Sins & Shadows si-1

by Lyn Benedict

  She turned her attention to the spooky stuff—the mess of chalks and candles, parchments and books—on the coffee table. She fished out that day’s Tribune, folded open to the comics, then the various soda cans, grimacing as some of them sloshed and splashed. Slob, she judged, but sat down before the low table and the space she’d cleared.

  Sitting down was a mistake. Weariness swept over her, turning the cheap futon at her back into near-impossible-to-resist comfort. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

  Erinya broke a lamp in the bedroom, and Sylvie jerked awake. “Later,” she said. “Finish this case, and I can either sleep for a week, or I’ll be dead.” Her body didn’t want to listen. She raised herself to her feet and hit the kitchenette again. Eating a dead man’s food was wrong somehow; fine, she could accept that, but surely the taboo didn’t extend to his caffeine. She draped herself over the fridge door and selected a Mountain Dew. Good for that little jolt. Crap for taste. She drank it anyway, gulping it on the way back to the living room and dropping the empty on the floor. One more wouldn’t matter.

  As for fingerprints, well, it wasn’t like his body was ever going to be found, no criminal investigation spurred by the bullet wound and broken bones. He might be listed as missing after some time, but even if someone reported his absence, the odds were good that he’d simply be presumed another feckless young man, drifting out of town. Safest murder she’d ever committed. Sylvie shuddered a little. It shouldn’t have been so easy. It should disturb her more than it did.

  She began sorting papers. A lot of them had scraps and sections of the oubliette spell written on them, different colors, different tilts to the Greek.

  These were his practice runs, she thought, touching a shaky rendering of the Greek letters that read “love,” and spelled nothing but pain for Brandon Wolf. Another sheet revealed row after row of paint stripes, some rough, some globbed, some runny. Getting the medium just right. Nothing was uglier than a spell going all to hell because the paint dripped and obscured a vital symbol.

  Sylvie leaned against the futon again, twisting herself and curling into it, resting her head for just one more moment. Her unfocused gaze picked up something shining on the floor near the end of the table. She reached out and collected it. A pendant on a long, heavy chain, meant to disappear beneath clothing. The pendant slithered down the chain, snagging at the clasp. Sylvie raised it closer, frowning. She’d seen that half bat wing before in South Beach, back when she and Val had thought the Maudits might be allies instead of enemies.

  It was an apprentice’s badge.

  “A goddamned apprentice,” Sylvie said. In the other room, Erinya stirred. “A talented runaway with something to prove.” Easy prey for the first charismatic leader to come along with a grand plan and an eye for talent. Even if that leader was a woman. Of course, Sylvie wasn’t any closer to finding out who the woman was, but she was beginning to get a tentative feel for her. A woman who used the Maudit instead of being used by them. Sylvie could admire that.

  Another piece of paper, sorted through, revealed not the stiff formal writing of the trained Maudits, but a new hand. Stark, confident, elegant, in a language Sylvie recognized but couldn’t read; the bastard mix of Latin and archaic French that filled the Maudits grimoires. So his lady boss knew his language in more ways than one. But if she had helped him compose the oubliette spell—why bother with him at all?

  The simplest answer was, like so many of those who hired sorcerers, the lady lacked talent herself. Strange, though, to find that kind of detailed knowledge in a non-Talent. What kind of person went to the effort to learn something she could never use herself?

  She sifted through papers faster, looking for that strange, elegant handwriting, and found only one more scrap. A single sentence in English that could be construed as threat, support, or reminder, depending on their relationship.

  “You know I’ll be watching.”

  Sylvie wasn’t sure which one it had been to the Maudit, but to her it meant nothing but threat. If she truly was watching the Maudit, then she had seen Sylvie kill him. While Sylvie hadn’t felt the creepy certainty that came of being the object of unwanted attention, that lack didn’t rule out less mundane means of watching.

  Sylvie glanced again at the snowy TV and grimaced. The odds were good she had blundered into two “I spys” tonight, the Maudit’s station spell and one focused on him. The fact that there had been no attempted intervention in her brief struggle with the Maudit argued for remote viewing.

  The question was, had the Maudit’s death woken the woman to outrage?

