Gods & Monsters

6 Delegation and Negotiation

SYLVIE CLATTERED BACK DOWN THE STAIRS AND FOUND ALEX TIDYING up the dinner dishes.

“So?” Alex said. “You talked to him?”

“He’s going to deal with the Odalys issue—”

“Yeah, not what I meant. Did you talk to him?”

“He’s fine,” Sylvie said. “I’m fine.”

“I can’t believe you sent him away. Unless . . . what? Does he not do it for you anymore now that he’s all body swapped? Got something against blonds?”

“Alex!” Sylvie said. “Would you just think before you talk tonight? Wright’s dead. He was flat broke when he died. He’s got a child, a wife who’s working full-time to cover her student loans. Wright died, saving Demalion.”

Her throat hurt, thinking about that close call; she’d been slow, caught up in saving her sister, in fighting Odalys. If it had been left to her, Demalion would have died. Again. “We owe Wright. I can’t do anything to help them out. Demalion thinks he can.”

Alex’s face shuttered; she winced. “Sorry. I didn’t . . . I thought . . . He told me he was trying to get back into the ISI. I thought maybe you’d dumped him for that—”

“I try not to make the same mistakes twice,” Sylvie said. “I don’t like the ISI. I don’t trust them. But I trust him.”

“Good,” Alex said, still quieter than was her usual wont.

Sylvie sighed. “Look, I had to leave those women in the’Glades at the mercy of their abductor. It makes me cranky. And we’re going back tomorrow, and I still know nothing about him. Except that he has a rep as the soul-devourer. It just doesn’t look good.”

“You can take care of it,” Alex said. “This is your world.”

And wasn’t that a lovely thought. That she belonged to the Magicus Mundi. She shook it off, and said, “All right, then. If he is a sorcerer, he’ll have a reputation somewhere. Can you hit up the contact list and see if anyone knows of a sorcerer with a penchant for killing shape-shifters for his own gain? Link it up with alchemy. This guy, if Wales is right, is old-fashioned.”

Alex reached for her computer, heading straight into research mode. Sylvie put a hand on the screen, and said, “Take it home with you.”

Alex met her gaze head-on. “You’re getting me out of the line of fire.”

“It’s getting late,” Sylvie said. “Besides, you can research from home just as easily, and we don’t get a lot of drop-ins. Odalys hit me here once already, and now the bell is dead. I don’t want you caught in the cross fire.”

Alex worried her lip, and said, “If I work from home, you’ll keep in contact?”

“Promise,” Sylvie said. “Go home.”

“You’re not going to sit here all night and play bait, are you? Demalion said I should watch out for you.”

“Demalion has problems of his own to worry about,” Sylvie said. “Don’t encourage him to focus on mine.”

Alex shut the laptop down, pulled the cord, and started packing up. “Sorcerer, alchemy, shape-shifting. Check. You want me to look for more incidents like Cachita found? I mean, I know we’ve been busy, but he can’t have been around here for that long, or we’d have noticed. If we can track where he’s been, maybe we can ID him. I mean, he might be Maudit.”

“Unlikely,” Sylvie said. “The Maudits are bastards, but they’re modern in their habits. I can’t see them going back to alchemical scribblings, even ones that work.” She poked at a peeling sticker of Chibi Cthulhu on Alex’s laptop. “I don’t know, Alex. I got a bad feeling about this one. It’s all so thin.”

“We’ll find him. There’s no way a monster sorcerer goes completely unnoticed. We’ll find him, and you’ll shoot him. End of problem.”

“I live in hope,” Sylvie said.

She saw Alex out, hit the phone again. Lio wasn’t in the hospital any longer, which was a plus, but it also meant that Lourdes could play gatekeeper a lot more efficiently. She hung up on Sylvie before she’d gotten three words out.

Sylvie sighed, flipped through the images of the women on her phone. They were all youngish, midtwenties. They were all Hispanic. They looked like they would have been healthy if they didn’t look so . . . dead. Made sense in a sorcerous sort of way: If the sorcerer was using them as receptacles for an overabundance of corrupted magical energy, healthy people would last longer.

That they were all women, all attractive women, implied that no matter what the sorcerer’s magical use for them was, he was indulging himself. He wasn’t desperate; he was picking and choosing.

She really hoped Alex was right, and this one could end with a single bullet. The Everglades could hide a dead sorcerer just as well as the ocean could. She and her little dark voice contemplated the idea with a shared hunger that lingered until a car honked outside.

