by Jessa Slade
“Nothing.” He smoothed a hand down the back of his neck. “A dead end. Let’s get out of here.”
Jilly propped her hands on her hips. “But you feel it too?”
“Feel what? That we’re wasting our time?”
“The creep.”
“If we found a few creeps, we wouldn’t be wasting our time.”
“Stop being so bossy and just listen a minute.” She put her hand on his arm, halting him in his tracks.
God, just that little touch sent ripples through his senses. Not calming, not at all, but clearing somehow, like a wind that swept the dreck away.
“If there’s nothing here, why are you so nervy?” She trailed her touch down his arm, wrapped her fingers around his wrist in a loose manacle. “The demon would be jumping out of your skin if it wasn’t tacked down in your soul.”
“I’ve always hated this place.” The admission blurted from him, drawn out as if her touch was the lure.
She glanced around at the identical beige buildings with their antiglare windows and the bare brown hollows of empty retention ponds. “What’s not to hate?”
He gave her a ghost of a smile. “This is better than what it was.”
She considered. “You knew the stockyards when they were still running.”
He jerked his head in a nod. “As a stinking off- the-boat immigrant with one eye, if you couldn’t do anything else, you could always work the slaughterhouses. They didn’t ask awkward questions.”
“Like, how come you had only one eye?”
“Like, ‘How did you get here?’ I didn’t have any papers.”
“A lot of people left Ireland during the famine. Was it so hard to get documentation?”
“It was if you were a murderer.”
Had he expected her to recoil? She just looked more thoughtful as they started hiking across the no-man’sland of empty parking lot to the next set of ugly buildings. “The boy who died when you were breaking down fences in Ireland? But that wasn’t your fault.”
“Not then. Later.”
She cast a sidelong glance at him that flicked over his reven, but she kept walking. “From running with a gang of rural hoodlums to one-eyed murderer. You’ve led a more rebellious life than I gave you credit for.”
“Rebellious?” He couldn’t contain a harsh bark of laughter. “Hardly. I’d learned my lesson about breaking rules after I saw that boy trampled into the mud. I kept my head down, never bent another thing besides nails, and even those I forged again. Never got hotheaded unless I was working too close to the fire. And still I managed to kill a man.”
There was nothing in this place to trigger memories of his last days at home. No heather and mist and peat smoke.
Just the woman with steady golden eyes, drawing the past from him like poison from a wound. “What happened?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. The hammer at his side swung counterpoint to his speeded step. With any luck, the next buildings over would be infested with salambes and this conversation would be over. “Just more of the same. Only worse. By then, I was working as the village blacksmith. Some local boys had broken into a British granary, stole barley. When the regiment came to town, I said the tools that did the deed were mine.”
“You didn’t want a repeat of what happened before. So, just like you always do, you took the lead.”
He clenched his teeth against the surge of remembered dread, barely dimmed. His temple throbbed. “I wasn’t going to let another boy die when I had a chance to stop it. I just wanted to talk, but one of the soldiers hit me with the butt of his rifle. The blood pouring into my eye blinded me, left my hands slick. When I grappled with him, the gun went off. And he was dead.”
“So you don’t even know whose finger pulled the trigger?”
He gave her a hard look. “Beside the point.”
“Not legally.”
“The demon didn’t come to me with a briefcase and power tie. That night was my penance trigger, the moment that had started all those years before when I ran through the darkness, yanking down fences with the boys, and has fated all the nights since.” His belly cramped. Youthful hunger for justice had morphed to just hunger. Naive rage had hollowed him into an empty vessel, perfect for the teshuva.
A worried line etched her brow. “The soldiers could have killed you.”
He paused and lifted his head to scan the buildings around them. “Are you sensing anything?”
She copied his stance, then shook her head and slanted a glance at him. “Just you avoiding the conversation.”
He walked on, a little faster, as if he could outpace her unasked question, the concern he felt from her. Concern for him, ages too late and as irrelevant now as then. “Would I have chosen that instead if I’d known what would come? Struggled just a little harder when they threw me in the cell along with the boys?”
“Would you?” she challenged.
Ah, there was the Jilly he knew. After a moment, he shook his head. “They confiscated everything I had, of course. But they didn’t notice the fine nails stuck in the sole of my boot.”
A grin chased across her lips. “You picked the lock. Why, boss, I’d never have guessed it of you. Iz would be so proud.”
He shrugged, though her teasing eased the pain in his gut. “I got the boys out, but where is safe in a hungry, occupied land with a price on your head?”
“You got them here.”
He squelched her admiring tone. “Not all. The oldest, Patrick, took fever during the passage. We’d bribed our way on board, but I couldn’t provide even enough water. So starving, fleeing, guilty as charged, and now dying of thirst.”
She hunched her shoulders. “I can’t imagine how terrible it was.”
“I was in charge, Jilly.” He met her gaze squarely. “When he passed, I dumped him off the back of the boat in the dead of night, afraid the quartermaster I’d paid would think we carried sickness and throw us all overboard. I told myself I would do anything if I could get the rest of them here, and keep them alive.”
