“She all right?” And wasn’t that a careful distinction of all right? Was the soul-shocked woman still breathing? Morals and the Magicus Mundi didn’t line up all that well.

“She is,” Wales said. Marco shrugged, an insincere oops. “They all are,” he said, nodding decisively as if saying it made it so.

“Yeah, let’s just do this,” Sylvie said. She directed her attention to the scene, trying to splice the two images together in her mind. When she’d been there last, it was a peaceful scene—minus the dead women, naturally—glimmering waters, green duckweed, saw grass stretching out toward the sloughs and the hammocks.

Now there was char everywhere, scraps of metal in the process of being collected; scorched grass, oily water, the detritus of investigation, and a double handful of dropped cops. Sylvie wandered over to the collected evidence bags, reading labels. Might as well start there.

There were two men fallen near the bags, dressed in Fed-standard suits, in Fed-standard colors—one blue, one black. Miami detectives had more sense, wore khakis and short-sleeved polo shirts. Sylvie pulled out the first man’s ID: Dennis Kent, ISI. She burned his face into her memory. Odds were, she’d be seeing him again. Dark hair, grey flecked, a Roman nose. Soft hands.

The second man—dirty blond, smooth-skinned, a babe in the woods—was Nick O’Neal, and definitely the junior of the pair.

Strange suits, indeed. Lio’s rumor mill had been right.

But these two looked more like an exploratory team than the first wave of an ISI incursion. Someone wanting to make sure that this was worth their time. Sylvie grimaced.

Using the Hand of Glory on them would probably go a long way to convincing them that this was ISI-interesting. Couldn’t win for losing, sometimes.

In the background, Wales held a furious, whispered conversation with Marco, a series of snake hisses on the breeze. Sylvie tipped her head, let the air cool her skin, drying the blood on her face until the streaks pulled uncomfortably. She reached up to scratch, then saw Marco studying her, his hollow eyes eager even from twenty feet away, and dropped her hands. Yeah, better not.

She put their IDs back, flipped through the evidence bags.

“You sense anything? Find anything?” Sylvie asked. She was coming up blank, blanker, blankest. Yesterday, the landscape had held that strange charge to the air, the sense that magic had been used, had altered reality. Today, it was just heat, breeze, sun, water, smoke, oil. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. She slapped at a mosquito that made a heat-slow sortie at her exposed wrist and pulled her sleeves back down.

“Nothing much,” Wales said. “Bit of a ghost presence. The dead cops. The burned woman. But they’re only traces, and they’re fading fast. They’re so far gone, holding ’em back’d be nothing but an act of cruelty.”

“You could do that?” Sylvie asked. “Pull them back?” That made her twitchy. It wasn’t just that he could keep them there, but that Wales—scarecrow klutz of a man—could pull their souls away from whatever gods lay waiting to claim them.

“Could. Won’t,” Wales said. “They can’t tell me much more than they already have, whispering about confusion and being lost.”

“You can hear them?”

Wales turned away from the empty space he was studying so intently that she knew he saw more than she could. “You don’t know much about necromancy, do you, Shadows?”

“Never needed to,” she said.

Wales hmmed thoughtfully, then spotted an open cooler of drinks, ice sparking against the sun, and said, “Thirsty?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said, caught the icy soda he tossed her way with relief, set the can against her nape. “So we’re done here?”

“Nothing of death magic happened here,” Wales said. “At least, nothing powerful enough to linger. And you said five dead women? That should have lingered.” He raised the can to his lips, lowered it without taking a drink. “You sure they were dead?”

“They were underwater,” she said, but she was thinking of different angles. “They weren’t breathing, weren’t moving.”

“Did you try to revive—”

“Wales, I took a look and got the hell gone.”

He gnawed his lower lip, knelt among the charred rubble that had been a police ’copter. He tilted his head as if he were listening.

“They weren’t dead,” he said.

Something slow and miserable churned in her belly, a flutter of guilt and professional embarrassment. She hadn’t even checked. She’d just seen the surface of things. And she knew better than to take things at face value.

“They weren’t dead,” he said again, and if she hadn’t known better, she’d have assumed he was rubbing salt in the wound. But it was an echo in his voice, patiently repeating something he heard. Something a ghost was sharing.

