by Jessa Slade
With the teshuva’s strength sputtering, the weight of the knife pulled at her arm. “They were never my masters.”
Now Corvus was sneering. Jonah had doubted her too. And the teshuva, cowering somewhere behind her navel or something, obviously didn’t think she could pull this off.
Like she’d once taunted wallets out of the back pockets of the jaded, cheap bastards at the Shimmy Shack, she focused every nerve and muscle toward a single point. Or four points, in this case. She hauled back and let fly with the knife. The four prongs whirled into one glimmering circle of death.
And sank into Corvus’s chest through his raggedyman clothes, crisscrossing the shallow slash she’d landed earlier.
Both of Corvus’s eyes focused on her with malevolent intent.
Empty-handed, she felt way more naked than she’d ever felt with all her clothes off. In retrospect, disarming herself might not have been the smartest move. But since when did she ever look back?
She spun on her heel and fled toward the malice darkness. No quipping now; Corvus’s heels on the wooden floor behind her pounded out a rhythm of doom. The fury of the djinni was like an inferno at her spine. She wasn’t going to make it.
Through the tenebrae blackness, pockmarked with the stark crimson of malice eyes, a glint of gold shone.
Nim cried out as a blade pierced the shadows; then Jonah emerged a heartbeat behind.
Jonah had heard her voice, and the malice-evoked memories that had paralyzed him—memories where the jungle darkness had never lifted, where he’d never walked out—lifted at the sound.
And he saw her with Corvus Valerius hard on her heels, the djinni’s venomous form reaching ahead to snag her.
The teshuva in him hesitated in the face of such unrelenting evil. But he’d stopped relying on the teshuva. So he stepped forward into the fight without a second thought for his doubtful demon.
Nim shouted his name, her eyes bright with fear and, he thought, delight. Well, he’d be glad to see the long reach of the executioner’s sword too, if he were empty-handed.
He swung, knowing he wouldn’t connect, knowing too that Corvus’s djinni would instinctively remove his body from danger, and give Nim a heartbeat to escape.
“Go,” he told her.
Of course, she made no such attempt. Instead, she slowed and, incredibly, turned back.
He swung again. He’d already discovered that the sword, cleverly fitted though it was, was no substitute for his arm. The wrist cuff didn’t bend, and his entire body was forced to follow through with the blow. A strange dance of power and momentum and vulnerability. A death dance. But who would die?
Nim, the bold and ungrateful wench, darted back in. Even as the djinni was jerking Corvus away from Jonah’s third swing, Nim leapt in from the side. She grabbed at the gladiator, and Jonah’s heart curdled as he pulled back from another attack. What was she—?
Then the chain looped around the djinn-man’s wrist caught a flash of light.
She’d found the anklet.
Corvus lashed out with one birnenston-laced arm. The anklet gleamed. He backhanded Nim and slammed her across the room. She hit the wall in an arc of blood and crumpled.
Corvus’s roar tore through the malice cloud and the tower shuddered, sending Jonah to his knees. One of the rotted beams buckled beside his hand, and he rolled away from the sudden fissure that went five stories down.
The malice scattered toward the high corners of the cupola. As they lifted, he caught a glimpse of the other talyan whose teshuva had been overcome by the sheer chaotic energy of the massed tenebrae. Nando pushed upright and gave Lex a hand up, the malice malaise rapidly clearing from their eyes.
Jonah thought that if he could keep the djinni occupied long enough for the other talyan to recover, to take back the anklet, while he went for Nim . . . He lunged at Corvus.
Corvus ducked. As he spun away, he wrenched up two floorboards, one for each hand. Nails squealed free from the decayed wood. He wielded the two makeshift maces over his head, and the nails glinted like snaggle fangs.
“You talyan should have killed me when you had the chance,” he said. “Or, I should say, chances.”
