by Jessa Slade
“The hierarchies in both other-realms are great believers in free will. Free, right up till you discover the price.” He waved his tattooed hand dismissively. “You’re still in the driver’s seat. Only now you have a passenger. A silent passenger, possibly with a gun to your head, who’s supercharged your vehicle for his own mysterious purpose and won’t let you go. But you’re not a puppet.”
If she turned her focus inward, would she feel this otherworldly passenger? The thought made her want to crawl out of her skin. But it was her skin, damn it. “You describe it like a parasite.”
“Technically, symbiont. The demon doesn’t just take. It gives. Technically.”
The last was muttered under his breath, and she studied him, wondering whom he was trying to convince.
He shifted beneath her regard. “A weakness in your soul made you vulnerable to a demon matching itself to the emptiness in you.”
“I wasn’t weak or empty,” she protested. “At least not until . . .”
This time, he studied her as she fell silent. Bad enough she’d sometimes felt her body, her mind, her very future, were casual stakes in a poker game where she hadn’t been invited. Now it seemed her soul was in the pot too.
When she didn’t speak again, he said, “The danger is greatest in the last stage of possession, during the demon’s virgin ascension. Until the bond between you and the demon stabilizes, your soul might be pulled through the link to the other side.”
“To hell?”
He shrugged. “No one’s come back with a travelogue. But there’s some reason our demons want out.”
“ ‘ Our’?” She’d been thinking only of how this strange fate applied to her.
The gray surroundings were less stark than his expression. “How else would I know all this? I am possessed too.”
Archer took her for coffee. He’d seen that bewildered, undercaffeinated look often enough in his mirror, waking from mostly unremembered dreams.
Preferably unremembered.
They found a secluded table in the glass-ceiling atrium at Navy Pier, where wintry lake light gave the palm trees a surreal cast. She huddled over her frothy, butterscotch beverage, a far cry from the simple black in his own cup, but he figured she needed as much consolation as sugar and whipped cream could offer. “Did you want chocolate sprinkles too?”
At the disbelieving look she shot him, he realized he should have come up with more meaningful conversation to follow his, “I’m demon-possessed” and her mumbled, “I need a drink.”
She leaned back, fingertips brushing her cup. “I’ll pass on the sprinkles. I hear temptation got me into this mess.”
“My demon is annihilation-class, with no special bent for enticement. I can’t know you so thoroughly to tempt you as your unbound demon did.”
“My demon.” Her gaze wandered over him. The track of her scrutiny raised a prickle of awareness in his skin that had nothing to do with his enhanced senses. He couldn’t know her—had no intention of knowing her—but some odd intimacy crackled between them all the same.
After all, the demon had come to her looking like him.
He crushed the thought. No intentions and good intentions seemed to lead to the same inevitable destination. “Is the coffee helping?”
“Making me feel human again? I guess you’ll tell me if I’m not human anymore.”
“You are. Mostly.”
She scowled at the “mostly.” “And the rest?”
“Is an other-realm emanation, latent at the moment, that matched itself to susceptible receptors in your idiopathic, perpetual etheric force.” When she blinked at him, he added, “More commonly called your soul.”
“Did I catch a demon or a cold?”
He slanted her a faint smile. “Our philosophers compare possession to an infection, where demonic viral code overwrites exposed portions of our humanity.”
She shook her head. Her wrists, thin and pale against the black aluminum mesh table, seemed unbearably delicate, ill-suited to the fight ahead, and he wondered why the demon had chosen her. “Demon philosophy. I can’t help thinking. . . .”
He made an encouraging sound, but her glance was more irate than reassured. He made a mental note that she was not a woman to be patronized. First he had to dust the cobwebs off the mental file where he kept his notes on women.
“If this is true,” she continued, “I might finally get some answers.”
Archer lifted one eyebrow. “To what?”
