Sins & Shadows

“So we can assume he’s right, and the boy’s gone down.” Val set her earrings to swinging again, stilled them. Noting the nerves, Sylvie was prepared for the hesitation in Val’s words, the softness of her tone. “You know he’s dead, right?”

Quick shock touched her back and cheeks with an internal chill, and a denial so strong she didn’t think it was hers; some bastard leftover of Dunne’s touch or influence. She fisted her hands. “He could—”

“You said weeks. Weeks in an oubliette. No food, no water, no air. An oubliette’s a coffin, Sylvie, for sorcerers who are too impatient to wait for their victims to die.”

“It makes no sense,” Sylvie snapped. “If he’s dead, and the spell’s supposed to be gone, why isn’t it? I think they plan to retrieve him.”

“It’s a one-way deal,” Val said. “You can’t just reach in and pull things out.”

“You can’t. What about the Maudits?”

Val paused in her automatic rebuttal, the idea that they could do something she couldn’t, and actually thought about it. “I—maybe. The original sorcerer could undo the spell, pick it apart layer by layer. That might reverse the effect.” She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. The time problem still stands. The most that anyone could retrieve is a corpse.”

“That might not matter to Dunne,” Sylvie said, thinking aloud. Dunne seemed confident he could restore the dead to life, given proper jurisdiction, and surely Brandon Wolf, his lover, belonged to him.

“You have the worst clients,” Val said. “First the gun, and now—”

“I didn’t mean that,” Sylvie said. She wished she hadn’t said anything, but wasn’t that an endless source of regret? Her mouth, her best weapon, even against herself.

Val drummed pale, painted nails, waiting. Sylvie sucked in a breath and forced a subject change. “So, if he’s been grabbed, what’s your explanation for the spell still chugging away?”

Question and answer, Sylvie thought, watching Val’s expression shift from peeved to contemplative. Val’s weakness: She couldn’t resist the urge to lecture, to describe the ways of the world to all those less intelligent, less aware. Most of the time that tendency drove Sylvie to eye rolling and backchat. Sylvie hated not being in the know as much as she hated being the object of condescension. But the tendency to lecture was also the reason that Sylvie, who thought all magic-users should be labeled: warning, contents unstable under pressure, could trust Val.

“It’s just too sloppy,” Val said. “Even if someone wanted to try to open the oubliette again—which doesn’t make sense—the spell just doesn’t look right.” She dragged Sylvie closer, gesturing with her free hand toward the first looping coil. “Look at this. That Greek there? It’s the signifier—the identity card, the thing that kept this station from becoming a Bermuda Triangle. But it’s not Wolf’s name. It just says Love, and that’s damn broad.”

“Or it says a lot about how they saw him. No one in his own right, just an appendage to Dunne. Their weapon against him.” Sylvie frowned, liking this less and less. How in hell a onetime mundane cop had made such serious occult enemies . . . ?

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? A onetime mundane cop now bearing a god-quantity of stolen power. That had to make enemies. It sure as hell didn’t make the kind of friends you could trust at your back. Maybe it wasn’t that they wanted anything at all from Dunne. Maybe they just wanted to make him hurt, and Brandon was the tool at hand.

Just another innocent in the line of fire.

“It’s still careless,” Val said. “It’s too open-ended. There’s a physical descriptor here, which would narrow it down some.” Val traced an elegant series of squiggles in the air. “Red hair, hazel eyes; sound like your boy?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said.

“Then you’ve got some bad news for your client,” Val said. “And I’m done.” She began tucking her tools away, pausing to look up at Sylvie. “If he wants the body, I want no part of it. I don’t deal in necromancy.”

“You think I do? Thanks, Val,” Sylvie snapped. “Maybe all I meant was that there’d be closure for him if there was a body found. You’ve been hanging around bad magic too long. There are other things to do with a corpse than fuck it or use it for spellcraft.”

“Uh-huh,” Val said, “And maybe that’s all bullshit.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said. “He’s not dead, according to Dunne. Weren’t you the one saying that Talents could feel these things?”

“Even Talents can fall into wishful thinking,” Val said as she snapped her case shut. “A normal man could not survive—”

“Not all that sure he’s normal,” Sylvie said. Proximity to the Magicus Mundi changed things, changed people. Brandon Wolf lived with a god.

Val raised an eyebrow, tapped the spell circle with her foot. “Human. That’s in the descriptor, too. You like to rub facts in people’s faces. Here’s one for you. Wolf is de—” A sound penetrated the bubble Val had sealed them in, the click-clack of impatient high heels.

“The hell?” Val said, attention diverted, face shifting from anger to wariness. “Someone’s at the spell edge.”

“Guess I’m not the only one who’s a hard sell,” Sylvie said, though her gut was churning. Silly to think she could recognize the quick steps up above. There was only one set of them anyway. Didn’t they run as a pack? Of course, the other two hadn’t worn high heels when she’d seen them that morning; they had moved soundlessly.

Val licked her lips as if they’d gone suddenly dry. The cobweb spell wavered; a place at the entrance showed the air rippling like a curtain stroked from behind. Sound increased; the previously silenced noise from the streets slipped downward, complaints that the station was out of order, passing vehicles, sirens in the distance. Then, two distinct voices came clear, not caught by the spell, but pushing through it. Sylvie stiffened.

