Gods & Monsters (9 page)

Then it started to trickle sluggishly down her skin, nothing like sweat, sticky and already going rank. She had to force herself to hold still for the next two touches, marking her forehead and chin. No point in doing this half-assed, and she really didn’t like the idea of having her soul munched on by a ghost who wasn’t all that fond of her.

The last time she’d seen Marco—more than just his remnant Hand—he’d gotten in her face and told her he killed women like her.

If there was anything that would break the deal between Wales and his pet ghost, it would probably be her: Recidivism was more than just a word, after all, and while alive, Marco had made a habit of killing women.

She was trusting Wales on two fronts here—that he knew what he was doing and that his word was good—and that made her nearly as edgy as the hunt they were on. She watched him, her vision narrowing until the flick of the lighter, his long, pale fingers, and bony knuckles, the quick and tiny spill of sparks, got eaten by the wash of the Hand of Glory coming alight.

The last time she’d seen Marco, they’d been confined and close in a single room. The last time she’d seen ghosts, they’d been focused on their victims. Both events left her utterly unprepared for the speed of Marco now.

Her breath went out in a rush, and Marco breezed through the small crowd of policemen and technicians, bending close, sending them into unconsciousness with a kiss—
a bite
—before they could even realize something was happening.

Marco moved like wind, a grey shape in the air, unfettered by human requirements of energy or space. He blew through the equipment, set one machine to shrieking an alarm, and took out the technician before she had time to turn her head. The woman crumpled, face-first, and Wales hissed in disapproval.

“What is it?” Sylvie said.

“Hurry up,
hurry up
!” Wales muttered more to himself than her, then broke, running with graceless haste through the slough, going knee deep in places, forcing his way through, leaving a muddy wake. Sylvie, finding a drier path, finally saw what Wales, with his greater height, had seen: The female technician was facedown in the water.

Marco hadn’t changed at all since his death. Sylvie wished she could be surprised.

SYLVIE PICKED UP HER PACE, FELT THE SAW GRASS LASH AGAINST her legs, heard the low hum of it rasping against her clothes; she got there as Wales manhandled the woman out of the water, checked her airways.

“She all right?” And wasn’t that a careful distinction of
all right
? Was the soul-shocked woman still breathing? Morals and the
Magicus Mundi
didn’t line up all that well.

“She is,” Wales said. Marco shrugged, an insincere
oops
. “They all are,” he said, nodding decisively as if saying it made it so.

“Yeah, let’s just do this,” Sylvie said. She directed her attention to the scene, trying to splice the two images together in her mind. When she’d been there last, it was a peaceful scene—minus the dead women, naturally—glimmering waters, green duckweed, saw grass stretching out toward the sloughs and the hammocks.

Now there was char everywhere, scraps of metal in the process of being collected; scorched grass, oily water, the detritus of investigation, and a double handful of dropped cops. Sylvie wandered over to the collected evidence bags, reading labels. Might as well start there.

There were two men fallen near the bags, dressed in Fed-standard suits, in Fed-standard colors—one blue, one black. Miami detectives had more sense, wore khakis and short-sleeved polo shirts. Sylvie pulled out the first man’s ID: Dennis Kent, ISI. She burned his face into her memory. Odds were, she’d be seeing him again. Dark hair, grey flecked, a Roman nose. Soft hands.

The second man—dirty blond, smooth-skinned, a babe in the woods—was Nick O’Neal, and definitely the junior of the pair.

Strange suits, indeed. Lio’s rumor mill had been right.

But these two looked more like an exploratory team than the first wave of an ISI incursion. Someone wanting to make sure that this was worth their time. Sylvie grimaced.

Using the Hand of Glory on them would probably go a long way to convincing them that this was ISI-interesting. Couldn’t win for losing, sometimes.

In the background, Wales held a furious, whispered conversation with Marco, a series of snake hisses on the breeze. Sylvie tipped her head, let the air cool her skin, drying the blood on her face until the streaks pulled uncomfortably. She reached up to scratch, then saw Marco studying her, his hollow eyes eager even from twenty feet away, and dropped her hands.
Yeah, better not.

She put their IDs back, flipped through the evidence bags.

