Vowed in Shadows

by Jessa Slade

  Jonah tipped the blade toward the salambes-laced sky. The tenebrae around them screamed their frustration. Or was it fear? They must feel the conviction that swept through him and aligned every impulse within him. “Not without me.”

  Nim landed in a crouch and rolled, hoping she didn’t impale herself on the throwing knife at her back. She came up running, and the tenebrae didn’t follow her. She would have thanked God, but she suspected a much closer, slightly less holy power was fighting on her behalf.

  She slowed and came to a stop when she spotted the hulking shape ahead of her on the sidewalk

  “You nearly killed me,” Corvus bellowed. He still had his lamppost and he shook it at her.

  From the deepened slur, she figured the man was in charge at the moment, since the djinni probably didn’t much care about death. Except that it still needed something from the man.

  “If you’d given me the anklet—”

  “Too late. Your league is here. They’ll open the way for me.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “That is no longer necessary.” Corvus’s guttural voice smoothed. The djinni ascended. “And neither are you.”

  He leapt at her, bashing with the post. She ducked and whirled. The lamppost slammed into the window of the vacant shop front, and glass sprayed.

  When she straightened, Corvus was gone.

  “No way.” She spun. The sidewalk in both directions was clear. She looked up. Could he have made that three-story vertical leap? She knew she couldn’t, even with the teshuva.

  She eyed the abandoned lamppost, wedged into the shattered window.

  She gritted her teeth against the grind of glass on her palms and climbed through.

  Unrelieved darkness, of course. A girl could get tired of never having the spotlight again. She crouched on the table where she’d landed and tweaked the teshuva to survey the interior. The space had obviously been a fast-food joint, and needed only a fresh coat of primary colors and somebody to crank up the deep-fryer to be functional again.

  She stared over the counter toward the kitchen area. Toward a glimmer of real-world light.

  Nothing to lose. She eased off the table, careful not to crunch on the glass. Tiptoes were good for sneaking.

  In the prep area, a wall had been cracked open. The glow came through from the other side. It was a soft, beautiful light, and she found herself drawn forward.

  It was the back side of the stained-glass museum.

  She’d noticed the sign earlier, though she’d never stopped in on all her trips to the pier. Now didn’t really seem the time either, but . . .

  She ducked through the broken concrete blocks. The vaguely gladiator-sized hole meant she didn’t even get any dust on her.

  The backlit, colored windows hung on panels throughout the room, seeming to linger suspended in the dark space. She’d come out in a room of eternal spring, with flowers and hummingbirds and sunrises and—oh, look—a cavorting nymph.

  She eased her knife from its sheath, wishing she’d thought to pick up Corvus’s discarded lamppost. But at least it would be a red flag to the talyan on their way.

  “Too late.” The voice hissed between panels.

  She whirled, trying to target the source. “It’s never too late while we still breathe.” She thought of Jonah’s lips on her. “And sometimes not breathing isn’t too late either.”

  “I wanted to breathe the rarified air, to fly with emperors. But they clipped my wings.”

  She cocked her head, following the sound. “That was your penance trigger? I think you’ve paid for your sins by now.”

  “And now the rest of the world must pay.”

  “Not our call.”

  “Who else? We are the only gods that still walk among them.”

  She slipped around a window that showed a large golden bird feeding a circle of its young. The bird’s head was bent to its breast and the droplets suspended from its beak were bloodred. She winced in sympathy and blinked to clear the bright dazzle from her eyes. “I prefer to dance.”

  “Then we shall.”

  Corvus stepped out from behind the panel.

  She couldn’t hold back a squeak of surprise and a startled step away. Her heel hovered over nothingness.

  In the least graceful movement of her entire life, she flailed, arms windmilling.

  And the knife lashed out and caught Corvus against his knuckles.

  He snatched his hand back.

  But not his fingers. Three severed digits thunked against the floor, and the anklet he’d clutched flew upward in a glinting arc of silver.

