by Jessa Slade
“Yes. He knew Sera came to me, but he says he needs Sera too, to be healed.”
Archer automatically checked the weight of the axe in his coat. “What does he think Sera can do?”
“I have no idea. I don’t think even the highest seraph could help.”
“Is he dying?”
“I don’t know what will happen if he does. This man doesn’t have a soul.”
Archer, with the club out but the blade retracted, ghosted through the dark cinder-block church, demon senses ranging out around him like a pack of leashed hunting dogs. No djinn.
He recognized Nanette in the doorway of the main office. She wrung her hands, but her distress seemed contained. His concern that she had called him under duress faded.
“This way,” she called.
He stepped cautiously into the smaller room—and froze when he saw Bookie splayed on the couch.
The historian lifted his head and groaned. “You’re not Sera.”
“No.” Archer circled toward the couch. “What the hell’s going on, Bookie? Where’s Sera? She was supposed to be meeting with you.”
“I need her. I have to find her.”
Nanette sighed. “He won’t say anything else. I almost called my husband, but then I noticed his”—she waved one hand helplessly—“his lack.”
“His missing soul.”
She nodded, her face ashen. “I know the teshuva lost the vision for what lies within, but my angel sees the brightness of someone’s soul.” Her gaze slid away from him. “Or darkness. But there’s always something there. With him, nothing.” She lowered her voice. “It sickens me to see. Like falling into a well. I can’t imagine what it’s doing to him.”
Archer watched Bookie through narrowed eyes. “I don’t see how losing your soul suddenly makes you stupid.”
Nanette gazed at him reprovingly. “I think he’s gone a bit mad.”
“I have no problem with mad. He just has to share the details.” Archer loomed over him. “Bookie, where’s your soul? And what’s Sera supposed to do about it?”
From behind his glasses, the man’s gaze flicked over him, incuriously. That, more than anything, made Archer believe something was wrong. Bookie had never been able to look at any of them without at least a hint of frustrated superiority. “I need Sera.”
“Right. For what?”
“I have to drive her away, destroy her havens, make you doubt her. I have to give her to him.”
A chill spidered down Archer’s spine. Bookie had tossed Sera’s apartment, keeping her on the run from . . . ? “Who’s ‘he,’ Bookie?” The freeze all but stopped his heart as bitter logic supplied the name. “Corvus.”
“He said I had to make an opening, make a place for it, in me.”
More questions without answers for the first ones. “Make a place for what?”
“He stole it from me. Now he’ll steal hers. Steal it and set them all free.” He muttered in Latin.
Archer grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook him. “All what, Bookie?”
“The demons,” Bookie shrieked. “All the demons. He’ll free all the demons.” His shriek rose to a glass-shattering pitch. “I wanted a demon. She took it, and it was supposed to be mine.”
Archer recoiled. Bookie began to cry. The gut-wrenching sobs shook him harder than Archer had.
“Why would anyone want to be possessed?” Nanette whispered.
“Only a fool.” Archer stared down at the weeping man.
Bookie had betrayed them.
The man looked up, tears speckling the inside of his glasses. “Don’t let him eat her demon. It’s mine.”
Everything came together in Archer’s head. Bookie e-mailing Sera for a meeting time. Sera slipping out. She’d gone to the meeting . . . with Corvus. Only hours ago.
He hauled Bookie upright with such violence his glasses flew off. “Where did he take her? Damn you, Bookkeeper. Where?”
“Mine,” Bookie mumbled. “I helped make the hole in the Veil, and he made a hole in me, so it’s mine. I need it.”
Archer cursed and spun away, grabbing his cell phone. He punched in Niall’s number, and was speaking almost before the other man could answer. “Corvus has Sera. Bookie sold us out. Retrace Bookie’s movements for the last forty-eight hours. He’s been in Corvus’s presence within that period. We need the djinn-man’s lair.”
He hung up, grabbed Bookie again, and headed for the door. “You, take me to your leader.”
