Vowed in Shadows

by Jessa Slade

  Something knew they were here.

  Well, it was practically an invasion, after all. Somewhere Sera’s calm brilliance and Jilly’s quicksilver verve would be lighting the shadows, not realizing their incursion laid a path for the soul bomb straight to the protective Veil between earth and hell.

  With Jonah’s bulk a comforting heat and heft and reality behind her, she closed her eyes and opened her arms. Opened her heart, her soul. Come.

  In her mind’s eye—or maybe to her body’s eye, if her body was still standing in a stained-glass museum on a pier in Chicago—a dark hole blossomed with silver as a tornado of soulflies spiraled upward in a spray of glimmering glass shards.

  Then the swirl was all around her and Jonah, here in the tenebraeternum. He tightened his grip, his arm warm under her breasts. The soulflies tingled on her skin as she leaned into the strength of his embrace. She could do this; she could save the world. Touch me. Stay with me.

  “No!”

  The scream snapped her upright.

  Corvus.

  He raced toward them. The djinni loomed above him in a tower of malevolent light, its power unfettered here, so close to its source.

  The rage of his coming blew the gray in streaks like storm clouds over a wind-whipped lake. His upraised fist with its missing fingers stained the gray with crimson-black. “The lost souls must take my place in the Veil.”

  Jonah pointed the executioner’s sword at the furious gladiator. “They can’t pay for your sins, Corvus. Salvation has never worked that way.”

  Corvus sneered. With the demon’s distortion, his teeth lengthened into fangs. “Not so, if you’ve read your own scriptures, talya.”

  Jonah shook his head. “You’ll find no saints here to take your place, djinni.”

  Nim shivered against Jonah’s chest. Wasn’t that a lie? She knew at least one saint who would do anything to save a sinner.

  Her hold on the soulflies wavered. And the Veil began to warp.

  Dark pennants unfurled from it like wings and drew the soulflies closer in a fractal whirl.

  In the center of the wings, in the maw of the whirlpool, was the tenebraeternum itself.

  “Mine,” Corvus crooned. He extended his stunted hand, and the wings flexed toward him in answer, as eternally drawn to him as the soulflies were to their haints. “My soul.”

  The djinni strained in the other direction. What havoc would it wreak unbound from its husk?

  “Nim.” Jonah’s voice broke with urgency. “You can’t let the soulflies take his place. Not all of them were meant to be here, and once Sera and Jilly close the path, the souls will go wherever they were bound—heaven or hell. They’ll leave a wound in the Veil that will let all of hell through.”

  “Let them through,” Corvus shrieked. “At long last, let them in and set us free.”

  The ferocity of his scream shredded through the etheric mists, and Nim turned to shelter her face against Jonah’s chest. She couldn’t do it. The tear in the Veil that Sera had woven together with the threads of Corvus’s soul almost a year ago was too great for any patch of soulflies. Nim wanted to let it go. Throw it all away. As she’d always thrown everything away.

  As Jonah would throw her away when the fight ended.

  And it would end. Maybe not tonight or in any span of years she’d ever counted, but she’d be there and she’d have to watch him walk away because, in the end, she could never be good enough. She’d never been good enough.

  This was why she hadn’t wanted to be touched.

  She looked up at Jonah and lifted her hands away from his chest. Pulling away from Jonah was like ripping off her own skin. The last hard thud of his heart echoed against her palms and was gone.

  He met her gaze. “Nim, no.”

  “You can’t really love me.”

  “Yes, I do. How can you doubt that?”

  Because she’d never known otherwise. But she did know her soul would fit where Corvus’s was tearing free. “There’s not enough saint in me for you, but the Veil always has room for another sinner.”

  “No.” He reached for her.

  The gray chill hardened like ice, like unbreakable glass, between them.

  And he kept reaching.

  “Don’t,” she cried. The demon realm closed around her, with knife teeth of cold and dark. He’d already lost so much. Would he sacrifice his other hand, his life?

