by Lyn Benedict
Zoe pushed her hair out of her face, remembered she had Merrow bits on her, and grimaced. “Ebbinghaus’s Corrective.”
“Sounds like patent medicine.”
“Eh. The Good Sisters were trying to keep a low profile. I mean, it sounds innocuous, right? Like their name? All their spells are like that. The Helpful Cat. Serena’s Trained Crow—both of those are spying spells, by the way. The Helpful Cat can also be used to start fires, remotely.”
“That what Merrow hit us with?”
Zoe shook her head. “That was just Pyrokinesis 101. Blow shit up. Coax all the heat in the air to coalesce in one spot. It’s why he had to do one wall at a time. Burns really hot, but it burns out really fast. A little like balefire.”
Sylvie said, “Zo. Trust me. That was nothing like balefire. I’ve seen balefire.”
Zoe blanched. “You should be dead. How the hell did you—”
“Erinya,” Sylvie said. “Long story. The Corrective.”
Zoe stared at her, looking worried, looking impressed and Sylvie tapped her nails against the table. “Zoe, sooner you talk, sooner you get your bath.”
“Okay, okay. Yeah. The Good Sisters, which you know, isn’t all women, right?”
“Merrow being one of them tipped me off. Continue.”
“So it’s kind of chicken and egg. Whether the Society decided to keep the Magicus Mundi their secret first, or whether they gained the ability to do so first. Doesn’t really matter—”
“Then stop telling me about it!”
“Whatever. You’re being a total bitch, Syl. I’ve had a terrible day and I want a bath and I saved you from Merrow and he’s dead and I should be glad but I’m just grossed out. And I want a bath!” Zoe’s breathing was harsh; her hands clawed at the table.
Sylvie closed her eyes and reminded herself that she’d pushed enough for the moment. Now she had to be patient. Let Zoe regain her composure, her pride—those were what kept her running, as essential to her as rage was to Sylvie. She got up and rummaged through the refrigerator, still thankfully holding human-style food. She made roast beef sandwiches, heavy on the horseradish and mustard, and tried not to think about Demalion’s sitting in her apartment kitchen, tasting foods to see if Wright’s taste buds made a difference.
He’d be all right. He’d used his precognition to ensure it. He had a plan. He was just waiting for her to do her part.
“So at first it was like, conceptual? They weren’t sure the spell would work? But it did. Honestly, from everything I hear from Val, what I heard from Merrow—I didn’t think they could do it again. I think it was like a desperate experiment that went right. That kind of lightning striking twice? The Society has to have been throwing witches at it for ages trying to make it work again. Val said it was a one-time spell when I asked about it. She said there wasn’t a coven alive that could get it running again.”
“Val’s wrong this time.” Sylvie slid a sandwich Zoe’s way, settled down at the table with her own.
Zoe peeled back the bread, wrinkled her nose at it. “I’m not sure it’s healthy to eat when I’ve got blood—”
“Don’t eat brain bits, don’t get kuru,” Sylvie said. “You’ll be fine.”
Zoe gave her that same startled expression, appalled and awed at once. “You eat a lot of meals with blood on you?”
“Some,” Sylvie said. “Eat when you can. So, they got this uber-difficult spell up and running again. How does it work?” She took a bite of her sandwich, found herself taking a second and third bite even as the horseradish brought tears to her eyes. “Like some type of pyramid scheme? People passing it down as needed?”
“More like feed the bits they don’t want people to remember into it. Tells the spell what to reach out and erase.”
“And the dispersal agents?”
Zoe squirmed in her seat, something she’d always done when she wanted to know the answer and didn’t.
“Best guess?”
“I think they carry something away? And it helps focus the Corrective better? Makes it work faster. Stronger.” She sounded more certain by the end of it.
Sylvie groaned. “Does that mean we have to hunt down each of the … dispersal witches after we break the main spell, which I still don’t know how to do.”
“I don’t think so,” Zoe said. Her admission dragged out of her. Like Sylvie, she hated to admit when she was in over her head.
“Any ideas on breaking the spell? I mean, if it’s that hard to create, maybe it’s fragile? If I yank out the ingredients?”
