Sins & Shadows

6 Allies, Enemies, and the Spaces Between

WITH MORE HASTE THAN GRACE, SYLVIE SHOVED ALL THE PAPERS back into their tattered folder. “Thanks, Tish.”

“Wait,” Tish said, and caught at her arm. “That’s it?”

“For now,” Sylvie said.

“Who is he?” Tish said. “You can’t just say you know him and walk off. Bran’s my friend. I have a right—”

“People have fewer rights than they think,” Sylvie said. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

At Tish’s startled and hurt eyes, Sylvie blinked.

“Sorry. It’s been a long day, and it’s not near done yet. The man in the photo is a government agent. He doesn’t work for very nice people.”

“If he comes back?” Tish said.

“If he comes back, we’re in real trouble,” Sylvie said. “If he comes back, it means they didn’t take Bran. And while they’re generally assholes, and dangerously shortsighted, they’re not casual killers. If they have Bran, there’ll be a happy ending.”

“Why would they even want him?”

“Don’t know,” Sylvie said. “Gonna ask.”

“They’ll tell you? If they have him?” Despite the hope-fulness of Tish’s voice, some deep doubt lurked beneath.

“I can be very persistent,” Sylvie said. She freed herself from Tish’s sinewy grip and headed down the stairs. Tish clattered down after her.

“You’ll come and tell me what you found out?”

“Sure,” Sylvie said. An empty promise, really. Her first duty was to Dunne, and she might uncover things he preferred to keep quiet.

Tish studied her, then nodded. “I’ll be waiting.”

Sylvie let herself out, and behind her, Tchaikovsky started up again, the sound mingling with the thumping bass of a sedan passing on the street. Tish working out her anxiety on her body.

Sylvie sighed. Now what? Her temper nagged, urging her to go drag information out of the ISI, out of Demalion in particular, but there were good reasons to wait.

First, she wanted to walk Bran’s path, see if she could find something the cops hadn’t been looking for—something magical and malevolent, some tangible proof of a kidnapping, even an occult one.

Second, she and the ISI were not friends. She’d lived under their watchful and condemnatory gaze for too long, and Dunne’s place-hopping might have swept her out of their sight. She wanted to have a damn good reason before she put herself back in their sights.

If the ISI had taken Bran, had locked him away in some magically shielded cell, she’d find it. The ISI were many things; subtle was not one of them. They didn’t have to be. They had the monetary weight of the US government behind them and the instinct of pit bulls. Once they seized something between their teeth, they never let go. At least, not without a firm smack to the nose. Sylvie had administered such a smack before. The price she paid for winning was their nonstop attention.

The last time she dealt with them directly, they’d taken a three-year-old child right out of preschool when the boy had given in to his genetic potential and gone wolf on the playground. It had been a bad situation to start with and ended immeasurably worse.

One of the lesser casualties was Sylvie’s brand-new relationship with Demalion grinding to a savage halt when she realized he was one of them.

No, better by far to avoid the ISI as long as possible, to gather all the proof she could before confronting them. Before confronting Demalion.

Sylvie started down the sidewalk and was jostled by a young man running past. Reflexively, Sylvie checked her bag, her gun, her papers. All there.

She sighed. It was really the wrong time of day to be doing this. Not only would she lack that all-important feel of the late-night street Brandon Wolf had traveled, the taste of who and what hung about at 3:00 a.m., but it was difficult to keep an eye out for some nebulous clue when she was playing dodge ’em with a growing crowd of the homeward-bound.

Sylvie evaded a tangle of leashes and a woman walking three huskies at once. The lead dog growled low in its throat as Sylvie passed, and she shuddered. Dogs just reminded her too much of the freaky, frightening Eumenides sisters.

She bit her lip, wondering how much damage those women-things would cause in her city, wondered if Alex would, for once, have the sense god gave small kittens and stay the hell away from the office.

The way things were going, though, Sylvie thought Alex might have gone straight back to the office to have it out with her and run headfirst into the sisters.

Her stomach clenched and roiled. The gun at her back throbbed in time with her accelerating heartbeat. She couldn’t lose Alex. Then you’d better stop whining and find Brandon Wolf, her internal voice said. Soonest found, soonest Dunne and his bitches are gone. Sylvie started walking again; she hated that voice, its spit and spite and rage. But hell, it could always be counted on to keep the goal clear.

The entrance to the El appeared, a dark stairway in the sidewalk. Sylvie headed for it, thinking how Chicago it was, that to board an elevated railway, she had to go underground. This city made so little sense, contrary with age. She missed Miami with a passion. Sure, Miami could be brutal, and the forces of good nominal at best, but everything was out in the open. The sun saw to that. A city like Chicago, with its underground and its history, kept its secrets close and guarded them jealously.

