Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

He blinked. “Okay.” Then her entire purse was on the seat beside her; she rummaged through it with one hand, identifying things by feel: too-thin wallet, cell phone, ID, spare bullets. The bullets made her pause, thinking of the latest threat she’d faced.

“The sisters are on their own?” she asked. “We left them there.”

“They’ll be fine,” he said.

“I’m not worried about them,” Sylvie said. “I’m worried about the people around them if you’re not there to snap their leash.”

He shrugged. “They’ll be looking for Bran mostly.”

“Mostly,” she muttered. But there was nothing she could do about it now. “Tell me what happened the night Bran disappeared.”

“We were at a friend’s party. Something came up, and I had to go—”

“Something like the Bat-Signal?” Sylvie interrupted.

“Something like that, yes,” Dunne said, evenly. “But Bran wanted to stay, which was fine by me. He’s too tenderhearted to watch me work.” He leaned his head against the window, fell silent. Sylvie glanced over, watched the pain surge and fade on his open face.

“It took a while,” he continued, after a moment in which the only sound was the sweeping thump of the wipers fighting the rain. “I was a little surprised when I got home and Bran wasn’t back before me—we came home at dawn.”

“We?”

“The sisters and I,” he said. “Mostly they live in our backyard.”

“Charming,” she said. “Wonder what they do for property values in the neighborhood.” He shot her a quelling look. “You weren’t worried about his absence?” she prompted.

A muscle jumped in his jaw as if she’d assigned blame. “No.” Guilt laced his voice, then morphed into irritation. “He’s my lover, not a child. He has a life of his own. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself. And I was . . . tired. To be the god, to enact justice—”

“It tires you out?” Sylvie asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

“No,” he said. “ Containing my power so that I don’t affect the whole world is tiring. It’s like walking. A fit man can walk forever. But a fit man forced to stand on one leg and hop—it takes effort. It’s far easier to be what you are than to fight it. But the consequences of a god on the mortal plane . . . Well, you’re seeing some of them, aren’t you? My concentration is going.”

The traffic up ahead crawled; police cars, lights strobing, blocked three of the four lanes, funneling all the traffic to one lane. “Like that?” she said. “Or do you suppose they’re doing a midday sobriety checkpoint?”

“Shit,” he muttered. There was the little hiccup of the world shifting, and the bottleneck was in her rearview mirror.

“So you went to bed,” Sylvie said, plowing ahead, shuddering reflexively. “And you weren’t worried.”

“Bran and Tish are close,” he said. “I assumed he stayed over to help her clean up. He’s done it before.”

“Tish?”

“Tish Carmichael,” he said. “It was her party. She’s a dancer. Ballet.”

Sylvie took her eyes from the road again to assess his mood. After all, with a self-proclaimed god in her truck, she probably didn’t have to worry about car accidents. He sounded more relaxed, as if he found the tradition of question and answer soothing, no matter that he was the one answering the questions.

“What kind of party was it?” she asked.

She had startled him; she saw it in his eyes. Outside, the rain began to slacken. “What?”

“What kind of party? A celebration of something. New job. New boyfriend. Birthday. Or was it just a party for the sake of it—a ‘hey, it’s Wednesday’ kind of thing? C’mon, Dunne, you know what I’m getting at.”

“Tish throws parties all the time. She’s sociable.”

“So not a collection of close friends attending, then. Not an exclusive list. Were there strangers crashing?”

“Always are,” Dunne said, frowning. “but I checked them out. I would have felt anyone powerful enough—”

“You keep saying what you would have felt. But tell me this—what were you feeling when Bran disappeared? If you didn’t feel that, then I don’t see—”

“I did ,” he said.

“But you weren’t worried when he wasn’t home. Something worried you enough to check out the strangers at the party, but you feel something when your boyfriend disappears and you aren’t worried. You go to bed.”

“It was so quick,” he said, his voice rough. “I was in the middle of a gang fight, and I was trying hard not to let the sisters go, trying to keep the battlefield confined, the witnesses to none. It was just a touch. It was just . . . I felt startled . . . and there was no reason. It was just a moment; he wasn’t hurt or scared. Just surprised.”

Sylvie fell silent. “You left the party. The kidnapper could have come later.”

“Yes,” Dunne admitted.

“You were suspicious of strangers earlier. Why?”

“Bran doesn’t like strangers,” he said, something in his tone withdrawing.

A lie, she thought. Clients all had to lie about something. Was it Dunne who didn’t like strangers? Or was it even simpler than that? Bran stayed out overnight often enough that Dunne wasn’t concerned. Maybe he’d been having an affair, and Dunne had caught on. Only a fool cuckolded a sorcerer. There probably weren’t words for anyone brazen enough to cuckold a god.

The road curved into the entrance to the airport, and she sighed. She’d learned the hard way there was no point pushing at a lie a client told her; she had to come at it from a different angle, and she was out of time.

He touched her arm, tense with the pressure she was putting on the steering wheel. “What are you going to do?”

“Talk to Tish,” Sylvie said, raising her hand to stifle his protest. “I know, I know, the cops talked to her already.”

“She doesn’t know anything. About me,” Dunne said. “She thinks I’m human.”

“So don’t do anything weird while I’m talking to her.”

“I’m not going with you,” he said. “I’m going to keep searching. I have to.”

She nodded, oddly relieved that she wouldn’t have him lurking behind her. He handed her a plane ticket. “There’s a flight in twenty minutes,” he said.

“Of course there is,” she muttered. She pulled into the parking lot, and a guard came over to inspect her truck. “Fuck,” she said. “My gun. Can you do something about that?”

The guard turned on his heel and went back the way he had come. Sylvie took her gun from her waist holster, and said, “Can you Jedi mindtrick the metal detectors?”

Dunne touched the gun in her hand, and it changed in her grasp, felt aware and warm. She twitched but controlled the instinct to drop it. She had been far too careless with it once today. “What did you do?”

“It will scan as flesh, as your own body,” he said, “and appear part of you while you wear it.”

“You turned my gun to meat?” Her voice soared, a little panicky, belatedly realizing how much comfort she took from the weapon.

“It’s still a gun,” he said. “Try not to kill anyone. You’re under my aegis, and it’s embarrassing.”

O’HARE AIRPORT WAS BUSTLING WHEN SHE DISEMBARKED, AND NOT in the usual harried-traveler fashion. The terminal seethed with police and airline security, and Sylvie, all too conscious of the gun seated warmly in the small of her back, hustled her way past them. No one even gave her a glance. It made her crazy.

Even after Dunne’s transformation, her gun was still a gun, still a weight beneath her thin Windbreaker. Someone should have noticed. Someone should have stopped her. That they didn’t was symptomatic of a larger disease: willful blindness. Humans clustered together even as they had in the beginning. Closing ranks against the things “not our kind.”