by Jessa Slade
Keeping her gaze off the bed, she rifled through the drawers. A pair of cotton flannel pants and a T-shirt soft with wear seemed like the fabric equivalent of a consoling hug.
She cleaned up at the kitchen sink. Other than her mud-spattered jeans and faintly scarred hands, she’d escaped the evening unscathed, if she didn’t count the memory of her father’s screams, the sickening stench as the feralis dropped from the tree, or Archer’s bleak stare as he wiped away the gore.
The last of the suds swirled down the drain, and she wished she could purge her thoughts as easily.
The shower gurgled to silence. Her heartbeat ramping up for no reason, she quickly pulled on the fresh clothes, inhaling the whiff of cedar from the too-large T-shirt. On the couch, she tucked her bare feet underneath her. She pulled a pillow onto her lap, realized it didn’t make much of a shield, but held on to it anyway.
The lights in the bathroom went out. Archer appeared, a darker shadow in the doorway.
His clothing matched hers. She felt the weight of his glance, but he made no comment as he padded across the living room.
With the two blades they’d used on the ferales in hand, he pulled up a chair across from her, took up a rag and a bottle of fluid, and began to clean the axe. Head bent over his task, his wet hair glistened like the steel.
Her fingers itched to smooth the hint of damp curl. Instead, she pushed the pillow aside and took the smaller knife. She rummaged through the case at his side for a second rag.
After a long minute of silence, he said, “For a first hunt, that didn’t go badly.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“You didn’t die,” he amended. “Eventually, that might not sound like much, but for now . . .” He held his blade to the light, then wiped along its length. “So, what did you learn tonight?”
“I suck as a killer?”
“You didn’t die,” he reminded her. “You learned not to get slimed by malice. You learned ferales are weak at their throats, eyes, and spines, and almost impervious anywhere else. You learned how to bleed out demonic emanations.”
“But I’m still not sure what happened,” she interrupted. “When you grabbed me—”
As if she hadn’t spoken, he continued implacably, “You learned to leave your old life alone.” He raised his gaze to hers.
She said nothing.
He went back to the knife. “Once you let the demon reflexes take over, the rest is simple.”
She didn’t think he meant just during the fighting. She couldn’t restrain a shiver—which she knew he saw, so felt obliged to explain. “You threw me the knife, and I didn’t have to think. I was so angry at being frightened, I just . . .” She pressed her thumb lightly to the knife’s edge, creasing her skin. “And then I was so frightened at being so angry, I couldn’t . . .” Once again, the words failed her. Blood welled out of the furrow in her thumb.
Archer eased the knife from her grasp, while the tiny wound in her thumb faded to just another line bisecting the loops of her thumbprint.
She glanced at Archer’s arm where the feralis’s jaws had clamped like a bear trap. With a touch she told herself was cool and clinical, she lifted his hand to study the wound. The flesh was raw and tender looking but nowhere near the gruesome maiming she’d seen. She traced the black line of the reven where feralis teeth had slashed complicated new patterns. Violet sparked behind the stroke of her finger.
He sat unmoving, but the muscle in his forearm jumped into sharp relief.
She flushed and released him. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m still shocked by it. It’s been—what?—three whole days now since I first heard of demons.”
He eased enough to smile faintly. “Seems like centuries.” He gave the blades a final coat of oil and returned them to the wall of weapons.
She raised her voice to carry across the room. “Has it been? For you?”
“What?” He didn’t turn to look at her.
“Centuries?”
“At least.” He said it so easily, she wasn’t sure if he was being sardonic or truthful. Or both.
“When will it end?”
“When I am killed.”
She grimaced. “Not you. The fighting. Will it end with the last malice and feralis? Will that be peace on earth?”
He shrugged, broad shoulders shedding her questions like rainwater. “We’ll never know. Because it’ll never happen.”
“Why not?”
Finally, he turned to her, bracing his shredded arm on the weight bench. “The teshuva and djinn that cross the Veil between the realms can’t exist here without our flesh to clothe them. The horde-tenebrae thrive on the wickedness done in this world, feeding on sin, spawning evil. They won’t be gone until we are.”
“We could teach people not to let them take hold. That man at the bar wouldn’t have wanted the malice on him if he knew he had a choice.”
“He knew he was furious. He knew he had fists.” Archer pushed away from the bench. “Would he have believed a fiend he couldn’t see drove both fury and fists? Would believing have stopped him, or made him think he had no option but to succumb? Or would it have emboldened him?” He straightened, managing to look down on her from across the room. “And unlike you, he wouldn’t have enhanced senses or speed or healing to help him, even if he wanted to resist.”
She bit her lip at the criticism. “Then how do we win?”
“Who said we’d win? We fight.”
“Forever?”
He let the word hang. “Until the end.”
She didn’t ask for a definition of end.
“Meanwhile, there’s a djinn-man out there somewhere who needs a name and a face and a severe ass-whooping.” He moved to the office area and flicked on the computer. “I have more of our histories and case studies in my bedroom. Make yourself at home.” He gave her another long look that lingered over her borrowed clothing until the cotton seemed to wear thin. “I’ll sleep on the couch tonight, and we’ll move you to Niall’s quarters in the morning. You’ll meet Bookie, and maybe he’ll have an idea what to do with you.”