  Ripping fabric in the bedroom caught her attention. Erinya lay sprawled on the bed, tearing a T-shirt into thirds with her teeth and talons. When she felt Sylvie’s eyes on her, Erinya re-formed her muzzle to human lips, and muttered, “I’m bored. I liked you better earlier.”

  Covered in blood, gun drawn, with a dead man at her feet. Sylvie thought a scathing reply but was halted by recognition of the shirt—the one she’d used in the kitchen.

  It made her skin crawl; she crossed the room in two adrenaline-filled strides and yanked it from Erinya’s talons. No way in hell was Erinya going to be tasting her sweat along with the sorcerer’s blood. That kind of thing could lead to a friendly fire she didn’t even want to consider. But the shirt felt different in her hands; the cloth stiffer, newer, thicker, even dampened with Erinya’s saliva.

  Sylvie shook it out. NDNM, the shirt said. A newer twin to the one in the kitchen. Sylvie threw it back to Erinya, who shrugged and dropped it. Sylvie went down on her knees, rooting through the mess Erinya had made, pulling black cloth free from jeans, from colored tees and khakis, from the finger-nipping bits of broken lamp bulb.

  Two of the same shirts, Sylvie thought, almost meant something. One shirt was nothing, a freebie, a promo, an impulse buy or gift. Sylvie dug up another matching shirt, tossed it toward Erinya, and found one more. Further excavations revealed a fifth, inside out and tangled with dirty socks.

  Sylvie sat back on her haunches and grinned, looking at the charcoal script stretched between her fingers. NDNM, and beneath it, in nearly invisible, black-on-black script, a local address. NDNM was a place.

  While one shirt meant nothing . . . five shirts . . . five shirts meant their sorcerer had worked there. A workplace meant coworkers who might very well know the Maudit’s lady-boss. If she were really lucky, lady-boss was also his real-world employer, and she’d find her new guide to Bran’s recovery at NDNM. Of course, there was the chance that the woman was waiting for her, ready to retaliate for the death of her lackey.

  Sylvie knee-walked through the clutter, winced as a shard of glass bit through her jeans, and ignored the small pain in favor of reaching for the bedside table. Phone book? Yes. She dived into it and found a number. She dialed, got a blast of music and raised voices before a man said, “NDNM.”

  Sylvie disconnected. Only one type of place had that kind of background noise, and would still be open at this late hour. She grinned. Eager to get moving, Erinya crawled over the bed and, in a half crouch, stared down at her.

  Sylvie rose, exhaustion pushed back. “C’mon, Erinya, we’re going clubbing.”

  12

  Ni Dieux, Ni Maîtres

  THE CLUB WAS HIDDEN ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY, IN THE no-man’s-land where the airport gave way to near-empty space. NDNM was a small, freestanding building sandwiched between a gas station and a run-down strip mall on the top of a weedy slope. At this late hour, just past 1:00 a.m., the only lights came from the neon above the gas station, the flickering yellow light of the late-night noodle shop, and the blue glow seeping through NDNM’s narrow, mirrored windows. They reminded Sylvie of gun slits, and her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  She drove past the building once, trying to get a feel for the club’s layout. Front door, narrow windows, back door, no windows, delivery door. A basic box. In the passenger seat, Erinya grumbled. “Scaredy-cat.”

  “Recon
naissance is never a bad idea,” Sylvie said. “Some of us are not immortal.”

  Erinya sank back against the fake leopard-print seat cover and sulked into silence, picking at a stiff stain in the ratty plush. Sylvie eyed the stain, then decided not to overthink it. They’d needed a car to get to the club; Erinya had gotten one, and made no mention of what its owner had thought about the appropriation of the vehicle.

  There was no reason for Erinya to have killed for it; in Chicago, old cars were as common as concrete. Besides, that stain didn’t look like blood. At least, not a lot like blood.

  Sylvie drew into the lot, counting cars by row, six here, ten there, two dozen there, trying to estimate how many people might be within. She parked at the edge of the lot and paused, a little at a loss. Erinya had started the car for her; it lacked its key, and she didn’t think the Fury had done anything as real-world as cross wires to jump-start it. Sylvie finally got out of the car with a shrug, the motor still running.

