Lies & Omens

15 Mission-Minded

THEY RECONVENED IN THE LIVING ROOM BY UNSPOKEN AGREEMENT. Zoe, following in Sylvie’s wake, was more subdued than Sylvie liked, but as she glanced around, it was far better than Lupe’s false bravado and Alex’s nervous concern.

Sylvie checked her guns again, her spare ammo, said, “Eri. If I need more bullets—”

“You won’t,” Erinya said.

Sylvie decided to take that as a vote of confidence, not another invitation to argument: She was remembering why she had worked alone for so long. Too much at stake. Too many viewpoints.

“Then let’s go,” she said. “Nice and easy. Try to bring us in quietly?”

“Teach your mother to suck eggs,” Erinya snapped, and flung out her arms. Sylvie winced, anticipating pain, that strange menacing chaos of Erinya’s realm. But all she felt was hideous itching as power crawled over her skin, seeking to make her part of it. A faint whimper suggested that Zoe was having real difficulties keeping from sampling that magic, and just as Sylvie thought she was going to have to halt the whirlwind of movement to save her sister, they slammed to a painful halt.

Sylvie dropped deep into warm, salty waters, rife with seaweed. She flailed upward, got a breath of air, grabbed out, and brought Zoe, coughing and spitting, to the surface alongside her. Lupe rose up a moment later, startled but unharmed. Water beaded off her scales. “Did we overshoot?”

“We never left,” Sylvie said looking up at the Rickenbacker Causeway from below. A furious, screeching howl ripped through the air, and all over the water, pelicans surged into ungainly flight, silvery fish dodged to the depths.

Erinya hadn’t made the leap off the island.

“She’s trapped,” Zoe said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think she can leave the island. There’s something shielding it.”

“That would be me,” Dunne said. He settled on the waves before Sylvie, cross-legged, jeans staying dry despite the wave roll. “Your cage? Does it meet with your approval? It’s temporary. I can get away with it for only a while. Call it a practical joke between old friends.”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “It does. Did you leave Alex on the inside? ’Cause Erinya’s going to be furious.”

“Eros sent her home.”

Lupe shot Sylvie a betrayed glance, and Sylvie ignored it. “Can you send us to San Francisco?”

Dunne flashed inhuman, a great grey swirl of wind and storm, and the water around them grew jagged and as rough as sharks’ teeth. Sylvie wished she hadn’t thought about sharks. Or, God, mermaids. “You’re asking for a lot of favors for a woman who’s not even marked as mine.”

“Sorry. My soul is my own.”

Zoe shivered, said, “Look, I get that Sylvie’s difficult, but we’re wet and going to get tired of treading water and we really need your help. So if you want us to grovel… she grimaced. “Okay, we won’t. But I’ll say please?”

“Oh, God,” Dunne said, and it was so strange to hear that word out of his mouth that Sylvie forgot to tread water. A slap of salty water going into her lungs reminded her. She surfaced in time to hear the rest of it. “… just like your sister, aren’t you? Fine. Go. Kill witches. I’m through with you.”

The water rose up around them like a waterspout, then it wasn’t water at all. Sylvie had time to think she’d really angered him—this ride was rougher even than Erinya’s, a far cry from the hiccup when he’d sent her to Dallas—before she lost any thought beyond trying to hold on to her allies. The hardest thing to believe was that she’d volunteered for this. The travel wasn’t instantaneous; it felt endless. Cold and stormy, roiling with momentum and power. It scoured as it shoved them before it, left them blind. She gritted her teeth, determined to endure.

Zoe screamed suddenly, sharp and as brilliant as a stroke of lightning. A moment later, the storm around them eased a notch. As if the power was flowing into something else. As if it were burning through a witch. Sylvie shouted and cursed and flailed and made no headway against the power inexorably rolling them onward. Killing her sister.

They dropped hard, and Lupe snarled furiously, snapping out at everything around her—no humanity in her. Sylvie dodged her and scanned the area, taking it in, in frantic Zoe-absent chunks: nighttime sea falling away blackly and steeply to her left. Sand and stone beneath her, roughing up her skin beneath her khakis. The dark tangle that was Lupe in the night. And, finally, a white glimmer that turned out to be Zoe’s blouse. Her sister was hunched tight in the shelter of a massive rock.

Sylvie scrambled to her feet, fell, scrambled up again.

This, her Lilith voice said, is why you don’t involve family. And why you don’t rely on witches. They’re both too fragile for the job.

