Sins & Shadows

by Lyn Benedict

  “I’ve told the cops that,” Dunne said.

  “Look, what do you suggest I do?” Sylvie said. “Wave a wand? I’m no witch. I am what you see, what my reputation declares me: an inquisitive bitch with a gun. I suppose I could wander the streets like your mindless cops, calling his name like he was a lost cat. . . .”

  The police reports appeared in her lap. He slumped forward, head in his hands. “That’s efficient,” she said.

  She flipped through the first report. Not local, these boys. Chicago. She frowned. She hated Chicago—all that concrete, those looming high-rise buildings, and the poor man’s ocean. Couldn’t hold a candle to the tropics. She found the Polaroid again of Brandon moving away from the camera’s eye.

  “That’s the most recent one,” Dunne said, his voice rough. “It was taken the night he was abducted. Two weeks ago.”

  Sylvie noted the cream-and-green sweater, the nice watch, the glittering gems in his ears. “Is he wealthy?”

  “Yes,” Dunne said. “But it’s not a kidnapping.”

  Yes, Sylvie thought. Of course he’d be wealthy. If you’re the play toy of a god, why not be rich. “Any vengeful exes?”

  “I checked them out,” he said, raising his head to meet her eyes. “Thoroughly.”

  “They still alive?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Dunne said, offended. “I’m not a killer.”

  “No, but your pets are,” Sylvie said. “No tricky technicalities here. You didn’t kill them. Did the sisters?”

  “No,” he growled, for one moment sounding uncannily like the creatures he commanded.

  Sylvie shut up, self-preservation kicking in. She flipped the picture facedown, turned it faceup, trying to restore her first impression of Brandon Wolf.

  Delectable.

  She closed her eyes and tried not to think about opportunists, killing for money or sex, feeding some dark fetish she’d never even imagined.

  Dunne said, in echo of her thoughts, “The FBI thinks there are approximately twenty known serial killers working, and assumes there may be up to three hundred working the country unnoticed. There are more than that, but the odds are still against one of them having taken Bran, especially when you consider that Bran is more aware than most of the evils of this world. Besides, I told you. He’s not dead.” He snagged the photograph from her, looked down at it.

  “You’d—feel it?” Sylvie asked, unable to keep the skepticism from her voice. “Like something out of a romance novel? Kindred souls and all that rot? You were a cop, Dunne, you know how full of shit that is. People die, and it’s an ugly surprise to their loved ones, each and every time.”

  “I’d know,” he repeated. “I’m not human. I am a god.”

  “Who once worked as a cop,” Sylvie said, forcing gentleness into her tone, turning the acid to humor. “Were things slow on the god front—had to moonlight?”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes. “Bran—” he whispered.

  Without fanfare, the skies clouded over and began to rain, a sudden Miami downpour that turned the air silver and thick with water. Sylvie grabbed the police report and bolted to her truck.

  He appeared in the seat next to her, the passenger door still locked, and she said, “All right. All right.”

  He seemed very close to shattering, and, god or not, he had power. She didn’t want to be at ground zero if he blew. She leaned back against her seat, let rainwater trickle down her face, and thought. Two weeks missing, no ransom, no clues. Conventional wisdom argued that Brandon Wolf was dead.

  But then, Sylvie thought, stealing another glimpse at Kevin Dunne, this was not a conventional situation. There was another alternative; Brandon Wolf might have fled. Her searching could jeopardize some exotic occult protection the young man had found—but she wasn’t sure she believed it.

  Dunne, despite his power, despite his minions, despite everything, kept defaulting back in her mind to Nice Guy. It made her uneasy.

  She started her truck, tucking the rain-spattered police reports in the door pocket, and headed for Miami International. Chicago, huh. At least it would take her out of the satanists’ immediate reach.

  “Hey, Dunne, don’t suppose you can magic me up a passport and a credit card?”

  He blinked. “Okay.” Then her entire purse was on the seat beside her; she rummaged through it with one hand, identifying things by feel: too-thin wallet, cell phone, ID, spare bullets. The bullets made her pause, thinking of the latest threat she’d faced.

