Gods & Monsters

12 In the Monster’s Lair

AN HOUR LATER, SYLVIE, WITH A NERVOUS AND SULLEN WALES AT HER side, drove into Serrano’s neighborhood. No wonder the police had been so willing to make a house call. Serrano lived on the distant edge of a golf course. The neighborhood was nice, professionally landscaped, spacious plats, two-story houses, expensive but not too expensive. Uppermiddle-class; the kind of area where people still called the police instead of their private lawyers.

Sylvie had been concerned that it would be a gated community, but it was one of the holdouts—a wealthy neighborhood that didn’t want to masquerade as an island resort. She took a last look at the real-estate paper in her hand: Jose Serrano’s house listed an indoor lap pool. She sighed.

“Think we’re wasting our time?” Wales said.

“Trying to figure our approach. If Serrano’s home sick, like the cops reported, breaking in is a no-go. And using Marco to sneak us in—”

“If he’s really ill, I wouldn’t chance it,” Wales said. “Marco’s bites take a lot out of you.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Even if it is Azpiazu there, waking Marco is a risk,” Wales said. “Azpiazu’s familiar with necromantic magic.”

“You think he can take Marco from you?”

Wales shook his head. “No. Marco’s mine, for good or ill. But using necromantic magic in his vicinity? It’ll be like ringing an alarm bell.”

“Will Marco be able to knock him out?”

“Doubt it,” Wales said. “You’ve gotten resistant to him with exposure. I’d imagine an immortal necromancer would be a sight more resistant than you.”

“Then we’re stuck playing cat burglar,” Sylvie said. “And if Serrano’s home?”

“You’re a fast liar,” Wales said. “I’ll leave the talking to you.”

“Thanks,” she muttered. But she didn’t see another option.

If this was an information misfire—if Serrano really was inside, sick with the flu, and the cops had brushed up against Azpiazu elsewhere—she couldn’t afford to break a window and climb inside. She had enough of a reputation with the cops that she didn’t want to add a B and E charge, especially since she was armed. That kind of thing could be difficult, if not impossible, to shake. Her life plans didn’t include a detour for jail time.

Sylvie touched the ouroboros at her breastbone, tapped the warning bell in her jacket pocket, and headed around the back of the house, Wales a clumsy afterthought.

One thing she’d had proved to her over and over again in this career path was that people’s idea of security was often more for show than fact. They made a big deal about locking the front door, the windows, put up security gates and signs, then left their back doors unlocked, unguarded, or shielded from all watchful eyes.

It made no sense to her, but the nicer the estate and surroundings, the more likely the homeowners fell into that kind of carelessness. They thought that privacy and space equaled safety when, in truth, what they mostly meant were no witnesses.

The lawn, thick and vividly green, denting beneath her boots, made her steps as soundless as if she were walking on pillows. Behind her, Wales swore softly as he tripped over a sprinkler head.

The twilight moving in made her as close to invisible as a human could be without magical intervention, turned the world into moving columns of grey, purple, black. Her red jacket sucked in light, turned dark and shadowed, better than camo prints.

Rustling in the underbrush and a skink oiled out before her, slipping clumsily through the grass, two heads drawing it in different directions. She watched it, struck by the freak show of it, and stepped onto a path that crunched. The gravel was dark and pale at once, as patterned as a copperhead. The paler splotches gave beneath her feet with small cracks and pops until she realized they were skeletal frogs. An entire pond’s worth.

Dead doves. Now this.

The last doubt in her mind that she might be blundering into some innocent’s house crumbled.

Tepeyollotl might not be physically present, but something of him was seeping through the curse—his power fueling it, his power that Azpiazu was warping. God-power spilling out and messing with the world.

Several acres over, she heard a car pull up, a garage door churn into mechanical life. The neighbors weren’t going to notice anything, focused on the homecoming transition. She wondered if they’d noticed any changes in their own little worlds, or if they’d just shrugged them off.

Recon, she thought. Take a look, get a grip on the situation, get Wales’s take on it, then come back better informed and armed for bear.

Or monster.

The backyard, accessed by a quick climb over a stucco wall, yielded a gardener’s paradise. Sylvie, used to seeing tropical gardens, was still impressed. The air was thick and damp and green sweet fragrant, the walls hidden with rosary pea and hibiscus; orange trees and woody jasmine bushes studded the walkways.

Wales landed in the grass behind her, grimacing.

She didn’t think the pained distaste on his face was for his awkward landing. The closer she drew to the house, the less soothing the garden felt. Her little dark voice growled in constant warning, and Sylvie didn’t think it was simple caution about housebreaking.