  Nim had a split second and a snake-bite reflex to hook the anklet chain with the four-pronged knife.

  And then she tumbled backward into the darkness.

  It wasn’t a long fall. She of all people appreciated the difference.

  Nim pushed to her feet, wobbling when her hands slipped in the shallow water. She must’ve blacked out for a moment when she hit bottom. How convenient that she’d landed flat on her back and spared her heels.

  Best of all, the conk on the head seemed to have shorted out her tenebrae lure, although she vastly preferred Jonah’s method of distracting kisses. At least she felt like she fit back inside her skin, and her reven wasn’t pulsing like other-realm signal fire anymore. Or maybe the slick of slimy water all over her had extinguished the lure.

  The lure . . . She fished through the water and winced when she sliced herself on something sharp. She lifted her knife from the muck. How many centuries before she forgot the sound of Corvus’s severed fingers pattering against the floor? She turned the knife side to side.

  The rough-hewn bead of demon-mutated metal clanked against the upper prong where the chain looped around the blade. “Just as ugly as I remembered.”

  She fastened the chain around her ankle, then stood to squeegee the front of her bustier. She grimaced up at the hole in the ceiling. No one was ever going to find her down here. How did a pier have a basement, anyway? The stained-glass glow across the opening gave the empty pit an embarrassingly cliché go-toward-the-light motif.

  As if she needed inspiration.

  The giant, creepy feralis down here with her was motivation enough to get out.

  It was vaguely turtle shaped but with tentacles, as if Chihuly had collected an insane number of Japanese glass floats and made an art car out of a Volkswagen Beetle. With tentacles.

  At least it was dead. No ether brightened its husk, only the glimmer of the glass orbs embedded in its shell between the limp, fleshy tentacles.

  She didn’t usually like modern art, and she really didn’t like the look of this thing.

  Options. Scream? Who knew what she’d bring down on her head. She’d already sworn a couple times, which hadn’t done her any good.

  She screamed anyway. Her voice, doubled with the demon and her own frustration, shivered the surface of the dank water. The only other effect was that it hurt her throat.

  So, not much in the way of options.

  She eyed the feralis husk. The uppermost curve of its shell would give her an eight-foot boost toward the ceiling.

  With a bit of grunting and more swearing, she centered the carcass below the hole. She scrambled up, cringing at the wet suck of flesh as her heels pierced the tentacles.

  The ragged opening was tantalizingly out of reach. Well, what was a demon for if not tempting? She crouched, tightened every muscle, and summoned the teshuva to the forefront. Her vision shifted into the black-light range.

  And she jumped. Her thighs burned as muscles and nerves ripped under the supernatural strain.

  Oh, not even close.

  She fell back to earth, knees bent to absorb the shock. Her heel punctured one of the orbs in the feralis shell. Glass sliced at her foot and chimed against the anklet chain.

  And a geyser of soulflies burst from their prison.

  She recoiled at the strange static hiss as they streamed past her skin. To her dismay, her teshuva wavered too,
withdrawing from the soul exodus. Her thighs darkened with bruises, and blood from her cut ankle pooled in the empty glass bowl.

  The cloud of soulflies dispersed slower. The pale flickers, like ash in the wind, drifted through the chamber.

  Nim stared down at the husk where she crouched. She brushed her fingers over another of the orbs. A silvery storm danced across the inner curve of the glass, following her touch.

  There were dozens, maybe more than a hundred, of the glass enclosures embedded in the feralis, some the size of her fist, some wider across than her forearm. This was what he’d been perfecting at the grain elevator. He’d learned to capture not just tenebrae, like Ecco bottling malice, but souls. Were all the orbs packed with soulflies? If all that etheric force was released at once . . .

  She was standing on a soul bomb.

  In the next heartbeat, she found herself standing on the other side of the chamber, her back flattened against the wall. Obviously, the teshuva wasn’t keen on sitting on a bomb either. If the teshuva didn’t like it, this must be part of Corvus’s reason for calling her here, for demanding she and the other talyan open the way to the Veil.

