Sins & Shadows

9 Finding Trouble

IN THE COOL DIMNESS OF THE STATION, THE SCENE HADN’T changed. Dunne stared at the destroyed oubliette, the greasy reminders of paint and malign intent, his expression as blank as a dropped doll’s.

Sylvie thought about that perfect, inhuman stillness and shuddered. People had thoughts; the thoughts reflected themselves on their skins. But Dunne, at the moment, seemed empty. Waiting for something, anything to wake him to movement and purpose.

Before him, Alekta and Magdala walked the oubliette, eyes closed, tracking something intangible to mortal senses.

Erinya winked into sight on the stairs, a punk mirage turning real, startling a shamed yelp out of Sylvie. It echoed the sound she’d heard earlier, the scared man who’d fled down the street.

Alekta raised her head to look at Sylvie, eyes reflecting silver-blue in the sputtering fluorescent light. She lunged forward like a Doberman, all the power in her shoulders, and vanished before she landed.

Erinya brushed past Sylvie and leaned into Dunne’s side.

Dunne blinked at her touch, but made no further movement, never moving his gaze from the stairs, as if he could draw Bran out by sheer attentiveness.

Maybe he could have, Sylvie thought, catching a glimmer of something behind the set stone of his jaw. Some tinge of guilt, self-condemnation. Maybe, if the spell had stayed active, he could have worked his way through whatever it was that shielded Bran from him. If Bran were—

“He’s not dead,” Dunne said.

“What?” Sylvie said.

“The witch thinks he’s dead. He’s not. Don’t let her plant doubts.”

“What, you’re a mind reader, now?” Sylvie said. She felt flicked on the raw. She’d cautioned herself before about assuming it was too late.

He turned his head and looked at her. Blank eyes. Inhuman eyes. Eyes that saw her as nothing more than a faulty collection of molecule and meat. A god’s eyes.

“Shit,” Sylvie said, under her breath. Mind reader, check. Probably went with the whole omniscient thing. Well, might as well hang for a sheep—“You sure ’bout that not-dead thing? Really sure?”

“If he were dead,” Dunne said, each word precise and cold. “If he were dead, the results would be unmistakable. If he were dead, I’d have a name and a face to blame.” His voice rose to a ragged shout; his jaw clenched until Sylvie imagined tooth enamel cracking. Beside him, Erinya whimpered and dug her head into his ribs, pushing hard enough to hurt.

Sylvie licked dry lips, twitching when Magdala vanished as Alekta had.

“Don’t doubt me, Sylvie.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sylvie said.

Dunne’s hand rose, ruffled through Erinya’s spiky crest of dark hair. “Wrong trails,” she whispered.

“Is that what they’re doing?” Sylvie asked. “Trying to find the sorcerer who laid the spell?”

“As you said,” Dunne said. “I destroyed your lead. The sisters are trying to salvage it, but this is a busy station, and the feel of souls fades.” He tightened his mouth.

Hunting souls? Sylvie said nothing, not wanting to think about the damage that could lead to.

“I’m sorry,” Erinya whispered. “I can’t track as well as the others.”

He tangled his fingers back into her hair. “Not your fault,” he murmured. “I know you’re trying.”

Trying means you go down fighting, that’s all. Trying doesn’t mean you win. Sylvie paced a circle of her own, tired of waiting, sick of that voice in her mind, preaching bile and pragmatism in equal measure.

“We’re running short on time, Sylvie. In my search, I’ve played fast and loose with the rules, and it’s been noticed. They won’t let it stand much longer.”

“They? Other gods?” Sylvie said. Just what this whole mess needed. More powerful looky-loos.

Dunne nodded. “Zeus. Ostensibly, he commands me.”

“I know how that goes,” Sylvie said. “It’s amazing how underrated free will is.”

Erinya stutter-growled deep in her throat, an oddly warm sound. Was she laughing? It almost sounded like it. Erinya eeled out of Dunne’s grip. “I’m going hunting.” She smiled at Sylvie and disappeared.

Sylvie didn’t even recoil when Alekta reappeared at a jog, ducked her head over the circle, and vanished again.

Instead, she said, “What about time? You reversed it this morning. Why not just unwind the moment when he vanished? Or when you blew up our only lead a moment ago?”

“I should have done it when Bran vanished,” Dunne said. “But each hour that passed made it less of an option. Time is heavy and fragile. Rewriting that moment in your office was nothing, a heartbeat of time disrupted. Even so, more changed than you know. You never fired the bullet. It was the simplest way to convince you I meant business. But others had their moments rewound, their lives changed, too. There was a cop on Alligator Alley, pulling a car over for speeding. He was shot for his pains. I rewound your moment, and he went to the car with his gun in his hand. He shot first. His career is over.”

