Sins & Shadows

12 Ni Dieux, Ni Maîtres

THE CLUB WAS HIDDEN ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY, IN THE no-man’s-land where the airport gave way to near-empty space. NDNM was a small, freestanding building sandwiched between a gas station and a run-down strip mall on the top of a weedy slope. At this late hour, just past 1:00 a.m., the only lights came from the neon above the gas station, the flickering yellow light of the late-night noodle shop, and the blue glow seeping through NDNM’s narrow, mirrored windows. They reminded Sylvie of gun slits, and her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

She drove past the building once, trying to get a feel for the club’s layout. Front door, narrow windows, back door, no windows, delivery door. A basic box. In the passenger seat, Erinya grumbled. “Scaredy-cat.”

“Reconnaissance is never a bad idea,” Sylvie said. “Some of us are not immortal.”

Erinya sank back against the fake leopard-print seat cover and sulked into silence, picking at a stiff stain in the ratty plush. Sylvie eyed the stain, then decided not to overthink it. They’d needed a car to get to the club; Erinya had gotten one, and made no mention of what its owner had thought about the appropriation of the vehicle.

There was no reason for Erinya to have killed for it; in Chicago, old cars were as common as concrete. Besides, that stain didn’t look like blood. At least, not a lot like blood.

Sylvie drew into the lot, counting cars by row, six here, ten there, two dozen there, trying to estimate how many people might be within. She parked at the edge of the lot and paused, a little at a loss. Erinya had started the car for her; it lacked its key, and she didn’t think the Fury had done anything as real-world as cross wires to jump-start it. Sylvie finally got out of the car with a shrug, the motor still running.

She touched the gun at her back for reassurance and headed toward the door, Erinya trotting eagerly at her heels.

The front door opened, and a young couple came out into the night air on a wave of cigarette smoke, dressed with dark European flair, and speaking in rapid and colloquial French. They passed Sylvie, and the woman turned back to look, her lips twisting slightly.

Sylvie paused; she’d seen Val look at her like that a thousand times. She didn’t pass muster. Sylvie glanced at her reflection in the mirrored windows and groaned.

“Give me your jacket,” she said. Erinya peered over her shoulder, studying Sylvie’s reflection also, as if she could see what Sylvie was seeing more clearly that way.

It might be true, Sylvie thought. Erinya might see insides as opposed to outsides, a person’s soul, rather than the flesh cloaking it.

Sylvie’s grey T-shirt, thrown on that morning in anticipation of a day spent moving boxes, was ready for the ragman. Small dark spots freckled the collar; leftover droplets of blood had washed down from her face and hair, and the fabric was fraying beneath the stains.

Sylvie prodded a dark spot with a fingernail, and the cotton popped beneath her touch with the nasty sensation of a blister giving way. Sorcerer’s blood, she thought. Some type of lingering power gnawing away at his killer. Good thing she’d gotten the blood off her skin.

Erinya handed her jacket over without objection. Black leather, heavily laden with zippers, and with a tattered Union Jack on its reverse. Not Sylvie’s style, but better than nothing. She slipped one arm in and shivered. It felt weirdly alive, vibrating to that strange, nonhuman frequency that surrounded Dunne and the sisters. She hesitated.

“Don’t be such a wuss. It’s just clothes,” Erinya said. She stuck out her tongue. “Bran bought it last time he was in London. A present for being such a good girl.” She stepped closer and stroked the scarred leather, her face as wistful as a born predator’s could get. The entire jacket shivered toward her, like a pet yearning toward its owner. Sylvie jerked away.

Gods and power. She finally understood, in a visceral way, what Dunne was fighting, his worries about the trails he left, the power he shed the way humans dropped skin cells and hair. Erinya’s jacket radiated the same kind of weight a spell did and could probably serve as a tiny little battery for those who were magically talented.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled it on the rest of the way, shuddering as the gun purred against it. The dark spots on her T-shirt bleached white and slowly dissolved in vaporous wisps. “Wonderful,” Sylvie muttered, zipping the jacket closed. She took a last look in the mirror, straightened her hair, checked that the gun was sufficiently hidden, leaving no revelatory bulge beneath the heavy leather hem. Good enough.

She tugged one-half of the double doors open, finding it surprisingly heavy, and Erinya flowed through into the dimness beyond and disappeared. Sylvie followed, slowing immediately and blinking in the low light.

The room was long, running the length of the storefront, but too shallow to be all there was. The light confounded her, being not only dim, but moving, flashing, alive with shadows. Muttered words reached her ears, a garble that she took for foreign before catching a word here and there, and understanding that it was several people speaking at once, not in conversation but in monologues. The light flickered again, blue-white, off to either side of her, and Sylvie’s eyes adjusted.

Television screens. The light that had seeped through the windows, the flickering that teased her eyes now was the familiar glow of television in a dark room. On either side of her, the televisions were stacked in columns ringed by chairs. The screens shifted at different speeds, showing multiple channels. To her left, the seats were mostly full, young men and women leaning forward or lounging back, watching the screens with varying shades of attention. To her right, the seats were mostly empty. Sylvie leaned right, turned her head, caught a brief snatch of words—one television broadcasting into a lull on the others.

“. . . each according to need is the standard we should strive to . . .”

