Sins & Shadows

20 Waking the Oubliette

SYLVIE ABANDONED THE ISI SEDAN ON A SIDE STREET. DEMALION would figure out where she had gone; he had all the pieces and had shown himself more than capable of putting them together. Abandoning the car was only a slowing device, but she wanted things played out before he hit the scene. Before he put himself between her and danger. He’d be furious, not only that she left him behind—again—but that she’d used a weakness he confided in her to do so.

She’d allowed his company as far as Dunne’s apartment, Sylvie driving the last mile when proximity keyed the return of Demalion’s blindness. They had changed places in a tension-ridden silence, and Demalion sank into the passenger seat, cradling his crystal “eye.” Once there, Sylvie had taken ruthless advantage of his blindness, of the effort it took him to see through the crystal; she collected what she had come for in a rush, too fast for him to make any sense of it, and hightailed it out of the brownstone.

Her actions had blown the hell out of their truce and set the ISI back on her tail, but it was the only thing she could do. The curse on her had rebounded onto Alex, who had been—mostly—safely out of the way. At her side, Demalion was nothing more than a walking target.

Another wary glance at the storm-churned sky, and Sylvie thought, Better hurry. Chicago was a shadow of itself, a town lit by tempest light, its borders girdled by towering dark clouds, and its people hunkered down in growing panic.

Lightning flickered and licked the clouds, coming not from within them, but from elsewhere. Dunne was on the run, hiding his own storm-cloud core of power somewhere within the sky tumult, and Zeus—Sylvie winced as another sheet of lightning crackled across the face of the cloud, red-violet, bruising the sky—Zeus was hunting. A bird splatted into the concrete near her, a twisted thing half scale, half feather, all writhing movement, before a passing cab smeared it into the asphalt. The cabbie slowed, backed up alongside her. “Car trouble? Lady, you need a ride?”

Sylvie shook her head. “El,” she said.

“It’s not running. Power outage at the main line.”

“Best news I’ve heard all day,” she said.

He drove on, not bothering to waste more words on an obvious idiot. Sylvie had been serious, though. Doing what she planned to do was already in the impossible category; doing it with an audience? Might as well ask her to save the world. Her intentions were much smaller. One girl, one boy. Alex. Bran. The world would have to fend for itself.

She hefted the artist’s satchel out of the backseat; she’d stolen it from Bran’s attic studio, filled it while Demalion hovered sightlessly, if not quietly, at her side. She bit her lip. If he’d just stay out of this . . .

If you wanted him safe, the dark voice said, you shouldn’t have let him in.

She shivered and forced those thoughts away. Keep him safe, she thought. It was a lie, or rather, a partial truth at best. She didn’t want Demalion at her side. Demalion was her weakness because he offered her his strength, a shoulder to lean on, arms to shelter in. Right now, Sylvie needed to stand alone and tall, needed aggression and vitriol more than understanding. She needed to keep her rage, and she fueled it by knowing she was alone against the world. Demalion had no place in that.

She slung the satchel over her shoulder and headed for the El, ignoring the crackling, fulminating sky above her head.

The entryway to the El gaped, dark under cloud cover, without electric lights. Sylvie stumbled down the stairs in the dimness, let her eyes adjust. In the uncanny storm light that trickled through, the oubliette spell’s greasy residue gleamed. Sylvie smiled at it and dropped the satchel.

“You can’t do it, Sylvie,” Val had said, when called for advice. Sylvie, still thinking of Val’s sending Alex away, had no problems in riding roughshod over Val’s objections and demanding answers. Rebuild the oubliette? Why not? No magic? When she was immersed in a city drowning in a god’s despair? When she had a Fury’s blood beneath her nails? And the will to refuse failure when so much depended on it.

Sylvie crouched and drew out the tubes of paint snagged from Bran’s studio. Vermilion, cobalt, titanium white, cadmium yellow, malachite green, mars black. Val had warned it took special ingredients to build a spell circle, that ordinary paint was fit for nothing but decoration. Sylvie, having recently seen the way a god’s sphere of influence could affect things, figured that these oil paints, stored and used in a god’s house, were soaked in special.

She unfolded the sketch she’d made of the oubliette and stuck it to the cement with a glob of white paint. She wished she’d brought a flashlight.

