by Lyn Benedict
A hard hand gripped her hair; Sylvie forced herself to keep her vision blocked instead of fighting back. The only defense against balefire was not to look. It fed on flesh and spread by vision. It only burned out when there was no one left to see.
The hand tugged, claws scratching at her skin, and Sylvie gasped. Erinya had survived the blast. The Fury yanked, guiding her out of the club, while Sylvie stumbled and choked on the stink of scorched bone and charred meat.
“Don’t look,” Erinya said.
“Won’t,” Sylvie said. “Don’t you look, either.”
“Won’t,” Erinya responded in kind. “No eyes right now.”
A trickle of fresh air reached her, and Sylvie picked up her pace, staggering over the asphalt of the parking lot and going down when Erinya released her.
She felt cold metal at her back, the smell of car oil, and a tire pushed up against her shoulder. She cracked an eye open, looking toward the ground just in case. The first hint of balefire, and she’d gouge out her eyes rather than turn herself into a firework.
Reassuring darkness soothed her nerves, the cracked yellow border of the parking spot barely visible. Sylvie opened both eyes and raised them toward the warmth before her.
No eyes, she thought, staring at Erinya’s blind, blank face, only a smooth expanse of skin above the nose and mouth. Shape-shifting was a handy thing, she mused, and giggled a little wildly.
“Did you get her scent this time?” she asked, voice cracking.
“I got balefire in my face,” Erinya said. “I’m scent-blind until I’m healed.”
“Anyone else get out?” Sylvie said.
“No.”
Sylvie pulled her knees up to her chest, rested her face on them. JK. Gone, just like that. The Magicus Mundi had a lot to answer for. She steadied her breathing and tried to listen to the night beyond her racing heartbeat. No fire alarm. Unsurprising since balefire had no interest in anything beyond flesh, but that was to the good. A fireman coming in too soon could catch it and pass the conflagration on.
“Don’t shift your eyes back yet,” Sylvie said. “I want that stick she was holding.”
“Get it yourself. It’s not like it’s useful.”
Sylvie leaned forward and tightened her hand on the Fury’s shoulder. “That had to have been Lily, the big winner in our suspect lottery. I assumed she couldn’t do magic. ’Cause she used Auguste as her hands. But balefire . . .
“I don’t know how she did it. The best clue to finding out is that stick. I want it. I need to know what resources she has.”
“Enough power to kill everyone just to get to you,” Erinya said.
“No,” Sylvie denied. “She killed everyone to destroy her memory scent. I think she’s been watching us. And she came armed with something that could put off a Fury, Erinya. You were her target. I was a surprise. An interesting one.”
13
Art Appreciation
SYLVIE ROLLED OVER WITH A GROAN SHE TRIED TO STIFLE OUT OF courtesy for Tish, but dammit, she hurt. Wrestling with a Fury was definitely an all-pain, no-gain sort of endeavor. She shifted enough to ease the spasm in her back and cracked an eye.
Tish slept on, drooling a little, her dark hair a tangled cloud against her polka-dotted pillowcase. Sylvie found a tiny smile. Had to love those party girls. They tended to be up at all hours and were oddly blasé about strangers coming to their door, soot-streaked, battered, and begging for a bed.
Tish hadn’t hesitated at all, dragging Sylvie in, seeing her showered, pj’d, and tucked in before she had so much as asked the question that had been trembling on her lips all that time—had Sylvie found any leads to Bran.
Nearly dead on her feet, Sylvie had confined herself to slurred syllables and half answers, concentrating more on dialing Alex’s number correctly. Sylvie had pieces of a puzzle but no picture. Alex could give her that. But Alex didn’t answer, undoubtedly tucked into bed like a good girl, not like Sylvie, staggering into a stranger’s home, smelling of char and burned blood. . . . Sylvie left a message on Alex’s voice mail, a raspy, coughing, muttering monologue about the art world, a woman called Lily, about NDNM.
Tish, listening with her ears cat-pricked, had chipped in the moment Sylvie disconnected. “Is that the same Lily Bran painted?”