“If you yank out the ingredients,” Zoe said, “you’ll be subject to spell backlash. You might just erase your entire mind.”
“So that’s a do-not-recommend approach,” Sylvie said. She hung her head. “Of course, first things first. We have to find them.”
“Well, you know one thing that should help,” Zoe said.
Sylvie thought back, realized, yeah, that Zoe was right. “Wherever they are, there are a hell of a lot of witches present. Enough that they might get noticed.”
“It’s not much, but that kind of word does get around. I could ask Val.”
“It’s something. I’ll take it,” Sylvie said. “Go get your bath.”
“Thank God,” Zoe said, leaped away from the table.
Left alone, Sylvie pushed her sandwich around on her plate under the watchful, swaying blossoms dangling from the ceiling, and wondered what Demalion’s plan was, exactly. He let himself get captured. Maybe. Or maybe the capture was the only way to extend his life. Maybe all the other possibilities led to death. Maybe his only plan was survival, and he’s waiting for me to rescue him. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
Sylvie gritted her teeth. She might grow to hate precognition as much as magic. Life had enough variables as it was. Her hands clenched on her plate.
“Syl?” Alex wandered into the kitchen, frowned at the changes, and sat heavily in the seat Zoe had vacated.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Better,” Alex said, managed a half smile. “Lupe had some Valium. I think she’s grinding it into my coffee. Is there even a coffeepot left here?”
Sylvie sighed. “Yeah. I fucked up there. I should have kicked Erinya back to her realm when Dunne asked. I bet he would have helped. Have you seen the outside world? I could see the changes as soon as I crossed over the water. I don’t know what the worst scenario is. That she’s not trying to control herself, or she is and failing.”
“She saved your life. You were … shot,” Alex said. That newly familiar furrow carved its way down between her brows. Her hands shook. A mug of coffee—smelling strongly of caramel and chocolate, steaming around the edges of the whipped cream—appeared between them, and the tremors in her fingers calmed.
Sylvie blinked. Erinya was, it seemed, committed to keeping Alex happy.
“She saved your life,” Alex repeated, more confidently.
“Yeah, but she marked Demalion’s soul in exchange—oh, fuck, I’m really stupid.”
Alex grimaced. “No. That’s me.”
“Hey!” Sylvie said. She reached across the table, laid her hand over Alex’s thin wrist. “I’ll fix this. I promise. You’ll be as good as new.”
“And Lupe? You going to fix her, too?” Alex wouldn’t meet her eyes, just fiddled with the coffee cup until it slopped over her fingers.
“No,” Sylvie said. “She’s beyond my help.”
Alex looked up. Relief etched her features. “She’s beyond you. But I’m not.”
“Not you,” Sylvie said. “You going to drink that?”
Alex shook her head. “It’s a vicious cycle. I drink coffee, I get caffeinated, I get bored. I try to work. My brain collapses. I panic. Lupe gives me drugs. I get exhausted. I nap. I drink coffee to push away the drugs.”
“You want a research project?” Sylvie suggested it tentatively. It might make things worse. Might give her something to hang on to.
Alex bit her lip, bit hard. The skin immediately around her t
eeth paled until it matched the enamel. “I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t interfere with any of the blocks—”
Alex winced.
“We need a new office space.”
“What happened to ours? Did I forget that, too?”
“Nope. Just happened. Burned down.” Her throat felt oddly tight as she remembered it. Her office hadn’t been much—overexpensive to rent, and outdated within—but it had been hers.
“Fuck,” Alex said. “I don’t remember where the insurance papers are. Syl. We had insurance, right? I’m not…
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “It’s okay. Try not to think about the past, huh? Think about the future. That’s safe.”
“For how long?”
“Should be okay for a while,” Sylvie said. “Apparently the magic works by dispersal, and that agent’s been splattered—”
Alex shook her head fiercely. “Stop. Stop. Stop it!”
Sylvie shut up, watched Alex fight her own mind.
Lupe arrived, two-legged, mostly human, barefoot, and comfortable wandering around on a jungle carpet; the vines parted for her, caressed her legs as she walked. “Eri says you’re upsetting Alex. Stop it.”
