Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  His throat worked, choking on his djinni’s wordless disturbance. What would it say if it had a tongue of its own? “I suppose ‘Go to hell’ won’t help my cause.”

  Her laugh was like industrial smoke, darker and grittier than her smooth voice. “Some might say, by joining my cause, that’s exactly where you’d be going.”

  Curiosity forced him to ask, “You’d say otherwise?”

  “While I appreciated his verve, Corvus Valerius wanted to pit hell against heaven with this realm as the battlefield. But I’ve found war to be … intrusive. The tenebraeternum can stay locked tight. I just want to borrow a bit of it, as needed.”

  Already the force of her demon, even idle, horrified him. If she had access to the eternal well of evil … “Hell isn’t a bank,” he said.

  She laughed again and leaned toward him to rest her hand on his arm where Carlo had torn the shirt. “More like a stock market. You ran a casino; you should understand. No one gets rich playing the bank.”

  Standing so close, her perfume teased him; something lush and exotic, but applied with a restrained hand so that even his djinni strained to capture the essence of the fragrance … and recoiled at the nearly imperceptible stink of cordite. Though her fingers were warm, almost uncomfortably so, his skin crawled at her touch. Before he could pull away, she released him. She turned to the chain-link fence and curled her fingers through the steel wire.

  “No,” she murmured. “I’m not trying to make this earth a living hell.” Her gaze fixed on the scene on the other side of the fence. “It’s already that. I just want it to be my hell.”

  Focused as he’d been on Magdalena, Thorne had dismissed the background shrieking as his freaked-out djinni. But the ruckus actually rose from the half-pint fiends confined behind the fence.

  The daycare center playground was decorated with pumpkins and hay bales that the children tumbled over with raucous glee. Since most were in costume—and empty candy cellophanes gusted in the whirlwinds of their capering—he guessed they’d been celebrating the coming of Halloween.

  He slanted a glance at Magdalena and swallowed hard at the dark void in her stare. “Thanks for the invitation, but I have my own hell.”

  She watched the children another long heartbeat, then trailed her fingers down the chain-link fence. Her white-tipped nails strummed the metal strands with a discordant rattle. When she finally turned to him and smiled, against her white teeth, her lips looked almost bloodred. “Of course you do. And you are alone there. Wouldn’t you rather be with us? Isn’t that why you came here today? Because you have nowhere else to go?”

  Only because the djinni bastards had burned his Princess. Thorne made himself smirk, disguising the rage of his loss with a flippant one-shoulder shrug. “I’m here because I knew Carlo would come eventually. And I planned to kill him.”

  She turned back the way they had come and raised one hand in a negligent wave. “Ah, you are brothers under the skin, and brothers will fight.”

  “Are you giving me permission to skin Carlo?”

  She gave him a reproving look as the limo sharked toward them on the wrong side of the street, wise guy at the wheel. “In the end, you are the same, and you will fight together.”

  On one hand, she was probably right. Now that he’d met her and felt the black-hole magnetism of her demon, he didn’t think that Chains or any of the other skeptical djinn-men would hesitate to join her. The counterculture associates of his day had liked to proclaim “power corrupts,” and if the opposite was true—that corruption was power—then Magdalena was absolutely powerful. What djinn-man could resist such magnificent malevolence?

  He wavered a little in his stolen shoes. She never dropped her gaze, but the thick fringe of her lashes narrowed. She was calling on her djinni, not to bring him to his knees, but enough to weaken his resolve.

  And if he didn’t bend, she would break him.

  His heartbeat hung suspended, as it had the moment all those years ago when he realized, with his fellow revolutionaries sleeping in the house above the basement lab, the timing device on the bomb was locked and counting down.

  Alyce had always feared that the demon-ridden were monsters. With Magdalena, there was no need to question.

  She was definitely a monster.

  But he kept his voice as light and steady as the touch he’d used on unstable explosives. “With such excellent specimens as Carlo, I think you don’t even need me.”

