8
When Only a Witch Will Do
SYLVIE WAITED OUTSIDE O’HARE, SITTING ON A METAL BENCH brought to oven warmth by the heat from passing car engines. She shifted, pulling sweat-damp cotton away from her nape, and went back to watching the airport police.
Earlier, they had been everywhere, running in packs of five or more, like confused hounds casting about for scent. Now, they were back to that deceptively slow cop stride, in pairs or singles, and the only signs of interference was the occasional freeze of movement coupled with a blank stare, like the stutter-stop of a petit mal seizure. Like a seizure, the symptoms disappeared with the cops unaware of them.
Sylvie couldn’t decide if this was an improvement or not; she lacked facts and was left with empty speculation. Did their return to near normal mean Dunne’s influence had faded? If so, why? Had he lost interest or hope in their ability to find Brandon Wolf? Or was it a simpler thing altogether? Had he regained some of his concentration, keeping his powers close to home? Sylvie gnawed her lip, checked her watch, and moved on—nearly time to meet Val.
A third option presented itself to her. Had Dunne weakened? Maybe gods weren’t affected by human limitations of distance or endurance, but that didn’t mean nothing could weaken him. If he was a god—and she chose to let that declaration stand—she could think of only two things that could stop him. A belatedly delivered ransom demand. Or another god. Sylvie shivered. She needed to check in with her client and soon.
Val strode up at that moment, smiling a little, looking like a sleek jet-setter anticipating nothing more taxing than the shopping trip she’d teased Sylvie about. That changed the moment she leaned in to give Sylvie a social hug. The gun at Sylvie’s waist . . . twitched. Sylvie felt the distinctive click of the safety shifting off, a tiny flicker of movement against her skin, a finger tap saying “ready.”
“What the hell is that?” Val said. “What have you done, Sylvie?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“You’re wearing something of stolen power,” Val accused. “Spirit bound to flesh. That’s black work. How did you—”
“It’s fine,” Sylvie said. “Just trust me, okay?”
Val grimaced but let the questioning drop, for which Sylvie was grateful. She needed to parse what Val had said. Flesh and spirit, bound? Her flesh—she knew that; otherwise, the gun wouldn’t feel so comfortable against her skin. Whose spirit? Dunne’s?
Val waved for a cab, her lips still tight in disapproval. “Let’s get this over with, Sylvie.”
“We’re not taking a cab to the subway,” Sylvie said. “That’s just plain stupid. How spoiled are you, anyway?” She waved off the cabbie and headed toward the El connection.
Val huffed but followed her down the sidewalk in silence. Once in the El, Sylvie leaned up against a pole near the doors, touching her cheek to the cool metal, studying the other passengers, mostly airport run-off of flight attendants and travelers. No one looked back at her; the one man in a business suit who did ducked her gaze a second later, leaving her with nothing to do but seethe and listen to the rattle and clank of the El rising above the street.
Three stops later, Sylvie decided Val had sulked long enough, and said, “You look at the spell?”
“Enough to know it’s probably what you’re looking for,” Val said, pausing in her own calming study of the posters within the car. “Not enough to tell you how, who, or why, yet. I’ve made some assumptions, of course, from the sketch, but I’d rather see the actual circle itself before I draw real conclusions.”
“Thanks, Val,” Sylvie said. She relaxed; it looked like Val was going to be helpful.
“Don’t thank me,” Val said. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here. Things are strange right now, and all I want to do is hole up someplace safe.”
“Strange,” Sylvie repeated.
“My coven thinks a god may have come to the mortal realm.”
“So?” Sylvie said. “It’s their earth, too, right?”
Val made a face as if Sylvie had said something unbelievably stupid. “The only good thing about gods is that they prefer their realm to ours.”
The El swayed heavily as they took a long curve, rattling loud enough to make it sound like a roller coaster, and drew to a screeching halt. Val winced. “Not quite a Benz, is it?”
“You’ll survive,” Sylvie said.
Once the engine reached speed again, Sylvie said, “In myths, gods walk the earth all the time.”
