by Jessa Slade
“I didn’t have to tell you,” he reminded her. She made a moue of displeasure, but he went on. “Just keep an eye out, okay, and get word to me if you get the heebiejeebies.”
Bella’s smile returned, more calculating than ever. She flicked the lighter. “I’ve got your number, darling.”
On their way back past the bar, she poured three different drinks, her hands picking deftly among the bottles. “On the house this time,” she said as she tipped back her own glass and returned to her work, the cigarette behind her ear.
Liam and Jilly took their drinks and continued to an empty spot along the railing overlooking the dance floor.
Jilly looked into her glass and snorted. “Absinthe. How chic.”
“Speaking of which, now that you’re immortal, don’t you think you’re too old for blue hair?”
“Even if you’re immortal, don’t you think you’re still too young to be such a drag?”
He took a draft from the pint of dark beer Bella had drawn him. “I’d look terrible with blue hair.” The tip of his tongue caught the faint shimmer of foam on his upper lip.
She froze at the pang of lust that arrowed through her. Damn, how could she blame that errant sexual escapade on saving her life if she wanted a repeat performance now with no excuse? She downed her evilly green glowing drink in one swallow. The herbal astringent puckered her throat and she made a face.
Liam was watching her. “How are you feeling?”
“Better.” When he raised an eyebrow, she realized that might’ve been a little insulting. She let it stand. “Why’s Bella so odd?”
He gave her another look. “She who is possessed probably shouldn’t throw stones.”
“I’m not stoning her.” Although the thought held a certain appeal. “Is she human?”
“As far as I can tell. I’ve been wondering if she’d serve as our new Bookkeeper.” At her questioning sound, he explained, “The league has always had an outsider, not talya, who acts as historian and researcher and sometimes our last connection to the worldly realm. We’ve been without a Bookkeeper for some time now.”
At his suddenly forbidding tone, Jilly asked, “Did the last one die?”
“Unfortunately, no.” He didn’t elaborate. “Bella guesses that we are something more than we seem. And she has hinted at connections that could be useful to the league, underground resources that keep us out of the everyday eye.” He returned his attention to Jilly. “I hoped having you along would make her more comfortable about joining the crew, knowing there are other women.” He scowled. “When I make Sera come here, she makes me dance.”
Jilly smiled, picturing his lean self in a white leisure suit, busting a Travolta. Then her amusement faltered. “I bet you’d have fine luck with Bella if you came by yourself and offered her a place in your . . . league.”
“No need to insinuate,” he said. “Bad enough having female talyan, which at least has precedent if I’m willing to go back a few thousand years. A female Bookkeeper goes against our entire history.”
“Your history is not your future. I tell—told the kids that all the time.”
“I am not one of your naive runaways.”
“No.” Jilly pushed her glass away.
Liam stared into his beer, as if he might find answers there instead. “Still, you’re right that what has worked before isn’t working now. I’ll do whatever I must to lead the league into these new dangers.”
Into danger, she noted. Not out of. But she supposed that part hadn’t changed. “Even if that means accepting the inevitable woman or two. How open- minded of you.”
Violet flared across his eyes, more intense than the strobe of the club’s pulsing lasers. “Our last Bookkeeper betrayed us and lost his soul and his mind in a very bad bargain. A friend of Sera’s found a place for him among the angelic host. But he’s alive simply because, without his soul, he can’t die.”
She let his anger wash over her. From experience, she knew better than to cut short the words now that he’d started.
Sure enough, he went on. “Sickeningly, I take some consolation in his predicament because at least he brought it on himself. The others, the talyan, I send out to their pain and destruction.” His voice dropped, which only underscored the anguish rather than fed the anger. “They go out and suffer and die on my word.”
She sat in silence with him for a minute. “As I understood it, they go out because it is their destiny, one they absorbed with the demon. Unless your demon double was there for all their possessions too?” She gave him a wry look.
After a moment, his lips quirked. “None of the men mentioned it.”