Sylvie flipped the phone closed, rose from the couch, smelled swamp and dirt, and grimaced. So past time for this day to be done.

Unfortunately, the world disagreed. She had just closed and locked the door when she turned to find Salvador Ruben coming up the sidewalk.

“SHADOWS!” HE SAID, HIS VOICE TIGHT WITH STRESS AND NERVES. His suit coat, open, rumpled, flapped as he hurried toward her. He tripped on the curb, stuttered in his question, but didn’t stop. “Wh-what the hell is going on? You said she was . . . You said the cops would call—”

Sylvie held up a finger—give me a moment—unlocked the door, and hauled him back inside her office. “Have a seat,” she said, busied herself with Alex’s ridiculous coffee-maker. He subsided onto the couch, clutching his knees. Anxious but obedient.

She wished the brew time were longer, wished that it required more of her attention: She needed every moment she could get to figure out what she was going to tell him. Maria was alive. That was a plus. But she was close enough to death that giving him hope might simply be cruel.

“Here,” she said, passing him a cup of coffee heavily adulterated with sugar. Good for stress, sugar. He wrapped his hands around it, brought it toward his chest as if the coffee could ward off some internal chill.

“What’s happening?” he asked again. Pleaded. Salvador Ruben was the kind of client she wanted to help most, the ones who might break under the weight of the world without her. “I called the cop you mentioned, but he’s ‘not available,’ and no one knows anything about Maria. Is she dead or not?”

Sylvie sat next to him on the couch. She was bad at offering comfort, but she could pretend. “Salvador. It’s complicated and strange. I want you to listen to me. Just hear me out.”

“Is she dead?” he asked. His mouth quivered like an old man’s. He twisted the ring on his finger. He and Maria had been married for eight years, been friends since they were twelve. More than half his life was bound up in this woman, and she was . . .

“She’s not dead, yet,” Sylvie said. “I’m going to do my best to save her. But it involves getting her away from a very dangerous situation. I thought the police could help. They can’t. They nearly died, trying.”

“Aliens,” he said, his knee-jerk response to anything extraordinary.

“No,” Sylvie said. “Sorcery.”

“What?” His breath gave out entirely. Sylvie fished his inhaler out of his suit coat pocket, handed it to him, watched him suck in air.

“She’s under a spell,” Sylvie said. “Like . . . Sleeping Beauty. Only not so nice. The spell’s draining her.”

“So break it!”

“I’ve got a specialist working on it,” she said. “We’re doing what we can. I hope we can save her. But, Salvador, you have to understand, it may be too late.”

He turned away from her, put his face in his hands. After a minute, he turned back, all his distress forced back. “You’re . . . you’re telling me the truth. Magic’s real.”

She nodded, wondering if the man who believed in little grey men could accept this in its place, wondering if he’d go running directly to the cops. She doubted it. He hadn’t gotten on too well with them in the first place.

“Is she . . . Is she hurting?” he asked. “You said she’s sleeping?”

“She is.”

“Can I see her?”

“No,” Sylvie said. “It’s not that much like Sleeping Beauty. You can’t kiss her awake. The spell’s fragile. Disrupting it has killed one woman already.”

He nodded, a man used to taking the advice he paid for. An easy client. “So what do I do?”

“Go home. Wait. Pray if you like.”

“We’re atheists,” he muttered.

“Good for you,” she said. “C’mon, Salvador. I’ll walk you to your car.”

When he stood, he did it like an old man, stoop-shouldered, curled around pain, staggering with it. She took his arm and walked him out, biting back the urge to tell him it would be all right. There was no guarantee it would.

HER APARTMENT COMPLEX, LIT AGAINST THE TWILIGHT, GLIMMERED whitely; the pool gleamed blue, proving once again that dim lighting was the best decorating technique of all. In the uncertain light, the cracks in the stucco, the weeds in the pavement, and the sheer bizarreness of the sculptural accents were easy to overlook.

There was dim light, Sylvie thought, then there was inadequate light. The stairs to her floor were deeply shadowed, the fixture at the base of the stairs dark. She took the first step, felt glass grate beneath her foot, and hesitated. Burned-out bulbs were common around her complex. Broken ones . . . not so much.

Her gun was back in her hand, held close and low to her side—no point in scaring the shit out of her downstairs neighbors if they looked out at the wrong moment. Or worse, courting their questions. College students. So nosy when it was least appropriate.

