Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

“Kevin?” Alekta asked. Glee surfaced in her pallid eyes. “Is it time for work?”

“Yes, Alekta,” Dunne said. The other two women looked up with sudden interest, but he waved them back. “Just Alekta.”

He nodded at the chair he had made, and Sylvie sat in it, ill at ease. “It’s easy enough, Sylvie. Just think of one of them; we’ll seal our bargain after the first one’s been dealt with. The rest will come . . . after you find Bran.”

There was the reminder of her leash again, she thought. Take out one of her enemies, but the rest would be free until she recovered Bran. It all added up to an unspoken Find him fast.

Sylvie closed her eyes, remembering. She wanted to be sure —they had been masked. She didn’t want him to just kill anyone and pretend it was one of them. There had to be some way. . . .

She focused. The leader raised his arms, spoke behind his mask, and Sylvie frowned. Nothing distinctive about him. Tall, but not remarkably so. He wore gloves, a full face mask, a full cloak. She couldn’t even tell if he was white, black, Hispanic, or other. She wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him on the street.

Reluctantly, she chose another target. Parting the crowd, pushing through silken cloaks, bumping up against one of the most avid participants. Behind her mask, the eyes had been blue; a spill of red-dyed curls tangled at the nape of her cloak, and her perfume, the ripe, sex-sweet musk of tropical orchids. Her, Sylvie thought, remembering the girl’s laughter when Suarez fell.

“That one,” she said. “That one first.” There was a brush of softness against her face, the faint prickle of blunt-cut hair and the creak of leather.

She opened her eyes and found Alekta pressed nearly into her, her eyes wide and blank, her mouth gaping. Sylvie recoiled, reaching instinctively for her gun and coming up short. “Get away from me.”

“Did you get the scent?” Dunne asked.

Alekta nodded, tongue lolling out of her mouth in a horror-movie moment; her waist and belly sucked in, her ribs expanded, her arms thickened, and she dropped to all fours, still shifting leisurely, as if she intended to enjoy the hunt.

“No!” Sylvie snapped. “No.”

Dunne said, “What now? Changed your mind?”

“No, but not like that. Not shredded by an animal.” Sylvie had seen deaths like that before—ugly, loud, and bloody. She wasn’t going to watch it again, and she had every intention of seeing the satanist die. If she ordered it, she had a duty to bear witness. Her heart pounded. “You do it,” she told Dunne. “Not your minion. You.”

Alekta whined, but reversed her transformation on Dunne’s command. “Fine,” he said. He reached over Alekta and seized Sylvie’s arm so tightly she knew there’d be bruises.

Bastard, she thought, just before the world dropped out from under her. She shrieked outrage, but the sound was swallowed by the overwhelming blur of color and noise that surrounded her. Like being inside a tornado, she thought, her breath hiccuping in her chest. And then it was done, and she and Dunne stood on the Gables campus of the University of Miami, midway between the Rathskeller, the Olympic pool, and the University Bookstore.

When she could speak, she growled, “Never again. I don’t like magic used on me.”

And such magic, she thought, her nerves still jangled. Dunne was far too talented. Mind-viewing, summoning of those horrible sister-demon things, transport spells, and of course, that tiny hiccup in time that she’d experienced earlier.

Humans could do each of those things if they were sufficiently talented and foolhardy. It took a type of power that always fought back, twisting in on itself, devouring its users if they faltered for even a moment.

Dunne seemed to use magic as easily as he breathed. Sylvie bit her lip; she was going to have to give Val a call—what she knew about magic was sketchier than it should be, confined mostly to her reasons for distrusting it.

“There she is,” Dunne said, gesturing. He had taken a seat on one of the benches that lined the concrete path.

Two girls walked side by side, coming down the path toward them. Sylvie recognized her would-be target immediately, in the way she moved, held herself, smirked .

The girl shook back her red curls and nudged her prettier companion just hard enough that the girl stepped off the path and into a slick spot of mud. She went down, and the red-haired girl laughed.

Still spreading her own particular brand of joy, Sylvie thought. If she had had any doubts, that little act of spite erased them. She nodded at Dunne, and his lips tightened.

“She wasn’t the one who shot him,” he said, but even as she opened her mouth to protest, he nodded. “Done.”

Sylvie turned, and the girl was suddenly gone. Sylvie had expected flames for some reason, people screaming and fleeing, campus police scratching their heads over an undeniable case of spontaneous human combustion, maybe even the girl’s ashes blowing back across Sylvie’s skin.

Instead, there was nothing. No outcry, no notice. Even the girl’s companion, rubbing exasperatedly at the mud on her jeans, seemed unaware that anything had occurred. But one moment the girl had been there, sauntering down the path, the next—nothing. Nearly nothing, Sylvie realized. Something lay on the path, something small and fragile.

With shaking legs, Sylvie walked over to the place where the girl had vanished, and bent, her fingers ready to recoil. An illusion, surely, not the thing itself. Sorcerers excelled in illusion and deception. But this—she reached out and touched it. Her eyes and her fingers agreed. She picked up the orchid, white bleeding into pale pink, the roots dangling, and said, “Transformed? Not dead?”

“She isn’t a murderer,” Dunne said. “Revenge is outside my nature. If you want her dead, you’ll have to do it. It won’t be that hard. Just throw her back on the ground, let someone trample her. Run her through a Weed Eater. Or even simpler, let her dry out and die.”

Sylvie let out a shaky breath; she should be relieved that her orders hadn’t put that responsibility on her. Instead, she only felt as if he was squirming out of their bargain. Testing her determination.

Sylvie felt the frailty of the narrow stem, the fleshiness of the petals, and cast it down onto the path again, raised her sneakered foot, imagining how the plant would shred, pulpy and tender beneath her heel. But when her sole touched pavement, she felt only the grit of concrete. She opened her eyes. Dunne stepped back from her, holding the orchid in his hands.

“AS SIMPLE AS THAT FOR YOU?” DUNNE SAID, TOUCHING THE FRAGRANT petals. “Transformation is not enough? An evil turned to harmless beauty, made benign—”

“You want me to take the damn case, don’t lecture me on my morals,” Sylvie said. “They killed Suarez. They’ll be after me. Yeah, it’s pretty simple. Kill or be killed.”

“But she’s harmless now,” he said. He frowned, but the expression was more puzzled than disapproving. “It’s one thing to kill in self-defense or in protection of another. To kill once there is no pressing need—”

“If your lover is dead, or alive but tortured,” Sylvie said, “will you dare tell me you won’t exact his pain on their hides?”

As he quailed, she pressed her advantage. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, tit for tat; it’s the oldest, simplest justice there is. Or is that different from being Justice with a capital J ? Are you a kindlier, gentler justice?”

He closed his fingers, and the orchid vanished. Sylvie caught the protest in her throat. “You let her go?”