“Demons wear jewelry made from ancient volcanic
events. Explains why people thought hell was in the bowels of the earth.”
He gave her an approving nod. “Underground was the closest our ancestors could come to envisioning the tenebraeternum, the eternal shadow that is the demon-realm.”
She remembered what Archer had said. “So it’s ugly, yes, but that doesn’t make it evil.”
“When saturated in your demonic emanations, it undergoes an etheric mutation. It becomes a
desolator numinis
, a soul cleaver, a metaphysical solvent that dissolves the link between body and soul.”
Okay, that was definitely evil. She would have ripped the pendant from around her neck, but she didn’t want to touch it. “Should I tell . . . ?” Whom? Archer had already separated himself as far as he could from her. No cleaver necessary.
“What? Tell them to read the archives they’ve had for the past two thousand years?” Bookie let out a long-suffering sigh. “Let me find out what this means first.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to keep it here?”
She grasped the stone, cold and oily slick. In her years of work, she’d presided over a great many spirits set free from failed flesh. To cut a soul from the still-living body . . . She swallowed back a flash of sick horror. “No. I understand you owe your loyalty to the league, but will you come to me first?”
He nodded. “Meanwhile, let’s get that biopsy done.”
His touch stayed as professional as any she’d endured during her surgeries and therapy, but she felt the weight of his gaze on the stone.
“Speaking of long-ago stories,” she said, “Archer mentioned a—a mated-talyan bond.”
He smoothly extracted a core of her flesh. “Bond? Hmm, yes, it’s around here somewhere. Bookkeeper archives have more old stories than anyone can remember.”
She tried to quell the twinge of disappointment that Bookie didn’t think it was important either. Why was she so eager to find yet another place where her life had become not her own? Archer had told her the demon dwelled in the emptiness of the talyan soul. Apparently there wasn’t room for anything else these days.
Bookie added the biopsy to his rack of samples, more bits of her lost to this change. “I have enough here. I’ll get back to you on the rest.”
Clearly dismissed, she rode the elevator back upstairs. At least Bookie must think she wasn’t an immediate threat if he let her walk out. Unless he was even now calling the firing squad. She rubbed her arms at a chill she hadn’t noticed before, wincing when her hand scraped the needle hole.
He hadn’t even offered her a bandage. Stupid complaint, since the wound would heal before she looked at it again. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the memory of a motherly kiss and unnecessary Band-Aid.
To get there, though, she had to claw past the last vision of her mother and the black lapping water. Had her mother’s soul floated out in that last moment? And where had it gone? She knew what her father’s religion would say. She sighed and opened her eyes with the elevator doors.
Without the large restless men, command central almost echoed with emptiness. She stepped out onto the balcony. The wind seemed colder, the night blacker, her spirit lower than a couple of vials of missing blood could justify.
She leaned over the railing, remembering her dream of flight. If she launched off the balcony, she wouldn’t be making snow angels; she’d be making a mess, a mess she doubted even the demon could clean up.
Could possession have saved her mother? Certainly the demon of depression that led to her fatal choice
could have predisposed her to accept a teshuva’s alternative, the same as Archer.
Sera tightened her grip on the rail. Would she have wished this fate on her soft-eyed mother? In her fury and confusion after her mother’s death, she’d told her father she would never set foot in his church again, not when his faith consigned suicides to hell. He’d accepted her decision, always thinking, she knew, that she would relent.
Relent. Repent. She’d believed in her father’s sermons just as she’d believed her mother could love her family enough to get out of bed, even on the bad days. Once the questions started, they didn’t stop.
Now she was finally going to get some answers on the really big questions of death, salvation, the fate of innocence. She touched the pendant. Maybe even know the shape and heft of a soul.
She rolled back her sleeve. Tiny knives of wind pricked her skin, but the hole in her arm was gone, except for the ache.
She hoped her answers wouldn’t prove as ephemeral.
He moved through the night, painting himself with the psychic screams of drained malice, swallowing down his own screams. Unraveled ether curled in his wake like a dread banner.