  “The sisters are on their own?” she asked. “We left them there.”

  “They’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I’m not worried about them,” Sylvie said. “I’m worried about the people around them if you’re not there to snap their leash.”

  He shrugged. “They’ll be looking for Bran mostly.”

  “Mostly,” she muttered. But there was nothing she could do about it now. “Tell me what happened the night Bran disappeared.”

  “We were at a friend’s party. Something came up, and I had to go—”

  “Something like the Bat-Signal?” Sylvie interrupted.

  “Something like that, yes,” Dunne said, evenly. “But Bran wanted to stay, which was fine by me. He’s too tenderhearted to watch me work.” He leaned his head against the window, fell silent. Sylvie glanced over, watched the pain surge and fade on his open face.

  “It took a while,” he continued, after a moment in which the only sound was the sweeping thump of the wipers fighting the rain. “I was a little surprised when I got home and Bran wasn’t back before me—we came home at dawn.”

  “We?”

  “The sisters and I,” he said. “Mostly they live in our backyard.”

  “Charming,” she said. “Wonder what they do for property values in the neighborhood.” He shot her a quelling look. “You weren’t worried about his absence?” she prompted.

  A muscle jumped in his jaw as if she’d assigned blame. “No.” Guilt laced his voice, then morphed into irritation. “He’s my lover, not a child. He has a life of his own. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself. And I was . . . tired. To be the god, to enact justice—”

  “It tires you out?” Sylvie asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

  “No,” he said. “Containing my power so that I don’t affect the whole world is tiring. It’s like walking. A fit man can walk forever. But a fit man forced to stand on one leg and hop—it takes effort. It’s far easier to be what you are than to fight it. But the consequences of a god on the mortal plane . . . Well, you’re seeing some of them, aren’t you? My concentration is going.”

  The traffic up ahead crawled; police cars, lights strobing, blocked three of the four lanes, funneling all the traffic to one lane. “Like that?” she said. “Or do you suppose they’re doing a midday sobriety checkpoint?”

  “Shit,” he muttered. There was the little hiccup of the world shifting, and the bottleneck was in her rearview mirror.

  “So you went to bed,” Sylvie said, plowing ahead, shuddering reflexively. “And you weren’t worried.”

  “Bran and Tish are close,” he said. “I assumed he stayed over to help her clean up. He’s done it before.”

  “Tish?”

  “Tish Carmichael,” he said. “It was her party. She’s a dancer. Ballet.”

  Sylvie took her eyes from the road again to assess his mood. After all, with a self-proclaimed god in her truck, she probably didn’t have to worry about car accidents. He sounded more relaxed, as if he found the tradition of question and answer soothing, no matter that he was the one answering the questions.

  “What kind of party was it?” she asked.

  She had startled him; she saw it in his eyes. Outside, the rain began to slacken. “What?”

  “What kind of party? A celebration of something. New job. New boyfriend. Birthday. Or was it just a party for the sake of it—a ‘hey, it’s Wednesday’ kind of thing? C’mon, Dunne, you know what I’m getting a
t.”

  “Tish throws parties all the time. She’s sociable.”

  “So not a collection of close friends attending, then. Not an exclusive list. Were there strangers crashing?”

  “Always are,” Dunne said, frowning. “but I checked them out. I would have felt anyone powerful enough—”

  “You keep saying what you would have felt. But tell me this—what were you feeling when Bran disappeared? If you didn’t feel that, then I don’t see—”

  “I did,” he said.

  “But you weren’t worried when he wasn’t home. Something worried you enough to check out the strangers at the party, but you feel something when your boyfriend disappears and you aren’t worried. You go to bed.”

  “It was so quick,” he said, his voice rough. “I was in the middle of a gang fight, and I was trying hard not to let the sisters go, trying to keep the battlefield confined, the witnesses to none. It was just a touch. It was just . . . I felt startled . . . and there was no reason. It was just a moment; he wasn’t hurt or scared. Just surprised.”