Sylvie forded a wave of ascending businessmen and -women, and started down the dimly lit stairs, trying to take them slow, to keep her eyes open, but between the crowds and residual light dazzle, she saw only blurs of movement and color.

Didn’t make a difference, anyway, Sylvie thought in discouragement. What kind of evidence was she expecting to find? What could remain firm in this kind of daily traffic? The only constants were the gritty walls, graffitied and stained, and the sweating cement beneath her feet—Sylvie yelped as the meat gun twitched against her spine, like someone receiving a static shock. What in hell had he done to her gun? She put her hand on it and felt it throbbing like a frightened heart.

People veered around her, and Sylvie’s fingers slowly peeled from the vise grip at her back. Her shoulders slumped. Her hands shook. She couldn’t do this. She had to. Dunne had made sure of it.

Her eyes, closed and lowered, opened as the crowd began drawing in again, and she blinked.

What was that? Feet crossed her vision, a quick parade of recent fashions, and beneath them, something else, something painted onto the concrete.

Sylvie turned in place, jostling people and gathering complaints, ignoring them all. Blue paint, thick and shiny, looking more poured than brushed, made a jagged circle, half of it on the stairs, the other half below. Red paint edged it in a looping line that weaved around the blue, and within the spaces created . . . Sylvie knelt, touching the symbols.

It looked Greek, not frat-boy, capital-letter Greek, but something more fluid. Inside the circle, a descending spiral coiled, all blues and greens, the color of a whirlpool. Not your usual graffiti, Sylvie thought, and while Chicago boasted a big art community, this wasn’t art.

She cleared the stairs and slouched against a wall, watching the crowds thin out as the trains came and went, waiting for another look.

With the people gone, with the air stilling in the wake of the trains, she knew she had seen it right. A spell circle. She might not hold with using magic, but she had a passing recognition of the way it felt. The sensation that here, in this spot, reality had been reshaped, even if only for a moment.

She sketched the circle and its patterns on the back of one of the police reports—Greek for sure, wasn’t that rounded w omega?—being careful not to close the loops completely on her sketch.

To work spells required talent and intent, but magic was tricky. A spell could look inert and be active. Sylvie had seen men killed with a simple talisman held the wrong way; a spell that vanished a young man beyond the reach of a god was best treated like toxic waste. She needed a witch.

Luckily for her, she knew one, and one who owed her favors. Sylvie left the underground and rejoined the sky, tugging her cell from her pocket. Val Cassavetes was due a phone call; Sylvie just hoped she didn’t check her caller ID. Val might owe her favors, but that didn’t mean she liked doing them.

Sylvie scrolled through the stored numbers and swore. Idiot, she cursed herself. So busy trying to end her connections to the supernatural world, the first thing she’d done, even before packing the office, was purge her phone of all non-real-world contacts—Val Cassavetes included.

She punched in another number before she could think about it, one memorized in her fingertips. She hadn’t wanted to, and God, Alex was going to gloat. Going to laugh and say I told you so, and don’t you regret taking my key? If Alex even spoke to her.

The phone picked up, and Alex answered, a little breathless; lost track of her cell phone for the millionth time, Sylvie thought.

“Syl? God, are you okay? Where the hell are you?”

“Chicago.” Sylvie answered the only real question in the lot, her voice strangely rough. “I need Val’s number. Can you get it?” Straight to business, in and out, disconnect, and go back to shutting her out. The only safe way.

“No sweat,” Alex said. There were faint background noises that Sylvie recognized, the sounds of surf and traffic, and a conch-fritter vendor in full dinnertime patter.

“Where are—”

“The office, duh,” Alex said. “I’ve been waiting. Worried sick, if you care. Do you even have a clue how worried I was—you’ve been running on empty since the satanists—” Her voice caught, but continued, growing in strength. “You shut me out, pack up all your stuff, and then . . . then you just disappear!” There was no sound for a moment but Alex’s breath, panting with anger and fear.

“Alex—” Sylvie said, meaning to say something, to apologize somehow. “How’d you get in?”

Alex laughed, a bark of unamused sound. “I’m quicker than you give me credit for, Syl. I stole the key back. Fast fingers, remember? You should call your sister, she’s worried, too.”

“You called Zoe?” Sylvie asked. What the hell—

“Well, yeah,” Alex said. “Called your parents, too, but they were out of town. I thought you were having a melt-down. I thought—” Her breath caught, and Sylvie understood.