The weathered deck creaked gently beneath her steps, her bootheels muffled impacts that echoed in her quickening heartbeat.

Recon, she reminded herself. A look-see. Nothing more. We aren’t prepared for more.

The house, seen through a pair of French doors, was dark, caught in that awkward space between being lit by daylight and not quite dark enough to require internal lights. The rooms she saw behind the glass looked as static and unpeopled as a closed movie set.

And, like a signal from the heavens, the alarm keypad she saw was flashing green green green. Unarmed. Unset. An open invitation.

Sylvie turned her head, looked sidewise, dropped her lashes, peering through the shadows she made of her vision. There. A glimmer on the glass, within the glass. Like the traceries of fingerprints and skin oils left behind, except that this was a magical symbol. Another tiny proof that made her believe Cachita’s assertion that Azpiazu was the original recipe: He used magic instead of technology at every turn.

Even the Maudits, proud sorcerers that they were, tended to mix and match.

Still, her trip to Val’s might have already paid off. Sylvie pulled the ouroboros amulet from around her neck, wrapped the cord around her wrist, and reached for the door handle.

Wales tugged at her wrist, a silent warning.

“You see something I don’t, Tex?”

“You trust the charm that much?”

“Got to try it out sometime,” she said. “Better now than in a face-to-face, yeah?”

She jiggled the door handle—locked—and waited.

No sparks, no magical result, no nothing. The magic made into nothing. The spell not broken but bypassed. Val did good work.

Wales let out a shaky breath.

Sylvie pressed close to the glass, looked down. Not even a dead bolt. Just the handle.

It was a moment’s work and another scrape on her credit card to get the latch to flip. She eased the door open, and the hair on her body stood on edge as the house air washed over her. It carried with it the brittle hush of a sleeping household, the movement of slow, steady breaths.

“Sense anything?” she asked.

Wales edged past her, getting himself beyond the ouroboros charm’s reach, then nodded. “Ghost. Someone’s dead.”

Sylvie frowned. Never good news. When the ratio of innocents to evil sorcerer was six to one, it was definitely bad news.

She closed the door behind them, easing the latch closed. She slung the ouroboros charm about her neck again, let it dangle on her chest.

Her breath, let out softly, warmed the air she moved through. Wales hunched tight, shivered. Her own skin goose-bumped.

The entire house was frigid, the AC working at full capacity. Sylvie moved inward and tasted the hint of something foul and greasy on her tongue. Rot.

Someone’s dead. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t Maria Ruben.

She followed the scent, followed Wales, wrinkling her nose and wishing that the charm neutralized odors as well as magic. An adult’s rec room, all plush carpet, pool table, wet bar, and HDTV, was ground zero for the meat-rot scent. She gagged, peered into each shadow, and finally found a man’s body shoved out of sight behind the wet bar.

It had to be Jose Serrano, the home owner, since he was clad in pajamas and slippers; hardly the outfit for a visitor to the house. His ankles were swollen red-black with pooled blood. His eyes were fixed and filmed over, his skin livid and streaked, his entire body contorted. He hadn’t died easy.

Grimacing, she knelt, turned his hands toward the light.

“Careful!” Wales said. He hovered behind her, looming over her shoulder.

“Tex,” she said. “Watch the door, all right? Watch my back, not my back.”

He huffed, but obeyed, leaving Sylvie to her inspection of the corpse.

Like a brand on his palm, a sigil charred the skin, wept a substance dull grey and soot black. Sylvie touched it with a fingernail, felt it dent beneath her touch. She scratched at it. It left a silvery streak on the edge of her nail.

Lead.

Azpiazu seemed to be a one-trick pony when it came to killing people. But that made sense. Even someone who didn’t believe in magic would still get up and walk away from a man shouting a lot of mumbo jumbo ritual magic.

Every sorcerer she had met had a single, instinctive offensive spell. Often, it was a paralysis spell; but Azpiazu . . . He hadn’t needed to kill the cops. They’d gone off content. It would have been days before the search for Serrano started up again. He’d killed them because they’d annoyed him.

And he had to have done it quickly, smoothly, and naturally. A handshake, given that the marks were found on the palms.

“Sylvie,” Wales warned, just as the glasses in the bar rattled. One shifted far enough that it danced out of its rack; she put a hand up and caught it. It was icy slick, burned her skin.

“What the hell—”

“Serrano’s ghost,” Wales said. “He’s pissed—”

“Tell him we’re here to help!”

She set the glass down, rubbed the cold off on her jeans, and stood. Ducked the cue ball as it blew directly at her. Her hand tangled briefly in the ouroboros charm, but it had no effect on the items winging in her direction.