“I got the memo,” Sylvie said. She pushed away from the table, smelled blood and char and sweat on her skin as movement stirred the air around her. Zoe had the right idea. Bath. And then?
Yvette.
“Alex,” Sylvie said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You reminded me of something very important.”
“Okay,” Alex said. She sounded like a little girl interacting uncertainly with an adult. It made Sylvie brittle with anger. Sylvie left Lupe caring for her with the sort of dispassionate efficiency that med students seemed to learn early on.
Erinya owned Demalion’s soul. Even the best spell in the world couldn’t hide him from her. Where Demalion was … Yvette and the Ebbinghaus Corrective.
Sylvie couldn’t wait.
14
Sisterhood
SYLVIE GOT HALFWAY DOWN THE HALL—NOW, A WINDING STONE tube that looked like it had been bored by a giant serpent—and paused, her first exhilaration fading. Erinya was a double-edged sword. She could find Demalion, but finding Demalion also meant finding the Good Sisters. Sylvie didn’t want Erinya anywhere near them. Erinya hated witches enough that nothing else mattered to her once she was hunting. The airport was proof of that.
Tackling the world’s most malevolent and largest coven might be a lot to handle, but Sylvie thought she was capable of it. With Zoe at her side, with Demalion scouting the way. Even with Marah, should she be inclined to lend her bloody talents. Erinya … she might take out Sylvie’s allies while going after the witches, leaving Sylvie attempting to stop the witches and minimizing Erinya’s massive wave of death and destruction.
Sylvie U-turned, went back toward the sound of running water, and stepped inside the changed bathroom. Zoe, sitting in a small pond beneath another waterfall, jerked, and said, “What? You can’t tell me I’m using all the hot water, because I don’t think there is any. Or, apparently, any privacy.” She sank lower in the water.
“Sorry,” Sylvie said. She crouched down near the pool, said, “Look. I need your help. I need you to do something for me.”
“Right now?”
Sylvie had to grin. “No. When you’ve cleaned up to your satisfaction, found fresh clothing, maybe had a latte.”
“There was no coffeepot—”
“Just ask Alex for one,” Sylvie said. “The thing is I need Erinya distracted. You’re a witch. You’re about the biggest distraction I’ve got. Sure as hell the only one I trust.”
“No,” Zoe said. “She squished Merrow.”
“She won’t squish you,” Sylvie said.
“You’re sure? I mean, really sure. Mom would be so pissed if you got me squished.”
“She hesitated to kill Marah on the grounds of being family, and she’s not even close. You should be fine.”
“Marah? The ISI agent that the witches were tracking?”
“Is that how they found Demalion—never mind, answer’s obvious. Yeah. Marah. The point being, she actively tried to kill Erinya, and Erinya didn’t turn her into chunks. But … don’t try to kill Erinya. Just to be safe.”
“Why am I doing this?” Zoe said. “What are you going to be doing?”
“Ostensibly, taking my own shower,” Sylvie said. “I need some private space to talk to someone she doesn’t like. I want her distracted so she doesn’t notice his arrival.”
“Who?”
“No names,” Sylvie said. “At least, not until Erinya’s distracted.”
“This is important?”
“Yeah, Zo. It is. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Eri’s out of control.”
“And you think provoking her will help keep her under control? Sounds sketchy. I mean, I’ll do it. But this had better work.”
“It’s a total gamble.”
Zoe grimaced. “Great. Hand me a towel.”
“Where—”
“They’re growing from that tree.”
“Ah, so they are,” Sylvie said. She wondered when she was going to stop feeling that dull shock of surprise. Probably around the same time her low-grade discomfort faded. Too much power in the air for the Lilith’s blood in her veins. All this loose magic. It set her teeth on edge.
“Towel?”
Sylvie tossed her one and headed out. Val’s mansion had six bathrooms last count. Sylvie wanted to find one as far from Erinya as she could get.
