by Lyn Benedict
Over Dunne’s shoulder, she saw Bran leaning into Demalion’s arms, seeking external strength, hiding his face in Demalion’s skin, hiding from an argument that was literally life and death for him.
She tried to lick her dry lips, but her teeth were locked, gritted against the strain on her neck. Maybe Dunne was right. Maybe she was.
Only one way to find out. She and the dark voice meshed, found perfect harmony. “Kill him to set things right.”
Sylvie gibbered inside, all her calm a veneer. She was right. She knew she was right. Bran couldn’t continue this life, not now that the clock had gone midnight and the masks had come off.
She knew she was right. Panic still scrabbled at her insides. She was right, but something wasn’t.
“It has to happen,” she said. The concrete beneath her feet crumbled a little as Magdala rested her weight on the ledge next to Sylvie’s sneaker, nudging her that much closer to the drop.
“We won’t let you,” Magdala growled.
Behind them, Demalion pulled Bran closer, stroked the bright hair with a taloned hand, as if shielding Bran from the inevitable bloodshed. Demalion’s eyes, as ever, rested on Sylvie. Waiting. Her turf, she had declared. Her orders. Whatever vision he had had earlier, he was willing to follow her now. She had a momentary jealousy that he knew how this played out. She had no idea at all.
Magdala nudged Sylvie’s ankle again, playful as a shark, and Sylvie teetered backward. A breath tore from her lungs; if Dunne’s hand hadn’t held her throat so tightly, it would have been a scream.
The street, ten stories down, might as well have been miles below. All it promised was an inky abyss, the darkness of a city without power—she whimpered. It seemed an impossibly long way to fall.
“I won’t allow you to hurt him,” Dunne said. So calm, so reasonable, despite the hand pushing her toward her death.
Demalion stiffened, claws flexing, a query that she read across the roof. Now? he asked with his eyes. Now?
She nodded, a tiny jerky movement, constrained by Dunne’s hand.
Demalion never hesitated. Hell, she thought briefly, he’d probably known what she was going to ask before she did. He’d had some time to come to grips with it.
We are both going to die for this, Sylvie thought.
So be it, the dark voice murmured in response.
A sudden flare of doubt struck her: The dark voice usually argued for survival at all costs. Scratchy panic flared again; she twisted in Dunne’s grip. Something was wrong. With her.
Demalion’s hand tightened on Bran’s nape, and Bran raised his head in pained protest. Demalion stilled the movement with his second hand, an apologetic caress along Bran’s jaw that the god of Love couldn’t help but lean into, just before Demalion used the leverage to snap his neck.
The sound echoed, froze them all as if it had been the sound of giant shackles snapping open rather than a tiny section of bone and nerve being displaced. Bran folded in Demalion’s arms.
Dunne threw back his head and howled. Sylvie clung to his arm like a limpet, shrieking over his wordless grief and rage. “Don’t undo this, don’t rewind it. Help him regain—”
Then he was gone from her grip, the Furies’ betrayed howls joining his, but she had no space to care as gravity tugged her backward.
One foot fell forward, over the edge, planting her on the roof, but the other fell back, over the void, her weight following. Sylvie fell, scrabbling at the crumble of concrete ledge, at ashy remnants from the lightning’s touch, and managed to hook one arm over the edge. She hung there, panting, muscles shrieking.
A stray, crazed thought raced her mind. So this is why the schools used to count pull-ups during health assessments. . . . She sobbed for breath, for strength, for control over the animal part of her brain, which whimpered in panic. Her feet kicked and dangled. Wetness splattered her face, traced her forehead and cheeks, dripped to the roof; rain, sweat, tears, blood—she had no idea and no time to investigate. A white fog rushed over her, drifting to the streets below, and making her hands slippery in passing.
She flailed, hooked her second arm up over the edge, and kicked madly for any type of footing beneath the overhang. Finally, she got a toehold planted on one of the ornate sculptural details so loved in Chicago, and kicked her weight upward, scratching her hips and belly and thighs, ignoring the pain, and pulling with all her might. She landed on the roof like a netted fish, graceless, flailing, but considerably more grateful.
