by Lyn Benedict
“Got you years ago,” Sylvie remembered aloud. “Fill me in. You’re human?”
Bran nodded, clutched his forearms again. “I am both. More human than god. I have power, but it’s not easy to reach it.”
“You made Dunne a god,” she said.
“I didn’t even think about it. We were out late. We got mugged. Kevin got shot. He was dying in my arms. I couldn’t—” He choked down the waver in his voice. “I cheated. I asked him for his soul, and he gave it to me. I don’t think he understood I meant it literally. All of us have access to ambrosia, the source of immortality. It’s intrinsic to our being.”
In his hands, a flower bloomed briefly, a flame-colored thing with seven petals that shifted from the shy, curled shape of rose petals to the spiky ylang-ylang. He folded his hands and it sank back into him, spreading a quick rosy glow through his skin and scenting the air.
“I called it up, fed it to him. But immortality without purpose is an exercise in frustration, so I started feeding him my power, what I could access of it.”
“You shared it?” Sylvie said. She hadn’t really thought any of the gods would do that.
“Surprised them, too,” Bran said, mouth quirking a little in rueful humor. “Especially since . . . When you start an immortal feeding on power, it’s like making a baby black hole. It pulls power like a magnet. Hera was disassembled. The first I knew of that was when her power started flooding into Kevin. He should have been a minor deity like the Furies, but mine, a cupid-type godlet. Enough to give him purpose. Instead, he became something new. Something more.”
“Revenge, that’s Hera’s shtick, isn’t it? And revenge tempered by love equals justice.”
Bran nodded.
“All that’s interesting,” Sylvie said, “but not to the point. Why are you human? Dunne looks human, but he’s not. That shell he wears is only an echo of who he used to be.”
He looked up at her, and she sat down beside him, trying to make herself more approachable. The hesitation in his eyes, the way his glance kept sliding away from her, all of it bespoke reluctance and more—embarrassment of some kind.
“Lilith,” he said. “I told you. I’m not clever. We’ve been friends for a long time, she and I. I thought we were friends.” He slid down farther to lie supine, crossed his arm over his eyes.
Sylvie, unable to resist, put a hand to his bared belly. His skin was as touchable as it looked, velvet smooth and blood warm. He arched into her touch, recoiled a second later, and blushed.
“It’s okay,” she said.
He relaxed under her touch when she kept it clean, kept to the safe territory between his rib cage and hip-bones. He laid his head back, letting her admire the long line of his throat. And she had teased Demalion about being her dog.
Brandon Wolf, despite being a god, was about as submissive as any creature could get. Dunne probably had his hands full finding the delicate line between protective and possessive.
“The other gods used me,” he said, voice muffled by his skin. “It’s my nature. I am Desire, and I am as much at its mercy as my worshippers. But I wanted to die for the weight of it. I was a god, and they treated me like a tool, with no mind or feelings of my own. I ran to earth. Lilith found me and suggested a better way to hide.
“She said she knew how I could mask myself in human flesh.”
“She wanted you helpless,” Sylvie said.
“I know that, now.” Bran dropped his arm to frown up at her. She stroked a soothing line across his belly, and his frown shifted to a more content expression, a cat accepting its due.
“To gain a god’s power, the shell must be destroyed,” Sylvie mused, caught her fingers tracing the no-man’s-land of the waistband, and removed them from temptation. He sighed and shifted his head to her lap, putting them back in contact. “Which is difficult for a human to do.”
“Very difficult,” Bran said.
“But flesh can be destroyed.”
“Very easily.”
“Why didn’t she kill you outright? Why all this nonsense?”
“Coming at me directly would have been a mistake. Either I’d escape, or Kevin would stop her. Distance is nothing to him.”
“She couldn’t shoot you?” Her fingers disobeyed her and traveled through the thick silk of his hair. He turned his head, rubbed his cheek against her hip. Her temperature spiked.
“She could,” he said. “But think of this flesh form as a plug in a drain. If it’s knocked out, the power flows immediately. If she was some distance away—”
“She wouldn’t get all of it.”