Ghost, right. Not magic.

Ghosts counted as fucked-up nature on their own. It was only once people started harnessing them that it became magic.

She dropped back to her knees, wincing. The carpet might be plush, but it wasn’t that thick.

Wales whispered into the air, more of that not-quite language, and Sylvie dodged a pool cue, caught it as it flew past.

“Wales! Less coaxing, more commanding!”

“Not that easy,” Wales snapped. “He’s not exactly a normal ghost.”

“Sic Marco on him.”

“He’s a victim here, not the enemy,” Wales said. “And remember, we were trying not to alert Azpiazu—”

She dropped, rolled, came up on the other side of the pool table, aggravated, and smelling of carpet powder and rot. “Easy for you to say. He’s not chucking stuff at you. C’mon, Tex—”

Wales let out his breath, stiffened his spine, jammed his hand out into the room—a flat-palmed Stop! “Enough.”

A glass and two striped balls dropped midflight. The room, already cold, grew frigid. Frost laced across the flatscreen TV like a shatter mark. “Sylvie, bring me some of his hair.”

“Serrano’s?” It was a stupid question; she knew it even as it left her lips: Who else’s?

She twined her fingers in his hair, thick and glossy still; the lead that had filled his blood had killed him too quickly for his hair to show the damage. She yanked, ungentle, uncaring. Serrano was dead, even though his bones creaked, and his head jerked back as if he felt the sting of her hurried fingers, her pinching nails.

She brought Wales the dark lock, pressed it into his free hand. “Now what?”

“I show him who’s in charge.”

Wales held the tuft of hair up, two hands out before him; the halt and a cupped palm, the hair resting in it like an offering. A wisp of smoke rose; Sylvie blinked. She hadn’t seen anything like fire coming near it. The smoke grew higher, lit from beneath with a blue flame that burned like ice, cooling.

In the arctic mist blooming from Wales’s hand, the ghosts took on a visible shape. Marco’s looming, hollow-eyed presence, familiar, inimical, shoulder to shoulder with his necromantic partner. And Serrano. Or what Sylvie assumed to be Serrano. At first she thought his ghost had been cleaved in two, mutilated even after death—she knew Azpiazu was no respecter of the dead. Then she saw him more clearly. Not a ghost split in two, not a mutilated ghost, but a mutated one. One body, dividing midtorso to stretch two necks upward, two heads, one flushed dark with rage, one blanched with fear.

“What the fuck—”

“Your time is spent; your life is gone to dust and ash. I bind you and dismiss you from this plane,” Wales said.

Serrano twitched and faded in chunks, left leg, angry face, torso, until the only ghost left was Marco. Wales closed his fist, let ashes dribble out, streaks against his bony hand, and sighed.

“That was ugly,” he said.

“What was that?” Sylvie said. The frigid air faded to something approaching warmth by comparison. She doubted the room temperature made it to sixty.

Wales shrugged. “Harder to dismiss than he should have been? Something warped his ghost, broke him into—”

“I saw,” she reminded him. “Ghost schizophrenia?” She remembered the double-headed skink outside, twitching and jerking its way forward, and surreptitiously ran her fingers along the line of her neck.

“Azpiazu’s magic.” Wales shoved his hands into his pockets, closed his body up, shoulders turned inward, chin tilted down. Thoughtful. Worried. “I think . . . I want to see that binding spell again.”

“Why we’re here,” Sylvie said. She shook off the chill that the room, Serrano, Wales’s magic working had left in her bones, and headed back into the hallway.

Bedrooms, bathrooms were likely toward the back, more public rooms toward the front of the house. If she were a lap pool, where would she—

She opened doors gingerly, as if she’d open one to Azpiazu leering at her. As if he’d have done nothing while Wales cleaned ghostly house for him.

Each door opened revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Her nervousness grew. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, each innocuous room bringing her one step closer to the loaded chamber.

The tang of chlorine overrode the scent of death and guided her finally in the right direction. For a brief moment, entering the pool room, she found the scene not only peaceful but beautiful. The lap pool was lit softly from below, casting a wavering blue gleam over the ceiling. The women, curled into seated positions, looked more like spa visitors than victims, resting peacefully in a beautiful room.

Until Sylvie took that next step into the room, saw the lines of strain on their faces, the haggard pallor to Maria Ruben’s skin; then it was all too easy to see the truth. It made Sylvie itchy under the collar, coldly furious.

Wales swore quietly. “Sylvie, we have to do something.”

“You’re the necromancer.”

Wales closed his eyes, listening to Marco, listening to his own instincts. Sylvie watched him, seething with impatience and a slow, guttering anger. There had to be a way. Something she could do to free them. She’d walked away once and had been regretting it ever since.