He stood, staggered a little, and said, “Okay. The burned woman is the only one of the five women who is actually dead. Jennifer Costas.”

“Could I have—”

He shook his head. “No. Jennifer burnt up because the spell binding them broke. It feels like a contingency plan of some sort. A magical if-then command. The others?”

“Fled,” Sylvie said. “According to my witness, they got up and walked away.”

“But Jennifer was restrained,” Wales said, turning as if he could see the helicopter that her body had been strapped into. “Trapped.”

“She was the only one who burned,” Sylvie said. “If the spell broke—”

“She was the only one who couldn’t get free,” Wales said. He paced back and forth, raising clouds of soot, stumbling over metal fragments, making his mark on the scene. There would be no pretending that they hadn’t been there. “She tried. Twisting. Tangled. Hot like spell fire in her veins. It’s strange magic, Sylvie. I don’t get it, and she only knows what she felt.”

“Necromancy?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s death in it. Sacrificial death of some kind, but old.” A shudder ran through his body. His eyes unfocused, listening. “She’s so afraid. She’s dead, and she’s still afraid it could get worse. She’s . . . It’s all . . . hunger and torn hearts and fear in her mind.” His voice gave out, going thready, then silent.

Sylvie waited. He was motionless, as if listening to the dead allowed him to take on some of their deathly calm. A moment passed, with his tight breathing and the distant slurp of moving water the only sounds.

He shook it off all at once, body moving from ghost languor to his more normal hunched shoulders and twitchy nerves. “It’s . . . necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft and . . . it’s a tangle of magics. It’s layered, and it’s really ugly.”

“So the other four women are . . . what? In some type of magical suspended animation?”

“They were,” he said. “Until Jennifer was pulled from the water.”

“Lio said the other women changed shape.”

“See!” Wales gesticulated broadly, pointing at nothing but his own aggravation and confusion. “That doesn’t fit either. Shape-shifting’s not necromancy; it’s closer to biology.”

“And you said you didn’t know anything about shape-shifters,” Sylvie said.

“So I hear things. So what?”

She let that slide. Wales wanted to keep his breadth of knowledge on a need-to-know basis? She could live with that. For now. There were other, more pressing problems. “How would that work?”

He shrugged. “Suspended animation? Hell, maybe it wasn’t magic at all, just more of the government fucking around in our lives, using us as—”

“Wales,” Sylvie snapped. “Take off the tinfoil hat and focus. It wasn’t pure necromancy, fine. I believe you. Can we get out of here now? Let these people recover before a snapping turtle starts nipping off fingers?”

Wales nodded. “Yeah. Good point.”

They backtracked to the ATV trail, Wales sticking to drier ground this time, and once they’d reached a point where the grass would cover their presence, Wales brought out a little packet, tipped it into the stagnant waters. Sylvie watched the water go the color of old bone, swirling white and cream, and said, “Powdered milk?”

“Don’t knock it; it works,” Wales said, and dipped Marco’s flaming Hand. “And a hell of a lot easier to cart around.”

It was one of the things she hated about magic. It made these rules for itself—the purity of milk could put out an evil flame—and then bent or broke them at the user’s will. Grocery-store milk? Powdered milk? Where was the purity in that? But it was working.

Marco faded away. Behind them there was silence, then shouting, as alarmed police found themselves waking, groggy and scared. Sylvie bit her lip as she and Wales moved away. The ISI would understand what had happened even if the police didn’t. Odds were, they’d come looking to her for answers first.

She hadn’t thought this through at all well, had let her eagerness to clear the debt she owed Lio send her rushing out to the scene, and for what? They hadn’t found anything. No monsters. No dead girls. Hell, if Wales was right—her stomach lurched once again.

“They’re alive,” Sylvie said. “Christ. I could have saved them if I’d called a witch instead of the cops yesterday. I freaked out, saw the scene, and thought I didn’t want to be found near it. I fucked up.”

Wales, thankfully, didn’t say anything, a veteran of the kind of second-guessing that paranoia bred. After another moment, Sylvie said, “So, can you help the women? If we find them? Even though it’s not necromancy?”

