by Lyn Benedict
Sylvie found herself torn between demanding his assistance and warning him to flee, but while she was stymied speechless, the blonde rubbed her cheek against his arm. He stroked her hair without looking at her, his expression of weariness and concern never shifting.
“You three been good?” he asked.
“She was leaving,” the punk girl said in the dulcet tones of a schoolgirl. “We stopped her.”
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes never leaving Sylvie’s.
A sudden shudder racked her, a quick acknowledgment that he meant trouble with a capital T. She had met men like him before. Humans with power and a yen for unnatural entourages. He was exactly what the satanists aspired to be.
The two sisters sat on the floor near him, not like people, cross-legged and uncomfortable, but crouched like dogs. The punk girl yawned widely, and Sylvie had a quick flash, like an X-ray rising through flesh, of something Other. Something huge, angry and implacable.
“Ms. Lightner?” the not-cop said, his voice pleasantly deep and rough. “I need your help.”
Sylvie shivered again. Most of her clients addressed her as Shadows, assuming that she’d given her name to the business: Shadows Inquiries. But the ones who checked her out . . . She didn’t like the idea of him looking into her life without her knowing. The Internal Surveillance and Intelligence agency snooped enough for anyone.
She sucked in a breath, and said, “I’ve quit. Besides, it looks like you’ve got more help than you can handle.”
His broad shoulders tightened as if she’d struck at him, and she pressed her case.
“Really, you should be careful. I’ve seen men torn apart by help like that. Their own help.” She didn’t know why she felt compelled to warn him, except maybe—there was pain in his eyes, deep and raw, and she had no intention of helping him ease it. Her warning was the least she could give.
“The sisters?” he asked. He petted the pale one’s hair again. “No danger of that. But they’re not the help I need right now. I need a detective who can deal—”
“With the supernatural,” Sylvie finished. “I told you. I’ve retired. And I’m not the only one of my kind. There are others if you know where to look. There’s the Good Shepherd—”
“That’s the hell of it,” he said, and the veneer of calmness slipped, giving her a glimpse of desperation. “I always know where to look. I can find anyone, track them anywhere. And no one escapes my eyes—”
He fell silent, but the impression lingered in Sylvie’s mind. Raw power, harnessed. Something flickered in his eyes like a whirlwind. This, Sylvie thought, is one hell of a dangerous man.
“I want you,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. You don’t give up. And you don’t back down.”
“News flash,” Sylvie said, regretting it even as she sassed him. “I’ve given up. I’ve backed down. Permanently.” This was exactly the kind of thing that got her into trouble.
The sisters responded with the eardrum-shivering, whining mewl, all three at once, and Sylvie fought the urge to slap her hands over her ears.
“Sisters,” he said, chiding, and they stopped.
“Ms. Lightner—”
“No,” she said. “And really, if you’ve checked me out, you know I’m mostly hired out to fight your kind. I couldn’t work for—”
“My kind?” he asked.
“Sorcerers, magicians, whatever the term du jour is,” Sylvie said.
“I’m not a sorcerer,” he said.
Her fragile patience unraveled. “You’re sure as hell too damn big to be a Boy Scout. And I don’t think there are badges for ‘plays well with minions.’ ”
She trailed off as the punk girl leaned forward onto her hands like a shifter about to go beast. Sylvie had a nasty feeling it would be something far stranger than a wolf that erupted from the girl’s skin.
The pale woman said, “He is your god, girl, and you will revere him, or I will have your throat.” Her voice, the first Sylvie had heard of it, was as raspy as if she spoke around a mouthful of feathers.
Swiveling her head, the preppie girl glanced from the not-cop to her sister, trying to decide.
“Alekta,” he said. “We came here to ask for help. Not threaten.”
“She should prostrate herself—” the pale, leather-clad woman argued.
“Alekta,” he repeated, and she fell silent, sulking.
“I think you put a bit too much hero worship into whatever summoning spell you used to get them,” Sylvie said. “Either that, or you have serious egomania.”