Kill the sorcerer, the little dark voice said. No sorcerer, no curse, no deflection spell.

Hell, it would be the best of all worlds. Kill Azpiazu, and she wouldn’t need to worry about Tepeyollotl’s making the scene . . . or maybe she would. Gods could be cranky about having their punishments interrupted.

Worth the risk.

The water rippled, a tiny movement disturbing its glassine smoothness. Maria Ruben was quivering. Tremors so small that they seemed more felt than seen.

Maria Ruben’s time was up.

“Think fast, Tex,” Sylvie said. “I’m going in.”

“What? Sylvie—”

“We don’t have time. Maria’s in trouble, and Azpiazu will be returning to harvest her soul.”

Wales nodded. “Give me three minutes. Let me see if I can start wearing down the spell defenses. Keep them from shifting or flaming out, at the least.” His eyes rolled back in his head, blind to anything but the power he was calling on. Sylvie shuddered. Shuddered again when he sliced into his hand and walked the perimeter of the lap pool, dripping his blood into the water, unerringly on target. Marco whispering directions to him, or magic at work?

Her curiosity got stomped hard when Wales began whispering into the room, nonsense words, broken syllables that somehow, upon repetition, crawled inside her head and translated themselves.

I am death the slowing drum the lassitude of bone I enfold all and I am death the clinging shroud the beetles’ breath the clock wound down . . .

She tuned him out in self-defense, waited for him to finish his slow circuit around the pool. The moment he did, she darted into action, clawing at the ouroboros about her neck. If Maria was about to die anyway, yanking her from the binding spell seemed like a worthwhile risk. The snake-scale necklace scratched her skin, snagged her hair, but Sylvie tugged it off, held the cord wide, and dropped it over Maria Ruben’s head. The result was instantaneous.

The room hummed; the water bubbled as if someone had suddenly nuked it to boiling. Maria Ruben’s eyes flew open, her mouth gasped, the tendons in her neck stood out like hawsers. Sylvie grabbed her shoulders, pulled—

The woman was heavy, as stiff in her arms as a corpse in full rigor; the other women were moving, too, eyes opening without awareness behind them, their skin flowing . . . sluggishly, like raw clay softening in the water.

Time ran short.

Azpiazu had to know, had to feel it. He would have felt Maria destabilizing, would already be on his way. One unbalanced binding spell, and somewhere Azpiazu was losing control of his shape, showing the world the monster he was on the inside.

Maria’s breath shivered coldly on Sylvie’s cheek, a brush of soundless words. Help me. Help me. The ouroboros around her neck tarnished from bright gold to something hot and dull, the magic being sucked from it. Overwhelmed.

She was going to lose Maria, Sylvie thought sickly. All the ouroboros was doing was bringing her back to awareness of her suffering and impending death. The sigil on Maria’s forehead began to seep blood at the cut edges.

Wales dropped down beside her, hauled Maria out, muttering a spell that sounded like the hissing of snakes and pounded against Sylvie’s body like the tide. Pushing, pressing. Sylvie felt like she was drowning and forced herself to let it slide by her, let it reach Wales’s target.

Maria.

The woman gasped, breathed in harshly as if she’d been drowned and just had the water punched from her lungs. “What—”

“Let’s go, let’s go—” Wales said.

“The others—”

“He’s here—”

A growl traveled through the room, a vibration that had Sylvie dropping the argument, and spinning around, trading Maria’s jerking flesh for the hard steel of her gun. She rolled back, making space and taking aim—the trigger juddered beneath her finger.

“Run, Wales!” on an outborne breath, panted between shots.

He did his best to obey, burdened by Maria’s slack weight.

A series of perfectly placed shots on an easy target: Azpiazu twisted to monster form, a distorted patchwork of predators, wolf teeth and bear bulk and long, lashing cat tail, claws leaving marks in the tile, coming straight for her. She put the entire clip into his chest.

Azpiazu didn’t even slow; her gun clicked on empty.

He howled, turned one gold eye, one black on Wales’s retreating form, crouched to spring. His first lunge after Wales coincided with a sudden hiss in the air, a window shattering and spilling glass in a storm toward him.

Marco, defending his master.

Azpiazu rocked back, shook glass off like a spill of sharp-edged raindrops.

Sylvie grabbed the warning bell out of her pocket and threw that in his face. It rang wildly, raised a cascade of sparks, but Azpiazu batted it away with a savage paw.