“Wait,” Nanette cried. “I’m going with you.”
Archer didn’t slow. “This could get messy.”
“I might be able to help. If I see the wandering soul . . .”
“You’d help him?”
She bit her lip. “I told you, I don’t think I can. But the soul might lead us to this Corvus. And Sera. And if he is trying to unlock the demon realm, you need all the help you can get.”
Archer stared at her. He’d traded the deadliest force of talyan fighters for a soulless traitor and a bottom-rung angelic possessed.
Hell of a way to save the world.
Corvus paced in front of the talya bound on the floor, small and pale as the exotic gazelle that had once been thrown into the arena with him. That had been an absurd match, his hacking sword against the delicate, curving horns that weren’t even aimed at him. He’d slaughtered the beast with blood-soaked thoroughness, to the crowd’s screaming delight. His soul had withered.
And that had been before the djinni came to him.
He crouched, nostrils flaring to catch the scent of blood still seeping from her wounds.
Where was the demon? Why did it let her bleed? Unease swept through him.
The crow cheeped, a ridiculous sound, and poked noisily through the empty shells in the bottom of its cage. He hadn’t remembered to feed it, distracted as he was by the destruction he was about to unleash.
But the key to unlocking the door to the demon realm was still unconscious. He’d almost killed her once already in his impatience.
The crow squalled. To shut it up, he threw a handful of seeds at the cage. Ungrateful wretch.
When he turned back, the talya was still slumped on the ground but was watching him.
He strode across the room to tower over her.
She stared up, no violet in her eyes.
He grabbed the waistband of her jeans and ripped. The sound of tearing denim was lost in her scream as the pant leg snagged around her broken thigh.
Pinning her down with his foot when she flailed at him, he stripped her pants. He gripped the bruised flesh of her thigh and squeezed. Her scream cut off in a sob-choked gasp.
He traced one finger along the curving lines of her demon mark. Such perfect arcs, like the gentle bend of heated black glass, spun finer and finer toward the juncture of soft skin between her legs.
His hand resting on the triangle of silk left covering her, he met her tear-bright gaze. “Summon it.”
“I must’ve left it in my other pants pocket.” Her voice rasped through her strained throat. “Just let me run home and get it.”
“I am through waiting.”
“Two thousand years finally enough?”
He backhanded her, not so hard as to break her slender neck, and settled to his haunches. “Why do you talyan delight in needling me? I just feel better about hurting you.”
“Zane teased you, so you tortured him? And Bookie too, I suppose?” Her voice cracked. “What’s your excuse for loosing demons on the world?”
He rolled up his sleeves, revealing the jagged black marks climbing like ancient thorny vines upward from both elbows. “The world welcomes its demons with open arms, just like your Bookworm. He came to me, you know, tracked me down through Bookkeeper archives. He thought he could drill through the Veil and tap the energy on the other side. He envied you talyan your power, and wanted his own.” He held out his hands, palms up in mock helplessness. “Maybe everyone should have a chance to face their demons, and I am only midwife to the
inevitable.”
She snorted, triggering a coughing jag. “Whatever Bookie wanted, I didn’t agree to play mother to the coming horde.”
“How convenient that I don’t require your cooperation.” He walked away.
He didn’t need her willingness, but he did need her demon ascendant. Only its energy coursing through its link to the demon realm would reveal the weakness in the Veil. And the cowardly teshuva was nowhere to be found.
He smoothed his palms over the clamps and shears and jagged rods of glass—the tools he’d arranged so carefully on his desk in preparation for their discussion. Without the demon, she wouldn’t survive five minutes of his most gentle techniques.
He glanced back at the woman. She’d taken a possessed as her lover, Bookie had said, and with him found a way to cast out evil.
For a moment, Corvus wondered.
But no. A djinni was no paltry darkling to be shooed back to the Darkness that did not fade. Unbidden, his breath quickened. The acid sting of his demon scoured the backs of his eyes.
