Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Tish, listening with her ears cat-pricked, had chipped in the moment Sylvie disconnected. “Is that the same Lily Bran painted?”

Sylvie’s exhaustion cleared long enough to collect facts. Brandon had painted a portrait of a woman called Lily, two months ago. A portrait he had worked on feverishly, then turned to the wall and forgotten. Tish thought it was still there, leaning up against other discards in his cluttered studio.

Go get it, Sylvie thought, staring at the clock, at the hour glowing 4:00 a.m. Get up. Get the painting. Her body betrayed her. Her attempt at sitting up had set her head to spinning, her vision to blurring, and Tish had pushed her back into the futon.

Finally it was morning—eight o’clock—and enough with the lounging about. She groaned deep in her throat, thought longingly of a vacation spent drowsing on the beach, and rolled over. Tried to. Tish’s arm dragged her back, pulled her against warmth. “G’back t’sleep,” she muttered, without ever really waking.

Party girls, Sylvie thought, not so fondly this time. She pinched at Tish’s arm until the sleeping girl let go, pulling her arm away from the sting.

Sylvie made her escape and dragged herself into Tish’s kitchenette. Coffee, now.

She found the coffeemaker, ladled in an extra scoop of grounds on principle, and the world began to smell promising. Behind her, Tish left the futon in a stumbling slide of sheets and blankets.

A moment later, a white flash filled the room, and Sylvie spun, heart pounding, thinking of balefire. Tish lowered her camera and yawned. “S’rry. Couldn’t resist.”

Sylvie turned back to the counter, rested her shaking hands on it, concentrating on stilling her breath. Coffee? Who needed caffeine when you could have an adrenaline jolt straight to the heart?

Sleep-warmed fingers traced a pattern on her back, a delicate scratch of nails between the spaghetti straps of the loaner tank top. “I wanted a picture of your tattoo. It’s Latin, right? What’s it mean?” Tish said. Her touch made Sylvie’s skin prickle.

“Cedo Nulli,” Sylvie said. “I do not yield.”

“Mm. Hostile,” Tish decided, and snagged the first cup of coffee for herself.

Sylvie filled another cup and after the first scalding mouthful, turned to the next pressing problem. Wardrobe. Hers was smoked. Her jacket gone with the Maudit , her T-shirt a tattered mess, her jeans sticky with spilled beer, and all of it reeking of charred human flesh.

Tish curled up in a tiny, tidy bundle on the futon, tucking her feet under her, and Sylvie sighed. Five feet tops. No way in hell was she fitting into any of Tish’s clothes.

“Closet’s upstairs,” Tish said. “Got some party leftovers that might fit.”

Sylvie wandered upstairs, stiff and sore, to rummage through Tish’s collection of clothes.

She hit the jackpot at one end of the walk-in closet, finding a tidy grouping of party stragglers and one-night leftovers. She pulled out a pair of men’s khakis that looked about right, and a red T-shirt that extolled a brand of firecrackers with a truly offensive logo. She flipped the tee inside out and put it on rather than waste time looking for something better. It’d be under Erinya’s jacket anyway.

A small shelf near the door yielded a giant bottle of ibuprofen, the dancer’s faithful friend, and Sylvie snagged three, taking them dry before heading back down toward the scent of brewed coffee.

She found Tish looking much more awake and unhappy about it. “You didn’t have to get up,” Sylvie said.

“I’m going with you,” Tish said. “I’ve got the key. I called, and Kevin’s not home. He should be. I mean, Bran’s missing.” Tish wouldn’t look at her, and her voice held an edge that Sylvie couldn’t decipher.

“All right,” Sylvie said. “But hurry.” Dunne’s absence wasn’t unexpected; he’d be out hunting, the sisters in tow. It did worry her a little. Sylvie had expected him to descend on her last night after she’d sent Erinya to update him. He hadn’t. And Zeus had been pulling at him. . . .

Lily herself made Sylvie antsy, generated more questions than answers. Sylvie had assumed the woman couldn’t do magic; she still found her logic sound. People who had power did not dragoon apprentice sorcerers to do their spell wetwork for them—that was like giving trade secrets to your competitors. But magic had definitely been done last night. Sylvie shuddered and chased the chill from her nerves with bitter, black coffee. Still slurping, scalding her lips and tongue, she rose to paw through her discarded clothes.

“Did you see something that looks like a broken chopstick?”

Tish said, “Maybe it’s under that gun .” The edge was stronger now, and identifiable. Fear. Sylvie dropped her eyes: The holster was there, bound up in Erinya’s jacket, but the seal had been unsnapped, the gun pulled partially free. Clumsy, Sylvie thought, remembering her exhaustion, remembering shedding clothes without any concern for the weapon, just letting it slip free with her jeans.

“This is why you don’t mess with other people’s things,” Sylvie said. She bent, tucked the gun back into the holster, and fastened the whole thing about her waist. It vibrated briefly, as soothing as a purr. “I’m sorry if it startled you—”

“That gun is not normal. It looks normal, but it’s . . . It felt like skin,” Tish said. Her voice shook, craving reassurance. Sylvie could see that fragile innocence crumbling in Tish’s eyes, the bewilderment and betrayal that the world kept secrets of its own.

Bran and Dunne had managed to hide the Magicus Mundi with its glories and its horrors from her, even with the Furies around. Sylvie, through carelessness, had betrayed the larger world.

“No,” Sylvie said. “It’s not.”

“What is it? How—”

“Give me the keys. Stay here,” Sylvie said. Stay safe.

“No,” Tish said. She passed Sylvie on the way up the stairs, and said, “I have the keys, and I know their security code, so don’t bother trying to go without me.”

Sylvie sighed and let it go. She sorted through the rest of the clothes, ducked her head under the futon, and found the stick.

In the morning light, with caffeine sharpening her brain, the broken chopstick still looked ordinary as dirt—the kind distributed with every fast-food Chinese meal in the country, still splintery where it had been torn from its other side.

Sylvie handled it gingerly. When Lily halved the stick, balefire had appeared. Sylvie didn’t want to find out it worked just the same if it were quartered.

She turned it over again in her hands, hoping for inspiration, but it was just a stick, inert in her hands. Nothing to say it was anything important at all, much less the trigger to a murder spell. If it was. Maybe Lily was the queen of misdirection and the stick was some type of in-joke, some game to send Sylvie chasing her own tail.

Sylvie groaned. She hated to do it, but she needed information. Chasing Lily was going to keep her busy enough; she didn’t have time to figure out how the woman did what she did.

Usually, with a question on magic matters, she dragged Val to the hot seat. That was no longer an option, at least not without a bigger fight than Sylvie needed at the moment. Sylvie’s options narrowed to two. Either throw herself on the mercy of this unknown Anna D, or try to winkle information out of the ISI. Neither thought appealed.

Tish thundered down the stairs and disappeared into the bathroom; the crash of water running against tile followed in seconds.

Sylvie looked at the closed door in disbelief. “Hurry, and she needs a shower.”