“I’ve handled bigger weapons than yours.”
Her bold words echoed more than the sheer reflective blades accounted for. The first hint of uncertainty he’d seen in her—even when she faced the ferales in the alley with nothing more than a dull razor blade—flushed her cheeks with color, and she bit her lip.
The hunger that stirred in him at the slight vulnerability had nothing to do with the demon. And was even more dangerous. He swallowed hard against it, and leveled his tone coolly. “No doubt your bravado has served you well. Did the demon come to you with the promise that now you’d finally be able to carry through with all that bluster?”
She froze at the question, but her cinnamon eyes snapped, like the tint of flames in straw.
“The demon always makes an offer we haven’t the strength to refuse,” he explained. “It knows us better than we know ourselves. I suppose that is the nature of temptation.” How fortunate for him that he’d been around long enough to amass scars of resistance.
“I’m tempted,” she said stiffly, “to grab that spiked mace and take a swing.”
He forced himself to focus on work. Pairing a new talya with the right weapon was vital. “If you want to try it out—”
“Just on you.”
“Ah.” He rose onto the balls of his feet as the demon shifted eagerly within him. “Always happy to help.”
Her hands clenched as if longing for that mace handle—or maybe just his neck. “You can’t ask how people were lured to the dark side.”
“Technically, we’re the repenting side, which is at least a half dozen steps from the dark side.” Thinking of her hands on his skin wasn’t helping his focus. To a leader of demon-slaying warriors, curiosity was only slightly less useless than desire. But how had the demon cozened her, if not through her boldness?
He took a long step back—physically and mentally—and swept out one hand in a grand gesture. “Choose.”
In his many years commanding the league, he’d found that a new talya’s choice of weapon indicated something about the man and the demon inside him. He was getting ahead of himself, putting Jilly through his tests so soon, but the urgency that had ridden him since the appearance of her unbound demon seemed even worse when she was near.
And with her hell-bent attitude, he suspected she might soon need all the weapons she could get.
He held himself silent and still, though every muscle twitched to follow as she stalked past him to circle the room. She paused near the mace, slanted a glance at him, and kept moving.
She passed the white-men-can’t-jump wall of massive, double-handed swords representing a wide swath of European history. The aesthetically organized Asian collection of kitanas and throwing stars earned not even a second look. Instead, she came around again to the blunt-force trauma corner.
But she didn’t reach for the mace, which was a smaller version of his mallet of doom. “No guns? No rocket launchers?”
“Rocket launchers tend to get noticed. We try not to be. More importantly, we have to get up close and personal with the bad guys to destroy them.”
“I tracked down my sister’s pimp about a year ago,
trying to find out where she’d gone. He stabbed me.” She put her hand against her left side, just under her breast. “Punctured a lung. Nicked my heart. But you already knew that, didn’t you, from this dossier your people put together on me. Did it tell you that, even huffing along on one lung and coughing blood, I still managed to knock out a few of his teeth?”
Liam pursed his lips. “So you’re saying you don’t need a mace.”
The protective cup of her hand slid around to settle brashly on her hip again. “I’m saying I don’t need a mace.”
He wanted to argue. Maybe he should argue in favor of the mace, full Kevlar—never mind that body armor interfered with the draining of the demonic emanations that were the sole reason for their immortal existence—hell, throw in a popemobile too. After all, the ferales had sniffed her out for some nefarious reason. And despite her rebellious independence, she’d come back to him because she knew she needed protection, needed his help.
He’d make her see. Finally, he shrugged. “If you change your mind. . . .”
“I’ll be sure to let you know.”
He withheld a snort. She’d voluntarily admit to anything that smacked of weakness only after a snowball survived August in Chicago, which was even less promising than its chances in hell.
She marched out of the weapons room but paused as he closed the door. “Sera said I’d meet the rest of the crew.”
He hesitated, picturing the predatory interest of his wayward, womanless fighters. “They’re recovering from last night’s battles. Leave them to their rest.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he added sharply, “You’ll be one of them soon enough.”
From the defiant flicker of violet in her eyes, he
thought soon might come even sooner. But she inclined her head and followed him back upstairs.
Instead of stopping at the main floor, he continued leading her up, their steps clanging on the steel treads, until they reached the roof. He shoved open the access door to a swirl of frigid air.
A scrim of high, thin clouds had blanked the sun into a matte white disk that leached the dimensions from the surrounding industrial district. The gray-walled buildings looked flat as cardboard cutouts, and even the graffiti had dulled.
The wind rattled Jilly’s blue-spiked hair but couldn’t bend it. “Why’d you bring me up here?”
“To show you.”
“King of all you survey, hmm?”
“Not even a knight,” he demurred. “I just want you to see what we’re fighting for.”
She studied the bleak landscape. “We’ll be hailed as conquering heroes, no doubt.”
He shook his head. This part of the test was always hard for the new recruits to grasp. “Demons stalk the Magnificent Mile as often as the South Side, but the battleground doesn’t matter. This is as close as you’ll get to heaven.”
She pivoted to face him. The wind bit through his cambric shirt; he knew she must be equally chilled, but she stood without shivering. Though the top of her head didn’t even reach his shoulder, she sized herself against him with a long, slow look even more deliberate than the one he’d given her. Was it his imagination, or did she linger over places a good, repentant demon should forget?
She made a soft noise that left him no indication of which way she had judged him. “This close, huh? And I haven’t even been properly damned yet.”
She took a step forward, tilting her head as if to get another perspective.
He tightened his hands into fists at his side, not against the cold but against a rising heat that seemed to spark off those cinnamon eyes. “You will be. Soon.” Obviously some demon was at work that she would tease him so.
“We have hours before nightfall,” she said. “Hours before I can meet your fighters. Or my demon. So let’s go. Show me something to make me believe I’m better off joining you.”
And that latent demon in her apparently still had power to call to him, because he—of all the talyan who should know better than to give in to temptation—followed her.