Lies & Omens

Three people walked out into the predawn light, talking quietly among themselves. Lupe snarled in animal surprise, and the agents looked up and out and spotted them. The lead agent—witch— gestured at the gravel pathway, shouted out a harsh-edged word. The ground before him roiled, rolled up into the world’s largest mole trail, then erupted. A monster shook dirt and sharp shells from its back and blocked their path.

Sylvie shot once at it, wondering what exactly it was that this witch had had leashed and following him beneath the ground’s surface, and where the hell its weak point was. First glance argued that there weren’t any: It was all scale and scute and armored legs. Her bullet spanged off it with a sound like breaking pottery.

She wasn’t even sure it had eyes. She lined up another shot, but Lupe beat her to it, lunging into her line of fire and engaging the monster directly.

Eager, but reckless.

The monster, something even Sylvie’s Lilith voice struggled to name, moved like a centipede, hundreds of jointed, armored legs, and evil pincers at the head. A long, stinging tail curved above its back. It raised all the hairs on her neck, made her stomach squirm in ingrained squeamishness. She really wasn’t wild about insects. Especially when this one might as well have been designed out of an insectophobe’s nightmare.

Though it seemed blind, or, at least, eyeless, it moved confidently enough to get Lupe on the defensive and keep her there. Lupe whimpered after one stinger strike; her side ran blood. She fell back.

Sylvie jerked the trigger, put another two bullets into the creature, trying to maim its front pair of legs and failing, trying to keep an eye on the witches as well. Be stupid to be killed by them while focusing on a monster.

The monster ignored Sylvie, oiling back on itself to make another attack on Lupe.

Take out the witch that controls it; free the monster, the Lilith voice suggested, guided her gun hand ’round to the man who had summoned the monster out of the earth. His mouth was a black slash in his neat beard, urging the monster on.

Free the monster, and who’s to say it’ll run? It might want to finish what it started, Sylvie thought, but shooting a witch was well within her plans. The witch, sensing his danger, pressed back toward the shed and shelter.

Zoe stepped between the monster and Lupe just as it charged again and slapped it hard right in its blind face. Zoe’s entire body was within the cutting grasp of the pincers.

Sylvie unloaded bullets into the monster’s tail end, trying to get it to turn, to forget her suicidal sister. But the monster was dissolving, starting from Zoe’s slap mark and crumbling back into gravel and dust.

“Illusion,” Zoe said. “Good one, though. Lupe. Stop believing you’re hurt.”

“Cassavetes’s protégé,” the illusion master said. His tone was dismissive. “You’re an acolyte. Nothing more. Your creature illusion is unconvincing. No chimera looks like that.”

“I’m a lot more than an acolyte, and Lupe’s not an illusion,” Zoe said. She raised her marked hand, started chanting. Dunne’s stolen powers shone silver, highlighting the mark.

Sylvie, exasperated, desperate—they had to be attracting attention they didn’t want yet—took advantage of the witch’s arrogance. He’d stepped out of his shelter, all his focus on Zoe.

Sylvie’s bullet made a hole through his throat; the witch managed to clutch at the wound, but nothing more, before he crumpled and died.

Zoe snarled, balked of an audience, and Sylvie thought Get the door! in her direction. The two witches remaining were doing their best to seal it. Lupe staggered to her feet and pounced on one of them, proving that she was no illusion. The witch, a woman whose hair was nearly as scarlet as her life’s blood, managed to look betrayed as she died.

Zoe and the remaining witch played magical tug-of-war over the door until Sylvie unloaded one more bullet, this one into the last witch’s head. The bullet shivered, pushing through a magical shield, before it penetrated. Sylvie wiped sweat off her face with her gun hand, smelled hot metal, thanked their lucky stars that these witches weren’t carrying invulnerability talismans. Just the lesser, rudimentary spell shields. If they’d been wearing talismans, she’d have had to tackle them physically first, get the talismans off, get up close and personal with her kills.

Sylvie leaned forward, breathing hard. There was killing witches; and then there was killing people in front of her baby sister. It didn’t make it better that Zoe seemed completely okay with it, was even now pushing past to grab hold of the closing door.

“C’mon, Sylvie. This damned door isn’t happy. It knows I’m not one of them, and it’s trying to close.”

Sylvie looked across at the main building, looked past the shed door, and had a feeling that they could raid the main ISI building for days and find nothing but patsies. The Good Sisters had leeched on and hidden themselves, parasites who made the host forget they were there.

Lupe pressed up against Sylvie’s side, her flanks wet with blood, but no wounds. Either she believed Zoe enough to erase the injury if not the signs of it, or Erinya had souped her up before the battle with some quick- healing genes. Good, Sylvie thought. She needed her team whole.

“Let’s go,” Sylvie said, and ignored Zoe’s muttered, “Finally!” as she squeezed into the shed. She felt the quiver of angry magic as she passed. Zoe winced; her grip tightened on the door edge. It moaned like a living thing beneath her hands. Sylvie thought it said a lot about the Good Sisters that even a spell as simple as a hidden door felt malevolent.

“Lupe, come on!”

Lupe was longer than the shed was, and her tail took forever to tuck in; her fur smoked as she brushed the shimmering, twisting door frame. The moment Zoe released the door, it slammed shut and left them in darkness.

The shed, when explored, yielded another door and beyond it a steep downward ramp, leading beneath the B&B main building.

Sylvie blew out her breath. Luck, both good and bad. Since the Good Sisters had set up shop underground, the intervening earth had muffled their ingress. Once Sylvie’s group was inside, that same earth would prevent anyone from hearing what happened to them if it all went wrong.

“Watch your backs down there,” Sylvie said. “One way in probably means one way out. Lupe, stick with Zoe. And for God’s sake, use your sense of smell. If you can’t smell the monster, don’t attack it.”

“You shot, too,” Lupe growled. The words were thick in her inhuman throat.

“Well,” Sylvie said, “better safe than sorry. And I don’t have your senses. Some of these witches leash monsters, remember. Stick close to Zoe.”

She shot another thought Zoe’s way, the warning that Lupe might turn on them and Zoe would need to be prepared and could she be prepared to take someone like Lupe down?

Zoe nodded once.

Sylvie thought maybe this mind reading wasn’t such bad idea after all, and turned her back on Zoe’s smirk. The ramp was stone on all sides, floor, walls, ceilings, lit every few feet by prosaic LED adhesive lights, battery powered. The stone was smooth beneath her shoes, worn down with age. The main building was at least a hundred years old, but the tunnel was older still.

Zoe pointed at a worn symbol chipped into the wall, blurred with age and erosion. A pentagram. “Sylvie. Think they were here first?”

Sylvie ran her fingers over it, and said, “I think it wouldn’t surprise me at all. The Good Sisters obviously believe in the long game, or they wouldn’t have bothered infiltrating the ISI.”

The tunnel lightened ahead. Sylvie estimated they were about thirty feet below the surface and about fifty feet in. The underdwelling, whatever it would prove to be, was more than a simple cellar to the hotel above.

Animal instinct made her want to walk faster, to reach the light sooner, to step out of the dank stone tunnel. But something about the quality of the light ahead, the faint shift and flicker of it, made her heart beat faster.

She held up a hand, pausing them.

“They’re waiting for us.”

That was what the shift and flicker was—people between them and the light, trying to remain still. Failing.

“An ambush?”