She took the stairs steadily, without much worry. The stairs were a straight shot up, open on the sides, no room for someone to lurk. A benefit to her apartment complex being built more along the lines of a beachside hotel—a lot of open space. Not a lot of nooks and crannies. Hell, it was one of the reasons she’d chosen to live there in the first place.

The light near her door was out, too.

Overplayed, she thought.

Take out the first light, and it made her careful. Take out a second light, and it stirred the atavistic sense to get in, get safe, get out of the dark. . . . Or run headfirst into a trap. Like an animal herded into a deadfall.

She slowed her steps further, approached her door cautiously.

Trap, her little dark voice agreed. The air was charged, the taste in the air sour and sharp, a roil of nausea in her stomach. A quiver of out-of-place energy. Another spell laid over another door.

She decided she was offended. The same trap? She might have fallen for it once, but not again.

Still, recognizing a trap wasn’t the same as disarming it. A witch’s spell had to be attached to something; if she found the trigger, it’d be pretty much like cutting the power.

Val Cassavetes liked cobwebs. Easy to overlook, easy to leave behind. It was a classic, and probably what had gotten Sylvie the day before.

Miami was full of spiders.

But it could also be a spill of sand or a scratched pebble. She swept her gaze over the door, the frame. Cobwebs, dust, clumps of mud. She wasn’t exactly house-proud, and it was coming back to bite her.

She pulled off her Windbreaker, ran it around the frame, cleared everything out of her path—there was a scatter of sparks, a hiss like a snake slipping by. She swore, slapped at her calf with her Windbreaker. Spell backlash—

The wood frame above her head splintered.

Sylvie whirled, tried to drop the Windbreaker from around her fist, tried to get her gun back up.

The gunman was closer than she thought he’d be, coming out of her next-door neighbor’s apartment. She slammed her door open, slammed it tight, latched it, gun in hand, breathed hard.

It wouldn’t hold. Not long enough for the police anyway.

Illusion spell plus bullets, she thought. Who said the bad guys couldn’t learn?

A back window might give her an escape route—if she didn’t break her leg on the landing.

The door burst open, right off the hinges, a rocket of wood that slammed into her shoulder, spun her gun out of her hand. He loomed in the doorway, looking as surprised as she felt about the broken door. Cheap material, or spell taint—she didn’t know. Didn’t have time to care.

She lunged forward, not for her gun, but for his knees. If he fell just right, she’d have him out of her apartment and even better—over the railing.

He grunted as she tackled him, snarled a hand in her hair, trying for balance, only succeeded in falling forward, the opposite direction she wanted. His weight crashed down on her, the heat and sweat and fear-stink of him. Sylvie squirmed beneath him, her goal crystal clear—

Get his gun.

She wasn’t a trained fighter, but she was strong, determined, and fought dirty. In the distance, she could hear her neighbor screaming. She got his gun hand beneath her body, cringing and praying that his finger had slipped from the trigger. He punched, aiming for her kidneys, hitting her hip, and she gouged hard at the nerves in his forearm.

He rolled, trying to expose her belly, to get his hand free, and she dug her nails in and raked, felt skin gum up the space beneath her nails . . . The gun wobbled in his grip; his breath went out in a hiss. She got the gun free, jerking it from his loosening grasp with a crack that she thought might be his finger.

They sprang apart. Sylvie twitched the gun into a proper grip. He canted a glance at the destroyed door, at her gun a few feet away from him; he looked like he was about to make a judgment call. Could he finish the job before the police arrived?

Sylvie made a judgment call of her own.

She pulled the trigger. He crashed backward—finally out of her apartment. She followed him, gun ready. If he wasn’t down, she’d have no problem shooting him again.

Dark blood bubbled through his T-shirt. Not arterial, but not insignificant. His eyes were closed, his features drawn tight with pain and shock, aging him.

Now that she had a chance to assess instead of react, she thought he was of the same ilk that had attacked Wales: youngish, dressed to blend in, but without even a protective charm to his name. Guess that might have broken the illusion if she’d been trapped in it.

Her downstairs neighbor, a college student named Javier, staggered up the stairs. Beer night with his buds, she thought. And yeah, there was the milling of footsteps beneath, young men who weren’t sure they wanted to get involved beyond calling 911.

He gaped at her. “You all right? He all right?” He didn’t wait for an answer but looked down at the gunman. “Should we try to stop the bleeding or something?”

