by Jessa Slade
“A balance and a tune-up, huh? I didn’t get the extended warranty in Liam’s fleet-vehicle maintenance plan,” Jilly said stiffly.
“Too bad. Have you seen the crap they drive around these days? Turns out their last Bookkeeper siphoned off league assets as well as souls before he ended up soulless himself. Apparently haints can’t remember bank-account numbers, and Ferris hasn’t been able to track the money transfers once they left the country.” Sera clicked down the page. “Ah, here it is. The reference is from an image-to-text scan of an old, handwritten league manuscript. Don’t know the date, but it was old enough that they wrote their descending s’s a lot like f’s. So the computer wasn’t recognizing the word.” She pointed at the screen where the reddish brown ink on the yellowed paper appeared to read “falambes.”
“How’d you know to look here?”
Sera rubbed the back of her neck. “Funnily enough, Bella pointed me in the right direction. After talking to your landlady, I’ve been wondering about these other women who seem to know more than we do. So I went to the Coil for a drink, sat down at the bar, and sort of idly asked her where she might look for things that burn. She said s’mores, urinary-tract infections, and witches. Needless to say, the league archives didn’t have a lot on Girl Scout outings or UTIs, but witch burnings . . .”
Jilly eyed the text. “You speak German?”
“No, I ran it through an online translator. Maybe an official league Bookkeeper would have more resources, but I haven’t had time to track down anyone trustworthy.”
“Which wouldn’t be Bella,” Jilly acknowledged.
Sera nodded. “Those women seem to know more than us, and they seem strangely reluctant to cough it all up. To make things worse, the German is actually a translation of a passage in Dutch, so the whole thing is just a half-assed pidgin garble.” She popped open a new page. “But here’s what we got.”
Some of the words hadn’t translated at all—including “falambes”—and the syntax was not proper English, but Jilly’s blood ran cold at the words she could read. “A witch trial. More than sixty people burned at the stake. Yeah, I imagine salambes would consider that quite the party.”
“Keep reading,” Sera urged. “It gets better. Or worse.”
“ ‘Unseen beast is the fiery salamander of legend’?” Jilly shook her head. “Is this from Ye Olde National Enquirer?”
“I searched on ‘fire salamander.’ Folklorists say that salamanders living in damp logs would scatter when the firewood was laid in the hot hearth, thus freaking out the nice people gathered around the fire into thinking that salamanders were fire demons. But I find it a little hard to believe that even people back in the sixteen hundreds confused a newt with this.” Sera clicked to a second page.
The intricate woodcut had overly stylized the flames, but Jilly recognized the misshapen, asymmetrically horned creatures frolicking around the burning faggots. Half buried in the piles of kindling, the victims—men and women both, judging from the costumes and hairstyles—writhed, contorted partners in the macabre dance.
Jilly’s throat seized in disgust, as if the ghost of scorched hair had drifted through the lab. She pushed away from the screen. “So the last extant reference to salambes was from the days of burning witches? How not reassuring that they’re back right when female talyan return to the scene.”
“Whoa, there’s nothing to associate the salambes with us,” Sera objected. “Witch burning was sporting for hundreds of years in the middle of the last millennium, and we think the last female talya was gone well before that. Besides, there are women and men both in this picture, tied back-to-back, their arms interlocked.”
“Exactly.” Jilly didn’t look at the illustration again. She remembered the feel of Liam’s arms wrapped around her, the heat of his passion slick on her skin. “The element of fire has always been associated with desire and sin. The mated-talyan bond has all that in spades.” She dragged her hands through her hair. Liam’s habitual gesture. She finally understood where he was coming from. “The Corvus-djinni said we’d brought this on ourselves.”
“Of course the devil says that,” Sera snapped.
“That’s what I told Liam,” Jilly murmured. And yet now, without him around to challenge, she questioned whether she was taking the easy way out. The devil might delight in lies, but it was the grain of truth, like the dust in the center of the pearl, that made the lie ring true.