“You thought I might do something terminally stupid. Sorry, Alex. You should know better. Other people die. Not me.” Sylvie kept one eye on the dwindling crowd, wanting to be back downstairs looking at the spell

“No,” Alex said. “You’re too mean to die.”

“Damn straight,” Sylvie said. “You got the number or what?”

“Had to unpack a few unlabeled boxes,” Alex said. “But I got it.”

Sylvie waited. And waited. A gust of warm air rolled up from the railway entrance as a train passed through and rose clattering over the street.

“What are you doing in Chicago, Sylvie?”

Sylvie thought about throwing the cell phone to the street in a satisfying shatter of plastic and walking off. If she could recall even a glimmer of Val’s damn number—

“Sylvie—” Alex singsonged into the receiver.

“Missing person,” Sylvie gave in, pitching her voice lower as a group of teens walked by.

“Weird, obviously, or you wouldn’t be using Val. How weird?”

“The weirdest,” Sylvie said, biting her lip. She shouldn’t, she knew she shouldn’t. Keep her safe, she thought. Safe meant away from all of this. But Alex was her researcher, and so damn useful. “Ever hear of a family named Eumenides?”

“Eumenides?”

“Yeah, three sisters. Not good with friendly, and not scared of guns. Shifty, scary, savage kind of girls.”

“Hellascary girls,” Alex breathed. “Jesus, Syl. They are . . . You . . . Why are you asking?”

Sylvie could hear it, the thing she’d been hearing in Alex’s voice more and more frequently, beneath the brashness, a tendril of fear as she was pitchforked into one dangerous situation after another.

“Met ’em, didn’t like ’em. Now I’m working for someone who owns them.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Alex chanted. “They’re not real—I mean, I never thought they were real. They’re myths.”

“Greek myths?” Sylvie said. I am the god of Justice. Greek lettering in the spell circle. The Olympus group.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “You think they’re the real deal? Not just sorcerers with a shtick?”

Sylvie remembered the bone-chilling paralysis she’d felt under their eyes, the small-rodent urge to curl up and die or run. With shape-shifters, the fear was always physical, that atavistic dread of being eaten alive; the sisters made her feel more than that. In their presence, Sylvie was aware of the fragility of her soul. “Yeah,” she whispered.

“Do you know how dangerous they are?”

“No,” Sylvie snapped, taking refuge in anger. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“They’re called the Kindly Ones, the Erinyes, sort of in a talismanic hope that respect will keep them off your back. But they’re also called the Furies.”

Sylvie twitched. That name she knew. Her blood cooled in her veins, raising goose bumps beneath her long sleeves. “A human could control them?”

“Hell no,” Alex said. “No one controls them. Not really. They’re punishers. Classically, they drive men mad for their sins, though I’ve heard they kill as well, or even destroy souls, depending on how much they want their victim to suffer. They’re family-obsessed in a way even the moral majority would shrink from—most of the sins they punish are crimes inflicted by a child upon parents. They’re unstoppable. They respect few gods, and obey only one.”

“The god of Justice,” Sylvie said.

“God? There is no god of Justice in the Greek pantheon, Syl. You gotta read more. There’s goddesses, weak things, Themis, Dike, but no god. If the Furies listen to any god, it’s Hera, who’s as mad as they are.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Sylvie said. She kicked at a dropped cigarette butt, sending a faint red spark across the sidewalk. “They’re working for a man now. Kevin Dunne, proclaims himself the god of Justice. They cower before him, fawn on him. Hunt murderers for him, like some vigilante team of cops.”

“Oh that’s so not right,” Alex said. “He’s pulling something. There is no god of Justice. You want me to snoop into Dunne’s life?”

“Absolutely not,” Sylvie said, though she desperately wanted more information on Dunne. Knowing who she was working for had always been top of the list important to her, second only to the ultimate goal of a case.

Normally, she set Alex on every client’s bio, knowing that they always lied about something. Alex, who made nice with people, made even nicer with computers. Not this time. She’d have to piece his history together herself and hope she beat the clock.

“Sure?” Alex asked.

“Absolutely sure. Besides, I’ve got a suspicion someone’s already been doing that. It’s his boyfriend who’s missing.”

“Ransom? Blackmail?”

“Not yet,” Sylvie said. “And probably not; it’s been two weeks.”

“Cold trail,” Alex said. “If you don’t find a missing person within—”

“Yeah, yeah, we all watch TV. But it’s a little messier than that. The ISI’s involved,” Sylvie said. “It looks like one of the reasons we haven’t seen Demalion sniffing around at home is ’cause he’s here. Or at least, he was here the night Bran Wolf disappeared.”

