by Jessa Slade
“So be it,” she said.
“I will not be bound again,” Corvus cried. His demon leapt into ascension, a jaundiced shadow that didn’t quite keep pace with its caster. When he charged Sera, the sulfurous pall shot ahead of him.
Archer hurtled forward with an answering roar, summoning demon-fueled strength and speed. But for the first time, he knew he would fall short. All the teshuva’s repentance was not enough to satiate the djinni’s hunger for extinction. Once, he would have gone with fierce joy to his doom, knowing death itself had nothing more to take from him.
But now there was Sera. From deep inside, deeper than the place the demon dwelled, he dredged up a power purely human, impelled by a force that to his desperate regret he had shut away in words not said—and met the djinn-man halfway.
The desolator numinis swept down. An ion comet trail glittered in the vortex-charged atmosphere. Archer felt its wake pass through him, felt a part of himself fall away, a weight that had grown too heavy, and another part, a lightness that made his heart ache.
The momentum of his leap carried them both toward the window and the row of glass birds.
Sera shouted a warning, but he’d already charted the trajectory. He’d been on this path a long time. And if, at the very end, he’d come to hope for something else. . . .
Corvus’s back hit the window as the vortex exploded outward. He screamed.
The glass birds blew apart, the shards a dazzling rainbow that followed Archer out into the night.
Surrounded by glittering glass and snow and a free flight of otherworldly birds, they fell.
CHAPTER 26
Sera cried out, the sound lost in the vortex howl.
Not again. She’d watched him jump from the hotel rooftop, just as she’d watched her mother leave her, not once but twice. She couldn’t survive another twofold abandonment. The demons couldn’t win again.
She didn’t remember racing down to the riverfront. Bookie and Nanette stood on the sidewalk where a dozen frantic-looking talyan converged. Corvus was an obscene snow angel, crooked and still. But her eyes were only on the black-leather-clad shape beyond, crumpled like broken wings.
The silence was devastating. White snow melted in the pool of crimson.
She fell to her bare knees beside Archer. Her demon couldn’t stop the icy pain.
Nanette reached for her. “Oh, Sera.”
Niall leaned over Corvus, prodding at the slush near the djinn-man’s head. “Still breathing. But this is gray matter. Damn it.”
Damned . . . Sera scuttled across the snow and kicked at Corvus’s body.
Niall grabbed at her. “Jesus, Sera.”
She shoved the body over to uncover the hand and yanked the ring free. The stone was cracked in two. One side flashed with ragged violet lightning; the other glimmered a burnished bronze that speared her heart.
She gripped her pendant, summoning a knowledge not her own. Then she leaned forward and let the pendant swing free over Corvus, where the barest mist of breath steamed from his gaping mouth. Violence, hatred, and terror swirled in her. But at the still center was a fragile hope.
“Sera,” Nanette said, “let it go.”
“It’s gone, all right,” Sera said. “I have it now.” She returned to Archer’s side.
“He’s gone too,” Niall said softly.
“Not gone, just dead. There’s a difference. Corvus took him. Now I have him.” She tightened her grip on the ring.
“The djinni—”
“Never mind one djinn. We’ll have all hell on us in another minute.” She turned to face the cavern.
The riverside door had shivered apart in splintered timbers and bolts melted to slag. Inside, other-realm winds had scoured away the moss, etching unreadable hieroglyphics in the brick. The soulless corpses had collapsed into a tumbled Stonehenge of flesh. The building swayed with the long inhalation of the vortex like a terminal patient on his last legs.
When it finally exhaled, what would escape on its world-scorching breath?
Sera gestured the talyan back. Niall shook his head, so she ignored them. Clutching the pendant, she flattened her palm over Archer’s chest. On her thumb, the ring glinted. She stared past the stone’s occluding layers to the shimmering bronze heart. Just as the teshuva ascended in her, she would descend into its realm, soul and demon bound.
“C’mon, demon,” she murmured. “Time to bring on the repenting.”
