“I won’t allow you to hurt him,” Dunne said. So calm, so reasonable, despite the hand pushing her toward her death.

Demalion stiffened, claws flexing, a query that she read across the roof. Now? he asked with his eyes. Now?

She nodded, a tiny jerky movement, constrained by Dunne’s hand.

Demalion never hesitated. Hell, she thought briefly, he’d probably known what she was going to ask before she did. He’d had some time to come to grips with it.

We are both going to die for this, Sylvie thought.

So be it, the dark voice murmured in response.

A sudden flare of doubt struck her: The dark voice usually argued for survival at all costs. Scratchy panic flared again; she twisted in Dunne’s grip. Something was wrong. With her.

Demalion’s hand tightened on Bran’s nape, and Bran raised his head in pained protest. Demalion stilled the movement with his second hand, an apologetic caress along Bran’s jaw that the god of Love couldn’t help but lean into, just before Demalion used the leverage to snap his neck.

The sound echoed, froze them all as if it had been the sound of giant shackles snapping open rather than a tiny section of bone and nerve being displaced. Bran folded in Demalion’s arms.

Dunne threw back his head and howled. Sylvie clung to his arm like a limpet, shrieking over his wordless grief and rage. “Don’t undo this, don’t rewind it. Help him regain—”

Then he was gone from her grip, the Furies’ betrayed howls joining his, but she had no space to care as gravity tugged her backward.

One foot fell forward, over the edge, planting her on the roof, but the other fell back, over the void, her weight following. Sylvie fell, scrabbling at the crumble of concrete ledge, at ashy remnants from the lightning’s touch, and managed to hook one arm over the edge. She hung there, panting, muscles shrieking.

A stray, crazed thought raced her mind. So this is why the schools used to count pull-ups during health assessments. . . . She sobbed for breath, for strength, for control over the animal part of her brain, which whimpered in panic. Her feet kicked and dangled. Wetness splattered her face, traced her forehead and cheeks, dripped to the roof; rain, sweat, tears, blood—she had no idea and no time to investigate. A white fog rushed over her, drifting to the streets below, and making her hands slippery in passing.

She flailed, hooked her second arm up over the edge, and kicked madly for any type of footing beneath the overhang. Finally, she got a toehold planted on one of the ornate sculptural details so loved in Chicago, and kicked her weight upward, scratching her hips and belly and thighs, ignoring the pain, and pulling with all her might. She landed on the roof like a netted fish, graceless, flailing, but considerably more grateful.

Until she focused on the picture outside of her own pains and tribulations, on her near call with death. She had escaped her own death, but Demalion—hadn’t. His blood painted the roof, sprayed wet and fine in a giant circle as if the two shape-changed Furies had hit him so hard and so fast from both sides that his skin exploded.

Blood ran black in the moonlight, sticky on Sylvie’s face and hands as she frantically scrubbed it from her skin, and thick, gouting red where it ran from Erinya’s muzzle as she ripped chunks from his chest and throat. His clawed hand spasmed as Erinya hit the long nerves in a body so recently destroyed, and his crystal globe erupted from the ruined flesh, glowing with dim ghostlight. Magdala made a long lunging slide at it, snapping her jaws, but missed. It rolled down the slant in the damaged roof, plummeted to the streets below.

Sylvie’s breath caught in her chest, locked there. The guilt, the pain—it solidified in her lungs like iron. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe at all.

Dunne held Bran in his lap, face wild and strained. Bran’s body was dissolving, flesh to motes of gold that shimmered in the air.

“You did it,” the voice said.

Sylvie shuddered. She did it, and Dunne had listened to her—he wasn’t rewinding the moment, wasn’t undoing Bran’s death, wasn’t undoing Demalion’s. . . .

“Please,” she whispered, a thin thread of pain. The Furies’ snarls were constant rumbles of sound as they continued to maul what was left of Demalion. Not content with simply killing, they were chewing him into scraps. Some crimes, Erinya had said, needed more punishment than a body could provide. Some crimes required destruction of a soul. . . . Sylvie gagged.

Demalion had killed Bran on her orders. He died for it, and Bran died for it. . . .

And for what? The motes that were Bran’s essence kept spinning outward with no cohesion, no sense of sentience at all. She’d gambled her life, Demalion’s life, Bran’s life, and she had lost.

“I’m impressed,” the voice said, and Sylvie realized it wasn’t internal any longer. An intense voice, so similar to her own, but not hers at all. Hadn’t been hers . . . for how long? A spell. There had been a cracked stick in the subway, a broken pencil on the roof. A spell in two parts. Cocking the gun and pulling the trigger in two steps. Ready, aim, and fire.

Sylvie’s words, her will, had been subsumed in a dangerous spell, insidious because it built on truth. Bran had had to die. But it shouldn’t have been here. Shouldn’t have been now. This could only benefit those who wanted Bran’s resurrection to fail.

A few feet away, the secretary stood, shedding her false fright as easily as a lizard shed its tail. Lilith plucked two elaborately spiral sticks from her braid, tugged the glasses from her face, revealing two silver-blind eyes. She raised the glasses to her face again, winked at Sylvie, eyes dark and sighted behind the bespelled lenses.

“Oh, my dear. I gave you the command to kill, be my woodsman, and you . . . delegated. You are my daughter to the bone.”

28

Grudge Match

LILITH HELD THE TWO SPELL STICKS IN HER FREE HAND. SHE TUCKED one over her ear, laid the other on her outstretched palm. Her eyes, even unfocused and blind, were intent. After a moment, the stick rose on point and began to spin in the palm of her hand. As it did, it created a tiny vortex. Bran’s self, that misty shimmer of gold, began to flow toward Lilith, twining around the tips of the sinuously curved stick, feeding themselves through the larger eye at the top. Lilith grinned; the muscles in her forearm bunched as if the motes had a tangible weight to them.

She flipped the stick up, caught it, and brought it to her mouth, as greedy as a child with cotton candy, plucking tangled clouds free and dissolving them on her tongue.

At the first bite, she moaned, then flung the spelled glasses away from her. She licked her lips, and her eyes lost their blindness, shading back to their normal brown. “So much better,” she murmured. She caught a last strand of gold on her lip with her thumbnail, sucked it clean. “A victory is so much sweeter when one can actually see it.”

“Not a victory yet,” Sylvie whispered, still on her hands and knees, still trying to surface above the grief that threatened to sink her. She’d been too confident in her resistance to spells even to imagine this trap.

Lilith set the spell sticks in either hand, setting both to spinning. “What’s going to stop me?” Lilith said. “The Furies? Sorry, granddaughter, they’re too busy hunting your man’s soul. They’ve destroyed his flesh, but it’s not enough for them. Not after what he did.” She devoured another long streamer of Bran’s power, then turned heavy-lidded eyes back to Sylvie.

“It’ll take them a while. His soul’s tricky. It’s a little more than human. It’s not merely a matter of rooting it out. It’s a matter of chasing it down. They’re rare beasts, you know. A sphinx cub can take a millennium to gestate. The man you delegated to die in your place might have been only thirty-some years old, but he was a thousand years in the making, a thousand years lying cradled beneath his mother’s heart.”