“Bastard. Kick his ass for me,” Alex said.

Sylvie grimaced against the phone. Alex had taken Demalion’s betrayal as hard as Sylvie had, if not harder. Demalion had used Alex to introduce him to Sylvie; in retrospect, Sylvie knew that it was the only way it would have worked. She trusted Alex. And Alex trusted people. Though not so much as she used to, courtesy of Demalion. One more black mark against the man.

“You want me to look into their files, see what I can find?” Alex said.

Sylvie hesitated, and what did it say about this case that she thought Alex would be safer taking on the Internal Surveillance and Intelligence agency than a single man who might be a god.

“I’m gonna go nuts otherwise,” Alex said.

“Yeah, all right,” Sylvie said. “But it’ll take some time. I’m still going to meet them head-on. Makes it harder for them to lie.”

“Ah, you just like the look on their faces,” Alex said. “All red and puffy.”

“Guilty,” Sylvie said.

“Give ’em hell,” Alex said. “And Syl, just so you know—you rehired me at a higher pay scale.”

“Alex—”

“I wrote the contract up already. Done deal. You can sign it when you get back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sylvie said. “Got Val’s number, you little mercenary?”

Alex read it off, and Sylvie punched it back into her memory list, cursing in her mind with each digit. “Hey, Alex,” Sylvie said. “Don’t—don’t hang around the office, okay? I don’t know where those sisters are now, but last time I saw them, they were prowling around the beach.”

“It’s okay,” Alex said. “I don’t want to run into them. I’d pee my pants for sure, but I’d be okay. They hunt specific sinners, and I’m clean. My parents are alive and well, all the multiple steps included, and there’s no blood on my hands.”

Sylvie sucked in a breath. You kill people, Dunne told her again. “Gotta go. You stay out of this,” she said, and disconnected without further words.

“I kill monsters,” she whispered, clinging to that. Monsters. Her stomach churned, roiled, declared her a liar. Her definition of monster had grown looser over the years.

Before Alex could call back, Sylvie dialed Val, punching in the number while it was fresh in her mind. Wrong number.

She cursed her inability to retain numbers, and hit the newly reprogrammed Memory 1—the first, and hopefully, only Magicus Mundi contact back in her books. The phone rang, but it wasn’t Val on the other end. A second wrong number. Sylvie frowned. Had Val changed it?

She tried again and got a disconnect notice. Always something with witches, Sylvie thought, getting it all at once. They couldn’t just screen their calls like normal people. No, Val had to bespell her phone with a dial-me-not when she didn’t want to be disturbed. Tough.

Sylvie took the phone, glared at it, and gritted her teeth. “I’m calling you, Val, so give it up.” She dialed the number, one careful, steady key at a time, focusing on Val, on her streaky blond hair, her pale linen dresses, her penchant for white-gold bangle bracelets and hoop earrings. It just shouldn’t be so damn hard to call someone.

The phone rang and a youthful voice picked up, didn’t speak directly to her, but shouted, “Mom! Sylvie’s on the phone!”

Sylvie winced. Julian’s lungs were growing along with the rest of him. Nice to see there were no lasting nasties after his go-round with the sorcerers.

“You shouldn’t be able to do that, you know,” Val said, into her ear. “Just break through my dial-me-not like that.”

“There are a lot of things that people shouldn’t be able to do,” Sylvie said. “They still get done. You up for a trip to Chicago?”

“Tell me you want to go shopping and need my fashion advice,” Val said.

“Wouldn’t that be something,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got a spell I want you to deconstruct for me.”

“I’m busy,” Val said. “There’s some strange stuff happening in the occult world, power shifts or something. Big stuff.”

“I wasn’t too busy to save your life,” Sylvie said. Favor number one. Val owed her three in total. “Look, I’ll fax you a sketch I made, and yes”—she overrode the automatic warning—“I was careful when I drew it. You can get a start on it that way, but I want you here. It might still be active.”

That would get her. Val had the good witch’s hatred of open spells. “ ’Sides,” Sylvie said, “there’s a good chance that this is related to your big stuff.”

“Why am I not surprised. You stir up the worst shit, Sylvie.”

“Hey,” Sylvie snapped. “You brought me into this world, so watch the attitude. Just get here. Call me when you land.”

“Fine,” Val said. “It’ll be late, though. And I’ll only owe you two after this.” The phone went dead in Sylvie’s ear, not with the normal flat tone but a shrieking laugh. She winced away. Witches.

Well, at least her argument with Val had done one thing; it had put her in the mood to go rattle the ISI.