He sighed, brown eyes downcast. “It doesn’t make sense, I admit, but I’m afraid it’s true.” His cheeks flushed as he spoke. “At least, I am a god, and unless you’re more devout than I think, there’s a good probability you’re mine by default.”
Sylvie pulled the gun from her purse, raised it, and said, “I said no.” She had let this nonsense go on for far too long, drawn by the pain in his face. Her business was closed, and even if it weren’t, she didn’t take clients like him. Crazy and powerful was a deadly combination.
“Ms. Lightner—” he said, half-raising a hand.
“Still feel divine?” she said. “It’s amazing how a little lead can bring out the mortal in men.”
“Not a good idea—” he said. He seemed concerned but unafraid, and while Sylvie tried to decide if that was good or bad, his minions lost patience.
“Insolent child,” the preppie girl spat.
“Magdala, don’t,” he chastised her.
Alekta, the pale one, lunged into the air like a raptor in flight. Panic seared Sylvie as the lean length of the woman changed, sprouting feathers and fur and scale, sprouting fangs, sprouting claws, showing a nightmare face that belonged nowhere in this world. She pulled the trigger without a moment’s thought, and the creature dodged, dropped, and rose again.
“Alekta! Here!” he snapped, then gasped. The gun’s explosion slammed distantly into Sylvie’s ears, the recoil twitching it out of her hand as if she were a rank amateur. It skidded down the stairs.
“Enough,” he said. His breath was labored. “This isn’t the way it should have gone—”
The women gathered around him, snarling at Sylvie, but tethered by his will. The blonde had snapped back to human form, and that freed Sylvie to look at him. Dreading the sight, the moment—Alekta had dodged, and he was behind her.
To kill a man, in her own office, with the ISI outside her door somewhere, watching . . . The problem with killing sorcerers was, after the deed, there was nothing to prove they had forfeited the right to be human. Sylvie had just bought herself a world of trouble.
There was blood on his hands, on his white shirt, like some crimson insignia over the heart. He had a faint frown on his tired face, more bewildered than angry. What would happen when he died? His sisters, freed?
Sylvie’s hands grew icy. The man scared her, but there had been no proof that he meant her harm.
He sighed, then the moment unwound.
Sylvie held the gun in her hands again, her finger curling on the trigger, the bullet in the chamber waiting, the metal cool and unfired. He held Alekta’s arm in a bruising grip, while she fell back toward him as if her lunge had been thwarted before it had actually begun.
“Why don’t you put the gun away,” he said. “They’re touchy of my honor and overprotective. Especially now.”
Sylvie opened her mouth, for once at a loss for words. His white shirt was pristine, no perfect chest shot, red rimmed with black, and the only pain in his eyes was the pain that had caused him to seek her out in the first place. Still wordless, she tucked the gun into her waistband.
“My name is Kevin Dunne. I am the god of Justice, and I need your help.”
2
Tall, Dark . . . Crazy
SYLVIE FUMBLED TO A SEAT ON THE STAIRS. SHE HAD NEVER SEEN A sorcerer so strong—she refused to contemplate the other. “Help?” she echoed.
“I need you to find my lover,” Dunne said.
Belatedly, his words filtered through. “You’re a god. Find her yourself.” Her lips were numb; she was running on autobitch, as Suarez had called it.
“I can’t,” he snapped. “Don’t you think that’s driving me mad? I should be able to—I don’t know why I can’t. I can find anyone I’ve ever seen, ever laid eyes on.”
“So don’t even think of running,” Magdala, the preppie woman, muttered.
Sylvie tore her eyes away from the woman, met his. Underneath their earnestness, she found herself talking again. “Dead maybe? Not among the living?”
His mouth twisted, his eyes squeezed closed, and the women’s expressions grew fiercer.
“No,” he said. “No.” She wasn’t sure if it was knowledge or hope that drove the denial. He opened the door to her shop and gestured to the women. “Go on, wait outside. I can’t talk to her when you’re distracting her.”
“But—” Magdala objected.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll call you when I need you.”
