Lies & Omens

6 Government Business

SYLVIE WAS EATING AN EARLY DINNER, HIDING OUT IN A PART OF town she didn’t normally visit, waiting. Waiting for Suarez to see if her name had hit the system, if she could go home without getting dragged into the station by the police. Waiting for a call back from Alex to assure her that Zoe was home and bitchy and resting up from her jet lag.

Instead, she got Alex calling to say, “Sylvie. She’s not here.”

Sylvie flipped her watch—an hour past the time Zoe had said. “Delayed?”

“No,” Alex said. “Her flight arrived on time. But I can’t find her. I tried calling, but her cell’s off.”

Sylvie pushed her plate away, the sushi suddenly repulsive. Her heart beat unpleasantly. “Okay. This is what we’re going to do. You’re at the airport? Check to see if her luggage made it, and if it’s still there.”

“You think she had checked baggage?”

“It’s Zoe. Of course she had checked baggage. Probably the maximum allowed.” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to remember. “I think it’s dark green. Hard-sided. A matching set.”

“Okay, what else?”

Sylvie sipped her tea, mostly lukewarm, set it back down. The cup chattered against the cherrywood tabletop. “You have your laptop?” She didn’t wait for Alex’s response, knew it would be a yes. “Dig up, oh… that smuggling case we had. Victor Arana. He owes us one. and he works at the airlines. Call him. See if Zoe ever got on the flight. If she’s missing, we need to know which end it happened on.”

Sylvie waved off the hovering waitress, trying to think of all the angles. NYC or Miami. Or god … Sylvie closed her eyes. The last time her family had been threatened, it had been Dunne doing the threatening. He wanted Erinya gone, and she hadn’t agreed. He could have snatched Zoe from the plane anytime he wanted, midflight.

“All right,” Alex said.

“Be careful. Keep me informed.” A shadow crossed her table; she turned, and though it felt like turning away from her sister’s plight, she disconnected. Suarez eased himself into the chair opposite her, rested scarred forearms on the table. The waitress brought him a menu, but he handed it back without looking at it, requesting coffee.

“So there’s nothing on the line about you,” Suarez said, his voice a deep, disapproving rumble. “Should there be? If I go through police logs, am I going to find something inexplicable with your name attached to it?”

“Not mine,” Sylvie said. “My client’s. She’s got some anger-management issues at the moment. With reason.”

“Yeah?”

Sylvie reached out, touched the scars on his arm, looked up at the scar winding over his face. “When you were in the hospital, I said you wouldn’t turn into a monster after being attacked by a magical were-creature, told you shape-shifting via curse was rare.”

“You did,” he said.

“She wasn’t as lucky as you. Azpiazu’s curse shifted to her.”

Suarez sat back, eyed her with a cop’s ingrained suspicion. “You’re volunteering information, Shadows. Why?”

“Because the way she’s going, she might end up in your cells. You call me if that happens. It’s not safe to keep her there. Not for your men. Or for her. Lupe Fernandez. You’ll know her if you see her.”

“Understood,” he said.

Sylvie rose, and Suarez reached out with that quickness he had, so surprising in such a solid man. “Not so fast. Since you’re in a sharing mood. I have two questions for you. There’s some sort of monster killing people in Miami. You know what’s doing it?”

“Depends,” Sylvie said. “There are a lot of monsters in Miami.”

He narrowed his gaze, losing patience. “Are you encouraging it?”

“Tell me about the people who’ve died.”

“A woman, only this morning, fleeing down the street, swore that a monster tore her mother’s head off and devoured her newborn baby. They sent her for a psychiatric evaluation. Last week, six men died, heads pulverized; witnesses claimed they saw something like an enormous cat. With feathers. Later, they recanted. Remembered nothing at all. What’s happening? Tell me.”

Sylvie debated pros and cons for a moment, then decided, hell with it. Suarez knew about the Magicus Mundi, and she didn’t have time to play keep-away games. Truth, it was. The whole truth.

