Forged of Shadows ms-2

by Jessa Slade

  “Then there’s that whole destroying-the-world thing I mentioned.” Liam propped his hip against the concrete blocks. Despite the casual stance, his taut wariness prickled at her nerves. “They’ve lost their focus along with their djinni controller, but we haven’t found the source of the solvo, so more and more of these are forming. It’s only been a few months, and in their passivity they tend not to accumulate too much damage. I dread the day one of them takes a fatal wound, ends up in an ER . . . and continues to live, bloodless and rotting.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “Can’t you do anything for them?”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “Because in your line of work you know how easy it is to get help for the dispossessed.” When she scowled, he rubbed his temple and sighed. “I’m possessed, Jilly, not a miracle worker. The league destroys. We have no doctors or priests, and we can’t go outside our ranks. The world can’t help us. It never could, even before we were possessed.”

  She stiffened. “Speak for yourself. I was helping.”

  “Ask Andre,” he shot back. Then he closed his eyes. “That was unnecessary.”

  “That was asshole,” she snapped. “Just because I couldn’t save them all doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try to save one.” Never mind that most of them passed through her hands without leaving a mark. At least not one that anyone could see.

  “You can’t help these,” Liam said. “There’s nothing left to save.”

  She knew he was right. The emptiness in the crowded park threatened to swallow her. And she would never let that sort of collective despair consume her again. She’d worked too hard to fight her way free from her family’s dysfunction to fall in with a tough guy from a bad crowd. The ring in her nostril had been a sharp-pointed reminder to herself—one she looked at every day—not to be led again.

  She took a shuddering breath, the old knife wound gone seemingly only to make way for fresh pain. “So why are we here?”

  “To show you.”

  “You’re doing a lot of that.” She glared at him. “You’re not showing me. You’re testing me.”

  “If you’re going to collapse on me, I’d as soon know it now.”

  She challenged him. “Do I look like I’m going to collapse on you?”

  He inclined his head in silence.

  She stalked out into the crowd. He followed without protesting, although he opened his coat, leaving easy access to the hammer.

  Nothing moved besides the two of them. At the far end of the park, she came to the chain- link fence that marked the boundaries. On the other side, traffic whisked past, oblivious. “I didn’t see Andre. Maybe . . .” She couldn’t continue.

  Liam’s tone was neutral. “He might not be here, not yet, but all solvo addicts come to this in the end. The haints are lost to everyone, even themselves. Jilly, you can’t save this one.”

  She curled her fingers through the chain link. “Then what’s the point of these demons inside us? Why did it tell me I could finally . . . ?” The wire bit deep as she tightened her fists.

  He went still beside her. “You could what?”

  She slanted a glance at him. The deep blue of his eyes was all the more intense for his stillness, though the restless wind had finally reached him. It ruffled his shaggy hair, covering and uncovering the stark black lines around his temple. “Nothing. Never mind. Who listens to the promises of a devil?”

  Besides the obvious—them—of course.

  She slammed away from the fence. “You’d think I’d know better than to listen to sweet lies. Even if—especially if—the lie comes along with a bribe.”

  From stillness to a blur of motion, he spun on his heel and grabbed her arm. “The teshuva gave you a gift?”

  She tried to wrench free, but his grip was unbreakable. “Now don’t you feel bad about not offering at least paid sick days?”

  “You won’t get sick,” he growled. “You’ll just get dead. What was the bribe? A stone? In a pendant?”

  His intensity unnerved her, so unlike the habitual reserve that carried him above her even more than his height did. She shook her head. “A bracelet. Woven metallic.”

  He pushed back her jacket sleeve. “Where is it? You didn’t lose it, did you? Are you wearing it?” His grasp scalded her flesh.

  As if he had the right to handle her. Oh, she knew how that went. She’d watched her mother submit, over and over, until cowering looked more natural than standing upright. She’d made the same mistake once—only once. This time, she summoned a furious strength and shoved him hard enough to make him stagger. “Get your hands off me. Don’t you ever . . .” To her horror, her eyes prickled with hot tears.