Sometimes even demons wouldn’t forgive temptation.
He focused his burning gaze on the talya. In her present condition, the brute darklings that lurked in the basement would find no sport with her. But their smaller brethren. . . .
He jerked her up onto her good leg. She paled around the red imprint of his knuckles, but didn’t cry out. Her strength wouldn’t save her, but would only keep her around long enough for his plans to reach their inescapable conclusion.
He hauled her downstairs, dragging her behind like a broken marionette when she stumbled.
He’d chosen the tower because the riverside location opened on soaring views over the city, views that brought him some measure of quietude. Only later had he discovered the dank basement with its river access.
Over time, his presence lured a plague of darklings to the passageways. The noxious morass of birnenston seeping from them had fueled his research into odd weapons that had hooked politicians, generals, and terrorists in many countries. They’d thought they were using him for their own ends. In a manner of speaking, they were right.
If contact with the poison sometimes forced his djinni into hiding deep within him, it always seemed to recover.
Even with their violence subjugated to his energy and the birnenston, the darklings were a malevolent flock. The occasional stink of corpse wafted from the basement when they snagged the homeless mumblers, the young runaways, the overdosed prostitutes. Sometimes he threw them a proverbial bone—or a not-so-proverbial bone.
Lucky darklings, this was one of those times.
CHAPTER 24
Through waves of pain, Sera grasped at consciousness. A tiny voice told her coming awake wasn’t going to make the nightmare go away. But not knowing was worse.
She gritted her teeth and pulled herself into awareness—cold, damp, stinking awareness. She coughed on the mingled stenches of stagnant water, rot, and sulfur. Yeah, sometimes knowing was worse.
“You’re free.”
She pushed herself up. The stone under her hands was slick with mold and other things she didn’t want to identify. Too dark to see, anyway, without her demon’s help, since only torches lit the cavernous room.
“Honest to God,” she said hoarsely. “Who uses torches anymore?”
“It makes the darklings feel at home.”
Sorry she’d asked, she rubbed her wrists. Embedded glass stung, but he hadn’t lied. He’d left her unbound. “Free at last, free at last.”
Corvus stood between the torches. “You can run for the stairs. I won’t stop you.” He swept his hand one way, and the torchlight shadows jumped on the old iron door that guarded the stairs. “Or you can swim.” He pointed toward the waterside dock. “It is more than was ever offered me.”
The dark around him winked with tiny crimson stars. Malice eyes. How unfair. Once she knew what to look for, even with her defenses stripped, she could still see them.
Then she saw the others.
They stood unmoving, facing her, eyes clouded and unseeing. Something about that wall of empty eyes—human-colored in mixtures of brown, blue, green, but blank stares—made her flesh crawl.
She kept her voice from trembling. “Friends of yours?”
“They are nothing. Quite literally. Pay them no mind. They can’t help you any more than they could help themselves, but they won’t stop you either. They wanted their freedom too.”
She raised her chin. “I wouldn’t think a slave would keep prisoners.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, muscles rippling. “I won my own way out.”
“Funny. Rumor has it you lost your last bout.” She studied him. “Judging by the reven, your arms were—what?—both broken? What did the demon promise you? The chance to take up arms again?”
“No.” The torch flames made the marks writhe. “It said I could lay down my sword forever. It gave me deadlier weapons instead.” He straightened, as if regretting his words. “They aren’t prisoners of mine. They took the chains upon themselves. I loosed them. And now, with you, I’ll free the rest of hell, and my struggle will be done.”
Her teshuva had been right to make itself scarce. If Corvus wanted it, she couldn’t let it out.
She dug her nails into the stone wall behind her. Clenching her jaw until her teeth just added another pain in the chorus, she forced herself to stand. “I won’t open the Veil. The demons stay.”
His face twisted, old scars contorting. “You want us to fight for them, angels and demons, forever? Let them suffer and die if they are so inclined.”