“Fuck off,” Zoe said, turning to glare at Sylvie. “You know you’ve got a rude-ass voice in your head?”

“Uh—” Sylvie stopped.

Zoe wasn’t dead, hurt, or even burned out. Power was crackling off of her, rolling around and around the Cain mark on her forearm and hand. When Sylvie reached out cautiously, actual sparks launched in her direction. She withdrew her hand fast.

Zoe admired the silvery, stormy halo flowing over her arm, watched that stolen power spill back and forth as she tilted her arm. It lit up the dark night like she had wrapped moonlight around her skin.

“Guess this mark is good for something. Dunne’s power should have overwhelmed me, fried me. Hell, I probably could have taken on Erinya.”

“Don’t get cocky. She would have chewed out your throat. Just be glad it saved your life,” Sylvie said. She studied their environment with a less panicked and more analytical gaze. “I think it also got us dropped too early. Dunne’s precise with power expenditure. No more, no less than is needed. Part of his no-carbon-footprint god style.”

“Well, crap,” Zoe said. “I’m really ready to take on those Society bitches.” Her lips were curling into a hungry smile. “I’ve been studying and studying and studying, and now I’ve got a chance to—”

You’re going to have to watch her, her little voice suggested. She’s corrupted from that much power.

She’s high, Sylvie countered.

“Shut up!” Zoe snapped. “I am not corrupted. I am not high. I am energized. I am in control. Perfect control.”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“Yeah. A spell I always wanted to try.”

“And you tried it now? Are you going to do anything useful with it or just going to pick fights with my brain?”

“Lupe’s eating a seagull,” Zoe said. “Worry about how useful she’s going to be.”

“What?” Lupe said, looming out of the dark on three legs at the sound of her name, the mangled bird dangling from her right front claws. “Where are we?”

“San Francisco,” Sylvie said. If Zoe had sucked in enough of Dunne’s power that he’d dropped them in the wrong city, she’d be more than … energized; she’d be a glowing trail of embers across the sky, mark of Cain or no.

“We’ve got to be close,” Zoe said. She waved her glowing hand before her as if it could illuminate their path.

“There’s nothing around us,” Lupe said. Her nose wrinkled; her tongue flicked out, tasted the air.

“What, just because you can’t smell it? Witches wash, you know,” Zoe said.

Sylvie left them bickering and started walking. She had her gun; the bullets had made the trip safely with her. Her sister had made the trip. Lupe had made the trip, and, despite Sylvie pulling a fast one on Erinya, she seemed willing to fight at Sylvie’s side. All systems were go, and Demalion was waiting for his rescue.

The ground sloped away from her feet, made each step forward an experiment in faith and discomfort. Each step jarred, and the rocky substrate shifted. But the sea cliff was at her back, and there was a hint of asphalt in the darkness. A minute’s walk revealed the slash of car headlights passing by and, a minute after that, the long black ribbon of a California highway slipping downhill.

Zoe joined her, not slip-sliding on the rough terrain at all courtesy of her own glow. Lupe followed in her wake.

“Now what,” Lupe said. “Do we even have an idea of where we’re going? Are all your cases this slipshod? How do you get anything done?” That angry edge was vibrating in her voice again. Erinya’s presence had tamed it somewhat. Sylvie couldn’t wait to find a witch to point Lupe’s bad temper at.

“I admit I’ve been slow about this,” Sylvie said. “The Good Sisters have infiltrated the ISI. San Francisco’s an ISI city. I am betting that we’ll find the entire coven tucked up at ISI home base.” She should have realized it was likely the moment Yvette took Marah and Demalion; they’d need a place to stash them—and the ISI buildings were all equipped with holding cells. Plus, she should have recognized the classic witchy arrogance. That a group of witches who had infiltrated the ISI easily and thoroughly would deepen the insult by running the spell that allowed them to expand their power out of the ISI bastion.

The irritation of knowing she’d been stupid itched beneath her skin. She could have gone directly from Dallas, attacked them on her own. She could handle a group of witches; she’d tackled gods.

“Going it alone would have been stupid,” Zoe said. “You don’t even know how many of them are there. That’s not even counting the monsters they might be controlling.”

Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Undo that mind-reading spell. Now.”

“No,” Zoe said. “It wasn’t a whim, Syl. We’re about to head into enemy territory. This way, I can keep up with you. Even if we get separated.”

Sylvie couldn’t argue with that. That was sound planning.

