the scarred leather, her face as wistful as a born predator’s could get. The entire jacket shivered toward her, like a pet yearning toward its owner. Sylvie jerked away.
Gods and power. She finally understood, in a visceral way, what Dunne was fighting, his worries about the trails he left, the power he shed the way humans dropped skin cells and hair. Erinya’s jacket radiated the same kind of weight a spell did and could probably serve as a tiny little battery for those who were magically talented.
Gritting her teeth, she pulled it on the rest of the way, shuddering as the gun purred against it. The dark spots on her T-shirt bleached white and slowly dissolved in vaporous wisps. “Wonderful,” Sylvie muttered, zipping the jacket closed. She took a last look in the mirror, straightened her hair, checked that the gun was sufficiently hidden, leaving no revelatory bulge beneath the heavy leather hem. Good enough.
She tugged one-half of the double doors open, finding it surprisingly heavy, and Erinya flowed through into the dimness beyond and disappeared. Sylvie followed, slowing immediately and blinking in the low light.
The room was long, running the length of the storefront, but too shallow to be all there was. The light confounded her, being not only dim, but moving, flashing, alive with shadows. Muttered words reached her ears, a garble that she took for foreign before catching a word here and there, and understanding that it was several people speaking at once, not in conversation but in monologues. The light flickered again, blue-white, off to either side of her, and Sylvie’s eyes adjusted.
Television screens. The light that had seeped through the windows, the flickering that teased her eyes now was the familiar glow of television in a dark room. On either side of her, the televisions were stacked in columns ringed by chairs. The screens shifted at different speeds, showing multiple channels. To her left, the seats were mostly full, young men and women leaning forward or lounging back, watching the screens with varying shades of attention. To her right, the seats were mostly empty. Sylvie leaned right, turned her head, caught a brief snatch of words—one television broadcasting into a lull on the others.
“. . . each according to need is the standard we should strive to . . .”
“Tear it all down! The world without authority cannot be worse than the world we have now.” An agitated orator from the left found an echo in a viewer. A man whose stubble gleamed in the reflected light spat the words back at the screen with the fervor of a fanatic. “Tear it all down.” His hands clenched on his knees.
Sylvie, scenting trouble, listened harder and got a trace of a passionate voice tinnily exhorting through muffled speakers: “The government doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t serve me. It serves itself, and forces us to serve it, at the expense of individualization. I say better by far to have no government at all—”
“Ten dollars,” a gruff voice spoke, startling her. She hadn’t seen him approach at all, which amazed her, given his size.
“Ten dollars,” he repeated. “No looky-loos. You want to stay, you pay.” She eyed the stretched-out T-shirt across his broad chest, the palm as big as a dinner plate extended before her, and looked up, then up some more.
The giant doorman looked at Erinya for a moment, thoughtful; as she felt his eyes on her, she turned and stared back. “Her? Twenty dollars for the trouble she’s gonna make.”
Sylvie forked over a twenty. He folded his hand around her arm and stamped her inner wrist with a crimson A in a circle. In the dim light, with those jagged lines, it looked more like a botched suicide than anything else.
“C’mere, girly,” the bouncer said, gesturing to Erinya.
Erinya’s eyes were full of “me?” Sylvie watched Erinya’s nose wrinkle in distaste, then watched her expression slide toward baffled offense once Sylvie nodded, confirming that yes, the bouncer did in fact mean the Fury.
Erinya surged to her feet, feral even in the low light, muscles shifting under her fishnet shirt. Her eyes sparked like phosphorus, gleaming white, then green. “I don’t want a stamp.”
He shrugged. “Then you can’t go in.”
Prudently, Sylvie distanced herself. The bouncer was on his own. After all, either his soul, conscience, memories—whatever it was that the Furies tested—was clean or not. If it was clean, then Erinya’s hands were supposedly tied by her own nature. Soiled—Sylvie had had enough of jostling with the Furies.
Sylvie slipped past the giant, into the cubicle he had appeared from, and opened the door hidden in its depths. A hallway greeted her, a mural on either side of her. Oil painting, living colors, not what she expected at all, not after the grimy tech of the anteroom. NDNM grew more interesting by the moment.
The mural on her left was of a naked giant, handing a blazing box to a group of men huddled before caves. In the gold-shot sky, vultures circled a mountain peak. Sylvie leaned closer. There were words mixed in with the blaze of light, created purely by paint layered deeper in sections than others, words made out of shape rather than color. Sylvie touched it, tracing the elaborate curls— something about fire and gifts and gods and freedom.
The door at the far end of the hall opened on a wave of sound, and Sylvie stepped aside for a sweaty, chattering group of clubbers.
She looked to the other side. Eden, the temptation of Eve, instantly recognizable. Eve lingered in a smothering verdant world of tangled vines and roots and dangling branches laden with overripe fruit. It made Sylvie claustrophobic looking at it.
Beside Eve, the serpent waited, silvery in the dark earth; its tail coiled about a tiny sapling with one delicate fruit gracing its branches. Only then did Sylvie see Eve’s hand outstretched beneath it, fingers straining against the pressing vines, pushing back the intrusive greenery, reaching for the tiny fruit that shone like starlight. Eden as a prison. Serpent as savior.
