by Lyn Benedict
“Lily,” Demalion said. “Got some info on her for you. I was coming to meet you.”
“Not Lily,” Sylvie said. “Though Lily sicced her on me. Helen wasn’t anything much last night, sparks and flint. But today, she was rolling out the fire like a dragon.”
“What the hell is going on?” Tish cried, ignoring the car honking behind her. “What’s all this got to do with Bran?”
“Nothing,” Sylvie said. “It’s all about Dunne.”
The driver behind them got out of his car and tapped on the driver’s side window. Tish shrieked and stepped on the gas. Sylvie rocked back into Demalion and winced. “Ow,” she whispered.
He touched her forearm, the blistering burn. “This was close.”
“It’s been closer,” she said, and hated that it was true. She was going to quit, find herself a spot in the sand, lie out like a lizard, and snarf drinks under a tropical sun. There would be no witches, sorcerers, succubi, monsters, gods, or girls who blew fire.
Tish ran a red light; cars honked, and Sylvie said in unison with Demalion, “Pull over!”
“I’ll drive,” Demalion said, beating Sylvie to it. She smothered her usual knee-jerk contrariness to anything Demalion said and nodded.
“How can a blind man drive a car?” Tish said. “You were at the intersection, in the car, alone. How’d you get there?”
“Drove,” Demalion said. He prodded Sylvie’s sore arm. “Who’s Helen?” Demalion said.
“Bastard,” she muttered, willing to ignore Tish for the moment. “Helen was at the bar last night; she left before the big finale. She got up this morning supercharged and superpissed. . . . Oh, hell,” Sylvie said. “It’s the damn gods!”
Tish pulled the car to a halt, and as soon as the way was clear, swung the driver’s door open and scrambled out. A passing truck buffeted them, but Tish was clear of it, pacing on the shoulder. They watched her shaking, arms clasped around herself. When Sylvie was sure Tish wasn’t going to fall into traffic, she turned back to Demalion. He tucked his crystal into his pocket and slid behind the wheel. “How does Helen fit—”
“Lily manipulated her,” Sylvie said. “We’ve got bigger problems. Dunne’s shedding pure power. Helen’s a scavenger. I saw a little of that last night; when Helen touched Erinya’s jacket, it flared. But at Dunne’s, where he’s been living, breathing, shedding—it’s like throwing chum in the water. Only this chum turns shrimp into sharks. And anyone with a hint of talent can feed on it. . . .”
Helen’s flaming hands, the insanity in her eyes, the death and damage she had done crossed Sylvie’s mind again, but this time she imagined it happening in a hundred different homes as people woke up and smelled the possibilities. Dunne had been everywhere looking for Bran. Even Miami. At its best, South Miami was a city of predators. With blood in the water—Sylvie thinned her lips, biting at the lower one until a nerve spasmed in protest.
“Not good,” Demalion said. “Let’s get Tish and get back. The ISI needs to know about this.” He leaned out of the car, calling to the dancer.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Tish said. Her face was pale, a small welt rising on her brow, and her eyes were shocky and dark-ringed. “Something’s really wrong, and it’s your fault!”
“No, it’s not,” Demalion said. “Don’t confuse the cure with the symptoms. We’re trying to make things right—”
“By sneaking and prying? I don’t trust you. I don’t like you, and Bran was scared to death of you. I only helped ’cause I had to. Go to hell.” Her eyes flickered over Sylvie’s for a second; her face crumpled into tears. “Both of you.” She raised her hand, dashed tears from her eyes, and waved frantically at oncoming traffic.
Demalion cursed under his breath and got out to corral her. Sylvie shook her head. Both of them idiots. Nothing good could ever come from a grown man chasing a screaming young woman around a major highway. Sylvie hit the horn and stuck her head out. “Demalion, get back here. Call her a damn cab if you’re worried.”
He got back into the car and dialed a number. “It’s Demalion. I need a cab pickup. . . .”
Sylvie snatched the phone from his grasp. “A real cab. Not the ISI!”
“She needs to tell us what she saw,” Demalion said.
