Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel Read Online Free Page A

down.”
    “Why should I?” Lupe shouted.
    Sylvie got her first good look at the woman since she’d entered the room and found herself in reluctant agreement. Why should Lupe calm down when things were so completely, visibly, wrong?
    When Lupe had turned wolf that first time, she hadn’t come back unscathed. Her teeth had stayed sharp-edged behind soft lips. When she’d become a jaguar, the shift back to human left her with a swath of spotted skin across her shoulders and back. Whatever she’d shifted into last night had left its own startling and far-too-noticeable mark: Lupe’s irises looked like hammered brass, and her pupils were black slits. They should have looked like special-effects lenses, easy to explain. They didn’t.
    Lupe crossed her arms, long, tanned limbs crossing darkly over her white tank top, her white-linen pants. Blood spread scarlet near her rib cage. The shirt was smoked at the center of the bloodstain. A bullet crease. Close range.
    Sylvie stepped closer, peeled the shirt up. Lupe winced. Superficial but bloody. Sylvie grabbed a towel from the weight bench, pressed it against the wound. It came away mostly dry. Lupe had bled hard, but she wasn’t going to bleed out. She could wait for first aid. Sylvie threw the towel across the room, a drift of white in a mostly white room. Lupe’s blood was the brightest thing in it.
    “They shot you?”
    “Wouldn’t you?” Lupe said. “The cage didn’t hold me. I almost killed him. Olivia came last night, waiting to welcome them all home. She brought my nephew, Sylvie. Two years old. She thought they were alone in the house, and I … I was loose.”
    “How’d you manage that, anyway?” Sylvie asked. The cage was first-rate. The bars were solid steel, none of them more than four inches from each other, closed at bottom and top, and, until Sylvie had smashed the lock, secure.
    Lupe blinked dark gold eyes, and Sylvie understood what they reminded her of just as Lupe said, “I turned into a python. A big one. I almost crushed his rib cage. Twoyears old, and his aunt tried to make him a meal. I knew better, even as I closed my coils, but I couldn’t stop.”
    Sylvie swore. It was all wrong. All unexpected. Werewolf was bad, were-jaguar was worse—but Lupe had worn those shapes before while held by Azpiazu. She’d worn bear also. Sylvie had expected that to be the third shift, something big but containable. Not this. Not a reptile who shared nothing with humankind.
    Lupe swayed closer; Sylvie smelled sweat, blood, and a musty underlay of old snakeskin. Her stomach turned uneasily.
    Careful,
her little dark voice warned.
She’s dangerous.
    Dangerous enough to maul a woman, to take on two wolves, to try to smother and eat a child. A calculating brain with animal instinct.
    “It’s the curse, isn’t it,” Lupe said. “The curse that Azpiazu suffered. Now it’s on me.”
    Sylvie thought of a slew of platitudes but chose not to lie. “Looks like.”
    Lupe’s legs gave out; she dropped to the floor as fluidly as if she had gone serpentine again. “Why me?”
    The question wasn’t an accusation, but it felt like one. The other women who’d survived being Azpiazu’s prisoners—Maria, Rita, Anamaria, Elena—had come out of it untouched except for nightmare memories and scarred foreheads where the binding sigils had been.
    The binding sigil had held them prisoner to Azpiazu’s will. Sylvie and her cohorts had disrupted the sigils on the other four, magically or physically. She remembered gouging at Rita in bear form, her marked forehead the only part of her still human. Sylvie had slashed the sigil with a sharp stone and her nails.
    But Lupe, during the final battle, had been wounded and retreated beneath a bush. Her sigil had never been disrupted. It hadn’t mattered. The spell had broken when Azpiazu died. It should have been a nonissue.
    “We went back,” Sylvie said, half in realization, half in explanation. “We dispersed the last