Lies & Omens

3 A Sea of Troubles

AN HOUR LATER, SYLVIE WAS POUNDING ON ALEX’S DUPLEX DOOR, feeling an entirely new worry jittering along her nerves. After she’d given up trying Demalion’s phone, she’d started calling Alex.

Alex hadn’t answered either. The phone hadn’t gone directly to voice mail, her usual sign of “closed for business,” and so Sylvie worried. She’d pushed herself into the Miami night, waved off her neighbor’s tentative question about gunshots, and headed for Alex’s place.

Sylvie knocked louder, called Alex’s name. Guerro, her German shepherd, barked from inside, but Alex didn’t appear. Sylvie felt anxiety spike. If the ISI were under attack, they’d be looking for someone to blame. They had to know Alex worked for Sylvie, had to know she kept the backup files, had to know Alex was the one who coded them. By grabbing Alex, they’d have an all-access pass to Sylvie’s work history.

Just when her knuckles began to smart, when she considered breaking in to Alex’s little house, footsteps stumbled in her direction, and Alex mumbled, “Yeah. Coming.” The barking stopped.

She opened the door, leaned on the jamb, and stared at Sylvie with bleary eyes and smudged makeup that made her look like she’d decided to take up boxing. “Syl? It’s really late—”

“It’s urgent,” Sylvie said. “You all right?” She slipped past Alex’s slumped form, stepped into Alex’s living room, and suddenly wanted a real answer to that question.

Alex was obsessively tidy. Always had been. But her home showed signs of disarray. Not a lot—a pile of dishes in the sink, rinsed but not washed, a few pieces of clothing flung over the couch, a tangle of dog fur not immediately vacuumed—just the usual detritus of a day or two left untended. Still, it wasn’t like her.

“Just headachy,” Alex complained. “Had a lot of them of late. I tried to sleep it off.”

“Without taking off your makeup?”

“Syl, this isn’t an interrogation. What do you want?”

“To find out if Dunne was fucking with me,” she said, recalled to her purpose. “Demalion’s in trouble.”

“Fuck,” Alex murmured. She rubbed her face, pushed away the sleepy languor, and said, “Shoot.”

Sylvie filled her in, and Alex’s expression grew miserable. “Demalion’s tough, Syl. He’s survived worse.”

“Sort of,” Sylvie said. “Just … just do your thing. Prove to me that Dunne was being a godly asshole, making me pay for not doing what he wanted.”

“What did he want?”

Sylvie waved a hand, a not-talking-about-it-now gesture. “The facts, Alex? I really want to know whether Dunne’s on the up and up.”

Alex cast a last longing look toward her bedroom and dragged out her computer, blinked lashes gummed with mascara at the bright screen. “Give me a moment.” She flipped the laptop open, held it over her forearm, typed with her free hand, as if she wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.

“I don’t know if we can trust the news. He’s a god—”

“Wasn’t going for the news. Always go to the source,” Alex said. She clicked through increasingly troubling screens, and said, “The ISI. Have a seat. It’s going to take a bit.”

“You think?” Sylvie said. “They started battening down the hatches months ago.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Paranoid, bad-tempered bastards. But I’ve got an in.” Her lips curved into a tight smile. “Demalion’s passwords.”

His name fell into the space between them like a cold front. Alex’s smile wiped itself away, traded for a squirming awkwardness, the taste of premature grief.

Sylvie roughed her voice into working order, said, “He’s not dead yet, and he’s going to kick your ass for snaking his passwords. He’s stupidly loyal to that organization. Keep going.”

It was unnecessary advice. Alex’s fingers had never paused. “I’m hitting their memos to each other. Interoffice warnings. Red alerts, that kind of thing. Chatter’s real. Talk about Dallas, about Chicago, about Memphis.”

“Memphis? What happened in Memphis?”

“Something bad I’m guessing. They’re sending around a list of precautions to be made SOP … Syl.”

“What?”

“Another one just showed up. Savannah,” Alex said.

“There isn’t an ISI branch in Savannah.” Sylvie kept pretty close track of them. They covered twenty-nine American cities.

“Well, not anymore.”

Alex’s jaw tightened, a white sliver in Sylvie’s field of vision. Flickers of light against her skin, and she nodded. “Look at this.” She turned the computer toward Sylvie. “Security video.”

It wasn’t what Sylvie had expected. The ISI tended toward government bland, but this lobby was stark beyond that. She squinted. Was that security glass around the intake desk? Something blurred the men behind it, made them look oddly distant.

When the woman wandered into view, captured the camera’s eye, Sylvie was irritated, trying to piece together the nagging sense that she should know what this place was. Then the woman moved forward and shed her coat like a falling stage curtain. It fell fast and hard, as if it were weighted, but none of the security guards could look away from the woman.

She stretched long and lean and more naked than it seemed possible for someone to be. Her skin drew all attention, gleaming and alive with opalescence, as if milky feathers fluttered beneath her skin. She had bright eyes, supple limbs, a curling mouth as flushed as a fall apple. She held out her arms in invitation.

Sylvie’s mouth dried. The men behind the desk, behind the security glass, jerked to their feet.

It wasn’t a woman. Wasn’t a man, either. But it encapsulated the most appealing of both.

A succubus.

The men opened the door—it was security glass hemming them in—stepped out. Other men and women came out of the depths of the building, clustered around the succubus’s lithe form.

“Is that—”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Succubus. But what it’s doing…

Sylvie didn’t understand it. Even if the succubus meant them harm, which it had to—no other reason for it to walk into the lion’s den—it couldn’t feed on all of them at the same time, and once it started to feed, it couldn’t keep perfect control.

The man closest to the succubus reached out, brushed shaking fingers over the perfect, pristine cheekbone. The succubus’s smile darkened. It bent smoothly, picked up its coat, revealed the weapon in it.

Sylvie sucked in a shocked breath.

