The screaming behind her was beginning to get on her nerves. Sylvie wondered how many shots she had in the gun now that it had been magicked. Would it make its own? Enough to take down the Fury? Enough to shut up the shrieking crowd?

What the hell are you thinking? For once it wasn’t the dark voice that crawled out of her mind, but her own. She shuddered all over, cold, sick, and utterly horrified. She fed all the fear into rage, her specialty, and the talent that kept her alive.

Erinya leaped, and Sylvie fired. Three more shots, all into Erinya’s torso. Erinya tumbled forward, somersaulting, and came up in a crouch. She hissed, a snakelike tongue lashing out from between sharpening teeth. Her wounds healed.

Sylvie, trying to assess the next move, met Erinya’s furious eyes and fell into them. Her head pounded, sweat slicked her face, her neck, and her vision exploded into a thousand images.

Her gun, and the people who fell beneath it. Strangers. Enemies. Allies. Innocents. Michael Demalion. Val. Alex. Even her sister Zoe. Sylvie stood in a world turned abattoir and laughed as she made her will felt; when there was no one left, she turned the gun toward the heavens.

Not real. Not going to happen. Try again. The dark voice spat it directly into Erinya’s mind, refusing the madness, refusing to be influenced by something external.

The hallucinations fled. Erinya knelt before her, looking for all the world like a pup who’d been unexpectedly smacked. “Get up,” Sylvie said, sheathing the gun. “Put your face back on.”

Erinya rose to two feet, shook all her little monster bits—teeth, clawed hands, snaky tongue—into human shape once more. “I owe you pain.”

“Collect it later, if you can,” Sylvie said. “We’ve made ourselves unwelcome. Let’s go.”

She turned and froze, looking out over the club attendees—why hadn’t they fled? They looked ready to bolt at a whispered “boo,” and yet they still stood, shaking and watching. Her eyes flickered to the entrance and widened.

A woman stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, entirely at her ease. She wasn’t much to look at, not quite as tall as Sylvie, judging by the space she took up in the door frame, on the whipcord side of slender, with hair a shade darker than Sylvie’s, sleeked into a twist, held up with what looked like chopsticks. She straightened once she had Sylvie’s attention and met her eyes.

“You,” she said, her voice pitched low and very clear, almost familiar. “You are an interesting girl. Pity.”

She was blocking the door, Sylvie realized abruptly. One rather ordinary woman holding a frightened mob of people at bay with only her presence. Lily reached up and fiddled with her hair, a nervous tell that spoke nothing of nervousness. Sylvie’s eyes narrowed.

Erinya snarled and disappeared, reappearing across the room, claws arcing out before her.

Lily tugged a chopstick free, and snapped the stick between her fingers; a brittle crack that created a group moan from the nerve-shattered crowd.

“Brûlez,” she cried, and Erinya, a bare scale width away from sinking her talons into Lily’s flesh, tumbled backward on a wave of scalding white light. The bartender went up like flash paper, flesh wicking the heat and raising a curtain of white flame.

Sylvie was already covering her stinging eyes. Dear God, no. Not this. She had thought Erinya’s monster act had filled the room with terror, but that was nothing compared to this. The screams now were of pure, primal dread, as vision led to flame led to spontaneous combustion.

Sylvie pressed her hands tighter, screwed her eyes shut harder, still getting bleed-through, like flashbulbs all around her, strobing through the vulnerable skin of her eyelids. She felt feverish, on the edge of burning.

A hard hand gripped her hair; Sylvie forced herself to keep her vision blocked instead of fighting back. The only defense against balefire was not to look. It fed on flesh and spread by vision. It only burned out when there was no one left to see.

The hand tugged, claws scratching at her skin, and Sylvie gasped. Erinya had survived the blast. The Fury yanked, guiding her out of the club, while Sylvie stumbled and choked on the stink of scorched bone and charred meat.

“Don’t look,” Erinya said.

“Won’t,” Sylvie said. “Don’t you look, either.”

“Won’t,” Erinya responded in kind. “No eyes right now.”

A trickle of fresh air reached her, and Sylvie picked up her pace, staggering over the asphalt of the parking lot and going down when Erinya released her.

She felt cold metal at her back, the smell of car oil, and a tire pushed up against her shoulder. She cracked an eye open, looking toward the ground just in case. The first hint of balefire, and she’d gouge out her eyes rather than turn herself into a firework.

Reassuring darkness soothed her nerves, the cracked yellow border of the parking spot barely visible. Sylvie opened both eyes and raised them toward the warmth before her.

No eyes, she thought, staring at Erinya’s blind, blank face, only a smooth expanse of skin above the nose and mouth. Shape-shifting was a handy thing, she mused, and giggled a little wildly.

“Did you get her scent this time?” she asked, voice cracking.

“I got balefire in my face,” Erinya said. “I’m scent-blind until I’m healed.”

“Anyone else get out?” Sylvie said.

“No.”

Sylvie pulled her knees up to her chest, rested her face on them. JK. Gone, just like that. The Magicus Mundi had a lot to answer for. She steadied her breathing and tried to listen to the night beyond her racing heartbeat. No fire alarm. Unsurprising since balefire had no interest in anything beyond flesh, but that was to the good. A fireman coming in too soon could catch it and pass the conflagration on.

“Don’t shift your eyes back yet,” Sylvie said. “I want that stick she was holding.”

“Get it yourself. It’s not like it’s useful.”

Sylvie leaned forward and tightened her hand on the Fury’s shoulder. “That had to have been Lily, the big winner in our suspect lottery. I assumed she couldn’t do magic. ’Cause she used Auguste as her hands. But balefire . . .

“I don’t know how she did it. The best clue to finding out is that stick. I want it. I need to know what resources she has.”

“Enough power to kill everyone just to get to you,” Erinya said.

“No,” Sylvie denied. “She killed everyone to destroy her memory scent. I think she’s been watching us. And she came armed with something that could put off a Fury, Erinya. You were her target. I was a surprise. An interesting one.”

13

Art Appreciation

SYLVIE ROLLED OVER WITH A GROAN SHE TRIED TO STIFLE OUT OF courtesy for Tish, but dammit, she hurt. Wrestling with a Fury was definitely an all-pain, no-gain sort of endeavor. She shifted enough to ease the spasm in her back and cracked an eye.

Tish slept on, drooling a little, her dark hair a tangled cloud against her polka-dotted pillowcase. Sylvie found a tiny smile. Had to love those party girls. They tended to be up at all hours and were oddly blasé about strangers coming to their door, soot-streaked, battered, and begging for a bed.

Tish hadn’t hesitated at all, dragging Sylvie in, seeing her showered, pj’d, and tucked in before she had so much as asked the question that had been trembling on her lips all that time—had Sylvie found any leads to Bran.

Nearly dead on her feet, Sylvie had confined herself to slurred syllables and half answers, concentrating more on dialing Alex’s number correctly. Sylvie had pieces of a puzzle but no picture. Alex could give her that. But Alex didn’t answer, undoubtedly tucked into bed like a good girl, not like Sylvie, staggering into a stranger’s home, smelling of char and burned blood. . . . Sylvie left a message on Alex’s voice mail, a raspy, coughing, muttering monologue about the art world, a woman called Lily, about NDNM.