Sins & Shadows si-1

by Lyn Benedict

  “Yeah?” Sylvie said. She took a sip; sweetness exploded on her tongue and reminded her how parched fear made her throat. She took a larger draught and set the glass down on the stage.

  “Well, you and your scary friend chased off my ex and her psycho Barbie accessory pack. Helen thinks it’s funny to come here every night and make me serve her. I,” he said, a scowl crossing his good-natured face, “don’t.”

  “She’s a bitch,” Sylvie agreed.

  “I’ve got better taste now,” JK said. He hopped up and took a seat on the edge of the stage, swinging lanky legs.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You want to prove it by giving me your phone number?”

  Sylvie finagled a card out of her jeans pocket, held it before him. “If you answer a couple of questions first.”

  “Shoot,” he said. “I give good answers. You should see me with parents. I can even make them overlook the tats.” He presented his arm to her; the words Live Your Own Way blazed around the forearm.

  Sylvie traced the final flare of the y, curling around his wrist. “My parents didn’t object to my ink.”

  “Can I see it?” he said. “Is it someplace . . . interesting?”

  Sylvie smiled, luring him in. It didn’t hurt that he was cute as all get-out. For the second time, she thought this club had a lot to recommend it.

  “Tell me about Lily,” she said.

  He blinked. “I was thinking it was going to be fave food, music, STDs.”

  She handed him the card, tapped the front of it. “I’m working.”

  “Working. Like a cop?”

  “Not like a cop,” Sylvie said, smoothly but quickly. Something had to have drawn him to Helen in the first place; she didn’t want it to be a shared aversion to authority.

  “PI?”

  “Inquiry agent,” Sylvie corrected. “See, Shadows Inquiries.”

  “What’s that when it’s at home?” he said. Laughter lurked in his eyes, daring her to answer truthfully.

  “PI,” she said. “But without rules.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Didn’t figure you for a ‘draws within the lines’ kind of woman. So, Lily?”

  Sylvie said, “Anything you can tell me.”

  “Lily,” he said, picking up her glass, stroking the condensation off it, and letting the drips fall from his fingertips. “Sweet Lily . . . though she isn’t.”

  Sylvie made a go-on gesture.

  “Lily—don’t know if that’s her real name. Doesn’t fit her much. Toil not, neither does she spin—well, I don’t know what she does for kicks, but she’s just not the idle sort.

  “She’s got money. Rumor has it, she has a share in the club. But I think her real job’s in art somehow. She found the artist for the murals here. You might check galleries if you’re hunting her. It wouldn’t surprise me to find she owned one, ran one, patronized one.”

  Sylvie sighed. “That’s specific,” she said. “She might be named Lily, or not. She’s got money, or access to it. She likes art—”

  “Some art,” JK interrupted. “Do not get her started on traditional religious iconography. That woman can seriously hate.”

  “And she might own, work in, or hang out at one of the hundreds of galleries in and around Chicago,” Sylvie finished.

  “She travels, too,” JK said.

  Sylvie threw her hands up, giving him the reaction he was teasing for, but she didn’t find it funny at all. JK, while being helpful, had told her nothing immediately useful. Some of that leaked into her voice despite her efforts. Inside her head, a clock kept a countdown, and she felt like it was heading fast to single digits. Part of it was Erinya; the Fury stalked the bar, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged animal.

  “Look, JK, it’s really important that I find her. Anyone else who might know more?”

  “You might ask Wolf,” JK said. “She hung out with him a lot.”

  Shock hit Sylvie. Of course Lily had hung out with Brandon. What better way to learn about your victim than to befriend him?

  “Eye candy, I thought, when she first brought him in. Thought it’d be awful. Some no-talent hack with a line of bull and a pretty face, but turned out he could really paint. And she backed off some once his boyfriend showed up.”

  “Yeah?” Sylvie asked, and if JK thought her accepting the shift in focus was strange, he didn’t say so. Truth was, Sylvie felt safer not saying Lily’s name aloud. There could be more scrying-glass televisions, charmed to a mention of Lily’s name. Sylvie shivered at the weight of unseen eyes on her skin, reminded herself that paranoia was a dangerous friend.

  If Lily had seen her kill Auguste, or was watching Sylvie question her acquaintances, surely she would have already acted on it.

  “Big guy. Quiet. Older. Dropped him off once or twice; I bet just to prove Wolf was taken.” JK fidgeted, dragged out his cigarettes, tapped one out, stuck it in his mouth.