  “I’d give it all for you.” His voice whispered through the thickening gray as her vision faded. “And you’ve already taken my heart.”

  He stepped through the gray in a searing blast of gold and blue.

  The shadows of wings tore loose and flared above her, high and hungry. She could throw herself into the darkness once again, where her only pain was self-inflicted, or she could let life, love, and Jonah do their worst.

  She ran for Jonah.

  She would’ve been faster, except for the really ill considered spiked heels.

  He pulled her close. “Dance for me, Nim.”

  She whirled in his arms to face the Veil. It was all around them now, a coruscating gray nightmare of half-seen shapes. A face, a bowed head, a locked fist—hundreds, thousands, an infinity—all gray as stone, all silent and still. Not tormented by anything she could see, they’d made the hell their own.

  The soulflies would be too scattered and shattered to fill the void, for the void was endlessly ravenous.

  She stretched out her hand, Jonah’s laid atop her own. The ring on his finger glinted.

  “Do you trust me?” she murmured.

  “With all that I am and more.”

  “If I call the souls to me now, maybe Sera can guide them and Jilly can contain them. But if I wait until the bomb explodes on its own . . .” She gazed at him. “Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t steal a soul again—I swear.”

  His lips twitched. “Good girl. Or as good as you need to be.”

  She sent out her call to the tenebrae as she’d once summoned her own darkness with matches against her skin. The power burned phosphorescent through her body.

  Instead of guttering out in a stink of scorched flesh, with no one to notice or care, the etheric call arced between her and Jonah—her power and his focus—and blasted outward from their joined hands.

  The shock reverberated through the Veil, and Corvus screamed.

  The souls came.

  Their white-ash drift coalesced around a million scintillating colored flecks of glass as the soul bomb shattered in the human realm and rode the tide of her call into the tenebraeternum.

  The darkened hole where Corvus’s soul had been inhaled.

  Corvus’s cry lengthened and rose in pitch. Around him, the djinni stretched, sucked in toward the demon realm. It blackened, as if the fires of hell scorched it, but it would not release the gladiator.

  He fell to his knees, and the thick lines of the demon mark on his arms cracked and bled. The djinni’s shadow mingled with red human blood and darkened the pool.

  The rivulets trickled toward the open wound in the Veil. The glass shards melted in midair and streamed into the hole.

  Still the djinni’s hook in the Blackbird held.

  Nim looked up, up, and up at the towering cloud of evil, then down at the gladiator on his knees. “You want to be free?”

  Both his eyes were the pale blue of summer. “So the demon promised me two thousand years ago.”

  “About time it paid up, then.” She lifted her foot. The anklet flashed with violet lightning. “Don’t touch.”

  And she brought her heel down on the point where djinni and blood were one. The Blackbird’s soul flew, loosed from her lure.

  Corvus lifted his arms and laughed as the black lines bled away. This time, the djinni screamed.

  Without the soul to root it, separated from the body it had possessed for two thousand years, the djinni was sucked through the tear in the Veil. The recoil blasted through the gray. The molten glass and blood and the blackened ether streamed inward as t
he void hungered.

  Nim’s fingertips warmed as the first touch of power returned to her. Jonah thought she was good enough; maybe that meant her soul wasn’t the puzzle piece to fit into the torn Veil.

  Who, then, should she sacrifice to keep hell from blowing wide-open? One of the wounded talyan souls she felt toiling at the other end of the no-man’s-land? Some other innocent? Or some not-so-innocent who then would never have the chance—as she had—to make amends?

  Well, she’d never thought much of sacrifice anyway.

  And then someone turned off the lights.

  A gentle touch on her eyelids, first one, then the other.

  Kisses. She looked up to dark blue sky and dark blue eyes.

  “Jonah?” Her voice cracked.

  “You’re back.”

  “Hell and back,” she whispered.

  “Not too often, hopefully.” He kissed her again, on the brow this time.