  She touched the gun at her back for reassurance and headed toward the door, Erinya trotting eagerly at her heels.

  The front door opened, and a young couple came out into the night air on a wave of cigarette smoke, dressed with dark European flair, and speaking in rapid and colloquial French. They passed Sylvie, and the woman turned back to look, her lips twisting slightly.

  Sylvie paused; she’d seen Val look at her like that a thousand times. She didn’t pass muster. Sylvie glanced at her reflection in the mirrored windows and groaned.

  “Give me your jacket,” she said. Erinya peered over her shoulder, studying Sylvie’s reflection also, as if she could see what Sylvie was seeing more clearly that way.

  It might be true, Sylvie thought. Erinya might see insides as opposed to outsides, a person’s soul, rather than the flesh cloaking it.

  Sylvie’s grey T-shirt, thrown on that morning in anticipation of a day spent moving boxes, was ready for the ragman. Small dark spots freckled the collar; leftover droplets of blood had washed down from her face and hair, and the fabric was fraying beneath the stains.

  Sylvie prodded a dark spot with a fingernail, and the cotton popped beneath her touch with the nasty sensation of a blister giving way. Sorcerer’s blood, she thought. Some type of lingering power gnawing away at his killer. Good thing she’d gotten the blood off her skin.

  Erinya handed her jacket over without objection. Black leather, heavily laden with zippers, and with a tattered Union Jack on its reverse. Not Sylvie’s style, but better than nothing. She slipped one arm in and shivered. It felt weirdly alive, vibrating to that strange, nonhuman frequency that surrounded Dunne and the sisters. She hesitated.

  “Don’t be such a wuss. It’s just clothes,” Erinya said. She stuck out her tongue. “Bran bought it last time he was in London. A present for being such a good girl.” She stepped closer and stroked the scarred leather, her face as wistful as a born predator’s could get. The entire jacket shivered toward her, like a pet yearning toward its owner. Sylvie jerked away.

  Gods and power. She finally understood, in a visceral way, what Dunne was fighting, his worries about the trails he left, the power he shed the way humans dropped skin cells and hair. Erinya’s jacket radiated the same kind of weight a spell did and could probably serve as a tiny little battery for those who were magically talented.

  Gritting her teeth, she pulled it on the rest of the way, shuddering as the gun purred against it. The dark spots on her T-shirt bleached white and slowly dissolved in vaporous wisps. “Wonderful,” Sylvie muttered, zipping the jacket closed. She took a last look in the mirror, straightened her hair, checked that the gun was sufficiently hidden, leaving no revelatory bulge beneath the heavy leather hem. Good enough.

  She tugged one-half of the double doors open, finding it surprisingly heavy, and Erinya flowed through into the dimness beyond and disappeared. Sylvie followed, slowing immediately and blinking in the low light.

  The room was long, running the length of the storefront, but too shallow to be all there was. The light confounded her, being not only dim, but moving, flashing, alive with shadows. Muttered words reached her ears, a garble that she took for foreign before catching a word here and there, and understanding that it was several people speaking at once, not in conversation but in monologues. The light flickered again, blue-white, off to either side of her, and Sylvie’s eyes adjusted.

  Television screens. The light that had seeped through the windows, the flickering that teased her eyes now was the familiar glow of television in a dark room. On either side of her, the televisions were stacked in columns ringed by chairs. The screens shifted at different speeds, showing multiple channels. To her left, the seats were mostly full, young men and women leaning forward or lounging back, watching the screens with varying shades of attention. To her right, the seats were mostly empty. Sylvie leaned right, turned her head, caught a brief snatch of words—one television broadcasting into a lull on the others.

  “. . . each according to need is the standard we should strive to . . .”

  “Tear it all down! The world without authority cannot be worse than the world we have now.” An agitated orator from the left found an echo in a viewer. A man whose stubble gleamed in the reflected light spat the words back at the screen with the fervor of a fanatic. “Tear it all down.” His hands clenched on his knees.

