by Jessa Slade
Archer never stopped his restless pacing. “That’s because for some fool reason, she wanted to save your fucking ass.” He snarled the last two words with demon harmonics, and Andre flinched.
Jonah knew that feeling, of the teshuva burning close to the surface, threatening to overwhelm what was left of his humanity. Then only constant movement—like Archer’s pacing or the concentration of battle—distracted the demon enough to keep his persona intact.
With the loss of his arm, sometimes it seemed he couldn’t move or fight enough to hold himself and the demon together. That loss brought to him courtesy of this boy’s master.
Still, he had survived, which had nearly not been the case for Nim.
As if sensing the spike of anger, Andre met Jonah’s stare. His face paled at whatever he saw there.
As if she didn’t care about the escalating threat of carnage, Nim nudged past him to approach Andre. “You’re the gutter punk who stole my anklet? I thought a minion of evil would be taller.”
He angled his head back insolently. “You’re the stripper Blackbird sent me for? I thought you’d be . . .”
Jonah took a silent step that put him right behind Nim, directly in Andre’s line of sight.
Nim waited a moment. “Naked-er?”
Archer stopped pacing, and Ecco made a noise that might have been a laugh. Or maybe a growl of the sort that preceded a fatality. Andre swallowed hard.
Without glancing back, Nim said, “Archer, Ecco, stop scaring the poor boy. He won’t be able to tell me where my anklet is.”
Jonah pitched his voice for her ears only. “I’m not scaring him?”
“You’re the kind of scary no one notices until it’s too late. So we’re cool.”
The young man scowled. “Why would I tell you anything?”
Nim gave a little huff. “Of course you’ll tell.”
Andre’s gaze shuttled among the male talyan, as if he couldn’t quite decide who was the biggest threat. Jonah wished he could clear up the question. But he’d let Nim play her game . . . at least until Liam came down to rip the man apart for damaging his mate.
But Nim said, very softly, “Not them, silly. Look at me.”
Andre’s stare snapped to her, and his eyes widened. Black pupils expanded to swallow the irises in a gulp.
Jonah felt a chill at the small of his back that he couldn’t blame on the damp waistband of his jeans. He didn’t think the punk was wrong about exactly where the threat lay.
Nim’s voice lowered, and Andre leaned forward in his chair. “You’ll tell me because that’s what men do.” She circled him. “They tell me things they shouldn’t. Do things they shouldn’t. I guess you’d call it . . . a gift.”
A curse. Jonah heard the word echo, distorted, in the demon harmonics of her voice.
Andre obviously heard it too, and shuddered, but his expression was rapt. Jonah had seen that entranced, hungry look before, when the Naughty Nymphette stepped onto the stage.
The chill crept farther up his spine, even though the thin cotton of his shirt was mostly dry. That wasn’t an air-conditioned subbasement breeze.
That was the tenebraeternum.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Archer stiffen. The mated talya knew what was happening. Ecco canted forward, as much under Nim’s sway as the young punk.
She came to a halt in front of the boy and leaned down, her palms flattened on the fronts of her thighs. At her fingertips, the black traceries of her reven blazed, matching her half-lidded eyes with violet intensity. “But don’t you worry about doing something you shouldn’t. Because Corvus sent you to find me. Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you find me?”
“Yes.”
“Then won’t you take me to my pretty demon jewelry?”
Andre’s answer drifted off on a dreamy sigh, his breath visible in the plunging cold. “Yes.”
“No,” Jonah snapped.
“Oh yes,” Nim said. “Tell me.”
Archer pulled Jonah aside. “She’s opening a path into the demon realm.”
Jonah shrugged out from under the talya’s hand. “Hard not to notice.”
“Without the teshuva’s artifact, she shouldn’t be able to do that.”
The rare note of alarm in Archer’s voice almost made Jonah smile, except he was equally dismayed. “Which makes me think we don’t quite understand the purpose of the demons’ offerings. What if the relics don’t grant the power, or even channel it? What if the jewelry is a control?”
