His face cleared a little in surprise. “No, of course you’ll get paid. Name your price. I am a god, Sylvie, whether you choose to accept it or not. Your fee could reflect that. What do you want?”
The Eumenides sisters were the only faces left in her storefront window; they watched Dunne as faithfully as the police had, but with far more intelligence behind their eyes, a visual reminder of the power Dunne wielded.
Sylvie’s heart skipped—a god? The possibilities reeled before her. Money zipped by; she always needed that, but money was easy. If Dunne wasn’t lying, if he was a god, he could give her something far more valuable. Something that would lift the guilt from her back and make Alex smile again. There was really only one thing to ask for.
“Anything I want?” she said, trying for casual in her voice, trying not to let him see how much this mattered.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Can you bring back the dead?”
3
The Unreal World: Magicus Mundi
“IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?” HE ASKED, HOLDING HER GAZE.
“I asked, didn’t I?” she said. Hope and disbelief warred in her, came out as bad temper. “And I don’t mean a zombie, dead flesh animated and forced to feign a life that it can barely recall. Don’t give me any Star Trek Prime Directive objections, either . . . that you’re not allowed to interfere. You claim to be a god. Put up or shut up. Can you do it?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “There are a lot of gods, Sylvie, and each of us has our own followers, devout folk who are ours to do with as we will. Then there are the rest. So few humans are truly devout anymore, mouthing words without belief. They’re up for grabs, and we divide them. We’re not too comfortable with sharing, though sometimes deals have been struck.
“If he’s mine or no one’s, I can bring him back. If not, not without permission. But most of law enforcement falls under my aegis. Including you.”
“I belong to no one,” Sylvie snapped.
He shrugged, not taking offense. The sisters, on the other hand, scowled at Sylvie through the window. Sylvie thought she could feel the thick glass vibrate beneath the weight of their collective growl.
“I’ve heard that before,” Dunne said. “As a general rule, policemen claim to lack belief in abstracts, but most of them believe in me. In justice. In the idea that wrongs can be made right.”
“Suarez isn’t getting any less dead,” Sylvie said.
“How did he die? What one god has done, it is not wise to undo.”
“He was killed by a bullet. By a human,” Sylvie said.
“Show me,” he said.
“Show you?” she repeated. “I didn’t videotape it. I had other things on my mind at the time. Knee-deep in satanists tends to do that to a girl.” She watched his face, and said, “I suppose you’re going to say since a satanist fired the gun, he’s lost—”
“That’s not a problem,” he said. “Satan’s not a god, only a fallen angel and one not inclined to waste his limited power defending his followers. But you must show me, Sylvie. I don’t know your man. To bring him back, I need to be able to find him.”
“How?”
“Just remember it. I’ll watch through your eyes.”
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“You’re doing it all the time,” he said, his voice softening. “You worry at it like the lion with the thorn.”
When she thought she was ready, she said, “His name was Rafael Suarez, my assistant and friend. He got into blood magic and went junkie for it, got wrapped up in the pain and power. Masochism done magic style.”
Sylvie let the words unroll, the images fill her mind. By the time she’d realized the scope of his problem, he’d gone to the satanists’ altar eagerly, hunting the ultimate rush. Sylvie had crashed the party, Alex refusing to be left behind, and there had been a brief stalemate as the celebrants saw Sylvie’s gun. They might have been reaching for power, but they were mortal and selfish at the moment. The gun sobered Suarez as well, sent him reeling from the altar toward them. A look back, and he crossed himself, a brief, desperate prayer for forgiveness.
At the time, Sylvie had seen it as a meaningless gesture, but now, in her head, the image of the sketched cross burned so bright it made her eyes water.
Dunne sighed. “He was Catholic? And truly believed. I’m sorry. He’s been taken to the light god’s hands, and He is a most jealous god.”
“So that’s a no, then? Figures,” Sylvie said, when the disappointment that thickened her voice past speech faded.
“I’m sor—” he said. She flung up a hand. Stop. Sorry meant nothing to her.