This wasn’t feeding. This wasn’t hunger. This was slaughter.

The automatic weapon chattered in silence on Alex’s small screen. The ISI agents, lust-struck, had no time for lust to change to fear. The security glass grew starred and spattered with blood.

On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun, drew a finger through a spray of blood that stippled its face like freckles, and sucked it clean. Then it turned and let itself out. A bar of light—the front door left open—draped over the bodies.

“Savannah,” Alex said. “She killed all of them. Called them up and mowed them down.” She shook her head, shook away the nerves. “There’s no security footage in Dallas. Or Memphis.”

“What about Chicago?”

Alex bit her lip. “You sure you want to see?”

“Play it.”

Same thing. The lobby, familiar to Sylvie. There was the elevator where Demalion had cornered her, argued with her, before chasing her down the street and insinuating himself back into her life. She swallowed.

The beginning of the disaster was more subtle than Savannah’s succubus. So slow, it took Sylvie time to notice. Dust crawled across the lobby floor, a slow ripple of shadow. Accreting.

Not dust.

Sand.

It swirled, trickled upward like a pulled thread, fitting itself into the seams of the building. The agent at the front desk stood, approached, hand on his gun. He reached out toward that tiny spinning thread of sand; it drilled through flesh, through bone—he jerked his hand back, a hole pierced right through, started shouting for help.

Too late.

As if his blood was the catalyst, the thread of spinning sand exploded into a tornado. It devoured the retreating guard, silica slicing him to ribbon. The building shook and blurred. The last glimpse Sylvie had was a pair of shining eyes at the heart of the whirlwind before the camera failed. Not a spell. A creature of some kind.

When Sylvie caught her breath, she could come to only one conclusion.

It’s war, her little dark voice said. Coldness crawled her spine, edged her jaw and cheeks. To say she didn’t like the ISI was like going on record saying that yeah, contracting Ebola was a bad way to spend the weekend. She distrusted them down to her very core. But she didn’t like this. Especially didn’t like the sense of organization behind the attacks.

One thing she’d always counted on was the Magicus Mundi’s disinterest in uniting against humankind.

So why now?

“It’s a prison,” Alex said. “Was a prison. Savannah. They just opened it. Skeleton staff.”

“That might change things,” Sylvie said.

“You think the Mundi finally woke up and said, enough? I can’t imagine they’d like the idea of being put in cages.”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Never one of her favorite phrases. “If it were the human magic-users attacking, I might be more willing to think that it’s a reaction to the jail. But the Mundi … if they were that easy to catch and cage, don’t you think we’d have a zoo full? I’m not sure they care about us that much. About what we’re doing.”

“That look like disinterest to you?” Alex said.

On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun again, rolled its shoulders and neck with a visible satisfaction. A job well-done.

“It’s too much and not enough,” Sylvie said. “It’s strange. Two different monsters, probably three if we assume Dallas’s gas accident means asphyxiation—something neither of these monsters tried. They don’t cooperate outside their own kind.”

Alex drew her finger along the screen, tracing a pattern made in the shadows of filmed blood.

Sylvie continued thinking aloud. “If they’ve organized enough to make alliances, then why not strike all at once? Why strike day by day? Allowing the ISI to warn their other branches? It’s pointless. And worse, it’s ineffective. The Mundi’s a lot of things, but it’s brutally efficient.”

“Fear,” Alex said, running her fingers over the keyboard, over the part of the world she could control. “Let them know what’s coming and let them know they can’t stop it. I mean, can they stop it?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. Grimaced. Goddammit. She wanted answers. She wanted them now. “Maybe it’s not a war. Maybe it’s revolution. A series of uprisings, each spurred on by the previous one.”

“Like an infection, spreading.” Alex bent her head over the computer. “What can we do?”

Sylvie closed her teeth on another I don’t know, and thought about it. “If it’s an infection, there’ll be a cause. If there’s an uprising, there’s a leader somewhere. Keep plugged in. Keep me informed. I got someplace to be.”

“Chicago?”

Sylvie shook her head. “And do what? Pick through the rubble and hope I strike lucky? If they even let me get that far? No. If he can, Demalion will call us.”

Alex raised her head for the first time in what seemed like ages. Her eyes seemed more shadowed now than when Sylvie had first woken her. “Let me guess. Four ISI agencies down. You’re headed for ground zero. Trying to see if you can get yourself killed protecting people who hate you.”

“Sounds bad when you put it that way,” Sylvie said.

Alex’s smile was perfunctory. “They gassed you, kidnapped you; you had to break out. If they weren’t so scared of your pet Fury, you’d be back in their cells. But you’re going to take the moral high ground and help them?”

“Miami might not even be next on the list,” Sylvie said, “Seems to me, though, that there’s a path being taken. From Savannah? There are two ISI offices in easy lines: DC and Miami. DC has its own building, but here, the ISI offices are in the hotel district. The ISI brought this on themselves but … there are too many innocent bystanders involved. Riordan does it deliberately, hedges his agents ’round with regular people. One floor of agency, fourteen floors of civilians. I don’t have a choice.”

Sylvie left Alex hunched over her laptop, one hand snarled into her short, wild hair, the other clicking through screens that opened and closed with such rapidity that it might as well be arcane magic that guided her. She hoped it was comforting.

Outside, out of Alex’s sight, Sylvie’s shoulders sagged. Her bravado faded. The nighttime air, hot and still, felt charged, electric with change. With chaos. The peace before disaster.

Her tongue felt dry and heavy in her mouth, choking her with the weight of all the anxious words she couldn’t say. It tasted of cooling asphalt, unsweetened by the jasmine nearby.

Her phone was in her hand again, Demalion’s number picked out. She closed the phone without pressing SEND.

Wondered, if he were dead, who would tell her? Not the ISI, who hadn’t connected Adam Wright with Sylvie Lightner. Maybe Adam Wright’s ex-wife would get the call. Maybe then she’d call Sylvie to pass the news on, that the man who’d taken over her husband’s body had lost his own hold on it in the end.

