Sins & Shadows

Sylvie pushed past the fifth-floor landing, legs aching with weariness. Storm light seeped down from above, limning the edges of the stairs in silver, showing the clear shot to the top. Bran and Alekta seemed diffused in its gentler light, blurred shadows moving forward. The roof door was open already, she thought. Invitation? Or trap? A little surge of anticipation made her pick up her pace. Now. Lilith.

Sixth floor, seventh floor passed in a blur of drumming feet echoing back at her. Eighth floor and she saw the shadow of whoever waited for them. Her breath came quick, anticipation, excitement, fear, rage—Sylvie couldn’t even tell what drove her on.

But the woman who stepped out of the shadows, grinned down at them with a mouthful of fire, wasn’t Lilith, but Helen. Sylvie faltered, everything in her stammering with surprise. The little dark voice whispered into that void, Kill her.

Alekta, half a flight ahead of her, shoved Bran downward, sending him plunging toward Sylvie. Demalion halted his fall.

A white streamer of flame engulfed Alekta, pushed the Fury into the landing wall, and pinned her there, snarling, growling, shrieking pain and rage.

Sylvie’s breath sucked out of her lungs; she covered her eyes, but the only burn in them was due to the wash of heat. Not balefire, then, but bad enough. The temperature skyrocketed in the close quarters. Down, she thought, but they needed to go up. Fight and flight warred. The cement walls turned ashy, soaking up heat like a kiln, preparing to bake them. Even the icy air from the storm was beaten back under the wash of flame.

Alekta was nothing but a writhing mass in the fire.

“Help her,” Bran whispered. “Please.” His forming tears dried instantly in the superheated air.

“She’s a Fury,” Demalion said. “She killed one of my men.”

“She’s my friend,” Bran said. Demalion just shook his head, held Bran tighter.

“We wait,” Demalion said.

“On the clock here,” Sylvie said. “We’ve got two gods upstairs and somewhere there’s a woman who wants to cut out Bran’s heart.”

Demalion smiled at her. His gemstone eyes slitted in the fire’s light. “She’s burning her borrowed power faster than she can replace it. We wait. Then we take her out.”

Yes, the little dark voice agreed. We don’t run. “Let’s not give her the chance to recharge,” Sylvie said. She slipped up the stairs, though her skin complained about getting closer to the heat, and Demalion bit back a protest. Alekta was silent now, struggling less. And Sylvie was going to stand by and wait for her attacker to run down, the better to kill her. Behind her, she heard Demalion’s grunt of effort as he blocked Bran’s sudden rush to aid Alekta. A quick glance downward showed Demalion holding Bran in an armlock.

The fire sputtered, and Sylvie rushed the landing, gun before her.

Demalion said, “Not yet,” but Sylvie was in no mood to wait. Disappointment drove her, she realized. This is it? My last obstacle? When it came down to Lilith’s end- game, she’d sent a mortal pyrokinetic to stop them? She hadn’t thought Lilith such a coward.

The flaming Fury a torch at her back, Sylvie narrowed her eyes against residual dazzle and took stock of her opponent. “God,” Sylvie said, “that can’t be comfortable.”

Helen was wreathed in her own fire; it cloaked her, shielded her, more—Sylvie squinted against the brightness—it held her together. Ropy stitches of fire covered the damage from their previous encounter, and her eyes were smoking in their sockets.

“Shadows,” Helen said. Her voice was the dry crackle of kindling. Alekta dropped beside Sylvie, all seared meat and angry, making staccato attempts to stand, crawl, attack—but she was down. Helen rictus-grinned and threw her hand out toward Sylvie. The fire faded to a curtain of dry heat before it touched her.

Helen whimpered and tried again. A wild flame shot from her hand like out-of-control fireworks, palest blue and far hotter than anything they’d seen from her before, a vast wave of scalding air, pouring down the stairs toward Sylvie, toward Bran.

