by Jessa Slade
“So far, they’re all hot as hell too. Can I borrow your lip gloss?”
Jilly refused to dignify that with an answer as she handed over her tube of balm.
In the basement, the weapons room called to her. But she bypassed its high-tech access panel and pushed open a smaller, regular old door, where she found stacks of cotton T-shirts, sweatpants, and socks, enough that she could have supplied a half dozen homeless outreaches. She hoped Liam was getting a great bulk discount.
“Black, black, or black?” She rifled through the piles.
“Large or extra large?”
“Extra large,” Dory said. “I plan to eat a bunch more omelets before I go.” She leaned against the door. “I missed you, Jilly.”
Jilly paused, her hands fisted in black cotton. “How about you don’t go again?”
Wait, what was she saying? She was an immortal demon-slaying half monster now. She couldn’t set any sort of good example.
She wondered what excuses were going through her sister’s mind when Dory sighed and shook her head. “I can’t help myself.”
“Then let me help, okay?” She waited for her sister’s faint nod, wondering if the hesitation had to do with the crap job she’d done in the past. But she couldn’t exactly explain that helping would prominently feature destroying Corvus—that, at least, should be in her demonic power.
Jilly left her sister to shower and hunted the hallways for Liam. A faint buzz through her skin stopped her outside the office where she’d first barged into his league. She pushed open the door. He was leaning behind that oversized desk, arms braced and palms flattened over the curling edges of a big map, like a lion over a kill. Archer, Sera, and a few other talyan clustered around as if waiting for their piece of the action. They all looked up at her, and Liam straightened his stance.
Archer spoke first. “Did you get anything else from her?”
“Just that all talya men are hot.” She glanced at Sera apologetically when the males grinned.
The other woman shrugged. “I noticed it too. At the beginning.” She punched Archer’s shoulder when he glowered. “Maybe immortality refines the pores.”
Jilly shrugged. “Maybe the teshuva like pretty boys.”
Liam cleared his throat over the male grumbles. “Looking for something useful here?”
Jilly shook her head. “Dory had nothing but good to say about Blackbird. Corvus.” Was it a shared failing of theirs, passed from mother to daughters, to fall for any tough male that strode by?
Sera nodded. “That’s the impression I get from the others we picked up. They don’t know the demon-possessed gladiator Archer and I faced in the tenebraeternum four months ago rejected his own soul, that he abandoned it in the Veil. They just wanted something to kill the pain. They don’t see that all that’s left is the evil.”
“No one ever does,” Ecco growled.
“That’s why we’re here,” Liam said. “The teshuva allow us to see what others can’t believe. And to do something about it.”
Jilly studied him. How did he manage to infuse his voice with such conviction when she knew the doubts that plagued him? Did no one else see cracks? They certainly leaned on him as if he could never falter.
She clenched her fist against the sudden urge to drag him away. He would never allow it. And besides, where would they go?
Sera and Archer had wheedled some locations from the other addicts they’d picked up, and the talyan plotted the addresses on the giant map.
Liam leaned over the rumpled, pushpinned paper again. “If we can find the pattern, maybe we’ll find Corvus.” His hand clenched beside the map, and muscle rippled up to his shoulders.
Despite that strength, he was lean to the point of . . . points. His wrist bone stuck out as if his skeleton had someplace else to be, as if the demon burned too hot in him. She shuddered, remembering how gruesome that could be. But she shouldn’t blame the demon. He pushed himself, with the weight of his crew behind him.
He assigned recon to the talyan and they disbanded.
She took his hand and tugged, steeling herself against the quick spark that fanned through her skin. “C’mon.”
Despite his height, he moved so smoothly she drew him along like a ghost on a string. “Where are we going?”
“Out. You gave everybody else a task. Now you have one.”
“Since when do you assign tasks?”
“Since you dropped the ball on this one.” At the faintest resistance in his following, she glanced back. “Oh, I know you had more important things to do, but while we’re waiting for the world to end, we can take care of this.”
She grabbed a set of keys hanging beside the back door that led out to the Cyclone- fenced lot behind the warehouse. She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ll drive.”
He held up both hands, palms out, as if anything else had never occurred to him.
In one of the league’s nondescript sedans, he lounged back in the passenger seat. His outstretched arm bridged the gap to her seat. Though he didn’t touch her, the back of her neck warmed at his nearness. If she leaned back just a little . . . But she knew everybody liked to lean on him.
So she kept her back ramrod stiff. “How long have you been crew boss here?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “The problem with even saying I’m boss is that demons tend to choose their victims from the conveniently disenfranchised. Even when they weren’t running with scissors, these people never played well with others.”
She huffed out an annoyed breath. “How long?”
“A long time.” He stared straight ahead. “There’s no ceremony to mark the transition. The purely not-honorary title of league chief hellion goes to whomever steps in it.”
“How. Long.”
He turned a fierce scowl on her. “About a hundred years. Give or take a decade.”
“So it’s been that long since you had a meal?”
He blinked. “I eat.”
“I saw what was in those cabinets.”