Most likely, it would be Alex, hunting through the casualty roster, refusing to tell her over the phone. Sylvie would have to watch Alex picking the careful words, trying to be gentle, while her face telegraphed every detail. She scrubbed a quick hand across her eyes.

Cowardice, her little dark voice said. To give up before the battle’s even joined.

Sylvie let its contempt steady her. It was right. It so often was. Older and wiser than she was. That genetic leftover from Lilith’s blood. As if Sylvie’s synapses occasionally fired in a different pattern, an older pattern, a memory trail that was laid in before she was born. A memory, given voice.

Demalion wasn’t dead yet. And he’d survived worse. This, whatever it was, hadn’t been aimed specifically at him. He’d survived when the Furies had torn his flesh apart and sent his soul fleeing to the first sanctuary it found: Adam Wright’s body.

She had better things to do with her time than mourn him prematurely.

NEXT MORNING FOUND HER SITTING IN ALEX’S JEEP OUTSIDE THE hotel that housed the ISI while dawn pushed back the skyline, spreading reflected pinks and pale blues in the dark, slow, canal waters alongside the street. Her anxiety had dulled to a background simmer in her brain, an occasional skip to her breath when she thought of where Demalion might be, why he hadn’t called. Boredom had always been a good cure for terror.

Sylvie yawned into her hand, thought about moving the Jeep again to keep ahead of the ticket-happy police who patrolled the hotel district. It was tricky, though. She wasn’t the only watcher. She’d seen more than one agency SUV with suspicious shadows behind tinted glass. Keeping an eye on their perimeter.

She rolled down the window, sucked in a breath of Miami at morning when it was clean and green. The ISI surveillance made watching their HQ that much more difficult; she had to evade their eyes as well as the traffic cops while staying in close proximity. Really, she should have just slumped low, let the tickets accrete on the windshield, and let them assume the car was abandoned.

Alex would have bitched, though, and with the ISI on alert, odds were the Jeep would have been towed at first ticketing.

Sylvie squirmed; Alex’s fabric seat covers wrinkled beneath her, creating uncomfortable ridges. She missed her truck and its leather seats and her stock of canned drinks and snacks. But Alex’s Jeep wasn’t bright red with a werewolf-clawed hood. Sylvie loved her truck, but it was the very opposite of subtle.

A gull wheeled out of the dark, white feathers reflecting the sun, heading for the docks and the fishermen chopping chum for a day on the water. Sylvie thought of those men, weathered by sun, stubble-faced, shirtless, wielding cleavers with one hand and slurping coffee with the other, and decided the ISI could fend for itself long enough for her to grab breakfast and a bathroom break.

SYLVIE WANTED REAL FOOD BUT COMPROMISED ON A STARBUCKS and took a seat outside, slanting her gaze down the street, where she could keep an eye on the art-deco front of the ISI hotel. The streets trickled to life; first, men and women heading to work, clogging the roads, bleary-eyed and cranky, their radios blaring NPR, Spanish talk radio, the shock jocks. When that rush passed, the early tourists began emerging from the hotels, equally bleary-eyed, but smiling or fussing and juggling maps and children.

Sylvie finished her first coffee, went back for a refill, and found the second seat at her outside table occupied when she returned. Erinya’s boot scuffed at the sandy concrete; the other leg was tucked up beneath her. Her collarbone and cheekbones stood out like ridges under her skin, as if being a god was whittling her away.

She looked up as Sylvie approached, her eyes as black and starved as a starless night, and said, “I want coffee, too. And a croissant.”

Sylvie turned on her heel and went back inside, resisting the urge to point out that Erinya could create any breakfast she wanted. It was better for everyone involved if she kept her godly powers unexplored. Gods shed enough as it was, warping the world by their very presence, unless they were very big on self-control.

Through the window, Sylvie watched Erinya testing her fingernails against the tabletop. Wood peeled back as easily as torn paper. Erinya used the slivers to pick at the mortar in the window seam, then dropped those stony chips into Sylvie’s coffee, smirking.

Yeah.

Erinya was a lot of things. Self-controlled? Not so much.

Sylvie’s mouth tightened. Little as she liked it, Dunne was right about that. Erinya couldn’t keep coming around. The world, as it was, couldn’t withstand her.

Sylvie collected Erinya’s food and rejoined her. She waited until the erstwhile Fury had a mouthful of pastry to say, “You can’t stay here, you know. You’re damaging the world.”

Erinya laughed. “The world’s ruined already. I’m making it better. I killed a witch last night.”

“You did,” Sylvie said, flatly. She needed a witch and couldn’t find one to save Lupe’s life, and Erinya was picking them off like low-hanging fruit.

Her attention veered back toward the ISI building as a crowd of people moved toward the entrance. Today, there was a doorman. An agent masquerading as a servant. She had to grin at the sight. Those bastards. Thought they were so clever, basing themselves out of a hotel, figuring no one would look for them there. Now they had to reap what they’d sown: They expected an attack and couldn’t lock down without drawing exactly the kind of attention they didn’t want.

Plus it did her heart good to watch the agent being harried by hotel guests, trying to hail cabs and cart luggage in and out, and getting stiffed for tips.

Erinya slurped her coffee, continued her tale, unprompted. “Her daughter was chained up in the pool house, had just given birth. The witch boiled the infant so it could be used for spellwork. Bones and fat, skin and tongue.”

Sylvie’s attention jerked back; her stomach soured.

Erinya leaned forward, hands flat on the table, nails digging in. Her expression was predatory, hungry. “I took her out of the world. She offered the infant’s heart up for power, prayed for a god to attend her, offered her worship. She didn’t specify which god. I was faster than the rest. I was already here. I did good. You should be thanking me. Not telling me to go away. You don’t have the right.” Arrogance rang in Erinya’s voice, echoed across the water, rang against buildings like a trumpet’s call.