“We tried. A good-faith attempt.” Jonah circled the hole in the floor, now three boards wide. The glass beneath the open space shimmered in the corner of his eye. Worse, a chill breath circled into the cupola. Somewhere below, the other women were piercing the Veil. And the demon realm was responding with its cold sigh. “Since you ask nicely, we’re willing to take another shot.”
Corvus tsked and shook his head. His blue eye drifted. “Too late. The djinni has made other plans.”
“How is hiding in the top of your pretty tower a plan?”
Corvus spat. Birnenston sizzled on the planks between his feet. “It works for heaven.”
Jonah cursed himself for engaging in repartee with a djinni-possessed man who’d left half his gray matter splattered across a sidewalk the first time they’d met. He vaulted across the hole in the floor, the downward whistle of the blade his only response.
Corvus met the blade with his board. The sword sheared through the wood.
Too easily. Jonah stumbled behind the swing, all his weight canted forward.
With a nasty chuckle, Corvus cracked the shortened board upward. He caught Jonah hard under the chin.
Jonah’s head snapped back. For an instant, he lost track of up and down as his feet went over his head.
But he’d already seen Lex and Nando right behind Corvus.
He might have felt more gleeful, except he knew the hole was behind him somewhere.
He scrabbled at the rotted wood that crumbled under his fingers until he finally caught himself. He shoved to his feet, staggered one step as his ringing brain caught up with the new direction.
Lex had Corvus in a half nelson, the anklet-bound arm flailing, while Nando moved in for the kill.
Not that any talya had ever killed a djinn-man before.
Corvus bellowed, but the sound held more fury than fear. The demon marks on his arms wept birnenston, and Lex’s face was cramped with the effort of keeping his grip. Jonah knew the other man’s teshuva must be faltering from the etheric toxin.
The djinni thinned to a yellow mist that choked the air with the stench of rotting eggs.
Was it trying to escape? Without a soul in Corvus’s husk to anchor it, Jonah knew that nothing prevented the demon from leaving. No wonder it had no fear.
The mist unfurled in a graceful, almost lazy spiral. Like when he and Nim had danced on the Shades of Gray and he’d spun her out to the length of their extended arms.
And then he’d whirled her back into his grasp, and the shock of her hitting his chest had nearly stopped his heart.
The djinni’s outward expansion slowed, stopped. Reversed.
“Nando, Lex, get down,” he cried. “Get down!”
The emanations snapped back into Corvus’s body, and the sudden compression of demonic energy in a confined space released a detonation of toxic ether. Weakened with age and neglect and the seeping battle stains, the cupola began to buckle.
The wall closest behind the djinn-man exploded in the damp stink of old wood. Malice circled, seeking escape, frenetic streamers of ether staining the air as the night poured in.
At its epicenter, the reven on Corvus’s arms burst with poison like a backed-up sewer. The beams around his feet groaned and sagged. His hulking body staggered but did not fall.
The talyan were not so lucky. Lex and Nando tumbled backward like a pair of dice. Lex went over the edge where the wall had been, with only Nando’s shout to mark his fall. The talya reached for his disappeared comrade. And then the malice sprang loose.
The second shock wave hit Nando and knocked him into the darkness after Lex, a split second before the force slammed into Jonah.
Again he clutched for some hold as he spun across the floor. But this time his fingers found only open air.
The hungry tongue of the te
nebraeternum wind swirled up through the riddled floor and sucked him down.
CHAPTER 24
Nim came to with a hundred malice streaming by, their frenetic screams slicing by her like a thousand paper cuts. The wall beside her was half-gone, and the city on the horizon fuzzed and crackled with bad reception. She blinked hard, and the teshuva snapped everything into focus.
She bolted to her feet and tried to catch her balance. But the tower swayed under her. Not her demon slacking off; the whole thing was going to crumble. “Jonah!”
She was alone.
“Nim!”
Not alone.
Wedged sideways in a gaping hole in the floor, the executioner’s sword glinted. Jonah had managed to hook his elbow over the floorboard. Only the oversized length of the sword had kept him from a long plummet down the glass-lined gullet of the abandoned bins.