“She needs to go stick her head in the sand and pretend nothing happened.”
“You think that’s okay?”
It was what Dunne wanted, Sylvie thought. She didn’t want him angry at her. “Leave her alone, Demalion.”
Lips tight, he recovered his phone, and dialed Airport Cabs, holding the phone out so that Sylvie could hear the dispatcher.
Then he put the car into gear and pulled them back into traffic. “Well, you saw what happened better anyway. Saw and understood . . .”
“I’m not going to talk to the ISI, either,” she said. “I should be hunting Bran. Hell, I should be at home,” she said, still mulling over that increase of ability that Helen had shown. “Dunne was in Miami. Talents will be ramping up there, too.”
“Best to find Wolf and be done with this. What could you do in Miami, anyway?”
“Whatever I had to, to protect it,” she said. “But maybe that concept’s alien to a government drone who thinks every problem can be handled with the appropriate paperwork.”
“Maybe your track record’s not the best at protection,” he snapped back. “Or was Suarez one of your success stories?”
She punched him, lost in rage, ignoring the common-sense rule that hitting the driver was a bad idea. Close quarters, but he managed to hunch a shoulder up to take the blow and keep the car from swerving. Much. A horn blared beside them.
“You’re reckless,” he said, his own temper burned out. “You’re dangerous. You used to think, Sylvie. What changed? Keep going the way you’re going, and you’ll be no different than the people you fight against.”
“Fuck you,” she muttered. She slumped against the passenger door, as far from him as she could manage. “Just drive.”
Traffic slowed and snarled as they approached orange cones on the street. Sylvie thought road work with minimal interest, more caught up in wondering what Dunne would do if she did pick up and run home. He’d send the Furies to retrieve me, she thought. But I could kill them if I laid a trap, made plans. They’re monsters. Fair game.
But she didn’t want to kill them, not Erinya with her quick tempers and childish ways, not elegant Alekta, or Magdala, who proved even deadly creatures could be dull. She was sick of killing things.
“We need to do something, or Wolf will die,” Demalion said, in uncanny echo of her thoughts. “You don’t want the ISI, then what?”
“Consensus is he’s already dead. Dunne’s the only holdout,” Sylvie said. She gritted her teeth as the car came to a dead stop. Becalmed in the asphalt sea, she thought. She hated this city.
“He’s a god,” Demalion said. “You don’t think he might know something you don’t?”
“You sure jumped on the bandwagon easily,” Sylvie said, “and you haven’t even seen him in action.” She blinked. That wasn’t right. The cab/agent had said something. I know what Dunne did to Demalion.
“Seen more ’n enough,” Demalion said. She met his steady gaze, and he reached out slowly, touched her chin, turned her head toward the street before them.
“Oh,” Sylvie said. No wonder the traffic had stopped. The worn lane markings on the roadway were peeling away, winding upward like airborne ribbons and spilling backward, touching down and gluing cars into place, creating a spiderweb that slowly sucked vehicles into the asphalt. A busload of tourists had gotten out and were snapping pics as drivers crawled out of windows of trapped cars.
“It’s been happening all day,” he said. “Not this. But things. You say Dunne’s shedding? I say, tell me something I couldn’t have guessed.”
“All day?” she said, staring at the webbing with more creeping terror than fascination.
“Transformations have happened all over town,�
�� Demalion said. “People have died. But you don’t want the ISI to help. You want to go it alone.
“We really could help, Sylvie. You want to go home, worried about what? Your family, your friends? I could have the ISI pick them up—”
Wrong thing to say, Sylvie thought. So terribly wrong. She went cold all the way through. “If you do, I’ll dig around, Demalion, find your family—you said they’re local—drag them into this,” Sylvie said. “Do they know what kind of job you have?”
“Point made,” Demalion said. His jaw tightened. “I don’t like threats, Shadows.”
“You started it.”
“It wasn’t meant as a threat.”
Sylvie stopped further explanation by drawing out the meat gun, setting it in her lap. “Stay away from my people. Or you’ll find out how dangerous I really am.” Even she was unnerved at the quiet fury in her tone.