Was Liam right that the bond between male and female talyan had been deemed too dangerous? What if the preternatural desire of two wounded talya souls had drawn the salambes, with their affinity for invading and destroying any empty vessel, through the Veil into the human realm?
What if, once again, her choice of lovers was toxic, not just to herself this time, but to the world?
The ugliness of the question—no, the wrongness of it—ripped through her, sharper than any demonic tooth or blade. Her “fight the power” defiance lost all relevance when Liam—demon-ridden though he was—so carefully wielded his power for the good of his men, the oblivious people of the city, for her. That ardent focus and hammer-blunt strength he’d used to form and refine the league. The power of the ravager inside him he’d turned only on the darkness. And on himself. Liam Niall might be all the things she feared, but only because she doubted herself, tangled up in the way he made her feel.
She straightened, casting off the urge to follow the thread of that thought until she came to the center of what, exactly, he made her feel. The damned discord demon had her tied in more knots than her bracelet. She pulled the solvo from her pocket. “I’m just here to drop this off.”
Sera took the beaker and headed into the lab. “Just because I have a soul cleaver myself, he thinks I know what to do with the pure stuff?”
Jilly blinked. “You have one?” She’d thought possessing a demon-warped trap was proof enough of trafficking with the devil. How could a soul cleaver ever lend itself to the fight against evil?
“Long story. Corvus and Bookie playing around with a formula in this realm is what called my demon through the Veil.” Sera touched the pendant hanging around her neck. The gray stone glimmered faintly, like a cheap opal. “I ended up with this.” She must have sensed the disapproval because her gaze narrowed on Jilly’s bracelet. “Kind of like how you ended up with that.”
Everything she’d ever fought against was here in this building, in one form or another. And half of it no longer seemed wrong. Jilly almost reeled at the wave of moral vertigo. “What are we?” she whispered.
Sera spun away from her. “Not whiners, that’s for damn sure.”
The confident scorn bolstered Jilly’s spirits a bit. Still . . . “I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the world.”
“God, aren’t you special?” Sera clunked the beaker down on the table with more force than was really necessary. “What makes you think the world needs you for that?”
Jilly winced. “Liam.”
“Figures. He thinks the sun goes down on his command so he can start the hunt.”
The urge to defend him welled up, but Jilly settled for “That’s a bitchy thing to say.”
“And yet so true. Jilly, good and evil go on without us.”
“But we’re supposed to be here to tip the balance toward the good.” Jilly gestured at the pearlescent matter in the beaker. “We have to be willing to use that to get the upper hand?”
“You’re already possessed by a demon. Did you really think this was going to be a bloodless—scratch that—soulless war?”
Jilly stared down. “If I sold my soul once, I didn’t think I’d have to do it again and again.”
Sera flattened her palm over the pendant. Or above her heart, Jilly wasn’t sure which. “The desolator numinis isn’t evil by itself. It’s all in how it’s used.”
Jilly snorted. “How many times has the world heard that one?”
“Yet it’s so true,” Sera repeated with a touch of asperity. “The only soul I ever
took was Corvus’s. And I tried to give it back.” She shook her head when Jilly drew breath to ask more. “Yes, your soul is suspect, sold and shattered. Stop mourning that. What matters now is what’s in your heart.”
Jilly managed not to recoil as if Sera’s words had hit her somewhere midchest. “I just want to stop Corvus from turning more of the people I care for into salambe flambé. I need my brain, muscles, and a sharp knife for that. Never mind my heart.”
Sera eyed her, and Jilly shifted uncomfortably under what felt a lot like pity. “He’s afraid, Jilly.”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand, but she snorted. “Liam isn’t afraid of anything. Except failing the league.” A failure made more likely by the discord she spread like a plague.
“What do you think it would be, if he tried for your heart and fell short?”
Jilly shifted. “Weren’t we talking about the fate of the world?”
Sera gestured at the bracelet, then wrapped her hand around her necklace. “In our case, it’s all connected, all tangled up. That’s what the mated- talyan bond is about.”