“We’ve got two separate problems, and neither is going to make you happy. The monster is the easy part. She’s a Fury, and she’s avenging dead or abused children.”

“Enojada?” He sounded perplexed, and Sylvie remembered English was his second language. He was so fluent that she forgot. Not only that, but his curriculum would have been different. She wondered if they taught the Greek myths to children in Cuba, wondered belatedly why they taught Greek myths to American children anyway.

“One of the Eumenides,” Sylvie said. “A Greek mythical monster, only less myth, more monster. A lonely creature, who’s doing what we all do. Losing herself in work. Just, her work is full of dead people.”

“Can I stop her from doing it? What do I need? SWAT team? Spell?”

“You can’t stop her,” Sylvie said. “The best you can do is take heart in the fact that she has very specific parameters for her kills. And that, so far, she has some sense of collateral-damage control.”

Suarez growled. “A murderer who kills undesirables is still a murderer.”

“Suarez, please,” Sylvie said. “I don’t have time to fight her now. I’ve got a client in bad shape, I’ve got the ISI bringing serious trouble to the city, and I’ve got a missing sister.”

“Again?” Suarez said. “Leash that girl. She’s trouble.”

“She might be in trouble.”

“Don’t count on me to rescue her. We’re short-staffed. Fifteen of our officers had to rush to the hospital today because their parents had had strokes or heart attacks while watching the morning news. When they did call in, they said the ERs were overwhelmed. I might not have your inside knowledge, but something seems wrong about that.”

“I don’t suppose mermaids mean anything to you?”

Suarez winced, pinched the high bridge of his nose, and Sylvie said, “That’s what I thought. That, right there, is our second problem. Someone’s playing cleanup with our brains. Well, your brains. Making you forget anything you were exposed to that was blatantly mundi. You didn’t take any of those monster calls yourself, right?”

“That’s right,” he said. “People told me about them.”

“I bet if you talk to the woman sent for the psych evaluation about her mother and the monster now, she’ll remember something different. Will get a headache if you press. Might even stroke out, depending on her overall health. I bet your men won’t be much different.”

Suarez dropped his hand, stared at it in horror. “They made me forget something? Like Garza did when you helped him?”

“You remember that, though,” Sylvie said. “That I dealt with Garza in the Keys?”

“Maudits, you said.”

“I did.” This was part of what was making her crazy. The results of the memory wiping seemed so scattershot. Secondhand info relayed to someone who hadn’t been a part of the original scene stayed just fine. Sylvie wondered what would have happened if Garza had written up truthful reports. Would they have altered like the video feeds? Would all the cops who read the report have their minds altered, like the TV viewers?

Sylvie thought the answer was probably yes.

“Who’s doing it?” Suarez said. “And why?”

“Witches,” Sylvie said. Witches were the most likely suspects. Anything more powerful—like a god—would be doing a better job. Anything less powerful than a full coven of witches, and the memory plague wouldn’t be so widespread. The Mundi, as Sylvie had noted before, didn’t cooperate with each other, and that ruled them out.

“Brujas?” Suarez seemed skeptical, which Sylvie thought was unfair of him. Azpiazu had nearly ripped Miami apart, which Suarez knew, and he’d started off as a witch.

“A whole coven of witches. More specifically than that, I can’t tell you. Why? I don’t know. I’m not sure who’s benefiting. Whether it’s ‘to protect society’ bullshit, or whether they’re protecting the Mundi from discovery.”

“Nothing good comes from secret workings,” Suarez said. “Those who hold power should be transparent in their use of it.”

“Don’t have to sell me on that,” Sylvie said.

“So, how will you identify this coven if you don’t know its motive?”

Sylvie’s phone buzzed. “Hold that thought.”

“She got to Miami,” Alex said. Her voice was thin and tight. Worried. “Victor found a flight attendant who remembered her—tried to carry on too much luggage, threw a bit of a fuss. Zoe is kind of a pain, but I guess, in this situation, it’s a good thing.”

“Alex,” Sylvie snapped. “You’re stalling. Where is she?”

