Sins & Shadows si-1

by Lyn Benedict

  The punk girl smiled up at her from where she was crouched. “I’m supposed to help you. He said. Since you could be relied on to think.” There were layers of delicate amusement in her voice that made Sylvie flush.

  “Fine. You want to help? Make that disappear.”

  “I can’t undo that. I’m a small god, and he’s dead.”

  “Didn’t ask you to. He tried to kill me. Dead is good. Dead, here, though . . .” Sylvie said. “Just make the body go away. I can’t help Dunne from inside a cell. Take him wherever you take your kills.”

  The girl smirked. “Why not take him where you left yours?”

  “ ’Cause the damn Atlantic’s a couple hundred miles away.” Never admit anything, Sylvie reminded herself, but there was no point in hiding from Erinya’s knowing gaze. “Just do it.”

  The girl stood in a quick, offended movement, crossing her arms over her chest. Sylvie couldn’t tell if it was a put-on or not, a deliberate mockery of humanity or genuine feeling. “For someone who touts freedom, you’re sure bossy. I get bossed around enough.”

  “Dunne?” Sylvie said.

  “He’s all right,” the girl said, relaxing a little, toeing the corpse with her boot with the fidgety, destructive curiosity of a monkey. “He mostly tells me not to do stuff, and that’s different than telling me what to do all the time. Alekta and Magdala—they make me mad. Just ’cause I’m the youngest doesn’t mean I’m young, you know. But they’re always biting my wings, putting me in my place. Even now, when Bran’s in such trouble.”

  It was like listening to her little sister, calling up to vent about curfew, Sylvie thought, not some mythological creature. The more the girl spoke, the more she picked up the cadence of human speech. But for all that Erinya’s speech was approaching normal, her actions—

  Sylvie blinked, her analytical thoughts interrupted by the Fury kicking the body forcefully. Bones crunched, and the sorcerer’s carcass left a glistening trail on the pavement as it inched away under the impetus of her kicks.

  “Stop it,” Sylvie said, tacked on a “please,” when the girl’s dark eyes swung round toward her, feral and red-black and not like a sulking teenager’s at all.

  A siren’s wail turned the distant street corner, showing a faraway flash of blue and red, like a warning aurora. She was running out of time; even if that siren had nothing to do with her, each passing moment meant the exponential danger of a motorist with a cell phone calling the cops, of those women reporting her.

  Sylvie bent over the body again, fumbled in pockets gone sticky; between the gunshot and Erinya’s boots, the sorcerer’s chest cavity was little more than a shattered mess, soft and splintered. Sylvie wiped her fingers on her jacket after she’d finished the search.

  Nothing. No ID, no keys, no wallet. He’d come out just to pick a fight. Sylvie scowled. It was never that easy.

  “Well?” she said to Erinya. So she’d shot her best lead; even dead, he could yield information, if she could figure out who he was. If she wasn’t arrested at any moment.

  “Oh, yeah,” the girl said. “Get rid of it, right.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Sylvie said.

  The girl hoisted the corpse into her arms, cradling it like a dead child, and stared down at it. She raised it a little higher and licked at the wound. “Mmm,” she said. The sight stopped the words in Sylvie’s throat. She coughed and forced them out, anyway.

  “Stop that,” she said, stripping off her Windbreaker and draping it over his torso, hiding the wound, the blood. “Dispose of him, don’t eat him. Come right back, but remember his scent. You can help me track him back to wherever he’s been staying.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” the girl said, that poison-sweet petulance in her voice again. “Want I should bring you a latte as well?”

  Sylvie laughed, the sound unexpected even to her. The Fury eyed her warily, shifted the sorcerer’s deadweight in her arms, and vanished. Sylvie walked a block down the street, a block away from a bloodstain she didn’t want to have to explain to anyone, and sat on the curb.

  In one irritable gesture, she waved off a cab that veered toward her. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out, angling it toward the streetlamp to see the number.

  Alex.

  Down the block, Sylvie saw the Fury reappear. Sylvie looked at her spattered hands and shut the phone off. Blood on her hands, in her voice; there was no way she could talk to Alex like this. Alex might be a visitor to the dark side of the world on occasion, but she didn’t need to know how comfortable Sylvie was in it.