  He took a long step back. With his height, that step carried him a ways. He raked his fingers through his hair. “My fault. Don’t reach for your demon.” The tattoo beside his eye seemed blacker than black. “I’m sorry.”

  She gathered herself, wrapping layers of anger around the hurt as she’d learned to long ago. “Sorry because I won’t let you push me around.” She hardly recognized her own voice, harsh with the anger and still trembling with the hurt. The twist of the two made her chest ache more than the negligible twinge of her wrist from having yanked away.

  “That push is the demon,” he said.

  “Mine? Or yours?” She refused to look away when his gaze snapped up to her. “You are not so in command as I thought.”

  He straightened. Not in threat, she realized, but as if she’d caught him out. His fists clenched, then fell open, empty. “And that was little enough indeed.” The Irish lilt was stronger for just those words.

  They stared at each other a moment. Finally, he added, “The battle isn’t what it was, Jilly, and I am struggling to keep ahead of the changing tide, lest we all be washed away. The bracelet may be a relic from the tenebraeternum. It may be a weapon we can use.”

  “You said the solvo was a demon weapon too. Seems like demon weapons are a bad thing.”

  He hesitated. “Could be. But as you’ve noted, we’re not entirely good ourselves.”

  “My demon might’ve mentioned the weapon part if it wanted to be helpful.” She manacled her wrist over the memory of cool metal and Liam’s urgent grasp. She didn’t have to forgive him; she was possessed by a demon, not an angel, after all. And even before he told her about demonic energy sinks, she’d known how to lock away her feelings.

  Keeping her voice level, she said, “I found the bracelet after the . . . after the demon came to me. I thought it was just a weird dream. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and I thought maybe one of the kids had hidden it in my bag as a going-away present after I got fired. Or . . . I don’t know what I thought. Lau-lau said it was a good-luck charm. I just put it in my jewelry box before I went to meet up with Iz and Dee and forgot about it.”

  He settled back on his heels. “Who is Lau-lau?”

  “My landlady. She lives downstairs from me.” She shot him an arch glance. “When I moved in, she asked me to call her grandmother in Chinese. She can’t possibly be a demon.”

  He didn’t respond. “We need that bracelet.”

  “We?”

  “You. The league. It’s all one now, Jilly.”

  She stiffened. “Is it?” So much for their little détente.

  A violet light glimmered in his eyes. “That’s what the demon promised you, isn’t it? You’d finally get the chance to save those little hooligans, get to be the hero no one else wanted to be. That’s why you let it into you.”

  The words knifed through her, so similar to her old boss’s taunt. Rebel without a chance, Envers had called her. “Do not mock me.” To her shock, her voice held a strange timbre, low and menacing, as if someone behind her—someone way bigger—repeated her warning.

  Liam held up both hands. “We’re getting carried away. Stand down your demon. And stop riling mine.”

  Her skin prickled like static electricity, and she wondered if her hair was standing on end. “I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing
.”

  “Yes, yes, hell. And thank you for actually admitting you don’t know. You’d be very proud of one of your kids for saying that.”

  “Are you trying to start a fight?”

  “Part of me is, apparently. Damn it.”

  “Yes, yes, damn you,” she parroted snidely. Abruptly, he smiled. The flash of white teeth startled her. “If I do or if I don’t. So I might as well.”

  Hands clasped behind his back, he leaned over and kissed her.

  Jilly sensed the incoming kiss, felt the pressure wave of the electric current spike the moment before he moved, so her skin flushed with warning heat. And she didn’t step back.

  She’d wondered, of course, how his kiss would be. No woman with breath wouldn’t wonder. She hadn’t thought she’d indulge her curiosity, though, since she was a woman who knew stupid as well as sexy, and while Liam Niall was definitely sexy, kissing him was definitely stupid—especially since he was far too calculating for his own good, or for her own bad, as the case might be.

