Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  She tilted her head. “Even damned?”

  “Especially damned.” He opened Sera’s door, and the mark across his knuckles flared as he held out his hand to her. She slid her palm across his and pulled herself into his embrace. Her long brilliant red coat flamed against the dark background of Archer.

  Alyce watched from the corner of her eye. The aura that pulsed around them, invisible if she faced them straight on, deepened and darkened, shot through with lightning. Like a storm cloud just for them. Its energy tempted her closer and warded her off. Not for you, it whispered, but somewhere … someone …

  “Alyce?” Sidney stepped out of the car, breaking her trance. “Come on. They’ll catch up.”

  Archer snorted, and the two fell into step behind. “You know where you’re going, Westerbrook? Liam told London about our secret diner, but you haven’t actually seen it yet.”

  “I heard enough,” Sidney growled.

  Alyce tagged alongside, but a thread of unease tightened around her. There was more to this lunch than any of them was saying. “I know a place where the old women save bread for the ducks. There would be plenty for all of us.”

  Sera’s mouth drew down. “What you do for this city, Alyce, deserves more than stale bread crumbs.”

  When they passed between the cars into a hallway of shops, Sera walked beside Alyce. “So, do you usually run away from the devils?”

  Alyce looked at her.

  Sera grinned. “The purple in your eyes says no.” Her smile flattened with gravity. “Then don’t run from us. Not anymore.”

  “You are all so loud,” Alyce said. “So big. So bright to my eyes and impatient. Like the city.”

  Sera paused beside a recessed foyer that displayed windows brilliant with colored glass. The lettering on the doorway beyond said MUSEUM. “We’re like the glass. Sharp and cutting when we’re in pieces, but together we make something breathtaking.”

  Archer walked to the next door and yanked it open. “If by breathtaking you mean we stop things from ever breathing again, then yeah.”

  Sera stalked up to him. “Ooh, badass.”

  “I just prefer dark sunglasses, not rose-colored ones.”

  “But your eyes are so pretty in purple.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss him. He tipped her chin up higher to deepen the kiss, and the ring on his finger matched the pendant around her neck, both opalescent stones shining.

  Sidney watched with his arms crossed over his chest, one eyebrow cocked. “The mated talya bond in action.”

  Archer lifted his head. “That is not for you to know. Be grateful we’re showing you the verge. It’ll blow your dissertation—and your mind.”

  More new words rolled around like careless cannonballs until Alyce thought she might be crushed. “I thought we were getting food.”

  “The verge is dessert.” Archer ushered Sera past, then Alyce, but let the door swing shut toward Sidney.

  Sidney stiff-armed through with a glower.

  The tang of peppers swirled past Alyce, and her stomach growled. She passed Archer, who was talking to the dark-skinned woman behind the counter where silvery tureens brimmed with stews and vegetables.

  Sidney slid a tray in front of her. “What do you want?”

  “Everything.”

  Sera laughed. “Say what you will, the girl knows her mind.”

  Sidney ignored her. “Let’s start with something basic.” He nodded at the woman behind the counter. “Just the rice and beans. I’ll have the curry. Extra spicy, please.”

  Archer bumped Sidney’s tray with another. “Make it two, Therese.”

  “Tough guys,” Sera said under her breath. “I’ll have the rice and beans too, and kanyah for after.”

  Alyce curled her lips in and hoped she wasn’t drooling as Therese passed the bowls plus a teapot over the counter.

  Sidney leaned closer. “Do you remember your last meal? Maybe before you were possessed?”

  “Sid,” Sera snapped. “Really, the only thing worse than asking about a woman’s age is quizzing her about her diet. If you ask her weight, I’m going to deck you.”

  “I can estimate her weight.” Sidney straightened his eyeglasses. “It’s the rest I want to know.”

  Alyce missed the warmth of him, lingering at her shoulder. “I want to know too, but …” She shook her head, not sure if she wanted to jar the memories loose or warn him away.

  Sera herded them toward the far corner with a view to the kitchen. “This is the talya table. You can tell by the extra jars of pepper flakes.”