Demalion raised an eyebrow like an aristocrat being abused by a peasant. But, and Sylvie had to admit it, Demalion had always had common sense as well as smarts. He merely nodded.
Sylvie continued in the same quiet tone, “We’ve come to a truce, you and I, am I right? Let’s not jeopardize it.”
“I’d call it a detente, myself, and one-sided at that,” Demalion said.
“I gave you Lily’s name. I gave you Dunne’s identity.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “You didn’t say which god.”
“Does it matter?” Sylvie felt the exasperation seep in and, even as she bridled with annoyance, admired the technique. Demalion backed her away from the killing edge, transforming shouting to bickering.
“I’d just like to know what pantheon I should convert to,” Demalion said.
“Not funny,” she said. “He’s the Greek god of Justice, and it’s a new position, so don’t give me grief about there being no such god.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how little I want to make you unhappy.”
“This is trying to make me happy?” She slipped the gun back into the holster. “You’re right, as much as I hate to admit it. I find Wolf, I get Dunne to clean up his mess. Without Wolf, it only gets worse.”
She reluctantly added, “Alex sent me some addresses. Stop by an Internet cafe, I’ll print the list. They’re places she thought Lily might be living in. We . . .” The word felt strange on her lips. Good, in a way she didn’t want to think about. “We could check them out.”
He took his eyes from the road for a long moment, looking at her. Then he nodded once, and said, “Lead the way.”
15
Trails and Dead Ends
“SHE’S NOT HERE,” SYLVIE SAID. SHE HADN’T EVEN GOTTEN OUT OF the car, and she knew, just knew, they were on the wrong track.
Demalion, hand paused on the ignition key, said, “Why?” Not another direct start to an argument but a definite call against her instinct.
Sylvie looked again at the apartment buildings, a series of interconnected town houses, at the children playing in the park across the street, the casual everydayness of the area, and shook her head. “Not a chance in hell.”
“She owns the place; there are empty units,” Demalion said. “I need more reason than that.”
“I saw her,” Sylvie said. She wasn’t used to explaining herself. But she and Demalion had agreed to a detente, so she should try to cooperate. “Lily pretends to be ordinary,” Sylvie said. “Everyone I talked to described her as ordinary. I saw her, though, and she’s not ordinary at all. She’s just good at masking herself. If you were like that, if you wore a mask all the time, would you want to live in an ordinary place? Would you want to have to worry about blending in, even in your home? You’d find someplace else. Someplace you could be yourself in comfort.”
“All that from one look across a crowded room?” Demalion said. “You don’t think your impression came from her burning everyone alive a moment later?”
Sylvie shrugged. “You said it yourself. Even the ISI uses my instincts as Cliff’s Notes.”
She didn’t want to share more than she had to, really didn’t want to get into what she had felt when Lily’s eyes had met hers: instant recognition, so strong that it might as well have been a physical shock. Logic be damned; Sylvie knew her, and more, knew what they were up against. A woman as determined as Sylvie herself. And deadlier.
“Let me see that list,” she said, fishing it out of the space between the driver’s seat and the gearshift.
“Where to, then, guru?” Demalion asked.
Sylvie dropped her eyes to the paper, edges crumpling in her hand. “Um, Bucktown apartments, no, too normal. MTV Real World trendy. Wicker Park—”
“A lot of artists, which is likely given her tastes, but there are also a lot of businessmen and loft living, which would make it a no by your criterion. Too normal.”
Sylvie skimmed the list; only a few addresses were left, and if she hadn’t felt so pressed for time, she’d have simply continued as they’d begun. Go down the list one by one. But she did feel harried by an unseen clock, by the fact that the children in the park were gasping, laughing, and the sand below their swing set was swirling and lapping at the grass in wavelets. Sharks would be next, she thought. Didn’t little kids always see sharks in water? And one of those children, latently talented, obviously saw the sand as water.
