Sins & Shadows

Sylvie followed his line of sight, and said, “Oh for God’s sake. So the shirt’s transparent. Get over it and drive before I push you out of the car.”

Demalion broke into a laugh, muffled it in her shoulder, then drew back, studying her, unsmiling. “What are you looking at, blind man?”

He reached out and traced a pattern on the sopping back of her shirt, centering between her shoulder blades. “Tattoo,” he said. “Cedo Nulli. The same phrase Lilith used for her password. Coincidence?”

Aware of Rodrigo’s gaze sharpening, of Bran’s recoil, Sylvie said abruptly, “Consanguinity.”

He stiffened, and she said, “Don’t give me that. At least I didn’t inherit a tail.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“You’re clever. Figure it out.”

“Old Cat,” Bran said.

“Hey,” Sylvie objected. “He can figure it out. If you want to ‘help’ so much, how ’bout you unblind him. Cryst-o-vision might be nifty, but he can’t hold a gun.”

“I didn’t say that,” Demalion said.

“You gave me your gun,” she said. “You didn’t need to say anything.” It warmed her heart, it really did. He trusted her to kill for him. “C’mon, Bran, even you have to see that having your point man blind isn’t a good thing.”

“I can’t—” Bran said, and stopped. She wasn’t surprised: She’d felt her expression change. Harden. Darken.

He licked his lips, dropped his gaze, and started again. “It’s Kevin’s will that did it.”

“With your power threaded through his,” Sylvie said. “Doesn’t that give you an in? The oubliette, which was keyed to you, opened for him.” She kept her voice conversational though she could feel Demalion bird-dog tense beside her, eager to be healed. She wanted to know if she could talk Bran into something rather than bully him into it.

Bran sighed. “I can try.”

“That’s better than can’t,” she said. “But how ’bout you just do?”

The van lurched, wheels slipping on wet asphalt, and Bran let himself fall forward into Demalion’s lap.

From her vantage point, Sylvie twitched. Bran looked up into Demalion’s blind face in an assessing way that made her want to yank him right off Demalion’s lap and slap him. The worst part was she wasn’t sure if it was jealousy driving it or sheer unabashed possessiveness. Demalion was hers, dammit. Or would be. If he proved himself trustworthy. If he didn’t feed both her and Bran into the ISI mills.

She bit back the growl in her throat, kept it unvoiced. Demalion didn’t need the ego stroke. Bran, though, he heard it, again showing the uncanny awareness of things relating to love. He smirked and stroked Demalion’s arms beneath his wet sleeves. Demalion’s breath hitched.

The van rocked again, and water splashed up alongside with such force that it sloshed over the high windows. Sylvie took the opportunity to escape Bran’s game and crawled forward through the jolting van, collecting a bruise on her shoulder when she failed to adjust to a sudden swerve and clipped a computer console.

She crouched beside the driver’s seat. “Bad roads?”

“Rain,” he said. His hands were white on the steering wheel. “This is definitely not natural.”

“The fact that it’s coming down hard enough to flake asphalt didn’t clue you in earlier?” Sylvie sniped. The road was degrading, turning to a crumbling, jagged mess that threatened their tires. She took another look, realized exactly how dense the rain was ahead of them, and winced. “It’s been doing this all night? It is night, right?” It was hard to tell. She’d lost time in the oubliette, and the skies were apocalypse dark. She took a look at the speedometer and sighed. They were creeping along the roads, at a bare ten miles per hour, and as much as she mocked the ISI, she couldn’t even blame him for it. Not in this weather. Not when strange shadows swept the night to either side of them. When behind all the dark windows, people’s fears might be taking on a new life—all it took was a little talent and spillover from Dunne or Zeus. She wasn’t going to tell him any of that, though.

“Acid rain, whatever. I don’t care. It’s been doing that for over twenty-four hours,” he said. “But it wasn’t parting for us before.” Burke goosed the accelerator, pushing the van into the sheets of water before them; the wheels slipped a little. Rain pounded the roof of the van for a bare second and stopped, like a switch had been thrown. Now that Sylvie paid attention, she realized she’d been hearing that sound pretty much constantly, a low, intermittent drumming. He swerved hard to the right, erupted into rain. It ceased again.

“We’re carrying valuable cargo,” she said. She licked her dry lips again, felt a tiny pain, tasted salt. Somewhere in the evening, she’d bitten it, or had it hit hard enough to bleed. “Someone’s paying attention.” She ignored his questioning glance, not inclined to share more information than that with the ISI.

Behind her, she heard Bran murmuring, “You know, it’s traditional to make an offering when asking a god for aid.”

“I didn’t ask,” Demalion said, and his tone was so strained that Sylvie’s attention swerved back. He held Bran close, protecting him from the jolting of the van, but his jaw was tight and tense. “Sylvie asked.”

“Jesus,” Sylvie said, rejoining them in the back, dropping to the floor with a thump that rattled her bones. “You haven’t fixed him by now? What have you been doing?”

“Fixed is a bad word,” Demalion said. “Fixed is what you do to your dog.” He seized on the possibility of banter with such enthusiasm that Sylvie knew he was scared.

“Just making sure he understands what I’m going to do,” Bran said. “I can’t reverse the curse. I can alter it. But it doesn’t absolve him of the sins that Kevin punished him for.”

Rodrigo smiled in mindless agreement, nodding, blissed out by Bran’s presence. Sylvie slapped his shoulder speculatively, and he merely rocked back and forth. Bran’s spell might have been too strong. This close to the object of his worship, for this long, Rodrigo had stopped functioning. She wondered what would happen if she slapped Bran, instead.