“Yes,” Val said, “and mythology is full of monsters and cataclysms. Trust me, they’re linked. Gods change things. It’s their nature. Their very presence.”
“The world bends to their will,” Sylvie said, echoing Dunne. “It’s all about power.”
“It’s always about power,” Val said. “There’s only so much of it to go around. Like anything rare, it’s prized, guarded, hidden, and sought.”
“And stolen,” Sylvie finished on the crest of a minor epiphany. Stolen would explain an awful lot about Dunne’s sudden appearance on the scene. There weren’t that many possibilities if the two facts she had gained were both true. Dunne was a god. Dunne had been a normal human. Between the two states lay power.
“If humans can steal their power, gods can’t be omniscient or omnipotent,” Sylvie said, “not really.”
“Technically true,” Val said, sliding forward on the plastic seat, shifting into lecture mode. “But it’s in the same sense that we’re not all-powerful to, oh, a bird’s egg. We can see it in its entirety, know what’s in it, know what it will become, juggle it, nurture it, alter it at will, break it, spare it, or devour it. The egg is completely vulnerable. The egg doesn’t even understand that it’s in a god’s hand. Except maybe, every now and then, it feels a ripple moving through, something vast shifting on a level it cannot comprehend.
“To steal a god’s power requires more than determination and a blatant disregard for personal safety, it requires an understanding of the world that most humans are simply not capable of. Suffice it to say that anyone who could seriously attempt such a thing would be a person to avoid, would make my ex-husband look like a saint.” Her volume dropped steadily as she spoke until Sylvie had to lean close to make out the soft words. Val crumpled the edges of the fax, the spell rippling with false life. She took a breath, smoothed the paper, and bent her attention to it, tracing lines with a manicured nail.
No real answers there, Sylvie thought. Dunne had been a normal human according to Demalion, and while the ISI was not infallible, its basic information gathering was stellar.
The conductor’s voice called out another station, and Sylvie looked up. Getting close. She nudged Val, and Val tucked the spell into her purse, neatly folded.
Ten minutes later, Sylvie sat at the top of the El’s steps, squeezing herself out of the way of the occasional passerby and watching Val walk the spell circle.
Fish out of water, Sylvie thought, tickled at the expression on Val’s face—such finely tuned distaste. Subways were definitely slumming it for Val, who was accustomed to casual luxury. Still, she bent and knelt beside the circle without hesitation, staining her cream-linen slacks.
“It’s—” Val raised a haughty brow at a commuter who was standing a little too close to her. “Do you mind?”
He stepped back and continued waiting for a train, jingling the tokens in his pocket. “Sylvie!” Val said, gesturing at him in an imperious fashion.
“Shoo. Go away,” Sylvie said. He flipped her off and stayed where he was. Sylvie shrugged, not surprised. He was the suited man who hadn’t met her eyes on the train. The one she thought she’d seen waiting at the airport terminal, passing her a few times too many for coincidence.
Well, lie down with the ISI, get up with ticks.
“I can’t do this,” Val said, rising. “Too many people coming in and out. You were correct, by the way. This spell is still active. It’s also sloppy. I thought so when I got your fax but chalked it up to your poor art skills.
I remember your flunking Woodmansee’s class.”
“Hey,” Sylvie said, “This isn’t a high-school reunion, you know.”
Val said, “Hand me my bag, will you?”
As if a thousand-dollar Valextra briefcase could be termed a bag. Sylvie tossed it toward her, and Val sighed as she caught it. “Look, all the tooling they do makes it magically inert. Okay?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Sylvie said.
“Sylvie, even your silences are damn loud,” Val said, flickering a smile. “Make sure no one else is coming, all right?”
“You’re gonna—”
“I’m tired of interruptions. I thought this was a matter of some urgency, but if you’d rather I work around street people?”
“Knock yourself out,” Sylvie said.
Val closed her eyes, raised her hands, and began talking.
At least, that was how it sounded to Sylvie. Talking, but incomprehensible, some bastard mixture of sounding too far away, or too foreign. It sounded like those important speeches she heard in dreams, full of portent without meaning.
