by Jessa Slade
Involuntary tears flooded his vision. Through the haze, he saw her duck into the alley. He swallowed back the metallic tang of blood, swearing at his momentary weakness and her sudden strength. The demon was taking hold faster than they’d thought possible, subtly replacing the influence of the human realm; so instead of screaming for the police, she called on the nascent power within her.
He supposed he should be grateful. His task, one way or the other, would be over that much faster.
He followed into the alley, eyeing the Dumpsters and doorways that practically screamed ambush.
At a flicker from the corner of his eye, he raised a defensive arm. He caught the down-swinging slat of pallet hard against bone and winced at the crack. Just the wood, he hoped, and a helluva bruise.
“Damn it, Sera.” He parried her thrust of the shorter and now-sharper plank.
“Damn you, for luring me into this.” She wove a pattern in the air with the tip of her makeshift sword.
“You ran into the alley,” he reminded her. “Who lured whom here?”
She snarled. “Don’t be obtuse.”
He heard the demon in the low thrum of her voice. Unconsciously, she was summoning it. But until the possession was complete, she couldn’t sustain the attack. He could push her to the edge, but that held danger for both of them.
“The demon lured you,” he amended.A strong demon, obviously, though strain and class unknown. “None of it my fault.” He grabbed for the wooden weapon.
With a shout, she jumped back out of reach. And landed some twenty feet away, balanced high on the corner of a closed Dumpster.
He stared up into her shocked gaze. A very strong demon, he corrected himself.
He held his hands low at his sides, unthreatening. If she called on the other-realm energy so readily so soon, she just might be able to escape him, only to lose herself in the last stages of possession or succumb to a djinni with all the destruction that entailed.
That, either way, would be his fault. For carelessness, for underestimating. Enough had been lost under his watch.
He took a breath, tightening supernatural musculature not entirely his own, that did not exist in any dis sectible way. His vision flickered with tracers and auras as the desire to chase, rend, consume, welled up. He channeled the surge of ravening violence and launched himself after her.
He slammed her around the middle, knocking off her hat and scarf. She shrieked, but the sound cut out as he drove her against the wall. He caught himself on the flat of his hands a hair’s breadth before he crushed her into the brick.
“You’ll be good,” he growled. “If you survive. But you’ll not be better than me.”
“I’ll kill you.” Violet incandescence occluded the hazel in her eyes, and the demonic lows lent double octaves to her voice.
“Not yet.” He tightened his grip against her straining. He couldn’t loose her—wouldn’t lose her.
He felt the heat rising in her, a fever out of control. The demon, invoked too soon, trailed other-realm elements leaching from her. Not yet fully anchored in the body and soul it had chosen, a demon during its virgin ascension was both stronger and more exposed, subject to the willful passions that it longed for and feared, such passions having been the downfall of angels. If he could fan those flames just a little higher, the psychic back draft would knock her senseless as her demon fled temptation.
She struggled to break free. But he anticipated every move.
“You want answers, Sera? I have them. The demon can’t tell you anything anymore. It’s locked inside you. Like the memory of your mother’s disappearance, the fear for your father’s vanishing mind. Just more questions, more pain. Until you die.”
“You don’t know anything about it.” Blond tendrils of her hair drifted on currents not of this realm.
“I’ve lost more than you could ever imagine, child.” But as she writhed against him, he didn’t feel much like the wise elder.
He pinned his knee between her legs, dimly aware of the grinding sting of brick through his jeans. The resistance of her shoulders beneath his hands excited something in him darker and more primitive even than the demon dwelling in his own soul.
“Give up,” he growled.
“I won’t.”
And that was the difference between them. How long since he’d felt such pure resolve? The lack sent a jealous ache through him, and a dread that he wouldn’t be able to restrain her. “It’s easier.”
Her arch look, while still squashed against the wall, pricked him. “Even the demon wearing your face wasn’t such a coward.”
