Sins & Shadows

8 When Only a Witch Will Do

SYLVIE WAITED OUTSIDE O’HARE, SITTING ON A METAL BENCH brought to oven warmth by the heat from passing car engines. She shifted, pulling sweat-damp cotton away from her nape, and went back to watching the airport police.

Earlier, they had been everywhere, running in packs of five or more, like confused hounds casting about for scent. Now, they were back to that deceptively slow cop stride, in pairs or singles, and the only signs of interference was the occasional freeze of movement coupled with a blank stare, like the stutter-stop of a petit mal seizure. Like a seizure, the symptoms disappeared with the cops unaware of them.

Sylvie couldn’t decide if this was an improvement or not; she lacked facts and was left with empty speculation. Did their return to near normal mean Dunne’s influence had faded? If so, why? Had he lost interest or hope in their ability to find Brandon Wolf? Or was it a simpler thing altogether? Had he regained some of his concentration, keeping his powers close to home? Sylvie gnawed her lip, checked her watch, and moved on—nearly time to meet Val.

A third option presented itself to her. Had Dunne weakened? Maybe gods weren’t affected by human limitations of distance or endurance, but that didn’t mean nothing could weaken him. If he was a god—and she chose to let that declaration stand—she could think of only two things that could stop him. A belatedly delivered ransom demand. Or another god. Sylvie shivered. She needed to check in with her client and soon.

Val strode up at that moment, smiling a little, looking like a sleek jet-setter anticipating nothing more taxing than the shopping trip she’d teased Sylvie about. That changed the moment she leaned in to give Sylvie a social hug. The gun at Sylvie’s waist . . . twitched. Sylvie felt the distinctive click of the safety shifting off, a tiny flicker of movement against her skin, a finger tap saying “ready.”

“What the hell is that?” Val said. “What have you done, Sylvie?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“You’re wearing something of stolen power,” Val accused. “Spirit bound to flesh. That’s black work. How did you—”

“It’s fine,” Sylvie said. “Just trust me, okay?”

Val grimaced but let the questioning drop, for which Sylvie was grateful. She needed to parse what Val had said. Flesh and spirit, bound? Her flesh—she knew that; otherwise, the gun wouldn’t feel so comfortable against her skin. Whose spirit? Dunne’s?

Val waved for a cab, her lips still tight in disapproval. “Let’s get this over with, Sylvie.”

“We’re not taking a cab to the subway,” Sylvie said. “That’s just plain stupid. How spoiled are you, anyway?” She waved off the cabbie and headed toward the El connection.

Val huffed but followed her down the sidewalk in silence. Once in the El, Sylvie leaned up against a pole near the doors, touching her cheek to the cool metal, studying the other passengers, mostly airport run-off of flight attendants and travelers. No one looked back at her; the one man in a business suit who did ducked her gaze a second later, leaving her with nothing to do but seethe and listen to the rattle and clank of the El rising above the street.

Three stops later, Sylvie decided Val had sulked long enough, and said, “You look at the spell?”

“Enough to know it’s probably what you’re looking for,” Val said, pausing in her own calming study of the posters within the car. “Not enough to tell you how, who, or why, yet. I’ve made some assumptions, of course, from the sketch, but I’d rather see the actual circle itself before I draw real conclusions.”

“Thanks, Val,” Sylvie said. She relaxed; it looked like Val was going to be helpful.

“Don’t thank me,” Val said. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here. Things are strange right now, and all I want to do is hole up someplace safe.”

“Strange,” Sylvie repeated.

“My coven thinks a god may have come to the mortal realm.”

“So?” Sylvie said. “It’s their earth, too, right?”

Val made a face as if Sylvie had said something unbelievably stupid. “The only good thing about gods is that they prefer their realm to ours.”

The El swayed heavily as they took a long curve, rattling loud enough to make it sound like a roller coaster, and drew to a screeching halt. Val winced. “Not quite a Benz, is it?”

“You’ll survive,” Sylvie said.

Once the engine reached speed again, Sylvie said, “In myths, gods walk the earth all the time.”

