Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

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?”