by Lyn Benedict
“Never,” Lilith said, her temper flaring in instant denial. “Worship’s where—Sylvie, watch out. You almost missed a spot.”
“Backseat spell casting?” Sylvie griped. It was more maddening that Lilith was right. She’d nearly skipped a tiny little symbol, and for all she knew, that could be a vital piece. It still burned that Lilith had spotted it before she did, when she was far enough across the room that she shouldn’t be able to see anything.
“It’s like perfect pitch,” Lilith said. “I can hear it, still can’t carry a tune. Be careful. Neither of us can afford a mistake. Where was I...? Worship is where things go wrong. Worship means you’ve stopped seeing people as independent beings, infantilized them permanently. I don’t want worship. I just want to make things right.”
“Run for Congress,” Sylvie said. “Hell, run for president.”
“Worthless,” Lilith said. “You aren’t listening. We reflect the gods. What happens with them, happens with us. The gods are corrupt, petty, despotic—so are their followers. The worst, though—”
“Let me guess,” Sylvie said. She gritted her teeth, pushed a last spurt of paint through the tube, stained the cement in a crimson swirl and shuddered as the entire diagram rang like a crystal goblet being struck. The tortured-machine hum smoothed out as reality bent and accepted its restructuring. Her bones vibrated to the new tune. “The whitebeard who booted you from Eden. Or should I call him Bluebeard.”
“You saw my work?” Lilith said. “You are dogged. Can you say I’m wrong? The similarities are striking. Bluebeard gave each successive wife a key and demanded that she not use it. And He put the Tree in the midst of our garden. They both demanded implicit trust but were not worthy of it. Neither of them ever considered that trust was a two-way street.”
Sylvie lifted her dizzy head and stared at Lilith. She panted, shivered, fought for breath. She felt cold and hot at once, as if the oubliette was a roaring fire in an arctic room. Everything she had learned only confirmed it for her: She loathed magic. All those sorcerers who did this kind of thing on purpose were morons.
When her breath had stabilized enough, when the buzzing in her limbs had faded, she said, “Does this really work for you? Talking people into submission? Did you just expect me to crumble and say of course you’re right?”
“No,” Lilith said. “I told you. I don’t want worshippers, or witless obedience. I want—”
“Anarchy,” Sylvie said. “Free will, free world, and you step in only if the whole shebang starts to go to hell. Lose your precious equilibrium.”
“You do understand. Maybe even agree.”
“Too general not to,” Sylvie said. She stood, her legs shaking, and backed away from the spell circle. It hummed in her head, alive, but not open. “If, on reflection, I say you’re full of shit?”
“I don’t care,” Lilith said. Abruptly the edge was back in her voice, the danger vibrant in the underground room. “Just be a good woodsman and bring me the little lover’s heart to eat. Open the door, Sylvie. Where’s your key?”
Sylvie hesitated, the moment upon her. There weren’t a lot of options; she had brought a key, or something she hoped would pass for one. But she didn’t want to use it with Lilith waiting. She had no intention of freeing Brandon just to have Lilith pounce on him; Sylvie’s entire body still shook with the effort of rebuilding the oubliette, and the gun was useless. What was left? Her mind raced, searching possibilities. A door has two sides, her dark voice pointed out.
Sylvie licked dry lips. Not an option she really wanted to consider, but the alternative? She imagined Brandon Wolf dead at Lilith’s feet, at Dunne so grief-stricken that he fell to Lilith’s attack, or turned the world inside out, trying to recover what was lost by time. In every scenario Sylvie could imagine, innocents died, Alex died, suffering for Sylvie’s mistakes. Unless—
Sylvie picked up the remaining item in the satchel, unwrapped it from the silk scarf she’d carried it in to protect it. Behind her, Lilith hissed something under her breath.
Sylvie didn’t pay attention, her eyes riveted on the painting, the small, violent self-portrait of Brandon Wolf. The flayed heart seemed to pulse. The oubliette throbbed in sympathy.
