Vowed in Shadows

by Jessa Slade

  “Not much farther,” he said. “I know you’re tired.”

  “I’m not.” She didn’t want to talk to him, but she also didn’t want him to think she was weak. Besides, it was true. Her nerves were too fried for her to be tired.

  In fact, after what she’d seen today, maybe she’d just never close her eyes again.

  When he veered at another junction, in her distraction she collided with him. How had he gotten so warm?

  “You’re so cold.” He wrapped his arm around her. Even the metal hook felt warm against her skin. “I shouldn’t be pushing you like this. What can I do?”

  “Nothing.” Although his body heat was actually a good start. But that would sound weak too. “I just want to get out of here.”

  He released her. “I know.”

  She felt colder when he walked on.

  A million years later, he finally said, “Here.”

  She looked up the shaft where he pointed, and sighed. “Do I go first and get eaten by whatever’s at the top, or do I go last and get eaten by whatever’s sneaking up behind us?”

  “There’s nothing sneaking up behind us. Remember, you drowned to get away from them.”

  “I notice you don’t say anything about what’s ahead.”

  “If you’re climbing up, chances are you won’t drown again.” He tapped a metal plaque set in the concrete near where he’d stopped.

  She leaned forward to reach the inscription. “We’re right below Buckingham Fountain? I thought you said chances are I wouldn’t drown again.”

  “I’m guessing we’ll exit in the underground pump room. Then we just have to get out of the pump room without attracting undue attention.”

  She studied him. He must have felt her continuing disbelief, because he crossed his arms over his chest, the hook tucked protectively against his ribs.

  She couldn’t decide which would attract more attention, the hook or his chest. Either way, she in his dress sized T-shirt wouldn’t warrant a second glance. What an odd position to be in. “Right,” she said at last. “No problem.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, then started up. He’d angled the hook around the side rail and just slid it upward as he climbed. He was quite . . . handy with the thing, although he probably heard that all the time. Whatever weaknesses the injury had left him with, leaving her ass in the dust wasn’t one of them.

  The ladder was even more rickety than the one they had descended under the strip club. If this was a “secondary addition” to the map, she wondered what other odd byways snaked through the city.

  Well, no. Really she didn’t want to wonder all that much.

  With a sigh, she wrapped her fingers around the cold metal and started hauling herself up.

  She hadn’t expected choirs of angels when they got to the top—what with being demon possessed and all—but running up against the bottom of Jonah’s boots was a drag. “Why are you stopping?” She longed to see the sun again. Right now. She’d make a terrible vampire.

  “There’s a hatch. It’s sealed shut.”

  She groaned. “No. No, I don’t want to hear that. I can’t. . . .” Her voice had risen, and she clamped her teeth down on the note of hysteria.

  Before the note had died away, Jonah slammed his shoulder into the hatch.

  Flakes of rust rained down on them. “Never mind,” she said. “I can wait. We can find another way out.”

  Bang. She wanted to cover her ears to keep out the desperate thud of body hitting metal, cover her mouth to keep from screaming, cover her nose to keep out the wet iron that smelled of blood. Hear no evil, speak no evil . . . smell no evil? She didn’t have enough hands to keep out all the evil, not if she didn’t want to plunge backward to another death.

  God, what a wimp.

  She shouldered up beside him, gripping the ladder rungs precariously, one foot hanging off in space. “Together?”

  He nodded once.

  Throwing her shoulder at the barrier was trickier than he’d made it seem, and she clanged her head against it for good measure. But the hatch popped open with an unholy shriek. Just the unholy shriek of resisting metal, not the unholiness of actual unholy things.

  Still no choirs of angels or even a stray beam of sunlight. Of course not, since the pump house was underground. Jonah levered himself up into the open chamber and held his hand out to her. She let him pull her up behind him. The thunder of water through the pipes around them made her wince. If the hatch they’d knocked loose had broken into one of those pipes . . .