Even humans who considered themselves dangerous, who eyed him from their own gloom, melted away when he passed. Only the ferales hunted him, and they hunted with vengeance in their gleaming rust eyes.
Somewhere beyond the endless waves of evil, he sensed a presence, darker yet, that he could not reach, though he hacked his way through demon after demon. He slogged through the destruction of his own making until caked ichor welded the blades to his hands. But the darkness casting the deepest shadows eluded him with a
whisper of mocking laughter that even the howls of the ferales could not disguise.
Dawn came. Washed of hue like a faded malice eye, the sun glinted a moment as it rose above the lake horizon. Then a bank of gray clouds swallowed it.
Still, that momentary gleam diverted the rage in him. He walked out onto the pier and stripped off his gore-spattered clothes.
He stared impassively at the ichor dried into the creases of his hands. Then he leapt, letting the demon-powered shove of his thighs thrust him beyond the boulders at the base of the pier.
He was flying.
Then falling. The freezing water shocked through him, jolting his heart as if it hadn’t been beating before. He flailed through the slap of wind-pushed waves, back toward shore.
Free of tenebrae stench and scum and sting, Archer hauled himself up onto the rocks. He huddled for a moment beside his filthy clothes, wracked with shivers.
A jogger and her dog passed above him on the sidewalk. The dog caught his scent, yelped, and bolted ahead, the oblivious jogger swearing and staggering to keep up.
He held his breath as he donned his clothes again. His cleaning service was going to double their fees again. Or maybe this time they’d just lock the doors when they saw him. He wouldn’t blame them.
He’d been drawn, against his will, to stand outside the hotel. He’d looked up and seen the golden beacon of her hair.
His heart stopped then, as he watched her lean dangerously over the void. He would catch her; that’s why he had come, why he’d been drawn back, why he’d been put on this earth for so many years with a strength he used only for annihilation. . . . Then she pulled back out of view, never noticing him so many stories below her.
He went out to destroy.
That, he reminded himself, was truly why he was here.
He trudged back to the sidewalk. He wouldn’t ask any cab to pick him up, and he wasn’t in the mood to call Zane for a ride. The league hotel was closer than his loft, and he kept a change of clothes there.
So despite his best intentions, he found his weary steps turning toward the one place he’d decided was off-limits.
He knew the league had been out in force the night before, having encountered other lingering shreds of etheric energy. Only Haji, a closemouthed talya whose blinding speed with the enormous curved blade did his boasting for him, walked the otherwise quiet halls on the residence floor.
They nodded as they crossed paths. Archer turned at his private room, fumbling for his key. Then he hesitated.
He glanced over his shoulder. Haji had disappeared into the elevator. He glanced in the other direction down the hall.
He closed his eyes. His enhanced senses, battered and raw as his flesh, prickled.
When he opened his eyes, he was standing in front of a door not his own. He knocked.
He stood there, hearing nothing but the shush of blood through his veins. He swayed a little on his feet, half asleep. Finally, the door opened.
“You weren’t going to answer,” he said.
“My first reaction.” Sera blocked the entrance with one arm braced across the opening, her stance forced casual. “Was that the right one?”
“Probably.”
“I didn’t think you’d leave.”
“Probably not.” He studied her through heavy-lidded eyes. From her soft yoga togs, he couldn’t tell if she’d just
gotten up or was getting ready for bed. His pulse kicked up a notch, and he stopped himself from thinking any more about her bed. “Can I come in?”
“I suppose we don’t need more gossip with you standing outside my bedroom door.”
“Technically, it’s a suite, not just a bedroom. So this could be league business. And technically, manly warriors don’t gossip; they relay information.”
She stepped back. “Just so the information they’re relaying is not that you’re fucking me.”
He winced as he stepped inside. The outer room looked hotel generic except for a blanket thrown over the couch beside a haphazard pile of books. “I came to apologize for that.”
“For not fucking me?”
