“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.
4
Making News
ALEX’S JEEP WAS MUDDY, SPLATTERED WITH CANAL REMNANTS, BUT it hadn’t been one of the casualties of the mermaids’ wave, hadn’t been shoved into another car or dragged into the waters.
Even better, throughout the entire business, Sylvie had managed to hold on to the keys. She got in, squelching miserably, and blew out a breath. The drive back to Alex’s went smoothly. All the major traffic—cop cars, news vans, gawkers—were headed in the other direction.
When she reached Alex’s place, she was tempted to trade cars and head home, but she needed to check in. She needed to know if Alex had heard anything on the Chicago situation, and Sylvie’s cell phone had died in the dunking.
She tapped on Alex’s door, leaning tiredly on the jamb. Guerro barked once; Sylvie heard Alex hushing the dog, then Alex swung the door wide.
“Oh my God, Syl. It’s all over the news. You’ve been all over the news.”
Sylvie put a hand on Alex’s shoulder, pushed her gently back inside. The woman was too excited to notice that she was blocking the door, and her neighbors were beginning to poke their heads out. Sylvie had had enough of gawkers. “My family call?” She’d be surprised if they had. Zoe was in Ischia, learning to be a good witch, and her parents had hit the other hemisphere, headed to Australia for an extended vacation.
“Wales called.” Alex’s duplex smelled of coffee and burned cinnamon toast. Sylvie thought toast sounded good. Warm and dry. Two words that otherwise didn’t apply to her at the moment.
“How is Tex? Burning feet to help us?” She found the bread, a thick-sliced Cuban loaf, put a smear of butter on it, a lashing of sugar and cinnamon, and stuck it under the broiler.
Alex shook her head, a little smile touching her mouth at the mention of her necromancer boyfriend. “I wish. He’s tangled up in that Alabama mess. Narrowed it down to kids playing at necromancy. Creating sort of their own zombie theme park.” The twist of her mouth was wry. As if she knew it was bad but found it amusing anyway.
“What is up with that?” Sylvie asked. “I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t a saint when I was a teen, and I know you were all juvie-girl, but c’mon, there’s a difference between raising a little hell and raising the dead.”
“Getting old there, Sylvie. Complaining about ‘kids these days.’”
Sylvie pulled her toast out of the oven, juggling it from hand to hand, and stifled any ruder retort when Alex waved a cup of coffee at her.
Sylvie, feeling as obedient as Alex’s German shepherd, sat down at the breakfast bar, shut up, and applied herself to breakfast. Killer mermaids were definitely a good thing for stimulating the appetite.
She wolfed down the slice, went back for more, and tossed the crusts to Guerro, sprawled on the couch. He snapped them down, beat his tail against the couch arm, and visibly hoped for more.
“So the ISI—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “That’s a postbreakfast conversation.” She wanted a few minutes of peace.
Alex sat down on the breakfast bar itself, swung long legs. “You can’t save everybody. I mean, they had warning, and they couldn’t save themselves. You can’t beat yourself up for this.”
“There’s a difference,” Sylvie gritted out, “between not being able to save everybody and not being able to save anybody. Including myself. If Erinya hadn’t taken out the mermaids, I’d be a floater in a magi
cal fish tank.”
Alex’s mouth turned down. Changed the focus of the subject. Too little, too late. Sylvie felt wired, edgy. “So, you know what you’re going to say? I mean, the news is going to track you down sooner rather than later. Local woman and monster kill another monster.”
“Guess the cat’s well and truly out of the bag.” Sylvie gnawed her lip, trying to figure out if it was good or bad. If whatever erased magical evidence would act on this event.
“Yeah, hard to squelch the news vans,” Alex said.
Exposure had to happen eventually. The human world was expanding, searching, documenting; the Magicus Mundi would be revealed sooner or later. Sylvie had been hoping for that discovery for years. Secrecy allowed all sorts of nastiness to fester, be it government agencies or magical monsters. But this wasn’t among the top ten ways she would have chosen. A monster attacking a major business district in broad daylight, killing US citizens? It was going to go over about as well as a terrorist attack.