Sylvie’s exhaustion cleared long enough to collect facts. Brandon had painted a portrait of a woman called Lily, two months ago. A portrait he had worked on feverishly, then turned to the wall and forgotten. Tish thought it was still there, leaning up against other discards in his cluttered studio.
Go get it, Sylvie thought, staring at the clock, at the hour glowing 4:00 a.m. Get up. Get the painting. Her body betrayed her. Her attempt at sitting up had set her head to spinning, her vision to blurring, and Tish had pushed her back into the futon.
Finally it was morning—eight o’clock—and enough with the lounging about. She groaned deep in her throat, thought longingly of a vacation spent drowsing on the beach, and rolled over. Tried to. Tish’s arm dragged her back, pulled her against warmth. “G’back t’sleep,” she muttered, without ever really waking.
Party girls, Sylvie thought, not so fondly this time. She pinched at Tish’s arm until the sleeping girl let go, pulling her arm away from the sting.
Sylvie made her escape and dragged herself into Tish’s kitchenette. Coffee, now.
She found the coffeemaker, ladled in an extra scoop of grounds on principle, and the world began to smell promising. Behind her, Tish left the futon in a stumbling slide of sheets and blankets.
A moment later, a white flash filled the room, and Sylvie spun, heart pounding, thinking of balefire. Tish lowered her camera and yawned. “S’rry. Couldn’t resist.”
Sylvie turned back to the counter, rested her shaking hands on it, concentrating on stilling her breath. Coffee? Who needed caffeine when you could have an adrenaline jolt straight to the heart?
Sleep-warmed fingers traced a pattern on her back, a delicate scratch of nails between the spaghetti straps of the loaner tank top. “I wanted a picture of your tattoo. It’s Latin, right? What’s it mean?” Tish said. Her touch made Sylvie’s skin prickle.
“Cedo Nulli,” Sylvie said. “I do not yield.”
“Mm. Hostile,” Tish decided, and snagged the first cup of coffee for herself.
Sylvie filled another cup and after the first scalding mouthful, turned to the next pressing problem. Wardrobe. Hers was smoked. Her jacket gone with the Maudit, her T-shirt a tattered mess, her jeans sticky with spilled beer, and all of it reeking of charred human flesh.
Tish curled up in a tiny, tidy bundle on the futon, tucking her feet under her, and Sylvie sighed. Five feet tops. No way in hell was she fitting into any of Tish’s clothes.
“Closet’s upstairs,” Tish said. “Got some party leftovers that might fit.”
Sylvie wandered upstairs, stiff and sore, to rummage through Tish’s collection of clothes.
She hit the jackpot at one end of the walk-in closet, finding a tidy grouping of party stragglers and one-night leftovers. She pulled out a pair of men’s khakis that looked about right, and a red T-shirt that extolled a brand of firecrackers with a truly offensive logo. She flipped the tee inside out and put it on rather than waste time looking for something better. It’d be under Erinya’s jacket anyway.
A small shelf near the door yielded a giant bottle of ibuprofen, the dancer’s faithful friend, and Sylvie snagged three, taking them dry before heading back down toward the scent of brewed coffee.
She found Tish looking much more awake and unhappy about it. “You didn’t have to get up,” Sylvie said.
“I’m going with you,” Tish said. “I’ve got the key. I called, and Kevin’s not home. He should be. I mean, Bran’s missing.” Tish wouldn’t look at her, and her voice held an edge that Sylvie couldn’t decipher.
“All right,” Sylvie said. “But hurry.” Dunne’s absence wasn’t unexpected; he’d be out hunting, the sisters in tow. It did worry her a
little. Sylvie had expected him to descend on her last night after she’d sent Erinya to update him. He hadn’t. And Zeus had been pulling at him. . . .
Lily herself made Sylvie antsy, generated more questions than answers. Sylvie had assumed the woman couldn’t do magic; she still found her logic sound. People who had power did not dragoon apprentice sorcerers to do their spell wetwork for them—that was like giving trade secrets to your competitors. But magic had definitely been done last night. Sylvie shuddered and chased the chill from her nerves with bitter, black coffee. Still slurping, scalding her lips and tongue, she rose to paw through her discarded clothes.
“Did you see something that looks like a broken chopstick?”
