Seduced by Shadows ms-1

by Jessa Slade

  She frowned. “I just need his key card to open the door.”

  He paced a few steps. “Ecco is the strongest fighter, but he’s reckless. Maybe—”

  “I’ll find someone.” Her tone rang harsher than she’d intended, with more nuance than she really meant. She saw it hit home in the way he straightened. If only she took more pleasure in his pain. “What’s the phone number to the hotel?”

  He grabbed the phone, punched a button, and tossed it across the bed. She turned away, listening to the ring, so she didn’t have to look at the rumpled covers and he couldn’t see the bleakness she knew was in her eyes.

  CHAPTER 13

  She’d planned to sneak into the league hotel under cover of darkness, but Zane met her at the door and said Liam had asked for her.

  The penthouse suite was quiet—with most of the talyan out demolishing demons, she supposed. A couple of the men nodded to her, but none approached. She remembered how Archer had run his hand down her back, claiming her.

  At the time, she’d been too nervous to pay attention. Now she wished she’d smacked him, since he didn’t have the guts to hold on to what he claimed.

  Annoyed, she circled the room as she waited for Liam. She paused before a collection of black-and-white giclee prints. The stark abstracts entranced her. Desert landscapes, she thought, or close-ups of the human body leached of context, but somehow they were familiar. . . . With a jolt radiating out along her teshuva’s marking, she recognized the empty, flowing lines of the demon realm.

  “Compelling, aren’t they?” Liam stepped up beside her. “Who’d guess a demon-ridden could have an artist’s eye?”

  “Slaughter would be easier without a lot of refined sensibilities.”

  He was silent a moment, as if contemplating who in particular might’ve led her to that insight. “Archer said you helped take out two ferales tonight.”

  Apparently Archer hadn’t explained the odd circumstances. She tucked her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater, warding off the phantom sensation of Archer’s fingers laced in hers. “A distraction, at least.”

  “Still, he seems to think you’d be more valuable in some other capacity.”

  She lifted one eyebrow. “Like what?”

  “No idea. We don’t have any purpose besides offing demons.” He ran a hand over his hair. “Since we found you, our Bookkeeper has been searching our records for any modern precedent for a female talya. I’ve asked him to meet with us.”

  “It’s not too late?”

  “Despite what Archer says, I have to believe it’s not too late to make a difference. . . . Oh, you meant too late in the evening to meet.” He flashed her a boyish grin. “We’re busy when the horde-tenebrae are, and since the last Veil crossing, they’ve been very busy.”

  “Which I’m told has been my fault.”

  “Your demon’s fault, which is not quite the same as yours.”

  She took a last look at the prints. She should make time to meet a talya who’d found beauty in hell. “I’m glad to talk to your Bookkeeper. I’ve been studying the collections he sent over. Grim stuff.”

  “And dull. We’re men of action. And woman.” He inclined his head. “Which is why we bring in Bookkeepers from outside the demon-ridden. Somebody has to keep their hands clean enough to take notes.”

  “I suppose you can’t post Bookkeeper job openings at the local coffeehouse.”

  “We start the search in seminaries, military colleges, and head shops.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “How open-minded.”

  “That’s the point.” He gestured toward the elevator. “I’ve set up a room downstairs to talk.”

  The parlor had a warmer ambience than the penthouse, with taupe highlighted in moss green to replace the black-and-white and crimson. The man who waited there was similarly less stark than the talyan, his ruddy coloring and slight build a marked contrast to the powerful and austere warriors.

  Liam waved him forward. “Sera, this is Bookie, our Bookkeeper for the last seven years. His father held the post before him.”

  Bookie pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “I’m excited to meet a female possessed.” He peered at her, as if she might do something noteworthy right then.

  She smiled. “Is Bookie your title, or should I call you by your name?”

  He blinked. “Yes, it’s my title. And my name.”