“Then you have nothing to offer me,” Sylvie said. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. You’ve got my obedience anyway.” She couldn’t believe she had almost liked this man.
“That’s not true,” he said. “I can give you the other thing you want, the thing you don’t want to admit to.” There was a note in his voice suddenly that resonated with her own internal voice, the one that spoke so often in terms of kill or be killed. She raised her head and met his eyes, no longer gentle, but cold, grey, and full of purpose.
“I’ll bring them to justice.”
Sylvie’s heart thudded in her rib cage. “The cops can do that,” she said, dismissively. “I can do that.”
“When they were masked?” he asked. “When the trail from the club has gone cold? When they’ll be hunting you? Kill you, and they not only get their power, they get rid of a witness to their crimes. Or . . . just say the word, and I’ll take care of them.”
Sylvie shivered; another line crossed. Asking Dunne to remove her human enemies was only one step from her doing it herself. Of becoming the monster. Still, the word hissed out, over her doubts, over her fears. “Yes.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice gentling again, as if he could read that weak trace of dismay in her thoughts.
“It would be . . . justice,” she said, voice flat. Her hands shook, and she slid her wet palms down the sides of her jeans. If Dunne and the sisters took out the satanists, it would solve her most pressing problems. Protect Alex, her family, anyone else the cultists ran across in their search for her. “A life for a life.”
“His life for all of theirs,” Dunne said.
“He was only their first victim. They’ll want more.” Sylvie thought of Alex crying silently for days, of her own tears, which stalked her at awkward moments, of Suarez’s bewildered parents uncovering their son’s private life. She closed her eyes, allowing that dark whisper to overrule the rest of her mind. “Can you deliver?”
“Yes,” he said. Simple, confident, impatient. He gestured to the sisters, and they sauntered back into the office. Magdala and the punk girl settled on Sylvie’s battered couch, speaking to each other in liquid syllables that Sylvie didn’t recognize. The blonde beelined for Dunne’s side. Obviously, he played favorites, Sylvie thought.
“Kevin?” Alekta asked. Glee surfaced in her pallid eyes. “Is it time for work?”
“Yes, Alekta,” Dunne said. The other two women looked up with sudden interest, but he waved them back. “Just Alekta.”
He nodded at the chair he had made, and Sylvie sat in it, ill at ease. “It’s easy enough, Sylvie. Just think of one of them; we’ll seal our bargain after the first one’s been dealt with. The rest will come . . . after you find Bran.”
There was the reminder of her leash again, she thought. Take out one of her enemies, but the rest would be free until she recovered Bran. It all added up to an unspoken Find him fast.
Sylvie closed her eyes, remembering. She wanted to be sure—they had been masked. She didn’t want him to just kill anyone and pretend it was one of them. There had to be some way. . . .
She focused. The leader raised his arms, spoke behind his mask, and Sylvie frowned. Nothing distinctive about him. Tall, but not remarkably so. He wore gloves, a full face mask, a full cloak. She couldn’t even tell if he was white, black, Hispanic, or other. She wo
uldn’t recognize him if she saw him on the street.
Reluctantly, she chose another target. Parting the crowd, pushing through silken cloaks, bumping up against one of the most avid participants. Behind her mask, the eyes had been blue; a spill of red-dyed curls tangled at the nape of her cloak, and her perfume, the ripe, sex-sweet musk of tropical orchids. Her, Sylvie thought, remembering the girl’s laughter when Suarez fell.
“That one,” she said. “That one first.” There was a brush of softness against her face, the faint prickle of blunt-cut hair and the creak of leather.
She opened her eyes and found Alekta pressed nearly into her, her eyes wide and blank, her mouth gaping. Sylvie recoiled, reaching instinctively for her gun and coming up short. “Get away from me.”
“Did you get the scent?” Dunne asked.
Alekta nodded, tongue lolling out of her mouth in a horror-movie moment; her waist and belly sucked in, her ribs expanded, her arms thickened, and she dropped to all fours, still shifting leisurely, as if she intended to enjoy the hunt.
