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

herself.
    Sylvie had taken her out to Tatya and Marisol in the Everglades,two women, two
werewolves
, who she thought might be willing to help deal with the change. They had been. Again, Sylvie had thought, problem solved. Or at least shelved.
    Sunlight lancing through her windshield from the car before her made her squint and wince, and realize she’d torn out of her apartment without grabbing her sunglasses. A small pain, though, compared to what Lupe was going through.
    Finding out she was a werewolf was bad and freaky enough—curse-inflicted lycanthropy was insanely rare—but spending the full moon with Tatya and Marisol had proved that Lupe’s problems were larger than that. With Tatya and Marisol at her side, Lupe had been braced to deal with the wolf-change, assured that no one would be hurt this time.
    The problem was that Lupe
didn’t
shift into a wolf. She changed under the moon, wasn’t left a human between two monsters, but she didn’t turn into a wolf either. For her second full moon, Lupe turned into a
jaguar
, all fury and rage at being caught between the two werewolves. No one came out of that unscathed.
    Lupe didn’t heal like Tatya and Marisol did, either; she was left with bloody bite marks that bled and scabbed for weeks. She bore the wounds without complaint, saying Jenny had had it worse.
    Sylvie had started looking into witches, hoping to find someone who could break the curse. It was a slow, too-slow, process, trying to find a witch with the right ratio of power to trustworthiness, and they’d run out of time. It didn’t help that three months ago, the ISI had helped themselves to Sylvie’s files. The ISI was supposed to deal with the intersection of the
Magicus Mundi
and the real world, but they had chosen to use the information gleaned from Sylvie’s files to run the few remaining local witches Sylvie could work with out of town. Business as usual with them. They would rather inconvenience Sylvie than do anything productive.
    So for the third moon, last night’s moon, Lupe had made her own arrangements. She’d gone to her parents’ home while they were on a buying trip in New York City and locked herself in a zoo-quality cage that she’d set up in thehome gym. Obviously, something had gone wrong.
Again.
Lupe couldn’t seem to catch a break.
    Sylvie changed lanes, got off the highway, and hoped Lupe hadn’t killed someone. If that happened, she didn’t know what she’d do.
    Put a bullet in her brain,
her little dark voice suggested.
You kill monsters.
    It was true. If she had been coming into the case from the outside, she would have shot Lupe already and fed her bones to the sea. But Lupe was hers. Sylvie had saved her from the sorcerer, and she was responsible for her well-being.
    She was forced to a stop outside the gated community’s security station and bit back her impatience. She’d forgotten Lupe’s family had money and the paranoia to go with it. The guard leaned out of his station, eyed her beat-up truck, eyed her, said nothing. “Sylvie Lightner,” she said. “I’m here to see the Fernandezes.”
    “Yeah, all right. They got back this morning.”
    He waved her on; the security mostly for show. He hadn’t even asked to see her ID. But he’d answered at least part of her question. What had gone wrong? Well, for one thing, Lupe’s parents had come home early.
    Sylvie felt her lips thin, press tight. She hit the gas, let her urgency spill out with that last rush to get to the house.
    She pulled into the long, curving, palm-shaded driveway, and cut the engine. The stucco facade, golden in the morning sunlight, seemed peaceful, at odds with the shrieking phone call.
    The driveway was paved brick and stone, money spent on decoration because it could be, and led her to a double front door with a brass knocker kept well polished. It was cold in her hands despite the growing heat of the morning.
    The door opened a bare person width to a middle-aged woman Sylvie didn’t