Until she focused on the picture outside of her own pains and tribulations, on her near call with death. She had escaped her own death, but Demalion—hadn’t. His blood painted the roof, sprayed wet and fine in a giant circle as if the two shape-changed Furies had hit him so hard and so fast from both sides that his skin exploded.
Blood ran black in the moonlight, sticky on Sylvie’s face and hands as she frantically scrubbed it from her skin, and thick, gouting red where it ran from Erinya’s muzzle as she ripped chunks from his chest and throat. His clawed hand spasmed as Erinya hit the long nerves in a body so recently destroyed, and his crystal globe erupted from the ruined flesh, glowing with dim ghostlight. Magdala made a long lunging slide at it, snapping her jaws, but missed. It rolled down the slant in the damaged roof, plummeted to the streets below.
Sylvie’s breath caught in her chest, locked there. The guilt, the pain—it solidified in her lungs like iron. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe at all.
Dunne held Bran in his lap, face wild and strained. Bran’s body was dissolving, flesh to motes of gold that shimmered in the air.
“You did it,” the voice said.
Sylvie shuddered. She did it, and Dunne had listened to her—he wasn’t rewinding the moment, wasn’t undoing Bran’s death, wasn’t undoing Demalion’s. . . .
“Please,” she whispered, a thin thread of pain. The Furies’ snarls were constant rumbles of sound as they continued to maul what was left of Demalion. Not content with simply killing, they were chewing him into scraps. Some crimes, Erinya had said, needed more punishment than a body could provide. Some crimes required destruction of a soul. . . . Sylvie gagged.
Demalion had killed Bran on her orders. He died for it, and Bran died for it. . . .
And for what? The motes that were Bran’s essence kept spinning outward with no cohesion, no sense of sentience at all. She’d gambled her life, Demalion’s life, Bran’s life, and she had lost.
“I’m impressed,” the voice said, and Sylvie realized it wasn’t internal any longer. An intense voice, so similar to her own, but not hers at all. Hadn’t been hers . . . for how long? A spell. There had been a cracked stick in the subway, a broken pencil on the roof. A spell in two parts. Cocking the gun and pulling the trigger in two steps. Ready, aim, and fire.
Sylvie’s words, her will, had been subsumed in a dangerous spell, insidious because it built on truth. Bran had had to die. But it shouldn’t have been here. Shouldn’t have been now. This could only benefit those who wanted Bran’s resurrection to fail.
A few feet away, the secretary stood, shedding her false fright as easily as a lizard shed its tail. Lilith plucked two elaborately spiral sticks from her braid, tugged the glasses from her face, revealing two silver-blind eyes. She raised the glasses to her face again, winked at Sylvie, eyes dark and sighted behind the bespelled lenses.
“Oh, my dear. I gave you the command to kill, be my woodsman, and you . . . delegated. You are my daughter to the bone.”
28
Grudge Match
LILITH HELD THE TWO SPELL STICKS IN HER FREE HAND. SHE TUCKED one over her ear, laid the other on her outstretched palm. Her eyes, even unfocused and blind, were intent. After a moment, the stick rose on point and began to spin in the palm of her hand. As it did, it created a tiny vortex. Bran’s self, that misty shimmer of gold, began to flow toward Lilith, twining around the tips of the sinuously curved stick, feeding themselves through the larger eye at the top. Lilith grinned; the muscles in her forearm
bunched as if the motes had a tangible weight to them.
She flipped the stick up, caught it, and brought it to her mouth, as greedy as a child with cotton candy, plucking tangled clouds free and dissolving them on her tongue.
At the first bite, she moaned, then flung the spelled glasses away from her. She licked her lips, and her eyes lost their blindness, shading back to their normal brown. “So much better,” she murmured. She caught a last strand of gold on her lip with her thumbnail, sucked it clean. “A victory is so much sweeter when one can actually see it.”
“Not a victory yet,” Sylvie whispered, still on her hands and knees, still trying to surface above the grief that threatened to sink her. She’d been too confident in her resistance to spells even to imagine this trap.
Lilith set the spell sticks in either hand, setting both to spinning. “What’s going to stop me?” Lilith said. “The Furies? Sorry, granddaughter, they’re too busy hunting your man’s soul. They’ve destroyed his flesh, but it’s not enough for them. Not after what he did.” She devoured another long streamer of Bran’s power, then turned heavy-lidded eyes back to Sylvie.
