“Nothing of death magic happened here,” Wales said. “At least, nothing powerful enough to linger. And you said five dead women? That should have lingered.” He raised the can to his lips, lowered it without taking a drink. “You sure they were dead?”
“They were underwater,” she said, but she was thinking of different angles. “They weren’t breathing, weren’t moving.”
“Did you try to revive—”
“Wales, I took a look and got the hell gone.”
He gnawed his lower lip, knelt among the charred rubble that had been a police ’copter. He tilted his head as if he were listening.
“They weren’t dead,” he said.
Something slow and miserable churned in her belly, a flutter of guilt and professional embarrassment. She hadn’t even checked. She’d just seen the surface of things. And she knew better than to take things at face value.
“They weren’t dead,” he said again, and if she hadn’t known better, she’d have assumed he was rubbing salt in the wound. But it was an echo in his voice, patiently repeating something he heard. Something a ghost was sharing.
He stood, staggered a little, and said, “Okay. The burned woman is the only one of the five women who is actually dead. Jennifer Costas.”
“Could I have—”
He shook his head. “No. Jennifer burnt up because the spell binding them broke. It feels like a contingency plan of some sort. A magical if-then command. The others?”
“Fled,” Sylvie said. “According to my witness, they got up and walked away.”
“But Jennifer was restrained,” Wales said, turning as if he could see the helicopter that her body had been strapped into. “Trapped.”
“She was the only one who burned,” Sylvie said. “If the spell broke—”
“She was the only one who couldn’t get free,” Wales said. He paced back and forth, raising clouds of soot, stumbling over metal fragments, making his mark on the scene. There would be no pretending that they hadn’t been there. “She tried. Twisting. Tangled. Hot like spell fire in her veins. It’s strange magic, Sylvie. I don’t get it, and she only knows what she felt.”
“Necromancy?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s death in it. Sacrificial death of some kind, but old.” A shudder ran through his body. His eyes unfocused, listening. “She’s so afraid. She’s dead, and she’s still afraid it could get worse. She’s . . . It’s all . . . hunger and torn hearts and fear in her mind.” His voice gave out, going thready, then silent.
Sylvie waited. He was motionless, as if listening to the dead allowed him to take on some of their deathly calm. A moment passed, with his tight breathing and the distant slurp of moving water the only sounds.
He shook it off all at once, body moving from ghost languor to his more normal hunched shoulders and twitchy nerves. “It’s . . . necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft and . . . it’s a tangle of magics. It’s layered, and it’s really ugly.”
“So the other four women are . . . what? In some type of magical suspended animation?”
“They were,” he said. “Until Jennifer was pulled from the water.”
“Lio said the other women changed shape.”
“See!” Wales gesticulated broadly, pointing at nothing but his own aggravation and confusion. “That doesn’t fit either. Shape-shifting’s not necromancy; it’s closer to biology.”
“And you said you didn’t know anything about shape-shifters,” Sylvie said.
“So I hear things. So what?”
She let that slide. Wales wanted to keep his breadth of knowledge on a need-to-know basis? She could live with that. For now. There were other, more pressing problems. “How would that work?”
He shrugged. “Suspended animation? Hell, maybe it wasn’t magic at all, just more of the government fucking around in our lives, using us as—”
“Wales,” Sylvie snapped. “Take off the tinfoil hat and focus. It wasn’t pure necromancy, fine. I believe you. Can we get out of here now? Let these people recover before a snapping turtle starts nipping off fingers?”
Wales nodded. “Yeah. Good point.”
They backtracked to the ATV trail, Wales sticking to drier ground this time, and once they’d reached a point where the grass would cover their presence, Wales brought out a little packet, tipped it into the stagnant waters. Sylvie watched the water go the color of old bone, swirling white and cream, and said, “Powdered milk?”
“Don’t knock it; it works,” Wales said, and dipped Marco’s flaming Hand. “And a hell of a lot easier to cart around.”
It was one of the things she hated about magic. It made these rules for itself—the purity of milk could put out an evil flame—and then bent or broke them at the user’s will. Grocery-store milk? Powdered milk? Where was the purity in that? But it was working.