“His life isn’t,” Sylvie said. “Sounds like a win. Where’s the problem?”

“The driver wasn’t mine,” Dunne said. “Don’t know that he was anybody’s, but if he was, I’ve committed an act of contempt toward a fellow deity. In a millisecond of time, I made an enemy. To change two weeks’ worth of seconds—it would make the world unrecognizable, pit god against god, change everything. Even twenty minutes reversed would create a tidal wave of change, and for what? To show us the spell again with no guarantee of learning from it?”

Sylvie sat down on the concrete. Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. “Never is,” she muttered, and then said, “Couldn’t you just—choose a future?”

“I’d have to be able to see the future first,” Dunne said.

“You can’t? What, there’s a limit? Mind reading or precognition? No combos allowed?”

Magdala and Erinya arrived back at the same time and began to confer quietly. Magdala, Sylvie noticed, had a spatter of blood on her khakis. It couldn’t have been the sorcerer, or she’d have dragged him back to Dunne. No, some other fool had crossed paths with the Fury and come out the worse for wear.

“It’s very rare, even among gods.” A smile curved Dunne’s mouth, something small, rueful, and rather sweet, giving Sylvie a glimpse of the man who was Tish Carmichael’s friend, Brandon’s lover. “Bran calls it checks and balances on a vast scale. Says otherwise all we’d ever do is jockey for position. A few monotheist systems have foresight to some extent, your Christian god, for example, and some gods have pieces of it. I don’t.”

A tiny spark drifted through the air, leftover, Sylvie assumed, from the destruction of the oubliette. She followed its will-o’-the-wisp path for a few moments, finding it as soothing as drifting soap bubbles.

“Kronos and the Fates,” Sylvie said. “That’s two, or whatever, in your own pantheon. You really can’t see the future?”

“I really can’t,” Dunne said. “As for Kronos, they ate him after they deposed him,” Dunne said. The pale spark brushed against his shoulder and disappeared. Dunne brushed his hand over his shoulder as if it had stung. “Kronos’s power, split into so many pieces, lessened. We can use it to grant immortality. That’s about it.”

A second spark, blue-white, drifted toward him.

“Immortality,” Sylvie said. Shock touched her. “That’s why you know he’s not dead. You gave Bran immortality.”

Dunne twitched again, touched a hand to his forearm as the spark made contact, clasping it. He closed his eyes, and a wave of heat moved through the station. In its wake, more sparks appeared.

Not the oubliette then: Its sparks would grow fewer, not multiply. Maybe they were visible bits of Dunne’s shedding power. They seemed to be drawn to him.

“Bran’s mortal,” he said. “And don’t expect me to ask the Fates. They don’t know where he is, either. The Fates can’t see the future. At least not more than the span of a man’s life. Shorter if Atropos gets pissy and cuts the thread.

“Truthfully, there are more humans who are visionaries than gods. It’s a cruel thing. Checks and balances. Give them the ability to see, and no power to change what they see, while we hold the power, but are blind.”

“I knew a visionary,” Magdala spoke. She licked a finger, rubbed at the bloodstain on her knee. “Hera sent me after her, but I needed to do nothing to punish her. She did it all to herself. She was pathetic. Every moment of joy was soured by the recognition of upcoming pain. Even pain was meaningless when she knew that grief was transitory, that people forget. Ultimately, all she saw of existence was futility. She cut her wrists and bled to death.”

“Like Bran tried to do,” Sylvie said.

Dunne’s attention whipped around like he had taken on the Fury’s predatory instincts. “Tish . . .” he said. Taking the source from her mind.

“You sure didn’t tell me,” Sylvie said. “Why not?”

The sparks hovered around him like fireflies, a ghostly set of flares that glimmered and faded. After a long moment, Dunne said, “I didn’t want you to hold his life cheap.” He curled his hands around his forearms, rubbing at them.

“Does he?” Sylvie said, hating that he made her ask, when he had to hear it burning in her thoughts. “Am I going to ride to the rescue, only to find that he’s decided not to wait?”

Dunne twitched again, a full-body convulsion this time. He shifted his grip from his forearms to his torso, muttered, “No.”

The sparks nipped at his skin, and Sylvie said, “I thought they were yours. But they’re hurting you?”

“Not hurting. Pulling. They’re Zeus’s summoning motes. Zeus must have found me. I made flares when I changed time, when I destroyed the oubliette. And now, he’s trying to take me back to Olympus,” Dunne said, through gritted teeth. “I’m fighting it.”

