by Jessa Slade
“We had orders not to kill the talyan,” Carlo explained with a scowl. “The league has a rogue female, and Magdalena wants her for us.”
The demon beat in Thorne’s blood like a war drum, deafening him. Magdalena had gone after Alyce? What interest could that evil old monster have in the faint sparkler that was Alyce?
Never mind that he should be asking himself the same question; he should have bent that andiron right through Carlo’s heart.
Carlo continued. “Taking out a warden’s hallowed sword is a trick. We’ll be ready for the sphericanum next time. As for the league … Magdalena has plans for them.”
“And for us, presumably.” Chains bared his diamond-bright teeth. “Why isn’t she here to speak for herself?”
Carlo tipped his hands up, in a what-can-you-do motion. “She called the ahaˉzum. The rest will follow, and with the angels cowering behind their gates while our traitor talya brothers put out fires, there will be no one to stop our ascent.”
No one?
Thorne took one silent step. Then every muscle in his body seized, locking him in place.
What was he thinking? There were too many of them standing under the bare bulb. Though they would not all side with Carlo, some would be swayed by the promises of godhood. His demon had obviously done the math and decided not to engage. Thorne let out a slow breath until his muscles were his own again.
The djinni might want to fall in line, but what Magdalena wanted, she could not have—not when he had wanted it first.
As silently as he had come, Thorne departed. At the front door, he ripped down the sign, shredded it between his fingers, and plastered it up again with scraps of the tape.
C UN T BOWLING FOR LEGION PRIVATES DE STRUC ION
Damn, not quite enough letters. He jabbed his fingertip with the lock pick until the corrosive ichor bubbled up in his skin. The glass smoked as he stenciled the second t in “destruction.” While he thought about adding punctuation, the djinni healed the wound, so he left the rest of the paper pieces to scatter on the wind.
Sid paced the halls at the warehouse as the night ticked onward. Each step jolted his shoulder under the fresh dressing, but when he tried to lie down, his senses strained to capture any hint of Nim returning, or the talyan who had gone out on their eternal nightly mission.
Nothing.
Somewhere out there, the league was lessening the city’s burden of darkness, and yet he felt the gloom settling on him. Guilt. Frustration. Anger. Even the lab with all its ledgers and machines and secrets to be revealed held no distractions for him tonight. Mending his specs had taken only a moment with a loop of duct tape, since of course the prime physical specimens of talyahood had no need of spectacle repair kits.
Finally, the lights of returning cars beamed through the foyer windows, casting a grand labyrinth of shadows amidst the columns and crossbraces. Sid hurried out to the loading dock, but only a handful of men entered.
His heart almost stopped. “What happened? Where is everyone? Was there a battle?”
The first two talyan swept past him, unheeding.
He stepped directly into Gavril’s path. The talya stopped to scowl at him. “There’s always a battle. Or we wouldn’t have to go out.”
“Did everyone … ?” Sid couldn’t even force the words past his teeth.
“Die?” The talya male grinned, but with an edge that gave his Slavic features a brutal air. “Not tonight. So they went to the Coil to celebrate not dying. That, and to hang with the rogue.”
Sid stiffened. He’d read about the Mortal Coil in Sera’s notes on the league’s assets—and enemies. The owner of the night club didn’t fall into either category yet. “They took Alyce there? They might as well have taken her out against the tenebrae.”
“I think they might still do that,” Gavril said.
Sid swore.
Gavril cocked his head. “Why the nerves, Bookkeeper? If you want to know what makes a talya tick, you have to see her in action. And judging from the etheric blowback on the hunt, I’m guessing somebody is going to get a lot of action tonight.”
Frustration melted into fury, dissolving through Sid in a rush. “Then why aren’t you there, queuing up for your chance at her?”
Gavril stared past him, his gaze unfocused. “Risk the symballein bond? Do I look stupid as well as damned? The only thing worse than eternity alone would be eternity trapped with someone. I have enough forces sharing pieces of my skin.” The talya glided away.
