by Jessa Slade
She wished doing the right thing felt less lonely. But that was what Corvus had demanded.
A cop directing the stream of traffic out of the parking garage and past the entrance gave her a hard look as she passed, bucking the tide of pedestrians. But her heels and short skirt weren’t entirely out of the realm of possibility for a nice girl taking a simple stroll on the boardwalk with her beau.
Luckily, he wasn’t the fashion police, because the black vinyl trench coat didn’t work with the ensemble at all. Except for hiding the throwing knife pinned between her shoulder blades, of course.
And she didn’t have a beau either.
She walked past the amusement park, past the mini golf and the shops, past the stained-glass museum and theater, past the grand ballroom where the curved facade reached almost to the water, and stopped at the edge of the pier.
The lake on all three sides was black, the city lights dimmed by the lowering clouds. But to her demon’s eyes, the fiery stain of the salambes overhead slicked the water like a burning oil spill. She tried not to hunch her shoulders at the psychic weight of the tenebrae above them. If she hunched, she’d skewer herself on the throwing knife at her back.
“You came.”
At Corvus’s distinctive slurred voice, she turned with only the faintest wobble. Not from the heels—she was far too professional for that—but from the fear that did unfortunate things to her knees. The thin traceries of the reven on her thighs raced like the heat lightning, there and gone again. She faced the gladiator with her teshuva guttering, one tiny match head against the raging flames of hell.
She imagined that match head against her skin, and she stiffened her knees. Yeah, this was going to hurt, but at least it would only be her doing the hurting. “I’m here, just like you asked.”
The djinn-man opened his arms in a hallelujah pose, and birnenston spewed from the open sores of his reven. The poison hissed on the pavers. “The only one of your kind to listen.” He clawed at his arm, and after a moment wrestled off the anklet. Birnenston welled from the gouge the too-tight chain had left in his skin. He held it out. “For you.”
She didn’t reach for it. She’d have to step too close. Besides, if he wanted her to have it, that couldn’t be good.
He twirled the loop around his finger. “You think you can take it from me, as you’ve taken everything else in your life.”
“I always gave a dance in return,” she said.
His blue eye twisted toward her. “I know you did more than that for your talya mate. You gave him his soul back. We want ours.”
“I don’t have your soul. They told me it’s woven in to the Veil, until the end of days.”
“So end days.” His voice thrummed with longing. “You were a slave like me, dancing to the masters’ whims. End it.”
“I wanted to, every time some wanker undertipped. But I can’t.” She hesitated. Actually, with Sera and Jilly, she almost had. So she added with reluctant truth, “Not by myself, anyway.”
“Even I can’t destroy the world alone—though please don’t think I haven’t tried—which is why you are here. And where are your league sisters?”
She frowned. How extensive was that brain damage? “You told me to come by myself. Remember?”
Both eyes—birnenston yellow and strangely celestial blue—focused on her in disbelief. “And you listened to me?”
Even evil thought she was a fuckup. A dust devil of cotton-candy threads, sulfur stink, and malice whirled around them, caught in the etheric centrifuge. “I couldn’t ask them to die.”
The djinni’s fury reverberated in a language of hatred she couldn’t quite make out under Corvus’s snarl. “Since when do you care about anyone else in this world?”
“Since I fell in love.”
She put her fingertips over her mouth. Her teeth lingered on her lower lip, as if she could bite off the V in “love” and stop herself before she said more. Where had that confession come from? And to say it to this monster? How sad.
But with the words said, an emptiness gaped around her. An endless, needy longing to be filled.
For a heartbeat, her knees wavered, and the poisonous darkness spread through her veins. After years of dancing alone, how had she let someone else become her other half? She’d sworn, with each burning match she snuffed on her skin, that no one else would steal her body, her soul, her life.
The stench of sulfur—from those old matches and from the swirling nightmare of tenebrae—sucked tears from her eyes. Around them, the malice hissed, as if sipping her pain.
