Sins & Shadows si-1

  Sins & Shadows

  ( Shadows Inquiries - 1 )

  Lyn Benedict

  Sylvie Lightner is no ordinary P.I. She specializes in cases involving the unusual, in a world where magic is real — and where death isn't the worst thing that can happen to you.

  But when an employee is murdered in front of her, Sylvie has had enough. After years of confounding the dark forces of the Magicus Mundi, she's closing up shop — until a man claiming to be the God of Justice wants Sylvie to find his lost lover.

  And he won't take no for an answer.

  Sins and Shadows

  Lyn Benedict

  For Kim and Nannette,

  for reasons that should be evident

  Acknowledgments

  As always, there are many people who should be thanked for helping bring this book to completion. Thanks to the KU CSSF novel workshop for starting me off right. Thanks to GS Dastur for saving me from Babel Fish French. Thanks to my noble critiquers, Luisa Prieto and Larry Taylor, for keeping me on the straight path! And thanks to Caitlin Blasdell and Anne Sowards for their tireless efforts on my behalf.

  1

  Closing Up Shop: The Real World

  SYLVIE LIGHTNER STUDIED HER COFFEEMAKER WITH A WEARY AND contemplative eye, trying to decide if she should dump the carafe and pack the machine now, or keep the caffeine until the very last moment. Maybe she could just leave it behind, along with everything else: her obligations, her pride, her pain. Just walk away from it and pretend it wouldn’t follow.

  A shadow crossed over her floor, fed in through the rippled glass of the front door, blocking the Florida sunlight and the gilded letters that reflected her sign on the floor: SHADOWS INQUIRIES. Sylvie automatically turned her eyes toward a marble bowl containing a walnut-sized bell on the recently cleared main desk. The warning bell stayed silent, meaning it wasn’t a boogeyman at the door, but when Sylvie heard the jangling of keys, she almost wished for the monster. She’d hoped to be gone before Alex got back.

  Alex swore as the keyhole refused to surrender the key, and finally yanked it away. “Syl, we have got to get that fix—” She gaped at the front office filled with cardboard boxes, her usual complaint derailed.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. The circles under her eyes darkened. Such anxiety used to look out of place amidst the pierced brow, the blond-and-black spiky hair, but of late, it had become all too common. Sylvie noticed with a pang that Alex wasn’t even wearing her tricolor eye shadow anymore. This was all for the best.

  “And you call yourself a detective,” Sylvie said, keeping her tone brisk. “I’m closing up shop. As of this moment, Shadows Inquiries is out of business.”

  “What?” Alex said. Her voice cracked. “Just like that? You can’t, Sylvie. I’m a part of this business, too.”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said. She continued taping a half-full box shut with a ruthless hand, sealing away files that could probably be left behind, as most of them were merely constructs of code and falsehood. Still, better safe than sorry was Sylvie’s new motto. “The employee part. Whereas I am the boss.”

  “Don’t I get a say?” Alex said. Anger lit Alex’s face, chasing away some of the ground-in grief. She snatched the tape gun from Sylvie’s hand, forcing her attention.

  “No,” Sylvie said. “See above, me boss, you employee. And, Alex—you’re fired. I’ll send your last check in the mail.” Sylvie refused to wince at the hurt in her friend’s open face. Alex was too loyal for her own good, that was the trouble. If Sylvie just laid it out, that she expected to be embroiled in a losing battle, Alex would refuse to leave her side. She had to be driven away. Better to lose a friend to temper and hurt than to another bullet.

  “Bullshit, you can’t just fire me,” Alex said. “I’ve been with you from the beginning. You need me, Sylvie.”

  Agree or disagree, Sylvie ignored the comment as irrelevant. “I’m closing the shop,” Sylvie repeated. “I’ll need your key back.”

  Alex dropped onto the cracked leather couch; a box slid to the floor with a thump and the chime of breaking glass. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said.

  “You’re trying to protect me,” Alex said. “That’s not your job. You can’t protect everyone.”

