by Jessa Slade
“It was cold,” she said finally. “And there were lights. Not like candles and not like those.” She jerked her chin at the neon over the gas station. “Like lightning behind clouds at night, but unfading. So beautiful …”
Sid shook off the mesmerizing drift of her voice. “That’s the etheric signature of an unbound demon,” he said briskly. “Of course, you couldn’t see it until the penultimate moment, but it was coming for you.”
She turned abruptly to face him. “Like tonight. Like the one coming—”
“No.” He cut off her rising agitation. The redoubled harmony in her voice—the demon’s echo—chilled him. Why did she have such trouble focusing on the task of remembering? “The frequencies of the lesser tenebrae you fought tonight are much different from a repentant teshuva. You’ll learn.”
At his correction, she curled one arm around her belly. The shielding gesture stung him almost more than the feralis bite. But she had so much to know if she was going to join the league and leave her rogue wandering days behind her. It had taken him years to get where he was; she’d have only one chance to prove she wasn’t a threat to the league.
Where she clutched at the front of her dress, the neckline had tugged down, and he studied the teshuva’s mark. The lines of a reven most often lay quiet in the skin, like nothing more than the sketchings of an erratic tattooist. The contours and complexity of the fractal design hinted at both the subspecies and the energy level of the possessing demon.
On Alyce, the reven was a simple wheal around her neck. Though she had tried to hide it with the conservative collar, the thin black wave ran just beneath the delicate line of her jaw and peeked out whenever she turned her head. Only a few curls spiraled off the central thread. Not a powerful teshuva, then. Perhaps she had survived so long and yet not thrived precisely because of her weak demon. She’d not been driven to self-destructiveness, but at the same time, she’d been unable to find her way to others like her.
Still, she had demolished two ferales and scared off two more, so weak was relative.
“Sidney?”
He startled. When had she knelt beside him? He hadn’t told her his name. But, of course, she had heard his father say his name. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, you are losing too much blood. You should not fall asleep or you might not wake up.”
“I wasn’t falling asleep. I was … looking at you.” Good God, he’d been less than an hour in her company, and his filters were already on the blink.
“Oh. That explains your fleeting insensibility.”
He drew breath to disagree, then peered at her. “Was that a joke of some sort?”
“Yes.” She settled on her heels with a frown. “Or perhaps not. I remember that men have looked into my eyes and forgotten how to speak.”
Had that been before the demon, or after? He managed to bite his tongue. Time enough to work on her after he got her to his lab.
There was a delicacy to her, though—if one saw beyond the streaks of blood, ichor, and grime—that might very well silence some men. Her skin was smooth, almost luminescent—an advantage of a youthful possession, demonic healing, and an eternal night shift without even fleeting UV damage. And though she was below average in height, she made up for the lack with a pleasing proportionality. When the fretful breeze tugged at the ugly dress, he noted a breast-to-waist-to-hip ratio that might be, in fact, considered something like perfect.
He swallowed and realized he hadn’t said anything in quite a long minute.
“Keep me awake then.” He cleared his throat of an alarming huskiness.
She tilted toward him a few degrees. “How?”
Her pale eyes glinted violet. Blood trickled at his shoulder with the sudden acceleration of his heart. Was he talking to the girl, or to the demon? No, he shouldn’t think of them as separate entities. They were one being, one soul, one dangerous hell-bound killer.
Learning that was his life’s work, with no room for error—or for anything else.
A flash of headlights blinded him as a car U-turned in front of them. Before the rust-speckled banger had come to a stop, the passenger door swung open.
Sid squinted against the brightness.
“What the hell, Westerbrook?”
“Something like that.” He staggered to his feet, holding back a groan. “Miss Alyce, may I introduce you to one of your fellow talyan, Jonah Walker?” He stumbled in a half circle. “Alyce?”
But in the harsh wash of neon and metal halide lighting, he found nothing. He lifted his gaze to the night beyond.
She was gone.
