Sins & Shadows

15 Trails and Dead Ends

“SHE’S NOT HERE,” SYLVIE SAID. SHE HADN’T EVEN GOTTEN OUT OF the car, and she knew, just knew, they were on the wrong track.

Demalion, hand paused on the ignition key, said, “Why?” Not another direct start to an argument but a definite call against her instinct.

Sylvie looked again at the apartment buildings, a series of interconnected town houses, at the children playing in the park across the street, the casual everydayness of the area, and shook her head. “Not a chance in hell.”

“She owns the place; there are empty units,” Demalion said. “I need more reason than that.”

“I saw her,” Sylvie said. She wasn’t used to explaining herself. But she and Demalion had agreed to a detente, so she should try to cooperate. “Lily pretends to be ordinary,” Sylvie said. “Everyone I talked to described her as ordinary. I saw her, though, and she’s not ordinary at all. She’s just good at masking herself. If you were like that, if you wore a mask all the time, would you want to live in an ordinary place? Would you want to have to worry about blending in, even in your home? You’d find someplace else. Someplace you could be yourself in comfort.”

“All that from one look across a crowded room?” Demalion said. “You don’t think your impression came from her burning everyone alive a moment later?”

Sylvie shrugged. “You said it yourself. Even the ISI uses my instincts as Cliff’s Notes.”

She didn’t want to share more than she had to, really didn’t want to get into what she had felt when Lily’s eyes had met hers: instant recognition, so strong that it might as well have been a physical shock. Logic be damned; Sylvie knew her, and more, knew what they were up against. A woman as determined as Sylvie herself. And deadlier.

“Let me see that list,” she said, fishing it out of the space between the driver’s seat and the gearshift.

“Where to, then, guru?” Demalion asked.

Sylvie dropped her eyes to the paper, edges crumpling in her hand. “Um, Bucktown apartments, no, too normal. MTV Real World trendy. Wicker Park—”

“A lot of artists, which is likely given her tastes, but there are also a lot of businessmen and loft living, which would make it a no by your criterion. Too normal.”

Sylvie skimmed the list; only a few addresses were left, and if she hadn’t felt so pressed for time, she’d have simply continued as they’d begun. Go down the list one by one. But she did feel harried by an unseen clock, by the fact that the children in the park were gasping, laughing, and the sand below their swing set was swirling and lapping at the grass in wavelets. Sharks would be next, she thought. Didn’t little kids always see sharks in water? And one of those children, latently talented, obviously saw the sand as water.

“Shit,” she muttered, as a sharp fin rose, and the children’s shrieking laughter just turned to shrieks. “Go get them off—” But Demalion was already on the way out of the car. He ignored the screamers and focused on the little girl with the fixed stare and the incredulous horror in her eyes. He snatched her up, pressed her face into his shoulder, and as parents came out to investigate the crying, handed her off. Behind them, the fin collapsed to falling sand.

Demalion lingered outside once the mother left, cell phone in hand, and Sylvie’s mood soured. Her great ally, reporting a nine-year-old to the government.

“What will you do with children like that?” Sylvie said. “You can’t charge them with anything, even if you join those who want to try kids as adults.”

Demalion said. “It’s a flaw in our justice system. They don’t recognize the supernatural, therefore—”

“There are no charges, no trials, no prison,” Sylvie said.

“We’re working on it,” Demalion said. “ISI’s got a ten-year plan. Five for concentrated study of the supernatural. Three for making and testing a security plan. Two for convincing the rest of the world—”

“You’re behind then,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t seen any hints of understanding on the news.”

Demalion laughed. “We’ve only been active for four years, Sylvie. We’re still newbies. Before 9-11, the ISI was only a maniacal gleam in some bureaucrat’s eye. After that, there were a lot more people willing to throw money at even the most undefined problems.”

“It’s the church,” she said. “Gotta be.” Changing the subject, and fast, before he saw that he’d shaken her.

Two years of tangling with the ISI, two years of running them in circles, and she thought she’d been winning. Too tough and too smart for the government. To find out they were still in a larval stage, that perhaps her success against them had more to do with their fumbling first steps into a bigger world, made her reassess. Just how much had she overrated her skills?

“The church?” Demalion parroted. He flipped through the list for the more-detailed reports. “That was condemned after a fire nearly twenty years ago. You think she’s living there? She’s got money. We know that. Rich women like their amenities.”

“Regardless,” Sylvie said. “It’s Sesame Street training. One of these things is not like the others. The church is the odd man out, and anomalies are always worth a look.”

“Your point,” Demalion said with a smile. He restarted the car, pulled them smoothly back into the traffic. “I’ll have the ISI check out the apartments anyway.”

Sylvie bit back protest. The apartments were meaningless. The church dangled before her like the brass ring on a carousel.

