by Jessa Slade
She straightened and opened her arms. A chill down her spine made the small hairs at her nape prickle.
“Nim, no!” Ecco’s shout warped through the black fog. But his wasn’t the voice she wanted to hear.
“Come on, then,” she whispered. “Is this the darkness you feed on, you sucking little bastards? I’ll show you shadows.”
They came.
Fast as obsidian wasps, the malice swarmed her. The embers of their eyes burned, and their vicious shrill rose toward a scream.
No, that was Sera, shouting a warning. “Ecco! Coming through the window.”
Nim dragged her awareness out of the morass where she’d gone. The shattered windows at ground level shone red with the last of the setting sun. But the sun had set a half hour ago.
A hot wind spun slivers of glass across her shins. The wind stank of brittle rust. And death.
The red was the glow of salambes.
The malice cloud squealed and spun faster, then rose toward the ceiling. Her pulse, which had faded to a shallow rasp, kicked into the demon’s double beat as the sullen gleam climbed to the second set of windows, and then the third. How many of the tenebrae were out there?
Ecco’s chanted curses rose to a sharper pitch, which suddenly made her giggle. If the hulking talya was scared, they must be well and truly fucked.
Finally, she was living up to her full potential. And she didn’t need any man to do that.
“You wanted to see what we could do,” she reminded Jilly, who was standing nearby.
The shorter woman whirled around, her violet eyes widened. “Nim? Are you back with us?”
Nim frowned. “Where else would I be?”
“The Veil was thinning. You must have felt the cold.”
“Oh. That.”
Jilly grinned. “Yeah. Can you stop with the luring thing now? We’re about to be swamped.” Her grin faltered. “And there’s no way we can take them all.”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t know I’d started.”
Sera moved closer to them. “I’ve always used Ferris to pull myself back.”
“Your boyfriends aren’t here,” Ecco said. “Although it just so happens that I . . .”
He trailed off when Nim gave him a look, and she realized the other two women had leveled identical expressions on him. He shrugged. “Potential hot four-way action. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Maybe a three-way . . .” Nim hummed to herself. When the rent check was due, she’d always been willing to do scenarios outside her usual repertoire.
“That’d be fine,” Ecco said.
She ignored him and held her hands out to Sera and Jilly. “What makes us different from the guys?”
“Where to start?” Sera mused with a last glare at the grinning Ecco, and took Nim’s hand.
“We aren’t afraid to look inward, to touch.” Nim waggled her fingers, and Jilly finally took her hand and Sera’s, completing the small circle.
Nim swallowed hard, hoping she could choke down the lie. She’d always been afraid to look inward. And as for touching . . . It could be good. Jonah had showed her it could be good.
Even for repentant evil.
“I think this is weird,” Jilly said.
“I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Ecco said.
Jilly started to tug away, but Nim tightened her grasp. “No, stay with us. You said we can’t take them all. Not alone. I brought them”—boy, had she ever—“just like you told me to. Now you have to trap them.”
Jilly swallowed hard and closed her eyes. The reven that curled over her breast, barely visible above the band of gauze around her chest, sputtered, then flared again. “This was a bad idea.”
Sera tugged at her, lifting their joined hands to rattle the bracelet around Jilly’s wrist. “And if you want to live long enough for Liam to tell you that, over and over, you better set that trap.”
Jilly cracked one closed eye to peer at Sera. “All right, Miss Know-It-All.”
The bracelet glimmered with unnatural lights woven through the dull metal. Nim stared at the knot work, trying to follow even one bead of light sliding through the strands. She startled when Sera tightened her grasp.
“Don’t get caught in there,” Sera warned. “You won’t like where you go when it’s my turn to deal with them.”
The tenebraeternum. The demon realm.
Sweat beaded on Jilly’s brow despite the chill fog that had descended. The malice drifted lower too, their wild churning slowed to a sluggish writhe as they approached. The featureless black haze crystallized into claws and spiked tails and spiteful red eyeballs.