“Yes,” Val said, “and mythology is full of monsters and cataclysms. Trust me, they’re linked. Gods change things. It’s their nature. Their very presence.”

“The world bends to their will,” Sylvie said, echoing Dunne. “It’s all about power.”

“It’s always about power,” Val said. “There’s only so much of it to go around. Like anything rare, it’s prized, guarded, hidden, and sought.”

“And stolen,” Sylvie finished on the crest of a minor epiphany. Stolen would explain an awful lot about Dunne’s sudden appearance on the scene. There weren’t that many possibilities if the two facts she had gained were both true. Dunne was a god. Dunne had been a normal human. Between the two states lay power.

“If humans can steal their power, gods can’t be omniscient or omnipotent,” Sylvie said, “not really.”

“Technically true,” Val said, sliding forward on the plastic seat, shifting into lecture mode. “But it’s in the same sense that we’re not all-powerful to, oh, a bird’s egg. We can see it in its entirety, know what’s in it, know what it will become, juggle it, nurture it, alter it at will, break it, spare it, or devour it. The egg is completely vulnerable. The egg doesn’t even understand that it’s in a god’s hand. Except maybe, every now and then, it feels a ripple moving through, something vast shifting on a level it cannot comprehend.

“To steal a god’s power requires more than determination and a blatant disregard for personal safety, it requires an understanding of the world that most humans are simply not capable of. Suffice it to say that anyone who could seriously attempt such a thing would be a person to avoid, would make my ex-husband look like a saint.” Her volume dropped steadily as she spoke until Sylvie had to lean close to make out the soft words. Val crumpled the edges of the fax, the spell rippling with false life. She took a breath, smoothed the paper, and bent her attention to it, tracing lines with a manicured nail.

No real answers there, Sylvie thought. Dunne had been a normal human according to Demalion, and while the ISI was not infallible, its basic information gathering was stellar.

The conductor’s voice called out another station, and Sylvie looked up. Getting close. She nudged Val, and Val tucked the spell into her purse, neatly folded.

Ten minutes later, Sylvie sat at the top of the El’s steps, squeezing herself out of the way of the occasional passerby and watching Val walk the spell circle.

Fish out of water, Sylvie thought, tickled at the expression on Val’s face—such finely tuned distaste. Subways were definitely slumming it for Val, who was accustomed to casual luxury. Still, she bent and knelt beside the circle without hesitation, staining her cream-linen slacks.

“It’s—” Val raised a haughty brow at a commuter who was standing a little too close to her. “Do you mind?”

He stepped back and continued waiting for a train, jingling the tokens in his pocket. “Sylvie!” Val said, gesturing at him in an imperious fashion.

“Shoo. Go away,” Sylvie said. He flipped her off and stayed where he was. Sylvie shrugged, not surprised. He was the suited man who hadn’t met her eyes on the train. The one she thought she’d seen waiting at the airport terminal, passing her a few times too many for coincidence.

Well, lie down with the ISI, get up with ticks.

“I can’t do this,” Val said, rising. “Too many people coming in and out. You were correct, by the way. This spell is still active. It’s also sloppy. I thought so when I got your fax but chalked it up to your poor art skills. I remember your flunking Woodmansee’s class.”

“Hey,” Sylvie said, “This isn’t a high-school reunion, you know.”

Val said, “Hand me my bag, will you?”

As if a thousand-dollar Valextra briefcase could be termed a bag. Sylvie tossed it toward her, and Val sighed as she caught it. “Look, all the tooling they do makes it magically inert. Okay?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Sylvie said.

“Sylvie, even your silences are damn loud,” Val said, flickering a smile. “Make sure no one else is coming, all right?”

“You’re gonna—”

“I’m tired of interruptions. I thought this was a matter of some urgency, but if you’d rather I work around street people?”

“Knock yourself out,” Sylvie said.

Val closed her eyes, raised her hands, and began talking.

At least, that was how it sounded to Sylvie. Talking, but incomprehensible, some bastard mixture of sounding too far away, or too foreign. It sounded like those important speeches she heard in dreams, full of portent without meaning.

The air rippled; the subway wavered in her sight and reappeared, warped out of true, the walls gleaming darkly, the shadows oppressive, the screech of metal heart-pounding. The commuters fled up the stairs in a disorderly mess.