Bran laughed, a rough unhappy sound. “It would be like throwing chum in shark waters. Lilith’s not a shark. She only wants to be one. She’d have to fight her way to the front, and again, Kevin would be there soon after.”
“So an oubliette to cage the power after you die,” Sylvie said. “And a key to open it in her hands. No wonder she’s been cranky. I killed her sorcerer.”
He shivered, moved off her lap, sat upright. She wanted to drag his warmth back to her and quelled the urge. “All that’s true. But there’s more. To kill a god—it’s an evil thing.”
Sylvie rolled her eyes. “That sounds like self-serving propaganda to me.”
Bran shrugged, obviously unwilling to fight with his rescuer.
“So that’s the game. You were supposed to die down here. Then she opens the oubliette and drinks in your power, claiming it for herself. Replaces you, at the mercy of your peers?”
“Her will’s stronger than mine,” Bran said. He withdrew another inch or so from her. “And they wouldn’t destroy her. Love’s important,” Bran said. “No matter how I feel about my fellow Olympians, I know that’s true. I thought I could do my job from hiding.”
“I haven’t seen a whole lot of love in the world,” Sylvie said. “Which begs the question, are humans so fucked up that nothing you do can help? Or are you shirking?”
He rose to his feet, padded silently toward the glowing walls. A nasty muttering hum rose to greet him, and Sylvie tensed, wanting him to stay away from it. He raised a hand and rested it a bare inch above the surface of the wall. The hum increased. It sounded . . . hungry.
“I made a mistake,” he said, so subdued. She shifted to watch him more closely. His eyes were closed, expression turned inward, reliving it. “I made myself an infant, but such a small bit of flesh couldn’t hold my power. For the first thirteen years of this existence, I was as wholly human as you even though I carried the thread that makes me Desire, Love.”
“But you had no power.”
“Couldn’t reach it, couldn’t contain it. Not even when it counted most.”
“What happened?” Sylvie said. It was guilt pulling at his beauty, self-contempt lacing the pain.
“I taught humans it was possible to abuse Love,” he said. “It’s not coincidence that the number of child molesters has skyrocketed. I let it happen to me. And the world reflected it.”
“Let it?” Sylvie said. “I thought you had no access to your power.”
“I should have recognized the signs. But I didn’t want to believe it.” Bran sank back down to the miserable huddle she was beginning to recognize. Knees up, ankles crossed, arms tight around his legs, face buried in the cavity of shoulder and knee.
“Flesh is stubborn,” he said, voice muffled. “I tried to end it, regain my godhood, but it wanted to live when I didn’t. Eventually, as I got older, saw the results of what I’d let happen, I realized that I had to make amends.”
“You can’t make them from in here,” Sylvie said. “It’s time to leave.”
Bran raised his head from the protective cradle of his arms, despair washed away, replaced by blatant disbelief.
“You think I haven’t tried?”
“You seem pretty cozy,” Sylvie said. “No signs you’ve been clawing at the walls.”
“It’s a death trap,” Bran said. “The walls, the original floor, everything. When I fell through, th
e oubliette started eating away at my body. My hands were down to bone before I managed to get the floor in place.”
“Destroys flesh, stores power,” she said, grimacing. “Charming. Bet Auguste was the kind of boy who cut the tails off mice.”
“Auguste?”
“Yeah, that’s your lackey, the one who built this little de Sade dream.” Sylvie spared a moment to think that maybe she didn’t need to carry a load of guilt for shooting Auguste. That kind of nastiness was inbred, not taught. “I refuse to believe a crappy sorcerer like Auguste could build something that defeats a god.”
“Well, I can’t get out,” Bran said. His irritation faded into something approaching sulkiness. It all looked good on him.
“Can’t is a ridiculous word in a god’s mouth,” Sylvie said. “If Dunne were in here, would it hold him?”
“No,” Bran said, “but it’s not the same thing. He’s all power, all the time.”
