by Jessa Slade
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.
“That’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?”
“God’s chosen warriors share nothing with us,” Archer said tightly.
For once, Ecco and Bookie muttered in annoyed agreement.
Sera shifted as Bookie aimed a palm-sized satellite dish at her. “So where does that energy go?”
“Anecdotal evidence from sensitive talyan”—Bookie’s scornful look eliminated the men in the room—“and untested theory indicate the matched demonic vibrations rejuvenate the teshuva and help maintain the human form over many years and otherwise fatal wounds. If improperly balanced, the energy could destabilize the teshuva, leading to unpredictable behavior in the possessed talya.” Another scornful, if carefully unfocused, look.
“Definitely seems like more research is needed.” Sera tried a smile on Bookie.
He stared back. “I suppose that’s why we’re here.” Amidst the reflected stainless steel in his glasses, the inky bottle of malice roiled like a second pair of pupils.
Her stomach followed the uneasy motion. “Okay then.”
She reached for the beaker. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ecco straighten, then subside when Archer shook his head.
She grasped the seal, half expecting it to burn or freeze or shock her. But the thin gold foil just flaked away under her fingers.
Behind the red eyeball, the malice boiled out like greasy smoke. The room filled with the stench of rotten eggs and worse gone putrid. Ecco swore. Bookie gagged.
Sera sunk her fingers into the writhing loops.
It never regained the vaguely animalistic shape of a roving malice. It only mewled. She couldn’t decide if pity or disgust moved her more.
She thought of her conversation with Nanette and remembered how Archer had accused her of talking the malice into oblivion. “Somebody told me that good and evil might be hopelessly intertwined.” She twisted the malice between her fingers, then glanced at Archer. “And somebody else hoped maybe they aren’t.”
Archer’s half-lidded gaze glimmered with a barely suppressed hunger, as if only they two stood in the room. He’d accused her of trying to psychoanalyze the demon, but whom was she trying to heal?
She folded the malice in on itself. “If terror and torture roam fr
ee as malice and ferales, where are the parallel shapes of beauty, joy, compassion?” Ether compressed like oily cobwebs under her hands. At most she could make a spit wad, not even a paper airplane. “How can I reshape one malice into a thousand origami cranes to make a wish come true?”
She’d heard the wary hope in his voice before, wondering if there might be an end to his fighting. That she might be the end.
But her past told her she could have hope or she could have the end; the agony of hope unrequited or the peace of inevitable death. Not both.
The moment spooled out, the room fading to sketched monochrome lines, except for the violet streaks in Archer’s tarnished bronze eyes. In his clenched hand, tendons stood stark under the black of his reven, as if he could smash ether under his fist. With his demon’s help, he’d bound hope and death into one convoluted and ruinous wish.
In the empty, echoing space that linked them, she said to him, “I’m sorry, but I will not be your end.”
She spread her hands.
“Quit mooning at him,” Ecco snapped. He jumped forward to grab at the malice, jolting her. “You’re going to lose it.”
Before she could even flinch, Archer caught her. He pulled her close, his big body steady and unsettling at the same time.
His breath against her temple raised shivers down her spine, through the unseen marks encircling her thighs. “You trying to lose me again?”
He wrapped his fingers possessively around her arms, brushing her breasts. The shock she always felt at his touch leapt between them, and the fragile bubble where she’d spoken just to him imploded. Rocked on her feet, she held him fast.
The malice unraveled in a cascade of pitchy streamers until only the stench remained.
Bookie cleared his throat. “Very pretty.”
“Where did it go?” Ecco turned a tight circle.
Archer straightened with a growl. “I told you to let her do it.”
“She tried to let it go.” Ecco dragged in a deep breath, as if he could sniff out the malice through the stink. “If you hadn’t stopped her . . .”
Sera ducked away from Archer to stand on her own. “It’s gone, all right.”
Ecco blinked. “But there’s nothing left.”