“If you want,” Sylvie said. “He attacked me. I’m not feeling forgiving enough to play paramedic.”

Javier dithered, and she said, “Why don’t you check on Christina? He came out of her apartment.” She jerked her chin in that direction, and he obeyed. Shocked but willing. A good kid.

Sylvie crouched down beside the gunman. “Who sent you?”

He groaned, turned his head, his breathing labored and thick.

“Confession’s good for the soul,” she said. “Think about it. You wake up in the hospital, talk to the cops. Of course, if you talk to me, your odds of reaching the hospital alive go up.” She tapped the gun muzzle against his shoulder; his eyes widened.

“I don’t—”

Sylvie said, “I’m not playing. And you didn’t know what you were getting into. I’ve killed worse than you and gone to sleep with a smile—”

“Odalys,” he said. “I used to smuggle things into the country for her. She asked me to do this.”

“Good,” she said. “Just remember to tell that to the cops when they ask.”

She dropped the gun when the police lights flashed into the lot and resigned herself to another couple of hours before she got that shower she wanted.

MIDNIGHT HAD COME AND GONE BEFORE SHE WAS DONE ANSWERING the police questions. Judicious use of Adelio Suarez’s name, and the clear evidence against the gunman—a shattered door, the traumatized neighbor who’d unwillingly hosted the bastard until Sylvie got home—meant Sylvie got to answer questions in the dubious comfort of her own apartment.

She gave the police a list of every possible place she could be reached in the near future and waved them goodbye. Ten minutes after that, she helped apartment maintenance nail plywood sheets over the gaping hole in the door and headed back out into the night.

Alex would open her doors to Sylvie; but then, the options were sharing her couch with the German shepherd who drooled or the futon with Alex, who kicked and twitched, as active in her sleep as she was during the day.

She called Wales. “Tell me you snuck into a hotel room with two beds.”

He groaned protest but gave her the address and room number.

Thirty minutes later, she was pulling into one of the Holiday Inn Expresses that dotted the Florida landscape. Tapping on his door yielded a grumble and a series of oddly careful footsteps.

He opened the door, leaned across it, blocking her entrance, and said, “I could have been sleeping, y’know.”

“What kind of necromancer sleeps at night? Isn’t that against union rules or something?” she asked. She squeezed in, blinked in the dimness, took in the scent of old tallow and spices. Not the usual hotel scent. Wales had been playing with the occult in the dark like the good, creepy Ghoul he was. “Tell me the room has a coffeepot.”

“Yeah.”

She lingered in the little square space beyond the door, trying to figure if she really wanted Wales for a roommate. Even for a night. If it had been a suite, maybe. “You know, if you’re going to sneak into a hotel, why not pick something nicer?”

“Reservations,” he said. “Theirs, not mine. I took this room out of the system, but at an expensive hotel, someone would throw a stink. More odds of discovery.”

“Surprisingly sensible,” she said. “Do you still have clean towels?”

He flipped on the light, looking at her. “D’you have a black eye?”

She touched her face; it wasn’t particularly tender. “Just dirt, I think. Bruised ribs, shoulder, and hip, though. Odalys sent one of her bullyboys to my home. Kicked my door in.”

“You shoot him, too?” Wales grinned.

“Yeah.”

He stopped smiling. “Seriously? I thought your rep was all about shooting monsters. Not people. That’s two in one day, Sylvie.”

“I’ve learned to make exceptions,” she said. Sylvie ducked under his arm and trespassed. She stopped two steps later and looked at the room. Basic layout—two beds, dresser, TV, a table, and two chairs—except Wales had spent some time rearranging. The chairs were piled on the dresser, a tangle of legs, and the table was squished into the narrow space between the second bed and the wall, clearing a space near the window.

He’d also let the Hands out of their box. He’d made a circle of them, palms up, and stippled them with some pungent herbal ash that made Sylvie’s nose wrinkle and her lungs itch as she approached.

“Pennyroyal,” he said. “Helps ward off curses. Be a hell of a thing if I went to all that trouble to get Jennifer back here, and it killed me.”

“I thought you were going to talk to her, not drag her back. Just talk.”

Wales shifted, antsy under his skin. “I wish. If I were wanting to know about her past, what her favorite color was, her best memory—I’d just ask. But death’s traumatic as hell no matter how it happens. We don’t like to have our toys taken from us, and life’s about the biggest toy there is.”

“And trauma leads to muddled thinking,” Sylvie interrupted.