“No wonder he isn’t interested.” That wasn’t fair, she knew. He was very interested. She could take off her shirt or take down a feralis and he was right there beside her. But through it all, a part of him was walled off, and every step she took toward him seemed to lead her farther from where she was trying to go. And she couldn’t even blame him, since she so staunchly defended her own walls—not a maze, but a barricade.
Sera frowned, running the pendant back and forth on its chain. “It’s not like he has a choice.”
Jilly yanked her gaze off the teasing glint of opal fire. “We always have a choice.”
“But the broken pieces of you fit together in ways no one else’s ever could. That’s the strength of the bond. It must be killing him not to reach out to you.”
“Not so’s you’d notice.” And once he found out salambes might indeed have risen out of the energies of the talya bond, he wouldn’t allow himself to merely fret about their connection; he’d feel duty-bound to sever it. Pain ripped from her insides through her heart to lodge in her throat, like being gutted.
Jilly held out one hand, the one without the bracelet, hoping it wouldn’t visibly shake, to block more interrogation. “I didn’t come down here to talk about him. . . . That. I just wanted to bring you the solvo.”
“I know as much about reverse engineering as I do about girl talk. Which is apparently nothing.” Sera sighed. “Just leave it.”
Jilly spun on her heel and started to walk away, then paused. “Thanks for bringing your angel friend in to talk to Dory.”
Sera lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Nanette was by again this afternoon. I didn’t get the impression it went much better than last time. She can’t control her healing touch.”
Jilly figured since she couldn’t control her destructive one, she couldn’t really complain. “Still, thanks.”
Returning upstairs, she followed the clatter of pans back to the kitchen.
Dory was rummaging through the cabinets but smiled over her shoulder. “I watched you do this often enough, with less food than we got here now. I should at least be able to throw a bunch of stuff in a pot and make stew, shouldn’t I?”
That was the attitude their mother had had. Throw a punch and the kid should obey, right? Throw enough love at her men and they should stick around, right? Throw away everything in the end and nothing would hurt, right? How wrong she’d been.
Jilly eyed the cluttered counter. “Let’s brown some onions while we see what we have.” Whatever else happened, they still had to eat. And chopped onions would at least explain the redness of her eyes.
Dory and Ecco had been enthusiastic in their shopping, if not exactly rational, though the economy-sized brownie mix and jumbo bag of miniature chocolate chips seemed like a blatant cry for help. Jilly inventoried, stocked, and found a little calm as the counter cleared.
With the big stockpot simmering on the stove, she wiped down while Dory sat at the table, mixing chocolate chips into the brownie batter. “So, Nanette was here again.”
Dory didn’t look up from her stirring. “She’s nice, but clueless. We prayed some more. I told her exorcism is my only hope.”
Jilly glanced sharply at her, but Dory seemed oblivious to the truth of her words. Had she overheard something, or was she picking up the not particularly subtle vibe around the warehouse? Jilly tossed the towel aside and sat across from her sister. “Dory, would you think I was crazy if I told you demons are real?”
Dory scooped a fingerful of batter from the bowl and stuck it in her mouth, eyes wide as she finally looked up. The pose struck Jilly as too innocent to believe.
Exactly how secret was this war the angels and djinn were fighting, with the teshuva in the middle?
She took a breath. “Dor, you really are in trouble. And so am I.”
Dory nodded. “It’s always been that way. We’ve always been on this path. That’s why Leroy hooked up with those self-help nuts, you know. They told him he could make his own future. After he cut himself off from everything else and followed their path, of course.” She gave an asthmatic smoker’s laugh.
Jilly cut over the coarse sound. “Corvus is a devil. An honest-to-God being from hell. He’s making the city over in his image, one soul at a time.”
Dory looked down, a faint smile playing over her lips. “And you think Nanette’s praying will help?”
“No,” Jilly snapped, disturbed by that secret smile. “Which is why I’m part of this team that’s going to kill Corvus. But I want you to be okay.” She held her voice steady against a threatening waver. “This won’t be worth it if you’re not okay.”
