Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  “Something about you tweaked them.”

  “Me?” She wished she hadn’t squeaked the word.

  “I’ve been through this crowd a half dozen times and they never twitched.”

  “Well, aren’t you special?”

  “No, but you must be.”

  “My mama would be so proud.” She’d meant it as a joke, but she choked on the bitterness that welled up instead. “I want to get out of here.”

  He nodded. “We need to retrieve that bracelet.” For all the distractions flying around, he hadn’t forgotten what he’d really wanted. Of course not. She wasn’t that much of a distraction, after all. The realization needled her. “Fine. I don’t want a demon weapon laying around my apartment anyway.” Other than herself, of course.

  And from the unabated shiver of her skin, she wondered if she’d mind having the unfathomable demon weapon that was Liam Niall lying in her bed.

  They crossed out of the park to the other side of the fence, where traffic and life continued, unwitting of the army in stasis among the trees.

  Jilly glanced back as Liam waved down a taxi. She tugged her coat closer around her. “They’re like Emperor Qin’s thousands of terra-cotta warriors, waiting for the afterlife.”

  “Considering that more than one tyrant liked to take living victims as funerary accompaniments, I doubt what waited for them was heaven.” When the taxi pulled over, Liam opened the door for her. “Dictators have a bad habit of draining resources to build their clay armies. The djinn-man who drained these haints came to the same bad end. Now we’re left with the dust and debris.”

  Jilly deftly avoided his helping hand and slid in to the backseat. “Chinatown,” she told the driver before scowling at Liam as he climbed in beside her. “How can you talk like that? They are people.”

  “Are they? Without souls?”

  Jilly hushed him, inclining her head toward the front seat.

  Liam shrugged. “No one believes all the crazy talk about souls. Right?”

  The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’m as infidel as they come.”

  Liam grinned at Jilly. “See?”

  Jilly settled back. “You’re very cavalier with other people’s souls, lives, whatever.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it.” But his grin faded, and he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. She didn’t think he was resigned at all.

  Still, his regret didn’t change the fact that—more brutal than any ancient emperor—he’d lead them all to destruction to achieve his ends.

  They rode the rest of the way to her apartment in silence.

  The old Sears Tower was a dramatic charcoal spike at the end of Wentworth Avenue, but Chinatown was oddly quiet, stuck between the business-lunch crowds and the evening go players, sipping tea while they flipped their black-and-white stones. No one stopped to peer into the import and herb shop on the ground floor under her apartment, despite the OPEN sign spelled out in orange neon in English and Mandarin.

  Jilly lingered on the sidewalk. “Play it cool, okay? Better yet, just stand there and keep your mouth shut.”

  Liam finished paying and glanced back at her with a frown. “What do you—?”

  “Xiao-Jilly!”

  She turned, blocking Liam. “Hi, Lau- lau. How’s business today?”

  “Better, if you have brought me a shopper.” The old woman sidestepped Jilly, keen black gaze roaming the length and breadth of him. “You don’t feed him enough. Haven’t I told you—”

  Jilly closed her eyes and took a calming breath. “Duck and plum sauce. I know.”

  “It is almost suppertime,” Liam pointed out, not helpfully.

  Jilly tsked. “Too bad about those darn MSG headaches.”

  “No MSG in my cooking,” Lau- lau broke in. “And I have soup on the stove. With dumplings.”

  Liam tagged behind her. “Dumplings sound good.”

  Jilly brought up the rear, staring daggers that no one noticed.

  Or so she thought. When Lau- lau slipped behind the beaded bamboo curtain separating the back room, Liam pulled her close. “Your neighbor recognized something about the bracelet. I just want to hear what she knows and then we’re gone.”

  Unreasonably, she was offended on her elderly neighbor’s behalf. “Taste and run, huh? Nice. You really know how to treat the ladies.” Not that she meant herself and that kiss.

  Liam’s expression was as smooth as the jade Buddha’s belly next to her. “I just want to make sure she’s not in any danger from whatever your demon brought along for the ride.”