“Four men in fancy suits and guns snagged her as she stepped out of the gate. Gate attendant noticed because Zoe dropped her carry-on, and they didn’t bother to pick it up. Said the suits had to be official since they were armed within the terminal.”

“ISI,” Sylvie said.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“But they’re dead. The flood destroyed their base. How in hell do they have time to hunt down Zoe?”

Suarez leaned in, shamelessly eavesdropping. Sylvie didn’t care; she was recalculating. The mermaids had killed the ISI agents who were there. But, like Yvette, maybe others had been out of the office.

“… want me to see if I can get video feed?”

“No,” Sylvie said. She was slow, so slow. How had she forgotten? When the ISI had tear-gassed her office and kidnapped her, she had woken up in a different facility than the downtown hotel. “I’m going straight to Dominick Riordan. If the ISI is grabbing my sister, he’s got to be alive.”

IT WAS LONG PAST FULL DARK BY THE TIME SYLVIE MANAGED TO retrace her path from the frantic night three months prior. Then, she’d been concentrating more on getting away and stopping Azpiazu, the Soul-Devourer, than on figuring out where she’d been held.

By starting at Vizcaya, still being repaired from the showdown with Azpiazu, and working her way back, she thought she was on the right track. It had been on a frontage road near the airport, but it hadn’t been one of the dozens of warehouses that sprouted in that area; it had been a business-office type of building, with at least two floors.

She slowed her already crawling pace, and the driver behind her honked and cut around her. Sylvie peered into the dark, trying to focus, trying to remember. There had been a parking garage full of matching SUVs. White-painted concrete already going green. A shadow in her memory smelling like mold—everything underground in Miami smelled like mold.

Up ahead, a sign flashed in her headlights, a time-faded declaration that Miami’s Best Bank would be opening soon. A bank she’d never heard of. Opening never, Sylvie thought. Not if it was a front for the ISI.

She jerked the wheel, garnered another series of traffic complaints, and crossed a narrow bridge over a watery ditch with pretensions to canalhood.

Sylvie bumped over the rough pavement, remembered that jarring sensation from her previous visit, and turned again sharply, picking a darker space out of an unlit lot that turned into a parking garage. One level down, lights bloomed distantly, showed a shiny row of dark SUVs and water glistening in thin trails down the walls. It made Sylvie think about mermaids.

Her nerves coiled and twisted. God, she wished Demalion had picked up a phone, wished he’d given her some way to contact him. She was used to going it alone, but right now, she wanted backup, and he was her first choice. Now and always.

Erinya could be called, but Erinya came with her own problems. If Zoe was in the ISI building, then Erinya was the last thing she needed. Zoe wouldn’t thank Sylvie for causing all her witchy powers to be burned away.

Sylvie backed into a parking slot, put the truck in park, and stared into the depths of garage and the discreet elevator. She didn’t see any surveillance cameras, but she didn’t doubt they were there. The ISI liked to watch.

She wondered, if things went wrong—if she disappeared into their holding cells instead of pulling Zoe out of them—if Alex would call up the video feed to be witness to it. Wondered how many agents were left. Riordan to give the orders. Four to pick up Zoe.

Don’t forget Demalion.

An uneasy squirm of unpleasant emotion crawled through her at that thought, made her jaw clench and her heart sink—unhappiness? betrayal? worry? Rather than dwell on it, she climbed out of her truck and went to face the music.

It sounded sooner than she’d expected. She rounded her truck’s scarred nose and found Dominick Riordan holding the elevator open for her, spotlighted in the otherwise-dimly-lit garage. A faint smile crossed his patrician face, showing a sliver of polished teeth. “Well, it’s about time. I was beginning to think we were going to have to send up flares.”

His voice was lovely, mellow and deep. It worked like nails on a chalkboard for Sylvie.

“I have an office, with office hours,” Sylvie said. “I know you know where it is. You gassed it, robbed it, and wrecked it just three months ago. If you wanted to talk, you knew where to find me.”

