Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel Read Free

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