  Never mind stopping Corvus. She had to stop Sera and Jilly. If they kept fighting the tenebrae as they always did, defending the league with their heshuka tricks, they’d inadvertently help Corvus bomb the hell out of . . . hell.

  She had to get out.

  Which made her wonder, How had the feralis gotten in?

  Since she was already against the wall, she walked the perimeter of the chamber. But touch found nothing that her demon-aided vision hadn’t already noticed wasn’t there—no hidden openings, no trapdoors.

  What wasn’t she seeing under the scrim of bilge sheeting over the floor? She waded out.

  The water never got higher than her knees, but at the lowest point, she took one more step and her foot hovered over nothing.

  She yanked herself back. “Great,” she whispered. The echo came back even more mocking than she’d said it.

  The turtle remains that the ferales at the grain elevator had scavenged must have given Corvus the idea to turn his attention from the skies to the water. It would have been easy enough to haul the huge, soul bomb–embedded husk here where no one would ever find it. Until he was ready for a trio of troublesome female talyan to set off his bomb.

  She gave one last longing look at the heavenly gleam of the reflected stained glass above her. She wished Jonah was beside her, so she could make him blush with some crude joke about the pleasures of going down.

  Then she dove into the dark.

  The divide between the realms stretched thin. Corvus Valerius lifted his head to catch the taste of hell. Thin, dry, and cold, but with a surprising sparkle, like a very drinkable, but regrettably evil, champagne.

  He paced the roofline, his wounded hand tucked under his arm. The djinni let the three stumps bleed, focused on the trapped souls far below his feet and the uproar of the tenebrae still battling the talyan. The league would win. They were very good. And Corvus was only one man. Well, one man and one djinni.

  But in winning, the talyan and their earnest teshuva would make his dream come true. What he had started, unknowingly, with the first female talya could not be stopped. He had sought a demon to end his pain. And his summoning had possessed Sera Littlejohn. She had stolen his soul to patch a hole in the Veil, but the second female talya had taught him that the bond between souls was stronger even than hell. Jilly Chan’s love for her mate had given him the template for the glass traps.

  And now the third . . . The Naughty Nymphette had brought them all together at last.

  What price, three fingers?

  In less time than it would have taken him to finish a bottle of 1907 Heidsieck, the Veil would be exposed, his missing soul would be reclaimed, and the final battle would light up the world.

  Jonah’s belief had leached away over every square foot of pier where Nim wasn’t.

  The talyan were spread out across the pier, slowly but definitively battling back the tenebrae, and the damage was going to make the papers the next day.

  Assuming there was a next day.

  “Good thing At-One Salvage will have the lowest cleanup bid to the city by nine tomorrow morning,” Liam said when Jonah found him. “We’ll find your mate too. She’s probably trying to keep a low profile while we finish off these ferales.”

  “Right,” Jonah said. “That’s Nim; low profile all the way.”

  Liam gave him a wry look. “Your mate has rubbed off on you. I like it.”

  She had, Jonah realized. And he liked it too.

  No, more than liked it.

  The rain had petered out to a mist that starred the lights of the city. His body ached with wounds he’d ignored and left to the demon. But the ache inside sharpened, like a blade whetted on his longing.

  Where was she?

  He closed his eyes. Even at the Shimmy Shack, when he’d tried to shut out the sight of her naked glory, he’d always known where she was.

  He walked away from the knot of talyan. The sound of the skirmish deadened in his ears.

  When he looked up, only the dark lake stared back at him, black and restless.

  And then the splash and a gasp drew him to the railing.

  “Nim!” He clambered over the railing and reached down to her. “What are you—? Never mind. Will you take my hand this time?”

  “Corvus will tell you, that’s not a good thing to say to me.” She slapped her palm into his, and he hauled her up. “We have to stop them.”

