Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Demalion shook his head. “I don’t know. I see it, like smoke in the air. Went up the stairs. Be careful, Sylvie.”

“Smoke,” Sylvie said. Her thoughts turned inexorably to balefire and the missing staff.

“Hurry,” Alekta said again, a growl in her voice. She shoved Bran into the stairwell, then took point.

“Wait,” Sylvie said. When had the situation gotten out of her control? But Bran moved on obediently.

He turned back to say, “If I can get to Kevin before Zeus wiggles free, it’ll be all over.” Hope was written across his face.

That made Sylvie oddly angry. She recognized the hope for what it was. Yes, two-thirds of it was relief that Dunne was alive, but one-third of it was that selfish desire to cling to stronger forces. “Zeus will stop, just like that?” Sylvie scoffed. “Because he’s what? Scared of you? A god who ran to the mortal realm?”

He let his silence answer her, and Sylvie bit her lip. Not big with the confidence builders. “You joining us, Demalion? Your turf,” she said.

He had balked at the base of the stairs, gazing at the walls. He pressed his hands to his temples, blinked a couple of times. “Yeah,” he said. “Go up. It all happens on the roof.”

She let him draw alongside her, and said, voice low, “Tell me Bran’s fix is holding.”

“Eyestrain,” he said. His tone was flat. “This is going to take some getting used to. Tell me, Sylvie. Will my mother be able to train me?”

“She won’t need to. We’ll make Dunne put it back right,” she said. “After. No monster for you.”

He laughed, the pinched tension lines in his face easing. “Only you would think you could bully a god, Shadows.”

“Someone has to do it,” she said, not really in the mood to be mocked.

On the risers before her, Bran suddenly gagged, froze in his tracks. Alekta paused, one foot poised on either side of the charred corpse on the landing, inquiry in her face.

“Go on,” Sylvie said. They had no time for squeamishness, not when she expected Lilith at any moment. “Just don’t look.”

Bran closed his eyes, face drawn and sick, and followed Alekta’s quick hop over the corpse. Sylvie knelt by the body. Security guard, flash-fried, skin bubbled and crisped, eyes boiled out. It hadn’t been balefire. Balefire would have left only a greasy, sooty smudge instead of this wreckage. She and Demalion traded a wary look.

Sylvie pushed past the fifth-floor landing, legs aching with weariness. Storm light seeped down from above, limning the edges of the stairs in silver, showing the clear shot to the top. Bran and Alekta seemed diffused in its gentler light, blurred shadows moving forward. The roof door was open already, she thought. Invitation? Or trap? A little surge of anticipation made her pick up her pace. Now. Lilith.

Sixth floor, seventh floor passed in a blur of drumming feet echoing back at her. Eighth floor and she saw the shadow of whoever waited for them. Her breath came quick, anticipation, excitement, fear, rage—Sylvie couldn’t even tell what drove her on.

But the woman who stepped out of the shadows, grinned down at them with a mouthful of fire, wasn’t Lilith, but Helen. Sylvie faltered, everything in her stammering with surprise. The little dark voice whispered into that void, Kill her.

Alekta, half a flight ahead of her, shoved Bran downward, sending him plunging toward Sylvie. Demalion halted his fall.

A white streamer of flame engulfed Alekta, pushed the Fury into the landing wall, and pinned her there, snarling, growling, shrieking pain and rage.

Sylvie’s breath sucked out of her lungs; she covered her eyes, but the only burn in them was due to the wash of heat. Not balefire, then, but bad enough. The temperature skyrocketed in the close quarters. Down, she thought, but they needed to go up. Fight and flight warred. The cement walls turned ashy, soaking up heat like a kiln, preparing to bake them. Even the icy air from the storm was beaten back under the wash of flame.

Alekta was nothing but a writhing mass in the fire.

“Help her,” Bran whispered. “Please.” His forming tears dried instantly in the superheated air.

“She’s a Fury,” Demalion said. “She killed one of my men.”

“She’s my friend,” Bran said. Demalion just shook his head, held Bran tighter.

“We wait,” Demalion said.

“On the clock here,” Sylvie said. “We’ve got two gods upstairs and somewhere there’s a woman who wants to cut out Bran’s heart.”

Demalion smiled at her. His gemstone eyes slitted in the fire’s light. “She’s burning her borrowed power faster than she can replace it. We wait. Then we take her out.”

Yes, the little dark voice agreed. We don’t run. “Let’s not give her the chance to recharge,” Sylvie said. She slipped up the stairs, though her skin complained about getting closer to the heat, and Demalion bit back a protest. Alekta was silent now, struggling less. And Sylvie was going to stand by and wait for her attacker to run down, the better to kill her. Behind her, she heard Demalion’s grunt of effort as he blocked Bran’s sudden rush to aid Alekta. A quick glance downward showed Demalion holding Bran in an armlock.

The fire sputtered, and Sylvie rushed the landing, gun before her.

Demalion said, “Not yet,” but Sylvie was in no mood to wait. Disappointment drove her, she realized. This is it? My last obstacle? When it came down to Lilith’s end-game, she’d sent a mortal pyrokinetic to stop them? She hadn’t thought Lilith such a coward.

The flaming Fury a torch at her back, Sylvie narrowed her eyes against residual dazzle and took stock of her opponent. “God,” Sylvie said, “that can’t be comfortable.”

Helen was wreathed in her own fire; it cloaked her, shielded her, more—Sylvie squinted against the brightness—it held her together. Ropy stitches of fire covered the damage from their previous encounter, and her eyes were smoking in their sockets.

“Shadows,” Helen said. Her voice was the dry crackle of kindling. Alekta dropped beside Sylvie, all seared meat and angry, making staccato attempts to stand, crawl, attack—but she was down. Helen rictus-grinned and threw her hand out toward Sylvie. The fire faded to a curtain of dry heat before it touched her.

Helen whimpered and tried again. A wild flame shot from her hand like out-of-control fireworks, palest blue and far hotter than anything they’d seen from her before, a vast wave of scalding air, pouring down the stairs toward Sylvie, toward Bran.

Alekta staggered up and embraced the flame, sucking it into herself, while Sylvie dodged.

Alekta . . . frizzled away, and as the fire faded, a rusty flood of loosed power streamed upward. Helen tried to seize it, reaching flaming hands for it, and Sylvie shot her, point-blank.

Helen’s legs gave out. The fires that sealed her wounds faded, the injuries reopening, sending blood sizzling over her skin.

“Should have gone to a real doctor,” Sylvie muttered. “Should have stayed out of my business.” She raised the gun again. Her hand shook; exhaustion, she realized. Demalion said, “She’s down, Sylvie. You don’t have to—”

Helen opened her mouth; smoke and flames traced the outline of her lips, and Sylvie fired. The bullet, despite her tired hands, went where she wanted it to go. Helen’s skull cracked, and the flame began to devour the body.

“I had to,” she said. “She had a taste of real power. Even if it faded. She’d want it back. If I didn’t kill her now—it’d be worse later.”

“There are laws, Shadows,” Demalion said.

“Oh, those ,” Sylvie said. Her voice cracked with exposure to the residual heat. She coughed for a moment, then said, “’Cause the ISI’s success rate at dealing with the supernatural evil is so superb. . . . Oh wait. Your success rate depends on pushing them off onto people like me. I take it back, Demalion. This isn’t your turf. It’s mine. Will you follow my orders?”