Tish said, “Maybe it’s under that gun.” The edge was stronger now, and identifiable. Fear. Sylvie dropped her eyes: The holster was there, bound up in Erinya’s jacket, but the seal had been unsnapped, the gun pulled partially free. Clumsy, Sylvie thought, remembering her exhaustion, remembering shedding clothes without any concern for the weapon, just letting it slip free with her jeans.
“This is why you don’t mess with other people’s things,” Sylvie said. She bent, tucked the gun back into the holster, and fastened the whole thing about her waist. It vibrated briefly, as soothing as a purr. “I’m sorry if it startled you—”
“That gun is not normal. It looks normal, but it’s . . . It felt like skin,” Tish said. Her voice shook, craving reassurance. Sylvie could see that fragile innocence crumbling in Tish’s eyes, the bewilderment and betrayal that the world kept secrets of its own.
Bran and Dunne had managed to hide the Magicus Mundi with its glories and its horrors from her, even with the Furies around. Sylvie, through carelessness, had betrayed the larger world.
“No,” Sylvie said. “It’s not.”
“What is it? How—”
“Give me the keys. Stay here,” Sylvie said. Stay safe.
“No,” Tish said. She passed Sylvie on the way up the stairs, and said, “I have the keys, and I know their security code, so don’t bother trying to go without me.”
Sylvie sighed and let it go. She sorted through the rest of the clothes, ducked her head under the futon, and found the stick.
In the morning light, with caffeine sharpening her brain, the broken chopstick still looked ordinary as dirt—the kind distributed with every fast-food Chinese meal in the country, still splintery where it had been torn from its other side.
Sylvie handled it gingerly. When Lily halved the stick, balefire had appeared. Sylvie didn’t want to find out it worked just the same if it were quartered.
She turned it over again in her hands, hoping for inspiration, but it was just a stick, inert in her hands. Nothing to say it was anything important at all, much less the trigger to a murder spell. If it was. Maybe Lily was the queen of misdirection and the stick was some type of in-joke, some game to send Sylvie chasing her own tail.
Sylvie groaned. She hated to do it, but she needed information. Chasing Lily was going to keep her busy enough; she didn’t have time to figure out how the woman did what she did.
Usually, with a question on magic matters, she dragged Val to the hot seat. That was no longer an option, at least not without a bigger fight than Sylvie needed at the moment. Sylvie’s options narrowed to two. Either throw herself on the mercy of this unknown Anna D, or try to winkle information out of the ISI. Neither thought appealed.
Tish thundered down the stairs and disappeared into the bathroom; the crash of water running against tile followed in seconds.
Sylvie looked at the closed door in disbelief. “Hurry, and she needs a shower.”
She took another preventative dose of caffeine and dialed, wondering what it said about her psyche and faulty memory that this number she could recall after one sneak peek.
“Sylvie,” Demalion said, picking up on the second ring. “You’re still with us.”
“Barely,” she said.
“So how was the club? It’s been on my list of places to go.”
“You had me followed,” she said. Not surprised, but chilled nonetheless. She’d killed a man last night.
“Nah,” he said. “Not once your witchy friend pushed Burke onto the tracks. He was thrilled to miss the rest. Thirty-one cases of spontaneous human combustion. Special even for you.”
“Not my fault,” Sylvie said. Her free hand found a box of raw-sugar cubes, and she started feeding them into her coffee.
“Didn’t say it was,” he said. “You okay?”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I? There’s no in-between with balefire.”
“Good to hear it,” he said, and damn if she didn’t almost believe him. “Is there a reason for the call, or can I just think you were worried that I might be worried and wanted to ease my mind.”
Sylvie growled, borrowing wordless irritation from Erinya. “You talk too much,” she said.
“Coming from you?”
A retort hovered on her lips, along with a smile, and she stopped. They weren’t friends. “What do you know about magic sticks?”
“Aren’t they usually referred to as wands? Or is this some new slang I’m missing out on?” Demalion asked. “I can never tell.”
“Wands don’t require you to break them to make the spell work,” Sylvie said. “This did.”
“Broken,” he said. “Check. I’ll see what we’ve got in the files. Anything else?”
