jumped back, but the stranger had laid a hand, smooth as silk, utterly uncallused, on her sternum. She swung at him, too slow, but he was already backing away. “I’ll find you,” he said. “Now that I’ve got the feel of you, I’ll find you.”
He took three quick steps, leaped into the watery ditch beside the roadway, attached to one of the Miami canals. Sylvie got a quick glimpse of something smooth and torpedo-shaped speeding through the shallow water, the jut of a not-quite fin. A dolphin?
“Crap,” Sylvie said. She clambered back into the truck, gunned it, and pulled out of the drive with a screech. “Like we don’t have enough going on.”
SYLVIE DIDN’T RELAX UNTIL SHE GOT THE TRUCK OFF THE MORE deserted frontage roads and into denser morning traffic.
She wanted to get back to her office. Needed her things—spare clips, cash—and she needed some safe space to sleep: where Riordan couldn’t rush her into killing Graves; where Marah couldn’t swan in at will; where Erinya couldn’t come calling with tales of bloody hearts and dead witches.
“Riordan won’t hurt Zoe,” Demalion said, attempting reassurance.
Sylvie nodded. She believed him, but there were a lot of levels of harm: Being held prisoner was its own kind of hurt. “Your psychic skills can’t home in on her?”
“I wish I could,” Demalion said. He sounded sincere.
Sylvie tightened her hands on the wheel, said, “I know you hate talking about this. But you’re clairvoyant. You should be able to see where she is—”
“
“You’re not powerless now,” she said. “You used it to survive the sand wraith, to warn the ISI about the Mora. You’ve been really quiet about how you managed that. Makes a girl wonder what it took to recover that ability.” She tried not to let her voice tighten. She kept her own secrets; he should be allowed his.
“Why do you always think the worst of me?” he said. “What do you think I did?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
“I told you my mother wasn’t happy with me, right? That she’s avoiding my calls? How much do you know about the sibyls of ancient Greece?”
Sylvie took a hand off the wheel, scrubbed at her face. Exhaustion was warring with adrenaline and winning.
“Syl?”
“Uh,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Mythic history ascribes their abilities to various gods speaking through them, but that’s not really the way it worked.”
Sylvie remembered arguing with Dunne about that while she was hunting for his lover. “The gods aren’t precognitive. At least, most of them aren’t. They can see possibilities, but it’s more like men playing chess. Experience and familiarity. But the Sphinx can see the future.”
“Yeah,” he said. “One of the few beings who can see it clearly.”
“
“Her bite carries a venom that can alter human abilities.”
“So you found your mom, convinced her it was you, and then what, asked her to rewrite your DNA?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
“And for that, she’s not talking to you? Come on, Michael, I’m too fucking tired to beat around the bush. What did you do?”
“It was risky. Her venom kills more often than it changes. I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks.”
Sylvie’s hand flew off the wheel again, grabbed his shoulder. “Idiot. Wright died to save you, and you…
She shut her mouth, felt one step away from hyperventilating, thought back to when he’d first returned to Chicago. “Those two weeks where you were ‘unreachable’? You were fucking dealing with the venom. Dying, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t die.”
Sylvie let out her breath; it rushed out on a shaky stream. She counted to ten, sucked in more air, and said, “Fine. Fine. You didn’t die, and I’ll crash the truck if we fight now. So, give me the short answer. You have psychic powers, but you can’t find Zoe.”
“I have limited abilities,” he said. “They’re all tied in to precognition and threat. I could tell you
“What?” She whipped a look at him, wondering if that was an example or a prophecy.
He shrugged, apparently not sure himself.
Sylvie’s phone rang shrilly in her jacket pocket, thrown over the back of the seat. “Get that,” she said. “Maybe it’s Zoe.”
“It’s not,” he said, before he even reached her jacket.
“So your talent’s good for crushing hope,” she muttered. “Figures.”
Demalion fumbled for the phone, dragging her jacket up from behind the seats. “It’s not an ISI number,” he said, before hitting speaker.
An agitated man started talking before Demalion could say more than, “Yes?”
“Who’s this? Wait, never mind. Tell that bitch, Shadows, that she needs to come pick up whatever it is she left in my hotel. It’s freaking the fuck out, and the doors aren’t going to hold it.”
“I’ll be there, Toro,” Sylvie said, raising his voice so he could hear. “Stay away from the doors.”
“You owe me another $500 for this, Shadows.”
“Only if my client is still present and in one piece when I get there. It’ll be… Sylvie checked her dashboard clock, tried to calculate distance, traffic, endless variables that flitted through her weary mind like elusive, darting bats. “It’ll be as soon as I can make it,” she snapped, jerking her hand across her throat, and Demalion cut the connection.
“Sylvie,” he said. “Do we have time for this?”
“No choice,” she said. Toro was a lot of things, but jumpy he wasn’t. If he was concerned, there was reason. She pulled the truck over into the nearest convenience-store parking lot, nearly sideswiped a fast- approaching Mercedes that she just hadn’t seen, and thought, Car wreck in her future. Right.
She got out of the truck, staggered into the store, bought an energy drink that looked to be made entirely of caffeine and sugar, grabbed a pack of Tums to go with it, and returned to the truck on the passenger side. “You drive.”
“Where am I going?”
“Siesta-Sleep Hotel in Homestead, and hurry.” She folded herself into the passenger seat, found it warmed by his skin, and nearly dropped off then and there. Instead, she buckled the belt down, and chugged her drink and two of the antacids.
“You left your client there? Jesus, Sylvie. What’d she do, try to stiff you on your fee? That place has cockroaches the size of scorpions—”
“Drive, Demalion,” she said, closed her eyes, and tried to think of yet another place to keep Lupe.
SHE WOKE WHEN DEMALION BRAKED HARD, TIRES PROTESTING, AND she woke up angry. Fucking Lupe couldn’t even control herself for one damn day.
Just great, she thought. All she needed. To have it go stealth, make it even harder for her to resist its brutal pragmatism.
“Good nap?”
“Not long enough.” She looked out along the streets, said, “Make a left.”
“I know where we’re going.”
“So go there faster,” she said. That drumbeat urgency in her blood was the only thing keeping her moving. It kept a clock running down, the time she was wasting. Time she could be using to deal with a world going wonky under the weight of Erinya’s presence, of Dunne’s expectations, of the witchy manipulations.
