Sins & Shadows

by Lyn Benedict

  “I should have done it when Bran vanished,” Dunne said. “But each hour that passed made it less of an option. Time is heavy and fragile. Rewriting that moment in your office was nothing, a heartbeat of time disrupted. Even so, more changed than you know. You never fired the bullet. It was the simplest way to convince you I meant business. But others had their moments rewound, their lives changed, too. There was a cop on Alligator Alley, pulling a car over for speeding. He was shot for his pains. I rewound your moment, and he went to the car with his gun in his hand. He shot first. His career is over.”

  “His life isn’t,” Sylvie said. “Sounds like a win. Where’s the problem?”

  “The driver wasn’t mine,” Dunne said. “Don’t know that he was anybody’s, but if he was, I’ve committed an act of contempt toward a fellow deity. In a millisecond of time, I made an enemy. To change two weeks’ worth of seconds—it would make the world unrecognizable, pit god against god, change everything. Even twenty minutes reversed would create a tidal wave of change, and for what? To show us the spell again with no guarantee of learning from it?”

  Sylvie sat down on the concrete. Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. “Never is,” she muttered, and then said, “Couldn’t you just—choose a future?”

  “I’d have to be able to see the future first,” Dunne said.

  “You can’t? What, there’s a limit? Mind reading or precognition? No combos allowed?”

  Magdala and Erinya arrived back at the same time and began to confer quietly. Magdala, Sylvie noticed, had a spatter of blood on her khakis. It couldn’t have been the sorcerer, or she’d have dragged him back to Dunne. No, some other fool had crossed paths with the Fury and come out the worse for wear.

  “It’s very rare, even among gods.” A smile curved Dunne’s mouth, something small, rueful, and rather sweet, giving Sylvie a glimpse of the man who was Tish Carmichael’s friend, Brandon’s lover. “Bran calls it checks and balances on a vast scale. Says otherwise all we’d ever do is jockey for position. A few monotheist systems have foresight to some extent, your Christian god, for example, and some gods have pieces of it. I don’t.”

  A tiny spark drifted through the air, leftover, Sylvie assumed, from the destruction of the oubliette. She followed its will-o’-the-wisp path for a few moments, finding it as soothing as drifting soap bubbles.

  “Kronos and the Fates,” Sylvie said. “That’s two, or whatever, in your own pantheon. You really can’t see the future?”

  “I really can’t,” Dunne said. “As for Kronos, they ate him after they deposed him,” Dunne said. The pale spark brushed against his shoulder and disappeared. Dunne brushed his hand over his shoulder as if it had stung. “Kronos’s power, split into so many pieces, lessened. We can use it to grant immortality. That’s about it.”

  A second spark, blue-white, drifted toward him.

  “Immortality,” Sylvie said. Shock touched her. “That’s why you know he’s not dead. You gave Bran immortality.”

  Dunne twitched again, touched a hand to his forearm as the spark made contact, clasping it. He closed his eyes, and a wave of heat moved through the station. In its wake, more sparks appeared.

  Not the oubliette then: Its sparks would grow fewer, not multiply. Maybe they were visible bits of Dunne’s shedding power. They seemed to be drawn to him.

  “Bran’s mortal,” he said. “And don’t expect me to ask the Fates. They don’t know where he is, either. The Fates can’t see the future. At least not more than the span of a man’s life. Shorter if Atropos gets pissy and cuts the thread.

  “Truthfully, there are more humans who are visionaries than gods. It’s a cruel thing. Checks and balances. Give them the ability to see, and no power to change what they see, while we hold the power, but are blind.”

  “I knew a visionary,” Magdala spoke. She licked a finger, rubbed at the bloodstain on her knee. “Hera sent me after her, but I needed to do nothing to punish her. She did it all to herself. She was pathetic. Every moment of joy was soured by the recognition of upcoming pain. Even pain was meaningless when she knew that grief was transitory, that people forget. Ultimately, all she saw of existence was futility. She cut her wrists and bled to death.”

  “Like Bran tried to do,” Sylvie said.

  Dunne’s attention whipped around like he had taken on the Fury’s predatory instincts. “Tish . . .” he said. Taking the source from her mind.