Sid looked out the open bay door and hurried for the street.
He had his wallet this time, and the cab driver was quick when he saw the gratuity. They pulled up in front of the Coil before Sid had gotten any further on his plan.
He couldn’t stop her; he couldn’t save her; he had perhaps ruined his chance to study her after his badly timed comment earlier. And still, here he was.
Despite the late hour—or early hour, depending on the reference point—a line of club-goers straggled out on the wrong side of the velvet rope. A talya-sized man shone his flashlight on IDs and waved away Sidney’s credit card.
“Cash only,” he said. “Next.”
Sid shifted so the couple behind him couldn’t shoulder past. “I just need to check on someone.”
“I’m sure she’s moved on without you,” the bouncer said disinterestedly.
“Alyce is still here?”
The bouncer elbowed Sid to one side. “Man, I don’t even know who Alyce is. But if she’s here without you, obviously she’s moved on, wouldn’t you say?”
Bloody fascinating—a sidewalk psychologist. “I’m with Liam Niall’s crew.”
That got a laugh. “When I asked if he was hiring, he told me all his positions are full. I know he didn’t make an exception for you.”
Sid wondered if adding the ache of his grinding teeth to his shoulder, his head, and his professional ego was going to be the end of him.
“Westerbrook, what are you doing here?” Archer stepped out through the club doors, Sera on his arm.
Sid had never been glad to see the broody talya before. “I came to check on Alyce. You didn’t leave her in there alone, did you?”
“Just her and a dozen new best dancing buds.” Sera poked Archer. “I should have made you work harder for me.”
“I don’t dance,” he said.
“You love to dance.”
“That lie will earn you an extra aeon in purgatory.”
Sid thought his enamel must be worn to bare nerves. “Could I interrupt this regularly scheduled pair bonding long enough to borrow a few greenbacks?”
Archer peered at him. “Attitude will get you nowhere.”
“Not true,” Sera said. “Attitude gets you everywhere.” She pulled out her wallet.
Archer lowered his voice as the bouncer dealt with another few people. “It’ll get him ass-whipped by that bunch inside.”
“Westerbrook can handle himself. Right, Sid?” She held the fanned bills just out of his reach.
“It’s never the Bookkeeper who needs the lecture.” Sid plucked the money out of her fingers with more force than necessary.
She blinked, as if his vehemence surprised her. “Stay away from the mixed drinks. Bella swaps labels and still waters ’em down. Actually, don’t drink anything you don’t open yourself. And have fun.”
Archer steered her to the street. “Just stay out of the way.”
Inside the club, Sid found he couldn’t stay out of anyone’s way. The interior was darker than a nightclub needed to be, as if the inevitable black lights and half-burned-out rope lights would reveal too much. Between the murk and the crowd, he bumped into a dozen people—none of them talyan, apparently, since his head was still attached to his shoulders. He fought his way to the bar with no sign of Alyce or the others.
He stood at the sticky Formica, aggravation surging through him.
A barmaid circled her wet bleach rag past his fisted hands. “What can I get you?”
“No
thing at the moment, thanks.” He added in a mumble, “Unless you can tell me what the hell I’m doing here.”
The barmaid’s cat’s eye glasses glinted in the neon of the liquor logos. “You must be looking for Liam’s crew.”
He’d intended the question more figuratively, but he’d take whatever answers he could get. “Actually, I am.”
She grinned, the flash of her white teeth deepening the feline resemblance. “I’d recognize that special brand of darkness anywhere.”
She tilted her face upward. Behind her glasses, the lights shone across her eyes in a clouded blur of cataracts. “They’re in the loft.”
Sid followed her blind gaze up to the second story. If the main floor was unnecessarily gloomy, the upstairs was just black. Without her direction, he would never have noticed the balcony level. Of course, the talyan would prefer such a place.
“Stairs are over there,” she said. “Tell the bouncer Bella said it’s okay.”
