Gods & Monsters

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FOR ONCE, WHEN PEOPLE STARTED DYING, SYLVIE LIGHTNER WASN’T at ground zero. When things went wrong, really wrong, she was fifteen miles away from the crime scene, haggling with a werewolf bitch over her finder’s fee.

Five days ago, Sylvie had asked Tatya to keep an eye out and a nose up for a woman who’d gone missing from Alligator Alley, figuring she could turn Tatya’s nightly perambulations through the Everglades to good use. Delegation had paid off: Three days later, Maria Ruben was no longer a missing person. Dead, but no longer lost, and that was something. Finding her body could bring its own resolution to the family and was worth every penny.

So Sylvie had met Tatya at the scene, called the cops, and split without waiting for them to show, spooked.

Maria Ruben hadn’t been alone. There were four other dead women, drowned, pushed beneath the duckweed surface of an Everglades lagoon, and left to sway slowly in the dark, stagnant waters. Maria’s short dark hair stuck out like a frightened puffer fish, showing the shock her slack face couldn’t. A pink barrette—cheap plastic butterfly— floated free, trailing a long bronze lock of hair belonging to a woman barely into her twenties.

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