  “You sure didn’t tell me,” Sylvie said. “Why not?”

  The sparks hovered around him like fireflies, a ghostly set of flares that glimmered and faded. After a long moment, Dunne said, “I didn’t want you to hold his life cheap.” He curled his hands around his forearms, rubbing at them.

  “Does he?” Sylvie said, hating that he made her ask, when he had to hear it burning in her thoughts. “Am I going to ride to the rescue, only to find that he’s decided not to wait?”

  Dunne twitched again, a full-body convulsion this time. He shifted his grip from his forearms to his torso, muttered, “No.”

  The sparks nipped at his skin, and Sylvie said, “I thought they were yours. But they’re hurting you?”

  “Not hurting. Pulling. They’re Zeus’s summoning motes. Zeus must have found me. I made flares when I changed time, when I destroyed the oubliette. And now, he’s trying to take me back to Olympus,” Dunne said, through gritted teeth. “I’m fighting it.”

  “O-kay,” Sylvie said slowly. “Problem?”

  “I’m losing,” he said.

  The sharp, clean scent of lightning began to fill the station. Sylvie stepped back from Dunne, from ground zero. Ball lightning crackled into existence, spinning around his chest in a liquid-plasma tumble of blue-white light and sound. It stretched over him like a living net, adapting itself to his shape.

  Dunne took a breath, closed his eyes, seemingly unaware of his clothes singeing under the lightning’s touch. Then he dropped his hands from his defensive posture, and said, “No.”

  His eyes, opened, were no longer human at all, no contrasting shine of white and pupil, but the featureless grey of a distant storm cloud. The grey sky effect bled outward, a slow dissolution of his cheekbones, his temples, his forehead. Pretending to flesh, Sylvie thought. Was this what he was, underneath?

  He grasped the lightning, plasma curling violently between his closed fingers, licking at his arms, thrashing like a living thing. “No,” he repeated, and flung it away.

  It splattered against the concrete, sinking into it and disappearing. It left a puddled slag of concrete and rebar on the floor.

  “I don’t have time,” he said, relaxed in the face of calamity. “He’ll try again, harder, and I’ll be stolen from the mortal plane, perhaps broken down. And I’ve got other problems. I’ve used power indiscriminately, had too much bleed off. I’ve got backtracking to do, prevent any of my leftovers from being used by sorcerers and witches, hungry for a taste of real power. Find him, Sylvie.”

  He vanished like a cutoff screenshot. She wished he’d make sound effects to go with it, just so her movie-trained mind could accept the vanishing as real.

  “Crap,” she said, slumping down to a weary crouch. She still had questions, important ones; she still had no leads, and no way of reaching him. When Alekta crawled out of the floor beside her, Sylvie’s nerves were too shot to allow for anything more than a soft rock backward to fall on her butt.

  “How do I call him?” she said. Alekta paused in her perusal of the station and its overlaid soul traces. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed at the slag on the floor.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Sylvie said. “Zeus threw lightning at him. Though myth always said it was a bolt of lightning, not that shiny little net. The things you learn.” She rested against the wall, letting the cool concrete soothe her aching neck. “So?”

  “Pray,” Alekta said.

  “Pray,” Sylvie echoed. “Well, that makes sense. But I gotta tell you—I’m not real good at prayer.”

  Sylvie kicked a sneakered fo
ot against a lone piece of litter, watched it drift into the tracks. “So, d’you know why the oubliette tried to swallow Dunne, when it was keyed for Bran?”

  Alekta walked away, climbed the stairs, and stood looking out into the night, tension rippling through her shoulders.

  Out of leads, Sylvie thought.

  She wondered how many of the “leads” the sisters had found ended with blood. Magdala, at least, had found one person guilty of something. Even if they hadn’t been hunting for anyone other than the sorcerer responsible for the trap, she couldn’t imagine the other two, with their snap judgments and hunger for retribution, passing on the chance to mete out their brand of punishment.

  “Some of him in him,” Alekta said, finally, and faded from sight. Sylvie frowned.

  “Cryptic,” she said. Some of him in him. Some of Bran in Dunne. The spell didn’t differentiate enough. Sloppy, Val said. Sylvie was inclined to agree.

