Vowed in Shadows ms-3

by Jessa Slade

  The words burst out of him like the ichor that had gushed from the throat-slashed feralis.

  She took an inadvertent step back, but still she felt the burn, melting toward the core of her as the black blood had sizzled through her skin.

  “You are married,” she said flatly. “I asked you about the ring.” And she hadn’t really cared about the answer. Not then, she hadn’t.

  “My wife is dead. She died more than eighty years ago.”

  Nim’s irritation guttered. “Eighty . . .”

  “I watched her grow old while I didn’t, and she died holding my hand.” He stared down at the hook. “She told me God had given me a gift, and made me promise I would use it for his glory.”

  Nim blinked. “God sent a demon to possess you? That’s fucked-up.” She shook her head. “Sorry; didn’t mean your wife.” Although, obviously, she was. What a burden to put on someone.

  Despite the warmth of the night, she clutched herself tighter. She didn’t have much experience with faithful men. But she could see how a man of faith might indulge a few moral quandaries about fingering a stripper into a mind-blowing orgasm, even for the sake of what remained of her soul. Tricky.

  No wonder he hated her.

  But she hadn’t made any promises to anyone. Just as no one had ever promised anything to her. And after hearing his story, she rather thought she’d prefer to keep it that way.

  “There’s the pawnshop,” she said instead.

  Jonah gave her a sharp glance but obviously he didn’t want to tell any more of his story either.

  The shop—in a strip mall between a bail-bond agent and a liquor store—was dark, the security grille pulled down over the windows.

  She rubbed her eyes. “I never even thought about it being so late.”

  “I did. We’ll go around back.”

  “You can’t break in,” she objected. But he ignored her and headed for the alley. She hurried to catch up. “Not another dark alley.”

  “Let your demon up and it won’t be so dark.”

  That knowledge wasn’t making her feel any better about the enterprise. “I’ve never been to jail before.”

  “You won’t go now either.” He stopped at the alleyside metal door to the shop. “Besides, no human prison could hold you.”

  “How does your boss feel about B and E?”

  “Liam understands expediency.”

  “God’s name is Liam? I thought he’d be Italian, at least.”

  He fiddled with the doorknob. “What? Liam is the leader of the Chicago talyan. He wasn’t a carpenter, but a blacksmith.” The door clicked. “He taught me all locks have a weakness.”

  He slipped inside, and she swore to herself and followed.

  The low-wattage security lighting barely picked out the shelves of digital cameras and computer-game consoles, locked racks of guns and electric guitars, and the counter display cases of wristwatches, diamond rings, and gold chains. Nim blinked and then blinked again. A strange, nacreous glow was smeared across the countertops, the walls and ceiling, even the floor. She hopped across one streak. “Who spilled the glow-in-the-dark paint?

  “Malice sign. Malice are lesser tenebrae—small, incorporeal demons that draw sustenance from greed, despair, indifference. This is a significant presence, although I should’ve guessed they’d swarm in a place like this.”

  He headed for the cashier’s station, where the most valuable pieces would be kept close at hand.

  “It won’t be there.” Nim edged farther down the counter toward the cheap crystal. “I’m telling you, it looked like junk.”

  “Not such junk that your neighbor wasn’t able to unload it here. What does it look like?”

  “A dull silver chain, too long to be a bracelet, too short to be a necklace. The links were rough-shaped, not consistent, as if it was handmade. And there was one metal bead strung on it, a hollow tube about an inch long, etched with a design.” She touched the top of her thigh above the reven. “Random patterns, like this.”

  Jonah leaned over the case. “I don’t see anything like that.”

  “Not here either.” She straightened. “I can’t believe they’d lock it up for the night.”

  “Seems unlikely,” he agreed, “since they leave these charming cubic zirconia out.”

  She sidled up beside him. “Sign says diamonds.”

  “My demon says fake.”

  She snorted. “And you told me it wasn’t good for anything anymore.”