He played with the leather ankles of his pants, running the zippered cuffs up and down, all nervous fingers and hissing rasp. Sylvie tried not to find the tiny little bit of anklebone worthy of arousal, but something in the way he toyed with the zippers encouraged it. Sylvie reached out and stilled his hands.
He was dancing away from the topic, Sylvie thought. Distracting himself and her as well. He looked up at her from under dark lashes, and said, “We can’t get out.”
“Don’t start that again,” she snapped. “Of course we can. It’s just going to take some thought. And some time.” She bit out the last, thinking time was the thing they couldn’t afford to waste.
She stretched sore muscles into some semblance of normalcy and assessed. What did they have going for them? Bran’s power, which kept them alive long enough to escape; hell, Sylvie thought, it should be instrumental in our escape. What kind of god lets himself get penned by a human? A glance at Bran showed him curled back into his quasi-fetal tuck. A depressed god. A god who blamed himself for something he couldn’t have fought. A god who would rather hide than fight back.
Sylvie made a tally mark in the “what did they have against them” column also for the same reason.
Sylvie paced around the fountain, thinking. Bran had enough power to fuel a spell; Sylvie had the will to make a spell obey. But the only spell she knew was the oubliette. She could draw it again—her map had blown in along with her—but that would just build a loop; from the oubliette to the oubliette.
Bran, however, might not need a spell. Not if he had more power. Sylvie looked over at Bran. “If you died, is that it? Game over? You said something earlier about regaining godhood. How?”
Bran raised his head, shrugged a shoulder. “Die. Release my power and re-form as I was meant to be. Theoretically.”
“Wouldn’t that give you full access to your power? You could blow this place to hell, be back home in time to catch the ninth inning of the apocalypse upstairs.”
“If Lilith doesn’t have some sort of shunt ready to pull the power—”
“She doesn’t. Or she wouldn’t have been so mad-keen for me to open the spell again.”
Bran worried his lip. “It’s not an easy process. The power wants to be free, and I have to corral it.”
“Four walls,” Sylvie gestured. “No one around, ’cept for me.”
“It takes time,” he said, back to playing with the zippers.
“You’re the one who’s got nothing but time,” she said, her voice as quietly ominous as a viper’s hiss. “You don’t want to go back.”
“I do,” he said. “I want to go home.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You don’t want to be the god again. You want to stay mortal. That’s why Dunne lives on earth, endangers the earth. Because you won’t leave it.”
“It hurts to die,” Bran said.
“Fuck that,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got a gun. A single round between the eyes isn’t going to smart at all.”
“I die, the air goes away,” he said.
“You come back, so does it.” It was a valid fear, one that sparked terror in her belly, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with hiding from himself. “You don’t want to.”
“I . . .” He stilled completely, like a prey animal making itself invisible. “If I go back, I’m their tool again. Nothing but Love. On earth, I paint, I play basketball, I go to concerts, I have friends, I eat out, I even cook breakfast. I have a life.”
“Dunne wouldn’t let you be their tool,” she said. “That’s not what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of something he won’t protect you from. Your responsibilities.”
“I stayed on earth to make amends,” he said. He surged to his feet, actual temper showing in his eyes. “How is that avoiding my responsibilities?”
“Then why wasn’t it on your list, alongside partying and painting? You know what happened to you wasn’t your fault. You were a child, and an adult raped you. Not something you could control. Dunne would have told you that. He would have told it to you until you believed it. You’re using it as an excuse to stay here.”
Sylvie watched the angry flush mantling his cheeks white out, all at once. Bull’s-eye, she thought, with a certain dark triumph.
“You know, I don’t have to convince you to do anything,” she said. “I have the gun.”
She sighted along it to his too-pretty, shocked face. “I could end this argument just by pulling the trigger—”
The little dark voice said, Why stop with killing him? You could take his power when it comes. Free yourself and turn to the world next. The cadence was all too familiar. Lilith’s quiet conversational tone, preaching better living through deicide, like a tune she couldn’t be rid of, like a cult’s brainwashing drone. She tried not to listen. What was it doing in her head?