The moment on her, she hesitated.

“It’s not paint by numbers,” Val said. “It’s magic. It’s bending reality. It’s more than will. It’s know-how. Even if you can muster the tools, get any kind of result at all, it won’t open the same door.”

It had to. Sylvie closed her eyes, breathed steadily. If she had Bran in her custody, Dunne would have to deal with her. Dunne would save Alex.

“You are resourceful, aren’t you?” the woman said, and Sylvie spun around. She had thought she was alone. At first she didn’t recognize her, felt an instinctive liking and camaraderie for this woman, slouched lazily on the stairs, dressed in clothing that looked every bit as “found” as Sylvie’s. Worn black denim, loose at the hips, bagging over cracking cowboy boots. A T-shirt that declared the wearer wanted Dead or Alive, a tangle of dark hair, and a bronze sheriff’s star on a thong around her neck, like an old-Western gunslinger doing CSI. Her eyes seemed sheened with silver, and in this city, that made Sylvie wary.

“Sylvie Lightner, aka Shadows,” she said. “I’ve been doing my homework. You have had a barrel of misfortune of late, haven’t you—”

“Lilith,” Sylvie said. Recognition swept over her all at once. The Old Cat was right: Lilith was able to blend in as well as stand out.

Lilith sat sideways on the stairs, fading in and out of shadow more deeply than her clothing could account for. She leaned back against the wall, stuck long, denim-clad legs along the riser, and inspected the dusty toes of her boots. “You’re really going to give it a go, aren’t you? The old college try. Well, more power to you,” Lilith said. “I knew you were interesting when I first laid eyes on you, a girl with a Fury on a leash, but—”

Sylvie raised the gun to bear, and Lilith sighed. “But now, you’re being dull. Go ahead. Fire. You want to, and I can tell there’s no talking to you until it’s out of your system. Just don’t expect much. I’m immortal, not—”

Sylvie pulled the trigger. One shot, aimed directly at the star-shaped metal at Lilith’s breast. The second shot was between Lilith’s iridescent, unblinking gaze, the thunder crack of the first shot still reverberating in the cement confines. When the second roll of noise stopped, Lilith was unharmed.

“—stupid,” Lilith finished. She fumbled in her jeans pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You a smoker?”

Sylvie stepped closer, closer, and Lilith lit her cigarette, sucking it to red-tipped life.

Trembling—Sylvie couldn’t miss from this range, no matter what—Sylvie put the barrel of the gun to Lilith’s temple.

Lilith cast a sidelong glance up at Sylvie, eyes silvery-glossy under dark lashes, and said, “Go ahead. I admire perseverance. But remember—I’m not stupid. Immortal’s not the same as invulnerable unless one takes steps to make it so. So try it again if you want, but I’ll tell you true, I don’t know where the bullets go. They don’t stop in my flesh, but that’s not to say they don’t find flesh. After all, isn’t that a bullet’s raison d’être; to pierce and kill?”

Lilith took a long breath, let out the smoke, and said, “I know your bloodline. I know you’re a killer—I watched you kill my petit sorcier. What a temper you have. But are you an indiscriminate killer? You’ve already sent two bullets into the world without a target. Will you send others?”

Sylvie let the gun barrel drop, her breath a loud rasp in the quiet. “You can’t make me think you care. You burned people alive in the nightclub.”

“You destroy everything and everyone you touch. And then you blame them for being weak.”

“You pretended to be Bran’s friend. You betrayed him.”

“Your arrogance saw your associate killed—”

Sylvie’s vision greyed. Was she already too late for Alex? She couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. “Are we done with the pissing contest? I’m bad, you’re worse. Pretty sure the vote would swing my way.” Her voice, though ragged, held its edge. Sylvie was perversely proud of that.

Lilith raised her head and smiled, serene. “It all depends on whom you ask. We’re not painted in black and white, Sylvie. Just different shades of grey.”

Sylvie closed her eyes, wished she could close her ears. “You can’t stop me from doing what I have to do.”

“I could. Of course I could. Just by snapping my fingers,” Lilith said. “Or a stick. Balefire down here would be spectacular, I’d imagine.” Like a stage magician, she folded her fingers closed, opened them again to reveal a wooden match. She pressed it between two fingers.