Bitterness laced her question, made it accusing, blaming the nearest magic-user for the actions of another. Wales blinked, paused in his steps, and she flipped a hand at him in apology.

Just . . . why did it always have to come down to magic? What had happened to the days of point and shoot, and problem solved? At this rate, she was going to have to have a full-time witch around, and Sylvie just didn’t trust them that much. Not Wales. Not Val. Hell, not even Zoe, whose first actions in the Magicus Mundi had been shortsighted at best.

“Magic’s not that different, branch to branch,” Wales said. “Sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. We’re all built of the same thing. We just . . . specialize.”

“Is that a yes?” Sylvie said.

“It’s a maybe. Don’t make me theorize without evidence.”

“Now you sound like a witch,” she said.

He stalked along, squelching, his jeans collecting dust and mud, and finally said, “So, let me guess. A witch told you about magic. Painted witchcraft as team Good. Let me tell you what. It’s all the same at the core. Greedy scavengers stealing power, growing stronger every year they survive, and rearranging the world to suit themselves.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie said. “So why isn’t there a word for a good necromancer? Everything else has a good versus bad. White witch. Mambo. Shaman.”

“Because we don’t need the ego stroke. Deal with death enough, and you’d be surprised how little you care for human approval. I think you’d understand that. Besides, good, bad, benign, malign—it’s all about who’s making the judgment.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “Enslaving the dead’s a magnitude worse than a witch’s glamour.”

“Even if the witch spells someone to fall in love? Erases their self-will? It’s not just the stuff of novels, Shadows. Witches talk a good game, but they use the same magic we do. And let me tell you. Witches do far more damage than your average necromancer. Yeah, we can turn a man into a zombie, keep him as a servant until he falls to pieces, but it’s really not all that useful. They take effort to create, they’re hard to control—too stupid to really get complex ideas across—and they can’t communicate even if they aren’t dumb as a sack of bricks. Brain death really means something, y’know.

“And in the time that a necromancer does that? Your average witch will have sold, traded, or dealt out enough spells to destroy a dozen men. Witches like their comforts. Or has your friend Cassavetes never used magic to get her point across?”

Sylvie shrugged, wanting to deny it, but she couldn’t. Val was, or had been—before her powers got nuked—all about the little irritants. Sylvie had seen her whisper a confusion spell through the phone when an unlucky solicitor had dialed her one time too many. Val had said the spell was temporary.

Wales said, “I knew a priest once who made awesome zombies. Mixed in a witch’s poppet spell, broke out his own teeth, and bound them into the zombies’ skulls. It was like he had an entire group of servants who responded to his every whim.”

“So, what, that makes it worth the effort?” Sylvie said. “That how you made your new deal with Marco? Tied a bit of yourself into him?”

Wales shuddered. “No. A thousand nos. The priest I mentioned? That witch spell was based on the law of similarity. Like to like. It let him control ’em with minimal effort. Problem was he drew that similarity so tight it went both ways. He started to rot.”

“Gross,” Sylvie said.

“At least he only injured himself,” Wales said. “Your average witch could do that to any man on the street.”

“Careful,” Sylvie said. “You make your point sharp enough, you’ll end up impaled on it.”

When he paused, she said, “I already distrust magic-users. You really want me to have another reason to tar you all with the same brush? Keep comparing yourself to the Maudits and bad cess witches. Give me a reason to go after—”

Sylvie stopped midthreat, shaking it off. Wales wasn’t a witch, but he just might be as clever as Val at getting his own way. Locked in their argument over semantics, they’d headed absently back toward her truck.

She had other ideas.

“The ghost girl,” she said.

“Jennifer,” he said.

She waved off the name. She knew it, but who the girl had been was currently less important than what she was now. “Can you get her to track the other women?”

Wales opened his mouth, caught her expression, and sighed. “Yeah. Probably. If she’s not too afraid.”

“So. Do it.”

Wales scrubbed at his face, at his wayward hair, and said, “Yeah, okay. It’s just weird.”

“You were talking to her before,” Sylvie pointed out.

“In the place she died. That’s like . . . going to interview someone at their home. This is like cuffing them and bringing them down to the station. She’s going to be unhappy.”

Sylvie said, “Talk, talk, talk. Not getting it done.” Briskness was best, the only antidote to Wales’s dwelling on a fear that wasn’t his.

