“What is up with that?” Sylvie asked. “I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t a saint when I was a teen, and I know you were all juvie-girl, but c’mon, there’s a difference between raising a little hell and raising the dead.”
“Getting old there, Sylvie. Complaining about ‘kids these days.’”
Sylvie pulled her toast out of the oven, juggling it from hand to hand, and stifled any ruder retort when Alex waved a cup of coffee at her.
Sylvie, feeling as obedient as Alex’s German shepherd, sat down at the breakfast bar, shut up, and applied herself to breakfast. Killer mermaids were definitely a good thing for stimulating the appetite.
She wolfed down the slice, went back for more, and tossed the crusts to Guerro, sprawled on the couch. He snapped them down, beat his tail against the couch arm, and visibly hoped for more.
“So the ISI—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “That’s a postbreakfast conversation.” She wanted a few minutes of peace.
Alex sat down on the breakfast bar itself, swung long legs. “You can’t save everybody. I mean, they had warning, and they couldn’t save themselves. You can’t beat yourself up for this.”
“There’s a difference,” Sylvie gritted out, “between not being able to save everybody and not being able to save anybody. Including myself. If Erinya hadn’t taken out the mermaids, I’d be a floater in a magical fish tank.”
Alex’s mouth turned down. Changed the focus of the subject. Too little, too late. Sylvie felt wired, edgy. “So, you know what you’re going to say? I mean, the news is going to track you down sooner rather than later. Local woman and monster kill another monster.”
“Guess the cat’s well and truly out of the bag.” Sylvie gnawed her lip, trying to figure out if it was good or bad. If whatever erased magical evidence would act on this event.
“Yeah, hard to squelch the news vans,” Alex said.
Exposure had to happen eventually. The human world was expanding, searching, documenting; the Magicus Mundi would be revealed sooner or later. Sylvie had been hoping for that discovery for years. Secrecy allowed all sorts of nastiness to fester, be it government agencies or magical monsters. But this wasn’t among the top ten ways she would have chosen. A monster attacking a major business district in broad daylight, killing US citizens? It was going to go over about as well as a terrorist attack.
Well, that was what it was, wasn’t it, she thought.
People were going to freak.
The only thing average Americans liked more than their illusions was the chance to panic. To find an Other and fear it.
Sylvie wasn’t fond of the Magicus Mundi—too often, when it and the human world intersected, humans got the worst of it—but she was sure that total terror was not the proper response.
Maybe, this time, if the reality censors kicked in, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.
She couldn’t believe it even as she thought it.
Alex, puttering around her kitchen, made an “Aha!” of triumph and waved the TV remote in Sylvie’s direction.
“Take a look for yourself!” The TV turned on, savagely loud in the tiny apartment; Guerro’s ears went flat, and Alex hastily muted it.
It wasn’t like they needed sound. BREAKING NEWS scrolled across a bright red bar on the local channel. The scene was the one Sylvie had just left. Waterlogged people, destroyed properties—cars and businesses—palm trees with slimy, glistening trunks and spiky leaves that sparked with lingering beads of water.
Then the image backtracked, showed a tourist-filmed video that cut away from the palm trees to that sudden, rising wave. The video was image without sound, but Sylvie still heard the roar of that much water displacing itself vividly in her memories. She thought she’d be hearing it for days.
On-screen, the water slapped the building, slid down, and flooded outward, eating pavement in hungry gulps. The camera eye tilted—the mermaid’s song, Sylvie thought, paralyzing the cameraman into a stupor.
Through his lens, the landscape surged and fell and foamed, a world of inrushing water.
The red bar scrolled on relentlessly, reading off disaster tolls. Four dead, multiple injuries—
Alex said, “That’s not too bad.”
“They haven’t gotten inside the hotel yet,” Sylvie said. “The death toll will go up.”
“There you are.”
It was true; horrible, but true. A new video, a better video shot by a professional hand, showed Sylvie and Riordan stumbling out of the hotel lobby, looking so much the worse for wear. Riordan’s face going grey and gaping—
seeing Erinya and the mermaid
—the camera pivoted sharply, chasing whatever he was gaping at.
Sylvie winced, anticipating.
The images on TV… blinked. Gold light flickered and flared so quick it was only an impression that Sylvie took away rather than something she consciously saw. She leaned closer. “Did you see that?”
“See what? Oh, what the hell—” Alex said.
On-screen, Erinya, dressed in her gothy human form, ran up to Sylvie, grabbed her hand, and drew her down the street to where a thrashing tiger shark took up immense quantities of pavement.
“That didn’t happen,” Sylvie said.
“It was different before,” Alex said.
“Turn up the volume.”
“… freak waterspout touching down in the city, today, washing up wildlife, and causing an unknown number of fatalities …
“It was different,” Alex said again. “I mean, it was you and Erinya, but Erinya was all—”
“I know,” Sylvie said. “I was there, remember?”
Alex flipped stations, chasing news but finding only more of the same. “It’s a cover-up,” she said. “I can’t believe it! I mean, how effective do they think that’ll be? I TiVoed it the first time. I can’t have been the only one.”
“Alex,” Sylvie said. “Show me the recording you made. Wait, no. Watch the screen. Do you see that?”
Alex squinted, focused, shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re wanting me to see.”
“Image flickers,” Sylvie said. “Goes gold for a second. A break in the image. Reality before it. Rewrite after it.”
“Photoshop?”
“Too fast,” Sylvie murmured. To splice in an image of Sylvie, an image of Erinya—human form—put them in motion, change out the mermaid for the shark, do it seamlessly enough that it didn’t blur or warp the rest of their surroundings, the light and shadows? It wasn’t possible in the time they’d had. At least, not by conventional methods.
She wanted to be surprised, but wasn’t. The whole mess was confirmation of her theory that someone, somewhere was censoring reality.
Alex clicked over to the recording, and played it. “No, no way.”
It was the same as the currently airing clip.
“How the hell—” Alex said. “Wait. That flicker you see, that I don’t… This is that memory thing you’ve been researching. Alteration of public perception. How? Magical Photoshop?”
“Witchcraft, I think,” Sylvie said. “Illusion’s one of their favorite tools.”
“What about a god hiding things?” Alex said. “Gods seem to want earth to keep chugging along in blissful ignorance.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “But I can’t see a god doing this. For one thing, we’re too damn small. Too fragile in comparison. Plus, there’s all the godly politics. This is affecting everyone. No matter who they worship.”
Alex hmmed in response, already bent over her laptop, clicking away, her green-painted nails bright against the silver keys. “Yeah. I’m not the only one. Others saw the change. They’re calling foul. Conspiracy sites are popping up fast. What do you think the memory wiper is going to do about them?”
“I don’t know. Without knowing who or why, I can’t predict their actions,” Sylvie said. “Witchcraft covers anything from the Maudits to Val’s research coven in Ischia, and they all have different motives.”