“Put it away and get out,” Sylvie said, losing patience. Lupe still hadn’t looked up.
“You’ll get rid of it?” Alberto demanded.
“I’ll take care of her,” Sylvie said.
He huffed, jerked his head at his son, and they ceded the ground. Sylvie waited for the adrenaline rushing her system to fade, but it, wiser than she, refused to go.
They could change their minds; they could come back at any moment, worked up all over again, guns firing. Sylvie and Lupe weren’t out yet. Relief was premature.
THE HEAVY PADLOCK ON THE CAGE WAS SNAPPED TIGHT, LOCKING Lupe behind bars, a beaten prisoner in her own family home. “Lupe. You have the key?” Sylvie tried to keep her voice steady, but blood smeared the pale tiles surrounding Lupe, a jumbled finger painting in shades of crimson and rust. The woman was injured, maybe seriously. Not dead. Sylvie could see the fine tremors running the angles of her bent elbows and knees, the shaky bellows of her rib cage.
“Lupe. Answer me!”
“… they took it,” Lupe breathed. “Put me back in and took it away.”
Back in. She’d gotten out. Not good.
“Oh, fuck this,” Sylvie said. She looked around, focused on the weight bench and free weights. That would do. She seized up a twenty-five-pound weight, swung it around, and brought it crashing against the padlock. The noise made Lupe scream, and it was echoed in the rest of the house. Sylvie dropped the weight on the broken lock, turned to greet Manuel with her gun raised. “Out!”
He held his hands up, gun pointing toward the ceiling, and backed out. “Your life,” he said. “Your risk.”
Sylvie followed him to the door, locked it behind him, dragged the weight bench in front of it, metal legs screeching over the tile.
“Lupe,” she said. “Come on, what happened?”
“I changed,” Lupe said. Her voice was a husk, ruined and wet. “Sylvie, I can’t live like this.”
“It’s okay—”
“It’s not!” Lupe jerked to her feet, faster than she should have been able to after trying to fold herself into origami. She was in Sylvie’s face almost before Sylvie could blink. Sylvie stiff-armed her in the chest, knocked her back.
“Calm down.”
“Why should I?” Lupe shouted.
Sylvie got her first good look at the woman since she’d entered the room and found herself in reluctant agreement. Why should Lupe calm down when things were so completely, visibly, wrong?
When Lupe had turned wolf that first time, she hadn’t come back unscathed. Her teeth had stayed sharp-edged behind soft lips. When she’d become a jaguar, the shift back to human left her with a swath of spotted skin across her shoulders and back. Whatever she’d shifted into last night had left its own startling and far-too-noticeable mark: Lupe’s irises looked like hammered brass, and her pupils were black slits. They should have looked like special-effects lenses, easy to explain. They didn’t.
Lupe crossed her arms, long, tanned limbs crossing darkly over her white tank top, her white-linen pants. Blood spread scarlet near her rib cage. The shirt was smoked at the center of the bloodstain. A bullet crease. Close range.
Sylvie stepped closer, peeled the shirt up. Lupe winced. Superficial but bloody. Sylvie grabbed a towel from the weight bench, pressed it against the wound. It came away mostly dry. Lupe had bled hard, but she wasn’t going to bleed out. She could wait for first aid. Sylvie threw the towel across the room, a drift of white in a mostly white room. Lupe’s blood was the brightest thing in it.
“They shot you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Lupe said. “The cage didn’t hold me. I almost killed him. Olivia came last night, waiting to welcome them all home. She brought my nephew, Sylvie. Two years old. She thought they were alone in the house, and I … I was loose.”
“How’d you manage that, anyway?” Sylvie asked. The cage was first-rate. The bars were solid steel, none of them more than four inches from each other, closed at bottom and top, and, until Sylvie had smashed the lock, secure.
Lupe blinked dark gold eyes, and Sylvie understood what they reminded her of just as Lupe said, “I turned into a python. A big one. I almost crushed his rib cage. Two years old, and his aunt tried to make him a meal. I knew better, even as I closed my coils, but I couldn’t stop.”
Sylvie swore. It was all wrong. All unexpected. Werewolf was bad, were-jaguar was worse—but Lupe had worn those shapes before while held by Azpiazu. She’d worn bear also. Sylvie had expected that to be the third shift, something big but containable. Not this. Not a reptile who shared nothing with humankind.
Lupe swayed closer; Sylvie smelled sweat, blood, and a musty underlay of old snakeskin. Her stomach turned uneasily.
Careful, her little dark voice warned. She’s dangerous.
Dangerous enough to maul a woman, to take on two wolves, to try to smother and eat a child. A calculating brain with animal instinct.
“It’s the curse, isn’t it,” Lupe said. “The curse that Azpiazu suffered. Now it’s on me.”
Sylvie thought of a slew of platitudes but chose not to lie. “Looks like.”
Lupe’s legs gave out; she dropped to the floor as fluidly as if she had gone serpentine again. “Why me?”
The question wasn’t an accusation, but it felt like one. The other women who’d survived being Azpiazu’s prisoners—Maria, Rita, Anamaria, Elena—had come out of it untouched except for nightmare memories and scarred foreheads where the binding sigils had been.
The binding sigil had held them prisoner to Azpiazu’s will. Sylvie and her cohorts had disrupted the sigils on the other four, magically or physically. She remembered gouging at Rita in bear form, her marked forehead the only part of her still human. Sylvie had slashed the sigil with a sharp stone and her nails.
But Lupe, during the final battle, had been wounded and retreated beneath a bush. Her sigil had never been disrupted. It hadn’t mattered. The spell had broken when Azpiazu died. It should have been a nonissue.
“We went back,” Sylvie said, half in realization, half in explanation. “We dispersed the last traces of Azpiazu from the site to make sure he couldn’t come back as a vengeful ghost. You still had the sigil whole on your skin. It acted like a beacon for those traces.”
Lupe’s skin was unmarked now. Her forehead where the sigil had been was as smooth as marble. The other women bore scars. Sylvie imagined the sigil groaning beneath the sudden weight of the curse and sinking through skin and bone, making itself at home somewhere in Lupe’s body like a migrating bullet.
“So you did this to me?”
Excuses leaped to Sylvie’s lips: She hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have happened. Azpiazu had started it. It was Tepeyollotl’s curse. “Yes.”
“What are you going to do to fix it?” Lupe said. “I’ve lost my girlfriend, I’ve fucked up my classes, and my parents want me dead. I mean, they haven’t been happy with me since I hooked up with Jenny, but … they really want me dead, Sylvie.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I noticed.”
Lupe’s face crumpled as if she’d hoped Sylvie would protest, would tell her pretty lies about her parents just being scared, bullet crease aside. She scrubbed at her eyes, but the snake taint in them seemed to prevent tears from forming.
“We’ll fix it,” Sylvie said. “We’ll find a witch who’ll figure out a way—”
“That’s what you tried last month,” Lupe said. “I’m still fucked. And it’s getting worse.”
“Witches are a little scarce on the ground right now,” Sylvie admitted. The witches with any real power had been leaving Miami in waves, fleeing Sylvie’s gun, fleeing the ISI, fleeing the new god that was making Miami her home. The new god that Sylvie had helped create. Erinya had been a demigodling, a servant to the god of Justice—dangerous, but containable—until Sylvie had used Erinya to defeat the soul devourer’s grab at godhood. Erinya got the shiny prize instead, becoming a full god, independent and unstoppable. Worst of all, instead of retreating from the real world in proper godly protocol, she insisted on sticking around.