Sometimes even demons wouldn’t forgive temptation.
He focused his burning gaze on the talya. In her present condition, the brute darklings that lurked in the basement would find no sport with her. But their smaller brethren. . . .
He jerked her up onto her good leg. She paled around the red imprint of his knuckles, but didn’t cry out. Her strength wouldn’t save her, but would only keep her around long enough for his plans to reach their inescapable conclusion.
He hauled her downstairs, dragging her behind like a broken marionette when she stumbled.
He’d chosen the tower because the riverside location opened on soaring views over the city, views that brought him some measure of quietude. Only later had he discovered the dank basement with its river access.
Over time, his presence lured a plague of darklings to the passageways. The noxious morass of birnenston seeping from them had fueled his research into odd weapons that had hooked politicians, generals, and terrorists in many countries. They’d thought they were using him for their own ends. In a manner of speaking, they were right.
If contact with the poison sometimes forced his djinni into hiding deep within him, it always seemed to recover.
Even with their violence subjugated to his energy and the birnenston, the darklings were a malevolent flock. The occasional stink of corpse wafted from the basement when they snagged the homeless mumblers, the young runaways, the overdosed prostitutes. Sometimes he threw them a proverbial bone—or a not-so-proverbial bone.
Lucky darklings, this was one of those times.
CHAPTER 24
Through waves of pain, Sera grasped at consciousness. A tiny voice told her coming awake wasn’t going to make the nightmare go away. But not knowing was worse.
She gritted her teeth and pulled herself into awareness—cold, damp, stinking awareness. She coughed on the mingled stenches of stagnant water, rot, and sulfur. Yeah, sometimes knowing was worse.
“You’re free.”
She pushed herself up. The stone under her hands was slick with mold and other things she didn’t want to identify. Too dark to see, anyway, without her demon’s help, since only torches lit the cavernous room.
“Honest to God,” she said hoarsely. “Who uses torches anymore?”
“It makes the darklings feel at home.”
Sorry she’d asked, she rubbed her wrists. Embedded glass stung, but he hadn’t lied. He’d left her unbound. “Free at last, free at last.”
Corvus stood between the torches. “You can run for the stairs. I won’t stop you.” He swept his hand one way, and the torchlight shadows jumped on the old iron door that guarded the stairs. “Or you can swim.” He pointed
toward the waterside dock. “It is more than was ever offered me.”
The dark around him winked with tiny crimson stars. Malice eyes. How unfair. Once she knew what to look for, even with her defenses stripped, she could still see them.
Then she saw the others.
They stood unmoving, facing her, eyes clouded and unseeing. Something about that wall of empty eyes—human-colored in mixtures of brown, blue, green, but blank stares—made her flesh crawl.
She kept her voice from trembling. “Friends of yours?”
“They are nothing. Quite literally. Pay them no mind. They can’t help you any more than they could help themselves, but they won’t stop you either. They wanted their freedom too.”
She raised her chin. “I wouldn’t think a slave would keep prisoners.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, muscles rippling. “I won my own way out.”
“Funny. Rumor has it you lost your last bout.” She studied him. “Judging by the
reven
, your arms were—what?—both broken? What did the demon promise you? The chance to take up arms again?”
“No.” The torch flames made the marks writhe. “It said I could lay down my sword forever. It gave me deadlier weapons instead.” He straightened, as if regretting his words. “They aren’t prisoners of mine. They took the chains upon themselves. I loosed them. And now, with you, I’ll free the rest of hell, and my struggle will be done.”
Her teshuva had been right to make itself scarce. If Corvus wanted it, she couldn’t let it out.
She dug her nails into the stone wall behind her. Clenching her jaw until her teeth just added another
pain in the chorus, she forced herself to stand. “I won’t open the Veil. The demons stay.”
His face twisted, old scars contorting. “You want us to fight for them, angels and demons, forever? Let them suffer and die if they are so inclined.”
She swayed, trying to make sense of his anguish. “Did Bookie even understand what you wanted? Do the demons? Or are you still the gladiator, thrown into the ring by his masters? Alone?”
