Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel (12 page)

“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.”

“I promise. Good or bad. I’ll tap into the Miami ISI and see if he reports in.”

Sylvie reached the door, turned back. “Wait. What? Alex, there’s no one left. The mermaids killed most of them. Any survivors are going to be scrambling for order, not—”

“Mermaids?” Alex said. The perfect incomprehension in her voice froze Sylvie in her tracks.

“Mermaids,”
Sylvie said. She went back, directed Alex’s attention to the TV, to the laptop sliding off her lap, forced her to look at the pages she’d bookmarked. “Conspiracy. Illusion. The ISI taken down a peg or two.”

Alex shook her head. “Don’t shout. My head hurts. I don’t want to look at that.” She turned her face away, closed her laptop, and slid it beneath the couch. Guerro whined, rested his heavy head in her lap. Alex’s fingers tightened in his ruff as if she were falling, and the dog was her only anchor. When she opened her eyes again, her pupils were two separate sizes. A magical concussion.

Sylvie whispered, “Bastards. Bastards, all of them.” This was why she hated witchcraft. It wasn’t bad enough to force an illusion down people’s throats, to make them doubt what they had seen. Somewhere, a group of witches was very busy making people forget they’d ever had doubt at all.

Alex’s breathing was tight and hitched; her face pinched with agony. Sylvie got her off the couch, walked her into
her bedroom, saw her put to bed with aspirin that couldn’t really touch the source of the pain—having her brain altered by something unnatural.

Alex curled into her sheets, hid her face in the bright teal pillowcase, passed out. Sylvie shut out the lights and hesitated in the doorway. There was no reason to stay. Alex would wake up without remembering any of it, with only a lingering memory of a killer headache.

But she was young and healthy.

Morning news broadcasts, though, had more than their share of elderly viewers, people who rose from their beds with the sun. How many sudden strokes would there be, or inexplicable heart attacks brought on by magic forcing its way into their brains and rearranging things to suit someone else’s will?

On the TV, the breaking news listed thirty-seven dead and counting in a freak waterspout. NOAA scientists were being harassed for quotes on the “anomalous weather.” Sylvie turned the TV off and headed home, chilled all the way through.

SYLVIE SQUELCHED UP THE CONCRETE RISERS TO HER APARTMENT and left a wet imprint on the doorjamb as she keyed the door open.

Her exhaustion weighed her down; her worries made her leaden, slow to realize she wasn’t alone. She shut the door behind her, flipped the dead bolt, and started shedding clothes. Her Windbreaker slapped the floor, mostly dry, but soggy around the cuffs and hem. Her boots—she toed them off, sent them thudding across the room, where they left dark marks on the white walls.

“So, crappy days all around, huh?”

Sylvie jerked around; her gun stuck in her holster, the nylon deformed by the icy water and the rough and tumble of the morning, but she got it out, leveled it at her uninvited guest.

It didn’t bother her guest at all.

Marah Stone, the ISI assassin, sat cross-legged on Sylvie’s kitchen counter devouring cold soba noodles forked up with her fingers.

“Marah,” Sylvie said. She licked her lip, nervous and unable to hide it. Sylvie had met Marah only twice, in brief meetings where the woman had been carelessly chatty and far too interested in Sylvie’s life. She might have seemed harmless, only Sylvie knew two things about her. One, the strange, mottled birthmark on her arm and hand wasn’t a birthmark, but a curse mark, which made her dangerous. Two, Marah had been the ISI’s solution to an imprisoned witch. She’d ghosted inside, evading guards and convicts with equal ease, and killed the witch without taking any damage to herself.

Sylvie could live with that. She’d killed her own share of magical baddies after all, but Marah had mutilated the body afterward, in a way that just screamed psychopathy.

“Are you even listening to me? God, what a fucking long week this has been. I mean, I dig my way out of a very premature grave, face down a lurking sand wraith with nothing but nerve, haul ass halfway across the country, and you don’t even have a clean fork. What the hell, Shadows. What kind of host are you? I had to load the dishwasher myself.”

“Are those my clothes?” Sylvie asked.

Marah licked her lips clean of brown sauce, wiped her fingers—again—on a very familiar pair of jeans. “Mine smelled really bad. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“I mind,” Sylvie said. “I mind a lot.”

“Ungracious,” Marah said. “I even brought you the mother of all hostess gifts. Thought you’d be pleased. But no, I get bitched at for borrowing your clothes, eating some really, frankly, mediocre takeout, and a gun in my fucking face!”

Sylvie stepped back, holstered the gun, raised her hands, a my-bad, sorry gesture.

Simple rule to stay alive by: Don’t piss off the assassin.

If Marah had wanted her dead, she’d be dead. Which meant this was exactly what she claimed it was. A visit.

Marah’s marked hand slowly unclenched from where it
was white-knuckled around the bowl, visibly backing away from the urge to throw it at Sylvie.

“Fine,” Sylvie said. “You’ve had a bad day. So have I. Let’s not take it out on each other. I’m going to go take a nap. You can…

Get out of my house.

“… occupy yourself.”