Zoe grinned, said, “You’re going to find out I’m all sorts of useful.” After picking up a scrap of broken wood and two small stones, Zoe stepped onto the empty roadway. She laid down the stones, laid the scrap across them, and whispered, “Catch and hold.”

A wash of silvery light, the burning itch of magic, and the road was suddenly barricaded with a police-grade roadblock. Zoe sauntered back and said, “Next car that stops, we take.”

Sylvie wanted to disapprove. Her parents would want her to disapprove—carjacking was not a skill set her family aspired to—but looking at her sister, at Lupe lurking slick and deadly in the shadows, she couldn’t feel anything but pleased.

IT TOOK SYLVIE AN HOUR TO TRACK DOWN THE ISI BUILDING IN San Francisco, and it was an enormously long hour. Zoe and Lupe, in combination, made hellish car companions, especially when the car that Zoe had liberated from a spell-stunned driver was small enough that Lupe and Zoe, divided by front and back seat, were still in constant physical contact, a fact that pleased neither of them.

As Zoe said, sliding into Lupe’s outspread tail when Sylvie took a curve more quickly than the car was really capable of, “Erinya’s going to be pissed enough that she’s trapped. I don’t need Lupe going back smelling like I’ve been rubbing up against her all night long.”

Sylvie wanted to snap at them to shut the hell up, to just stop, to impress upon them how serious this whole matter was, but Zoe had to know. She was jacked in to Sylvie’s brain after all. Knew the constant flashes of terror that she was suffering—not for herself, but for Alex, for Demalion. What if she wasn’t fast enough, good enough? What if Demalion was already dead? The ISI seemed to have nothing on the Society of the Good Sisters when it came to magical experimentation. Demalion, having died once, was a curiosity they’d be dying to take apart.

If they had—

Sylvie pulled the car to a graceless halt streetside; the engine cooled and pinged, way overdue for an oil change. Or a new engine. Zoe had stolen a lemon.

But it had brought them here.

The San Francisco ISI building, unlike many of their other branches, was isolated, an entity in itself. That was a plus. It meant the only people she had to worry about were her own. No close bystanders. There were shops on the other side of the road, closed at this hour. A few houses, owned by people rich enough to afford sizable plots of land in California.

An iron gate barricaded the oyster-shell drive, which led to a dimly lit building backed up against the jagged coastline. The sea was a constant growl, unseen but threatening. Helpful, too. The crash it made as it hit the rocky shore would mask their approach.

Zoe said, “The gate’s not spelled.”

“Wouldn’t be,” Sylvie said, giving it a good shove. “Not if this hosts real ISI agents as well. With non-Talents coming in and out.” The metal screeched, salt air eating away at the hinges.

Lupe slipped through the gap, darted toward the building, pulled up short, wincing. Oyster-shell drive, Sylvie thought. Sharp-edged, uncomfortable to walk on even in her boots. Lupe’s bare footpads were going to slow her down.

This branch occupied a turn-of-the-century bed-and-breakfast, and it still looked more like a hotel than a government facility: The stone facade was ivy covered, the grounds were manicured and landscaped with flowering bushes that perfumed the night. The only thing that gave them away was the dull shine of replacement windows—bulletproof. Dark, angular blotches studded the roofline, and Sylvie thought they were security cameras. Inactive ones: no movement, no light.

The Good Sisters wanted privacy.

Worked for her.

“One entrance,” Zoe said. “You think there’s a back door?”

“Depends on whether the ISI has to abide by fire codes,” Sylvie said. “But I was thinking more about hitting them head-on.”

Unlike Demalion, who would have been muttering about stealth and discretion, Zoe and Lupe merely nodded, trusting her.

Sylvie checked the solid weight of her weapon, reassured herself that the spare ammo was still in her pockets, and moved up the drive, sticking to the shadows. They were nearly on the house when the tiny stone shed leaning up against the side of the building cracked open, sprouting a door where none had been.

Three people walked out into the predawn light, talking quietly among themselves. Lupe snarled in animal surprise, and the agents looked up and out and spotted them. The lead agent—witch—gestured at the gravel pathway, shouted out a harsh-edged word. The ground before him roiled, rolled up into the world’s largest mole trail, then erupted. A monster shook dirt and sharp shells from its back and blocked their path.

Sylvie shot once at it, wondering what exactly it was that this witch had had leashed and following him beneath the ground’s surface, and where the hell its weak point was. First glance argued that there weren’t any: It was all scale and scute and armored legs. Her bullet spanged off it with a sound like breaking pottery.