Alekta staggered up and embraced the flame, sucking it into herself, while Sylvie dodged.

Alekta . . . frizzled away, and as the fire faded, a rusty flood of loosed power streamed upward. Helen tried to seize it, reaching flaming hands for it, and Sylvie shot her, point-blank.

Helen’s legs gave out. The fires that sealed her wounds faded, the injuries reopening, sending blood sizzling over her skin.

“Should have gone to a real doctor,” Sylvie muttered. “Should have stayed out of my business.” She raised the gun again. Her hand shook; exhaustion, she realized. Demalion said, “She’s down, Sylvie. You don’t have to—”

Helen opened her mouth; smoke and flames traced the outline of her lips, and Sylvie fired. The bullet, despite her tired hands, went where she wanted it to go. Helen’s skull cracked, and the flame began to devour the body.

“I had to,” she said. “She had a taste of real power. Even if it faded. She’d want it back. If I didn’t kill her now—it’d be worse later.”

“There are laws, Shadows,” Demalion said.

“Oh, those,” Sylvie said. Her voice cracked with exposure to the residual heat. She coughed for a moment, then said, “’Cause the ISI’s success rate at dealing with the supernatural evil is so superb. . . . Oh wait. Your success rate depends on pushing them off onto people like me. I take it back, Demalion. This isn’t your turf. It’s mine. Will you follow my orders?”

“Will you kill people needlessly?” he shot back.

“No cells, remember,” Sylvie snapped. Then, remembering Demalion had become her ally, she said more calmly, “Besides, did you really want to leave her at our backs?

“Come on,” she said. “Not nice to keep a god waiting.” She fought back a mad giggle, unsure what she found so funny. She wanted to chalk it and the strange distance she felt from her body to simple exhaustion and fear, but wasn’t sure she believed it herself. Demalion’s eyes, palest gold and slitted, rested on her, judging her. It didn’t worry her much. When it came right down to it, Demalion was an ISI agent; he’d side with the safety and security of the human world. He’d side with her.

Tick, tick, the dark voice reminded her. She concentrated on what had to be done. “Bran, let’s go. Up and at ’em.”

Bran pressed himself away from the wall, nodded mutely, then said, “All right.” He allowed Demalion to escort him upward.

When they stepped out onto the roof, Sylvie’s attention went straight to the sky. Hard not to when the clouds were as close as they were outside an airplane window. Darker than night, they condensed themselves, boiling toward the ground.

“Demalion, thank God,” a man said. “Do you know what’s going on? We came up to see what was happening, then got stuck up here. There’s some type of firestarter—”

“Not anymore,” Sylvie said. She tore her eyes from the clouds to look at the scattering of ISI agents on the rooftop. One suited agent, two security types in army wear, and a single secretarial- type woman, clutching a pencil close, another behind her ear, her mouth unattractively open.

“Stairs are clear,” Demalion echoed. “But stay here. We might need backup.”

“But—but—” the secretary started to protest.

A paler spindle of cloud stretched down, touched the gravel; the entire substrate rippled, shivering beneath Sylvie’s feet, like a horse about to buck under a fly’s bite. It was not a soothing sensation.

“Stay here?” the suit said. “I don’t think—”

“Stay put. That’s an order,” Demalion said.

Yes, Sylvie thought, let them witness it. See what they precipitated with their snooping and spying, their bureaucratic ideals and careful forms. They needed to know the world wasn’t theirs alone. These were civilians on whom she wouldn’t waste one iota of worry.

The roof surged again. Sylvie shifted her feet, trying to keep her balance, and the roof crackled with the sound of splintering ice. It froze her in her steps. The clouds wound themselves down the delicate tornado, masses of them spilling damply down to the roof.