He sank down to a spider-legged crouch; his shadow drew away from him, spraddled long and dark over the grasses and waters. He scraped charcoal from his boot tread, piled the chunky ash and soot into Marco’s turned-up palm, folded himself over the Hand, whispering, his breath stirring the dust and ash. “Marco, bring her here.”

A spur of glacial cold racked Sylvie’s bones for a millisecond, then passed through her, leaving her with a taste of danger in her mouth and a rocketing heart. Wales shrugged uncomfortably. “Marco doesn’t care for you overmuch,” he said.

“He’s not the only one,” Sylvie said. “Just keep him under control.”

The brush of cold came back; this time she sidestepped the majority of it. She was a quick learner if nothing else.

“Is she here?”

Wales ignored her, head cocked slightly, gaze turned inward, lips moving in soundless speech, coaxing, commanding. He shivered, either for being bracketed between ghosts or for fighting off Jennifer Costas’s fear.

“Wales,” Sylvie said. “Her pain. Not yours. Her fear. Not ours.”

Wales nodded, head up, gaze following something invisible to Sylvie. If she squinted hard, concentrated, she thought she saw a shimmer walking ahead of him, something like a blur of smudgy heat. Jennifer Costas.

A coolness in the air—the lurking Marco—got her moving also, thinking wryly that this was the single most gruesome game of hot’n’cold she had ever played, directed by ghosts in the search for bespelled women.

Only the mosquitoes stayed persistent. She slapped another one from her cheek, drawn there by the bloody symbols Wales had put on her skin. She lifted her shoulder, rubbed at the stickiest spot, and left smears on her clothes.

“Don’t suppose she has a time frame,” Sylvie said. The sun was high and hot, would stay that way for hours yet. Didn’t mean she wanted to spend the entire day in the swamp.

“Look on the bright side,” Wales said. “At least we’re off the radar for Odalys and her crew.”

“Small comfort,” Sylvie said. “Very small.”

Wales grinned, surrounded by ghosts and utterly at ease. Necromancers were just plain different from regular people.

“You just want to shoot something,” he said.

“It is cathartic,” she agreed.

She slipped off the next hummock, splashed down into dark water to her calf. Shaking water out of her shoes, she thought, Yeah, shooting things was better than this.

Between one breath and the next, her irritation fled. Her spine tightened up; her skin went clammy. She wanted to blame Marco for it, a ghostly bump and run, but Wales had gone just as rigid.

She drew her gun, the rasp of it leaving the holster loud in the sudden silence. Wales, beside her, was whispering into the wind, or Marco’s ear, or Jennifer’s, seeking reassurance or explanation.

The question—Is something there?—hovered on her lips, unasked. The answer was evident. The thick heat of the day had gone unwholesome, unhealthy. Sylvie licked her lips and tasted something in the air, something foul and earthy like a poorly skinned hide left out to cure.

Her palm sweated on her gun; she changed hands and wiped the other against her jeans.

Wales said, “We’re close.”

“You think?”

He shot her a pissy look, which she gave back in spades, and he shrugged a single shoulder in reluctant agreement. “To our left. Magic. A lot of it.”

“Necromancy?”

“Not exactly,” Wales said. His face creased in concentration; his eyes closed as if he could get the feel of the area better with one sense cut off. Sylvie, thinking of dead cops and bespelled women, preferred to keep her eyes open, watchful. “It’s not not-necromancy either. I don’t . . . I don’t like it. Marco doesn’t like it. And Jennifer—she’s so scared. I’m letting her go now.”

Jennifer wasn’t the only one scared; Wales’s voice wavered. He tucked his hands into his pockets, tangling Marco’s dead fingers in his own.

Sylvie felt the trembling echo of his fear in her own bones, transmitted like a virus. This, this was why she preferred to work alone. It was hard enough to face the Magicus Mundi on her own; she didn’t need someone to infect her with their fears.

“We could go back,” he said.

“Or hey, we could do the job I brought you here for? Investigate?”

“We don’t even know what we’re walking into,” he said. “I like caution. Caution is good.”