She wasn’t even sure it had eyes. She lined up another shot, but Lupe beat her to it, lunging into her line of fire and engaging the monster directly.

Eager, but reckless.

The monster, something even Sylvie’s Lilith voice struggled to name, moved like a centipede, hundreds of jointed, armored legs, and evil pincers at the head. A long, stinging tail curved above its back. It raised all the hairs on her neck, made her stomach squirm in ingrained squeamishness. She really wasn’t wild about insects. Especially when this one might as well have been designed out of an insectophobe’s nightmare.

Though it seemed blind, or, at least, eyeless, it moved confidently enough to get Lupe on the defensive and keep her there. Lupe whimpered after one stinger strike; her side ran blood. She fell back.

Sylvie jerked the trigger, put another two bullets into the creature, trying to maim its front pair of legs and failing, trying to keep an eye on the witches as well. Be stupid to be killed by them while focusing on a monster.

The monster ignored Sylvie, oiling back on itself to make another attack on Lupe.

Take out the witch that controls it; free the monster, the Lilith voice suggested, guided her gun hand ’round to the man who had summoned the monster out of the earth. His mouth was a black slash in his neat beard, urging the monster on.

Free the monster, and who’s to say it’ll run? It might want to finish what it started, Sylvie thought, but shooting a witch was well within her plans. The witch, sensing his danger, pressed back toward the shed and shelter.

Zoe stepped between the monster and Lupe just as it charged again and slapped it hard right in its blind face. Zoe’s entire body was within the cutting grasp of the pincers.

Sylvie unloaded bullets into the monster’s tail end, trying to get it to turn, to forget her suicidal sister. But the monster was dissolving, starting from Zoe’s slap mark and crumbling back into gravel and dust.

“Illusion,” Zoe said. “Good one, though. Lupe. Stop believing you’re hurt.”

“Cassavetes’s protégé,” the illusion master said. His tone was dismissive. “You’re an acolyte. Nothing more. Your creature illusion is unconvincing. No chimera looks like that.”

“I’m a lot more than an acolyte, and Lupe’s not an illusion,” Zoe said. She raised her marked hand, started chanting. Dunne’s stolen powers shone silver, highlighting the mark.

Sylvie, exasperated, desperate—they had to be attracting attention they didn’t want yet—took advantage of the witch’s arrogance. He’d stepped out of his shelter, all his focus on Zoe.

Sylvie’s bullet made a hole through his throat; the witch managed to clutch at the wound, but nothing more, before he crumpled and died.

Zoe snarled, balked of an audience, and Sylvie thought Get the door! in her direction. The two witches remaining were doing their best to seal it. Lupe staggered to her feet and pounced on one of them, proving that she was no illusion. The witch, a woman whose hair was nearly as scarlet as her life’s blood, managed to look betrayed as she died.

Zoe and the remaining witch played magical tug-of-war over the door until Sylvie unloaded one more bullet, this one into the last witch’s head. The bullet shivered, pushing through a magical shield, before it penetrated. Sylvie wiped sweat off her face with her gun hand, smelled hot metal, thanked their lucky stars that these witches weren’t carrying invulnerability talismans. Just the lesser, rudimentary spell shields. If they’d been wearing talismans, she’d have had to tackle them physically first, get the talismans off, get up close and personal with her kills.

Sylvie leaned forward, breathing hard. There was killing witches; and then there was killing people in front of her baby sister. It didn’t make it better that Zoe seemed completely okay with it, was even now pushing past to grab hold of the closing door.

“C’mon, Sylvie. This damned door isn’t happy. It knows I’m not one of them, and it’s trying to close.”

Sylvie looked across at the main building, looked past the shed door, and had a feeling that they could raid the main ISI building for days and find nothing but patsies. The Good Sisters had leeched on and hidden themselves, parasites who made the host forget they were there.

Lupe pressed up against Sylvie’s side, her flanks wet with blood, but no wounds. Either she believed Zoe enough to erase the injury if not the signs of it, or Erinya had souped her up before the battle with some quick-healing genes. Good, Sylvie thought. She needed her team whole.

“Let’s go,” Sylvie said, and ignored Zoe’s muttered, “Finally!” as she squeezed into the shed. She felt the quiver of angry magic as she passed. Zoe winced; her grip tightened on the door edge. It moaned like a living thing beneath her hands. Sylvie thought it said a lot about the Good Sisters that even a spell as simple as a hidden door felt malevolent.

