Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  “You sacrifice them every night,” she hissed. “It’s just that they’re immortal, so they survive.”

  If her words penetrated his imperturbable armor, she couldn’t see it. “Be that as it may, you’ll wait.”

  She relaxed in his hold until he loosened his grip; then she tore free. The better to turn her glare on him. But she didn’t bolt off again.

  Sera walked past them, tracing the wand through the air in a slow-motion wave like some demented fairy godmother. “Emanation spike here.” She studied them reprovingly, a glint of violet in her hazel eyes. “Get a grip, you two.”

  Jilly tamped down her wayward emotions. Liam’s already perfectly composed face didn’t change at all. Probably that spike was all her fault. Never mind the blue hair dye, she’d always been the hotheaded one. And look where it had gotten her.

  She resisted the urge to look over at her sister.

  Sera completed a circuit of the room, Archer never leaving her side. She frowned as she approached Liam. “Something odd just—Oh hell.”

  “What?”

  “Hell,” she said more urgently.

  As one, the haints took a gasping breath. An etheric shock wave passed through the room at that moment. What was left of the walls seemed to bow inward, on the edge of collapse.

  Jilly clamped her hand under her breast where the flare of her teshuva’s mark stole her breath worse than a kick to the ribs. Though he must have suffered a similar blow to his reven like an instant migraine, Liam never flinched. He spun and pulled her under the edge of his coat just as yellow poison suddenly gushed from the birnenston stalactites, splashing across the floor in all directions. As if the stones themselves wept in the presence of what had arrived.

  Through the bilious fog, a deeper shadow moved. Nothing corporeal, just a suggestion of a looming monstrosity given shape by the smoking birnenston. Something misshapen and ghastly, with a half-crescent extrusion cutting up through the fog like an off-center horn or enormous tooth or scythe. No, not one monstrosity, but a dozen.

  The demons had returned to their lair.

  CHAPTER 10

  Liam whirled, putting Jilly behind him as he faced the attackers. His heart leapt into his throat, and a half step after, his demon leapt into his extremities and a word appeared on his tongue. “Salambes.”

  Shock and a taste bitter as dry ashes licked from a cold anvil made him grimace. The teshuva had surged past his humanity to give him that name. As if a name did them any good unless it had fairy-tale authority to command the demons, but he saw no hesitation in the attack at his outcry.

  No, the only change was inside him. The unprecedented shift in the way the demon melded with him worried him as much as these unknown, unbound tenebrae. Change had never been in the league’s favor.

  The other talyan had already gone into fight mode. They fell into their old solitary-hunter stances instead of aligning themselves into a team as they’d been drilling. They’d been working the new patterns for only a few months, but he’d hate to have all that effort wasted. About as much as he’d hate seeing all of them wasted by the new demons.

  As he called out for the talyan to regroup, frustration boiled through him. Just what the hell was a salambe? Big as a feralis, but only half materialized, like a malice. League archives hinted at a vast array of demon subspecies in the tenebraeternum, but only a few kinds seemed disposed to slip through the Veil into the human realm. Had there been a breach? Such had never happened in his memory; would he even recognize one?

  It was bad enough to fight in the shadows; the teshuva kept him fighting in the dark. If only he could know everything his demon knew. The taste of ashes choked him again. So maybe not.

  The things came forward through the birnenston fog but never gained substance. A stink like rusting metal flooded the chamber.

  With a battle cry, Ecco broke ranks and rushed forward, his gauntlets crossed for a fatal cut. But when he launched himself at the demon, he passed right through it and crashed to the floor on the other side.

  The demon phased. Liam could think of no other word. It curled into a column of smoke and streamed into the nearest haint. The limp, pallid haint—a slender, sandy-haired man—suddenly flushed and straightened. His brown eyes clouded, then drained of color. For a moment, only bleached whiteness stared out.

  Until a speck of red brightened the orb. Broken blood vessels spidered across the white, unbearably vivid. He turned on Ecco with inhuman quickness, at least one joint in his leg snapping with the strain.

