She lunged at him, uncertain whether she wanted to kiss him or pummel him senseless. “Bastard,” she snapped. “I thought she was going to kill you.”
“I knew she wasn’t.”
Her hands were shaking, both the broken one and the one that held the empty gun. “You’re bleeding all over the place. Do something about that, would you?”
“I’m all right, Sylvie. I’m all right.” He dragged her close, and she burrowed into him, smelled blood, but his pulse was strong and solid beneath her cheek.
She shook off her fears and straightened her shoulders. “Yeah. You are.”
Demalion looked at the liquid flutter of river water, that oily memory sink, and said, “So, I know we don’t trust Yvette’s word, but I’m concerned about the magical backlash. You’re tough, but that’s a century-old spell you’re planning to disrupt—”
“No,” she said. “Not disrupt. Kill. Put it down. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”
She felt distanced from her own body, its shakes and scrapes and broken bones a thin layer above a solid, untouchable core. It seemed so easy to walk across the room, Demalion’s gun collected on the way. To stand between the two Lethe stones, brought up out of a god’s realm. She took a breath and shot them, one after another.
Two bullets against two stones that had deflected spells and semiautomatic gunfire, and when her bullets hit—they quavered and rang like breaking bells. The sigils along their sides wisped out like blown candle flames. The water churned furiously, steaming and bubbling, then drained away.
“Well, that’s that—”
Sylvie hunched, felt oddly like someone had just punched her in the back of her head. Beside her, Demalion fell to his knees. Her vision bobbled, swamped out by memory.
* * * THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, SULKING FURIOUSLY. THE FIRST FAMILY VACATION since the brat sister had been born. Her parents were ignoring her to show off Zoe. Sylvie slunk out of the aquarium, blinking at the cloudy sky until she stopped seeing the blue of carefully maintained tanks. The ocean, grey and jagged and wild, beckoned, and she wandered down to the pier, where dockworkers were scraping barnacles off a recently raised boat.
She sat on a boat cleat and watched their knives work, scrape and twist and scrape and twist. The salt air was soothing, and there were no crying toddlers. On the other side of the pier, a man sat beneath a beach umbrella, minding three separate fishing rods wedged into the wood slats.
Then the gulls died.
They plummeted out of the sky, smacking into the pier in a splay of broken wings and twisted necks. Others slapped her face and hair and shoulders, and she screamed.
“Oye, muchacha!” the man who’d been fishing from the side of the pier called. “Ven aca! Hurry!” She ran to him, and he tucked her beneath his sunshade umbrella. Birds splatted against it, and she leaned up close to the pole, smelling salt and blood and something cold beneath. Beneath the pier, the waters slapped cold and dark as if a storm were brewing in its depths.
“Madre de Dios,” he said. Clapped a hand over her eyes. “No mire, muchacha. Don’ look.” She pried his hand away from her face. She wanted to see.
A small boat drifted toward the pier, and even from the distance, Sylvie could see that something was wrong. The people were lying on the deck. Like the birds. All loose and empty. The air was cold.
The boat collided with the pier, shaking her world; one of the bodies on the deck slid down, giving her a clear view of the body’s glazed eyes, as blank as the dead gulls’. Her stomach hurt. The fisherman rushed to the boat, along with others. Sylvie, gaping at the side of the yacht, saw a shining mist slide out through a closed porthole, curling around and around in the sky like one of the eels she’d seen in the aquarium, except they’d been just fish in water. This … The dockworkers shouted and jerked back; the fisherman swore in Spanish.
It was a monster. And it had human-shaped eyes. It coiled lazily, looked at her, and she felt her breathing stop; she crouched small and hoped it wouldn’t keep looking at her. She thought, the monster got aboard that boat, and it looked at the people on it, like she looked at the fish in the aquarium, and the people died.
Its eye was glittering and red. The air was frigid; she couldn’t stop shivering. All around her, the pier was quiet.
The monster slid back into the water and fish bobbed to the surface, silver bellies up, as it passed. A thin wake cut against the waves and disappeared into the deeper sea.
A minute later, sound and warmth crashed over her again, her mother shaking her, “We were worried, Sylvie, you can’t just walk away—oh God no, don’t look at them, you don’t need to see that—” and dragging her away from the dock, from the dead people on the boat.
“There was a monster,” Sylvie told her mother.
“No such thing as monsters,” her mother said. “Come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”
Sylvie had gone, glad to be warm, glad to be safe, glad even to see her dumb little sister. She knew that her mother was wrong. It was a monster. She’d seen it.
The next day she went back to the pier, slipping away when her mother went to get them lunch and her father was trying to get Zoe to stop shrieking. It was closed off, yellow tape where the boat still bumped against the dock. Sylvie kicked at the gravel, studied the area.
A dark-haired woman ducked under the tape, walked out to the pier. She wasn’t a policewoman; she was wearing a long, narrow skirt and lots of strange jewelry. Sylvie bit her lip, followed her. The woman turned when Sylvie approached. Her eyes were dark and hard and she didn’t look nice at all. She looked interesting.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see where the monster was,” Sylvie said. “The papers didn’t say anything about it. It said they all died from drugs. I don’t get it. The fisherman saw it. The dockworkers saw it. Why didn’t they say so?”
“Because people are willfully blind,” the woman said. She turned back to stare out at the sea. Her lips curled. “They want to pretend dangerous things don’t exist.”
“Like the eel-monster thing.”
“Water spirit,” the woman said. “A genus loci, do you know what that is?”
“No,” Sylvie said. The woman shrugged, didn’t explain what that meant. Silence fell, then the woman spoke again.
“They picked it up in the Bermuda Triangle. It gets bored sometimes. That makes it cruel and destructive.”
“It killed people because it was bored?”
“You’re young. The world is new for you,” the woman said. “You have no idea how boring things can get when you’re my age. You have to make your own amusements where you can.”
“Is that why you’re here? To be amused? People died.”
“Aren’t you the junior moralizer?” the woman said. “But not law-abiding. You’re going to get in trouble if they see you behind the tape.”
“I’m a kid,” Sylvie said. “They’ll just send me home to my parents. They might arrest you.”
“Not likely,” she said. She turned, put her back to the water. “So. Little moralizer. When you go home, and you’re back with your little friends. What are you going to tell them? That you saw a monster? Or will you lie and tell them what the newspaper said?”
“Why would I tell them anything at all?” Sylvie asked. “They won’t believe me if I do, and I’m not going to lie. I know what I saw.”
The woman’s hand was on Sylvie’s cheek suddenly; Sylvie jerked, but the woman was strong,
