Sins & Shadows

17 Back to the Basics

BACK OUTSIDE, SYLVIE PACED THE PARKING LOT, KICKING AT LOOSE landscaping gravel and bark chips. Her entire brain felt locked up, grinding between aggravation, fear, and yes—she’d cop to it, even if only in her own head—a little, treacherous pleasure when she thought of Demalion.

Still, the frustration, the thought that she should be doing something, anything, rolled pleasure under and drowned it as effortlessly as a riptide. To go through that interview and come out no further ahead was infuriating. So much so that she considered going back upstairs and taking it out on Anna D rather than the landscaping, but a faint glimmer of sense held her back. Anna D, sphinx, had teeth, and Sylvie still ached from fighting with Erinya.

As if on cue, all of her sundry pains sat up and cried for attention. From one breath to the next, Sylvie went from furious avenger to whimpering mortal. She staggered to the front steps and settled herself as gingerly as an old woman. Damn, she really thought at least one of her ribs was cracked.

What now? It was something to know who had snagged Bran and why, the confirmation of her theory that Lily was after Dunne’s power. Ultimately, that information did her little practical good.

Eventually, Lilith would have to deal with Dunne, if she wanted to trade Bran for power, though how she expected to accomplish that was a mystery Sylvie couldn’t even begin to grasp. Unless, Sylvie shuddered, there wasn’t going to be a trade, or even the lure of one. Maybe Bran was as good as dead. Maybe Dunne, weakened by grief and guilt, would make easy prey for a clever and willful immortal.

Sylvie wished she could think otherwise, but it seemed plausible. It wasn’t like Lilith had any scruples about killing innocents. A nightclub turned crematorium proved that.

Sylvie had two real options as she saw it. Recover Bran herself or force Lilith to do it for her. Neither prospect pleased. Sylvie was no witch, had estranged the only one she trusted, and if a god couldn’t force Lilith to obey Him, what chances did Sylvie have?

Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them back. Weakness wouldn’t accomplish anything. She needed a goal, even a little one.

Her cell phone chirped, a reminder that she had a message. She tugged it out of her pocket, frowning. Witch. She gestured rudely at the glass above and flipped the phone open. Three calls missed in the last hour. Maddening, since she hadn’t shut it off. Guess Val wasn’t the only witch to weave leave-me-alones into her house.

Sylvie tucked the phone up to her ear and listened. Alex had called first, and Sylvie flashed to the vision Anna D had shown her of Alex throwing down the phone.

Alex’s voice tried for casual and failed. “You know how you said the satanists weren’t magic? I think they got some real power. The bell went off, Syl. That curse went active. Call me! Tell me where to go. Val turned me down for sanctuary—you must really have hacked her off this time, Syl. Good riddance, anyway. She makes me nervous, and her mansion—bleah.” Alex’s panic faded under her familiar ranting about Val Cassavetes.

Sylvie grinned even through her worry. Yeah, a onetime juvenile delinquent, Alex never did make happies with the conspicuously consumptive. Still, Val had some nerve. It was one thing to turn on Sylvie, another to risk an innocent—where were her morals now?

“Look for me tonight,” a woman said in the next message. Sylvie blinked. That was it? The voice wasn’t familiar, and the number was blocked. Sylvie shrugged and went on.

Alex again, and more stressed. “I’m getting out of here. Hitting the hotels. Call me.”

Sylvie hit memory, called Alex, and got nothing but her voice mail. “Hotels sound good, Alex,” Sylvie said. “Stay tucked away. Stay safe. I hope you took my spare gun when you raided my closet. You know how to use it. Don’t hesitate.”

She swallowed hard. That wasn’t going to make Alex relax any in her theory that Sylvie killed people, but Alex alive and horrified was a fair price to pay for Alex’s safety.

She tucked the phone into the jacket and sighed. She really hadn’t planned this day well. Coming to see Anna D left her stranded, no cab fare, no transit, and she felt itchy, fidgety, needing to move.

“Where’s a hot-wiring Fury when you need her,” Sylvie said, and sighed again, worry shifting. Erinya had been sullen and silent after Lilith’s attack, slinking away as Sylvie approached Tish’s, which, in retrospect, made little sense. Erinya knew Tish, and if Tish were willing to take in a perfect stranger, surely she would have accepted the Fury.

