Sins & Shadows

27 Broken World, Breaking Hearts

EVEN BEFORE THE LAST WORD LEFT HER LIPS, DUNNE PIVOTED, HEADING for her. Sylvie threw up her hands, projecting Unarmed, unarmed! as loudly as she could, though it went against the grain.

Dunne halted, his hand on her throat, eyes black with fury. This close, she could smell the ozone on his skin, feel the prickling thunderweather hiding beneath his false flesh, feel the tiny muscles in his fingers moving as he failed to crush her windpipe. A warning. An effective one. This close, with the echoes of what her voice had said still jagged in the air, she couldn’t see anything of the nice guy in him at all.

Behind him, Bran wrapped his arms around himself, shaking, turning his face away from her. She couldn’t blame him. The last time she’d held that note of determination in her voice, she’d run him through hell and back. Demalion leaned in and offered support, putting a clawed hand on Bran’s shoulder, eyes resting on her, oddly un-surprised.

It all happens on the roof, he had said.

She curled her fingers around Dunne’s wrist, shifted her gaze from the Furies creeping up behind Dunne, murder in every line of their bodies.

The little dark voice wound beneath her own, tangled in her breath, winding around her mind like a secret demanding to be told. It’s not done yet. You know what has to be done.

“You know it’s true,” Sylvie said, obedient to its prompt. “This can’t continue. I know you want to pretend nothing’s changed, but that’s not possible. Look at the damage that’s been done.” The ISI suit was frozen in place, perhaps literally, Sylvie thought, as a shift in the available light revealed a stony skin. Man gone statue—she thought. There’s a Greek god for you. Tucked behind the shelter of his body, the young secretary huddled, hands clenched tight in her braided hair.

The wrist under her fingers twitched, and Sylvie swallowed hard. Distraction would be fatal now. “If that doesn’t move you—look at Bran. He’s wrung out, damn near dead several times over. And he’s still a target. He’s walking power, a scrumptious all-you-can-eat buffet, ready to be devoured by any starving sorcerer who comes across him. This will happen again and again and—”

“I won’t let it—” A low growl in three-throated harmony: Dunne, Erinya, Magdala.

“Did you let Lilith take Bran? I didn’t think so. She’s just a human who can plan better than most. What will you do—what will Bran do, when a bigger threat comes hunting? When a god who wants to shake things up thinks Bran’s just what the doctor ordered. But if Bran dies—”

Her weight dangling from Dunne’s arm let her mind catch up with what her body knew—he’d transported them again. Not far, only a matter of feet, but enough that his grip on her throat and her grip on him, were the only things keeping her from plunging ten stories to the ground.

She wriggled the toes of her sneakers onto the roof edge, seeking purchase. An updraft climbed her spine, stirred her hair, and made her shudder.

“You brought him back to me,” Dunne said. “Do not make me repay you this way.”

“Make you?” Sylvie said, gagging a little as his hand tightened. “You’re the fucking god, Dunne. Can I make you do anything?” She was bone-cold and not from the drop at her back. That drop was a problem, a tiny part of her acknowledged. The bigger problem, the one she couldn’t understand, was her moving mouth.

They were her words, her throat, her thoughts, undeniably. It wasn’t even that she didn’t think she was right, it was simply that she had had no intention of starting this here and now. But the voice in her head was on its own time line and wouldn’t be swerved. Tick tick, it reminded her.

“You were a cop, Dunne,” she said. “You know the hard truths. If someone really wants to get to Bran, they will. Sooner or later, they will.”

“No,” Bran said. “I was careless.” Taking the blame on himself, trying to defuse the situation between Dunne and Sylvie.

Demalion drew Bran back, wrapped him close, clawed hands crossed over Bran’s chest, keeping him from worsening the confrontation.

Sylvie said, “Lilith used the Maudits and the ISI to flush Bran from hiding so she could net him. You couldn’t stop her. You never even saw her coming. How could you fight another god?”

“It would be war,” Dunne said. “They wouldn’t—”

“Sure they would,” Sylvie said. She coughed. The pressure around her neck hadn’t tightened, but it hadn’t slackened, either. “Zeus acted fast enough when he thought he could slaughter you. And as for war . . . The gods must love it, or humans wouldn’t do so much of it.”