“No!” Sylvie snapped. “No.”
Dunne said, “What now? Changed your mind?”
“No, but not like that. Not shredded by an animal.” Sylvie had seen deaths like that before—ugly, loud, and bloody. She wasn’t going to watch it again, and she had every intention of seeing the satanist die. If she ordered it, she had a duty to bear witness. Her heart pounded. “You do it,” she told Dunne. “Not your minion. You.”
Alekta whined, but reversed her transformation on Dunne’s command. “Fine,” he said. He reached over Alekta and seized Sylvie’s arm so tightly she knew there’d be bruises.
Bastard, she thought, just before the world dropped out from under her. She shrieked outrage, but the sound was swallowed by the overwhelming blur of color and noise that surrounded her. Like being inside a tornado, she thought, her breath hiccuping in her chest. And then it was done, and she and Dunne stood on the Gables campus of the University of Miami, midway between the Rathskeller, the Olympic pool, and the University Bookstore.
When she could speak, she growled, “Never again. I don’t like magic used on me.”
And such magic, she thought, her nerves still jangled. Dunne was far too talented. Mind-viewing, summoning of those horrible sister-demon things, transport spells, and of course, that tiny hiccup in time that she’d experienced earlier.
Humans could do each of those things if they were sufficiently talented and foolhardy. It took a type of power that always fought back, twisting in on itself, devouring its users if they faltered for even a moment.
Dunne seemed to use magic as easily as he breathed. Sylvie bit her lip; she was going to have to give Val a call—what she knew about magic was sketchier than it should be, confined mostly to her reasons for distrusting it.
“There she is,” Dunne said, gesturing. He had taken a seat on one of the benches that lined the concrete path.
Two girls walked side by side, coming down the path toward them. Sylvie recognized her would-be target immediately, in the way she moved, held herself, smirked.
The girl shook back her red curls and nudged her prettier companion just hard enough that the girl stepped off the path and into a slick spot of mud. She went down, and the red-haired girl laughed.
Still spreading her own particular brand of joy, Sylvie thought. If she had had any doubts, that little act of spite erased them. She nodded at Dunne, and his lips tightened.
“She wasn’t the one who shot him,” he said, but even as she opened her mouth to protest, he nodded. “Done.”
Sylvie turned, and the girl was suddenly gone. Sylvie had expected flames for some reason, people screaming and fleeing, campus police scratching their heads over an undeniable case of spontaneous human combustion, maybe even the girl’s ashes blowing back across Sylvie’s skin.
Instead, there was nothing. No outcry, no notice. Even the girl’s companion, rubbing exasperatedly at the mud on her jeans, seemed unaware that anything had occurred. But one moment the girl had been there, sauntering down the path, the next—nothing. Nearly nothing, Sylvie realized. Something lay on the path, something small and fragile.
With shaking legs, Sylvie walked over to the place where the girl had vanished, and bent, her fingers ready to recoil. An illusion, surely, not the thing itself. Sorcerers excelled in illusion and deception. But this—she reached out and touched it. Her eyes and her fingers agreed. She picked up the orchid, white bleeding into pale pink, the roots dangling, and said, “Transformed? Not dead?”
“She isn’t a murderer,” Dunne said. “Revenge is outside my nature. If you want her dead, you’ll have to do it. It won’t be that hard. Just throw her back on the ground, let someone trample her. Run her through a Weed Eater. Or even simpler, let her dry out and die.”
Sylvie let out a shaky breath; she should be relieved that her orders hadn’t put that responsibility on her. Instead, she only felt as if he was squirming out of their bargain. Testing her determination.
Sylvie felt the frailty of the narrow stem, the fleshiness of the petals, and cast it down onto the path again, raised her sneakered foot, imagining how the plant would shred, pulpy and tender beneath her heel. But when her sole touched pavement, she felt only the grit of concrete. She opened her eyes. Dunne stepped back from her, holding the orchid in his hands.
