Sins & Shadows

21 Love Divine

WHEN SYLVIE WAS IN FOURTH GRADE AT PINECREST, THE READING curriculum had included Alice in Wonderland. Sylvie was one of the few who hadn’t enjoyed the assignment. Even then, her core of practicality was set; she found Alice and her casual curiosity to be the acts of a dangerously careless girl. Now, at the mercy of the oubliette’s undertow, Sylvie felt the first glimmer of sympathy for the girl, as she plunged on her own long fall.

She was surrounded by a colorless haze of motion that pulled and pried and tried to take her apart. The tough leather jacket creaked; seams popped like the breaking of tiny bones. Bran’s self-portrait warped and wavered, trying to escape her hands. The gun fluttered feebly at her spine like a stunned bird. “No,” she said, her voice swallowed by nothingness. “No.” She would not loose her grip. She had no intention of coming out on the other side naked and defenseless, assuming she would finish the journey at all if the painting, the key, left her grasp.

The idea of spending eternity locked in nothingness—Sylvie reassessed her ideas of hell and growled under her breath. “I’m coming through, and I’m taking it all with me. My gun, my key, my clothes.”

As if it had been a test, the oubliette spat her out, abruptly and painfully, into absolute darkness. Her knees ached from the impact; her free hand stung where she had flung it down to protect her face. Her breath sobbed in her throat. She dropped the painting, and dug her fingers into the surface, trying to guess what it was. Softer than concrete, harder than earth, all one piece, melting slightly away from her hand but warmer than ice. It reminded her of nothing so much as molten glass, drifting, stretching, minus the scalding heat.

She held her breath, listening, trying to hear someone else’s presence, trying to guess how big the enclosure was. He’s dead, Val had said. But the room didn’t smell of decay. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears with the effort of not breathing, deafening to her and defeating the purpose. She sucked in a grateful gulp of air and froze. God, the air—how did it . . . ? Would it last?

A faint candlelight glimmer touched her eyes, a diffuse glow in the darkness, a splotch of color that could be wishful thinking.

“Hello?” she said. “Brandon?” Her voice wavered, but was, at least, audible. She didn’t want to be alone in the dark, cut off from everything, dying in inches. She wanted to have made the right choice. She wanted her chance to save Brandon, to save Alex, to save innocents from the manipulations of the powerful.

The glow strengthened, then raced around the room, spreading outward in fiery streamers, delineating a circular enclosure about the size of a conference room. A whisper of breath touched her ears, then a sudden trickle of something that was distinctly running water. Sylvie, who hadn’t realized how ringingly silent the oubliette was, began to relax. The glow increased.

The water became visible first. Of all the things she’d expected to find in a spell prison, a scaled-down Greco-Roman fountain, complete with fat cherubs dribbling water, was not one of them. The marble gleamed with a slick, soapy shine; the water smelled sharp and clear and cold.

The confines of the oubliette slowly came clear, a pinched-off teardrop of a room, a demented genie’s bottle. The walls curved undulantly at their base, arched inward at the top, seemed made of some shifting, opaque material that roiled like chemical-laden toxic clouds.

Sylvie inched away from them. The floor . . . She shifted her gaze until the vertigo passed. She stood above the floor on some stretched-out pane of glassine material. The true floor belled beneath it, and Sylvie dared another glance down. It, too, burned with the chemical cloud-roil of the walls, made her think of planks laid over lava spills.

She was alone on one side of the fountain, but on the other? Squinting against the growing brightness, she walked around the curve of the fountain and stopped cold.

Brandon Wolf lay asleep—not dead—on the floor, naked as the day he was born. The dread she’d held tightly to her since the beginning of this case, from the moment Dunne had sworn Bran was alive against all reason, fled. Sprawled, asleep. As if the oubliette was nothing more than a time-out for a child.

She knelt suddenly, knees weak.

