“It’s me,” Sylvie said the moment she heard his breath.
Demalion huffed quietly, something approximating wry amusement. “Fun. All the guilt of cheating, and she’s not even my wife. But you’re okay? You sound postcase.”
“Bad guys vanquished,” Sylvie said. Her throat was tight.
“Casualties?”
She closed her eyes. “Yeah.”
“Not your pet necromancer,” Demalion said. “Alex has a crush.”
“No, thankfully. They’re off courting over bacon. But the intrepid mini-me didn’t make it.”
“You liked her.”
“Yeah. She was smart and brave when it counted. Anyway, that’s not why I called. You’re safe from the Furies. Or at least, reasonably safe.”
Another betraying breath. A mingled intake of relief and shock. When had she learned his language so well that she could read his mood over the phone? “How’d you swing that?”
“Erinya called off her hunt, and the other two think you’re still dead.”
“That must have cost you.” He was hedging his gladness, refusing to give in to it just yet.
“Nothing I wanted to keep,” Sylvie said. “Hey. You still planning on rejoining the ISI?”
“If I can get an entry point, yeah. Why?” His relief was short-lived, giving way to wariness. She pressed the phone closer to her cheek and smiled. Probably wrong, but she liked Demalion suspicious. Kept her on her toes.
“I need eyes on the inside,” she said. “They’ve stepped up their interest in me.”
Demalion said, “Stepped up how? More surveillance? Phone tapping—” He faltered. “Do you think they’re listening now?”
“I’m on Etienne’s phone,” Sylvie said. “And more like tear gas and sudden detention.”
He swore, something angry, quiet, and hissed. “You all right?”
“Not going to mark tear gas as one of my top experiences, but I think I came out of there in better shape than they did.” She hunched over the phone, tried to sound tough. Her hands shook. She hadn’t been afraid then, too caught up in worry about Azpiazu and Tepeyollotl. Now she had the time.
“You want me to fly down?”
“If you’re going to rejoin the ISI, better have as little contact with me as possible. It’s going to be iffy enough when they research Wright and realize he . . . you were a client. Luckily, I never cashed his check. He . . . you can be dissatisfied with my services.”
“Ah,” Demalion said on a sigh. “The good old days. Careful backstories. Disposable cell phones. Coded calls. Secret rendezvous in strange cities. Sounds like fun.”
“Spy junkie,” Sylvie said, and knew he could hear her smile across the distance. She heard Alex and Wales returning, Alex chattering lightly and Wales’s slower drawl interrupting. Near-death experiences, or perhaps Eros’s recent presence in Alex’s life, seemed to whisk away his shyness.
They walked toward her, shoulders bumping companionably, and Sylvie sighed. Chicago was a long way away.
“I have to go,” she said. “Hey, D? Be careful. I don’t trust the ISI.”
“I’m the careful one, remember?”
“Seriously,” she said. “Watch yourself.”
“Always,” he said.
She folded the phone closed as Alex approached, bag in hand. Alex said, “We’re going elsewhere to eat. The office is a health hazard. My apartment?”
Sylvie felt her smile falter. “Actually, I have something I need to do.”
“Something risky?” Alex said.
“No,” Sylvie said. It was even the truth, though it didn’t feel that way. Alex studied her, turned, and handed the bag of food to Wales.
“I’m going with her. I’ll catch you later, all right?”
“I’ll wait,” he said.
Sylvie said, “You don’t need to come, Alex.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to.”
“Fine,” Sylvie said. Arguing with Alex was a fool’s game; she preferred to save the fights for when she really cared about the results.
Her truck, when she opened it, was scaldingly hot, a lion’s breath of sun-baked metal, and her entire body flushed. Alex swore as she clambered into the passenger seat. Sylvie cranked the windows down, blasted the air, and headed off. Her hair snarled and tangled in the breeze, and Alex’s attempts at conversation—at prying—were lost to the roar of the engine and the buffet of wind.
Alex subsided, made herself comfortable in the seat, and rubbed briefly at the god mark on her cheek. Sylvie wondered suddenly if that touch of Eros had anything to do with Alex’s ability to make people listen to her. To make people like her. Alex had always been amiable and clever, but . . . when had Sylvie started confiding in her to such an extent?
Sylvie shook her head, shook the suspicion off, well aware that she was dwelling on other things than the source of her discomfort.
She turned the radio to local news, listened to a report that occupied her mind quite nicely. Apparently, prison had lost nearly a hundred convicts to sudden death this morning. They just dropped where they stood, their hearts rupturing.
