Sins & Shadows

28 Grudge Match

LILITH HELD THE TWO SPELL STICKS IN HER FREE HAND. SHE TUCKED one over her ear, laid the other on her outstretched palm. Her eyes, even unfocused and blind, were intent. After a moment, the stick rose on point and began to spin in the palm of her hand. As it did, it created a tiny vortex. Bran’s self, that misty shimmer of gold, began to flow toward Lilith, twining around the tips of the sinuously curved stick, feeding themselves through the larger eye at the top. Lilith grinned; the muscles in her forearm bunched as if the motes had a tangible weight to them.

She flipped the stick up, caught it, and brought it to her mouth, as greedy as a child with cotton candy, plucking tangled clouds free and dissolving them on her tongue.

At the first bite, she moaned, then flung the spelled glasses away from her. She licked her lips, and her eyes lost their blindness, shading back to their normal brown. “So much better,” she murmured. She caught a last strand of gold on her lip with her thumbnail, sucked it clean. “A victory is so much sweeter when one can actually see it.”

“Not a victory yet,” Sylvie whispered, still on her hands and knees, still trying to surface above the grief that threatened to sink her. She’d been too confident in her resistance to spells even to imagine this trap.

Lilith set the spell sticks in either hand, setting both to spinning. “What’s going to stop me?” Lilith said. “The Furies? Sorry, granddaughter, they’re too busy hunting your man’s soul. They’ve destroyed his flesh, but it’s not enough for them. Not after what he did.” She devoured another long streamer of Bran’s power, then turned heavy-lidded eyes back to Sylvie.

“It’ll take them a while. His soul’s tricky. It’s a little more than human. It’s not merely a matter of rooting it out. It’s a matter of chasing it down. They’re rare beasts, you know. A sphinx cub can take a millennium to gestate. The man you delegated to die in your place might have been only thirty-some years old, but he was a thousand years in the making, a thousand years lying cradled beneath his mother’s heart.”

Sylvie whimpered under her breath; guilt surged up a higher notch. She hadn’t thought it was possible. But there it was, scouring her from the inside out. Dry-mouthed, sick with revulsion of her own skin—she wanted to be someone else, anyone else, anyone but the monster.

Magdala snapped her jaws in the air near Sylvie, swallowing down some fluttering piece of light, silvery grey. A soul fragment? Another piece of Demalion eradicated completely.

“Dunne,” she said, a breath of scratchy hope that he could make her pay for what she had done, and end this agony of guilt.

“Dunne has his own problems,” Lilith said. “Some of which are mine, dammit.”

Sylvie managed to raise her head. Anything that put that note of startled frustration into Lilith’s voice had to be good.

She was wrong.

Dunne still knelt where he had cradled Bran’s body, shoulders slumped, face racked by fear and longing. He was surrounded by a smeary gold shimmer like a veil. Sylvie’s heart gave a tiny, hopeful leap; the gold mist was denser than it had been, less spread out, more focused. Bran was trying to re-form. . . . No, she realized, he wasn’t.

All that was left of Bran was trying to get closer to Dunne, seeking a familiar shelter. In this state, it meant they would mingle together, meant that Bran would dissolve his soul into Dunne’s, eradicating himself in a way Dunne could never repair.

A tiny wisp of gold darted in toward Dunne’s parted lips, licked inside, and Dunne gasped, covering his mouth. “No, baby. No. Be yourself. Please, Bran, come back to me.” A storm cloud pressed outward from Dunne’s skin, pushing back the gold.

The shimmer, rejected, grew wispier.

Lilith’s spindles still worked, collecting ingestible power, but with the power motes dispersing outward, she had to work harder to draw less.

“No,” Sylvie muttered. God, no. Dunne’s shell-shocked concentration was focused solely on keeping Bran and himself distinct entities, his own power trickling out through the stump of his right arm like mercury, thinning him down. While he worried about that, Lilith would keep picking off Bran nibbles here and there, until she had enough, or until Bran faded into the sky to be snagged by any passing collector. And it was all Sylvie’s doing.

