Sins & Shadows

11 Women on the Hunt

SYLVIE KEPT A CAREFUL EYE ON THE APARTMENT HALLWAY WHILE THE Fury put her hand to the latch. It opened without fuss or fanfare. “Slick,” Sylvie said.

Erinya smiled, a wild-toothed expression that made Sylvie shiver even as she responded in kind. She and the Fury were getting along entirely too well. Really, what did that say about her—that these days she was more at ease working with a stone killer than talking to Alex? Sylvie slipped through the door behind the Fury and latched it.

A quick rush of controlled light ran along the door and frame, tracing an esoteric pattern burned into the wood. “You didn’t tell me there was a spell on the door.”

“It didn’t matter,” the girl said, sticking her tongue out at the voided spell. “No door can bar me.”

“You and the Grim Reaper,” Sylvie said. “Just goes to prove no good comes from unexpected guests.”

“Don’t compare us,” Erinya said. “He uses tools. I use my hands. . . .” She flashed said hands in Sylvie’s face, hands gone scaled and black, twisted from a human’s five-fingered grip, to something more birdlike, something reptilian.

“Oh, and that makes all the difference,” Sylvie said. “ ’Cause one is so much more dead than the other.”

“It is if we eat the soul,” Erinya said, licking her lips with a snake’s tongue.

Sylvie refused to flinch at either claws or tongue. Erinya had been testing her nerve all the way to the sorcerer’s apartment, leaping at her suddenly, shifting shape halfway, then grinning around a toothed beak.

Sylvie figured she was as safe at the moment as she would ever be from the Furies. Not only had Dunne sent Erinya to aid her, a clear sign of his intent, the Furies themselves wanted her to succeed. Erinya’s rage at the Maudit’s body had proved that.

Still, she shouldn’t get cocky—their tempers were as bad as hers, and she had just killed a man she had meant to question.

Sylvie paused in the apartment’s tiny entryway and took puzzled stock while Erinya prowled the room. The interior matched the exterior of the building; on the small side, a little run-down.

The Maudits were usually big on pomp and panoply, preferring five-star-hotel suites and the best of everything, no matter the splash it made. This apartment, with its tangled clutter of dropped clothing, of candle ends and piled DVDs, of Salvation Army furniture and velvet blackout curtains, looked more like a D&D geek’s idea of a sorcerer’s lair, minus only a tattered copy of the Necronomicon.

Of course, unlike a D&D geek, the resident really did have magical abilities, and the books lying casually on the coffee table, between half-empty soda cans, incense sticks, mortars and pestles, were honest-to-god-or-the-devil grimoires. The kinds too often made from human skin or written in blood. Sylvie tucked her hands into her jeans pockets and wandered inward, noting the TV screen and its hissing snow.

“Any other spells lying around?” Sylvie asked. “ ’Cause I’m so not in the mood to go up in smoke. Or be turned into a toad.”

“That’d be bad,” Erinya said. “I’d eat you up if you were a toad.”

Erinya’s gaze was predatory, just that little bit sharper than a moment before, and fixed on her. Upping the bluff? “Back off, I’m not a toad, yet,” Sylvie said. “Besides, if I were a toad, I’m sure I’d be poisonous. . . .” The girl’s gaze didn’t falter. Sylvie stuffed her nervousness behind a quick scowl.

“You’re all over blood,” Erinya said. “Didn’t see it so much outside, in the dark.”

“I’ll wash up,” Sylvie said, her mouth dry.

“You don’t have to. I like it.”

“I’ll wash up,” Sylvie repeated. There was a small kitchenette in sight, and she aimed herself at it, pushing past Erinya when the Fury didn’t get out of her way. The brief contact made her shudder, a reflexive reaction to touching flesh that had only a cursory resemblance to human; it was like reaching out to touch a fallen branch and finding the lively suppleness of a snake.

She leaned over the kitchen sink, splashing her hands clean, using enough of the Maudit’s soap that her hands were slimy instead of lathered and took forever to rinse, giving her an excuse to linger.

Don’t forget what she is. She hunts killers. She destroys them down to their souls. The only thing keeping you safe is Dunne’s need.

Sylvie couldn’t argue with any of that, but she also couldn’t deny the sense of camaraderie that had risen between them.

Part of it, she knew, was Erinya’s situation. Once out of the reach of the sullen sisters, out of Dunne’s brooding misery, the Fury had proved to be both chatty and profane, spewing bile that struck chords deep within Sylvie. Erinya, the afterthought sister, created only because three could corner prey better than two. For the worst offenders, the ones who deserved more than simple death, the Furies worked as a team. Two to flank their prey and one up ahead to devour the soul.