“Tear it all down! The world without authority cannot be worse than the world we have now.” An agitated orator from the left found an echo in a viewer. A man whose stubble gleamed in the reflected light spat the words back at the screen with the fervor of a fanatic. “Tear it all down.” His hands clenched on his knees.

Sylvie, scenting trouble, listened harder and got a trace of a passionate voice tinnily exhorting through muffled speakers: “The government doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t serve me. It serves itself, and forces us to serve it, at the expense of individualization. I say better by far to have no government at all—”

“Ten dollars,” a gruff voice spoke, startling her. She hadn’t seen him approach at all, which amazed her, given his size.

“Ten dollars,” he repeated. “No looky-loos. You want to stay, you pay.” She eyed the stretched-out T-shirt across his broad chest, the palm as big as a dinner plate extended before her, and looked up, then up some more.

Gentle giant? she thought. Let’s not find out. She fumbled through her pockets and pulled out two crumpled fives. “That cover my friend also?” She gestured toward Erinya, now crouched before the lowermost screen, watching the movement within, like a cat fascinated by a fish tank. No one seemed to object that she was blocking the view. It didn’t require any sensitivity to the Magicus Mundi to see that Erinya was best left unprovoked. Even her human-shaped shell suggested that she was the kind of girl who might knock you down in a mosh pit, then kick you in the head if you complained. Kick back, and she’d grab a bottle and brain you.

The giant doorman looked at Erinya for a moment, thoughtful; as she felt his eyes on her, she turned and stared back. “Her? Twenty dollars for the trouble she’s gonna make.”

Sylvie forked over a twenty. He folded his hand around her arm and stamped her inner wrist with a crimson A in a circle. In the dim light, with those jagged lines, it looked more like a botched suicide than anything else.

“C’mere, girly,” the bouncer said, gesturing to Erinya.

Erinya’s eyes were full of “me?” Sylvie watched Erinya’s nose wrinkle in distaste, then watched her expression slide toward baffled offense once Sylvie nodded, confirming that yes, the bouncer did in fact mean the Fury.

Erinya surged to her feet, feral even in the low light, muscles shifting under her fishnet shirt. Her eyes sparked like phosphorus, gleaming white, then green. “I don’t want a stamp.”

He shrugged. “Then you can’t go in.”

Prudently, Sylvie distanced herself. The bouncer was on his own. After all, either his soul, conscience, memories—whatever it was that the Furies tested—was clean or not. If it was clean, then Erinya’s hands were supposedly tied by her own nature. Soiled—Sylvie had had enough of jostling with the Furies.

Sylvie slipped past the giant, into the cubicle he had appeared from, and opened the door hidden in its depths. A hallway greeted her, a mural on either side of her. Oil painting, living colors, not what she expected at all, not after the grimy tech of the anteroom. NDNM grew more interesting by the moment.

The mural on her left was of a naked giant, handing a blazing box to a group of men huddled before caves. In the gold-shot sky, vultures circled a mountain peak. Sylvie leaned closer. There were words mixed in with the blaze of light, created purely by paint layered deeper in sections than others, words made out of shape rather than color. Sylvie touched it, tracing the elaborate curls—something about fire and gifts and gods and freedom.

The door at the far end of the hall opened on a wave of sound, and Sylvie stepped aside for a sweaty, chattering group of clubbers.

She looked to the other side. Eden, the temptation of Eve, instantly recognizable. Eve lingered in a smothering verdant world of tangled vines and roots and dangling branches laden with overripe fruit. It made Sylvie claustrophobic looking at it.

Beside Eve, the serpent waited, silvery in the dark earth; its tail coiled about a tiny sapling with one delicate fruit gracing its branches. Only then did Sylvie see Eve’s hand outstretched beneath it, fingers straining against the pressing vines, pushing back the intrusive greenery, reaching for the tiny fruit that shone like starlight. Eden as a prison. Serpent as savior.

Sylvie spotted one more tiny piece of brightness in the mural, near the floor, and bent to look at it. A wolf in profile, standing on a pair of crossed arrows, the whole thing small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. Wolf, she thought. She touched the arrow shaft, and felt more of the tricky bas-relief painting. Tiny letters fought her fingertips, fought deciphering, insisted on being merely texture, but she persisted and found an r, an o.

A signature. Brandon Wolf. He’d been here, working among his enemies. No wonder the Maudit had condescended to work in a club.

Wolf’s abduction looked worse and worse all the time. The oubliette argued planning, but this type of planning was another level up. This was the careful infiltration that swamped its victim in lies and betrayal.

The inner door opened again, and a young man in a staff tee came through, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. “It’s not that scary, you know,” he said, grinning at whatever expression had frozen on her face. “You’ll like it in there.”

He sauntered on by and headed outside. Sylvie opened the inner door, stepped into the club proper, and was numbed by sudden sensation. She shifted to the side, put her back to the wall and rode the moment out.

After the silent hallway, the club seemed a riot of sensory overload. Alcohol scenting the air, iced drinks chiming against glass, the pounding drive of the rock music—My Chemical Romance, Sylvie identified absently, Alex’s current favorite—dozens of people talking, breathing, dancing, moving, and the chaotic visuals of a room divided into sections, not by walls, but chain curtains and raised or lowered floors: All of it made her pause to catch her breath.

