by Jessa Slade
This was where he’d belonged, just another methodical, dispassionate, and bloodless machine.
But in two days with the Chicago league, he’d thrown his methodology right out the window and gotten excessively bloody, and as for the passion …
Technically, these were not the answers he was seeking.
He finally flicked on the lights. While he’d driven around the river with Alyce, looking for billboards, Archer had returned to the warehouse earlier with Thorne’s gun and the shard taken from Alyce’s leg.
To Sid’s human eye, the gun looked more dangerous: a cheap, ugly, short-barreled thug of a gun. But his gaze kept shifting to the shard, the teshuva’s vision overlying his own like a jeweler’s loupe.
The shard had been placed in an isolation cabinet. A pink sticky note on the front of the glass read WTF? in Sera’s handwriting.
The revolver lay on the counter, cleaned of crypt mud, its hollow point rounds unloaded. The computer monitor behind it displayed nested tabs of what Archer had found through his wireless skullduggery. Sid pulled up a chair and minimized the windows as he read.
To his surprise, the gun did have a history. One of the first to bear a serial number after a 1968 law, it had passed through the hands of a gun dealer, Rose Red Pony. And Red Pony had her own history on the next screen. The FBI had opened a file on her after several arrests where she’d been agitating for violence during otherwise peaceful civil rights marches. Whether her motivation had been equality for all or better sales for herself, the conspiracy case against her had become irrelevant when the gun shop and the flophouse above—a known hangout for dissatisfied protesters—exploded. No one had survived.
Clicking on the page of known associates and presumed deceased, Sid scanned the list until his gaze locked on the name: Thorne Halfmoon, suspected bomb maker, remains unverified.
Dead? If only. Quickly cross-referencing the names with burial records, Sid found funeral matches for all but one. Of course not. Throne had descended not into a pauper’s grave but into possession.
Archer had ended his search there, apparently satisfied to know their enemy’s full name and probable possession date since the possessed rarely left deep footprints. This was one reason the demons chose them. Still curious, Sid followed the electronic trail down through the years.
While older records were only haphazardly being digitized by police departments, local governments, and libraries, Bookkeepers had learned to take advantage of industrious amateur genealogists. Their findings—from scans of yellowed family Bible birth ledgers to snapshots of weathered tombstones—often captured the ephemera that history forgot.
The possessed were just such ephemera, but Sid refused to feel pity, for himself or Thorne.
He scanned several active forums before he found a link to a Thorne Halfmoon. The genealogist was following a different family line but had posted a Polaroid of a half-dozen young men framed in the girders of a skyscraper, their hard hats tucked under their elbows. Sid didn’t need to read the names typed neatly along the bottom of the screen; his gaze locked on the rawboned, buzz-cut youth standing a little apart from the rest. A shadow from the girder cut across his face, the set of his unsmiling mouth already as hard edged as the steel.
Sid pushed back in the chair, contemplating the black bore of the gun and the smaller hollow tips of the ammunition. The glimpse into Thorne’s past was every bit as dark and empty: the makings of a djinn-man. Had the younger Thorne felt the forces of darkness gathering around him? As he stood on those suspended beams, had he sensed the cracks in his soul that made him vulnerable to the demon?
If he had known, what would he have done differently?
When Sid clicked the little x in the upper right-hand-corner of the photo, all that remained on the computer screen was the gray on black @1 logo and the ghostly reflection of his own face. The question reflected back at him too. Knowing what he did now—what he would have known before his possession if he’d stopped for half a second to really listen to Alyce’s halting explanation of the etheric energy that had surrounded him—would he have done anything differently?
The casters of the chair creaked as he shifted, his mind whirling through the choice that had passed, untaken. No wonder Archer had stopped his search on Thorne. Train-wreck curiosity was too macabre; there was nothing left to examine, not even in the pieces of his own life.
Sid ran the gun through an etheric sequencer, hoping to identify the demonic signature that might pinpoint the class of djinni they were up against, and his lip curled in an involuntary sneer as he remembered Thorne’s braggart comments about his shooting skills. The reaction was the teshuva’s, of course, not his own, since firearms mastery was not something a Bookkeeper could claim.
Sid tamped down his impatience. A master Bookkeeper wouldn’t try to hurry an investigation any more than he would pull an algae culture into bloom. A talya, however, was a master of forceful impatience.
He’d been left with the worst of both worlds; no power, no patience. If only he could weld those helplessly spinning wheels of himself into something useful again.
In the corner of his vision, the shard of the angel relic wavered in its burning-unconsumed eternity like a warning.
Or maybe, like an idea.
“Just give in to it, Alyce.” He had to raise his voice a little. In the midst of family hour at the YMCA, the pool overflowed with children shrieking and adults looking the other way.
She sputtered. “If I give in, I go under.”
“That’s your dread talking.”
“The demon doesn’t talk.”
He glanced around. No one was close except a trio of young girls, their beaded cornrows clacking as they whirled and splashed one another and screamed.
He turned to Alyce. “Just listen to me. Lie back on my hands.”
She eyed him with clear misgiving, then sighed and eased herself horizontally.