“Then maybe you’re assuming a little more guilt than is due you.” She kept her tone neutral. “I’m sure you can lay claim to enough wickedness without that.”
He finished the beer in a long gulp and thumped the glass down with extra force. “You are teasing me.”
“I don’t tease.”
He swept her with a glance that shifted from violet to a smoldering blue. “No. I guess you didn’t.”
He was trying to distract her. The heat that traced over her skin sank deeper, into her bones, like a hook that drew her helplessly to him.
But she was not helpless. Hadn’t been for a very long time. She refused to contemplate how the demon playing on that fear had gotten her here. Could a discord demon play at all, or would it be out of tune? The fleeting, irreverent thought gave her the impetus to lean along the railing and put her hand on his arm. The shock doubled back along her nerves, but his eyes widened. Good.
She met his gaze, dark not with the rising demon but with desire. The sparks between them snapped a little higher. Then she deliberately removed her hand, letting her fingers trail up his arm for a heartbeat. “I just wanted to remind you, Liam, sometimes it’s not all about you charging in and taking command.”
His eyes crinkled with sudden amusement. “I can hold back, let someone else go first.” He wrapped his long fingers loosely around her elbow and reeled her closer. “Didn’t I?”
The darkness of his long coat around his wide shoulders made a private space at the crowded rail. While she struggled to decide whether she was more annoyed by his male arrogance, insolent manhandling, or the fresh jolt of lust that shot through her, he said, “Now let’s see what you can do.”
She stared up at his mouth, remembering the graze of his lips on her skin. “Here?” The boss man was kinkier than she’d guessed.
“No horde-tenebrae here,” he said. “We’re done with our drinks. Next stop, draining a malice.”
She jerked her gaze up to his eyes. He hadn’t grabbed her arm just to continue their touchy- feely moment. He was studying the bracelet peeking out beneath the cuff of her jacket. The silvery metal seemed to absorb the light around it, deadening the air.
Yeah, it sucked all right. “The horde. Of course.” The reason they were here. The reason he was here with her.
The memory of the headless feralis in the alley snuffed the embarrassed heat lingering in her cheeks as they left the club, Liam cutting a swath through the crowd. It would never occur to him to think of leading her on. He’d simply lead and expect her to follow.
And it was one thing to think about taking on a trio of ferales with a box cutter when she was in crisis- hero mode. It was something else to head out, stone-cold sober despite the wimpy absinthe, with the intent to slay demons.
They passed the bouncer with another man-to-man nod from Liam. Would she ever master that distant coolness? Or did one have to have a big, dangling . . . hammer to pull it off?
She stopped and turned on her heel to face the bouncer, her jacket only half zipped. “Bella mentioned you’ve had to toss some solvo dealers lately. You confiscate any fake IDs? I’m missing one of my halfway-homeboys.”
The bouncer looked her over as he passed another couple into the bar. His gaze lingered a moment on the neckline of her T-shirt. Then he dug through his back pocket and brought out a fistful of ID
s. “We hand ’em over to the police once a week.”
She shuffled through the cards. “I don’t see him. It was a long shot, but thanks.” She handed back the plastic stack with a smile.
Liam fell into step beside her. “What was that about?”
“Those were some pretty half-assed fakes. Not a competent lamination in the bunch.” When he lifted an eyebrow, she shrugged. “I worked with budding juvenile delinquents, remember? I know my fake IDs. I’m guessing bouncer boy tosses the wannabes and passes at least a few of the pros for a cut of their profits.” She slanted a glance at Liam. “I wonder if Bella knows.”
His brows drew together. “She knows how dangerous the desolator numinis chemical is.”
Jilly gave him a look. “Anyway, now we have a line on the dealers we can follow.”
“Follow to what?”
“To what got Andre, to the source of solvo. Or at least a step closer.” At his deepening frown, she continued. “To get solvo off the streets.”
“That’s not our primary goal.”