People on the street shivered, staggered by the surge.

At Sylvie’s feet, blood-colored flowers pushed through the pavement, spreading petals like opening mouths. Vines twined around them, curled up the table legs. Erinya growled; the jungle slunk back into the concrete.

“Did you let the daughter out of the pool house?”

Erinya blinked, sank back into her seat. Crossed her arms over her chest.

“Did you leave her there, chained in the dark, injured and afraid, grieving, calling for help?”

“… I can go back.”

“You can’t stick around,” Sylvie repeated. “I know your intentions are good, but you’re a god now. You can’t—”

Erinya’s shoulders rounded; she caved inward. “I’m lonely. There’s no one good in my god space. I don’t like it there. I miss my sisters.”

“I thought you were sick of them bossing you around.”

Erinya’s fangs, razor-edged, dented her lower lip. “I miss fighting with my sisters.”

“Then make minions of your own,” Sylvie said. “Make them mouthy. Make them tough enough to stand up to you.”

“I could have you—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “No.”

Silence fell across the table; Erinya’s sulking spread outward. The other patrons in the tiny courtyard let their drinks go, ignored their food.

A bird crashed into the glass storefront with an unpleasant thunk and bounced downward. The man closest to the bird jumped from his table, grabbed the corpse, and brought it to Erinya.

“For you,” he said. His gaze was adoring. His hands, covered by the wings, trembled, giving the dead bird the illusion of imminent flight.

Erinya smiled, her human slipping. Her teeth gleamed like new razors; spotted feathers sprouted from her hair and nape.

“Thank you,” she said. She leaned forward, kissed the man, claiming him for her own; he stepped away, dazed, his mouth bloody where her fangs had scored his skin.

Erinya licked her lips, plucked the bird’s heart out with jagged claws, and ate it in a single bite, lapping at her fingers afterward. The smell of blood was sharp, as metallic as a bullet. Sylvie wondered suddenly if Erinya had killed the witch before or after she’d eaten the infant’s offered heart.

Sylvie shuddered. “You can’t stay.”

“Do you smell that?” Erinya asked, her head coming up, eyes going unfocused.

Sylvie sniffed. She smelled a lot of things. Car exhaust, coffee, the woman two seats over who had decided to go for broke when she slathered on the Giorgio. Erinya’s bloody snack. The scent of salt air, a taste of canal rankness … and something else. Something slight, but pervasive, rippling along beneath everything else, lifting the other scents.

“What is that?”

“Something wet,” Erinya said, shaking herself fastidiously. Catlike. When she’d been just a Fury—just—she’d seemed more doglike. Now that she’d incorporated Tepeyollotl’s powers into her own, her animal aspect, more mythic than real, edged toward cat.

“How about a little more detail?” Sylvie shot a glance toward the ISI. All serene. Annoyingly so. She hated wasting her time.

“Smells old?”

“Old like a Mundi monster? Like the Sphinx?” Sylvie’s heart skipped, equal parts anticipation and pain. Demalion was bright in her mind again, an absence that felt like a weight.

Erinya curled her lips into a satisfied smile. “Old like drowned bones. I know what they are. Mermaids.”

Her gaze lasered into the canal. Sylvie almost protested. Mermaids?

The canal waters rose like a tsunami and slammed into the ISI building.

THE SOUND OF IT WAS BREATHTAKING, A SOUND THAT HIT LIKE A body blow—the crash and thunder of pouring water, the gunshot cracking of glass, the screech of metal as cars were shoved aside. Beneath it all, another noise. Something wild and inhuman, like whale song fed through a broken autotuner.

Sylvie, on her feet, water rolling toward her, found herself with her head cocked just like Erinya, trying to focus on that sound. How many of them? Where were they?

All around her, people did the same, but without purpose. Just stood and listened to that alien song beneath the chaos. Ignoring the sheeting, foaming water rising, tugging at their feet, slapping up against legs like angry fish tails, spilling into shops.

No one reacted at all.

“Mermaids sing the sea,” Erinya said. “Coax men into the water, drown them, lick the despairing froth from their lungs like a delicacy. But if the men don’t jump. If they can’t be coaxed…

“The mermaids bring the sea to them,” Sylvie said. For being surrounded by water, her mouth felt desert dry.

A little boy tugged curiously at his mother’s hand, looked around, the beginnings of distress on his face. His hands flew, asking questions no one answered. No one noticed.

He squatted, slapped at the water reaching for his mother, crying. The water, darker than it should be, slapped back. The boy fell backward, limbs flailing, and went under.

The water was shallow on the ground, but the boy didn’t rise.

“Eri—”

Erinya was already moving, surging through the waves; the waves jerked back, cleared a path. Erinya, shape-shifting as she moved, never set a paw to the water, dancing above it. She jerked the boy out of the froth with her teeth, flung him toward her back. The boy, showing more sense than Sylvie had expected, clung tight to Erinya’s spiky feathers. Erinya vanished, and Sylvie was left, the only waking person in the mermaids’ murderous nightmare.

Water cascaded down the ISI building, peeling stucco away in foaming, chalky ribbons. Sylvie put a hand on her gun, cast another glance at the dark canal waters. The mermaids were there, had to be. But they might as well have been on the moon for all she could get to them. If she was going to help the ISI, she’d have to do it one victim at a time.

Erinya would have been more helpful here, she thought. Never mind saving the child. But that was logic, that was reason, that was fear at being hopelessly outclassed. A gun did her no good if she couldn’t get the bullets to her targets.

Really, she was grateful that Erinya was still child-focused, still protective. That Dunne-programmed core of her—avenge crimes done to children—had been untouched by her change in god status.

Sylvie swallowed, anxiety like the taste of dry metal in her mouth, and headed toward the ISI building. Ground zero.

It was hard to think, hard to hear with the roar of the water, but her little dark voice was an internal sound, something even deafness wouldn’t allow her to escape.

