by Jessa Slade
Archer’s blood ran cold.
The halls were dark and empty except for the two talyan in chairs flanking the door to Zane’s room.
Sera’s brows drew down in angry bewilderment. “No one would go in to sit with him.”
Archer slowed, looked closer at her. Just as the teshuva could take away the wound, but not the pain, it couldn’t erase her sorrow, though the lines of grief would never etch her face. “Have you been here all day?”
She nodded mutely.
The bedside light cast a soft glow over Zane. Other than that, his skin had bleached the same color as the bandages.
Archer sat heavily on the chair beside the bed. Carefully, he peeled back the lower half of the sheet and the gauze Sera had laid over Zane’s leg.
The slice in his white flesh wasn’t worse than what had already been done to that battered body. But Archer felt the last of his hope drain away with that slow welling of blood.
Sera murmured in surprise. “His reven is almost gone. You can barely see the shadow on his skin.”
Archer nodded wearily. “The demon took its mark with it.”
She stilled. “It’s gone?”
He didn’t repeat himself.
She spun for the door. “Then we’ll take him to a hospital. They’ll heal him the human way.”
“Sera.” The harshness of his voice stopped her in her tracks. “There’s nothing anyone can do for him.”
“But . . .”
A chill stole over him, as if his blood pooled on the floor to mingle with Zane’s. “His initial wound, the one that brought the demon on him, is back, along with a lifetime of damage done while fighting for the teshuva.”
She hesitated. “So every wound he ever took . . .”
“Will now bleed him dry. He’s a walking battlefield of wounded in one man.”
“My God, the agony . . .”
“That, at least, is spared him. Since the teshuva couldn’t take away the pain when the wound was inflicted, Zane lived through it then, so it doesn’t come back now. As if that’s any consolation.” The coldness in him flared to fury. “Cowardly, useless fucking demon to leave now.”
“We can’t do anything?” Sera’s voice was small.
The fury faded as hope had. The cold remained. “Wait.”
“I always hated that part of my old job,” she said softly. “The waiting.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.”
He didn’t answer.
The shuffle of bare feet separated them. Ecco stood in the doorway, his face expressionless.
Archer gave up his seat, and Ecco took it—a measure, Archer knew, of the damage done.
Ecco crossed his arms. “He’s dying?”
Sera took a breath and nodded.
“Just when I was starting to like him.”
She frowned. “You’ve been living and fighting together for almost forty years.”
“The fighting part got in the way of the living part. Well, both are over for him now.”
Sera closed her eyes with a “God, give me strength” sigh. Archer almost smiled.
Ecco studied the comatose man. “Aren’t you going to play the harp or something?”
“After a patient told me dying would be sweet release from my attempts, I gave up the harp. Plus, the music always sounds a little depressing, don’t you think?” She took a breath. “I usually just sang.”
Ecco voiced Archer’s surprise. “You sing?”
“A little. I haven’t killed anybody yet.”
“So sing us something.”
Quietly, so at first Archer thought she was only humming, she began. He retreated to the back of the room.
She segued into familiar notes that had lulled him more than once on the front porch of his home, where he’d lazed with evening heat and the childhood conviction that summer would never end.
“ ‘Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come. / ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.’ ”
How old had he been? How many years before the war that would take everything? The voices singing had been lower and far wearier than Sera’s, rich with the slow cadences that had all but deserted him. As the verses of “Amazing Grace” rolled over him, he swore he caught the drifting scent of sun-warmed honeysuckle. He rested his head back against the wall.
“ ‘ Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, / I shall possess, within the veil, a life of joy and peace.’ ”
The last note faded, and Archer straightened. He sensed the change in the room and glanced at Sera. Her head was bowed. She’d dropped her hands into her lap, and from the tension in her laced fingers, he knew she felt it.
Death had come.
On the bed, as if he knew too, Zane stirred. “Mom?”
“Just us,” Ecco said. “Sera and me. And Archer.” He glanced over his shoulder where the hall had filled with silent talyan. “And everybody else.”
Zane tilted his head from side to side, though what he was looking for, Archer couldn’t guess. “I’m tired.”
Sera touched his forehead. “Then rest. You’ve worked hard, for a long time.”
Zane let out a sigh, too long for the air that must have been in his lungs. Archer held his breath as if he could stop the last exhalation.
But Zane wasn’t quite ready to go. “Archer?”
“I’m here.”
“Someone came in after my eyes . . . I heard someone call him Corvus.”
“So we have a name,” Archer said. “Good. Don’t wear yourself out.”
“I am worn-out.” Zane sighed again, even deeper. “I think Corvus is too. He’s old, older than any of us. He said he wanted it to end.”
“Any time,” Ecco growled. “The minute we find him, he’ll be over.”
“His djinni is too powerful. It stole . . .” Zane’s hands flailed on the sheet, as if in remembered shock. “It stole my teshuva. I felt the demon ripped from me, and then it was gone. Just gone.”
Silence spread in waves from his words.