  She closed her eyes, just for a moment, reveling in his touch. “How’d we do?”

  “You brought down the curtain. But left a chance for an encore.”

  When she frowned at him, he helped her sit up, though he remained on his knees behind her, cradling her. They were out at the end of the pier. To the east, the first rays of the sun glinted on the horizon.

  She stiffened. “An encore? Then we need to get out of here before more people come. We can’t let them be caught in this.”

  He hugged her. “No one will notice. They see what they want to see. And what they’ll see is a nice new Congolese diner. I already have a proprietress in mind. What they won’t see is the hole to the basement where there’s a strange inverted glass sculpture that leads straight into the tenebraeternum.”

  “Leads into the . . .” She winced. “Corvus took his soul, and all I had left to patch the hole were the shards of glass and ether. Nothing else would fit. Nothing else I would give up.”

  “Keep what’s yours. We’ll work it out.”

  “Together? Are we counting that as a win?”

  He smiled, and the curve of his lips warmed her more than the sun that now slanted across the water. “We’re still breathing.”

  He led her past the talyan who were hastening to clean up what they could before the morning crowds returned. She paused when they neared Fane. “You were here for the fight?”

  Fane lifted one eyebrow. The knee-jerk disdain was tempered by the feralis gore staining him up to the knees. “Dawn of a new day.”

  She gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. “I work nights.”

  Jonah tugged her onward. From the museum, they climbed down a ladder someone had found into the chamber below.

  Jonah said, “Liam is already drawing up a bid to do the repairs and renovations through At-One Salvage, Sewage & Bistros, Inc.”

  “Catchy.” Nim walked around the old feralis husk. To her human eyes, the cracked-glass orbs looked like a nest of pretty broken eggs, as if—somewhere—birds of every hue were flying free. “Luckily, the museum upstairs only does windows, or they’d want this for their collection.”

  To her teshuva, the shattered remnants were terrifying. Past the brilliantly colored glass, it saw the void at the bottom of each open orb and the slow, oily churn of the black leading that held the remaining pieces together. Her pulse raced double time with the teshuva’s tension. “That blackness . . . It’s the djinni.”

  Jonah nodded. “Corvus left the djinni in his place when you freed his soul.”

  “If by ‘free’ you mean ‘dead.’ ” She’d seen the clatter of yellow bones half drowned in the shallow pool of the chamber. The dent in the skull and the two broken arms made identification a simple matter.

  “Without the djinni to sustain him, he couldn’t outrun a couple thousand years.”

  “I think he met it with open arms.” She shivered at the chill that breathed from the exposed void. “Maybe he redeemed himself, but he left us with a hell of a problem. Actually, looks like several hells’ worth.”

  “It just so happens I plan to have much to atone for.”

  She had leaned closer, despite the teshuva straining away from the hell it had escaped, but some note in Jonah’s voice, a light in gloom, made her straighten.

  As she did, another glint caught her eye. Threaded through the etherically mutated leading that was the djinni ran a razor-thin strand of gold.

  The sudden stutter of her heart rivaled the teshuva for panic. “Your ring.” She reached for Jonah’s bare hand.

  He gave her a smile, pure and simple as the missing band around his finger. “I am free too.”

  “But . . .” Her gaze slipped past him to the open pathways into hell. “Even possessed by a repentant demon, I’m no good at being good.”

  “Maybe good isn’t what we need anymore. It’s definitely not what I want.”

  He wasn’t looking at the hellholes, though. He was looking at her. When she drew a breath to ask him what that shimmer in his eyes meant, he tugged her hand. “Come on.”

  The storm had passed, and the Shades of Gray rocked gently at the railing where he’d left it, with only one rope looped hastily around a cleat.

  As they climbed in, she looked over her shoulder at the pier. From this distance, everything looked the same except for a couple missing lampposts. “Shouldn’t we stay to help clean up?”

  “We saved the day. That’s enough for this morning.”