  Jonah didn’t release her hand. He drew her across the large room. How could he know which way to go without even that worthless map? She didn’t want to be any more impressed with him. What with saving her life and everything, pretty soon she might actually start liking him. And that never ended well for her.

  At the far end of the room, light poured down another metal staircase. Finally. She tugged him impatiently forward.

  “Wait,” he said. “We can’t go rushing out there. People will be watching.” With his good hand in hers, he tucked the hook against his chest.

  “I’m used to that,” she said. “Don’t you want to find a phone and call your friends?”

  Ah, appealing to his savior complex worked. Suddenly, he was pulling her to the stairs.

  At the top of the stairs, the much smaller room—a room of levers and knobs that controlled the fountain—was toasty in the sunlight. She sighed. “Safe.”

  “Hardly.” He gestured out the low bank of windows overlooking the fountain. “We have to get past them.”

  As was true on any nice day—or even most crappy days—people milled around the park. “At least they don’t have fangs,” she objected.

  “They have eyes, and this they don’t need to see.”

  She scowled. “You’re not that bad.”

  He frowned back. “I meant this. What we are.” His hand swept over his reven again.

  “You said they see what they want to see,” she reminded him.

  “After what happened at the club, I don’t know how much longer we can keep them blind, for their own good.”

  “Please.” She let a note of whine creep in. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  He hesitated another moment, then popped the lock on the door. Modern and well kept, it yielded easily to his brute strength. They slipped out into the bright summer afternoon, and Jonah eased the door shut.

  They’d gone only a few steps when a brusque, officious voice called out, “You there.”

  They turned to face the park ranger striding toward them.

  “Oh, great,” Nim said.

  “I told you,” Jonah said.

  “Shut up.” She spun him against the wall of the control booth and kissed him.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jonah had a split second to realize what she intended. He’d had split seconds to make life-and-death decisions before, and yet somehow this one sneaked by him. A soft, cool, sighing sneak. The flare of heat that blazed through him had nothing to do with the August sun beating on his shoulders.

  Or maybe that wasn’t the sun, but the cop tapping on his shoulder. “Sir? I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”

  He wasn’t moving, not with Nim’s lithe frame pressed tight against his, one long leg thrust between his thighs. And her lips, heating now but still closed, almost sweet beneath his own.

  The cop cleared his throat. “Sir?”

  Nim slid away from him, a torture of friction over his skin. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Officer. We didn’t hear you.” She cast her eyes downward and curved one shoulder with demure bashfulness.

  Jonah tried not to choke. Bashful fit her as well as his shirt did.

  The park ranger frowned at them, sweaty despite his short sleeves and more than a little annoyed. “This isn’t the place for a free-for-all.”

  Jonah flinched when Nim grabbed his hook and clutched it to her chest. “No, sir,” she said fervently. “Freedom is never free, is it?”

 
Jonah swore he could feel her breasts yielding against his nonexistent hand. Just one more of her breathy gasps, and the pulse raging in his elbow would probably blast the hook right off his arm.

  The ranger straightened. “You’re a soldier?”

  Before Jonah could answer, Nim said, “Just back from the war. I mean, just.”

  “Well, God bless you, son.”

  Jonah hunched against a possible lightning strike. “He’s behind me every day, sir.”

  After a last warning that they better not be swimming in the fountain, the ranger moved on toward a group of preteens screeching like ferales at the edge of the water.

  Jonah let out a breath. “I prefer to get through my days without lying.”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” Nim said. “He just heard what he wanted to hear.”

  “I’m not a soldier.”

  “Maybe not by choice.”

  He squinted. She’d bought into the horrors of this new life as carelessly as she’d shrugged off the ugliness of her old. Was there no skin she couldn’t slip into—or out of—on a whim?

  Shame pinched in his gut. The thought was unfair. Just because he was still wrestling with his demon almost a century later was no reason to condemn her to the same fate. Although how her teshuva had called to his when they were so unsuited baffled him. “Let’s find a phone and see if we won this battle or not.”

