by Jessa Slade
Just hours ago, he had explained the code came from the Song of Solomon, a passage his farmer father often quoted: “For, lo, the winter is passed. The rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come.”
The latch released under her thumb, letting in the stinging Chicago wind. She slipped out quickly.
The real problem with suddenly acquiring the knowledge of good and evil wasn’t simply the knowing part. It was deciding what to do about it.
If she wanted to fight, wanted to matter, she had to go.
She’d just kicked herself out of the garden.
A touch of cold roused Archer. He reached for Sera, but his arm closed around empty air.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the canopy. She’d be back in a moment and he’d have to decide what to tell her about his revelation in the night.
Love conquers evil. How simple that was. Not easy necessarily, but simple. God knew, it still took a sharp blade, not Air Supply ballads alone, to subdue a rampaging feralis.
All this time, he’d held himself apart, dealing death and refusing to lose again, when only partnership with the woman he’d come to trust and admire could make a difference.
Eager to share his insight, he called her name. Water murmured over rocks in the little stream, and leaves rustled gently.
But no answer.
He slid out of bed. Without pausing to gather his clothes, he circled the paths. Empty.
Kitchen and bathroom. Empty.
In the doorway, he stopped, backpedaled, looked at the two brimming cups of tea beside the computer.
When he jostled the mouse, the black monitor brightened. He reviewed the history. Within a minute, he’d read everything she’d typed.
Fury pulsed through him, pushing back the chill gathered on his skin. Damn Bookie. That wasn’t how it had gone down. The historian hadn’t liked the baited-trap idea either; he must’ve caved in.
Of course, his own version had missed some key points too. And she’d obviously decided who was to be believed. And where she wanted to be.
He crossed his arms against the chill.
She’d rejected the kidnapping charge, but now she knew he’d tried to keep her from a path she’d chosen. He, the great talyan warrior, was afraid of death—not his own, but hers.
What use was a talya afraid of death? Sera, always the guide, had shown him the answer.
The e-mail time stamps said she’d been gone almost an hour, but he imagined the frost she’d let in still lingered. He returned to the garden’s center to yank on his jeans. The scent of lily, sex, and Sera drifted around him.
She’d made him no promises—nor he to her. How could he before, knowing his immortal life was not his own, when eternity had been given to him only so long as he waged the teshuva’s war.
And how could he now, knowing she didn’t feel the same. The bond between them when they banished the demons had been an illusion as fleeting as a Chicago spring.
He’d forgotten the only way the garden could survive in this harsh place was behind thick walls and iron restraint. Letting someone in had been a mistake, one he wouldn’t make again.
Sera walked until the falling snow stopped melting on her bare arms. Let the demon keep her from freezing if it wanted. She couldn’t go to the league hotel before her appointment with Bookie. She didn’t want to answer their questions about Archer.
She wondered how much trouble he was in. The talyan were independent and wayward souls, and Liam steered them with a light hand. But even his relaxed management style couldn’t allow outright revolt.
Her willing return might take the sting out of Archer’s mutiny, especially when they needed all the fighters they could get. She had more reason to be angry with Archer than the league did. She was the one lured away under false pretenses.
A rebellious part of her mind asked, what pretense? She knew he hadn’t wanted to see her broken like Zane. Whether his motivation was guilt, simple humanity, or . . . something else, didn’t change the fact she almost welcomed his intervention.
Archer would confront Corvus without hesitation. She’d just have to keep that boldness in mind when her turn came. Of course, it’d be easier if she had his death wish too.
Her aimless steps brought her to the nursing home. She stood across the street, half hiding behind a parked truck. Two days ago—only that long?—she’d called Wendy to say Nanette would check on her father, but she’d never heard how the encounter had gone.
Lights on the porch gleamed warm and welcoming, but Sera didn’t approach. If her father had sensed the repentant demon in her and wanted her banished, she could only imagine how he’d feel about her releasing all the demons of hell. Not exactly a distinction to make a papa proud.
She pictured the honor student bumper sticker peeling off under a bloodred scrawl: MY CHILD IS IGNITING THE APOCALYPSE.
She turned and kept walking.
By the time she’d fully tested whether the demon would let her die of exposure, or only wish hypothermia would stop her shivering, she found herself outside the hospital. The emergency room offered heat and a seat. Unless she was spurting copious amounts of some bodily fluid, nobody would look twice.
As a place to contemplate her possible demise, with the gray linoleum tiles, beige plastic chairs, and the stench coming from the vending-area coffee machine, it could double for purgatory any day.
“Sera?”
For a heartbeat, her world felt surreally normal, as if this were the start of another workday in her old life—her old, old life.
“Betsy.” She stood up too fast and swayed as the blood rushed out of her head.
“Whoa.” Betsy put a hand under her elbow. “Damn, girl, you’re freezing, and you’re whiter than . . . You’re always white. Where’s your coat?”
“I lost it.” She realized she sounded vague and shook her head.
Betsy steered her toward the admitting area. “Are you in trouble?”
“Hey.” One of the waiting patients held up his hand. “I was next.”