“Especially when what you’re wanting to ask about is their death. Then it’s all metaphor and scrambled words. Like talking to someone who got their Happy Meal with a side order of LSD. If I want to learn anything from her death, she’s gotta come back. And that requires more than a bit of thought.”

“Plus backup, or are you just using the Hands as ashtrays?”

Wales snorted. “Martha Stewart would have my hide. Nah, they’re going to be a fence of sorts. Hem her in. In case she tries to escape.”

Sylvie edged past the piled-up furniture, crawled onto one of the beds. Necromancy. A lovely way to victimize the dead. But they needed more to go on. As if he had had this same argument with himself, Wales said, “If she could understand what was at stake, she’d want to help us. Save the other women.”

“That’s sweet,” Sylvie said. “But I’ve always found that human nature involves a lot of ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine.’ ”

Wales cracked a thin smile. “Truth. Are you gonna hang around for this shindig?”

“Nowhere else to go,” Sylvie said. The bed was comfortable beneath her. She might have won her battle with her attacker, been checked over by the EMTs and pronounced okay, but her side ached, her hands ached, and she thought there might still be splinters in her hair from the bullet hitting the door frame. Here was good. Even if it meant playing witness to coercive magic.

Plus, this way she could keep an eye on Wales. He might be more competent than he had pretended to be on their first meeting, but dealing with ghosts just made her skin crawl.

Dead things should stay that way, her dark voice commented.

Demalion, Sylvie rebutted. The dark voice sulked and slunk away.

Wales took a breath, flipped out his lighter, and Sylvie coughed. “Smoke detector?”

He clambered up with a shame-faced wince and yanked the wires. “Thanks.”

“Had enough excitement for tonight,” Sylvie said. “Hate to add hotel evac to the list.” She dragged a pillow to her chest, curled around it; the bruising ribs on her side appreciated the support. She felt like a tween on a sleepover—all they needed was a Ouija board and some Gummi Bears to replicate her seventh-grade birthday party—and patted her gun for moral support.

Wales lit a small brazier of herbs; they didn’t stink as strongly as the pennyroyal did, but they made a strange smoky trail that coiled not-quite-aimlessly through the circle of Hands. Where the smoke brushed up against the Hands, ghosts shimmered in grim outlines.

Yeah, this was going to be ugly. Drag a dead girl’s soul back through the ether, interrogate her, study her, and slap her in the center of a hard-eyed ghost ring of murdered ex-cons.

Wales tossed a piece of jewelry into the brazier; it sank under herbs so fast that Sylvie only had time to register the gold shine of it. It looked like a pendant charm.

He rattled off a long stream of words that could have been anything, a quick blur of vowels barely contained by a consonant here and there. Alex would have been making zombie-language references—all groan and moan and tongueless words. Whatever it was, it raised the fine hairs on Sylvie’s arms, made her clutch the pillow tighter.

Not fear, she told herself. Discomfort. It didn’t sound like something people should say.

The smoke reacted to it, eddying back from the edges of the magical ghost circle, twining up Wales’s legs, creeping through the air like a snake tracking a rat’s scent.

“Jennifer Costas,” Wales said. Back to English, and it should have been a relief. But the Texas drawl was gone from his voice; he sounded crisp and hard and clean. It was a tone a stage actor would envy, meant for carrying cleanly to the rearmost seats. It was a sound to wake the dead.

“Jennifer,” Wales said again.

The smoke thickened, bunched like a swallowing snake, pulling at something Sylvie couldn’t see.

Belatedly, she wondered if she’d see anything at all, or if she’d be stuck watching Wales talk to more invisible people, trying to read success or failure in his body language.

Fire crackled in the smoke, a sullen flicker like a banked fire being poked. Sylvie thought of Jennifer Costas, burned up in a spell backlash, and found herself whispering the closest thing to a prayer she was capable of. Please, let her not spend the afterlife eternally burning.

It depended, she supposed, on whichever god had laid claim to her soul. Some were more merciful than others. Some were indifferent. And some were downright cruel.

The smoke closed in, engulfed the flame, giving shape to the intangible. Jennifer Costas was formed out of smoke and distant fires, her long hair like fiber optics, glowing dully at the ends, drifting.

Why?

Her voice was a wisp, a child’s plaint.

Sylvie smothered guilt. Sooner done, sooner she’ll be released. For once, she and her inner voice agreed.

Wales swallowed, let the hard edge leave his tone. “Jennifer,” he said.