“Caution had me calling the cops last night,” she said. “Caution killed Jennifer Costas and three policemen. Injured a friend of mine. This job doesn’t reward caution.”

She took a steady breath, refusing to choke under the weight of whatever saturated the air. She had resisted aversion charms made by one of the best witches in the state; she could withstand this growing miasma of fear and wrongness. She let her breath out, pushed Wales’s fear out of her bones, and took the first step toward trouble.

The next one was easier.

Wales followed on the fourth step, so tense that she felt his presence like a live wire, something to be wary of, something that could lash out, unexpectedly, in any direction.

“Are we getting closer?”

When he didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder, irritated that she had to do so—the ground before them was growing marshy again, treacherous.

He nodded stiffly. “Straight on.”

Straight on, like there was even a path. Sylvie soldiered onward, stepped into a deceptive puddle, and found herself suddenly knee deep, a plume of mud swirling through the previously still water.

Wales said, his voice tight and small, “Marco says we’re close.”

“Well, if Marco says so.” She shifted her grip on her gun. Didn’t know if she would need it. So far, the day was quiet. Creepy and fraught with magical tension, but quiet. But then, that was how it had been yesterday, and Lio had been mauled.

Her skin goose-bumped. She didn’t know if she should use the gun, even if attacked. Odds were, any attackers would be the shape-changed women, not the wildlife that fled their path.

But she knew herself and knew that she would shoot in a heartbeat. If necessary. She hoped it wouldn’t be.

Water slipped into her jeans, nearly blood temperature, and wicked upward, filling her senses with swamp. A vibration in the water ahead sent ripples stroking slowly back her direction.

Sylvie squinted against sun gleaming off the water. There was something up ahead, a paler patch in the water, the sway of something that wasn’t reed. “Wales,” she breathed, and picked up her pace, still scanning the area but moving off to investigate that pallid gleam. Sand maybe?

Given that Wales looked as happy to be in the water as a house cat, she doubted it was anything so natural.

Sylvie hastened the last ten feet, her pulse echoing in her ears, her breath in her chest, and splashed forward. She stilled, staring down at the choppy water, trying to see. She could reach through the water, touch . . . but even the kaleidoscope image she could piece together looked distressingly like flesh. If she reached, would she end with cold flesh in her hands?

Or worse, if this was one of the women, would touching her break the spell in the wrong way? Create another burst of lethal flame, boiling her and Wales alive?

Wales said, “Sylvie?”

“I found . . . something,” Sylvie said.

“So did I,” Wales said. He waded a gentle circle around her and the lagoon. His mouth drew tight. “You said there were five women?”

“Were five. Now four.”

“Five,” he said.

“What?”

“I count five. A pentagram. Jennifer’s been replaced.”

Sylvie waded over to him, following his path, dismay overriding the cold dread in her bones. She studied each face, blurred by water, trying to pick out which one was new.

Six women and only two names known. One of them elicited from the woman’s ghost. Her city had enough problems without women being dragged into the ’Glades and turned into mannequins.

The bodies swayed gently in place, as if tethered. Despite Wales’s assurance that they lived, they looked dead. Abused and dead. Grimacing, Sylvie reached into the water. Blood temperature near the surface, cooler and subtly slimy deeper down. Beside her, Wales hissed out a warning breath.

“Easy, Tex,” she murmured. “I’m just getting a closer look.”

“Just be careful,” he said. “I think the water is an insulator. Like silk. Magically inert. Pun aside, it might be a dampening field. Helps maintain the stasis they’re in.”

Sylvie nodded. “What if I keep most of the body beneath the surface?”

“Why mess with them at all?”

“Pictures,” she said. “I know Maria Ruben. The others are still unidentified.” She grasped the woman’s shoulders from behind, her palms pressing flat against clammy shoulder blades. The woman—girl, really—felt dead. Heavy and inert, unpleasantly limp, free from rigor. Her blond hair slithered over Sylvie’s forearms like a swath of clinging weed. She swallowed hard and gently raised the woman’s face; the water rolled back, baring open contact-green eyes with fixed pupils. A symbol was carved into her forehead, blanched white and bloodless. The skin furrowed.

“Do you know this symbol?” Sylvie asked.

“No,” he said, after a glance.