Slowly, more details kicked in: The bar was situated to her left, running the length of a cracked, mirrored wall. Men and women leaned on the bar in small groups, talking and gesturing. Directly before her, two steps down led to a dance floor that wound its way through raised sections for seating.

She took the steps down to the floor, heading toward the bar, watching herself approach in the faceted glass, a tired woman with a troubled face. She looked past the weary lines in her skin and focused on the mirror itself. Though she had thought the glass cracked on first glance, now she saw the joins and seams, and realized that it was deliberately done. The pattern eluded her, and she traded that small mystery for that of the bartender, filling glass after glass with a hasty hand, though the club was far from full. A staff member in the NDNM black tee took a tray from the bartender and vanished toward a swinging door. Backroom meeting?

Sylvie pushed past a chain curtain and climbed the three steps to the bar. Once on the same level, the cracks in the glass made words, scratchy, sketchy words, but easily readable. Ni Dieux, Ni Maîtres. NDNM.

While Sylvie had only menu-literacy in French, that phrase she knew. No gods, no masters. The rallying call of anarchists, and a sentiment that Sylvie endorsed wholeheartedly. Most of the misery she’d seen came from people thinking they could tell others how to live or think. She smiled, thinking if she weren’t here for work, this might be a nice place to play.

The bartender barely glanced up, still tapping drinks that were 90 percent foam, tattoos shifting on his forearms, and Sylvie nodded. New carbonation. Mystery solved.

“Be right with you, Lily,” he said, raising his voice to compete with the music, the four-foot space between them, and the constant hiss of the tap.

Sylvie twitched, hearing her own name at first. Then she realized that the sibilance came from the tap, and he had mistaken her for one of the regulars.

His eyes slewed around—hunting black shirts, Sylvie decided, as he hailed one, a girl with frizzed-out hair. “Mickey, come dump these for me.”

The girl sighed but grabbed the tray. “Where’s JK?”

“On break.”

“I thought Auguste—”

“He didn’t come in,” the bartender said, “It happens.” The cool was put on, Sylvie could tell. He was ticked and refusing to show it, refusing to let the girl show it; she wondered why. Maybe Auguste was the owner’s golden boy. Auguste—Sylvie remembered the dark tee the Maudit had been wearing, before she blew a hole in it. Auguste, she thought, might not come in ever again.

“He’s such a shit,” Mickey said. The bartender twitched a shoulder toward Sylvie. The movement had a distinct “shut up, teacher’s watching,” feel about it.

“Vent all you want. I don’t care,” Sylvie said, inserting herself into the conversation. She took a few steps closer, hooked a stool, and sat, putting her between the bartender and a raised table with three young women. They paused in their debate over the merits of a pair of star-shaped sunglasses to stare at her. One of the women caught Sylvie’s expression and stuck her tongue out before snatching the glasses and resting them in her curly hair.

The bartender looked over at Sylvie, startled. “I’m sorry. I thought you were . . . Never mind, can I get you something?”

Mickey took the opportunity to vanish, leaving the laden tray behind.

“Regular Coke,” Sylvie said, “no additions.” The sugar and caffeine would do her energy level a world of good. She sucked half of it down all at once, then turned to look around, pretending she hadn’t scoped the place already.

Her order caused a furrow to start in his pierced brow, a wariness in his expression. “You gonna want anything else?”

“Another Coke, for sure,” Sylvie said. “Maybe a little info. I’m looking for a friend of Auguste’s.” Go with the gamble. Really, in a club this size, how many staffers with French names could suddenly not show up for work?

“Cop,” the curly-haired woman said, with a dismissive sniff and hair toss. The glasses in her hair caught the light and sparked. “Pay up.” She held out a hand to her table mates, a Paris Hilton wannabe and a sulky brunette, and they forked over dollar bills.

The bartender shook his head. “Sorry. Drinks I can help you with. Anything else, try the Internet.”

“Hold that thought,” Sylvie said. “Do I really look like a cop?” She split her glance between the table and the bartender.

The woman who’d declared her a cop spoke up. “You look nosy, and that’s just as bad. People deserve their privacy. No matter what the government would have you believe.” She tossed her head again, a flash of dark glass in her hair. Sylvie imagined her doing it one time too many and breaking her own neck.

“Some people forfeit it through their actions,” Sylvie said. She took another long sip of her Coke, crunched ice. They wanted to argue; she could do that.

“Typical authority viewpoint,” the woman said.

“You don’t like it, don’t eavesdrop,” Sylvie said. “I’ll just chat with the bartender instead. He’s paid to serve, after all.”

The bartender’s lips tightened.

“Kinda ironic, considering the slogan at your back. But there’s always going to be someone like you, just trying to make a living, working under someone else. I’m not trying to hurt you, or anyone like you. I’m looking for one of the alpha types, someone who uses people like you. A woman, a friend of Auguste’s.”

“Auguste doesn’t have friends.” The bartender walked down the bar to an emptied glass and waved hand, but had to come back for the refill. He refused to meet Sylvie’s eyes.

“Don’t you tell her anything,” the woman said, with another aggressive nod. “Next thing you know, she’ll be demanding names and making threats. Her kind always does.”

