Vowed in Shadows

by Jessa Slade

  Nim lifted her eyebrows. “You feel sorry for him?”

  “What can I say?” Jilly tugged at the gauze bandage. “I’m a bleeding heart.”

  “Har har.” Sera stood and stretched, blond hair rippling down her back. “Come on. Let’s meet Ecco halfway. I don’t want to be fighting the league barriers in the warehouse when we try our little trick.”

  Nim stood, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. “How will we find him? How will he catch the malice?”

  Sera turned away from them, toward the city. Her racerback tank top displayed the traceries of her reven.. “Ecco has a way with the malice. He flays open his soul, and then they come to feast. Can’t you feel it? He’s out there now, like he’s ringing a bell and singing ‘Come and get it.’ ”

  Nim shuddered. “How can he stand to be eaten alive?”

  Sera shrugged. “He’s come to the same sort of serenity as the dying people I counseled.” The violet lights flared higher. “Except he gets to fight back. Unlike our missing sisters, apparently.”

  “But we’re here now,” Jilly said. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 16

  They traced Ecco’s path to the next industrial park. He’d chosen an empty warehouse, the four stories of brick still standing but every windowpane shattered and the bottom eight feet of the exterior wreathed in layers of garbled graffiti.

  Train tracks passed it, but the rails had been partially filled in with asphalt, the line abandoned.

  “At least we won’t have to explain to Liam how the building got destroyed,” Jilly said.

  “That does make it easier.” Sera kicked open the door.

  The interior had been gutted; only broken glass and the support beams that disappeared into the darkness four floors up remained. The darkness was thick with etheric smoke as tangled as the graffiti, and in a strange way, almost as legible.

  And the word it pulsed was “doom.”

  Ecco whirled at the heart of it, gauntlets dulled but his teshuva alight to Nim’s demon-amped vision. A dozen forty-ounce liquor bottles surrounded him. Nim realized when he’d said he was bottling malice, he meant actually bottling them. Obviously, he’d had no trouble finding containers in the vacant building.

  Not that the malice seemed inclined to participate. A cloud of inky darkness darted around him, staining the air behind it with streamers of demon sign, as the malice tried to avoid the bottles and get to Ecco.

  He chanted obscenities, and his eyes blazed. Nim wasn’t sure she wanted to get too close either. “What’s our move?”

  “You’re the lure,” Sera said. “Call them.”

  “Me?” Nim stammered the word into multiple syllables.

  Jilly wrapped her fingers around her wrist, where her woven metallic bracelet flickered with violet. “Bring them close enough and I’ll trap them all.”

  “And I’ll send them to the other side,” Sera said.

  “Although this is a bigger horde than we’ve tried before.” Did Jilly’s voice waver a bit? Her uncertainty was almost lost in the malevolent drone of the malice as they circled.

  Nim took a breath. Too late to back down now.

  But she wanted Jonah by her side, so badly her knees shook. Or maybe that was fear. Or maybe the reven wrapped around her thighs kicking in. She didn’t know which. And that was why she wanted him. He’d know. With his steady assurance, his unwavering strength, his devotion. Oh, not devotion to her—she knew that—but to the bond between them, which was almost the same. She wanted it to be the same.

  The longing shocked her.

  As did the realization that her yearning had distracted the malice.

  Their focus weighed on her like a major depression, like the yawning void that before had inspired her to strike entire books of matches. As if those tiny flames could ever light the darkness. The bright flare of pain as she’d extinguished the fire in her skin had been something like light, an illusion of illumination.

  But not as bright as the reven that flared now to her knees, straightening her stance.

  The tornado of malice made a vacuum that sucked at her breath, as if they could stop her heart with their convergence.

  “That’s it,” Jilly whispered. “Lure them in.”

  The horde wanted her as much as she wanted Jonah. No, they wanted her more. Because all the crazy, luminous, weightless yearning that made her pulse race when she thought of him was not enough to satisfy them.

  Because she could not be enough to satisfy Jonah.

  “Don’t lose them, Nim.” Sera’s voice came as if from a deep well, distorted and thin. “Nim?”

