They hesitated just enough that she felt comfortable putting her back to them. “Are you sure about this, Lupe? Erinya’s trapped, and not in the best of moods. A drawback to being a god? Their tantrums can last eons.”
“She won’t hurt me,” Lupe said. “She likes me.”
“She liked you as a monster,” Sylvie said.
“I’m still a monster. It’s just … inside now.”
“Lupe—”
“I killed people, Sylvie. I ripped them apart and ran my claws through their guts. I’ve done a lot of things in my life. None of it has ever been as satisfying as killing. Erinya understands that. Erinya likes me. And you know. I think I like her.”
Sylvie let her go. If the world was going to change, if people were going to see the truth of things, she needed to let them act on what they knew. She couldn’t play gatekeeper for the entire world. She had to trust people to make their own decisions.
Lupe nodded, walked past the armed men, walked right to the seething vines. Their chaos continued unabated, lashing and twining, but as she reached out, they parted, swallowed her down.
The cops swore and took steps back. Sylvie watched the greenery close up again and wondered if she’d done the right thing. It seemed to be a constant refrain in the back of her mind, as if she were vibrating to the uncertainty of the world.
She shook it off. She’d pulled the wool from the world’s eyes. She couldn’t regret it. Whatever came. Whatever happened.
Better to build a world with truth than one full of lies.
19
And After
TWO WEEKS LATER, SYLVIE WAS PUTTING TINY PINS IN A VERY LARGE map as Demalion called out city names, state names, country names, listing places that were waking up. In the states, Florida had been the first to admit that there were magic and monsters and everything people had dreamed of and feared.
Of course, they had Erinya’s Key Biscayne makeover to help them along. The cops had gone in an hour or two after Lupe—shamed into it—and, surprisingly, Erinya had let them come back out, unscathed. Their report, which Alex had helped herself to, had said two women were living there, and they both could turn into monsters at will.
Then the army had invaded.
They’d been gone for four days, stumbling out with depleted weapons, shiny new PTSDs, and the word from on high: Erinya might be trapped there, but she demanded respect. Word got out. A god had taken over Key Biscayne.
The Christian fundamentalists claimed it was a devil and were holding prayer vigils for God to smite Erinya out of existence. So far, there was no response.
A temporary prison, Sylvie thought. She’d forgotten that temporary meant a different thing to immortals. It might be centuries before the other gods came to a consensus on whether Dunne’s trap constituted an act of war or not.
Another pin marked one final ISI attack in Seattle. While Sylvie and Demalion had been busy fighting Yvette, a sea monster had slipped out of the dense fogs and taken out the ISI building, two piers, and a homeless shelter. The sheer number of witnesses made Seattle the second city to acknowledge the truth, that humankind had neighbors they knew next to nothing about.
Sylvie didn’t like that pin. Not only did it mark civilian casualties, it marked her failure to track down all the Good Sisters. There was at least one out there, and a dangerous one at that. One like Merrow, who could turn monsters into weapons. Alex was struggling to crack Graves’s computer encryption. Maybe once Alex succeeded, Sylvie would have a better idea of how many more of the Good Sisters were running loose.
Demalion said, “Earth to Sylvie? UCLA just started a new scientific study on ESP.”
“Yeah?” she said. She braced her cast-encased hand against the edge of the board and stuck a tiny pin in an already crowded spot. The universities, as a whole, were reacting in two ways: sheer, unbridled fascination or utter refusal to accept the magical world. That was all right. They weren’t the ones she was worried about. Not really.
She was worried about the churches. It was one thing to believe in your gods, to get proof that your gods were real, concrete, tangible. To have your faith proved fact. It was a whole other type of shock to realize that other people’s gods were just as real. Right now, the religious groups were being very, very quiet. It made her nervous. The whole world made her nervous, hence the board—Alex’s idea to keep them up to date, trying to predict trouble spots.
“Apparently, someone at UCLA was going back through old studies and found out that the reports had—”
“Changed,” Sylvie finished. “Proved that psychic powers were possible?”
“Guess whatever it was was definitive enough. The new scientists are a group of geneticists.”
Sylvie grimaced. “Urgh. That … I don’t like that. They go too far down that road in this environment, and we’ll have genetic scans made mandatory. The government’s already strung tight.” There were seventeen red pins in DC. Each of them represented another blip on the radar, another constituent group who’d managed to get an audience with their senator or congressman for something that once would have branded them lunatic fringe.
“Tell me about it,” Demalion said. He sounded strung tight himself. She stopped putting pins in the corkboard and looked at him. “Marah’s been calling.”
“Marah tracked you down?”
Sylvie had been expecting it. Partly because Marah was just that determined. Partly because Sylvie and her allies hadn’t gone far.
Sylvie had left her South Beach office behind—not that there was much left of it—and found them discreet office space in Hialeah. It wasn’t the beach, but it had everything she needed, including a lot of escape routes. Hialeah was a transport city.
Originally, Sylvie’s intention was to pack up her business, her partner, her sister, and Demalion and get out of Florida for good. It would have been the wise thing to do. But Erinya was still her mess. She couldn’t walk away from that. Right now, Erinya was playing nice, making a nest out of her small world for herself and Lupe. If that changed, it would be Sylvie walking up the causeway, with her gun in hand.
She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Lupe had come over for lunch a day ago, and she was happy, healthy, and bringing a peace offering from Erinya—a slew of carnivorous plants in pretty pots. Sylvie had passed them off to Alex with a grimace.
Erinya hadn’t forgotten Sylvie’s and Dunne’s treachery, but … as Lupe said, “She’s occupied. We’ve got worshippers finding their way to us, daily. Supplicants asking for vengeance and aid.” Lupe had ducked her head when Sylvie asked how vengeance played out with Erinya trapped. Lupe hadn’t needed to answer after that.
Lupe was dealing out punishment in Erinya’s name.
Demalion sighed. “Marah’s trying for the hard sell. Pushing guilt. I don’t think she’s even capable of feeling guilt.” He stepped away from the desk, stretched out the kinks in his back. His shirt rose, revealing smooth flesh where there had been stitches.
Another benefit to the Sphinx toxin treatment. He healed better now. Sylvie would be lying if she said it didn’t ease her mind. But healing wasn’t where her thoughts went as she watched the small, subtle play of flat muscle over his hips. He caught her gaze and grinned, slow and wicked. “Call it a day? Head home?”
“Don’t think about it,” Alex said, from the front room, eavesdropping automatically. “I swear. I’m this close to getting into Graves’s files.”
“You’ve been saying that for days,” Sylvie said. She almost, almost opened her mouth and teased Alex about losing her touch. Then she recalled Alex, unhappy and scared and losing her mind, and shifted direction. “You’re just cranky ’cause Tex is out doing fieldwork.”
“You sent him to Georgia.”
“Look at the map!” Sylvie said. “There are pins all over Georgia! I have to know why. And there’s only so much that facts can tell me. I want to know the feel of the—”