“Look, chickie,” Sylvie said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you about the golden rule? If you don’t have anything useful to say, butt out.” From the corner of her eye, she saw the bartender slipping away again.

“Watch yourself,” the girl said. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” She raised a hand and wispy flames began to sprout from her palm. Paris and Sulky shared take-that smiles with each other.

Sylvie swallowed a piece of ice wrong, then laughed until she was breathless.

“Oh God,” she gasped. “The only way fancy fire-starting could scare me, after the day I’ve had, is if you lit a cigarette with it. Secondhand smoke’s a killer.” She dropped away from the bar and pulled up a seat at the table, unasked. Paris and Sulky screeched their seats aside. “But, hey, if you can do that, you have to know Auguste, right? Two magic-users and all that.”

Though magic-user was a stretch—what the girl had shown her was akin to a toddler getting to its feet. All show, prone to collapsing at a single touch. The Maudit had undoubtedly scorned her, not only an amateur, but a female. That didn’t mean, though, that the girl had no interest in Auguste.

The flame wavered in the girl’s hand, and Sylvie said, “Do I need to spell it out? I’m not impressed. Put it out before I put it out for you.” Sylvie slapped the table, and all three girls jumped; the flame went out as if Sylvie had snuffed it. “Thanks,” Sylvie said. “All friends now?”

“Why don’t you just wait and talk to him?” the Paris wannabe said. Sylvie bit back a grimace. Like that was possible.

“I’m impatient,” Sylvie said. “It’s a character flaw.”

The chain curtains parted with a slithering clink just as one song drew to a close on the speakers. In the hush, the squeaks from the girls at the table rang out. Erinya stalked toward Sylvie with murder in her eye.

“Got stamped?” Sylvie asked, catching sight of a reddish smear on Erinya’s inner wrist. Guess the bouncer was a righteous man, after all.

Erinya growled. Nothing human at all in the sound, deeper than a human throat could even voice. Sylvie flipped the Fury her wallet. “Guess that means you can drink. If you’re so inclined. Then you can come chat with our new friends.”

Erinya growled, human this time, complete with a “fuck you,” but turned toward the bar. In the mirror, her reflection swirled, as if it wanted to reveal the monster beneath the skin.

The pyrokinetic girl leaned forward, capturing Sylvie’s attention, and said, “Auguste has a wand up his ass, but he’s tough enough to take you down.”

“Unlikely,” Sylvie said. “But Auguste isn’t my interest. I want the name of his friend. You know—the only woman he listens to.” Present tense, she thought, keep it present tense. No need for them to remember that you spoke of him as dead when he turns up missing.

Pyro hesitated; her friends’ eyes rested on her, and Sylvie said, “Don’t balk now.”

“Lily,” the Paris wannabe said. “What? Like you wouldn’t have told her?” Pyro humphed in exasperation, and Paris ignored her. “Lily. That’s all I know. She comes around here a lot. She’s a bitch. Kinda like you, actually.”

“She here tonight?” Sylvie asked. She ignored the girl’s insult. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before. “Answers, anyone?”

“Haven’t seen her tonight,” Pyro said. “She doesn’t come every night.”

“Describe her for me.” Sylvie’s tension leaked through; Erinya was suddenly at her side, crouched, staring at the girls with predatory intent. Sylvie touched Erinya’s mesh sleeve, a request for self-restraint. The fabric shivered beneath her fingers, and Sylvie took her hand away, nerves tingling as if a current had passed through them.

“Ordinary,” Pyro said, and Sylvie’s heart sank. Ordinary. That was not a hopeful word; a woman who could manipulate a sorcerer, who could plan and execute a kidnapping beneath the nose of a god, was hardly ordinary.

“You might be hot stuff, Helen, but you’re blind as a bat. Lily’s creepy as sin,” Sulky said, speaking for the first time. She turned to Sylvie. “I mean, yeah, she looks normal, unlike your freak-friend there . . .” The girl’s voice trailed off as Erinya’s eyes turned to meet hers. A faint whimper came out of her throat; her muscles locked up, her hands clenched each other beneath the table.

Flames burst from Helen’s palms; Sylvie caught Helen’s wrists before she could interfere. Helen’s bones and tendons trembled under Sylvie’s tight-knuckled grasp. Fire licked at Sylvie’s skin, dry heat promising pain as it stretched and grew even closer.

One flamelet touched the leather of Erinya’s jacket and turned a virulent green, stretching tall under the sudden influx of god-touched leather, coiling back toward Helen like a serpent.

“Erinya’s just taking a look-see, that’s all. You interfere, and there’ll be trouble. More trouble than any of us wants.”

“I can’t stop it,” Helen said, eyes wide on the flames encircling her fingers.

“You can. You will,” Sylvie said, implacable. “Or you’ll burn. Take control or lose it. It’s your choice. But if you combust, don’t expect me to put you out.”

Helen shivered, but the flames began to die back as she pulled in her fingers, one by one. Sylvie relaxed her hold, and when Helen’s flame had become puddles of ash in her hands, she said, “Now, tell me what you consider ordinary.”

Beside her, Sulky began to drool. Paris sat frozen, head down, shoulders shaking.

