Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Helen’s flaming hands, the insanity in her eyes, the death and damage she had done crossed Sylvie’s mind again, but this time she imagined it happening in a hundred different homes as people woke up and smelled the possibilities. Dunne had been everywhere looking for Bran. Even Miami. At its best, South Miami was a city of predators. With blood in the water—Sylvie thinned her lips, biting at the lower one until a nerve spasmed in protest.

“Not good,” Demalion said. “Let’s get Tish and get back. The ISI needs to know about this.” He leaned out of the car, calling to the dancer.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Tish said. Her face was pale, a small welt rising on her brow, and her eyes were shocky and dark-ringed. “Something’s really wrong, and it’s your fault!”

“No, it’s not,” Demalion said. “Don’t confuse the cure with the symptoms. We’re trying to make things right—”

“By sneaking and prying? I don’t trust you. I don’t like you, and Bran was scared to death of you. I only helped ’cause I had to. Go to hell.” Her eyes flickered over Sylvie’s for a second; her face crumpled into tears. “Both of you.” She raised her hand, dashed tears from her eyes, and waved frantically at oncoming traffic.

Demalion cursed under his breath and got out to corral her. Sylvie shook her head. Both of them idiots. Nothing good could ever come from a grown man chasing a screaming young woman around a major highway. Sylvie hit the horn and stuck her head out. “Demalion, get back here. Call her a damn cab if you’re worried.”

He got back into the car and dialed a number. “It’s Demalion. I need a cab pickup. . . .”

Sylvie snatched the phone from his grasp. “A real cab. Not the ISI!”

“She needs to tell us what she saw,” Demalion said.

“She needs to go stick her head in the sand and pretend nothing happened.”

“You think that’s okay?”

It was what Dunne wanted, Sylvie thought. She didn’t want him angry at her. “Leave her alone , Demalion.”

Lips tight, he recovered his phone, and dialed Airport Cabs, holding the phone out so that Sylvie could hear the dispatcher.

Then he put the car into gear and pulled them back into traffic. “Well, you saw what happened better anyway. Saw and understood . . .”

“I’m not going to talk to the ISI, either,” she said. “I should be hunting Bran. Hell, I should be at home,” she said, still mulling over that increase of ability that Helen had shown. “Dunne was in Miami. Talents will be ramping up there, too.”

“Best to find Wolf and be done with this. What could you do in Miami, anyway?”

“Whatever I had to, to protect it,” she said. “But maybe that concept’s alien to a government drone who thinks every problem can be handled with the appropriate paperwork.”

“Maybe your track record’s not the best at protection,” he snapped back. “Or was Suarez one of your success stories?”

She punched him, lost in rage, ignoring the common-sense rule that hitting the driver was a bad idea. Close quarters, but he managed to hunch a shoulder up to take the blow and keep the car from swerving. Much. A horn blared beside them.

“You’re reckless,” he said, his own temper burned out. “You’re dangerous. You used to think , Sylvie. What changed? Keep going the way you’re going, and you’ll be no different than the people you fight against.”

“Fuck you,” she muttered. She slumped against the passenger door, as far from him as she could manage. “Just drive.”

Traffic slowed and snarled as they approached orange cones on the street. Sylvie thought road work with minimal interest, more caught up in wondering what Dunne would do if she did pick up and run home. He’d send the Furies to retrieve me, she thought. But I could kill them if I laid a trap, made plans. They’re monsters. Fair game.

But she didn’t want to kill them, not Erinya with her quick tempers and childish ways, not elegant Alekta, or Magdala, who proved even deadly creatures could be dull. She was sick of killing things.

“We need to do something, or Wolf will die,” Demalion said, in uncanny echo of her thoughts. “You don’t want the ISI, then what?”

“Consensus is he’s already dead. Dunne’s the only holdout,” Sylvie said. She gritted her teeth as the car came to a dead stop. Becalmed in the asphalt sea, she thought. She hated this city.

“He’s a god,” Demalion said. “You don’t think he might know something you don’t?”

“You sure jumped on the bandwagon easily,” Sylvie said, “and you haven’t even seen him in action.” She blinked. That wasn’t right. The cab/agent had said something. I know what Dunne did to Demalion.

“Seen more ’n enough,” Demalion said. She met his steady gaze, and he reached out slowly, touched her chin, turned her head toward the street before them.

“Oh,” Sylvie said. No wonder the traffic had stopped. The worn lane markings on the roadway were peeling away, winding upward like airborne ribbons and spilling backward, touching down and gluing cars into place, creating a spiderweb that slowly sucked vehicles into the asphalt. A busload of tourists had gotten out and were snapping pics as drivers crawled out of windows of trapped cars.

“It’s been happening all day,” he said. “Not this. But things. You say Dunne’s shedding? I say, tell me something I couldn’t have guessed.”

“All day?” she said, staring at the webbing with more creeping terror than fascination.

“Transformations have happened all over town,” Demalion said. “People have died. But you don’t want the ISI to help. You want to go it alone.

“We really could help, Sylvie. You want to go home, worried about what? Your family, your friends? I could have the ISI pick them up—”

Wrong thing to say, Sylvie thought. So terribly wrong. She went cold all the way through. “If you do, I’ll dig around, Demalion, find your family—you said they’re local—drag them into this,” Sylvie said. “Do they know what kind of job you have?”

“Point made,” Demalion said. His jaw tightened. “I don’t like threats, Shadows.”

“You started it.”

“It wasn’t meant as a threat.”

Sylvie stopped further explanation by drawing out the meat gun, setting it in her lap. “Stay away from my people. Or you’ll find out how dangerous I really am.” Even she was unnerved at the quiet fury in her tone.

Demalion raised an eyebrow like an aristocrat being abused by a peasant. But, and Sylvie had to admit it, Demalion had always had common sense as well as smarts. He merely nodded.

Sylvie continued in the same quiet tone, “We’ve come to a truce, you and I, am I right? Let’s not jeopardize it.”

“I’d call it a detente, myself, and one-sided at that,” Demalion said.

“I gave you Lily’s name. I gave you Dunne’s identity.”

“You didn’t,” he said. “You didn’t say which god.”

“Does it matter?” Sylvie felt the exasperation seep in and, even as she bridled with annoyance, admired the technique. Demalion backed her away from the killing edge, transforming shouting to bickering.

“I’d just like to know what pantheon I should convert to,” Demalion said.

“Not funny,” she said. “He’s the Greek god of Justice, and it’s a new position, so don’t give me grief about there being no such god.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how little I want to make you unhappy.”

“This is trying to make me happy?” She slipped the gun back into the holster. “You’re right, as much as I hate to admit it. I find Wolf, I get Dunne to clean up his mess. Without Wolf, it only gets worse.”