“I’d take a shower first, if I were you,” Marah said. The last vestiges of temper in her face faded, shifted to a maddening smirk. “I left your hostess gift in there.”

Sylvie belatedly realized that the noise she heard in the background was not the leftover aural trauma of the mermaids’ watery attack, not even the homely sound of the dishwasher churning its slow way through its cycle, but the shower running.

The splash of the water was muted, not just crashing down on tile and curtain; something intercepted the spray.

Sylvie felt her nerves jangle, tighten. What an assassin considered a hostess gift might be something she really didn’t want.

“Brought it all the way from Chicago,” Marah said.

Sylvie’s attention jerked.

“Chicago?” Her voice was hungry, vulnerable.

“I told you I had a crappy day, told you I had to dig my way out. Never said I was alone. I wanted to go straight to a nice hotel with a Jacuzzi and complimentary robes, but no, he insisted on coming here—”

Sylvie, heart in her mouth, headed for the bathroom, half-terrified, half-hopeful. Marah wouldn’t have, couldn’t have brought her a corpse. She might be dangerous, but she was mercenary enough to want something from Sylvie. And Sylvie would owe her one for this.

Even though the crash and sputter of water made Sylvie’s gut churn, she couldn’t stop herself. A hand on the doorknob, her pulse ricocheting in her throat, and she flung the door open.

“Hey, Stone, a little privacy? Near death and a road trip doesn’t make us that close—”

Demalion stuck his head out from the curtain, blond hair damp and darkened, slicked to his skull, bruising on his cheek, his shoulder, but alive… His lips parted, moved silently.
Sylvie.

Sylvie crashed into the shower stall with him; his arms tightened around her even as she slid and slipped on the soapy tile, trying to get closer.

Alive.

She was laughing, wild, triumphant. Surprised.

Though she’d talked a good game with Alex, she’d been most of the way convinced to thinking him dead. She clutched him closer, the sleek, wet warmth of him making her think of selkie lovers, bit his shoulder, trying to hang on.

“Sylvie,” he murmured, dragged her mouth up to his. Laughed low and hungry in his throat when she whined at having to release him from her teeth. “Too much time with werewolves?”

“Shut up,” she said and smothered that laughter with her breath. She pressed closer, bare feet unsteady on slick tiles, hanging her weight from his shoulders. He caught her around the waist, snagging her belt loops, holding her tight, holding her up.

Sylvie, who normally relegated shower sex to something best left in the movies, felt his hands pressing into the small of her back, the dip of fingertips tracing heat beneath her waistband, and thought,
The hell with it.
She pulled away, grabbed the hem of her tee, and eeled out of it, all awkward elbows and jutting angles in the small space.

He caught her wrists while they were overhead, leaned in, pressed her back against the cool tiles. She arched into him, hissing, and he kissed her wrists, her palms, his breath as heated as the water splashing her skin.

“Clothes in the shower, Sylvie, really?” He ducked his head; the light in his eyes familiar even in Wright’s paler shade, making it no surprise when the next kiss hovered at her mouth without connecting before descending to her throat, the rasp of his stubbled chin waking a thousand tiny nerve endings to singing pleasure.

“Tease,” she said, tangling her hands in his hair—different, she cataloged. Demalion’s hair used to feel like mink to her, back when he was original recipe. Now, it felt like raw silk, equal parts coarse and soft. Different, but wonderful.

He popped the button on her pants; she released his hair to help shimmy them off her hips. Both of them were breathless with effort and desire by the time the clinging fabric was peeled off, abandoned on the floor of the shower stall.

His hands closed on her hips, wordlessly urging her closer, tighter. She tried to climb him, cracked her knee against the tile, and swore, staggering backward, losing that brief press of connection. Missing it immediately. She whined in frustration—but that was shower sex for you, bumps and bruises and awkward clinches that broke just when they were getting really good, terrible footing, and someone’s back always got slapped up against the chilly tiles.

Her tongue tangling with his, tasting heat and the bitterness of soapy foam, Sylvie thought, awkward or not, she wouldn’t trade this moment for all the silk sheets and scented candles in the world.

At last braced, balanced, they rocked against each other, trading breathless frustration for laughter, and finally for a pleasure that had their voices cracking against the ceramic tiles, saw them sprawling in the morass of water and discarded clothes that soaked the floor. Her shampoo bottle had tipped, overlaying the scent of sex and the sea in the room with a lashing of citrus foam.

Sylvie kicked feebly at her pants, unblocked the drain, and put her head back to Demalion’s shoulder and listened to the gurgle of water receding. In a moment, she was going to get up, shake this lassitude from her veins, drag Demalion with her to the bedroom, and never mind the assassin in the living room.

He stroked her wet hair, smoothing it from the wild kinks and curls it had worked its way into. “I should check in with the locals.”

Sylvie stiffened, rolled away from him. “About that.”

He propped himself up on his elbows. “What?”

“You haven’t been watching the news.”

He rolled up to sit cross-legged. He looked tired suddenly, and past the first flush of their reunion, she saw dark bruises on his arms, his hands, his shins. Marah’s words came back to her—had to dig out of a premature grave—mixed with the memory of the collapsed ISI building in Chicago.