Helen said, “Dark hair, brown eyes. Ordinary. Not too tall. Not a lot of anything. Wears designer clothes. That’s all I know.”

Sylvie studied the marks of distress in her face, blotchy cheeks, quivering lips, the blisters rising in her palms. “You should learn to be more observant of the world around you. Save you no end of trouble in the long run. You done yet, Eri? ’Cause her mind’s going to pop any moment now, and that’ll be messy.”

The Fury turned to look at her. “Eri?” she questioned, offense hovering in her voice.

“You wanted a name that wasn’t a thing,” Sylvie said, watching Sulky collapse now that eye contact was broken. Helen and Paris grabbed her shoulders and dragged her toward the door.

Sylvie watched them go, sighing. Ordinary. In a creepy way. Not exactly enough to build an APB on. “You get anything useful?”

“Alekta’s better at mind-tracking,” Erinya muttered.

“That’s not a yes,” Sylvie said. “You climbed inside that girl’s soul, scared her into catatonia, and I didn’t stop you. Tell me you got a scent.”

“I got it,” Erinya snapped. “Mostly. She smells a little like every human. Even you smell like her.”

Sylvie groaned. “So no bloodhound act. Did you get enough to recognize her if we run into her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s something,” Sylvie said. She picked up her Coke, gone tepid and flat from nearness to the flames, and gulped the rest of it. Her mouth was dry. “Any visual?”

“Ordinary,” Erinya said.

Erinya headed toward the door with the determined stalk of a lioness. Sylvie squawked and went after her. She took three running steps and snagged Erinya’s wrist, heart thumping. No way was she letting Erinya out to hunt, not with a flawed scent that smelled like general humanity.

Under her hands, Erinya’s skin shifted and stung. Sylvie forced herself to hold on. It never seemed to get easier, touching one of the gods. She wondered how Bran had stood it and stayed sane.

“No, no, no, Eri,” Sylvie said. She leaned her weight back, trying to stop Erinya, and having as little success as if she were trying to hold back a bull. Erinya’s mass seemed far more than her human shape allowed.

Sylvie gritted her teeth and dug her nails into Erinya’s skin, jolted at the increase in sensation. Erinya stopped; her lips peeled back from her teeth, but she paused.

“Let’s not go haring off into the dark. We know she’s been here before. Maybe she’ll be back to check on—”

Maybe, Sylvie decided, was the wrong word to use. The Fury batted her away with a single hand, slamming her backward. Sylvie’s spine impacted painfully with the edge of a table; a chair screeched across the floor.

“I’ll find her if I have to wade through the blood of every human in the world.” The sweet-voiced, slangy punk was gone; in Erinya’s voice, in her eyes, all that showed was rage. Sylvie lost the battle with her self-control. Her skin burst into goose bumps, giving way to a convulsive shudder.

The Fury’s pupils swelled, feeling Sylvie’s fear. She leaned closer, nearly nose to nose with Sylvie, and said, “Will you dare stop me? When you know so many humans deserve the pain I visit on them?”

Sylvie sucked in a shaking breath, trying for calm, and losing. She gave up trying to control her body and focused only on meeting Erinya’s glare head-on, watching as the engorged pupils slowly turned phosphorescent. She counted her own heartbeat in the tiny sparks of crimson that danced in the Fury’s sclera, in the small scales that began to dot the false delicacy of her temple and eyelids.

“Get off me, or I will make you comprehend mortality.” It wasn’t her voice, not really. That dark inner core had stepped to the front, spewing its determination not to be beaten.

Erinya barked a laugh. “How?”

Sylvie smiled, letting the expression spread across her face, displacing fear. “You said yourself, your shells can die. I’m good at killing things.”

Erinya frowned, her gaze clouding; Sylvie felt the intrusion in her mind, a brief kaleidoscope of bloody imagery. Cassavetes, Hellhound, sorcerers, succubi, an angel with buckshot wings . . . Her greatest hits, replayed. Sylvie pushed Erinya out of her mind, put her hands on Erinya’s shoulders, and shoved.

Erinya stepped back; Sylvie ignored the sensation that sparks leaped between her fingers, crackled against her hands. She pressed harder. Erinya staggered, and Sylvie advanced.

“I think. You help. Isn’t that what Dunne sent you to do? To act as I tell you? We stay here. Lily might, yes might, come back. Even if she doesn’t, we can get a better description of her. A definitive one. Then you can hunt to your heart’s content. In the meantime, stay.”

Sylvie spun on her heel and strode into the crowd, past the few dancers who had stopped to stare at Erinya and herself.

Sylvie fetched up near the stage before the shaking found her again. She leaned up against its support, her legs trembling and her throat dry.

A drink drifted into her vision, held toward her in a nicotine-stained hand. “Coke, right? On the house.” Sylvie shot him a glance, identifying him as the staff member she had seen in the hallway, heading for a smoke break. Sylvie took the glass, her hands so chilled that, for a moment, the cold sweat on the glass felt warm.

She held the glass, loving the heavy tangibility of the crystal, something natural, something normal, something that didn’t fizz and burn like a god’s power. She shifted uncomfortably as the leather jacket buzzed against her neck and back.

“You lied, you know,” Sylvie said. “This place is plenty scary.”