Riordan said, “Your office also has a guard dog of a particular ferociousness, and I’m down men already. Did you bring her with you?”

“Does it look like I brought anyone in with me? Do you see her sitting in my truck? Or launching herself at your throat?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. Which is odd to me, Shadows. Here you have this powerful attack dog, and you’re not using her.” He smiled again, a fuller thing that made his eyes bright with pleasure. Made him look like a nice guy. “Which makes me think you can’t use her.”

“Or maybe I don’t need her for the likes of you. Seems to me your lot is folding all on your own. Mermaids, Riordan? Sand wraiths? Succubi? I don’t need to call on Erinya. You’re fucked.”

Riordan’s lips flattened, but he wasn’t goaded into temper. That was the problem with him, Sylvie thought. He was always so measured. So damn rational. Usually people shot off their mouths around her, goaded into it by her rudeness, by the desire to prove her wrong. Riordan just observed, calculated, then struck.

“Tone down your glee,” Riordan said. “You have hostages to fate here, or did you forget who brought you to my door?”

Sylvie swallowed back her retort, caught by the plural. Hostages. She hadn’t expected a plural. Zoe, yes. Who else?

Riordan said, “Your sister’s actually been helpful, though I doubt that was her intention. She saw a certain agent in the halls and hailed him by a dead man’s name. Pled with him for help that he’s now in no position to give. Come along, Shadows. Let’s talk.”

He stepped back from the entry of the elevator, gestured her in. Sylvie saw no option but to follow his lead.

RIORDAN WASN’T ALONE IN THE ELEVATOR. AS SHE STEPPED IN, THE agent holding the door open released the button and turned his attention to her. “Hand over your weapon,” he said.

“Think you can make me?” Sylvie asked.

He took a step toward her, and she took that same step closer to Riordan, a quick two-step made awkward by the close confines of the elevator. Riordan pressed his code into the keypad, selected the top floor.

“Relax, Powell. Shadows can keep her weapon. She knows to be mindful of what she does with it.”

“I do?” Sylvie said, as the elevator glided into motion, ticking upward. Too much to hope for that Zoe would be at the top. More likely, she was in one of the holding cells, and Sylvie recalled the chill damp of them, thought they must be pressed up against the parking-garage wall. The elevator was taking her farther away.

Riordan said, “You’re much less impulsive than your reputation states. You control yourself well enough that your crimes have raised suspicion but nothing approximating proof. Shoot an ISI agent, and you’ll be in jail.”

“For as long as Erinya left me there. She doesn’t like me in distress. You should have seen her with the mermaids.”

“I am honestly sorry to have missed it,” Riordan said.

“Wait,” Sylvie said. “You know about the mermaids?”

“My son told me about them.”

“He remembers them?” Sylvie thought back. The other witnesses didn’t. But then, he’d fought off their song also. “That’s right. He’s a witch.”

“Of course he’s not,” Riordan said. Faint distaste drew his mouth down.

Before Sylvie could delve deeper, the elevator motor traded its whisper for a sudden whine and grind of machinery. The lights snapped off, plunging them into darkness.

Sylvie dodged Powell’s inevitable lunge, put her elbow into his ribs, put her gun to his throat, and pushed him back. He went.

“Shoot her, boss, don’t worry about me,” Powell said, voice strained.

Riordan sighed. “No one’s shooting anyone. Shadows, you doing this?”

“Trapped in an elevator doesn’t get me closer to Zoe.”

“Boss,” Powell said.

“Shut up, Powell. Listen. We have bigger problems than an unexpected stop.”

Through the muffling thickness of the elevator doors and shaft, Sylvie heard rapid cracks of gunfire and shouts made distant by architecture. A battle being fought.

“Shadows, let go of my man and let’s get this door opened.”

“How about instead of just plain out, we go up and out,” Sylvie said. “Just in case someone’s aiming those guns at the elevator door. Your doors might be bulletproof, I’m not.”

“My men are in trouble. I don’t want to waste time clambering up a shaft. We’re going through the doors,” Riordan said.