“I didn’t even get a name,” Erinya had said, vaulting over a mailbox in the sidewalk, kicking it on her gymnastic way down and knocking it over with a shuddering clang and a burst of broken concrete. “We’re the Erinyes. I’m a thing, not an individual. Alekta got a name. Not a mind, though. She’s all orders and rank, kowtowing to them all. Magdala plays their games, nipping and nudging them into listening to what she wants. We’re gods, too, but fuck if they act like it. We’re just the punishers. And if we forget our place—” Erinya shook her head; black wings shook around her and disappeared. “It’s like a prison, Olympus. I was glad, glad”—she tilted her head back to shout at the dark sky above—“glad when Kevin took our reins from Hera.”

Sylvie stifled the urge to ask how—it couldn’t matter. “What can they do to you? You’re gods.”

Erinya paused in midstride and snarled. “You don’t know anything.”

“So tell me,” Sylvie said, watching the girl’s shape shift, pushing her into a canine crouch.

Fangs sprouted, a muzzle shifted to a beak, and still the words were clear, as if they bypassed such things as vocal cords or physical structure. “We’re not bodied. We’re just power. We make bodies, build immortal dolls strong enough to contain our Selves. The big gods, they break those doll-shells if we anger them. It’s—unpleasant. If we can’t put our shells back together fast enough, we disperse and die. And if we get help—well, better to have no help at all than be altered at their whims. Once, I had a name. Once I was Tisiphone. Now, I’m just one of a type. We’re all vulnerable when we’re just power. Hera learned the hard way. Zeus broke her shell at the wrong moment; now she’s nearly the weakest of us all.”

“The wrong moment,” Sylvie echoed. She knew it involved Dunne somehow. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. A man could become a god if he stole a god’s power. Could he steal it by accident?

Hera got weak; Hera had owned the Furies. Dunne got strong; Dunne took the Furies’ leashes in hand. Cause and effect. Obvious. But how had he done it? How could a man contain such stolen power and not be consumed by it? She’d seen sorcerers burn up tapping too much magic from another human. What would it feel like to be mortal and tap into a god?

Beside her, Erinya shifted full out, losing all human shape, embodying a creature that Sylvie had never seen before and never wanted to see again. A hooked beak full of teeth, a mane that writhed and tangled along an outstretched neck, eyes that ran bloody tears. Sylvie looked away so fast her neck spasmed. Furies drove men mad. She bet it was after they’d revealed themselves, or given what Erinya had just said, what they saw as themselves.

“Put the scary away, huh?” she said. She stared up at the night sky, stars occluded by streetlights streaming upward. “No need for panic in the streets.”

“There’s no one to watch,” Erinya said.

“There’s me,” Sylvie said. “Don’t want me to go all hysterical on you, do you?” She made her voice light, as if the possibility were laughable; she wondered if her scent would give the game away. She heard the god stretching, the rasp of feathers and fur giving way to the more normal sounds of fabric and metal.

“So you took the out that Dunne provided and came to earth,” Sylvie said. “You live in the mortal realm.”

Erinya nodded. “With Dunne. With Bran. We watch over him, when Dunne can’t.” She stopped dead, hands fisting at her side. “We were hunting when Bran was trapped. It shouldn’t have happened. We were hunting mortals. All four of us, when Dunne alone could have done it. It’s our fault. We shouldn’t have trusted that Bran was safe.”

Sylvie raised a brow. She wasn’t going to try patting the girl on the shoulder, or even mumbling a “there, there,” no matter how mournful she sounded. Sylvie valued her skin too highly for that. Besides, the dark voice chimed in, they had been fools to think Dunne could escape the other gods by running to earth. Someone had to pay for the theft. Brandon Wolf was vulnerable.

In the apartment kitchen, rubbing the last suds from between her fingers, Sylvie paused in her memory. Maybe that was it—the connection Erinya and she had: They both knew what it was like to have innocents hurt while under their protection.

She scrubbed her hand across her face, wiping a few stealthy tears from her lashes. Her hands came away red-tinged, and she shuddered, wildly.

God, more of it? She bent back to the sink, cupped water in her hands, and splashed her face, the stickiness at her neck, the crusting tangle in the hair by her left ear. The water pattered down, rust colored. She did it again until her shirt was sopped and clammy around the collar, and only the steel sink showed through the water drops.

No paper towels to hand, she spotted a worn shirt, crumpled on the Formica counter, and she used it to blot her hair and neck, soak up any lingering blood that might have evaded the water. Black, she thought, so good for hiding stains. It wasn’t like the Maudit was in any position to object, and the cotton was soft, even if it smelled of sulfur and smoke. A slogan on the shirt scratched her skin and put an end to her grooming.

Habit made her drape the shirt neatly over the back of the single kitchen chair to dry. In Miami, everything mildewed given half a chance. The apartment refrigerator was going to be bad enough by the time the landlord realized that the sorcerer wasn’t coming back, why add mold to his or her problem?