“Can you not,” he said with great dignity, “use that word now.”
She raised her eyebrow. “Squeamish?”
He raised his arms, mutely displaying the spatters and stains.
She sighed. “Fine. Apology accepted. Go take a bath.”
Images kaleidoscoped through his mind, raising more than his pulse this time. “I am out of practice with relations between men and women. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Our relations were fine. Twice fine, as I recall. I wasn’t hurt.”
He managed not to grit his teeth. “I didn’t mean physically.”
She rubbed her forehead. “When I accepted your apology, that meant we don’t have to talk about it anymore. I know office romances never work out.”
He frowned. “Since when does evil keep office hours?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Naïve young apprentice falls for sexy older mentor. Seduces him. Ruins
his chance for tenure. Sacrifices her chance to learn who she is on her own.”
Despite the sexy-mentor remark, he was regretting the impulse that led him here. “You wouldn’t have survived the possession without me. And I’m no league sycophant.”
She crossed her arms, her expression blank as any battle-trained talya. “Right. That would be just a little too much like a relationship.”
He backed toward the door. “I should go. I wanted you to know that Lenore, my fiancée, would not have wanted me back.”
She let her arms fall slack at her sides. “You can’t know that. You didn’t see her again.”
Sera was nothing like Lenore. Lenore had been a vivacious brunette who’d made clear that while she might marry a well-to-do farmer’s son, she would never pluck her own chickens. At the time, his going off to war had been terribly romantic to both of them.
He just shook his head and caught a flicker of emotion as Sera’s eyebrows drew together. Mostly bewilderment, he decided, recognizing the uncertainty he felt himself.
“You run like storm clouds,” she murmured. “Sometimes I see the light hidden behind, but mostly you freeze everyone out. Does winter ever end with you?”
His face felt encased in ice. “Not so far.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t why I let you in.” She lifted the pendant hanging around her neck. “I wanted to tell you, Bookie identified it. The stone is a weapon. A soul cleaver.”
“Never heard of such a thing.” He’d had his nose against it, with his mouth on her nipple. He’d been cleaved, all right, of his instinct for self-preservation. Heat washed through him, and he struggled to focus on the stone, not the enticing curves behind it.
“You wouldn’t know it. It’s djinn.”
That focused him.
She lifted her chin with a hint of desperate bravado. “Aren’t you even happier you rejected me last night?”
He fixed his gaze on the pendant and stepped closer. She stood unresisting as he cupped his hand behind hers, the gray stone suspended in their nested hands.
“Bookie thinks it’s dangerous,” she murmured.“Maybe the djinn-man knows I should be playing on his team.”
“
We
are dangerous. But you aren’t djinn-ridden.”
She glanced up at him, uneasy hazel eyes glinting with demon light, green and brown and violet in a mesmerizing swirl. “After you saw the
reven
on me, you said you weren’t sure.”
“I am now.” He overrode the question forming on her lips. “If you worry, your demon is teshuva. You think a djinni would choose someone who frets about being evil? If half the wickedness in the world arises from not caring, the other half definitely comes from not questioning.”
“Oh, I have questions,” she said fervently. “How about some answers finally? What should I do with it?”
“Bookie had no suggestions?”
She hesitated. “Not really. Other than not becoming a traitor.”
Archer tightened his grasp. The stone stayed cold, but her skin warmed under his. “Maybe the difference between teshuva and djinn is not so clear-cut as we’d like to believe. More a continuum.”
“You’re saying one wrong step and I could slip over to the dark side?”
“I’m saying maybe the shadows are relative.” In some strange way, the thought was a relief. It left room for improvement, for options.
For hope.
He let a touch of Southern cadence soften his words. “If ever I turned away from you, Sera Littlejohn, I’d do so not in hatred, but because I’d want no one else at my back.”
The curve of her collarbone brushed his fingers as she slowly exhaled. The innocent contact pained him. He released the stone, and with it her hand.
“Thank you for that,” she said softly.