How he managed to banish her so completely in a room with no walls she wasn’t sure.
She took a glass of water with her and sat cross-legged on the bed with a dusty-smelling manuscript in her lap. It listed those possessed around the world who’d banded together in leagues like the one headed by Liam Niall. All were men’s names, she noted, tracing her finger down the roll call. She stifled a pang of loneliness. Not for herself, but for those centuries of solitary warriors. “The world goes on without us,” Archer had said. Or had he just pushed it away? Not that she blamed him, considering.
Beyond the screens, she caught a glimpse of the tumbled dolls. For all his declarations of holding himself apart, he kept the league’s horrible little trophies, the only adornment in the otherwise empty loft. Did he really want to be so removed?
Suddenly she wondered if the tortured, mismatched dolls represented the defeated ferales . . . or the talyan themselves.
The thought made her wince. As if defending Archer’s detachment, the next pages warned of rogue possessed, talyan who refused to temper their possession so the demon ran always ascendant. Despite the lurid topic, she fought the heaviness of her eyelids. When Archer finished up, she’d insist on taking the couch since she’d already caused trouble enough.
She switched to a book on fighting techniques, hoping it would keep her alive, maybe even awake.
On the page about mitigating damage from highly corrosive feralis ichor when using explosives during husk demolition, she stretched out at the foot of the bed, propped on one elbow. Might as well get comfortable while reviewing such mayhem, she thought.
Somewhere in the part explaining the impossibility of removing the last of the psychic stains left after draining a malice, she laid her head down on her forearm, just for a moment.
The glistening snow lay so deep, she had to jump. Each bound took her higher, skimming the moon-bright earth. Her
footsteps, farther and farther apart, left dark imprints in the snow, like lonely islands in a silver sea.
She spread her arms and pointed her toes, aloft like a ballerina. Her heart pounded with delight. And fear. If she fell, her feet were not under her.
She tried not to look down, but she did. Her shadow cast a hazy violet cross on the snow.
On her back in the snow, thrashing her arms and legs, she almost frightened herself with the violent waving, but then she realized she was making snow angels. She hadn’t made snow angels in forever.
She laughed, looking up at . . .
“Ferris,” she whispered.
He was seated on the edge of the bed, his hip near her curled knees. “I heard you. I thought it was a nightmare.”
She turned her head, knocking her nose on the book’s cracked leather spine. “I fell asleep.”
“Counting sheep instead of ways to eviscerate ferales?”
“With bedtime stories like yours, who needs night-mares?” She rubbed at her eyes. “I was going to tell you I’d sleep on the couch.”
He stroked the back of his knuckles through her hair. “You remind me of things.” His voice was a murmur, as if he hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “Things I’d forgotten. How do you smell of flowers here, in the middle of winter?”
She glanced away, keenly aware of every molecule of space between them. If she pushed upright, she’d be sitting as if ready to kiss him. If she rolled the other way, onto her back . . .
“What time is it?” Distraction seemed like a good idea.
He didn’t bother checking the clock or his watch. “Very late. Or very early.” His gaze fixed on her. So much for distraction. “I was getting ready for bed. I heard you.” His voice, already low, trailed off.
Apparently, since he’d lost his T-shirt, getting ready for bed meant getting at least half naked. The dark hair across his chest and the demon mark on his arm stood out in bold relief against his skin. At least he still had the flannel pants. She forced herself not to look, to see if anything there stood in bold relief.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” she said.
“I can’t stop myself from listening. I can’t stop this thing between us.” Violet hazed his eyes, as if he were ready for an attack. From her?
She didn’t understand the depths of his agitation, but she sensed its source. At the hot musk of aroused male, her heartbeat ramped up again, and her skin tingled as if thawing after hours of playing in the snow. Jumping off a cliff might be fine in a dream, but she knew better in real life.
Didn’t she?
“It was just one night.” Was she trying to convince him? Or herself? “We did what we had to.”
She eased up onto her elbow, a half step to scooting away from him. He tensed, eyes sparked brighter as when he’d plunged into the wood after the feralis. The tightening of his every muscle echoed in her own.
If she ran, he’d chase. If she stayed utterly still, he’d say something, probably something she didn’t want to hear.
On one of the pages flattened under her hand, she’d read about taking the initiative, pressing the advantage, never letting the opposition catch his breath.
So she coiled her knees against him, threaded her fingers behind his nape, and pulled him down to her kiss.
It was doubtful this was what those stuffy old historians had meant. She shoved the books off the bed.
“Sera,” he said against her mouth, “I don’t think—”
“I just read, upon the twenty-first repetition, an attack sequence becomes rote muscle memory.” She traced the upper line of his lip with her tongue. “Don’t think.”
He groaned and pulled her tight against his bare chest so she sprawled half across his lap. His body was hot enough to melt snow angels through concrete. She closed her eyes and let her head tip back so he could run his teeth up the column of her neck.