She stifled her doubts, even when the neighborhood they drove through grew progressively run-down. The church was a hulking shadow on the street, a reminder that nothing evaded entropy. Its spire crumbled near the top, the bell long gone for scrap, and its gargoyles had worn to near-featureless stone.

They approached the church cautiously, noting boarded-up windows, a chain across the great double doors, and, with a glance at each other, turned and went around the side, hunting a door out of sight of the street.

All the way around the back, there was a narrow door, cast in shadows by the stone around it. “Prep room, I bet,” Demalion said.

“Altar boy?” Sylvie asked.

“Yup,” he agreed. He knelt, eyed the lock, and nodded once. From a pocket, he pulled a key ring dangling with filed-down keys. He forced one into the lock, thumped it once, and popped the latch open.

“Somewhere, a priest just cried,” Sylvie said.

“Never said I was a particularly devout altar boy,” he said. “After you?”

Sylvie kicked at the door. It flew open, and she watched for a moment, waiting for Lily to come at them, for any other esoteric security to make itself known.

“She’s not home,” Sylvie said.

“I could have told you that,” Demalion said. He put away a gun she hadn’t seen him draw and ducked inside. “I’m more than just a pretty face, you know.”

“Yeah?” she challenged. He merely smirked and gestured her in.

“It’s all about the eyes,” he said, tapping just above the bridge of his nose.

“Whatever,” she muttered. She was more concerned with the security measures Lily might have in place. No magical wards, Sylvie noted, as she stepped over the sill. If Lily were arcanely talented, there would have been wards.

The room was dark and empty; the linoleum beneath their feet cracked with each footstep. Sylvie opened cupboards meant to hold vestments, the unconsecrated host and wine, and found them restocked with secular items. Jeans, leather jackets, stocking caps, makeup. A woman’s wardrobe. “Definitely my point,” she murmured.

Demalion moved into the main body of the church, black with shadows. Automatically, Sylvie fumbled for a switch in the doorway, ignoring the fact that this was a church and not a home. A string brushed her fingers; she caught it and tugged. A work light, hung where a crucifix should have been, illuminated the altar and made valiant inroads into the congregational shadows that filled the rest of the building. Two pews had been turned to face each other, suspending a mattress between them. The sheets shimmered with a subdued luster that whispered silk. There were some of Demalion’s amenities.

“Oh, she’s so going to hell,” Demalion said. He pointed at the holy-water font, and said, “Toothbrush and toothpaste stains. She’s been spitting in the well.”

“Creepy,” Sylvie said aloud.

“But not normal,” Demalion said. His voice echoed against the marble, the vast empty space.

“This is true.”

It looked like Lily had concentrated her living space around and on the altar. A small generator hummed behind the altar, and a long tangle of extension cords led off that, anchoring a tiny fridge and a desktop computer that gave her a password prompt when Sylvie started it up.

Papers tacked up along a wall, fluttering in shadow and the wake of their movement, turned out to be photographs of Bran, Dunne, the sisters, and their house. Sylvie shivered when she noticed that every one of the Furies’ images showed them red-eyed, and not in the usual flash-flare way, but in a burning, empty-eye-socket, red-flame fashion. The Furies weren’t as good as Dunne at hiding what they were. Dunne’s photographs showed a man. Nothing more.

Another picture showed Bran, bright head bent to speak to a man in a sleek, black sedan, just down the block from their house. The man in the suit looked blank, almost mindless, and in the bare periphery of the photo, Dunne lurked. Team one, Sylvie thought. Getting brain-washed. Two-step trick. Bran distracts them, and Dunne lays on the whammy. Sylvie couldn’t blame the agent. Who wouldn’t be distracted by his target coming up to talk to him, and smiling that smile?

Even in a photograph, Bran’s smile promised all sorts of delight.

She moved deeper into the church, studying the stained-glass windows. Most of them had been slathered over with black paint, the color as thick and uneven as if Lily had climbed a ladder and simply poured the paint downward.

Other images were spared the black-paint bath, but none had been left alone. A few had been broken, and others altered in strange, telling ways. Sylvie looked up at a white-robed God whose beard had been spray-painted blue.

JK had been right. Lily was not fond of religious art. Even Sylvie, who considered her religious meter to hover around zero, felt a little uneasy at such concentrated venom.

Bluebeard, she thought, and in a flash of understanding that almost seemed to come from outside, got the bitter joke.

“Some churches changed the Lord’s Prayer,” Sylvie said. “Didn’t they?”

“I guess,” Demalion said.

“Lead us not into temptation. The PC crew took it out, because God wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Do you have a point?” Demalion asked.

“Not really,” Sylvie said. She headed back up to the altar desk and took another look at the computer. Password-protected. Demalion would take it when they left. The ISI would hack it open, and Sylvie would get dribs and drabs of the contents, doled out in increments as they decided what was safe to let loose.