The bell served its purpose, though, bringing Azpiazu’s attention back on her and let Wales vanish to safety, Maria slung any which way over his bony shoulders. Sylvie scrabbled for a weapon, found metal to hand—freestanding towel rack—and slammed it into his chest and side. The metal crumbled beneath the impact.

She rolled away from the next attack, splashed into the pool, flailed away from the women who reached for her with slow-forming claws. As she clambered back out, a heavy paw slapped her between the shoulder blades.

Numbness, crashing pain. Dizzy speed. Sylvie slammed into the wall, as spread-eagled and ungainly as a landed starfish, breathless, blackness hovering.

She crashed to the tile, got her hands down in time to prevent her from cracking her skull, but her back screamed protest.

Six inches higher, and he would have broken her neck.

“Mine!” Azpiazu’s voice was a guttural thing, a wolf’s snarl, a cat’s scream, a bear’s grunt.

“No,” Sylvie said, her voice inaudible. Didn’t matter. She heard it in her head, felt it in her throat. Maria Ruben wasn’t his. Not anymore.

The room swooped and swayed about her. She dodged the next crashing blow, managed to shift her weight enough to kick Azpiazu square in the drooling, misshapen muzzle.

His jaw slammed shut, teeth severing the lolling tongue. Blood spattered her face, the floor, Azpiazu’s patchy fur.

He howled, a gargle of blood and rage, and Sylvie shoved past him, all plans gone, traded for the basic need to survive this unexpected fight. Survive it long enough for Wales to get Maria away.

Azpiazu lunged after her, knocked her sprawling, crouched over her, growling, salivating. His mottled fur was unmarked; her bullets hadn’t done any good at all. Metal wasn’t going to do the job, she thought. Not in bullet form, not in any form.

Fucking transformationist necromancer, she thought. Hard enough to kill something that was immortal. Even harder to kill something that could change a weapon’s composition to something useless.

“Kill me, and you’ll be cursed forever,” she rasped out. “Thought you wanted my help.”

Being this close to him set her skin afire with magic, corruption of the natural order. It made her gag, made her recoil.

He lashed out with a bear’s massive paw, claws nearly an afterthought behind the physical power that could break bones with a single blow.

Sylvie kneed him in the jaw, knocked him back, kicked him once more, hearing bones creak beneath her heel, before he wrapped a human hand around her wrist. “Die,” he snarled.

Her blood kindled; her skin burned as if it had been struck with a branding iron. He flung her back, and she curled around her arm, watching the symbol for lead rise on her flesh, scarlet and black, a burn welling up from the inside.

No, she said, you won’t be rid of me that easy.

It wasn’t really her voice, but the thing that lived within her. She gouged at the hot lash of the brand, tore at it, intent on ripping the magic out of her skin if necessary. Blood burst beneath her nails, hot, wet, crimson. Human.

Blood, but not lead.

The fire in her veins, the heat that throbbed at her temples, the fever—they all faded until she was left with the taste of metal in her mouth and a bloody wound on her forearm. She got up, shook her matted, soaked hair back, and stared into his eyes. “Come on. Want to try again?”

Faintly, beneath everything else—the flutter of broken water, his panting, hers—she heard a sound familiar and welcome: a garage door rising, a car engine working at speed. Wales and Maria were nearly gone.

He surged in their direction, and Sylvie, burning adrenaline, picked up a potted palm and hurled it at him, breaking his stride and his jaw. His muzzle was streaked with blood; his teeth were wet with it. His pelt grew gore-clotted.

She’d hurt him more with that than with an entire clip of bullets.

“Give it up,” she said. “Maria’s gone.”

“Replaceable,” he slurred.

He paused, still crouched, still drooling blood and teeth, the first glimmer of something human beneath the monster coating. The first hint of the cleverness she knew he had.

Azpiazu had manipulated her from the start. She’d stumbled over him, and he’d acted quickly, given her an impossible, deadly task—find the god—to keep her out of his way. To give himself space. And he’d used the women as bargaining chips.

His muzzle reshaped itself; ivory teeth sprouted from broken edges.

“You never really wanted my help,” she said. “Your curse is your ticket to immortality.”

He hunched tight; the space between them could be breached with a single leap. His long tongue worked; his jaw pushed back. Beneath the animal snout, he shifted to a human mouth. “Smarter than Lilith,” he said. “No. I never wanted your help. What could I possibly want from you? An untalented blunt object.”

Sylvie licked her lips. Apparently, they weren’t going to start duking it out again. She couldn’t say she regretted it. Her head ached where he’d slammed her into the glass, and her back throbbed. Blood spilled down her arm, dripped from her nails.

“You wanted to use me to distract a god.”

“A god?” he echoed, a growl in the room.