Sylvie wondered if maybe Erinya wasn’t hurt more deeply than she’d let on. After all, Lilith had shown up soon after Sylvie had shot Erinya. Bullets followed up with balefire; even a Fury might hurt, and like an animal, might head for solitude to lick her wounds.

Pray, Dunne had said, and she would reach him. She wondered if transportation issues and a vague concern for one of his creatures was enough to rouse him from his troubles.

Approaching footsteps rounded the edge of the walk and faltered, probably at the sight of her. A dirty beggar at the gates of heaven. A conspicuous have-not at the doors of plenty. She’d be lucky if they didn’t call the cops Of course, then she’d have a ride out of here. If the cops responded at all. If they weren’t still absorbed in hunting Bran Wolf.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She raised her head, startled. “Demalion.” He didn’t sound angry, and Anna D’s words were echoing in her ear. Apparently, he liked her. She licked her lips. “Are you selling information to Lil—”

“No,” he said. “I’m not sure who is. It’s different addresses every time. Like someone who doesn’t belong is accessing any computer they can.” He settled beside her on the stairs, giving the cement a quick glance to make sure his pristine suit would stay that way.

“Don’t you all have passwords? Private terminals? Locked doors?”

“Temps, cleaning people, rookie agents, random politicians,” Demalion said. “You didn’t answer, though. What are you doing here?” he repeated.

“Suffering for all my sins,” she said.

“Those sins include thinking I’d sell government information to a psychopath?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Forgiven,” he said. “Go in peace, my child.” He sketched a cross over her head, and she found herself smiling.

“You like to make the priests cry, don’t you?” she said. “You were a bad altar boy. Drank the sacramental wine. Nibbled on the host when you got munchy.”

“What, and bring shame on my mother? She’s not much for religion but a big believer in manners. She lives here, you know,” he said. It was a quiet explanation for his presence and a polite demand for hers.

“I know,” she said. She watched his eyes darken. “She’s a right bitch.”

“After all you said about your family—you dragged mine into this?” He surged to his feet again, frustrated rage, and collapsed back against the stair railing. His mouth worked over things he couldn’t get out.

“Huh,” Sylvie said. “And rumor has it you don’t hate me half so much as I thought.”

“What did—”

“Give me a break. She was a source, Demalion, not a means for petty vengeance. I didn’t know who she was until she told me.”

“Hardly a source,” he said. “She scries a little. A talent that she indulges just so she can decorate with shiny crystals. Who gave you her name?”

“Val Cassavetes. Anna D, she said. A local power. Capital P. It’s way past time for someone to have a heart-to-heart with his mother.” She grabbed his pant leg and pulled him back down beside her.

“Cassavetes,” he said, tonelessly. He tugged the little crystal out of his pocket, rolling it, then stilled and stared down at it.

He knew Val, of course, knew her reputation, and right now, Sylvie thought, he was reassessing his own family history.

“Your family’s occult,” she said. “Deal with it.”

“Easy for you to say.” The crystal began its nervous migration over his fingers again.

“I just found out who my primogenitors are, and I’m not a happy camper, so don’t expect sympathy.” She stilled his hands with her own, enjoying the human warmth of them, nothing unearthly here, just human flesh and bone, no matter what his mother was. The crystals he carried, though, hinted otherwise. Maybe he had inherited some of Anna D’s talents. Or maybe he just found crystals comforting, having grown up surrounded by them. She didn’t have enough clues to guess. “What did Dunne do to you?”

“I thought you’d have figured it out by now,” he said.

“God, the attitude runs in the family,” she said. Then, as it crossed her mind, “Were you born with a tail?”

“What?”

“Ah, never mind,” she said. “Keep your secrets.”

“Dunne blinded me,” Demalion said. The crystal shifted, dropped to the cement with a tiny crack as he turned his hands to clasp hers.

“You see me,” she said. “You drove here.” Even while she contradicted him, she was tabulating. He had talked about a third team spying on Dunne, spies who would never watch them again, a team of two field agents and a clairvoyant.

“As long as I’m not within five miles of Dunne, Wolf, or the things he considers his, I’m fine. The minute I overstep—” He swallowed hard. “It takes longer each time to come back,” he said.

“Lovely,” she said. “Perfect fate for a spy.”

“I’m glad you admire his sense of irony. It makes it all so much easier to take.” He detached his hands from hers and stood.