“That doesn’t make killing Bran the solution,” Dunne growled. His grip increased, and Sylvie fought the urge to kick him. He wouldn’t feel it, and she—she needed the fragile support of the rooftop ledge under her feet.

Magdala panted in mocking synchronicity with her. Erinya crouched, ready to leap into movement, but her eyes went from Sylvie to Dunne and back again, and her mouth turned down. Sylvie directed her next words to her.

“I don’t want him dead. . . .” Pause to fight for a breath past those tightening fingers. “I want . . . regain godhood. It’s not death . . . transition.”

Staring up into Dunne’s eyes, past the sheer horror of the inhuman storm-cloud gaze, she realized it wasn’t only rage that drove him to choke the life from her; it was fear.

Dunne agreed with her: Bran was a target. All Dunne’s training told him so, probably in ways more vivid than Sylvie could imagine. But, when it came down to it, he didn’t believe Bran had personal strength or will enough to make the transition from human death to renewed godhood.

Dunne looked at his lover and saw the man who yielded rather than fought, who bent, and endured the unendurable until he broke. He didn’t see, maybe didn’t know, the man Sylvie had met, the one who could be pushed to action.

Over Dunne’s shoulder, she saw Bran leaning into Demalion’s arms, seeking external strength, hiding his face in Demalion’s skin, hiding from an argument that was literally life and death for him.

She tried to lick her dry lips, but her teeth were locked, gritted against the strain on her neck. Maybe Dunne was right. Maybe she was.

Only one way to find out. She and the dark voice meshed, found perfect harmony. “Kill him to set things right.”

Sylvie gibbered inside, all her calm a veneer. She was right. She knew she was right. Bran couldn’t continue this life, not now that the clock had gone midnight and the masks had come off.

She knew she was right. Panic still scrabbled at her insides. She was right, but something wasn’t.

“It has to happen,” she said. The concrete beneath her feet crumbled a little as Magdala rested her weight on the ledge next to Sylvie’s sneaker, nudging her that much closer to the drop.

“We won’t let you,” Magdala growled.

Behind them, Demalion pulled Bran closer, stroked the bright hair with a taloned hand, as if shielding Bran from the inevitable bloodshed. Demalion’s eyes, as ever, rested on Sylvie. Waiting. Her turf, she had declared. Her orders. Whatever vision he had had earlier, he was willing to follow her now. She had a momentary jealousy that he knew how this played out. She had no idea at all.

Magdala nudged Sylvie’s ankle again, playful as a shark, and Sylvie teetered backward. A breath tore from her lungs; if Dunne’s hand hadn’t held her throat so tightly, it would have been a scream.

The street, ten stories down, might as well have been miles below. All it promised was an inky abyss, the darkness of a city without power—she whimpered. It seemed an impossibly long way to fall.

“I won’t allow you to hurt him,” Dunne said. So calm, so reasonable, despite the hand pushing her toward her death.

Demalion stiffened, claws flexing, a query that she read across the roof. Now? he asked with his eyes. Now?

She nodded, a tiny jerky movement, constrained by Dunne’s hand.

Demalion never hesitated. Hell, she thought briefly, he’d probably known what she was going to ask before she did. He’d had some time to come to grips with it.

We are both going to die for this, Sylvie thought.

So be it, the dark voice murmured in response.

A sudden flare of doubt struck her: The dark voice usually argued for survival at all costs. Scratchy panic flared again; she twisted in Dunne’s grip. Something was wrong. With her.

Demalion’s hand tightened on Bran’s nape, and Bran raised his head in pained protest. Demalion stilled the movement with his second hand, an apologetic caress along Bran’s jaw that the god of Love couldn’t help but lean into, just before Demalion used the leverage to snap his neck.

The sound echoed, froze them all as if it had been the sound of giant shackles snapping open rather than a tiny section of bone and nerve being displaced. Bran folded in Demalion’s arms.