“Lily, no last name offered,” Sylvie said. “Connected with art, Brandon Wolf, and bad magic. Not a nice woman.”
“Our firestarter?” Demalion asked, his voice growing distant. Sylvie imagined him frowning, sorting his own thoughts for information, imagined him rolling that little crystal ball between his hands, fidgeting as he thought.
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “She killed them all to keep her trail clouded. Lily’s cold-blooded and dangerous. I can’t believe she doesn’t have a rep.”
“This is related to Dunne, right?” Demalion said. “He’s the problem we’re trying to solve—”
“Typical bureaucracy. Focusing on the wrong thing. Lily is the problem. Lily started it,” Sylvie said. “Lily kidnapped a god’s lover. Forget about Dunne. You can’t do anything about him anyway.”
“I don’t particularly feel like playing forgive and forget with him. He’s dangerous. I don’t know how much you’re following the news, but he needs to be dealt with.”
“Then you step up to the plate,” Sylvie said. “Instead of pushing me to do it. Look, just let me know what you can find on stick magic. Or on Lily, won’t turn that down, either.”
“What are you up to?” Demalion said. “Save me the trouble of spying and just tell me.”
The shower stopped, and Sylvie said, “What, deprive you of your special-agent fun?” and cut the connection. She’d shaken Tish’s trust with the meat gun; she didn’t want to be caught talking to the government. Especially not to the government man who’d been in disguise and present the night Brandon disappeared. It might be a little difficult to explain. To Tish and, God, to Dunne. Sylvie made a note. Do not let Dunne catch you thinking about Demalion, especially since Sylvie still wasn’t sure what she thought about Demalion. Help or hindrance. Ally or enemy. Trust or—a belated thought touched her.
Forgive and forget, Demalion had said. What did he have to forgive Dunne for? Something more personal than the ISI teams’ lack of success?
“Ready,” Tish said. Sylvie finished tucking her cell phone into a pocket before turning.
Hmmm. Combat ballerina. Spandex as body armor beneath cutoff jeans and Doc Martens overlaid with leg warmers.
Sylvie snagged Erinya’s jacket, making sure it covered the gun. A whiff of charred flesh touched her senses as she settled the jacket over her shoulders, but she judged it nearly unnoticeable. No worse than having lingered at a barbecue.
Outside, they both paused and stared up at the sky as one. “Wow,” Tish said. “Look at that.”
“I’m looking,” Sylvie said. Sh
e was. She didn’t like what she saw. The morning skies were sullen, cloud-heavy, and tinged green. And so still—the clouds looked carved in place, like some elaborate bas-relief. A white-backed gull fought its way through the sky, but there was no other movement. Even the planters at street level, laden with ivy and petunias, were motionless. A good Floridian, Sylvie thought it looked like nothing so much as a hurricane building up offshore. Only this was Chicago, and far from the sea.
“Cab?” she asked. She waved down a shiny new cab that was conveniently approaching, conveniently empty of fares. “Great timing,” she said to the driver. Suspiciously good timing. How long had she talked to Demalion? While he was a talker, he’d rambled more than usual. Buying time? How long did it take the ISI to locate a cell phone within a city?
Not long, apparently.
The cab driver barely grunted an acknowledgment of the address Tish gave. Maybe more concerned with the discomfort of his shoulder holster beneath the strap of his seat belt. The bulge beneath his sweatshirt could be nothing less.
The cabbie turned on the news to fill the silence and first thing Sylvie heard was the local morning DJ laughing. “Weird world out there today. A section of I-90 was reported struck by lightning and turned to glass. Don’t believe everything you hear, folks, but you still might plan an alternate way to work. And for those of you who work lakefront—massive fish kill last night. The surface is covered with dead fish and birds. So skip the picnic lunch.
“Forecast for today—rain. Tornadoes maybe. Hell, they don’t know. When do they ever? Either way, O’Hare’s grounding all morning flights.”
Are you following the news, Demalion had asked.
Cataclysms and monsters, Val had said, when gods walk the earth.
Sylvie leaned back to stare at the gloomy sky, listening to callers reporting their own run-ins with weirdness. Beside her, Tish got more and more withdrawn, until she finally whispered, “Shut that off.”