Marco faded away. Behind them there was silence, then shouting, as alarmed police found themselves waking, groggy and scared. Sylvie bit her lip as she and Wales moved away. The ISI would understand what had happened even if the police didn’t. Odds were, they’d come looking to her for answers first.
She hadn’t thought this through at all well, had let her eagerness to clear the debt she owed Lio send her rushing out to the scene, and for what? They hadn’t found anything. No monsters. No dead girls. Hell, if Wales was right—her stomach lurched once again.
“They’re alive,” Sylvie said. “Christ. I could have saved them if I’d called a witch instead of the cops yesterday. I freaked out, saw the scene, and thought I didn’t want to be found near it. I fucked up.”
Wales, thankfully, didn’t say anything, a veteran of the kind of second-guessing that paranoia bred. After another moment, Sylvie said, “So, can you help the women? If we find them? Even though it’s not necromancy?”
Bitterness laced her question, made it accusing, blaming the nearest magic-user for the actions of another. Wales blinked, paused in his steps, and she flipped a hand at him in apology.
Just . . . why did it always have to come down to magic? What had happened to the days of point and shoot, and problem solved? At this rate, she was going to have to have a full-time witch around, and Sylvie just didn’t trust them that much. Not Wales. Not Val. Hell, not even Zoe, whose first actions in the Magicus Mundi had been shortsighted at best.
“Magic’s not that different, branch to branch,” Wales said. “Sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. We’re all built of the same thing. We just . . . specialize.”
“Is that a yes?” Sylvie said.
“It’s a maybe. Don’t make me theorize without evidence.”
“Now you sound like a witch,” she said.
He stalked along, squelching, his jeans collecting dust and mud, and finally said, “So, let me guess. A witch told you about magic. Painted witchcraft as team Good. Let me tell you what. It’s all the same at the core. Greedy scavengers stealing power, growing stronger every year they survive, and rearranging the world to suit themselves.”
“Yeah?” Sylvie said. “So why isn’t there a word for a good necromancer? Everything else has a good versus bad. White witch. Mambo. Shaman.”
“Because we don’t need the ego stroke. Deal with death enough, and you’d be surprised how little you care for human approval. I think you’d understand that. Besides, good, bad, benign, malign—it’s all about who’s making the judgment.”
“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “Enslaving the dead’s a magnitude worse than a witch’s glamour.”
“Even if the witch spells someone to fall in love? Erases their self-will? It’s not just the stuff of novels, Shadows. Witches talk a good game, but they use the same magic we do. And let me tell you. Witches do far more damage than your average necromancer. Yeah, we can turn a man into a zombie, keep him as a servant until he falls to pieces, but it’s really not all that useful. They take effort to create, they’re hard to control—too stupid to really get complex ideas across—and they can’t communicate even if they aren’t dumb
as a sack of bricks. Brain death really means something, y’know.
“And in the time that a necromancer does that? Your average witch will have sold, traded, or dealt out enough spells to destroy a dozen men. Witches like their comforts. Or has your friend Cassavetes never used magic to get her point across?”
Sylvie shrugged, wanting to deny it, but she couldn’t. Val was, or had been—before her powers got nuked—all about the little irritants. Sylvie had seen her whisper a confusion spell through the phone when an unlucky solicitor had dialed her one time too many. Val had said the spell was temporary.
Wales said, “I knew a priest once who made awesome zombies. Mixed in a witch’s poppet spell, broke out his own teeth, and bound them into the zombies’ skulls. It was like he had an entire group of servants who responded to his every whim.”
“So, what, that makes it worth the effort?” Sylvie said. “That how you made your new deal with Marco? Tied a bit of yourself into him?”
Wales shuddered. “No. A thousand nos. The priest I mentioned? That witch spell was based on the law of similarity. Like to like. It let him control ’em with minimal effort. Problem was he drew that similarity so tight it went both ways. He started to rot.”
“Gross,” Sylvie said.
