Sylvie pushed her plate away, the sushi suddenly repulsive. Her heart beat unpleasantly. “Okay. This is what we’re going to do. You’re at the airport? Check to see if her luggage made it, and if it’s still there.”
“You think she had checked baggage?”
“It’s Zoe. Of course she had checked baggage. Probably the maximum allowed.” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to remember. “I think it’s dark green. Hard-sided. A matching set.”
“Okay, what else?”
Sylvie sipped her tea, mostly lukewarm, set it back down. The cup chattered against the cherrywood tabletop. “You have your laptop?” She didn’t wait for Alex’s response, knew it would be a yes. “Dig up, oh… that smuggling case we had. Victor Arana. He owes us one. and he works at the airlines. Call him. See if Zoe ever got on the flight. If she’s missing, we need to know which end it happened on.”
Sylvie waved off the hovering waitress, trying to think of all the angles. NYC or Miami. Or god … Sylvie closed her eyes. The last time her family had been threatened, it had been Dunne doing the threatening. He wanted Erinya gone, and she hadn’t agreed. He could have snatched Zoe from the plane anytime he wanted, midflight.
“All right,” Alex said.
“Be careful. Keep me informed.” A shadow crossed her table; she turned, and though it felt like turning away from her sister’s plight, she disconnected. Suarez eased himself into the chair opposite her, rested scarred forearms on the table. The waitress brought him a menu, but he handed it back without looking at it, requesting coffee.
“So there’s nothing on the line about you,” Suarez said, his voice a deep, disapproving rumble. “Should there be? If I go through police logs, am I going to find something inexplicable with your name attached to it?”
“Not mine,” Sylvie said. “My client’s. She’s got some anger-management issues at the moment. With reason.”
“Yeah?”
Sylvie reached out, touched the scars on his arm, looked up at the scar winding over his face. “When you were in the hospital, I said you wouldn’t turn into a monster after being attacked by a magical were-creature, told you shape-shifting via curse was rare.”
“You did,” he said.
“She wasn’t as lucky as you. Azpiazu’s curse shifted to her.”
Suarez sat back, eyed her with a cop’s ingrained suspicion. “You’re volunteering information, Shadows. Why?”
“Because the way she’s going, she might end up in your cells. You call me if that happens. It’s not safe to keep her there. Not for your men. Or for her. Lupe Fernandez. You’ll know her if you see her.”
“Understood,” he said.
Sylvie rose, and Suarez reached out with that quickness he had, so surprising in such a solid man. “Not so fast. Since you’re in a sharing mood. I have two questions for you. There’s some sort of monster killing people in Miami. You know what’s doing it?”
“Depends,” Sylvie said. “There are a lot of monsters in Miami.”
He narrowed his gaze, losing patience. “Are you encouraging it?”
“Tell me about the people who’ve died.”
“A woman, only this morning, fleeing down the street, swore that a monster tore her mother’s head off and devoured her newborn baby. They sent her for a psychiatric evaluation. Last week, six men died, heads pulverized; witnesses claimed they saw something like an enormous cat. With feathers. Later, they recanted. Remembered nothing at all. What’s happening? Tell me.”
Sylvie debated pros and cons for a moment, then decided, hell with it. Suarez knew about the Magicus Mundi, and she didn’t have time to play keep-away games. Truth, it was. The whole truth.
“We’ve got two separate problems, and neither is going to make you happy. The monster is the easy part. She’s a Fury, and she’s avenging dead or abused children.”
“Enojada?” He sounded perplexed, and Sylvie remembered English was his second language. He was so fluent that she forgot. Not only that, but his curriculum would have been different. She wondered if they taught the Greek myths to children in Cuba, wondered belatedly why they taught Greek myths to American children anyway.
“One of the Eumenides,” Sylvie said. “A Greek mythical monster, only less myth, more monster. A lonely creature, who’s doing what we all do. Losing herself in work. Just, her work is full of dead people.”
“Can I stop her from doing it? What do I need? SWAT team? Spell?”
“You can’t stop her,” Sylvie said. “The best you can do is take heart in the fact that she has very specific parameters for her kills. And that, so far, she has some sense of collateral-damage control.”
Suarez growled. “A murderer who kills undesirables is still a murderer.”
“Suarez, please,” Sylvie said. “I don’t have time to fight her now. I’ve got a client in bad shape, I’ve got the ISI bringing serious trouble to the city, and I’ve got a missing sister.”
“Again?” Suarez said. “Leash that girl. She’s trouble.”
“She might be in trouble.”
“Don’t count on me to rescue her. We’re short-staffed. Fifteen of our officers had to rush to the hospital today because their parents had had strokes or heart attacks while watching the morning news. When they did call in, they said the ERs were overwhelmed. I might not have your inside knowledge, but something seems wrong about that.”
“I don’t suppose mermaids mean anything to you?”
Suarez winced, pinched the high bridge of his nose, and Sylvie said, “That’s what I thought. That, right there, is our second problem. Someone’s playing cleanup with our brains. Well, your brains. Making you forget anything you were exposed to that was blatantly mundi. You didn’t take any of those monster calls yourself, right?”
“That’s right,” he said. “People told me about them.”
“I bet if you talk to the woman sent for the psych evaluation about her mother and the monster now, she’ll remember something different. Will get a headache if you press. Might even stroke out, depending on her overall health. I bet your men won’t be much different.”
Suarez dropped his hand, stared at it in horror. “They made me forget something? Like Garza did when you helped him?”
“You remember that, though,” Sylvie said. “That I dealt with Garza in the Keys?”
“Maudits, you said.”
“I did.” This was part of what was making her crazy. The results of the memory wiping seemed so scattershot. Secondhand info relayed to someone who hadn’t been a part of the original scene stayed just fine. Sylvie wondered what would have happened if Garza had written up truthful reports. Would they have altered like the video feeds? Would all the cops who read the report have their minds altered, like the TV viewers?
Sylvie thought the answer was probably yes.
“Who’s doing it?” Suarez said. “And why?”
“Witches,” Sylvie said. Witches were the most likely suspects. Anything more powerful—like a god—would be doing a better job. Anything less powerful than a full coven of witches, and the memory plague wouldn’t be so widespread. The Mundi, as Sylvie had noted before, didn’t cooperate with each other, and that ruled them out.
“Brujas?” Suarez seemed skeptical, which Sylvie thought was unfair of him. Azpiazu had nearly ripped Miami apart, which Suarez knew, and he’d started off as a witch.
“A whole coven of witches. More specifically than that, I can’t tell you. Why? I don’t know. I’m not sure who’s benefiting. Whether it’s ‘to protect society’ bullshit, or whether they’re protecting the Mundi from discovery.”
“Nothing good comes from secret workings,” Suarez said. “Those who hold power should be transparent in their use of it.”
“Don’t have to sell me on that,” Sylvie said.
“So, how will you identify this coven if you don’t know its motive?”
Sylvie’s phone buzzed. “Hold that thought.”
“She got to Miami,” Alex said. Her voice was thin and tight. Worried. “Victor found a flight attendant who remembered her—tried to carry on too much luggage, threw a bit of a fuss. Zoe is kind of a pain, but I guess, in this situation, it’s a good thing.”