It surged up in her like a wildfire crowning. Every nerve blazed, and the reven over her bare thighs sparked violet. She cast herself onto the pyre, one with the spiral ing hellfire.
Now she knew why fallen angels didn’t need wings.
Bearing her burden of souls, she crossed over the Veil.
The vortex breathed at her back. Threads of living color leaked into the demon realm—the hint of blue in an icy river, the blush of blood diluted in snow, the slumbering brown of dormant trees with the faintest hint of spring’s green buds—achingly vibrant and utterly wrong in this place.
The threads marked her path back, just as the gray tendrils on the other side would lead demons out into the world. To close the rift, she knew she had to untangle the places where the realms had intertwined. Corvus had said souls would seal the wound where the soulless had sucked apart the Veil.
Something shifted in the mist. She whispered Archer’s name.
The mist whispered back. “Sera.”
A ghastly apparition coalesced from the gray. Sera recoiled when its cloudy weeping eye fixed on her. When she’d drifted into the demon realm before her possession, she’d thought it was a reflection of her wounded self.
It wasn’t.
With a shock that slammed across her heart, she knew the other time she’d stared deep into that hopeless gaze—into her mother’s eyes, as the car filled with river.
“Sera.” The sigh swirled the gray, like an idle finger wiping fog from a mirror to reveal a woman’s face with Sera’s own hazel eyes.
“Oh, Mom.” Sera took a step forward, away from the bright threads. “Not you, not here.”
No wonder it had all led here. Darkness engulfed her before she could take another step.
“You mustn’t follow.”
“Archer,” she gasped.
He held her tight, the black leather of his coat like wings around her. “Demons are all around us, and the devil will lead you astray.”
“We’re demon-ridden too.”
Except he wasn’t anymore. The tarnish in his burned-bronze eyes had been rubbed away to a simple earthy brown, with no hint of violet, and nothing of recognition.
He frowned at her. “Have you lost your way? This is a dark place.” His grip softened, and he raised one hand to touch her hair. “Only you shine.”
Archer had neither demon nor soul within him. He was a cipher. No wonder hell held only confusion, no horror, for him. Was this a pale reflection of the man the demon had seduced away from life, ingenuous and gentle?
Her heart felt ripped from its mooring. How could she close the Veil now, with her mother’s soul trapped on this side? And how could she so desperately want a return of the potent, dangerous man she’d come to know?
She strained against his hold. “Let me go. I have to get my mother before I seal the Veil.”
Threads unraveled with a discordant note like a broken string on the harp she’d never mastered. All the hues of the living world sprayed from the severed ends, a rainbow blossom of droplets that painted the demon realm for a single heartbeat. Then they fell, faded and hard, to shatter under her feet.
Her mother’s specter knelt where one of the dulled droplets had fallen. She cupped the chipped marble.
Her hazel eyes welled, and one tear dropped into her palm. The pebble bloomed into a tiny, perfect tea rose, more beautiful than anything Sera remembered growing on that Chicago windowsill. Then the petals withered, melting from the specter’s hand into the mist.
Sera’s heart ached. “You can’t leave. Not ag
ain. Why did you go?” She raised her voice to reach the guttering silhouette. “Why?”
The specter hovered on the edge of nothingness where the flower had gone.
“No,” Sera whispered. “Not again.”
Archer tightened his hold. His memory might have faltered, but not his strength. “With every step you take, the way behind you unravels.”
She twisted to glare at him. “I can’t leave her in hell. She killed herself. Like you tried to do. Don’t you remember? You failed, but I couldn’t stop her.”
She had hoped to shock him into releasing her, but she underestimated the man he’d been. His expression turned grim, more like the Archer she’d come to know, and he did not flinch. “If I tried to kill myself, then I too am damned.”
“No. You atoned.” Endlessly, but she couldn’t tell him that without bringing the shadows back to his eyes.
“Then give her that.”
“What?” Her head spun with memories wound tight around her heart.