“It’ll take them a while. His soul’s tricky. It’s a little more than human. It’s not merely a matter of rooting it out. It’s a matter of chasing it down. They’re rare beasts, you know. A sphinx cub can take a millennium to gestate. The man you delegated to die in your place might have been only thirty-some years old, but he was a thousand years in the making, a thousand years lying cradled beneath his mother’s heart.”
Sylvie whimpered under her breath; guilt surged up a higher notch. She hadn’t thought it was possible. But there it was, scouring her from the inside out. Dry-mouthed, sick with revulsion of her own skin—she wanted to be someone else, anyone else, anyone but the monster.
Magdala snapped her jaws in the air near Sylvie, swallowing down some fluttering piece of light, silvery grey. A soul fragment? Another piece of Demalion eradicated completely.
“Dunne,” she said, a breath of scratchy hope that he could make her pay for what she had done, and end this agony of guilt.
“Dunne has his own problems,” Lilith said. “Some of which are mine, dammit.”
Sylvie managed to raise her head. Anything that put that note of startled frustration into Lilith’s voice had to be good.
She was wrong.
Dunne still knelt where he had cradled Bran’s body, shoulders slumped, face racked by fear and longing. He was surrounded by a smeary gold shimmer like a veil. Sylvie’s heart gave a tiny, hopeful leap; the gold mist was denser than it had been, less spread out, more focused. Bran was trying to re-form. . . . No, she realized, he wasn’t.
All that was left of Bran was trying to get closer to Dunne, seeking a familiar shelter. In this state, it meant they would mingle together, meant that Bran would dissolve his soul into Dunne’s, eradicating himself in a way Dunne could never repair.
A tiny wisp of gold darted in toward Dunne’s parted lips, licked inside, and Dunne gasped, covering his mouth. “No, baby. No. Be yourself. Please, Bran, come back to me.” A storm cloud pressed outward from Dunne’s skin, pushing back the gold.
The shimmer, rejected, grew wispier.
Lilith’s spindles still worked, collecting ingestible power, but with the power motes dispersing outward, she had to work harder to draw less.
“No,” Sylvie muttered. God, no. Dunne’s shell-shocked concentration was focused solely on keeping Bran and himself distinct entities, his own power trickling out through the stump of his right arm like mercury, thinning him down. While he worried about that, Lilith would keep picking off Bran nibbles here and there, until she had enough, or until Bran faded into the sky to be snagged by any passing collector. And it was all Sylvie’s doing.
The Furies were gone from the roof, vanished after a tiny ghostlit will-o’-the-wisp, chasing an elusive piece of Demalion’s soul; hell, Sylvie thought, they were probably mad enough to kill Anna D simply for birthing him. Then they’d be back for her.
The thought didn’t upset her, and that realization shocked her out of the stupor shrouding her. Her despairing inertia was another spell, some fail-safe that Lilith had planned and implemented to keep Sylvie out of the way.
Lilith feared what she might do.
Given something to fight, Sylvie dived for the heart of her stupor, rooting out the miasma that weighed her down, bringing back awareness of her body as more than a vehicle for numb despair. Her hands clenched tight in the softened roof tar.
She might be guilty. She might be damned. She probably wouldn’t withstand the Furies’ vengeance any better than Demalion had, but dammit, she’d go out better than this. Demalion deserved better. Bran deserved better. She reached inside herself and found that little dark core, the voice that spoke survival and spite. It sprang to life at her touch, shrieked in outrage at what Lilith had done to her.
Make her pay, the little dark voice commanded.
First things first, she answered back. There was more at stake here than avenging her pride.
She marshaled a savage edge to her voice, as intimidating as anything Erinya had voiced. “Bran! Stop it. You might solve your problems by melting away, but you’ll screw everyone else. Every thing else.” She broke off to pant. The acid rage felt raw in her throat, but it was a pain that was clean and good, familiar and strong.
“Leave him alone,” Dunne snapped. “He just died. He’s confused. Give him a moment.”
“We don’t have—”
“Then make some time,” Dunne said. A command.