  She let it go. Everyone else was possessed; why shouldn’t he be obsessed at least? “I’m glad to meet you too. I’m fascinated by your collation of accelerating timelines in cyclical demonic activity. Although I guess by the dates on the paper, your father worked on that report too.”

  He straightened. “You read that?”

  “Your hypothesis that demonic disturbances are becoming more common certainly calls for investigation.”

  Bookie straightened. “I’ve been trying to get reliable figures for contact with malice and ferales, since teshuva-djinn interactions aren’t feasible, but . . .” He slanted a glance at Liam.

  The league leader dusted his hands. “Well, you two have a lot to talk about, and I have evil to destroy.”

  Bookie muttered as Liam escaped.

  Sera raised an eyebrow. “Men of action don’t take kindly to gathering stats?”

  Bookie glared after the retreating talya, then shrugged. “It’s not as if I have a peer review journal waiting for the article.”

  “Chicago isn’t the only place with demons and talyan. Don’t you share your studies with them?”

  “League enclaves with supporting historians exist in many of the world’s bigger cities. Wherever enough people gather, they attract the horde-tenebrae. But the leagues focus more on putting out fires than . . .”

  “Than discovering the source of fire?”

  He gave her a considering look. “Well, we won’t change their minds anytime soon. One of the downsides of immortality.”

  “Stubborn, are they?” Sera tried to tell herself she didn’t care.

  “Also arrogant, violent, and borderline suicidal.” He hesitated. “Present company excepted, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure,” she murmured. The way Archer had thrown off her touch as if she were poison, he’d certainly excluded her from his bad ol’ boys’ club.

  But Bookie turned away as if embarrassed by his candor. “I’m interested in running some tests, if you’re agreeable. None of the others will sit still long enough.”

  She was suddenly wary. “What are the tests exactly?”

  The overhead light glinted off his glasses as he tipped his head back. “Nothing that will kill you.”

  After the immortality crack, that didn’t exactly reassure her. But she wanted to make a place for herself in this new life. Not that she had a choice anymore. She’d never been content with more of the same. If she could advance this war against evil, what had happened to her might be worth something.

  How much was a soul worth anyway?

  Bookie took her downstairs. He explained how the league had converted the old hotel to their private retreat. Past generations of talyan, she was informed, had made sound investments during their long, ascetic lives.

  In the basement, the lab was a clutter of hardware, steel cabinets and glistening glass pipettes, sheaves of papers and a bottle of red wine.

  He saw her roving gaze land. “Would you like a glass?”

  “Are the tests going to be that bad?”

  “Ironically, considering that intoxication lends itself to many sins, I’ve never seen a talya drunk. The demon-quickened metabolism never falls behind.”

  Again, that didn’t exactly answer her question. But when he patted an exam table, she hopped up. He photographed her eyes and showed her the pictures of her enlarged irises. Then he showed her a second set.

  “Under ultraviolet,” he said. “Flowers must look beautiful to you when the demon is ascendant, like they do to a butterfly.”

  “I haven’t seen any flowers since my possession.” The last flowers
she’d seen had been in Archer’s greenhouse. And she’d been otherwise occupied.

  She wrenched her wayward thoughts back as Bookie continued. “It’s an endless source of amazement to me, all the ways demonic energy shows itself in our realm, right down to the changed structure of your bodily tissues.”

  “There are other changes too,” she murmured.

  He cocked his head, then turned away to gather the materials for a blood draw. “Yes. The immortality, the aptitude for violence.”

  She’d meant the weary, wary eyes, the hesitation at every touch, the loss of faith in hope itself. But she supposed those didn’t show up in blood work.

  “Liam thought you might have some insight into why this demon chose me, a woman, and what that might mean . . . ,” she said, hesitating, then finished, “to the league, to the war between good and evil. And repentant evil, I guess.”

  He didn’t look up from threading a large-bore needle. “I couldn’t really say. I’m little more than a secretary around here. Roll up your sleeve.”