Be grateful to Lilith, it growled. Be grateful to me; without me, you’d be just another victim waiting for death to roll in with the tide.

Water roared in her ears until they rang with the echoes of it, a waterfall that wrapped itself—rising and falling and rising again—around the ISI hotel, as tightly as a strangling vine.

One of the dark SUVs lifted off the asphalt, was swept swiftly into the canal waters, its glossy finish going dull as the water rose up to envelop it.

Something supple and quick rose out of the water, cracking the windshield with a single hard tail-lash, and vanished back into the darkness. It had been matte grey-beige, as rubber-plastic as a shark. Sylvie was left with the impression of rolling teeth and black eyes before the SUV sank, the men inside doing nothing at all as they were drowned.

Fuck, Sylvie thought. Fuck it all.

Water danced in the air before her, making breathing a chore, trying to filter out the rainbow shards of suspended droplets, flung into the air with such violence that they seemed like projectiles.

The main glass door was sheeted with water, crashing and foaming; dirty water roiled behind it—a blurry, ominous shadow.

Pressing up against the entry, Sylvie was soaked to the skin in a second as she forced the door open. The motion sensor had given up the battle at the first impact, seizing up. As she forded her way in, she cast a last glance back to see if Erinya might have returned, and caught a glimpse of another person moving among the bespelled. Dark-eyed, peak-faced, and frowning, he raised a hand toward her as if he might draw her back. His hair curled sleek and wet along his face, dripped like seaweed.

She shook her head. Witch or whatever—she was committed now. He was on his own.

The lobby was more peaceful than she’d expected, having had horror-movie images of bloated bodies suspended in seething waters stuck in her head. The lobby had been mostly empty when the waves struck, the clerks slumped over the desk, their legs bobbing in the water. The hotel security—ISI agent—seemed the only casualty, floating facedown in the water, jacket flaring wide, exposing his gun. A few guests, seated on lobby furniture, drifted, staring and uncaring through the room, bumping up against walls, unmoored from the earth.

Sylvie flipped the guard, but one glance was enough to tell her he was dead past reviving, skin already softening, bloating in the water.

She stripped him of his keycards, left him floating. Sylvie waded toward the stairs and the cascade of water coming down, a shattering amount of noise in the concrete confines of the stairwell. She gritted her teeth, wished for earplugs, thought she was never going to find the ripple of water soothing again, and headed upward. The mermaid song—penetrating concrete, steel, glass—followed, resonating in the walls as if the rebar that supported the building acted as enormous tuning forks.

Sylvie might be immune to the song’s effects, but it set her nerves on edge.

The ISI had the fourth floor all to itself. Four flights wasn’t much normally, but climbing through cataracts?

She was sweating hard with nerves and exertion by the time she made it to the fourth-floor door. Water flowed sluggishly out beneath the rim, and condensation beaded cold and foggy on the steel fire door. Sylvie ran the card through the scanner, hoping that the glowing red light meant it still worked.

The door beeped, shorted out, but the lock popped. Sylvie, braced for a flood, found herself staring into a magical aquarium. Water glimmered and lapped at the door but didn’t do more than seep through at the edges. If she’d had any doubt that the mermaids had total control of their element, that wavering pool, a damp inch from her face, removed it.

The people below, the people dying on the streets, the people on the other floors—they were all incidental. The mermaids intended the ISI to drown. And the only thing she could think to do was remove the mermaids’ targets and change their focus.

Here was her horror-movie moment. Through the water, made cloudy by loose papers drifting into the hall, by stirred carpet dust, she made out bodies. A man bumped up against the hallway ceiling, swaying in a killing tide, his tie drifting, his gun holster empty, the gun itself sunk into the waving anemone plush of the carpet.

She pushed her hands into the water. It gave slowly, cold and sucking. Sylvie shuddered, her certainty slipping. What was she doing? She couldn’t save them if she couldn’t even breathe. If there was anyone left to save.

If they hadn’t died like Demalion.

She shook her head. No. For one thing, if they were all dead, the mermaids would have stopped singing. She could do this. She’d broken spells before. Accidentally, full of rage, or with luck and her little dark voice on her side. She could do it on her own. At will. On purpose. She put her hands back into the water, hunting the magics that held the wall of water in place.

Nausea churned in her gut as she crept up on it; her nerves fired in distaste as she felt out the spell’s hold on the real world—a seaweed tangle of malignant intent netting the water.

The magics slipped through her fingers, defying her urge to pull.

Careful, her little dark voice said. Careful.

Preaching survival.

Risk your life for them? For your enemies? For the dead?

She faltered. It had a point. They were her enemies. How much of this determination to save them was her hoping to save Demalion by proxy? If they were all dead, all trapped below the water—it had been twenty minutes since the wave first broke. And the mermaids’ song had never faltered. Twenty minutes of concentrated ill will.

A new sound impinged on her hearing. A rhythmic percussion traveling through the water, amplifying itself as it came.

Thumpthumpthump.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Thumpthumpthump.

Sylvie didn’t need to know Morse code to recognize that; the pattern was a part of pop culture.

SOS.

She’d never been able to turn away from someone pleading for help.

She delved back into the water, seeking to grab that intangible something. To break it apart. It slipped like a shoal of minnows through her hands, cold and slimy, her grasp slowed by the water.

No, you don’t, she thought at it, and dug in harder, wet to her elbows, scratching her nails through the liquid, snagging that magic. It thrashed like an eel, stung her palms with a near-electrical protest that made her grimace and curse between tight-locked teeth. But she held on, and, millimeter by slick millimeter, she dragged it toward her, through the door, spurred on by the drumbeat SOS.

Just as her wrists breached the glittering surface of the water, her little dark voice spoke again. Wait!

Too late.

She broke the magic’s hold, and the water crashed into the stairwell, sweeping her from her feet, slamming her—pinball style—wall to wall, then plunging her down the stairs.

