Sins & Shadows

“I have some questions for you. I know you can break that spell—it’s yours after all. But I’m faster than you are. I’m meaner than you are, and I’m on deadline. You heard what happened the last time the Maudits went against me when I was against a clock?”

She waited a moment, watching his eyes change, a slow shift from anger to the beginnings of concern. She smiled. “Cat got your tongue? Blink once for yes. . . . You know, I fought your spell faster than you’re managing. Pretty sad. Hard to imagine you created the oubliette. Impossible to imagine you did it just for kicks. I want to know all about it, but let’s start with the big one. Brandon Wolf—how do I get him out?”

“You closed the door,” he grated out.

“Yeah, yeah, mea culpa, sort of,” Sylvie said, impatience sparking. “Can we move on, or should I see what fun games I can devise with you as a stiff? There isn’t much traffic around here. But I bet there’s enough. If I pushed you into the street—you think you could break the spell before you turned into roadkill?”

A passing taxi sailed by, slowing a little at the sorcerer’s upraised arm, but picked up speed when Sylvie waved him on.

“He doesn’t come out,” the sorcerer said. “That’s not the purpose of an oubliette.”

He’s working his way free, Sylvie thought. The sneer was back. No one had ever taught these boys to play poker.

“Then why get so pissy over a closed door—or were you thinking to bargain with hope? I don’t think Dunne’s someone who likes bargains like that. I know I don’t. It’s crap, and everyone knows it. Like promising salvation to a damned man. A lie spread by gods to make us docile.”

Sylvie found her breath coming fast, her anger resurfacing, thinking of Dunne and Suarez. Of hopes destroyed, and bargains struck when choice was only pretend. That black edge crept through her mind and into her voice. “I don’t do docile.”

His eyes widened; he licked his lips. Little nervous tells that told her more than his state of mind, told her the spell was fading fast.

She seized his shirt collar, tangling the fabric in one clenched fist, the gun’s barrel jabbing into the soft flesh of his throat. Shaking with rage, she dragged him away from the street, into the shadows of closed storefronts, and threw him against a wall.

He oofed with the impact, legs giving out until he landed, slumped, on the sidewalk. She followed him, crouched over him, gun in his face. “Just tell me how to get him back and we can get on with our lives. You do want to get on with yours, don’t you?”

Vigilante, Dunne’s voice accused.

“Stop, stop,” he panted, pushing away from the gun, composure shaken.

“The slightest hint of a spell, and we’ll see what this gun spits out next,” she said. Two women passing by in a flurry of heels and chatter froze midstep, gaping. “Not your business,” Sylvie said. They gasped and looked away, picking up their pace.

Still, they were nice women, Sylvie could tell, the kind who would worry and stop at the first open storefront to call the police. Nice women had faith in the police.

“I don’t understand,” he said. He sounded confused. “You—you’re hers. I can tell—it’s in your voice. We’re on the same side here.”

“Like that could happen,” Sylvie said. “Stop babbling. Focus. Brandon Wolf. Free. Make it happen.”

“It’s not supposed to let him out. I swear—”

“You left it open, left a back door into the spell—”

“So we could find it,” he said. “Keep track of the oubliette. Not bring a body out.”

Body. “Is he dead?” She grabbed his collar again so tightly her short-trimmed nails dug into flesh.

“No,” he gasped.

“You sure?”

“I’d know.”

“Then open it up again.”

“I can’t!”

Sylvie sucked in a breath, grappling with anger, with the need to be calm, the need to think. “For a sorcerer who rearranges the natural world at will, you’re awfully fond of can and can’t.”

He breathed harshly, then said, “It’s the spell. It makes a pocket of Elsewhere. There are millions of them, as many of them as there are of . . . of . . . of stars. Otherwise, what good would they be? If every time we opened them, the previous stuff came back, we wouldn’t use them. You can’t open the same oubliette twice.”

“It might surprise you what you could do if you were sufficiently motivated,” Sylvie said. He shivered a little, and she grinned, taking care to show as many teeth as possible. God help her, but she loved it when the bad guys were afraid of her.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I just don’t have the will for it.”

“Suggest you find it fast or, hey, call one of your friends to help. Maybe your we who decided to keep track of the oubliette in the first place. There’s someone I want to meet. The man with the plan.”

He tore his gaze from hers, searching the street. Sylvie tapped him on the chin with the gun barrel. “Trust me, a big city like this, there’s no one looking to help you. Unless . . . You expecting your boss?”

“She wouldn’t—”

“She,” Sylvie said. The word pinged her mind like something unexpected on her radar screen, pushing past the simmering adrenaline and rage. “Thought you guys weren’t much for the distaff side of things. Guess I really need to meet the woman who can change your mind.”

“You—” Perplexity touched his face again. “But you have met her, you must have, I can hear it in your voice. You’re human, but you belong to her.” His eyes widened the same way they had when he named her Shadows. Recognition. “Dieu,” he whispered. “L’enfant du meurtrier.”

“I belong to no one,” Sylvie said. “Never have, never will. Do you understand me? I am the cat who walks by her goddamned self, and if you speak one more word in a language I don’t understand, I will kill you.”