The sisters rose and filed out, obedient but not happy. The punk girl paused to stick her tongue out at Sylvie. Dunne shut the door on her.
“What are they?” Sylvie asked. “Some sort of Aztec werewolves? I saw feathers and fur—”
“They’re the Eumenides,” Dunne said, taking a seat on the cardboard box nearest the stairs. It sagged a moment, then firmed beneath him, transforming from a standard cardboard box to a heavy chair, lattice-backed, in a golden oak that looked like it belonged in some homey kitchen somewhere. He hooked his feet around the support rungs automatically.
Sylvie swallowed, her attention diverted. A sorcerer at the very least. A common magic-user couldn’t transform an item worth a damn; give cardboard the appearance of strength, the look of oak, no problem, but actual strength? Even sorcerers preferred illusion to actual transformation, saved them the effort of reshaping the world. Dunne didn’t look bothered. Dunne didn’t look like he had thought about it at all. More to the point, Sylvie thought, there was rather more chair than there had been box. Creation of matter—
The files inside, she thought. He’d transformed paper to oak. Her files had just become woodwork, and wasn’t that one way to hide the evidence.
He leaned forward. “Before I came, I hadn’t realized you’d killed quite so many people.”
“I’m no murderer,” Sylvie said. “I don’t kill people.” Monsters, on the other hand, yeah, she’d killed those in quantity.
“They think otherwise, and they get a little . . . overzealous in their desire to help justice.”
“Good to love your job,” Sylvie said. Empty words to go with her empty mind.
He sighed. “I am a god, Sylvie, whether you choose to believe me or not. But I was once a policeman, so let me save you some time. Death is no mystery to my kind. I ask you to find my lover, and I do this knowing, without any doubt at all, that he’s alive. Equally, I know that he’s being held somewhere I can’t reach or find. And he can’t get free—” His voice cracked, the calmness deserting him.
He, Sylvie thought, now that’s a surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. But I’ve quit.”
“Can you?” he asked. “Some things are in the blood. You can’t be other than you are.”
She started to rise, and he took her wrist. She yanked it away. “Call the cops if you think your boyfriend’s been kidnapped.”
“I already have,” Dunne said. “They’re hunting for him, but their methods have become mindless.”
Sylvie remembered the cops earlier and hesitated. It couldn’t be related. Even a sorcerer couldn’t influence people that greatly. Charm, Deceive, Destroy. The three major spell groups; the first coaxed people into action they wouldn’t otherwise take, the second shrouded a person’s mind, and the third ruined a man or woman, body or soul. Perhaps a big enough charm—
“Just hear me out,” he said. He reached into the space between them and opened his palms. A photograph lay on them.
Sylvie, reluctantly, took it. It wasn’t a great photo. The subject had been moving at the time, slipping to the outside of the shot, as if he didn’t like the camera eye’s weight on his skin, but it revealed a good-looking man with red hair, a lithe build, and an expression on his face that struck a worried chord in her.
“His name is Brandon Wolf,” Dunne said.
Robbing the cradle a bit, Sylvie thought, looking at the young man’s face; she wouldn’t put Dunne at a day less than forty-five. But maybe gods aged differently—the fog in her head cleared. She knew what had woken that worried burst of déjà vu. Brandon Wolf, twenty years his lover’s junior. Her old friend, Valerie Cassavetes, twenty years her husband’s junior. They both held the same expression in their eyes, a little tinge of fear. Valerie’s fear had been of her husband. Before Sylvie had killed him dead and helped bind his spirit forever. Brandon’s fear?
“I’m sorry—”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that again. You don’t trust me, I see that. But you’re not the kind to gladden an old cop’s heart, either. I know you’re unlicensed, unsupervised, unauthorized. An amateur with a gun.”
“If that’s what you think of me,” Sylvie said. She tried to hand back the photograph. He closed his hands into fists.
“I told you,” he said, eyes dark with unhappiness. “I checked into you. You’re a vigilante. The only saving grace I see is that there’s no system set up to deal with the supernatural. I’m trying to ignore the thought that says even if Metro-Dade had processing forms for rogue angels and werewolves, you’d still act as you saw fit.”