Sylvie’s hand dropped to the gun, though it hadn’t proved useful. She couldn’t stop watching the matchstick rotating in Lilith’s agile fingers. “You should listen better, Sylvie. There’s no need for melodrama. I could stop you. I have no intention of doing so.”

“I don’t believe—”

“Well, it’s not like he’s doing me a lick of good all locked away like that, now is he? Auguste, my little prodigy, was quite a genius when it came to magical doors, locks, keys . . . oubliettes. Pity he slacked on his defensive skills. I expected him to be able to open it for me. Now, I’ve got you, willing to do the same.”

“I’m not a talent,” Sylvie said. “So there’s no point in you hanging around, playing cat at the mousehole.”

“Never a cat,” Lilith said, making a moue. “Nasty, sly, self-indulgent creatures.” She gestured broadly with her cigarette, tracing a pale, smoky path in the dim light. “The fun part is I don’t think another sorcerer could reopen it. Too much power. They’d open another oubliette, maybe, and that wouldn’t slice the bread for sandwiches, would it? But a nonwitch, a nonsorcerer, doesn’t have power to open anything. . . . Such the conundrum. I was furious with you at first. I admit it. You made my simple, elegant plan into a locked-room mystery. But then you show up, carrying all the tools to redeem yourself.”

Lilith finished her cigarette, fished out another, and dropped her hand to the cement, the matchstick reaching out. . . . Then she yanked it back, unstruck. Unbroken. “Oops. Wouldn’t that be overkill for lighting a cigarette?” She lit the new cigarette from the ashy tail of the first. “You want one?”

Sylvie shook her head, wordless. Lilith raised the fine hairs on her arms and nape. Her chatter couldn’t mask the stink about her, the obsessive rage that betrayed itself in a hundred little tells in her false calm, in her ragged fingernails, in the flick, flick, flick of those silvery eyes. If Sylvie were a dog, she’d have been laying her ears flat and growling low in her throat.

“No, suppose not,” Lilith said, putting the cigarettes away in her hip pocket with a little pat, as if to make sure they made it there. It reminded her of Demalion with his little crystal and his constant check on it. A crutch. “Mortal after all, and who needs lung cancer? Though, Syl, I’ve got to say, you aren’t going to live long enough for that kind of death.” She spun her own cigarette away; Sylvie dodged the burning tip with a scowl.

“I’m not helping you.”

“You are being painfully slow about it,” Lilith said. “Is there anything I can do to speed matters?”

“Go away.”

“If it’s confidence you’re lacking, don’t,” Lilith said. “You know what they say. There’s not a safe that can’t be cracked, given the right skill set and a good set of tools. And you’re well prepared. Got your hands slicked with power I can smell from here.”

“I’m not—”

“Tick, tick, Sylvie,” Lilith said, voice dropping low and smooth as a snake. “Your friend’s counting on you, isn’t she? And your poor blinded lover boy—whom you left all alone. You may work alone. I don’t. I’d get started if I were you. I’m really being very patient.”

Sylvie shivered at the glimpse of the steel core beneath the persiflage. Her trembling increased until she felt it rattle her spine, felt the room vibrate with it. Rage. Fear. Stress. She wasn’t sure what the driving emotion was, and her little dark voice seemed to have deserted her.

Tick, tick, she thought, and Lilith tapped her wrist as if she plucked the thought from Sylvie’s mind.

Sylvie took a last look at those faintly luminous eyes, trying to decide if the moment she turned her back, Lilith would incinerate her. Lilith’s gaze gave her nothing to go on, and finally Sylvie turned to the satchel.

Tick, tick. Sylvie clenched her jaw and knelt before the stained remnants of the first spell casting. Bending reality, she thought. Val had made it sound impossible for a non-Talent. But it seemed to Sylvie that doing it once was the hard thing, doing it twice—well, the world had bent already. It could bend again and would follow the path of least resistance, the path it had followed before.

Sylvie uncapped the cobalt paint and globbed it onto her fingertips. The dregs of Erinya’s blood leached toward the oils, and Sylvie sucked in a breath. Once begun, she couldn’t stop. She wasn’t a magic-user, had never wanted to be one, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t picked up a few basics. She’d seen elaborate spell casting done before. Always build the circle first, Val had said, in full-out lecture mode.