CHAPTER 3
Alyce folded herself into the shadows to watch the one-armed man help her Sidney into the carriage.
Car, she reminded herself. With no one to share her wonder and fear, she hadn’t bothered with the endless changes of the world, but she’d noticed the way Sidney winced at her oddity. At the memory of his expression—as appalled and reluctantly curious as if he’d cracked open the only fresh egg for breakfast to find a half-feathered chick inside—she sank deeper into the darkness.
Across the lighted street, the one-armed man—Jonah, Sidney had named him—lingered beside the car door. The hook where his right hand should have been shone almost as bright as his amethyst eyes while he surveyed the night.
His gaze passed over her. The invasive chill inside that never left her tensed for the attack, but she held herself still. The flares of devilish light that pulsed around the man and the car and Sidney would blind him to her small self.
Jonah climbed into the car beside Sidney and wheeled the vehicle from the curb with a squeal against the pavement like a temperamental horse.
At least Sidney had said he would have help for his wound. She looked down at the scalds from the devils’ blood on her hands and curled her fingers into her frock where congealed blood had glued the folds together. These marks would heal without any help at all, she’d learned.
How long ago had that realization ceased to make her lonely? And why was the terrible feeling—more caustic than ichor—back with a vengeance now?
Memories teased her, as elusive as falling leaves swirled on the autumn wind. She passed through them without pause. Maybe she couldn’t grasp the memories, but a clean frock was still within her reach—if she could just remember where she’d left the stash she’d taken from the church charity box.
She followed the flow of cars beneath the raised railroad tracks. The shriek of metal on metal as the train passed overhead was louder than the devils’ death knells. Despite the assault on her senses, she stopped when she spied the shadowy presence leaning against a lamppost. Though the lamp was intact and shining brightly, the tall, lean man seemed to stand in a darkness all his own.
“Go away,” she said softly, knowing he would hear over the clatter and squeal.
He tilted his head so his long braids swung over the lapels of his coat. In the stuttering light from the train windows above, his hair glinted as shiny black as the leather. “And a good evening to you, Miss Alyce. I saw the fireworks from afar and had to come find you.”
“Because you like to watch the devils play.”
He stalked toward her. “Because your glow when you vanquish them is irresistible. Like watching a baby stealing candy from the monsters.”
He had told her long ago to call him Thorne, and she had remembered, because the name fit him well. His skin was burnished brown, like the cane of some ancient bramble, and his gaze sharper than any barb. Though the sleek blackness of his hair softened the thrust of his cheekbones, the yellow flames in his eyes burned away any chance of mistaking what dwelled within him.
He was a devil.
She stood her ground since she’d never been fast enough to run from him. “Instead of watching, you could fight the monsters too.”
“Could I now?” For a fleeting moment, his furrowed brows made him look as lost as she sometimes felt. “And tell me, to fight at your side, all I’d have to do is forget
myself?”
She couldn’t untangle the threads of puzzlement and scorn in his voice, so she answered simply as she started walking again and he fell into step beside her. “You are stronger than I am; too strong to forget.”
“Too bad.” The last light of the train gleamed off the sharp spine of his lopsided smile; then the shadows closed in again. “Ah, but that is the point, isn’t it? I am too bad, a monster through and through.” He bumped her with his hip, not gently, and her weak knee buckled, so she staggered. When she aimed a scowl at him, he laughed. “See? There’s the little sparkler I love.”
She blinked hard to force down the flicker of the devil in her eyes. “We are not monsters. We can atone. My Sidney will tell you.”
His smile faded until his wide mouth curled at only one corner like a snake raising its head to strike. “Your Sidney.”
She touched her cheeks, warm under her fingers. “Mine. He knows what I am.”
“And don’t I know you after all these years together?”
“We aren’t together.” She stopped and looked at him over her fingertips as he prowled a circle around her.