Like water, the clouds poured faster and faster as they got closer to the last of the storm. The entire storm condensed as it came, flaunting a strange disregard for physics. It should miniaturize, or become blackly impenetrable. Instead, it stayed simultaneously vast and confined in a small space. A hurricane spinning and taking a vaguely human shape. In its slow movement, Sylvie could see distant gulls windswept and trapped. One winged close, a beady, desperate eye rolling at Sylvie, a flash of white-backed feathers against an ominous sky, then it was far distant, still in the cloud loop.

Sylvie’s ears popped and rang. She saw Demalion’s jaw working to relieve the same pressure, but his eyes never left Dunne. He stood like a man stunned, gaze flickering from cloud to empty sky and back again. How did this all look to him, to his new vision? Bran slipped away from Demalion, heading for Dunne, and Sylvie grabbed at him. “No,” she said.

A sudden pulse thrummed out beneath her feet, a shivering, skin-crawling burst of power. Dunne was bleeding some of it off, Sylvie thought, to fit the man shape better. Power saturated the air and made such a presence of it that Sylvie found she could actually taste it: the sharp bitterness of ozone underlaid with something sweet and heady, darkly floral, and beneath that, the entirely mortal scent of gun oil and powder. The air reached some strange critical mass, and in a Fortean moment, everything changed.

Demalion’s hands grew clawed and furred; a tail lashed behind him. His eyes widened; he turned his hands over, flexing the claws.

It wasn’t just Demalion, either. The agents on the roof were affected in other ways. The suited ISI agent coughed, a hand to his throat, alarm on his face, and an abiding panic in his eyes. The camo-clad agents collapsed, their drawn guns foaming into water, and their skins following after. The secretary squeaked and darted behind the choking suit, putting him between her and Dunne. So much for backup.

Still, Dunne apparently had a chivalrous core; only she and the secretary remained unchanged.

Bran slipped free from Sylvie’s restraining hand, heading toward Dunne and the heart of that altering power.

“It’s dangerous!” she called.

“Not to me,” Bran said.

Sylvie half expected Bran to be sucked in toward the cloud as brutally as if he were trying to embrace a black hole.

Instead, the clouds firmed, and a gusty sigh moistened the roof like the last salvo of a spring rain. Then it was Kevin Dunne again, yielding to flesh for the pleasure and need of touching his lover again.

He was barely recognizable as the man Sylvie had met three days ago. Wounded—his right arm ended at the elbow, and he tucked the stump against his side. Exhausted—his eyes kept closing, springing open to gaze down at the man in his arm, and closing again. All too human yet, at the same time, so completely not.

Lightning danced in his eyes; his mouth, parted to whisper Bran’s name, showed storm-cloud core, but the clutch of his left arm around Bran’s waist, the way he rested his cheek against Bran’s bright hair, the open thankfulness on his face was all human love and relief. Bran twined himself around Dunne as if he meant never to let go.

Dunne arched back suddenly, spat out a crawling mass of lightning that, like the storm before, was too dense, too big, and too small all at once. It spat sparks and melted holes in the roof before it rose into the sky like a demented UFO and disappeared.

It made Sylvie shudder with her own relief. The right thing had happened. The rare thing. The happy ending.

“That was Zeus?” she said, into the lull. “What’s the forecast?”

“Fleeing to Olympus and gnashing his teeth as he goes,” Erinya said, appearing on the roof and slumping to a low, pained crouch. One tired punk puppy, Sylvie thought. If the girl had ears and a tail, they’d be drooping.

Magdala followed, cast a glance around, and said, “Where’s Alekta?” Demalion gestured mutely toward the open door into the building. Magdala darted for the stairs. Her voice rose from the stairwell. “Hera’s furious. She wanted her power back. Zeus promised her her power back. But Dunne was too strong. We were too strong, and Zeus got nothing.” She carried Alekta’s body onto the roof, cradling it like a child, and Dunne moaned.

He released Bran reluctantly, their hands clasping to the very last, then came across the roof in strides that weren’t quite human, taking too few steps and still making too much progress.