Dory raised her gaze, her expression somber again. “And what about you?”
Before Jilly could answer, Ecco stumped by in the hall, then stuck his head into the kitchen, hair slicked back wetly and gauntlets shining. His gaze fixed on Dory. “Brownies.”
Jilly rose. “Only if we come back alive.”
Dory wrinkled her nose. “Only if I don’t eat them all first.”
Jilly was grateful that meant her sister would stay. After one last glance back at Dory, she joined the exodus of other talyan.
They gathered again in the warehouse truck bay. No one had turned on the heater. This was no cozy debriefing. The men stood, wrapped in dark coats, heavy with weaponry, violet eyed. They were all so tall, it was easy for her to duck behind them. Not that she was hiding. Just being as politely circumspect as Liam had been, letting her sneak out of his bed.
Liam paced the raised concrete dock. “I want a salambe, and I want a haint. Separate and intact.”
Ecco spoke up. “We starting a petting zoo?”
Over the scatter of chuckles, Liam continued. “Containing an unoccupied haint should be simple enough. Tie a string around one and lead it here. The salambe . . . If you corner one, try the same technique as bottling a malice.”
“You can stuff a malice in an empty beer bottle as long as it’s blessed,” Jonah said.
Ecco interrupted. “What do you know about empty beer bottles, missionary man?”
Jonah shot him a flat glance. “We’re going to need a sanctified fifty-gallon drum for a salambe.”
“Nanette was kind enough to put her touch on a fairly large fishbowl this afternoon.” When no one spoke, Liam added, “It’s a nice old antique from the storeroom. Very sturdy. Comes with a wrought iron stand, even.”
“Oh well, then,” someone muttered with asperity. “If the Holy Roller laid hands on a fishbowl, what could go wrong?”
Jilly stepped up. “I’ll take it.” If she didn’t trust Nanette’s blessing, how could she believe Dory would be saved?
“Jilly.” For the first time since she’d entered the room, Liam’s deep blue gaze fixed on her.
What did she see in there? How far would she have to go to find out?
“I’ll help,” Sera echoed. Behind her, her mate was a ta
ll, dark, expressionless statue. Who did not speak against her volunteering.
“Hell,” Ecco said. “Might as well make a night of it. Let’s all go.”
CHAPTER 21
In the end, Liam limited the bag-and-tag team to a half dozen plus himself—Jilly, Sera and Archer, Ecco, who had the most experience bottling malice, Jonah and his penchant for preaching, and Perrin, a quiet talya whose affinity for curbing the poison birnenston had earned him a spot on more than one cleanup crew. With another team of seven on close standby in the event they ran into something more substantial than a free- ranging salambe, Liam figured he’d made the outing as foolproof as possible.
Except for himself, of course.
He was a hundred kinds of fool for not simply assigning the task to Ecco. He should have known Jilly would leap at the chance to get into trouble, leaving him no choice but to jump behind her.
And he’d been damn quick about it when the jumping had been into bed.
When had he lost control of his league? How had he lost control over himself?
He wasn’t such a fool that he didn’t know the answer to both questions was riding in the far backseat of the passenger van. Jilly was talking to Sera in a voice so low that even though he tweaked his teshuva, he couldn’t eavesdrop over the sound of the engine. But even that faintest murmur of her voice distracted him from Ecco’s running commentary on the joys of thumb wrestling malice. Something about—“And if you get too much of one under your fingernails, when you try to stuff it in the bottle, the ether will snap back at you like a freakin’ rubber band smacking you in the balls.”
“Maybe if you kept your pants zipped while you hunt,” Archer suggested drily.
“Since you’re the only one with a girlfriend around here, I think you better keep your mouth zipped,” Ecco started. Then his gaze slid toward Liam, who stared pointedly forward.
Perrin’s voice from the middle seat across from Archer was even more to the point. “Anybody else picking up that eau de birnenston?”