  “I want you all.” Her dark eyes widened, and from the black depths peered the same hunger as when she’d looked at the children. It was not so different, really, from how those children must have looked at the Halloween candy that had once filled those empty wrappers now scuttling ahead of the wind.

  The limo coasted to a stop beside them, and Carlo stepped out onto the curb to open the back door for Magdalena. “My lady, let’s go. The fundraiser dinner starts in an hour.” He squinted at Thorne, an evil look compounded by the smears of blood from his broken nose. “He ain’t worth missing the hors d’oeuvres.”

  Thorne forgave the wise guy for all his bad manners if he’d just hustle his damn lady out of there. Nevertheless, no open bar tab, no number of courses to a meal, would fill the void in those bottomless eyes.

  She slipped into the maroon leather interior, but Thorne’s relief was short-lived as she rolled down the window. “I’ll find you again,” she promised.

  And although he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to lose, he was suddenly afraid.

  Nowhere to go and nothing to lose—was this how birdbrain Blackbird had raged as the pieces of him were chipped away?

  Thorne crouched beside the white van’s shining tires and tucked the equally black strands of his unbraided hair behind his ears. He sliced the lock pick across the pad of his thumb and grimaced at the stink, worse than the new rubber next to him. Blood, ichor, and birnenston welled up in threads of red, black, and yellow, festive as a coral snake and far more deadly.

  With unhurried thoughtfulness, he painted his cheekbones. The toxic ooze ate into his flesh, and he tasted salt as the deep furrows siphoned his tears downward.

  Corvus died to reach his vision; there must be another way.

  The white clouds had thickened all day to an ashen gray, condensing toward black like his poor boat. They bellied down now to spit rain in his face, but nothing could extinguish the burning pain of the birnenston on his flesh.

  The Princess was drowned. A cruel goddess was rising. And his innocent little Alyce … had never been his.

  See, this was why a man was better off alone.

  The talyan would come to curse the symballein lash, he had no doubt. But in the meantime, they’d triggered a torrent of changes that had yet to run its course. Who would be left standing and who would be swept away?

  He’d bragged to Alyce, and to Carlo of the gaping chest hole, that he walked his own path. That was what he’d told himself while his grandmother dragged him down from the apartment roof one night short of his seven-night vigil. He would find his own way.

  And look what a clusterfuck had ensued.

  He’d been a slow student at the rez school, and worse when he’d been sent to his grandmother in the city. Maybe if his spirit guide had appeared. Maybe if the bomb hadn’t gone off, or—better yet—if he’d never twisted the wires together. Maybe if the radiance he’d seen in Alyce had held out any chance for him … But no. He was what he was.

  Possessed by evil. But he would not allow anyone else to lead him by the nose. It was time he mastered the darkness in him, by himself, since the light had never been burning for him.

  That last encounter with Alyce had shamed him. Held at bay by an Anglo toting his own gun … He needed to get back his edge.

  War paint complete, his djinni roused to a fury, he crept past the Last Call Cleaning van. SERVICES IN DECONTAMINATION AND STERILIZATION, promised the lettering on the vehicle.

  They’d need those services after he was done.

  “Idiot
!” Nim bounced hard on the mats.

  “Who?” Gavril straightened his black T-shirt. Throwing Nim over his shoulder had left a wrinkle. “You or me?”

  “You! Okay, me. Just … ouch.” She pulled herself to her feet with a grimace.

  Alyce stepped forward. “I’ll try now.”

  Nim limped off the mats to stand in the wan gray light filtering through the warehouse windows. Fretful rain spattered against the glass. “Did you see what I did wrong?”

  “You let him catch you.”

  Nim snorted. “My mistake.”

  Gavril took a few circling steps to the side as Alyce walked into the empty corner amidst all the salvaged junk. He had bowed to Nim. He did not do the same to her, Alyce noticed.

  She followed him along the circling path he’d set, their bare feet silent on the mats.

  He studied her, eyes unreadable. “Jonah asked me to work with her, to streamline the reflexes her teshuva has given her. He worried—needlessly—that his missing hand makes him less of an instructor. He worried—rightly—that he would be too gentle with her.”

  Nim snorted again. “His mistake.”