She ran to him, stepping lightly on the patchwork beams.
He hung suspended. His legs swung above the four-story drop. Below him, the mad swirl of the battle reflected a million times in the facets of shimmering, shattered glass.
She flung herself down beside the hole to hook her elbow under his armpit. “Can you get a grip with your other hand?”
“It’s rotting from the inside.” He looked up at her. “Get out.”
“Do you know me at all?”
Despite his precarious position, he grinned fiercely. “I wanted to make sure you’d stay.”
She snorted. “Just reach up on the other side so you don’t crack the boards under me.”
The wood pulped under his fingers, and the tower seemed to list farther with every handful that tore free. Glass chimed as it fell, and she shuddered at a scream from below. Talyan or tenebrae? She couldn’t be sure, but something desperate and hurting.
With her counterweight, he swung one leg up through the hole. Even as the planks disintegrated, he heaved himself toward her. She pulled back, narrowly avoided yanking them both down another fissure opening in the floor, and dragged him away from the gaping center. The flooring around the outer edge seemed sturdier; at least it held their weight for the moment.
“Where are—?” She bit off the rest of the question in horror when Jonah shook his head.
“We have to get out of here.” He rose, pulling her to her feet. “If the building comes down with us inside, we’ll be minced.”
“The stairs peeled off the walls behind me,” she said. “We’re not getting out that way.”
“So where’d Corvus go?”
They both looked up.
Side by side, they raced to the gaping wall of the cupola. Attached to the outside, a ladder went up.
“Not down,” Nim noted sadly.
“Climb,” Jonah said. He started up.
He’d made it only halfway when dark wings launched over their heads.
It was Corvus, suspended below the wings of the float plane. The skeletonized cockpit was a steel death trap around him, but the wings held just enough glide to descend.
The tower listed again. It was going down. And so were they, one way or another.
Below them, indecipherable figures streamed from the doorway.
“Nim, follow me.” Jonah leapt for the fleeing Corvus, the executioner’s sword outstretched.
She hesitated for less than a heartbeat, and launched herself after him, thigh muscles screaming, though her throat was locked.
She caught his waist, heard the demonic screech of metal on metal as the blade scraped on the broken tail of the plane.
The blade skittered, then bit deep. Jonah reached for her shoulders to pull her up his body.
“Grab the fucking plane,” she shrieked.
“Don’t curse,” he reminded her. He heaved himself higher on the tail section, dragging her with him.
The plane listed sideways, its glide severely hampered by extra weight.
Behind them, the wood of the tower groaned and snapped. The chime of glass rose above it in crescendoing destruction.
The building gained speed as it collapsed, aiming right at them. They weren’t going to get clear of its shadow.
Corvus roared, and his djinni pulsed with a nuclear–mushroom cloud fury. But suspended in the darkness, there was nothing to rage against.
The cupola they’d moments ago escaped raced at them, smashing into the tail section. The planks crashed around Nim, knocking her free. Jonah cried her name, reached back for her. The sword wrenched loose.
And they were falling.
But not far enough even to scream. Nim hit the brush in a bruising tangle, rolled, slammed into Jonah. He grabbed her close and threw himself over her as the cupola boomed and splintered all around.
They lay in a daze, limbs entwined. Not just their limbs, but tree limbs. Carefully, Nim straightened. Nothing broken. Other than the tree. And the tower. And Corvus?
She stiffened, gaze darting. Even with the teshuva on high alert, she couldn’t distinguish the rusted metal outline of the plane. How much farther had it gone?
“Nim?” Jonah’s hands were all over her.
She batted him away. “I’m fine. You?”
“There’s blood on your face.” He cupped her jaw. “It shines to the demon.”
She winced as his thumb brushed the cut on her cheek where Corvus had backhanded her. The tenebrae-flustered teshuva had been slow to seal the wound. But she couldn’t push Jonah away again. She leaned into his touch. “That was crazy.”
