This is a story in two parts that's set in the Sylvie landscape, though it's about Kevin Dunne. It's spoilerific for certain plot info in Sins & Shadows.

In the minimalist store front he used as his office, Kevin Dunne bent over his desk, leafing through the book of flowers, trying to remember. Had it been six-petaled or seven? The whisper of the glossy pages was the only sound besides his steady breathing. And theirs. No matter how silent they were, they were always with him. The three sisters were watching him, their dark eyes unblinking, their expressions not so much passive as abeyant.

The eldest, an elegant blonde, flipped a stiletto as delicate as a nail file into the air, caught it between her teeth, drew it out. “We should be working.”

“Don’t do that,” Kevin said. He’d seen blood enough in his lifetime. Too much of it his.
The memory washed over him. Lying in the alley, running feet muffled by the echo of the gunshots, his chest, his back soaked in blood. Bran, holding a perfect flower, leaning over him, eyes wild, his voice as distant as one down a well. “Do you love me? Do you trust me? Forever?” And the bittersweet taste of the fleshy petals pushed past his bloody lips.

It had been a dream, Kevin knew. One of those dreams that seemed so real that the dreamer lived a lifetime in REM seconds.

A dream. Except.

He’d been shot before, a graze on his shoulder. A stab wound in his side. A brick to his temple. He knew the flavor of violence and pain. The shot in the alley had been all too real. Except.

There was no scar. Not from the alley, not from any of his wounds, ever. Even his childhood appendix scar had disappeared. He remembered running his hands over it for years after the surgery, a kid amazed that someone had reached inside him and taken a piece of him out.

It couldn’t have been a dream. Time had passed. A month, then two, in this uneasy state of faulty memories and delusional images of flowers and blood. A breakdown, he thought.

Across the room, the youngest of the sisters, a Goth queen with pink and black streaked hair, sighed ostentatiously, but said nothing. She made a perfect cat’s cradle pattern out of narrow wire, an elaborate weave of a flower, smiled at him over it. His breath caught. That was it. The shape he’d been trying to recall. Her fingers worked and the flower morphed into a perfectly centered heart.

The middle sister looked up, pinned him with her dark gaze and said, “Door,” just as the chimes sounded.

A client. Kevin forced a smile away. His clients distrusted smiles. But this part of his life, real or delusion, made sense. Homicide detective, and now, private investigations. He’d always served in the cause of justice.

A middle-aged woman dressed with the prim serenity of a bank teller came in and dropped a packet of photographs on his desk. He raised an eyebrow. Usually they wanted him to take the photos. The sisters, nosy as always, clustered behind him, peering over his shoulders.

Crime scene pictures--he wondered how she’d gotten them. An obese dead man lay on the pavement, eyes bulged, tongue blue. “My husband,” she said. “Gerald. The police say he died of natural causes. He was murdered and I want you to find out who did it.”

“What did they cite as cause of death?” Kevin asked. He knew what the police would have thought when they’d seen the blood-engorged face, the size of the man.

“Heart attack,” she said. “Gerald was fat. I know that. God knows I know that. But he was doing something about it. Eating better, exercising regularly. His doctor did a full physical, said his heart was sound. Gerald jogged a mile a day. Slowly, but a mile. But he dies just walking downtown? All the cops see is a dead fat man and a self-inflicted coronary.”

The youngest sister reached over and picked up a photo, looking at it with eager eyes. The client paused.

“My assistants,” Kevin said. “They help me with legwork, with undercover work.”

At the magic word undercover, her doubtful face cleared. Undercover explained so much. Goth girl, blond assassin chic, and the little librarian look of the middle sister. The middle sister, better than the others at people skills, stuck her hand out. “Magdala Eumenides.”
The client shook it, winced at the girl’s strength, and turned her attention back to him.
“Mrs. James, we’ll need to go over the basics. Enemies, rivals, some personal stuff.”

She interrupted him. “I didn’t give you my name.”

Kevin dropped his gaze. “It’s on the photos,” he said. “Gerald James.”

“On the back, which you haven’t seen,” she said. “Did the police tell you all about me, tell you I was a deluded old lady? They asked me who I was going to see.”

“Mrs. James,” Kevin said, keeping his voice low as hers rose. “The police don’t play that kind of game. No one’s called me. They asked who probably to make sure you didn’t end up in some con artist’s hands. I’ll look into your case. I don’t make promises though. Will that do?”

“You’ll look hard,” she said.

“Yes,” Kevin said and she settled back into her seat.

#

At the end of the day, he grabbed his coat, her file, and headed home the short way, walking through narrow alleys that stretched upward toward the sky, overhung with metal fire-escapes and iron-spiked balconets. The girls traveled with him, flaunting their agility, leaping and clinging to dangling ladders, jutting brick, crumbling ledges, falling in controlled tumbles that landed them back at his feet with a speed and precision that freerunners would envy.