He shifted uneasily at her dire tone. “Ecco does most of the shopping. Sera’s still on the recently possessed talya ‘I can eat doughnuts every day and still fit in my demon-slaughtering clothes’ diet.”
Jilly smiled. “Yeah, I noticed that. Plus, I don’t think I’d want to tell her she was stuck with the grocery shopping.”
“Archer went there already. And came back quick.”
She winced. “Which is why he would not make a good league boss.”
Liam sighed. “I tried to give it to him once. He’s been possessed almost as long as I have. He comes from the right background.”
“Wrong temper.”
“Plus he’s not an idiot.”
The note of bitterness that crept into his voice wasn’t directed at the other talya, she knew. “Why’d you take it, then?”
“I’d just joined the league.” Just been possessed was the unspoken corollary. “Roald, the talya who you would call leader before me, was already . . . drifting.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’d been possessed a very long time.” He glowered at her. “And don’t ask me how long. I have no idea, since I never asked. That would’ve been disrespectful.” His glower turned more pointed.
“Demons being so well-known for their table manners,” she muttered.
He grunted a halfhearted mix of annoyance and assent. “Roald was tired. The demon erases most damage to the body, but the mind, the soul . . . Half the time, he wouldn’t surface from the hunt for days. Leading the talyan might be harder than netting poisonous fanged butterflies, but even poisonous fanged butterflies want . . .” He shook his head. “Where was I going with that?”
She didn’t think the comparison was apt. If anyone had been cruelly pinned down, it wasn’t the wayward talyan; it was Liam. “The league wanted a leader.”
“Not wanted, probably.”
“Needed.” The inescapable truth of the word tasted like iron in her mouth.
He sh
rugged. “One night, Ro went out on the hunt, and we never saw him again. If he was fatally wounded past the point his teshuva could hold him together, he was old enough his body would’ve been ashes to ashes, dust to dust, before we even knew where to look.”
Jilly wrinkled her nose.
“When it was obvious he wasn’t coming back, somebody asked me, since I’d been a blacksmith once, if I knew where he could get the biggest whetstone ever. And thus a not-so-glorified supply clerk was born.”
She pulled into the parking lot. “Speaking of supplies.”
He glanced out. “Kitchen Komforts? Are Sera and Archer registered here? Is there something those two haven’t told me?”
“You used to have good copper pots, you said.”
“We lost them all when Corvus destroyed our head-quarters.”
She patted his hand, behind her on the seat. “He has much to answer for.”
Liam nodded gravely.
“I need a stockpot if I’m going to make soup.”
He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Why are you making soup?”
Under her fingers, the bones of his wrist felt both powerful and exposed. “You want a well-fed fighting team or what?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Then buy me a pot.”
CHAPTER 13
He had not been alone with his thoughts for a very long time. Even when the demon rested, Corvus had always been aware of it, if only from the bands of black that snaked up his arms, once broken on the glaring sands of the Colosseum and healed by the powers of darkness. As his demon dragged him through the city, it saddened Corvus, now that he had his thoughts, that his thoughts now were so . . . thoughtless.
Too, he had not imagined being alone would be sad in itself.
Tilting his head so that his rolling eye would align with its more attentive brother, he watched the empty husks arrayed around him as the demon made its rounds. He was more than them, at least, though he wasn’t sure why. Most of the solvo blanks faded into listless apathy within a very short time. That he’d kept any wit or awareness after his djinni-riddled soul had been forcibly woven in the Veil between the realms puzzled him. Whether it was a testament to his iron will, his long possession, or some other quirk, he had no idea.
The soul-swiped husks were everywhere now, as he’d seen on the demon’s daily forced marches. He could be proud of himself that the powdery distillation of the desolator numinis had worked so well.
He was less entranced with the searing darklings of smoke and metal that had begun coalescing around his own demon. As his ill-fit demon yanked him around, the marks on his arms oozed with a spoiled- egg stench that seemed the sweetest nectar to these unfamiliar darklings. Not the old hulking fellows or little darting black monsters that had once trailed in his wake. These new demons consumed whatever they touched.
Without the tempering influence he once exerted, his demon seemed set on a path that would end in the utter devouring of all. Not his original intent, to be sure. Not even his demon had understood they sought release, not obliteration. With some ruin along the way, unavoidably, but certainly not the central aim.
The demon set their feet for the next congregation of husks. He couldn’t understand its obsession; once they’d settled, the soulless carcasses never went anywhere. But his lips were chanting something as he walked, and he realized they were headed to one of the newer collections.
“Free her, free her,” he was saying.
Now he remembered. There were a few who longed for release as much as he. One of those waited at this place. He’d seen the trapped longing in her eyes, and he’d felt the kinship of the demon-ridden. Oh, demonic powers hadn’t actually invaded her soul; her damnation had been self-imposed.
It had been nice to not be alone. Stripping that female talya of half her clothes and most of her teshuva all those months ago had reminded him of the revels of his Roman master. Not that he’d been invited to those, of course. Nero’s court glassworker had strutted his prize gladiator on the sands, but hadn’t trusted him around the lovely, delicate works of his trade. Not just the glass, but the girls. No brute hands, he’d said—an unfair branding, to Corvus’s mind, considering his virtuosity in the Colosseum.