  “So, what did Wolf think about her?”

  JK lipped his cigarette as if it were lit, then let it drop into his lap. He chased it, studied it, avoiding her eyes.

  “What?” Sylvie said. “You can’t tell me you didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I saw those murals. He was here for a month, minimum. And you were around enough to see Lily and him together.”

  “That doesn’t mean I talked to him,” JK said, picking up her Coke, melting ice and all, and taking a drink as if his throat hurt.

  “JK, you always talk,” Sylvie said. “I’ve only known you for minutes, and strangely, I’m sure of that.”

  “Look,” he said. His voice dropped; his cheeks reddened. “I don’t have anything against fags, I really don’t, it’s just that I couldn’t—”

  “Talk to one?” Sylvie finished in irritation.

  “Couldn’t deal with the fact that I wanted him, okay?” he snapped, then blushed again. “God. I watched him, you know, more entertaining than mopping up last night’s stale beer. He just—there was just something. His hands were covered in paint, green, blue, gold, and I saw him forget, push his hair out of his way. He got paint on his face, in his hair, and he looked so surprised. Like he couldn’t figure out how it got there, and then he just laughed. I wanted him so bad. . . . I stayed the hell away from him.”

  Sylvie let the silence lie while JK picked up the cigarette, and with a furtive glance at the bar, lit it.

  “So,” Sylvie said, “confession being good for the soul and all that, you feel better?”

  “If by better, you mean mortified, sure,” JK said, stubbing out the cigarette after two quick, deep puffs. He put it out on her business card. “I just—I don’t swing that way. It freaked me out. So, really, I don’t have a clue what he thought about Lily. I mean, she disappeared after his boyfriend came in, so maybe Wolf was annoyed with her hanging around and asked him to discourage her. I didn’t see much of her after that.”

  He wouldn’t, Sylvie thought. If Lily had gone after Bran to punish Dunne, she had to have some connection with Dunne, maybe even a history—though in that case, Sylvie would have expected Dunne to put her at the top of the suspect list. He didn’t seem to have anyone there at all. Or maybe he hadn’t shared.

  “Look, I’m glad to talk to you. Mostly,” he said, with a wry twist to his mouth for his confession. “But the person you really need to talk to is Auguste or Wolf. I can give you Auguste’s address.”

  “Thanks,” Sylvie said. “Would you do one thing for me?”

  “Maybe,” he said. A little wary now.

  “Call me if you see her.”

  He hesitated; Sylvie stifled familiar exasperation. Always the sudden withdrawal. Talking was okay, just gossip, ultimately harmless. People could always reassure themselves that they weren’t the only ones who would talk, finding both anonymity and absolution in the thought. But calling her? That brought them right into the picture, and worse, lobbed a bit of the responsibility directly their way. No one wanted that.

  “Call me,” Sylvie s
aid, laying out a new card beside the scorched one.

  A massive crunch cut the air, followed by a patter of falling glass. Sylvie whirled. Erinya crouched on the bar top, the bartender back against the mirrored wall, at the center of a new starburst of cracks.

  Erinya reached for him, hefting his weight with inhuman ease. Along her back, muscles shifted and spikes snagged and stretched out Erinya’s mesh shirt like a porcupine-quill coat.

  “Shit,” Sylvie swore, taking off at a run.

  “Erinya,” Sylvie snapped, even as the bartender’s face went slack with terror. “Stop it!”

  Erinya backhanded her, hitting her jaw with stunning force. Sylvie went down to the taste of rust, seeing stars. She crouched on the floor and shook long bangs out of her face.

  Get up, the voice told her. Make her pay.

  Sylvie drew the gun; a man near her yelped in surprise, and Sylvie whirled. JK gaped at her.

  “Back off,” she growled. Without waiting to see that he did, she jammed the gun barrel into Erinya’s rib cage, snugging it in amidst the wide-spaced mesh of her shirt, nestling it into quills that pricked at her skin, and said, “Let him down.”

  “He wants her dead. . . . Wants to kill his mother—for her house . . .”

  “Wanting isn’t doing,” Sylvie said. “One more warning, Erinya.”

  “Fuck you,” Erinya said. “I’m doing my job—”

  “You’re interfering with mine.” Sylvie fired, once, twice, and again.