  11

  Women on the Hunt

  SYLVIE KEPT A CAREFUL EYE ON THE APARTMENT HALLWAY WHILE THE Fury put her hand to the latch. It opened without fuss or fanfare. “Slick,” Sylvie said.

  Erinya smiled, a wild-toothed expression that made Sylvie shiver even as she responded in kind. She and the Fury were getting along entirely too well. Really, what did that say about her—that these days she was more at ease working with a stone killer than talking to Alex? Sylvie slipped through the door behind the Fury and latched it.

  A quick rush of controlled light ran along the door and frame, tracing an esoteric pattern burned into the wood. “You didn’t tell me there was a spell on the door.”

  “It didn’t matter,” the girl said, sticking her tongue out at the voided spell. “No door can bar me.”

  “You and the Grim Reaper,” Sylvie said. “Just goes to prove no good comes from unexpected guests.”

  “Don’t compare us,” Erinya said. “He uses tools. I use my hands. . . .” She flashed said hands in Sylvie’s face, hands gone scaled and black, twisted from a human’s five-fingered grip, to something more birdlike, something reptilian.

  “Oh, and that makes all the difference,” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause one is so much more dead than the other.”

  “It is if we eat the soul,” Erinya said, licking her lips with a snake’s tongue.

  Sylvie refused to flinch at either claws or tongue. Erinya had been testing her nerve all the way to the sorcerer’s apartment, leaping at her suddenly, shifting shape halfway, then grinning around a toothed beak.

  Sylvie figured she was as safe at the moment as she would ever be from the Furies. Not only had Dunne sent Erinya to aid her, a clear sign of his intent, the Furies themselves wanted her to succeed. Erinya’s rage at the Maudit’s body had proved that.

  Still, she shouldn’t get cocky—their tempers were as bad as hers, and she had just killed a man she had meant to question.

  Sylvie paused in the apartment’s tiny entryway and took puzzled stock while Erinya prowled the room. The interior matched the exterior of the building; on the small side, a little run-down.

  The Maudits were usually big on pomp and panoply, preferring five-star-hotel suites and the best of everything, no matter the splash it made. This apartment, with its tangled clutter of dropped clothing, of candle ends and piled DVDs, of Salvation Army furniture and velvet blackout curtains, looked more like a D&D geek’s idea of a sorcerer’s lair, minus only a tattered copy of the Necronomicon.

  Of course, unlike a D&D geek, the resident really did have magical abilities, and the books lying casually on the coffee table, between half-empty soda cans, incense sticks, mortars and pestles, were honest-to-god-or-the-devil grimoires. The kinds too often made from human skin or written in blood. Sylvie tucked her hands into her jeans pockets and wandered inward, noting the TV screen and its hissing snow.

  “Any other spells lying around?” Sylvie asked. “ ’Cause I’m so not in the mood to go up in smoke. Or be turned into a toad.”

  “That’d be bad,” Erinya said. “I’d eat you up if you were a toad.”

  Erinya’s gaze was predatory, just that little bit sharper than a moment before, and fixed on her. Upping the bluff? “Back off, I’m not a toad, yet,” Sylvie said. “Besides, if I were a toad, I’m sure I’d be poisonous. . . .” The girl’s gaze didn’t falter. Sylvie stuffed her nervousness behind a quick scowl.r />
  “You’re all over blood,” Erinya said. “Didn’t see it so much outside, in the dark.”

  “I’ll wash up,” Sylvie said, her mouth dry.

  “You don’t have to. I like it.”

  “I’ll wash up,” Sylvie repeated. There was a small kitchenette in sight, and she aimed herself at it, pushing past Erinya when the Fury didn’t get out of her way. The brief contact made her shudder, a reflexive reaction to touching flesh that had only a cursory resemblance to human; it was like reaching out to touch a fallen branch and finding the lively suppleness of a snake.

  She leaned over the kitchen sink, splashing her hands clean, using enough of the Maudit’s soap that her hands were slimy instead of lathered and took forever to rinse, giving her an excuse to linger.

  Don’t forget what she is. She hunts killers. She destroys them down to their souls. The only thing keeping you safe is Dunne’s need.