He kept his palms flat under her shoulder blades. “Now relax, spread your arms out to your sides, and arch your back.”
“My ears get wet.”
“Water in your ears won’t kill you. Not being able to float might.” There were so many other ways a talya could die, but she was probably better able to defend against those than he was.
She sighed again, more aggrieved, but did as he said.
He kept his gaze fixed on hers. But at the top of his peripheral vision, he couldn’t help but notice the thrust of her breasts as she tried to comply with his directions. The white triangles of stretchy fabric reminded him too much of the clothes he’d removed from her the night before. He was suddenly very glad for the baggy fit of his trunks and the frenetic action in the pool that obscured any sight line beneath the waves.
Alyce peered up at him. “You aren’t relaxed.”
“We’re about to trap ourselves on the boat of a former terrorist possessed by a demon who has already tried to kill us once, nosing around for secret dirt that will set us on a collision course with the worst monsters in the city. Why wouldn’t I be relaxed?”
“At least you’re standing up.” She jutted her lower lip. “Why did you want to go to Thorne alone?”
“It would be safer.”
Her eyes widened, stricken. “You thought you’d be safer without me?”
“I thought you would be safer.”
She tilted her head back farther to lock gazes. “I was the youngest daughter of a poor farmer. I was a servant, a lunatic. Even the angel and demon who fought above me never gave me a thought.”
The emotion in her eyes was deeper than any pool, at once buoying him up and stealing his breath with the threat of drowning.
“I thought about you.” His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. “See, when you get distracted, you float fine.”
Once he called her attention to it, she tensed and started to sink. He levered her shoulders up and put her on her feet. They were near the shallower end, but she was not tall, so when she faced him, the waves lapped do
wn her décolletage.
The trio of girls had moved closer, and their antics pushed Alyce toward him as the water surged over her shoulders.
He lifted her and turned to shield her against the splashing. Before he could put her down again, she circled her arms around his neck and levered herself higher on his body to fold her legs behind him. His pulse kicked up a few waves of its own.
“Once again, you are right.” From her perch around his waist, she looked down, and her husky voice surged through him. “I am distracted, and look how I float.”
Beads of water sparkled over her reven like crystals on a black velvet choker. If he leaned forward just a fraction, he could press his lips to the hollow of her throat. Except this was such the wrong time, no matter what the craving in him said.
Not that there had yet been a right time. He supposed immortality and the symballein bond would take care of that, unless they were viciously slaughtered later tonight.
“Alyce,” he murmured, “does nothing frighten you?”
“Those children might still get water up my nose”—she tilted her head—“and finding this swimming suit was an unpleasant experience, bordering on terrible. The teshuva wanted to tear everything into tiny pieces. Tinier pieces.”
He smiled. “And yet you overcame.”
“I did. Do you like it?” She lifted herself higher out of the water, her legs tightening around him. He shifted his hands under her backside to hold her up. The soft curve of her bottom and the flex of muscle in her thighs made a slingshot of lust that catapulted rational thought into another time zone.
He caught his breath, gaze fixed not on the white bikini but on her darkening eyes. “I like it.”
Her smile picked up where his had vanished. “Good. I cannot wait to hear what you think about the dress.”
He wished he’d found something nicer for himself. Archer had said Thorne’s illegal riverboat gambling operation catered to high rollers and that they should try to fit in.
They’d agreed Sid’s posh accent would earn him a pass with an expensive collared shirt, rumpled just enough to imply a certain carelessness with his money. But later, when Alyce came down the steps of the YMCA in a white cocktail dress, one shoulder bared and a thin white scarf trailing around her throat, he wanted a tuxedo—and a limo, maybe with a hot tub, and an evening that didn’t include unrelenting evil.
He gestured at her white ballet flats. “No boots?”
“My black ones clashed.”
Since he couldn’t drag his gaze off her, he supposed she knew what she was doing. Certainly Bookkeeper tradition didn’t cover uniforms for possible suicide missions.
Maybe they knew basic talya black covered all occasions.
He held his arm out to her. “You look beautiful.”
Beyond beautiful. In her pure white, her hair braided in a dark corona, she gleamed against the muddy fall hues of the city—fall, as he had fallen.
He gave himself a shake. Not fallen so much as pushed by the demon. The urges of the symballein bond just honed the edge of the stairs he was currently tumbling down.
When her fingers settled lightly on his sleeve, the touch vibrated through his bones, and he struggled to keep his voice even. “No coat?”
“I didn’t want to ruin it.”
She shivered, just an infinitesimal quiver, and he drew her under his arm. “I thought you said you didn’t feel the cold.”
“I don’t. At least, I didn’t.”
“I think removing the angelic relic from your body is allowing the human and demon energies to finally come into balance, as they should have been all along. You’ll probably notice more changes—hopefully all good—as the resonance aligns.”
“Maybe.” She gazed up at him. “Mostly I feel cold when I’m with you.”
He frowned and started to pull away. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” She caught him before he’d gone far. “I feel warm and good with you. The sunshine is brighter. But I feel the cold too. I had forgotten, and now I remember.”