Dunne threw back his head and howled. Sylvie clung to his arm like a limpet, shrieking over his wordless grief and rage. “Don’t undo this, don’t rewind it. Help him regain—”

Then he was gone from her grip, the Furies’ betrayed howls joining his, but she had no space to care as gravity tugged her backward.

One foot fell forward, over the edge, planting her on the roof, but the other fell back, over the void, her weight following. Sylvie fell, scrabbling at the crumble of concrete ledge, at ashy remnants from the lightning’s touch, and managed to hook one arm over the edge. She hung there, panting, muscles shrieking.

A stray, crazed thought raced her mind. So this is why the schools used to count pull-ups during health assessments. . . . She sobbed for breath, for strength, for control over the animal part of her brain, which whimpered in panic. Her feet kicked and dangled. Wetness splattered her face, traced her forehead and cheeks, dripped to the roof; rain, sweat, tears, blood—she had no idea and no time to investigate. A white fog rushed over her, drifting to the streets below, and making her hands slippery in passing.

She flailed, hooked her second arm up over the edge, and kicked madly for any type of footing beneath the overhang. Finally, she got a toehold planted on one of the ornate sculptural details so loved in Chicago, and kicked her weight upward, scratching her hips and belly and thighs, ignoring the pain, and pulling with all her might. She landed on the roof like a netted fish, graceless, flailing, but considerably more grateful.

Until she focused on the picture outside of her own pains and tribulations, on her near call with death. She had escaped her own death, but Demalion—hadn’t. His blood painted the roof, sprayed wet and fine in a giant circle as if the two shape-changed Furies had hit him so hard and so fast from both sides that his skin exploded.

Blood ran black in the moonlight, sticky on Sylvie’s face and hands as she frantically scrubbed it from her skin, and thick, gouting red where it ran from Erinya’s muzzle as she ripped chunks from his chest and throat. His clawed hand spasmed as Erinya hit the long nerves in a body so recently destroyed, and his crystal globe erupted from the ruined flesh, glowing with dim ghostlight. Magdala made a long lunging slide at it, snapping her jaws, but missed. It rolled down the slant in the damaged roof, plummeted to the streets below.

Sylvie’s breath caught in her chest, locked there. The guilt, the pain—it solidified in her lungs like iron. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe at all.

Dunne held Bran in his lap, face wild and strained. Bran’s body was dissolving, flesh to motes of gold that shimmered in the air.

“You did it,” the voice said.

Sylvie shuddered. She did it, and Dunne had listened to her—he wasn’t rewinding the moment, wasn’t undoing Bran’s death, wasn’t undoing Demalion’s. . . .

“Please,” she whispered, a thin thread of pain. The Furies’ snarls were constant rumbles of sound as they continued to maul what was left of Demalion. Not content with simply killing, they were chewing him into scraps. Some crimes, Erinya had said, needed more punishment than a body could provide. Some crimes required destruction of a soul. . . . Sylvie gagged.

Demalion had killed Bran on her orders. He died for it, and Bran died for it. . . .

And for what? The motes that were Bran’s essence kept spinning outward with no cohesion, no sense of sentience at all. She’d gambled her life, Demalion’s life, Bran’s life, and she had lost.

“I’m impressed,” the voice said, and Sylvie realized it wasn’t internal any longer. An intense voice, so similar to her own, but not hers at all. Hadn’t been hers . . . for how long? A spell. There had been a cracked stick in the subway, a broken pencil on the roof. A spell in two parts. Cocking the gun and pulling the trigger in two steps. Ready, aim, and fire.

Sylvie’s words, her will, had been subsumed in a dangerous spell, insidious because it built on truth. Bran had had to die. But it shouldn’t have been here. Shouldn’t have been now. This could only benefit those who wanted Bran’s resurrection to fail.

A few feet away, the secretary stood, shedding her false fright as easily as a lizard shed its tail. Lilith plucked two elaborately spiral sticks from her braid, tugged the glasses from her face, revealing two silver-blind eyes. She raised the glasses to her face again, winked at Sylvie, eyes dark and sighted behind the bespelled lenses.

“Oh, my dear. I gave you the command to kill, be my woodsman, and you . . . delegated. You are my daughter to the bone.”