Well, that was what it was, wasn’t it, she thought.
People were going to freak.
The only thing average Americans liked more than their illusions was the chance to panic. To find an Other and fear it.
Sylvie wasn’t fond of the Magicus Mundi—too often, when it and the human world intersected, humans got the worst of it—but she was sure that total terror was not the proper response.
Maybe, this time, if the reality censors kicked in, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.
She couldn’t believe it even as she thought it.
Alex, puttering around her kitchen, made an “Aha!” of triumph and waved the TV remote in Sylvie’s direction.
“Take a look for yourself!” The TV turned on, savagely loud in the tiny apartment; Guerro’s ears went flat, and Alex hastily muted it.
It wasn’t like they needed sound. BREAKING NEWS scrolled across a bright red bar on the local channel. The scene was the one Sylvie had just left. Waterlogged people, destroyed properties—cars and businesses—palm trees with slimy, glistening trunks and spiky leaves that sparked with lingering beads of water.
Then the image backtracked, showed a tourist-filmed video that cut away from the palm trees to that sudden, rising wave. The video was image without sound, but Sylvie still heard the roar of that much water displacing itself vividly in her memories. She thought she’d be hearing it for days.
On-screen, the water slapped the building, slid down, and flooded outward, eating pavement in hungry gulps. The camera eye tilted—the mermaid’s song, Sylvie thought, paralyzing the cameraman into a stupor.
Through his lens, the landscape surged and fell and foamed, a world of inrushing water.
The red bar scrolled on relentlessly, reading off disaster tolls. Four dead, multiple injuries—
Alex said, “That’s not too bad.”
“They haven’t gotten inside the hotel yet,” Sylvie said. “The death toll will go up.”
“There you are.”
It was true; horrible, but true. A new video, a better video shot by a professional hand, showed Sylvie and Riordan stumbling out of the hotel lobby, looking so much the worse for wear. Riordan’s face going grey and gaping—
seeing Erinya and the mermaid
—the camera pivoted sharply, chasing whatever he was gaping at.
Sylvie winced, anticipating.
The images on TV… blinked. Gold light flickered and flared so quick it was only an impression that Sylvie took away rather than something she consciously saw. She leaned closer. “Did you see that?”
“See what? Oh, what the hell—” Alex said.
On-screen, Erinya, dressed in her gothy human form, ran up to Sylvie, grabbed her hand, and drew her down the street to where a thrashing tiger shark took up immense quantities of pavement.
“That didn’t happen,” Sylvie said.
“It was different before,” Alex said.
“Turn up the volume.”
“… freak waterspout touching down in the city, today, washing up wildlife, and causing an unknown number of fatalities …
“It was different,” Alex said again. “I mean, it was you and Erinya, but Erinya was all—”
“I know,” Sylvie said. “I was there, remember?”
Alex flipped stations, chasing news but finding only more of the same. “It’s a cover-up,” she said. “I can’t believe it! I mean, how effective do they think that’ll be? I TiVoed it the first time. I can’t have been the only one.”
“Alex,” Sylvie said. “Show me the recording you made. Wait, no. Watch the screen. Do you see that?”
Alex squinted, focused, shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re wanting me to see.”
“Image flickers,” Sylvie said. “Goes gold for a second. A break in the image. Reality before it. Rewrite after it.”
“Photoshop?”
“Too fast,” Sylvie murmured. To splice in an image of Sylvie, an image of Erinya—human form—put them in motion, change out the mermaid for the shark, do it seamlessly enough that it didn’t blur or warp the rest of their surroundings, the light and shadows? It wasn’t possible in the time they’d had. At least, not by conventional methods.
She wanted to be surprised, but wasn’t. The whole mess was confirmation of her theory that someone, somewhere was censoring reality.
Alex clicked over to the recording, and played it. “No, no way.”
It was the same as the currently airing clip.
“How the hell—” Alex said. “Wait. That flicker you see, that I don’t… This is that memory thing you’ve been researching. Alteration of public perception. How? Magical Photoshop?”