“You sense anything? Find anything?” Sylvie asked. She was coming up blank, blanker, blankest. Yesterday, the landscape had held that strange charge to the air, the sense that magic had been used, had altered reality. Today, it was just heat, breeze, sun, water, smoke, oil. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. She slapped at a mosquito that made a heat-slow sortie at her exposed wrist and pulled her sleeves back down.

“Nothing much,” Wales said. “Bit of a ghost presence. The dead cops. The burned woman. But they’re only traces, and they’re fading fast. They’re so far gone, holding ’em back’d be nothing but an act of cruelty.”

“You could do that?” Sylvie asked. “Pull them back?” That made her twitchy. It wasn’t just that he could keep them there, but that Wales—scarecrow klutz of a man—could pull their souls
away
from whatever gods lay waiting to claim them.

“Could. Won’t,” Wales said. “They can’t tell me much more than they already have, whispering about confusion and being lost.”

“You can hear them?”

Wales turned away from the empty space he was studying so intently that she knew he saw more than she could. “You don’t know much about necromancy, do you, Shadows?”

“Never needed to,” she said.

Wales hmmed thoughtfully, then spotted an open cooler of drinks, ice sparking against the sun, and said, “Thirsty?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said, caught the icy soda he tossed her way with relief, set the can against her nape. “So we’re done here?”

“Nothing of death magic happened here,” Wales said. “At least, nothing powerful enough to linger. And you said
five
dead women? That should have lingered.” He raised the can to his lips, lowered it without taking a drink. “You sure they were dead?”

“They were underwater,” she said, but she was thinking of different angles. “They weren’t breathing, weren’t moving.”

“Did you try to revive—”

“Wales, I took a look and got the hell gone.”

He gnawed his lower lip, knelt among the charred rubble that had been a police ’copter. He tilted his head as if he were listening.

“They weren’t dead,” he said.

Something slow and miserable churned in her belly, a flutter of guilt and professional embarrassment. She hadn’t even checked. She’d just seen the surface of things. And she knew better than to take things at face value.

“They weren’t dead,” he said again, and if she hadn’t known better, she’d have assumed he was rubbing salt in the wound. But it was an echo in his voice, patiently repeating something he heard. Something a ghost was sharing.

He stood, staggered a little, and said, “Okay. The burned woman is the only one of the five women who is actually dead. Jennifer Costas.”

“Could I have—”

He shook his head. “No. Jennifer burnt up because the spell binding them broke. It feels like a contingency plan of some sort. A magical if-then command. The others?”

“Fled,” Sylvie said. “According to my witness, they got up and walked away.”

“But Jennifer was restrained,” Wales said, turning as if he could see the helicopter that her body had been strapped into. “Trapped.”

“She was the only one who burned,” Sylvie said. “If the spell broke—”

“She was the only one who couldn’t get free,” Wales said. He paced back and forth, raising clouds of soot, stumbling over metal fragments, making his mark on the scene. There would be no pretending that they hadn’t been there. “She tried. Twisting. Tangled. Hot like spell fire in her veins. It’s strange magic, Sylvie. I don’t get it, and she only knows what she felt.”

“Necromancy?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s death in it. Sacrificial death of some kind, but old.” A shudder ran through his body. His eyes unfocused, listening. “She’s so afraid. She’s dead, and she’s still afraid it could get worse. She’s . . . It’s all . . . hunger and torn hearts and fear in her mind.” His voice gave out, going thready, then silent.

Sylvie waited. He was motionless, as if listening to the dead allowed him to take on some of their deathly calm. A moment passed, with his tight breathing and the distant slurp of moving water the only sounds.

He shook it off all at once, body moving from ghost languor to his more normal hunched shoulders and twitchy nerves. “It’s . . . necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft and . . . it’s a tangle of magics. It’s layered, and it’s really ugly.”

“So the other four women are . . . what? In some type of magical suspended animation?”

“They were,” he said. “Until Jennifer was pulled from the water.”

“Lio said the other women changed shape.”

“See!” Wales gesticulated broadly, pointing at nothing but his own aggravation and confusion. “That doesn’t fit either. Shape-shifting’s not necromancy; it’s closer to biology.”