“Like a limiter that only allows a certain amplitude of power through?” For a heartbeat, Archer looked intrigued. Then he recalled himself, brows crashing down in a scowl. “Well, we’re missing hers. So you have to control her.”
Jonah choked back a laugh that would have sounded desperate. “How?”
“The way you control any woman.”
“Sera would have your head if she heard you.”
“Both of them. And while she was busy, she wouldn’t be tearing open the barrier between our realm and hell.”
Jonah couldn’t keep his gaze off Nim. Her soft croon spiraled up on a breath, visible in the deepening chill. She gleamed with the demon’s raw power, like a jewel herself.
Archer punched his shoulder, sharp and hard. “She doesn’t need another lust slave. Snap out of it and back her up.”
Jonah shook his head. “I don’t—”
“You’d better. There are no tenebrae here to shove back into the demon realm. Do you want her using her soul to patch the hole she rips through the Veil?” When Jonah shook his head again, trying to throw off his spellbound fascination, Archer continued relentlessly. “Do you want her to use mine? Ecco’s?” He paused. “Yours?”
“Enough,” Jonah growled. He wasn’t sure if he spoke to Archer or Nim. Not that it mattered.
He reached out to grab her. Her skin was like dry ice, so cold it burned, fusing him to her. When he tried to pull her back, away from Andre, he felt resistance. But not in her. She bent toward him, pliant and yielding.
The resistance was in Andre. In the soul stretching from him like a fish being teased from the river. As if Jonah were the fisherman, casting Nim upon the water like a lure.
He almost let her go, at the cruel mockery of the life’s work he’d once aspired to, a fisher of souls leading men from sin.
Instead, he was using sin incarnate to lure evil itself.
Because he shouldn’t have been able to see Andre’s soul. The teshuva had once—like their angelic and djinni kin—been privy to the warp and weft of the human soul, but they’d sacrificed the ability when they chose a third path, sanctioned by neither heaven nor hell.
They were able to see the wayward soulflies cut adrift from their haint husks, but a soul contained within its body should have been indiscernible.
Of course, Andre’s soul wasn’t entirely within his body anymore. And judging from the murky tatters drifting from him, she was only getting the nasty bits.
“Nim,” he murmured. “Put it back. That’s not a toy.”
“He treated it like one,” she replied. “No, worse. He valued most of his toys more than this.”
“Don’t judge,” he warned. He didn’t want to guess what his own soul would look like, with the teshuva threaded through the shards.
“I’m not judging. I like toys too. In fact, I might just keep this one.”
“It’s not yours.”
“Andre doesn’t mind. Do you, Andre?” She gave a little tug; Jonah could feel it through her body.
Andre’s soul stretched a bit more. “I don’t mind.”
Jonah’s throat tightened. “That’s something Corvus would do.”
“You’re trying to make me feel bad about myself, comparing me to a bad man.” Nim’s voice was dark, brooding. Andre whimpered. “But I never pretended this darkness wasn’t here. And now you want to control it, control me.”
“You’re not controlling yourself. Is this how you
would dance? Destroying your audience?”
He felt another tremor go through her. “He took what was mine.”
“That’s the thrall talking,” he said. “Would you, Nim, take a man’s soul?”
“I’ve taken their money—all their money—and their time, their sobriety, their faithfulness, their innocence. . . .” But she shivered again, as if the cold burning him had finally penetrated her focus.
“Then tell me: If that boy stubbed out a match flame on his skin, wondering if there was someone inside him who cared, who would be left to flinch if you do this?” When she didn’t answer, he murmured, “You never let anyone take this part of you, not even at your worst. Give it back to him, Nim.”
The moment drew out, spun brittle and sharp like the old pane of glass that had severed his hand.
Then she turned and threw herself into his arms, unmindful of the point of his hook. He gathered her gingerly and buried his fingers under the fall of her dreads.
Andre tipped forward out of his chair and thudded to the floor. Ecco and Archer drew in ragged breaths, and Jonah realized there’d been more than one soul drawn toward her.