  She dragged her sweater back. “Liam values your opinion. And Archer also suggested I talk to you.”

  “Archer? He’s one of the few who sends me his demon depletion counts with any regularity, although he’s always stingy on the details.”

  “Maybe he’s not the sort to brag.” She managed not to snort since then she’d have to explain herself.

  Bookie pressed the needle against her skin. “That’s right, you’ve fought with him. Twice.”

  More than that. Of course, Bookie was talking only about demons. She grimaced as he drove the needle in.

  “I’ll be glad to share my experiences,” she told him in some desperation. She needed guidance here.

  He huffed out an aggrieved sigh. “Then I’ll share my thoughts. Mostly that I don’t have any. No idea why the demon chose you. No idea what you will offer the never-ending battle. If I knew . . . maybe I’d finally make the talyan pay attention.”

  In silence, they watched her blood pour into the syringe.

  “I want to get a biopsy of muscle tissue too,” he said at last. “Take off your sweater.” She hesitated, but he turned away to stow the syringe, saying, “I’d give you a local anesthetic, but the demon would neutralize it as fast as the alcohol. You’ll just have to tough it out this time.”

  This time, right. Because so far possession had been such a cakewalk. She stripped off her sweater, sitting in just Archer’s T-shirt.

  Bookie turned back with an even larger needle—and froze, his gaze fixed on her chest.

  Somehow, she didn’t think the unflappable historian acted this way around Ecco’s chest. “Something wrong?” Annoyance flickered through her, and the room wavered toward a black-light tinge.

  She fought back the rise of irritation since demonic intervention seemed somewhat extreme. Until Bookie reached out to touch her. She caught his wrist, arresting the stereoscopic possibilities where he touched her, and then she broke his arm.

  The possibilities collapsed into one when he finally looked into her eyes. He went limp. “I don’t—”

  “Definitely don’t.” She forced herself to release him.

  “That stone. I’ve never seen another—” He drew back, rubbing his wrist. “Where did you get it?”

  She narrowed her eyes, demon-fueled suspicion warring with her customary yearning for answers. “It came with the teshuva. Why?”

  “It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t go waving it around.”

  She hadn’t been waving it. “What is it?”

  “Desolator numinis.” He clutched the biopsy needle. “A djinn weapon.”

  The stone burned icily against her skin. “Djinn? Why do I have it?”

  His gaze shifted away.

  “I am not evil,” she said softly.

  “Good and evil are such subjective terms.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

  Bookie didn’t. “The league would laugh at me too. Right before they tore you to pieces as a djinn traitor.”

  That shut her up. “But I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Most talyan don’t.” He scowled as if he resented the need to enlighten her. “It’s in our league records, from long ago, if they’d read. The stone is fluorspar, common in old hydrothermal vents. Lots of occlusions in this sample, more like the material used in fluxes than the refined stuff used in making glass.”

  “Demons wear jewelry made from ancient volcanic events. Explains why people thought hell was in the bowels of the earth.”

  He gave her an approving nod. “Underground was the closest our ancestors could come to envisioning the tenebraeternum, the eternal shadow that is the demon-realm.”

  She remembered what Archer had said. “So it’s ugly, yes, but that doesn’t make it evil.”

  “When saturated in your demonic emanations, it undergoes an etheric mutation. It becomes a desolator numinis, a soul cleaver, a metaphysical solvent that dissolves the link between body and soul.”

  Okay, that was definitely evil. She would have ripped the pendant from around her neck, but she didn’t want to touch it. “Should I tell . . . ?” Whom? Archer had already separated himself as far as he could from her. No cleaver necessary.

  “What? Tell them to read the archives they’ve had for the past two thousand years?” Bookie let out a long-suffering sigh. “Let me find out what this means first.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to keep it here?”

  She grasped the stone, cold and oily slick. In her years of work, she’d presided over a great many spirits set free from failed flesh. To cut a soul from the still-living body . . . She swallowed back a flash of sick horror. “No. I understand you owe your loyalty to the league, but will you come to me first?”