  Blood splashed her hands, more rust scent in the air, beginning to compete with the sting of shattered glass and high-proof alcohol. Erinya stiffened; then she lashed out, one-handed again. Sylvie managed to duck, warned by the tiny adjustment of muscles along Erinya’s neck. Erinya’s nails tore strands of her hair from her temple with a distinct and delicate sting.

  The knit mesh of Erinya’s shirt shifted to scale and covered the burned and cored flesh, the bloody gouges that the bullets had torn.

  “You dare shoot a god?” Erinya said, shoving the bartender away. He dropped and scuttled for the front door. Erinya hissed, and he froze. “Not done with you yet, matricide.”

  Sylvie grinned, her own temper shining as bright and as sharp as diamond. “I’ve been stupid. I started to believe, to see gods everywhere. Dunne may be what he claims to be, but you—you and your sisters are no gods. You’re nothing more than shaped power. Like angels. Like demons. I can destroy you.” She raised the gun again, peered through her bangs, her narrowed vision like a gunsight.

  “It might take some careful doing, I admit.”

  The screaming behind her was beginning to get on her nerves. Sylvie wondered how many shots she had in the gun now that it had been magicked. Would it make its own? Enough to take down the Fury? Enough to shut up the shrieking crowd?

  What the hell are you thinking? For once it wasn’t the dark voice that crawled out of her mind, but her own. She shuddered all over, cold, sick, and utterly horrified. She fed all the fear into rage, her specialty, and the talent that kept her alive.

  Erinya leaped, and Sylvie fired. Three more shots, all into Erinya’s torso. Erinya tumbled forward, somersaulting, and came up in a crouch. She hissed, a snakelike tongue lashing out from between sharpening teeth. Her wounds healed.

  Sylvie, trying to assess the next move, met Erinya’s furious eyes and fell into them. Her head pounded, sweat slicked her face, her neck, and her vision exploded into a thousand images.

  Her gun, and the people who fell beneath it. Strangers. Enemies. Allies. Innocents. Michael Demalion. Val. Alex. Even her sister Zoe. Sylvie stood in a world turned abattoir and laughed as she made her will felt; when there was no one left, she turned the gun toward the heavens.

  Not real. Not going to happen. Try again. The dark voice spat it directly into Erinya’s mind, refusing the madness, refusing to be influenced by something external.

  The hallucinations fled. Erinya knelt before her, looking for all the world like a pup who’d been unexpectedly smacked. “Get up,” Sylvie said, sheathing the gun. “Put your face back on.”

  Erinya rose to two feet, shook all her little monster bits—teeth, clawed hands, snaky tongue—into human shape once more. “I owe you pain.”

  “Collect it later, if you can,” Sylvie said. “We’ve made ourselves unwelcome. Let’s go.”

  She turned and froze, looking out over the club attendees—why hadn’t they fled? They looked ready to bolt at a whispered “boo,” and yet they still stood, shaking and watching. Her eyes flickered to the entrance and widened.

  A woman stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, entirely at her ease. She wasn’t much to look at, not quite as tall as Sylvie, judging by the space she took up in the door frame, on the whipcord side of slender, with hair a shade darker than Sylvie’s, sleeked into a twist, held up with what looked like chopsticks. She straightened once she had Sylvie’s attention and met her eyes.

  “You,” she said, her voice pitched low and very clear, almost familiar. “You are an interesting girl. Pity.”

  She was blocking the door, Sylvie realized abruptly. One rather ordinary woman holding a frightened mob of people at bay with only her presence. Lily reached up and fiddled with her hair, a nervous tell that spoke nothing of nervousness. Sylvie’s eyes narrowed.

  Erinya snarled and disappeared, reappearing across the room, claws arcing out before her.

  Lily tugged a chopstick free, and snapped the stick between her fingers; a brittle crack that created a group moan from the nerve-shattered crowd.

  “Brûlez,” she cried, and Erinya, a bare scale width away from sinking her talons into Lily’s flesh, tumbled backward on a wave of scalding white light. The bartender went up like flash paper, flesh wicking the heat and raising a curtain of white flame.

  Sylvie was already covering her stinging eyes. Dear God, no. Not this. She had thought Erinya’s monster act had filled the room with terror, but that was nothing compared to this. The screams now were of pure, primal dread, as vision led to flame led to spontaneous combustion.

  Sylvie pressed her hands tighter, screwed her eyes shut harder, still getting bleed-through, like flashbulbs all around her, strobing through the vulnerable skin of her eyelids. She felt feverish, on the edge of burning.

  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.