  “Get your stuff and get out,” Sylvie said, finding real temper for the first time. Can’t protect everyone? Didn’t need to tell her that. Not now. Her gun hand twitched; the little dark voice that lived inside her head roused, and laced her tone with fury. “Get out.” She throttled back the rage.

  Alex, despite Sylvie’s current pretense, was her friend. The dark voice had no friends at all, and why should it? It existed only to survive, had woken during Sylvie’s first brush with the Magicus Mundi. Sylvie wasn’t sure what it was; a microsplit in her personality, the echo of ancient genetics, or something else entirely. Her witch friend, Val, when consulted, argued for option A or B, said it was too bitchy not to be pure Sylvie. But hers or not, she couldn’t argue with its priority: to keep her alive.

  Alex licked her lips, nervous. It wasn’t a tone Sylvie usually turned on her. “Syl—”

  “You don’t feel like packing up? Fine, I’ll mail anything you leave. Now, key and out.” Sylvie held out her hand, met Alex’s eyes without flinching.

  Alex dug in her pocket and dropped the key into Sylvie’s palm. Sylvie chucked it into an open box and turned her back, though the prickling at the back of her neck let her know that Alex still watched her.

  “You forget what the door looks like?”

  Footsteps edged away, then the door opened, bringing in the sound of the crowded South Beach streets, the sounds of foreign tourists talking, the cars honking as people jaywalked before them. The office filled with the warm scent of salt and sun.

  The noise faded, but Sylvie knew that Alex wasn’t gone; she refused to turn around.

  “This is because of Suarez,” Alex said, her voice low. “He died, and you think—”

  “Be accurate,” Sylvie snapped. “He was murdered. In front of us.”

  Alex scrubbed at her eyes, and Sylvie said, “It’s not just Suarez. It’s all the shit we deal with, the creepy crawlies and nightmare fodder most sane people refuse to acknowledge. And that’s not even including the government agents who think we’re worth watching day and night. I’ve had enough.” All true. All utterly misleading. But how did she say, “I’m quitting before I have to start killing people as well as monsters,” when Alex had no idea she killed anything at all?

  She chucked a handful of pencils at a box just as two patrolmen pushed into the room, shoving Alex out of the way.

  “What now?” Sylvie asked. The little silver bell chimed faintly in its marble bowl, too quietly for Sylvie to tell if it had been jarred to movement by the cops’ sudden entrance or by something else.

  Sylvie didn’t care for the police at the best of times. Not that they had much reason to like her either, an unlicensed PI who’d ended up standing over one too many bodies.

  “I’ve quit, guys, so take your shit elsewhere,” Sylvie said, but the police ignored her. One of them climbed the stairwell to her private office and kicked the door open. It banged against the wall hard enough to scar plaster.

  The other cop, a fortyish black male, headed toward Sylvie. Something was wrong with his eyes. He had junkie eyes, strung out, hurting eyes, looking for some intangible fix. Sylvie wasn’t sure he saw her at all.

  He circled the small kitchenette, opening the storage closet and peering inside.

  It was their silence that worried her the most. It was too loaded and too separate. The officers seemed as unaware of each other as they were of her. She traded a look with Alex, still pressed back against the wall, and tilted her h
ead slightly toward the door. Go on, she thought. Get out.

  Alex shook her head. Stubborn as always. Loyal to a fault. Exactly the reason she had to go.

  The cop came down from the office above and focused in on Sylvie for the first time. She glared back, unflinching. Young, Hispanic, and a little too pudgy for his uniform, he still made her blood run cold. Like the other cop’s, his eyes were empty.

  Careful, Sylvie’s inner voice whispered. Her hand ached to pull her gun from the desk drawer.

  “Is there something you want?” Sylvie said, her tone steadier than her nerves. “Got some java going if you’re needing caffeine.”

  The older cop pushed past her again; her hand spasmed on the drawer, but he headed straight for the exit and was gone. A moment later, pudgy followed.

  Sylvie put her hands on the desk and leaned forward, staring at the fake-wood grain, following the patterns until her adrenaline faded.

  “What was that?” Alex asked.