  He nodded. “Meanwhile, let’s get that biopsy done.”

  His touch stayed as professional as any she’d endured during her surgeries and therapy, but she felt the weight of his gaze on the stone.

  “Speaking of long-ago stories,” she said, “Archer mentioned a—a mated-talyan bond.”

  He smoothly extracted a core of her flesh. “Bond? Hmm, yes, it’s around here somewhere. Bookkeeper archives have more old stories than anyone can remember.”

  She tried to quell the twinge of disappointment that Bookie didn’t think it was important either. Why was she so eager to find yet another place where her life had become not her own? Archer had told her the demon dwelled in the emptiness of the talyan soul. Apparently there wasn’t room for anything else these days.

  Bookie added the biopsy to his rack of samples, more bits of her lost to this change. “I have enough here. I’ll get back to you on the rest.”

  Clearly dismissed, she rode the elevator back upstairs. At least Bookie must think she wasn’t an immediate threat if he let her walk out. Unless he was even now calling the firing squad. She rubbed her arms at a chill she hadn’t noticed before, wincing when her hand scraped the needle hole.

  He hadn’t even offered her a bandage. Stupid complaint, since the wound would heal before she looked at it again. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the memory of a motherly kiss and unnecessary Band-Aid.

  To get there, though, she had to claw past the last vision of her mother and the black lapping water. Had her mother’s soul floated out in that last moment? And where had it gone? She knew what her father’s religion would say. She sighed and opened her eyes with the elevator doors.

  Without the large restless men, command central almost echoed with emptiness. She stepped out onto the balcony. The wind seemed colder, the night blacker, her spirit lower than a couple of vials of missing blood could justify.

  She leaned over the railing, remembering her dream of flight. If she launched off the balcony, she wouldn’t be making snow angels; she’d be making a mess, a mess she doubted even the demon could clean up.

  Could possession have saved her mother? Certainly the demon of depression that led to her fatal choice could have predisposed her to accept a teshu
va’s alternative, the same as Archer.

  Sera tightened her grip on the rail. Would she have wished this fate on her soft-eyed mother? In her fury and confusion after her mother’s death, she’d told her father she would never set foot in his church again, not when his faith consigned suicides to hell. He’d accepted her decision, always thinking, she knew, that she would relent.

  Relent. Repent. She’d believed in her father’s sermons just as she’d believed her mother could love her family enough to get out of bed, even on the bad days. Once the questions started, they didn’t stop.

  Now she was finally going to get some answers on the really big questions of death, salvation, the fate of innocence. She touched the pendant. Maybe even know the shape and heft of a soul.

  She rolled back her sleeve. Tiny knives of wind pricked her skin, but the hole in her arm was gone, except for the ache.

  She hoped her answers wouldn’t prove as ephemeral.

  He moved through the night, painting himself with the psychic screams of drained malice, swallowing down his own screams. Unraveled ether curled in his wake like a dread banner.

  Even humans who considered themselves dangerous, who eyed him from their own gloom, melted away when he passed. Only the ferales hunted him, and they hunted with vengeance in their gleaming rust eyes.

  Somewhere beyond the endless waves of evil, he sensed a presence, darker yet, that he could not reach, though he hacked his way through demon after demon. He slogged through the destruction of his own making until caked ichor welded the blades to his hands. But the darkness casting the deepest shadows eluded him with a whisper of mocking laughter that even the howls of the ferales could not disguise.

  Dawn came. Washed of hue like a faded malice eye, the sun glinted a moment as it rose above the lake horizon. Then a bank of gray clouds swallowed it.

  Still, that momentary gleam diverted the rage in him. He walked out onto the pier and stripped off his gore-spattered clothes.

  He stared impassively at the ichor dried into the creases of his hands. Then he leapt, letting the demon-powered shove of his thighs thrust him beyond the boulders at the base of the pier.