Sylvie spotted one more tiny piece of brightness in the mural, near the floor, and bent to look at it. A wolf in profile, standing on a pair of crossed arrows, the whole thing small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.
A signature. Brandon Wolf. He’d been here, working among his enemies. No wonder the
Wolf’s abduction looked worse and worse all the time. The oubliette argued planning, but this type of planning was another level up. This was the careful infiltration that swamped its victim in lies and betrayal.
The inner door opened again, and a young man in a staff tee came through, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. “It’s not that scary, you know,” he said, grinning at whatever expression had frozen on her face. “You’ll like it in there.”
He sauntered on by and headed outside. Sylvie opened the inner door, stepped into the club proper, and was numbed by sudden sensation. She shifted to the side, put her back to the wall and rode the moment out.
After the silent hallway, the club seemed a riot of sensory overload. Alcohol scenting the air, iced drinks chiming against glass, the pounding drive of the rock music—My Chemical Romance, Sylvie identified absently, Alex’s current favorite—dozens of people talking, breathing, dancing, moving, and the chaotic visuals of a room divided into sections, not by walls, but chain curtains and raised or lowered floors: All of it made her pause to catch her breath.
Slowly, more details kicked in: The bar was situated to her left, running the length of a cracked, mirrored wall. Men and women leaned on the bar in small groups, talking and gesturing. Directly before her, two steps down led to a dance floor that wound its way through raised sections for seating.
She took the steps down to the floor, heading toward the bar, watching herself approach in the faceted glass, a tired woman with a troubled face. She looked past the weary lines in her skin and focused on the mirror itself. Though she had thought the glass cracked on first glance, now she saw the joins and seams, and realized that it was deliberately done. The pattern eluded her, and she traded that small mystery for that of the bartender, filling glass after glass with a hasty hand, though the club was far from full. A staff member in the NDNM black tee took a tray from the bartender and vanished toward a swinging door. Backroom meeting?
Sylvie pushed past a chain curtain and climbed the three steps to the bar. Once on the same level, the cracks in the glass made words, scratchy, sketchy words, but easily readable.
While Sylvie had only menu-literacy in French, that phrase she knew.
The bartender barely glanced up, still tapping drinks that were 90 percent foam, tattoos shifting on his forearms, and Sylvie nodded. New carbonation. Mystery solved.
“Be right with you, Lily,” he said, raising his voice to compete with the music, the four-foot space between them, and the constant hiss of the tap.
Sylvie twitched, hearing her own name at first. Then she realized that the sibilance came from the tap, and he had mistaken her for one of the regulars.
His eyes slewed around—hunting black shirts, Sylvie decided, as he hailed one, a girl with frizzed-out hair. “Mickey, come dump these for me.”
The girl sighed but grabbed the tray. “Where’s JK?”
“On break.”
“I thought Auguste—”
“He didn’t come in,” the bartender said, “It happens.” The cool was put on, Sylvie could tell. He was ticked and refusing to show it, refusing to let the girl show it; she wondered why. Maybe Auguste was the owner’s golden boy. Auguste—Sylvie remembered the dark tee the
“He’s such a shit,” Mickey said. The bartender twitched a shoulder toward Sylvie. The movement had a distinct “shut up, teacher’s watching,” feel about it.
“Vent all you want. I don’t care,” Sylvie said, inserting herself into the conversation. She took a few steps closer, hooked a stool, and sat, putting her between the bartender and a raised table with three young women. They paused in their debate over the merits of a pair of star-shaped sunglasses to stare at her. One of the women caught Sylvie’s expression and stuck her tongue out before snatching the glasses and resting them in her curly hair.
The bartender looked over at Sylvie, startled. “I’m sorry. I thought you were . . . Never mind, can I get you something?”
Mickey took the opportunity to vanish, leaving the laden tray behind.
“Regular Coke,” Sylvie said, “no additions.” The sugar and caffeine would do her energy level a world of good. She sucked half of it down all at once, then turned to look around, pretending she hadn’t scoped the place already.
Her order caused a furrow to start in his pierced brow, a wariness in his expression. “You gonna want anything else?”
“Another Coke, for sure,” Sylvie said. “Maybe a little info. I’m looking for a friend of Auguste’s.” Go with the gamble. Really, in a club this size, how many staffers with French names could suddenly not show up for work?
“Cop,” the curly-haired woman said, with a dismissive sniff and hair toss. The glasses in her hair caught the light and sparked. “Pay up.” She held out a hand to her table mates, a Paris Hilton wannabe and a sulky brunette, and they forked over dollar bills.
The bartender shook his head. “Sorry. Drinks I can help you with. Anything else, try the Internet.”
“Hold that thought,” Sylvie said. “Do I really look like a cop?” She split her glance between the table and the bartender.
The woman who’d declared her a cop spoke up. “You look nosy, and that’s just as bad. People deserve their privacy. No matter what the government would have you believe.” She tossed her head again, a flash of dark glass in her hair. Sylvie imagined her doing it one time too many and breaking her own neck.
“Some people forfeit it through their actions,” Sylvie said. She took another long sip of her Coke, crunched ice. They wanted to argue; she could do that.
