The Fury turned to look at her. “Eri?” she questioned, offense hovering in her voice.

“You wanted a name that wasn’t a thing,” Sylvie said, watching Sulky collapse now that eye contact was broken. Helen and Paris grabbed her shoulders and dragged her toward the door.

Sylvie watched them go, sighing. Ordinary. In a creepy way. Not exactly enough to build an APB on. “You get anything useful?”

“Alekta’s better at mind-tracking,” Erinya muttered.

“That’s not a yes,” Sylvie said. “You climbed inside that girl’s soul, scared her into catatonia, and I didn’t stop you. Tell me you got a scent.”

“I got it,” Erinya snapped. “Mostly. She smells a little like every human. Even you smell like her.”

Sylvie groaned. “So no bloodhound act. Did you get enough to recognize her if we run into her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s something,” Sylvie said. She picked up her Coke, gone tepid and flat from nearness to the flames, and gulped the rest of it. Her mouth was dry. “Any visual?”

“Ordinary,” Erinya said.

Erinya headed toward the door with the determined stalk of a lioness. Sylvie squawked and went after her. She took three running steps and snagged Erinya’s wrist, heart thumping. No way was she letting Erinya out to hunt, not with a flawed scent that smelled like general humanity.

Under her hands, Erinya’s skin shifted and stung. Sylvie forced herself to hold on. It never seemed to get easier, touching one of the gods. She wondered how Bran had stood it and stayed sane.

“No, no, no, Eri,” Sylvie said. She leaned her weight back, trying to stop Erinya, and having as little success as if she were trying to hold back a bull. Erinya’s mass seemed far more than her human shape allowed.

Sylvie gritted her teeth and dug her nails into Erinya’s skin, jolted at the increase in sensation. Erinya stopped; her lips peeled back from her teeth, but she paused.

“Let’s not go haring off into the dark. We know she’s been here before. Maybe she’ll be back to check on—”

Maybe, Sylvie decided, was the wrong word to use. The Fury batted her away with a single hand, slamming her backward. Sylvie’s spine impacted painfully with the edge of a table; a chair screeched across the floor.

“I’ll find her if I have to wade through the blood of every human in the world.” The sweet-voiced, slangy punk was gone; in Erinya’s voice, in her eyes, all that showed was rage. Sylvie lost the battle with her self-control. Her skin burst into goose bumps, giving way to a convulsive shudder.

The Fury’s pupils swelled, feeling Sylvie’s fear. She leaned closer, nearly nose to nose with Sylvie, and said, “Will you dare stop me? When you know so many humans deserve the pain I visit on them?”

Sylvie sucked in a shaking breath, trying for calm, and losing. She gave up trying to control her body and focused only on meeting Erinya’s glare head-on, watching as the engorged pupils slowly turned phosphorescent. She counted her own heartbeat in the tiny sparks of crimson that danced in the Fury’s sclera, in the small scales that began to dot the false delicacy of her temple and eyelids.

“Get off me, or I will make you comprehend mortality.” It wasn’t her voice, not really. That dark inner core had stepped to the front, spewing its determination not to be beaten.

Erinya barked a laugh. “How?”

Sylvie smiled, letting the expression spread across her face, displacing fear. “You said yourself, your shells can die. I’m good at killing things.”

Erinya frowned, her gaze clouding; Sylvie felt the intrusion in her mind, a brief kaleidoscope of bloody imagery. Cassavetes, Hellhound, sorcerers, succubi, an angel with buckshot wings . . . Her greatest hits, replayed. Sylvie pushed Erinya out of her mind, put her hands on Erinya’s shoulders, and shoved.

Erinya stepped back; Sylvie ignored the sensation that sparks leaped between her fingers, crackled against her hands. She pressed harder. Erinya staggered, and Sylvie advanced.

“I think. You help. Isn’t that what Dunne sent you to do? To act as I tell you? We stay here. Lily might, yes might, come back. Even if she doesn’t, we can get a better description of her. A definitive one. Then you can hunt to your heart’s content. In the meantime, stay.”

Sylvie spun on her heel and strode into the crowd, past the few dancers who had stopped to stare at Erinya and herself.

Sylvie fetched up near the stage before the shaking found her again. She leaned up against its support, her legs trembling and her throat dry.

A drink drifted into her vision, held toward her in a nicotine-stained hand. “Coke, right? On the house.” Sylvie shot him a glance, identifying him as the staff member she had seen in the hallway, heading for a smoke break. Sylvie took the glass, her hands so chilled that, for a moment, the cold sweat on the glass felt warm.

She held the glass, loving the heavy tangibility of the crystal, something natural, something normal, something that didn’t fizz and burn like a god’s power. She shifted uncomfortably as the leather jacket buzzed against her neck and back.

“You lied, you know,” Sylvie said. “This place is plenty scary.”

“Ah, you brought the scary with you,” he said, as easy and casual as he had been in the hallway. “JK.”

“Sylvie,” she said. She eyed the Coke, contemplating the addition of more caffeine to a nervous system jazzed with adrenaline.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Promise. I owe you one.”

“Yeah?” Sylvie said. She took a sip; sweetness exploded on her tongue and reminded her how parched fear made her throat. She took a larger draught and set the glass down on the stage.

“Well, you and your scary friend chased off my ex and her psycho Barbie accessory pack. Helen thinks it’s funny to come here every night and make me serve her. I,” he said, a scowl crossing his good-natured face, “don’t.”

“She’s a bitch,” Sylvie agreed.

“I’ve got better taste now,” JK said. He hopped up and took a seat on the edge of the stage, swinging lanky legs.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You want to prove it by giving me your phone number?”

Sylvie finagled a card out of her jeans pocket, held it before him. “If you answer a couple of questions first.”

“Shoot,” he said. “I give good answers. You should see me with parents. I can even make them overlook the tats.” He presented his arm to her; the words Live Your Own Way blazed around the forearm.

Sylvie traced the final flare of the y, curling around his wrist. “My parents didn’t object to my ink.”

“Can I see it?” he said. “Is it someplace . . . interesting?”

Sylvie smiled, luring him in. It didn’t hurt that he was cute as all get-out. For the second time, she thought this club had a lot to recommend it.

“Tell me about Lily,” she said.

He blinked. “I was thinking it was going to be fave food, music, STDs.”

She handed him the card, tapped the front of it. “I’m working.”

“Working. Like a cop?”

“Not like a cop,” Sylvie said, smoothly but quickly. Something had to have drawn him to Helen in the first place; she didn’t want it to be a shared aversion to authority.

“PI?”

“Inquiry agent,” Sylvie corrected. “See, Shadows Inquiries.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?” he said. Laughter lurked in his eyes, daring her to answer truthfully.

“PI,” she said. “But without rules.”

“Cool,” he said. “Didn’t figure you for a ‘draws within the lines’ kind of woman. So, Lily?”

Sylvie said, “Anything you can tell me.”

“Lily,” he said, picking up her glass, stroking the condensation off it, and letting the drips fall from his fingertips. “Sweet Lily . . . though she isn’t.”

Sylvie made a go-on gesture.

“Lily—don’t know if that’s her real name. Doesn’t fit her much. Toil not, neither does she spin—well, I don’t know what she does for kicks, but she’s just not the idle sort.