Sylvie flailed, locked a hand on the guardrail, and hung on for dear life.

WHEN THE FLOOD SUBSIDED, WHEN SHE’D BEEN BATTERED BY CURRENT and cold and the dead agent slamming into her as his corpse swept inexorably by, she uncrimped her hands and staggered to her feet. She felt bruised all over, sodden, cold, more in need of a rescue than a rescuer. But she had to get moving; there was no guarantee that the waters wouldn’t rise to drowning levels again.

She labored up the half flight she’d fallen, headed into the hallway, water swirling about her ankles. She scanned the area swiftly, wondering where the SOS had come from. The first two doors she opened sent more water crashing down, turned corpses into driftwood. The water level, she thought, was rising again. The hiss of water pressing in through the broken windows.

Morgue, she thought. The ISI had a makeshift morgue. She’d been in it. The room had been baffled, had sucked the air into the room when the door closed. Close to soundproof. Maybe close to waterproof.

She tried to remember which door it was—in the refurbished maids’ supply room—and found it, not by memory but by the SOS starting up again, more desperate. She tapped on the door, got voices responding.

“Is there anyone out there? Is it safe to come out?”

“No,” Sylvie said, “Not safe. But safer. Open up.”

“Is that you, Grace?”

“Just open the damned door,” Sylvie snapped.

A furious set of whispers, then the door popped open, revealing four soaked and shivering ISI agents. The room, thankfully, was mostly dry. The water had only been up to their shins, and it flooded out past her.

Sylvie stepped in, shook off like a dog, and looked at them. “Let’s move.”

“Who—”

“That’s Shadows,” the agent in the back of the little huddle answered. She recognized him: John Riordan, the local ISI chief’s son.

“Hey, Junior. Want out? We need to go now. I broke the spell but only briefly. If they put it back up while I’m inside the barrier? We’re all dead.”

“We’re safe here,” another agent said. “We can wait.”

“For who?” Sylvie said. “Your security? They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

John’s teeth set; he shoved past the other agents. Sylvie braced herself for a fight, either physical or verbal. The look on his face was pure rage. But he only gained her side, and said, “Let’s go, people.”

Being the boss’s son has its perks, Sylvie thought. The three remaining agents fell in line like good little ducklings.

Sylvie opened the door again. Looked out. A wet hallway shouldn’t look that intimidating. But the water had risen noticeably in the few minutes they’d debated, moved faster, in purposeful ripples and rills as if snakes undulated beneath the surface. The hallway smelled like the sea, and it stretched out like a football field. The morgue had been nearly at the blind end of the hall, two hundred feet of enemy territory.

“Elevators?” John suggested.

“No,” Sylvie said. “We’d have to pry them open first.”

“First?” he said.

“You don’t listen well, do you. You think water floods one floor of a hotel naturally?” Sylvie asked. “There’s a spell calling the water. And there’s a spell holding the water in place. The better to drown you with.”

One of the agents said, “What’s that sound?” His lean face was tight with longing; green eyes drifted closed, the better to focus on the thin threads of the song he heard.

“I don’t hear anythi… wait. Yeah. What is that?” And there went agent number two. His heavyset body slowed, eased, relaxed.

The third agent, showing some sense, stuck his fingers in his ears, looking wild-eyed. It seemed to help, at least a little.

“Shit,” Sylvie muttered. Fucking mermaids. She yanked the door closed, dragging it through the rising waters. “Junior. Earplugs?”

He shook off his own stillness more easily than she’d expected. The other men were close to catatonic. “Earplugs?”

“Cotton balls, paper towels, rags, anything?”

Sylvie glanced around, but the room was as empty as a broken eggshell. White and wet and useless.

He opened his mouth to ask, then shook himself, started ripping fabric from his shirtsleeve. Shoved the first scraps at the agent with his fingers in his ears. The others followed suit. Makeshift. Sylvie hoped it’d buy them enough time. If they all froze on her, they were dead.

Sylvie took a big breath, hoping that if the spell lock was restored—which she had to assume it was, given the rising water—that she could disarm it again and do so from the inside.

“Close the door behind us,” Riordan said to the other agents. “If we can’t get out, we can retreat.”

They nodded, and Sylvie kept her mouth closed. She wasn’t going to burst their bubble, but if the water filled the hallway again, that door might as well be glued shut. Water pressure would ensure it. The doorway opened out.

Riordan’s jaw clenched, released; he cast a sidelong glance her way, and she raised a brow. He knew.

“Move,” Sylvie said.

They waded into the hallway, the last agent forcing the door closed through the frigid water.

It hadn’t been that cold before.

On her way in, the water had been chilly, water from below the sun’s reach, but this… this was icy. Deep-sea icy. Abyssal-plain icy. It leached heat and energy, set her teeth to chattering. It swallowed light, turned the hallway to rolling shadows and splashes. Worst of all, the water reached above her knee.

“What’s happening?” Riordan asked, as they headed into the hallway. Two hundred feet to go.

“You tell me. What’d you all do to piss off the Mundi so bad?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His teeth chattered. “I don’t even know what’s attacking us. The Maudits?”

“Mermaids,” Sylvie said.

One hundred eighty feet. The water reached midthigh.

A new sound penetrated the hallway, a low moan, the complaint of masonry giving way. Doors burst behind them, before them, spilling icy torrents into the hall. Fingers-in-his-ears shouted, stopped cold, changed trajectory.

Riordan reached for him, but the man forded the water, waist high and rising, to catch the body cresting the surface. Long hair streaming out, as red as undersea corals, falsely alive. “Grace!” he shouted.

“Jack!” Riordan shouted. “Leave her.”

The agent dropped her, but it cost him something; his pace slowed, his gaze dragging him backward. It slowed him, slowed them all.

Sylvie gritted her teeth, kept moving. They didn’t have time to waste on argument.

One hundred forty feet.