“Hey, Demalion,” she said. “Where’re you going?”

“Didn’t you say I should have a talk with my mother?”

“Jesus, not today,” Sylvie said. “She’d slaughter me for sure.”

Demalion frowned but hesitated.

“So . . . I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier.” If she’d thought she could manage it, she would have tried for a winsome smile. But tiredness made it an impossible effort.

“What do you want?” he asked. Noncommittal, still looking toward the condominium, still ruffled by her amusement at Dunne’s justice.

“A ride,” she said. “Suburbia’s not my thing.”

“Where to?”

“Haven’t decided yet.”

“Your hotel?”

“Cash-flow problems. Stayed with Tish last night. Not an option tonight.”

“Fine,” he said, held out his hand. She let him pull her up, wincing as her ribs shifted.

“Doctor?” he asked.

“Some strapping might be nice,” she said. He slid an arm around her waist, and she let him, leaned her aching head on his shoulder. She wondered if his mother was watching from above, clawing at the walls. She tried not to smirk.

“You need to be more careful,” he said, as they made their way across the lot to his car.

“I’m always careful.”

“Yeah, in a way that would make a drunk stuntman blanch.”

She pulled away from him, climbed into the car. “Just shut up and drive,” she said, sinking into the passenger seat and sulking.

“It’s a good thing I like you,” he said.

“A very good thing,” she agreed. After all, she was in no shape for another fight. She closed her eyes for a minute, then said, “You want to upgrade that detente of ours to a truce?”

“Depends. You going to run out on me again?”

“No,” she said.

“Then very much,” he said. “Not only for our sakes. I think this mess may take both of us. I think I’ve followed your path. Brandon Wolf was kidnapped to get to Dunne’s power and immortality. And immortality’s a powerful lure.”

“Not for her,” Sylvie said. “She’s already immortal. Lilith, not Lily. The Lilith.” My blood kin . . . That part she left unsaid; truce or no, there were some things she just wouldn’t share with the ISI.

“Just the power, then,” he said.

“Just,” she agreed. “Don’t you think Lilith would make a nice addition to the pantheons? Spreading balefire with a thought instead of a borrowed spell?”

“What’s the plan?” he said.

Sylvie fidgeted. Trust Demalion to hit her weak spot. “See if we can find any other address for Lilith. See if Dunne will come check up on our progress. Maybe we can get him to hunt her.”

“That’s not much of a plan—”

“More ’n you have,” Sylvie snapped. “I might be stalled for a moment, but that’s ISI modus operandi.”

He glanced away from the road, frowning. “Truce?”

“Mea culpa, just frustrated,” Sylvie said. She shrank in her seat; they were just crossing back into the city proper, and the traffic was getting interesting. “Eyes on the road, blind man.”

“So we’re looking for her less likely hangouts, and continuing to watch the ones we know about,” Demalion said. “The ISI could put out a bulletin, get the cops in on it.”

“Most of the cops are either hunting Bran or dealing with the Magicus Mundi; the last thing they need is to be sent after a woman who throws balefire party favors around.” She wasn’t going to put people between herself and Lilith. She licked dry lips, said, “You know, you don’t have to help me.”

“I’m going to,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. Take that, Anna D. She’d tried. No one could say she hadn’t.

Demalion pulled the car to a stop, and she followed him into his apartment building, workaholically close to the ISI base. She bit back a comment, at least until he opened the door to the tiny apartment and revealed piles of labeled cardboard boxes that showed clear signs of being lived out of. She looked at him again, all crisp and clean in his charcoal grey suit, and said, “Good call on getting the suits out first. Not like you’ll ever want to eat on plates or anything.”

“Hey,” he said. “Hosting you, remember? Play nice.”

“If I were nice,” she said, “I’d offer to help unpack.” She sat on the couch, admiring his forethought in keeping it, at least, clear of the clutter.

“I’m pretty sure my heart would stop,” he said, dropping down at the other end of the couch with a woof of displaced air and dust.

“That better not be some oblique comment about my housekeeping skills, ’cause I’m not really in the mood to remember my apartment is on the ISI daily tour.”

“Too tired to get mad?” he asked. “That’s a first.” He tugged out the little quartz globe, cracked now, and rolled it between his palms.