When he’d identified her as temptation, he hadn’t known quite how deeply the charm set its hooks.
He stroked his hand down the line of her back until the shivers eased.
Ecco knelt beside Andre and flipped the young man over. The punk’s eyes were open and fixed, but he took a shuddering gasp. As Ecco levered him up into the chair, he groaned a few words.
Jonah stared over Nim’s bowed head at the gauntleted talya. “What did he say?”
“That Blackbird always talks about flying free.” Ecco gave him a sharp grin. “And that if Nim is coming for him, he better fly faster.”
Jonah took her to his room. All the talyan kept rooms at the warehouse, even if they had private retreats hidden elsewhere in the city. And while there were unoccupied rooms in the building, with plenty of salvaged furniture to scavenge, still, he took her to his room.
From the sidelong glances that slipped away as he lifted her into his arms—her face buried in his chest, her hands locked behind his head—he doubted anyone would dare challenge him for the right.
He’d had opportunity before—after a long, ichorsoaked night of tenebrae slaughter—to be grateful for Liam’s foresight in retrofitting the warehouse with private baths for each room. But for the first time in a long time, his thankfulness bordered on a prayer as he awkwardly unlatched the door to his suite.
He let her feet slide to the floor but kept her tucked against his side as he cranked on the hot water in the shower.
“Please turn the light on,” she said. “The dark and the water . . .”
Too much like the tunnels. He clicked on the light. Shortly after his maiming, being none to eager to see himself, he’d broken all but one bulb in the old-fashioned vanity light bar. At least the muted light was better than the blackness under the city. Or the shadows that must be coursing through her mind.
He knelt at her feet. The laces of her sneakers were stiff and grimy and resisted his fingers. He sliced through them with the tip of the hook. He tapped her ankle to let him pull off her shoe, and she lifted her foot with a passivity that was starting to alarm him. “You didn’t do it,” he reminded her.
“I would have,” she said. “I wanted to. I was pulling his soul—his soul!—out of him. Like teasing a dollar bill out of a guy’s pocket.” She gripped his shoulder when he lifted her other foot. The skin above her sock was crusted with silt.
“A hundred-dollar bill, at least.” He tried to keep his tone light.
“No, he gave it up as easily as a single dollar. I don’t mind being a bad girl, Jonah, but I never wanted to be evil.”
He looked up at her and was shocked to see tears glistening in her eyes.
Something shifted in his chest. He remembered that moment himself, in a jungle less forgiving than this one of asphalt and concrete. He and the Naughty Nymphette were more alike than she knew.
He wrapped his fingers around her ankle and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Nim, Andre was a drug dealer before he fell in with Corvus. He’s one of the few humans to see a djinn-man—truly see, just like he saw the demon sign at the pawnshop—and it didn’t stop him from offering his services. He was leading a horde of demons to kidnap you after he let them butcher a dozen people. After all that, do you think he held his soul in any particular regard?”
One tear escaped and tracked over her cheekbone. “Maybe he was like me, and didn’t believe in it.”
“But you believe now.” He stood. Unable to stop himself, he reached up and thumbed away the tear. “More important, you’re trying to do the right thing now that you know.”
She sniffled. “The right thing? Like I just did?”
“I suppose there’s a learning curve,” he admitted. And apparently the league—male dominated for millennia—knew less than ever.
Her lip quivered, as if undecided between another sniffle and a smile. She echoed his touch, her fingers curving around his jaw. “Would you be so generous if it had been your soul I was stealing?”
“You can’t steal my soul,” he said. “You already have it.”
CHAPTER 12
Nim froze despite the steam starting to drift over the top of the shower, and despite the warmth of his touch. “I didn’t take your soul.”
“Before we even met,” he said. “I told you, your demon called to mine. That’s how I found you. Because our damage, the vulnerability that opened us to the demon, resonated and made us a matched pair, one fitting into the other.”