“Witchcraft, I think,” Sylvie said. “Illusion’s one of their favorite tools.”
“What about a god hiding things?” Alex said. “Gods seem to want earth to keep chugging along in blissful ignorance.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “But I can’t see a god doing this. For one thing, we’re too damn small. Too fragile in comparison. Plus, there’s all the godly politics. This is affecting everyone. No matter who they worship.”
Alex hmmed in response, already bent over her laptop, clicking away, her green-painted nails bright against the silver keys. “Yeah. I’m not the only one. Others saw the change. They’re calling foul. Conspiracy sites are popping up fast. What do you think the memory wiper is going to do about them?”
“I don’t know. Without knowing who or why, I can’t predict their actions,” Sylvie said. “Witchcraft covers anything from the Maudits to Val’s research coven in Ischia, and they all have different motives.”
She looked at the television clips again, playing disaster porn nonstop, and said, “More than one witch. A coven. That’s an awful lot of reality to paint over. But I can’t believe it’s a local coven, not with all the hunting I’ve been doing for a single witch with a decent grip on power. A task like this? I don’t know. It feels … big. Organized.”
Alex opened her mouth, shut it again. It didn’t matter. Sylvie had heard the thought clearly. It was the same one in her mind. Wonder if Demalion had discovered anything. Before.
“So… any word?” Sylvie went to the window, fiddled with the fraying edge of the batik curtain, wrapped her fingers in scarlet, green, and gold, and thought of macaws bursting into flight.
“Yes and no,” Alex said. “Good news? He wasn’t on the list of the dead, not as Wright, not as Demalion. Wasn’t on the injury list either. Bad news? No one’s heard from him.”
“My cell phone’s fucked,” Sylvie said. “Waterlogged.” The words were rote; she was concentrating on the peculiar sensation of relief trickling through her blood. She’d expected the worst.
“I’ve got a spare,” Alex said. “There’s a box.” She waved vaguely toward her kitchen, toward a dusty box on top of the refrigerator.
Sylvie pulled the box toward her, peered in. “Alex?”
Alex waved a hand. “My father came by, gave them to me. You know, kind of like
some families taking their kid out to dinner. Mine just hands out burner phones and reminds me that The Man is watching. Take one. You can at least call people on it instead of having to leg it all over Miami.”
“What do you think I’m about to do?” Sylvie asked.
Alex looked up from the computer where she was bookmarking conspiracy sites like a fiend for later response, and tilted her head. “Hunting down the brainwashy witches? Calling to get the scoop from Val and Zoe? I mean, what good is it, having a witchy little sister, if she can’t—”
“I’m going home,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t slept. And the witches aren’t the problem. They’re just covering up the problem.” The sun streaming through the kitchen window seemed heavy and bright, but it also seemed distant. She felt cold and dark and empty. Grief, she thought. The relief that trickled through her wasn’t enough to chase it away.
She closed her eyes, was suddenly back there in the cold waters, watching people watching the water without panic even as they drowned. She’d seen a lot of terrible things, but that was going to make it into her nightmares.
“Are you okay? You want me to drive you?”
She shook the memory off, and said, “No, stay here, stay online, see if you can get a better idea of how far the illusion goes. I mean, the video is step one. What happened to the newscasters who put the real one on? Did they forget? We can figure out a lot about the witches who did this by how they treat the people who saw the truth.
“Miami’s pretty low on bad-cess witches at the moment. They’re keeping a low profile if they’re around at all. They’ve got to know Erinya’s hunting them. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t in danger from this. Charm, coerce, kill. Right now, someone’s playing at charm, at illusion. We want to keep it on that level. Illusion spells are ugly, coercion spells are worse.”
“Hey, Syl,” Alex said. “You look wrecked. Go home. Get some sleep.”
Sylvie scrubbed her face with her hands; her hair dripped down her neck and face, smelled like the churned bottom of a canal—fishy and rank. She grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. Just … call me, Alex. If you find out about Demalion. Call me at once. Good or bad. Limbo’s killing me.”