  And then he slanted his mouth over hers and the wild circle of her thoughts flew apart.

  Warm. Soft. And as fleeting as his smile.

  The sigh of his breath was gone before she caught more than a whiff of that elusive scent, heather and woodsmoke. Her own breath hitched in her chest, as if he’d taken something from her, more frightening than the knife that had pierced and slid from her body with such ease.

  He lifted his head and gazed down at her. She realized her hands were fisted in the front of his coat, not flattened to push him away, but tangled tight to draw him closer. In the dark blue of his eyes, she caught a glimpse of bewilderment as profound as her own. Where had the steady, reserved leader gone?

  She drew in a deep lungful of bracing chill. “What was that?”

  “A kiss, last I checked.” He paused. “Although I admit it has been a while.” With one finger, he touched his lower lip, just a glancing caress, as if he was double- and triple-checking.

  That hinted uncertainty sent another wave of heat coursing through her. “Why?”

  “Leading a gang of immortal demon slayers doesn’t leave a lot of time for deep, meaningful relationships.”

  She glared at him for his purposeful obtuseness. “Why did you kiss me?”

  “Because you are a beautiful, startling woman.”

  She clenched her fist.

  She didn’t swing, but he reached out and caught her hand. He pressed her white knuckles against the rough canvas of his coat. “And right there would be the more pragmatic reason. Your rising demon was making you unmanageable.”

  “And you managed me.” She kept her voice level. “With a kiss.”

  His gaze narrowed warily. “Yes?”

  So the practical leader had done the expedient thing. She gritted her teeth until her jaw popped. “Is that how you always inspire your troops?”

  He shifted his grip higher, so the callused pad of his thumb brushed the pulse in her wrist. “Only the ones that kiss me back.”

  With all her strength and some that didn’t belong to her, she powered through his gently imprisoning fist and knocked him back a step.

  His eyes widened with surprise. But he recovered quickly and pivoted behind her. His duster wrapped around her when he drew her close.

  “Don’t summon it again,” he murmured in her ear. “Who knows what we’d have to do next time?”

  She held herself taut against the hard plane of his chest. “Is that a hammer in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

  His soft laughter warmed her cheek and still made her shiver. “Yes.”

  Something coiled deep in her, and it wasn’t any demon. A demon would be easy to banish in comparison. “Let me go.”

  “Are you going to attack again?”

  “If I say yes, are you going to kiss me again?”

  He opened his embrace and stepped back. “Just say no.”

  Her lips tingled. Her whole body tingled. But that was the hard part about temptation, wasn’t it? Saying no.

  Still, he was right that the sudden attraction had been a distraction. She looked away from him and froze. They’d distracted everyone, apparently.

  “Uh, Liam? We seem to have an audience.”

  He whirled, putting her against the fence behind him. After a heartbeat, he relaxed marginally. “They don’t seem inclined to attack. Unlike some others I could mention.”

  The haints hadn’t moved from their positions around the park, but their heads had swiveled, several looking so hard over their shoulders that their necks appeared broken, to face Liam and Jilly. Despite their new alignment, their expressions were still uniformly slack, eyes as blank as the windows in the neighborhood.

  Jilly huffed out a breath and stepped away from Liam. “Okay, that’s just creepy.”

  As if an unheard voice had moved among them, whispering, “Nothing to see here,” the watchers slowly returned to their neutral stances facing in random directions.

  “Like somebody cut their strings again,” Liam murmured. “But what plucked at them to begin with?”

  He glanced speculatively at Jilly, but she backed farther away. “Nuh-uh. I told you, no more testing.”

  “Something about you tweaked them.”

  “Me?” She wished she hadn’t squeaked the word.

  “I’ve been through this crowd a half dozen times and they never twitched.”

  “Well, aren’t you special?”

  “No, but you must be.”

  “My mama would be so proud.” She’d meant it as a joke, but she choked on the bitterness that welled up instead. “I want to get out of here.”