Sylvie traced the pattern around the altar, the Latin that read out “this is my body, this is my blood,” following it around the back, where Lily had marked over the rest of it with more black paint. My body, my blood, my soul are mine, and I yield them to none.

It gave Sylvie a jolt, an uncomfortable spasm; the skin of her back itched and prickled as if Tish’s nails were tracing the tattoo again. Oh yes, Sylvie understood Lily.

Sylvie finished her walk around the altar, thinking of Bran painting Eden at Lily’s behest. Paradise as prison. God as Bluebeard. Lily’s desire to steal a god’s power. Ni Dieux, Ni Maîtres. No gods, no masters, save yourself.

Without conscious desire, her fingers stroked the keys, and she tapped in a familiar phrase. Cedo Nulli. I yield to none.

The computer welcomed her in with a chime that Sylvie moved to stifle even as it started. Demalion raised his head. “Shadows? What are you doing?”

“Seeing if I can guess the password,” she said. She surfed Lily’s desktop folders, headed for e-mail, and called it up. French again, she thought, and started skimming, hunting for words she could understand. She found one e-mail that fulfilled that, and made her growl. Maudits. Sylvie Shadows. A communiqué sent late last night.

Footsteps behind her; she started to close the program, but Demalion’s hand caught hers.

He frowned at the screen, cast her a wary glance. “How did you—” And he went back to reading, her hand still caged in his. “Do you understand French?”

“No,” she said. “But I don’t like that combination.”

“Lily’s inviting the Maudits to come get you. She says she knows they have been waiting for a chance. That if they weren’t feeling energetic enough, that you . . . killed the boy they sent to her.”

“Focus on the important thing,” Sylvie said. “Are they taking her up on it?”

“Did you kill the boy?”

She shrugged. The deed was done, and dead was dead. Demalion needed her too much to get picky. “Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing in the same situation. Anything else interesting?” Sylvie said.

Demalion read another few aloud, e-mails between Lily and the Maudits bickering over prices for an assortment of insta-spell sticks and a single pair of magic spectacles. Sylvie had divided the world into talented and not, had assigned Lily to the latter capacity, when she’d forgotten there were such things as gadget witches. Stored spells used by anyone and everyone. And supplied, at a hefty price, by unscrupulous sorcerers like the Maudits. At least Lily haggled with them, made it that much less profitable for them.

That disagreement, Sylvie thought, was all to the good, made it that much less likely the Maudits would get off their luxury couches to come hunting her.

She left Demalion to his muttering and skimming of Lily’s mail and went back to the photographs. Lily had been stalking Dunne for several seasons; pictures of Dunne wrapped up in winter wools, Bran’s hair a splash of color against the dull blues of Dunne’s sweater, both of their faces bright with cold and amusement, looking straight at the camera.

Looking straight at the photographer. Sylvie peeled the photo from the wall, flipped it, already knowing what she was going to see. Two initials: TC. Tish Carmichael.

If Lily hadn’t taken the photographs, then the wall wasn’t so much a record of her surveillance as a collage of her intent. Bran smiled at the ISI again and started a new row of photos, less-candid moments and more stalkeresque. Dark, grainy shots taken at night with special lenses that washed all color away. Dunne’s bedroom, their dining room, the two of them coming home, trailed by the sisters.

These were professional surveillance shots, her dark voice whispered, and how did Lily get them from the ISI?

Sylvie flicked a glance downward and shied back in reflexive concern. A pile of chopsticks bound with a scarlet ribbon lay next to a similarly bound collection of wooden matchsticks. Wood and brittle, the perfect things to contain a borrowed spell. Guess Lily had come to an agreement with the Maudits.

She dropped her gaze to the bottom of the wall and hissed out a breath. Maybe she’d come to an agreement with others as well.

The bottom level was comprised of reports, not photographs, reports on where Dunne and Bran banked, Dunne’s past career highlights, Bran’s psychologist’s notes. And all the reports had e-mail headers ending in isius.org.

Can’t trust anyone but yourself.

Demalion said, “Sylvie, what was the password? There are some other protected—”

“Earn your own damn paycheck.”

“Hey,” he objected, but Sylvie was already heading for the back of the church and out. Guess a government group didn’t have to be around very long before corruption got to it. Lily had bought someone in the ISI.

The reasonable side of her brain popped up. Hadn’t she already called Lily a thief? Maybe it wasn’t betrayal, but hacking.

“Sylvie,” Demalion said. He caught up, grabbed her arm, and said, “What’s wrong?”

“You tell me. You’re not hunting Lily, you all might as well be working for her.”

She shook him off when his grip went tight.

“That’s why I want the password. I need to know who’s selling—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said, sick at heart. She couldn’t trust him. He might want the password so he could present his superiors with proof of a leak. Or he might be wanting to cover his own tracks.

He reached for her again, and she threw the information at him like bait. “Password? Try the big fat hint on the altar.” He turned to look, helpless not to, and she was gone.