Gods in the real world were always a disaster waiting to happen. They were pure power, and like a human shedding skin cells, shedding breath, gods shed scraps of power wherever they lingered. Witches could use that power, collect it for their own, but it was a risky habit. A god’s power was more likely to burn out a witch’s ability entirely than it was to recharge it.
Once Erinya had started making her presence felt, Sylvie’s favorite go-to witch, Val Cassavetes, had disappeared somewhere in Italy, and taken Sylvie’s witchy sister, Zoe, with her. She couldn’t even rely on family.
The witches who were left? Scavengers who hoped to grow fat on the god’s shed leavings. Untalented, untutored. Untrustworthy. Too small to be of interest to the ISI or too skilled at going to ground. The kind of witch who’d be just as glad to kill Lupe and use her bones for spell ingredients.
“Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “We’ll beat this. I’ll broaden the search. I’ll find a way to break this curse.” The words felt empty in her mouth, fragments of faint hope. She wasn’t a spell-breaker. Point her in the direction of the spellcaster, and she’d take him or her out of the picture, break the curse through brute force. But Azpiazu was three months dead, and the god who’d laid the original curse was a powerless shell who’d retreated to a realm Sylvie couldn’t reach.
Lupe grimaced, all pointed teeth and animal distress, and said, “You’d better hurry. I’m running out of normal.” As if to prove her point, she went from her crouch to a leap that took her to the top of the cage, then to the high window and through it. She left a bloody smear on the sill as her wound broke open again with the exertion.
Sylvie, thinking of the armed men outside the weight room, thought Lupe had the right idea, and clambered awkwardly, humanly, after her.
WITH NO PLACE ELSE COMING TO MIND, SYLVIE DROVE LUPE AND herself to the Shadows Inquiries office, ushering Lupe in ahead of her. Lupe’s bare feet were soundless on the dusty terrazzo floor, and Alex, wielding a broom with determination, grimaced as she splashed sawdust over Lupe’s feet.
“Crap. Sorry, Lupe,” Alex said.
Lupe raised her head; Alex sucked in a breath and retreated to the sanctuary of her desk. The lanky blonde looked uncharacteristically flustered, but Sylvie understood. There was something particularly horrifying about watching Lupe grow less human each month.
“There are some spare clothes upstairs,” Sylvie said, disrupting the awkward moment.
Lupe headed for the stairs and came face-to-face with the workman coming out from beneath them. He dropped his toolbox, and Lupe turned back to Sylvie, fury and humiliation on every distorted line of her face. Her throat mottled darkly with passing spots. “Fix this, Shadows.”
The carpenter, kneeling over his spilled tools, crossed himself as Lupe stomped upstairs. Sylvie said, “How’s the safe room coming, Emmanuel? We’re going to need it a little sooner than I thought.”
“What’s wrong with her?” he said. His dark eyes jittered over hers; then he looked up the stairs as if his gaze could drag Lupe back down and pin her in place until he understood the inexplicable.
“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Sylvie said. She kept her tone friendly but didn’t bother with an excuse. She was tired of helping the world blind itself to the Magicus Mundi. Let him worry and wonder.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m taking lunch. I’ll have the room finished by this evening. Just need to finish up the ventilation system. Can’t have you suffocating in there.”
“Would defeat the purpose of a safe room,” she agreed, and waved him off.
He stopped at Alex’s desk, flashed a smile, and offered to buy her lunch. Alex turned him down but sent him away with a smile. Sylvie shook her head and tuned out the flirty conversation.
She peered into the narrow corridor that Emmanuel had excavated beneath the stairwell. She hated that they needed the room at all, but Alex had been agitating for one for months. After the ISI had tear-gas-bombed the office, Sylvie decided Alex was right.
Ideally, it would be a magical safe room as well, a place to store dangerous talismans or to hide from magical attackers, but that would require a trustworthy witch to build the proper shields.
A shift in the air, the scent of blood and antiseptic, and she turned to find Lupe at her side, peering over her shoulder. Her lips were pulled tight over her teeth, outlining the jut of her canines. “That for me?”
“If it comes to that.”
“Guess it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.” Lupe crossed her arms tight over Sylvie’s borrowed sweatshirt. She shifted foot to foot. “You sure it’ll hold me?”
“Long as you don’t turn into a swarm of mosquitoes,” Sylvie said.
Lupe grinned without amusement. “Right now, I’m not ruling it out.”
Sylvie shot Alex a help glance. She was out of anything even remotely approaching comfort. Alex slid out from behind her desk, put a careful hand on Lupe’s sleeve, and said, “You want to get in on our lunch order? I mean, I don’t know much about shape-shifting, but it seems like hungry work.”
Lupe followed Alex’s lead docilely enough, even as she protested that she was too stressed to think about food. Sylvie took the opportunity to duck up to her office.
She left the door open, keeping an ear out for Lupe and Alex, and let her shoulders slump. She didn’t like Lupe’s changes. The curse was bad enough, but she really didn’t like the level of violence that went with the changes. She needed a witch, and she needed one now.
Even if a witch couldn’t break the curse, maybe one could ameliorate the worst effects.
Sylvie ran through her usual contacts in her mind, trying to figure out who was speaking to her this month, who was too busy to talk, and finally just admitted the truth to herself. There was only one person she was going to call.
She pushed back her rolling chair, propped her sneakered feet against the scarred wood desk, and dialed.
“Sylvie,” Demalion said. Picked up on the first ring. And didn’t that make her skin warm embarrassingly even though she knew the quickness was dictated more by proximity than desire. She’d caught him at a good time.
“Got a moment?”
“You’ve got trouble?”
“When don’t I?” Despite the truth in that, she felt her voice relaxing. It had been three months since he’d taken his new body back to Chicago, three months that should have stretched the relationship between them to the breaking point. Instead, it had given them something they’d never known they had needed. Distance and the time to talk.
“Truth,” he said. “I think you wouldn’t know what to do with a vacation if you had one.”
“You could come down early and find out,” she said.
His voice roughed itself into a huff of not-quite-amusement. “Would if I could.”
“Oh, damn,” she said. “I know that tone. You’re not coming next week.” Disappointment sat sourly in her stomach. Time to talk was all well and good, but she missed being able to touch him. His resurrection from the dead and his departure had happened so close together that some nights she woke sweating, thinking he was only a voice on the other end of her line. A ghost she couldn’t let go.
It had been difficult enough to let him go when he was determined to repay a dead man for giving Demalion back his life, when he had gone back to Chicago to fix what was broken in Wright’s life. It hadn’t taken too long for Wright’s wife to smell a rat, to come to the correct but improbable answer that the man wandering around in her husband’s body was no longer her husband. Once she figured it out, she took her son and the money Demalion offered and fled the city. Sylvie had hoped Demalion would return at that point. Instead, he’d rejoined the ISI under Adam Wright’s name. That had been a harder pill to swallow. No debt owing there, just ambition and an ideology Sylvie didn’t share.