“And you did.”
He strode away from her. “This is the place I brought them. From the green hills of Ireland, to the killing fields of Chicago.” He couldn’t curtail the native lilt that had all but deserted him, and his lips curled back, as if the stench too had come back to haunt him. “We lived in a Back of the Yards boardinghouse. I tracked the filth in every night, and slept with the taste of blood in my mouth. I thought if I just worked harder, I could get us down south to a farm, something more like where we’d come from. I took a third shift, stole scraps for the boys.”
“No wonder you’re worn thin,” she murmured. “The starvation continued.”
He rubbed his temple this time, feeling the old ache. “I was blind on this side from the soldier’s strike, and it slowed me enough that the foreman always passed me over, even though my blacksmithing skills carried, in some ways, to butchering. I was desperate, exhausted.”
“Understandably,” she said.
They stopped just beyond the sidewalk to the next building. He met her gaze. “Could you understand if I said I wanted to leave the boys?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “By myself, I could have made it. With the four of them that remained, impossible.”
“But you didn’t leave them,” she said softly.
How could she be so sure about him? “Worse. I betrayed them. Good Catholic boys, they looked up to me. And I came home after one really fucked- up night possessed by the devil.”
“What did it promise you?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper.
“That those I led would never die.” His lips twisted. “I forgot the devil says what we want to hear. I never thought how ‘never die’ wasn’t the same as ‘couldn’t be killed.’ ”
“You couldn’t know.”
“One of the boys did. The youngest, Sean, would have been a fine priest.”
“Except for the stealing-barley part,” Jilly broke in. “But I know how that goes.”
He smiled, surprised at how easily her irreverence lightened his memories and his heart. “Sean said he went along just to forgive them.” His smile slipped. “But he couldn’t forgive me. I couldn’t ask him to.”
“Which one? He couldn’t, or you couldn’t? Those are two different things.”
He waved his hand. “I should never have gone back after Roald brought me into the league. But I couldn’t just abandon the boys. Sean wouldn’t let me in, though. He saw what I was, and he was afraid I would take all their souls. I was . . .” He cleared his throat. “I worried they’d be lost without me. But Ro said he’d make sure they survived as long as I didn’t betray the league. Not as I’d betrayed the boys.” The old leader hadn’t accused him of any such betrayal, of course, but the memory of guilt still had teeth.
“What happened to them?”
This was when she would turn away from him. “I don’t know. I never went back again.”
She lifted her eyebrows knowingly. “Never ever?”
Her perception made him shift from one foot to the other before he could stop himself, like any boy caught out in a lie. “Once,” he admitted. “A woman was staying with them. Sean had told her what I was. She wouldn’t let me see them either. I left.” When Jilly took another breath, he added repressively, “For good.”
And it had been. For their good, as well as his own. He stared up at the building before him. They could be standing right where the old tenements had been. In those days, he had staggered back to the boys each night in a black oblivion, making his way by animal instinct alone. Now even the concrete and steel pylons that had guided the stock cars this far into the yards were gone.
Everything was gone. Which didn’t explain his lingering unease. He turned a slow circle, scanning.
Jilly stiffened and set herself to guard his back. “What is it?”
“There’s nothing here.”
“We’ve established that.”
“Nothing remains from that time, and yet I can’t shake the memories.” Even though he very much wanted to.
“They dozed the place flat.”
He straightened with a twinge of hunter’s thrill. “Flat. Of course. But they didn’t get everything. This way.”
He loped away from the building with Jilly on his heels.
“What’s up?” she called.
“Not up. Down.” He headed for the retention dredge that would handle melting snow or overflow water in a storm. The gaping mouth of a concrete culvert poked out of the shallow bank. “All that filth had to go somewhere.”
Jilly peered past him at the sewer. “You’re not thinking . . .”
“Where better to hide the psychic stench of evil than under a century of old blood?” He tracked the line of the culvert back along the street. Halfway down the block, he stopped at a manhole cover. He toed the tufts of brittle brown grass grown around the edges. “Stay here while I—”
“Oh, please.” She leaned down and with one hand overturned the solid steel disk. “Got your demon eyes on?”
Before the clang of metal on concrete died in his ears, she stepped into the black hole.
CHAPTER 20
Jilly straightened in the stinking dark, her hand braced on the curve of the wall. Cold concrete scraped against her palm.
That jump would’ve been way cooler if she hadn’t landed in ankle-deep sludge and spattered it all over her jeans. “Yuck.”
Liam executed a controlled slide down the rickety ladder she hadn’t been sure would hold even her weight much less his six-foot self. Of course, he was such a lean cuisine, as Dee liked to call the boys.
He stepped off the last rung. His precisely placed boot barely made a ripple in the goo. “How convenient nothing waited down here to gut you.”
“I figured I had the advantage of surprise. And splatter.” She lifted one foot with a grimace. “No birnenston or ichor streamers here. Deeper?”
The passageway barely cleared her head. Liam had to hunch to avoid touching the concrete dome. He brought out his hammer, though she wondered how he’d find room to swing. She took the crescent knives from her pocket and fanned them in her left hand, leaving her right free to trail near the wall.