Betsy scowled over her shoulder. “Yeah? What’s the problem?”
“I was putting up my Christmas lights, and the hammer tacker put a staple through my thumb.” He waved the digit in question.
“Right. Give me a minute to set up an OR for amputation.” Betsy pushed Sera into the nurses’ lounge. “We finally get a break from all the solvo crazies—it’s weird, they just disappeared; are they all getting high together somewhere?—and back come the normal crazies to fill the gap. Now, tell me what’s going on. How’s my patient?”
Sera dropped onto the worn couch. “Buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Southern Illinois.”
Betsy let out a long breath. “It’s that one big guy you were with, the one with the scary eyes. He looked like trouble incarnate, and now he’s got you mixed up in it.”
Sera couldn’t argue with the physical description. But she shook her head. “I mixed myself up in it. And those guys will help me make it right.” Just not the one big guy.
Betsy sat down beside her. “Honey, I know you never believed this, but the weight of the world isn’t on your shoulders.”
“It wasn’t before.” She could admit that, now that she knew what the real weight of the world felt like.
“You need to get out, save yourself.”
Sera bit her lip. “It’s complicated. I didn’t mean to bother you. I didn’t know you were on today.”
“I’m always on.”
Had she subconsciously remembered her friend’s schedule? Sera wondered what she’d hoped to find here. “You’ve seen the worst that people do to one another.
Do you think . . .” She remembered the two men lit by the neon bar sign, the shadow of the malice darkening them. “Do you think they mean to do it?”
“What’s my other choice? Every shooter, beater, and user is clinically and legally insane?”
“Maybe they are driven to it by . . . ,” S
era said, hesitating again, then finished, “by their demons.”
“We all have demons. The trick is not listening to them. That’s what I think.”
The nurse wasn’t speaking literally, Sera knew. She wondered what the other woman would say if she found out that she was right.
She had an advantage, seeing what everyone else thought was allegory, if they bothered thinking about it at all. Wouldn’t everyone fight evil if they saw what she’d seen?
She rose. “I have to go.”
“You’re not going to listen to me, are you?”
“I did listen. I’m going to fight my demons.”
She just wished she knew which were the most dangerous.
When she left, Betsy insisted on handing over her coat. Sera wanted to promise she’d bring it back. But she didn’t like to lie. Now seemed a good time to start keeping her soul as pure as possible. She remembered Archer’s insistence on the truth. Right up until he didn’t like the truth, of course.
On her way, she stopped by the hospital chapel, a non-denominational room with a lone stained-glass panel ripping off Monet’s water lilies. The orange throats of the lilies looked like a drained feralis’s fading sulfurous eyeball. That mental image probably didn’t haunt most visitors to the chapel, but she knew she’d find no peace, regardless.
If she was honest, she’d admit she never really sought peace in her faith. After her mother’s disappearance, she’d wanted answers, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
Looking around at the conscientious trappings of watered-down spirituality, she knew she still wasn’t ready. She didn’t want to be consoled or calmed. She didn’t want a conviction someone else handed her, however prettily or practically it might be packaged, like a bouquet. She wanted it to grow from within. Until it did, she’d go without.
Outside, the snowfall had thickened, and the low, heavy clouds hushed the city night. Whirling flakes glittered in streetlights come on early in the gathering darkness. She arrived at the league hotel a little before the hour and thought she’d wait in the doorway until Bookie came looking for her. But when she rattled the door, it opened.
She frowned at the lax security. But they’d moved everything out to avoid birnenston contamination, so maybe there was no reason to lock up, especially since Bookie knew she was coming.
In the lobby, only the low night lighting was on, leaving the ceilings all but invisible. She eyed the shadows and remembered the swarms of malice in the building where they’d found Zane. Shaking off her unease, she headed downstairs to the lab.
The lower halls were entirely unlit, leaving indirect light from a few office windows to spread in pools along her path. Only Bookie’s lab at the end of the hall stood open and bright.
She took a few steps toward it, then slowed, her senses tightening.
She knew the violet flicker was in her eyes as the hallway took on a black-light cast, reflecting energy signatures her human eyes couldn’t see. The birnenston stench had dissipated, but faint smudges on the walls remained like smoke stains. She held her breath, listening, and heard nothing.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear, but all her senses, and the demon’s too, thrummed a warning.
She didn’t call out for Bookie. Soundlessly, she backed away, wishing she’d been quieter going through the stairwell door. She turned to run.
A man stepped out from a dark doorway she’d passed, blocking her return to the stairs. He faced her, a black silhouette. He took a step forward, and to her demon-pitched hearing, the step boomed with other-realm power, reverberating in her bones until her teeth rattled. Another thunderous step brought him within reach of one of the lighted rooms.
And still he was a black silhouette. Her enhanced vision couldn’t penetrate the unrelieved darkness that devoured him.
Now she knew why he’d taken the name Corvus—Latin for blackbird.
She bolted. Not Bookie’s office, obviously a trap. Was the historian there, wounded or dead? The next door down the hall wasn’t locked. She ducked in, then cursed when she flicked on the light and realized there was no lock on what was clearly a catch-all room and small at that.
