Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Demalion regained his poise, and said, “Dunne was a source of unusual and unknown power. I owed it to my employers, my city, and my country, to assess the situation accurately, the better to protect my world. So, yes, I followed my orders. I judged them fair and worthy of being obeyed.”

“You ruined everything,” Bran said. “Everything.” He put his head in his hands. “All I wanted was to live in peace. To be myself and happy with Kevin. And then you came, and Lilith—I want to hate you so much.”

Demalion’s stern face softened. He might not have been able to see Bran’s beauty to be seduced by it, but the voice was powerful enough to have an effect, Sylvie thought.

“You can’t,” she said. “Can you? Not because you think Demalion has a point, which he does , mind you, but because you can’t hate—”

“I lack that fire,” Bran admitted.

“What burns hot but can’t keep a body warm?” Sylvie said, under her breath. Demalion and Bran turned identical expressions of startlement on her; she shrugged. “Sorry. Thinking of the sphinx.”

Bran made a moue. Apparently, the sphinx was unpopular all the way around, if even he wasn’t a fan.

“Sphinx,” Demalion said. “There’s another monster in all this?”

Sylvie let out a breath. So not the time to get into that . “Bran, we’re under the gun. Pick up the pace.”

Bran leaned back against Demalion, and Demalion fended him off, one palm flat against Bran’s chest, one fist holding a crystal with white-knuckled intensity. “Just the eyes,” Demalion said. “ Nothing else.”

“I don’t understand,” Bran said.

“No Rodrigo specials,” Sylvie said. She waved at him, flipped him off, and Rodrigo ignored her completely, still blissed out on Bran. “No ‘love me, love me’ force-fed into his veins. Rodrigo might as well be meat at this point. We need Demalion whole, sane, and sharp-witted.”

“If I’m going to love someone,” Demalion said, “I want it to be my choice.”

“I understand,” Bran whispered. “Didn’t I choose my own life? My own lover?” He knelt up, blew a stream of air across Demalion’s eyes. When Demalion’s eyes blinked shut, Bran kissed the closed lids, right then left, and followed with a lingering kiss on Demalion’s forehead above the third eye.

Wonder what that’ll do to his clairvoyance, Sylvie thought.

Demalion’s hands, fisted tight around the crystals, suddenly spasmed and collapsed inward. His arms twitched; veins popped as if something had blocked their flow. “Bran,” Sylvie said. “Heal not hurt.”

Demalion groaned deep in his throat, through clenched teeth. His body shivered through tiny seizures.

“Shh,” Bran whispered, “ ’s tricky, this.”

Demalion fell out of Bran’s embrace, gasping, eyes wide and strained. The distortion in his veins raced upward, bulging through his shoulder into his neck.

Demalion’s eyes went blank and glassy, the eyes of a corpse, and his body fell limp. Sylvie shoved Bran out of the way, grabbed Demalion’s collar, got her hands on his throat. His pulse was strong, as was her relief. He blinked, and his eyes—changed. First from mirror blind back to his usual dark espresso, but then, before Sylvie could let out her held breath, his eyes lost color, ending as gold and as glossy as heartless topaz. The pupils rounded, then slitted catlike, before rounding outward again.

“What did you do ?” She let Demalion go and shook Bran. She got in two good shakes before Rodrigo lunged forward and stopped her—They all fell into a tangle of limbs; she elbowed him in the throat, and Rodrigo yelped hoarsely. She kicked again and hit something unyielding—the driver’s seat. Burke snapped at them from the front. “Trying to concentrate! Keep it down back there!”

“I did what you asked,” Bran said, extricating himself from beneath her and Rodrigo with a muttered curse. “Kevin remade his vision. I couldn’t restore what had never changed as far as his body was concerned. That takes a full-powered god. I just . . .”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“He had two genetic choices,” Bran said. “Kevin’s spell blinded the man. I sort of . . . switched tracks on his genetic line, went the monster route?” Her hands fell away from his sweater, and he said, “Hey, he can see now. That’s what you wanted. . . .”

“Demalion,” she said. “You can see?”

His voice was rough, furred with pain and amazement when he finally woke from the abstracted trance he seemed to be in. “It’s not like it used to be,” Demalion said, blinking. He closed his right eye, looked through the left, then reversed it. The pupils slitted and flared. “It’s—Sylvie—it’s more . It’s—there are patterns. I was a clairvoyant, could see things that happened out of my sight. But this . . . Now, I think I saw bits of my future.” He rubbed at his head, and sighed, obviously at a loss for explanation.

“Old Cat,” Bran muttered.

Demalion’s attention swerved; his eyes flared. “Old Cat? What the hell are you—”

“Can you shoot straight?” she interrupted. Unmasking his genealogy in an ISI surveillance van was a capital-B-bad idea. Burke was casting disturbed glances back their way.

“You are a scary woman. But yes, I can shoot again. Hell, I might be able to shoot around corners at this point.”

The van swerved again; rain splashed, ceased, and Sylvie snapped, “Stop playing with the rain, Burke, or I’m going to come up there and take my bad mood out on you.”

“It’s . . .” Burke said, the van slowing. His hands shook on the wheel. “It’s not rain anymore. It’s blood.”

Sylvie beat Demalion to the front by a nose, and peered out. Her view was rapidly eclipsed by Bran, who lunged over her and jerked the window open. Blood spattered across his hands, his face. He brought his palms up to cover his eyes. His shoulders shook. He scrubbed at his face as if he could unsee it but only managed to smear the blood into his skin.

The rain’s grey needles changed to a slippery darkness that ran the streets, foaming at the curbs. The rain-free zone over the van wavered and closed in, blood falling stickily and staining the windshield, obliterating even the minimal line of sight they’d had before.

Sylvie shuddered. If the storm cloud was Dunne, the rain sprang from his soul, his immortal body. That was why it had parted for them, Dunne instinctively easing his lover’s path. Rain turned to blood—

“He’s hurt, isn’t he?” Sylvie said. “Zeus did him some real damage.” She watched the wipers sheet blood from one side of the windshield to the other, catching in the small cracks that the heavy rain had created.

“Yes,” Bran whispered, his face pale beneath the streaks of his lover’s blood. His lips lost color.

Demalion leaned into Sylvie, and said, “You were counting on Dunne, weren’t you?”

“We still are,” she said. Lilith was still out there somewhere, awaiting her chance. Sylvie’s skin prickled in waves of gooseflesh; she rubbed her arms fiercely, listening to her little dark voice growling a litany of warning. Lilith was smart. Too smart to waste time hunting them through the storm when she had to know how limited Sylvie’s resources were. When the ISI were the only resource she had left. Lilith was sitting somewhere, warm and dry, waiting for her ISI lackeys to give her a call.

“Best to go on as we’ve begun,” Sylvie said. “Not a lot of choice left. Dunne knows where we’re heading; no injury short of death will stop him. And gods? They don’t die easy.”

Bran turned to look at her, eyes wet, but he nodded. “That’s right. That’s right.” If he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, Sylvie chose to ignore it.