The ghost girl turned her head, and Sylvie decided she preferred the smudgy shimmer the girl had been in the’Glades to this phantasm, whose eyes gleamed with lambent flames. Jennifer shouldn’t have been threatening—lost, scared, dead—but panic lent strength to any creature.

Sylvie shifted on the bed, running over anything she knew on how to banish a ghost. Just in case.

Jennifer shuddered in response to one of Wales’s questions. Like a child, she repeated it, Was I first? No. She and she were there. White eyes under the water, and he pressed me down under the water, a knife blade in my skin, crimson rivers flowing. . . . He gave us to him like a poisoned sweet, and he lodged in our bones. In our blood. We burn.

The fire crackle beneath her smoke skin doused itself, faded into silence. An utter silence. Utter stillness. Death in a smoke shell. A hollow core of memory and pain.

Sylvie shivered. She almost wished the flames were back.

“Do you remember the words he used?” Wales asked. “Can you tell me?”

Wales was dogged; Sylvie gave him that. Still concentrating on the spell that bound the rest of the women. Trying to figure out a way to safely unpick the knot they were in. Still trying to make sense of someone else’s malignancy. But his shoulders were tight, his eyes jittery, and she wondered how long he could hold Jennifer there.

Chains. More chains. Jennifer mourned, turning about in the circle. Trapped. I want to go home. I must. He calls.

Beneath the stillness, a tension. Sylvie thought of tides pulling back before tsunamis, of the silence before an earthquake.

“Wales,” she murmured. “Hurry it up.” Dangerous to interrupt, to divert his attention, but she couldn’t help but feel that time was short. A new sound grew beneath the smoke, something distant, repetitive, vaguely familiar. Something that made her edgy.

“What was his purpose?” Wales said.

The smoke shape turned her palms upward, wordless answer or a confused shrug. The sigils carved into her palms meant the motion could be either.

To hide. To grow strong at our expense. At his. He calls.

Sylvie peered through the haze of ghosts playing fence, tried to see what Wales might be seeing. All it was to her was featureless grey-black, a roil of distress.

“Hide from whom?”

Jennifer flashed in the circle, a rush of smoky movement, crashing up against the hedging ghosts, trying to escape. Her face, built of smoke and terror, was visible through the gaps; her lips moved soundlessly. The word was clear, though.

No. No. No. I don’t want to. . . .

Wales frowned, his face tight and stern. “Tell me,” he commanded. The ghost wept flaming tears.

Sylvie wondered if Alex would still find him sweet now. She didn’t dwell on it. That sound came again, just on the edge of her hearing. A displacement of expelled air. An explosive sigh, but with anger beneath. The bed shivered beneath her. She dropped the pillow, held her hands out before her. Steady as a rock. The trembling wasn’t her. It was something else. Something approaching. Something sniffing them out. Sniffing the ghost out.

A power filter, Wales had said. Power went in, changed, came out again. That kind of thing left a mark on a soul. That kind of thing could make a ghost a tasty morsel for anything powerful enough to sense it.

Another thought crossed her mind, sent her heart into rocketing overdrive. He gave us to him.

It wouldn’t be the first time a sorcerer had bartered with a god for power. If the soul-devourer had given these women’s souls to a god . . . if Wales was keeping Jennifer here when a god was expecting her.

He calls.

“Wales!” Sylvie snapped. “Send her back. Do it now.”

“Just a minute more,” he crooned, equal answer to Sylvie and comfort to the ghost. “Just a moment, now.” He circled the ghost, scribing a circle within the ghost circle, and Sylvie’s nerves seized with a sudden realization.

Wales was inside the ghost circle. Contained as much as the ghost he summoned.

Too late, Jennifer whispered. He comes.

Sylvie rose, paced the outside of the circle in an echo of Wales pacing the inside. The cold barrier of the Hands kept her at bay.

Leave him, her dark voice suggested. Run.

The air hummed, seethed in the room like locusts, something fiercely alive, something terrifyingly hungry.

The entire room trembled around them, a localized earthquake. In the hall, people were beginning to cry out, a hastening of footsteps running for the exits.

And the explosive grunting cough was getting stronger.

God, Sylvie thought. A god, coming to see what was keeping his newly gifted soul.

“Wales!” she shouted. “End the spell!”

Wales’s head came up, only then catching on to his danger. His expression went blank with shock; Jennifer’s burning gaze was tilted upward, terrified, waiting, a huddled creature in the glare of a headlight.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, sucked in willpower, hoped there were enough remnants of Wales’s protective spell on her skin, and reached through the ghost barrier.