Not that her petty commitment issues mattered anymore. She would sacrifice any chance of keeping body, soul, or life in order to save the league, the city, and maybe heaven itself.
Slave, he’d called her, and he was right. She had feared all she had left would be stolen. But what he didn’t understand, and what she’d finally learned, was that it could still be shared. That knowledge, bittersweet, was all she had now, so she said it again because she always flaunted what she had. “Since I fell in love with Jonah, and he with me.”
This time, the words locked her knees where even the teshuva and her years of pole work had failed. She stood so straight, the knife between her shoulder blades never touched her spine.
Corvus’s face lit yellow with his djinni. “That is not the force you think it is.”
“I know.” She rocked up onto her toes until the high heels barely scratched against the pavers. “It’s worse.”
Despite her warnings, Jonah had touched her, and not just in the ways that made her moan. She was supposed to be the demon lure, and instead he had been the one to tempt her to try living on the light side.
Through the tenuous contact of the stilettos on ground, she sensed the tremor.
Corvus stiffened. “Liar. You aren’t alone.”
She let the black coat slip down her arms to pool at her feet. The lake breeze teased between the laces of the bustier, and the knife came easily to her hand. “Do I look stupid?”
Corvus scowled and took a menacing step toward her. “With that embarrassment of a weapon? You look suicidal. And your fellow talyan are no better off.”
“Then it’s a good thing that’s not who’s coming.”
With a shriek and a clatter, the ferales poured over the facade of the ballroom. A crimson-studded tsunami of malice boiled behind.
“You are suicidal and stupid.” Corvus whirled and spread his arms. But the oncoming horde—drawn irresistibly to the lure of her—was too overwhelming even for his powerful demon. The djinni streamed away from him like a ragged cloak in a hard wind, but the etheric connection never quite severed.
Of course not. The djinni would never believe it could fail.
Well, she knew all about making mistakes.
He spun toward her. “They’ll tear us apart. Stop them!”
“Gladly.” She leapt forward with a downward slash of the knife at his hand where the anklet still dangled.
He bellowed, and the djinni snatched him away with the careless violence of an angry child with an old toy.
“I can’t do it without the anklet,” she shouted back.
“Open a path to the Veil first.”
She would’ve stomped her foot, but not in these heels. “That’s not my trick.”
“You’ve turned plenty of tricks since the teshuva made you its whore.”
Nim wished she had a witty comeback, something about prosti-dudes who lived in glass houses . . . but the ferales were upon them.
Corvus roared again and ripped one of the decorative lampposts out of the concrete. Wires crackled and the two bulbs exploded in a shower of glass. Corvus swept the impromptu weapon in a wide arc and scattered the first line of ferales.
Nim ducked as the arc continued over her head. On the backswing, Corvus took out the next line, knocking a half dozen of the tenebrae monsters into the lake.
Nim straightened slowly and looked askance at her puny knife. Her teshuva needed her to be up c
lose and personal to drain demonic emanations, but right now she needed to be far, far away.
She slid the knife back in its sheath just as a half-human—one arm and one leg anyway—feralis slithered on its other, silverfish legs around Corvus’s swing and reared up in front of her. Ratlike jaws opened in its sloped head. Revenge of the Mobi meals.
She grabbed for the nearest lamppost and swung herself around it, one leg at full extension.
Ah, this felt familiar.
The tip of her heel raked through the feralis’s throat. The creature toppled, rat tail lashing, and black ichor spewed in gruesome imitation of the cheerful fountain at the park entrance. But she had already landed safely beyond its reach.
With her demon’s strength she grabbed the next lamppost and snapped it off at the base. Electrical sparks burned her ankles. So much for her shiny new sandals.
She bashed the end of the post against the pier railing to crack off the double lanterns at the top. With her newfound spear, she leveled a threesome of rushing ferales. Their attendant malice scattered beyond her reach, but the fiery vortex of salambes kept them from going too far.