His expression settled into something like calm. “If hell fancies burning, then let it truly burn. As for God and his judgment, let us see how he fares on his own against the devils at his gate.”
Slowly, so she didn’t knock herself over in dizzy pain, she shook her head. “I won’t sacrifice the world just to teach God and hell a lesson.”
“Then go.” Corvus spread his hands.
“Right. Run or swim. No bicycle portion of this triathlon? Oh wait. My leg’s broken.”
A poison yellow gleam brightened his eyes. “Ah. True. This would be a good time for your demon to make an appearance. Before the rest of the darklings get home for dinner.”
She contemplated the djinn-man, the shifting mass of malice, and the blank-eyed watchers against her MIA demon. She just had to make sure the teshuva stayed lost. “Damn,” she muttered.
“If you do or if you don’t,” Corvus agreed.
She glanced at the rank, black water and shivered, remembering the lapping tongue of river against cracked windshield glass. That was out. She wouldn’t want to drown before she was brutally killed.
She wheeled toward the iron door and started to run—or hobble.
She wasn’t even halfway there when the malice descended.
Of course. He’d said he wouldn’t stop her. He just hadn’t mentioned anything about his pets.
She fell, and the malice swarmed over her.
They bit deep, latching on to her hands and glass-cut wrist, one ankle, her neck, and cheek. They snapped at one another when they couldn’t reach her.
With each ravenous pull of malice mouths, terrible images played through her head, as if the vile little monsters sucked every ugliness to the surface for their feast. Her mother’s waxen skin. Her father’s screaming mouth, opened wide. Her own body, mangled after the car accident. Every dark and dreadful thought brought back to life, to haunt the heart like ghosts or zombies.
The sick weight of the malice made her wish she’d chosen to jump into the water, after all. Maybe she could drown them, float them away—as her mother finally had.
A low moan raised tremors down her spine. For an awful moment, she thought the sound came from her.
She twisted her head and met the vacant stares of Corvus’s prisoners. From the black holes of their slack, gaping mouths came the whispering groan, despair or hunger or both.
They’d wanted freedom from this, she realized, from the torment that fed the malice so richly.
The watchers grew dim as her vision grayed, like shades of her hospice patients. Had guiding them to quiet grace been a terrible deception, only to assuage her own fear of the end they were all coming to someday? Was grace an illusion, peace a myth?
She was going to die with her questions unanswered. Or maybe only in her death would she have her answers.
At least she was about to find out.
Niall rattled off his report. “At five o’clock this evening, Bookie took a cab over to River North. He was
dropped off near the Mart. That’s the last location we can confirm until he showed up at Nanette’s church.”
“We’re close,” Archer said. “Maybe Bookie will give himself away if he sees the place.” He glanced at the man slouched in the passenger seat. “You going to help us, Bookkeeper?”
“I need Sera,” the historian muttered.
Archer shifted the phone to his other ear. “Yeah, he’s going to help.”
“I’ll send everyone I can,” Niall said. “But this storm is closing down fast. And I’m getting strange reports. On the way to meet the cabbie, Jonah saw ferales herding people. I think Corvus’s army is on the move. They weren’t corpses yet, but if they’re with ferales, they soon will be.”
Archer glared out at the thickening snow. “If we don’t stop Corvus before he forces Sera to open the Veil, a few oddball ferales will be the least of our problems.”
“And the people with them?”
Archer hesitated. “They’re fucked.” He hung up to manhandle the SUV through snow soft and heavy as a burial shroud. “We’re all fucked.”
The water was a dark slash through the white as they crossed the bridge. They quartered the streets until Archer finally slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “He can’t just disappear.”
“The high tower,” Bookie whispered. His breath fogged the side window where he’d angled his pale face.
Archer ran a hand through his hair. “They’re all towers.”
In the middle of the next block, from behind a parked truck, a pedestrian stepped out into the street. Archer slammed on the brakes, and the SUV slewed sideways.