  He huffed out an answering breath, then turned a slow circle, his eyes half-closed. “It’s hard for me to feel anything past the malice sign. If only . . .” He slapped his hand down on the counter in frustration, and she jumped. “There’s nothing demonic here besides us. How could they have sold the anklet so quickly if it’s as ugly as you say?”

  “Don’t leave fingerprints,” she cautioned over her pounding heart.

  “I’m not in any human record books. Not anymore.”

  He strode away from her toward the alley door where they’d entered, and she hurried to follow. Just her luck to get caught holding the bag. Not that they had a bag. She squelched a tremor of guilt. She hadn’t known what the anklet was when she sold it to Pete.

  Jonah stopped at the office door and kicked it in. The jamb splintered from the brutality of the blow.

  She jumped again. “I thought you knew all the weaknesses of locks.”

  “This one’s weakness was that it was set in plywood.” He disappeared within, and the indirect glow of a light spilled onto the floor.

  Hesitantly, she stuck her head in the doorway. He was flipping through a receipt book on the desk, the curve of the hook scanning down each page. He grunted and the hook stopped.

  “You found it?”

  “This is a receipt when Pete brought in his haul, including one silver chain.” The hook bit into the paper and he flicked the book away, his jaw tight. “But there’s no outgoing sales ticket. So where is the anklet?”

  Nim backed away and he followed a moment later, carrying a VHS tape.

  “The security tape?”

  He gave a curt nod. “In case you are in the system.” His stare weighed on her until she squirmed.

  “I made sure not to touch anything,” she said defensively.

  “And with any luck, maybe there’s something on the tape to show what they did with the anklet.”

  So he hadn’t been trying to save her from a misdemeanor burglary. “And then we’ll hunt them down?”

  “Undoubtedly, we’ll be able to buy it back with appropriate incentive.”

  “Head lopping?”

  “Cold, hard cash—your favorite kind—is tidier. They won’t know what they have, so they’ll have no reason to resist.” His eyes glittered.

  If anyone would know about cold, hard, and irresistible . . . She followed him out.

  “What have we here?”

  Corvus Valerius dangled the coarse chain between his fingers. To his human eyes—at least the one that focused—the chain looked like nothing more than a timeworn silver veneer over some base metal. But to the djinni that infused him, the trinket twinkled with unholy power.

  “I found it. Well, a swarm of darklings found it. But when I saw them all mobbing, I knew it would be something you’d like.” The young man shifted uneasily from foot to foot, as if he wasn’t quite sure of his welcome. Although with the youth’s pants hanging baggy around his knees, Corvus wondered how quickly the boy thought he’d get away.

  “Interesting.” Corvus tugged the chain over his thick swordsman’s hand. The links bit into his wrist. It would chafe his human flesh, but the djinni didn’t care. The demon’s senses expanded through him, probing at the hollow cylinder about the size of his first finger joint. When his vision blurred with the djinni’s focus, the carved patterns on the bead churned inward to another dimension. The vast depth drew his attention deeper and deeper, where he would fall endlessly. . . .

  His stomach heaved with a purely human rea
ction and he jerked involuntarily. The demon recoiled, and without his conscious effort, his hand slapped over the bead.

  The youth flinched. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll get rid of it—”

  “No. No, we like this very much. Thank you, Andre. You have proved yourself once again a valuable ally.” Corvus smiled at the young man.

  Judging from Andre’s second flinch, though, Corvus thought perhaps he shouldn’t make the effort again. Ever since that fall from his penthouse citadel, the muscles in his face didn’t always respond as they should. And ever since his soul had been stolen from him, he’d had little reason to practice smiles.

  But with this trinket, he’d be able to avenge both those wrongs.

  Andre smoothed the nervousness from his expression. “Without you warning me to stay away from that solvo shit, it would’ve dissolved me for sure, and I wouldn’t’ve even cared.”

  “Indeed,” Corvus murmured. “It is hard to stay focused in the face of overwhelming pain. But that is what purifies and absolves us. You have risen above your pain and not dissolved into it. Which separates you from the rest.”