“Ah, you brought the scary with you,” he said, as easy and casual as he had been in the hallway. “JK.”

“Sylvie,” she said. She eyed the Coke, contemplating the addition of more caffeine to a nervous system jazzed with adrenaline.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Promise. I owe you one.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie said. She took a sip; sweetness exploded on her tongue and reminded her how parched fear made her throat. She took a larger draught and set the glass down on the stage.

“Well, you and your scary friend chased off my ex and her psycho Barbie accessory pack. Helen thinks it’s funny to come here every night and make me serve her. I,” he said, a scowl crossing his good-natured face, “don’t.”

“She’s a bitch,” Sylvie agreed.

“I’ve got better taste now,” JK said. He hopped up and took a seat on the edge of the stage, swinging lanky legs.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You want to prove it by giving me your phone number?”

Sylvie finagled a card out of her jeans pocket, held it before him. “If you answer a couple of questions first.”

“Shoot,” he said. “I give good answers. You should see me with parents. I can even make them overlook the tats.” He presented his arm to her; the words Live Your Own Way blazed around the forearm.

Sylvie traced the final flare of the y, curling around his wrist. “My parents didn’t object to my ink.”

“Can I see it?” he said. “Is it someplace . . . interesting?”

Sylvie smiled, luring him in. It didn’t hurt that he was cute as all get-out. For the second time, she thought this club had a lot to recommend it.

“Tell me about Lily,” she said.

He blinked. “I was thinking it was going to be fave food, music, STDs.”

She handed him the card, tapped the front of it. “I’m working.”

“Working. Like a cop?”

“Not like a cop,” Sylvie said, smoothly but quickly. Something had to have drawn him to Helen in the first place; she didn’t want it to be a shared aversion to authority.

“PI?”

“Inquiry agent,” Sylvie corrected. “See, Shadows Inquiries.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?” he said. Laughter lurked in his eyes, daring her to answer truthfully.

“PI,” she said. “But without rules.”

“Cool,” he said. “Didn’t figure you for a ‘draws within the lines’ kind of woman. So, Lily?”

Sylvie said, “Anything you can tell me.”

“Lily,” he said, picking up her glass, stroking the condensation off it, and letting the drips fall from his fingertips. “Sweet Lily . . . though she isn’t.”

Sylvie made a go-on gesture.

“Lily—don’t know if that’s her real name. Doesn’t fit her much. Toil not, neither does she spin—well, I don’t know what she does for kicks, but she’s just not the idle sort.

“She’s got money. Rumor has it, she has a share in the club. But I think her real job’s in art somehow. She found the artist for the murals here. You might check galleries if you’re hunting her. It wouldn’t surprise me to find she owned one, ran one, patronized one.”

Sylvie sighed. “That’s specific,” she said. “She might be named Lily, or not. She’s got money, or access to it. She likes art—”

“Some art,” JK interrupted. “Do not get her started on traditional religious iconography. That woman can seriously hate.”

“And she might own, work in, or hang out at one of the hundreds of galleries in and around Chicago,” Sylvie finished.

“She travels, too,” JK said.

Sylvie threw her hands up, giving him the reaction he was teasing for, but she didn’t find it funny at all. JK, while being helpful, had told her nothing immediately useful. Some of that leaked into her voice despite her efforts. Inside her head, a clock kept a countdown, and she felt like it was heading fast to single digits. Part of it was Erinya; the Fury stalked the bar, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged animal.

“Look, JK, it’s really important that I find her. Anyone else who might know more?”

“You might ask Wolf,” JK said. “She hung out with him a lot.”

Shock hit Sylvie. Of course Lily had hung out with Brandon. What better way to learn about your victim than to befriend him?

“Eye candy, I thought, when she first brought him in. Thought it’d be awful. Some no-talent hack with a line of bull and a pretty face, but turned out he could really paint. And she backed off some once his boyfriend showed up.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie asked, and if JK thought her accepting the shift in focus was strange, he didn’t say so. Truth was, Sylvie felt safer not saying Lily’s name aloud. There could be more scrying-glass televisions, charmed to a mention of Lily’s name. Sylvie shivered at the weight of unseen eyes on her skin, reminded herself that paranoia was a dangerous friend.

If Lily had seen her kill Auguste, or was watching Sylvie question her acquaintances, surely she would have already acted on it.

“Big guy. Quiet. Older. Dropped him off once or twice; I bet just to prove Wolf was taken.” JK fidgeted, dragged out his cigarettes, tapped one out, stuck it in his mouth.

“So, what did Wolf think about her?”

JK lipped his cigarette as if it were lit, then let it drop into his lap. He chased it, studied it, avoiding her eyes.

“What?” Sylvie said. “You can’t tell me you didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I saw those murals. He was here for a month, minimum. And you were around enough to see Lily and him together.”

“That doesn’t mean I talked to him,” JK said, picking up her Coke, melting ice and all, and taking a drink as if his throat hurt.

“JK, you always talk,” Sylvie said. “I’ve only known you for minutes, and strangely, I’m sure of that.”

“Look,” he said. His voice dropped; his cheeks reddened. “I don’t have anything against fags, I really don’t, it’s just that I couldn’t—”

“Talk to one?” Sylvie finished in irritation.

