Sins & Shadows

Picking Up the Pieces

HELP BRAN. PROTECT BRAN. SO MUCH EASIER SAID THAN DONE, Sylvie thought, when she was overwhelmed by the idea. So much simpler to fight an enemy than aid an ally who had given up. Lilith wanted to be a god so desperately, and Bran—he had wanted to be human. And Sylvie had taken that away from him.

Sylvie had failed before, pulled defeat from victory. She had no intention of doing so again, not when Demalion had died to make this victory possible.

Across the roof, Lilith scrabbled at the shielding Dunne had ringed them round with, tearing bits free like curls of paper beneath a cat’s claws. Under Dunne’s influence, the curls only rewound and sealed themselves tighter. Lilith wasn’t going to be able to run away.

Lilith doesn’t need to, Sylvie thought. Not if she could absorb more of Bran. The power still flowed toward her, into her, like water running inexorably downhill. Dunne must have been thinking on the same lines; a strange construct swirled into place around Lilith, gleaming like a mirror and acting like a dam. Power still slipped in, under, and over it, but it was a bare trickle compared to what had been heading her way. The rest of it pooled up against the dam and glimmered, a wealth of power and potential just drifting.

“Bran,” Sylvie said. It was a whisper, drowned in the sounds of Lilith cursing Dunne as she chipped at the dam, temporarily letting go her attempt to escape the shield. Made sense, Sylvie thought. If the shield fell, and Lilith escaped, the power would pour after her; with the dam up, though, she couldn’t take the power with her.

Of course, if Sylvie could get Bran back together, Lilith could do nothing, either. Bran’s mind was still around, somewhere—his occasional words reassured her that her task was at least theoretically possible.

A subtle vibration of rage, so low-pitched that Sylvie felt it in her bones before she heard it, came from Dunne, as Lilith continued to fight him. Dunne had taken more than the Furies’ strength for his own, obviously, Sylvie thought as she watched him stalk Lilith with a predator’s calculated patience. Unearned patience. Sylvie wanted to scream at him to hurry.

Do something, the little dark voice warned. If you fail here, Dunne will take us apart. Or Lilith. The only way to win—

“—is if Bran’s whole,” she said. Behind Dunne’s rooftop shielding, strange bursts of white light flared and faded. Someone or something was working its way in. A wild card no one wanted or needed.

Sylvie spun, looking, hunting for some hint that Bran’s consciousness was near and able to hear her. The gold spill of his power seemed massed in three places; one, the mindless juncture of Lilith and working spindle, two, the needy coils winding about Dunne, and—there—by the stairwell. A cloudy density hovered, heedless of the currents of struggle. It wasn’t particularly big, but it was almost man-shaped.

Sylvie realized it was hovering over Alekta’s corpse. Definite consciousness, she thought. Grief—an inevitable part of love.

“Bran,” she said. She put a tentative hand out, stirring the nebulous cloud to shifting, sending a cold chill through her skin, as if a ghost had turned in its path to touch her in return.

She loved bad jokes, Bran whispered. But she didn’t know that until she came to be Kevin’s. Until she followed him to the mortal world. This is my fault. But I thought—

Hurry, hurry, the dark voice shrieked, but Sylvie tried a gentler approach.

“You thought you could get away with it,” Sylvie said. Her lips were dry, and when she licked at them, one cracked and bled. “You thought you had it all under control. It hurts to find out you’re wrong,” she said. “But dying isn’t going to make anything better.”

That’s not what you said earlier, Bran communicated, and, despite the sullenness, Sylvie was heartened by his anger. Anything was better than that pervasive grief and despair he’d been projecting a moment ago. Anger, she could live with. But grief—it drowned her, made her numb, thinking of a pair of gold-flecked eyes.

Behind her, Dunne said, “Hurry, Sylvie.” followed by a low groan.

Aggravation mixed with a healthy dose of terror spiked her. “You think Alekta’s death hurts you? Wait ’til Lilith gets smart and uses your power for something other than brute strength. Wait ’til she uses it as it wants to be used. Wait ’til she goes for Dunne’s weak point. His heart.”