  “An omen rolling up to wish us bye-bye,” Sylvie said. “See you ’round, Alex.”

  She locked the door behind Alex and sighed, looking at the mess. Enough. She’d tape the boxes closed and hire someone to come collect them. She wanted to be gone. Just headed toward noon, and the day had already been too damned long for her tastes.

  But first—she opened the desk drawer and took out the gun, feeling more secure with the weight of it in her hand. She checked again that it was loaded, scrabbled the loose bullets out of the drawer and into her purse.

  It was one thing to turn her back on the Magicus Mundi; it was another entirely to trust it to ignore her. And a well-placed salvo of bullets could take apart a sorcerer or drop a werewolf in its tracks. Bullets even held sway over the sex-drenched glamour of the succubi, provided, of course, you sniped them at a distance. Bullets made everything better. As long as you were fast enough.

  Better practice that, the cold dark voice jibed at her. She pressed her palms over her eyes and breathed, sniffing back the tears. Grief was valueless. It couldn’t change facts, and guilt meant nothing but that she had failed.

  Not her fault, Alex had told her. There were too many of them, all of them determined to see the ritual completed. What could two women do about a crowd hell-bent on earning power through a blood sacrifice? When Suarez had laid his neck on the chopping block with a smile?

  Make it a lose-lose. Suarez died, but the satanists hadn’t gotten their ritual done. Of course, as a result, Sylvie had thirteen very angry people hunting for her. People didn’t like having their rituals disrupted, even if the ritual was as benign as morning coffee and the newspaper. Interrupting a proceeding that promised supernatural power and influence? Sylvie was number one on their shit list. Their problem was that they didn’t have the power yet; they were still human.

  Sylvie didn’t have a lot of rules in her life, liked it better that way, but she held tight to two. She didn’t put innocents between herself and trouble. She didn’t kill people that the cops could handle. The satanists were perilously close to making her throw rule number two away. Better for her just to get out of town.

  The door handle rattled.

  “Closed! ¡Cerrado!” she snapped. “Go away.”

  She turned toward the upper-office stairs, intending to see how much damage the cops had done, how much of her deposit wasn’t coming back. On the desk, the bell jangled suddenly, spinning in its marble orbit, ringing louder and louder, like the wail of breath over wet glass.

  Behind Sylvie, the locked door opened, bringing in the sounds of distant sirens and the pungent scent of the low-tide shore. Slipping her hand into her purse, she curled her fingers around the reassuring weight of the gun before turning.

  Three women looked back at her, closer than she had anticipated. They moved with a silent, animal grace, loose-limbed and long-legged, like escapees from some models’ runway.

  A dark-haired girl in punk regalia of layered, fishnet tees, plaid skirt, and hefty Doc Martens sauntered forward and crouched near the base of the stairs. Her near twin, a woman demurely dressed by J. Crew, flanked Sylvie, pacing around her until she and her sisters had Sylvie pinned between them.

  The third woman, pale blond in dark leather, returned to the door, watching the street. She tapped her high-heeled boot idly against the floor, waiting, counting off against an internal clock.

  Not a lookout, Sylvie thought, not someone to prevent the outside world from interfering while the other two did what they’d come for. These women were bodyguards, an advance troop of some kind, and according to the ringing bell, not human.

  She took a step back, feeling her way up the riser, trying to move smoothly, trying to give herself some space to work with. Two sets of eyes tracked her movement instantly.

  The preppie girl raised her upper lip, showing teeth, and made a faint, querulous whine. Sylvie stopped dead in her tracks. She’d never heard a sound like that before, but it resonated in the atavistic part of her brain that recognized a predator’s cry.

  The blond woman at the door stiffened, coming to alert. The sisters beside Sylvie cocked their heads, listening. The bell went silent as a tall man ducked beneath the doorjamb, filling it momentarily.

  Another cop, Sylvie thought, watching his scoping of the room, the way he carried himself. A plainclothes detective who had picked one hell of a bad time to come ask some more questions about Suarez. His dark brown eyes flickered around the room, noting the boxes and the clutter, before homing in on her.