Val was obviously still pissy; usually her leave-me-alones were gentle things, tending to make people recall sudden chores that required them to be elsewhere. But this—

Sylvie watched the nightmare spread across the station, adding a layer of revulsion to the glamour, and blinked it away, refusing to give in to her suddenly racing heart. She knew better, dammit. It was all illusion. She closed her eyes as the glamour tried harder to get rid of her, leaving behind subtle nightmare imagery for streamers of blood on the ground, the patchwork paint of body outlines. If she looked long enough, the shape took on the contorted one that Suarez had fallen into when the bullet took out his throat.

Ignore it. It’s false. It means nothing. The dark voice was calm as it declared there was no threat here.

Sylvie opened her eyes, and things were back to normal. Or as normal as it could be with a witch casting a spell in a subway station.

“You really shouldn’t be able to evade my spells,” Val said. “Someday I’m going to test your aptitude for magic.”

“Yeah, and someday I’m going to make a nice little housewife,” Sylvie said.

Val shook her head and bent to her bag. “Well, now that I’ve gotten rid of them, let’s keep them gone.” Val pulled out a silk-wrapped feather, a grey Baggie of what looked like spiderwebs, and a knife from her bag.

“You have trouble with airline security?” Sylvie said, noticing that the suit at the platform was still there, still watching, looking sweaty and rather sick. “Ah, Val?”

“I took the jet,” Val said, teasing the spiderwebs apart with the knife tip. “Shut up, Sylvie. This takes concentration.”

Val teased one of the cobwebs back into web shape, dangling it from the tip of her knife. “Come down the stairs,” she said.

Sylvie sighed and joined Val. “What about him?” she asked, gesturing to their watcher.

“He should have left when I asked him to,” Val said. She raised the knife and blew gently on it, simple breath giving way to more of her exotic murmurs.

The cobweb fluttered from the knife, expanding, thinning, gleaming red and gold like metal reflecting firelight. It drifted up the stairs, and Val whispered more coaxing words. The suit on the platform began to look concerned. Sylvie flipped him off and grinned. After all, there weren’t many people who were determined enough to stick around through a repulsion glamour. He had to be ISI. He edged closer to the rails, as if a foot or so could make all that much difference.

Val gestured with the feather, and the web spread wider and darted forward, sticking suddenly to the edges of the entrance to the El. Sounds from above stopped filtering down to them, wrapping them in silence.

“One more,” Val said, another web dangling from the knife tip.

She turned to the wary agent watching them and smiled, that perfect social smile that allowed all sorts of backstabbing to go on behind it. The web flew wide and pushed the agent to a teetering position on the very edge of the platform. The man jumped off, rather than be pushed, and the spell snapped into place behind him.

“I knew we were friends for a reason,” Sylvie said, smiling at the agent’s predicament. “Hope he’s informed about the train schedule and the dangers of high voltage.”

Val permitted herself a more honest grin, a rare, open look on her face. There was the impish gamine Sylvie had known in high school. “What? I’m not allowed to enjoy my work?” Val said, turning back to the spell circle. She took a white-silk glove from her bag and traced the circle in silence.

She sat back on her heels, finessed the glove from her fingers, careful not to let the outer part of the glove touch her skin, and tossed it into the trash can. “Nasty,” she said, wiping her hands down her slacks. “I was afraid of that.”

“Don’t be vague,” Sylvie said. “If you’ve got something bad to say, might as well get it over with.”

“Maudits,” Val said. “Specific enough for you?”

“Fuck,” Sylvie said, closing her eyes. “I thought they’d disbanded, decovened, or whatever sorcerers do when you destroy their leaders.”

“We stopped them,” Val said. “Once. Hardly a final battle. They must have found a new figurehead.”

“Lovely,” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause their last choice was oh so good for the world.” The Maudits were bad news; a cabal of blood-crazed sorcerers could hardly be anything but. Last time Sylvie had run into them, they’d been intent on resurrecting Val’s ex-husband, a voodoo king with one hell of a mean streak. Sylvie doubted their tastes had improved in the time since.