She hauled a battered desk in front of the door. It wouldn’t stop Corvus, she knew. He wasn’t relying on his ferales anymore.
In the hall, each step boomed with etheric shock waves that sent her demon, trapped within her, fleeing in helpless circles until she reeled with vertigo. Her hypersensitive hearing faltered, so one moment her ears rang with the relentless footsteps, and in the next, only an eerie, lying silence.
No wonder teshuva didn’t fight the djinn. Her demon obviously thought they were doomed. Great. Abandoned once again.
Screw that. She pushed another desk in front of the first, then spun it ninety degrees lengthwise so that only a few inches separated it from the far wall. If he pushed open the door, the door would shove the desks into the wall.
That wouldn’t stop him either. Nothing would.
She cast around the small space, looking for something, anything, to defend herself. A box of file folders. A rolling chair. A shelf with a row of glass beakers. Maybe the acoustic tiles overhead hid a false ceiling where she could escape.
The door exploded inward, crushing the corner of the first desk. Splinters and a strip of metal blew through the room. The rebound sent the second desk spinning crazily. It knocked her to the ground.
She tried to roll and screamed at the pain in her leg.
Broken. She knew that physical sensation of sound, of bone grating on bone. The right femur was snapped in half. She wouldn’t be able to stand until her teshuva healed her.
From outside, Corvus shoved at the debris, all that was keeping him from entering.
She clawed through the wreckage, avoiding the chair that rolled toward her as he crashed through. Glass from the shattered beakers cut her palms.
Her fingers closed around the metal strip.
She rolled to her back, saw him looming over her, and lashed out with the thin metal.
He recoiled, but the tip grazed diagonally across his face. Blood sprayed. Before she could attack again, he lunged, pinning her wrist under his boot, grinding her hand into the broken glass. On either side of the bloody line, his eyes narrowed.
Okay, yeah, they were doomed.
He plucked the measly weapon from her grasp, slicing her fingers. She bit into her lip rather than cry out.
Without the teshuva focused on the djinni, she finally could see the man. Blunt features, thick neck, shaved bullet head. He looked like a gladiator. The scratch she’d given him was healing, almost lost among the myriad faint scars on his face.
But his eyes . . . She’d expected anything—crimson red, jaundiced orange, deep black, or blank white—besides this shimmering, celestial blue.
He wrapped his fingers around her neck and straightened, pulling her upright, up to her toes, then off her feet entirely. The ring on his finger cut into her throat. He held her aloft without straining.
“Where is your demon?” He gave her a little shake, as if she might be hiding it in her pocket. “Teshuva coward, where are you? You’d abandon your woman to fight your battles alone?”
She clawed at his fingers around her neck, prying at the large-stoned ring she could feel but not see. She kicked, but the agony in her leg almost made her vomit, not good while being choked.
Her all-too-human vision darkened. She supposed she should be glad for a relatively painless death, compared to poor Zane’s.
On the other hand, she finally understood Archer’s desire to go out in a blaze of demon-shredding glory.
She’d add her own demon to the ass kicking. The teshuva had promised her strength, and she was dying from want of air.
As the blackness closed around her, her last sight was those heavenly eyes, and her last thought that heaven should be pissed.
CHAPTER 23
Half buried in leaves beside the daybed, Archer’s cell phone buzzed. He glared at it balefully. Wouldn’t b
e good news. When was it ever?
Because he feared whom the bad news might be about, he answered on the last ring before the call went to voice mail.
The voice on the other end was tentative. “This is Nanette. Sera’s friend. I don’t know if you remember me.”
“The faith healer.” A prickle of unease went through him. “Is Sera all right?”
A pause on the other end. “She’s not with you? I had the impression . . . Sorry to bother you.”
“Wait.” He gripped the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone needs to talk to her, rather urgently, and I can’t reach her. I remembered you gave Wendy, the nursing home director, the name of your cleaning service. I called them—who needs a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner?—and they agreed to give me your phone number if I promised to tell you not to send them any more business like yours. I said I would, and I have.”
Archer closed his eyes, struggling for patience. “Can we get to the ‘rather urgently’ part?”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Not at the moment.” Likely never again.
“We have to find her. She’s in terrible danger.”
“She’s possessed by a demon. Of course she’s in danger.” He tensed at the thought of what the angelic host would do to her if they discovered she could open a path into the demon realm.
“Not just danger to her soul. Real danger. I mean, her soul being in danger is real danger—”
“Urgently,” Archer reminded her.
“Sorry. I’ve just never seen anything like this. All he keeps saying is he needs Sera.”
“He?” Archer’s blood froze. “Nanette, listen. You may be dealing with a djinn-possessed man. And he is most definitely dangerous.”
“No, this is just a man. And he’s hurt.”
“He could be disguising what he is, to gain your trust.”
“Mr. Archer,” Nanette said briskly, “I am host to an angel, a lesser angel, but even I’d smell a djinni this close.”
“He’s with you now?” Archer was already pulling on his boots.