He shook his head, laughter in his eyes, pushed past fear into bravery born of desperation. “You belong to her, and what she’s going to say when she finds out you’re opposing her . . . She admires willfulness, but this—oh, you’re going to be in such trouble. You’re working on the wrong side, Shadows!” He laughed in her face. “She’ll bring you to heel. Show you the error of your ways. She’ll make you crawl.”

Rage washed over her, distracted her, and she nearly paid the price for it. He turned a single hand in her direction, the clawed gesture familiar, as were the snarled words. “Votre coeur . . .”

Sylvie shot him, the close-range blast heating her hand and spattering her with blowback and blood. He slammed into the wall as if the bullet had pinned him there.

Sylvie looked at the concavity in his shirt, a perfect chest shot again, for a long, blank moment. She touched his neck, still warm with sweat, but free of anything resembling a pulse. He’d died hard and fast. Best way to deal with an inimical sorcerer who had been about to rip out her heart with a single phrase and a crooked finger, but still—

“Shit,” she whispered, casting a wary glance back at the street, at the few cars passing by. It was one thing to threaten someone on a big-city street, another still to murder him. The gun felt treacherous in her shaking hand. Why not the paralytic spell again? Why the bullet? She hadn’t wanted him dead.

Especially when he hadn’t told her anything. She’d chewed Dunne a new one for reacting on instinct, but she’d made the same mistake he had: She’d destroyed a lead.

Soft footsteps approached, and Sylvie ducked into the nearest shadowed doorway, waiting.

The rubber-soled boots and torn plaid pleats were familiar, so she stepped out to meet the punk Fury’s gaze, knowing that she couldn’t hide successfully anyway.

“Nice,” Erinya said, dropping to get a closer look. “Finally found someone to kill, huh. Feel better? I always feel better.” The girl tugged the body forward, examined the exit wound, and the ragged hole in the mortared brick behind him. “Good ammo.”

“What are you doing here?” Sylvie demanded. It couldn’t be good to feel relieved at the presence of a Fury, but concentrating on her inappropriate relief was preferable to dwelling on the dead. She slipped the gun back into its holster.

The punk girl smiled up at her from where she was crouched. “I’m supposed to help you. He said. Since you could be relied on to think.” There were layers of delicate amusement in her voice that made Sylvie flush.

“Fine. You want to help? Make that disappear.”

“I can’t undo that. I’m a small god, and he’s dead.”

“Didn’t ask you to. He tried to kill me. Dead is good. Dead, here, though . . .” Sylvie said. “Just make the body go away. I can’t help Dunne from inside a cell. Take him wherever you take your kills.”

The girl smirked. “Why not take him where you left yours?”

“ ’Cause the damn Atlantic’s a couple hundred miles away.” Never admit anything, Sylvie reminded herself, but there was no point in hiding from Erinya’s knowing gaze. “Just do it.”

The girl stood in a quick, offended movement, crossing her arms over her chest. Sylvie couldn’t tell if it was a put-on or not, a deliberate mockery of humanity or genuine feeling. “For someone who touts freedom, you’re sure bossy. I get bossed around enough.”

“Dunne?” Sylvie said.

“He’s all right,” the girl said, relaxing a little, toeing the corpse with her boot with the fidgety, destructive curiosity of a monkey. “He mostly tells me not to do stuff, and that’s different than telling me what to do all the time. Alekta and Magdala—they make me mad. Just ’cause I’m the youngest doesn’t mean I’m young, you know. But they’re always biting my wings, putting me in my place. Even now, when Bran’s in such trouble.”

It was like listening to her little sister, calling up to vent about curfew, Sylvie thought, not some mythological creature. The more the girl spoke, the more she picked up the cadence of human speech. But for all that Erinya’s speech was approaching normal, her actions—

Sylvie blinked, her analytical thoughts interrupted by the Fury kicking the body forcefully. Bones crunched, and the sorcerer’s carcass left a glistening trail on the pavement as it inched away under the impetus of her kicks.

“Stop it,” Sylvie said, tacked on a “please,” when the girl’s dark eyes swung round toward her, feral and red-black and not like a sulking teenager’s at all.

A siren’s wail turned the distant street corner, showing a faraway flash of blue and red, like a warning aurora. She was running out of time; even if that siren had nothing to do with her, each passing moment meant the exponential danger of a motorist with a cell phone calling the cops, of those women reporting her.

Sylvie bent over the body again, fumbled in pockets gone sticky; between the gunshot and Erinya’s boots, the sorcerer’s chest cavity was little more than a shattered mess, soft and splintered. Sylvie wiped her fingers on her jacket after she’d finished the search.

Nothing. No ID, no keys, no wallet. He’d come out just to pick a fight. Sylvie scowled. It was never that easy.

“Well?” she said to Erinya. So she’d shot her best lead; even dead, he could yield information, if she could figure out who he was. If she wasn’t arrested at any moment.

“Oh, yeah,” the girl said. “Get rid of it, right.”

“If you don’t mind,” Sylvie said.

The girl hoisted the corpse into her arms, cradling it like a dead child, and stared down at it. She raised it a little higher and licked at the wound. “Mmm,” she said. The sight stopped the words