  Pay phones were harder to find in a cellular world, but Nim brazenly interrupted the park ranger from scolding the kids to ask where they could make a call. She sauntered to Jonah. “Give me your wallet.”

  “Again?” He hauled the sodden leather billfold out of his pocket.

  She plucked two twenties from the interior and handed it to him with a long-suffering sigh. “For the phone call.”

  “Since when is a local call forty bucks?”

  “The commemorative T-shirt is twenty.” She dragged him across the park to the nearest vendor. “I wish the snow cones were spiked. I could use a drink.”

  She dickered with the vendor for a shirt and two pairs of plastic sunglasses. “Do you want the fake rhinestones or the grandpa glasses?”

  “No.”

  “Grandpa glasses it is.” She tossed him the blue-tinted wraparound shades.

  He pulled the shirt over his head and tucked in the hem. “Why’d you get me a small?”

  “It’s not small; it’s stylish. And better shows off your muscles.” She plucked at the limp, stained material of her shirt. “So people won’t look at me.”

  “Since when do you not want people to look at you?”

  “Since I was branded, drowned, and smudged off the last of my eyeliner.”

  She’d all but invited him, so he let his gaze roam over her. With her hair in ropes and his T-shirt hanging like a gunnysack, she looked . . . wild. Terrifying in the same way he’d felt the one night he stepped into the jungle for a moment alone and realized he’d lost the path. He’d calmed his racing heart with the reminder that he’d been smart enough, at least, to bring a lamp. When he cranked up the wick, he’d been dazzled by the light of bright, twin stars shining through the impenetrable canopy.

  Only to realize the stars were the cold, unblinking eyes of a night-roaming cat.

  The predator hadn’t been hungry, or maybe the light had dissuaded it from attack. The twin stars had winked out and he’d been very alone. He didn’t think his heart had started beating again until a voice called him from the way he had come and he stumbled back into the circle of the village, saved by his little lamp and his worried wife.

  Nothing would save him this time. He tugged at the neck of his too-tight T-shirt.

  She scowled at him. “The long stare . . . the silent treatment . . . You really know how to make a girl feel special.”

  He shook his head. “You are special. One of only three female talya we know of.”

  She sighed. “Right, one of your harem.”

  Unlike that long-ago leopard watching him from the jungle, she would never give up the attack. He turned and walked away. Which might invite an assault, but her nails weren’t that long.

  They found a pay phone across the street. He lifted the receiver. The dial tone seemed disturbingly loud, bordering on ominous.

  Nim pushed her tacky sunglasses up on her head. In the daylight, her turbulent eyes had settled to clear cyan. “There’s only one way to find out what happened to them.” Her voice barely carried over the flat buzz.

  He punched in the @1 number.

  The phone didn’t finish a full ring before Liam was on the line. “You’re both alive?”

  “Yes.” Jonah watched both of Nim’s fists unclench. She’d been worried no one would answer. He turned to face the wall. “You all? And the second team?”

  A longer hesitation than before he’d picked up the phone. “The teshuva will earn their keep tonight,” Liam said.

  Jonah closed his eyes a moment. He, of all the talyan, knew how the demons’ healing powers, the knitting of flesh and bone, never touched the pain. He opened his eyes again when he felt the brush of Nim’s fingers against his arm. He’d dug the hook into the mortar between the bricks. A sharp tug pulled it free. He said to Liam, “Bonus points for breathing.”

  Nim gave him her best devil-may-care-but-what-business-is-it-of-his? smile.

  Jungle cat, warrior woman, heathen, temptress. Dear God in heaven, he wanted to kiss her again.

  “Take her home,” Liam said. For a heartbeat, Jonah’s cheeks heated; then Liam continued. “Not her apartment. Take her to the warehouse. The police will no doubt be interviewing everyone on the books at the strip club, and I’d rather work out a script with her first.”

  “She’d do fine on her own,” Jonah said. He’d seen her in action.

  “The demons prefer us on our own,” Liam agreed. “But she doesn’t have to be alone, because she has us now.”