God, photographs did not do him justice. Sprawled, prone, head tucked on one outflung arm, he woke nothing so much in her as sheer animal want. His supple skin, the dark-flame tint of autumnal hair, the long eyelashes peeking out beneath longer bangs, his lips, slightly curved even in sleep, his shoulders broad and golden, his lean thighs, his—Sylvie’s kaleidoscope thoughts derailed entirely, leaving her with nothing but a quickened pulse and the undeniable urge to pounce. She shivered. And she’d thought succubi were dangerously attractive.

The idea shocked her cold for a brief, brain-saving moment. Bran’s attractiveness, even unconscious, more than a match for a succubus, for a preternatural creature of desire? Sylvie’s breath caught. Her dark voice whispered. Human? It sounded perplexed. The edge was gone from it, quiet wonder in its voice.

Sylvie caught a quick gleam of eye shine as he peeked through his lashes, and realized he was feigning sleep. “Brandon,” she said.

He swung into a crouch, facing her. “What do you want?” Even his voice was delicious. Low, husky, as warm as a firelit room.

“To get you out,” Sylvie said. She looked into amber eyes and forgot to breathe. “My name’s Sylvie. Dunne sent me.”

“Bullshit,” he said, though his entire face washed with relief before closing off again. “You’re one of Lilith’s lackeys.”

“I am no one’s lackey,” she snapped. He flinched, and she thought, Great, scare the guy senseless. “Really, I’m working for Kevin.”

He flicked a glance at her, flicked it away. “You’re wearing Erinya’s jacket. I bought it for her in London.”

“I am. You think she’d let just anyone borrow it?” He wanted to believe her, but he had the eyes of someone used to pain and disillusionment. It deepened the beauty of his too-pretty face.

He shivered, and she tracked the ripple of muscle and skin, sliding her gaze down the taut curves of his shoulders, down to the flat planes of his chest, the narrowing of his waist and hips. He dropped his hands to cover himself, flushing. Sylvie yanked her gaze away. God, what was wrong with her? The poor guy was scared, naked, and she gawked at him like he was nothing more than meat. She shucked the jacket and dropped it into his lap. “Sorry,” she said.

“Used to it,” he muttered, and she looked over in time to see the resignation on his face, and more—the old scars on his forearms.

He might be strong physically—his body attested to that—but there was a fragility in his eyes that she didn’t like.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. Shit comfort, but the best she could manage.

He nodded, still not looking. His hands fisted in the coarse leather.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Lilith’s clever. Erinya’s not. I’m not. We’re easy to fool.” Bitterness laced his voice.

“She got you with the murals.”

“She got me way before that,” Bran said. “Years and years ago.”

Years and years? Dunne had only become a god recently. Sylvie got that irritating prickle again, the one that said she hadn’t been given all the information she needed.

Bran stood, put his back to her, and she tried to keep her eyes from wandering over the long line of exposed skin. Not the typical redhead, creamy pale with freckling. Brandon Wolf seemed to have been tapped by Midas instead. His skin laid claim to gold and held the silkiness of flower petals. It looked so—touchable.

She fisted her hands. Human? Her dark voice raised the question again. Sylvie still didn’t have an answer for it. How much of this attraction was built into him by Dunne thinking of him as beautiful, the reflection of a god’s desire? How much of it was intrinsic?

He lowered the jacket and stepped into the skinny, unzipped sleeve. Sylvie blinked. What the hell—

He tugged on it, and the jacket stretched, shifted, grew. Brandon Wolf drew the jacket on like a pair of pants, and it shaped itself to his need. He buttoned the front closed and sighed in obvious relief at being clothed, even partially. Sylvie, on the other hand, felt immeasurably worse. Perhaps she was the fool Anna D had called her.

She’d risked so much to rescue the human innocent, and he was neither; he was Power.

“You’re not human,” she said. The client always lied.

“I am,” he said, hugging himself. He lowered his head to stare at his bare toes.

“Humans can’t create matter. A sorcerer could transform the jacket, but he couldn’t make more of it. That jacket should have gone as sheer as Saran Wrap as you stretched it. You created more of it.” She shivered. Fool. The pieces all put together wrong. Anna D had told her straight out. It was love that made Dunne a god. Love made Dunne. Love. While she was unfamiliar with the pantheon, she could juggle a few pieces, pluck a name everyone knew out of the air, and create a new picture. “You’re a god,” she accused.