  Archer squeezed into the booth beside Sera, but Sidney put his tray down and pulled an extra chair to the end of the table. Alyce clenched her empty hands. Maybe he’d seen her salivating and didn’t want to sit next to her.

  But he pushed a bowl her way along with a cup of yellow-green tea, and she decided to forgive him for the moment. The scents wafted up, complicated in a good way, as words could never be. She closed her eyes and inhaled.

  When she opened her eyes, her spoon clattered against the bare bottom of the bowl and the other three were staring at her. Sidney pushed his plate toward her. “I can’t finish.”

  He hadn’t even started. Sera and Archer sat with spoons poised and still sparkling clean.

  Alyce took a slower bite, savoring. “Thank you, Sidney. Sera, may I have the peppers, please?”

  Archer snorted. “Yeah, she’s talya.”

  Sera grinned at her. “Serves that teshuva right if you burn it out of you. It should have fed you better.”

  Sidney leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, subtly distancing himself. No, not so subtly, Alyce thought. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked for the peppers, but the spreading warmth felt nice. And he had chosen to sit over there, away from her.

  Sidney tapped the hinge of his eyeglasses, as if ticking off possibilities in his head. “How much of the memory loss might be long-term metabolic shock, not just faulty demonic integration?”

  Sera passed pieces of kanyah around the table. “The teshuva provides perpetual physical maintenance, but some of the fine points get lost. Like daily sixty-thousand-mile overhauls without the detailing.” She leaned against Archer. “And some of those details are really important.”

  Archer wrapped his arm over her shoulder. “Don’t need a memory to massacre tenebrae. And after a while—never mind how long a while is—maybe you don’t want to remember.”

  Alyce met his hooded gaze, the sugared peanut treat sticky in her fist. “I try to remember, when Sidney asks.”

  “Yes,” Archer said softly. “Let’s go downstairs and see what else gets shaken loose.”

  Sidney stayed firmly in his seat, blocking the way. “I don’t like this.”

  “You haven’t even seen it yet,” Archer said. “As a Bookkeeper, don’t you think you should not like something only with full knowledge of what you’re not liking?”

  Sidney’s jaw clenched, and Alyce wondered what words he was holding back. He never seemed to bother holding back words, so they must have been very bad.

  “I want to see,” she told him. “If it can help me remember, if it can help you, I won’t be afraid.”

  Archer’s low laugh raised her hackles. “No reason to stop now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Sid had worked with enough ancient papyrus scrolls to know when something was crumbling out of his grasp. The harder he clutched, the quicker this meeting was coming apart.

  He flanked Alyce as Sera led the way to the back of the diner where Therese gave them a distracted wave. Archer shouldered aside a full shelf of canned goods, easily balancing the heavy load to let Sera push back a plywood panel. She dropped out of sight, and Alyce reached out for the edges of the dark opening.

  “Wait,” Sid said. When she perked up, clearly hopeful that he would think better of this, he nudged past her. “Let me go first.”

  Could the talyan have found a more rickety descent? An old extension ladder was propped haphazardly on a painter’s scaffol
d forty feet above the ground, and an even older ladder spattered with paint spanned the lower distance. The wooden frame stuck a purely spiteful splinter in his palm as he clutched the rails.

  When he got to the dirt floor—half silty mud, as if a flood had passed through a tomb—he forgot the petty pain as he followed a thick tangle of power cables to a row of glaring klieg lights. The aluminum hoods were focused with unblinking intensity on a … What?

  In the middle of the otherwise empty chamber lumped a meter-high hillock of bleached bone and twisted glass. If he squinted, he could decipher the outline of the detonated soul bomb Sera had described in a few terse paragraphs in the league archives. The glass orbs embedded in the freakish sculpture had contained the energy of damned souls like spiritual shrapnel. When the bomb had gone off, it had left a crater, not only in the floor, but through the Veil between the realms and right into hell.

  Mostly, though, the verge looked like an unwanted exhibit shoveled straight out the door of the Art Institute’s newest wing; abstract post-futuristic surrealism at its ugliest and most nonsensical.

