Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel (2 page)

“Hey,” Sylvie said. “You believed in them enough to pick out the bad guy.”

She opened the file folder in her lap again, though she’d memorized most of it. Marcel Braud. Twenty-seven years old. He looked bad on paper. Spoiled, rich, a history of smaller crimes: shoplifting, DUIs, and the habit of getting high and beating up his girlfriends. But he was sober now.

Sober enough to use black magic?

The first victim was his ex-girlfriend. The people who died were the ones who’d danced with her, or in her immediate orbit. Last night, the first one to fall under the curse was his current girlfriend, who Braud had accused of cheating. No matter which way Garza added it up, the culprit seemed the same. Braud.

Garza had told Sylvie that Braud, when brought in for questioning, hadn’t done much to deny it, only smirked and asked what Garza thought he could do about it.

Which led to this. Sitting outside Braud’s Key West condo waiting for their chance to go inside without witnesses. Garza’s jaw kept jumping. She couldn’t blame him. He was well out of his comfort zone.

She was in hers.

“Let’s go,” she said, as the neighbor pulled out and left the tiny parking lot quiet. The midday dead zone.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, but followed her out of the car. “You sure about this?”

“He’s killing people,” Sylvie said.

“I meant … what’s protecting us from him?”

“Me.”

Garza watched her unholster her weapon, and visibly, carefully said nothing about a civilian drawing a gun like she meant to use it.

Sylvie tapped on Braud’s door, and when he opened it, she stuck her gun in his face and let herself in.

Garza shut the door hastily behind them.

“What is this?” Braud said, looking past Sylvie and her weapon. “Garza? You again? I’ll have your job.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “You won’t.”

She’d come prepared to scare him senseless, to take away any magic he’d gathered. Until this very moment, she’d assumed he had possession of some malignant magical tool that could be removed from his custody. But there was a chain around his neck with a too-familiar bat-wing pendant. Part identification, part magical amplification.

He was
Maudit
.

His magic was inborn.

The energy in the room shivered, fluxed cold, pulling away from them like an icy wave washing out to sea. Beside her, Garza shouted, his voice scaling up in panic.

Sylvie’s skin crawled; Braud smirked.

“Stop,” she said. Normally, she wouldn’t have bothered with that much warning, but she had a cop beside her. Her resistance to magic meant she could afford that momentary hesitation.

Garza, his face a rictus of pain, raised his gun and shot. Sylvie jerked aside; the air before Braud shimmered like an oil slick and let the flattened bullets slip down to ping hotly against the tile floor.

“Shadows!” Garza gasped. His face was blistering, tiny seeping pustules.

Braud jerked at hearing her identified, turned to look at her. Garza gasped in what sounded like relief as Braud’s focus split between them.

Braud repeated, “Shadows.”

Cold air rushed past her, sucking all the chill toward him. Heat sparked around her, stung her skin with points of fire. One of the
Maudit
top-ten favorites for removing an enemy: the immolation spell.

Sylvie stepped forward, ignored his increasingly desperate spell casting, ignored the heat that couldn’t seep beneath her skin, couldn’t boil her blood the way it was doing to Garza’s. She sent a bullet toward Braud’s skull.

A glimmer of that opalescent shield eddied between her bullet and his brains, then disappeared all at once, letting her shot hit home between his eyes.

He collapsed.

Garza had a quiet breakdown at the door; his hand jittered between his own weapon, his radio, his brow. Finally, he said, “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill—I was burning alive.”

“And now you’re not,” Sylvie said. She eyed him carefully despite her flippant words. The welts on his face were fading fast, sinking back into his skin as the temperature around them dropped; the air conditioner whined, recovering from the sudden burst of heat.

Garza holstered his gun, kept patting at his face, his forearms. “My bullets didn’t touch him.”

“Magical body armor. It’s a
Maudit
thing. They like to attach a few prepared spells to their amulets.”

“Maudit?”

“Society of very bad men. Who have issues with women. I should have known when you told me he was killing off his girlfriends.”

“You killed him. You carrying special rounds? Like silver?”

“No,” Sylvie said. She didn’t elaborate. Cops liked facts, and she didn’t have any. What could she say? That her bullets somehow could be relied on to find a weakness in magical shields? She hadn’t figured it out herself. “Call the hospital. Let’s make sure the people he cursed are healed up, too.”

“Then what?”

“Make him disappear?” She tried to sound like this was a first for her, that she was just as lost as he was. Garza eyed her sidelong, suspicious. Not surprising. She didn’t do innocent very well.

She was going to catch hell for this one way or the other. She really hadn’t been expecting to kill Braud, had expected a one-spell dilettante, the kind that could be
scared straight. But the
Maudits
were a different type of sorcerer entirely: socially connected, rich, entitled, and far more talented than they deserved to be. Death was the only thing that stopped them.

Garza could have been killed. She’d endangered her client.

She should have come alone.

She was tired of going it alone.

“… they’re awake? Stopped seizing? No, no, no need to bother the doctor. That’s wonderful. May I interview them in the morning? Perfect.”

Sylvie eavesdropped shamelessly, felt a quick glow of satisfaction. That was that, then.

Garza disconnected. The unhappy tension in his face had changed out for a visible and grim contentment. Not the outcome he’d planned but one he could live with. “So, we make him disappear. How?”