  Jonah tried to believe that was better. He had to believe the battle was worth the cost. After all, he was almost a league poster child for fighting on, never mind the odds.

  Deliberately, he scraped the hook down the wall again, leaving a furrow in the brick. “Do we have anything to show besides the scars?”

  He knew Liam wouldn’t bother debating the philosophy with him and, sure enough, the league leader went straight to the literal interpretation. “We have Andre. He was quite surprised to see Jilly.”

  Since the young punk had known her only as a street counselor, Jonah could imagine the shock of seeing the woman wielding her double knives and the demon-realm trap that was her teshuva’s legacy.

  “Did he have the anklet?”

  Nim edged closer, head cocked as she listened in.

  “No. He sold it.”

  “There’s a market for demon artifacts?”

  “Among the djinn.”

  Despite the shimmering August heat, Jonah’s bones chilled. “Corvus.”

  “And Andre was supposed to bring him Nim next.”

  As their cab pulled up near the warehouse, Jonah finished his explanation to Nim. “And now, after two attempts to rip through the Veil that divides us from the tenebraeternum, Corvus finally has a weapon in hand. The etheric energy of his lost soul is all that stabilizes the rift in the Veil. If he reclaims his soul, using the anklet to call that energy to him, he’ll loose hell on earth. Only we can stop him.”

  He handed money over the seat to the driver, who said, “Aw, man. You can’t stop there. How does it end?”

  Nim opened the door. “You’ll have to read the book. Or see the movie.” As the cabbie pulled away, she shook her head. “It is an incredible story. That this Blackbird guy has been possessed by an evil demon since he was a gladiator in Rome, and he wants to end demonic possession by pitting hell directly against heaven, without the intervening human pawns. . . .”

  “And now he’s recruiting humans to his side. Bad enough when we were fighting just demons. But at least the tenebrae can be drained and even banished. We’ve been struggling to keep
up with the soulless haints. If we have a tide of people willing to align with unrepentant evil—”

  “Not a tide,” Nim interrupted. “One man. Just a boy, really.”

  “That’s how it starts,” Jonah said. At the front door, he ran his @1 pass card in front of the scanner.

  “Enter the sanctum,” Nim intoned. She hummed a few vaguely Twilight Zone notes. “There should be theme music for the movie.”

  “This is serious.”

  “As a heart attack. But I already had one of those when I drowned. I figure you’ll bring me back again.”

  She stopped just inside the doorway. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  The warehouse had held architectural salvage materials before Liam made it the league’s main headquarters. After their last battle with Corvus left the warehouse in pieces, they’d used the salvaged stone, tile, and glass to rebuild. The results were . . . eclectic.

  Nim ran her fingers over one of the pink Italian marble columns that supported a web of steel beams bracing the outer wall. “Does the fire marshal approve of siege towers?”

  “He would if he’d ever seen a salambe.”

  She turned to him. “Where are the dungeons?” When he lifted one eyebrow, she pursed her lips. “Oh, please. You know you have one. I want to meet the punk who stole my anklet.”

  “You sold it,” he reminded her.

  “Not to Andre. He stole it from that nice pawnbroker.” Her voice lowered toward the demon harmonics. “And he was coming to steal the matching piece: me.”

  Jonah shook his head. “What are you going to do?”

  “Obviously, Andre isn’t afraid of evil, not if he’s hooked up with Corvus. So let’s see what he thinks of repenting.”

  When had he developed a reckless streak? Had his good sense been severed with his arm? He’d blame Nim’s bad influence, but that seemed too easy. Because the streak felt a little too good. “This way.”

  He led her down the stairs. “Into the basement, of course,” she muttered.

  Another turn of the staircase took them to the subbasement. But the halls were lined with the best examples of what they’d saved from the salvage operations: gorgeous landscape paintings in museum-quality, gilded frames; a mosaic fresco that might have been stolen from a museum; a midcentury stained-glass panel that shimmered even in the ugly gleam of the fluorescent bulbs overhead.