Even under stress, he sounded calm, in control. Sylvie envied him. She hadn’t felt in control for days. She released Powell. The big man shoved past her to help Riordan pry open the doors. Sylvie leaned against the back wall and tried to stay out of their way.

The air in the elevator, against the laws of probability, was cooling instead of growing stuffier with three people’s trapped breath and bodily exertion. She fumbled through her pockets, hunting for the tiny penlight she kept on her keychain. She pressed the button down, illuminating the small space before her. Something darkly vaporous jerked back from the light, streamed up into the elevator vent. It looked like smoke, but moved like ink in water, spreading and seeking.

“What was that?” Powell asked, jerking around in the shift of light and shadow. His eyes were wild. Riordan, Sylvie noticed, was unruffled.

“Your saboteur,” Sylvie said. “I don’t think it’s human. I think it’s come to finish the job the mermaids started.”

“Powell, the doors.” Riordan eyed Sylvie in the eerie greenish glow of the penlight, and said, “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said.

“Don’t shoot my men. Shoot everything else,” Riordan said.

Powell and he made progress; the elevator doors grumbled but slid apart. “Go,” he told Sylvie.

Sylvie studied the gap. Definitely wide enough, split by two levels, leaving her with a choice—to enter the upper floor crawling, her gun hand hampered, or to drop an unknown distance into a darkness deep enough that her little penlight couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Neither idea appealed, but she chose to drop. Zoe, after all, was beneath them somewhere.

She passed Riordan the useless light.

She braced herself in the width of the space, heard voluptuous movement in the darkness, like velvet rolling over stone, and tightened her grip on her gun. One last breath, and she dropped.

The floor was farther down than she’d hoped—one of those office buildings that prided itself on high ceilings—and forced a grunt out of her. Her free hand felt damp marble; she smelled fear sweat and blood and bile, and it was cold enough she thought her breath must be clouding the air before her. It made no sense. It was Miami, for God’s sake, and the power was out. The rooms should be gaining heat, not losing it.

It was the cold of morgues, of underground mausoleums, dank like an abandoned animal’s lair. Empty of everything but death.

Sylvie’s fingers were sticky, clammy with old blood; she brushed them against her sleeves, felt the contaminant liquefy and seep into the fabric, chilling her. She was the only breathing thing she could hear, her heart a desperate drum looking for an echo. Death rolled over her like a shroud.

She was alone, and everyone else was dead and gone—rotting—and she was alone. Her breath seized.

Riordan dropped to the ground beside her, said, “When you enter a hostile room, clear the area and get out of the way, dammit, do you know nothing?” It was like a wave breaking. An external influence breaking. Her ears popped; the sound of the world returned in a roar of gunfire and Riordan muttering about untrained lone wolves with delusions of competence.

Even her skin felt dry and warm again, the cold blood only an illusion of some kind. She should have known better.

“Powell, get down here,” Riordan said.

Harsh panting was the only answer, and Sylvie turned. Riordan flashed the penlight once, briefly, and Powell jerked. His eyes had iced over, gone cataract white, faintly luminescent in the blackness. He pointed his gun at them, and said, “You’re trying to kill me! It’s a trap, and you want to grind me up in it!”

Sylvie darted away from the elevator doors, running blind in the darkness, away from Powell’s shooting after them. She heard Riordan keeping pace, a rhythm of footsteps and breath beside her. He veered suddenly, tackled her to the floor.

She punched him. He reeled, and said, “There’s a staircase, Shadows. You were heading straight for it. Say thank you.”

“You deserved it anyway,” Sylvie growled. “My sister’s somewhere in this nightmare, isn’t she?”

“She should be safe,” Riordan said. “Locked up nice and tight. Do you know what we’re dealing with?”

“Something that’s radiating influence. I think your men are killing each other, losing it like Powell did.”

“Like you did?” Riordan said.

Sylvie swallowed, said, “How better to know what’s going on than to let it affect me for a moment?” Sounded good. She wished it were true. “What about you. You going to start shooting at me?”