“I know you. I name you. You’re Eladio Azpiazu. Cursed by the god Tepeyollotl. I know all of this is to avoid him.”

“Not all of it,” he said. “Some of it’s for my pleasure.” His weight shifted. Azpiazu lunged; Sylvie dodged, taking the slash against the thick leather of Zoe’s jacket. A sigil sizzled against the coat, burned hide curling away from his touch.

“Missed me,” she said, her voice clogged with anger. “Want to try it again? Get inside my space? I’ll make you hurt.” Never mind that the room was sparse on weapons; pottery shards would be enough for her at the moment. From the sudden caution in his eyes, animal wariness, the uneasy shift of that massive body, she thought maybe she’d hurt him more in the past five minutes than he’d been hurt in decades.

The thing about immortals was that they got divorced from human experience. From pain. From fear. They felt untouchable as the years piled up behind them. She was reminding him of those things, reminding him that immortal did not equal invulnerable.

And that she had a reputation for killing things.

He sucked in a breath, spun away from her. She let him put the space between them, leaping across the lap pool’s width. He hunkered down beside the pool, ran his fingers through the water, licked the taste of it from his skin, his eyes always on her.

“Don’t overestimate yourself,” Azpiazu said. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. I’m stronger than you can imagine.”

“And yet, you can’t shake the curse,” Sylvie said. “Immortal, yes, but miserable with it.”

He laughed, spittle and blood streaking his chin. “Not for much longer.”

“Yeah? Got big plans? Feel free to share,” Sylvie said.

He swayed foot to foot, lowered his heavy head, looked at her like a wolf studying prey. It made the fine hairs on her neck stand up. Azpiazu was just so . . . wrong. The wolf brow, the human mouth, the bear bulk, the cat claws—a forced-together chimera working against itself.

There was no way in hell he’d want immortality in this guise.

For one thing, he was far too vain. For another, it hampered his magic. All of that energy going just to maintain himself. Like a car with a chronic oil leak.

“Get out, and count yourself lucky,” he said.

“You never needed me, but you didn’t want my attention on you either. You have my undivided attention now. I’ve got you in my sights.”

“Get out,” he snarled once again. This time, Sylvie’s better sense prevailed. She really wasn’t in any shape to take him down. Not and survive.

She straightened, backed out of the room, pausing to scoop up her emptied gun, and watching Azpiazu as long as she could.

Turning her back on the house and striding into the dark felt impossibly difficult, not just for the crawling fear that he was following her, ready to rip out her spine, or slap another sigil on her meant to boil her blood, but because there were four women she was leaving behind.

Saving Maria didn’t seem like enough of a triumph to count the evening as a win. Their recon had been interrupted, their enemy made aware of it. Azpiazu was undoubtedly packing up his remaining harem right now, heading someplace new.

Times like this, she hated the ISI with a passion bordering on obsession. If she could just call them for help. If she could count on them to know what they were doing. If she could trust them to be as interested in saving the victims as in studying the wicked.

Instead, it was her and a cobbled-together crew doing their meager best. Sylvie cast an unfavorable eye on her gun, a dark shadow in the passenger seat. If metal was no good, if Azpiazu’s transformation skills worked fast enough to make bullets benign, she was going to need a different weapon.

TWO CALLS—ONE TO WALES, ONE TO ALEX, TO PASS ON THE NEWS—had her pulling into the Baptist Hospital lot where Wales had taken Maria Ruben. He’d gotten far enough ahead and Maria’s quasi-celebrity status as a missing person had gotten them sucked right in past the emergency room waiting area.

“Here for Maria Ruben,” Sylvie said, slipping past the ER receptionist. Confidence counted here. She hefted her purse as if it were Maria’s, and she was just taking her things to her.

“Room fourteen,” the receptionist said. “We’ve got some forms that need—”

“I’ll take ’em,” Sylvie said. Nothing better than a clipboard to prove you had a legit reason to be in the hospital. When she reached out, the nurse’s eyes sharpened, focused, seeing Sylvie as more than just an irritant.

“You’re bleeding.” Seeing her as a potential patient.

Sylvie looked at her arm as if it belonged to someone else. She’d taken the time to bandage it in the truck, but the gouges her nails had left ripping Azpiazu’s sigil apart had reddened the white gauze.

“Not a lot.”

“You come back up here if you decide it needs to be stitched,” he said.

Sylvie nodded. She wouldn’t. It didn’t need sutures. Though it had hurt like hell, when she went to bandage it, the wound was less deep, less severe, than she had thought. Looked no worse than a staple-gun accident, complete with silvery streak that she’d had to peel out.