“Your case. Your call.” She’d love to push this off onto Garza if she could. Failing that, she certainly wasn’t going to suggest a place to dump the body. There was foolhardy—shooting a sorcerer dead in front of a cop—and then there was just plain stupid—drawing a cop, no matter how friendly, a map to her occasional graveyard.

Garza grimaced. “God. Yeah. I can’t believe I’m saying this.”

“Didn’t believe in curses either, at first.”

“Fine. There’s a drug spot. I’ll leave him there. Braud has a past of drug-related offenses. A deal gone wrong in a drug alley will pass. Your gun on file?”

“No. What about the apartment?” There wasn’t a lot of mess. Braud’s magical shield hadn’t saved him, but it had contained the blood spatter surprisingly well. And since the shield was keyed to the bat-wing amulet, it was keeping the blood spill close to the body.

“I know someone,” Garza said.

“Figured as much.” Sylvie shivered. Cops made the best murderers. Or accomplices.

WHEN SYLVIE HADN’T HEARD FROM GARZA IN A WEEK, WHEN THE finding of Braud’s body passed almost without comment in the press—odd for a wealthy white man with a luxury lifestyle—she bit back her instincts that suggested no news was good news, and called him.

“Any fallout?” she asked, when he answered.

“Fallout?”

“With Braud.”

“Who is this?”

Sylvie hung up, frowning. Garza’s confusion sounded real. More, when she’d mentioned Braud, his attention had sharpened as if he’d been investigating Braud’s death. Not covering it up.

Sylvie figured it was time for a trip back to Key West.

Hours later, she waved at Detective Raul Garza across a parking lot, and he raised a hand back in the halfhearted way one did when recognition was lacking. She let her hand drop. She wasn’t as surprised as she should have been. Garza had been her fourth stop. Sylvie had visited some of the dance-’til-you-die-cursed clubbers, and none of them recalled anything more complex than someone
maybe spiking my drink
? One man, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if his feet felt bruised and tender, said he thought that maybe there’d been E going around.

When she pressed, tried to get them to admit they recalled more, remembered something magical, they’d locked up and stuttered like a skipped record, claimed headaches. She imagined, if she confronted Garza, he’d do the same.

Her jaw set; she tightened her grip on the steering wheel as she turned the truck for Miami and home.

The thing was, Sylvie had always known the world was blind to the
Magicus Mundi
, that people would ignore their own senses to come up with a more “real world” answer. It wasn’t a werewolf that ate the family pet, it was an alligator. Fur? What fur?

People liked their world’s being safe and sane and sensible. Sylvie had always assumed that the hard cases who denied magic even when it was happening big and bright and undeniable in front of them were
willfully
blind.

She’d never considered that they might have been blindfolded by someone or something else.

Maybe she needed to.

This wasn’t the first time Sylvie had expected to have real-world fallout from a magical event: After the gods had battled in Chicago, scattering god-power and warping the city, she’d expected to hear endless speculation and theorizing. Instead, there’d been a news report about an inland storm and freak occurrences brought on by panic and strange atmospheric pressures. Strange atmospheric pressures that allowed children to bring nightmares to life, that set buildings to attacking each other, and lifted roadways off the ground like ribbons. Very strange pressures.

That was the most egregious example, but several hours of research later, Sylvie had compiled a list of should-have-been-noticed events. Chicago, obviously. The cursed bodies she’d found in the Everglades, more locally. And reading between the lines on newspaper accounts and her case files: another half dozen. It seemed like anytime the
Magicus Mundi
made itself felt with a significant death toll, something or someone swept it under the proverbial rug.

Sylvie, who believed in honesty, even if she didn’t always practice it, found it insupportable. She couldn’t stop people from pretending the
Magicus Mundi
didn’t exist. But deliberately blinding them? The world was dangerous enough when you knew the predators existed, even subconsciously. If you weren’t allowed to know? It was like being shoved into a room to take a test without even knowing what the subject was, and if you failed, you died.

She and her business partner, Alexandra Figueroa-Smith, would have to do some research. Find out who was behind it. Find out why they were doing it. And find out what it would take to stop them.

Fall Apart

SYLVIE HAD A WHOLE LIST OF THINGS SHE DISLIKED—MISOGYNIST sorcerers, incompetent drivers, government agents who raided her office illegally, trashed her security, and absconded with her files, lovers who were too busy to call, and cops who weren’t—too many things to really enumerate or rank, but frantic phone calls from her clients were close to the top.

She liked frantic calls even less when things were theoretically under control. Her client, Lupe Fernandez, was supposed to be tucked up safe and sound at her parents’ home.

Lupe’s call had been brief, mostly unintelligible. It had been three minutes of sobbing, shouting, a vibration of mortal terror. When the call had disconnected, mid panicked babble, Sylvie knew something had gone wrong. Knew she hadn’t done her job right.

That was the kind of thought that ruined her morning, sent her scrabbling out of her bed, grabbing at clothes, her gun, her keys, and heading for her truck at a dead run. Not the way she preferred to begin her days. Ideally, they’d start with waking before the alarm went off, having time for a leisurely cup of coffee, a morning jog, or swim if the
day was too hot, then a late breakfast at her office, while Alex caught her up on potential clients.

If it were a really good day, when she woke, Demalion would be beside her, lashes dark on his face, the glint of blond stubble in slanting sunlight, sleeping as determinedly as a cat. If it were a good day, she’d get to lean over and nudge him awake, watch his pupils flare and fade as he blinked into morning light.