“Lupe, come on!”

Lupe was longer than the shed was, and her tail took forever to tuck in; her fur smoked as she brushed the shimmering, twisting door frame. The moment Zoe released the door, it slammed shut and left them in darkness.

The shed, when explored, yielded another door and beyond it a steep downward ramp, leading beneath the B&B main building.

Sylvie blew out her breath. Luck, both good and bad. Since the Good Sisters had set up shop underground, the intervening earth had muffled their ingress. Once Sylvie’s group was inside, that same earth would prevent anyone from hearing what happened to them if it all went wrong.

“Watch your backs down there,” Sylvie said. “One way in probably means one way out. Lupe, stick with Zoe. And for God’s sake, use your sense of smell. If you can’t smell the monster, don’t attack it.”

“You shot, too,” Lupe growled. The words were thick in her inhuman throat.

“Well,” Sylvie said, “better safe than sorry. And I don’t have your senses. Some of these witches leash monsters, remember. Stick close to Zoe.”

She shot another thought Zoe’s way, the warning that Lupe might turn on them and Zoe would need to be prepared and could she be prepared to take someone like Lupe down?

Zoe nodded once.

Sylvie thought maybe this mind reading wasn’t such bad idea after all, and turned her back on Zoe’s smirk. The ramp was stone on all sides, floor, walls, ceilings, lit every few feet by prosaic LED adhesive lights, battery powered. The stone was smooth beneath her shoes, worn down with age. The main building was at least a hundred years old, but the tunnel was older still.

Zoe pointed at a worn symbol chipped into the wall, blurred with age and erosion. A pentagram. “Sylvie. Think they were here first?”

Sylvie ran her fingers over it, and said, “I think it wouldn’t surprise me at all. The Good Sisters obviously believe in the long game, or they wouldn’t have bothered infiltrating the ISI.”

The tunnel lightened ahead. Sylvie estimated they were about thirty feet below the surface and about fifty feet in. The underdwelling, whatever it would prove to be, was more than a simple cellar to the hotel above.

Animal instinct made her want to walk faster, to reach the light sooner, to step out of the dank stone tunnel. But something about the quality of the light ahead, the faint shift and flicker of it, made her heart beat faster.

She held up a hand, pausing them.

“They’re waiting for us.”

That was what the shift and flicker was—people between them and the light, trying to remain still. Failing.

“An ambush?”

“Let me draw their fire,” Sylvie said. “I’m going first. I’ve got the gun, and I’ve got some immunity to magic.”

“If they have weapons?”

“Then I’ll wish I’d asked Dunne for a bulletproof vest,” Sylvie muttered.

Zoe’s lips twisted, but she swallowed her instinctive urge to argue.

Sylvie checked her gun, contemplated changing out the clip before going in, but didn’t want them to get impatient and come after them while she was reloading, functionally disarmed. She gripped her gun tight—four bullets left in this clip. She could do a lot with that—and headed through the doorway at speed.

If Demalion wasn’t somewhere in this building, she’d have gone in shooting blind.

Ten witches waited for them in the open room, a blur of suited figures, male and female, arrayed in two rows, six up close, four farther back; Sylvie got off one shot before the first spell surge hit her, saw one suited figure spin around with the force of it. Not a killing shot, dammit, but the woman stayed down. For now.

Magic crawled over her skin like fire ants, nailed her with a spell that sank in and wrapped her body like a clammy, all-encompassing shroud—cold, growing colder, tasting of clay and stone and death. It sucked heat from her skin, her heart, her breath.

Life-draining spell, Sylvie identified. Didn’t matter. She had life to spare. She pushed through the paralysis the spell encouraged, blinked eyelashes that seemed weighted by sand, and sighted for the next shot. Careful, her voice warned. Three bullets left.

This time, her shot was effectively lethal. The witch in the center collapsed silently, no time even for a shout. Sylvie had hit her square between the eyes.

Two bullets, she told it. Nine witches still alive.

Nine witches blocking a doorway behind them. There could be more of the Good Sisters waiting beyond it. There probably were. Yvette wasn’t one of the opponents facing them. Sylvie’s shots had to count.

The life-draining spell didn’t slacken. Wrong witch.

Sylvie growled, heard Lupe echo it before leaping out of the tunnel; chameleon-like, her bright, poisonous colors had dulled, left her dark and sleek, hard to see in the dim, underground chambers.