“Sylvie—” Bran said, trying to sidle away from the muzzle of the gun.
She tracked him, all serpentine reflex. “You think you could access your power fast enough to transform a bullet?”
He flung up a hand in futile self-defense. Before Sylvie could even decide if she would pull the trigger or not, the gun surged in her hand, coming to a life beyond its simple animal warmth and heartbeat. It melted over her hands, oiling between her clutching fingers, and came back at her, some impossible snake creature, sprouting fangs and gunmetal scales.
Fail-safe, she thought, even as she flung it down. Dunne really didn’t trust her. A tiny bit of his spirit playing watchdog; it let her kill the Maudit, let her shoot the Fury who could heal, but turn it on Brandon and—
Sylvie ducked the strike at her knee, dodged behind a stunned Brandon, and caught a quick breath. Dunne’s spirit. Her flesh. She knew which to blame for the ugly shape the gun had taken.
The gun-snake coiled for a strike, forked tongue flickering. Sylvie forced Bran into playing living shield, ignoring his yelp. If she were right . . . The snake swayed, hesitating. Dunne’s spirit ruled it, and Bran was sacrosanct. She, on the other hand, was a heretic. “Gonna stop it?” Sylvie asked.
“What?” Bran gasped. She rocked him back and forth, keeping herself behind him. Defensively, he was a great tool. Offensively? She’d be better off with a rock.
Sylvie took a breath, stepped away from Bran, and when it struck, she was ready. It lunged; she caught it behind the head.
“Kill it!”
Bran backed away, shaking his head. “I don’t kill things. . . .”
Sylvie’s triumph faded; the snake was strong and agile, it might work its way free. And then what? The question was never answered. Its dagger tail whipped around, grew a head, and sank needle fangs into her shoulder.
Pain blazed upward; her fingers on the other head spasmed, loosening, and the snake bit down, chewing a long line of punctures across her arm.
“Oh God,” Sylvie muttered.
She yanked it away from herself, heedless of injury—it couldn’t get worse, now—and tossed it toward the shifting, blazing walls that made up the oubliette. The dark shape flailed and hit the
wall and stuck, slowly being eaten away into its component bits.
Pain racked her, sent her to her hands and knees, then to darkness.
22
If at First
SYLVIE WOKE CRADLED IN BRAN’S ARMS, HIM TAPPING HER CHEEK, using her name as a lure to wakefulness, her face pressed up against the drum of his heartbeat. His gentleness was surprising considering what she had just threatened to do. She liked to think she wouldn’t really have done it—wiped out that generous concern and caring nature just to prove a point.
Not to prove a point. But if it were the only way—the dark voice said.
She raised her arms toward the ceiling, still sore, but her flesh admirably clear of serpent bites.
“Make house calls?” she whispered. “I know a girl who needs you.”
Bran dumped her from his lap. “You tried to kill me; why on earth would I help you?”
“It was a bluff,” she said. He relaxed, believing her at once. She thought, no wonder Lilith talked him in circles. He might be a god, but he was an innocent.
“If I had died, would you have resurrected me?” she asked. “Transformed me into something useful? I mean, you’re pretty handy with that, right?”
“I suppose,” he said. His eyes were wary, already seeking ways to deny whatever it was she wanted.
She gritted her teeth, forced temperance to her voice, and said, “What about transforming the oubliette walls—”
He was shaking his head before she could finish, and Sylvie sighed, exasperated but not surprised. “What?”
“I’d have to touch the spell to transform it.”
“So?”
“So I don’t think I could keep my focus while my hands burned away.” In his lap, his hands fisted, the leather creaking beneath them. “Any other brilliant ideas?”
“I don’t see you contributing,” she said. She paced the room, ignoring the way heat and dizziness rushed her every time she pivoted. “You know, when I first met Dunne, I thought you might be hiding from him, afraid of your dominant, dangerous lover. Now, I see it right. He loves you way more than you love him.”