Ice and cold and vertigo; her arm went dead to the shoulder, but her hand hit what she was aiming for, closed tightly around Wales’s thin forearm. She leaned back and yanked.

He barreled out of the circle, shouting protest; Sylvie only yanked harder, pulled them both down between the beds. Light exploded into the room after him—the spell breaking on two fronts.

The room shuddered; Sylvie scrabbled for her gun, got Wales between her and the floor, and stared into the heart of the light, trying to see what was coming for them. For Jennifer.

Something clouded the light, a dark mass, the shadow of a god reaching out toward them. The air in the room stung Sylvie’s skin, magic crawling over her body, jangling every nerve all at once. Again, she heard that hungry, moaning grunt.

Jennifer’s ghost blazed with heat, flames rushing outward, crawling the ceiling, the walls, the floor.

Sylvie rolled, trying to angle herself for a shot. Took it. Hit nothing but the wall. Got another roar of complaint.

We’re fucked. Too late to run.

She ducked, curled tight around Wales, choked on ovenhot atmosphere, her ears throbbing with pain as that animal howl went on and on, too loud for human comfort, Jennifer’s shriek mingling with it.

Heat on the back of Sylvie’s neck, a supernatural shadow drifting over her skin, Wales a bony, quivering mass beneath her. Jennifer’s scream cut off like someone had flipped a switch. The heat in the room subsided.

That angry moan sounded again, close enough to rattle her bones. And then . . . nothing. The shaking stopped; the light blinked out; her ears rang tinnily; spots danced before her eyes.

When she was convinced the god was gone, not merely playing with them, she rolled off Wales. He was out, eyes sealed shut, bruising beneath it. Yanking him through the circle hadn’t been a good idea. But it had been the only way. Ending spells, like starting a spell, took time that they hadn’t had.

She manhandled him onto the bed, fell back against his side, and gaped at the room. She expected destruction. Cracked plaster, scorch marks, the like. But there was almost nothing. The mirror over the dresser, glimpsed between stacked-up chair legs, had gone dark, smoked, as if it had gotten a better glance at the intruder than she had and burned from the inside out, incapable of reflecting it back.

A god, she thought again. And they were lucky. It hadn’t manifested completely. Hadn’t done more than cast its shadow on the mundane world. She spared a brief, belated thanks to the god of Justice: When he’d walked the earth, he’d contained his godly strength as best he could. This god didn’t care enough to do so.

She got up on shaky legs, and something crunched beneath her feet. Bone. She let her gaze drop, held through the swinging dizziness that caused, and let her eyes focus slowly. A skeletal hand. One of several.

The Hand of Glory had transformed from a withered, yellow mass of flesh and bone to a hand stripped completely to bone and charred black all the way through. Like Pompeii’s victims had, when she touched the hand, it disintegrated to a crisp pile of brittle ash.

Guess they’d finally found a way to destroy the Hands of Glory in one swoop, Sylvie thought wryly. That could have been useful a week ago. Now it was only a huh and a footnote in the supernatural files her memory kept.

She kicked it aside, away, staggered into the bathroom, ran the water cold and clear in the sink, and scrubbed at her face and nape. She felt more human at once. Another cloth, wetted down, still dripping, came with her back into the main room. She slapped it across Wales’s forehead, watched him flinch with some relief. Just out, then. Not dead.

She folded the comforter—scratchy, floral polyester—around him, cocooning him. He muttered, ducked his face into it, and dislodged the washcloth. He flailed a spastic hand in complaint as water ran down his neck and spine, then gave up, passing out or falling asleep. One or the other.

Sylvie dug her bullet out of the wall where it had lodged, dumped the misshapen thing into her pocket. That was the final straw as far as her own energy levels went. She staggered over to the other bed, face planted in the abused pillow, and was out before she could do more than wonder if housekeeping would wake them in the morning.

SHE WOKE TO HER PHONE RINGING SHRILLY, TO WALES’S GROANING something that might be Make it stop, to fading dreams of someone growling in her ear, and to a body gone stiff and sore. Bastard, she thought. She hoped the gunman’s wound got infected. She’d ill-wish their godly visitor, too, if she had a name to fling her curses toward.

Fumbling an arm across the stretch of clean sheets brought the phone to her hand. She flipped it open, “What?”