  Sylvie fell silent. “You left the party. The kidnapper could have come later.”

  “Yes,” Dunne admitted.

  “You were suspicious of strangers earlier. Why?”

  “Bran doesn’t like strangers,” he said, something in his tone withdrawing.

  A lie, she thought. Clients all had to lie about something. Was it Dunne who didn’t like strangers? Or was it even simpler than that? Bran stayed out overnight often enough that Dunne wasn’t concerned. Maybe he’d been having an affair, and Dunne had caught on. Only a fool cuckolded a sorcerer. There probably weren’t words for anyone brazen enough to cuckold a god.

  The road curved into the entrance to the airport, and she sighed. She’d learned the hard way there was no point pushing at a lie a client told her; she had to come at it from a different angle, and she was out of time.

  He touched her arm, tense with the pressure she was putting on the steering wheel. “What are you going to do?”

  “Talk to Tish,” Sylvie said, raising her hand to stifle his protest. “I know, I know, the cops talked to her already.”

  “She doesn’t know anything. About me,” Dunne said. “She thinks I’m human.”

  “So don’t do anything weird while I’m talking to her.”

  “I’m not going with you,” he said. “I’m going to keep searching. I have to.”

  She nodded, oddly relieved that she wouldn’t have him lurking behind her. He handed her a plane ticket. “There’s a flight in twenty minutes,” he said.

  “Of course there is,” she muttered. She pulled into the parking lot, and a guard came over to inspect her truck. “Fuck,” she said. “My gun. Can you do something about that?”

  The guard turned on his heel and went back the way he had come. Sylvie took her gun from her waist holster, and said, “Can you Jedi mindtrick the metal detectors?”

  Dunne touched the gun in her hand, and it changed in her grasp, felt aware and warm. She twitched but controlled the instinct to drop it. She had been far too careless with it once today. “What did you do?”

  “It will scan as flesh, as your own body,” he said, “and appear part of you while you wear it.”

  “You turned my gun to meat?” Her voice soared, a little panicky, belatedly realizing how much comfort she took from the weapon.

  “It’s still a gun,” he said. “Try not to kill anyone. You’re under my aegis, and it’s embarrassing.”

  5

  Digging for Facts

  O’HARE AIRPORT WAS BUSTLING WHEN SHE DISEMBARKED, AND NOT in the usual harried-traveler fashion. The terminal seethed with police and airline security, and Sylvie, all too conscious of the gun seated warmly in the small of her back, hustled her way past them. No one even gave her a glance. It made her crazy.

  Even after Dunne’s transformation, her gun was still a gun, still a weight beneath her thin Windbreaker. Someone should have noticed. Someone should have stopped her. That they didn’t was symptomatic of a larger disease: willful blindness. Humans clustered together even as they had in the beginning. Closing ranks against the things “not our kind.”

  The Magicus Mundi wasn’t invisible, intangible, or safely elsewhere. It seethed around and in and through the mass of humanity; all it required was a willingness to look beyond the expected, to ask why and how and who and most often—what.

  Once seen, the Magicus Mundi had a way of keeping your attention. Sylvie had had a crash course—crash curse, she thought wryly—years ago, when Troilus Cassavetes turned out to be more than your average businessman and set a killing curse on Sylvie.

  Maybe blindness was the safer choice: The Magicus Mundi might not be hard to discover, but it was hell on earth to live with.

  Sylvie bypassed four parked police cars and the eight cops standing beside them on the way to the taxi stands, and shivered as they all turned to watch her go. Dunne’s eyes on her, long-distance? Or some instinct that she held an image of their search in her sweating hands? She didn’t feel like finding out.

  She slid into a taxi, read off Tish’s address, and was pleased when her voice was steady. The weight of their eyes lingered on her skin.

  “You sure you want to go there, lady?” the driver said, meeting her eyes in his rearview mirror. His voice held the rich Cuban tones she knew from Miami, but the accent was flattened and clipped. He’d been in Chicago a long time.

  “Yes,” she said. “Is there a reason not to?” She couldn’t imagine the area being dangerous, not if rich-boy Bran partied there in cashmere and silk.