Sylvie pounced, grabbing for it. He jerked back, startled, and slid to evade her. She snarled one hand in his shirt, caught his wrist; they grappled for a moment until he fell from the couch. Sylvie grinned, crouched over him, crystal in her hand. “So, how does this thing work? And how often have you used it on me?”

“I haven’t,” he said. At her raised brow, he repeated himself. “I haven’t.” No excuses, no proof, just a statement. She was annoyed that she believed him.

“So, how does it work?” she said. “Do you need a new one, now that this one’s chipped?”

“No,” he said, relaxing from his cautious tension. He lay back, watched the crystal sparkle between her fingers. “It’s only a focus. I’m clairvoyant. I see the images inside my head. It’s not like real vision. It’s color-reversed, or black and white. Sometimes it’s blurry.”

“Like satellite TV for the brain,” she said. She dropped the crystal onto his stomach, rested her weight on his thighs. The crystal rolled with his breathing, and she put her fingers on it, pushing it along his rib cage, then chasing it down his belly and catching it in his navel. She pushed up his shirt to admire the gloss of glass against his warm skin, the way his flesh goose-bumped and shivered at her touch. “The talent’s innate in you, and it never occurred to you to wonder why?”

“We have psychics on staff. They’re human.” There was unease in his voice. He rolled his head to the side, avoiding her gaze.

“Maybe they just think they are,” she said. At the quick wash of pain that crossed his face, she regretted saying it. After all, as far as her honed senses could tell, he read human. She opened her mouth to say so. “You really never wondered about your mother?”

He squirmed beneath her, and she answered for him. “You took her being human for granted. Like most of the normals out there who don’t recognize the Magicus Mundi until it waves hello up close and personal.” She rose and reseated herself beside him, braced comfortably between his hip and the low-fronted couch.

She poked the crystal into movement again. “Do you want to know what she is? What’s lurking in your genes?”

“I’ll ask her myself.”

Sylvie studied the reflection of her fingertips in the glass and slid it between two ribs, using his tie as a net when the orb slipped away from her. He sucked in a breath. “Sylvie, not that this isn’t . . . pleasant—what are you doing?”

“Do you think she’s looking at you right now? Or when you’re looking in the glass, does she look back? How do you manage to feel unwatched?”

“I try not to think about it,” he said, breath catching as she pushed his shirt farther up to chase the rib all the way to his sternum, letting the orb slip and slither over his nipple. “We’re talking about this now?” He licked his lips, laughed, but his eyes were wary. “I don’t think this is the time to talk about my mother.”

Sylvie said, “I don’t think anytime is that time. I really didn’t like her.”

“I’m sure it was mutual.”

“You say the sweetest things.” She let the crystal roll away like a bead of water. She wanted to taste his skin, see if the crystal, like water, had left a trail. “But you’re right. This is not the time.” The ache in her chest told her that, the weariness in her bones, the brittle edge to her mood. She felt lazy now, but the rage still simmered, waiting to be woken to life again.

He leaned up, leaned close, and said, “Answer a question?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What’s up with the clothes? How bad did you piss off Cassavetes?”

She blinked at him, flashing back to six months on the run, learning that all the monsters of her childhood nightmares were real, before realizing he meant Val, not her dead husband. “Did cracking that crystal crack your head? What about the clothes? Yeah, they’re kinda wrecked but—”

He tugged on the collar of Erinya’s jacket, pushed it back, touched the lumpy seam of the inside-out T-shirt. “That jacket belongs to one of Dunne’s bodyguards, the punk one. The T-shirt isn’t yours either, unless you have some tastes the ISI isn’t aware of, and is inside out, besides. The pants are cut for a man. Supernaturally speaking, you’re running under a stealth shield.”

“Like that would work,” she said, then paused. “Would it?”

“Traditionally,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve ever tested it.”

“All talk,” she said. “Here I thought the ISI was going to be a good resource for a moment. But no, you were picking my brain.” She lifted herself off the floor just enough to slide herself onto the couch; the hard floor was beginning to create new aches. “Besides, maybe this is my T-shirt, and the ISI doesn’t know all about me. Not all of us can have a formal sense of style, you know.”

“Don’t dis the suits,” he said. “If you want fresh clothes, you’ll be wearing pieces of them tomorrow.”

Sylvie sighed. “This one’s too small, this one’s too large. I’m living in a Goldilocks world.”