“To end evil—”
“We battle demons.” He strode ahead, forcing her to hustle to keep up with his long stride.
“Solvo dealers are demons,” she pointed out.
“Of the human kind. We’re more literal minded.”
“The definition of insanity is hoping for something different when you’ve been doing the same thing over and over for—”
“For eons. Since the dawn of man.”
They passed below a broken streetlight. In the shadows, the edge of his jaw and cheekbone seemed harsher.
“Of man,” she reiterated. “Not woman. You said female talyan just appeared on the scene.”
“Reappeared,” he said reluctantly. “We have old texts mentioning them. Just nothing recent. And by recent, I mean eons.”
“You said you were willing to do anything. You even did me—”
He slammed to a halt. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, what we’re up against. Just like you never really knew what those kids were facing, even though you were out on the street every day. At least Sera had a degree, and she was just helping people die. What makes you think you’re ready to fight the power if you don’t know how to wield it?”
Each accusation snapped her like a whip, cutting deeper. She stumbled a step back, as if she could avoid his words. “If you think I’m so useless, why am I here at all?”
“Ask your demon. Oh, wait. You can’t, since it’s trapped inside you. You have no one to ask except me.” He straightened to glare down at her. “And I’m telling you, all that fury you’re beaming at me is about to bring down a world of hurt on both of us.”
“What do you—?”
A malice boiled out of the alley, another up from the sewer grating in the gutter, still another down from the shattered light. A flood of oily black smoke swept around them at knee level. At the stench of rotting egg, tears poured from her eyes.
With a strangled curse, Liam grabbed her hand and leapt onto the roof of a battered sedan parked at the curb. They landed with a thump, and the peeling vinyl of the rooftop shifted under her boots. She kept hold of his coat and scrambled to right herself.
The malice milled for a moment, as if they’d lost the scent.
“I hate it when I’m so right,” Liam murmured.
The malice swirled into a horizontal funnel cloud of blackness. The open maw stretched wide enough to encompass the car itself.
She clutched his coat tighter. “You said malice traveled in small flocks.”
“And you said you wanted new.” He shrugged under her grip. “Since when are you so clingy?”
“I’m looking for your hammer.”
“Xiao-Jilly, now is really not the time.”
She would gladly have knocked his head off. “A swing and a miss, you jerk. We’re about to get massacred.”
“No material weapon can stop them. We have to match our demonic emanations to theirs and siphon them off etherically, but I have never seen a mass formation like this. One by one, my ravager could overwhelm this lot in a night, maybe two, but all of them together . . .”
“There’s something you can’t do? Any other time, I’d be fascinated, really. But about plan B?”
“I’m hoping that will come to me in the next few seconds.”
Then the maw, all obsidian razor claws and sparking crimson eyes, closed over them.
CHAPTER 8
Liam stared up through the inverted cone of whirling etheric dissonance. At the apex, the tiny circle of night sky seemed almost bright in comparison. And then it disappeared as the malice tornado tightened, with Jilly and himself at its center.
He let it all go. Anger. Fear. All feeling. Only danger remained.
And he was that danger.
He pulled Jilly close, away from the bristling smears of black smoke. She nestled into him, her hand fisted in the front of his shirt, but her eyes shone violet, and he knew she would not back down, no matter what.
That feeling—the feel of her, so heady and terrifying—he could not banish it even as he called his demon to the fore. “The malice are drawn to evil. So let’s show them what demons can do.”
Keeping Jilly against his chest, he reached out toward the funnel. After a moment, she followed suit, stretching her fingers to the other side. The woven metal strands of her bracelet shone with opalescent fire to his teshuva-altered vision.
Her fingers touched the spinning wall just as his did. The surge wrenched through his shoulder and rocked them both, but she steadied him, with her free arm tight around his waist, his knee braced between her thighs.