“Shut up,” Lilith snapped through a mouthful of power. She raised a hand, and a smear of gold flame rose from her fingertips.
“Gonna waste that on me?” Sylvie said. “You aren’t that juiced yet; hell, your firestarter had more oomph than that. She was nearly to balefire when I shot her down.”
“Shut up!” Lilith repeated, but didn’t release the flame.
Handicapped, Sylvie thought. Lilith couldn’t fight and suck in power at the same time.
“Sorry. It’s in the blood. I’ll talk ’til I’m dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Sylvie grinned as the smear of power in Lilith’s hand sucked back into her skin, the spindle beginning to rotate again. She’d bought a little time.
“Bran, listen to me,” Sylvie said. “There’s no safe haven for you like this. Not even within Dunne.” Across the roof, she saw Dunne’s anger warring with a tiny spark of hope that she might be able to rouse Bran faster than he could. The grey shielding around him sparked and flared as gold motes rebounded from it. His damaged arm was unraveled nearly to the shoulder, and he made no attempt to repair it, concentrating instead on corralling Bran.
A tiny breath of a whisper, a voice made entirely of air, reached her. Bran wasn’t thinking of his own safety. I can heal him. If he lets me in. Tell him to let me in, Bran said, muzzy-voiced, tenuous, and focused on the wrong thing entirely.
“Don’t know that I trust your motives,” Sylvie said. “You’re greedy for protection. Heal yourself first.”
Distracted by proof of Bran’s existence, even so attenuated, Sylvie nearly missed the movement on her left. She dodged but too late. Lilith’s foot caught her cheek, flung her back. Sylvie’s head hit the edge of the roof, and the world greyed for a moment. When she came back, Lilith’s foot was planted on her throat.
“Forgot for a moment that I didn’t need to use my new power or even my hands,” Lilith said. “Not for you. My little girl with no power of her own.”
Sylvie kicked up, thumped Lilith weakly in the back of her thigh. The woman’s face showed no pain—invulnerable to blunt force as well as bullets—but pushing someone off balance had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with leverage.
She gagged, shifted beneath Lilith’s instep; the pump’s narrow heel punched a tiny hole in her skin, and Sylvie kicked harder. Lilith staggered away, her hand flying wide to help her keep her balance, and the vortex spell faltered. Sylv
ie rolled to her knees, levered herself to a crouch, panting for breath.
“I didn’t say you could fight back,” Lilith said. “I don’t have time for this, you stupid girl.”
In the background, Dunne murmured quiet prayers to the only god he still worshipped. Bran. Eros. Pleading in one breath for him to come back. For him to stay away in the next, as Bran persistently tried to merge his powers with Dunne.
If she could just distract Lilith long enough, it would all be over. Surely Dunne could make Bran see that restoration had to come before repair.
“Did you really think I’d just lie down and die?” Sylvie said. “It’s not in my nature, any more ’n it’s in yours.”
“You overestimate yourself,” Lilith said. “You’re only mortal. You’ve done your task. Go home. Mourn your dead. Put another notch on your gun.” The air around Lilith shivered; amber light glowed beneath her flesh as the power that had built up on the spindles overflowed and poured into her skin.
Tears started in Sylvie’s eyes as Lilith’s taunts flicked her on the fragile hurts beneath her rage; she forced them back. “Thing of it is,” she said, voice ragged, “someone’s got to stop you, to save what can be saved. And like it or not, someone always seems to be me.”
“Pity them, then,” Lilith said. “You’ll help them into their graves. You think your snakebite girl is still alive? Or did she die with your name between her teeth, cursing you—”
Sylvie’s hearing blacked out. She lunged out of her crouch like any linebacker and tackled Lilith around the knees, taking her to the roof. Or at least, that was her intent. Lilith’s body was as unyielding as granite. Side effect of the invulnerability spell? Or evidence of Bran’s power successfully integrated? Sylvie didn’t stop to theorize.
Lilith stopped the vortices with a frustrated shout, fisting them in one hand. She dodged Sylvie’s next lunge, but when Sylvie elbowed her in the throat, Lilith actually quailed. Sylvie noted it, but the neck jab had never been more than a feint. She had a more important target.