, hoping he hadn’t seen it. Dark hilt, dark blade, dark night. Erinya dropped heavily down beside her, panting, coughing up something smoky and dark. Demigod blood.

Azpiazu said, “Caught between death and . . . death. What are you going to do, Shadows?
Nothing.
You’re just a human woman. And I’m a god.”

Sylvie’s retort died on her lips. There. On his chest. Dead center. The binding sigil—the fusion symbol that held the rest of the spells together, the last bit of human in him. The flesh there rippled, muscles straining from an exertion the rest of him managed effortlessly.

“Not yet,” Sylvie said.

“Close enough,” he said. “And that knife won’t help you.” He spread his arms. “I can be generous. If you want to try . . . one last blow before I eat your heart and soul. Make you my sacrifice.”

Arrogance, she thought. Had to love it.

She grinned, dropped the silvery blade, and brought the obsidian knife up, hard, fast, and on target. It lodged right where she wanted it. Right through the spell link he had carved into his skin. The one that blinded Tepeyollotl to his presence.

Azpiazu, impaled, staggered forward, clutching at Sylvie’s arms, slipping death under her skin. Her skin grew cold and heavy, unresponsive. Nerves withering, death creeping in. Her numb hands slid on the knife’s handle, losing grip. She compensated with a full-body shove; the blade had already penetrated, its glassine edges sliding through skin, muscle, and bone as if it had been designed exactly for that purpose. She would push it deeper with her last effort, lodge it in his black heart, if that was what it took.

Sylvie didn’t think it would come to that.

Azpiazu coughed, his stolen power bleeding out, his eyes showing shock and betrayal.

“I kill the unkillable,” Sylvie whispered.

“I’ll outlast you,” he gasped, coughing.

“No,” she said. “You won’t.” She yanked the knife out, a slippery leap in her hands, and jammed it through his throat.