A tiny crack behind her made her jump nearly out of her skin. She spun, hand full of blue paint, spattering the wall. Oddly dizzy, Sylvie forced her eyes closed.

“It’s okay, you know,” Lilith said. “It was a dud.” Sylvie opened her eyes, breath lodged in her throat, heart pounding, still half-expecting balefire to devour her. Instead, all there was was Lilith looking down at the broken matchstick in her hand and pouting. “Maudits bastards. I despise shoddy work.”

“You burn me up, no chance in hell of getting Bran back,” Sylvie snapped.

“True,” Lilith said. “I didn’t mean to snap it. I was getting bored, and it just . . . slipped. Don’t bore me, Sylvie.”

Tick, tick.

Lilith traded the most recent end of a cigarette for another fresh one, chain-smoking, staring blankly at the cement ceiling. Dud, my ass, Sylvie thought. Lilith was far too careful to set off any spell accidentally.

Gritting her teeth, Sylvie globbed more cobalt on her fingers and started following the first curve. Build the circle first, Val said. That way, if the spell goes wrong, it’s contained. She couldn’t let this one go wrong.

She tucked the tube of paint into her palm, nozzle down, squeezing, providing herself with a steady flow. Beneath her fingertips, the concrete felt as rough as sharkskin. She scuttled along the old curve in an uncomfortable half crouch, trying to keep an eye on Lilith even while she focused her will on the circle.

Halfway around, and Sylvie paused, knees cramping, fingers still connected to the concrete. It wasn’t working, she thought, and despair made her fingers tremble. Shouldn’t there be some sense of progress? She was learning nothing more than finger painting on a surface rougher than sandpaper sucked and that oil paints smelled like gassy swampland. An inane thought echoed in her head. Art is pain.

“Focus,” Lilith said. “Keep moving.”

Sylvie almost gave up then and there, wanting just to spite Lilith and half-convinced it was too late for Alex anyway.

“Listen to me. Focus your will. Get it done.”

Sylvie bent back to the oubliette. Three-quarters around, and a tiny spark of something lanced upward, an electric tingle like touching a battery with wet hands. Then, a last knee-walk, sideways crab scuttle, and she closed the circle. The sting returned tenfold, ran up her arms in a jangling, nerve-strung firecracker series of tiny explosions. Her entire body felt sensitized, like she stood too close to a hot-wire-laced fence.

“There you go,” Lilith said. “Do the signifiers next. Don’t lose focus. The world doesn’t like to bend. It’ll fight back.”

Sylvie bit her lip, needing to concentrate. That electric feel increased, and her thoughts felt fuzzed out. She traded the squeezed-out blue tube for the green one, and when her hand left the diagram, a vaporous trail traced her movement, luminous in the dimness.

“What does it feel like?” Lilith asked. “It’s always bothered me, that I lack that particular talent. It’s ridiculous how important power is. It trumps everything, and that’s not right. Look at Zeus, throwing petty fits just because his will was balked. Power shouldn’t go to idiots. Or to those who see life as a source for experiment. Power shouldn’t be used to prod and poke, deceive, blind, manipulate—but the gods reflect us, and we reflect them. Bound together in foolishness, venality, and greed.”

Sylvie concentrated on smearing the malachite green with fingers that felt bee-stung and raw, shivering as she traced the looping Greek letters that read love. The station felt as if it had warmed at least ten degrees. Sweat beaded on her scalp, on her cramping thighs, behind her knees. Somewhere, she could hear someone trying to start an engine that resisted, grinding as it stuck between gears. It annoyed her, made her head buzz. Her eyes itched and burned; the template of the oubliette blurred in her vision, and she echoed Lilith’s admonition to herself. Focus. You can do this. Never mind that she had never had a desire to touch magic. Distrusted it.

Tick, tick, her heartbeat said, pointing out that she no longer had the luxury of swearing off magic on principle. Too much depended on her successful use of it. Just this once. An exception to the rule.

Lilith said, “You’ve heard the truism a thousand times. Power corrupts. There are those who might wield it wisely, who would understand that power is best used sparingly. You understand. Don’t you burn to do better? To take the power from those frivolous hands and hold it safe in yours?”