Nim’s skin prickled, the demon rising to the menace. She knew the little bastards, knew the creak of them that was like a door opening surreptitiously in the night when all should be still, like a cold, groping touch where no one had the right to touch her. This was why the demon had chosen her. Because she would fight with everything she had—with everything the teshuva gave her—to never be broken again.
Etheric smoke guttered in oily streamers like a backfiring junker car. But instead of staining the air as it had before, the smoke froze and splintered and fell to the floor. The black residue glazed the sparkling shattered glass until the footing was as treacherous as marbles under heel. Ecco, pacing close, crushed them and coughed at the lung-searing dust.
Nim tightened her grasp on the other two talyan. Beyond the frozen malice, the salambes raged, bigger and stronger. Even in their frenzy, they were better defined than their smaller cousins. Their off-center, upthrust tusks pierced the distorted blur around them. The teeth cast shadows like giants’ pike staves three stories up the brick walls.
The salambes circled, seeking a way in, but clearly unwilling to meet the same fate as the malice. Their hot, hungry breath tumbled the malice-encrusted glass shards around Nim’s shoes and rattled against the empty forty-ounce bottles. When she tried to kick a clear path around her feet, she almost stumbled on the precarious ground. The other women’s grasps on her hands kept her upright.
“Nim,” Jilly gasped. “Bring them closer.”
“That seems really dumb,” Nim said. But since when did dumb stop her? She steeled herself against the trembling in her knees. Not fear this time. Exhaustion. Could she do it again? Did she even understand what she’d done?
She’d been willing to embrace the doom of the malice. All because Jonah wouldn’t embrace her. So attractive was her self-destructiveness to the tenebrae, they couldn’t help but come closer. And closer. To their doom.
Maybe it was just as well she’d frightened Jonah away.
“That’s it, Nim,” Sera said. “Just a little closer . . .”
The salambes were an encroaching wall of disruptive ether. Inside her, Nim felt the teshuva falter, cutting out like a bad phone connection, overwhelmed by the massive attack.
Oh, they wanted her. Even more than the malice. They would take her and her demon and shred her—body and soul—on an etheric breeze. . . .
But she’d already decided she wasn’t giving up body or soul, not anymore, not to anyone else.
Brutally, like a grip on the stripper pole, she clamped down on the demon. “Come here, you. We’re in this together, forever. Amen.”
Even if becoming what Jonah wanted her to be—a lure to the darkness, her own shadows the bait—meant she would never be what he could love. Every girl who’d ever strapped on eight-inch, clear plastic heels knew where fantasy and reality parted without a last kiss good-bye.
She released the thought like a pheromone of anguish, and the salambes fell on her in a rushing wave.
Ecco shouted as Jilly loosed Sera and flung up her bracelet-clad hand, fingers spread wide and scattering light from the demonic artifact around her wrist. She brought her hand slicing down again. The crystallized malice echoed the motion, tumbling toward the salambes.
And the viscous black wrapped around and through the blistering red. The tangle constricted, flailing tusks and rol
ling eyeballs drawn tighter and tighter until the congealed mass was only a little larger than the three of them could have encompassed with their outstretched arms. Nim stood equidistant from Jilly and Sera around the noxious snarl.
Caught, the salambes shrieked out one multioctave cry that cracked the bricks. They strained, and little dust devils of unnatural flame skittered across the floor.
“Ah, fuck,” Ecco mumbled as he stomped out a blaze. “The teshuva can’t hold up walls.”
Between the growl of the crumbling bricks, the renewed cries of the tenebrae, and Ecco’s next curse, Nim almost missed the low hiss of the rising demon wind.
“My teshuva can break at least one wall.” The pendant around Sera’s neck gleamed, bright as her eyes. “The Veil to the demon realm.”
With a hollow boom, the tangled tenebrae mushroomed up in a cloud of dust, glass, and what else, Nim didn’t want to know. Before the pulsation knocked her backward, she caught a glimpse of something in the heart of the tangle. No, not something—someplace. Then she was skidding across the concrete floor. Her ears rang with the explosion and Ecco’s most energetic swearing to date.