Her demon-amped vision captured the last photons of light coming from the open culvert at the end of the tunnel. When they rounded a curve, even that petered out.
Her fingers bumped against an outcropping in the wall. “The tunnel just changed to brick.”
“We joined up with the old sewer system.” The stone made his voice hollow. “They flushed the offal right out into the waterway.”
They walked on. She guessed they must be well under the buildings now although the sewer showed no signs of use. Even the trickle of backwash had dried up. Her skin puckered at the thought of the rivers of blood and worse that had poured where they were walking, soaked red on red into the bricks. No, wait. That wasn’t the reason her skin was crawling. “Do you see that?”
“Yeah.”
The sickly yellow tendrils snaking down the corridor made a hell of a welcome mat. The key word being “hell,” of course.
She switched one knife to her free hand.
The tunnel vaulted abruptly into a central hub the size of a large room with other tunnels trailing away into the deeps. The ceiling was high enough for Liam to stand up despite the crusting of birnenston that hadn’t quite engulfed the entire space.
“Home, bitter home,” she murmured as they circled the jumble of overturned shelves and shattered glass, so violently destroyed that one metal bracket was embedded in the bricks, and the pulverized glass sparkled like glitter over the thick gluey ropes of birnenston. She booted a broken- necked flask, and it rolled away through a scattering of matte white powder. The binder, she guessed, that they’d used to give solvo substance in the human realm.
She’d been in a meth lab once, pulling out one of her kids, and she knew she’d never forget the unique stench, like cat piss and diesel spiked with ugly desperation.
But this . . . Under the birnenston stench was a sweeter fragrance. “It smells like the first minute of a spring rain.”
“Washes everything away, Corvus promised. Memories. Pain.” His voice petered out.
She grimaced. “Your soul.”
“That attitude’ll get you kicked off the marketing team.” He prodded a vein of birnenston with his hammer, and the substance crumbled, released a cloud of sulfurous rot that overwhelmed the rain. “Who’s in charge of quality control around here?”
She edged around the tumbled shelves but found no raw materials, no finished vials of solvo, and no convenient cookbook with the damning recipe. “Corvus didn’t have much time to close up shop. He burned up haints doing it, but there must not have been much to move either. Why? Does he have another lab somewhere?”
Liam stood tall in the center of the hub. “Or does he have everything he needs to make his move?”
She thought for a moment. “Which is worse? That’ll probably be our answer.”
A faint smile flickered across his face. “That’s the spirit.”
“Spirits are exactly the problem.” She pocketed her knives again. “You were right the first time. There’s nothing here. Damn it.”
“Not quite nothing.” He pointed above his head.
She followed the line of his hammer. Almost lost in the embedded tangle of birnenston threads was a small beaker, miraculously intact and gleaming like a tiny strung pearl.
They made their way back to the surface. The beaker of raw solvo nestled in Jilly’s puffed pocket, and she walked gingerly, as if she carried a rain-sweet bomb. Not that there’d been any explosions, but she figured the day was young. “I can’t believe they missed it.”
“The downside of an army of smoke- heads led by the brain damaged. Details may get overlooked.”
“What are we going to do with it?”
He let out a long breath. “I haven’t worked that out yet. Right now, it’s just another twist.” His
gaze drifted toward violet, and she wondered if he was angry with her, his newest recruit leading him astray and once again twisting, wrinkling, and denting his precious SOP.
Then he blinked as he faced the sun, and his demon was gone. “Let’s get back to the warehouse. It’s going to be another busy night.”
The trek back to the car was silent. Only as they climbed in did she ask, “Why’d you come after me?”
“What should I have done instead?”
“You were pretty explicit that there’s no place for any . . .” She hesitated, testing the awkward word. “Any bond between us.”
“That doesn’t mean the league doesn’t need you.”
Oh. The league. Of course.
Her expression must have given her away, because he said softly, “That’s all I am now, Jilly. The leader of the league of teshuva. Those who would repent. If not for that, I’d be nothing.”
Silence descended again as they drove through the bright day.
When they returned to the industrial area around the warehouse, they had to dodge delivery trucks and bustling forklifts. Only the salvage building was still, the league’s inhabitants not yet roused for their night’s work. Liam parked in the back lot with the other well-used cars. Side by side, they walked through the quiet corridors made narrow by the leftovers and castoffs of other people’s lives.
The dust of the past tightened Jilly’s throat. Here they’d finally had a victory—a little victory, about the size of a test tube, actually, but still—and she was moping because . . . because some blind throwback of a saloon girl said she couldn’t dance?
Staring at her booted feet, she realized she’d dogged Liam’s footsteps right up to his room.
He stopped, hand on the doorknob, and looked down at her, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry.
Her cheeks burned. “Bella says the guys should dance more.”
“Bella sells more drinks to sweaty people.”
An image sheeted through her mind, straight off a comic book cover—Liam, as he might have been in happier days with some no-doubt practical implement taking shape under his hammer, perspiring at his forge, iron thewed, and clad in a leather apron.