  Liam shouted a warning, but Ecco was already up, ready to face the threat. All around them, the salambes phased into the quiescent haints, and blank human eyes flared. But the connection was imperfect. Like a monster wearing an ill-fitting human suit, the salambes seemed to lurk over and behind the soulless human husks, as if they couldn’t quite cram themselves in. Human flesh blushed feverishly. As one of the haint/salambe pairings jumped toward him, Liam felt the heat wave like a forge fired to the danger point.

  He yanked Jilly out of the way, only to realize another doubled-up demon had sneaked up behind. Jilly used the momentum of his pull to fire off a gutter-punk kick that knocked the woman-wearing salambe backward.

  “Tag teaming allowed,” Jilly growled.

  The thing toppled but sprang back so quickly the woman’s head rocked. The crack of her spine made Liam’s hairs stand on end. Her head flopped to one side, and the outline of the salambe’s vaguely reptilian skull towered over her shoulders like a fiendish bobblehead.

  The haint rushed Jilly.

  “Down,” he shouted.

  Jilly dropped to her knees. The hammer was already swinging without his conscious thought. Its dull whistle howled through the air.

  He knocked the haint clear across the chamber. Before the body hit the wall, the salambe had phased free and poured itself into the next nearest haint, which spun to face them, its exposed skin already starting to blister from the conflicting energies of human and demon realms.

  “Keep them moving, people,” Liam shouted. “They’ll burn out.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Archer and Sera work in tandem to force the salambe to leap from one haint to next. The abandoned bodies collapsed, steaming faintly. Then he was too busy to oversee as Jilly pushed a salambe-ridden haint his way. He dispatched it with a mighty thunk.

  It was just butchery.

  Between the talyan’s weapons and the salambes’ caustic emanations, the haints were destroyed. When the last soulless husk collapsed, the smoke of incorporeal salambes swirled into a single thick column, then split, the half dozen streams escaping out into the hallway, through the ventilation grate, through a crack by the window to disperse on the midnight breeze.

  Ecco let out a yell and raised his gauntleted fists as if the gore-smeared razors could stop the smoke.

  The stink of rusting metal dissipated. The salambes were gone.

  Bracing the hammerhead on the floor, Liam knelt beside the haint of the first woman he had flung across the chamber. The bloodied eyes were gone. Not back to human color. Just gone. The burned-out sockets stared up at him, empty except for the accusation that carved another divot in his already patchy soul.

  Even as he watched, the soulless husk began to crumble. He touched its forehead and in another moment only dust remained.

  Jilly stood beside him. “You wondered what would happen when the soulless died.”

  “Did they die?” He pulled himself upright with the hammer as support. “We can only hope.”

  She shuddered, and he dragged her close.

  “Hey,” she protested, but she didn’t pull away.

  “That’s what happens when a poorly integrated human and her demon don’t play nicely together.” He forced himself not to wrap himself around her, shelter her from the horror. He wasn’t coddling her, just trying to make sure she hadn’t overdone the battle. She was so new to her own changes. “How are you? Hurt anywhere?”

  Jilly stared down at
the dust. “Not compared to that.”

  Liam glanced around at the other talyan. All of them were standing, except Jonah, who’d been thrown into a shattered pile of lathe.

  Ecco smirked at Jonah. “Hey, missionary man. You don’t actually have to crucify yourself. The demon’ll take care of that for you.”

  Jonah heaved himself up, scrabbling through the trash as he reached for Ecco’s throat. Perrin hauled him back to pick the bent nails out of his hide.

  “Enough.” Liam pitched his command soft and low to cut through the ruckus.

  He felt Jilly shiver against him and knew the demon harmonics were in his voice. The men subsided, reluctantly, and edged away from each other. The energies of the risen demons always crackled uncomfortably against one another, probably one of the reasons talyan had historically been solitary hunters. But they could no longer stand alone against the forces hunting them back.