“Sloppy, though,” Val said, looking over the spell, breaking Sylvie’s darkening thoughts. “Far from their usual standards—maybe you’re dealing with a splinter group. Last I’d heard, they had begun to argue their methods—since they were so spectacularly unsuccessful last time. Beaten by two women and a child.” Val’s lips quirked. “Serves them right, those chauvinistic blowhards.”

“Yeah, yeah, we kicked their collective ass. Yay us, moving on,” Sylvie said. “The spell is sloppy? Meaning what exactly?”

Val slipped off her loose jacket, laid it on the concrete, and settled herself on it. “Well, for one thing it’s active, which it shouldn’t be. Not if it’s swallowed its prey.”

“So it is a snatch-and-grab machine,” Sylvie said, toeing the painted curlicues thoughtfully, “not a curse or a kill.”

Val fiddled with the platinum hoop in her ear, a habit Sylvie recognized from high school, from a hundred scenes of Val before a test, before a big date, before lying her ass off to get away with coming home drunk. Sylvie braced herself for trouble.

“Not exactly. It’s an oubliette spell. A magical ambush keyed to a specific person. It sucks the target down the minute they cross it, then it shuts down and disappears. We shouldn’t be able to see it at all. A spell like this is either hidden and active, or triggered and gone. The fact that it’s visible at all tells me it’s triggered, but not complete. Normally, I’d say that its prey got away. God only knows how—we’re not talking a beginner spell here. But you say that Wolf is missing?”

“Vanished,” Sylvie said. “In the space of a heartbeat according to my client.”

“Witnessed it?” Val paused in her fidgeting.

“Felt it,” Sylvie said. “How’s that for proof?”

“Don’t scoff,” Val said mildly. “Talents can feel such things. Is he—”

“Talented? Oh hell yeah,” Sylvie said.

“So we can assume he’s right, and the boy’s gone down.” Val set her earrings to swinging again, stilled them. Noting the nerves, Sylvie was prepared for the hesitation in Val’s words, the softness of her tone. “You know he’s dead, right?”

Quick shock touched her back and cheeks with an internal chill, and a denial so strong she didn’t think it was hers; some bastard leftover of Dunne’s touch or influence. She fisted her hands. “He could—”

“You said weeks. Weeks in an oubliette. No food, no water, no air. An oubliette’s a coffin, Sylvie, for sorcerers who are too impatient to wait for their victims to die.”

“It makes no sense,” Sylvie snapped. “If he’s dead, and the spell’s supposed to be gone, why isn’t it? I think they plan to retrieve him.”

“It’s a one-way deal,” Val said. “You can’t just reach in and pull things out.”

“You can’t. What about the Maudits?”

Val paused in her automatic rebuttal, the idea that they could do something she couldn’t, and actually thought about it. “I—maybe. The original sorcerer could undo the spell, pick it apart layer by layer. That might reverse the effect.” She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. The time problem still stands. The most that anyone could retrieve is a corpse.”

“That might not matter to Dunne,” Sylvie said, thinking aloud. Dunne seemed confident he could restore the dead to life, given proper jurisdiction, and surely Brandon Wolf, his lover, belonged to him.

“You have the worst clients,” Val said. “First the gun, and now—”

“I didn’t mean that,” Sylvie said. She wished she hadn’t said anything, but wasn’t that an endless source of regret? Her mouth, her best weapon, even against herself.

Val drummed pale, painted nails, waiting. Sylvie sucked in a breath and forced a subject change. “So, if he’s been grabbed, what’s your explanation for the spell still chugging away?”

Question and answer, Sylvie thought, watching Val’s expression shift from peeved to contemplative. Val’s weakness: She couldn’t resist the urge to lecture, to describe the ways of the world to all those less intelligent, less aware. Most of the time that tendency drove Sylvie to eye rolling and backchat. Sylvie hated not being in the know as much as she hated being the object of condescension. But the tendency to lecture was also the reason that Sylvie, who thought all magic-users should be labeled: warning, contents unstable under pressure, could trust Val.