“That, too,” he whispered.

How did an American cop end up a Greek god? He married in. How did a man built of Hera’s power become a god of Justice and not simply her replacement? Some of him in him. Revenge tempered by love. Brandon Wolf, who would wake a corpse’s senses, Brandon Wolf, the heart of Anna D’s riddles, who signed his art with a pair of crossed arrows, who by all accounts drew admiration and desire wherever he went, even from pissy, violent godlets like the Furies—Brandon Wolf could be only one god.

“Eros,” she said.

Dunne wasn’t Lilith’s target. Dunne was incidental. Lilith had already caged her god.

“Why are you alive?” Sylvie asked.

He tugged fitfully at the low waist of the leather pants, grew it up another few inches. “Killing a god isn’t a simple thing.” He raised his face to hers, as wary as a wild animal. “Kevin really sent you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Look, he changed my gun. You can sense that right?” She held it out; he shied, but when she held the muzzle down, he reached out to touch it. He sighed, slumped back to the floor of the oubliette.

“He sent you in here to get me?”

“That was . . . not part of the original plan, no,” Sylvie said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But hell, it’s got to be easier to break out than break in.”

He laughed, three hitched breaths, then gasped back what might have been a sob. “There’s no way out.”

“Have you tried?” Sylvie asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Do you think I like sitting here, just waiting for Kevin to come rescue me like some pathetic infant?”

Sylvie was glad to see the anger, a hint that he wasn’t broken.

“The oubliette was meant to see me dead. But I’ve managed to keep ahead of that, at least.”

“Transformation and creation of matter,” Sylvie said.

Bran nodded. “Air to water, hair to air—all small things.”

“Dunne defeated the oubliette entrance without effort,” Sylvie said.

“Kevin’s a god,” Bran said. Some color crept into his pale face. “I’m not. Or not much of one at the moment. Lilith—”

“Got you years ago,” Sylvie remembered aloud. “Fill me in. You’re human?”

Bran nodded, clutched his forearms again. “I am both. More human than god. I have power, but it’s not easy to reach it.”

“You made Dunne a god,” she said.

“I didn’t even think about it. We were out late. We got mugged. Kevin got shot. He was dying in my arms. I couldn’t—” He choked down the waver in his voice. “I cheated. I asked him for his soul, and he gave it to me. I don’t think he understood I meant it literally. All of us have access to ambrosia, the source of immortality. It’s intrinsic to our being.”

In his hands, a flower bloomed briefly, a flame-colored thing with seven petals that shifted from the shy, curled shape of rose petals to the spiky ylang-ylang. He folded his hands and it sank back into him, spreading a quick rosy glow through his skin and scenting the air.

“I called it up, fed it to him. But immortality without purpose is an exercise in frustration, so I started feeding him my power, what I could access of it.”

“You shared it?” Sylvie said. She hadn’t really thought any of the gods would do that.

“Surprised them, too,” Bran said, mouth quirking a little in rueful humor. “Especially since . . . When you start an immortal feeding on power, it’s like making a baby black hole. It pulls power like a magnet. Hera was disassembled. The first I knew of that was when her power started flooding into Kevin. He should have been a minor deity like the Furies, but mine, a cupid-type godlet. Enough to give him purpose. Instead, he became something new. Something more.”

“Revenge, that’s Hera’s shtick, isn’t it? And revenge tempered by love equals justice.”

Bran nodded.

“All that’s interesting,” Sylvie said, “but not to the point. Why are you human? Dunne looks human, but he’s not. That shell he wears is only an echo of who he used to be.”

He looked up at her, and she sat down beside him, trying to make herself more approachable. The hesitation in his eyes, the way his glance kept sliding away from her, all of it bespoke reluctance and more—embarrassment of some kind.

“Lilith,” he said. “I told you. I’m not clever. We’ve been friends for a long time, she and I. I thought we were friends.” He slid down farther to lie supine, crossed his arm over his eyes.