“At least he only injured himself,” Wales said. “Your average witch could do that to any man on the street.”
“Careful,” Sylvie said. “You make your point sharp enough, you’ll end up impaled on it.”
When he paused, she said, “I already distrust magic-users. You really want me to have another reason to tar you all with the same brush? Keep comparing yourself to the Maudits and bad cess witches. Give me a reason to go after—”
Sylvie stopped midthreat, shaking it off. Wales wasn’t a witch, but he just might be as clever as Val at getting his own way. Locked in their argument over semantics, they’d headed absently back toward her truck.
She had other ideas.
“The ghost girl,” she said.
“Jennifer,” he said.
She waved off the name. She knew it, but who the girl had been was currently less important than what she was now. “Can you get her to track the other women?”
Wales opened his mouth, caught her expression, and sighed. “Yeah. Probably. If she’s not too afraid.”
“So. Do it.”
Wales scrubbed at his face, at his wayward hair, and said, “Yeah, okay. It’s just weird.”
“You were talking to her before,” Sylvie pointed out.
“In the place she died. That’s like . . . going to interview someone at their home. This is like cuffing them and bringing them down to the station. She’s going to be unhappy.”
Sylvie said, “Talk, talk, talk. Not getting it done.” Briskness was best, the only antidote to Wales’s dwelling on a fear that wasn’t his.
He sank down to a spider-legged crouch; his shadow drew away from him, spraddled long and dark over the grasses and waters. He scraped charcoal from his boot tread, piled the chunky ash and soot into Marco’s turned-up palm, folded himself over the Hand, whispering, his breath stirring the dust and ash. “Marco, bring her here.”
A spur of glacial cold racked Sylvie’s bones for a millisecond, then passed through her, leaving her with a taste of danger in her mouth and a rocketing heart. Wales shrugged uncomfortably. “Marco doesn’t care for you overmuch,” he said.
“He’s not the only one,” Sylvie said. “Just keep him under control.”
The brush of cold came back; this time she sidestepped the majority of it. She was a quick learner if nothing else.
“Is she here?”
Wales ignored her, head cocked slightly, gaze turned inward, lips moving in soundless speech, coaxing, commanding. He shivered, either for being bracketed between ghosts or for fighting off Jennifer Costas’s fear.
“Wales,” Sylvie said. “Her pain. Not yours. Her fear. Not ours.”
Wales nodded, head up, gaze following something invisible to Sylvie. If she squinted hard, concentrated, she thought she saw a shimmer walking ahead of him, something like a blur of smudgy heat. Jennifer Costas.
A coolness in the air—the lurking Marco—got her moving also, thinking wryly that this was the single most gruesome game of hot’n’cold she had ever played, directed by ghosts in the search for bespelled women.
WITH THE GHOSTS GUIDING THEM, THEY CAREFULLY MOVED OFF THE track into the pure wilderness. Sylvie tried to pick her way over the grassiest ridges, tried to stay out of the water. At least she didn’t have to worry about animal life—the ghosts were better than hounds at flushing game. Everything fled before them. Anhingas rose up on dark wings, clacking beaks. Snakes oiled through the grass, left dark wakes on the water like miniature sea serpents.
Only the mosquitoes stayed persistent. She slapped another one from her cheek, drawn there by the bloody symbols Wales had put on her skin. She lifted her shoulder, rubbed at the stickiest spot, and left smears on her clothes.
“Don’t suppose she has a time frame,” Sylvie said. The sun was high and hot, would stay that way for hours yet. Didn’t mean she wanted to spend the entire day in the swamp.
“Look on the bright side,” Wales said. “At least we’re off the radar for Odalys and her crew.”
“Small comfort,” Sylvie said. “Very small.”
Wales grinned, surrounded by ghosts and utterly at ease. Necromancers were just plain different from regular people.
“You just want to shoot something,” he said.
“It is cathartic,” she agreed.
She slipped off the next hummock, splashed down into dark water to her calf. Shaking water out of her shoes, she thought, Yeah, shooting things was better than this.