“You didn’t call me back,” Lio said.

“Your guard-dog wife hung up on me,” Sylvie said. A moment later, she put her face in her pillow and groaned. She’d intended to talk to Lio, but after she’d inhaled enough caffeine to be reasonably civil, at least to the point of not insulting the man’s wife.

Lio was silent for an angry second, then sighed. “Did you find anything?” He sounded good. Lucid. Impatient. Cop on the mend.

“Found everything,” Sylvie said. She sat up in the bed, shoved her hair out of her face. “It’s complicated.”

“Magic?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Good news, bad news? Good news is the women aren’t actually dead—well, except for the one who burned up—Jennifer Costas was her name, by the way.

“The rest are in mortal danger, but alive. At least if I don’t screw around too much. They’re kind of on a time limit. More good news? I found them again. Bad news? I left them there, and you can’t send anyone out to move them. They have to stay missing until we fix this.”

“What?” All the irritation he’d suppressed earlier came out in one sharp bark. “You what?”

“Look, Lio, I don’t like it either. But right now, I don’t have a choice. I could tell you where the women are, but that would just lead to a repeat of what put you in the hospital.”

They argued for a few minutes longer, repeating the same material—How could she? This was why he didn’t like private investigators. This was why she didn’t like cops. They didn’t understand the risks—until Wales shut her up by hurling a pillow into her face and slinking into the bathroom. “Make coffee,” he snapped, and slammed the door.

Guess he wasn’t suffering too much damage from spell shock, then, if he was lucid, irritable, and hogging the shower.

“Look, Lio,” Sylvie said. “I do have some info you can work on, even from home. I took pictures. If you can match them up with missing people . . . No, I’m not telling you how to do your job.” She tugged at her hair in increasing frustration and finally hung up. They were never going to be easy allies, but dammit, she needed him to keep the cops occupied, to distract the ISI.

She threw the phone down on the bed, fisted her hands in the sheets. It just pissed her off. A government agency designed to deal with the supernatural, and they were so bad at it that she couldn’t just tell them where the women were and trust to them to fix the problem. A government agency that was so bad it didn’t even realize how fucked-up it was. They’d poke, and pry, and drag out some low-level witch or psychic who’d preach caution. Then they’d ignore him or her and bull on ahead.

She heard clattering and chatter in the hallways—the maids talking about the shaking last night, talking about crazy guests, and Sylvie took it as a sign. She might not be ready for the day, but it was more than ready for her.

First up, the office and faxing the pics to Lio. He might be pissed at her, but he was homebound, bored, and far too decent a cop to let the information go just because it came from her; he’d look into it.

Wales stumbled out of the bathroom, towel slung around narrow hips and looking like he’d been on a three-week bender. Dripping, he started coffee, leaned over the pot as if caffeine steam was a panacea for what ailed him.

“So what the hell happened?” he asked. He frowned at the charcoal splotches on the carpet, all that was left of the Hands. “Last thing I recall, you were dragging me out midspell. You do like to live dangerously.”

She made grabby fingers at the mug of coffee he poured, and with a growl, he handed it over. “So . . .”

“So, next time listen to me when I say stop the spell,” Sylvie said. “Then you won’t get a magical concussion. Did you get anything more out of the conversation with Jennifer than I did? ’Cause I heard mostly gibberish. Before she got yanked away.” He looked like he was going to demand more answers, answers she wasn’t ready to give yet. Talking about gods before breakfast was just . . . inhumane. She took a deliberate sip of coffee, mmmed happily though the coffee didn’t deserve it.

As an early-morning distraction, it worked.

Wales followed her second sip with a hooded, hungry gaze, then poured himself a cup. “I was closer to her, got some of her memories relayed up close and personal.”

“Ugh,” Sylvie said. “Glad I missed that. Get anything useful to go with the horror show?”

“Yeah,” he said. As usual, he qualified his first positive response. “Maybe. I might be able to peel back at least one layer of the spell.”

“Break the stasis? Kill the spell like you suggested?”

He shook his head. “After losing the Hands? Best I can do is buy the women some time, weaken whatever’s draining them.”

“That’s not nothing,” she said. “You going to be up to a trip to the ’Glades?” Sylvie asked. It wasn’t quite the question she meant. She meant was he up to trying another tricky life-endangering series of spells after the magical backlash he’d suffered last night.

He poured a second cup of coffee, killing the pot, and said, after a long, scalding swallow, “Reckon I’ll find out.”