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

traces of Azpiazu fromthe site to make sure he couldn’t come back as a vengeful ghost. You still had the sigil whole on your skin. It acted like a beacon for those traces.”
    Lupe’s skin was unmarked now. Her forehead where the sigil had been was as smooth as marble. The other women bore scars. Sylvie imagined the sigil groaning beneath the sudden weight of the curse and sinking through skin and bone, making itself at home somewhere in Lupe’s body like a migrating bullet.
    “So
you
did this to me?”
    Excuses leaped to Sylvie’s lips: She hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have happened. Azpiazu had started it. It was Tepeyollotl’s curse. “Yes.”
    “What are you going to do to fix it?” Lupe said. “I’ve lost my girlfriend, I’ve fucked up my classes, and my parents want me dead. I mean, they haven’t been happy with me since I hooked up with Jenny, but … they really want me dead, Sylvie.”
    “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I noticed.”
    Lupe’s face crumpled as if she’d hoped Sylvie would protest, would tell her pretty lies about her parents just being scared, bullet crease aside. She scrubbed at her eyes, but the snake taint in them seemed to prevent tears from forming.
    “We’ll fix it,” Sylvie said. “We’ll find a witch who’ll figure out a way—”
    “That’s what you tried last month,” Lupe said. “I’m still fucked. And it’s getting worse.”
    “Witches are a little scarce on the ground right now,” Sylvie admitted. The witches with any real power had been leaving Miami in waves, fleeing Sylvie’s gun, fleeing the ISI, fleeing the new god that was making Miami her home. The new god that Sylvie had helped create. Erinya had been a demigodling, a servant to the god of Justice—dangerous, but containable—until Sylvie had used Erinya to defeat the soul devourer’s grab at godhood. Erinya got the shiny prize instead, becoming a full god, independent and unstoppable. Worst of all, instead of retreating from the real world in proper godly protocol, she insisted on sticking around.
    Gods in the real world were always a disaster waiting to happen. They were pure power, and like a human shedding skin cells, shedding breath, gods shed scraps of power wherever they lingered. Witches could use that power, collect it for their own, but it was a risky habit. A god’s power was more likely to burn out a witch’s ability entirely than it was to recharge it.
    Once Erinya had started making her presence felt, Sylvie’s favorite go-to witch, Val Cassavetes, had disappeared somewhere in Italy, and taken Sylvie’s witchy sister, Zoe, with her. She couldn’t even rely on family.
    The witches who were left? Scavengers who hoped to grow fat on the god’s shed leavings. Untalented, untutored. Untrustworthy. Too small to be of interest to the ISI or too skilled at going to ground. The kind of witch who’d be just as glad to kill Lupe and use her bones for spell ingredients.
    “Don’t worry,” Sylvie said. “We’ll beat this. I’ll broaden the search. I’ll find a way to break this curse.” The words felt empty in her mouth, fragments of faint hope. She wasn’t a spell-breaker. Point her in the direction of the spellcaster, and she’d take him or her out of the picture, break the curse through brute force. But Azpiazu was three months dead, and the god who’d laid the original curse was a powerless shell who’d retreated to a realm Sylvie couldn’t reach.
    Lupe grimaced, all pointed teeth and animal distress, and said, “You’d better hurry. I’m running out of normal.” As if to prove her point, she went from her crouch to a leap that took her to the top of the cage, then to the high window and through it. She left a bloody smear on the sill as her wound broke open again with the exertion.
    Sylvie, thinking of the armed men outside the weight room, thought Lupe had the right idea, and clambered awkwardly, humanly, after her.

    WITH NO PLACE ELSE COMING TO MIND, SYLVIE DROVE LUPE