  Gavril inclined his head, but his gaze did not leave Alyce. “You do not need such streamlining.”

  Nim put her hand on the lush swell of her hip. “Did you just call me fat?”

  They both ignored her. Alyce shrugged. “We have been together a long time, my demon and I. But we are weaker than we should be because I do not know what to give it. I don’t know how to be with it.”

  Gavril’s gaze was still dark. “Your symballein mate should show you. He has no excuse not to.”

  “He has many excuses,” Alyce said softly.

  Nim sucked in a breath. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

  Gavril held up one hand. “I have no intention of pursuing this opening.” His smile at Alyce was cool and sharp. “No intention of pursuing you, other than here, around this attack.”

  “I don’t intend to be caught. In either way.”

  “Then let us begin.”

  Gavril did not catch her long enough to throw her—although he laid hands on her twice and managed to trip her once—but the chase left her panting. In the end, she managed a leap that sucked the last of the energy from her legs. She planted both heels in Gavril’s chest with a mighty kick that drove him back to the windows. His elbow cracked a pane, and if she’d gone for the follow-up, she might have shoved him through the glass to a debilitating, if not fatal, fall.

  She hit the mat and rolled backward, coming to a stop in a low crouch, one hand steepled before her. The demon arched through her, straining toward the fight. In the bottom of her vision, the rivet ring glinted with a twinge of violet.

  Gavril waited against the windows. “You might not know all the demon needs, but your instincts haven’t failed you.” He gave her the bow he’d withheld before, as smooth as the raindrops rolling down the glass behind him.

  Lounging on her belly at the edge of the fight, propped on her elbows, Nim pouted. “How come I didn’t get instincts?”

  “You did,” Gavril said. “You talk over them.”

  “True.” She coiled her legs around to sit. “Enough ass-kicking for today?”

  “Until tonight,” Gavril said. “And then it will be for real.”

  Despite the saucy tilt of her head, Nim’s eyes were serious as her gaze slid from Alyce to Gavril. “Speaking of talking … You won’t mention any little symballein spats, right? Just between us girls?”

  Gavril grimaced. “Any of the others could have chosen to be up here to enjoy your indiscretions. They are not brave enough. So they will get no advantage from me.”

  “Great.” Nim bounded to her feet. “Let’s have ice cream.”

  Alyce looked over with interest. “What is ice cream?”

  Nim hooked her arm through Alyce’s elbow. “Sweetie, let me show you heaven.”

  Gavril shook his head and stalked away.

  Down the stairs to the main floor, Nim was silent. But when they got to the kitchen, she paused before reaching into the freezer. “It’s not easy being symballein. I used to get stark naked in front of strangers, but nobody saw my soul.”

  She spooned out a bowl of ice cream for herself, then solemnly handed Alyce the carton and the ladle. “Go for it.”

  “I tried that. I said I loved him. He, the man of many words, said nothing.”

  Nim winced. “I meant go for the ice cream.”

  “Oh.” Alyce stared down into the chunky chocolate depths. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “To me or dumbfuck? Sweetie, you can tell a girlfriend anything. A man, not so much.” She shoved her spoon into the ice cream as if the frozen lump were a particularly unfeeling heart.

  Alyce took a bite and waited while the confection melted across her tongue. The demon stretched one last time, tightening and relaxing every muscle in a long ripple; then it was quiet. “I frightened him. I saw it in his eyes.”

  “I’m sure you did. They are easily scared that way.”

  “Not Jonah,” Alyce said. “Not Liam or Archer.”

  Nim laughed. “Not now. But before … As quick as they are to run to trouble, a talya male is twice as fast running from the symballein bond. Which is just silly, when the two are fairly synonymous.”

  “But what should I do?”

  “What do you want?”

  Alyce contemplated the chocolate on her spoon. The sweet darkness made her hungry for more. “I want him.”

  “Remember when I said it wasn’t easy?”

  Alyce inverted the spoon over her tongue and nodded.

  “Well, you won’t be, not anymore. Let him fight for it.”