She eased herself up from her not-so-comfortable slouch, finding her ribs bothered her more now that she wasn’t enjoying herself. “Aspirin?”

“Bathroom,” he said. “There’s Tylenol 4, Percocet, and Vicodin.” At her raised brow, he said, “The ISI believes in a fully stocked first-aid kit. Not so much in insurance benefits.”

“Figures,” she said. “Guess a bunch of people with unusual injuries all in the same insurance group might attract attention.”

“I think that’s their justification,” Demalion said. “But it bites when you’re getting stitched up by a student veterinarian in the backwoods who’s freaking out about putting needle to nonfurry flesh.”

“Life’s tough all over.” Sylvie wandered off to find the promised land of painkillers. Running her finger over the selection, she chose a handful of ibuprofen. Other painkillers might slow her down too much. She shucked the shirt, admired the bruises that had come up, stuck her tongue out at the dirt that had ground itself into her skin, and gave in. The world could wait while she showered. The hollow-eyed woman reflecting back at her agreed.

“Sylvie!” Demalion said. There was controlled panic in his voice, strong enough to bleed through a shut door.

Maybe not.

Sylvie pulled her shirt back on, and went out, gun in hand, though she doubted it was needed urgently. She might not trust Demalion all the way from heart to head, but he wouldn’t call her out to face a deadly foe with only that bare warning.

She found him standing in his kitchenette, bent over the counter as if he’d been injured, one hand compressing a Chinese take-out container, the other white-tensed against the laminate.

“Sylvie?” he said, turning, seeming oddly off balance, as if the world had shifted beneath his feet. As if he’d suddenly been deprived of a sense.

“Blind?” she asked. She didn’t need confirmation; the way he jerked and tracked her voice was enough.

“My crystal?”

“All right,” she said, and went to fetch it. “I thought this only happened when you spied on them.”

“At first I did, too. I mean, that’s what we were doing when it all blew up in our faces. Sylvie . . .”

“I’m hurrying,” she said.

“Lilith was there,” he said. “It must have been her. A dark, angry force, watching us, watching them. We knew there was something else, but we never saw it. Just felt it.”

“You’d know it again?” she asked, casting her gaze about the floor. Amazing how something so shiny-glossy could become invisible when you wanted it. She knelt, set her gun on the nearest cardboard box, and peered beneath the sofa. There it was. Sylvie forced her hand under the couch, stretching. “You said, at first? What’s blinding you now?”

“It’s nearness to something Dunne considers his. His lover, his house, his car. Took me a week to learn where Dunne parked and avoid passing by that garage.”

So was this Dunne on the move? Coming back to check in at long last? Sylvie doubted life would be that easy.

Sylvie closed her fingers over the glass, scraping her arm against the sofa frame, and wincing.

“Hurry, Sylvie,” Demalion said.

“What?” she said. She found herself in a crouch, waiting, gun in hand.

“It’s getting closer. It’s like pressure in my head.” He cocked his head, listening to something inside it, and she tensed.

“Demalion, incoming, twelve o’clock,” she said, and chucked the crystal at him. His hand closed on it as she bolted for the door. Even if it were Dunne, he and the ISI weren’t a good combination.

“Sylvie,” Demalion called, but she was already gone. She took the first flight of stairs down at a near gallop but drew up short with the agonizing pinch of ribs grating. She took the second flight more gingerly, slow enough, dammit, that Demalion, even blind, had found the elevator and caught up.

“Go back,” she snapped. “Or at least, stay put.”

Through the lobby glass, the night sky seethed with sheets of color. The aurora borealis ran loose in the streets of Chicago like the risen tide, a shimmer of blue and gold and deepest purples that made her scalp tingle. It parted the air with the sound of distant bells.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, a prickling warning. She didn’t think this was Dunne’s work, despite Demalion’s blindness. Dunne was all storm cloud behind his eyes, leashed thunder, and this gaudy display—

A figure breached the stream, like a drowning victim making one last flailing attempt at breath and air and life. There was a flash of teeth, a choked-off growling, then the tide crashed down on her again, dragging her under as inexorably as a riptide.

“What is it?” Demalion asked. The light reflected off the shiny silver of his eyes, got caught in dancing sparks in his crystal.

“A god,” Sylvie said. “It’s eating Erinya.”