“Heaven. Hell. God. What is the soul?” Her voice picked up speed. “Does it matter if we are good people or bad? How good do you have to be? If God is good and God made everything, why would he make bad? Why can’t—?”
“Is that how it lured you?” She blinked at his curtness, and he tried to modulate his tone. “It won’t give you answers. You’ll only have more questions.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know.”
“Tell that to Adam.”
“I didn’t cause the downfall of man.”
His body tightened with the remembered weight of her straddling his hips. Most often such a scuffle involved some demonic entity eager to kill him. But she’d wanted to save him, to fall under her again. . . .
He felt the shift within him, not just in the suddenly snug crotch of his jeans, but the restless demon rising at his distraction. Damn. He’d said they weren’t puppets, and here he was, losing control like any newly possessed or rogue talya.
He dragged his mind back to the conversation. “Regardless, Eve didn’t pass along any apples of knowledge. We have generations of historians who’ve filled archives with what they’ve learned, but they’d fill Lake Michigan with what they still can’t fathom. They’d overflow the Great Lakes with what they haven’t even thought to ask.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are there many like you?”
He noticed she didn’t include herself. “Leagues of talyan exist in pockets around the world.” When she frowned at the strange word, he explained, “One of those first scholars tagged us talyan, an unkind comparison to Aramaic sacrificial lambs.”
She stared off into the middle distance, contemplating. “Aramaic? See, now I have more questions.”
“You’ll find no religion or science with answers. We’ve culled the sects of a hundred cultures to find words for what we face, but the faiths of centuries offer no solace, and the science of today provides no explanations. We are heretic and madman rolled into one.” He reached across the table to take her chin in his hand, forcing her to focus on him. “Your only task now is to survive the coming days.”
Her hazel eyes speared him, and his demon surfaced like a leviathan on a gaff hook. She couldn’t know what lurked below. He was a fool to rile it with the touch it both longed for and feared.
He let go abruptly just as she jerked her chin up. “I’ve probably survived worse.”
His fingertips tingled with the flush of her skin, the heat flickering up his demon’s mark like ignition along black lines of gunpowder. “No doubt you have, or the demon would have chosen another.”
“When I had the vision of it, it said I’d called it.” She fixed her gaze on her hands wrapped around the coffee cup. “It said I was lonely. It said it loved me. How desperate is that?”
Love. The word exploded in an empty place in him, as if that powder had burned to the end of the line. He clamped down until the echo died. “Desperate on the demon’s part? Or yours?” When she glared at him, he shrugged. “It makes a bargain to fill what’s missing in us and then takes what it needs.”
“But why me?” She wilted a bit. “Seems a little conceited to think I’ve had any more tribulations than the next guy.”
“Haven’t you?” He waited while she considered. “But it’s not about the quantity of your suffering. It’s the quality. Demons are quite the connoisseurs of pain.”
She grimaced. “Me too lately, I guess.”
“Exactly. When the demon crosses over, it seeks a matching target, a
soul that resonates with its energy. Somewhere in your past is a penance trigger. It defines the headwaters of an invisible fault line in your soul, cutting a path right to the moment when the demon breaks your life in two.”
“A penance trigger?” Some memory brought a hazy glitter to the corner of her eye. “So it was because of me.”
The tear never fell, but his muscles tightened as if reacting to a mortal threat. He held himself still with effort. He wouldn’t reach for her again. “Whatever it was doesn’t necessarily make you guilty, Sera. It just made you vulnerable.”
Despite his soft tone, her instant focus pinned him. Her narrowed eyes left no room for tears. “I still can’t believe any of this. I should have my head examined.”
“You mean your soul.”
She took a hard hit off her coffee. “I don’t go to church anymore.”
Her brusque dismissal cut him off as surely as he’d interrupted her list of existential questions. Well, he didn’t want her to pry into his past either. He should respect those boundaries, as he would the no-touch taboo of the possessed.
