Lies & Omens

pulverized; witnesses claimed they saw something like an enormous cat. With feathers. Later, they recanted. Remembered nothing at all. What’s happening? Tell me.”

Sylvie debated pros and cons for a moment, then decided, hell with it. Suarez knew about the Magicus Mundi, and she didn’t have time to play keep-away games. Truth, it was. The whole truth.

“We’ve got two separate problems, and neither is going to make you happy. The monster is the easy part. She’s a Fury, and she’s avenging dead or abused children.”

“Enojada?” He sounded perplexed, and Sylvie remembered English was his second language. He was so fluent that she forgot. Not only that, but his curriculum would have been different. She wondered if they taught the Greek myths to children in Cuba, wondered belatedly why they taught Greek myths to American children anyway.

“One of the Eumenides,” Sylvie said. “A Greek mythical monster, only less myth, more monster. A lonely creature, who’s doing what we all do. Losing herself in work. Just, her work is full of dead people.”

“Can I stop her from doing it? What do I need? SWAT team? Spell?”

“You can’t stop her,” Sylvie said. “The best you can do is take heart in the fact that she has very specific parameters for her kills. And that, so far, she has some sense of collateral-damage control.”

Suarez growled. “A murderer who kills undesirables is still a murderer.”

“Suarez, please,” Sylvie said. “I don’t have time to fight her now. I’ve got a client in bad shape, I’ve got the ISI bringing serious trouble to the city, and I’ve got a missing sister.”

“Again?” Suarez said. “Leash that girl. She’s trouble.”

“She might be in trouble.”

“Don’t count on me to rescue her. We’re short-staffed. Fifteen of our officers had to rush to the hospital today because their parents had had strokes or heart attacks while watching the morning news. When they did call in, they said the ERs were overwhelmed. I might not have your inside knowledge, but something seems wrong about that.”

“I don’t suppose mermaids mean anything to you?”

Suarez winced, pinched the high bridge of his nose, and Sylvie said, “That’s what I thought. That, right there, is our second problem. Someone’s playing cleanup with our brains. Well, your brains. Making you forget anything you were exposed to that was blatantly mundi. You didn’t take any of those monster calls yourself, right?”

“That’s right,” he said. “People told me about them.”

“I bet if you talk to the woman sent for the psych evaluation about her mother and the monster now, she’ll remember something different. Will get a headache if you press. Might even stroke out, depending on her overall health. I bet your men won’t be much different.”

Suarez dropped his hand, stared at it in horror. “They made me forget something? Like Garza did when you helped him?”

“You remember that, though,” Sylvie said. “That I dealt with Garza in the Keys?”

“Maudits, you said.”

“I did.” This was part of what was making her crazy. The results of the memory wiping seemed so scattershot. Secondhand info relayed to someone who hadn’t been a part of the original scene stayed just fine. Sylvie wondered what would have happened if Garza had written up truthful reports. Would they have altered like the video feeds? Would all the cops who read the report have their minds altered, like the TV viewers?

Sylvie thought the answer was probably yes.

“Who’s doing it?” Suarez said. “And why?”

“Witches,” Sylvie said. Witches were the most likely suspects. Anything more powerful—like a god—would be doing a better job. Anything less powerful than a full coven of witches, and the memory plague wouldn’t be so widespread. The Mundi, as Sylvie had noted before, didn’t cooperate with each other, and that ruled them out.

“Brujas?” Suarez seemed skeptical, which Sylvie thought was unfair of him. Azpiazu had nearly ripped Miami apart, which Suarez knew, and he’d started off as a witch.

“A whole coven of witches. More specifically than that, I can’t tell you. Why? I don’t know. I’m not sure who’s benefiting. Whether it’s ‘to protect society’ bullshit, or whether they’re protecting the Mundi from discovery.”

“Nothing good comes from secret workings,” Suarez said. “Those who hold power should be transparent in their use of it.”

“Don’t have to sell me on that,” Sylvie said.

“So, how will you identify this coven if you don’t know its motive?”

Sylvie’s phone buzzed. “Hold that thought.”

“She got to Miami,” Alex said. Her voice was thin and tight. Worried. “Victor found a flight attendant who remembered her—tried to carry on too much luggage, threw a bit of a fuss. Zoe is kind of a pain, but I guess, in this situation, it’s a good thing.”

“Alex,” Sylvie snapped. “You’re stalling. Where is she?”

“Four men in fancy suits and guns snagged her as she stepped out of the gate. Gate attendant noticed because Zoe dropped her carry-on, and they didn’t bother to pick it up. Said the suits had to be official since they were armed within the terminal.”

“ISI,” Sylvie said.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“But they’re dead. The flood destroyed their base. How in hell do they have time to hunt down Zoe?”

Suarez leaned in, shamelessly eavesdropping. Sylvie didn’t care; she was recalculating. The mermaids had killed the ISI agents who were there. But, like Yvette, maybe others had been out of the office.

“… want me to see if I can get video feed?”

“No,” Sylvie said. She was slow, so slow. How had she forgotten? When the ISI had tear-gassed her office and kidnapped her, she had woken up in a different facility than the downtown hotel. “I’m going straight to Dominick Riordan. If the ISI is grabbing my sister, he’s got to be alive.”

* * *

IT WAS LONG PAST FULL DARK BY THE TIME SYLVIE MANAGED TO retrace her path from the frantic night three months prior. Then, she’d been concentrating more on getting away and stopping Azpiazu, the Soul- Devourer, than on figuring out where she’d been held.

By starting at Vizcaya, still being repaired from the showdown with Azpiazu, and working her way back, she thought she was on the right track. It had been on a frontage road near the airport, but it hadn’t been one of the dozens of warehouses that sprouted in that area; it had been a business-office type of building, with at least two floors.

She slowed her already crawling pace, and the driver behind her honked and cut around her. Sylvie peered into the dark, trying to focus, trying to remember. There had been a parking garage full of matching SUVs. White-painted concrete already going green. A shadow in her memory smelling like mold—everything underground in Miami smelled like mold.

Up ahead, a sign flashed in her headlights, a time-faded declaration that Miami’s Best Bank would be opening soon. A bank she’d never heard of. Opening never, Sylvie thought. Not if it was a front for the ISI.

She jerked the wheel, garnered another series of traffic complaints, and crossed a narrow bridge over a watery ditch with pretensions to canalhood.

Sylvie bumped over the rough pavement, remembered that jarring sensation from her previous visit, and turned again sharply, picking a darker space out of an unlit lot that turned into a parking garage. One level down, lights bloomed distantly, showed a shiny row of dark SUVs and water glistening in thin trails down the walls. It made Sylvie think about mermaids.

Her nerves coiled and twisted. God, she wished Demalion had picked up a phone, wished he’d given her some way to contact him. She was used to going it alone, but right now, she wanted backup, and he was her first choice. Now and always.