She found Room 14, the curtain drawn across the glass but the door open. The bed was empty, and Wales was pacing in the quiet.

He turned, and his expression was pure surprised relief, eyebrows up, mouth slack but shifting toward a smile. “You got out alive.”

“Took some doing,” she said.

“Azpiazu?”

“Alive. Evil. Up to something. How’s Maria?”

“She made it here,” he said. “They rushed her up to a real room. Can we get out of here? I’ve already fended off more questions than I know how to answer.” He jolted toward the door, then back toward the bed as if tethered. Sylvie knew what held him. There was a certain weight that came with rescuing someone. A responsibility. Wales had carried Maria out of Azpiazu’s lair, and he couldn’t let go, no matter how much his paranoia urged him to flee.

Down the hall, just past the swinging doors, a pair of police officers consulted with a nurse, who pointed toward Room 14, toward Sylvie and Wales. “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Let’s go.” These cops weren’t here for them; even if a doctor had called them about Maria, they’d shown too quickly. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t stop and interrogate, given the chance.

She stepped out of the room, her bandaged arm crossed over her chest, head ducked. Wales put an arm about her waist, quick on the uptake. The best way to leave an ER unnoticed? Look like any other patient who’d been treated.

They met Salvador Ruben rushing in as they were rushing out—he homed in on Sylvie like a tracking dog. “Your assistant called. She said. She said . . .”

“Maria’s alive,” Sylvie said. “Weak, but alive. Go see her.” His attention veered toward the intake desk, and Sylvie and Wales slipped away.

They got out into the lot, and Wales dithered. “Serrano’s car?”

“Leave it,” Sylvie said. “Not the first car I’ve abandoned in the hospital lot.”

He hotfooted forward through the lot, came back when he didn’t see her truck right off, and took off again. Sylvie seized his sleeve on his second twitchy search, and said, “That way,” gesturing.

When he nodded once and set off at a rapid pace that she was hard-pressed to keep up with, she said, “Hey, you okay, Tex? What? Hospital too ghosty for you?”

He didn’t respond, only hovered around her truck until she opened the door for him. Once the hospital lights shone bright in her rearview mirror, he finally answered.

“Maria died, Sylvie. I shoved her spirit back in her body. I’m kind of freaked-out. I’m not sure whether that makes me a healer or if she’s a revenant.”

“Breathe,” Sylvie said. “Her heart was beating; she was breathing, right? The doctors weren’t running around in a panic freaking out about zombies? She’s alive. You saved her, Tex. That’s a win.”

“Did I save her? I’m not all that sure I did. Azpiazu’s marks are all over her body. Her face, her palms, her feet, her heart . . . What’s to prevent him from reaching out and killing her for pride and—”

“For one thing, he’s got to move the rest of his harem and find a replacement,” Sylvie said. “We fucked up our recon, but we also fucked up his night. He’s going to be a busy monster.”

“But Maria—”

“We’ve done what we can. Is the ouroboros charm still with her?”

“She’s not wearing it, but it should be in the same room.”

“That’ll help,” Sylvie said. She said it mostly to watch Wales lose some of that vibrating tension that made her feel like his spine might start rattling at any moment. “Focus, Tex, I’ve got questions. Azpiazu’s got bigger things in mind than just controlling the curse Tepeyollotl laid on him. I think he’s got some idea of how to break it, and without the curse holding his attention . . .”

Wales leaned his head against the passenger window, staring blankly at the stream of headlights. “Without the curse, he’ll be more powerful. He’s had decades spent fighting magic, decades spent in chains.”

“Yeah. He’ll be raring to go,” Sylvie said. “Thing is, I think there’s something more going on. You have any ideas?”

Wales closed his eyes. “There’s something about the way he’s set up this curse-block, power-exchange spell. It’s . . . complex. Bizarrely so. Even beyond the whole sleight of hand required to use Tepeyollotl’s power to gain immunity from the curse.”

“Explain,” she said.

“Ritual,” Wales said. “It’s all in how you’re taught. Me? I don’t use a lot of ritual, you might have noticed. ’Cause really? I’m a mundane with a skill for improvising. The more I tried to train, the worse I got. For someone like Eladio Azpiazu? An alchemist first? It’s all about ritual.”

“You’re the one who was bitching that it was too complicated—”

Wales sighed. “True ’nough. And I think I phrased it wrong. Magical rituals are like . . . statements of intent. I have a poppet, I have an enemy. I want my enemy to suffer the same fate as this poppet. Yeah?”

“That’s 101,” Sylvie said. “Skip ahead.”