The Furies were gone from the roof, vanished after a tiny ghostlit will-o’-the-wisp, chasing an elusive piece of Demalion’s soul; hell, Sylvie thought, they were probably mad enough to kill Anna D simply for birthing him. Then they’d be back for her.

The thought didn’t upset her, and that realization shocked her out of the stupor shrouding her. Her despairing inertia was another spell, some fail-safe that Lilith had planned and implemented to keep Sylvie out of the way.

Lilith feared what she might do.

Given something to fight, Sylvie dived for the heart of her stupor, rooting out the miasma that weighed her down, bringing back awareness of her body as more than a vehicle for numb despair. Her hands clenched tight in the softened roof tar.

She might be guilty. She might be damned. She probably wouldn’t withstand the Furies’ vengeance any better than Demalion had, but dammit, she’d go out better than this. Demalion deserved better. Bran deserved better. She reached inside herself and found that little dark core, the voice that spoke survival and spite. It sprang to life at her touch, shrieked in outrage at what Lilith had done to her.

Make her pay, the little dark voice commanded.

First things first, she answered back. There was more at stake here than avenging her pride.

She marshaled a savage edge to her voice, as intimidating as anything Erinya had voiced. “Bran! Stop it. You might solve your problems by melting away, but you’ll screw everyone else. Every thing else.” She broke off to pant. The acid rage felt raw in her throat, but it was a pain that was clean and good, familiar and strong.

“Leave him alone,” Dunne snapped. “He just died. He’s confused. Give him a moment.”

“We don’t have—”

“Then make some time,” Dunne said. A command.

“Shut up,” Lilith snapped through a mouthful of power. She raised a hand, and a smear of gold flame rose from her fingertips.

“Gonna waste that on me?” Sylvie said. “You aren’t that juiced yet; hell, your firestarter had more oomph than that. She was nearly to balefire when I shot her down.”

“Shut up!” Lilith repeated, but didn’t release the flame.

Handicapped, Sylvie thought. Lilith couldn’t fight and suck in power at the same time.

“Sorry. It’s in the blood. I’ll talk ’til I’m dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Sylvie grinned as the smear of power in Lilith’s hand sucked back into her skin, the spindle beginning to rotate again. She’d bought a little time.

“Bran, listen to me,” Sylvie said. “There’s no safe haven for you like this. Not even within Dunne.” Across the roof, she saw Dunne’s anger warring with a tiny spark of hope that she might be able to rouse Bran faster than he could. The grey shielding around him sparked and flared as gold motes rebounded from it. His damaged arm was unraveled nearly to the shoulder, and he made no attempt to repair it, concentrating instead on corralling Bran.

A tiny breath of a whisper, a voice made entirely of air, reached her. Bran wasn’t thinking of his own safety. I can heal him. If he lets me in. Tell him to let me in, Bran said, muzzy-voiced, tenuous, and focused on the wrong thing entirely.

“Don’t know that I trust your motives,” Sylvie said. “You’re greedy for protection. Heal yourself first.”

Distracted by proof of Bran’s existence, even so attenuated, Sylvie nearly missed the movement on her left. She dodged but too late. Lilith’s foot caught her cheek, flung her back. Sylvie’s head hit the edge of the roof, and the world greyed for a moment. When she came back, Lilith’s foot was planted on her throat.

“Forgot for a moment that I didn’t need to use my new power or even my hands,” Lilith said. “Not for you. My little girl with no power of her own.”

Sylvie kicked up, thumped Lilith weakly in the back of her thigh. The woman’s face showed no pain—invulnerable to blunt force as well as bullets—but pushing someone off balance had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with leverage.

She gagged, shifted beneath Lilith’s instep; the pump’s narrow heel punched a tiny hole in her skin, and Sylvie kicked harder. Lilith staggered away, her hand flying wide to help her keep her balance, and the vortex spell faltered. Sylvie rolled to her knees, levered herself to a crouch, panting for breath.

“I didn’t say you could fight back,” Lilith said. “I don’t have time for this, you stupid girl.”

In the background, Dunne murmured quiet prayers to the only god he still worshipped. Bran. Eros. Pleading in one breath for him to come back. For him to stay away in the next, as Bran persistently tried to merge his powers with Dunne.