“Forgiveness. Forgive and let her go.”
“But I can’t just . . . I have to know—”
“You’ll never know.”
“But she’s right there.” Frustrated tears smeared Sera’s vision with the straying colors. How could she turn her back when she finally had a chance to quiet the doubts that had haunted her? Could she have saved her mother from the sinking car, the drowning depression, from the hell that life itself had been? Could anyone be saved?
Archer shook his head. “There are no answers.” He paused. “And there was nothing you could have done.”
She thumped her fist into his chest. “You don’t even remember who you are, the terrible things you’ve done, that have been done to you. You can’t preach forgiveness of anyone.”
He clasped her hand against his heart. The ring she’d hooked over her thumb peeked between his fingers. Even broken in two, the desolator numinis shone with opal fire, as if the worldly realm had masked its true soulful glory.
“You’re right. How can I convince you to let go when I’ve lost everything, even the memory of what I’ve lost.” He closed his eyes and grasped her hand. “My life, my death, my fate, are in this stone. I feel it calling. Perhaps it’s time I remembered.”
Suddenly realizing what he intended, she strained away from him. “Without your soul, this place can’t touch you.”
His heart pounded under her palm, matching her racing pulse. “Maybe I needed to be touched.”
“I shouldn’t have said—”
Too late. He shuddered under her hand. The ring scalded her skin with icy fire. She struggled to yank back, but he wouldn’t let her go. He would never let her go.
When he opened his eyes, the copper brightness glimmered and sunk behind the returning shadows, like a penny falling into a well.
“Sera,” he murmured. He lifted their joined hands. His skin was unmarked, the reven gone. But a creased line appeared between his brows as he frowned. “I thought this quiet aloneness without even memory would be heaven.”
“Ferris?” Tears jammed in her throat. “It’s my fault. I brought your soul with me. You’re here because of me.”
“Yes, it’s your fault heaven isn’t enough for me now.” He released her hands. “Sera, you have to go.”
She swallowed hard. “I won’t leave her like she left me.”
“That wound is yours. You hold her here.”
“No.” The vortex echoed her wail.
“Yes. A hell of your making.”
A chill swept through her. “Corvus was right. I’ve always brought on the end.”
“You’ve always been seeking.” He turned away from the faded reflection of her mother, away from the hole in the world. “But not all answers are yours to find.”
“If I can’t be sure—” She choked back the rest of her hopeless questions.
“You fight on. And now, as always, you fight on faith.”
“Faith? You of all people would spring that on me, here of all places?”
“Where else? And who better than someone who lost everything else but found hope?”
The widening vortex, a luminous beacon to every denizen of hell, cast the edge of his jaw and his deep-set eyes into stark relief that emphasized the resolve on his face. From the beginning, his strength had borne her when she would have faltered in confusion.
She took one last step toward the lingering shade of a woman she’d never had the chance to know. “I love you. I’m sorry.”
Even as the Veil between the realms unraveled, so did the knot in her heart. With a rushing clap like ethereal wings, the silhouette of her mother’s specter collapsed, sending out a fleeting cat’s-eye gleam of dawn light.
Mists roiled upward, as if gigantic, unseen forces stirred in the depths to fill the empty space.
Sera felt herself shaken, not in this realm, but in another. The cavern was crumbling, bricks crashing down. The rift was massing toward critical, about to obliterate everything in reach.
She took a steadying breath. “What just happened?”
“Looked like that little piece of hell inverted, and something didn’t like it. We have to get you out.”
“Me? What about you?”
His hand fisted, tendons tight beneath the unmarred skin. “That army of walking corpses shredded the souls bound into the Veil. Someone—some soul—has to stay to heal the wound.”
“No, I won’t leave you too. This is not how it ends.”
“Sera—”
Corvus burst from the churning mist, eyes white ringed. Streamers of gray clung to him like torn flesh.
At the horizon behind him, a dark band formed. The thrum of a half-heard sound sent a tremor down Sera’s spine.