“You remember that moment well, do you?” He pressed her harder. “You keep mentioning it. Did possession bring you such pleasure?”
The violet wash over her eyes lightened toward amethyst. “You have no right to judge me.”
Judge, jury, and executioner, if she only knew.
Still she was right. He had no right. His grip on her arms tightened, finding places human tender, yet coursing with demon power. She didn’t flinch, only stared up, defiant, with just enough hazel left in her gaze to let him know she would always defy him, demon or not.
That remnant of her swayed him where her lithe body hadn’t quite done the trick. He imagined what the demon—wearing his face, as she accused—had done to gain her compliance.
He breathed her scent again. Honeysuckle, he remembered abruptly. How had he forgotten? It had rambled every lane of his childhood. The pale flowers were touched in purple, sweetly scented but tenaciously climbing, bitten back in winter and ever more wild with the return of the sun.
A wayward lock of her hair curled around his finger, possessed of its own too-human temptation. “I wish I could save you from this. But all I have left in me is destruction.”
He lowered his mouth over hers.
CHAPTER 5
After all she’d been through—her accident and the gru eling surgeries afterward, the bizarre appearance of demonology, not to mention that unbelievable jump just now—she had thought nothing could shock her.
His kiss jolted through her as if she’d grabbed the L’s third rail.
His lips parted over hers, rough and raw, nothing like the doppelganger’s smooth touch. His body, hard against her, drove the thrill deeper, so her every nerve fired at his touch. She dug her fingers into his shoulders. She should push him away. She knew in the depths of her bones that she could, if she wanted.
But, oh, how she wanted.
She stretched, muscle and sinew flexing, matching his strength against her own. He growled into her mouth, and the vibration triggered aftershocks all through her. Still pinning her to the wall, he levered her arms above her head, both her wrists clasped in one of his hands, his other wrapped around her throat, driving her chin up, opening her mouth for him. She answered his growl with a moan, a throaty animal sound far too low for her own voice.
Not like her at all. None of this was like her. To throw sense and caution to the winds, swept by primordial needs she’d never indulged before. The ferocious pounding of blood to her belly and thighs excited and shamed her. What was she becoming?
Her heart pulsed more frantically, and she couldn’t breathe. Her chest was on fire. She wrenched her head to the side, sucking in chill winter air.
He swore and released her, then took a step back. His eyes sparked with unnatural violet light. “My God. I didn’t mean . . .”
He reached out to touch her, and she flinched away from his hand.
Just as a monstrous dark shape slammed into the wall where they’d been. Under her shoulder, the brick trembled at the impact. A chip exploded out, catching her below one eye.
A bestial snarl, like a mockery of the sound she’d made, filled the alley.
Archer grabbed her and spun her behind him. She stumbled in a circle, trying to keep her feet under her.
Her breath froze even as her heart quadrupled its pace. The thing was huge, half as wide again as Archer and every bit as tall, though it slumped, one clawed foo
t braced against the Dumpster, one gnarled fist on the wall. She took in a confused impression of half-fur, half- insectoid armor plating, and a glowing rust-orange eye.
Not pausing to be admired, it sprang at them. Its gargled cry almost drowned out the squeal of the Dumpster shoved across the pavement.
Archer shouted in reply and leapt forward—low, sweeping the club from under his coat. The axe blades whirled open in a shining arc.
The creature slashed at him and jumped for the wall, caroming off the bricks.
Straight for her.
She felt the weight of death upon her. The stink of excrement and sulfurous rot made her stomach heave. Behind the creature, half-hidden by its bulk, Archer dove forward, blade at the ready, but too far from her.
Under her hand, she found the broken slat of the pallet. She’d wrenched it up when Archer was chasing her, not even thinking that such a move should have been impossible without a crowbar.
She didn’t want to think too much now either. She reached down into the empty place where she went in the moments before a patient passed, when time and chances were exhausted and nothing remained to say.
She was supposed to find peace down there, she knew—acceptance of approaching death.
What she found instead was fury.