  That, and the fact that when Corvus had turned the young man toward the shadows and shown him what lurked there, Andre hadn’t screamed and bolted. Indeed, his crowing, “I knew it!” had been singularly anticlimactic.

  “Andre,” Corvus said slowly. “There was a woman to whom this charming bauble belonged.”

  Andre frowned. “I found the little demons and the chain at a pawnshop. The owner and the guy behind the counter were both men.” He hitched his pants higher. “You want me to find the woman who had it first.”

  Corvus nodded. The motion set his wayward eyeball rolling and upset his stomach again. “You have been an excellent soldier, Andre. It is time for you to become a centurion, to learn what we are truly fighting for. Follow the darklings’ sign. They will follow the woman. Do not approach her. She will be dangerous, to you and to me. But find her.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Jonah didn’t want to take Nim to the @1 sanctuary.

  Liam, though he had once been wholeheartedly devoted to the league, had given his heart to the second known extant female talya, Jilly. And it had been Liam’s suggestion—the coloring high in his Black Irish skin had hinted at his embarrassment—that Jonah pursue this latest female talyan in private. Jonah had been shocked that the formerly duty-bound league leader would underplay the only purpose of the mated-talyan bond: to form a stronger weapon in the battle against evil. His new priorities spoke volumes about the influence of his exceedingly rebellious woman.

  Now, as Jonah drove Nim out of the predawn city, he was grateful for the distance from his league brothers.

  How could he return with only half a weapon in hand? Nim, without her demon-wrought jewelry, was not the prize he’d sought. Nim, in her outrageously short skirt—when she’d bent over to scrutinize the jeweler’s case at the pawnshop, the curve of her buttocks had been nearly exposed at the apex of her long legs—was perhaps too much of a prize, at least for the companionship-starved males lurking in the halls of the league’s salvage warehouse.

  He’d been married, and he’d lost his wife. Whatever had happened to the long-ago female talyan hinted at in league archives, he knew what the remaining men really needed to complete them.

  But they’d want Nim’s hell-on-heels allure even more.

  He’d pity them if he had room for the sentiment in all the pity he was feeling for himself.

  His amoral associate cracked a yawn. “Where are we going? I’m beat.”

  “I want to take a look at this video. We need to find that anklet before things get out of hand.” More out of hand.

  “Nobody has VCRs anymore,” she said. “We couldn’t even have stolen one from the pawnshop. They only had DVD players.”

  “I know a place just enough behind the times to have what we need.”

  A streak of orange showed in the eastern sky, like the heating element of a toaster oven promising another broiling day, when they pulled up at the cinder-block building on the edge of the city proper.

  Nim stood with the open car door between her and their destination. “A church? You brought me to a church while I’m dressed like this?”

  “I was a churchgoing man.” He clipped the words off; whether he was dulling them for himself or sharpening them for her, she wasn’t sure. “And you dressed like that for me.”

  “Yeah, but I’m offending you on purpose.” She clutched the doorframe. “Is this your church?”

  “No. I don’t belong now.” And never would again. Thankfully, the reminder no longer had the power to wound him through the scars of years. He slammed his door and stalked around the front of the car.

  “Right. What with being possessed by a demon. That’d probably freak ’em out.”

  “Most, undoubtedly. But Nanette knows what we are. She is the wife of the pastor here, and is host to an angelic force.”

  Nim’s sneakers thudded on the concrete behind him as she scurried to catch up. “Angels? You didn’t tell me there are angels here on Earth.”

  “Didn’t it seem inevitable, once you knew demons existed?”

  “Just because brussels sprouts are healthy doesn’t mean they’re tasty.”

  He stopped in his tracks. “What?”

  “There are all sorts of bad things with no corresponding good.”

  He shook his head and continued on. “Why do you insist on dwelling on the evil?”

  “Being good is too hard. Doesn’t leave any room for failure. Speaking of failure, why’d you forget to tell me there’re good guys—real good guys, not good guys by comparison—in this fight?”

