Lyn Benedict - Sins & Shadows

The Magicus Mundi wasn’t invisible, intangible, or safely elsewhere. It seethed around and in and through the mass of humanity; all it required was a willingness to look beyond the expected, to ask why and how and who and most often— what .

Once seen, the Magicus Mundi had a way of keeping your attention. Sylvie had had a crash course—crash curse , she thought wryly—years ago, when Troilus Cassavetes turned out to be more than your average businessman and set a killing curse on Sylvie.

Maybe blindness was the safer choice: The Magicus Mundi might not be hard to discover, but it was hell on earth to live with.

Sylvie bypassed four parked police cars and the eight cops standing beside them on the way to the taxi stands, and shivered as they all turned to watch her go. Dunne’s eyes on her, long-distance? Or some instinct that she held an image of their search in her sweating hands? She didn’t feel like finding out.

She slid into a taxi, read off Tish’s address, and was pleased when her voice was steady. The weight of their eyes lingered on her skin.

“You sure you want to go there, lady?” the driver said, meeting her eyes in his rearview mirror. His voice held the rich Cuban tones she knew from Miami, but the accent was flattened and clipped. He’d been in Chicago a long time.

“Yes,” she said. “Is there a reason not to?” She couldn’t imagine the area being dangerous, not if rich-boy Bran partied there in cashmere and silk.

“No,” he said. “No reason.” An obvious lie.

He rabbited away from the curb, rocking her back in the seat, his eyes all for the cops coming their way.

She shifted in her seat, the gun pressing into the small of her back like a warm, strong hand—muscle and bone at her command. The sensation soothed even as it repelled, the near-heartbeat feel of what was once metal.

A god? She bit her lip and turned her thoughts away from that conundrum.

Sylvie flipped the police reports open again, turning back to statements. Wealthy? Oh yes, she thought. Even if there hadn’t been a list of platinum-card numbers now considered stolen, accounts shut down, she would have known simply by the fact that the police had accumulated this much paperwork.

The file, nearly as thick as a phone book, threatened to spill with every page she turned. This kind of effort only happened with wealth or influence behind it.

The pity of it was all that effort was useless; the reports didn’t give her anything much to chew on. Bran left the party and disappeared somewhere in the ten blocks between Tish Carmichael’s downtown loft and the parking garage, leaving no traces. The cops had canvassed the area, asking questions of the nighttime scavengers, making threats, making promises, and came up blank. Even the reports betrayed her. The first pages were standard collections of interviews and facts, but the latter pages of the report were all the same. Typed. Handwritten. Word processed. But all the same. Two words. Page after page.

Find Him. Find Him. FindHim Findhimfindhimfindhim . . .

Sylvie forced the pages back into a neat pile, wrapping the rubber band around them. Police reports looked nice and official, a neat alignment of facts. But these “facts” came from human lips, and people loved to lie, about big things, little things, for any number of reasons. All the reports hinged on Tish Carmichael as a starting point. The last-known person to see Brandon Wolf ali—

Sylvie shook her head. She had to assume he was alive, no matter the underlying tone of the reports—before Dunne’s all-Bran, all-the-time channel took over, at any rate—no matter what common knowledge said. If she presumed him dead, how hard would she look for him? It had to be her best—whether or not Kevin Dunne was the god he claimed to be, he was capable of causing a great deal of harm.

Tish Carmichael. Kevin had said Bran and she were close. Sylvie wondered how close.

Close enough to tell lies about it?

The cabbie swore under his breath, and Sylvie was recalled to her surroundings. He pulled over, and said, “Walk from here.”

“Something the matter?” she asked, but the streets ahead answered her question. The police swarmed the street like ants. She briefly wondered what it was—criminal history, points on his license, or a missing green card—that made him want to avoid inquisitive cops.

“You walk,” he said. “Five blocks more.”

“All right,” she said. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t burdened by luggage. Hell, it even saved her some of the fare, and saving money was always good. Especially since she’d bartered this case for something other than cash.

She groaned. Crap. Alex would kick her butt—no, Alex was fired. Sylvie was on her own.

Sylvie walked on, keeping quiet, keeping out of the way of the cop cars, and beginning to swelter in the summer heat. In the small of her back, the gun sweated also, soft uneven droplets that touched her skin like tears or blood; Sylvie shuddered and picked up her pace.

Sylvie recognized Tish’s apartment immediately. How could she not? The checkered bands in the Chicago PD’s hats were deeply distinctive. Tish’s apartment had four policemen sitting on her stoop. Just sitting, watching the door, like dogs left leashed outside a shop, waiting for their owners. Stray dogs, maybe. They looked unwashed and hungry. The crackle-pop static of their radios went ignored.

She took a breath, then climbed the five steps between them, aware of their eyes shifting to stare at her. She knocked on the door. “Go home,” she said. The dog image rose in her mind again. “You’re not helping. And you have other jobs to do. Dunne—”

Their eyes sharpened, and she said, “Yeah, I know him. He wants you to go back to work.” They hesitated.

“But he was here,” the youngest of them said, voice unsure. The other cops nodded in unison.

“He’s not now.” Sylvie knocked, harder the second time, taking into account the distorted strains of classical music being cranked out at full volume.

Frustration rose in her, woke the little dark voice within. “Go away,” she said, letting its utter contempt for human frailty bleed through.

They stiffened and blinked. Their faces took on individuality again; panic, confusion, embarrassment. She turned her back as they scattered with confused murmurs.

After checking that the cops were out of sight, Sylvie tested the knob. The door opened. Maybe Tish Carmichael was a trusting soul who believed in a literal open-door policy. Maybe not.

Sylvie slunk through the door, wincing as the volume increased. Her hand settled in the small of her back; the gun gave an eager pulse.

The apartment was long but roomy and seemingly empty. The bottom floor, one large brick-walled room that doubled as bedroom and living area, held signs of Tish: discarded clothes, a plate left on the tiny kitchenette counter, a scatter of cameras beside the plate—Polaroid, 35mm, and digital—a proof sheet left out, images circled in red. The futon was opened out, sheets rumpled, sagging toward the floor. A miniscule bathroom stood empty, save for a clutter of hair products and dropped towels. Sylvie climbed the narrow stairs, following the music, and soft thumps and scuffles.

Dancer, Sylvie remembered as she came out onto the second floor and found the girl alive, well, and working hard in a homemade studio. One wall was mirrors; the wood floor was sanded smooth and oddly springy. Sylvie caught Tish’s eyes midspin, and the girl came to a graceless halt.

“Kevin Dunne sent me,” Sylvie said. She pitched her voice to compete with the music. Tchaikovsky, she thought, now that the distortion was gone. “I’m Sylvie. Your door was unlocked.”