“That’s you, seeing yourself mirrored in me,” Sylvie muttered. Getting better at this. Sweating bullets, but her focus was refining itself; it left her breath enough to argue. “I don’t want power over others, at least not magical power. It’s a burden.”

“I never said otherwise. But if it’s needed—If you know you could do what was needed. Someone has to do it; someone might as well be you. Or me, of course.” She grinned. “Preferably me.”

Sylvie scowled; Lilith just kept talking, and her voice was insidious, slipping in past Sylvie’s concentration, past the numb fuzziness of reality fighting her attempts to alter it. That engine sound wasn’t real at all, she thought, as it shifted to a Doppler pulsing in time with her heartbeat. It was reality slipping, earthquake fashion, along a fault, a basso continuo protest.

Lilith’s words were hard to ignore, trickling in like icy water on a rainy, winter day, snaking in beneath her collar, as relentless as a bore who held forth despite the blank, desperate expressions of his captive audience.

God, she thought, suddenly appalled. It’s in the blood. The laser focus, the obsessive stubbornness, the inability to shut the fuck up. She whimpered low in her throat, tuned her senses to the oubliette spell, trying to block Lilith out.

“—of it is, if left alone, mankind would settle itself out, like the animal kingdom. There is no sin in nature. There is, instead, equilibrium. But gods, they have to poke and prod, make rules and pick fights—tell me about wars, Sylvie. Can you think of one that didn’t have religion at its core?”

“It’s water torture,” Sylvie breathed. Or subliminal programming, she thought. Her fingers wavered; she forced her focus back on that machine-grinding, bone-humming, electric sensation of power coiling beneath her.

“The gods—”

“What about you?” Sylvie said, pausing for a moment as she came to the end of a curlicue she couldn’t interpret. Her breath came in gasps; her belly growled, and her knees felt like they might reverse themselves at any moment. The Fury’s borrowed power aside, the spell was eating through Sylvie’s own energy. The way things were going, even if she managed to open the oubliette, she’d be as weak as an infant, easily brushed aside. Sylvie fought to distract Lilith with the only means left to her. Words. “You want power. You want to be worshipped.”

“Never,” Lilith said, her temper flaring in instant denial. “Worship’s where—Sylvie, watch out. You almost missed a spot.”

“Backseat spell casting?” Sylvie griped. It was more maddening that Lilith was right. She’d nearly skipped a tiny little symbol, and for all she knew, that could be a vital piece. It still burned that Lilith had spotted it before she did, when she was far enough across the room that she shouldn’t be able to see anything.

“It’s like perfect pitch,” Lilith said. “I can hear it, still can’t carry a tune. Be careful. Neither of us can afford a mistake. Where was I...? Worship is where things go wrong. Worship means you’ve stopped seeing people as independent beings, infantilized them permanently. I don’t want worship. I just want to make things right.”

“Run for Congress,” Sylvie said. “Hell, run for president.”

“Worthless,” Lilith said. “You aren’t listening. We reflect the gods. What happens with them, happens with us. The gods are corrupt, petty, despotic—so are their followers. The worst, though—”

“Let me guess,” Sylvie said. She gritted her teeth, pushed a last spurt of paint through the tube, stained the cement in a crimson swirl and shuddered as the entire diagram rang like a crystal goblet being struck. The tortured-machine hum smoothed out as reality bent and accepted its restructuring. Her bones vibrated to the new tune. “The whitebeard who booted you from Eden. Or should I call him Bluebeard.”

“You saw my work?” Lilith said. “You are dogged. Can you say I’m wrong? The similarities are striking. Bluebeard gave each successive wife a key and demanded that she not use it. And He put the Tree in the midst of our garden. They both demanded implicit trust but were not worthy of it. Neither of them ever considered that trust was a two-way street.”

Sylvie lifted her dizzy head and stared at Lilith. She panted, shivered, fought for breath. She felt cold and hot at once, as if the oubliette was a roaring fire in an arctic room. Everything she had learned only confirmed it for her: She loathed magic. All those sorcerers who did this kind of thing on purpose were morons.