She wrapped her fingers around the iron-honed muscles of his arms and held on against the sensations threatening to send her out of her body. He’d pulled so far away after the last time, she wanted to remember his every touch, forget the chill of her father’s rejection, forget the terror of the feralis fight, think only of the warmth of breath on skin.
She’d gotten the impression, for all Archer’s talk of sin, that the pleasures of the flesh were few and far between.
She let her hands roam up his shoulders, reveling in the strength. The faint tremble at her touch became a shudder as her hands drifted back down his narrowing flanks to his hips.
He sank his fingers into her hair, thumbs at her temples, and almost painfully drew her upward to meet his gaze. “Sera, what are you doing?”
His voice was harsher even than his touch.
“I can draw you a diagram,” she said. “Hold on. I’ve got a notebook here.”
His eyes narrowed, searching hers. “You’d mock me now?”
She stared him down. “I would kiss you now.”
His eyes widened. She knocked his grip away and set her lips hard against his. He breathed faster than he had after the fight, his hands fisted in the hem of her T-shirt. The salty musk of his arousal filled her head. She tasted him deep in her mouth.
When she rose up onto her knees, he skimmed his hands inside her shirt, grasping her waist when she rocked on the mattress. He looked up at her, fingers pressed against her hip bones, neither reeling her in nor pushing her away.
She’d seen that wary look from him before, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he wanted. He reached for her without flinching only when he wanted her to destroy a demon.
She bent over him, so that his head hovered near her breast. The pendant stone swung over him, but she wasn’t interested in that particular mystery at the moment. “Touch me,” she whispered in his ear as she trailed her fingers down his back. The muscles beneath her palms flexed and jumped. “That’s why you came over here, isn’t it?”
“You cried out.”
“You told me you don’t lie.”
“You made a sound.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare.”
He was silent a moment. “You laughed in your sleep. I wanted to see . . .”
The prowling huntress in her faltered. The bold talyan warrior quivered at her touch. She should have exulted at the thought. Instead, she felt as if she held something fragile in her grasp, a delicate crystal that might shiver apart.
She leaned back a fraction. His hands dropped to her hips, and though she kept her gaze on his, at the bottom of her vision she saw the sinuous lines of the reven.
Violet haze scudded across his eyes like eerie storm clouds.
She leaned over again and pressed her lips, gently, to his forehead. “I dreamed of flying, and of snow angels.”
“Angels don’t fly,” he said with great seriousness. “Not in this realm.”
“Maybe in their dreams too.”
“Maybe.” He enclosed both her hands between his big palms. He raised their clasped hands to his lips. His breath fanned over her knuckles, sending a shiver down to her knees.
When he looked up, his eyes were dark and half hooded. “I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
The shiver went deep freeze. She slipped her hands out of his. “But—”
“I brought you through the possession, which no doubt rouses feelings of connection—”
“Couldn’t have been the great sex that did that.” She jumped off the bed.
“But any lasting bond could be our doom.” He still sat with his hands folded penitently. “I almost got you killed tonight. I knew the feralis was hunting us, and still I was thinking about you.”
About her? A treacherous warmth softened the stiffness in her spine. “No harm done. And you said together we banished the demons so thoroughly, we didn’t leave any pieces.”
“I don’t know exactly what you—what we did, but it was more dangerous than any tenebrae I’ve fought.”
The nascent warmth in her snuffed out. “It didn’t feel danger
ous. When you touched me, I knew everything bad about the malice and the ferales didn’t have to be that way, didn’t have to be at all, and then it was gone. It felt . . . right.”
“You think right makes it harmless?”
She lifted her chin in challenge. “You felt it too.”
His pupils constricted, lost in a sudden flare of violet, as if she’d struck some terrible blow. “If I die in battle with a demon, the stain on my soul is at least lightened. But if I take you with me . . . I am already damned, but I won’t be twice damned.”
“My life and my soul have nothing to do with yours.” She wanted to stamp her foot, but he was already treating her like a child. “You’d fight with a man, with Zane or Ecco.”
“I hunt alone. I always have.”
“Which doesn’t mean you always have to.”
“Yes, it does.” He stood. The thin flannel made it obvious he wasn’t impassive to her touch, but from his expression, harder yet, she knew he’d never give in.
“Don’t put me aside like you did your fiancée. You didn’t even give her a chance to accept what you’d become.”
“No one should have to accept.”
“No, you clearly haven’t. After how many years?”
The violet deepened toward black, merging with his pupils as he roused the demon in him. “If there ever was a mated-talyan bond, it died out for a reason.”
From that flat, threatening tone, she thought he was desperate to do some convincing of his own. “What bond?”
“Nothing. It’s only a story in one of Bookie’s old books. There’s no mystical fate holding us together; just blood and demon gore.”
Apparently rejecting her for personal reasons wasn’t enough; he’d had to find something in the demon-ridden employee manual to make it official. “Since you’re kicking me to the curb, I’ll call Liam and make sure that room is available.”
His hands clenched at his sides. “I said I’d take you in the morning.”
“Never mind. Zane will let me in.”
“Zane’s too young to be your partner.” The words seemed torn from him.