“It’s just too sloppy,” Val said. “Even if someone wanted to try to open the oubliette again—which doesn’t make sense—the spell just doesn’t look right.” She dragged Sylvie closer, gesturing with her free hand toward the first looping coil. “Look at this. That Greek there? It’s the signifier—the identity card, the thing that kept this station from becoming a Bermuda Triangle. But it’s not Wolf’s name. It just says Love, and that’s damn broad.”

“Or it says a lot about how they saw him. No one in his own right, just an appendage to Dunne. Their weapon against him.” Sylvie frowned, liking this less and less. How in hell a onetime mundane cop had made such serious occult enemies . . . ?

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? A onetime mundane cop now bearing a god-quantity of stolen power. That had to make enemies. It sure as hell didn’t make the kind of friends you could trust at your back. Maybe it wasn’t that they wanted anything at all from Dunne. Maybe they just wanted to make him hurt, and Brandon was the tool at hand.

Just another innocent in the line of fire.

“It’s still careless,” Val said. “It’s too open-ended. There’s a physical descriptor here, which would narrow it down some.” Val traced an elegant series of squiggles in the air. “Red hair, hazel eyes; sound like your boy?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said.

“Then you’ve got some bad news for your client,” Val said. “And I’m done.” She began tucking her tools away, pausing to look up at Sylvie. “If he wants the body, I want no part of it. I don’t deal in necromancy.”

“You think I do? Thanks, Val,” Sylvie snapped. “Maybe all I meant was that there’d be closure for him if there was a body found. You’ve been hanging around bad magic too long. There are other things to do with a corpse than fuck it or use it for spellcraft.”

“Uh-huh,” Val said, “And maybe that’s all bullshit.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said. “He’s not dead, according to Dunne. Weren’t you the one saying that Talents could feel these things?”

“Even Talents can fall into wishful thinking,” Val said as she snapped her case shut. “A normal man could not survive—”

“Not all that sure he’s normal,” Sylvie said. Proximity to the Magicus Mundi changed things, changed people. Brandon Wolf lived with a god.

Val raised an eyebrow, tapped the spell circle with her foot. “Human. That’s in the descriptor, too. You like to rub facts in people’s faces. Here’s one for you. Wolf is de—” A sound penetrated the bubble Val had sealed them in, the click-clack of impatient high heels.

“The hell?” Val said, attention diverted, face shifting from anger to wariness. “Someone’s at the spell edge.”

“Guess I’m not the only one who’s a hard sell,” Sylvie said, though her gut was churning. Silly to think she could recognize the quick steps up above. There was only one set of them anyway. Didn’t they run as a pack? Of course, the other two hadn’t worn high heels when she’d seen them that morning; they had moved soundlessly.

Val licked her lips as if they’d gone suddenly dry. The cobweb spell wavered; a place at the entrance showed the air rippling like a curtain stroked from behind. Sound increased; the previously silenced noise from the streets slipped downward, complaints that the station was out of order, passing vehicles, sirens in the distance. Then, two distinct voices came clear, not caught by the spell, but pushing through it. Sylvie stiffened.

Never deny the gut instinct, she thought.

“He didn’t say to wait—”

“He didn’t say not to—”

“Stop arguing.”

The first two voices were regrettably familiar, the rasping, hungry contralto and the poison-sweet tones: the leather-clad Alekta and the punk one. The third voice, sounding surprisingly normal, if weary, had to be Magdala.

Alekta’s heels clicked on the concrete, distinct bursts of sound that made Sylvie want to find a hiding place and disappear. Beside her, Val muttered frantically, trying to reinforce the spell or trying to dismantle it before it blew apart—Sylvie couldn’t tell.

The Furies took the choice from her, pushing through the wavering shield as if it were nothing more than the cobweb it had come from. Val yelped, her hands flying to her head.

“Sylvie,” the punk sister said, and skipped down the stairs toward her, pleated skirt flaring. “Were you hiding?”

“I’m working,” Sylvie said. “And, hey! Don’t step on the evidence, okay?” To her surprise, the Fury stopped in her approach, blinking down at the spell circle.

“What’s that?” Alekta said. She slunk alongside her sister to split her glare evenly between Sylvie and the circle.