When her breath had stabilized enough, when the buzzing in her limbs had faded, she said, “Does this really work for you? Talking people into submission? Did you just expect me to crumble and say of course you’re right?”

“No,” Lilith said. “I told you. I don’t want worshippers, or witless obedience. I want—”

“Anarchy,” Sylvie said. “Free will, free world, and you step in only if the whole shebang starts to go to hell. Lose your precious equilibrium.”

“You do understand. Maybe even agree.”

“Too general not to,” Sylvie said. She stood, her legs shaking, and backed away from the spell circle. It hummed in her head, alive, but not open. “If, on reflection, I say you’re full of shit?”

“I don’t care,” Lilith said. Abruptly the edge was back in her voice, the danger vibrant in the underground room. “Just be a good woodsman and bring me the little lover’s heart to eat. Open the door, Sylvie. Where’s your key?”

Sylvie hesitated, the moment upon her. There weren’t a lot of options; she had brought a key, or something she hoped would pass for one. But she didn’t want to use it with Lilith waiting. She had no intention of freeing Brandon just to have Lilith pounce on him; Sylvie’s entire body still shook with the effort of rebuilding the oubliette, and the gun was useless. What was left? Her mind raced, searching possibilities. A door has two sides, her dark voice pointed out.

Sylvie licked dry lips. Not an option she really wanted to consider, but the alternative? She imagined Brandon Wolf dead at Lilith’s feet, at Dunne so grief-stricken that he fell to Lilith’s attack, or turned the world inside out, trying to recover what was lost by time. In every scenario Sylvie could imagine, innocents died, Alex died, suffering for Sylvie’s mistakes. Unless—

Sylvie picked up the remaining item in the satchel, unwrapped it from the silk scarf she’d carried it in to protect it. Behind her, Lilith hissed something under her breath.

Sylvie didn’t pay attention, her eyes riveted on the painting, the small, violent self-portrait of Brandon Wolf. The flayed heart seemed to pulse. The oubliette throbbed in sympathy.

Dunne had set off the oubliette. Some of him in him, Alekta had said. The painting, crimson in spots, dull brown and flaking in others—Sylvie thought it, too, had some of Bran in it. She flaked a tiny little rusty chip off and watched it stream toward the oubliette, a tiny object caught in an eddy.

Disturbing, Sylvie had thought the first time she saw the painting. A second viewing had clarified her visceral response. It looked painted in blood, and it seemed that looks weren’t deceiving.

“What is that?” Lilith said.

“Can’t you tell?” Sylvie said. “You were fast enough to point out my errors in spell copying. You think this’ll work?”

“Yes,” Lilith said, her voice husky, a little excited. “Do it. Bring him up. Do it now.” Her eyes were almost pure silver now, gleaming and milky in the low light. Her gaze was avid, was fierce, was . . . off. Something had changed.

Sylvie cradled the painting to her chest and shivered as the oubliette seemed to yearn toward it. One choice left. Sylvie shivered again. She didn’t want to—God, she didn’t want—

She clutched the painting close, the image facing outward, as if the heart shown were her own, her rib cage split asunder, and stepped back, one step, two, keeping an eye on Lilith, whose face grew distantly puzzled, pallid eyes going narrow under frowning brows. “What are you doing, Sylvie? Open it, at once.”

A third step, and Sylvie could feel the tug of the spell, like a magnet aligning, reaching out for its complement. Lilith stood, moving with the awkward, lanky haste of a marionette, and Sylvie laughed. “Jesus,” she said, seeing it suddenly. “You’re blind! Dunne’s spell. You were there when he blinded Demalion and his team. You got caught in it. You were half-blind when I came in carrying supplies from Dunne’s house, but the key’s wrapped in silk. Inert, magically, until I unwrapped it. You can’t see me at all.”

“Don’t need to,” Lilith said. “I can feel the spell. I can—”

“Pity,” Sylvie said, on an adrenaline high. “I would love to see your expression when you realize what I’m doing.” She took that last step back, her heels clearing the sticky-wet, painted lines. Beneath her feet, the cement trembled like quicksand. “When I lock the door from the inside.” Then the oubliette tasted her, tasted the painting in her hands, and found it a match, tugged it to itself. The world bent, and she plummeted into the spell.