  “What the fuck is a salambe?” Though the immediate threat had gone out the window, Archer was still standing guard over his woman, axe in hand, as Sera reassembled the scattered pieces of the ESF recorder. “I heard you yell.”

  Liam rubbed his temple where the reven still pulsed. “The teshuva just slipped the word into my head.”

  As one, the talyan lifted their eyebrows. Archer said slowly, “That’s . . .”

  “Fucked-up beyond all recognition,” Ecco supplied.

  Archer shifted his axe. “Odd. Since when do the teshuva give us anything besides what gets us into more trouble?”

  “Let’s not assume they’ve broken tradition,” Liam said drily. “We’ll have to find the reference in league archives.”

  “Never mind the history books,” Ecco growled. “Even hardcovers don’t do enough damage when you throw them.”

  Archer’s scowl said he was inclined to agree. “With the discontinuity in our Bookkeeper line, we could be digging through old records for weeks and never find anything that will help us here and now. We already knew the soullessness of the haints can destabilize the weave of repenting souls that form the Veil. No surprise, considering the escalating number of solvo junkies, the weakness in the Veil let something like a salambe sneak through. The salambes filled the empty haints like they were coming home.”

  “Just long enough to burn the house down,” Jilly murmured from where Liam still had her tucked under his arm. When he looked down at her, surprised she’d stayed so long, she touched his stomach and lowered her voice another half step. “Your demon mark is still glowing. Relax. The danger’s over. For now.”

  He took a shallow breath, afraid to dislodge her hand. That was a danger too enticing to dismiss.

  But he had to get the talyan back on track. “We might not care about the salambes’ provenance, but we want to know how to destroy them. The malice are incorporeal too, but small enough to restrain while the teshuva matches their emanations and drains them. We can do the same with the ferales, once they are incapacitated in their corporeal husks. But the salambes have the advantages of both, and are stronger than malice and smarter than ferales.”

  “Not smart enough to keep weaponry in their lair,” Ecco said. “Without the haints to maneuver, they had nothing.”

  “Good thing,” Archer said. “Or they could have massacred us.”

  Ecco sniffed. “You maybe, forgetting yourself while watching your mate’s ass.”

  “Watching my back, you mean,” Sera said distractedly.

  Archer and Ecco exchanged a glance. Archer shrugged.

  Sera missed it all as she brought the recorder over to Liam. The screen was cracked, but when it whirred to life, the spike in etheric-spectral frequencies was unnervingly clear.

  “That’s where the . . . the salambes appeared,” Sera said. “But you can see the background readings were already high, and not just from the birnenston. These demons have been camping out.”

  Liam glanced over at the decimated haints and the junkies sprawled obliviously against the far wall. “How long have the demons been cultivating these?”

  “No way to tell,” Sera said. “Human readings won’t show on the recorder.”

  Jilly strained away from him. “Because why would the league care about humans anyway, right? Let me go.”

  He did, and she went straight to her sister.

  Though there’d been a picture of Dory Chan in Jilly’s dossier, the emaciated, ragged blonde on the floor bore no resemblance at all to the curves and lush colors of his tyro talya. Only the roots of their hair were the same. Liam couldn’t guess how Ecco had made the connection. He’d wondered before if there was more to the brutish fighter than flashing gauntlets, but had never had reason to pry.

  Jilly knelt beside her sister and took the limp hand. She brushed back the stringy bleached hair. Even across the room, he heard Jilly’s despondent sigh.

  He realized Sera was watching him watch Jilly. “What?”

  She didn’t flinch, but as usual, questions churned in her hazel eyes. “Nothing.”

  “You female talyan are . . .” He bit back the rest, though gritting his teeth set off a fresh stab of pain through his skull. To match the pain in his ass.

  She tilted her head. “Yes?”

  “Never mind. Collect some of the detritus from these burned-out haints. We’ll want it for comparison.” He stalked across the room to Jilly’s side.

  She lifted her sister’s arm. “The track marks are fresh.”

  “Then she’s probably not using solvo.” He didn’t add “yet.”

