by Lyn Benedict
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 at.”
“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 tell 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.
Frustration rose in her, woke the little dark voice within. “Go away,” she said, letting its utter contempt for human frailty bleed through.
They stiffened and blinked. Their faces took on individuality again; panic, confusion, embarrassment. She turned her back as they scattered with confused murmurs.
After checking that the cops were out of sight, Sylvie tested the knob. The door opened. Maybe Tish Carmichael was a trusting soul who believed in a literal open-door policy. Maybe not.
Sylvie slunk through the door, wincing as the volume increased. Her hand settled in the small of her back; the gun gave an eager pulse.
The apartment was long but roomy and seemingly empty. The bottom floor, one large brick-walled room that doubled as bedroom and living area, held signs of Tish: discarded clothes, a plate left on the tiny kitchenette counter, a scatter of cameras beside the plate—Polaroid, 35mm, and digital—a proof sheet left out, images circled in red. The futon was opened out, sheets rumpled, sagging toward the floor. A miniscule bathroom stood empty, save for a clutter of hair products and dropped towels. Sylvie climbed the narrow stairs, following the music, and soft thumps and scuffles.
Dancer, Sylvie remembered as she came out onto the second floor and found the girl alive, well, and working hard in a homemade studio. One wall was mirrors; the wood floor was sanded smooth and oddly springy. Sylvie caught Tish’s eyes midspin, and the girl came to a graceless halt.
“Kevin Dunne sent me,” Sylvie said. She pitched her voice to compete with the music. Tchaikovsky, she thought, now that the distortion was gone. “I’m Sylvie. Your door was unlocked.”
Tish hit the remote, and the stereo fell silent.
“Okay,” Tish said, and picked up a hand towel. She wiped the sweat out of her tousled black hair, fluffing it with the ease of old routine.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Sylvie said. Make nice when you meet people, Alex told her. Sometimes Sylvie tried.
“I think Bran’s more important, don’t you?” Tish said.
Sylvie sighed. Nice worked for Alex; people opened right up to her, even with the exotic haircut and cosmetic insanity. But Sylvie—even when she tried, it went wrong. “Of course I do,” she said.
Sylvie watched her sniffle, trying to get a read on the girl. Tish was careless for sure—to leave the door unlocked after Bran’s disappearance, to accept Sylvie’s identification without question—but careless didn’t mean stupid.
Tish dropped the towel in favor of a well-faded Joffrey sweatshirt and pulled it over her soaked leotard. She reached for a pair of running shorts on the floor.
“Good for Bran, how?” Sylvie asked, leaning back against the mirrored wall so that she didn’t have to watch herself interview Tish.
Tish folded herself to a cross-legged seat on the floor-boards. She tugged nervously at her ankles, pulling threads from the edges of her slippers. Her blue eyes, reddened now around the rims, met Sylvie’s and flicked away.
“He—he’s been different of late. He stopped wanting to go out, to do things he used to do. It worried me. Especially since Kevin’s been so busy.”
“Doing what?” Sylvie asked, curious to see what Dunne’s cover story was.
“He’s security for . . . Olympus Group Ltd., I think he said. Some big, global tech company.”
Sylvie kept her face still. Olympus group? Surely it couldn’t be coincidence. A Greek god? Kevin Dunne didn’t sound like a Greek name. Maybe he just liked the reference. Cocky bastard. “I see,” she said.
“I’ve never heard of it, but honestly, if it doesn’t involve dance, I’m probably not going to know about it.” Tish sighed. “Bran says I have a one-track mind. I wish I did. Then I’d be more than just a fill-in member of the troupe. Bran’s got me started on photography, though. That way, when I can’t dance, I can maybe still get a job in the arts—”
“Artists give the best parties,” Sylvie agreed. Get her back on track. “But Bran didn’t want to come to yours. He give a reason?”
“Sort of,” Tish said, rubbing her fingers over the callused soles of her feet, hesitant.