  Sid pushed his spectacles higher and tilted his head.

  Nope. Still ugly.

  Alyce dropped to the ground beside him with a splat. Conscious of her limping steps in the uncertain footing, he half turned to steady her.

  From the corner of his eye, the hellhole gaped like a screaming mouth, aimed right at them.

  “Holy shit!” He jumped toward the ladder, one hand on the highest rung he could reach.

  Alyce, however, took a halting step forward.

  Sera moved to join her. Archer leapt down from the scaffold above, his leather trench coat flapping. Sid flinched as the other man’s boots barely missed his head. When he straightened and faced the verge, its glassy fangs seemed to have lengthened while he wasn’t watching, each point glistening with a drop of black poison.

  Alyce whispered, “It’s hungry too.”

  In the hollow emptiness of the crypt, she sounded like a ghost. Sid could have done without the rapt expression on all three talya faces. What did they see? When he stared straight at the portal, the verge was a pile of trash. But in his peripheral vision …

  It wanted them. It wanted to suck their souls and hawk up their empty corpses like sunflower seed shells.

  “What have you Chicago talyan done?” His voice broke across the words.

  “Relax, Bookkeeper,” Archer said. “It’s dormant. Mostly. We think.”

  Sid made a strangled sound. “Tell that to the people of Pompeii.”

  Sera gestured at a row of milk crates at the base of the kliegs. “Pompeii didn’t have those.” The crates supported a small tower of instruments, only three-quarters of which Sid recognized. “Our last dear, departed Bookie was a megalomaniacal madman—aren’t they all?—but he knew his way around a soldering iron.”

  Jolted out of his shock by professional jealousy, Sid edged around the gaping maw to study the machines. The boom in cheap consumer electronics had been a source of much glee for the engineering branch among Bookkeepers, though he had always kept more to the theoretical side of the equations. “It’s just a resonance sensor with a remote alarm—admittedly, that is fascinating—routed through a … oh.” He resettled his specs as he straightened. “Is that an etheric sequencer? With an inversion module?”

  “Geek alert,” Archer muttered.

  Sera nodded. “A demonic ant trap.”

  Sid leaned closer and almost jumped out of his skin when Alyce murmured at his elbow, “What is that inside?”

  “There’s nothing. …” A flicker inside the beaker, like a half-invisible moth, shut him up.

  “A soul fragment,” Sera explained. “Thanks to Corvus, there are still bits wafting around the city. No tenebrae could resist such an easy snack.”

  “A baited ant trap,” Sid said.

  Alyce traced her finger over the gold-rimmed glass. “Poor soul.”

  Archer toed the stack of perforated paper neatly stacking itself beside a printer that ticked every few seconds. “Nothing has eaten it, which means nothing’s coming over the verge.”

  Sid locked his knees to keep from stepping back. “When you told London you had opened a doorway to hell, we thought you meant …”

  Archer gave him a moment, then crossed his arms. “We didn’t stutter.”

  “We didn’t imagine you meant this.” Sid flung one hand out toward the gaping maw.

  Sera narrowed her eyes. “You thought we’d imagined it?”

  “Talyan have no imagination,” Sid admitted. “But you are known to be … predisposed to postapocalyptic ideation. There were suggestions of group psychosis.”

  Sera’s scowl deepened. “London thought we’d been taken over by evil?”

  “If a demon can decide to repent, what’s to stop it from unrepenting?”

  “So they sent you?” Archer’s harsh bark of laughter lacked amusement.

  Sid stiffened. “I volunteered.”

  Alyce smoothed his sleeve as if patting down his hackles. “I could look inside. I would fit.”

  All three of them swung on her with a chorus in one breath. “No!”

  Sid caught her hand, unwilling to let one word, no matter how vehemently uttered, enforce the command. “No, Alyce. If the door to hell is closed—at least for the moment—we are not peeping behind it just to see what jumps out at us.”

  Climbing out of the hole was worse than going down. Chills spidered up Sid’s spine until his shoulder went numb from the tension, as if the hole breathed death and damnation at their retreating backs.

