Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

Lilith jabbed at her eyes with the spell sticks, and Sylvie caught her wrist, pounded it against the edge of the roof. Lilith yelped. The sticks clattered free. Sylvie snatched them, ready to hurl them over the edge.

“Burn,” she heard Lilith shout beneath her, and the sheriff’s star on Sylvie’s chest burst into white-hot flame under Lilith’s touch. The star fell free; slagging as it went. Sylvie screamed as the molten metal wrapped around her arm for a brief caress before dripping to the ground. Her hands spasmed, and she dropped the spindles.

Beneath her, Lilith screamed also, as the effort she poured into breaking the invulnerability charm left her mostly human again. Sylvie wrapped a hand in Lilith’s hair, attempted to pound her skull into the roof.

Lilith gouged at Sylvie’s neck, reaching toward her eyes, and Sylvie rolled away, covering the spindles with her body. Lilith tried to get them, nails digging at Sylvie’s side, and Sylvie fumbled a rock into her hand. She brought it up, crashing it into Lilith’s temple. Lilith dodged in time to turn it into a scalp wound, nothing more serious, and Sylvie, in pure incandescent rage, rolled her over and struck down.

Squirming, Lilith caught the blow on her shoulder and managed to pinch the long nerve in Sylvie’s arm. The rock in her grip trembled, but Sylvie refused to let go.

A sudden pulse, like a giant heartbeat, rocked the roof. A roll of grey fog passed over them, through them, and circled the roof, corralling all the drifting bits of Bran.

A small distant part of Sylvie wondered what that effort had cost Dunne, to use his own faltering power with such a finesse for borders, but most of her was fixated on wiping Lilith off the map. In the silence as the world was cut away from them, she heard a tiny word, a word weighted by Erinya’s growl. Matricide.

Sylvie’s hot blood cooled as if a glacier had breathed on her. Magdala met her eyes, licked away a bloody streak on her cheek with a long, inhuman tongue, and sat back, watching. Any excuse, her posture said. Yeah, Lilith wasn’t her mother, but hadn’t Anna D said it? That Sylvie was the first of her children to be awake? Maybe it was close enough to give them the excuse they wanted.

The rock in Sylvie’s hand trembled and fell. The dark voice wailed as they fell out of concert with each other, but Sylvie shuddered. So close to a crime the Furies considered unforgivable. The dark voice snarled, You’re damned anyway. Dead anyway. Make her pay for it.

Tentative hope sprang up in Sylvie’s chest. Would Erinya bother to warn her if her life were already forfeit?

Lilith laughed, a sound hoarse and sore. “Cain’s child, too. A rock in your fist. But you should never show mercy.” A flick of her fingers, and a tiny stick dropped into her hand, a thin matchstick, brittle, breaking, a tiny ghost flare promising balefire. . . .

Sylvie scrabbled for something, anything, found a weapon, plunged it into Lilith’s chest. Lilith’s shriek broke off into a familiar whine. Sylvie glanced down, at the blood on her hands, at the spindle embedded in Lilith’s rib cage. Glowing, spinning, dragging power directly into her heart.

Mistake, she thought. Bad mistake.

As if Bran had just been waiting for blood, the motes that made his soul poured toward Lilith, as if she were the black hole. Sylvie heard a protesting gasp from Bran, but it wasn’t repeated. Instead, the gold began to shift and struggle. If Bran had been sleepwalking through the transformation before, now he was awake, aware, and very afraid. The more concentrated streamers of his power coiled tightly around Dunne for aid.

Lilith vanished from beneath Sylvie, reappeared closer to Dunne, closer to Bran’s power.

Sylvie pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t know what she could do, but she had to do something. Dunne was at the end of his strength.

She shook her head. Careless thinking. He wasn’t at the end of his strength; he was at the limits of his ability to control that strength. In the storm-cloud core of him, Sylvie saw a sight as bleak as a nuclear winter. He could stop all this. Smite Lilith, force Bran into shape, but he couldn’t do that and keep his strength confined. Working against himself was burning him to nothing. The raveling of his body was considerable. His torn arm was gone, and a large divot was eating out his rib cage.

“Erinya. Magdala.” Dunne held out his good arm. There was pain in his voice. “I need you.”

Magdala leaped forward. Dunne held her close, and she dissolved into him. Erinya looked at Sylvie, and said, “Save Bran.”

“Eri—”

“I only kill things; sometimes you save them,” Erinya said. She turned and burrowed into Dunne, fading. His body, torn and winnowed, arced. Light flashed once, and when it was done, he was whole again. But his right arm was a thing of scale and feather, with a hand that flashed talons.

Lilith glowed brightly against the grey shielding Dunne had surrounded them with. Sylvie gritted her teeth; she was going to get swatted like a bug buying Dunne some of his “moments.”

She took a step forward, and Dunne’s hand caught her, pulled her back as he passed her. “I’ll deal with her. You—” He licked his lips. She caught a pale glimpse of fangs on the right side of his mouth, the jut of animal muscle, before his words made it through. “Help Bran. Protect Bran. Whatever he needs to put himself back together.”

HELP BRAN. PROTECT BRAN. SO MUCH EASIER SAID THAN DONE, Sylvie thought, when she was overwhelmed by the idea. So much simpler to fight an enemy than aid an ally who had given up. Lilith wanted to be a god so desperately, and Bran—he had wanted to be human. And Sylvie had taken that away from him.

Sylvie had failed before, pulled defeat from victory. She had no intention of doing so again, not when Demalion had died to make this victory possible.

Across the roof, Lilith scrabbled at the shielding Dunne had ringed them round with, tearing bits free like curls of paper beneath a cat’s claws. Under Dunne’s influence, the curls only rewound and sealed themselves tighter. Lilith wasn’t going to be able to run away.

Lilith doesn’t need to, Sylvie thought. Not if she could absorb more of Bran. The power still flowed toward her, into her, like water running inexorably downhill. Dunne must have been thinking on the same lines; a strange construct swirled into place around Lilith, gleaming like a mirror and acting like a dam. Power still slipped in, under, and over it, but it was a bare trickle compared to what had been heading her way. The rest of it pooled up against the dam and glimmered, a wealth of power and potential just drifting.

“Bran,” Sylvie said. It was a whisper, drowned in the sounds of Lilith cursing Dunne as she chipped at the dam, temporarily letting go her attempt to escape the shield. Made sense, Sylvie thought. If the shield fell, and Lilith escaped, the power would pour after her; with the dam up, though, she couldn’t take the power with her.

Of course, if Sylvie could get Bran back together, Lilith could do nothing, either. Bran’s mind was still around, somewhere—his occasional words reassured her that her task was at least theoretically possible.

A subtle vibration of rage, so low-pitched that Sylvie felt it in her bones before she heard it, came from Dunne, as Lilith continued to fight him. Dunne had taken more than the Furies’ strength for his own, obviously, Sylvie thought as she watched him stalk Lilith with a predator’s calculated patience. Unearned patience. Sylvie wanted to scream at him to hurry.

Do something, the little dark voice warned. If you fail here, Dunne will take us apart. Or Lilith. The only way to win —