No, that wasn’t fair to the monsters. The lure that was her only claim to fame was what kept them from going too far. She felt dizzy, stretched outside her skin. Was she glowing like an irresistible bug zapper to tenebrae eyes? She had to get that anklet.
Backed to the end of the pier, at least she and Corvus couldn’t be surrounded. Not that the djinn-man counted as an ally, but when ranking all the ways she could die in the next five minutes, fighting beside him seemed pretty low on the list.
At a scream behind her—not human or tenebrae, but mechanical—she moved Corvus even farther down the list.
Because Jonah had just moved to the top.
The Shades of Gray was coming in too fast. Jonah was going to hit the pier.
Another pulse of tenebrae energy knocked her back a step as the salambes swirled down and the ferales pressed forward, the malice a frantic presence between them. She was definitely in danger of getting chomped.
A spray of water hit the pier and jetted up as Jonah wheeled the boat sideways. Over the screech of fiberglass on concrete, the engine shrieked.
While she hesitated, her attention torn, Corvus swung at the closest ferales. Not to batter them. To herd them toward her. He took a step toward the cleared path.
No. He couldn’t escape, not again.
“Nim!” Jonah stood on the prow despite the treacherous buck of the boat in the waves he’d kicked up. The wind whipped his hair into a gold corona, as if he’d just risen from a bout of wild lovemaking.
The ridiculous flutter of her heart made her sigh.
He held up his hand, the executioner’s sword slung low along his thigh. “Get in.”
She glanced back. Corvus had muscled his way into the midst of the tenebrae. Focused on her, on the lure, they didn’t care. “Corvus is here,” she yelled to Jonah. “I can’t let him go.”
“Liam is coming from the land side. We have to get you away.”
Before the mass of tenebrae slaughtered the last of the league.
This was what Corvus had wanted. For all of them to come, pawns in his attack on the Veil. The teshuva had made that mistake once, in the first battle that had started it all, and they were paying for it with an eternity of penance, along with the men who’d taken a few wrong steps down a dark path and into a demon’s possession.
And she had damned them again.
In another heartbeat, Corvus would be clear of the feralis ring. He could slip by the talyan as they rushed to join her.
She took a breath. She couldn’t settle the sick waves in her stomach as she took a step toward Jonah.
“Hurry,” he urged. “Take my hand. I’ll catch you.”
She had to jump. Not that she’d ever really been one to keep her feet on the ground.
She took two more steps toward Jonah, opening space between the ferales and herself. She met his gaze; a long look. Or it seemed long to her, although the descending flare of salambes drew no closer, so maybe it wasn’t that long at all.
His blue eyes widened, and she had a glimpse of what it would be like to live with someone who knew her better than herself.
It looked maybe a bit like heaven.
“Don’t do it, Nim,” he said. “Let Corvus go.” He clung to the railing with his one hand but didn’t pull himself up, unable to tie off the boat in the choppy waves and come after her. If the boat drifted, they’d have no way to escape.
“He’s going to cut through the Veil like he cut through you,” she told Jonah.
“I don’t care, not anymore. Not if it means losing you.”
“And now I do care.” She smiled. “It’s what you wanted, right?”
Stuck between the water and death, he canted toward her, every line of his body straining to reach her. “I want you.”
“I love you.” She whispered the words and trusted the demon lows to carry the truth through the shrill malice cries and the sudden boom of thunder as the clouds cracked and bled rain black as ichor.
Droplets clung to her lashes, lending light-spiked stars to the night.
Then she turned and ran toward the ring of monsters, jammed the broken tip of the lamppost into the concrete, and launched herself into the sky.
CHAPTER 27
Damn her! Jonah vaulted from the boat to the pier railing at her first step away from him and hauled himself over with one wrench of his arm.
Nothing compared to her leap, of course. Adding the teshuva’s strength to her own daredevil insanity, she flung herself up into the open layer of night between the ferales roiling across the pier and the flaming cloud of salambes.