  “Fight?” Alyce swallowed, and the sugared cream raced through her system. “But we were talking about love.”

  “The only thing worth fighting for,” Nim said. “Are you strong enough?”

  “My teshuva—”

  “Not the demon. You.”

  Alyce hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe you don’t really want him.”

  Denial reared up in an instant, the demon a heartbeat behind in solidarity. Alyce narrowed her eyes.

  Nim smiled. “You’re strong enough. But it could get ugly. If he resisted that white satin underwear …”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But he managed to break free of the lace.” Nim tilted her head in thought. “Well, maybe he is stronger than I thought too. We’ll have to enthrall him well.”

  “He likes puzzles. I’m too simple.”

  Nim snorted. “No woman is simple. He was just blinded by those pretentiously nerdy glasses. You’ll show him. Tonight, when the league goes out. Come to my room at sundown. We’ll see who’s chasing whom.”

  Alyce bit her lip. “But what if—” A jagged bolt of energy not her own seared across her awareness.

  She found herself on her knees, Nim beside her, hand on her shoulder. “Alyce? How hard did Gavril hit you?”

  “Didn’t you feel—?”

  Nim stiffened. “Everybody’s suddenly on attack. The warehouse sinks aren’t dampening it all. Let’s go.”

  The other woman really did think she’d be a help, Alyce marveled. And she would be, she swore to herself, if only she could stop clutching her temples.

  The leashed uproar was worse in the foyer, etheric energy sparking like lightning in the cool, rain-scented air. The wall-to-wall black of the talyan split around one redheaded angelic-possessed.

  “Nanette.” Nim hurried forward to join Sera in the seething morass of motionless talyan. How they managed to do both—seethe and be still … Alyce crept up behind Ecco. His bulk seemed to absorb some of the furious energy.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Nanette was saying. “Help Cyril.”

  The sphere warden lay sprawled on the floor, his face a disturbing shade somewhere between the concrete and the white of his pristine linen shirt—pristine except for the blooming crimson across hi
s belly.

  Sidney shouldered between the talyan. “Put pressure on that. Stop the bleeding. His angel isn’t like the teshuva; it won’t do the work for us.”

  “Typical angel,” Ecco mumbled.

  Alyce slipped out from behind him and went to Sidney’s side. He had flipped up Fane’s shirt, and she held back a gasp at the vivid, vicious wound surrounded by ichor scorch.

  “What happened?” Nim had brought a towel to her workout. She tossed it to Sera, who made a thick pad and pressed it to the gaping red gash.

  “A djinn-man,” Nanette said. Her shoulders shook until Nim wrapped an arm around her. “I was closing the church when Cyril came, bleeding. He said he’d been attacked and told me to bring him here.”

  From the woman’s blank stare, unmindful of the way her red hair dripped rain around her cheeks, Alyce knew she was picturing the moment again, probably superimposed over her husband’s attack. Alyce wondered if she would ever go back to the church again.

  Blood seeped through the towel between Sera’s fingers. “We need to get him to the hospital. Now.”

  “No,” Fane rasped. “They’ll come for me there.”

  Sidney half rolled the warden to check his back for an exit wound. “The djinn-men?”

  Fane hissed like a curse: “The sphericanum.”

  The talyan shot one another mystified glances.

  “He lost his abrasax,” Nanette said. When they only shrugged, one after the other, she added, “His blesséd weapon.”

  Ecco’s eyes bugged. “He lost it?”

  “Didn’t lose it,” Fane growled. “Djinni fuck took it.”

  “That’s why the sphericanum will”—Nanette swallowed hard—“not be forgiving.”

  Ecco scratched his close-shaved head with a sound like sandpaper. “Huh. I always thought the side of goodness and light automatically included forgiving. Like, ‘If you order now …’”

  Sidney interrupted. “If we’re saving his life, we need to get him down to the lab. Ecco, help me carry him.”

  As they trooped downstairs, Sera sent various talyan peeling off on other errands: to inform Liam, to recon the church, to patrol the warehouse roof in case a maddened army of angelic-possessed came to reclaim their fallen.