  Alyce stood in the doorway at the top, looking down, until he bumped her out of the way. “Did you see the way it sparkled?”

  “I’m not like you.” But he had seen enough that a full fortnight of Guinness wouldn’t erase the image: female talyan, hell portals, imprisoned souls. Had good begun drifting back toward evil? Was one small rogue just the latest symptom of a fatal breakdown?

  There’d been nothing like this in the multimillennia worth of archives he’d spent years of his life memorizing. And what could one human Bookkeeper do about it?

  Archer secured the door while Therese watched them with steady dark eyes.

  “Do you know what’s down there?” Sid asked the diner owner.

  “A bad thing.”

  “And it doesn’t frighten you to be right on top of it?”

  No purple lights moved in her gaze, but she felt a resolve more human and somehow more unnerving. “I have been closer to bad things. At least this time, someone cares.” She handed a bag of kanyah to Alyce. “For you, little one.”

  Alyce clutched the wax paper baggie of golf ball–sized treats to her chest and murmured her thanks.

  Sid—stomach churning with what he’d seen—dropped to the rear as their quartet left the diner and returned past the stained-glass museum toward the parking garage. Ahead of him, Alyce dug into the bag of kanyah. How could she eat after staring down hell’s gullet?

  Stupid question. She’d hovered almost a hundred years—if her comment about the World’s Fair was to be believed—with her and her demon on the edge of starvation. His gaze lingered on her petite form an arm’s length ahead of him. His two hands outstretched would easily span her hips, and her waist nipped in smaller yet. He should run back to the diner and get another to-go bag so he could feed her bite by bite. …

  Damn it, his brain was still rattling around like half a pair of dice. She’d survived without him bringing her sticky sweets.

  He slowed, letting her pull away so that he wasn’t tempted to more accurately measure her dimensions.

  As if she felt him retreat, she glanced over her shoulder. For a heartbeat, she met his gaze; then she held out one of the mottled white and brown desserts, and he wondered what hunger had been in his eyes.

  He shook his head and dropped his glance, focusing on her bare feet. Her demon seemed as incapable of providing for her as he was. She was still looking back at him, and he
r sideways step emphasized her awkward gait.

  He seized on the puzzle gratefully. “Alyce, did you injure yourself again?”

  Sera shortened her stride to Alyce’s. “Again? What happened?”

  Sid gestured at her left knee. “Alyce was limping when she fought the ferales in the alley, but the teshuva should have repaired any damage by now.” The teshuva mended constantly on the cellular level, though it offered no pain relief.

  Alyce shrugged. “It’s always there.”

  Archer palmed open the double doors out to the garage. The stark black reven flowing over his knuckles flared violet. “The demon is supposed to reset the body to pristine factory defaults when it takes possession.” His words bounced hollowly off the concrete pillars around them. “That’s part of the deal.”

  Sera angled toward Sid. “You must have a theory.”

  Reminding them a rogue was, by definition, out of sync with her demon seemed unnecessary. “Research on talyan therapeutic interventions is scarce,” he said. “We do know that which does not immediately decapitate, eviscerate, or exsanguinate a talya just makes him crankier, but by the time Bookkeepers see you after a tenebrae encounter, you’re healed.”

  “Or dead and gone,” Archer finished with a scowl. “No middle ground. So why is she stuck with the hurt?”

  Sid shrugged his still-aching feralis-bitten shoulder as they reached the league car. “X-rays don’t image ether-transmuted flesh, but I’ll find the reason.”

  Alyce had tugged open the rear car door. Now she paused, and the frame creaked under her clenched fingers. “No hospital.”

  “Never,” Sera soothed her. “But Nanette could help. She has a healing touch, and she knows what we are. This time of day, she’ll be at the church.”

  Sid considered as he slid into the backseat beside Alyce. Sera’s archive notes had bullet pointed Nanette as a friend of the league. Since she was possessed by an angelic force, would her goodwill extend to a rogue who walked with one foot in the darkness? Indecision whipsawed him as if the feralis had him in its grasp again.