Sid frowned. “‘Okay’? That’s your security password?”
“Nobody misuses it twice.” She smiled, and again he was reminded of a cat—the kind that might hide the limp bodies of pet hamsters in his shoes.
He thanked her and slid a tip across the bar, thinking one of the other barmen would retrieve it. But she took the bill with one hand, her other hand busy below the level of the bar. Before he could turn away, she pushed a tumbler across to him. The drink gleamed an unnatural yellow under the neon.
“On the house,” she said.
An impatient patron inserted himself between Sid and the bar, and he stepped away.
A short, dark corridor led to the stairs. Sid repeated the barmaid’s terse approval, and the bouncer—twin to the thick-necked bruiser on the street—stepped aside.
Did the hamster walk into the cat’s mouth with this same sense of inevitability?
He took a sip of the liquid fortitude and almost missed a step. Some heinous concoction of cheap burning whiskey and fruity syrup supernovaed through his sinuses. It was not at all weak as Sera had warned.
He downed half of it before he reached the upper landing.
The loft wasn’t as noisy as below, nor as dark as it had looked from the bar. Stubs of votive candles burned in a dozen chipped tumblers—Sid ran his fingertip around the rim of his glass—giving just enough light to define the corners of the low tables surrounded by even lower couches of indeterminate color. The atmosphere was set for self-indulgence and sprawling ennui, but the talyan couldn’t play that hipster role if their souls depended on it.
Instead, they stood in concentric rings, the veritable wall of broad male backs to Sid, enclosing the Liam-Jilly and Jonah-Nim pairs, and, at the center, Alyce, looking over the balcony.
Despite his position on the very outside, Sid thought he’d never seen a lonelier figure than the wisp of a girl, her hand gripping the rail as if she might throw herself over.
When Nim had snatched Alyce away for a shopping spree, Sid had known he’d find her either barricaded in the grim shades of talya destruction or—worse yet—tricked out like Nim in some cleavage-enhancing, cock-teasing latex extravaganza.
Which made him blink even harder at the vision in white before him.
The simple fall of the skirt only emphasized her slender lines. Her hair, coiled in the braided crown on her head, revealed the column of her throat, and the demure round collar cupped ghostly hands around her reven that shimmered violet with her disquiet.
All she needed was some of the blinking neon from below announcing SACRIFICIAL VIRGIN HERE.
And the talyan were gathered like hungry dragons.
He should add footnotes to known tribal matrimonial customs. He should run home and grab a recorder to compare the etheric flares captured during street battles to the fierce energies he sensed swirling around them now. He should …
He tossed back the rest of his drink and set the glass down gently on one of the empty tables. He meant to set it down gently, anyway. Somehow the glass cracked. Now he knew where all the broken candleholders came from.
Despite the stern clack, only Alyce turned. Against the white dress and her white skin, her icy eyes burned with a pale blue fire.
Her expression didn’t soften, still as cold and remote as the moon since she’d heard him choose London over her, and he realized he’d wanted her to be happy to see him. He wanted her smile to invite him through the ring of prowling talyan to her side.
Several millennia of Bookkeeper doctrine stood in direct opposition to his wants, though he couldn’t quote the exact passages right at this moment, but what did they know? He was just one man, and she, despite her demonic burden, was still a woman, the woman he couldn’t get out of his otherwise ruthlessly disciplined mind. Despite all the unspecified fears, really, how could this shimmering awareness between them destabilize the world?
Even as his head spun from the alcohol in his empty belly, his determined footsteps carried him through the first ring of talya males. Tonight, he was through taking notes.
CHAPTER 12
A tremor swept down Alyce’s spine, riding an anonymous surge of keen expectation.
She had never been around so many overwrought people. When the lights above the dance floor swept the crowd, the garish illumination captured fleeting moments of expressions. A blue frozen laugh. A red openmouthed shout. A yellow head thrown back in abandon. The unfettered passions sent another wave of shivers through her bones, as if trying to vibrate her into ill-considered action.
