She looked at the television clips again, playing disaster porn nonstop, and said, “More than one witch. A coven. That’s an awful lot of reality to paint over. But I can’t believe it’s a local coven, not with all the hunting I’ve been doing for a single witch with a decent grip on power. A task like this? I don’t know. It feels … big. Organized.”
Alex opened her mouth, shut it again. It didn’t matter. Sylvie had heard the thought clearly. It was the same one in her mind. Wonder if Demalion had discovered anything. Before.
“So… any word?” Sylvie went to the window, fiddled with the fraying edge of the batik curtain, wrapped her fingers in scarlet, green, and gold, and thought of macaws bursting into flight.
“Yes and no,” Alex said. “Good news? He wasn’t on the list of the dead, not as Wright, not as Demalion. Wasn’t on the injury list either. Bad news? No one’s heard from him.”
“My cell phone’s fucked,” Sylvie said. “Waterlogged.” The words were rote; she was concentrating on the peculiar sensation of relief trickling through her blood. She’d expected the worst.
“I’ve got a spare,” Alex said. “There’s a box.” She waved vaguely toward her kitchen, toward a dusty box on top of the refrigerator.
Sylvie pulled the box toward her, peered in. “Alex?”
Alex waved a hand. “My father came by, gave them to me. You know, kind of like some families taking their kid out to dinner. Mine just hands out burner phones and reminds me that The Man is watching. Take one. You can at least call people on it instead of having to leg it all over Miami.”
“What do you think I’m about to do?” Sylvie asked.
Alex looked up from the computer where she was bookmarking conspiracy sites like a fiend for later response, and tilted her head. “Hunting down the brainwashy witches? Calling to get the scoop from Val and Zoe? I mean, what good is it, having a witchy little sister, if she can’t—”
“I’m going home,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t slept. And the witches aren’t the problem. They’re just covering up the problem.” The sun streaming through the kitchen window seemed heavy and bright, but it also seemed distant. She felt cold and dark and empty. Grief, she thought. The relief that trickled through her wasn’t enough to chase it away.
She closed her eyes, was suddenly back there in the cold waters, watching people watching the water without panic even as they drowned. She’d seen a lot of terrible things, but that was going to make it into her nightmares.
“Are you okay? You want me to drive you?”
She shook the memory off, and said, “No, stay here, stay online, see if you can get a better idea of how far the illusion goes. I mean, the video is step one. What happened to the newscasters who put the real one on? Did they forget? We can figure out a lot about the witches who did this by how they treat the people who saw the truth.
“Miami’s pretty low on bad-cess witches at the moment. They’re keeping a low profile if they’re around at all. They’ve got to know Erinya’s hunting them. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t in danger from this. Charm, coerce, kill. Right now, someone’s playing at charm, at illusion. We want to keep it on that level. Illusion spells are ugly, coercion spells are worse.”
“Hey, Syl,” Alex said. “You look wrecked. Go home. Get some sleep.”
Sylvie scrubbed her face with her hands; her hair dripped down her neck and face, smelled like the churned bottom of a canal—fishy and rank. She grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. Just … call me, Alex. If you find out about Demalion. Call me at once. Good or bad. Limbo’s killing me.”
“I promise. Good or bad. I’ll tap into the Miami ISI and see if he reports in.”
Sylvie reached the door, turned back. “Wait. What? Alex, there’s no one left. The mermaids killed most of them. Any survivors are going to be scrambling for order, not—”
“Mermaids?” Alex said. The perfect incomprehension in her voice froze Sylvie in her tracks.
“Mermaids,” Sylvie said. She went back, directed Alex’s attention to the TV, to the laptop sliding off her lap, forced her to look at the pages she’d bookmarked. “Conspiracy. Illusion. The ISI taken down a peg or two.”
Alex shook her head. “Don’t shout. My head hurts. I don’t want to look at that.” She turned her face away, closed her laptop, and slid it beneath the couch. Guerro whined, rested his heavy head in her lap. Alex’s fingers tightened in his ruff as if she were falling, and the dog was her only anchor. When she opened her eyes again, her pupils were two separate sizes. A magical concussion.
Sylvie whispered, “Bastards. Bastards, all of them.” This was why she hated witchcraft. It wasn’t bad enough to force an illusion down people’s throats, to make them doubt what they had seen. Somewhere, a group of witches was very busy making people forget they’d ever had doubt at all.
Alex’s breathing was tight and hitched; her face pinched with agony. Sylvie got her off the couch, walked her into her bedroom, saw her put to bed with aspirin that couldn’t really touch the source of the pain—having her brain altered by something unnatural.
Alex curled into her sheets, hid her face in the bright teal pillowcase, passed out. Sylvie shut out the lights and hesitated in the doorway. There was no reason to stay. Alex would wake up without remembering any of it, with only a lingering memory of a killer headache.
But she was young and healthy.
Morning news broadcasts, though, had more than their share of elderly viewers, people who rose from their beds with the sun. How many sudden strokes would there be, or inexplicable heart attacks brought on by magic forcing its way into their brains and rearranging things to suit someone else’s will?
On the TV, the breaking news listed thirty-seven dead and counting in a freak waterspout. NOAA scientists were being harassed for quotes on the “anomalous weather.” Sylvie turned the TV off and headed home, chilled all the way through.
SYLVIE SQUELCHED UP THE CONCRETE RISERS TO HER APARTMENT and left a wet imprint on the doorjamb as she keyed the door open.
Her exhaustion weighed her down; her worries made her leaden, slow to realize she wasn’t alone. She shut the door behind her, flipped the dead bolt, and started shedding clothes. Her Windbreaker slapped the floor, mostly dry, but soggy around the cuffs and hem. Her boots—she toed them off, sent them thudding across the room, where they left dark marks on the white walls.
“So, crappy days all around, huh?”
Sylvie jerked around; her gun stuck in her holster, the nylon deformed by the icy water and the rough and tumble of the morning, but she got it out, leveled it at her uninvited guest.
It didn’t bother her guest at all.
Marah Stone, the ISI assassin, sat cross-legged on Sylvie’s kitchen counter devouring cold soba noodles forked up with her fingers.
“Marah,” Sylvie said. She licked her lip, nervous and unable to hide it. Sylvie had met Marah only twice, in brief meetings where the woman had been carelessly chatty and far too interested in Sylvie’s life. She might have seemed harmless, only Sylvie knew two things about her. One, the strange, mottled birthmark on her arm and hand wasn’t a birthmark, but a curse mark, which made her dangerous. Two, Marah had been the ISI’s solution to an imprisoned witch. She’d ghosted inside, evading guards and convicts with equal ease, and killed the witch without taking any damage to herself.
Sylvie could live with that. She’d killed her own share of magical baddies after all, but Marah had mutilated the body afterward, in a way that just screamed psychopathy.
“Are you even listening to me? God, what a fucking long week this has been. I mean, I dig my way out of a very premature grave, face down a lurking sand wraith with nothing but nerve, haul ass halfway across the country, and you don’t even have a clean fork. What the hell, Shadows. What kind of host are you? I had to load the dishwasher myself.”