Dunne had set off the oubliette. Some of him in him, Alekta had said. The painting, crimson in spots, dull brown and flaking in others—Sylvie thought it, too, had some of Bran in it. She flaked a tiny little rusty chip off and watched it stream toward the oubliette, a tiny object caught in an eddy.
Disturbing, Sylvie had thought the first time she saw the painting. A second viewing had clarified her visceral response. It looked painted in blood, and it seemed that looks weren’t deceiving.
“What is that?” Lilith said.
“Can’t you tell?” Sylvie said. “You were fast enough to point out my errors in spell copying. You think this’ll work?”
“Yes,” Lilith said, her voice husky, a little excited. “Do it. Bring him up. Do it now.” Her eyes were almost pure silver now, gleaming and milky in the low light. Her gaze was avid, was fierce, was . . . off. Something had changed.
Sylvie cradled the painting to her chest and shivered as the oubliette seemed to yearn toward it. One choice left. Sylvie shivered again. She didn’t want to—God, she didn’t want—
She clutched the painting close, the image facing outward, as if the heart shown were her own, her rib cage split asunder, and stepped back, one step, two, keeping an eye on Lilith, whose face grew distantly puzzled, pallid eyes going narrow under frowning brows. “What are you doing, Sylvie? Open it, at once.”
A third step, and Sylvie could feel the tug of the spell, like a magnet aligning, reaching out for its complement. Lilith stood, moving with the awkward, lanky haste of a marionette, and Sylvie laughed. “Jesus,” she said, seeing it suddenly. “You’re blind! Dunne’s spell. You were there when he blinded Demalion and his team. You got caught in it. You were half-blind when I came in carrying supplies from Dunne’s house, but the key’s wrapped in silk. Inert, magically, until I unwrapped it. You can’t see me at all.”
“Don’t need to,” Lilith said. “I can feel the spell. I can—”
“Pity,” Sylvie said, on an adrenaline high. “I would love to see your expression when you realize what I’m doing.” She took that last step back, her heels clearing the sticky-wet, painted lines. Beneath her feet, the cement trembled like quicksand. “When I lock the door from the inside.” Then the oubliette tasted her, tasted the painting in her hands, and found it a match, tugged it to itself. The world bent, and she plummeted into the spell.
21
Love Divine
WHEN SYLVIE WAS IN FOURTH GRADE AT PINECREST, THE READING curriculum had included Alice in Wonderland. Sylvie was one of the few who hadn’t enjoyed the assignment. Even then, her core of practicality was set; she found Alice and her casual curiosity to be the acts of a dangerously careless girl. Now, at the mercy of the oubliette’s undertow, Sylvie felt the first glimmer of sympathy for the girl, as she plunged on her own long fall.
She was surrounded by a colorless haze of motion that pulled and pried and tried to take her apart. The tough leather jacket creaked; seams popped like the breaking of tiny bones. Bran’s self-portrait warped and wavered, trying to escape her hands. The gun fluttered feebly at her spine like a stunned bird. “No,” she said, her voice swallowed by nothingness. “No.” She would not loose her grip. She had no intention of coming out on the other side naked and defenseless, assuming she would finish the journey at all if the painting, the key, left her grasp.
The idea of spending eternity locked in nothingness—Sylvie reassessed her ideas of hell and growled under her breath. “I’m coming through, and I’m taking it all with me. My gun, my key, my clothes.”
As if it had been a test, the oubliette spat her out, abruptly and painfully, into absolute darkness. Her knees ached from the impact; her free hand stung where she had flung it down to protect her face. Her breath sobbed in her throat. She droppe
d the painting, and dug her fingers into the surface, trying to guess what it was. Softer than concrete, harder than earth, all one piece, melting slightly away from her hand but warmer than ice. It reminded her of nothing so much as molten glass, drifting, stretching, minus the scalding heat.
She held her breath, listening, trying to hear someone else’s presence, trying to guess how big the enclosure was. He’s dead, Val had said. But the room didn’t smell of decay. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears with the effort of not breathing, deafening to her and defeating the purpose. She sucked in a grateful gulp of air and froze. God, the air—how did it . . . ? Would it last?
A faint candlelight glimmer touched her eyes, a diffuse glow in the darkness, a splotch of color that could be wishful thinking.