  “We are. We almost have them contained, and then Sera and Jilly will finish them off, send them to hell.”

  “No, we can’t do that! I think that’s what Corvus wants.” She dragged her hands through her wet hair so the mismatched locks stood up in wild disarray.

  He shook his head, trying to concentrate on her words, not the slick black leather of her bustier. “Corvus wants us to defeat the tenebrae?”

  “Because if we use our best weapons—me and Sera and Jilly—we’ll open a path to the Veil, Corvus will follow, and then he’s going to set off a soul bomb. That much etheric energy will be worse than anything we’ve faced against the demon realm.”

  There were all sorts of bombshells, and right then he decided he liked the half-naked kind better.

  As she quickly explained the feralis husk she’d found, she dragged him down the boardwalk. She hopped a few steps on one leg to show him the anklet.

  He let his gaze linger on her leg. “All this for that?” He traced his way up her exposed thigh, past the black vinyl and lacings, to focus on her wide eyes. And he knew he’d do all this again in a second. Or an eternity.

  She thought he was still talking about the anklet. “I told you it was ugly.”

  As if he cared about the anklet when the woman attached had enthralled him, body, heart, and soul. He wrapped his arm over her shoulder. “You’re shivering.”

  “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “Because Sera and Jilly are reaching for the tenebraeternum.”

  Nim strained against him. “We have to get to them.”

  “We don’t have time. The museum is just down there. You can lure the souls to you, keep them from getting through to the Veil.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Every attempt has been a disaster.”

  “You have the anklet now.”

  “What’s this ugly jewelry going to do for me?” Her voice rose, laced with panic. “Trust me, anything I’ve ever gotten from my admirers has not been good.”

  “If the teshuva’s artifact isn’t enough”—he took a breath and looked into her eyes, forcing her to match the steady rhythm of his pulse—“then there’s always me.”

  She stilled. “What are you going to do for me?”

  “Be there. Always.”

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, hell.”

  He smiled. “Especially there.” He tugged her hand. “Come on. It’s not too late.”

  They ra
ced through the abandoned restaurant. In the shadowed museum, the magnificent light of the stained-glass windows cast a halo of color, as if dark clouds has spilled a rainbow across the earth.

  “Watch the hole,” Nim warned him.

  “I see—”

  Before he could finish, the temperature had dropped. The water between the laces of Nim’s bustier glittered with ice. His vision fogged as the thin layer of moisture over his eyes crystallized before he blinked.

  The tenebraeternum swallowed them whole.

  CHAPTER 28

  The infinite hues of the glass all drained to icy gray, and Nim’s heart withered. Maybe once, she’d imagined setting the world on fire. But all that would remain was ash, and it would look a lot like this. She whirled to run back.

  Right into Jonah’s arms.

  Gold and blue. His hair and eyes held the lingering warmth of summer. “This is the boundary of the demon realm. We have to stop this here.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Nim, it’s never too late.”

  How could he say that when he’d spent almost the past hundred years in mourning?

  She wanted to call him on it, but he added, “The city and our souls are in your hands.”

  She scowled. “Oh, no pressure or anything.”

  He kissed her hard. “At least you have two hands.”

  The chill settled in her bones. “I can’t hold the Veil together, even with two hands.”

  “You’d be surprised what your touch will make whole and right.” He lifted her white-knuckled fist to his lips, and this time his kiss was fleeting.

  She had never wanted to fight on the light side. The stakes were too high. And the darkness never minded a fuckup. But he believed in her. She owed him for more than everything she’d taken from his wallet.

  She swallowed. “Where is the Veil?”

  “All around us. The boundaries of the no-man’s-land between the realms have their own rules.”

  She turned in his embrace and faced outward. Stirred by her movement, swirls of the gray pulsed outward like a ripple of oil on water, carrying a faint haze of Jonah’s gold and blue, as if the demon realm sipped from his warmth. An answering shift in the chill flowed back to her.