If she could just distract Lilith long enough, it would all be over. Surely Dunne could make Bran see that restoration had to come before repair.

“Did you really think I’d just lie down and die?” Sylvie said. “It’s not in my nature, any more ’n it’s in yours.”

“You overestimate yourself,” Lilith said. “You’re only mortal. You’ve done your task. Go home. Mourn your dead. Put another notch on your gun.” The air around Lilith shivered; amber light glowed beneath her flesh as the power that had built up on the spindles overflowed and poured into her skin.

Tears started in Sylvie’s eyes as Lilith’s taunts flicked her on the fragile hurts beneath her rage; she forced them back. “Thing of it is,” she said, voice ragged, “someone’s got to stop you, to save what can be saved. And like it or not, someone always seems to be me.”

“Pity them, then,” Lilith said. “You’ll help them into their graves. You think your snakebite girl is still alive? Or did she die with your name between her teeth, cursing you—”

Sylvie’s hearing blacked out. She lunged out of her crouch like any linebacker and tackled Lilith around the knees, taking her to the roof. Or at least, that was her intent. Lilith’s body was as unyielding as granite. Side effect of the invulnerability spell? Or evidence of Bran’s power successfully integrated? Sylvie didn’t stop to theorize.

Lilith stopped the vortices with a frustrated shout, fisting them in one hand. She dodged Sylvie’s next lunge, but when Sylvie elbowed her in the throat, Lilith actually quailed. Sylvie noted it, but the neck jab had never been more than a feint. She had a more important target.

Sylvie’s other arm snapped out, a knife-edged hand aimed at one thing only: the spell sticks clenched in Lilith’s fist. She struck them straight on, yelped at the jolt they gave her, as unpleasant and as startling as the dentist’s drill. One of them slipped Lilith’s grip, and the golden glow stopped completely.

Sylvie made an attempt for the second stick, but Lilith burned some of her stolen power to fling Sylvie away without touching her. Sylvie, half-expecting it, rolled this time and saved herself a concussion.

Sylvie panted, “No finesse, no points for style. Brute force is so passe. Some god you’ll be.”

Lilith ignored her, scrabbling for the fallen stick, and Sylvie pounced, this time, directly for the neck: She liked it when Lilith flinched. She wanted to see it again.

Lilith’s back was to her, her nape bared as she fumbled the sticks back to her hands, back to spinning. Perfect for Sylvie. She got both hands around Lilith’s neck, but her nails made no impression. Lilith sent her sprawling back, without apparent effort.

But Sylvie had felt something beneath the bland button-down collar, a serpent slide of leather under her clawing fingers.

A flash of memory; Lilith in the subway, tricked out in goth cowboy gear, complete with sheriff’s star. It had hung from a woven leather thong. Then, Sylvie had thought it just wry fashion statement. But if Lilith wore it still, wore it when every other part of her masqueraded as a white-collar worker, from the crisp white blouse to the navy pumps beneath dark slacks—it might be something else. Something important.

A hailstorm of pebbles and gravel poured from the sky, stinging Sylvie’s bare hands, her neck, her head, increasing in size as the torrent continued. Sylvie huddled up, protecting her face, wincing as a rock the size of a softball pelted the roof inches from her, biting her lip as her back stung and welted.

Lilith was getting the hang of her stolen power and had found a way to keep Sylvie off her back from a distance.

Dunne was murmuring again; this time it wasn’t in any language Sylvie recognized, something liquid. She wondered briefly if it was aimed at helping her. She doubted it.

Sylvie rolled away, aiming for the shelter of the rooftop stairwell. Each step toward safety put Lilith farther from her reach.

The golden motes in the air swirled suddenly, blown as if in a sudden draft. A faint ripping sound reached her, and a sudden stink of arterial blood. Erinya emerged onto the roof in human form, sheeted in blood, with three livid claw marks across her face.

Magdala galloped into sight on Erinya’s tail, four-legged, skeletal, bat-winged, and heading straight for Lilith.