Sylvie, unable to resist, put a hand to his bared belly. His skin was as touchable as it looked, velvet smooth and blood warm. He arched into her touch, recoiled a second later, and blushed.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He relaxed under her touch when she kept it clean, kept to the safe territory between his rib cage and hip-bones. He laid his head back, letting her admire the long line of his throat. And she had teased Demalion about being her dog.

Brandon Wolf, despite being a god, was about as submissive as any creature could get. Dunne probably had his hands full finding the delicate line between protective and possessive.

“The other gods used me,” he said, voice muffled by his skin. “It’s my nature. I am Desire, and I am as much at its mercy as my worshippers. But I wanted to die for the weight of it. I was a god, and they treated me like a tool, with no mind or feelings of my own. I ran to earth. Lilith found me and suggested a better way to hide.

“She said she knew how I could mask myself in human flesh.”

“She wanted you helpless,” Sylvie said.

“I know that, now.” Bran dropped his arm to frown up at her. She stroked a soothing line across his belly, and his frown shifted to a more content expression, a cat accepting its due.

“To gain a god’s power, the shell must be destroyed,” Sylvie mused, caught her fingers tracing the no-man’s-land of the waistband, and removed them from temptation. He sighed and shifted his head to her lap, putting them back in contact. “Which is difficult for a human to do.”

“Very difficult,” Bran said.

“But flesh can be destroyed.”

“Very easily.”

“Why didn’t she kill you outright? Why all this nonsense?”

“Coming at me directly would have been a mistake. Either I’d escape, or Kevin would stop her. Distance is nothing to him.”

“She couldn’t shoot you?” Her fingers disobeyed her and traveled through the thick silk of his hair. He turned his head, rubbed his cheek against her hip. Her temperature spiked.

“She could,” he said. “But think of this flesh form as a plug in a drain. If it’s knocked out, the power flows immediately. If she was some distance away—”

“She wouldn’t get all of it.”

Bran laughed, a rough unhappy sound. “It would be like throwing chum in shark waters. Lilith’s not a shark. She only wants to be one. She’d have to fight her way to the front, and again, Kevin would be there soon after.”

“So an oubliette to cage the power after you die,” Sylvie said. “And a key to open it in her hands. No wonder she’s been cranky. I killed her sorcerer.”

He shivered, moved off her lap, sat upright. She wanted to drag his warmth back to her and quelled the urge. “All that’s true. But there’s more. To kill a god—it’s an evil thing.”

Sylvie rolled her eyes. “That sounds like self-serving propaganda to me.”

Bran shrugged, obviously unwilling to fight with his rescuer.

“So that’s the game. You were supposed to die down here. Then she opens the oubliette and drinks in your power, claiming it for herself. Replaces you, at the mercy of your peers?”

“Her will’s stronger than mine,” Bran said. He withdrew another inch or so from her. “And they wouldn’t destroy her. Love’s important,” Bran said. “No matter how I feel about my fellow Olympians, I know that’s true. I thought I could do my job from hiding.”

“I haven’t seen a whole lot of love in the world,” Sylvie said. “Which begs the question, are humans so fucked up that nothing you do can help? Or are you shirking?”

He rose to his feet, padded silently toward the glowing walls. A nasty muttering hum rose to greet him, and Sylvie tensed, wanting him to stay away from it. He raised a hand and rested it a bare inch above the surface of the wall. The hum increased. It sounded . . . hungry.

“I made a mistake,” he said, so subdued. She shifted to watch him more closely. His eyes were closed, expression turned inward, reliving it. “I made myself an infant, but such a small bit of flesh couldn’t hold my power. For the first thirteen years of this existence, I was as wholly human as you even though I carried the thread that makes me Desire, Love.”

“But you had no power.”

“Couldn’t reach it, couldn’t contain it. Not even when it counted most.”

“What happened?” Sylvie said. It was guilt pulling at his beauty, self-contempt lacing the pain.

“I taught humans it was possible to abuse Love,” he said. “It’s not coincidence that the number of child molesters has skyrocketed. I let it happen to me. And the world reflected it.”