Lupe looked like a monster, but she killed like a cat in a pack of birds, slashing wildly, doing as much damage as possible before picking a specific target to kill and eat. She scattered three witches with bloody gouges to their thighs and calves, torsos and hips. One man fell with a shriek, rolled beneath Lupe’s weight and claws. Blood glossed the dark stone floor, sinking into crevices; his voice gurgled to a stop.

The other two slapped spells on each other, stopping their bleeding.

After that, Sylvie lost track of things for a bit, bombarded by spells that made her skin burn or freeze or feel like it was going to shatter. Illusions rushed the room—collapsing ceilings and panicking clouds of bats, the stink of burning sulfur and too little air.

But nothing crashed into her, and nothing slowed her breathing. Illusion, just illusion, her Lilith voice whispered over and over, breaking the hold the spells tried to lay on her.

Some spells weren’t illusion, Sylvie thought, as she ducked a lash of impossibly scarlet flame.

The next fiery lash wasn’t aimed at her, but Lupe and Zoe. Zoe held firm; showed the Good Sisters what a shielding spell should really be able to do.

With the witches’ focus split over three targets, Sylvie figured out fast who held the life-draining spell on her—the fiftyish woman with hard, green eyes. Sylvie met that challenging gaze and fired directly at her. The bullet veered in defiance of all natural law and disappeared. One bullet wasted. One bullet left.

Invulnerability talisman, Sylvie thought. This witch was one step up from the ones she’d killed outside, probably the leader of this little coven. Made sense. Ten here, plus the three outside. Witches did like their traditions.

Sylvie fought against the life-draining spell, tried to peel herself out of it, even as the struggle exhausted her, made her feel like the air she breathed was full of sand and sharp edges. She felt years being whisked away from her with each labored breath.

“Why aren’t you dead?” the coven leader shouted. She looked irritated, outraged, even as she directed the other witches with clipped phrases in a language that meant nothing to Sylvie. Zoe seemed to understand just fine, and countered each attempt. She made it look easy, but Sylvie saw the trembling strain in Zoe’s corded neck and braced legs.

“Because I hate to oblige you,” Sylvie snapped. “Tell your goons to leave my sister alone.”

“Only when she’s dead.”

Lupe’s marauding had drawn to a halt; she slunk behind Zoe’s shielding, baring bloody teeth, her eyes flaring in the firelight.

“You’ll go first,” Sylvie said.

The coven head sucked in a breath to object and Sylvie used her last shot to take out the witch aiming fireballs at Zoe. No invulnerability shield there. The man died spectacularly; his spell backlashing on him as the bullet penetrated, wreathing him in fire. His fellow witches twisted and fled him, and Zoe took the opportunity to let loose some offensive spells of her own.

Sylvie gaped for half a moment, watching her baby sister create a whirlwind to drop a witch directly in Lupe’s waiting claws, then started reloading.

“Sylvie!” Zoe shouted. “Go. Get Demalion. We’ve got this.”

Not a bad idea, but not quite yet. Sylvie shot two witches who tried to prove Zoe wrong; her bullets slipped through their shielding—a quick shimmer the only sign that there’d been anything to slow her bullets down. She was getting faster at finding the weak spots in their shields. Some instinct kicking in.

The coven head turned her attention back to Sylvie, began whispering another spell, no longer content to wait for Sylvie to drop dead from the life-draining spell, and Sylvie decided the woman had to go.

She lunged forward, the exertion of pushing past the spell still wrapped around her, making her heart beat hard and heavy and labored, but she had the satisfaction of watching the coven leader’s eyes go shocked just before Sylvie tackled her.

Stupid witches. Even the Good Sisters, who used guns and technology, still seemed stunned when someone got physical with them. Of course, the Lilith voice muttered nastily, it might have more to do with the life-draining spell coming into solid contact with an invulnerability talisman. Warring magic was never fun, and while the coven leader squirmed and fought, Sylvie used the burn of the conflicting magics to locate the woman’s talisman—a thin, golden bracelet—and rip it off.

The witch shrieked; age wrinkled her skin, and Sylvie put a stop to that with a bullet.

She felt better instantly, scrambling to her feet, panting, but energized. Zoe nodded determinedly at her. Another go, go, go. Sylvie dodged another spell and bulled her way through the door into the deeper recesses of the Society stronghold. The door closed behind her and cut off Lupe’s snarls and the sounds of witches fighting for their lives.

She’d never wanted this life for Zoe. Right now, though, she was damn grateful that the girl seemed built for it.