  Sylvie, scenting trouble, listened harder and got a trace of a passionate voice tinnily exhorting through muffled speakers: “The government doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t serve me. It serves itself, and forces us to serve it, at the expense of individualization. I say better by far to have no government at all—”

  “Ten dollars,” a gruff voice spoke, startling her. She hadn’t seen him approach at all, which amazed her, given his size.

  “Ten dollars,” he repeated. “No looky-loos. You want to stay, you pay.” She eyed the stretched-out T-shirt across his broad chest, the palm as big as a dinner plate extended before her, and looked up, then up some more.

  Gentle giant? she thought. Let’s not find out. She fumbled through her pockets and pulled out two crumpled fives. “That cover my friend also?” She gestured toward Erinya, now crouched before the lowermost screen, watching the movement within, like a cat fascinated by a fish tank. No one seemed to object that she was blocking the view. It didn’t require any sensitivity to the Magicus Mundi to see that Erinya was best left unprovoked. Even her human-shaped shell suggested that she was the kind of girl who might knock you down in a mosh pit, then kick you in the head if you complained. Kick back, and she’d grab a bottle and brain you.

  The giant doorman looked at Erinya for a moment, thoughtful; as she felt his eyes on her, she turned and stared back. “Her? Twenty dollars for the trouble she’s gonna make.”

  Sylvie forked over a twenty. He folded his hand around her arm and stamped her inner wrist with a crimson A in a circle. In the dim light, with those jagged lines, it looked more like a botched suicide than anything else.

  “C’mere, girly,” the bouncer said, gesturing to Erinya.

  Erinya’s eyes were full of “me?” Sylvie watched Erinya’s nose wrinkle in distaste, then watched her expression slide toward baffled offense once Sylvie nodded, confirming that yes, the bouncer did in fact mean the Fury.

  Erinya surged to her feet, feral even in the low light, muscles shifting under her fishnet shirt. Her eyes sparked like phosphorus, gleaming white, then green. “I don’t want a stamp.”

  He shrugged. “Then you can’t go in.”

  Prudently, Sylvie distanced herself. The bouncer was on his own. After all, either his soul, conscience, memories—whatever it was that the Furies tested—was clean or not. If it was clean, then Erinya’s hands were supposedly tied by her own nature. Soiled—Sylvie had had enough of jostling with the Furies.

  Sylvie slipped past the giant, into the cubicle he had appeared from, and opened the door hidden in its depths. A hallway greeted her, a mural on either side of her. Oil painting, living colors,
not what she expected at all, not after the grimy tech of the anteroom. NDNM grew more interesting by the moment.

  The mural on her left was of a naked giant, handing a blazing box to a group of men huddled before caves. In the gold-shot sky, vultures circled a mountain peak. Sylvie leaned closer. There were words mixed in with the blaze of light, created purely by paint layered deeper in sections than others, words made out of shape rather than color. Sylvie touched it, tracing the elaborate curls—something about fire and gifts and gods and freedom.

  The door at the far end of the hall opened on a wave of sound, and Sylvie stepped aside for a sweaty, chattering group of clubbers.

  She looked to the other side. Eden, the temptation of Eve, instantly recognizable. Eve lingered in a smothering verdant world of tangled vines and roots and dangling branches laden with overripe fruit. It made Sylvie claustrophobic looking at it.

  Beside Eve, the serpent waited, silvery in the dark earth; its tail coiled about a tiny sapling with one delicate fruit gracing its branches. Only then did Sylvie see Eve’s hand outstretched beneath it, fingers straining against the pressing vines, pushing back the intrusive greenery, reaching for the tiny fruit that shone like starlight. Eden as a prison. Serpent as savior.

  Sylvie spotted one more tiny piece of brightness in the mural, near the floor, and bent to look at it. A wolf in profile, standing on a pair of crossed arrows, the whole thing small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. Wolf, she thought. She touched the arrow shaft, and felt more of the tricky bas-relief painting. Tiny letters fought her fingertips, fought deciphering, insisted on being merely texture, but she persisted and found an r, an o.

  A signature. Brandon Wolf. He’d been here, working among his enemies. No wonder the Maudit had condescended to work in a club.

  Wolf’s abduction looked worse and worse all the time. The oubliette argued planning, but this type of planning was another level up. This was the careful infiltration that swamped its victim in lies and betrayal.