“Oubliette,” Sylvie said. “Swallowed Bran. I was—”

“Kevin,” Magdala said, “come here.” She never raised her voice. “Your PI found something.” Sylvie bristled at the surprise in the girl’s voice.

“Sylvie,” Val whispered, face pale, hands trembling where they clutched her bag. “What are they?”

“Client’s pets,” Sylvie said. Magdala shot her a disgusted glare that had real menace in it. Sylvie put a hand to her back, touching the gun, but their attention had turned again, their gazes all shifting to a point about mid-stairs.

Beside her, Val shuddered; Sylvie heard the faint jangle of her jewelry complain with her movement, but kept her eyes on the man who had appeared without any fanfare.

Since she’d seen Dunne that morning, she had accepted that he was a god, that he had power to spare, that his whims were physical laws the world wanted to obey; she’d forgotten how much like an ordinary man he looked. How tired. How scared.

He came down the stairs, hope flickering in his worried eyes. “You found something?” His voice was rough and quiet.

“Spell circle,” Sylvie said, her own voice uneven, thinking of Val’s conviction that Bran was dead, of the sisters waiting to see this scene play out.

Dunne reached the intersection of spell edge and stair and paused. “This it?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie said. He stepped into the curve of spell, and it went wild.

The swirling greens and blues rose as if they were the water they resembled, winding around him like a whirlpool. Cold winds blew through the station; Sylvie’s ears popped and ached under the pressure.

Over the roar of the not-water, she could hear the Furies shouting. Through wind-stung eyes, she saw Dunne at the heart of a cyclone, and had time for a frantic thought that she was going to lose her client, and was that good or bad, when the spell collapsed in a rush of heat and a sound like tearing metal.

In the lingering silence, Val’s whimpers became gasping breaths. The spell circle gleamed and cracked, its paint flaking and drifting upward into brightly hued mist and dispersing, leaving only faint hints of its presence behind.

Dead spell, Sylvie thought. Very dead. If the Maudits intended to trap Dunne with it, they’d failed. But if they hadn’t—why had it opened at his feet?

“Oh God,” Val gasped, and surged to her feet. “Oh—God—” Her eyes wide with shock and horror, she darted for the entrance.

It took two steps before the Furies were on her, slamming her up against the stained concrete walls. “Witch, why do you run?”

“Stop it!” Sylvie yelled. She grabbed the nearest sister, trying hard not to think about what she was doing, just reached out and grabbed, getting a handful of warmed leather, and yanking her away. Alekta hissed, tongue narrow, black, and pointed, her teeth going sharp.

“Get away from her,” Sylvie said, putting herself between Val and Alekta.

The preppie sister growled, and Sylvie’s gun was out before she had thought about it, out and unwavering in Magdala’s face, Sylvie’s arm braced on Val’s trembling shoulder. Sylvie got a wild-eyed view of the punk sister leaning back against the wall—laughing?

“Dunne, call them off.”

“A trap,” Dunne said, and now Sylvie had no problems seeing him as inhuman. There was an utter blankness to his eyes, warning that no humanity was at home.

“Val didn’t do it,” Sylvie said, talking fast, hoping to break past that alien barrier to the man beneath. “Val’s my research witch. You know, like an informant? She identified the spell. Hell, she was going to tell me more about it, maybe how to undo it, except someone had to lose his almighty temper and blow up the only piece of evidence we had. Guess being a god doesn’t rule out being an idiot.”

Something touched the barrel of her gun, and Sylvie’s gaze flickered back to Magdala, who was, eww, licking her gun, with an avidity out of place with her prim and proper wardrobe.

“Won’t kill me,” she said.

“Maybe not, but I bet there’d be splatter. Get your button-down all splotchy,” Sylvie warned. “Dunne?”

“Magdala,” he said, “Alekta. Erinya. Stop.” The words seemed to be dragged out of his throat, as if it were an effort to remember how to talk. An effort to act human.

Sylvie shivered, remembering him saying that it was hard to be less than he was.