“You would not have chosen me.” The words hurt to say, so she knew they must be the truth. She was just a necessary evil in his fight. And after what she’d almost done, emphasis on the “evil” part.
She let her hand drop from his face, but he caught it. “Nim? I didn’t mean you’d taken my soul in cold blood. I know this is all still so strange to you. We’ll figure it out together.”
“Together,” she echoed softly.
“Now get in the shower before we use up all the hot water. And then go to bed. You need the sleep.”
She took a steadying breath. “That’s not what I need.”
“I can get you some dinner too. You hardly ate any breakfast. . . .”
“Not food.” She turned her hand to lace her fingers through his. With her free hand, she tugged down her bedraggled skirt. The skimpy denim snagged on her hips, then slipped free to puddle at her feet.
Now he was frozen in place. “Nim . . .”
She wrinkled her fingers in front of his shirt, over his belly, scrunching the material out of his jeans. With his only hand trapped in hers, there wasn’t much he could do to stop her. Except club her with his hook, maybe, but she was sixty-forty sure it wouldn’t come to that. “You know, nobody tucks in a T-shirt.”
He sucked in a breath. Not to make her job easier, she guessed, so much as to avoid her touch. “A habit from the jungle,” he said. “Tucking in cuffs and hems kept out the mosquitoes and botflies and leeches.”
“Oh, my,” she murmured as she eased his shirt higher. Her fingers tripped up the rippled muscles of his abdomen. “Sexy.”
“What are you doing?” The question grated out past the breath he was still holding.
“Money, time, and the other thing I could always take from a man—his body. But at least I give up my own in return. Fair trade?”
“I have only one arm.”
She blinked at him, unsure if he was serious. “Well, you’re taller than me. So it works out.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
Didn’t ask for her. “I know.” He was the only man who hadn’t. She knew better than to want things she couldn’t have, but she wanted this man. This good man. She wanted him to want her. Because if he did, then maybe, despite what she’d almost done, what she’d done before, maybe there was good somewhere in her. “It’s a bribe.”
“For what?”
“You won’t drown in a shower. You won’t die.”
“Not with you in there.” She let go of his hand to peel the shirt from his shoulders. She let it fall to the floor and took that moment to strip off her own.
Standing only in her black thong, she knew he’d finally give in. Not even a man with demonic strength could resist a black thong.
But when her hand went to his fly, he caught her. “Nim . . . Elaine . . .”
She put her finger over his lips to silence him. “I haven’t been Elaine for a very long time. Elaine would not have survived what happened to Nimue.”
“And now I have the Naughty Nymphette.” His breath teased her skin.
“Not her either. She doesn’t allow touching, remember?” She stroked her finger across his bottom lip. “You were right the first time. It’s Nim. Nobody but Nim.”
His breathing was ragged. Her own wasn’t much better. What she was doing was wrong, selfishly taking advantage of a good man. Well, a good man and a repentant demon. She was wrong to think his goodness would rub off on her. Goodliness, like cleanliness, didn’t transfer. Unlike dirt, blood, and sin, which were endlessly contagious.
But he was the one who’d said “together.”
When she reached for the front of his jeans this time, he didn’t resist.
In fact, parts of him were eager to be free. As she eased the zipper apart and the backs of her fingers grazed his erection through his briefs, his whole body shuddered. Feralis teeth didn’t scare him, but zipper teeth would bring down any man. And bringing this man to his knees was her job.
She’d make him forget he hadn’t wanted her, couldn’t want her.
He kicked off his boots as she pushed down his jeans, his briefs along for the ride. Then he was naked, except for the hook. “Nim . . .”
“I figured out how to pull a soul from a body. I think I can get your arm out of this trap.” She ran her fingers along the straps that cuffed the hook to his upper arm, searching out the snaps. Underneath the pad, knotted scars gnarled his flesh.
He pulled away from her, nudging the hook from her hand. “It’s ugly. The birnenston where I fell sealed the wound. Hellfire saved my life and crippled me for the only purpose I had left.”