Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Sylvie let the gun barrel drop, her breath a loud rasp in the quiet. “You can’t make me think you care. You burned people alive in the nightclub.”

“You destroy everything and everyone you touch. And then you blame them for being weak.”

“You pretended to be Bran’s friend. You betrayed him.”

“Your arrogance saw your associate killed—”

Sylvie’s vision greyed. Was she already too late for Alex? She couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. “Are we done with the pissing contest? I’m bad, you’re worse. Pretty sure the vote would swing my way.” Her voice, though ragged, held its edge. Sylvie was perversely proud of that.

Lilith raised her head and smiled, serene. “It all depends on whom you ask. We’re not painted in black and white, Sylvie. Just different shades of grey.”

Sylvie closed her eyes, wished she could close her ears. “You can’t stop me from doing what I have to do.”

“I could. Of course I could. Just by snapping my fingers,” Lilith said. “Or a stick. Balefire down here would be spectacular, I’d imagine.” Like a stage magician, she folded her fingers closed, opened them again to reveal a wooden match. She pressed it between two fingers.

Sylvie’s hand dropped to the gun, though it hadn’t proved useful. She couldn’t stop watching the matchstick rotating in Lilith’s agile fingers. “You should listen better, Sylvie. There’s no need for melodrama. I could stop you. I have no intention of doing so.”

“I don’t believe—”

“Well, it’s not like he’s doing me a lick of good all locked away like that, now is he? Auguste, my little prodigy, was quite a genius when it came to magical doors, locks, keys . . . oubliettes. Pity he slacked on his defensive skills. I expected him to be able to open it for me. Now, I’ve got you, willing to do the same.”

“I’m not a talent,” Sylvie said. “So there’s no point in you hanging around, playing cat at the mousehole.”

“Never a cat,” Lilith said, making a moue. “Nasty, sly, self-indulgent creatures.” She gestured broadly with her cigarette, tracing a pale, smoky path in the dim light. “The fun part is I don’t think another sorcerer could reopen it. Too much power. They’d open another oubliette, maybe, and that wouldn’t slice the bread for sandwiches, would it? But a nonwitch, a nonsorcerer, doesn’t have power to open anything. . . . Such the conundrum. I was furious with you at first. I admit it. You made my simple, elegant plan into a locked-room mystery. But then you show up, carrying all the tools to redeem yourself.”

Lilith finished her cigarette, fished out another, and dropped her hand to the cement, the matchstick reaching out. . . . Then she yanked it back, unstruck. Unbroken. “Oops. Wouldn’t that be overkill for lighting a cigarette?” She lit the new cigarette from the ashy tail of the first. “You want one?”

Sylvie shook her head, wordless. Lilith raised the fine hairs on her arms and nape. Her chatter couldn’t mask the stink about her, the obsessive rage that betrayed itself in a hundred little tells in her false calm, in her ragged fingernails, in the flick, flick, flick of those silvery eyes. If Sylvie were a dog, she’d have been laying her ears flat and growling low in her throat.

“No, suppose not,” Lilith said, putting the cigarettes away in her hip pocket with a little pat, as if to make sure they made it there. It reminded her of Demalion with his little crystal and his constant check on it. A crutch. “Mortal after all, and who needs lung cancer? Though, Syl, I’ve got to say, you aren’t going to live long enough for that kind of death.” She spun her own cigarette away; Sylvie dodged the burning tip with a scowl.

“I’m not helping you.”

“You are being painfully slow about it,” Lilith said. “Is there anything I can do to speed matters?”

“Go away.”

“If it’s confidence you’re lacking, don’t,” Lilith said. “You know what they say. There’s not a safe that can’t be cracked, given the right skill set and a good set of tools. And you’re well prepared. Got your hands slicked with power I can smell from here.”

“I’m not—”

“Tick, tick, Sylvie,” Lilith said, voice dropping low and smooth as a snake. “Your friend’s counting on you, isn’t she? And your poor blinded lover boy—whom you left all alone. You may work alone. I don’t. I’d get started if I were you. I’m really being very patient.”

Sylvie shivered at the glimpse of the steel core beneath the persiflage. Her trembling increased until she felt it rattle her spine, felt the room vibrate with it. Rage. Fear. Stress. She wasn’t sure what the driving emotion was, and her little dark voice seemed to have deserted her.

Tick, tick, she thought, and Lilith tapped her wrist as if she plucked the thought from Sylvie’s mind.

Sylvie took a last look at those faintly luminous eyes, trying to decide if the moment she turned her back, Lilith would incinerate her. Lilith’s gaze gave her nothing to go on, and finally Sylvie turned to the satchel.

Tick, tick. Sylvie clenched her jaw and knelt before the stained remnants of the first spell casting. Bending reality, she thought. Val had made it sound impossible for a non-Talent. But it seemed to Sylvie that doing it once was the hard thing, doing it twice—well, the world had bent already. It could bend again and would follow the path of least resistance, the path it had followed before.

Sylvie uncapped the cobalt paint and globbed it onto her fingertips. The dregs of Erinya’s blood leached toward the oils, and Sylvie sucked in a breath. Once begun, she couldn’t stop. She wasn’t a magic-user, had never wanted to be one, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t picked up a few basics. She’d seen elaborate spell casting done before. Always build the circle first, Val had said, in full-out lecture mode.

A tiny crack behind her made her jump nearly out of her skin. She spun, hand full of blue paint, spattering the wall. Oddly dizzy, Sylvie forced her eyes closed.

“It’s okay, you know,” Lilith said. “It was a dud.” Sylvie opened her eyes, breath lodged in her throat, heart pounding, still half-expecting balefire to devour her. Instead, all there was was Lilith looking down at the broken matchstick in her hand and pouting. “ Maudits bastards. I despise shoddy work.”

“You burn me up, no chance in hell of getting Bran back,” Sylvie snapped.

“True,” Lilith said. “I didn’t mean to snap it. I was getting bored, and it just . . . slipped. Don’t bore me, Sylvie.”

Tick, tick.

Lilith traded the most recent end of a cigarette for another fresh one, chain-smoking, staring blankly at the cement ceiling. Dud, my ass, Sylvie thought. Lilith was far too careful to set off any spell accidentally.

Gritting her teeth, Sylvie globbed more cobalt on her fingers and started following the first curve. Build the circle first, Val said. That way, if the spell goes wrong, it’s contained. She couldn’t let this one go wrong.

She tucked the tube of paint into her palm, nozzle down, squeezing, providing herself with a steady flow. Beneath her fingertips, the concrete felt as rough as sharkskin. She scuttled along the old curve in an uncomfortable half crouch, trying to keep an eye on Lilith even while she focused her will on the circle.

Halfway around, and Sylvie paused, knees cramping, fingers still connected to the concrete. It wasn’t working, she thought, and despair made her fingers tremble. Shouldn’t there be some sense of progress? She was learning nothing more than finger painting on a surface rougher than sandpaper sucked and that oil paints smelled like gassy swampland. An inane thought echoed in her head. Art is pain.