“But there’s no way out for Corvus, no one to stop him,” Zane said softly. “He’s found a way to rip through the Veil where the teshuva’s crossing weakened it, to free all the demons of hell.”
“My God,” Sera whispered.
Zane nodded once. “God will have no choice but to open the gates and send forth his armies of heavenly host in response.”
Archer rubbed his hand over his face. “Yeah, that would pretty much be the end.”
“He said his army of corpses is massing against the Veil, but he only liked to talk when he was hurting me, so it was hard to pay attention.”
From the talyan in the hallway, ripples of questions came back. “How can he do that?” “Rip open the Veil?” And louder, “What can the dead do? No one reaches across the Veil from this side.”
Archer stiffened. Across the room, Sera lifted her head, awareness a violet tint in her eyes. “Actually, maybe we can.”
CHAPTER 20
Sera supposed there was a measure of relief in having some clue what the djinn-man intended. Bad enough that her demon had weakened the barrier between the realms, but now whatever wicked quirk or misplaced kindness allowed the teshuva to send others back through the Veil, Corvus wanted to use it for his own ends.
Well, all their ends, apparently.
She pushed the frightening knowledge away. She’d panic later, when she had a free moment.
She stroked Zane’s brow, ignoring the seep of blood from all his wounds as his body quit holding itself together.
Teshuva and cellular cohesion gone, only his spirit and the memory of pain remained.
“That’s it,” Zane whispered. “Will you sing again?”
She took a breath and watched him inhale with her.
Now comes the nighttime, little bird, be done. To the nest with feathers soft, come home. Bright eye, close. Let the moon keep her watch, Guide your dr
eams through the dark hours.
She went through the verses, remembering her mother singing to her youngest brother in the womb. By the time he’d been born, her depression had been full-blown and she never sang again. Sera refused to let the memory tighten her throat, not now.
Sleep, my nestling, in the quiet boughs.
One last sigh now, settle you down.
Sleep deep, my child, fuss no more.
And my kiss shall wake you in the morn.
She held on to the last note. Finally, the limits of her still-too-human lungs faded her to silence.
Despite the muscled bulk of talyan who’d crept close, the air felt too light, the room empty. Sera pressed the back of her hand to her eyes a moment, then laid her fingers against Zane’s neck.
The slow seep of his wounds had stopped with his heart.
“He’s dead,” Ecco said.
As one, the men straightened. A murmur swept through them. Surprise, sadness, anger? Sera couldn’t tell. She’d felt all of those emotions herself. Once upon a time, her job had been to sit with the family after the death, guide them the first steps down the path to acceptance and, eventually, joyful memory.
Not this time. Not when the path out of the death-watch led toward the end of the world. She stood too quickly and swayed on her feet. A hand at her elbow steadied her.
Archer, of course.
“Come on,” he said. “Time for somebody to sleep, anyway. Plain old sleep, though, nothing metaphorical.”
She tried to dredge up a smile, but he was having none of it.
“This way.” He steered her past the talyan.
“What will happen to him now?”
“We have a place outside the city. Used to be a farm when land was the core of the league’s wealth, but Niall returned it to a native prairie reserve. Zane will be buried there.” He stopped outside the door to an empty bedroom. “It’s peaceful.”
Sera looked up into his dark eyes, haunted with remembered losses. “Are many buried there?”
“The graves are unmarked, and talyan cadavers decompose quickly once the demon leaves. Who knows how many fighters have been lost in a battle most people don’t even know about and wouldn’t believe anyway?” Rage curled around him, sparking violet.
She touched his sleeve. Underneath, she knew the demon mark ran rampant. She took a step backward into the room. “Come inside.”
The violet in his eyes flickered out behind a cloud of confusion. “What?”
She took another step back. “I don’t want to be alone.”
She thought he would run. Technically, according to the stages of grief, denial came before anger.
He didn’t move. “What will this solve?”
“Nothing. It’s not a problem or a question. I just won’t be alone tonight, and neither will you.”
“It’s not tonight anymore. It’s almost morning.” He sighed, longer even than Zane’s last breath, followed her inside, and locked the door.
He took off her clothes as if he’d never had the chance before, unbuttoning and unzipping with rapt concentration. He pressed his lips over each uncovered inch with exquisite gentleness.
She shoved at his shirt with impatient hands and bared his chest. But when she reached for the fly of his jeans, he captured her wrists.
“Slowly,” he murmured. “We have forever.”
They might not even have the rest of the dark hours. But his lingering caresses stole her breath, made her forget what she was going to say, banished even the thought of later.
He led her to the bathroom and finally shucked his jeans. With the light still off, he started the shower, and steam curled through the little room. To her demon-enhanced vision in the unrelieved blackness, an aura outlined him with scintillating lights of smoky, silvery green.
Where they touched, as he led her under the spray of water, the lights shot through with gold.
“How do you see me?” she asked wonderingly.
“As a mystery I’ll never understand.”
“I meant the colors. Is this part of the talyan bond?”
He stilled. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what the bond is, what it’s doing to us.” He turned her, back to front, and pulled her close against his chest, letting the water tumble over both of them.