Lilith threw up her hand defensively; fire leaped from her fingers, first ruddy, then white-hot, coiling around her palm. The fiery blast washed over both Furies, tumbling them over the edge of the roof. Sylvie clapped hands over her eyes before realizing it wasn’t balefire, that she hadn’t just bought herself a ticket to an ashy death. Lilith wasn’t that strong yet, couldn’t summon balefire by wishing it. Yet.

The glow that stippled Lilith’s skin faded, as did the fire. The rocks pelting Sylvie shrank back to pea-sized, stinging, but mostly harmless. Lilith panted and forced the vortex spell back into action.

Don’t let her get that strong, the dark voice said. Stop her now. With no further plan than that, Sylvie moved forward. She didn’t even bother with stealth. Between the whine of the vortex spell, the rattle of falling gravel, and the Furies clawing their way back onto the roof, Lilith’s attention was well and truly elsewhere.

Lilith wasn’t a sorcerer, or hadn’t been. Her invulnerability had nothing to do with her immortality; she’d implied as much in the El station. It might have everything to do with an amulet. Gadget witches did so love their trinkets.

Sylvie got her hands on the cord, and Lilith knocked her back again, but it was too late. The thong whizzed through Sylvie’s clawing hands, the sheriff’s star thunked into her palm, and Sylvie yanked. The thong snapped, leaving a tiny red welt on Lilith’s neck, already beading with blood.

Lilith clapped her hand to it, eyes wide and wild.

“Forgotten what pain feels like?” Sylvie asked. “I’ll remind you.” She drew her fist back and punched Lilith in the face.

Stupid, the dark voice said. A wasteful blow.

But so very satisfying, Sylvie told it. Between her fingers, the thong seethed with motion and repaired itself. Sylvie laughed, and slung it around her own neck. Now, this is more like it.

Sylvie had never been all that fond of hand-to-hand fighting. She much preferred her guns, which made variables of size and strength almost irrelevant.

But this—she was just as glad the guns were spent. She craved Lilith’s skin shredding under her nails. Use her, would she? Sylvie didn’t play pawn for anyone. She stepped out into the spray of gravel, pausing for a brief second to enjoy the fact that she couldn’t feel its sting.

Erinya crouched low, ready to dive in, and Sylvie’s attention swerved. “Mine,” she growled.

Erinya dropped her eyes in surprising obedience. Lilith took the chance to murmur a spell under her breath and vanished. Magdala clambered over the roof’s edge, fighting her own weight, and sniffed. “Still here,” she growled. “Somewhere.”

Sylvie swept the rooftop with her gaze. An eddy of gold shimmered near the other side of the roof, not spilling over, but disappearing steadily nonetheless.

There, Bran said, a thready whisper.

No shit, she thought, already in motion. If she misjudged, if Lilith dodged the right way, Sylvie would find herself over open air, but that thought only occurred in the tiny piece of space and time between motion and contact. She slammed into Lilith hard, nearly had them both over the edge.

Doesn’t matter, the dark voice crowed. You can stick the landing. Sylvie laughed again, an edge of mania in it. Lilith flared under her hands, bubbles of power rising, bursting against Sylvie’s clutching hands.

“Burn,” Lilith said. The illusion of invisibility broke with her voice.

Sylvie’s shirt smoked.

Sylvie shook Lilith, even while slapping at her own skin, damping whatever blaze had started. The metal of the star felt warm against her skin.

Lilith jabbed at her eyes with the spell sticks, and Sylvie caught her wrist, pounded it against the edge of the roof. Lilith yelped. The sticks clattered free. Sylvie snatched them, ready to hurl them over the edge.

“Burn,” she heard Lilith shout beneath her, and the sheriff’s star on Sylvie’s chest burst into white-hot flame under Lilith’s touch. The star fell free; slagging as it went. Sylvie screamed as the molten metal wrapped around her arm for a brief caress before dripping to the ground. Her hands spasmed, and she dropped the spindles.

Beneath her, Lilith screamed also, as the effort she poured into breaking the invulnerability charm left her mostly human again. Sylvie wrapped a hand in Lilith’s hair, attempted to pound her skull into the roof.