  How could she have spent a lifetime honing herself into a tool of desire, and yet all her hot caresses left him cold, untouched? Not his body, of course; that always rose to her teasing fingers like the teshuva roused to demon sign. But his heart . . . That was locked away where she couldn’t ever reach. He didn’t want her, not like the malice wanted her.

  She straightened and opened her arms. A chill down her spine made the small hairs at her nape prickle.

  “Nim, no!” Ecco’s shout warped through the black fog. But his wasn’t the voice she wanted to hear.

  “Come on, then,” she whispered. “Is this the darkness you feed on, you sucking little bastards? I’ll show you shadows.”

  They came.

  Fast as obsidian wasps, the malice swarmed her. The embers of their eyes burned, and their vicious shrill rose toward a scream.

  No, that was Sera, shouting a warning. “Ecco! Coming through the window.”

  Nim dragged her awareness out of the morass where she’d gone. The shattered windows at ground level shone red with the last of the setting sun. But the sun had set a half hour ago.

  A hot wind spun slivers of glass across her shins. The wind stank of brittle rust. And death.

  The red was the glow of salambes.

  The malice cloud squealed and spun faster, then rose toward the ceiling. Her pulse, which had faded to a shallow rasp, kicked into the demon’s double beat as the sullen gleam climbed to the second set of windows, and then the third. How many of the tenebrae were out there?

  Ecco’s chanted curses rose to a sharper pitch, which suddenly made her giggle. If the hulking talya was scared, they must be well and truly fucked.

  Finally, she was living up to her full potential. And she didn’t need any man to do that.

  “You wanted to see what we could do,” she reminded Jilly, who was standing nearby.

  The shorter woman whirled around, her violet eyes widened. “Nim? Are you back with us?”

  Nim frowned. “Where else would I be?”

  “The Veil was thinning. You must have felt the cold.”

  “Oh. That.”

  Jilly grinned. “Yeah. Can you stop with the luring thing now? We’re about to be swamped.” Her grin faltered. “And there’s no way we can take them all.”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t know I’d started.”

  Sera moved closer to them. “I’ve always used Ferris to pull myself back.”

  “Your boyfriends aren’t here,” Ecco said. “Although it just so happens that I . . .”

  He trailed off when Nim gave him a look, and she realized the other two women had leveled identical expressions on him. He shrugged. “Potential hot four-way action. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “Maybe a three-way . . .” Nim hummed to herself. When the rent check was due, she’d always been willing to do scenarios outside her usual repertoire.

  “That’d be fine,” Ecco said.

  She ignored him and held her hands out to Sera and Jilly. “What makes us different from the guys?”

  “Where to start?” Sera mused with a last glare at the grinning Ecco, and took Nim’s hand.

  “We aren’t afraid to look inward, to touch.” Nim waggled her fingers, and Jilly finally took her hand and Sera’s, completing the small circle.

  Nim swallowed hard, hoping she could choke down the lie. She’d always been
afraid to look inward. And as for touching . . . It could be good. Jonah had showed her it could be good.

  Even for repentant evil.

  “I think this is weird,” Jilly said.

  “I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Ecco said.

  Jilly started to tug away, but Nim tightened her grasp. “No, stay with us. You said we can’t take them all. Not alone. I brought them”—boy, had she ever—“just like you told me to. Now you have to trap them.”

  Jilly swallowed hard and closed her eyes. The reven that curled over her breast, barely visible above the band of gauze around her chest, sputtered, then flared again. “This was a bad idea.”

  Sera tugged at her, lifting their joined hands to rattle the bracelet around Jilly’s wrist. “And if you want to live long enough for Liam to tell you that, over and over, you better set that trap.”

  Jilly cracked one closed eye to peer at Sera. “All right, Miss Know-It-All.”

  The bracelet glimmered with unnatural lights woven through the dull metal. Nim stared at the knot work, trying to follow even one bead of light sliding through the strands. She startled when Sera tightened her grasp.