“You won’t struggle to believe much longer.” The sleeve scratched at his right arm, and he shifted uncomfortably. The flesh might heal quick and clean, but the pain lingered. She’d find that out soon enough too. “Possession with the demon ascendant is proof enough.”
She stood. “Okay then. Thanks for the coffee.”
He looked up at her without rising. Niall could choke on his cracks about gentlemanly behavior. “That’s it for all your questions?”
“You haven’t answered any of them. I get the sense you’re holding back until I make it to the other side.” She smiled, barely.
He wondered whether he should try reassuring her again, but decided she’d only think worse of him. Because she was right; he was holding back.
And if for a moment he’d foolishly thought to reach out to ease the pain he’d seen in her eyes, well, she’d also been right to fend him off. Just because two lost people found each other, didn’t make them less lost.
He slid a business card across the table.
She placed the tip of one finger over the terse @1 symbol on the card. “ ‘At One’?”
“Demonic possession twists your soul and your sense of humor. See? ‘Atone.’ ”
“Oh. Ha.” Her hazel gaze rose to his. “So tell me one thing, straight.”
He inclined his head solemnly.
“Are the talyan—” She stumbled over the exotic word. “Are the demon-ridden damned?”
He hesitated. From the way she spoke, she’d had more than a flirting relationship with religion. And he’d bet his soul—had it still been his to bet—the penance trigger that made her susceptible to possession had its roots in her beliefs.
Not that evil gave a flying fuck about faith. He opened his mouth.
She shook her head. “Too late. You already answered.”
He scowled. “I didn’t. You’re jumping ahead.”
This time, her smile was genuine. “Let me know when you catch up.”
She walked away. But the business card peeked out between her fingers.
Archer sat back to watch her go. Straight and steady. The sweetened coffee and her pique had given her that, at least. Once upon a time, he’d preferred more sass and sway.
But those times were dead, and she—so far—was not.
The destroyer in him quivered, a taut stretch deep in his muscles as its quarry escaped. The quiver intensified to an ache, muscles cramping, raising the hair on his arms and a black-light hunter’s glow over his vision. It wanted to give chase, badly.
He held himself still as he tracked her progress out of the atrium, down the stairs. There’d be a car waiting for her. He’d taken care of that while he bought the coffee—the least he could do, and the most he thought she’d allow.
He didn’t flinch when a body thumped down in the seat she’d left. “I suppose you got all that for Niall?”
“For posterity,” Zane corrected. “You let her walk away again.”
“She has our card this time.”
“Now that she’s infected.” Zane drummed his fingers on the table, a tinny sound that set Archer’s teeth on edge. “Did you really think she’d deny it?”
If anyone . . . “She wanted to know.”
“Know what?”
“Everything.”
Zane chuckled. “A gambit old as Eve. So the demons triumph again.”
Archer exhaled the worst of his tension. “If you call it a triumph when demons merge with unsuspecting conscripts to fight in a never-ending war between good and evil.”
“Depends on your alternatives, I suppose.”
No one knew the demons’ circumstances in their own realm. The lies before possession and the metaphysical radio silence afterward guaranteed that. On their own behalf, the demon-ridden humans rarely discussed the alternatives they faced before. And there was nothing to discuss after.
Zane slid an electronic file folder across the table. “Bookie downloaded the rest of the dossier on our new recruit.”
“We’re not sure she’s ours yet.” Archer opened the slim manila-colored folder to reveal a screen of scrolling data. The league expected to market the gadget through one of their anonymous corporations. While he understood all wars had to be funded, he cared for tech in direct proportion to how well it streamlined his mission, and so far he hadn’t found a digital method of slaughtering demons.
He scanned the downloading information. “Preacher’s kid. No wonder she was vulnerable.”
“Pop was old-fashioned fire and brimstone,” Zane abridged from memory. “He’s in a nursing home now. Four brothers in irregular contact. Mama disappeared from the family when Sera was ten. Still digging up dirt on that. We already knew she contracts with a hospital to provide hospice deathbed counseling, but a bad car accident this year set her back physically, professionally, and financially. Mentally too, probably.”