  He aimed the boat toward the rising sun. She blinked at him when he set the engine on a slow churn and joined her in the prow. “We’re just going?”

  “For the moment. It’s not like we’ll hit anything.”

  “I bet I could find a way,” she muttered darkly.

  He lifted her chin and kissed her, then settled her in his arm as he leaned back on the cushions and kicked his feet up. “We will find a way.”

  She’d never seen him so . . . happy. Something loosened in her, and she curled up against him and rested her palm on his chest. She couldn’t remember now why she’d thought pulling away made sense.

  His elbow was hooked over the side rail, and the cuff caught her eye. She touched the oddly familiar, intricate swirl that ran around it, and a violet spark raced away from her fingertip. She caught her breath and propped her foot on the cushion to look at her anklet.

  The bead that had run loose on the thick, rough chain was missing. In its place, tiny glass rivets sparkled among the links.

  He shrugged. “Not so ugly now, is it? The backlash of the lure power caught me so hard, it fused the cuff down to the bone.” She gasped, but he squeezed her reassuringly. “It doesn’t hurt. Not anymore. No straps means whatever weapon I use will fit almost as close as my hand. At least until I take it off.” He gave her a wicked grin. “Good demon.”

  She bit her lip. Any weapon he wanted? “You wanted to be a stronger fighter. Now I guess you are.”

  He pulled back a little, and she shivered at the breeze that wedged between them.

  He stared into her eyes. “I’m stronger with you. Because of you. You made me not the warrior, but the man I wanted to be.”

  “You were always a good man,” she protested. “Too good for me.”

  He shook his head. “You always knew how to bend without breaking, how to dance even when the world was on fire. If anyone is thrall here . . .” He raised the cuff in a little wave, and the pleasure in him softened the curves of his lips.

  She curled into him, and the anklet clicked against his wrist. A single violet spark raced around and through the patterns of his cuff and crossed to the anklet. “Ah, I knew from the start you liked to look. Thank heavens for my newfound ability to prettify hell.”

  “You’ve always enthralled me. Stop fishing for compliments.”

  “I don’t fish.”

  “You caught me.” He slipped off the cushions to kneel beside her.

  “I guess I’m caught too,” she said. “Mated-talyan bond. Symballein. Whatever that means.”

  “Love.” He tucked a strand of
hair behind her ear and smiled as it sprang loose. “It means ‘I love you.’ ”

  “How can you?”

  “My body and my sword are yours—were always yours.” He rested his forehead on her thigh a moment. “But you didn’t just make me fight again. You let me love again.”

  She buried her fingers in the gilded waves of his hair and closed her eyes to focus on the whisper of his breath across her reven and faded scars. The sensation he ignited smoldered in her soul, sweet and everlasting. When he lifted his head, she met his gaze. His eyes reflected the blue of the water and sky, and she felt herself falling.

  “But my heart is yours too,” he said, “if you want it.” He cupped her cheek, and she realized he’d waylaid a tear at the corner of her eye. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I do. I can’t believe I believe you.” She knew the wonder in her voice betrayed her. “But I love you.”

  His smile lit every corner of her heart with a hint of devilish heat. “I have forever to prove myself good and true.”

  “Start now.” She leaned into his hand. “And touch me.”

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS FROM THE @ I ARCHIVES

  ascendant: The rise of a demon within a possessed human; refers to the initial incident of possession and subsequent risings.

  birnenston: Also, brimstone. A sulfuric compound leached from some demonic emanations interacting with the human realm.

  desolator numinis: “Soul cleaver”; a demonic weapon.

  djinni: djinn (pl.): Upper echelon of demonkind; fallen angels who are content to stay fallen.

  djinn-man: A human possessed by a djinni.

  ether: The elemental energy of spiritual and demonic emanations.

  feralis: ferales (pl.): Lesser demonic emanation encased in a physical shell of mutated human-realm material. Physically strong, but not so impressive in the brains department.

  heshuka: The unknown darkness; from Aramaic.