“Dunne’s bodyguard—”

Sylvie nodded. The gun was a weight in her hand, but Sylvie knew when a gun was outclassed. Even a magical one. She gritted her teeth; she wanted Erinya out of the lethal tide. For all she knew, Erinya had the linchpin piece of information Sylvie would need to save Bran.

A breath of superchilled air touched her, dropping down fast like ice water. She went from cold-scared to cold-frozen in half a moment. The icy air brought the scent of salt with it, the tang of a winter sea, and as it hit the sidewalk, the asphalt, and buildings heated by the day’s sun, small tornadoes formed, wisping upward, taking glass in its wake, taking small stones, then bigger ones.

Sylvie drew back into the doorway of the apartment building, pushing Demalion ahead of her.

“Amazing,” he said. A breath hidden in the howl of wind.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“A man’s hand pulling a woman’s long hair,” he said, staring at his crystal, “pulling her away, and an animal tangled in the hair.”

The aurora swept upward, spiraling as it went, twisted into the storm, leaving a shape hunched and growling, on buckled tarmac.

Sylvie kept her gun out and cautiously approached. The Fury’s head snapped up, teeth bared, eyes full of phosphorescent heat. Her short, punk bob stood out as stiffly as a porcupine’s quills.

“Erinya,” Sylvie said. “Eri.” The Fury let her hackles settle.

“Is the attack done?” First thing first. If the gods were going to start brawling again, she wanted to be elsewhere.

“Not an attack,” Erinya muttered, breathy gasps of explanation. “Just a squabble. Hera took a chance. Kevin found out.”

Demalion followed Sylvie into the street, and Erinya’s calm disappeared. Her eyes went hollow and dark, bloody gaps beneath tangled lashes. “Why are you with him?” she growled. “Traitor—”

She eased to a low crouch, veering between shapes, and Sylvie said, “Don’t start a fight, Eri. You’re beat. Demalion’s going to help us.”

“I’ll kill him—”

“You’ll have to heal first,” Sylvie said. She holstered the gun and crossed to Erinya’s side, ready to help though her ribs winced at the thought. Erinya got to her feet, unaided, slunk after them into the elevator.

In the light, Sylvie grimaced. Erinya looked worse for wear, and nothing much of human. If Sylvie were grading on human disguises, Erinya would get a C minus. And that was on a curve. The Fury had always looked lanky; now she looked like a puppet about to come apart at the joints.

“It’s all his fault,” Erinya said, and the petulant little-girl whine did nothing to belie the menace in her presence. “He doesn’t want to help.”

Demalion, wisely, stayed silent, though he turned a betrayed look on Sylvie when she said, “You don’t trust him? Go on, then. Look for yourself; read him. Judge his sincerity.”

It was a risk, but one Sylvie found worth taking. If Demalion couldn’t be trusted, better to know now, and if he was found wanting—Sylvie wouldn’t have to do anything about it. Not with Erinya’s shape rippling through cloudy spikes of scale and claw.

“Don’t feel like it,” Erinya said. She didn’t check; Demalion, still standing mutely before her, hand raised with his crystal “eye,” was proof enough of that. Sylvie remembered the rigor tension of the girl in the bar, her own collapse in Miami. Being read took something from you.

The elevator dinged open, and Erinya slumped with the jolt. Sylvie reached out, wrapping an arm around the Fury’s waist. Pins and needles, a shocking cold/heat confusion, and nerves firing in overload—Sylvie nearly jerked away. Demalion reached out and steadied her, fumbling only a little.

Together they manhandled the quietly growling Fury to his apartment, with only one gaping eyewitness.

Sylvie just shook her head. Normally, she’d worry about it, but with all that was going on in the city? A single, bleeding, mythological monster wasn’t much of a secret.

They dropped Erinya on the couch, Demalion fidgeting, the crystal going hand to hand, until Sylvie stopped it with her own. “You should go elsewhere,” she suggested. “Erinya’s presence is causing the blindness.”

“It’s my apartment,” he said. “End of discussion.”

“At least go into the bedroom, shut the door.” Like that would even slow the Fury down if she lost it. Sylvie wasn’t going to endanger Demalion; wasn’t that what she had told Anna D?

“No,” he said. “I’ll be watching.” He tapped the crystal meaningfully.

“Fine,” Sylvie said. “We’ll be getting cleaned up in the bathroom. Eri—you ever had oxycodone?”