“This from a man who calls himself the god of Justice,” Sylvie said, finally setting the photograph facedown on the stairs. Out of sight, out of mind.
“I was a cop first,” he said.
Sylvie shook her head. “What, you just woke up one morning and were a god? It doesn’t work like that. Men don’t become gods. Men don’t have that kind of power. At most, humans can borrow it or manipulate it. Not own it.”
“You don’t know as much as you think you do, Sylvie,” he said. “You want to watch out for that. That’s the kind of thing that comes back to haunt you.” In his eyes, grey skies rolled, slaty and darkening. “But maybe you know that already.”
She shied when Dunne rose from his chair and collected his lover’s photograph from the steps beside her. Up close, he smelled almost electric, like a stormy day. She raised her head, forced herself to meet his gaze.
“I can’t help you.” Finally, finally she mastered the flat conviction to her voice that should drive him off.
He leaned against the wall, slumping. “I’m sorry, Sylvie. I don’t think you understand. You don’t have a choice.” His voice sounded dragged out of him, ending in a whisper.
Familiar rage buoyed Sylvie after the first shock. Always the same with his type. It always came down to threats. “You may claim godhood, but last I checked I still had free will.”
“Free will,” he said, “is overrated and not as powerful as you think. To be truly free, Sylvie, you have to care only for yourself. To care for no one else.”
“You’re threatening my friends,” she said, “my family? Is that it? After all your talk about justice, you’re going to play mob boss?”
He said, still in that strained half whisper, “Gods radiate their influence around them. Very rarely do we linger in the mortal world. When we do, it has ramifications. I need Bran found. And the world will bend to that, whether it knows it or not.” He turned his head, looking toward the front of the store, and Sylvie’s eyes followed.
<
br /> It had grown dark in the last few minutes of their conversation, but unwilling to take her eyes from him, Sylvie hadn’t noticed it much. Cloud cover, an early storm rolling in. Her blood chilled when she saw the reality.
It wasn’t the sky that had darkened. Instead, her glass doors and windows were blocked, filled by policemen, motionless, peering in with blank eyes. Waiting.
“Come here,” Dunne said. He opened the door, and the police stepped back. Sylvie went to the door and looked out, looked at the blankly determined faces all turning toward Dunne like sunflowers to the sun. In the midst of the uniformed mass, she spotted two suits, two faces she vaguely recognized. Her ISI watchdogs had fallen prey to Dunne also.
Surveil that, she thought, a quick, fleeting satisfaction trying to surface. Dunne’s words drove it back.
“Everyone who is mine, everyone who falls under the aegis of Justice, will hunt. But they hunt without understanding, without control, just a reflection of my need to find him. And the more desperate I grow—”
“The harder they search,” Sylvie finished. “I get the picture. It’s not just my friends and family you’re holding over my head. It’s the city.”
Across the street, nearly swamped in the uniformed mass, the sisters grouped themselves. Alekta raised her head and grinned at Sylvie.
Sylvie shut the door, thinking dark thoughts about power. Dunne either had far more than any human had a right to, or he was siphoning off the inhuman but undeniably powerful sisters. Eumenides: the word sounded familiar in a high-school way, something heard and dismissed in one of her classes. Back before she knew there was more to reality than what they taught.
“You’ll find him?” Dunne said, interrupting her thoughts.
“What if I fail?” Sylvie asked.
Dunne closed his eyes, biting at his lip, exhaustion pulling his features. Outside the police slowly dispersed. “Don’t. I couldn’t bear it.”
“And they’re the stick to make sure I do my best,” Sylvie said. “Them and your sisters.”
“Not mine,” he muttered. “The sisters.”
“You want me to take your case; you won’t take no for an answer, and you’ve got the power to make my life extremely difficult and very short,” Sylvie said. “I suppose that means there’s no carrot to the stick. Just a do-it-or-else kind of clause.” Bitterness laced her voice. Maddening to take on a case when she wanted to quit; to do so without remuneration made her want to spit.