  “No,” he said. “No reason.” An obvious lie.

  He rabbited away from the curb, rocking her back in the seat, his eyes all for the cops coming their way.

  She shifted in her seat, the gun pressing into the small of her back like a warm, strong hand—muscle and bone at her command. The sensation soothed even as it repelled, the near-heartbeat feel of what was once metal.

  A god? She bit her lip and turned her thoughts away from that conundrum.

  Sylvie flipped the police reports open again, turning back to statements. Wealthy? Oh yes, she thought. Even if there hadn’t been a list of platinum-card numbers now considered stolen, accounts shut down, she would have known simply by the fact that the police had accumulated this much paperwork.

  The file, nearly as thick as a phone book, threatened to spill with every page she turned. This kind of effort only happened with wealth or influence behind it.

  The pity of it was all that effort was useless; the reports didn’t give her anything much to chew on. Bran left the party and disappeared somewhere in the ten blocks between Tish Carmichael’s downtown loft and the parking garage, leaving no traces. The cops had canvassed the area, asking questions of the nighttime scavengers, making threats, making promises, and came up blank. Even the reports betrayed her. The first pages were standard collections of interviews and facts, but the latter pages of the report were all the same. Typed. Handwritten. Word processed. But all the same. Two words. Page after page.

  Find Him. Find Him. FindHim Findhimfindhimfindhim . . .

  Sylvie forced the pages back into a neat pile, wrapping the rubber band around them. Police reports looked nice and official, a neat alignment of facts. But these “facts” came from human lips, and people loved to lie, about big things, little things, for any number of reasons. All the reports hinged on Tish Carmichael as a starting point. The last-known person to see Brandon Wolf ali—

  Sylvie shook her head. She had to assume he was alive, no matter the underlying tone of the reports—before Dunne’s all-Bran, all-the-time channel took over, at any rate—no matter what common knowledge said. If she presumed him dead, how hard would she look for him? It had to be her best—whether or not Kevin Dunne was the god he claimed to be, he was capable of causing a great deal of harm.

  Tish Carmichael. Kevin had said Bran and she were close. Sylvie wondered how close.

  Close enough to t
ell lies about it?

  The cabbie swore under his breath, and Sylvie was recalled to her surroundings. He pulled over, and said, “Walk from here.”

  “Something the matter?” she asked, but the streets ahead answered her question. The police swarmed the street like ants. She briefly wondered what it was—criminal history, points on his license, or a missing green card—that made him want to avoid inquisitive cops.

  “You walk,” he said. “Five blocks more.”

  “All right,” she said. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t burdened by luggage. Hell, it even saved her some of the fare, and saving money was always good. Especially since she’d bartered this case for something other than cash.

  She groaned. Crap. Alex would kick her butt—no, Alex was fired. Sylvie was on her own.

  Sylvie walked on, keeping quiet, keeping out of the way of the cop cars, and beginning to swelter in the summer heat. In the small of her back, the gun sweated also, soft uneven droplets that touched her skin like tears or blood; Sylvie shuddered and picked up her pace.

  Sylvie recognized Tish’s apartment immediately. How could she not? The checkered bands in the Chicago PD’s hats were deeply distinctive. Tish’s apartment had four policemen sitting on her stoop. Just sitting, watching the door, like dogs left leashed outside a shop, waiting for their owners. Stray dogs, maybe. They looked unwashed and hungry. The crackle-pop static of their radios went ignored.

  She took a breath, then climbed the five steps between them, aware of their eyes shifting to stare at her. She knocked on the door. “Go home,” she said. The dog image rose in her mind again. “You’re not helping. And you have other jobs to do. Dunne—”

  Their eyes sharpened, and she said, “Yeah, I know him. He wants you to go back to work.” They hesitated.

  “But he was here,” the youngest of them said, voice unsure. The other cops nodded in unison.

  “He’s not now.” Sylvie knocked, harder the second time, taking into account the distorted strains of classical music being cranked out at full volume.