  “The salambes only jumped into the soulless, did you notice? They didn’t even try to possess these people, which means she still has her soul.”

  “So it seems.”

  She glared, not at him exactly. Maybe at the universe around him. “We got here in time. We got her in time.”

  Pity the universe if it let her down. Liam shook his head. “Come on. We need to go.” He put a hand under Dory’s armpit and levered her up. She weighed barely more than his coat. Without the hammer strapped into it.

  Jilly slung her sister’s arm over her shoulder. “You said the salambes were cultivating her. You mean turning her into a haint.”

  “When we get her sobered up, maybe we can ask her.”

  “That’s the only reason you think she’s worth saving.” Minus the sharp sting of accusation, Jilly’s tone broke with resignation.

  “No.” He didn’t elaborate. Not with Sera across the room watching him with violet-tinged eyes that meant her demon senses were measuring his every capillary betrayal.

  Dory most likely was beyond hope. And whatever she could tell them wouldn’t change what he had to do. Yet for the sake of the grieving woman at his side, he wished cavalries really did ride to the rescue, that heroes really could save the day. The ravager twisted inside him, a rude reminder that heroes might have day jobs, but the talyan performed best at night.

  He looked down at the twinkle of Jilly’s nose stud, and his fingers yearned to thread through the blue spikes of her hair. The passion with which she threw herself into the fray terrified him. And enticed him. He’d almost be tempted to rebel too, but he wouldn’t force someone else to step in to fill his vacancy. If he pierced a stud through his lips, it would be only to keep himself from telling them all he’d never wanted this hopeless task laid at his feet and he was tired of leading this painstaking charge to the end of the world, one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t leave them foundering in the shadows, so he wouldn’t indulge his desires and walk away, especially not from her.

  So much for saving anyone. Including himself.

  Jilly settled her sister under the covers in one of the apartments on the second floor of the warehouse. The mismatched furniture from the salvage offerings below created a sort of cheery, ugly hodgepodge semblance of a home. Against the garish bedspread, Dory looked even more pale and gaunt. Jilly stepped back, swallowing down useless tears.

  Sera arranged the nightstand with a glass of water, a puke bucket, a couple unmarked pil
l bottles. “She’s going to wake up rough. These will help.”

  Jilly tried not to glare. “She doesn’t need more damn drugs.”

  Sera’s expression was calm. “She’s an addict. Of course she’ll need more drugs.”

  Now Jilly did glare, and let her temper call up a smidgen of the demon for the added light show she knew would appear in her eyes. Sera had been right about the demon’s terrifying strength and speed coming out of nowhere. The memory of using Liam as a springboard to launch herself at those things seemed ludicrous in retrospect, even though her muscles and bones couldn’t forget the turbulent pleasure of the attack. Or the feel of her talya boss’s steadfast power.

  Jilly crushed the recollection. At the very least, she didn’t want the other woman to be right about Dory. “None of you care what happens to her.”

  “We want to stop this chemical version of desolator numinis from making more soulless blanks for the salambes to invade—you can believe that.”

  Jilly subsided. There was no sense being stupidly vicious as well as stupidly sad.

  A knock at the door brought them around.

  Liam stepped through. “We have the others down the hall. How is she?”

  “Completely out of it,” Sera said. “She won’t remember a thing from tonight.”

  He sighed. “Same with the others, I’m guessing.”

  “I’ll go take a look at them.” Sera shook her head.

  “Who would’ve guessed my hospice training would be useful for the walking dead?” Then she slanted a glance at Jilly and bit her lip. “Sorry. I’m starting to sound like Archer.” She slipped out of the room.

  “We should take them to the hospital, to a detox center.” Jilly could’ve bitten her tongue. Now she sounded stupidly optimistic. Who would unquestioningly take an unidentified baker’s dozen of smacked-out bums, petty thieves, and one prostitute?

  “After we talk to them, we will,” Liam said. And he sounded as if he meant it. He crossed his arms over his chest as she plunked herself down in one of the mismatched chairs that flanked a table by the window. “How long since you’ve seen her?”