The air rippled; the subway wavered in her sight and reappeared, warped out of true, the walls gleaming darkly, the shadows oppressive, the screech of metal heart-pounding. The commuters fled up the stairs in a disorderly mess.
Val was obviously still pissy; usually her leave-me-alones were gentle things, tending to make people recall sudden chores that required them to be elsewhere. But this—
Sylvie watched the nightmare spread across the station, adding a layer of revulsion to the glamour, and blinked it away, refusing to give in to her suddenly racing heart. She knew better, dammit. It was all illusion. She closed her eyes as the glamour tried harder to get rid of her, leaving behind subtle nightmare imagery for streamers of blood on the ground, the patchwork paint of body outlines. If she looked long enough, the shape took on the contorted one that Suarez had fallen into when the bullet took out his throat.
Ignore it. It’s false. It means nothing. The dark voice was calm as it declared there was no threat here.
Sylvie opened her eyes, and things were back to normal. Or as normal as it could be with a witch casting a spell in a subway station.
“You really shouldn’t be able to evade my spells,” Val said. “Someday I’m going to test your aptitude for magic.”
“Yeah, and someday I’m going to make a nice little housewife,” Sylvie said.
Val shook her head and bent to her bag. “Well, now that I’ve gotten rid of them, let’s keep them gone.” Val pulled out a silk-wrapped feather, a grey Baggie of what looked like spiderwebs, and a knife from her bag.
“You have trouble with airline security?” Sylvie said, noticing that the suit at the platform was still there, still watching, looking sweaty and rather sick. “Ah, Val?”
“I took the jet,” Val said, teasing the spiderwebs apart with the knife tip. “Shut up, Sylvie. This takes concentration.”
Val teased one of the cobwebs back into web shape, dangling it from the tip of her knife. “Come down the stairs,” she said.
Sylvie sighed and joined Val. “What about him?” she asked, gesturing to their watcher.
“He should have left when I asked him to,” Val said. She raised the knife and blew gently on it, simple breath giving way to more of her exotic murmurs.
The cobweb fluttered from the knife, expanding, thinning, gleaming red and gold like metal reflecting firelight. It drifted up the stairs, and Val whispered more coaxing words. The suit on the platform began to look concerned. Sylvie flipped him off and grinned. After all, there weren’t many people who were determined enough to stick around through a repulsion glamour. He had to be ISI. He edged closer to the rails, as if a foot or so could make all that much difference.
Val gestured with the feather, and the web spread wider and darted forward, sticking suddenly to the edges of the entrance to the El. Sounds from above stopped filtering down to them, wrapping them in silence.
“One more,” Val said, another web dangling from the knife tip.
She turned to the wary agent watching them and smiled, that perfect social smile that allowed all sorts of backstabbing to go on behind it. The web flew wide and pushed the agent to a teetering position on the very edge of the platform. The man jumped off, rather than be pushed, and the spell snapped into place behind him.
“I knew we were friends for a reason,” Sylvie said, smiling at the agent’s predicament. “Hope he’s informed about the train schedule and the dangers of high voltage.”
Val permitted herself a more honest grin, a rare, open look on her face. There was the impish gamine Sylvie had known in high school. “What? I’m not allowed to enjoy my work?” Val said, turning back to the spell circle. She took a white-silk glove from her bag and traced the circle in silence.
She sat back on her heels, finessed the glove from her fingers, careful not to let the outer part of the glove touch her skin, and tossed it into the trash can. “Nasty,” she said, wiping her hands down her slacks. “I was afraid of that.”
“Don’t be vague,” Sylvie said. “If you’ve got something bad to say, might as well get it over with.”
“Maudits,” Val said. “Specific enough for you?”
“Fuck,” Sylvie said, closing her eyes. “I thought they’d disbanded, decovened, or whatever sorcerers do when you destroy their leaders.”
“We stopped them,” Val said. “Once. Hardly a final battle. They must have found a new figurehead.”
“Lovely,” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause their last choice was oh so good for the world.” The Maudits were bad news; a cabal of blood-crazed sorcerers could hardly be anything but. Last time Sylvie had run into them, they’d been intent on resurrecting Val’s ex-husband, a voodoo king with one hell of a mean streak. Sylvie doubted their tastes had improved in the time since.
