18
Getting Gone
SYLVIE AND DEMALION SPENT A FEW EXTRA MINUTES WALKING THE edges of the dead Corrective spell, Sylvie looking for any remaining cloudiness, Demalion watching her back. Unlike Pandora’s box, this world-changer had emptied itself completely. Even as she walked the perimeter of the crossed loops, the water began to evaporate, revealing a smooth stone groove only two feet deep.
Neither of the witches’ bodies, wolf or man, was there. They had been taken.
“Think there’s going to be chaos?” Demalion asked.
“When isn’t there? People never react well.”
“I don’t know,” Demalion said. “Some of the memories won’t have people to return to. A hundred-plus years? Some people are long dead.”
“Not all of them. Not even most of them, I’d bet. Population goes up. So do the number of incidents. Yvette said they’d been getting more dependent on it.”
Demalion grimaced, ceding the point. Sylvie winced. Her broken hand cramped and burned. She lifted it to her opposite shoulder, rested her wrist there, tried to slow the swelling.
“Syl. I remember the vampire. But I also don’t remember it. I remember being at home, instead of the alley, watching TV, instead of being grabbed by a child-killing vampire. Double memories. False and real. You’re always complaining about people choosing to be blind. Maybe things won’t change. Maybe they’ll just think they had vivid dreams about a real-world event.”
“Until they realize other people had the same dreams. The Good Sisters specialized in big magic scenarios. Like the sand wraith in Chicago, the mermaids in Miami.” Sylvie leaned up, kissed his cheek, tasting splash-back blood from the wound in his shoulder. “You’re such an optimist. Unless you can take a look ahead with your handy-dandy psychic skills and tell me that the world just says, Oh, all right, monsters, I’m going to prepare for the worst. And stock up on ammo.”
Despite her words, she did feel a little bit better. Demalion was partly correct. People did like to ignore the evidence before their eyes, even at the expense of their own memories. Things were going to change, had already changed, but maybe the change would be gradual enough that it wouldn’t be a cultural apocalypse.
Maybe.
A lot depended on the Corrective itself. The spell had affected more than memories—had been the Corrective it was named. It had altered data files, video feed, Internet content, and paper reports, as well as human memory. Magical white-out par excellence. The question was, when people’s memories were returned, what happened to the documentation?
Were there, even now, video files slowly changing back? Where a mangy coyote running down a Texas county road suddenly grew spikes and saber-tooth fangs and became more obviously the chupacabra? Where blubbery pieces of dead whales washed up on a shoreline slowly lengthened and twisted and became the sea serpent it had been before the Corrective hit?
Were there old newspapers with wild accounts of magical events, with conclusive photographs reshaping themselves on microfiche, in the recycling bins, in the landfills?
Zoe would know.
Now that she’d thought of Zoe again, the anxiety was sharp in her chest. She’d survived. Demalion had survived. Her sister? Sylvie gave Demalion’s gun back to him. He raised a brow. “You don’t want it?”
She readjusted her broken hand, using her good hand to brace the elbow on her bad arm, to keep it upraised. Still throbbed and complained. “I trust you to take out any stragglers we missed.”
Demalion ushered her toward the door, looked back once at the cavernous room. “Amazing.”
“What?”
“It’s still standing,” he said. “That’s a first for you, isn’t it? Leaving something other than wreckage behind—”
She kicked at him, and he laughed, a little wild. A little giddy. “Shut up,” she muttered. “Or you’ll be sleeping on the couch.”
“Your apartment’s probably under surveillance. We’ll be sleeping in a hotel.”
“Then you’ll be sleeping on the floor,” she said.
Rediscovering the bodies of Kent and his team drove the laughter from her voice. Yeah. She might have left the building standing, but she’d done bloody damage to the people defending it. She looked at Kent’s waxy face, the gore that made a void of his throat and jaw, and couldn’t regret it. It was war. She’d won.
The treacherous curtains were peaceful and motionless, and she forced herself to recall that Marah had passed through them unscathed. It still made her nerves flare to brush up against them. But they behaved as curtains should, and she took her good hand from its task of makeshift sling, and yanked the curtains down as they passed through. No more magical booby traps.
They hissed down like a rain of snakes, coiled limply across the floor. Sylvie eyed them warily, tried not to turn her back on them as they hustled—her wincing, him limping—across the ruined pentagram and back to the antechamber.
It was empty of life, and Sylvie’s heart turned over. Bodies littered the floor, bloody or burned beyond recognition. Panic shivered through her, the cold coil of rage—she shouldn’t have trusted Marah.
Demalion’s eyes flicked over each body just as hers did, each of them racing to disprove her fear. He said, “Zoe’s not here.”
A yellow spark of light illuminated the dark tunnel they’d come through, and Zoe’s voice, ragged and exhausted, said, “That’s ’cause we got the hell out of Dodge in case you brought the roof down. Marah said you probably would.”
“Zo—” Sylvie raced across the room, caught her sister up, one-handed, smelled char and fire, not just from the lighter Zoe hastily clicked shut.
“Did you do it?” Zoe asked. “Break the Corrective?”
Sylvie leaned back. “None of your memories changed?”
“Should they have?”
“Only if you ran into something big and magical before, I guess.”
Weariness was settling onto her like a shroud. The earth above their head seemed suddenly oppressive, crushing her with its darkness and chill. Demalion caught her around the waist as she sagged. He groaned as he did so, and she forced herself to stiffen her spine, carry herself. He was wounded, too.
“Come on,” Zoe said. “Let’s get the hell out of here before someone comes to investigate.”
“Investigate what?” Sylvie muttered.
“Your part of the fight might have been quiet—at least, we didn’t hear it. But ours was not. We set off the ISI alarm above. Marah’s up there shutting it down.”
“And Lupe?” Sylvie said, following her sister’s voice through the dark tunnel.
“She’s … okay,” Zoe said.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“She’s not sure.”
Sylvie stepped out into a thick fogbank tinted with dawnlight, pink and gold and palest violet. It was almost a physical relief after the closed-in dark and blood of the underground base. Two shapes swirled out of the mist and joined them. Marah Stone, a long, lean figure—the only one of them who was moving smoothly. Behind her … it had to be Lupe. Back in human shape. Completely human. Down to her fingertips.
“Lupe,” Sylvie said. “You’re—”
“I was killing them. They decided the best way to fight me was to make me normal again.” Lupe’s voice was blank where it should have been exultant. The bad guys had done what Sylvie couldn’t. What Lupe had wanted for so long. Given her back her human life. Maybe it was just too much, all at once.
Sylvie had a bad feeling about it, though, remembering Lupe fierce and savage and powerful. That kind of feeling was addictive.
“Marah,” Demalion said. “Transport?”
“SUV’s waiting,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I know a place we can clean up.”