The thought froze him for a moment, as if all the cold she’d forgotten had been pumped through his veins. That was a duty to the symballein bond he hadn’t contemplated. The demon that fit itself to the flaws in a human soul offered immortality, strength, quickness, improved sensory acuity, and a remarkable affinity for anything sharp, pointy, heavy and/or plain old deadly. It didn’t make the sunlit world shiny.
The only thing that could do that, if he remembered his popular rock’n’roll ballads correctly, was love.
Alyce loved him.
Of course, the symballein bond implied a certain intimate working relationship, what with balancing the broken shards of each other’s souls—and having sex.
How had he forgotten the element of love?
As a secretly aspiring Bookkeeper, he’d memorized the periodic table of the elements before he’d had his first wet dream. Then he’d seen a video of the Hindenburg—watched in gut-curdling horror as fire ate the world’s largest airship to a smoldering skeleton—and learned how there was so much more to that first innocuous element, hydrogen, than a single tidy square, even with the atomic number, could explain.
Looking into Alyce’s eyes, he realized love was apparently like hydrogen.
The first element. Simple. All-encompassing. And violently, dangerously explosive.
What could he say? “I don’t want you to be cold.”
How inanely beside the point.
A yellow cab honked as it passed another car, and he eagerly stepped past her to raise his hand. “I’ll ask the driver to turn up the heat,” he promised her as the cab pulled to the curb.
“Don’t bother.” She slipped past him when he held open the back door and settled herself. She patted the seat beside her and cast him a look with violet flames smoldering under the ice. “I have you.”
Suddenly, demonic possession, the rise of a djinn army, and gaping doorways into hell seemed the least of his worries.
CHAPTER 18
On the ride to the dock where the River Princess waited, Sidney was quiet, but Alyce didn’t pester him. He was probably working out a way to get onto the boat, get all his answers, and get off without needing her questionable swimming skills.
Best to leave him to his thinking, because she wanted to keep the dress dry and silky smooth so he could tease it from her later.
She’d felt his interest while they floated in the pool. And then she’d really felt his interest when she’d wrapped herself around him. That had been inappropriate on her part, the sort of behavior her old master would have been entirely justified in calling temptation.
But the sight of his strong, nearly bare body had tempted her first, and his gentle hold on her shoulders had stripped whatever restraint she might have considered.
Another shiver went through her—memory of how gently he’d stripped her in bed—but she stopped herself from touching him and distracting him from his thoughts.
Time enough for that later.
The cab dropped them off amidst a flow of sleek and satisfied people reeking of alcohol. Soft music piped from the bars lining the river. Sidney steered through the crowd, polite, but clearing a way for her to the gangplank. Small tea lights lined the walkway out to the boat, and a yellow spotlight illuminated the name at the prow, but the rest of the boat was dark. The bowed and tinted windows reflected warped images of the activity onshore without a clue of what happened within.
A small group had just crossed into the boat as they made their way closer. Another man stood at the foot of the gangplank, thick arms crossed in plain disinvitation. As they approached, he stepped to block the path onto the boat.
Sidney waved one hand with a touch of exasperation. “Was I supposed to bring a bottle of champagne to crack over the bow?”
“That’s only when launching a ship for the first time, sir,” the man said.
“Well, it is my first time.” Sidney laughed, a touch too loud. “That explains the wine I’ve h
ad.” He waggled his fingers at Alyce, so she sidled up under his arm. “Hey, luv, did you call ahead?”
She shrugged one shoulder. She made sure it was the bare shoulder. “I forgot.”
“Of course you did, luv. Which is why I hold the money.” Sidney pulled out his wallet and fanned out a handful of bills. “That should do it.”
“Sir, I’m afraid we can’t—”
“I’m always afraid too.” Alyce lowered her tone into demonic range as her teshuva responded to the nebulous fears circling the man and twisted his worries back to him. “Thorne likes you that way.”
While the man gaped at her, Sidney freed another few bills and stuffed them in the other man’s shirt pocket. “Nothing to worry about, right, old chap?” He patted the bulging shirt pocket hard enough to nudge the man aside. “I see they’re casting off the lines. You should watch out.”
He tugged her down the gangplank before the man could protest again.
“Won’t he come after us?”
“To watch an annoyingly drunk Brit lose his money at the tables and his mind over a vision in white?” He smiled at her, a little crookedly.
She bit her lip. “Is it too late to think maybe this is one of the bad kinds of ideas?”
“Quick, quiet recon,” he reminded her. “Thorne obviously has a very comfortable setup here. He won’t sacrifice that for mere pesky talyan.”
His logic made sense. She found that comforting, although it would have been more comforting if her teshuva hadn’t felt so small in her, withdrawn to the very depths of her being, almost lost to her senses.
She felt alone. She felt … human.
They stepped onto the smooth, dark deck. Beside her, Sidney looked so at ease, the rich russet waves of his hair ruffled and his sleeves rolled back in defiance of the October chill. She slipped her hand into his.
He looked down at her with a faint smile. “Yet another strange date.”
“I’d go anywhere with you.”
