Free Lies & Omens: A Shadows Inquiries Novel by Lyn Benedict

skin.
    Erinya licked her lips, plucked the bird’s heart out with jagged claws, and ate it in a single bite, lapping at her fingers afterward. The smell of blood was sharp, as metallic as a bullet. Sylvie wondered suddenly if Erinya had killed the witch before or after she’d eaten the infant’s offered heart.
    Sylvie shuddered. “You can’t stay.”
    “Do you smell that?” Erinya asked, her head coming up, eyes going unfocused.
    Sylvie sniffed. She smelled a lot of things. Car exhaust,coffee, the woman two seats over who had decided to go for broke when she slathered on the Giorgio. Erinya’s bloody snack. The scent of salt air, a taste of canal rankness … and something else. Something slight, but pervasive, rippling along beneath everything else, lifting the other scents.
    “What is that?”
    “Something wet,” Erinya said, shaking herself fastidiously. Catlike. When she’d been just a Fury—
just
—she’d seemed more doglike. Now that she’d incorporated Tepeyollotl’s powers into her own, her animal aspect, more mythic than real, edged toward cat.
    “How about a little more detail?” Sylvie shot a glance toward the ISI. All serene. Annoyingly so. She hated wasting her time.
    “Smells old?”
    “Old like a
Mundi
monster? Like the Sphinx?” Sylvie’s heart skipped, equal parts anticipation and pain. Demalion was bright in her mind again, an absence that felt like a weight.
    Erinya curled her lips into a satisfied smile. “Old like drowned bones. I know what they are. Mermaids.”
    Her gaze lasered into the canal. Sylvie almost protested.
Mermaids?
    The canal waters rose like a tsunami and slammed into the ISI building.

    THE SOUND OF IT WAS BREATHTAKING, A SOUND THAT HIT LIKE A body blow—the crash and thunder of pouring water, the gunshot cracking of glass, the screech of metal as cars were shoved aside. Beneath it all, another noise. Something wild and inhuman, like whale song fed through a broken autotuner.
    Sylvie, on her feet, water rolling toward her, found herself with her head cocked just like Erinya, trying to focus on that sound. How many of them? Where were they?
    All around her, people did the same, but without purpose. Just stood and listened to that alien song beneath the chaos. Ignoring the sheeting, foaming water rising, tuggingat their feet, slapping up against legs like angry fish tails, spilling into shops.
    No one reacted at all.
    “Mermaids sing the sea,” Erinya said. “Coax men into the water, drown them, lick the despairing froth from their lungs like a delicacy. But if the men don’t jump. If they can’t be coaxed…
    “The mermaids bring the sea to them,” Sylvie said. For being surrounded by water, her mouth felt desert dry.
    A little boy tugged curiously at his mother’s hand, looked around, the beginnings of distress on his face. His hands flew, asking questions no one answered. No one noticed.
    He squatted, slapped at the water reaching for his mother, crying. The water, darker than it should be, slapped back. The boy fell backward, limbs flailing, and went under.
    The water was shallow on the ground, but the boy didn’t rise.
    “Eri—”
    Erinya was already moving, surging through the waves; the waves jerked back, cleared a path. Erinya, shape-shifting as she moved, never set a paw to the water, dancing above it. She jerked the boy out of the froth with her teeth, flung him toward her back. The boy, showing more sense than Sylvie had expected, clung tight to Erinya’s spiky feathers. Erinya vanished, and Sylvie was left, the only waking person in the mermaids’ murderous nightmare.
    Water cascaded down the ISI building, peeling stucco away in foaming, chalky ribbons. Sylvie put a hand on her gun, cast another glance at the dark canal waters. The mermaids were there, had to be. But they might as well have been on the moon for all she could get to them. If she was going to help the ISI, she’d have to do it one victim at a time.
    Erinya would have been