Sylvie braced the woman’s shoulder against her hip, took out her camera, and clicked. One down.

“That’s enough,” Wales said. “Put her back.”

“Sense something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s a yes-or-no question,” she said. “Do you sense something?”

“Yes, then. Don’t know what. But something’s paying attention. Do the others fast.”

“You could help. You’re the necromancer. You’re the one who’s supposed to be grappling with corpses.”

“That’s the point, Shadows. They’re not corpses, remember?”

“Picky, picky,” she said. She repeated the picture taking with the other women, careful not to raise them too high, careful to get clear shots, not only of their faces, too pale, too slack, but the symbol on each of their foreheads.

She stared down at Maria Ruben’s dark eyes, the color of the mud beneath her, and said, “Maria doesn’t look too good.”

“There’s a good?”

Sylvie said, “There’s definitely a bad.” Maria looked . . . withered. Dry. Even in the water’s embrace, her skin looked parched. Her mouth looked chapped, the edges split. Her fingertips looked charred; reddish black streaks climbing her hands. More symbols nestled in her upturned palms.

Too close to the woman who went up in flames?

Or something worse.

Wales hissed when he joined her.

“What do you think?” Sylvie asked. “Collateral damage or intrinsic?”

Wales tilted his head, listened to Marco, his body slowly tightening. “Marco says she’s close to death. The spell—it’s too much energy to contain. Even like this.”

“What’s the spell for?” Sylvie said. “It’s an awful lot of work to go to if we just have a sicko sorcerer who likes his girls passive.”

“I don’t know,” Wales said. “It’s not . . . It seems nonsensical. If I can figure out what the symbols represent, I might be able to get a better idea. But I can’t do that here. All I can tell you is that the magic feels strange. Like it’s trying to do two things at once. The power’s both coming and going. Like . . .” He crouched, put his hands into the water, licked swamp off his fingers while Sylvie felt her nose wrinkle in disgust. Necromancers. Always with the organics.

“It feels like some kinda exchanger,” he said. “Like a person breathing. Changing oxygen to carbon dioxide. Some type of magical chemistry. It’s—” He jerked upright, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “It’s too complicated not to be fragile. I think we should get ourselves gone before Marco or I have an adverse effect on the holding pattern.”

Sylvie studied the women; she hated like hell to leave them behind. But she’d known that was a possibility the moment she began snapping pics: That wasn’t the kind of thing you did if you expected to solve the problem then and there. Their options were so limited. They hadn’t come prepared to camp out, hoping that the spellcaster would return. They could try to disrupt the spell. . . .

Wales was obviously following along with her thoughts; he shook his head. “We’ve got no guarantee they wouldn’t just burn if we broke the stasis.”

“Can you break the spell completely?”

Wales grimaced. “Not without making a few mistakes first. Which would kill most of them.”

Sylvie tapped her gun barrel, thinking. “If we leave, and you figure out what the symbols mean, what all the spell’s actually trying to do—”

“I might be willing to give it a try,” Wales said. “Even if I can’t break off the spell, I’m a necromancer. I can encourage it toward entropy. Encourage it to break itself.”

Sylvie blinked. “You can kill a spell.”

“Theoretically?”

She sucked in a humid breath, tasting her own frustration. “How long’s Maria got, you think?”

Wales had another one of those whispered conferences with Marco. Sylvie turned away, staring out over the still water that held the women like flies in amber. A drawback to working with necromancers. Hanging out with the person who looked like he had an imaginary friend. Negative points on the discretion factor.

“Best guess? Four days, maybe.” Wales ran a damp hand through his too-long hair; he left dark streaks behind on his cheek. “It’s like . . . stress, right? Too much stress, and the body rebels. For all intents and purposes, Maria’s having the world’s slowest heart attack. The spell can’t hold it off forever.”

The women bobbed gently in the water, imprisoned without a cage. Sylvie thought of Maria’s high-strung husband, so lost without his wife, of what Lio would say, and her stomach soured.

Her voice was clipped when she said, “Fine. We’re out of here.”

She took a last, frustrated look at the innocent women she was leaving and stalked off back toward her distant truck. It felt . . . wrong. Like she was walking away from a fight.

Sylvie never ran from a fight. It wasn’t in her blood.