“Let it?” Sylvie said. “I thought you had no access to your power.”

“I should have recognized the signs. But I didn’t want to believe it.” Bran sank back down to the miserable huddle she was beginning to recognize. Knees up, ankles crossed, arms tight around his legs, face buried in the cavity of shoulder and knee.

“Flesh is stubborn,” he said, voice muffled. “I tried to end it, regain my godhood, but it wanted to live when I didn’t. Eventually, as I got older, saw the results of what I’d let happen, I realized that I had to make amends.”

“You can’t make them from in here,” Sylvie said. “It’s time to leave.”

Bran raised his head from the protective cradle of his arms, despair washed away, replaced by blatant disbelief.

“You think I haven’t tried?”

“You seem pretty cozy,” Sylvie said. “No signs you’ve been clawing at the walls.”

“It’s a death trap,” Bran said. “The walls, the original floor, everything. When I fell through, the oubliette started eating away at my body. My hands were down to bone before I managed to get the floor in place.”

“Destroys flesh, stores power,” she said, grimacing. “Charming. Bet Auguste was the kind of boy who cut the tails off mice.”

“Auguste?”

“Yeah, that’s your lackey, the one who built this little de Sade dream.” Sylvie spared a moment to think that maybe she didn’t need to carry a load of guilt for shooting Auguste. That kind of nastiness was inbred, not taught. “I refuse to believe a crappy sorcerer like Auguste could build something that defeats a god.”

“Well, I can’t get out,” Bran said. His irritation faded into something approaching sulkiness. It all looked good on him.

“Can’t is a ridiculous word in a god’s mouth,” Sylvie said. “If Dunne were in here, would it hold him?”

“No,” Bran said, “but it’s not the same thing. He’s all power, all the time.”

He played with the leather ankles of his pants, running the zippered cuffs up and down, all nervous fingers and hissing rasp. Sylvie tried not to find the tiny little bit of anklebone worthy of arousal, but something in the way he toyed with the zippers encouraged it. Sylvie reached out and stilled his hands.

He was dancing away from the topic, Sylvie thought. Distracting himself and her as well. He looked up at her from under dark lashes, and said, “We can’t get out.”

“Don’t start that again,” she snapped. “Of course we can. It’s just going to take some thought. And some time.” She bit out the last, thinking time was the thing they couldn’t afford to waste.

She stretched sore muscles into some semblance of normalcy and assessed. What did they have going for them? Bran’s power, which kept them alive long enough to escape; hell, Sylvie thought, it should be instrumental in our escape. What kind of god lets himself get penned by a human? A glance at Bran showed him curled back into his quasi-fetal tuck. A depressed god. A god who blamed himself for something he couldn’t have fought. A god who would rather hide than fight back.

Sylvie made a tally mark in the “what did they have against them” column also for the same reason.

Sylvie paced around the fountain, thinking. Bran had enough power to fuel a spell; Sylvie had the will to make a spell obey. But the only spell she knew was the oubliette. She could draw it again—her map had blown in along with her—but that would just build a loop; from the oubliette to the oubliette.

Bran, however, might not need a spell. Not if he had more power. Sylvie looked over at Bran. “If you died, is that it? Game over? You said something earlier about regaining godhood. How?”

Bran raised his head, shrugged a shoulder. “Die. Release my power and re-form as I was meant to be. Theoretically.”

“Wouldn’t that give you full access to your power? You could blow this place to hell, be back home in time to catch the ninth inning of the apocalypse upstairs.”

“If Lilith doesn’t have some sort of shunt ready to pull the power—”

“She doesn’t. Or she wouldn’t have been so mad-keen for me to open the spell again.”

Bran worried his lip. “It’s not an easy process. The power wants to be free, and I have to corral it.”

“Four walls,” Sylvie gestured. “No one around, ’cept for me.”

“It takes time,” he said, back to playing with the zippers.

“You’re the one who’s got nothing but time,” she said, her voice as quietly ominous as a viper’s hiss. “You don’t want to go back.”

