by Slade, Jessa
“It will be over soon, but not yet.” Corvus pushed to his feet. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Just talk, hmm? That’s why you’re cracking your knuckles?” Geoffrey laughed. A bit more of his soul flaked away.
Corvus let his hands fall to his sides. The ring still burned coldly on his finger. “There is much poor Matthew does not want to understand.”
But he would, since unfortunately for Matthew, the shield of his righteous wrath was only a metaphor.
Archer waited in the cold light of the hotel door, contemplating his shadow cast onto the sidewalk before him.
Sera hunched her shoulders when she saw him but came on steadily to stand on his shadow. From the glint in her eyes, he thought probably she wanted to put her foot through his corporeal self.
He didn’t move. “I don’t want to hunt you down.”
“Then don’t. You’re good at letting go.”
“We said we’d meet.” He kept his voice neutral, though the effort revived some of the warmth he’d been missing.
“Actually, you told me to show up.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “Look, I don’t want to fight with you. Not verbally, not physically. Not anything.”
When he still didn’t move, she reached past him to punch the summons on the key pad.
He didn’t flinch away to stop her from touching him. He never flinched, even though touching her—thinking of touching her—burned worse than ichor. He just sucked in his breath to avoid her.
And inadvertently breathed honeysuckle. His body tightened, all senses—man and demon—coming alert.
He kept his voice even. “No one’s home tonight to let you in. They’re on rounds, killing the horde-tenebrae riled up by your coming.”
“My demon’s coming,” she corrected.
He ignored the interruption, just as he’d ignore the promptings of his lust. “At least you’ll learn how to do your part.”
“You told Liam you don’t know what my part is,” she said. “And you didn’t seem interested in learning anything more.”
That stopped him. She was still angry—no, hurt he’d turned away from her. Didn’t she understand how dangerous their intimacy, that uncontrolled spiral going God knew where, had become?
He could deny his temptation; he might refuse any further role in molding her to Liam Niall’s little army of the damned. But the simmering pain in her gaze was too much. He’d take claws over tears any day.
He drew himself up. “I know damn well you can’t go off sulking.”
“I wasn’t sulking,” she flared.
“Where were you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t answer to you. Open the damn door already. I changed my mind. I do feel like fighting with you.”
Just as he’d wanted, he reminded himself when she arrived at the ballroom ten minutes later, her hair in a severe braid, her slender curves defined under slim-fit yoga pants and workout bra.
She stood in front of the windows, her fair skin and hair bright against the blackness of the night. As if his mind needed a frame for the maddening loop of images from their night together.
He swallowed past his dry throat. The destroyer in him offered no subliminal suggestions while he contemplated where he’d put his hands on her. He’d planned to show her all the places a fight could go wrong. She’d already shown him one he hadn’t considered.
Her hazel eyes snapped. “Well?”
“Follow my lead.”
She snorted, but softly, so he didn’t have to respond.
She mirrored him through the tai chi poses, not touching. A little of the ancient harmony flowed through him.
He feinted at her. She blocked him, harder than necessary. He sent the same attack in the other direction. She faltered, stiffening.
“Easy,” he murmured. “Same as before.”
They sparred until her cheeks were bright with color and her hair a wild corona with the tie long gone.
When he paused, she shook the sweat-darkened strands back from her face. “I’ll have to get a cut like yours.”
“That would be a sin.” His fingers twitched with a visceral memory of blond silk wound between his fingers. Shaking off the sensation was harder than sublimating the demon. His body ached even where she’d never landed a blow.
She settled her hands on her hips. “You told me someone else would teach me this.”
“I changed my mind too . . . ,” he said, hesitating, then added, “about some things.”
Her expression was shuttered. “Why?”
She didn’t ask what, he noticed. Just as well.
“This shift in demonic activity since you—since your demon arrived. I wanted to talk to Bookie tonight, about the tests he’s doing with you, about some of the history leading up to this crossing. He knew, from the tear it left in the Veil, that the demon was strong, although he had guessed it would be djinn. Maybe the pendant stone threw off his readings. But if he was wrong about that, we might have to rethink our strategy against this upsurge.”
She took a few steps toward the mirror, as if looking for the demon inside her. “Maybe you can convince him I’m not evil.”
“It would be safer for you if you were. The djinn are damn hard to kill.”
“More than the teshuva?”
“By orders of magnitude. Maybe teshuva are weakened by their repentance, or maybe they repent because they are weak. Whichever, we’re at a disadvantage and always have been, just left to pick up the pieces.” He fell silent until she turned from the mirror to meet his gaze. “Until you.”
She blinked.
“Even before your possession was complete, the demon was strong and your link to it impressive. What you’ll be with time and training . . .” He watched as she turned to pace across the room. “When your demon roamed the city, Zane said the end was nigh. He might’ve been right.”
She spun to face him. “How can there be an end? I thought you said good and evil are endemic to the human heart?”
He hesitated. “But must they be eternally, inescapably bound? Think of other diseases that have been cured.”
“Evil is like chicken pox?”