“And you said you didn’t know anything about shape-shifters,” Sylvie said.

“So I hear things. So what?”

She let that slide. Wales wanted to keep his breadth of knowledge on a need-to-know basis? She could live with that. For now. There were other, more pressing problems. “How would that work?”

He shrugged. “Suspended animation? Hell, maybe it wasn’t magic at all, just more of the government fucking around in our lives, using us as—”

“Wales,” Sylvie snapped. “Take off the tinfoil hat and focus. It wasn’t pure necromancy, fine. I believe you. Can we get out of here now? Let these people recover before a snapping turtle starts nipping off fingers?”

Wales nodded. “Yeah. Good point.”

They backtracked to the ATV trail, Wales sticking to drier ground this time, and once they’d reached a point where the grass would cover their presence, Wales brought out a little packet, tipped it into the stagnant waters. Sylvie watched the water go the color of old bone, swirling white and cream, and said, “Powdered milk?”

“Don’t knock it; it works,” Wales said, and dipped Marco’s flaming Hand. “And a hell of a lot easier to cart around.”

It was one of the things she hated about magic. It made these rules for itself—the purity of milk could put out an evil flame—and then bent or broke them at the user’s will. Grocery-store milk? Powdered milk? Where was the purity in that? But it was working.

Marco faded away. Behind them there was silence, then shouting, as alarmed police found themselves waking, groggy and scared. Sylvie bit her lip as she and Wales moved away. The ISI would understand what had happened even if the police didn’t. Odds were, they’d come looking to her for answers first.

She hadn’t thought this through at all well, had let her eagerness to clear the debt she owed Lio send her rushing out to the scene, and for what? They hadn’t found anything. No monsters. No dead girls. Hell, if Wales was right—her stomach lurched once again.

“They’re
alive
,” Sylvie said. “Christ. I could have saved them if I’d called a witch instead of the cops yesterday. I freaked out, saw the scene, and thought I didn’t want to be found near it. I fucked up.”

Wales, thankfully, didn’t say anything, a veteran of the kind of second-guessing that paranoia bred. After another moment, Sylvie said, “So, can
you
help the women? If we find them? Even though it’s not necromancy?”

Bitterness laced her question, made it accusing, blaming the nearest magic-user for the actions of another. Wales blinked, paused in his steps, and she flipped a hand at him in apology.

Just . . . why did it always have to come down to magic? What had happened to the days of point and shoot, and problem solved? At this rate, she was going to have to have a full-time witch around, and Sylvie just didn’t trust them that much. Not Wales. Not Val. Hell, not even Zoe, whose first actions in the
Magicus Mundi
had been shortsighted at best.

“Magic’s not that different, branch to branch,” Wales said. “Sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. We’re all built of the same thing. We just . . . specialize.”

“Is that a yes?” Sylvie said.

“It’s a maybe. Don’t make me theorize without evidence.”

“Now you sound like a witch,” she said.

He stalked along, squelching, his jeans collecting dust and mud, and finally said, “So, let me guess. A witch told you about magic. Painted witchcraft as team Good. Let me tell you what. It’s all the same at the core. Greedy scavengers stealing power, growing stronger every year they survive, and rearranging the world to suit themselves.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie said. “So why isn’t there a word for a good necromancer? Everything else has a good versus bad. White witch. Mambo. Shaman.”

“Because we don’t need the ego stroke. Deal with death enough, and you’d be surprised how little you care for human approval. I think you’d understand that. Besides, good, bad, benign, malign—it’s all about who’s making the judgment.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “Enslaving the dead’s a magnitude worse than a witch’s glamour.”

“Even if the witch spells someone to fall in love? Erases their self-will? It’s not just the stuff of novels, Shadows. Witches talk a good game, but they use the same magic we do. And let me tell you. Witches do far more damage than your average necromancer. Yeah, we can turn a man into a zombie, keep him as a servant until he falls to pieces, but it’s really not all that useful. They take effort to create, they’re hard to control—too stupid to really get complex ideas across—and they can’t communicate even if they aren’t dumb as a sack of bricks. Brain death really means something, y’know.