  “Don’t get caught in there,” Sera warned. “You won’t like where you go when it’s my turn to deal with them.”

  The tenebraeternum. The demon realm.

  Sweat beaded on Jilly’s brow despite the chill fog that had descended. The malice drifted lower too, their wild churning slowed to a sluggish writhe as they approached. The featureless black haze crystallized into claws and spiked tails and spiteful red eyeballs.

  Nim’s skin prickled, the demon rising to the menace. She knew the little bastards, knew the creak of them that was like a door opening surreptitiously in the night when all should be still, like a cold, groping touch where no one had the right to touch her. This was why the demon had chosen her. Because she would fight with everything she had—with everything the teshuva gave her—to never be broken again.

  Etheric smoke guttered in oily streamers like a backfiring junker car. But instead of staining the air as it had before, the smoke froze and splintered and fell to the floor. The black residue glazed the sparkling shattered glass until the footing was as treacherous as marbles under heel. Ecco, pacing close, crushed them and coughed at the lung-searing dust.

  Nim tightened her grasp on the other two talyan. Beyond the frozen malice, the salambes raged, bigger and stronger. Even in their frenzy, they were better defined than their smaller cousins. Their off-center, upthrust tusks pierced the distorted blur around them. The teeth cast shadows like giants’ pike staves three stories up the brick walls.

  The salambes circled, seeking a way in, but clearly unwilling to meet the same fate as the malice. Their hot, hungry breath tumbled the malice-encrusted glass shards around Nim’s shoes and rattled against the empty forty-ounce bottles. When she tried to kick a clear path around her feet, she almost stumbled on the precarious ground. The other women’s grasps on her hands kept her upright.

  “Nim,” Jilly gasped. “Bring them closer.”

  “That seems really dumb,” Nim said. But since when did dumb stop her? She steeled herself against the trembling in her knees. Not fear this time. Exhaustion. Could she do it again? Did she even understand what she’d done?

  She’d been willing to embrace the doom of the malice. All because Jonah wouldn’t embrace her. So attractive was her self-destructiveness to the tenebrae, they couldn’t help but come closer. And closer. To their doom.

  Maybe it was just as well she’d frightened Jonah away.

  “That’s it, Nim,” Sera said. “Just a little closer . . .”

  The salambes were an encroaching wall of disruptive ether. Inside her, Nim felt the teshuva falter, cutting out like a bad phone connection, overwhelmed by the massive attack.

  Oh, they wanted her. Even more than the malice. They would take her and her demon and shred her—body and soul—on an etheric breeze. . . .

  But she’d already decided she wasn’t giving up body or soul, not anymore, not to anyone else.

  Brutally, like a grip on the stripper pole, she clamped down on the demon. “Come here, you. We’re in this together, forever. Amen.”

  Even if becoming what Jonah wanted her to be—a lure to the darkness, her own shadows the bait—meant she would never be what he could love. Every girl who’d ever strapped on eight-inch, clear plastic heels knew where fantasy and reality parted without a last kiss good-bye.

  She released the thought like a pheromone of anguish, and the salambes fell on her in a rushing wave.

  Ecco shouted as Jilly loosed Sera and flung up her bracelet-clad hand, fingers spread wide and scattering light from the demonic artifact around her wrist. She brought her hand slicing down again. The crystallized malice echoed the motion, tumbling toward the salambes.

  And the viscous black wrapped around and through the blistering red. The tangle constricted, flailing tusks and rolling eyeballs drawn tighter and tighter until the congealed mass was only a little larger than the three of them could have encompassed with their outstretched arms. Nim stood equidistant from Jilly and Sera around the noxious snarl.

  Caught, the salambes shrieked out one multioctave cry that cracked the bricks. They strained, and little dust devils of unnatural flame skittered across the floor.

  “Ah, fuck,” Ecco mumbled as he stomped out a blaze. “The teshuva can’t hold up walls.”

  Between the growl of the crumbling bricks, the renewed cries of the tenebrae, and Ecco’s next curse, Nim almost missed the low hiss of the rising demon wind.