“Couldn’t deal with the fact that I wanted him, okay?” he snapped, then blushed again. “God. I watched him, you know, more entertaining than mopping up last night’s stale beer. He just—there was just something. His hands were covered in paint, green, blue, gold, and I saw him forget, push his hair out of his way. He got paint on his face, in his hair, and he looked so surprised. Like he couldn’t figure out how it got there, and then he just laughed. I wanted him so bad. . . . I stayed the hell away from him.”

Sylvie let the silence lie while JK picked up the cigarette, and with a furtive glance at the bar, lit it.

“So,” Sylvie said, “confession being good for the soul and all that, you feel better?”

“If by better, you mean mortified, sure,” JK said, stubbing out the cigarette after two quick, deep puffs. He put it out on her business card. “I just—I don’t swing that way. It freaked me out. So, really, I don’t have a clue what he thought about Lily. I mean, she disappeared after his boyfriend came in, so maybe Wolf was annoyed with her hanging around and asked him to discourage her. I didn’t see much of her after that.”

He wouldn’t, Sylvie thought. If Lily had gone after Bran to punish Dunne, she had to have some connection with Dunne, maybe even a history—though in that case, Sylvie would have expected Dunne to put her at the top of the suspect list. He didn’t seem to have anyone there at all. Or maybe he hadn’t shared.

“Look, I’m glad to talk to you. Mostly,” he said, with a wry twist to his mouth for his confession. “But the person you really need to talk to is Auguste or Wolf. I can give you Auguste’s address.”

“Thanks,” Sylvie said. “Would you do one thing for me?”

“Maybe,” he said. A little wary now.

“Call me if you see her.”

He hesitated; Sylvie stifled familiar exasperation. Always the sudden withdrawal. Talking was okay, just gossip, ultimately harmless. People could always reassure themselves that they weren’t the only ones who would talk, finding both anonymity and absolution in the thought. But calling her? That brought them right into the picture, and worse, lobbed a bit of the responsibility directly their way. No one wanted that.

“Call me,” Sylvie said, laying out a new card beside the scorched one.

A massive crunch cut the air, followed by a patter of falling glass. Sylvie whirled. Erinya crouched on the bar top, the bartender back against the mirrored wall, at the center of a new starburst of cracks.

Erinya reached for him, hefting his weight with inhuman ease. Along her back, muscles shifted and spikes snagged and stretched out Erinya’s mesh shirt like a porcupine-quill coat.

“Shit,” Sylvie swore, taking off at a run.

“Erinya,” Sylvie snapped, even as the bartender’s face went slack with terror. “Stop it!”

Erinya backhanded her, hitting her jaw with stunning force. Sylvie went down to the taste of rust, seeing stars. She crouched on the floor and shook long bangs out of her face.

Get up, the voice told her. Make her pay.

Sylvie drew the gun; a man near her yelped in surprise, and Sylvie whirled. JK gaped at her.

“Back off,” she growled. Without waiting to see that he did, she jammed the gun barrel into Erinya’s rib cage, snugging it in amidst the wide-spaced mesh of her shirt, nestling it into quills that pricked at her skin, and said, “Let him down.”

“He wants her dead. . . . Wants to kill his mother—for her house . . .”

“Wanting isn’t doing,” Sylvie said. “One more warning, Erinya.”

“Fuck you,” Erinya said. “I’m doing my job—”

“You’re interfering with mine.” Sylvie fired, once, twice, and again.

Blood splashed her hands, more rust scent in the air, beginning to compete with the sting of shattered glass and high-proof alcohol. Erinya stiffened; then she lashed out, one-handed again. Sylvie managed to duck, warned by the tiny adjustment of muscles along Erinya’s neck. Erinya’s nails tore strands of her hair from her temple with a distinct and delicate sting.

The knit mesh of Erinya’s shirt shifted to scale and covered the burned and cored flesh, the bloody gouges that the bullets had torn.

“You dare shoot a god?” Erinya said, shoving the bartender away. He dropped and scuttled for the front door. Erinya hissed, and he froze. “Not done with you yet, matricide.”

Sylvie grinned, her own temper shining as bright and as sharp as diamond. “I’ve been stupid. I started to believe, to see gods everywhere. Dunne may be what he claims to be, but you—you and your sisters are no gods. You’re nothing more than shaped power. Like angels. Like demons. I can destroy you.” She raised the gun again, peered through her bangs, her narrowed vision like a gunsight.

“It might take some careful doing, I admit.”

The screaming behind her was beginning to get on her nerves. Sylvie wondered how many shots she had in the gun now that it had been magicked. Would it make its own? Enough to take down the Fury? Enough to shut up the shrieking crowd?

What the hell are you thinking? For once it wasn’t the dark voice that crawled out of her mind, but her own. She shuddered all over, cold, sick, and utterly horrified. She fed all the fear into rage, her specialty, and the talent that kept her alive.

Erinya leaped, and Sylvie fired. Three more shots, all into Erinya’s torso. Erinya tumbled forward, somersaulting, and came up in a crouch. She hissed, a snakelike tongue lashing out from between sharpening teeth. Her wounds healed.

Sylvie, trying to assess the next move, met Erinya’s furious eyes and fell into them. Her head pounded, sweat slicked her face, her neck, and her vision exploded into a thousand images.