The talyan wanted her. Nim had promised they would not attack, though the marks of their demons glittered brighter than the club lights. Jilly had also promised to put her heavy boot through their backsides if they touched Alyce without her permission.
Alyce wondered what the fierce little woman would do to Sidney.
Then, as if conjured by her thought, he emerged from the stairwell.
To her devil-riddled eyes, he stood out against the shadows like one of the candles in the cracked glass. His light gleamed through his flaws until her eyes watered from looking at him.
There was more light to him than shadow, which was more than she could say for herself. No wonder he wouldn’t stay.
She let the tears blind her, so she didn’t have to see him watching her from a distance that was impossible even for a powerful demon to cross and utterly hopeless for her. She would do anything to stave off the dreadful moment when he would walk up to her and say good-bye.
Through the haze of weakling tears she glimpsed the starry night of red watching eyes.
Ah, that was who was so excited about her misery.
Without raising her head or drawing attention, she murmured to Nim, who stood closest, “Do you see them? We’re surrounded.”
“Can’t miss ’em. Tall, dark-souled, and disgustingly handsome. You’d think in a few thousand years between them of walking this earth, they could come up with one pickup line.”
“I meant the devils.”
“Yeah, all that teshuva tweaking makes the reven light up like a pinball game.” Nim scowled. “Sorry I made you the shiny silver ball.”
“The dress is very pretty.” Alyce brushed her palms down her thighs. Around her, the net of etheric energy pinged on her skin as it tightened another notch. “I’m talking about the tenebrae.”
“What? Where?” Nim whirled, her hand at the small of her back. She kept a blade there, Alyce had noticed. The grim-faced man at the door to the club hadn’t noticed, despite his air of officiousness, because he’d been too busy looking at Nim’s long, bare legs.
But the concealed knife would do no good against these devils.
“Up,” Alyce said. “No, don’t look. You’ll bring them upon us.”
“We can take them.”
“You are stronger,” Alyce agreed, “but the panic downstairs would be … messy.”
Nim nodded. “The horde-tenebrae always like the juicy tang of panic.” She leaned toward Jonah and spoke into his ear.
&n
bsp; He stiffened but didn’t look up. “Let’s take it outside.”
As if someone had thrown a match on the line of black powder connecting them, the demon marks on all the talyan flared violet at once.
Tucked like black mold into the nooks and crannies in the ceiling girders, the malice shrieked and were echoed in a deeper register by the larger salambes. The cry reverberated in the big gray boxes that boomed music below. The song cut out and projected the horde’s voice in a vicious roar. People on the dance floor dropped to their knees, hands clamped over their ears.
Alyce winced. “We have to get out. Maybe the devils will follow us.”
“They will if I tell them to,” Nim said. She threaded her fingers through Jonah’s.
To Alyce’s astonishment, the talya tucked her into the crook of his arm and kissed her. It was a scandalizing kiss, her breasts tight against his chest, his hook gleaming low against the yielding curve of her spine. The backlash went through the teshuva and tenebrae alike in a shuddering wave.
Alyce was already heading for the stairs, shoving between the frozen talyan.
Sidney stepped in front of her. “What—?”
She grabbed his hand and yanked him along.
Her passage broke apart the stillness, and they fell into line behind her and Sidney. Liam was right at their heels. “Thank all the saints you were paying attention.”
“There are no saints here.” She hunched her shoulders against the gathering storm cloud of devils overhead.
“Through the back, to the alley,” Jonah said. “Nim will lure the malice with us.”
In a wave of blackness all their own, the talyan swept through the stunned crowd. Someone was tugging at wires around the big music boxes, muttering, “Damn speakers.”
Yes, Alyce thought, all the talking had almost damned them. She didn’t want to hear any more from Liam and the others about all she would be with them—or worse, hear the words they didn’t say; the look, lonely and hungry, that was only in their eyes.
She’d show them what she did with lonely and hungry.