He grimaced. “Maybe more like smallpox. Something deadly to be eradicated. When you drained that first malice, and later the ferales, something strange happened. They vanished.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“But they were gone. No shards. No echo. Nothing left in this realm.” He took a slow breath. “Sera, millennia of talyan have just been hopelessly holding back the tide of evil. With that one malice, those two ferales, you turned it.”
She tipped her head to one side. She had hold of the pendant and ran the pale stone along the cord as she considered. He could almost see the gears ticking over in her brain. A sense of calm stole over him. He’d never met as serious and intense a questioner. Her response could only deepen his understanding.
How long had it been since he’d done anything besides destroy? And long for his own destruction? When had he last had an inkling of possibility for an end to his pain?
Sera was his hope.
Her devotion to the last moments, when even loved ones gave up, had given her a clear-eyed resilience of spirit, the opposite of everything he feared he’d become. The realization shifted something inside him, something he didn’t want to examine too closely.
Hope could be crippling in ways beyond mere feralis claws and malice slime. The wounds left by shattered hope plunged deeper than the healing power of the strongest teshuva.
He would’ve sneered at the exaggeration if he hadn’t carried the scars.
She shook her head. “I just don’t know. Dark and light. Evil and good. The dichotomies started with the big bang and somebody thinking to write it all down in a best seller called the Bible and about a thousand other storybooks since.”
Had he thought she’d agree with him so easily? In a way, he was glad she hadn’t. If he could convince her, maybe he could convince himself. “Then we’ll just
have to go back to the big bang and do it again. Without evil this time.”
She smiled. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“Oh, I do,” he said softly.
Her smile faded.
He gave himself a shake. “I think we’re done here for the night.”
“You bring up a host of mysteries and then disappear? Lovely.”
He cocked his head. “Did you want something else?”
“Answers,” she snapped.
“I left a message for Bookie with some suggestions to jump-start his research, and I borrowed a history on—”
“I was thinking of something a little more today, now, this instant.”
“You are young and impatient, grasshopper,” he said, just to watch her scowl. “I also asked Ecco to bring back a malice. I want Bookie to record you draining it. He finished his father’s work on an etheric shunt to drain demonic emanations, which rather than metaphysical garbagemen, makes us metaphysical waste-treatment specialists. Not really progress. But what you do . . .” He shook his head.
She rubbed at her arm where the malice had fastened its teeth. “Yeah, it was interesting, all right.”
“You wanted blood-and-guts action.”
She grimaced. “Not my own.”
His amusement faded. “I hope it won’t come to that. For the sake of both our souls.”
“You do what needs to be done, and so will I. You’ll just have to let go of the rest.”
He contemplated all that had slipped away from him over the years. “My soul?”
“Your hurt.”
The accusation rankled, unfair, not to mention pointless. “I thought you’d have figured out by now that the demon heals the wound but not the pain.”
“I’m not talking about the battle scars.”
Neither was he. “When you’ve fought as long as I have, see if you still feel the same.”
She raised her chin. “Who’s got that kind of time?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” The thought should have depressed him, being far too true. But somehow the snap in her eyes made him glad the nights were long.
Sera made him go another bout, retribution for that crack about their respective ages. If he wanted to play the wise old man, at least he could wheeze a little.
Too bad he was in such damn fine shape. But they were both breathing hard at the end.
“We’re through.” A glint of respect shone in his eye. “Save something for the malice.”
She rubbed her shoulder, wincing at the twinge. “How is Ecco supposed to catch one?”
“Oddly enough, or maybe not, he has a way with them.” From behind, Archer splayed his fingers over her shoulder. “Where does it hurt?”
Her breath, which had eased, jumped again at the contact. “It’s not bad. The teshuva is taking care of it.”
“Just checking.” His voice was soft, at odds with his firm hands.
She forced herself not to lean into him. “You were saying, about Ecco and his malice.”
“I found him once, covered in slime. They kept coming to their slaughter. I thought he might cry. He said it was like drowning kittens. Evil kittens, but still.”
She shivered, telling herself it was his story, not his touch. “I shouldn’t think poor malice, but somehow I do.”
“Hate the sin, not the sinner.”
“I think you mean, ‘Love the sinner, not the sin.’ ”
His hands fell away. “Same thing.”
“No,” she said patiently. “One is negative and one is positive.”
“I suppose, if you want to split hairs and not malice.” He stretched, a roll of muscle and sinew that made something inside of her leap in answering reflex. “The talyan won’t be back until early morning. You should get some rest before then.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to. Who knew what her dreams would be? Temptation, no doubt. “Let me know when you need me.”
The faint breathlessness in her voice made her squirm. Just the workout, she told herself. Anybody would have been breathless. It wasn’t just his body having that effect on her body.
Without waiting for his confirmation, she escaped to her suite.
Despite the long day, she couldn’t sleep. The talk with Nanette and the sparring—physical and verbal—with Archer had her brain in a whirl. She called and left a message for her physical therapist, canceling her appointments, saying she felt much better lately. It was too late to call her brothers or Wendy at the nursing home. She lay on the couch and wondered if, from now on, it would always be too late.