  “I didn’t forget. It’s just not relevant. They aren’t like us. They move in the human realm and live fragile, mortal, human lives. Most of the angelic forces don’t see fit to acknowledge our efforts. To them, a demon once, a demon forever.”

  “But the first devil was a fallen angel, right? Or do the angels think once you’ve fallen you can’t get up?”

  “There’s some question whether they might not be right.” He unlocked the double front door with a key from his ring and held it open for Nim.

  She regarded him suspiciously. “If demons are bad news, why did this Nanette chick give you a key to her place? And does her husband know?”

  “Since when does a stripper care about a betrayed spouse?”

  Nim stalked past him into the vestibule. “I don’t. I’ll just feel even less guilty now that I know you’re lying too.”

  “Nanette is protecting her husband from knowledge that would destroy his world.”

  “He’s a preacher, for God’s sake. He should already believe in good and evil.”

  “She wants him to keep believing that good has a chance.”

  “How nice for him that somebody cares enough to lie.”

  The lobby beyond was dark. Jonah’s vision flickered like a failing old television between black snow and grainy image as the demon swelled and short-circuited, struggling with its tricks in his broken body.

  “Nanette has seen that the battle doesn’t always go to the righteous,” he said. “Sometimes strategy, guile, and luck win the day. She wants the powers of light to have every possible advantage.”

  “So they have us, the wayward powers of darkness?” Her voice wavered, and he knew she was having as much difficulty as he adjusting her sight. But at least one day she would find her way through the demon’s conflicting energies.

  Cruelly, he didn’t turn on the light in the hallway, and only led her deeper into the church. “She hosts the weakest of angelic forces, and yet if more people were like her—kind, caring, loving—there’d be no room in this realm for demons.”

  Nim followed close behind him and stumbled on the stairs leading downward, but he couldn’t escape her comment. “Between Nanette and your wife, you’d have quite the virtuous harem.”

  He stopped abruptly at the bottom of the stairs, and she sm
acked into him.

  She didn’t reach out to steady herself, but the scent of her warm skin wreathed him in the lingering hint of incense.

  “You’re trying to offend me again,” he said. “Is it jealousy? My wife is dead. Nanette is married to a man she adores. They cannot come between what you and I will be to each other.”

  She recoiled. “We’re nothing to each other. Except maybe thorns in each other’s sides.”

  “Then the ache will help us remember why we are here.” When he faced her, her expanded pupils were shot with violet sparks.

  “That’s just sick,” she hissed.

  He leaned toward her and thumped the hook into the wall at her eye level. “This,” he said. “This is what we are to each other. Missing pieces that will never again be unbroken. But in the striving, we will atone.”

  She slapped her palm against the wall just above the hook and canted forward to get in his face. “I am not your phantom hand.”

  “A phantom would be quieter.” He stalked away from her, unlocked the storage room, and shoved open the door. This time, he turned on the light.

  Behind him, Nim sucked in another breath.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m sure Nanette has a VCR here with all this other junk.”

  “Junk?” Nim crept the last few steps to the doorway.

  He stepped in amid the half dozen people standing motionless around the stacked plastic chairs and folding tables, a rolling car with a slide projector, and a teetering pile of cardboard boxes labeled CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. None of the people moved to avoid him, spoke, or even blinked at the change of light. A misty haze hung in the air.

  Nim lingered in the doorway, her fingers pressed bloodlessly against the jamb. “Who are they?”

  “No one. Not anymore. Their souls have been stripped by a desolator numinis, a rare demonic weapon. Similar to the one you apparently sold for—what?—fifty bucks.”

  “Ten,” she whispered. “I told you, it looked like . . . junk.”

  “The desolator numinis was reengineered into a street drug called solvo and spread through the city.”

  “But solvo disappeared months ago. One of the girls at the club, her boyfriend was a dealer. She was complaining because as the source dried up, he got twitchy and weird, and then he . . .”