Never deny the gut instinct, she thought.

“He didn’t say to wait—”

“He didn’t say not to—”

“Stop arguing.”

The first two voices were regrettably familiar, the rasping, hungry contralto and the poison-sweet tones: the leather-clad Alekta and the punk one. The third voice, sounding surprisingly normal, if weary, had to be Magdala.

Alekta’s heels clicked on the concrete, distinct bursts of sound that made Sylvie want to find a hiding place and disappear. Beside her, Val muttered frantically, trying to reinforce the spell or trying to dismantle it before it blew apart—Sylvie couldn’t tell.

The Furies took the choice from her, pushing through the wavering shield as if it were nothing more than the cobweb it had come from. Val yelped, her hands flying to her head.

“Sylvie,” the punk sister said, and skipped down the stairs toward her, pleated skirt flaring. “Were you hiding?”

“I’m working,” Sylvie said. “And, hey! Don’t step on the evidence, okay?” To her surprise, the Fury stopped in her approach, blinking down at the spell circle.

“What’s that?” Alekta said. She slunk alongside her sister to split her glare evenly between Sylvie and the circle.

“Oubliette,” Sylvie said. “Swallowed Bran. I was—”

“Kevin,” Magdala said, “come here.” She never raised her voice. “Your PI found something.” Sylvie bristled at the surprise in the girl’s voice.

“Sylvie,” Val whispered, face pale, hands trembling where they clutched her bag. “What are they?”

“Client’s pets,” Sylvie said. Magdala shot her a disgusted glare that had real menace in it. Sylvie put a hand to her back, touching the gun, but their attention had turned again, their gazes all shifting to a point about mid-stairs.

Beside her, Val shuddered; Sylvie heard the faint jangle of her jewelry complain with her movement, but kept her eyes on the man who had appeared without any fanfare.

Since she’d seen Dunne that morning, she had accepted that he was a god, that he had power to spare, that his whims were physical laws the world wanted to obey; she’d forgotten how much like an ordinary man he looked. How tired. How scared.

He came down the stairs, hope flickering in his worried eyes. “You found something?” His voice was rough and quiet.

“Spell circle,” Sylvie said, her own voice uneven, thinking of Val’s conviction that Bran was dead, of the sisters waiting to see this scene play out.

Dunne reached the intersection of spell edge and stair and paused. “This it?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. He stepped into the curve of spell, and it went wild.

The swirling greens and blues rose as if they were the water they resembled, winding around him like a whirlpool. Cold winds blew through the station; Sylvie’s ears popped and ached under the pressure.

Over the roar of the not-water, she could hear the Furies shouting. Through wind-stung eyes, she saw Dunne at the heart of a cyclone, and had time for a frantic thought that she was going to lose her client, and was that good or bad, when the spell collapsed in a rush of heat and a sound like tearing metal.

In the lingering silence, Val’s whimpers became gasping breaths. The spell circle gleamed and cracked, its paint flaking and drifting upward into brightly hued mist and dispersing, leaving only faint hints of its presence behind.

Dead spell, Sylvie thought. Very dead. If the Maudits intended to trap Dunne with it, they’d failed. But if they hadn’t—why had it opened at his feet?

“Oh God,” Val gasped, and surged to her feet. “Oh—God—” Her eyes wide with shock and horror, she darted for the entrance.

It took two steps before the Furies were on her, slamming her up against the stained concrete walls. “Witch, why do you run?”

“Stop it!” Sylvie yelled. She grabbed the nearest sister, trying hard not to think about what she was doing, just reached out and grabbed, getting a handful of warmed leather, and yanking her away. Alekta hissed, tongue narrow, black, and pointed, her teeth going sharp.

“Get away from her,” Sylvie said, putting herself between Val and Alekta.

The preppie sister growled, and Sylvie’s gun was out before she had thought about it, out and unwavering in Magdala’s face, Sylvie’s arm braced on Val’s trembling shoulder. Sylvie got a wild- eyed view of the punk sister leaning back against the wall—laughing?

“Dunne, call them off.”

“A trap,” Dunne said, and now Sylvie had no problems seeing him as inhuman. There was an utter blankness to his eyes, warning that no humanity was at home.

“Val didn’t do it,” Sylvie said, talking fast, hoping to break past that alien barrier to the man beneath. “Val’s my research witch. You know, like an informant? She identified the spell. Hell, she was going to tell me more about it, maybe how to undo it, except someone had to lose his almighty temper and blow up the only piece of evidence we had. Guess being a god doesn’t rule out being an idiot.”

Something touched the barrel of her gun, and Sylvie’s gaze flickered back to Magdala, who was, eww, licking her gun, with an avidity out of place with her prim and proper wardrobe.

“Won’t kill me,” she said.

“Maybe not, but I bet there’d be splatter. Get your button-down all splotchy,” Sylvie warned. “Dunne?”

“Magdala,” he said, “Alekta. Erinya. Stop.” The words seemed to be dragged out of his throat, as if it were an effort to remember how to talk. An effort to act human.

Sylvie shivered, remembering him saying that it was hard to be less than he was.

Val ducked beneath Sylvie’s arm the minute Magdala relaxed, and headed for the street, yanking herself to a walk after a first rapid step that brought the sisters’ attention right back to her. Running was definitely a no-no around those three.