Then he’d been injured, and thrown aside. Even broken glass was valued. But not him. The demon, though, had wanted him, invited him to join it—slagged and reformed him into something more. After that, he had invited himself to the next merrymaking. But then the screaming had rather ruined the night, and the blood overshadowed the beauty of the glass.
In two thousand years, he’d come to realize the demon was no friend to him, and now it had decided to play master without the subterfuge. But maybe, in the depths of his woe, he had found another to share his pain.
Though he’d admit his hands lacked the finesse they’d once had, and she looked as brittle as the ones who had broken under his touch that night in his master’s house after his possession.
Still, as the demon propelled him down the street, his rolling eye looked eagerly ahead. And saw.
Though he had no control anymore, still the force of his dismay locked his muscles, and the demon was forced to wait with him.
The marks on his arms dripped poison with its fury. Once again, he and the demon were in accord. Someone had stolen the congregation and, with it, the one who had met his eye.
“Jilly wants something.” Archer paced outside the kitchen.
Liam craned his neck past the other man. To think he’d ever underestimated how sometimes playing leader to a bunch of violent, paranoid immortals got in the way of more important things. “Dinner maybe?”
Archer snorted. “Oh, that’s not all she wants.”
“Just because your mate offered to serve up your choicer bits if you volunteered her for KP duty again doesn’t mean all women fear subjugation by slotted spoon.”
“I’m telling you, when a woman feeds her man, she has plans.”
“I’m not her—” Liam took a deep breath. “Well, I’m not entirely opposed to the idea.”
Ecco stumped down the hall. “What ideas are we talking about? And what is that smell? I want that.”
Liam fixed Archer with a smug stare. “See? Sometimes it’s simple.”
“Did you just call me simple?” Ecco shouldered past him. “Out of my way.”
One by one, other talyan drifted into the hall. Liam had sent off the addicts—except for a couple who’d refused—to various rehab programs, courtesy of Sera’s previous life and hospital connections. With the coming twilight, that left only the prehunt crowd at the warehouse, restless and well aware they, unlike the junkies, had no chance of casting off the compulsions that rode them.
They milled outside the door to the kitchenette, reluctant to edge by him, until Liam fell into Ecco’s wake.
Jilly stood at the stove, a cheerful red-and-white-striped towel hanging from the back pocket of her jeans. The knot-work bracelet was shoved high on her forearm. She didn’t look around, just said, “Get a bowl.”
Ecco stepped up with alacrity. He towered over the petite Jilly with his outstretched bowl like some Oliver Twist on ’roids. She ladled out the soup, and Liam heard the eager inhalation of the talyan behind him as the fragrance rolled over them.
An elbow in his ribs shoved him aside, and the talyan streamed past him to get in line, never mind the usual teshuva-triggered avoidance of close contact. Or, God forbid, a little respect for their leader.
Good thing they’d never find out what a hard time he’d given her about slapping down the platinum card for the stockpot big enough to cook down a feralis. Not that the whiff of chicken and dumplings coming his way had anything to do with demonology. Heaven, maybe.
He waited in the doorway, arms crossed, while his crew filed past the stoves. From the dinky oven, Jilly handed out fist-sized domes of lightly browned biscuit. Almost the same color as her eyes, he noted idly. The tightening in his belly was definitely hunger. Of what sort, he wasn’t entirel
y sure.
He wished he’d held firm at the grocery store when she wanted to get the insanely expensive industrial-sized jar of honey. Not necessary, he’d argued. Talyan didn’t need to be sweetened up. Listening to the men’s pleased murmurs as they drizzled spoonfuls of the golden glaze over their biscuits, he realized he wanted that all for himself.
As if he’d touched her shoulder, Jilly met his gaze across the long metal table lined with talyan focused on their bowls. She lifted her eyebrows and tipped the pot toward him. Almost empty. She filled a last bowl and slid it across the counter.
After a moment, he pushed away from the door. The clink of spoons against empty bowls accompanied him across the room along with the low murmur of voices as the men leaned back. Content, he realized.
He walked up to Jilly. “Taming the savage beasts?”
“Maybe.” She handed him a biscuit.
The dough warmed his palm. “Thanks.” He propped his hip on the counter. His mouth watered and he forced himself not to tip the bowl to his lips. No sense acting the savage, half-starved beast.
She hummed to herself. “I used to cook for the kids. I miss it a little, I guess.”
A velvety dumpling slipped over his tongue with a hint of rosemary. Despite his pleasure—maybe because of it?—he couldn’t take his attention from her. She scanned the room with lips pursed. He imagined her keeping watch over her kids and was half tempted to start a food fight. Except the soup was too good to fling.
When she turned that eagle eye on him, he said, “You know it’s good.”
She nodded. “The more they come together as a team, the more likely they are to survive.”
“I meant your cooking. The halfway house’s loss was our gain.”
She ran her gaze over him, foot to head. He held himself still though his skin prickled even with his demon dormant again. “A strong wind could blow you over. Well, assuming it was a demon-driven wind. Which, lately, it has been.”
“I’m not Roald. I won’t walk off into the ether.”