“Hello?” she said. “Brandon?” Her voice wavered, but was, at least, audible. She didn’t want to be alone in the dark, cut off from everything, dying in inches. She wanted to have made the right choice. She wanted her chance to save Brandon, to save Alex, to save innocents from the manipulations of the powerful.
The glow strengthened, then raced around the room, spreading outward in fiery streamers, delineating a circular enclosure about the size of a conference room. A whisper of breath touched her ears, then a sudden trickle of something that was distinctly running water. Sylvie, who hadn’t realized how ringingly silent the oubliette was, began to relax. The glow increased.
The water became visible first. Of all the things she’d expected to find in a spell prison, a scaled-down Greco-Roman fountain, complete with fat cherubs dribbling water, was not one of them. The marble gleamed with a slick, soapy shine; the water smelled sharp and clear and cold.
The confines of the oubliette slowly came clear, a pinched-off teardrop of a room, a demented genie’s bottle. The walls curved undulantly at their base, arched inward at the top, seemed made of some shifting, opaque material that roiled like chemical-laden toxic clouds.
Sylvie inched away from them. The floor . . . She shifted her gaze until the vertigo passed. She stood above the floor on some stretched-out pane of glassine material. The true floor belled beneath it, and Sylvie dared another glance down. It, too, burned with the chemical cloud-roil of the walls, made her think of planks laid over lava spills.
She was alone on one side of the fountain, but on the other? Squinting against the growing brightness, she walked around the curve of the fountain and stopped cold.
Brandon Wolf lay asleep—not dead—on the floor, naked as the day he was born. The dread she’d held tightly to her since the beginning of this case, from the moment Dunne had sworn Bran was alive against all reason, fled. Sprawled, asleep. As if the oubliette was nothing more than a time-out for a child.
She knelt suddenly, knees weak.
God, photographs did not do him justice. Sprawled, prone, head tucked on one outflung arm, he woke nothing so much in her as sheer animal want. His supple skin, the dark-flame tint of autumnal hair, the long eyelashes peeking out beneath longer bangs, his lips, slightly curved even in sleep, his shoulders broad and golden, his lean thighs, his—Sylvie’s kaleidoscope thoughts derailed entirely, leaving her with nothing but a quickened pulse and the undeniable urge to pounce. She shivered. And she’d thought succubi were dangerously attractive.
The idea shocked her cold for a brief, brain-saving moment. Bran’s attractiveness, even unconscious, more than a match for a succubus, for a preternatural creature of desire? Sylvie’s breath caught. Her dark voice whispered. Human? It sounded perplexed. The edge was gone from it, quiet wonder in its voice.
Sylvie caught a quick gleam of eye shine as he peeked through his lashes, and realized he was feigning sleep. “Brandon,” she said.
He swung into a crouch, facing her. “What do you want?” Even his voice was delicious. Low, husky, as warm as a firelit room.
“To get you out,” Sylvie said. She looked into amber eyes and forgot to breathe. “My name’s Sylvie. Dunne sent me.”
“Bullshit,” he said, though his entire face washed with relief before closing off again. “You’re one of Lilith’s lackeys.”
“I am no one’s lackey,” she snapped. He flinched, and she thought, Great, scare the guy senseless. “Really, I’m working for Kevin.”
He flicked a glance at her, flicked it away. “You’re wearing Erinya’s jacket. I bought it for her in London.”
“I am. You think she’d let just anyone borrow it?” He wanted to believe her, but he had the eyes of someone used to pain and disillusionment. It deepened the beauty of his too-pretty face.
He shivered, and she tracked the ripple of muscle and skin, sliding her gaze down the taut curves of his shoulders, down to the flat planes of his chest, the narrowing of his waist and hips. He dropped his hands to cover himself, flushing. Sylvie yanked her gaze away. God, what was wrong with her? The poor guy was scared, naked, and she gawked at him like he was nothing more than meat. She shucked the jacket and dropped it into his lap. “Sorry,” she said.
“Used to it,” he muttered, and she looked over in time to see the resignation on his face, and more—the old scars on his forearms.