For an endless beat that threatened to drag his heart from his chest, she lingered at the top of the arc, a silhouette against the inferno.
The lamppost had no pole-vault flexion, only the demon’s power to get her past the tenebrae ring.
It wouldn’t be enough.
The sea of tenebrae was already turning to follow her flight, drawn unerringly to her.
Not that he blamed them.
He crashed into their rear guard, the sword a blur even to his teshuva vision. A head, a claw, a wing, a tail yielded to his blows. Ichor flowed below his boots, thin and viscous in the rain.
She was gone. Lost on the other side of the darkness.
And everything that remained of the man he’d been—no, of the man he wanted to be—was gone with her.
But he’d heard her last words. They echoed in his soul, stripped of demon harmonics. From the lips of his twisty, lying Nymphette, words simple and true.
Three quiet words sunk so deep into his heart, no hook would ever fish them out. He wanted her to say it again and again and again, to drown his disbelief forever in her sea-change eyes.
And he needed to say the words to her, to let the cry that echoed out of his soul.
The ferales closed around him. She was tenebrae temptation, no doubt, but he was a force they dare not deny.
The teshuva rose in him, fierce and furious with his desire. Where the loss of his hand had left him unable to balance it, now its havoc matched the tenebrae chaos like the dark water matched the sky. The triplicate edge of the sword and its shining point led him forward, a focus to his yearning for her.
Nothing would keep him from her.
His conviction was nothing mere demons could stand against. Hell itself didn’t stand a chance.
He spun and slashed. Every blow was a followthrough that eviscerated another feralis. The teshuva’s turbulent ascension spun curls of backwashed energy through the salambes.
A shiver went through the ether, and in mid-dance they paused.
Somewhere, the tenebraeternum was opening.
The league had reached the pier.
“Jonah!”
He looked up through the rain to see Archer beyond the ring of tenebrae. He’d fallen into a nightmare rhythm. Slash. Whirl. Parry. Duck. Sl
ice. Repeat. With his teshuva rising higher, he hadn’t realized he had fought almost clear of the ferales.
From the other side of the ring, Archer wielded his battle-axe in an annihilating swing.
Beside him was Fane. To Jonah’s teshuva, the angelic host’s hand-and-a-half sword did indeed flame, giving the tenebrae one choice: fall back or fall to pieces.
Standing between demon and angel, Sera emptied the husks so thoroughly, no trace of ether remained, banished to hell. The chill of the tenebraeternum hovered over them, as did the cold realization that Nim wasn’t with them. They hadn’t found her as they fought their way inward.
The four of them circled, back to back.
“Where’s Nim?” Sera gasped. “The others are clearing the pier on their way here, but we need her.”
“She’s gone,” Jonah said. It had been so easy to track her here. The thunderhead of demonic emanations rising above the pier had been an unsubtle-as-Nim clue. Now his teshuva senses were muddled with conflicting energies, and he had only his need for her, his desire, to lead him.
“Gone again?” Archer slammed the axe through a particularly insistent feralis. “I’d be starting to get a complex if I were you.” He winced when his mate elbowed him. “Sorry. That’s right. I did get a complex when I was you.”
Jonah traced his sword through the last of the oncoming horde and smiled. “Complex? No. It’s really quite simple.”
“Nothing is simple,” Fane growled. “Or I wouldn’t be here. Your symballein has ruined millennia of perfectly good ignoring each other.”
The storm wind yanked at his shirt hem and traced up his skin with wild fingers to unlatch his heart. Jonah was proud. If it was the kind of pride that went before a fall, he already knew who he’d fallen for. “Nim is hard to overlook.” The powers of heaven couldn’t resist, so what chance had he?
“We’ll retrace our steps,” Sera said. “She’s on this pier somewhere. We’ll find her.”
Archer put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder. “She can’t have gone far.”
