“Towel?”
Sylvie tossed her one and headed out. Val’s mansion had six bathrooms last count. Sylvie wanted to find one as far from Erinya as she could get.
The guest room where she’d stayed with Demalion was at the back of the house, and Sylvie aimed for that with good results. Found it and its attached bath both empty, and more pleasingly, not completely changed over to Erinya’s world yet. The bathroom still had a shower, still had recognizable dials amidst the twining vines. She turned on the water, stripped down, figuring she might as well get in a shower before she had to use a waterfall, and closed her eyes. She listened for magic, listened for any shivering sense that Erinya was approaching and, instead, got a sudden screech of outrage.
Zoe had distracted Erinya successfully, it seemed.
“Dunne,” Sylvie said. “I need to talk to you. Now. Hurry up.”
One minute she was alone in the shower, the next she was way too close to an increasingly damp god of Justice. She hadn’t thought that through as well as she might. She fought the urge to leap for a towel of her own; he was a god, a towel meant nothing, and, besides, he wasn’t inclined to look. Hell, he was all but wed to Eros, and no mortal could compare to him.
He shook his head, and the shower water stopped falling on him.
“You travel by storm and lightning, and you’re annoyed by the shower?”
“You asked me here for that?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Look. I need your help.”
“I asked for yours and you haven’t done it and now you ask me for a favor? Another one? I sent you to Dallas. To Graves. I tweaked time so you’d reach him before he died.”
“Thank you,” Sylvie said. It didn’t stick in her throat as much as she thought it might. That really had been a generous act. “I can’t do it.”
Dunne sighed. “You can.”
“I can’t kill her. Not now. I don’t have the time, the energy to waste fighting her, and honestly, I don’t have the heart. She’s fucked-up and awful and dangerous and amazing and she’s my friend. She’s creating coffee for Alex whenever she wants it.” Sylvie retreated into the spray, hid the flush of tears on her face with heated steam.
Dunne wrinkled his brow. “I can’t do it,” he said. “Not without causing an uproar in the heavens. We can fight to our heart’s blood within our own pantheons and we do. But when you took her out of my pantheon, you took her out of my hands.”
“You’re no longer thinking like a human,” Sylvie said. “You were going to be different. Justice. Not godly vengeance. Think back. Think to when you were human. When you caught a criminal, what did you do with them? Execute them? Every single one?”
“No,” he said. “We jailed them.”
“So jail her.”
“I can’t attack—”
“You’re not harming her. I’m not suggesting chaining her to a mountain while eagles eat her liver. You’re just confining her. Come on, she’s alone in her pantheon. Tepeyollotl’s a shattered shell. He’s not going to even notice, much less care.”
“And the other gods? Those not in my pantheon or hers?”
“They probably won’t notice,” Sylvie said. “Right? I mean, if I killed her, they’d notice; there’d be a huge flare of power. If you killed her, the same. There’d be a fight. But they’ve been watching her trample Miami for months now. They haven’t done anything.”
“They’re still debating.”
“They’re slow debaters, then,” Sylvie said. Immortals tended to be slow about some things. She was grateful to it right now. “Which means, if you cage her, they’ll debate that, too. Probably for generations. You can buy me time. You can teach her a lesson that she might listen to. You know she’s not subtle. It probably hasn’t occurred to her that there are other ways the gods might choose to deal with her beyond straight-up attacks.”
Sylvie’s nerves jangled. The gods might have time, but she didn’t. Every second that Dunne was here was a second Erinya might notice. A second longer that Zoe courted disaster.
“It’s a risk, I admit,” she said. “Is it one you’re willing to take?”
Dunne vanished in answer. Guess that was a no.
Sylvie punched the shower stall, winced as her knuckles impacted and shredded on the grout. She had washed the blood off and had just rinsed the shampoo from her hair when Alex came barreling into the room. “Syl, you gotta … Zoe and Erinya…
Sylvie shook soap out of her hair, grabbed a towel, and ran, tripping over her feet, the vine-matted floor, the soil, and stone.
WHEN SHE HIT THE LIVING ROOM, SHE FOUND THAT ERINYA HAD CORNERED Zoe, was snarling into Zoe’s turned-away face. Lupe was coiled in the corner, returned to the snake-woman shape, caging a frightened nutria between her palms, watching with unblinking suspicion as Erinya and Zoe faced off.
“Aren’t you going to use your witchy powers against me? Try to save yourself?” Erinya taunted Zoe.
Zoe had closed her eyes, but her face held none of the fear Sylvie had expected. Instead, she looked utterly blank, as serene as a painted doll.
“Erinya, back off,” Sylvie said.
“I don’t like witches,” Erinya said. “I don’t like her.” A huge paw crashed into the stone beside Zoe, cracking it and shedding rock dust over Zoe’s damp hair.
Zoe opened her eyes. “I don’t like you either. But you can’t bait me into using magic. Into letting you burn me out.”
Erinya breathed out magic. Sylvie, who’d felt the entire island like an itch against her skin, suddenly felt like she’d stepped into poison ivy. Zoe closed her eyes again but kept talking.
“Val Cassavetes trained me. You know Val. Woman whose home you’ve turned into a Yucatán jungle. She’s good at what she does. She taught me more than how to scavenge power. She taught me how to refuse it. Told me that sometimes the best skill a witch had was not sucking up the available power.”
Erinya huffed. “So you’re not only a thief, you’re a picky one?”
Zoe grinned nastily. “I am a discerning shopper. I am educated and elegant, and I like the finer things. And you’re all blunt-force power, unthinking and crude—”
“Zoe!” Sylvie shouted. “Shut up.” Before Erinya stopped trying to burn her out and just bit her head off. Sylvie didn’t understand why Erinya seemed so pissed. She’d heard worse before. Sylvie chalked it up to Zoe’s special ability to needle in just the right way.
“I could bring Merrow back. Let him do all the things to you he promised he would. His little pet.” Erinya’s teeth were coated in blood, her voice thick as if she were savaging her own tongue.
Lupe had picked up the nutria and was staring at its furry face with an expression that veered between it’s so cute and I could eat it. Finally, Lupe set the rodent down, watched it scamper for a bolt-hole near the river—when did the living room get a river? And did it run fresh or salt this close to the sea? Sylvie shook the irrelevant thoughts away in time to hear Lupe say, “Eri. Don’t be silly. She’s just a girl.”
“So are you,” Erinya snarled.
“No, I’m not,” Lupe said. “She’s in high school. I’m a junior in college. Was a junior. Now, I’m a monster.”
“This place is a madhouse,” Alex said, trying to add her own distraction. “Erinya, the TV just spat out little snake things. You want to go clear them away? It’s freaking me out.”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Everyone chill out. Focus. Erinya. I need you to find Demalion for me. Then I need you to send me and Zoe there. The nice way.” It was a bad idea, but it was the only one she had left. Dunne hadn’t even let her ask him if he could find Demalion.
“Send me, too,” Lupe said.
Erinya’s teeth flashed, and she beat Sylvie to the reflexive “No!” The howl made the stones shake.