She nestled against the insistent nudge of his erection, but he didn’t try an answering grope. Instead, he slicked his hands over her hair, then drew the warm, wet strands down over her breasts, barely grazing her nipples. Despite the heat, she shivered.
“I want to thank you,” he murmured against her cheek, “for what you did with Zane.”
The hot water, or maybe Archer’s looming presence behind her, kept the worst of the coldness at bay as she considered. “It was my fault. We shouldn’t have been there.”
“Taking out the horde-tenebrae was his job. And the only way to redeem himself.”
“Then the least I could do was my job. My old job.” She closed her eyes when he brushed his lips over her temple. “Do you think it mattered to him?”
He was silent a moment, which made her realize that she trusted him to tell her the truth. “We can’t know what it was like for him. But you made a difference for everyone else in that room. They all hoped they might someday go as gently into that dark night.”
“I suppose that has to be enough.”
His slick hands skimmed over her shoulders. She leaned back as he dug his thumbs into tight muscles.
“It’s hard work, isn’t it?”
“Harder because Zane didn’t have to die.” She shrugged, lifting his hands. “In a way, I was glad to leave it behind. I want to do more.”
He didn’t answer. He moved in front of her, and knelt. She stared at his bowed head as he ran his hands down her legs.
“Why don’t you sing outside the vigils?”
She shifted. “How do you know I don’t? This last week hasn’t exactly been much to sing about.”
He looked up at her, not blinking despite the droplets of water beading his face. His eyes shone silver.
Those eyes would burn through her if she didn’t answer. “I sang with my mother in my father’s choir at church. When she got too sick to go, I led the group. After she disappeared, I gave it up. I didn’t start again until I heard how severely I sucked on harp. But singing got tangled up with death.”
He reached up toward her belly. “You have a beautiful voice.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little breathless as his hands stroked over her hips.
“Beautiful like the rest of you.” His hands framed her pelvis, thumbs brushing the points of the reven curling over her hip bones. The mark gleamed a brilliant amethyst in the nimbus of demon light. “Even this is beautiful. So graceful and intricate.”
She thought the bold, powerful lines of his reven suited him perfectly. She took his arms and pulled him upright. Where she touched him, silver pinwheels struck off his skin.
“I see why you left the lights off,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know. I just thought. . . .”
She waited a moment. “That I’m shy?”
“Maybe I am.”
“We’ll see.” She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. He followed as she padded, dripping wet, to the bed.
He yanked the blanket half off the bed, but she avoided the wrap he tried to make. “You’ll get cold.”
“You’ll warm me.” She stepped into him. Silver sparked before she even touched him.
His arms closed around her, tentatively, as if she might break.
She threaded her fingers through his short hair and pulled him down to her kiss. He breathed out against her mouth, and his arms tightened around her, pulling her up onto her toes.
They fell backward onto the already-rumpled bed, mouths locked.
When he lifted himself above her, he was breathing hard. “Why did you invite me in? You aren’t afraid to be alone.”
She stared up at him.
“Not afraid, no. I wanted life. I want you.”
He stilled. “The two aren’t necessarily the same.”
She slipped her hand between their bodies to press against the base of his erection. “You’re not dead.”
He groaned, half laughter, half desire. “Not yet.”
“I won’t hurt you.” She stroked her fingers down the length of him.
“Make me feel. . . .”
“What?”
“Just make me feel.”
She adjusted her hand, cradling the heft of him in her palm, burnishing her thumb over the hot flesh.
“Good?”
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
“Very.” His breath caught as her grip tightened sensuously. Then he caught her hands. “Too much.”
“No such thing as too alive.”
“Too good, then.” He stretched her arms over her head.
In retaliation, she locked her heels behind his back. Her thighs slicked wet over his flanks. His cock pointed at her, shining with his aura like a burning brand.
He put a hand under the curve of her behind and pulled her up hard against him. She gasped at the friction of him sliding into the shadow space between her legs, grazing the pulsing nub at her core. He held her there, his heat radiating through her, silver whorls spi raling over his skin.
She writhed against him, driving herself toward the brand that would mark her yet again. She had other marks. Accident victim. Demon possessed. This, Archer’s brand, she chose for herself.
And that would mark her as what, exactly?
She didn’t care. Alive was enough, wasn’t it?
She slid, wet skin on wet skin, impaling herself. Sweet heat soaked her from the inside out. She rocked against him, taught him the rhythm singing in her veins.
He loosed her wrists so she filled her hands with him, his shoulders, the taut muscles of his back, his buttocks clenching as he drove into her.
The impatient, rising sounds of his desire flared along her nerves, brighter than the aurora surrounding them. “I can’t wait,” he groaned.
“Don’t wait,” she whispered. “Now. Now.”
The heat and light and life she’d longed for spilled from him, rolling through her, vast and devastating as a tidal wave, carrying with it her own orgasm. Just when she thought she was doomed, it washed her up onto the safe shore of Archer’s chest and receded.