Absently, she read the broken, charcoal-colored letters, NDNM, wondering philosophy, rock band, or other.

Erinya was a series of soft scuffles in the other room, and Sylvie rejoined her. “Anything?” Sylvie asked.

“It all smells like magic,” the Fury complained, frustration evident in her voice, and in the scales sliding along her skin. Sylvie was amazed that Erinya could even pass as human the way she shuffled guises. Either the stress was getting to her, eroding her self-control, or—scary thought—Erinya felt as peculiarly comfortable in the strange duo they formed as Sylvie did.

Erinya walked into the small bedroom, yanked the first drawer out of the dresser, ripping the cheap laminate, and dumped the contents to the floor. She rooted around in the mass of clothes with her foot.

“All right then,” Sylvie said. “You check out the bedroom.” Since you’re going to do it anyway, she thought. Sylvie watched the Fury yank another drawer out, and sighed before turning to more organized searching.

The dead Maudit had had a partner, a woman, but she didn’t live here. One chair in the kitchen. One pillow on the bed. One dirty plate at the edge of the futon was still half-full of cooling chow mein. Sylvie’s stomach roiled. When was the last time she’d eaten? Ten, twelve hours ago? That cruller in the bakery.

She picked up the plate, unwilling to look at it, more unwilling to admit the urge to tuck into it. Hell, she’d eaten out of garbage cans more than once, back in the bad times. A sorcerer’s recent leftovers didn’t look too bad, and she liked chow mein. Still, eating your victim’s last meal—Sylvie thought psychologists might find that deeply symptomatic of some regrettable pathology. She set the plate down on the TV, felt a tingly zip and zing in her fingers like the quick dance of current, and jumped back, thinking, Spell!

Two breaths later, she let out a slow sigh and forced herself to relax. Just faulty wiring. She leaned over to check and stared at the plug lying next to the baseboard, six inches or more from the outlet. The TV hissed quietly.

Sylvie backed up to take another look at the screen. Snow. Bad reception. Amazing reception, actually, considering the lack of electricity to the set. But what had he been watching?

She squinted, seeing blurry shapes behind the static, dark, light, a long rush of steady movement that struck a chord of memory. She absently reached up for a nonexistent rabbit ear, then yanked her hand back at the tingle. Duh, Sylvie. Magic. Still, when in doubt. Gingerly, she reached out and thumped the side of the set, prepared this time for the little nonshock sensation. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen.

For a bare second, the screen grew clear, the signal noise twitched and lifted. Sylvie got a fast glimpse of the scene, and recognized it. Why wouldn’t she? She’d been there. The screen was an “I spy” scrying spell keyed to the El station and the oubliette. Sylvie bet that the screen had been nice and clear before Dunne made things go boom.

Sylvie glanced at the noodles again, and grinned. Bet the Maudit had nearly choked when he spied, with his own little eye, Dunne making oubliette hash. No wonder he’d come running.

She turned her attention to the spooky stuff—the mess of chalks and candles, parchments and books—on the coffee table. She fished out that day’s Tribune, folded open to the comics, then the various soda cans, grimacing as some of them sloshed and splashed. Slob, she judged, but sat down before the low table and the space she’d cleared.

Sitting down was a mistake. Weariness swept over her, turning the cheap futon at her back into near-impossible-to-resist comfort. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

Erinya broke a lamp in the bedroom, and Sylvie jerked awake. “Later,” she said. “Finish this case, and I can either sleep for a week, or I’ll be dead.” Her body didn’t want to listen. She raised herself to her feet and hit the kitchenette again. Eating a dead man’s food was wrong somehow; fine, she could accept that, but surely the taboo didn’t extend to his caffeine. She draped herself over the fridge door and selected a Mountain Dew. Good for that little jolt. Crap for taste. She drank it anyway, gulping it on the way back to the living room and dropping the empty on the floor. One more wouldn’t matter.

As for fingerprints, well, it wasn’t like his body was ever going to be found, no criminal investigation spurred by the bullet wound and broken bones. He might be listed as missing after some time, but even if someone reported his absence, the odds were good that he’d simply be presumed another feckless young man, drifting out of town. Safest murder she’d ever committed. Sylvie shuddered a little. It shouldn’t have been so easy. It should disturb her more than it did.

She began sorting papers. A lot of them had scraps and sections of the oubliette spell written on them, different colors, different tilts to the Greek.

These were his practice runs, she thought, touching a shaky rendering of the Greek letters that read “love,” and spelled nothing but pain for Brandon Wolf. Another sheet revealed row after row of paint stripes, some rough, some globbed, some runny. Getting the medium just right. Nothing was uglier than a spell going all to hell because the paint dripped and obscured a vital symbol.