  “My teshuva can break at least one wall.” The pendant around Sera’s neck gleamed, bright as her eyes. “The Veil to the demon realm.”

  With a hollow boom, the tangled tenebrae mushroomed up in a cloud of dust, glass, and what else, Nim didn’t want to know. Before the pulsation knocked her backward, she caught a glimpse of something in the heart of the tangle. No, not something—someplace. Then she was skidding across the concrete floor. Her ears rang with the explosion and Ecco’s most energetic swearing to date.

  She shook her head and levered herself upright on bloody palms, reaching for her demon inside.

  To no avail. Could a demon be knocked offline, go into hiding inside her? Seemed so. Sera and Jilly looked equally stunned, Sera with a gash over her eye, as if one of the forty-ouncers had blown upward.

  Only Ecco had kept his feet, and he held his gauntlets crossed at the ready, eyes wide and darting, seeking the next threat.

  But the tenebrae were gone.

  “Well,” Jilly said. She gathered her knees under her, but made no attempt to stand.

  Sera just blinked. “Very enlightening.”

  “If by ‘enlightening,’ you mean ‘explosive,’ ” Nim said.

  “I’m always impressed how a little demonic ether, some bad will, and a few good intentions can go so skyhigh,” Sera admitted.

  “Can we go home now?” Ecco asked. “Before what’s left of this building collapses on top of us.”

  Nim, Sera, and Jilly looked at one another, then, with a sigh, pulled themselves upright. Sera touched her forehead and looked down at her bloody fingers.

  Jilly bit her lip. “Can you heal before Archer gets back?”

  “Or at least come up with a story?” Nim suggested.

  “About walking into a door?” Sera gave them a faint grin. “I’ll have a few hours.”

  Ecco cocked his head. “Or maybe less.”

  Nim stiffened. Had he heard the league’s cars returning? Then she heard it too. A rumble and growl.

  But it wasn’t a league of angry men.

  A feralis vaulted into one of the dozen empty windows. From its vantage-point perch, it stretched its naked, birdlike neck toward them and shrieked.

  “Bitch, please,” Ecco said to it. “You should see what the girls just did to your compadres.”

  Before his sneer faded, another feralis appeared in the window beside the first. And then, with
a flap of wings, the window above held a third feralis. In half a faltering heartbeat, the rest of the windows filled with tenebrae shadows that eclipsed the night outside.

  The first feralis tightened its serrated claws on the windowsill, cracking through the last shards of glass, which rained down in a shimming dust. As one, the horde lifted to their haunches and screamed.

  Nim winced. “Oh, hell.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The search was a bust. Even O’Hare, with its chronic delays, hadn’t produced more than a half dozen nests of malice, grown Cinnabon sleek off the annoyance and desperation of stranded passengers.

  Jonah slouched in the passenger’s seat beside Liam after the car pulled away from the Mortal Coil, leaving behind a pack of morose talyan to brood in their beer. Liam had handed the @1 credit card to Archer and told him not to let anyone take out their disappointment on innocent bystanders. Their anger might get the best of them, but, conveniently, their demon-fueled metabolism would ensure they burned through the alcohol and were sober before they drove home.

  Jonah had never used his teshuva for such a reason, and when Liam announced he was forgoing the antifestivities to check on the wounded Jilly, Jonah jumped on the chance to head to the warehouse.

  He wanted to get back. Not to the warehouse. The place didn’t matter. Just back to her.

  Nando and Haji had elected to skip the club. “Why drink? There’s nothing to celebrate until we get Blackbird.” Haji stretched his lanky tracker body across the backseat. “And nothing to mourn until he kills me.”

  “And I already have a headache,” Nando said, rubbing at his eye patch.

  As he had for Archer, Jonah recounted for Liam the encounter with Cyril Fane, and they tossed around possible outcomes of an alliance—or a war—with the angelic host. Both seemed inadvisable.

  As they approached the industrial park, he and Liam fell silent, gazes scanning the dark streets.

  “You got that feeling on the back of your neck?” Liam asked quietly.

  “No,” Nando said.