Sins & Shadows

Sylvie sat down on the concrete. Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. “Never is,” she muttered, and then said, “Couldn’t you just—choose a future?”

“I’d have to be able to see the future first,” Du

“You can’t? What, there’s a limit? Mind reading or precognition? No combos allowed?”

Magdala and Erinya arrived back at the same time and began to confer quietly. Magdala, Sylvie noticed, had a spatter of blood on her khakis. It couldn’t have been the sorcerer, or she’d have dragged him back to Du

“It’s very rare, even among gods.” A smile curved Du

A tiny spark drifted through the air, leftover, Sylvie assumed, from the destruction of the oubliette. She followed its will-o’-the-wisp path for a few moments, finding it as soothing as drifting soap bubbles.

“Kronos and the Fates,” Sylvie said. “That’s two, or whatever, in your own pantheon. You really can’t see the future?”

“I really can’t,” Du

A second spark, blue-white, drifted toward him.

“Immortality,” Sylvie said. Shock touched her. “That’s why you know he’s not dead. You gave Bran immortality.”

Du

Not the oubliette then: Its sparks would grow fewer, not multiply. Maybe they were visible bits of Du

“Bran’s mortal,” he said. “And don’t expect me to ask the Fates. They don’t know where he is, either. The Fates can’t see the future. At least not more than the span of a man’s life. Shorter if Atropos gets pissy and cuts the thread.

“Truthfully, there are more humans who are visionaries than gods. It’s a cruel thing. Checks and balances. Give them the ability to see, and no power to change what they see, while we hold the power, but are blind.”

“I knew a visionary,” Magdala spoke. She licked a finger, rubbed at the bloodstain on her knee. “Hera sent me after her, but I needed to do nothing to punish her. She did it all to herself. She was pathetic. Every moment of joy was soured by the recognition of upcoming pain. Even pain was meaningless when she knew that grief was transitory, that people forget. Ultimately, all she saw of existence was futility. She cut her wrists and bled to death.”

“Like Bran tried to do,” Sylvie said.

Du

“You sure didn’t tell me,” Sylvie said. “Why not?”

The sparks hovered around him like fireflies, a ghostly set of flares that glimmered and faded. After a long moment, Du

“Does he?” Sylvie said, hating that he made her ask, when he had to hear it burning in her thoughts. “Am I going to ride to the rescue, only to find that he’s decided not to wait?”

Du

The sparks nipped at his skin, and Sylvie said, “I thought they were yours. But they’re hurting you?”

“Not hurting. Pulling. They’re Zeus’s summoning motes. Zeus must have found me. I made flares when I changed time, when I destroyed the oubliette. And now, he’s trying to take me back to Olympus,” Du

“O-kay,” Sylvie said slowly. “Problem?”

“I’m losing,” he said.

The sharp, clean scent of lightning began to fill the station. Sylvie stepped back from Du

Du

His eyes, opened, were no longer human at all, no contrasting shine of white and pupil, but the featureless grey of a distant storm cloud. The grey sky effect bled outward, a slow dissolution of his cheekbones, his temples, his forehead. Pretending to flesh, Sylvie thought. Was this what he was, underneath?

He grasped the lightning, plasma curling violently between his closed fingers, licking at his arms, thrashing like a living thing. “No,” he repeated, and flung it away.

It splattered against the concrete, sinking into it and disappearing. It left a puddled slag of concrete and rebar on the floor.

“I don’t have time,” he said, relaxed in the face of calamity. “He’ll try again, harder, and I’ll be stolen from the mortal plane, perhaps broken down. And I’ve got other problems. I’ve used power indiscriminately, had too much bleed off. I’ve got backtracking to do, prevent any of my leftovers from being used by sorcerers and witches, hungry for a taste of real power. Find him, Sylvie.”

He vanished like a cutoff screenshot. She wished he’d make sound effects to go with it, just so her movie-trained mind could accept the vanishing as real.

“Crap,” she said, slumping down to a weary crouch. She still had questions, important ones; she still had no leads, and no way of reaching him. When Alekta crawled out of the floor beside her, Sylvie’s nerves were too shot to allow for anything more than a soft rock backward to fall on her butt.

“How do I call him?” she said. Alekta paused in her perusal of the station and its overlaid soul traces. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed at the slag on the floor.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sylvie said. “Zeus threw lightning at him. Though myth always said it was a bolt of lightning, not that shiny little net. The things you learn.” She rested against the wall, letting the cool concrete soothe her aching neck. “So?”

“Pray,” Alekta said.

“Pray,” Sylvie echoed. “Well, that makes sense. But I gotta tell you—I’m not real good at prayer.”

Sylvie kicked a sneakered foot against a lone piece of litter, watched it drift into the tracks. “So, d’you know why the oubliette tried to swallow Du

Alekta walked away, climbed the stairs, and stood looking out into the night, tension rippling through her shoulders.

Out of leads, Sylvie thought.

She wondered how many of the “leads” the sisters had found ended with blood. Magdala, at least, had found one person guilty of something. Even if they hadn’t been hunting for anyone other than the sorcerer responsible for the trap, she couldn’t imagine the other two, with their snap judgments and hunger for retribution, passing on the chance to mete out their brand of punishment.

“Some of him in him,” Alekta said, finally, and faded from sight. Sylvie frowned.

“Cryptic,” she said. Some of him in him. Some of Bran in Du

Some of what? Sylvie teased at the thought, knowing she was missing something. Skin cells maybe, she thought. Shared living, shared scents, or maybe it was some romantic thing? A piece of his heart and all that jazz? Given that the sloppy sorcerer had defined Bran by his relationship, perhaps he had drawn Du