Her eyes were finally adjusting to the darkness. She couldn’t see anything much, but she got the sense of shapes, the slightly paler black where the walls were, the endless black gap where the stairs were, the moving darkness where Riordan shifted to a crouch. If she read the space right, they were on a balcony overlooking the lobby below. Stairs ahead. Offices to her left. A glass barrier between her and a long fall. Echoes of gunfire bounced off the ceiling and made it hard to tell if fights were going on above and below or just echoing upward. A sudden draft, a rush of displaced air suggested a body falling from above. The gruesome thud and crunch of that same body hitting the floors below suggested that both directions were treacherous.

Riordan swore quietly, said, “If I shoot you, Shadows, you can be sure I’ll be doing it of my own will. Not someone else’s.”

“You’re immune?”

“I’ve never been one for feeling fear. What are we facing, Shadows?”

“Headaches and a good possibility of bullet holes? I don’t know. I didn’t know in the elevator, and I don’t know now. I can make some guesses. It’s a monster. It’s not happy.”

“Can you kill it?”

Sylvie shivered. Her little dark voice whispered. We can kill anything. “First I have to find it.” That wouldn’t be hard, really. The monster would be ground zero, the only calm place in the midst of chaos, spreading its influence—those inky tendrils—wider and wider. “It’d be easier if there were lights. I thought you agency types were big on emergency power supplies.”

“We are,” Riordan said. “But our generators are inside the building. Vulnerable to bullets, or men under the influence.”

“Okay. Two questions. How many men do you have left?”

“None of your business.”

“If I have to fight my way through them, it is. I’m not bulletproof.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It bears repeating.” It was comforting in a panic-inducing sort of way. She might be immortal, but she was still human.

“More men than you’d like,” Riordan said. “We were transitioning from the hotel to this building after the earlier attacks on the other ISI branches, trying to minimize civilian risk.”

“Good job, then,” Sylvie said. “Too little, too late.”

“This is hardly the time to assign blame,” Riordan said. “Would you prefer to argue or survive?”

Sylvie hated to admit it, but he was right. “Fine. Second question. Flashlights?”

He passed her back the penlight, and she said, “That’s not gonna cut it. I need to see what I’m walking into.”

“Demanding,” he said. “Wait here.”

“Get two if you can.”

He shifted around her, made her realize that their drop-and-hide spot was more sheltered than she’d thought—she reached back, felt a jut in the wall. An alcove looking over the lobby. If this were a real office building, it would probably have held a water fountain.

She had time to think. Time to kill. She laughed, soundlessly, a little closer to hysteria than she’d admit. Hunting monsters in the dark to save her sister, and God, Demalion—where was he in all this? Locked up tight with Zoe? Safe? Or roaming the halls, shooting at everything he could. If Demalion was out there, prone to the same panic that Powell had fallen prey to, he’d be lethal. Paranoia plus psychic abilities? Ugly.

She wished she knew what she was dealing with. It wasn’t a succubus. Wasn’t anything attached to elements: no sand wraiths, no mermaids, no fiery salamanders, and, despite the smoky tentacles in the air, she didn’t think it was any type of air elemental.

It wasn’t a succubus, but it was something that worked on a similar principle. Used the body to overwhelm the brain. Whatever this was spread panic and paranoia as easily as a succubus spread lust and hunger.

Movement near her, and she turned, a “Took your time” on her lips. It wasn’t Riordan. She caught the faint glimmer of eyes with an icy shine and held her breath. The tainted agent went past, limping, his breath wheezing and whispering out insanity. Not my teeth. Can’t take them. Not for you. Kill you first.

Sylvie wiped her face. This was all a little too zombie apocalypse for her. She wondered if Zoe was terrified, pissed, or trying to work magic. She wondered if Zoe was still alive.

Riordan returned, passed her a flashlight, kept his hand over the switch, and said, “Don’t turn it on yet.”

“Not stupid,” Sylvie murmured. “You get one for yourself?”

“I did.”

“Good. While I’m hunting monsters? You’re going to fix the damn generator.”