She can’t. . . .

“She can. She will. She’s not stupid, Bran. Just frantic. Why did she choose you in the first place? Not simply for your availability. She plans long range. She wanted your power specifically. She’ll be a new and different and deadly kind of Love. And Dunne, who already has a piece of you in his makeup . . . I’m betting he’ll fall easy. You may not have forced him to love you. She will.”

His protests fluttered against her mind, and she shook her head, ignoring him. “Imagine what she’ll do to him. He’ll be her puppet as she makes war on heaven, and sends the Magicus Mundi into chaos.”

“No.” An actual word. A brief eruption of mouth and teeth and flesh. “Kevin’s mine.” There was a hint of body breaching out of the glitter-ghost.

“Then you’d better fight for him,” Sylvie said. “But you can’t do it like this—she’d eat you up like dessert.”

“You do it—”

“No,” she snapped. “Bran, I can’t—”

“Thought you didn’t believe in can’t,” he whispered in her ear, a cool breath, a ghost of something warmer.

“Just do it,” she said. “It’s not my battle. Live or die, the world rests on you.” She coughed, suddenly bone-weary. She dropped to a crouch, as close to a state of readiness as she could manage. Her head rang, and her vision blurred and faded. Her arm burned steadily where the charm had melted, and she kept smelling scorched flesh, even over the blood.

“I’m no good at confrontation,” he murmured. “I couldn’t save myself. You think I can save Kevin? The world?”

Sylvie bit back her retorts. He might be protesting, but he was also doing it. Pulling himself together, making something solid and real out of a ghost image in a gleaming fog.

Like the artist he was, he made a sketch first, a thinned-out body delineating the borders where paint would lie were this anything so ordinary as a canvas. If she had to name the sketch, Sylvie would call it Apprehension, his fear evident in every line, the edge of a bitten lip, an arm that wrapped itself around the jut of a rib, the nervous twitch of a man expecting to be struck.

It called for an encouraging word, but Sylvie couldn’t find anything to say that sounded more meaningful than a Hallmark platitude. Her brain had defaulted to a whisper of desire— Please, please, please, let him do this. Let him succeed. Let him be real again.

His gaze, eyes bare hollows in a shelter of cheekbone, turned to hers. The bitten lip tugged free of white teeth, flushed to color, and curled slightly. “Don’t pray for me,” he said. “Pray to me.”

Across the roof, Dunne’s spine straightened, as if the sound of Bran’s voice was enough to give him a surge of will, enough to push Lilith back, to dissolve the dam at his wish, instead of hers. He used it like a tidal wave, a collapse of weight pushing the power back toward Bran and Sylvie.

Lilith spat a curse, hard-edged words that smudged the air and ignited. Dunne threw up a hand and shielded himself. When the curse faded, his shield crumbled and flowed toward Lilith. She said, “I won’t let you stop me. And I won’t let him.” The next spell ignored Dunne entirely and pinpointed Bran.

Bran’s shell lost definition as the spell roiled forward, absorbing all power in its path. Dunne reached to stop it, and his power was rolled over and into it, increasing the spell’s impetus like an avalanche. Sylvie blinked. Power. Lilith wanted to steal Bran’s power. The curse swallowed power. Sylvie forced herself to her feet, hurled herself in the spell’s path.

Better be right, the dark voice warned.

The blast knocked her backward, scraped some skin from her elbows and her forearms, made her head ring, and gave her the unpleasant sensation of a hungry pig rooting at her body, bruising, invasive. Ultimately, though, it left her unharmed. She didn’t have anything it wanted.

“Want to try again?” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause Dunne’s on your tail, and I think he won’t be fooled again.”

Dunne slapped the next spell out of Lilith’s hand; her eyes went black with rage. Sylvie said, “Back to work, Bran.”