  “And make sure that she’s not a demon in disguise.” His lips quirked. “Oh, she’s more frightening than any demon. She’s a matchmaker.” His gaze slipped past her and his smile widened as he stepped forward to take the laden tray from Lau-lau. He took a deep breath. “Ah. Egg flower soup and green tea. With lotus blossom?”

  Lau-lau beamed. “Your senses are exquisite.”

  Jilly rolled her eyes at their flirting and pushed aside a display of corkscrew bamboo shoots on the counter to make room for the tray. She took her soup and a teacup and went to perch on a ceramic plant stool.

  Liam cradled the small cup in his big hands. “I find I have a deepening appreciation for Far Eastern exotics.” When Jilly choked on her scalding tea, he went on blandly, “Jilly tells me you liked the bracelet I gave her.”

  She set down her cup with a clatter. “You didn’t—”

  Liam glanced at her. His eyes were half lidded, but the warning clouds in the dark blue stopped her. “I didn’t appreciate the nuances before, but I always knew it was perfect for you, sweetheart.”

  Lau-lau’s glance shuffled between the two of them.

  Jilly knew the only gossip to beat a charming romance was a bitter breakup. She eased back on her hard seat. “Well, xiao-long, at least you know when you need to make amends.” She hoped her sideways glower told him the reparations would be steep indeed.

  Lau-lau chuckled. “Xiao-long? Have you forgotten your Mandarin? Haven’t I told you not to ignore your past?” She lowered her voice, as if Liam weren’t right there. “I very much doubt he has a little dragon.”

  Jilly smiled sweetly and sipped her tea.

  Liam cleared his throat. “Of course not. After all, you did tell Jilly the bracelet is good luck. And she sure needed it.”

  Lau-lau nodded. “True, true. And good luck for you too that she brought you to me for your little . . . ailment. I have an infusion for that.” She rose to poke through her herb cabinet. With each drawer she opened, another scent wafted into an invisible whirlwind of florid and dank that puckered Jilly’s sinuses.

  Over the scuttle of dried leaves and paper packets, Liam whispered, “This won’t kill me, will it?”

  “If not, maybe I will. ‘Sweetheart’?”

  “ ‘Little dragon’?” he shot back.

  She shrugged.

  “Chinese knot work does more than bring good luck,” Lau-lau said over her shoulder. “But confusing demons won’t help your problem either.”

  Jilly and Liam locked glances.

  “What kind of demons?” Jilly kept her voice as casual as when she asked one of her kids if they really thought getting double-digit piercings would help with their job hunts. And speaking of hunts, the stark pattern of Liam’s marking blazed as he fixed the old woman with an intent stare. “Just bad demons?”

  “All demons are bad.” Lau-lau dumped the ingredients she’d collected into the hollow of a marble mortar. She tapped the matching pestle briskly against the bowl. “But little-dragon syndrome is caused by poor circulation, not demons.” She chuckled.

  Jilly managed a weak echo. “Confusing demons. How quaint.”

  “In the old stories, demons get lost in the intertwined patterns of the knot and bother you no more.” Lau- lau crushed the herbs, releasing a scent unlike any that had gone into the bowl. The faint musk evoked moonlight on rumpled bedsheets.

  Jilly shook her head. She certainly didn’t
believe in that herbal crap.

  Of course, she had to believe in demons now too. She held her breath until the leaf dust had settled. Or until her hormones had.

  Lau-lau whisked around the counter and dumped the contents of the mortar into the remains of Liam’s tea. “There. That’ll put the snap back in your New Year dragon firecracker.”

  “Why, thank you, ma’am.” He smiled, looking only slightly less green than the contents of the cup.

  As Lau-lau cleared away the soup, Jilly smirked at Liam. “What are you waiting for? I thought talya fighters were immortal.”

  He peered doubtfully into his tea. “We don’t die, but we can be killed.”

  She snorted. “Lau-lau has only been a person of interest in one poisoning.”

  “Oh. Well, then.” He downed the tea in a gulp, then set down the cup.

