Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Sylvie blinked. The sorcerer? The Maudit she’d shot? How could Anna know about—

“I grow bored.”

“It was French,” Sylvie said. “I don’t speak French. Enfant. Le Enfant Meurtrier , something like that.”

“Yes,” Anna said. “ L’enfant du meurtrier. He recognized you. As I do.”

“Maybe you’ve got the wrong idea,” Sylvie said. “I know who I am. I need to know who Lily—”

“L’enfant du meurtrier,” Anna D said. “The Murderer’s Child.”

After a moment, Sylvie said, “I’ve heard worse,” refusing to show that the name-calling rocked something deep inside her. Not Murderer, but Murderer’s Child . The murderer, like she should know what or who that meant. She realized Anna D, that bitch, had taken advantage of her silent abstraction to recite her riddle again, and she’d nearly missed it.

Anna D’s lips tilted up at the corners, a feline smile of triumph and pleasure. Sylvie watched it grow, become more purely about victory, watched the door begin to close. At the last moment, Sylvie put her hand out, slapped the door back, and solved the riddle. “Love.”

She grinned her own nasty triumph at the witch, and said, “I can play games, too.”

Anna D stalked away from the door, ceding this round; Sylvie had a mental image of a ticked-off cat, lashing its tail, and smiled again.

“At least you recognize it,” Anna D said, dropping into a velveteen-covered chair. “Enough to answer the question, and that’s something.” She sounded as if she were reassuring herself. She stroked the chair arms where the beige velvet tucked itself beneath brass nailheads.

Sylvie wandered around the sunken living room, with the focus not a television or entertainment system, but the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Looked like she was right; Anna D was a scryer.

“It’s like multiple-choice tests, really. When in doubt, choose B. Riddles always end in love or death.” She detoured over to a knickknack table covered in crystal globes of varying size; she picked one up and warmed it in her hand. “So many things do.”

“You guessed?” Anna D said.

“Correctly,” Sylvie said. “Isn’t that what matters?”

Anna sank back into her seat; her expression, never warm, faded to an icy hauteur. “You are a fool, Ms. Lightner. A dangerous one. You pick up shards of fact, hoard them like a magpie, pushing shiny things this way and that, and cackle over your own cleverness. You lack vision. Love, Ms. Lightner, is more than the answer to my riddle. It’s the source of the problems you face.”

“I get it already,” Sylvie said. Her ears burned. She set the little crystal down before she hurled it at something. Or someone.

“Let me be precise. Love made Dunne a god. The dissolution of love will reset the world, and both the mortal realm and the divine will be forever altered.”

“How about you shut up about me and start talking about Lily?” Sylvie said.

Anna D drew herself up in the chair; her hands flexed over the curved arms and stretched like claws. “I cannot discuss one without the other. You and the woman you misname are thrice linked, by blood, by circumstance, by purpose.”

“Like my own evil twin,” Sylvie said, pushing away another touch of chill with empty rejoinder. She sat down on the coffee table, hunched into the jacket for warmth, and tried to enjoy the way Anna bristled at the casual misuse of her furniture.

“Tell me about her then, if you know so much. Tell me how I have anything to do with her, other than being the one sent to make her give back what she’s taken.”

Anna D bridled again at Sylvie’s challenge but finally said, “There were humans even before the gods turned their interest to the mortal realm. The gods began to watch, to shape themselves to interact with the humans, and the humans reacted accordingly. Millennia passed with each of us shaping the other. Then several of the gods chose to create their own peoples—”

“Start at the very beginning, why don’t you?” Sylvie muttered, leaned forward, and put her head in her hands. She could smell the leather of Erinya’s coat, lingering smoke, and a lingering wisp of Demalion’s cologne. Damn, he smells good.

“I am not talking for my own edification, Ms. Lightner,” Anna D said, in a schoolteacher-prissy tone of voice, and wasn’t Sylvie going to kick someone’s ass for telling the witch her real name. . . .

“I get it,” Sylvie said, when the silence continued, when she realized she was going to have to listen actively , like some remedial student. “So which creation myth are we talking?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I don’t think you like it when I guess.”

“Her name’s not Lily,” Anna D said. “It’s Lilith, and she is an immortal creature of immense will, frustration, and rage.”

“Lilith,” Sylvie said, thought she said, though no sound came from her mouth. Her lips felt cold. It wasn’t surprise; it felt like fate. After all, it was the succubi, Lilith’s daughters, that had brought Sylvie into awareness of the Magicus Mundi all that time ago, Lilith’s influence that had seen Sylvie’s innocence shattered. Lilith’s touch tainted everything. Her fingers curled tightly into fists, stretching the jacket’s pockets taut.

“Your conflict was inevitable—”

“I made some of her daughters dead,” Sylvie said. “In retrospect, not the smartest move ever.” She picked up one of the little crystals and juggled it hand to hand. No wonder Demalion had taken to carrying one; they were as smoothly soothing as meditation balls minus the annoying chime.

“She has other offspring,” Anna D said. “What’s a double handful of them gone to a woman like her? To a woman of enormous will and obsessive focus? They could not help her; she dismissed them from her mind. But you, Ms. Lightner, are fated to face her.”

“Fate’s just an easy word for not trying,” Sylvie said. “I make my own choices, make my own fate.”

“Perhaps fate was the wrong word,” Anna said, shifting in her seat to gaze at the sheet glass. Sylvie doubted that she and Anna D were seeing the same sky beyond it. “There are patterns. Cause and effect, choices so small they’re meaningless until the accumulation is clear. Do you like to look in mirrors, Ms. Shadows? Do you like what you see?”

“We were talking about Lilith,” Sylvie said.

“We still are,” Anna D said. “Answer me.”

“I always wanted green eyes,” Sylvie said.

“Do not be pert,” Anna D snapped, lips drawing into a snarl; her teeth seemed rather long and very white. “I have put up with enough of your foolishness. What do you see in the mirror?”

“Myself,” Sylvie said, intimidated despite herself. The Furies were always enraged; their sudden bursts of temper were expected. This feral distortion of an elegant woman just plain scared her. Kill it, the dark voice hissed again.

“Tell me,” Anna D said. “Is it the same face you used to show? Back when you first chose to protect? Or is it the face of a Fury, driven to punish?” Cat-quick, she reached out and flicked Sylvie’s sleeve, leaving a long, rough scratch in the leather. “You smell of blood and death.”

Sylvie slipped out of the woman’s reach and rose. She leaned up against the cool glass and closed her eyes. “I know who I am,” she said. “Tell me about Lilith.”

She opened her eyes and watched Anna D sink back in the chair, almost seeming to dwindle. The woman’s lips parted, the barest sigh soughed out. “You don’t know,” she said. “But we’ll come at it another way. Lilith hates her God. Do you know that?”