The guest room where she’d stayed with Demalion was at the back of the house, and Sylvie aimed for that with good results. Found it and its attached bath both empty, and more pleasingly, not completely changed over to Erinya’s world yet. The bathroom still had a shower, still had recognizable dials amidst the twining vines. She turned on the water, stripped down, figuring she might as well get in a shower before she had to use a waterfall, and closed her eyes. She listened for magic, listened for any shivering sense that Erinya was approaching and, instead, got a sudden screech of outrage.
Zoe had distracted Erinya successfully, it seemed.
“Dunne,” Sylvie said. “I need to talk to you. Now. Hurry up.”
One minute she was alone in the shower, the next she was way too close to an increasingly damp god of Justice. She hadn’t thought that through as well as she might. She fought the urge to leap for a towel of her own; he was a god, a towel meant nothing, and, besides, he wasn’t inclined to look. Hell, he was all but wed to Eros, and no mortal could compare to him.
He shook his head, and the shower water stopped falling on him.
“You travel by storm and lightning, and you’re annoyed by the shower?”
“You asked me here for that?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Look. I need your help.”
“I asked for yours and you haven’t done it and now you ask me for a favor? Another one? I sent you to Dallas. To Graves. I tweaked time so you’d reach him before he died.”
“Thank you,” Sylvie said. It didn’t stick in her throat as much as she thought it might. That really had been a generous act. “I can’t do it.”
Dunne sighed. “You can.”
“I can’t kill her. Not now. I don’t have the time, the energy to waste fighting her, and honestly, I don’t have the heart. She’s fucked-up and awful and dangerous and amazing and she’s my friend. She’s creating coffee for Alex whenever she wants it.” Sylvie retreated into the spray, hid the flush of tears on her face with heated steam.
Dunne wrinkled his brow. “I can’t do it,” he said. “Not without causing an uproar in the heavens. We can fight to our heart’s blood within our own pantheons and we do. But when you took her out of my pantheon, you took her out of my hands.”
“You’re no longer thinking like a human,” Sylvie said. “You were going to be different. Justice. Not godly vengeance. Think back. Think to when you were human. When you c
aught a criminal, what did you do with them? Execute them? Every single one?”
“No,” he said. “We jailed them.”
“So jail her.”
“I can’t attack—”
“You’re not harming her. I’m not suggesting chaining her to a mountain while eagles eat her liver. You’re just confining her. Come on, she’s alone in her pantheon. Tepeyollotl’s a shattered shell. He’s not going to even notice, much less care.”
“And the other gods? Those not in my pantheon or hers?”
“They probably won’t notice,” Sylvie said. “Right? I mean, if I killed her, they’d notice; there’d be a huge flare of power. If you killed her, the same. There’d be a fight. But they’ve been watching her trample Miami for months now. They haven’t done anything.”
“They’re still debating.”
“They’re slow debaters, then,” Sylvie said. Immortals tended to be slow about some things. She was grateful to it right now. “Which means, if you cage her, they’ll debate that, too. Probably for generations. You can buy me time. You can teach her a lesson that she might listen to. You know she’s not subtle. It probably hasn’t occurred to her that there are other ways the gods might choose to deal with her beyond straight-up attacks.”
Sylvie’s nerves jangled. The gods might have time, but she didn’t. Every second that Dunne was here was a second Erinya might notice. A second longer that Zoe courted disaster.
“It’s a risk, I admit,” she said. “Is it one you’re willing to take?”
Dunne vanished in answer. Guess that was a no.
Sylvie punched the shower stall, winced as her knuckles impacted and shredded on the grout. She had washed the blood off and had just rinsed the shampoo from her hair when Alex came barreling into the room. “Syl, you gotta … Zoe and Erinya…
Sylvie shook soap out of her hair, grabbed a towel, and ran, tripping over her feet, the vine-matted floor, the soil, and stone.
* * *
WHEN SHE HIT THE LIVING ROOM, SHE FOUND THAT ERINYA HAD CORNERED Zoe, was snarling into Zoe’s turned-away face. Lupe was coiled in the corner, returned to the snake-woman shape, caging a frightened nutria between her palms, watching with unblinking suspicion as Erinya and Zoe faced off.