Her vision blurred strangely, so she saw the monster trailing a stereopticon afterimage, not just where it had been, but everywhere it might go. When the demon had promised answers, she hadn’t imagined such a practical application. Now she just had to guess which answer was right.
Her fingers closed over the wood, and she lunged into the trajectory outlined most brightly a split second before the monster.
One slash for every person who’d left her, starting with her mother, first when she was ten, then again at thirteen. The thing flinched back. A wild glee, not entirely her own, ripped through her. The demon. Her demon.
The monster recovered, then reached for her. But she knew, somehow, that it would, and her makeshift blade was already in motion. She chopped at its arm, batting it aside. It shrieked. The wood shattered, leaving her with less than six inches of jagged splinters in her fist.
She stepped inside the arch of raking claws and stabbed her much-shortened weapon toward the corroded eye.
The thing wailed and reared back. A glint of steel at its throat caught her gaze. She recoiled just as the spray of black ichor exploded over her head. She threw up one hand to ward off the gruesome cascade, and a few stinging droplets scalded her skin.
A purling whine from the beast, pathetic and foul, made her stomach lurch. It kicked once with curling claws like a dead rat’s clenched foot; then Archer hauled it over backward, where it lay still.
She half turned toward the wall, sinking to her haunches. The unnatural strength and surety that had buoyed her vanished, so she was left floundering on her own.
Archer plunged toward her. “Sera.” The axe clattered to the pavement, and his hands were everywhere on her, searching. “Where are you hurt?”
She looked at the back of her hand where the black blood burned. She was still clutching the wooden stake. She spread her fingers, and the remaining splinters pattered to the ground. “I missed it. Geez, that close, and I still missed.”
Archer sat back on his heels and raised one eyebrow. That was the last she remembered before the hollow-ness inside her reverberated with a cry even more terrible than the dead beast’s wail, and the blackness took her.
Corvus left his tower, three leather satchels bumping against his hip with a tinkle of glass. In his wake, the whining darklings made the shadows quake. A few followed, unbidden.
On a corner lit not by a streetlamp but by flames flickering in a bullet-pierced, fifty-gallon drum, he passed a man, fidgety as the darklings.
“Hey, Jack, nice night.”
Corvus slowed, then turned on his heel. “Lovely.”
“You looking for somethin’? I got it.”
The ancient malevolence in Corvus recognized more holes in the man’s soul than in the scudding clouds in the cold lead sky. “I seek my freedom.”
The man laughed, a sound as muddy as ruined glass. “Got your freedom right here in my pocket. Wanna smoke it or shoot it?”
“Along that path lies freedom through death. Not what I seek.”
The man threw up his hands. “You an idiot? A priest? Get the hell outta here.”
“Why, yes. That is indeed the way to my freedom. Getting hell out.” Corvus tipped his sunglasses down his nose and peered over the rim.
The dealer stiffened. “Hey, I gotta go—”
“Unbeknownst to yourself, you have been long gone, my friend.” The poison burned in the back of Corvus’s eyeballs. He stiffened against the pain, but the acid leak of tears spilled over, blistering his cheeks. He raised his hand. On his finger, the opalescent stone was a second icy burn against his scarred and callused skin.
The man scrambled backward, far too slowly. Corvus slashed his ringed hand like a scythe.
Following his sweeping gesture, a patchwork mist tore from the dealer’s body. To Corvus’s scalded eye, the severed soul glistened like a snail’s broken trail.
The dealer staggered back, clutching at the drum. It tipped, and flaming debris washed across the sidewalk. The dealer fell into the embers, gagging and weeping.
Darklings swarmed around Corvus’s feet like ducks flocking around a retiree bearing loaves of stale bread. Of course, they were embodiments of pure evil with needle teeth, and he threw them scraps of shredded soul.
Corvus left the darklings to their insatiable feast; not even a memory would remain to pass into eternity. He turned to the corpse sprawled on the sidewalk. The body groaned and stirred, clutching its head. Not a corpse quite yet.