Archer looked down at the black-and-white surveillance photo embedded in the text, the arch glance, the set of that fine-boned jaw. “Maybe.”
He wondered why she’d chosen a job surrounded by the dying. Mama’s abandonment hadn’t been painful enough?
He’d told himself her past didn’t matter, but the demon had voiced her wound when it said she was alone. How cruel then, the only companionship available to her now was a ragged band of misfit soldiers stalked by shadows and doomed to damnation.
“Bookie included a footnote,” Zane said. “Turns out, female talyan may have once matched us in number. Bookie said a postscript from before the creation of the leagues references the catastrophic loss of the mated-talyan bond. The provenance on the note can’t be verified—it was written just this side of antiquity—so established league archives have squat about it.”
A demon-ridden couple, each missing half their soul . . . Archer’s lips twisted. A Hallmark movie it wasn’t.
“Anyway.” Zane cleared his throat. “Some light reading while you babysit the demon’s ascension. Ecco finished securing her apartment. When are you heading over?”
“When she calls me.”
Zane sat back. “I know I’m the new guy and all, but do you always play so close to the chest?”
Archer closed the folder on the picture, which replaced the static monochrome with his memory of bright searching hazel eyes, a high flush across pale skin. He knew better than to be drawn to her. Her light was only a lonely traveler’s campfire in the wilderness to the wolf in him. Such attraction never ended well for the traveler.
He hadn’t lied to Niall when he said he’d purged his Southern gentlemanly charm. That had died with everything else. The quickening in his blood at her scent had been the thrill of the chase, the hard breathing of the scuffle, the raw intimacy of her hands over his wound. The destroyer he’d become roused to the danger of her, nothing more.
Archer rose and gathered the coffee cups, hers with just the candy scent of butterscotch and a ring where t
he whipped cream had been. “We don’t know which strain of demon possessed her—one of ours or one of theirs. We won’t know until the mark manifests. I’ll be there when it does.”
“And if it’s not what you want to see?”
Archer dumped the trash. “Then that’s one more demon wishing it were back in hell.”
CHAPTER 4
Lost in thoughts by turns too crazy or awful to indulge, Sera didn’t turn when the town car honked, but the driver leaning out the window stopped her with a wave.
“I’m your ride,” he said. “Guy upstairs said to take you wherever you wanted to go.”
She crumpled the business card in her fist. She was tired of feeling like she was being taken for a ride. “No thanks.”
Dark glasses hid the driver’s eyes, an unnecessary affectation on such a gloomy day. “Hey, I’m already paid for.” He leaned a little farther out, exposing the tattoo curling around the side of his neck.
She backed away. “I said no.”
She’d checked her pockets on the way down from the atrium. As blackout fugues went, at least this one hadn’t been terribly inconvenient. She’d lost time and memory, but she’d remembered her house keys. She supposed she could plunge a key through one of those dark lenses and see if the eye behind was brown or blue or green . . . or white.
As if he sensed the spike of violence in her, he eased back into the car and sped away.
Lots of people had tattoos, she told herself. The car squealed around a corner, out of sight, but not out of mind. Emblazoned in her memory was the same sort of archaic, arcane symbol on the man she’d left inside: Ferris Archer.
She glanced back uneasily. Questions followed close on her heels, seething and maddening and ridiculous as rabid Chihuahuas. He’d teased her that she’d come up with conspiracy theories, as if that would make more sense than legions of demons and idiopathic perpetual whatever forces and penance triggers.
Okay, a conspiracy was sounding pretty good right now.
She shivered as the cold penetrated her uncertainty. She’d ended her postaccident counseling sessions with a colleague when they’d taken her father away. Maybe she needed to rethink her impatient proclamations of health.