He might be strong physically—his body attested to that—but there was a fragility in his eyes that she didn’t like.
“It’ll be okay,” she said. Shit comfort, but the best she could manage.
He nodded, still not looking. His hands fisted in the coarse leather.
“You don’t believe me.”
“Lilith’s clever. Erinya’s not. I’m not. We’re easy to fool.” Bitterness laced his voice.
“She got you with the murals.”
“She got me way before that,” Bran said. “Years and years ago.”
Years and years? Dunne had only become a god recently. Sylvie got that irritating prickle again, the one that said she hadn’t been given all the information she needed.
Bran stood, put his back to her, and she tried to keep her eyes from wandering over the long line of exposed skin. Not the typical redhead, creamy pale with freckling. Brandon Wolf seemed to have been tapped by Midas instead. His skin laid claim to gold and held the silkiness of flower petals. It looked so—touchable.
She fisted her hands. Human? Her dark voice raised the question again. Sylvie still didn’t have an answer for it. How much of this attraction was built into him by Dunne thinking of him as beautiful, the reflection of a god’s desire? How much of it was intrinsic?
He lowered the jacket and stepped into the skinny, unzipped sleeve. Sylvie blinked. What the hell—
He tugged on it, and the jacket stretched, shifted, grew. Brandon Wolf drew the jacket on like a pair of pants, and it shaped itself to his need. He buttoned the front closed and sighed in obvious relief at being clothed, even partially. Sylvie, on the other hand, felt immeasurably worse. Perhaps she was the fool Anna D had called her.
She’d risked so much to rescue the human innocent, and he was neither; he was Power.
“You’re not human,” she said. The client always lied.
“I am,” he said, hugging himself. He lowered his head to stare at his bare toes.
“Humans can’t create matter. A sorcerer could transform the jacket, but he couldn’t make more of it. That jacket should have gone as sheer as Saran Wrap as you stretched it. You created more of it.” She shivered. Fool. The pieces all put together wrong. Anna D had told her straight out. It was love that made Dunne a god. Love made Dunne. Love. While she was unfamiliar with the pantheon, she could juggle a few pieces, pluck a name everyone knew out of the air, and create a new picture. “You’re a god,” she accused.
“That, too,” he whispered.
How did an American cop end up a Greek god? He married in. How did a man built of Hera’s power become a god of Justice and not simply her replacement? Some of him in him. Revenge tempered by love. Brandon Wolf, who would wake a corpse’s senses, Brandon Wolf, the heart of Anna D’s riddles, who signed his art with a pair of crossed arrows, who by all accounts drew admiration and
desire wherever he went, even from pissy, violent godlets like the Furies—Brandon Wolf could be only one god.
“Eros,” she said.
Dunne wasn’t Lilith’s target. Dunne was incidental. Lilith had already caged her god.
“Why are you alive?” Sylvie asked.
He tugged fitfully at the low waist of the leather pants, grew it up another few inches. “Killing a god isn’t a simple thing.” He raised his face to hers, as wary as a wild animal. “Kevin really sent you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Look, he changed my gun. You can sense that right?” She held it out; he shied, but when she held the muzzle down, he reached out to touch it. He sighed, slumped back to the floor of the oubliette.
“He sent you in here to get me?”
“That was . . . not part of the original plan, no,” Sylvie said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But hell, it’s got to be easier to break out than break in.”
He laughed, three hitched breaths, then gasped back what might have been a sob. “There’s no way out.”
“Have you tried?” Sylvie asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Do you think I like sitting here, just waiting for Kevin to come rescue me like some pathetic infant?”
Sylvie was glad to see the anger, a hint that he wasn’t broken.
“The oubliette was meant to see me dead. But I’ve managed to keep ahead of that, at least.”
“Transformation and creation of matter,” Sylvie said.
Bran nodded. “Air to water, hair to air—all small things.”
“Dunne defeated the oubliette entrance without effort,” Sylvie said.
“Kevin’s a god,” Bran said. Some color crept into his pale face. “I’m not. Or not much of one at the moment. Lilith—”