Archer spun her away when Corvus lunged.
“Thief,” Corvus shrieked. “Soul thief. Give it back. I need to go back.”
Archer circled, barring his way. “You have to leave, Sera, and seal the Veil behind you.”
She sheltered in his wake. “Not without you.”
“You left me before.” His tone never changed, but his words folded the mist upon itself in wrinkles of deepening gray.
She flattened her hand against his taut spine. “And you tried to keep me away from what only I could do. We both did the wrong thing for the right reasons.”
“We know all about good intentions.”
“The road to hell,” Corvus snarled. “But there’s a road out.” He leapt straight at them.
Archer pushed Sera out of the way and grabbed Corvus.
The dark band on the horizon resolved into individual shapes. A dozen men with spears. An elephant and a lion. A woman with a whip. They stretched as far as the eye could see. A gladiator’s victims. Had Corvus conjured them out of the mist as Archer had swathed himself in isolation, as she had faced her mother?
“Let me go,” Corvus chanted.
“Archer,” she called, “let him go.”
Archer glanced over his shoulder at her, his gaze clashing with hers. Then he sprang away.
She snapped the pendant from around her neck. She had no means to judge Corvus, no right to keep his essence. She swung the stone toward him, holding tight to the cord like a censer.
Out of the stone, a sooty bird, small as a sparrow, soared for a heartbeat toward Corvus, then plummeted, its wings fluttering, broken.
Corvus flinched away. “Not more black,” he hissed. “And flawed. It mocks me still.”
Seething from the horizon, the vicious crowd fell upon him. It tore him apart. With a crescendoing scream, he unraveled in a spray of blood black feathers and inky crimson splatters that stained the mist.
Sera recoiled, aghast. Archer drew her gently under his arm. He eased the pendant from her numb fingers and tied the cord behind her neck. “I always said dying was the easy part.”
She tightened her grip on the ring still around her thumb. What she had to offer him wasn’t easy at all.
She slipped off the cracked stone and held it u
p. “Your soul was in one half. Without it, your body can’t truly die. Your demon, which could heal you, is in the other half.”
He looked past her where black feathers clogged the mists, forcing back the light. The remnants of Corvus’s soul might mend the Veil, but she had to retreat now, winding the frayed threads back with her.
“You accused me once of storming the bastion of last vigils to force answers. So I won’t ask now.” She took a breath. “But releasing your soul alone, you stay dead. If I release the demon too, you live. Possessed.”
“I should choose damnation a second time? Knowing what awaits me back there?”
What could she say? Pain, violence, heartache. That was on the days he wasn’t battling the darkness that left his body in tatters, his soul in shadow. But he knew all that.
The ring trembled in her fingers. She hunched her shoulders, desolation a cold wash through her body that swept away any possible words.
Except . . . “This time, I will be there.”
His tarnished gaze pierced her.
“I told you once not to risk your soul dying on my behalf.” She held out her hand. “But whether this bond between us is fate or something we brought on ourselves, you are the other half of my soul. Will you live for me?”
He lifted his unmarked hand.
She slipped the ring over his finger, held him for a moment, and let go.
The vortex closed with an inverted oscillation that exploded against her eardrums and sternum, and threw her backward. The worldly realm bloomed around her, icy cold and agonizingly bright.
Archer convulsed beside her, one hand clawing for the sky. She pulled herself to her knees, reaching for him.
Just beyond, Corvus’s body twitched, smearing gray matter.
“The building is coming down,” Niall shouted. “Get them.”
Through the rain of bricks and glass, the talyan rushed forward.
Warm, strong fingers tangled in Sera’s as Archer took her hand. Hers was covered in blood, his in the bold black lines of the reven.
She’d remember to care about the fate of the world in just a minute. She laid her palm against his jaw, brushing her thumb under his violet-shot dark eye, and kissed him.
This time, she’d hold on, no questions asked. No why, how, or how long. Just here. Now. Him.