She shook her head and levered herself upright on bloody palms, reaching for her demon inside.
To no avail. Could a demon be knocked offline, go into hiding inside her? Seemed so. Sera and Jilly looked equally stunned, Sera with a gash over her eye, as if one of the forty-ouncers had blown upward.
Only Ecco had kept his feet, and he held his gauntlets crossed at the ready, eyes wide and darting, seeking the next threat.
But the tenebrae were gone.
“Well,” Jilly said. She gathered her knees under her, but made no attempt to stand.
Sera just blinked. “Very enlightening.”
“If by ‘enlightening,’ you mean ‘explosive,’ ” Nim said.
“I’m always impressed how a little demonic ether, some bad will, and a few good intentions can go so skyhigh,” Sera admitted.
“Can we go home now?” Ecco asked. “Before what’s left of this building collapses on top of us.”
Nim, Sera, and Jilly looked at one another, then, with a sigh, pulled themselves upright. Sera touched her forehead and looked down at her bloody fingers.
Jilly bit her lip. “Can you heal before Archer gets back?”
“Or at least come up with a story?” Nim suggested.
“About walking into a door?” Sera gave them a faint grin. “I’ll have a few hours.”
Ecco cocked his head. “Or maybe less.”
Nim stiffened. Had he heard the league’s cars returning? Then she heard it too. A rumble and growl.
But it wasn’t a league of angry men.
A feralis vaulted into one of the dozen empty windows. From its vantage-point perch, it stretched its naked, birdlike neck toward them and shrieked.
“Bitch, please,” Ecco said to it. “You should see what the girls just did to your compadres.”
Before his sneer faded, another feralis appeared in the window beside the first. And then, with a flap of wings, the window above held a third feralis. In half a faltering heartbeat, the rest of the windows filled with tenebrae shadows that eclipsed the night outside.
The first feralis tightened its serrated claws on the windowsill, cracking through the last shards of glass, which rained down in a shimming dust. As one, the horde lifted to their haunches and screamed.
Nim winced. “Oh, hell.”
CHAPTER 17
The search was a bust. Even O’Hare, with its chronic delays, hadn’t produced more than a half dozen nests of malice, grown Cinnabon sleek off the annoyance and desperation of stranded passengers.
Jonah slouched in the passenger’s seat beside Liam after the car pulled away from the Mortal Coil, leaving behind a pack of morose talyan to brood in their beer. Liam had handed the @1 credit card to Archer and told him not to let anyone take out their disappointment on innocent bystanders. Their anger might get the best of them, but, conveniently, their demon-fueled metabolism would ensure they burned through the alcohol and were sober before they drove home.
Jonah had never used his teshuva for such a reason, and when Liam announced he was forgoing the antifestivities to check on the wounded Jilly, Jonah jumped on the chance to head to the warehouse.
He wanted to get back. Not to the warehouse. The place didn’t matter. Just back to her.
Nando and Haji had elected to skip the club. “Why drink? There’s nothing to celebrate until we get Blackbird.” Haji stretched his lanky tracker body across the backseat. “And nothing to mourn until he kills me.”
“And I already have a headache,” Nando said, rubbing at his eye patch.
As he had for Archer, Jonah recounted for Liam the encounter with Cyril Fane, and they tossed around possible outcomes of an alliance—or a war—with the angelic host. Both seemed inadvisable.
As they approached the industrial park, he and Liam fell silent, gazes scanning the dark streets.
“You got that feeling on the back of your neck?” Liam asked quietly.
“No,” Nando said.
Jonah tightened his fist. “Yes. Turn here.”
But Liam was already turning, apparently drawn on the same garrote tightening around Jonah’s chest. The tires rumbled a warning over the abandoned rail line.
Nando slung his arm over Jonah’s seat. “Where are we—Oh.”
The building at the end of the tracks seemed to twitch. Ferales swarmed in uncountable numbers across its surface, their wings and tails and claws a rattling hiss in the night.
“I never really appreciated the word ‘horde’ before,” Haji said.