  A droplet lingered on the center of his bottom lip, and Jilly realized she was staring. Worse, she wanted to brush away that drop. She dropped her gaze guiltily and tucked her hands under her seat.

  He huffed out a breath. “Not bad. Tastes like . . .”

  She glanced up and caught the flicker of his smile. If he did that more often, smiled like he had a secret he wanted to share, she might actually be in some trouble here. “Tastes like what?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe you should take a sip.”

  “You finished it all.”

  He just looked at her.

  Heat flashed through her, sudden and overpowering. Only Lau-lau’s return kept her from leaping to her feet and . . . she wasn’t sure. Even if the knot-work bracelet was capable of leading demons like hers astray, that still didn’t explain the waywardness of her purely human response to the man sitting just out of arm’s reach.

  Lau-lau glanced at his cup. “Good man. You don’t fuck around.”

  Jilly swiveled on her seat to goggle at the old woman.

  Liam inclined his head solemnly. “Ma’am, indeed I don’t.”

  “Up you go, then.” Lau-lau grinned at Jilly. “You can pay me later.”

  CHAPTER 6

  They left the shop and climbed the steep, narrow stairs past Lau-lau’s second-floor apartment to Jilly’s garret loft on the third floor.

  Liam hummed to himself as she unlocked the door. “A knot-work labyrinth. The Celts had similar stories in their mythology.”

  So the calm, cool, and collected commander wanted to ignore all the irrelevant stuff that had happened downstairs. How very calm, cool, and collected of him.

  “Sacred path or trap,” he continued, all professorial, “depends on what you find in the center.”

  God knew what happened in her center every time he turned that deep gaze on her. Butterflies, felt like. Butterflies couldn’t be evil, could they?

  She opened the door and stripped off her jacket. She paused, looking down the entry hall, past the cheap pine table with its collection of random papers and knickknacks to the kitchen doorway and the living room visible at the far end. Lately, whenever she stood here, it seemed that the place should be different. She had changed so much over the last year.

  The attack. Rico’s subsequent trial and conviction. More recently, her firing. And now the demon.

  “What’s wrong?” Liam’s hand was a solid, warm pressure between her shoulder blades. “Is something out of place?”

  Besides her? For a weak moment, she was glad he stood there, a convenient focus for her confusion.

  “I found the bracelet on the floor here. After I . . .” She turned back to the hallway table. She rummaged through the catchall bowl. The etched glass chimed with the discordant music of spare keys and loose change. “I tossed it in here somewhere. Ah.”

  She lifted the bracelet. The matte silvery metal was an intricate design of finer strands woven over and under each other, coming together and separating again, doubling back to form a flat cuff just wider than her two fingers when she held it aloft. The convoluted weave, glimmering between the strands, made her eyes ache.

  “It needs polishing,” she said.

  “Nothing in this realm would touch it.” He showed no inclination to, peering at it from a short distance. A flicker of violet deepened his blue eyes to a midnight storm. “Gangue—that’s the waste rock around a mineral deposit—and fluorspar. See the shine? But it’s a demon artifact, all right. The etheric mutation is strong enough that the base matter of it isn’t even rooted in this world anymore.”

  She clenched her fist, and the edges of the bracelet bit into her palm. She wanted to drop it, punt kick it back to whence it came, along with the demon who’d presented it.

  “I came home late after the homeless outreach at the park. That was the first time I saw you, wasn’t it? I didn’t remember until I saw you in the alley last night.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling him. Except who else could explain the beginning of this end she had come to?

  He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We talyan have a knack for blending into the shadows. Occupational hazard.”

  “I think I was still furious that Envers had fired me and then been so kind as to ‘let’ me work the event. Anyway, I went out for a drink after.” She hesitated, then met his gaze levelly. “Maybe it was more than one drink. When I came home, you were here.”

  The violet flare in his eyes was unmistakable this time. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out already. At the time, though, I wasn’t thinking quite right. I wanted a fight. Or something. And then here was this guy, too skinny and sad looking to be scary.”

  He pursed his lips. “Definitely not me.”