“Sloppy, though,” Val said, looking over the spell, breaking Sylvie’s darkening thoughts. “Far from their usual standards—maybe you’re dealing with a splinter group. Last I’d heard, they had begun to argue their methods—since they were so spectacularly unsuccessful last time. Beaten by two women and a child.” Val’s lips quirked. “Serves them right, those chauvinistic blowhards.”
“Yeah, yeah, we kicked their collective ass. Yay us, moving on,” Sylvie said. “The spell is sloppy? Meaning what exactly?”
Val slipped off her loose jacket, laid it on the concrete, and settled herself on it. “Well, for one thing it’s active, which it shouldn’t be. Not if it’s swallowed its prey.”
“So it is a snatch-and-grab machine,” Sylvie said, toeing the painted curlicues thoughtfully, “not a curse or a kill.”
Val fiddled with the platinum hoop in her ear, a habit Sylvie recognized from high school, from a hundred scenes of Val before a test, before a big date, before lying her ass off to get away with coming home drunk. Sylvie braced herself for trouble.
“Not exactly. It’s an oubliette spell. A magical ambush keyed to a specific person. It sucks the target down the minute they cross it, then it shuts down and disappears. We shouldn’t be able to see it at all. A spell like this is either hidden and active, or triggered and gone. The fact that it’s visible at all tells me it’s triggered, but not complete. Normally, I’d say that its prey got away. God only knows how—we’re not talking a beginner spell here. But you say that Wolf is missing?”
“Vanished,” Sylvie said. “In the space of a heartbeat according to my client.”
“Witnessed it?” Val paused in her fidgeting.
“Felt it,” Sylvie said. “How’s that for proof?”
“Don’t scoff,” Val said mildly. “Talents can feel such things. Is he—”
“Talented? Oh hell yeah,” Sylvie said.
“So we can assume he’s right, and the boy’s gone down.” Val set her earrings to swinging again, stilled them. Noting the nerves, Sylvie was prepared for the hesitation in Val’s words, the softness of her tone. “You know he’s dead, right?”
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Quick shock touched her back and cheeks with an internal chill, and a denial so strong she didn’t think it was hers; some bastard leftover of Dunne’s touch or influence. She fisted her hands. “He could—”
“You said weeks. Weeks in an oubliette. No food, no water, no air. An oubliette’s a coffin, Sylvie, for sorcerers who are too impatient to wait for their victims to die.”
“It makes no sense,” Sylvie snapped. “If he’s dead, and the spell’s supposed to be gone, why isn’t it? I think they plan to retrieve him.”
“It’s a one-way deal,” Val said. “You can’t just reach in and pull things out.”
“You can’t. What about the Maudits?”
Val paused in her automatic rebuttal, the idea that they could do something she couldn’t, and actually thought about it. “I—maybe. The original sorcerer could undo the spell, pick it apart layer by layer. That might reverse the effect.” She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. The time problem still stands. The most that anyone could retrieve is a corpse.”
“That might not matter to Dunne,” Sylvie said, thinking aloud. Dunne seemed confident he could restore the dead to life, given proper jurisdiction, and surely Brandon Wolf, his lover, belonged to him.
“You have the worst clients,” Val said. “First the gun, and now—”
“I didn’t mean that,” Sylvie said. She wished she hadn’t said anything, but wasn’t that an endless source of regret? Her mouth, her best weapon, even against herself.
Val drummed pale, painted nails, waiting. Sylvie sucked in a breath and forced a subject change. “So, if he’s been grabbed, what’s your explanation for the spell still chugging away?”
Question and answer, Sylvie thought, watching Val’s expression shift from peeved to contemplative. Val’s weakness: She couldn’t resist the urge to lecture, to describe the ways of the world to all those less intelligent, less aware. Most of the time that tendency drove Sylvie to eye rolling and backchat. Sylvie hated not being in the know as much as she hated being the object of condescension. But the tendency to lecture was also the reason that Sylvie, who thought all magic-users should be labeled: warning, contents unstable under pressure, could trust Val.