The homeless man, his coat hung awkwardly from one shoulder, never looked around, his gaze fixed upward.
Archer tightened his grip on the wheel as another
oblivious walker—a girl in stiletto heels still not high enough to keep her out of the snow—followed the man into the street, her face turned toward the sky as if drawn by a hook in her lip.
Archer glanced at Bookie, then back at the pedestrians. Zane had said Corvus commanded an army of corpses. “Nanette. Those people. Tell me what you see.”
“What? Nothing.” Her voice rose with excitement. “Nothing. Just like Bookie.”
The odd couple cut between the parked cars, following a line only they sensed, and disappeared into a park. Archer pulled over, his hand on the door handle, ready to give chase.
“Over there,” Nanette said. “Three more of them.” The enthusiasm in her tone wavered. “Whatever they are.”
They followed slowly until Bookie clawed at his door, whining, “It’s here.”
“My God,” Nanette whispered.
Archer glanced in the rearview mirror. Nanette had her cheek pressed to the glass, as rapt as their unwitting guides.
He peered out at the dark high-rise. “What?”
“Don’t you see them? Stop the car.”
He hauled the wheel over, bouncing onto the curb. “What is it? Bookie’s soul?”
“No. It’s like . . . but not a soul.” She tumbled out before he could turn off the car. He got out, hand on his axe.
She stood, eyes bright, mouth agape like a child catching snowflakes on her tongue.
He followed her gaze.
High up, white and drifting, the birds, brighter than the clouds, flew through the storm.
They soared on other-realm winds that didn’t disturb the endless fall of snow. The trailing edges of their ethereal wings flickered with light as if from a distant dawn.
They looped around the building’s crown in graceful patterns that almost reminded him of something, if he could only trace their flight with a pen.
“Bookie said tower,” Nanette murmured. “I looked up, and they were there.”
After a moment, Archer found his voice. “I see them too.” He followed the intricate dance, the patterns sketching ever-more complicated fractals into infinity, like Sera’s
reven
. His breath caught. “This is the place.”
He hit Niall on speed dial, handed Nanette the phone, and ran for the door.
“You don’t have to die, Sera.”
Nothing existed outside the evil movies in her head, but the voice snaked through.
“Everybody has to die,” she murmured.
“Not now you don’t. Just call on me.”
The demon. Her teshuva.
Or maybe the other demon. Corvus.
Either way, the voice was right. Her demon could save her.
She just had to damn the world.
Shouldn’t everyone fight the demons with her? Her wounds of abandonment would never heal, even if the teshuva came raging back. She sighed, a breath that felt like her last. She would not call on the demon. She wouldn’t make the world face its demons.
Not peace, but resignation.
Until the iron door exploded and her name came howling through.
In flash-frozen images worse than anything the malice visions had conjured, Archer crashed in, engulfed by a dozen ferales.
His flaring, violet gaze caught hers. As always, his glance blazed over her skin, slammed through her bones. Then he was fighting his way toward her.
The ferales raged out of control, in a melee of clashing
claws and jaws, rending one another as often as Archer. A handful of the malice on her squealed and scrambled away.
Corvus dodged for the stairs, out of the fray.
The fanned blade of Archer’s axe spun through the air, its shining edge shedding ichor. In his off hand, the smaller knife flashed and pierced, but always another mutation of evil barred his way.
She dragged herself up, then stumbled a step toward him. Malice weighed on her, draining her spirit like bloated ticks. No way could she reach him; far too many monsters were between them.
Her broken leg twisted, and she sunk to the floor. A malice dropped back on its smoky coil of a tail and wailed.
Archer’s answering shout of defiance echoed across the stones. He rose up, scattering ferales. He stood, stark and alone, black coat in tatters around bare skin and crimson rivulets of blood.
“Sera!”
He reached out, as if he could hold her across the cavern, against the death and damnation that threatened.
The ferales swept in. Archer brought up his blades, winking fierce and fragile against the darkness. One hideous fiend towered over him, its slavering maw open to crooked rows of serrated teeth. The feralis roared and fell upon him.