“I do,” he said. “I want to go home.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You don’t want to be the god again. You want to stay mortal. That’s why Dunne lives on earth, endangers the earth. Because you won’t leave it.”

“It hurts to die,” Bran said.

“Fuck that,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got a gun. A single round between the eyes isn’t going to smart at all.”

“I die, the air goes away,” he said.

“You come back, so does it.” It was a valid fear, one that sparked terror in her belly, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with hiding from himself. “You don’t want to.”

“I . . .” He stilled completely, like a prey animal making itself invisible. “If I go back, I’m their tool again. Nothing but Love. On earth, I paint, I play basketball, I go to concerts, I have friends, I eat out, I even cook breakfast. I have a life.”

“Dunne wouldn’t let you be their tool,” she said. “That’s not what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of something he won’t protect you from. Your responsibilities.”

“I stayed on earth to make amends,” he said. He surged to his feet, actual temper showing in his eyes. “How is that avoiding my responsibilities?”

“Then why wasn’t it on your list, alongside partying and painting? You know what happened to you wasn’t your fault. You were a child, and an adult raped you. Not something you could control. Dunne would have told you that. He would have told it to you until you believed it. You’re using it as an excuse to stay here.”

Sylvie watched the angry flush mantling his cheeks white out, all at once. Bull’s-eye, she thought, with a certain dark triumph.

“You know, I don’t have to convince you to do anything,” she said. “I have the gun.”

She sighted along it to his too-pretty, shocked face. “I could end this argument just by pulling the trigger—”

The little dark voice said, Why stop with killing him? You could take his power when it comes. Free yourself and turn to the world next. The cadence was all too familiar. Lilith’s quiet conversational tone, preaching better living through deicide, like a tune she couldn’t be rid of, like a cult’s brainwashing drone. She tried not to listen. What was it doing in her head?

“Sylvie—” Bran said, trying to sidle away from the muzzle of the gun.

She tracked him, all serpentine reflex. “You think you could access your power fast enough to transform a bullet?”

He flung up a hand in futile self-defense. Before Sylvie could even decide if she would pull the trigger or not, the gun surged in her hand, coming to a life beyond its simple animal warmth and heartbeat. It melted over her hands, oiling between her clutching fingers, and came back at her, some impossible snake creature, sprouting fangs and gunmetal scales.

Fail-safe, she thought, even as she flung it down. Dunne really didn’t trust her. A tiny bit of his spirit playing watchdog; it let her kill the Maudit, let her shoot the Fury who could heal, but turn it on Brandon and—

Sylvie ducked the strike at her knee, dodged behind a stunned Brandon, and caught a quick breath. Dunne’s spirit. Her flesh. She knew which to blame for the ugly shape the gun had taken.

The gun-snake coiled for a strike, forked tongue flickering. Sylvie forced Bran into playing living shield, ignoring his yelp. If she were right . . . The snake swayed, hesitating. Dunne’s spirit ruled it, and Bran was sacrosanct. She, on the other hand, was a heretic. “Gonna stop it?” Sylvie asked.

“What?” Bran gasped. She rocked him back and forth, keeping herself behind him. Defensively, he was a great tool. Offensively? She’d be better off with a rock.

Sylvie took a breath, stepped away from Bran, and when it struck, she was ready. It lunged; she caught it behind the head.

“Kill it!”

Bran backed away, shaking his head. “I don’t kill things. . . .”

Sylvie’s triumph faded; the snake was strong and agile, it might work its way free. And then what? The question was never answered. Its dagger tail whipped around, grew a head, and sank needle fangs into her shoulder.

Pain blazed upward; her fingers on the other head spasmed, loosening, and the snake bit down, chewing a long line of punctures across her arm.

“Oh God,” Sylvie muttered.

She yanked it away from herself, heedless of injury—it couldn’t get worse, now—and tossed it toward the shifting, blazing walls that made up the oubliette. The dark shape flailed and hit the wall and stuck, slowly being eaten away into its component bits.

Pain racked her, sent her to her hands and knees, then to darkness.