She must have fallen asleep, because when the knock came at her door, she was dreaming about an assembly line full of pie shells. À la I Love Lucy, she sealed squirming malice into the pies. But the pie shells were glass and she sliced her thumb. Suddenly, on the conveyor belt sat a huge, hulking feralis, its orange eyes fixed on her, drool from its overhung jaw burning holes in the crusts.
She staggered up at the second knock.
Zane waited at the door. “Archer said meet him in Bookie’s lab.”
She gathered a sweater, her bag, and a notebook—not sure what else one took to a malice execution—and followed him. “Will you be there?”
He shook his head. “I’m beat, literally, figuratively, you name it, it’s beat. You’ll be okay?”
“Just not sure what to expect.”
“You’ve done it already. Do it again.”
And again. And again. “ ‘ Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,’ ” she sang under her breath.
Zane picked up the next line. “ ‘ When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.’ ” He shook his head. “I’d be pissed if my dinner started talking back. Speaking of dinner . . .” He gave her a wave and broke off at the kitchen.
Daylight gleamed through the windows, but the halls were quiet, the talyan having returned from their night’s work and now recovering for the next. As she headed down to the lab, the silence thickened, until she found herself holding her breath.
So she heard the low murmur of the men’s voices, then a thin blackboard screech that raised her hackles. The malice.
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Bookie was saying.
“I got slimed for nothing?” Ecco’s petulant complaint was almost lost in Archer’s brusque reply.
“Testing a hypothesis is not jumping to a conclusion. You should know that.”
Bookie gave a sharp laugh. “I do, since I’m the one supposed to be creating the hypothesis.”
“Who cares?” Something rattled, and Sera imagined Ecco slapping his hand down on a tray of obscure implements.
“Easy for you to say,” Bookie snapped. “No one wants your job.”
Archer’s soft voice carried all the more clearly for its intensity. “Your rank is safe, Bookkeeper, always has been. If your father made you feel unwelcome in his studies, perhaps he wanted more for you than a lifetime down here.”
Sera winced, picturing Bookie’s expression. No one liked their familial failures laid out on the exam table. She should know.
She scuffed her feet and whisked around the corner, already talking. “Sorry I’m late.”
The three men moved away from the stiff stances they’d held. Archer nodded at her as she dropped her bag on the counter.
Between the men, a beaker topped with a gold seal held a flowing, inky substance of half liquid, half gas. She leaned closer, then recoiled with a gasp when a red eye spun across the inner surface of the glass.
“Don’t knock it over,” Ecco warned. “They’re a bitch to get out of the ductwork, and they always end up in my shower.”
She swallowed. “I didn’t realize you could fold them so small.”
“They’re like rats. They go wherever that eyeball fits. Still a pain getting them into the bottle, even with the etheric dissonance generator and the rogue-priest blessing on the glass.”
“I already have papers on malice morphology,” Bookie said impatiently.
“Th
at’s not why we’re here.” Archer leaned his hip against the counter. “I want you to take an ESF and ion reading as Sera drains the malice.”
“Seems kind of unsporting at the moment,” she said.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel?” Ecco grinned. “We could let it out and you can try to drain it before it ends up in your shower. I’d hate to have to come after it.”
She grimaced. “I guess I’ll work up the nerve then.”
Bookie crossed his arms. “I have papers on malice dispatching too. Adding footnotes to studies already done is all very interesting, but—”
Archer straightened from his lazy stance.
Bookie fell silent. Even Ecco studied his fingernails with sudden attention.
Sera leaned over the beaker again. “I don’t know how I did it before.”
“Don’t think about it,” Archer said. “Just do what comes naturally.”
“Supernaturally,” Echo said. When they glared at him, he waved one hand. “Continue, please.”
Archer glanced at Bookie. “Do you have the equipment set up?”
Bookie gave a curt nod. “As you requested last night.” He wheeled a squat cabinet closer to the table. Sera was reminded of a hospital crash cart, only in this case, they were offing something, not saving it.
Bookie saw her attention and despite his pique, seemed unable to prevent himself from explaining. “The ether-spectral field detector will record emanations from you and the malice. Probably fairly consistent with readings we’ve taken before.” He glared at Archer. “In our realm, lesser demons manifest as an etheric shell, if you will, containing spectral energy. When a talya captures a malice or incapacitates a feralis, the teshuva’s emanations overwhelm the lesser-demonic field, altering its pattern. Once closely enough aligned, the lesser energy is subsumed within the teshuva energy, leaving only the exhausted etheric shell—drained.”
“Like sucking down a beer bong and tossing the can over your shoulder,” Ecco murmured. “Without the burp.” No one looked his way.
“That’s why you don’t tangle with the djinn, only horde-tenebrae,” Bookie continued. “The teshuva can’t overcome the stronger emanations of the djinn.”
Sera pictured Nanette hefting a beer bong. “How do angels fare against the djinn?”