Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel
Lyn Benedict
PRAISE FOR
Gods & Monsters
“Lyn Benedict has a gift for intertwining the fantastic with the mundane and creating a story that stops me in my tracks.”
—All Things Urban Fantasy
“Another gripping tale of the unconventional PI who keeps eking out an existence that depends on her keeping a cool head in the face of unimaginable horrors while defying gods and immortals with virtually unlimited powers.”
—Night Owl Reviews
“The writing continues to be excellent. Benedict evokes a dark mood but breaks it up with occasional snarky humor … Benedict continues to deliver good writing, original choices in antagonists, and, overall, urban fantasy that doesn’t fall into cliché … Read these books!”
—Fantasy Literature
“Benedict’s brooding private eye gives her series a film noir feel sparked with the psychedelic colors of inordinately powerful paranormal adversaries. Sylvie Lightner’s … reluctant sense of morality and drive to protect innocents make her one of the most appealing in the relatively new crop of urban fantasy heroes.”
—Fresh Fiction
Ghosts & Echoes
“With her usual beautiful prose, a clever new take on an old piece of folklore, and a plot that keeps us feverishly turning pages to learn what new revelation waits ahead, Lyn Benedict has written one of the best urban fantasies I’ve read in some time.”
—Fantasy Literature
“The mix of supernatural elements and a real-world setting … makes this a good recommendation for fans of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series or Seanan McGuire’s new October Daye series.”
—Booklist
“This second Shadows Inquiries novel can stand alone as a strong, well-written tale with an evolving heroine who’s tough without being a sex goddess. Sylvie is a complex, flawed character, and that makes her interesting. The real-world setting keeps things believable.”
—RT Book Reviews
Sins & Shadows
“Dark and fascinating.”
—Kat Richardson, national bestselling author of Downpour
“Sylvie is harder and darker than the usual paranormal PI, and this story is the better for it.”
—CA Reviews
“Ferocious, no-holds-barred Sylvie is abrasive but forthright—a heroine that any reader would champion. Rounded out by a series of well-developed characters and pulse-pounding action, this story looks to be the start of an excellent series.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Lyn Benedict delivers one hell of a powerful story, expertly weaving Greek, Egyptian, and Christian lore and traditions together before tossing them into a modern setting … Sylvie herself is a tough cookie, one willing to boss around gods and monsters alike to get the job done.”
—The Green Man Review
“With fantastic characters, engrossing magic, and creative mayhem, Benedict gives us a new twist on the supernatural noir front. A fast-paced ride all the way!”
—Chris Marie Green, author of Deep in the Woods
“Pulls out all the stops. Sylvie does battle for no less than the fate of the world.”
—Carrie Vaughn, New York Times bestselling author of Kitty’s Greatest Hits
“A dark, gutsy urban fantasy filled with mythology … I’m looking forward to reading the next installment.”
—Fantasy Cafe
Ace Books by Lyn Benedict
SINS & SHADOWS
GHOSTS & ECHOES
GODS & MONSTERS
LIES & OMENS
LIES & OMENS
A SHADOWS INQUIRIES NOVEL
Lyn Benedict
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
LIES & OMENS
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / May 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Lane Robins.
Cover art by Shane Rebenschied.
Cover design by Lesley Worrell.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-56899-6
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For my mother,
who is oddly fond of Sylvie’s bad behavior
Acknowledgments
As always, there are many people who should be thanked for helping me bring this book to completion: the local Wednesday Night Writers, who had to hear more of my plot-wrangling than they ever wanted; Barb Webb, who kept a stick handy; and, of course, Caitlin Blasdell and Anne Sowards, who’ve both helped Sylvie run amok through the world.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Murder Unmemorable
1: Fall Apart
2: Unwelcome News
3: A Sea of Troubles
4: Making News
5: Complications
6: Government Business
7: Bureaucracy & Other Monsters
8: On the Run
9: Regrouping
10: Turbulence
11: The Good Sister & the God
12: Unmasking
13: Manipulations
14: Sisterhood
15: Mission-Minded
16: Clearing the Way
17: A Fight to Remember
> 18: Getting Gone
19: And After
PROLOGUE
Murder Unmemorable
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS,” DETECTIVE RAUL GARZA SAID AGAIN. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Afternoon sunlight spilled hot and heavy through the windshield and the open windows. The faux-leather seats had gone sticky and soft, as irritating as his incessant finger drumming. Garza scowled at the world from beneath his mirrored sunglasses.
He wasn’t the only one. Sylvie Lightner had been sitting beside him in the unmarked car for the past three hours. In that period, he’d expressed his doubts about their purpose no fewer than ten times. A frustrated scream built in her chest.
Coming to Key West to help Garza hadn’t been her idea, and it sure as hell wasn’t something she’d do for fun. For work, on the other hand—as Miami’s go-to girl for dealing with the supernatural nasties, this kind of moment was all too common, right down to the thinly veiled dislike Garza showed her. Made sense. Sylvie had so many strikes against her that it was hard to pick out which one bothered him the most. Unlicensed PI with a reputation for trouble? A vigilante who took care of problems the police didn’t want to acknowledge? A woman with a liking for large-caliber weaponry, a smart mouth, and something dangerous in her blood? Or maybe Garza had caught wind of her change in reputation. It had been bad before. The Magicus Mundi—the supernatural world that mingled with the mortal one—had called her L’enfant du meurtrier, The Murderer’s Child.
Now they knew her as the New Lilith. The dark heir to an immortal woman who had wanted to make war on her god. If Sylvie’s reputation had been bad before, now it was abysmal. She was unpopular with everyone. Witches. Monsters. Law enforcement. And nosy and controlling government agencies like Internal Surveillance and Investigation, who would rather blame her for the magical problems than deal with them on their own. No one liked her; they all treated her with suspicion and fear.
Sylvie didn’t understand it. It wasn’t like being the new Lilith had done much to change her beyond increasing her innate resistance to inimical magic.
Beyond making us immortal, her little dark voice said. She ignored it. She often did. It was another genetic legacy, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. It had its uses, not least its desire to survive, but it also was a little like having the world’s most cynical and angry roommate living in her head. She hoped it was wrong about the immortality thing; on the off chance it wasn’t, she’d started trying to play nice. Forever was a terribly long time to be friendless.
With that thought recurring to her more and more frequently, she had begun to treasure her few allies. So when Detective Adelio Suarez, her only friend in the Miami PD, asked for her help, the answer had to be yes. Suarez had told her that Garza had a major problem, her type of problem. Magical malfeasance with a rising body count.
“I must be out of my mind,” Garza said, reaching for the ignition.
“Six dead men, three dead women in a nightclub two weeks ago,” Sylvie reminded him. “Another eight down for the count last night, in hospital on IVs, still twitching. It’s a classic dance-’til-death curse.”
“I don’t believe in curses,” Garza said. He sat back, took his hand from the keys. Sighed. Spoke again. “I don’t want to believe in curses.”
“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?”
&nb
sp; “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?”
