“I taught humans it was possible to abuse Love,” he said. “It’s not coincidence that the number of child molesters has skyrocketed. I let it happen to me. And the world reflected it.”

“Let it?” Sylvie said. “I thought you had no access to your power.”

“I should have recognized the signs. But I didn’t want to believe it.” Bran sank back down to the miserable huddle she was beginning to recognize. Knees up, ankles crossed, arms tight around his legs, face buried in the cavity of shoulder and knee.

“Flesh is stubborn,” he said, voice muffled. “I tried to end it, regain my godhood, but it wanted to live when I didn’t. Eventually, as I got older, saw the results of what I’d let happen, I realized that I had to make amends.”

“You can’t make them from in here,” Sylvie said. “It’s time to leave.”

Bran raised his head from the protective cradle of his arms, despair washed away, replaced by blatant disbelief.

“You think I haven’t tried?”

“You seem pretty cozy,” Sylvie said. “No signs you’ve been clawing at the walls.”

“It’s a death trap,” Bran said. “The walls, the original floor, everything. When I fell through, the oubliette started eating away at my body. My hands were down to bone before I managed to get the floor in place.”

“Destroys flesh, stores power,” she said, grimacing. “Charming. Bet Auguste was the kind of boy who cut the tails off mice.”

“Auguste?”

“Yeah, that’s your lackey, the one who built this little de Sade dream.” Sylvie spared a moment to think that maybe she didn’t need to carry a load of guilt for shooting Auguste. That kind of nastiness was inbred, not taught. “I refuse to believe a crappy sorcerer like Auguste could build something that defeats a god.”

“Well, I can’t get out,” Bran said. His irritation faded into something approaching sulkiness. It all looked good on him.

“Can’t is a ridiculous word in a god’s mouth,” Sylvie said. “If Dunne were in here, would it hold him?”

“No,” Bran said, “but it’s not the same thing. He’s all power, all the time.”

He played with the leather ankles of his pants, running the zippered cuffs up and down, all nervous fingers and hissing rasp. Sylvie tried not to find the tiny little bit of anklebone worthy of arousal, but something in the way he toyed with the zippers encouraged it. Sylvie reached out and stilled his hands.

He was dancing away from the topic, Sylvie thought. Distracting himself and her as well. He looked up at her from under dark lashes, and said, “We can’t get out.”

“Don’t start that again,” she snapped. “Of course we can. It’s just going to take some thought. And some time.” She bit out the last, thinking time was the thing they couldn’t afford to waste.

She stretched sore muscles into some semblance of normalcy and assessed. What did they have going for them? Bran’s power, which kept them alive long enough to escape; hell, Sylvie thought, it should be instrumental in our escape. What kind of god lets himself get penned by a human? A glance at Bran showed him curled back into his quasi-fetal tuck. A depressed god. A god who blamed himself for something he couldn’t have fought. A god who would rather hide than fight back.

Sylvie made a tally mark in the “what did they have against them” column also for the same reason.

Sylvie paced around the fountain, thinking. Bran had enough power to fuel a spell; Sylvie had the will to make a spell obey. But the only spell she knew was the oubliette. She could draw it again—her map had blown in along with her—but that would just build a loop; from the oubliette to the oubliette.

Bran, however, might not need a spell. Not if he had more power. Sylvie looked over at Bran. “If you died, is that it? Game over? You said something earlier about regaining godhood. How?”

Bran raised his head, shrugged a shoulder. “Die. Release my power and re-form as I was meant to be. Theoretically.”

“Wouldn’t that give you full access to your power? You could blow this place to hell, be back home in time to catch the ninth inning of the apocalypse upstairs.”

“If Lilith doesn’t have some sort of shunt ready to pull the power—”

“She doesn’t. Or she wouldn’t have been so mad-keen for me to open the spell again.”

Bran worried his lip. “It’s not an easy process. The power wants to be free, and I have to corral it.”

“Four walls,” Sylvie gestured. “No one around, ’cept for me.”

“It takes time,” he said, back to playing with the zippers.

“You’re the one who’s got nothing but time,” she said, her voice as quietly ominous as a viper’s hiss. “You don’t want to go back.”

“I do,” he said. “I want to go home.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You don’t want to be the god again. You want to stay mortal. That’s why Dunne lives on earth, endangers the earth. Because you won’t leave it.”

“It hurts to die,” Bran said.

“Fuck that,” Sylvie said. “I’ve got a gun. A single round between the eyes isn’t going to smart at all.”

“I die, the air goes away,” he said.

“You come back, so does it.” It was a valid fear, one that sparked terror in her belly, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with hiding from himself. “You don’t want to.”

“I . . .” He stilled completely, like a prey animal making itself invisible. “If I go back, I’m their tool again. Nothing but Love. On earth, I paint, I play basketball, I go to concerts, I have friends, I eat out, I even cook breakfast. I have a life.”

“Dunne wouldn’t let you be their tool,” she said. “That’s not what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of something he won’t protect you from. Your responsibilities.”

“I stayed on earth to make amends,” he said. He surged to his feet, actual temper showing in his eyes. “How is that avoiding my responsibilities?”

“Then why wasn’t it on your list, alongside partying and painting? You know what happened to you wasn’t your fault. You were a child, and an adult raped you. Not something you could control. Dunne would have told you that. He would have told it to you until you believed it. You’re using it as an excuse to stay here.”

Sylvie watched the angry flush mantling his cheeks white out, all at once. Bull’s-eye, she thought, with a certain dark triumph.

“You know, I don’t have to convince you to do anything,” she said. “I have the gun.”

She sighted along it to his too-pretty, shocked face. “I could end this argument just by pulling the trigger—”

The little dark voice said, Why stop with killing him? You could take his power when it comes. Free yourself and turn to the world next. The cadence was all too familiar. Lilith’s quiet conversational tone, preaching better living through deicide, like a tune she couldn’t be rid of, like a cult’s brainwashing drone. She tried not to listen. What was it doing in her head?

“Sylvie—” Bran said, trying to sidle away from the muzzle of the gun.

She tracked him, all serpentine reflex. “You think you could access your power fast enough to transform a bullet?”

He flung up a hand in futile self-defense. Before Sylvie could even decide if she would pull the trigger or not, the gun surged in her hand, coming to a life beyond its simple animal warmth and heartbeat. It melted over her hands, oiling between her clutching fingers, and came back at her, some impossible snake creature, sprouting fangs and gunmetal scales.

Fail-safe, she thought, even as she flung it down. Dunne really didn’t trust her. A tiny bit of his spirit playing watchdog; it let her kill the Maudit, let her shoot the Fury who could heal, but turn it on Brandon and—

Sylvie ducked the strike at her knee, dodged behind a stunned Brandon, and caught a quick breath. Dunne’s spirit. Her flesh. She knew which to blame for the ugly shape the gun had taken.

The gun-snake coiled for a strike, forked tongue flickering. Sylvie forced Bran into playing living shield, ignoring his yelp. If she were right . . . The snake swayed, hesitating. Dunne’s spirit ruled it, and Bran was sacrosanct. She, on the other hand, was a heretic. “Gonna stop it?” Sylvie asked.