“We’re down,” he pointed out. “And alive.”
“And everyone else?”
He didn’t answer, but rose and held his hand out to her.
If the wreckage of the industrial site had been Superfund-worthy before, it was positively apocalyptic now. Wood and glass crunched under their steps as they circled the crash site.
In the debris, they found Nando.
His gaze was fixed upward toward the black sky, no demon violet, no human spark. Nim stumbled to her knees in grief. Glass stung her palms in a hot flush of pain.
She flinched from Jonah’s hand on her shoulder. “If you say he’s in a better place, I’ll punch you.”
“At least he’s not here.”
She glared up at him and clenched her fists, driving glass shards deep. At least that explained the tears that clouded her vision.
“Jonah, Nim.” With his black clothes, Liam was a shadow in the night, except for the twinkling flecks of glass in his dark hair and the rampant reven at his temple. His pupils, blown wide with the teshuva, glowed. “We couldn’t come after you. The stairs . . .”
“I know,” Jonah said. “Nando . . .”
“I know,” Jilly echoed as she walked up beside the league leader.
In silence, they assembled.
“Lex is missing,” Sera said. “Also Marc, Argus, and Haji.”
“I found Lex,” Ecco said. He didn’t have to say more.
“Start digging,” Archer said. Sera nodded. “Crush injuries or lacerations will be bad enough, but the amount of birnenston that was sealed in the glass chambers will be fatal if we can’t find them soon. And the tenebrae could be drawn to the pain.”
Someone asked, “Corvus?”
Jonah’s voice was monotone, the demon harmonics threaded into one livid tone. “Gone.”
They started digging.
With improvised shovels torn from fifty-gallon drums, they managed to keep their fingers attached. Still, blood ran in slick rivulets from Nim’s hands and wrists, and her grip on the scoop kept slipping and she kept swearing. Jonah, bent to his own search a few yards away, said nothing and never looked up.
She dug and bled, and the teshuva healed her, slower and slower as the birnenston poison sapped its coherence, and so she bled some more.
They found Marc and Argus, dead. Haji they pulled from the ruins just as dawn’s gleam brightened the lake.
The talya was sliced head to foot, his blood a congealed pool brimming the glass depression in the remains of the elevator floor. “I tri
pped,” he mumbled with woozy incoherence. He touched the back of his head where he’d obviously knocked himself unconscious— and nearly scalped himself—when he fell into the sharpedged pit. “I never trip.”
Sera bumped his hand away. “Don’t touch.”
The words, the echo of her old life, sent claws down Nim’s spine. Her selfish cluelessness had led directly to this moment. She’d sold the anklet, never thinking, never caring.
Not knowing, she tried to remind herself. But in the devastation, the guilt clung dank and thick as river mud.
Four dead, and she’d barely known their names, when the league needed every man and woman it had.
Well, not every woman.
She staggered away from the destruction. Others had taken breaks away from the birnenston to give their teshuva a chance to refresh, so no one paid attention. Thankfully, the tenebrae that had escaped their glass enclosure hadn’t returned, though the anguish must have been tempting. Despite their much-vaunted control over their emotions, the talyan almost shimmered with the waves of their fury and grief.
Maybe the pain was so bad even the malice wanted no part of it.
Maybe the malice were smarter than her.
Not far beyond the scattered glass and wood, she found the crumpled remnants of the float-plane wings. She swayed, dripping blood from her fingertips. The divot she and Jonah had kicked up where they hit the ground looked like a shallow grave.
No Corvus, of course. But, really, even if she returned now with her anklet in hand, or around her ankle, actually, could she redeem the talyan sacrifice?
Was this how Jonah had felt when he lost his hand?
To live and fight was to salvage their souls. Anything else—even death itself—was unacceptable. At least she understood him now.
Now that it was too late.
A yellow glimmer caught her gaze, and the first ray of sunlight filtered through the trees just as Corvus stepped into view.
“Come to me, alone, tonight,” he said. “I have no fight with your friends.”