  Sylvie couldn’t argue with any of that, but she also couldn’t deny the sense of camaraderie that had risen between them.

  Part of it, she knew, was Erinya’s situation. Once out of the reach of the sullen sisters, out of Dunne’s brooding misery, the Fury had proved to be both chatty and profane, spewing bile that struck chords deep within Sylvie. Erinya, the afterthought sister, created only because three could corner prey better than two. For the worst offenders, the ones who deserved more than simple death, the Furies worked as a team. Two to flank their prey and one up ahead to devour the soul.

  “I didn’t even get a name,” Erinya had said, vaulting over a mailbox in the sidewalk, kicking it on her gymnastic way down and knocking it over with a shuddering clang and a burst of broken concrete. “We’re the Erinyes. I’m a thing, not an individual. Alekta got a name. Not a mind, though. She’s all orders and rank, kowtowing to them all. Magdala plays their games, nipping and nudging them into listening to what she wants. We’re gods, too, but fuck if they act like it. We’re just the punishers. And if we forget our place—” Erinya shook her head; black wings shook around her and disappeared. “It’s like a prison, Olympus. I was glad, glad”—she tilted her head back to shout at the dark sky above—“glad when Kevin took our reins from Hera.”

  Sylvie stifled the urge to ask how—it couldn’t matter. “What can they do to you? You’re gods.”

  Erinya paused in midstride and snarled. “You don’t know anything.”

  “So tell me,” Sylvie said, watching the girl’s shape shift, pushing her into a canine crouch.

  Fangs sprouted, a muzzle shifted to a beak, and still the words were clear, as if they bypassed such things as vocal cords or physical structure. “We’re not bodied. We’re just power. We make bodies, build immortal dolls strong enough to contain our Selves. The big gods, they break those doll-shells if we anger them. It’s—unpleasant. If we can’t put our shells back together fast enough, we disperse and die. And if we get help—well, better to have no help at all than be altered at their whims. Once, I had a name. Once I was Tisiphone. Now, I’m just one of a type. We’re all vulnerable when we’re just power. Hera learned the hard way. Zeus broke her shell at the wrong moment; now she’s nearly the weakest of us all.”

  “The wrong moment,” Sylvie echoed. She knew it involved Dunne somehow. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. A man could become a god if he stole a god’s power. Could he steal it by accident?

  Hera got weak; Hera had owned the Furies. Dunne got strong; Dunne took the Furies’ leashes in hand. Cause and effect. Obvious. But how had he done it? How could a man contain such stolen power and not be consumed by it? She’d seen sorcerers burn up tapping too much magic from another human. What would it feel like to be mortal and tap into a god?

  Beside her, Erinya shifted full out, losing all human shape, embodying a creature that Sylvie had never seen before and never wanted to see again. A hooked beak full of teeth, a mane that writhed and tangled along an outstretched neck, eyes that ran bloody tears. Sylvie looked away so fast her neck spasmed. Furies drove men mad. She bet it was after they’d revealed themselves, or given what Erinya had just said, what they saw as themselves.

  “Put the scary away, huh?” she said. She stared up at the night sky, stars occluded by streetlights streaming upward. “No need for panic in the streets.”

  “There’s no one to watch,” Erinya said.

  “There’s me,” Sylvie said. “Don’t want me to go all hysterical on you, do you?” She made her voice light, as if the possibility were laughable; she wondered if her scent would give the game away. She heard the god stretching, the rasp of feathers and fur giving way to the more normal sounds of fabric and metal.

  “So you took the out that Dunne provided and came to earth,” Sylvie said. “You live in the mortal realm.”

  Erinya nodded. “With Dunne. With Bran. We watch over him, when Dunne can’t.” She stopped dead, hands fisting at her side. “We were hunting when Bran was trapped. It shouldn’t have happened. We were hunting mortals. All four of us, when Dunne alone could have done it. It’s our fault. We shouldn’t have trusted that Bran was safe.”

  Sylvie raised a brow. She wasn’t going to try patting the girl on the shoulder, or even mumbling a “there, there,” no matter how mournful she sounded. Sylvie valued her skin too highly for that. Besides, the dark voice chimed in, they had been fools to think Dunne could escape the other gods by running to earth. Someone had to pay for the theft. Brandon Wolf was vulnerable.

