Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Sylvie inched away from them. The floor . . . She shifted her gaze until the vertigo passed. She stood above the floor on some stretched-out pane of glassine material. The true floor belled beneath it, and Sylvie dared another glance down. It, too, burned with the chemical cloud-roil of the walls, made her think of planks laid over lava spills.

She was alone on one side of the fountain, but on the other? Squinting against the growing brightness, she walked around the curve of the fountain and stopped cold.

Brandon Wolf lay asleep—not dead—on the floor, naked as the day he was born. The dread she’d held tightly to her since the beginning of this case, from the moment Dunne had sworn Bran was alive against all reason, fled. Sprawled, asleep. As if the oubliette was nothing more than a time-out for a child.

She knelt suddenly, knees weak.

God, photographs did not do him justice. Sprawled, prone, head tucked on one outflung arm, he woke nothing so much in her as sheer animal want. His supple skin, the dark-flame tint of autumnal hair, the long eyelashes peeking out beneath longer bangs, his lips, slightly curved even in sleep, his shoulders broad and golden, his lean thighs, his—Sylvie’s kaleidoscope thoughts derailed entirely, leaving her with nothing but a quickened pulse and the undeniable urge to pounce. She shivered. And she’d thought succubi were dangerously attractive.

The idea shocked her cold for a brief, brain-saving moment. Bran’s attractiveness, even unconscious, more than a match for a succubus, for a preternatural creature of desire? Sylvie’s breath caught. Her dark voice whispered. Human? It sounded perplexed. The edge was gone from it, quiet wonder in its voice.

Sylvie caught a quick gleam of eye shine as he peeked through his lashes, and realized he was feigning sleep. “Brandon,” she said.

He swung into a crouch, facing her. “What do you want?” Even his voice was delicious. Low, husky, as warm as a firelit room.

“To get you out,” Sylvie said. She looked into amber eyes and forgot to breathe. “My name’s Sylvie. Dunne sent me.”

“Bullshit,” he said, though his entire face washed with relief before closing off again. “You’re one of Lilith’s lackeys.”

“I am no one’s lackey,” she snapped. He flinched, and she thought, Great, scare the guy senseless. “Really, I’m working for Kevin.”

He flicked a glance at her, flicked it away. “You’re wearing Erinya’s jacket. I bought it for her in London.”

“I am. You think she’d let just anyone borrow it?” He wanted to believe her, but he had the eyes of someone used to pain and disillusionment. It deepened the beauty of his too-pretty face.

He shivered, and she tracked the ripple of muscle and skin, sliding her gaze down the taut curves of his shoulders, down to the flat planes of his chest, the narrowing of his waist and hips. He dropped his hands to cover himself, flushing. Sylvie yanked her gaze away. God, what was wrong with her? The poor guy was scared, naked, and she gawked at him like he was nothing more than meat. She shucked the jacket and dropped it into his lap. “Sorry,” she said.

“Used to it,” he muttered, and she looked over in time to see the resignation on his face, and more—the old scars on his forearms.

He might be strong physically—his body attested to that—but there was a fragility in his eyes that she didn’t like.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. Shit comfort, but the best she could manage.

He nodded, still not looking. His hands fisted in the coarse leather.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Lilith’s clever. Erinya’s not. I’m not. We’re easy to fool.” Bitterness laced his voice.

“She got you with the murals.”

“She got me way before that,” Bran said. “Years and years ago.”

Years and years? Dunne had only become a god recently. Sylvie got that irritating prickle again, the one that said she hadn’t been given all the information she needed.

Bran stood, put his back to her, and she tried to keep her eyes from wandering over the long line of exposed skin. Not the typical redhead, creamy pale with freckling. Brandon Wolf seemed to have been tapped by Midas instead. His skin laid claim to gold and held the silkiness of flower petals. It looked so—touchable.

She fisted her hands. Human? Her dark voice raised the question again. Sylvie still didn’t have an answer for it. How much of this attraction was built into him by Dunne thinking of him as beautiful, the reflection of a god’s desire? How much of it was intrinsic?

He lowered the jacket and stepped into the skinny, unzipped sleeve. Sylvie blinked. What the hell—

He tugged on it, and the jacket stretched, shifted, grew . Brandon Wolf drew the jacket on like a pair of pants, and it shaped itself to his need. He buttoned the front closed and sighed in obvious relief at being clothed, even partially. Sylvie, on the other hand, felt immeasurably worse. Perhaps she was the fool Anna D had called her.

She’d risked so much to rescue the human innocent, and he was neither; he was Power.

“You’re not human,” she said. The client always lied.

“I am,” he said, hugging himself. He lowered his head to stare at his bare toes.

“Humans can’t create matter. A sorcerer could transform the jacket, but he couldn’t make more of it. That jacket should have gone as sheer as Saran Wrap as you stretched it. You created more of it.” She shivered. Fool. The pieces all put together wrong. Anna D had told her straight out. It was love that made Dunne a god. Love made Dunne. Love. While she was unfamiliar with the pantheon, she could juggle a few pieces, pluck a name everyone knew out of the air, and create a new picture. “You’re a god ,” she accused.

“That, too,” he whispered.

How did an American cop end up a Greek god? He married in. How did a man built of Hera’s power become a god of Justice and not simply her replacement? Some of him in him. Revenge tempered by love. Brandon Wolf, who would wake a corpse’s senses, Brandon Wolf, the heart of Anna D’s riddles, who signed his art with a pair of crossed arrows, who by all accounts drew admiration and desire wherever he went, even from pissy, violent godlets like the Furies—Brandon Wolf could be only one god.

“Eros,” she said.

Dunne wasn’t Lilith’s target. Dunne was incidental. Lilith had already caged her god.

“Why are you alive?” Sylvie asked.

He tugged fitfully at the low waist of the leather pants, grew it up another few inches. “Killing a god isn’t a simple thing.” He raised his face to hers, as wary as a wild animal. “Kevin really sent you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Look, he changed my gun. You can sense that right?” She held it out; he shied, but when she held the muzzle down, he reached out to touch it. He sighed, slumped back to the floor of the oubliette.

“He sent you in here to get me?”

“That was . . . not part of the original plan, no,” Sylvie said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But hell, it’s got to be easier to break out than break in.”

He laughed, three hitched breaths, then gasped back what might have been a sob. “There’s no way out.”

“Have you tried?” Sylvie asked.

“Of course ,” he said. “Do you think I like sitting here, just waiting for Kevin to come rescue me like some pathetic infant?”

Sylvie was glad to see the anger, a hint that he wasn’t broken.

“The oubliette was meant to see me dead. But I’ve managed to keep ahead of that, at least.”

“Transformation and creation of matter,” Sylvie said.

Bran nodded. “Air to water, hair to air—all small things.”