“So touchy,” he muttered. “Depending on your nerve and your skills, you can layer your rituals. Like . . . oh, a witch who wants you to see an illusion. That’s almost always a two-part spell. The illusion they want you to fall prey to, and a stay-in-place layered beneath. After all, an illusion is a fragile thing, really. If they anchor it directly to you . . . it loses plausibility. I mean, say they curse you to see a—”

“Fire?” Sylvie asked.

“Yeah,” Wales said. “That’s a good one.”

“Not really,” Sylvie said.

Wales was undeterred. “So you walk in a place, and it’s suddenly on fire. You run, right? I mean, hell, it’s not even human nature; it’s faster than that. It’s animal instinct. Flee. So that’s wasted energy on the witch’s part if you just walk away. But if they attached it directly to you, so it followed you—”

“You start to doubt it,” Sylvie said. “Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“People like their real-world rules,” Wales said. “Things that tell us the sun rises in the east, the moon waxes and wanes, and the entire world cannot be on fire. So the witch slaps an anchoring spell beneath the illusion spell. A stick-around suggestion.”

“Cobwebs,” Sylvie said. “They like to put illusion spells on cobwebs.”

“Exactly!” Wales nearly bounced in the seat beside her, a researcher getting to share his passion. Springs creaked, audible even over the steady growl of the engine. “And that’s ritual in itself. A stay-put spell on something sticky. Helps them layer the spells, helps them keep it sharp, keep it safe.”

“So Azpiazu’s layering his rituals, which means he’s layering his . . . intent?”

Azpiazu’s name dragged all that excitement right back out of Wales’s body. He slumped. “That fucker. I don’t know what the hell his intent is. The binding spell is part of it, but it’s overkill. Even for a god. Why not just deflect the power coming at him? Some of the sigils I saw on Maria . . . they almost looked like magical lightning rods, like they were meant to draw the magic in.”

“You said he was filtering it.”

“And he is. To control his shape, I thought, and to fuel his spells so he can keep controlling it. A sort of magical loop that I don’t even know how he got started. He would have needed some kind of boost. . . .” He trailed off, then his mouth twisted. “I can’t think of any good ways.”

“Soul-devouring,” Sylvie said. “Any boost from that?”

“And that,” Wales said. “That’s another layer. Another ritual. It has nothing to do with deflecting Tepeyollotl. I don’t know why he’s doing it. Humans don’t need souls.”

“You use them to sneak into hotels,” Sylvie said.

Wales shifted. “Not the same thing. Ghosts aren’t souls. Ghosts are the dead, personality warts and all. Souls are . . . They’re pure. Distilled.”

“Powerful?”

Wales shrugged. “Not to us. A soul doesn’t want. Can’t bribe them or make them afraid. They don’t care about the living.”

“But he devours them—”

“Devour. It’s only a word. He’s doing something to them; I just don’t know what. Souls are god business, not human.”

Sylvie said, “Maybe it’s just an act of contempt. You know, he’s taking Tepeyollotl’s would-be people, using them to counteract the curse, then destroying souls that would have been the god’s? Azpiazu’s bastard enough for that type of spitefulness.”

“I don’t know,” Wales said. “I don’t. But we have to stop him, Sylvie. Before he takes someone else. Before he finishes.”

“You’re my best hope for that,” she said. “You figure out what his goals are. How necromancy and alchemy and god-avoiding works out to something good for him. So we can turn it bad. Work fast, Tex. I think we’ve got a deadline, and I’m not sure if it’s Azpiazu’s or the god’s.”

“Sure,” he said. “No pressure. That’s my hotel you’re passing.”

She slewed the truck over two lanes, did a U-ie, and brought him to the front doors. He popped the latch; she put a hand on his arm, curling her fingers around the thin sinew of it. “Tex, we did good tonight. Mostly.” She shook herself and started again. “We saved Maria. You saved Maria. I know I can count on you.”

“Lose the pep talk,” he said. “Doesn’t suit you. We’re screwed. But I’ll work on ways that might make us less so. See if I can figure out what the layers are for. See if I can figure the best way to unpick them. What about you?”

“Azpiazu’s shopping for a new girl now. That reporter, Cachita, had some ideas.”

“It’s . . .” He turned his attention to her dash, to the dimly glowing clock. “It’s nearly 3:00 a.m. I don’t think Cachita’s gonna give you anything but grief you go waking her up now.”

“You and Alex, all about working hours. Too much can happen while you’re sleeping.”

“Sylvie, you’re mean enough without sleep dep. Go home. Get some hours in.”

“Who’s the boss, here?” Sylvie said.

Wales yawned in her face, showing her all his teeth. “You’re paying me for my advice. Might as well take it.”