Val ducked beneath Sylvie’s arm the minute Magdala relaxed, and headed for the street, yanking herself to a walk after a first rapid step that brought the sisters’ attention right back to her. Running was definitely a no-no around those three.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Sylvie said, holstering her gun and setting out after Val. She collected Val’s bag on the way.

She caught up with Val halfway down the block, her pale clothes a beacon in the evening light. “Val—”

Val swung round on her, and Sylvie ducked, waiting for the glimmer of spell casting, that telltale flicker between Val’s fingers. Instead, Val dropped her hand to her side.

“We’re through,” Val said, voice quivering. “I owe you nothing after this. A fucking god, Sylvie. You exposed me to a god.” She snatched her bag from Sylvie’s fingers, hurled it into the street, watched one car swerve around it, and a second drive over it with a soft thud-crunch.

Still the drama queen.

“You done? ’Cause I still have some questions, including why the hell that oubliette tried to eat Dunne. I thought you said it was keyed to Bran?” Sylvie asked. She didn’t have time for Val’s histrionics. Her only lead was gone, and Dunne—she rather thought he was on the ragged edge. Val’s dramatic fits could find a better time to come out and play. Luckily, they were usually short in duration.

Val’s breath rasped in her throat. “Get another witch.”

Usually. Sylvie wondered if this time Val was covering fear with temper. She softened her tone.

“Val, I know you’re scared, but I need you, need your talents,” Sylvie said. “Please.”

Val closed her eyes, her face a pallid, shocky oval in the dark. Her lips trembled. “You don’t have a clue. Do you know what happens to a witch when a god goes off? It’s like being hurled headfirst into a nuclear reactor. I’m burned, Sylvie. Burned to bits. Find another witch. I’m not one anymore.” She wrapped her arms tightly about herself, shuddering.

Sylvie let the shock of it wash over her, felt the rising sickness of guilt trying to claw into her belly. Maybe this wasn’t just another of Val’s melodramatic starts, a sneaky way to get out of a task she didn’t want to do. “Val—”

“What?” Val said. She saw a cab up the street and gestured. Sylvie saw her moment dwindling, while behind her Dunne and the sisters waited. She imagined Alekta’s heels tapping impatiently in the subway and the world suffering tiny seizures at each impact.

“You could still help,” Sylvie said. “You can’t use the magic, but you can still help me—”

“Like I’d want to,” Val snapped, and it sparked Sylvie’s quick temper in response.

“Fine. Don’t help. Then give me the name of a witch who will.”

“You’re cold,” Val whispered.

“No, I’m on the edge of disaster,” Sylvie said. “My only real lead just went up in colored smoke, and while it was pretty, it doesn’t make me happy. You’re hurt, you’re scared, you’re going to split, fine. I can’t blame you. If I could, I’d join you. I can’t. You said it yourself. Dunne’s gone nuclear, and there’s only me between him and a really big flash.”

Val’s face was streaked and blotched with tears, all her cool poise stripped bare. A memory jolt fed Sylvie, the image of Val on a sixth-grade playground, sobbing, while Sylvie fisted her hands and rounded on the class bully who had made her cry.

“I’m sorry, Val. I wouldn’t have called you if I’d known.”

“Yes, you would have,” Val said. The cab drew to the curb, and Val nodded at the driver, darted into the street to retrieve her misshapen briefcase, and climbed inside.

Sylvie put her hand on the cabbie’s door, a wait-a-minute. “Val—” she said. “Your abilities are really truly gone? Don’t abilities grow back, sometimes?”

“You think I’m making it up?”

“You did a lot of lying, in school.”

“This is a little different than avoiding essays. Fuck off, Sylvie.” Val scrawled a phone number on the spell fax and thrust it out the window at Sylvie. “Here’s your new witch. Anna D. A local power. Arrogant as hell. You deserve each other.”

The cab merged into traffic and disappeared, becoming one of many. Behind her, a faint shriek rose, as someone attempted to go down the station’s stairs and ran right into a nightmare, emerged again, shaking and breathless. Sylvie’s paralysis broke as the man ran by. She would apologize later. At the moment, there was simply too much at stake to worry about the damage already done.

Sylvie turned her back on the streets, and rejoined the monsters waiting below.