“Shit,” she muttered, as a sharp fin rose, and the children’s shrieking laughter just turned to shrieks. “Go get them off—” But Demalion was already on the way out of the car. He ignored the screamers and focused on the little girl with the fixed stare and the incredulous horror in her eyes. He snatched her up, pressed her face into his shoulder, and as parents came out to investigate the crying, handed her off. Behind them, the fin collapsed to falling sand.
Demalion lingered outside once the mother left, cell phone in hand, and Sylvie’s mood soured. Her great ally, reporting a nine-year-old to the government.
“What will you do with children like that?” Sylvie said. “You can’t charge them with anything, even if you join those who want to try kids as adults.”
Demalion said. “It’s a flaw in our justice system. They don’t recognize the supernatural, therefore—”
“There are no charges, no trials, no prison,” Sylvie said.
“We’re working on it,” Demalion said. “ISI’s got a ten-year plan. Five for concentrated study of the supernatural. Three for making and testing a security plan. Two for convincing the rest of the world—”
“You’re behind then,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t seen any hints of understanding on the news.”
Demalion laughed. “We’ve only been active for four years, Sylvie. We’re still newbies. Before 9-11, the ISI was only a maniacal gleam in some bureaucrat’s eye. After that, there were a lot more people willing to throw money at even the most undefined problems.”
“It’s the church,” she said. “Gotta be.” Changing the subject, and fast, before he saw that he’d shaken her.
Two years of tangling with the ISI, two years of running them in circles, and she thought she’d been winning. Too tough and too smart for the government. To find out they were still in a larval stage, that perhaps her success against them had more to do with their fumbling first steps into a bigger world, made her reassess. Just how much had she overrated her skills?
“The church?” Demalion parroted. He flipped through the list for the more-detailed reports. “That was condemned after a fire nearly twenty years ago. You think she’s living there? She’s got money. We know that. Rich women like their amenities.”
“Regardless,” Sylvie said. “It’s Sesame Street training. One of these things is not like the others. The church is the odd man out, and anomalies are always worth a look.”
“Your point,” Demalion said with a smile. He restarted the car, pulled them smoothly back into the traffic. “I’ll have the ISI check out the apartments anyway.”
Sylvie bit back protest. The apartments were meaningless. The ch
urch dangled before her like the brass ring on a carousel.
She stifled her doubts, even when the neighborhood they drove through grew progressively run-down. The church was a hulking shadow on the street, a reminder that nothing evaded entropy. Its spire crumbled near the top, the bell long gone for scrap, and its gargoyles had worn to near-featureless stone.
They approached the church cautiously, noting boarded-up windows, a chain across the great double doors, and, with a glance at each other, turned and went around the side, hunting a door out of sight of the street.
All the way around the back, there was a narrow door, cast in shadows by the stone around it. “Prep room, I bet,” Demalion said.
“Altar boy?” Sylvie asked.
“Yup,” he agreed. He knelt, eyed the lock, and nodded once. From a pocket, he pulled a key ring dangling with filed-down keys. He forced one into the lock, thumped it once, and popped the latch open.
“Somewhere, a priest just cried,” Sylvie said.
“Never said I was a particularly devout altar boy,” he said. “After you?”
Sylvie kicked at the door. It flew open, and she watched for a moment, waiting for Lily to come at them, for any other esoteric security to make itself known.
“She’s not home,” Sylvie said.
“I could have told you that,” Demalion said. He put away a gun she hadn’t seen him draw and ducked inside. “I’m more than just a pretty face, you know.”
“Yeah?” she challenged. He merely smirked and gestured her in.
“It’s all about the eyes,” he said, tapping just above the bridge of his nose.
“Whatever,” she muttered. She was more concerned with the security measures Lily might have in place. No magical wards, Sylvie noted, as she stepped over the sill. If Lily were arcanely talented, there would have been wards.
The room was dark and empty; the linoleum beneath their feet cracked with each footstep. Sylvie opened cupboards meant to hold vestments, the unconsecrated host and wine, and found them restocked with secular items. Jeans, leather jackets, stocking caps, makeup. A woman’s wardrobe. “Definitely my point,” she murmured.