  The violet highlights of the demon overlay in his eyes almost distracted her, but underneath, she caught a glimpse of the imaginary man in her apartment whose ass she’d hesitated to kick that night. What had the demon teased her with? A lie? Or some deeper truth?

  She shook her head, not agreeing with him, but banishing the distracting thought. Whatever—whoever—was hiding under his duster and feral tattoo didn’t matter; the clan chieftain he’d become would never let it out.

  Probably best. For both of them.

  She continued. “The thing pretending to be you gave me the bracelet.”

  Liam studied her as if he heard the reticence in her tone. “Just gave it to you.”

  “Sort of dropped it. After I punched you. It.”

  “Punched it. What happened to sad and skinny?”

  “Well, there was a strange man in my apartment. And it was standing too close. And then its eyes turned creepy.”

  “Creepy?” Liam cut himself off and said between gritted teeth, “Can you just tell me what happened? In order?”

  She huffed out a breath. “I came home from the bar. You—it was waiting for me. For some reason, I wasn’t afraid.”

  “Back to the skinny and sad thing.” He sounded irked.

  “Am I telling this story? We talked for just a minute about . . . nothing, really. Then it tried to kiss me. But its eyes turned all solid white with little black slashes.” The remembered horror made her voice shake, and she cleared her throat. “Anyway, I took my comic books seriously as a kid and I know that’s never going to end well. So I decked it. It dropped the bracelet, and the sound of metal hitting the floor woke me up.”

  “Or sobered you up, since you said you were drunk.”

  She tapped the bracelet against her leg in annoyance. “I said I had a few drinks. I wasn’t drunk enough to black out or hallucinate.”

  “Just drunk enough to let it touch you.”

  Her thigh, where she’d flicked the bracelet, tingled. “That’s how I was possessed? Because I wanted . . .” She swallowed the rest of the words. After all, it didn’t matter what she’d wanted. Whom she’d wanted.

  After a moment, he shook his head, his expression shuttered. “The demon had chosen you. Your possession was inescapable.” His blue gaze pierced her, so unlike the eerie white of the demon’s eyes that had finally snapped her from her daze. “What did you want, Jilly?”

>   She felt she could fall endlessly into that deep blue. Except he was a trap worse than any other, the kind where a girl could forget to fight her way free. “You said it didn’t matter what I wanted. Maybe I’ll give the parting gift back.”

  “Impossible. The only thing worse than your having it would be leaving it for something more evil to find.”

  “More evil than me. You sure know how to charm a girl.” She slipped the bracelet over her wrist and backed away from him.

  “The demon had time for that. I don’t.” He stalked after her, and the prickle that had started in her spread at the predatory intentness of his gaze, until every nerve seemed to stand at attention. She wondered if she’d have to attack him as she had his demon double. And if she’d have any better luck this time around.

  He made no move to touch her, only circled around her to cast sidelong glances into the tiny galley kitchen, then the living room with its mass-produced Scandinavian furnishings.

  She watched him narrowly. “Nothing so cool as your warehouse. And I only got the one piece of weird jewelry.”

  “I was just checking to see if the surveillance equipment was in place as I ordered.”

  She froze. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re obviously on the verge of your virgin ascension, and it will be enlightening to have the event on tape.”

  The short hairs on the back of her neck rippled. Fury, she recognized idly. Even the demon—an entity of pure, if repentant, evil—hadn’t pissed her off so bad. “I am not a guinea pig.”

  “No. Presumably a demon wouldn’t find much use for a guinea pig.” He poked at the phone on the table beside the couch, then peered under the fringe of the lampshade. “Ah, there it is. Good.” He swiveled on his heel and settled onto the couch. He flicked aside the hem of his duster and splayed the dark canvas across her generic but easy-to-clean upholstered cushions.

  She narrowed her eyes. How easy to clean—now, that would be worth analyzing as she scrubbed his blood out. “I’m not going to transform before your eyes.”

  “You are already.” Violet gleamed as he swept her with a glance. “I can see the dilation in your eyes, the capillary expansion flushing your skin.” He took a long breath.