Between one breath and the next, her irritation fled. Her spine tightened up; her skin went clammy. She wanted to blame Marco for it, a ghostly bump and run, but Wales had gone just as rigid.
She drew her gun, the rasp of it leaving the holster loud in the sudden silence. Wales, beside her, was whispering into the wind, or Marco’s ear, or Jennifer’s, seeking reassurance or explanation.
The question—Is something there?—hovered on her lips, unasked. The answer was evident. The thick heat of the day had gone unwholesome, unhealthy. Sylvie licked her lips and tasted something in the air, something foul and earthy like a poorly skinned hide left out to cure.
Her palm sweated on her gun; she changed hands and wiped the other against her jeans.
Wales said, “We’re close.”
“You think?”
He shot her a pissy look, which she gave back in spades, and he shrugged a single shoulder in reluctant agreement. “To our left. Magic. A lot of it.”
“Necromancy?”
“Not exactly,” Wales said. His face creased in concentration; his eyes closed as if he could get the feel of the area better with one sense cut off. Sylvie, thinking of dead cops and bespelled women, preferred to keep her eyes open, watchful. “It’s not not-necromancy either. I don’t . . . I don’t like it. Marco doesn’t like it. And Jennifer—she’s so scared. I’m letting her go now.”
Jennifer wasn’t the only one scared; Wales’s voice wavered. He tucked his hands into his pockets, tangling Marco’s dead fingers in his own.
Sylvie felt the trembling echo of his fear in her own bones, transmitted like a virus. This, this was why she preferred to work alone. It was hard enough to face the Magicus Mundi on her own; she didn’t need someone to infect her with their fears.
“We could go back,” he said.
“Or hey, we could do the job I brought you here for? Investigate?”
“We don’t even know what we’re walking into,” he said. “I like caution. Caution is good.”
“Caution had me calling the cops last night,” she said. “Caution killed Jennifer Costas and three policemen. Injured a friend of mine. This job doesn’t reward caution.”
She took a steady breath, refusing to choke under the weight of whatever saturated the ai
r. She had resisted aversion charms made by one of the best witches in the state; she could withstand this growing miasma of fear and wrongness. She let her breath out, pushed Wales’s fear out of her bones, and took the first step toward trouble.
The next one was easier.
Wales followed on the fourth step, so tense that she felt his presence like a live wire, something to be wary of, something that could lash out, unexpectedly, in any direction.
“Are we getting closer?”
When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder, irritated that she had to do so—the ground before them was growing marshy again, treacherous.
He nodded stiffly. “Straight on.”
Straight on, like there was even a path. Sylvie soldiered onward, stepped into a deceptive puddle, and found herself suddenly knee deep, a plume of mud swirling through the previously still water.
Wales said, his voice tight and small, “Marco says we’re close.”
“Well, if Marco says so.” She shifted her grip on her gun. Didn’t know if she would need it. So far, the day was quiet. Creepy and fraught with magical tension, but quiet. But then, that was how it had been yesterday, and Lio had been mauled.
Her skin goose-bumped. She didn’t know if she should use the gun, even if attacked. Odds were, any attackers would be the shape-changed women, not the wildlife that fled their path.
But she knew herself and knew that she would shoot in a heartbeat. If necessary. She hoped it wouldn’t be.
Water slipped into her jeans, nearly blood temperature, and wicked upward, filling her senses with swamp. A vibration in the water ahead sent ripples stroking slowly back her direction.
Sylvie squinted against sun gleaming off the water. There was something up ahead, a paler patch in the water, the sway of something that wasn’t reed. “Wales,” she breathed, and picked up her pace, still scanning the area but moving off to investigate that pallid gleam. Sand maybe?
Given that Wales looked as happy to be in the water as a house cat, she doubted it was anything so natural.
Sylvie hastened the last ten feet, her pulse echoing in her ears, her breath in her chest, and splashed forward. She stilled, staring down at the choppy water, trying to see. She could reach through the water, touch . . . but even the kaleidoscope image she could piece together looked distressingly like flesh. If she reached, would she end with cold flesh in her hands?