Lies & Omens

Graves slowly; he tasted of rage and panic and blood. You, I’ll kill quickly.”

“No, you won’t.”

The adrenaline had worn off. Sylvie just felt tired. Felt like she had all the time in the world. The Night Hag lunged at her, bony fingers diving for her chest, and Sylvie shot it three times in the chest. Bone splintered and cracked.

The creature looked surprised, as if it hadn’t expected the bullets to affect it at all. Sylvie was getting used to that expression. She liked it. The Night Hag crumbled inward, its bones crunching under the weight of that leathery skin.

Sylvie kicked it away from her as it fell, left it a broken, skeletal nightmare stretched obscenely across a white carpet. Huffed and went back for the journal. She flipped it open to the last entry; if there was ever a time for skipping to the end, it was now.

Her throat was dry; she dragged herself and the journal to the kitchen, pulled a bottle of springwater from the glass-front fridge, and sat at the white-marble counter to read it.

The creature’s escape means nothing. Only proves that one of mine has turned traitor. Hovarth, probably. I think he’s Yvette’s man. Traitor to me, the ISI, the country. Mankind.

Doesn’t matter. One monster free. What can it do? It told me what I needed to know. I’ll stop it. I won’t be beaten by the Good Sisters.

That was it. Sylvie groaned, flipped back and forth, trying to piece together the narrative. Graves’s captive, not surprisingly, ended up responding better to crumbs of kindness: food, fresh water, the faint promise of freedom. A lie—Graves gloated for a page about how desperate the creature must be to believe him. Once it started talking, it had things to say, things that must have made Graves feel like all his paranoia was worth it.

It told me that I had only caught it because it was fleeing a more dangerous foe and stumbled into my net. It told me about the Society of the Good Sisters, told me that they were witches who tried to control monsters, the better to increase their own powers. Then it told me that they had infiltrated my organization.

I did the research. It was right.

The Society is a secret, a rumor, a ghost, but I’m a determined hunter. I found proof. Shreds of history, shreds of evidence. Their motto. Keep the secret world secret. They harvest it, steal its powers to fuel their spells, protect it, hide it from society. They will go to any lengths to hide their resources, including erasing people’s minds.

There was her answer to her memory plagues. Motive and perpetrator laid out in Graves’s cramped penmanship. The Good Sisters. The Encantado had been right.

They are in the ISI working against us, working to increase their power, working to hinder us in our war against the monsters. I’ve found the head of the snake. Yvette Collier and her secretive cabal of witches and freaks. Have evidence and photographs to prove it. It shouldn’t be a surprise. You can’t trust magic-users, not when the power they use is dependent on the Magicus Mundi’s existing. Can’t trust them to wipe out the monsters when scavenging power keeps them strong. I told DC that they shouldn’t allow witches in the government. Now I’ll prove it.

Sylvie closed the journal. Graves had never had the chance to prove it. The Night Hag had latched on, followed him home; while he lay trapped and dying, his base had been attacked, his men killed. If the much- scorned Hovarth really had been Yvette’s man, if Yvette was the Society, then the attacks made sense. He released the monster and ran to Yvette, telling her that they had been unmasked.

The Encantado had been right, but so had Riordan. Sylvie’s objections had all been based on Yvette’s being genuinely a member of the ISI. If Yvette wasn’t ISI, then suddenly she became a lot more likely as a suspect. The only suspect.

Infiltrating the ISI had to have been a simple way to keep an eye on their competitor, to make sure that Graves’s xenophobia didn’t win the day. They put in their own man, or woman, and undermined him. Then the ISI accelerated their ten-year plan, was thinking of opening up the Magicus Mundi to public knowledge. Regulating it.

For the Good Sisters, who seemed to farm the magical world, it would mean sharing their resources. If the rest of the world knew about magic, everyone would be poking at it. The number of witches would skyrocket, as all the would-be latent talents suddenly gave it a go. Boys and girls like Zoe.

Until they killed themselves messing with power they weren’t ready for, her little voice said.

Until equilibrium was reached, Sylvie responded. Every system, no matter how chaotic, eventually settled. Humans were adaptable, and they learned fast. Look at the technology—science had gone from Model Ts to the moon, from the inklings of genetics to DNA mapping, from the first snowy TV to the ubiquitous Internet. They’d kick and fuss and panic and slowly make space for the new knowledge.

Sylvie wouldn’t have to fight alone any longer. When something went wrong in the Magicus Mundi, people would be able to defend against it. They’d know what they were dealing with.

It wouldn’t be the end of things, only a new beginning. A beginning that the Good Sisters opposed to the extent that they were willing to wipe out government agencies, to wound or kill civilians to keep from happening.

Why wouldn’t they? When they could erase their own tracks, what would stop them?

The Encantado couldn’t get close enough.

It left her and Demalion. And Marah and Riordan. If they could be trusted. They wanted Graves dead, but Riordan, at least, had suspected Yvette of manipulating memory. He didn’t seem to mind, but that was when he thought Yvette was working her spells on behalf of the ISI.

She needed to tell him. He’d want proof. The journal was a start. Graves had mentioned photos and files. Sylvie checked the computers, found each of them required a password to enter. She groaned. She didn’t have time for this. Maybe Alex would be feeling better and could crack whatever security the paranoid Graves had put on his machines.

A glance at her watch showed her the flight from Miami to Dallas should be landing any moment now. She needed to get there, pick Demalion up. And Marah. The eternal, unwelcome afterthought.

Sylvie packed up the journal, the two laptops—one ISI issue, one personal use—and the external drive she’d found in the locked drawer beneath. It hadn’t been a very good lock.

For the hell of it, she packed up his weapon—standard-issue Glock—and ammo. It left her with quite a pile. She stared at the keys on the kitchen counter and thought, in for a penny …

Besides, Graves was dead. He didn’t need his car any longer.

When she left the apartment, stepping over the dust pile that had been an unfortunate ISI bodyguard, the alarm went off. She cursed and clattered down the stairwell, trying for haste without dropping any of her armful of things.

Twelve floors later, Sylvie came out into the parking garage and thought, penthouse apartment. Graves would have a prime parking spot. She waved the key fob at the closest spots, and a slate grey SUV chugged to life.

She should have time to pick up Demalion and Marah and make new plans before the car was reported stolen. Any cops who responded to the alarm’s going off would be far more occupied with the two bodies left in the apartment—Graves’s half-disintegrated corpse and the unearthly Night Hag.

11 The Good Sister & the God

SYLVIE HAD JUST MANAGED TO MAKE HER WAY INTO THE DALLAS/ Fort Worth terminal, remembering at the last that, no matter how much she liked her gun, she couldn’t get it inside without causing a major fuss. She left it in Graves’s glove box, along with his Glock; she chose to carry the laptops with her, stuffed into a single, overstretched laptop case.

Two small children raced past, screaming and fighting, their mother chasing after, shouting vainly for them