  Some of what? Sylvie teased at the thought, knowing she was missing something. Skin cells maybe, she thought. Shared living, shared scents, or maybe it was some romantic thing? A piece of his heart and all that jazz? Given that the sloppy sorcerer had defined Bran by his relationship, perhaps he had drawn Dunne into the spell, too.

  The rush of air from the passing train sent her to her feet, heart racing. After all the spells, the sisters, after Dunne, the station had begun to feel like a no-man’s-land. The world reflected his desire, she thought. He wanted us alone, and he hadn’t needed a spell to make it so.

  She made her way through the first stragglers on the stairs and headed back into the night. Nearly midnight and nothing to show for her day; time to retreat and think. She touched the crumpled paper in her pocket. Maybe give the local witch a call if she wanted to risk pissing off a spell caster by calling at this hour.

  Her mind full of questions, she managed to get nearly fifteen blocks, passing by darkened storefronts and deserted alleys, when it dawned on her that the throbbing at her spine wasn’t merely protest at her long day but the gun reacting to the rapid steps behind her.

  She turned, half-expecting it to be an ISI agent whose skill at shadowing had been made clumsy by Dunne-itis, or even Demalion, giving her fair warning of his approach.

  Not ISI, she thought, as the binding spell lanced from his outstretched palm and pinned her in place as neatly as if she had been flash-frozen.

  Sylvie had just found herself a sorcerer, and judging from the scowl on his thin-boned, dark-browed face, one in no mood for playing civil.

  10

  Luck and the Ladies

  CARELESS, THAT VOICE IN HER MIND CHASTISED, FULL OF SELF-CONTEMPT. Sylvie snarled and wiggled the fingers of her right hand by sheer force of will. She had been reaching for the gun when the spell took; she could feel its warmth yearning toward her hand. An inch, no more. She had been so close.

  Careless, the voice said again, this time in a purr. Sylvie agreed; the sorcerer hadn’t followed his binding spell with anything more permanent. He closed the distance between them, moving with an unearned confidence, and stood before her frowning. Like he had any right to frown, she thought. He wasn’t much to look at, either. Skinny, squinty; no great shakes in the fashion department, black T-shirt and dirty-wash Levi’s under an army-surplus jacket.

  Was this her Maudit sorcerer? He looked . . . rather more scruffy than she was used to from their kind. But the binding spell was a spell that took finesse. Not one of the common ones. Entrapment never was. Couple that with the oubliette—he had to be Maudits.

  Sylvie forced her hand to move, though fighting the spell chafed her skin like steel wool. Her fingertips walked the gun barrel, traveling until she found its butt.

  She curled her fingers around it, let the spell lock them back into place, and turned her concentration to her arm muscles. Pull the weapon. Shoot. A simple plan, with a lot of problematic variables. He might catch on, the spell might tighten, she might shoot herself—She met his eyes as if she hadn’t a worry in the world.

  “You destroyed my spell,” he said. “Why?”

  “I look like a witch to you?” Sylvie said. For a moment, she was glad of the spell’s constriction—it masked the urge to grin as the gun rose in her hand. “No wonder your work’s so sloppy. You don’t take the time to observe.”

  His face, young and more revealing than he probably liked, moved between offense and concern. “You were there—” Another thought passed his face, wrinkling that too-young, too-smug brow. A word hovered on his lips, finally made it free. Recognition. “Shadows.”

  Maudits, for sure, if he knew of her. Her reputation really hadn’t spread that far.

  “You’re not a witch,” he said. “You’re nothing. Just a woman. How did you do it?” And oh, that easy contempt in his voice was textbook. The Maudits were utterly convinced of their superiority. It was one of the things that made it so much fun to fuck them over. The gun warmed her hand; she curled her finger on the trigger.

  “Arrogance should be earned,” Sylvie said, pressing the trigger home, and bedamned to a bad angle. The crack of the bullet never came. Instead, the gun made a distressingly hungry sound like a fervent gulping and purr, and the spell holding her disappeared.

  Devoured? Not that she had time to wonder about what had happened, not when she still had the Maudit to deal with, not when his eyes were going wide with shock and rage.

  The Maudit stepped back, flung up a hand. Light coalesced in his palm, and Sylvie took her own step back, sighting down the gun—catch her twice; shame on her—and firing.