  Sylvie found herself torn between demanding his assistance and warning him to flee, but while she was stymied speechless, the blonde rubbed her cheek against his arm. He stroked her hair without looking at her, his expression of weariness and concern never shifting.

  “You three been good?” he asked.

  “She was leaving,” the punk girl said in the dulcet tones of a schoolgirl. “We stopped her.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his eyes never leaving Sylvie’s.

  A sudden shudder racked her, a quick acknowledgment that he meant trouble with a capital T. She had met men like him before. Humans with power and a yen for unnatural entourages. He was exactly what the satanists aspired to be.

  The two sisters sat on the floor near him, not like people, cross-legged and uncomfortable, but crouched like dogs. The punk girl yawned widely, and Sylvie had a quick flash, like an X-ray rising through flesh, of something Other. Something huge, angry and implacable.

  “Ms. Lightner?” the not-cop said, his voice pleasantly deep and rough. “I need your help.”

  Sylvie shivered again. Most of her clients addressed her as Shadows, assuming that she’d given her name to the business: Shadows Inquiries. But the ones who checked her out . . . She didn’t like the idea of him looking into her life without her knowing. The Internal Surveillance and Intelligence agency snooped enough for anyone.

  She sucked in a breath, and said, “I’ve quit. Besides, it looks like you’ve got more help than you can handle.”

  His broad shoulders tightened as if she’d struck at him, and she pressed her case.

  “Really, you should be careful. I’ve seen men torn apart by help like that. Their own help.” She didn’t know why she felt compelled to warn him, except maybe—there was pain in his eyes, deep and raw, and she had no intention of helping him ease it. Her warning was the least she could give.

  “The sisters?” he asked. He petted the pale one’s hair again. “No danger of that. But they’re not the help I need right now. I need a detective who can deal—”

  “With the supernatural,” Sylvie finished. “I told you. I’ve retired. And I’m not the only one of my kind. There are others if you know where to look. There’s the Good Shepherd—”

  “That’s the hell of it,” he said, and the veneer of calmness slipped, giving her a glimpse of desperation. “I always know where to look. I can find anyone, track them anywhere. And no one escapes my eyes—”

  He fell silent, but the impression lingered i
n Sylvie’s mind. Raw power, harnessed. Something flickered in his eyes like a whirlwind. This, Sylvie thought, is one hell of a dangerous man.

  “I want you,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. You don’t give up. And you don’t back down.”

  “News flash,” Sylvie said, regretting it even as she sassed him. “I’ve given up. I’ve backed down. Permanently.” This was exactly the kind of thing that got her into trouble.

  The sisters responded with the eardrum-shivering, whining mewl, all three at once, and Sylvie fought the urge to slap her hands over her ears.

  “Sisters,” he said, chiding, and they stopped.

  “Ms. Lightner—”

  “No,” she said. “And really, if you’ve checked me out, you know I’m mostly hired out to fight your kind. I couldn’t work for—”

  “My kind?” he asked.

  “Sorcerers, magicians, whatever the term du jour is,” Sylvie said.

  “I’m not a sorcerer,” he said.

  Her fragile patience unraveled. “You’re sure as hell too damn big to be a Boy Scout. And I don’t think there are badges for ‘plays well with minions.’ ”

  She trailed off as the punk girl leaned forward onto her hands like a shifter about to go beast. Sylvie had a nasty feeling it would be something far stranger than a wolf that erupted from the girl’s skin.

  The pale woman said, “He is your god, girl, and you will revere him, or I will have your throat.” Her voice, the first Sylvie had heard of it, was as raspy as if she spoke around a mouthful of feathers.

  Swiveling her head, the preppie girl glanced from the not-cop to her sister, trying to decide.

  “Alekta,” he said. “We came here to ask for help. Not threaten.”

  “She should prostrate herself—” the pale, leather-clad woman argued.

  “Alekta,” he repeated, and she fell silent, sulking.

  “I think you put a bit too much hero worship into whatever summoning spell you used to get them,” Sylvie said. “Either that, or you have serious egomania.”