Her gun, and the people who fell beneath it. Strangers. Enemies. Allies. Innocents. Michael Demalion. Val. Alex. Even her sister Zoe. Sylvie stood in a world turned abattoir and laughed as she made her will felt; when there was no one left, she turned the gun toward the heavens.

Not real. Not going to happen. Try again. The dark voice spat it directly into Erinya’s mind, refusing the madness, refusing to be influenced by something external.

The hallucinations fled. Erinya knelt before her, looking for all the world like a pup who’d been unexpectedly smacked. “Get up,” Sylvie said, sheathing the gun. “Put your face back on.”

Erinya rose to two feet, shook all her little monster bits—teeth, clawed hands, snaky tongue—into human shape once more. “I owe you pain.”

“Collect it later, if you can,” Sylvie said. “We’ve made ourselves unwelcome. Let’s go.”

She turned and froze, looking out over the club attendees—why hadn’t they fled? They looked ready to bolt at a whispered “boo,” and yet they still stood, shaking and watching. Her eyes flickered to the entrance and widened.

A woman stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, entirely at her ease. She wasn’t much to look at, not quite as tall as Sylvie, judging by the space she took up in the door frame, on the whipcord side of slender, with hair a shade darker than Sylvie’s, sleeked into a twist, held up with what looked like chopsticks. She straightened once she had Sylvie’s attention and met her eyes.

“You,” she said, her voice pitched low and very clear, almost familiar. “You are an interesting girl. Pity.”

She was blocking the door, Sylvie realized abruptly. One rather ordinary woman holding a frightened mob of people at bay with only her presence. Lily reached up and fiddled with her hair, a nervous tell that spoke nothing of nervousness. Sylvie’s eyes narrowed.

Erinya snarled and disappeared, reappearing across the room, claws arcing out before her.

Lily tugged a chopstick free, and snapped the stick between her fingers; a brittle crack that created a group moan from the nerve-shattered crowd.

“Brûlez,” she cried, and Erinya, a bare scale width away from sinking her talons into Lily’s flesh, tumbled backward on a wave of scalding white light. The bartender went up like flash paper, flesh wicking the heat and raising a curtain of white flame.

Sylvie was already covering her stinging eyes. Dear God, no. Not this. She had thought Erinya’s monster act had filled the room with terror, but that was nothing compared to this. The screams now were of pure, primal dread, as vision led to flame led to spontaneous combustion.

Sylvie pressed her hands tighter, screwed her eyes shut harder, still getting bleed-through, like flashbulbs all around her, strobing through the vulnerable skin of her eyelids. She felt feverish, on the edge of burning.

A hard hand gripped her hair; Sylvie forced herself to keep her vision blocked instead of fighting back. The only defense against balefire was not to look. It fed on flesh and spread by vision. It only burned out when there was no one left to see.

The hand tugged, claws scratching at her skin, and Sylvie gasped. Erinya had survived the blast. The Fury yanked, guiding her out of the club, while Sylvie stumbled and choked on the stink of scorched bone and charred meat.

“Don’t look,” Erinya said.

“Won’t,” Sylvie said. “Don’t you look, either.”

“Won’t,” Erinya responded in kind. “No eyes right now.”

A trickle of fresh air reached her, and Sylvie picked up her pace, staggering over the asphalt of the parking lot and going down when Erinya released her.

She felt cold metal at her back, the smell of car oil, and a tire pushed up against her shoulder. She cracked an eye open, looking toward the ground just in case. The first hint of balefire, and she’d gouge out her eyes rather than turn herself into a firework.

Reassuring darkness soothed her nerves, the cracked yellow border of the parking spot barely visible. Sylvie opened both eyes and raised them toward the warmth before her.

No eyes, she thought, staring at Erinya’s blind, blank face, only a smooth expanse of skin above the nose and mouth. Shape-shifting was a handy thing, she mused, and giggled a little wildly.

“Did you get her scent this time?” she asked, voice cracking.

“I got balefire in my face,” Erinya said. “I’m scent-blind until I’m healed.”

“Anyone else get out?” Sylvie said.

“No.”

Sylvie pulled her knees up to her chest, rested her face on them. JK. Gone, just like that. The Magicus Mundi had a lot to answer for. She steadied her breathing and tried to listen to the night beyond her racing heartbeat. No fire alarm. Unsurprising since balefire had no interest in anything beyond flesh, but that was to the good. A fireman coming in too soon could catch it and pass the conflagration on.

“Don’t shift your eyes back yet,” Sylvie said. “I want that stick she was holding.”

“Get it yourself. It’s not like it’s useful.”

Sylvie leaned forward and tightened her hand on the Fury’s shoulder. “That had to have been Lily, the big winner in our suspect lottery. I assumed she couldn’t do magic. ’Cause she used Auguste as her hands. But balefire . . .

“I don’t know how she did it. The best clue to finding out is that stick. I want it. I need to know what resources she has.”

“Enough power to kill everyone just to get to you,” Erinya said.

“No,” Sylvie denied. “She killed everyone to destroy her memory scent. I think she’s been watching us. And she came armed with something that could put off a Fury, Erinya. You were her target. I was a surprise. An interesting one.”