Bran pressed himself away from the wall, nodded mutely, then said, “All right.” He allowed Demalion to escort him upward.

When they stepped out onto the roof, Sylvie’s attention went straight to the sky. Hard not to when the clouds were as close as they were outside an airplane window. Darker than night, they condensed themselves, boiling toward the ground.

“Demalion, thank God,” a man said. “Do you know what’s going on? We came up to see what was happening, then got stuck up here. There’s some type of firestarter—”

“Not anymore,” Sylvie said. She tore her eyes from the clouds to look at the scattering of ISI agents on the rooftop. One suited agent, two security types in army wear, and a single secretarial-type woman, clutching a pencil close, another behind her ear, her mouth unattractively open.

“Stairs are clear,” Demalion echoed. “But stay here. We might need backup.”

“But—but—” the secretary started to protest.

A paler spindle of cloud stretched down, touched the gravel; the entire substrate rippled, shivering beneath Sylvie’s feet, like a horse about to buck under a fly’s bite. It was not a soothing sensation.

“Stay here?” the suit said. “I don’t think—”

“Stay put. That’s an order,” Demalion said.

Yes, Sylvie thought, let them witness it. See what they precipitated with their snooping and spying, their bureaucratic ideals and careful forms. They needed to know the world wasn’t theirs alone. These were civilians on whom she wouldn’t waste one iota of worry.

The roof surged again. Sylvie shifted her feet, trying to keep her balance, and the roof crackled with the sound of splintering ice. It froze her in her steps. The clouds wound themselves down the delicate tornado, masses of them spilling damply down to the roof.

Like water, the clouds poured faster and faster as they got closer to the last of the storm. The entire storm condensed as it came, flaunting a strange disregard for physics. It should miniaturize, or become blackly impenetrable. Instead, it stayed simultaneously vast and confined in a small space. A hurricane spinning and taking a vaguely human shape. In its slow movement, Sylvie could see distant gulls windswept and trapped. One winged close, a beady, desperate eye rolling at Sylvie, a flash of white-backed feathers against an ominous sky, then it was far distant, still in the cloud loop.

Sylvie’s ears popped and rang. She saw Demalion’s jaw working to relieve the same pressure, but his eyes never left Dunne. He stood like a man stunned, gaze flickering from cloud to empty sky and back again. How did this all look to him, to his new vision? Bran slipped away from Demalion, heading for Dunne, and Sylvie grabbed at him. “No,” she said.

A sudden pulse thrummed out beneath her feet, a shivering, skin-crawling burst of power. Dunne was bleeding some of it off, Sylvie thought, to fit the man shape better. Power saturated the air and made such a presence of it that Sylvie found she could actually taste it: the sharp bitterness of ozone underlaid with something sweet and heady, darkly floral, and beneath that, the entirely mortal scent of gun oil and powder. The air reached some strange critical mass, and in a Fortean moment, everything changed.

Demalion’s hands grew clawed and furred; a tail lashed behind him. His eyes widened; he turned his hands over, flexing the claws.

It wasn’t just Demalion, either. The agents on the roof were affected in other ways. The suited ISI agent coughed, a hand to his throat, alarm on his face, and an abiding panic in his eyes. The camo-clad agents collapsed, their drawn guns foaming into water, and their skins following after. The secretary squeaked and darted behind the choking suit, putting him between her and Dunne. So much for backup.

Still, Dunne apparently had a chivalrous core; only she and the secretary remained unchanged.

Bran slipped free from Sylvie’s restraining hand, heading toward Dunne and the heart of that altering power.

“It’s dangerous!” she called.

“Not to me,” Bran said.

Sylvie half expected Bran to be sucked in toward the cloud as brutally as if he were trying to embrace a black hole.

Instead, the clouds firmed, and a gusty sigh moistened the roof like the last salvo of a spring rain. Then it was Kevin Dunne again, yielding to flesh for the pleasure and need of touching his lover again.

He was barely recognizable as the man Sylvie had met three days ago. Wounded—his right arm ended at the elbow, and he tucked the stump against his side. Exhausted—his eyes kept closing, springing open to gaze down at the man in his arm, and closing again. All too human yet, at the same time, so completely not.

Lightning danced in his eyes; his mouth, parted to whisper Bran’s name, showed storm-cloud core, but the clutch of his left arm around Bran’s waist, the way he rested his cheek against Bran’s bright hair, the open thankfulness on his face was all human love and relief. Bran twined himself around Dunne as if he meant never to let go.

Dunne arched back suddenly, spat out a crawling mass of lightning that, like the storm before, was too dense, too big, and too small all at once. It spat sparks and melted holes in the roof before it rose into the sky like a demented UFO and disappeared.

It made Sylvie shudder with her own relief. The right thing had happened. The rare thing. The happy ending.

“That was Zeus?” she said, into the lull. “What’s the forecast?”

“Fleeing to Olympus and gnashing his teeth as he goes,” Erinya said, appearing on the roof and slumping to a low, pained crouch. One tired punk puppy, Sylvie thought. If the girl had ears and a tail, they’d be drooping.

Magdala followed, cast a glance around, and said, “Where’s Alekta?” Demalion gestured mutely toward the open door into the building. Magdala darted for the stairs. Her voice rose from the stairwell. “Hera’s furious. She wanted her power back. Zeus promised her her power back. But Dunne was too strong. We were too strong, and Zeus got nothing.” She carried Alekta’s body onto the roof, cradling it like a child, and Dunne moaned.

He released Bran reluctantly, their hands clasping to the very last, then came across the roof in strides that weren’t quite human, taking too few steps and still making too much progress.

The secretary’s nervous squeak took on a slightly desperate note as she realized she was between Dunne and Alekta’s body. She backed up, hands fluttering. The pencil snapped between her fingers with a tiny crack, oddly distinct in the charged atmosphere. A broken half rolled down the roof, butted up against Sylvie’s foot. She stared at the splintered edge for a moment, something clicking in her head. What was broken couldn’t always be repaired.

“It’s not over,” Sylvie said, without conscious volition. The little dark voice growled out between her teeth, “It’s not done yet. It’s sweet you got your big reunion scene, but Bran has to die.”