Lilith gouged at Sylvie’s neck, reaching toward her eyes, and Sylvie rolled away, covering the spindles with her body. Lilith tried to get them, nails digging at Sylvie’s side, and Sylvie fumbled a rock into her hand. She brought it up, crashing it into Lilith’s temple. Lilith dodged in time to turn it into a scalp wound, nothing more serious, and Sylvie, in pure incandescent rage, rolled her over and struck down.

Squirming, Lilith caught the blow on her shoulder and managed to pinch the long nerve in Sylvie’s arm. The rock in her grip trembled, but Sylvie refused to let go.

A sudden pulse, like a giant heartbeat, rocked the roof. A roll of grey fog passed over them, through them, and circled the roof, corralling all the drifting bits of Bran.

A small distant part of Sylvie wondered what that effort had cost Dunne, to use his own faltering power with such a finesse for borders, but most of her was fixated on wiping Lilith off the map. In the silence as the world was cut away from them, she heard a tiny word, a word weighted by Erinya’s growl. Matricide.

Sylvie’s hot blood cooled as if a glacier had breathed on her. Magdala met her eyes, licked away a bloody streak on her cheek with a long, inhuman tongue, and sat back, watching. Any excuse, her posture said. Yeah, Lilith wasn’t her mother, but hadn’t Anna D said it? That Sylvie was the first of her children to be awake? Maybe it was close enough to give them the excuse they wanted.

The rock in Sylvie’s hand trembled and fell. The dark voice wailed as they fell out of concert with each other, but Sylvie shuddered. So close to a crime the Furies considered unforgivable. The dark voice snarled, You’re damned anyway. Dead anyway. Make her pay for it.

Tentative hope sprang up in Sylvie’s chest. Would Erinya bother to warn her if her life were already forfeit?

Lilith laughed, a sound hoarse and sore. “Cain’s child, too. A rock in your fist. But you should never show mercy.” A flick of her fingers, and a tiny stick dropped into her hand, a thin matchstick, brittle, breaking, a tiny ghost flare promising balefire. . . .

Sylvie scrabbled for something, anything, found a weapon, plunged it into Lilith’s chest. Lilith’s shriek broke off into a familiar whine. Sylvie glanced down, at the blood on her hands, at the spindle embedded in Lilith’s rib cage. Glowing, spinning, dragging power directly into her heart.

Mistake, she thought. Bad mistake.

As if Bran had just been waiting for blood, the motes that made his soul poured toward Lilith, as if she were the black hole. Sylvie heard a protesting gasp from Bran, but it wasn’t repeated. Instead, the gold began to shift and struggle. If Bran had been sleepwalking through the transformation before, now he was awake, aware, and very afraid. The more concentrated streamers of his power coiled tightly around Dunne for aid.

Lilith vanished from beneath Sylvie, reappeared closer to Dunne, closer to Bran’s power.

Sylvie pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t know what she could do, but she had to do something. Dunne was at the end of his strength.

She shook her head. Careless thinking. He wasn’t at the end of his strength; he was at the limits of his ability to control that strength. In the storm-cloud core of him, Sylvie saw a sight as bleak as a nuclear winter. He could stop all this. Smite Lilith, force Bran into shape, but he couldn’t do that and keep his strength confined. Working against himself was burning him to nothing. The raveling of his body was considerable. His torn arm was gone, and a large divot was eating out his rib cage.

“Erinya. Magdala.” Dunne held out his good arm. There was pain in his voice. “I need you.”

Magdala leaped forward. Dunne held her close, and she dissolved into him. Erinya looked at Sylvie, and said, “Save Bran.”

“Eri—”

“I only kill things; sometimes you save them,” Erinya said. She turned and burrowed into Dunne, fading. His body, torn and winnowed, arced. Light flashed once, and when it was done, he was whole again. But his right arm was a thing of scale and feather, with a hand that flashed talons.

Lilith glowed brightly against the grey shielding Dunne had surrounded them with. Sylvie gritted her teeth; she was going to get swatted like a bug buying Dunne some of his “moments.”

She took a step forward, and Dunne’s hand caught her, pulled her back as he passed her. “I’ll deal with her. You—” He licked his lips. She caught a pale glimpse of fangs on the right side of his mouth, the jut of animal muscle, before his words made it through. “Help Bran. Protect Bran. Whatever he needs to put himself back together.”