“She’s my sister. I’ll protect her. Or I’ll arrange protection for her. I thought we had an understanding—”

Demalion said, “Sylvie, please. I’m trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said. Her hands fisted. She wanted to throw herself at him, but held back, a little uncertain whether angry grappling wouldn’t lead back to the bedroom. And if he was going to betray her, she wanted it to be a point of pride that she walked away first—

“Alexandra Figueroa-Smith is dying.”

Sylvie’s entire body spasmed as if she’d been electrocuted. Cold traced her nerves, made her pant. Her brain locked, repeating those words. Not Alex.

“A curse of some kind. Or one hell of a freak accident. Her jeep overturned. They didn’t find her right away, and when they did, she was covered in—”

“Coral snakes,” Sylvie said through numb lips. She’d driven them off, feeling in control, feeling smug—it was her fault entirely.

Her breath seared her throat, and she realized distantly that she was hyperventilating. Her ankle complained, and Sylvie eased it out from under her, wondering when she’d hit the floor.

Beside her, Demalion crouched, still talking, empty words where one or two percolated through every so often. Paralysis. Neurotoxin. Ventilator. Antivenin. Hours. Sylvie’s mind raced. Shorted out. Started again. Swerved to vengeance. They were going to pay and pay. . . . Dunne could save her. No, Dunne couldn’t save himself at the moment. Mnemosyne had said as much. His attention elsewhere.

So get his attention. You know how. The one thing he can’t ignore. The one thing he’d die for. Sylvie closed her eyes. Impossible. But, if there were no other options, then the impossible had to be done. A scheme unfolded, bit by bit by impossible bit. Sylvie’s breath steadied, her pulse slowed. She looked at her plan through a sniper’s obsessive focus and found it acceptable.

“. . . you on a private flight to Miami,” Demalion said.

“What good would watching her die do?” She ignored the shock that lit his face. “I need clothes, I need your car. I need my phone and my gun.”

“What are you planning?” he said, eyes growing less concerned and more wary. “You’re upset, not thinking clearly.”

“I’m angry,” she said. “I find it clears the mind extraordinarily well.”

20

Waking the Oubliette

SYLVIE ABANDONED THE ISI SEDAN ON A SIDE STREET. DEMALION would figure out where she had gone; he had all the pieces and had shown himself more than capable of putting them together. Abandoning the car was only a slowing device, but she wanted things played out before he hit the scene. Before he put himself between her and danger. He’d be furious, not only that she left him behind—again—but that she’d used a weakness he confided in her to do so.

She’d allowed his company as far as Dunne’s apartment, Sylvie driving the last mile when proximity keyed the return of Demalion’s blindness. They had changed places in a tension-ridden silence, and Demalion sank into the passenger seat, cradling his crystal “eye.” Once there, Sylvie had taken ruthless advantage of his blindness, of the effort it took him to see through the crystal; she collected what she had come for in a rush, too fast for him to make any sense of it, and hightailed it out of the brownstone.

Her actions had blown the hell out of their truce and set the ISI back on her tail, but it was the only thing she could do. The curse on her had rebounded onto Alex, who had been—mostly—safely out of the way. At her side, Demalion was nothing more than a walking target.

Another wary glance at the storm-churned sky, and Sylvie thought, Better hurry. Chicago was a shadow of itself, a town lit by tempest light, its borders girdled by towering dark clouds, and its people hunkered down in growing panic.

Lightning flickered and licked the clouds, coming not from within them, but from elsewhere. Dunne was on the run, hiding his own storm-cloud core of power somewhere within the sky tumult, and Zeus—Sylvie winced as another sheet of lightning crackled across the face of the cloud, red-violet, bruising the sky—Zeus was hunting. A bird splatted into the concrete near her, a twisted thing half scale, half feather, all writhing movement, before a passing cab smeared it into the asphalt. The cabbie slowed, backed up alongside her. “Car trouble? Lady, you need a ride?”

Sylvie shook her head. “El,” she said.

“It’s not running. Power outage at the main line.”

“Best news I’ve heard all day,” she said.

He drove on, not bothering to waste more words on an obvious idiot. Sylvie had been serious, though. Doing what she planned to do was already in the impossible category; doing it with an audience? Might as well ask her to save the world. Her intentions were much smaller. One girl, one boy. Alex. Bran. The world would have to fend for itself.

She hefted the artist’s satchel out of the backseat; she’d stolen it from Bran’s attic studio, filled it while Demalion hovered sightlessly, if not quietly, at her side. She bit her lip. If he’d just stay out of this . . .

If you wanted him safe, the dark voice said, you shouldn’t have let him in.

She shivered and forced those thoughts away. Keep him safe, she thought. It was a lie, or rather, a partial truth at best. She didn’t want Demalion at her side. Demalion was her weakness because he offered her his strength, a shoulder to lean on, arms to shelter in. Right now, Sylvie needed to stand alone and tall, needed aggression and vitriol more than understanding. She needed to keep her rage, and she fueled it by knowing she was alone against the world. Demalion had no place in that.

She slung the satchel over her shoulder and headed for the El, ignoring the crackling, fulminating sky above her head.

The entryway to the El gaped, dark under cloud cover, without electric lights. Sylvie stumbled down the stairs in the dimness, let her eyes adjust. In the uncanny storm light that trickled through, the oubliette spell’s greasy residue gleamed. Sylvie smiled at it and dropped the satchel.

“You can’t do it, Sylvie,” Val had said, when called for advice. Sylvie, still thinking of Val’s sending Alex away, had no problems in riding roughshod over Val’s objections and demanding answers. Rebuild the oubliette? Why not? No magic? When she was immersed in a city drowning in a god’s despair? When she had a Fury’s blood beneath her nails? And the will to refuse failure when so much depended on it.

Sylvie crouched and drew out the tubes of paint snagged from Bran’s studio. Vermilion, cobalt, titanium white, cadmium yellow, malachite green, mars black. Val had warned it took special ingredients to build a spell circle, that ordinary paint was fit for nothing but decoration. Sylvie, having recently seen the way a god’s sphere of influence could affect things, figured that these oil paints, stored and used in a god’s house, were soaked in special.

She unfolded the sketch she’d made of the oubliette and stuck it to the cement with a glob of white paint. She wished she’d brought a flashlight.

The moment on her, she hesitated.

“It’s not paint by numbers,” Val said. “It’s magic. It’s bending reality. It’s more than will. It’s know-how. Even if you can muster the tools, get any kind of result at all, it won’t open the same door.”

It had to. Sylvie closed her eyes, breathed steadily. If she had Bran in her custody, Dunne would have to deal with her. Dunne would save Alex.

“You are resourceful, aren’t you?” the woman said, and Sylvie spun around. She had thought she was alone. At first she didn’t recognize her, felt an instinctive liking and camaraderie for this woman, slouched lazily on the stairs, dressed in clothing that looked every bit as “found” as Sylvie’s. Worn black denim, loose at the hips, bagging over cracking cowboy boots. A T-shirt that declared the wearer wanted Dead or Alive, a tangle of dark hair, and a bronze sheriff’s star on a thong around her neck, like an old-Western gunslinger doing CSI. Her eyes seemed sheened with silver, and in this city, that made Sylvie wary.