“I make no apologies,” Demalion said. “I did my job to the best of my abilities.” His breath was coming fast, a little panicked, and from the way he clutched at the crystals in his hands, Sylvie thought even his clairvoyance was being balked now.

“Bran,” she warned. He ignored her completely.

Bran shifted closer in his lap, pressed his lips to Demalion’s neck, and said, “That’s been the excuse for countless acts of atrocity. Aren’t you a thinking man?”

Demalion’s eyes were pure silver now, as reflective as mirrors. Sylvie wondered if Anna D would be able to scry through her son’s eyes, and slid to one side, just in case. She had enough problems already without getting the sphinx in a hissy fit.

Demalion regained his poise, and said, “Dunne was a source of unusual and unknown power. I owed it to my employers, my city, and my country, to assess the situation accurately, the better to protect my world. So, yes, I followed my orders. I judged them fair and worthy of being obeyed.”

“You ruined everything,” Bran said. “Everything.” He put his head in his hands. “All I wanted was to live in peace. To be myself and happy with Kevin. And then you came, and Lilith—I want to hate you so much.”

Demalion’s stern face softened. He might not have been able to see Bran’s beauty to be seduced by it, but the voice was powerful enough to have an effect, Sylvie thought.

“You can’t,” she said. “Can you? Not because you think Demalion has a point, which he does, mind you, but because you can’t hate—”

“I lack that fire,” Bran admitted.

“What burns hot but can’t keep a body warm?” Sylvie said, under her breath. Demalion and Bran turned identical expressions of startlement on her; she shrugged. “Sorry. Thinking of the sphinx.”

Bran made a moue. Apparently, the sphinx was unpopular all the way around, if even he wasn’t a fan.

“Sphinx,” Demalion said. “There’s another monster in all this?”

Sylvie let out a breath. So not the time to get into that. “Bran, we’re under the gun. Pick up the pace.”

Bran leaned back against Demalion, and Demalion fended him off, one palm flat against Bran’s chest, one fist holding a crystal with white-knuckled intensity. “Just the eyes,” Demalion said. “Nothing else.”

“I don’t understand,” Bran said.

“No Rodrigo specials,” Sylvie said. She waved at him, flipped him off, and Rodrigo ignored her completely, still blissed out on Bran. “No ‘love me, love me’ force-fed into his veins. Rodrigo might as well be meat at this point. We need Demalion whole, sane, and sharp-witted.”

“If I’m going to love someone,” Demalion said, “I want it to be my choice.”

“I understand,” Bran whispered. “Didn’t I choose my own life? My own lover?” He knelt up, blew a stream of air across Demalion’s eyes. When Demalion’s eyes blinked shut, Bran kissed the closed lids, right then left, and followed with a lingering kiss on Demalion’s forehead above the third eye.

Wonder what that’ll do to his clairvoyance, Sylvie thought.

Demalion’s hands, fisted tight around the crystals, suddenly spasmed and collapsed inward. His arms twitched; veins popped as if something had blocked their flow. “Bran,” Sylvie said. “Heal not hurt.”

Demalion groaned deep in his throat, through clenched teeth. His body shivered through tiny seizures.

“Shh,” Bran whispered, “ ’s tricky, this.”

Demalion fell out of Bran’s embrace, gasping, eyes wide and strained. The distortion in his veins raced upward, bulging through his shoulder into his neck.

Demalion’s eyes went blank and glassy, the eyes of a corpse, and his body fell limp. Sylvie shoved Bran out of the way, grabbed Demalion’s collar, got her hands on his throat. His pulse was strong, as was her relief. He blinked, and his eyes—changed. First from mirror blind back to his usual dark espresso, but then, before Sylvie could let out her held breath, his eyes lost color, ending as gold and as glossy as heartless topaz. The pupils rounded, then slitted catlike, before rounding outward again.

“What did you do?” She let Demalion go and shook Bran. She got in two good shakes before Rodrigo lunged forward and stopped her—They all fell into a tangle of limbs; she elbowed him in the throat, and Rodrigo yelped hoarsely. She kicked again and hit something unyielding—the driver’s seat. Burke snapped at them from the front. “Trying to concentrate! Keep it down back there!”

“I did what you asked,” Bran said, extricating himself from beneath her and Rodrigo with a muttered curse. “Kevin remade his vision. I couldn’t restore what had never changed as far as his body was concerned. That takes a full-powered god. I just . . .”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“He had two genetic choices,” Bran said. “Kevin’s spell blinded the man. I sort of . . . switched tracks on his genetic line, went the monster route?” Her hands fell away from his sweater, and he said, “Hey, he can see now. That’s what you wanted. . . .”

“Demalion,” she said. “You can see?”

His voice was rough, furred with pain and amazement when he finally woke from the abstracted trance he seemed to be in. “It’s not like it used to be,” Demalion said, blinking. He closed his right eye, looked through the left, then reversed it. The pupils slitted and flared. “It’s—Sylvie—it’s more. It’s—there are patterns. I was a clairvoyant, could see things that happened out of my sight. But this . . . Now, I think I saw bits of my future.” He rubbed at his head, and sighed, obviously at a loss for explanation.

“Old Cat,” Bran muttered.

Demalion’s attention swerved; his eyes flared. “Old Cat? What the hell are you—”

“Can you shoot straight?” she interrupted. Unmasking his genealogy in an ISI surveillance van was a capital-B-bad idea. Burke was casting disturbed glances back their way.

“You are a scary woman. But yes, I can shoot again. Hell, I might be able to shoot around corners at this point.”

The van swerved again; rain splashed, ceased, and Sylvie snapped, “Stop playing with the rain, Burke, or I’m going to come up there and take my bad mood out on you.”