Lies & Omens

“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.”

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