“Yes,” he said. The process quickened; ghostly shoulders firmed, knots of bared tawny skin and shifting muscle that ran and flexed downward, drawing in the spine and a strong, bare thigh.

It was a bizarre sort of striptease, watching Bran’s body appear in segments from behind the veil of his power. The more he recovered shape, the more the scattered power on the roof flowed toward him and rejoined him. A defined hand, elegant and purposeful, created a long line of naked belly and narrow hips. He grazed fingertips down his newly created skin, as if he were reacquainting himself with how it felt, how it was to be a god, a being of pure will and power.

Sylvie opened her mouth to say something scathing about the need to play with himself later, but got derailed. Bran might be sculpting flesh, but he was still a painter at heart. His tracing finger suddenly left a trail in its wake, a last homage to the art he had preferred for so long. Butterflies bloomed on his skin; lapis lazuli, sunset orange, and crimson, striped and spotted, following the path his touch took, starting from his navel and swirling outward.

“Oh,” Sylvie found herself saying instead. The wings looked dusty, real, quivering with his breath. She wanted to cage them beneath her palms, feel his skin warm and flutter against hers, wanted to taste them and see if their scales would melt on her tongue like raw sugar.

Pray to him? At that moment, she’d worship him, just for a chance to touch him.

She swallowed hard, closed her eyes, thinking he might very well be as dangerous as balefire to look at. She’d thought his human shell built to bring out mindless want; by the time he finished rebuilding his immortal shell, she might be a pile of ashes, immolated by her own desire.

A gasp reached her, and for a moment she felt relieved. At least it wasn’t just her. Then the pitch of the voice warned her. Dunne lost focus, turning toward Bran as devotedly as any human worshipper, his face blind with joy and want.

Lilith stepped up behind him, skin-close, and Dunne didn’t pay any attention, all his eyes on Eros.

“Hurry, Bran,” Sylvie said. Building the shell was only the first step, after all. It wasn’t enough simply to regain immortality, regain some of his power. He had to get it all back, and at present, Lilith was scooping it up at an enormous rate. Her skin—

Sylvie blinked, and in that single moment, Lilith found the core of Bran’s power, that hopeless desire that fueled men’s dreams and made them try for the impossible. One moment, Lilith was the Lilith Sylvie had come to know and loathe. The next—she flickered, skin warming, going from a too-pale, sharp-boned, witchy woman, to a goddess.

Still knife-edge lean, still competence and will made wiry flesh, but Lilith now appeared as sleek and as elegant as a glass-bladed sword. She demanded respect and admiration, and created in her beholders a helpless urge to touch, even if, like a blade, yielding to that temptation would gain you nothing but bloody fingertips.

Sylvie closed her mind as best she could. Falling into worship of Bran was dangerous, but falling for Lilith was just plain suicidal. She whimpered; her skin buzzed, caught between the two gods of Love. If she could have, she’d have crawled away and hidden. Dunne didn’t look much better. Lilith dropped a hand to his shoulder, and he shuddered, tilted his head back, baring the line of his throat. Her white hand crawled over it, cupped his chin.

“I want you to do something for me, lover,” she said.

Dunne shook his head minutely. The Fury-influenced arm rose, clamped around her forearm, but the claws stayed lax.

“No,” Bran said, but the kind of force Sylvie needed to hear in it was lacking. Lilith had lapped him on the field, taken the main bulk of his power into her. We, Sylvie thought bleakly, are losing.

“I need you to strengthen those lovely shields of yours,” Lilith said to Dunne. “We’ve got visitors I’m not ready to deal with yet. Can you do that for me?”

Clever, Sylvie thought. Dunne couldn’t really object to that, not when he wanted Bran’s power corralled and kept safe. If Lilith had asked something else, he might have tried to fight her pull on his loyalty, but this . . . And having said yes to her once made it so much simpler to say yes again.

“Bran, do something,” Sylvie said, even as Dunne slowly nodded to Lilith. The shielding around the building turned from the cloudy opacity of pebbled glass to the complete darkness of steel. The