“Yes,” she said. “Look, he changed my gun. You can sense that right?” She held it out; he shied, but when she held the muzzle down, he reached out to touch it. He sighed, slumped back to the floor of the oubliette.

“He sent you in here to get me?”

“That was . . . not part of the original plan, no,” Sylvie said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But hell, it’s got to be easier to break out than break in.”

He laughed, three hitched breaths, then gasped back what might have been a sob. “There’s no way out.”

“Have you tried?” Sylvie asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Do you think I like sitting here, just waiting for Kevin to come rescue me like some pathetic infant?”

Sylvie was glad to see the anger, a hint that he wasn’t broken.

“The oubliette was meant to see me dead. But I’ve managed to keep ahead of that, at least.”

“Transformation and creation of matter,” Sylvie said.

Bran nodded. “Air to water, hair to air—all small things.”

“Dunne defeated the oubliette entrance without effort,” Sylvie said.

“Kevin’s a god,” Bran said. Some color crept into his pale face. “I’m not. Or not much of one at the moment. Lilith—”

“Got you years ago,” Sylvie remembered aloud. “Fill me in. You’re human?”

Bran nodded, clutched his forearms again. “I am both. More human than god. I have power, but it’s not easy to reach it.”

“You made Dunne a god,” she said.

“I didn’t even think about it. We were out late. We got mugged. Kevin got shot. He was dying in my arms. I couldn’t—” He choked down the waver in his voice. “I cheated. I asked him for his soul, and he gave it to me. I don’t think he understood I meant it literally. All of us have access to ambrosia, the source of immortality. It’s intrinsic to our being.”

In his hands, a flower bloomed briefly, a flame-colored thing with seven petals that shifted from the shy, curled shape of rose petals to the spiky ylang-ylang. He folded his hands and it sank back into him, spreading a quick rosy glow through his skin and scenting the air.

“I called it up, fed it to him. But immortality without purpose is an exercise in frustration, so I started feeding him my power, what I could access of it.”

“You shared it?” Sylvie said. She hadn’t really thought any of the gods would do that.

“Surprised them, too,” Bran said, mouth quirking a little in rueful humor. “Especially since . . . When you start an immortal feeding on power, it’s like making a baby black hole. It pulls power like a magnet. Hera was disassembled. The first I knew of that was when her power started flooding into Kevin. He should have been a minor deity like the Furies, but mine, a cupid-type godlet. Enough to give him purpose. Instead, he became something new. Something more.”

“Revenge, that’s Hera’s shtick, isn’t it? And revenge tempered by love equals justice.”

Bran nodded.

“All that’s interesting,” Sylvie said, “but not to the point. Why are you human? Dunne looks human, but he’s not. That shell he wears is only an echo of who he used to be.”

He looked up at her, and she sat down beside him, trying to make herself more approachable. The hesitation in his eyes, the way his glance kept sliding away from her, all of it bespoke reluctance and more—embarrassment of some kind.

“Lilith,” he said. “I told you. I’m not clever. We’ve been friends for a long time, she and I. I thought we were friends.” He slid down farther to lie supine, crossed his arm over his eyes.

Sylvie, unable to resist, put a hand to his bared belly. His skin was as touchable as it looked, velvet smooth and blood warm. He arched into her touch, recoiled a second later, and blushed.

“It’s okay,” she said.

He relaxed under her touch when she kept it clean, kept to the safe territory between his rib cage and hip-bones. He laid his head back, letting her admire the long line of his throat. And she had teased Demalion about being her dog.

Brandon Wolf, despite being a god, was about as submissive as any creature could get. Dunne probably had his hands full finding the delicate line between protective and possessive.

“The other gods used me,” he said, voice muffled by his skin. “It’s my nature. I am Desire, and I am as much at its mercy as my worshippers. But I wanted to die for the weight of it. I was a god, and they treated me like a tool, with no mind or feelings of my own. I ran to earth. Lilith found me and suggested a better way to hide.

“She said she knew how I could mask myself in human flesh.”

“She wanted you helpless,” Sylvie said.

“I know that, now.” Bran dropped his arm to frown up at her. She stroked a soothing line across his belly, and his frown shifted to a more content expression, a cat accepting its due.

“To gain a god’s power, the shell must be destroyed,” Sylvie mused, caught her fingers tracing the no-man’s-land of the waistband, and removed them from temptation. He sighed and shifted his head to her lap, putting them back in contact. “Which is difficult for a human to do.”

“Very difficult,” Bran said.

“But flesh can be destroyed.”

“Very easily.”

“Why didn’t she kill you outright? Why all this nonsense?”

“Coming at me directly would have been a mistake. Either I’d escape, or Kevin would stop her. Distance is nothing to him.”

“She couldn’t shoot you?” Her fingers disobeyed her and traveled through the thick silk of his hair. He turned his head, rubbed his cheek against her hip. Her temperature spiked.

“She could,” he said. “But think of this flesh form as a plug in a drain. If it’s knocked out, the power flows immediately. If she was some distance away—”

“She wouldn’t get all of it.”

Bran laughed, a rough unhappy sound. “It would be like throwing chum in shark waters. Lilith’s not a shark. She only wants to be one. She’d have to fight her way to the front, and again, Kevin would be there soon after.”

“So an oubliette to cage the power after you die,” Sylvie said. “And a key to open it in her hands. No wonder she’s been cranky. I killed her sorcerer.”

He shivered, moved off her lap, sat upright. She wanted to drag his warmth back to her and quelled the urge. “All that’s true. But there’s more. To kill a god—it’s an evil thing.”

Sylvie rolled her eyes. “That sounds like self-serving propaganda to me.”

Bran shrugged, obviously unwilling to fight with his rescuer.

“So that’s the game. You were supposed to die down here. Then she opens the oubliette and drinks in your power, claiming it for herself. Replaces you, at the mercy of your peers?”

“Her will’s stronger than mine,” Bran said. He withdrew another inch or so from her. “And they wouldn’t destroy her. Love’s important,” Bran said. “No matter how I feel about my fellow Olympians, I know that’s true. I thought I could do my job from hiding.”

“I haven’t seen a whole lot of love in the world,” Sylvie said. “Which begs the question, are humans so fucked up that nothing you do can help? Or are you shirking?”

He rose to his feet, padded silently toward the glowing walls. A nasty muttering hum rose to greet him, and Sylvie tensed, wanting him to stay away from it. He raised a hand and rested it a bare inch above the surface of the wall. The hum increased. It sounded . . . hungry.

“I made a mistake,” he said, so subdued. She shifted to watch him more closely. His eyes were closed, expression turned inward, reliving it. “I made myself an infant, but such a small bit of flesh couldn’t hold my power. For the first thirteen years of this existence, I was as wholly human as you even though I carried the thread that makes me Desire, Love.”

“But you had no power.”

“Couldn’t reach it, couldn’t contain it. Not even when it counted most.”

“What happened?” Sylvie said. It was guilt pulling at his beauty, self-contempt lacing the pain.