Sylvie leaned against the futon again, twisting herself and curling into it, resting her head for just one more moment. Her unfocused gaze picked up something shining on the floor near the end of the table. She reached out and collected it. A pendant on a long, heavy chain, meant to disappear beneath clothing. The pendant slithered down the chain, snagging at the clasp. Sylvie raised it closer, frowning. She’d seen that half bat wing before in South Beach, back when she and Val had thought the Maudits might be allies instead of enemies.

It was an apprentice’s badge.

“A goddamned apprentice,” Sylvie said. In the other room, Erinya stirred. “A talented runaway with something to prove.” Easy prey for the first charismatic leader to come along with a grand plan and an eye for talent. Even if that leader was a woman. Of course, Sylvie wasn’t any closer to finding out who the woman was, but she was beginning to get a tentative feel for her. A woman who used the Maudit instead of being used by them. Sylvie could admire that.

Another piece of paper, sorted through, revealed not the stiff formal writing of the trained Maudits, but a new hand. Stark, confident, elegant, in a language Sylvie recognized but couldn’t read; the bastard mix of Latin and archaic French that filled the Maudits grimoires. So his lady boss knew his language in more ways than one. But if she had helped him compose the oubliette spell—why bother with him at all?

The simplest answer was, like so many of those who hired sorcerers, the lady lacked talent herself. Strange, though, to find that kind of detailed knowledge in a non-Talent. What kind of person went to the effort to learn something she could never use herself?

She sifted through papers faster, looking for that strange, elegant handwriting, and found only one more scrap. A single sentence in English that could be construed as threat, support, or reminder, depending on their relationship.

“You know I’ll be watching.”

Sylvie wasn’t sure which one it had been to the Maudit, but to her it meant nothing but threat. If she truly was watching the Maudit, then she had seen Sylvie kill him. While Sylvie hadn’t felt the creepy certainty that came of being the object of unwanted attention, that lack didn’t rule out less mundane means of watching.

Sylvie glanced again at the snowy TV and grimaced. The odds were good she had blundered into two “I spys” tonight, the Maudit’s station spell and one focused on him. The fact that there had been no attempted intervention in her brief struggle with the Maudit argued for remote viewing.

The question was, had the Maudit’s death woken the woman to outrage?

Ripping fabric in the bedroom caught her attention. Erinya lay sprawled on the bed, tearing a T-shirt into thirds with her teeth and talons. When she felt Sylvie’s eyes on her, Erinya re-formed her muzzle to human lips, and muttered, “I’m bored. I liked you better earlier.”

Covered in blood, gun drawn, with a dead man at her feet. Sylvie thought a scathing reply but was halted by recognition of the shirt—the one she’d used in the kitchen.

It made her skin crawl; she crossed the room in two adrenaline-filled strides and yanked it from Erinya’s talons. No way in hell was Erinya going to be tasting her sweat along with the sorcerer’s blood. That kind of thing could lead to a friendly fire she didn’t even want to consider. But the shirt felt different in her hands; the cloth stiffer, newer, thicker, even dampened with Erinya’s saliva.

Sylvie shook it out. NDNM, the shirt said. A newer twin to the one in the kitchen. Sylvie threw it back to Erinya, who shrugged and dropped it. Sylvie went down on her knees, rooting through the mess Erinya had made, pulling black cloth free from jeans, from colored tees and khakis, from the finger-nipping bits of broken lamp bulb.

Two of the same shirts, Sylvie thought, almost meant something. One shirt was nothing, a freebie, a promo, an impulse buy or gift. Sylvie dug up another matching shirt, tossed it toward Erinya, and found one more. Further excavations revealed a fifth, inside out and tangled with dirty socks.

Sylvie sat back on her haunches and grinned, looking at the charcoal script stretched between her fingers. NDNM, and beneath it, in nearly invisible, black-on-black script, a local address. NDNM was a place.

While one shirt meant nothing . . . five shirts . . . five shirts meant their sorcerer had worked there. A workplace meant coworkers who might very well know the Maudit’s lady-boss. If she were really lucky, lady-boss was also his real-world employer, and she’d find her new guide to Bran’s recovery at NDNM. Of course, there was the chance that the woman was waiting for her, ready to retaliate for the death of her lackey.

Sylvie knee-walked through the clutter, winced as a shard of glass bit through her jeans, and ignored the small pain in favor of reaching for the bedside table. Phone book? Yes. She dived into it and found a number. She dialed, got a blast of music and raised voices before a man said, “NDNM.”

Sylvie disconnected. Only one type of place had that kind of background noise, and would still be open at this late hour. She grinned. Eager to get moving, Erinya crawled over the bed and, in a half crouch, stared down at her.

Sylvie rose, exhaustion pushed back. “C’mon, Erinya, we’re going clubbing.”