Kevin had met the sisters during one of his particularly vivid hallucinations. There had been a bright hall, brighter than any hospital and open to the sky, so bright his eyes had streamed. Then, the sisters had been creatures, not women--built like greyhounds, scaled to giant size, and with human faces. Their forelegs had been feathered, and they had dived from the sky to twine 'round his feet. Magdala had snuffled him as he sat there, numb, dazzled in the bright hall, and whispered, “He’s one of us.”

When he reached his apartment, they stepped back, waiting, let him go inside alone. Looking out through the glass inset, he saw them lingering on the stoop for long minutes before they, as one, lost patience, and ran off into the night.

#

At home, Kevin spread the photos across the table, pored over the police report faxed to him from a friend. Other PIs claimed to have trouble with the police, but Kevin found them reliably amenable to his wishes.

Of course they are, a voice in his head said. You know why. Just admit it. They’re yours. All of them.

Kevin distracted himself by looking at Bran, reading across the room, tucked into the oversized chair, red-gold head bent over the pages.

Feeling Kevin’s eyes on him, Bran looked up from his book and smiled. He made no move to come over, ever wary of the blood and guts of Kevin’s job.

The moment lingered. Kevin watched the light in those pale honey-colored eyes, wondered what would happen if he asked, did you feed me a flower?

Bran’s answer could shatter the uncertainty once and for all, could tell him whether it was fact or delusion, breakdown or break in reality. Couldn’t it?

“It’s not working this way, is it?” Memory Bran asked someone out of sight. “Too much, too fast. I’m taking him home.” Ambiguous words, suitable for medical therapy or sudden godhood.

Kevin flushed, even as the thought came to him. It was ridiculous. An Irish-Catholic had no business thinking like that. An Irish-Catholic fag went to hell, not Olympus, no matter who his lover was.

No matter how loved.

“You hungry?” Bran asked, standing. “I’m starved.”

“Sure,” Kevin said, unsure. Hungry? Would an immortal need food? Bran sat on the arm of his chair, kissed his mouth; Kevin’s heartbeat increased. He could feel it pounding steadily against his ribs.

“What’s that?” Bran asked, wincing away from the photographs.

Kevin flipped them over. “Dead man. Murdered, maybe. Wife says so.”

Bran shrugged. “Wives can be wrong. What’s your instinct say?”

Kevin hesitated. Sense said natural death, his doctor missed something: Some heart problems came out of the blue. But the blood in his veins whispered “murder, deliberate and malicious, and what are you going to do about it?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Kevin said. “The police--”

“You’re better at this than they are,” Bran said. “You know it’s true, if you’d only trust yourself, your instincts.”

I can’t even trust my memory, Kevin thought. Bran rose from the chair, disappeared into the kitchen. Kevin flipped the photographs back over, studied them, wanted to see something other than shock and physical pain in the man’s face, looking for some awareness of murder. A hundred years ago, he’d have been studying the pupils to see the murderer’s reflection. It felt that childish, but he’d seen the look on so many corpses.
He reached for the phone. If it were murder, and the wife were right and James had no enemies, two big ifs; there might be more dead men. An impersonal murderer had another name as well. Serial killer.

He spoke to another friend, a file clerk at the coroner’s office. There had been a spate of recent heart attacks. One a day, each morning. With days off for the weekend. Seven men and two women. All overweight. Kevin hung up, more convinced than ever. Modern medicine could prevent a heart attack. Modern medicine could also induce one.

A dark, savory smell reached him. Vaguely, he was aware of Bran closing the front door.
“Put those away, dinner’s here.” He laid out the plates as Kevin tidied the photos and the files.

Steak with blue cheese butter, cream-laced potatoes, artichoke hearts dripping with hollandaise sauce appeared, all on nicer china than they owned. “I ordered in. From Pierre and Yvette’s,” Bran said, smiling.

Pierre and Yvette’s didn’t deliver. Unless you were Bran. People would do anything for Bran. Even the three sisters, temperamental and prone to offense, were all smiles around Bran.

Kevin studied the food with a mixture of anticipation and disquiet. High fat, high cholesterol, rare red meat. The kind of meal he hadn’t eaten for years.

But he supposed if he were a god, fat didn’t matter. The Flower? The words rose to his lips, but he let them fall back. The meal was too good, the moment too pleasant to disturb with psychosis.

#

In the darkness of their bedroom, Kevin sprawled, resting his head on Bran’s smooth hip. In the dark, he remembered light--Bran’s skin radiant under a glittering blue-gold sky, lounging in each other’s arms while a small goat-creature with silver hooves played shining pipes for them.

“I’m so crazy,” Kevin said, voice muffled by doubt.

“Hm?” Bran said.

“About you,” Kevin tacked on. He should just ask.

“Crazy,” Bran said sleepily. “Two types of crazy. Flawed people who can’t handle the stresses of the normal world, who dream up their own. Normal people who find themselves in an impossible situation and fight it. One needs medication, the other--acceptance. Oh, and artists--but they’re just wacked.”

Kevin raised his head but Bran’s eyes drifted shut, his lovely mouth slackening, leaving Kevin with the question. . . . which one was he?

#