She swayed, trying to make sense of his anguish. “Did Bookie even understand what you wanted? Do the demons? Or are you still the gladiator, thrown into the ring by his masters? Alone?”
His expression settled into something like calm. “If hell fancies burning, then let it truly burn. As for God and his judgment, let us see how he fares on his own against the devils at his gate.”
Slowly, so she didn’t knock herself over in dizzy pain, she shook her head. “I won’t sacrifice the world just to teach God and hell a lesson.”
“Then go.” Corvus spread his hands.
“Right. Run or swim. No bicycle portion of this triathlon? Oh wait. My leg’s broken.”
A poison yellow gleam brightened his eyes. “Ah. True. This would be a good time for your demon to make an appearance. Before the rest of the darklings get home for dinner.”
She contemplated the djinn-man, the shifting mass of malice, and the blank-eyed watchers against her MIA demon. She just had to make sure the teshuva stayed lost. “Damn,” she muttered.
“If you do or if you don’t,” Corvus agreed.
She glanced at the rank, black water and shivered, remembering the lapping tongue of river against cracked windshield glass. That was out. She wouldn’t want to drown before she was brutally killed.
She wheeled toward the iron door and started to run—or hobble.
She wasn’t even halfway there when the malice descended.
Of course. He’d said he wouldn’t stop her. He just hadn’t mentioned anything about his pets.
She fell, and the malice swarmed over her.
They bit deep, latching on to her hands and glass-cut wrist, one ankle, her neck, and cheek. They snapped at one another when they couldn’t reach her.
With each ravenous pull of malice mouths, terrible images played through her head, as if the vile little monsters sucked every ugliness to the surface for their feast. Her mother’s waxen skin. Her father’s screaming mouth, opened wide. Her own body, mangled after the car accident. Every dark and dreadful thought brought back to life, to haunt the heart like ghosts or zombies.
The sick weight of the malice made her wish she’d chosen to jump into the water, after all. Maybe she could drown them, float them away—as her mother finally had.
A low moan raised tremors down her spine. For an awful moment, she thought the sound came from her.
She twisted
her head and met the vacant stares of Corvus’s prisoners. From the black holes of their slack, gaping mouths came the whispering groan, despair or hunger or both.
They’d wanted freedom from this, she realized, from the torment that fed the malice so richly.
The watchers grew dim as her vision grayed, like shades of her hospice patients. Had guiding them to quiet grace been a terrible deception, only to assuage her own fear of the end they were all coming to someday? Was grace an illusion, peace a myth?
She was going to die with her questions unanswered. Or maybe only in her death would she have her answers.
At least she was about to find out.
Niall rattled off his report. “At five o’clock this evening, Bookie took a cab over to River North. He was dropped off near the Mart. That’s the last location we can confirm until he showed up at Nanette’s church.”
“We’re close,” Archer said. “Maybe Bookie will give himself away if he sees the place.” He glanced at the man slouched in the passenger seat. “You going to help us, Bookkeeper?”
“I need Sera,” the historian muttered.
Archer shifted the phone to his other ear. “Yeah, he’s going to help.”
“I’ll send everyone I can,” Niall said. “But this storm is closing down fast. And I’m getting strange reports. On the way to meet the cabbie, Jonah saw ferales herding people. I think Corvus’s army is on the move. They weren’t corpses yet, but if they’re with ferales, they soon will be.”
Archer glared out at the thickening snow. “If we don’t stop Corvus before he forces Sera to open the Veil, a few oddball ferales will be the least of our problems.”
“And the people with them?”
Archer hesitated. “They’re fucked.” He hung up to manhandle the SUV through snow soft and heavy as a burial shroud. “We’re all fucked.”
The water was a dark slash through the white as they crossed the bridge. They quartered the streets until Archer finally slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “He can’t just disappear.”
“The high tower,” Bookie whispered. His breath fogged the side window where he’d angled his pale face.