Their touch brought the engulfing tornado to a screeching halt. The shriek echoed through the immobile ranks of malice, the hint of dark wings, forked tails, and glittering points of eyes like a worn frieze of ancient evil.
Where the points of their fingers speared into opposite sides of the wall, black ooze dripped, as if they’d pierced a hole through to something much uglier than the vaguely animalistic malice.
Jilly slanted a glance up at him. “Now what?”
Despite the unusual pattern of their attack, the familiar malice chill spread up his arm and he clenched his teeth. “We drain what we can. The teshuva’s stronger emanations will align and devour.”
“You said there are too many. Or were you being modest?” The strain in her voice tugged at his heart despite her attempt at a light tone. “I think my demon will puke.”
Rage and fear nibbled around the edges of his control, more chilling than malice teeth. Not that he feared for himself. He would go down fighting in a swirl of etheric dissonance if it came to that. But he would not lose his tyro on her first night.
His arm trembled with the effort of holding that seething wall in place. He couldn’t believe Jilly withstood the mounting pressure. Of course, his admiration wouldn’t mean much if they were swamped by the black tidal wave.
Too many. His demon was ancient and strong, and its energy patterns had subsumed thousands of the horde-tenebrae, overshadowing those lesser patterns and reweaving them into itself. But with so many malice, the mass was too chaotic for the teshuva’s energy to overwhelm.
At least, for his teshuva alone.
He tightened his grip on the woman beside him. Despite the peril that had his ravager locked in destruction mode—or maybe because of that distraction—he was keenly aware of her on a visceral male level. The softness of her curves. Her scent, sweet and unruly like a wild spring wind tearing through cherry blossoms. Insanity, but he could not stop thinking of the scant hour lost in her body. It should have been all night. No, nights.
Now they’d be lucky to see the dawn.
“Only one thing left to do before we die,” he murmured.
She glanced up at him in question, and he kissed her.
He had not quite understood how Archer could risk his heart, his very soul, even the world itself, just for his talya mate. They had a duty, damn it, a mission—all
of them.
But duty, mission, heart, soul, and world were mere tinder to the conflagration that swept him on Jilly’s soft moan as his lips passed over hers.
He loosed his grip on the blackness around them, the better to enfold her in his embrace. She molded herself to him, the slick, soft fabric of her unzipped puffy jacket crushed against his chest. Half hidden by the neckline of her T-shirt, the reven-sparked wings of her butterfly tattoo fanned his desire. The black wall of malice swirled into sickening motion, faster and faster. And they mattered less than scattered leaves in the flames that consumed him. All was madness. And he didn’t care in the least.
On some level, he realized that didn’t bode well for the world.
The cyclonic wind tugged his coat and whipped his hair to tangle with Jilly’s blue spiked locks. When she cupped his face, angling her jaw to deepen the kiss, her fingertips brushed the reven at his temple. At her touch, the bracelet around her wrist glimmered as if coming to life. The lunatic malice swarm was like a negative of the silvery interweaving, the strands that looped around and back, lost in themselves, trapped. . . .
He drew back suddenly. “We don’t have to drain them. We just have to trap them.”
He struggled to focus past the chaos of the malice, of the bracelet, of his lust. Underneath was . . . stillness, at least. If he could reach it. “Lau- lau said the knot work was a demon trap. We use that pattern.”
She swayed against him. “I don’t want to be trapped.”
“Not us. The malice.” After that kiss, he refused to think how trapped he might be.
She took a step back from him. The whirling malice had tightened their circle, and the oily black smeared past them. He also didn’t want to think what would happen if he was wrong.
To be eaten in a single gulp by a monstrous feralis would suck, but death by a thousand malice mouths was just no way for a talya to die. His demon would never forgive him.
He held her hand tight. The bracelet glinted between them. He raised her fist. “Bend the malice to this pattern. Back upon themselves. Evil consuming evil.” His voice fell into a rhythm, almost a chant. He held her gaze every bit as tight. “Locked into eternity. Trapped. Leaving us free.”