In the beginning, spurred by the demon, she had tried to destroy him once or twice—perhaps more—and each time he had left her so shattered, she had thought she would finally, finally die. She didn’t know why he had never lost patience and finished her, but he did not run from her. And sometimes she thought only that had kept her from sliding at last into madness.
But now she had Sidney. She let her hands drift down from her heated cheeks and drew herself upright. As she straightened her spine, her devil flowed into the spaces between the bones.
Thorne took a step back, eyebrow raised. “This love you’ve found will break your heart, I bet you.”
“Which is the only piece of me you have left unbroken.”
Thorne’s eyes glittered brighter than the bullet holes in the burning metal drums that warmed the homeless dwellers below the overpasses. “I have left other parts of you untouched. But I’m sure your Sidney will find a way to fill you.”
Forgetful she might be, but she did not misunderstand his allusion. “It’s not like that,” she whispered.
“It’s always like that. Older than words, old as evil is that.” Thorne’s laugh cracked like an open slap across her face.
Her cheeks heated, and with that flush of rage, she launched herself at the devil-man. But he only laughed again and struck her aside. The backhanded blow spun her into a parked carriage. Car, she reminded herself viciously as the glass splintered around her elbow and the alarm blared in her ear. If she could not remember “car,” how would Sidney ever teach her anything?
By the time she hauled herself out of the broken window, Thorne and his shiny black coat were lost to the night.
She looked down at the fresh smears of blood on her frock. Truly, she needed to find her last stash of clothing.
“Hey, what the fuck’d you do to my car?” A stranger raced toward her. He stabbed one finger at a small black device in his other palm. “I’m calling the cops right now—”
She raised her gaze, and he slid to a halt. The box clattered to the pavement.
“Pardon me,” she said. She brushed glass from her skin. “I slipped.”
The man screamed, turned, and sprinted away as if for his very life.
From the device, a tinny voice called out. “Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?”
Alyce retrieved the little box and set it on the front seat of the car, in case he forgot where he’d dropped it. Forgetting was so easy. By the time he stopped running, he wouldn’t remember the nature of his emergency, but his white-ringed eyes crystallized her determination.
With the peekaboo moon winking from behind the towers of concrete and steel, she made her way through the streets she haunted. She’d moved so often, over so many years, she wasn’t ever sure where she’d last been. The intersections bled together, and the buildings seemed to shift facades before her eyes—from flickering candlelight to the stink of gas to the hum of electric bulbs—as if they couldn’t remember who they were either.
She would clothe herself properly. She would find Sidney. She would know what she was. And maybe the blackness in her head would finally go.
Some days were worse than others.
All days were peppered with the buckshot of injustice, banality, and defeat, but evil seemed prone to arm itself in progressively higher calibers of wrongness as the days and decades passed.
Thorne Halfmoon had accepted that truth when his grandmother caught him on the roof of their crappy apartment building after six and a half pointless days of fasting and chanting. Though the Boys’ Life magazine he’d stolen from the rec center had been a little vague on the particulars of vision quests, in his delirium, he’d seen dark spirits aplenty, but he hadn’t found his spirit guide. And as his grandmother—cursing up a Thunderbird-scented storm—dragged his scrawny ten-year-old body down the stairs, he’d realized evil could always get worse and he would always face it alone.
But he preferred not to have to face anyone before, say, coffee. To open the boat’s cabin door with his first cup still brimming, unsipped, in his hand and find one of his exceedingly evil brethren standing on his deck, uninvited, was the nadir of bad taste and bad timing.
“You didn’t knock,” he said.
The djinn-man scrunched his thick features with exaggerated hurt. He tugged at his coat lapels as if soothing his ruffled feathers. “You wouldn’ta answered the door, would ya?”
Thorne spread his empty hand as if displaying a deck of cards. “For you? Never.”
“So. I waited. We got the time, am I right?”
“Wait a little longer.” Thorne slammed the door.
Too late, of course.
The other man’s heather-toned suit said Brooks Brothers, but his footwear was plain shit stomper. He booted open the door, and the heavy wood rebounded against the wall with a thud, rattling the round portal glass.