“Mermaids,” Riordan said. “Mermaids.”

His lips were blue; Sylvie assumed hers must be likewise. She knew her steps were slowing, dragging through the water. Movement was an act of will, a heavy shift of hip and numb leg, left, then right. Leaning forward. Simply trying not to topple in. Keeping her hands raised above water, awkward strain on her shoulders.

“Fuck,” Riordan said. “Why the hell can’t the water flow toward the door?”

Sylvie forced her lips into a grimace. It was meant to be a smile. “Think there’s enough bodysurfing going on in here, already,” she said. His face darkened. Graveyard humor. Never an ISI trait.

“Shit.” The curse slipped free. Behind Riordan, the count had changed.

They were down to three. Jack was gone, drifting back to join with his dead partner. Lost in the dark waters, lost silently, lost among the jetsam of floating bodies.

One hundred feet. Only halfway there.

Riordan turned. Sylvie grabbed his arm, dug her nails in, and yanked. “No. We stop. We die.” As if her words were carried by water, as if her pointing out that there were still living agents was overheard, the mermaid song kicked up to a new, angry volume. The water jumped and bubbled with its force.

The two ISI agents stopped cold, faces slackening.

Sylvie shivered, loss biting as hard as the cold. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save them. The water was an icy hand at her heart. The distant door glimmered, water rising unnaturally to fill the gap.

Riordan, thank God, was still alert. “Grab one of them,” Sylvie snapped. She wrapped her numb arm around the nearest agent and dragged him after her, saw that Riordan was doing the same to the other. Eighty feet left.

She’d save anyone she could. If she could get the door opened again—

The agent writhed in her grip like seaweed being torn from the seafloor, went slick and slippery in her arms. Her nails drew blood, a warmer, rosy drift in the gelid water. She couldn’t hold him. The water was actively dragging him out of her arms, fighting her.

“I can’t hold on. Help me,” Riordan gasped. He went under as if he’d been yanked downward. A sinuous ripple of faster water suggested that was exactly what had happened. The mermaids were getting more and more precise in their song. A cold coil of water wrapped around her thigh, impossibly colder than the rest of the water, altered by magic. It tugged; she clawed at it with one hand, feeling the same spell that had been stretched over the doorway—the mermaids’ song given physical shape and intent.

The agent in her arms slipped free of her one-handed grasp. The water rope rose out of the water, lashed around her waist, and dragged her under. She fought the riptide, felt the purpose behind it, and finally, clawing and kicking, got her head up and out of the water, sucking in great gasps of air.

She’d lost ground. A hundred feet to the door.

Warm skin brushed hers, and she yanked, came up with Riordan, sputtering, breathing. Alive.

His face was fierce, her grip on her hands brutal. “Don’t let go.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“God, won’t they stop singing!” he said.

He was still aware, still fighting. It looked like it hurt him, though; his face contorted with effort.

“Watch our backs,” she said. “We can’t afford to get sucked under again. Even if we survive it, we can’t lose the time.”

Her feet were floating, rising above the carpet; she grabbed at the molding on the hallway wall, scraped her way forward, kicking off from doorjambs. Riordan was close to a deadweight on her back, all his energy going to fighting the song, to keeping an eye out for a single ripple of water in an entire hallway of moving waves.

Leave him, her little dark voice said.

No, she thought.

Forty feet.

He’s a witch, her voice said. Or he wouldn’t be able to fight off the song.

All the more reason to save his ass. She needed a witch who owed her one.

Twenty.

The door. Sylvie clung to the jamb, forced Riordan’s weight between her and it, kept him floating, contained. Looked back.

No sign of the others.

She clawed for that magic netting; the thing she’d torn so easily before. As before, it tried to elude her grip. As before, she caged it in her hands anyway, guided not by physical sensation—her hands were utterly numb, useless meat—but by the revulsion that magic woke in her blood.

“Hurry,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. If he was a witch, he wasn’t a helpful one. His urgency raised hers to a painful level. She clawed faster.

This time, though, the netting refused to tear. She hung her entire weight on those magical bindings, kicked against the doorjamb, her face underwater, her breath bubbling out of her. It glowed under the water, with an icy bioluminescence, thick, anchored at a dozen points, fifty points, more …

That rope of water reached out again, wrapped her leg tight to Riordan’s, geared up to pull them away from the door. Her chest heaved; her lungs burned. She didn’t have time to fight it, too. Riordan slipped from between her and the door, his lips parting, whispering spells, whispering let us go, let us go. She could feel the shiver of intent, and it seemed to be working, at least minimally. The water trying to pull them down faded, gave her just that much more time to fight with the seal on the door.

As long as he could keep murmuring spells. There wasn’t enough air to make her think he could do it for more than another minute, tops.

Sylvie grimaced, peeled the first of the anchors away. Despair got her nothing. Effort might pay off.

She doubted it.

Fear, bright, sharp, nearly overpowering, danced through her veins. She’d done this all wrong. Had been overconfident. Had been stupid.

She was going to pay for it. And she wasn’t ever going to find out if Demalion had survived.

The mermaids’ song—a vibration traveling her skin, the walls, the building—broke off on an awkward screech. Riordan jerked, flailed, sought air that didn’t exist.

The spell on the door weakened.

Sylvie yanked and yanked and tore and scrabbled, using her hand, her feet, her teeth—the taste rank and vile, rotten oysters, scabrous and greasy in her mouth.

The netting tore.

She and Riordan tumbled headfirst into the stairwell; Sylvie gasped for air, lost the breath with impact against the far wall, whooped for air again.

She and Riordan skidded to the next landing and stopped, water streaming over them. Riordan groaned, got to his knees. “The others?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. She forced herself to her feet.

“What happened?”

“Mermaids stopped—” Sylvie frowned. No, they wouldn’t have stopped. Something or someone had stopped them.