“O-kay,” Sylvie said slowly. “Problem?”

“I’m losing,” he said.

The sharp, clean scent of lightning began to fill the station. Sylvie stepped back from Dunne, from ground zero. Ball lightning crackled into existence, spinning around his chest in a liquid-plasma tumble of blue-white light and sound. It stretched over him like a living net, adapting itself to his shape.

Dunne took a breath, closed his eyes, seemingly unaware of his clothes singeing under the lightning’s touch. Then he dropped his hands from his defensive posture, and said, “No.”

His eyes, opened, were no longer human at all, no contrasting shine of white and pupil, but the featureless grey of a distant storm cloud. The grey sky effect bled outward, a slow dissolution of his cheekbones, his temples, his forehead. Pretending to flesh, Sylvie thought. Was this what he was, underneath?

He grasped the lightning, plasma curling violently between his closed fingers, licking at his arms, thrashing like a living thing. “No,” he repeated, and flung it away.

It splattered against the concrete, sinking into it and disappearing. It left a puddled slag of concrete and rebar on the floor.

“I don’t have time,” he said, relaxed in the face of calamity. “He’ll try again, harder, and I’ll be stolen from the mortal plane, perhaps broken down. And I’ve got other problems. I’ve used power indiscriminately, had too much bleed off. I’ve got backtracking to do, prevent any of my leftovers from being used by sorcerers and witches, hungry for a taste of real power. Find him, Sylvie.”

He vanished like a cutoff screenshot. She wished he’d make sound effects to go with it, just so her movie-trained mind could accept the vanishing as real.

“Crap,” she said, slumping down to a weary crouch. She still had questions, important ones; she still had no leads, and no way of reaching him. When Alekta crawled out of the floor beside her, Sylvie’s nerves were too shot to allow for anything more than a soft rock backward to fall on her butt.

“How do I call him?” she said. Alekta paused in her perusal of the station and its overlaid soul traces. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed at the slag on the floor.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sylvie said. “Zeus threw lightning at him. Though myth always said it was a bolt of lightning, not that shiny little net. The things you learn.” She rested against the wall, letting the cool concrete soothe her aching neck. “So?”

“Pray,” Alekta said.

“Pray,” Sylvie echoed. “Well, that makes sense. But I gotta tell you—I’m not real good at prayer.”

Sylvie kicked a sneakered foot against a lone piece of litter, watched it drift into the tracks. “So, d’you know why the oubliette tried to swallow Dunne, when it was keyed for Bran?”

Alekta walked away, climbed the stairs, and stood looking out into the night, tension rippling through her shoulders.

Out of leads, Sylvie thought.

She wondered how many of the “leads” the sisters had found ended with blood. Magdala, at least, had found one person guilty of something. Even if they hadn’t been hunting for anyone other than the sorcerer responsible for the trap, she couldn’t imagine the other two, with their snap judgments and hunger for retribution, passing on the chance to mete out their brand of punishment.

“Some of him in him,” Alekta said, finally, and faded from sight. Sylvie frowned.

“Cryptic,” she said. Some of him in him. Some of Bran in Dunne. The spell didn’t differentiate enough. Sloppy, Val said. Sylvie was inclined to agree.

Some of what? Sylvie teased at the thought, knowing she was missing something. Skin cells maybe, she thought. Shared living, shared scents, or maybe it was some romantic thing? A piece of his heart and all that jazz? Given that the sloppy sorcerer had defined Bran by his relationship, perhaps he had drawn Dunne into the spell, too.

The rush of air from the passing train sent her to her feet, heart racing. After all the spells, the sisters, after Dunne, the station had begun to feel like a no-man’s-land. The world reflected his desire, she thought. He wanted us alone, and he hadn’t needed a spell to make it so.

She made her way through the first stragglers on the stairs and headed back into the night. Nearly midnight and nothing to show for her day; time to retreat and think. She touched the crumpled paper in her pocket. Maybe give the local witch a call if she wanted to risk pissing off a spell caster by calling at this hour.

Her mind full of questions, she managed to get nearly fifteen blocks, passing by darkened storefronts and deserted alleys, when it dawned on her that the throbbing at her spine wasn’t merely protest at her long day but the gun reacting to the rapid steps behind her.

She turned, half-expecting it to be an ISI agent whose skill at shadowing had been made clumsy by Dunne-itis, or even Demalion, giving her fair warning of his approach.

Not ISI, she thought, as the binding spell lanced from his outstretched palm and pinned her in place as neatly as if she had been flash-frozen.

Sylvie had just found herself a sorcerer, and judging from the scowl on his thin-boned, dark-browed face, one in no mood for playing civil.