Thorne sighed in vexation. “You said you’d wait.”
“I guess we got the time, but not the patience.”
“Why start with virtues now?” Thorne stalked down the narrow stairs to the lower deck, his bare feet silent on the gleaming mahogany floorboards, and left the other man to follow, or not.
In his stateroom, he clunked his coffee cup on the mantel over the empty fireplace and dropped into one of the wingback chairs framing the hearth. The rose velvet armrest crinkled under his elbow as he slouched, chin in palm, tracking the other man with his eyes. The djinn-man lowered himself to the matching chair and shot his cuffs as if he owned the place.
Thorne dug his elbow into the nap until it squeaked. He really needed to redecorate—something less Colonial. “What do you want, Carlo?”
Carlo crossed one ankle over his knee and steepled his fingers. The managerial pose sent a quiver of annoyance through Thorne like the glass rattling in the door. “Times, they are a-changing.” His hard Chicago accent smoothed, as if the voice were no longer his own. “The deadlock that held the war between heaven and hell in balance has cracked. Magdalena is calling an ahaˉzum.”
Thorne smirked when Carlo stumbled over the Akkadian pronunciation. Probably ex–wise guys didn’t have much call for mastering extinct Mesopotamian languages. “A gathering of all the djinn-possessed? What is that psychotic bitch thinking?”
Carlo put both feet back on the floor, the better to puff himself up. “Watch your mouth, half-breed.” The growl of the street was back in his voice. “My lady hears all.”
“Only because you repeat it. Fucking magpie. And what’s with the medieval ‘my ladying’?”
Carlo’s eyes yellowed in outrage. “I owe her my life. I swore her my loyalty.”
“You’re no knight errant,” Thorne scoffed. “You swore that to any slick Chicago mobster who threw you a bone, even before you were possessed.”
In contrast, he himself had been too virtuous to ask for the bone, th
inking he was fighting for rights, not riches.
Thorne struggled to hold his sneer in place. Was the reproachful voice in his head supposed to be the better angel of his nature? Obviously that wasn’t possible. Annoyed at his momentary weakness, he let his demon spiral up. “Tell her no, Carlo. For my sake and hers.”
“But she wants you. While the sphericanum dicks around, Magdalena is gathering soldati—an army of djinni soldiers, yeah?—and soldati need capos. Men like me and you.”
“I want nothing to do with a djinni mob. I want …” He shifted in his chair. The wood, like silky dark hair, and the velvet, pink as flushed cheeks, reminded him of what he desired and yet had not taken. “I want to be left alone.”
“Alone ain’t a good place to be. Since Corvus Valerius resurrected the symballein bond—”
“Corvus the Blackbird? Another fucking birdbrain,” Thorne snapped.
Carlo ran his hand over his head without actually touching his hair. “Getting tossed out a high-rise onto one’s skull makes for stupid, no doubt. But you ain’t thinking right either, Thorne, to defy her.” He leaned forward in his chair, as if the cant of his body could add pressure to his words. “You have to fight for the darkness.”
“I can fight whomever I choose, or so I’ve been told.” Thorne couldn’t keep the wry note from his voice.
“You were told wrong. ’Sides, rumor has it you always pick the losing side. So quit choosing and just give in.”
Though every nerve—human and djinni—told him to hold his ground, Thorne surged to his feet. “I had a soft spot for impossible cases. Don’t remind me.”
“Not much to remember, was there? Magdalena says your little terrorist gang couldn’t make a mark with how many pounds of ammonium nitrate?” Carlo claimed smirking rights as he kicked back in his seat. “First kaboom, and everyone—even your moll—was fertilizer. Everyone but you.”
Thorne stalked to the windows, where the wind lifted whitecapped waves from the lake.
And dropped them again. That was the way of leaders—to whip their followers into a froth, only to leave them roiling over themselves. Corvus the gladiator had despised his masters. He’d wanted to be free.