Sylvie limped down the stairs, Riordan staggering and sliding after her, scratches livid on his neck where she’d clawed him in her attempts to keep him above the waterline. “Where are we going?”

“Out,” she said.

The lobby’s floodplain was draining out into the streets, draining back into the canal. People were waking all over. Sylvie could hear them screaming.

After the mermaids’ song, it sounded like music.

The screaming took on a new and frantic pitch and Sylvie burst out into the sunshine, squinting, half-blind with exhaustion and sun dazzle.

“Holy mother of God,” Riordan said from behind her. He fell back and sprawled on the concrete, crossing himself.

For once, Sylvie was in complete agreement. She’d seen a lot of things since she’d been made aware of the Magicus Mundi: witches and werewolves, gods and ghosts. But this was a spectacle even for her eyes.

Erinya, in full nonhuman form—a twice-tiger-sized mass of scales, feathers, and talons, and fangs that glistened scarlet in sunlight, her eyes great, empty, burning holes—was dragging a thrashing, writhing sharkish mass out of the canal: gills flaring, flashing red, thrashing tail slicing through the air with a sound like ripping paper, and a screaming maw of teeth under bulging, opalescent eyes.

Mermaids, Sylvie thought numbly, were nothing like in the storybooks.

Erinya dragged the screaming mermaid—God, it must be nearly seventeen feet long—right to Sylvie’s feet and dropped it, then crouched atop it, looking for all the world like a nightmare cat bringing its owner a mouse.

The mermaid’s tail slapped at Erinya, rough scale slicing at the Fury’s hide; its front limbs pushed upward, trying to break the weight from its back. Sylvie found herself staring at its … fingers. Four of them, scaled, jointed like a crab, sharp enough that the concrete was chipping beneath its efforts. Erinya punched it on the back of its oddly flat head, stunning it, then dragged its head back so Sylvie could see its face. Nacreous eyes as large as eggs stared blindly at her, blinking in scarlet membranous tides.

“Want to ask it questions?” Erinya asked.

“Will it understand me?” Sylvie asked. Her hands were shaking. Her voice wasn’t, but it took effort. Years dealing with the Magicus Mundi, and she suddenly realized she’d only just scratched the surface.

The mermaid thrashed, spat out curses in a dozen human languages, with a tongue as pale as a drowned man. “Do I understand? The water carries all words to our hearing. We know more about your world than you do.”

Faced with that promise of understanding, Sylvie fumbled for words. She was under no illusions that the mermaid would talk, even if it could, but she had to try. Had to ask.

“Why attack the ISI?”

“They overreach,” it said. It seemed to have no qualms with confessing. “They think to control what cannot be leashed.”

“And in Chicago? That wasn’t you in Chicago. Or in Savannah. You’re working with the others?”

The mermaid twisted, left wide swaths of its dull scales on the cement; its breathing seemed labored. The water was mostly gone.

“We are ourselves. We don’t mingle.”

“So, not working with. Working for—” Sylvie said.

The mermaid gusted cold air over her feet—contempt.

“You killed my people!” Riordan said. “Why? Tell me, or I’ll see you hung out to dry.”

A for attitude, Sylvie thought. D for common sense. He was too close to that tail, and it slapped him off his feet, back on his ass.

Light flashed.

“We do what needs to be done,” the mermaid said. “Do not think that capturing this one makes a difference. We are the water. And water is everywhere.”

“And you chose to attack now. At the same time as the other attacks. You want me to believe that’s coincidence?”

“We do not mingle.”

If it were possible for something without a human face to sneer, the mermaid was doing it. Sylvie said, “You came up with the idea all on your lonesome?”

“We do not mingle.”

Erinya snarled; blood spouted out of the creature’s flesh. The mermaid shrieked. Then its gills fluttered madly and stopped.

“I wasn’t done,” Sylvie said.

“I was bored. And it was arrogant,” Erinya said. “It wouldn’t have talked.” Erinya turned the heart, a greenish mass the size of a man’s skull, in her hands, eyed it warily. She licked it with a coiling serpentine tongue. Wrinkled her muzzle in reaction. “Fishy.”

She licked it again, this time with a human tongue, a human face. Trying to decide if she liked it with a different set of taste buds.

More flashing lights.

Lightning? An early-morning storm blowing in on the heels of the mermaids’ false tide?

Sylvie turned.

They had an audience. Not much of one—most of the bystanders were microfocused, trying to figure out what had happened to them. But some were gaping at Sylvie. At Erinya, sitting atop a dead mermaid, licking her talons clean of heart’s blood.

“Is that … Is that a shark?” a man asked.

“Does it look like a shark?” Sylvie snapped.

He edged closer, drawn to the strange. “Oh my God. It’s a monster.” He looked up; Erinya smiled, bright and bloody, and he fell back, gaping.

“Riordan!” Sylvie snapped. “Your crowd, I think?”

Sylvie ducked another camera flash, the growing murmur of oh, my God, a thing … in the canals, who caught it, monsters! Blown up by the storm, wasn’t that a freak storm? No, the things made the storm. The other monster stopped it.

Riordan rose shakily to his feet; his clothes were torn where the mermaid’s tail had slapped him. But he was wearing a suit, and people were turning to him for an explanation.

Her problem was figuring out what the hell was going on, and she was no closer now than she had been.

Worse, actually.

Now she understood how little of the Magicus Mundi she really knew. If it hadn’t been for Erinya, she’d be dead.

Sylvie looked back. Erinya had gotten tired of preening over her kill and vanished. Her presence lingered. The sidewalks bloomed with jungle flowers; her beastly footprints smoked in the wet asphalt. A child pointed them out to her mother, talking a mile a minute.

Sylvie wondered abruptly what Erinya had done with the child she saved from drowning.

Things were changing and changing fast. Sylvie, sore, soaked, cold to the bone, wasn’t sure she could keep up.

She was going to need help. Erinya, unreliable, unpredictable, callously single-minded, might be the best she could get.