Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

The room was dark and empty; the linoleum beneath their feet cracked with each footstep. Sylvie opened cupboards meant to hold vestments, the unconsecrated host and wine, and found them restocked with secular items. Jeans, leather jackets, stocking caps, makeup. A woman’s wardrobe. “Definitely my point,” she murmured.

Demalion moved into the main body of the church, black with shadows. Automatically, Sylvie fumbled for a switch in the doorway, ignoring the fact that this was a church and not a home. A string brushed her fingers; she caught it and tugged. A work light, hung where a crucifix should have been, illuminated the altar and made valiant inroads into the congregational shadows that filled the rest of the building. Two pews had been turned to face each other, suspending a mattress between them. The sheets shimmered with a subdued luster that whispered silk. There were some of Demalion’s amenities.

“Oh, she’s so going to hell,” Demalion said. He pointed at the holy-water font, and said, “Toothbrush and toothpaste stains. She’s been spitting in the well.”

“Creepy,” Sylvie said aloud.

“But not normal,” Demalion said. His voice echoed against the marble, the vast empty space.

“This is true.”

It looked like Lily had concentrated her living space around and on the altar. A small generator hummed behind the altar, and a long tangle of extension cords led off that, anchoring a tiny fridge and a desktop computer that gave her a password prompt when Sylvie started it up.

Papers tacked up along a wall, fluttering in shadow and the wake of their movement, turned out to be photographs of Bran, Dunne, the sisters, and their house. Sylvie shivered when she noticed that every one of the Furies’ images showed them red-eyed, and not in the usual flash-flare way, but in a burning, empty-eye-socket, red-flame fashion. The Furies weren’t as good as Dunne at hiding what they were. Dunne’s photographs showed a man. Nothing more.

Another picture showed Bran, bright head bent to speak to a man in a sleek, black sedan, just down the block from their house. The man in the suit looked blank, almost mindless, and in the bare periphery of the photo, Dunne lurked. Team one, Sylvie thought. Getting brain-washed. Two-step trick. Bran distracts them, and Dunne lays on the whammy. Sylvie couldn’t blame the agent. Who wouldn’t be distracted by his target coming up to talk to him, and smiling that smile?

Even in a photograph, Bran’s smile promised all sorts of delight.

She moved deeper into the church, studying the stained-glass windows. Most of them had been slathered over with black paint, the color as thick and uneven as if Lily had climbed a ladder and simply poured the paint downward.

Other images were spared the black-paint bath, but none had been left alone. A few had been broken, and others altered in strange, telling ways. Sylvie looked up at a white-robed God whose beard had been spray-painted blue.

JK had been right. Lily was not fond of religious art. Even Sylvie, who considered her religious meter to hover around zero, felt a little uneasy at such concentrated venom.

Bluebeard, she thought, and in a flash of understanding that almost seemed to come from outside, got the bitter joke.

“Some churches changed the Lord’s Prayer,” Sylvie said. “Didn’t they?”

“I guess,” Demalion said.

“ Lead us not into temptation. The PC crew took it out, because God wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Do you have a point?” Demalion asked.

“Not really,” Sylvie said. She headed back up to the altar desk and took another look at the computer. Password-protected. Demalion would take it when they left. The ISI would hack it open, and Sylvie would get dribs and drabs of the contents, doled out in increments as they decided what was safe to let loose.

Sylvie traced the pattern around the altar, the Latin that read out “this is my body, this is my blood,” following it around the back, where Lily had marked over the rest of it with more black paint. My body, my blood, my soul are mine, and I yield them to none.

It gave Sylvie a jolt, an uncomfortable spasm; the skin of her back itched and prickled as if Tish’s nails were tracing the tattoo again. Oh yes, Sylvie understood Lily.

Sylvie finished her walk around the altar, thinking of Bran painting Eden at Lily’s behest. Paradise as prison. God as Bluebeard. Lily’s desire to steal a god’s power. Ni Dieux, Ni Maîtres. No gods, no masters, save yourself.

Without conscious desire, her fingers stroked the keys, and she tapped in a familiar phrase. Cedo Nulli. I yield to none.

The computer welcomed her in with a chime that Sylvie moved to stifle even as it started. Demalion raised his head. “Shadows? What are you doing?”

“Seeing if I can guess the password,” she said. She surfed Lily’s desktop folders, headed for e-mail, and called it up. French again, she thought, and started skimming, hunting for words she could understand. She found one e-mail that fulfilled that, and made her growl. Maudits. Sylvie Shadows. A communiqué sent late last night.

Footsteps behind her; she started to close the program, but Demalion’s hand caught hers.

He frowned at the screen, cast her a wary glance. “How did you—” And he went back to reading, her hand still caged in his. “Do you understand French?”

“No,” she said. “But I don’t like that combination.”

“Lily’s inviting the Maudits to come get you. She says she knows they have been waiting for a chance. That if they weren’t feeling energetic enough, that you . . . killed the boy they sent to her.”

“Focus on the important thing,” Sylvie said. “Are they taking her up on it?”

“Did you kill the boy?”

She shrugged. The deed was done, and dead was dead. Demalion needed her too much to get picky. “Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing in the same situation. Anything else interesting?” Sylvie said.

Demalion read another few aloud, e-mails between Lily and the Maudits bickering over prices for an assortment of insta-spell sticks and a single pair of magic spectacles. Sylvie had divided the world into talented and not, had assigned Lily to the latter capacity, when she’d forgotten there were such things as gadget witches. Stored spells used by anyone and everyone. And supplied, at a hefty price, by unscrupulous sorcerers like the Maudits . At least Lily haggled with them, made it that much less profitable for them.

That disagreement, Sylvie thought, was all to the good, made it that much less likely the Maudits would get off their luxury couches to come hunting her.

She left Demalion to his muttering and skimming of Lily’s mail and went back to the photographs. Lily had been stalking Dunne for several seasons; pictures of Dunne wrapped up in winter wools, Bran’s hair a splash of color against the dull blues of Dunne’s sweater, both of their faces bright with cold and amusement, looking straight at the camera.

Looking straight at the photographer. Sylvie peeled the photo from the wall, flipped it, already knowing what she was going to see. Two initials: TC. Tish Carmichael.

If Lily hadn’t taken the photographs, then the wall wasn’t so much a record of her surveillance as a collage of her intent. Bran smiled at the ISI again and started a new row of photos, less-candid moments and more stalkeresque. Dark, grainy shots taken at night with special lenses that washed all color away. Dunne’s bedroom, their dining room, the two of them coming home, trailed by the sisters.

These were professional surveillance shots, her dark voice whispered, and how did Lily get them from the ISI?