Corvus hauled the dealer to his feet and brushed away the clinging embers. “Did you fall?” he asked solicitously.
The dealer hitched up his pants. “What you want, Jack?” He recited his mantra in a muddled tone. “I got it.”
“Not anymore,” Corvus said softly. “But you will still be of use.” He lifted one satchel over his head and settled the strap around the dealer’s shoulders. “Here is the fruit of your wicked labors, the harvest of your sins. With it, you will help me sow the next—nay, the last crop.”
The dealer boggled at him. Corvus sighed. “It’s the hot new shit, man. Everybody’s doing it.”
The dealer plunged his hand into the satchel. Glass clinked when he lifted out a slim vial. Even in the smol dering light of the dying cinders, the small tablets reflected a lunar glow like unstrung pearls. “You got sol?”
“Like you would not believe.” Corvus plucked the vial from the dealer’s grasp and returned it to the pouch. “Don’t set the price too high. Impatience and greed, my friend, will be the death of you.” Already had been, in fact.
He steered the dealer’s still-animate body through the pool of indifferent darklings. They already had what they wanted.
The dealer squinted at Corvus with vague suspicion. “What do I owe you, Jack?”
“Nothing. Do you know what a corvus is? No, why would you? It was an ancient naval weapon, like a gangplank with a sharp tooth on the end. The Romans dropped the corvus on enemy ships, which allowed their soldiers to rush across the bridge.” At the dealer’s silent confusion, Corvus rubbed wearily at his eyes. “I am a bridge, my friend.”
The dealer nodded. “You giving everybody a free taste, then they come to you.”
“A taste of freedom, yes, then they will come to me.”
The dealer looked crafty. “If you’re just the bridge for sol, what’re your masters gonna want at the other end? I ain’t paying twice.”
Corvus smiled thinly. “You are wiser than I thought. Let us just say, the masters have more pressing concerns. But you, my friend, needn’t pay them anything more. And I will take my reward in the hereafter.”
“You sure sound like a priest.”
Corvus inclined his head. “Perhaps in a manne
r of speaking.”
He sent the dealer away on a drifting tide of weakness like a plague ship. Corvus patted the remaining satchels. Two more vessels yet to be launched into the night.
In all his centuries, only recently had enough devotees of doom perceived the freedom he had sought for so long. The Worm thought his formula was the catalyst. But the hunger had come first. That emptiness had drawn the demon through the Veil, leaving the wound through which the rest would follow. And that craving would never be assuaged until the world’s isolation was ended, until heaven and hell collided.
At the mouth of an alley, a few misshapen hulks, lured by their smaller brethren’s littered feast of soul, drew back to let Corvus pass.
“Peace,” he whispered. “There will be more soon. Many more.”
Awareness crept back like dawn’s faint light. Sera smelled leather and wool and something wilder. Once again, the dream hadn’t quite gotten to the point where she had sex with Archer since they were interrupted by . . .
As if someone had booted the sun in the ass, consciousness came blazing back. Sera jolted upright on the unfamiliar couch.
Across from her, Archer straddled a hard-backed chair. “Back with the living.”
She remembered the eerie wail, the black monstrosity, Archer’s lips on hers. It seemed more like a dream than life.
“Where are we?” She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “What was that thing?”
“We’re at a safe house. And that thing was a feralis. A lesser demon from the horde-tenebrae.”
“If that was less, I’d hate to see more.”
He made a noncommittal noise and pushed to his feet, spinning the chair to face her properly, as if he no longer needed its shield.
She shook her head at the strange fancy. She’d been unconscious. Why would he need a shield from her?
She tracked his path across the industrial warehouse- cum-upscale loft—spare and unpolished, just like him. “This is your place, isn’t it?”
“It’s both. Safe and mine.” In the foyer, he tapped at the keypad. Lamps came on around the room, though the disconnected pools of light hardly brightened the darkness.