  The gun twitched in her hand and spat the binding spell back out. Sylvie smiled as she watched the sorcerer stiffen and grow still. Not exactly as she had intended, but she could work with this.

  She circled his body, posed like some war statue, arm raised, all pissy attitude, and found a smile. She could definitely work with this.

  Maybe a god-touched gun wasn’t all bad. The second spell steamed like frost vapor in the Maudit’s cupped hand, still active. Careful not to come in contact with it herself, Sylvie forced one reluctant finger to fold after another and snuffed the spell, ignoring his tremors of rage.

  “I have some questions for you. I know you can break that spell—it’s yours after all. But I’m faster than you are. I’m meaner than you are, and I’m on deadline. You heard what happened the last time the Maudits went against me when I was against a clock?”

  She waited a moment, watching his eyes change, a slow shift from anger to the beginnings of concern. She smiled. “Cat got your tongue? Blink once for yes. . . . You know, I fought your spell faster than you’re managing. Pretty sad. Hard to imagine you created the oubliette. Impossible to imagine you did it just for kicks. I want to know all about it, but let’s start with the big one. Brandon Wolf—how do I get him out?”

  “You closed the door,” he grated out.

  “Yeah, yeah, mea culpa, sort of,” Sylvie said, impatience sparking. “Can we move on, or should I see what fun games I can devise with you as a stiff? There isn’t much traffic around here. But I bet there’s enough. If I pushed you into the street—you think you could break the spell before you turned into roadkill?”

  A passing taxi sailed by, slowing a little at the sorcerer’s upraised arm, but picked up speed when Sylvie waved him on.

  “He doesn’t come out,” the sorcerer said. “That’s not the purpose of an oubliette.”

  He’s working his way free, Sylvie thought. The sneer was back. No one had ever taught these boys to play poker.

  “Then why get so pissy over a closed door—or were you thinking to bargain with hope? I don’t think Dunne’s someone who likes bargains like that. I know I don’t. It’s crap, and everyone knows it. Like promising salvation to a damned man. A lie spread by gods to make us docile.”

  Sylvie found her breath coming fast, her anger resurfacing, thinking of Dunne and Suarez. Of hopes destroyed, and bargains struck when choice was only pretend. That black edge crept through her mind and i
nto her voice. “I don’t do docile.”

  His eyes widened; he licked his lips. Little nervous tells that told her more than his state of mind, told her the spell was fading fast.

  She seized his shirt collar, tangling the fabric in one clenched fist, the gun’s barrel jabbing into the soft flesh of his throat. Shaking with rage, she dragged him away from the street, into the shadows of closed storefronts, and threw him against a wall.

  He oofed with the impact, legs giving out until he landed, slumped, on the sidewalk. She followed him, crouched over him, gun in his face. “Just tell me how to get him back and we can get on with our lives. You do want to get on with yours, don’t you?”

  Vigilante, Dunne’s voice accused.

  “Stop, stop,” he panted, pushing away from the gun, composure shaken.

  “The slightest hint of a spell, and we’ll see what this gun spits out next,” she said. Two women passing by in a flurry of heels and chatter froze midstep, gaping. “Not your business,” Sylvie said. They gasped and looked away, picking up their pace.

  Still, they were nice women, Sylvie could tell, the kind who would worry and stop at the first open storefront to call the police. Nice women had faith in the police.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. He sounded confused. “You—you’re hers. I can tell—it’s in your voice. We’re on the same side here.”

  “Like that could happen,” Sylvie said. “Stop babbling. Focus. Brandon Wolf. Free. Make it happen.”

  “It’s not supposed to let him out. I swear—”

  “You left it open, left a back door into the spell—”

  “So we could find it,” he said. “Keep track of the oubliette. Not bring a body out.”

  Body. “Is he dead?” She grabbed his collar again so tightly her short-trimmed nails dug into flesh.

  “No,” he gasped.

  “You sure?”

  “I’d know.”

  “Then open it up again.”

  “I can’t!”

  Sylvie sucked in a breath, grappling with anger, with the need to be calm, the need to think. “For a sorcerer who rearranges the natural world at will, you’re awfully fond of can and can’t.”