  He nodded. “We need to retrieve that bracelet.” For all the distractions flying around, he hadn’t forgotten what he’d really wanted. Of course not. She wasn’t that much of a distraction, after all. The realization needled her. “Fine. I don’t want a demon weapon laying around my apartment anyway.” Other than herself, of course.

  And from the unabated shiver of her skin, she wondered if she’d mind having the unfathomable demon weapon that was Liam Niall lying in her bed.

  They crossed out of the park to the other side of the fence, where traffic and life continued, unwitting of the army in stasis among the trees.

  Jilly glanced back as Liam waved down a taxi. She tugged her coat closer around her. “They’re like Emperor Qin’s thousands of terra-cotta warriors, waiting for the afterlife.”

  “Considering that more than one tyrant liked to take living victims as funerary accompaniments, I doubt what waited for them was heaven.” When the taxi pulled over, Liam opened the door for her. “Dictators have a bad habit of draining resources to build their clay armies. The djinn-man who drained these haints came to the same bad end. Now we’re left with the dust and debris.”

  Jilly deftly avoided his helping hand and slid in to the backseat. “Chinatown,” she told the driver before scowling at Liam as he climbed in beside her. “How can you talk like that? They are people.”

  “Are they? Without souls?”

  Jilly hushed him, inclining her head toward the front seat.

  Liam shrugged. “No one believes all the crazy talk about souls. Right?”

  The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’m as infidel as they come.”

  Liam grinned at Jilly. “See?”

  Jilly settled back. “You’re very cavalier with other people’s souls, lives, whatever.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it.” But his grin faded, and he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. She didn’t think he was resigned at all.

  Still, his regret didn’t change the fact that—more brutal than any ancient emperor—he’d lead them all to destruction to achieve his ends.

  They rode the rest of the way to her apartment in silence.

  The old Sears Tower was a dramatic charcoal spike at the end of Wentworth Avenue, but Chinatown was oddly quiet, stuck between the business-lunch crowds and the evening go players, sipping tea whi
le they flipped their black-and-white stones. No one stopped to peer into the import and herb shop on the ground floor under her apartment, despite the OPEN sign spelled out in orange neon in English and Mandarin.

  Jilly lingered on the sidewalk. “Play it cool, okay? Better yet, just stand there and keep your mouth shut.”

  Liam finished paying and glanced back at her with a frown. “What do you—?”

  “Xiao-Jilly!”

  She turned, blocking Liam. “Hi, Lau- lau. How’s business today?”

  “Better, if you have brought me a shopper.” The old woman sidestepped Jilly, keen black gaze roaming the length and breadth of him. “You don’t feed him enough. Haven’t I told you—”

  Jilly closed her eyes and took a calming breath. “Duck and plum sauce. I know.”

  “It is almost suppertime,” Liam pointed out, not helpfully.

  Jilly tsked. “Too bad about those darn MSG headaches.”

  “No MSG in my cooking,” Lau- lau broke in. “And I have soup on the stove. With dumplings.”

  Liam tagged behind her. “Dumplings sound good.”

  Jilly brought up the rear, staring daggers that no one noticed.

  Or so she thought. When Lau- lau slipped behind the beaded bamboo curtain separating the back room, Liam pulled her close. “Your neighbor recognized something about the bracelet. I just want to hear what she knows and then we’re gone.”

  Unreasonably, she was offended on her elderly neighbor’s behalf. “Taste and run, huh? Nice. You really know how to treat the ladies.” Not that she meant herself and that kiss.

  Liam’s expression was as smooth as the jade Buddha’s belly next to her. “I just want to make sure she’s not in any danger from whatever your demon brought along for the ride.”

  “And make sure that she’s not a demon in disguise.” His lips quirked. “Oh, she’s more frightening than any demon. She’s a matchmaker.” His gaze slipped past her and his smile widened as he stepped forward to take the laden tray from Lau-lau. He took a deep breath. “Ah. Egg flower soup and green tea. With lotus blossom?”

  Lau-lau beamed. “Your senses are exquisite.”