  In the apartment kitchen, rubbing the last suds from between her fingers, Sylvie paused in her memory. Maybe that was it—the connection Erinya and she had: They both knew what it was like to have innocents hurt while under their protection.

  She scrubbed her hand across her face, wiping a few stealthy tears from her lashes. Her hands came away red-tinged, and she shuddered, wildly.

  God, more of it? She bent back to the sink, cupped water in her hands, and splashed her face, the stickiness at her neck, the crusting tangle in the hair by her left ear. The water pattered down, rust colored. She did it again until her shirt was sopped and clammy around the collar, and only the steel sink showed through the water drops.

  No paper towels to hand, she spotted a worn shirt, crumpled on the Formica counter, and she used it to blot her hair and neck, soak up any lingering blood that might have evaded the water. Black, she thought, so good for hiding stains. It wasn’t like the Maudit was in any position to object, and the cotton was soft, even if it smelled of sulfur and smoke. A slogan on the shirt scratched her skin and put an end to her grooming.

  Habit made her drape the shirt neatly over the back of the single kitchen chair to dry. In Miami, everything mildewed given half a chance. The apartment refrigerator was going to be bad enough by the time the landlord realized that the sorcerer wasn’t coming back, why add mold to his or her problem?

  Absently, she read the broken, charcoal-colored letters, NDNM, wondering philosophy, rock band, or other.

  Erinya was a series of soft scuffles in the other room, and Sylvie rejoined her. “Anything?” Sylvie asked.

  “It all smells like magic,” the Fury complained, frustration evident in her voice, and in the scales sliding along her skin. Sylvie was amazed that Erinya could even pass as human the way she shuffled guises. Either the stress was getting to her, eroding her self-control, or—scary thought—Erinya felt as peculiarly comfortable in the strange duo they formed as Sylvie did.

  Erinya walked into the small bedroom, yanked the first drawer out of the dresser, ripping the cheap laminate, and dumped the contents to the floor. She rooted around in the mass of clothes with her foot.

  “All right then,” Sylvie said. “You check out the bedroom.” Since you’re going to do it anyway, she thought. Sylvie watched the Fury yank another drawer out, and sighed before turning to more organized searching.

  The dead Maudit had had a partner, a woman, but she didn’t live here. One chair in the kitchen. One pillow on the bed. One dirty plate at the edge of the futon was still ha
lf-full of cooling chow mein. Sylvie’s stomach roiled. When was the last time she’d eaten? Ten, twelve hours ago? That cruller in the bakery.

  She picked up the plate, unwilling to look at it, more unwilling to admit the urge to tuck into it. Hell, she’d eaten out of garbage cans more than once, back in the bad times. A sorcerer’s recent leftovers didn’t look too bad, and she liked chow mein. Still, eating your victim’s last meal—Sylvie thought psychologists might find that deeply symptomatic of some regrettable pathology. She set the plate down on the TV, felt a tingly zip and zing in her fingers like the quick dance of current, and jumped back, thinking, Spell!

  Two breaths later, she let out a slow sigh and forced herself to relax. Just faulty wiring. She leaned over to check and stared at the plug lying next to the baseboard, six inches or more from the outlet. The TV hissed quietly.

  Sylvie backed up to take another look at the screen. Snow. Bad reception. Amazing reception, actually, considering the lack of electricity to the set. But what had he been watching?

  She squinted, seeing blurry shapes behind the static, dark, light, a long rush of steady movement that struck a chord of memory. She absently reached up for a nonexistent rabbit ear, then yanked her hand back at the tingle. Duh, Sylvie. Magic. Still, when in doubt. Gingerly, she reached out and thumped the side of the set, prepared this time for the little nonshock sensation. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen.

  For a bare second, the screen grew clear, the signal noise twitched and lifted. Sylvie got a fast glimpse of the scene, and recognized it. Why wouldn’t she? She’d been there. The screen was an “I spy” scrying spell keyed to the El station and the oubliette. Sylvie bet that the screen had been nice and clear before Dunne made things go boom.

  Sylvie glanced at the noodles again, and grinned. Bet the Maudit had nearly choked when he spied, with his own little eye, Dunne making oubliette hash. No wonder he’d come running.