4
Murder, Morals, Motive
“AS SIMPLE AS THAT FOR YOU?” DUNNE SAID, TOUCHING THE FRAGRANT petals. “Transformation is not enough? An evil turned to harmless beauty, made benign—”
“You want me to take the damn case, don’t lecture me on my morals,” Sylvie said. “They killed Suarez. They’ll be after me. Yeah, it’s pretty simple. Kill or be killed.”
“But she’s harmless now,” he said. He frowned, but the expression was more puzzled than disapproving. “It’s one thing to kill in self-defense or in protection of another. To kill once there is no pressing need—”
“If your lover is dead, or alive but tortured,” Sylvie said, “will you dare tell me you won’t exact his pain on their hides?”
As he quailed, she pressed her advantage. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, tit for tat; it’s the oldest, simplest justice there is. Or is that different from being Justice with a capital J? Are you a kindlier, gentler justice?”
He closed his fingers, and the orchid vanished. Sylvie caught the protest in her throat. “You let her go?”
“No,” he said. “Put her elsewhere.” His eyes were tired, and he rubbed at them with the heels of both hands, the face of a man with a dilemma. “Is this going to work? I need you to think—you’re almost as bad as the sisters.”
“Fuck you,” Sylvie snapped. “I’m smarter than your minions.” She was shaking, cold all the way to her bones at what she had tried to do. She didn’t kill people. Even if they were flowers. She clung to that thought, but she had always responded to fear with rage. Fear paralyzed you. Rage kept you moving.
“How many others could you identify clearly from your memories? The girl passed close to you—you saw her hair, heard her laugh, saw her move, smelled her perfume and sweat. The others? If you destroyed her, their identification becomes harder.”
“Your sisters could follow her scent back, right?” Sylvie said.
“Oh, they could have followed it anywhere. On anyone she’d been near. Like her classmates, her teachers, the people in her dormitory, and those she stood next to on slow elevators. How many throats would you see the sisters hunt?” His eyes were steady on hers.
Sudden sickness welled in Sylvie’s throat; she turned from his gaze.
“This way, you have a choice. We can still ask her questions. Identify the others the simplest way.”
“Kinda hard to ask a flower questions,” Sylvie said, trying not to let him see how shaken she was. “All that language of flowers crap aside.”
“Don’t be difficult,” he said. “I’ll change her back first, of course.”
“Of course
,” she said. No big deal. Transformation. Real transformation of matter. Most transformations were only a matter of rearranging mass. Werewolves were big because men were bigger than wolves. Turning a person into a toad would only result in a toad the size of a man. To turn a woman into a single, delicate orchid—to change her back at will—that required destruction and creation of mass. Destruction was a human skill, possible for a juiced-up sorcerer. Creation—wasn’t.
He took her arm again, and she yanked away. “No. We are not traveling that way again.”
Dunne’s face darkened. “We don’t have a lot of time—”
“Enough for you to lecture me on ethics. Enough for you to prove your skills. I think we have enough time to take a car wherever we go next.” She met his eyes, refused to back down. He could force the issue, she supposed. But he was weak, too. He was desperate, and he needed Sylvie.
“Fine,” he said. He gestured in a manner that looked a lot less like a spell trigger than a man throwing his hands up in exasperation. With the sudden rearrangement Sylvie was beginning to get used to, her truck appeared in the parking lot nearby, its battered and clawed red hood a familiar beacon.
“Great,” she said, her poise restored with its appearance. The clawed hood reminded her she’d survived a lot more intrinsically malevolent creatures than Dunne was turning out to be. “But tell me this. Where are we going?”
“To look for him,” Dunne said. Bewildered panic entered his eyes again.
Sylvie found a bench and sat on it, noticing campus security showing up more and more in her line of sight, blooming like fungus after a rain. Watching Dunne. Not approaching him. Just watching.
“Everyone’s looking for him. Sit down, Dunne, and let’s do this right. You accused me of not thinking, so let’s think. Where was he the last time you saw him? When exactly was that?”