Another report said the police were taking calls about other sudden deaths in the city, trying to map if there was any single cause. They were dancing around the idea of some new type of gas. Sylvie had a good idea that it was something other than that. Especially when the information started trickling in that the prisoners had all been in jail for child-related offenses.
Erinya didn’t need to make personal stops any longer.
If she hadn’t been dealing with morning traffic, Sylvie might have closed her eyes, shut out the looming sense of responsibility she felt. She’d wondered what kind of god Erinya was going to be; now she was finding out. Violent, deadly, but still sticking to the guidelines the god of Justice had set her.
Alex shifted in her seat. “Weird, you think?”
“Hopefully controlled weird,” Sylvie said, let the conversation lapse again. She shoved a CD into the deck, cranked the volume.
When she stopped the truck, the air was cooler outside than it had been at the beach. Early hours still, and the tree shade kept the neighborhood dim and silent.
“Where are we?” Alex asked.
“Cachita’s house,” Sylvie said. “I want to pack it up, put her files in order.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Why?”
Sylvie shrugged. “Respect? She was—”
“I’m you,” Cachita had said.
“No, you weren’t,” Sylvie murmured. “That was the problem.”
“Sylvie?”
Sylvie got out of the truck, ignoring Alex’s query, headed for the door. The house was as overgrown as before, but the cats were gone, and they’d taken all vestiges of life with them.
Sylvie jimmied the lock, let them in. Less than twenty-four hours, and it felt like the house had been empty forever. Alex looked at the papers stapled all over the living-room walls, the detailed reports, the sheer amount of information she’d gathered. “She did this?”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Once a research student, always a research student, I guess. You see any boxes?”
“Paper bags,” Alex said, finding a stack of them. She opened the first one, started layering file folders in. Sylvie flipped open Cachita’s computer and a password prompt greeted her.
Tepeyollotl, she typed. The password was accepted. Sylvie wasn’t surprised. Tepeyollotl had been the biggest event in Cachita’s life as well as her biggest secret.
There was a journal. Sylvie opened it, then shut it down before her eyes could take in any of the words. Not hers to read.
“So, you going to tell me what’s got you so shaken?” Alex said.
“Dead friend not enough? Tepeyollotl obliterated her.”
“Don’t try that,” Alex said. “You didn’t know her. You might have liked her, but she wasn’t your friend. Don’t use her death to stave me off. It’s disrespectful.”
“Ouch,” Sylvie said.
Alex shifted a shoulder but didn’t back down. Just waited.
“The ISI thinks I’m a monster,” Sylvie said. “They’ve lumped me in with sorcerers and the like.”
“Yeah, you said.”
Sylvie swallowed. “That’s not the confession part. This is. I’m not sure they’re wrong, Alex. I’m not sure I’m human standard any longer. The new Lilith.”
“I hate to break it to you, Syl, but a little voice in your head makes you crazy, not inhuman.”
“Thanks,” Sylvie said. “I wasn’t talking about that. The voice is actually calming down. Being helpful. I’m talking about Azpiazu sucking up a god’s power. He was able to contain it.”
“He was immortal. Barely human at all.”
“I was able to contain it. Hell, I was able to use it. For one moment, Alex. For one moment, I was teetering on being a god.” The words were ragged in her throat, hard to say, hard to admit. That lingering repulsion still echoed in her bones.
Alex said nothing at all, only licked her lips and sat down on the windowsill, peeling old stucco away with shaking fingers.
“I should have burned to ash,” Sylvie said. “And the pins should have done more damage. And Odalys . . . The ghost she sicced on me couldn’t devour my soul.”
“So, you’re saying you think that you could maybe be . . .” Eventually Alex ran out of qualifiers and came at it from a new angle. “Lilith was immortal.”
“She was,” Sylvie said.
“And you?”
Sylvie shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in her skin, edgy, as if it had changed sometime ago, and she was only now noticing. “I don’t know. But I’d better find out what being the new Lilith means before the ISI does.”
Alex leaned her head back against the paper-covered glass. “Okay, I’m rethinking the running plan.”
“No,” Sylvie said. “You were right. Running only encourages things to chase you. I’ve fought gods, Alex. I’m not scared of the ISI.”
“No,” Alex said. “You’re scared of yourself.”
“Maybe,” Sylvie admitted. “But think about it this way. If I scare myself, imagine what I do to the ISI. If they’re foolish enough to want a fight, I’ll give it to them.”
Ace Books by Lyn Benedict
SINS & SHADOWS
GHOSTS & ECHOES
GODS & MONSTERS
Lyn Benedict, Gods & Monsters
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