Bricks tumbled from the top cornice of the building, as if the structure writhed in pain. Demonic emanations had amassed to such pressure, ether steamed from the upper windows like a kettle about to scream. The same force leapt into Jonah’s throat.
“That doesn’t look long for this world,” Nando commented. “So remind me: Why are we getting out of the car?”
Jonah had fumbled the door open before Liam brought the car to a halt. The other bonded talya was only a half step behind him as he raced for the building.
What could possibly lure this many tenebrae to one place?
As if he even needed to ask.
He hit the first feralis before it knew he was there and easily scaled the eight-foot, sloping spine to bury his hook in its chest. In silence, he wrenched the hook upward. Ichor spilled in a stinking gush.
The demon’s frustrated power rebounded through him, and its frenzied craving to be unleashed aligned with his one desire: to be with Nim.
The two nearest ferales cringed away. He ripped through them in one blow and clambered over the husks to boost himself into the open window.
The interior was awash in tenebrae. The sour scent of rot yanked his breath away as effortlessly as he had disemboweled the ferales.
Ecco was a dervish, gauntlets invisible under ichor and feralis chunks. He slashed with deadly grace, but only the sheer mass—the horde getting in its own way—kept him from being overwhelmed. At his back, Sera and Jilly formed the other two points of a triangle, holding back the tide with their small and deadly knives.
Nim stood in the middle, looking lost in the fray.
As Jonah launched himself through the window, he wondered acidly why Jilly—who loved to visit the league’s weapons depot—hadn’t seen fit to arm Nim before their girls’ night out.
Since he’d carelessly not seen to the task himself. He’d kick himself later. If they survived.
He cried out a warning, his throat cracking with the crisscross of human fury and demonic ecstasy. He’d sacrifice the surprise attack to let the defenders know help had arrived. Although only four more talyan against the horde . . .
Liam and the other two talyan exploded through the windows on either side of him, and they fell on the rear of the packed ferales.
As if oblivious to the new attack, the ferales continued to press inward. Liam swu
ng his hammer, blasting through three ferales at a time, yet they didn’t turn to rend him or try to flee. Instead, they yearned toward Ecco and the women. Toward Nim. They had to get to her and stop the lure, or who knew what else she’d bring down on their heads.
First, though, Jonah had to get through the concentric rings of ferales. And while the tenebrae weren’t focused on him, they’d exterminate him if he made it convenient enough.
As he spun past the outer circle, a feralis with spiderlike forelegs reached for him. He ducked, found himself face to . . . mandibles with its second, lower head. When he lashed out, it reared back, and he followed, knocking it over. He scrambled across its belly, his boots slipping on the ulcerated gray skin, and then sprang toward the next layer of tenebrae.
Disoriented in the melee, he couldn’t see even Ecco’s tall form. And yet some awareness drew him irresistibly onward. The bond or Nim’s lure? Or were the two the same? Certainly every man in her orbit felt the magnetism, bonded or not. And so, obviously, did every demon.
He had to stop it. Stop her.
The ring of tenebrae drew tighter. He leapt from one gutted feralis corpse to the next—except that one moved. It tossed him off his feet and he sprawled in a pool of ichor. The acidic black burned at his hand as he pushed himself upright.
Inside him, the teshuva reached greedily for the feralis’s death throes, matching itself to the resonance and drawing off the emanations to refresh itself. But he didn’t have time to indulge its hungers. He tore free, just in time to dodge a winged feralis that dove in and tried to grab his head from his shoulders. He ducked behind another lumbering, roachlike monstrosity.
The flying feralis shrieked and winged backward with a blast of fouled air. Jonah spun away as the feralis dove at him again.
A wicked whistle of blades cut through the air. And through the feralis’s outstretched talons.
It screamed, a piteous sound, but Ecco had zero pity. With a series of blurred punches like a speed-bag boxing workout, he diced the feralis. He reached out with his other hand and pulled Jonah into the inner circle.
“Jonah!” Nim’s voice rang with pure elation. She threw herself against his chest.
