by Jessa Slade
“Since before her pimp stabbed me. I’d gone to him looking for her.” Jilly knotted her fingers in her lap. “I can’t believe . . . She always wanted to be the rebel.”
“Runs in the family, hmm?”
She shook her head. “I was never trying to run away from anything.” She realized she sounded a little defensive. “She took off a year after my brother did. I tried to tell Mom that seventeen was too young, but she was too wrapped up in her own problems to listen.”
“Those uncles you told me about.”
After a moment, she nodded. “My brother had gotten mixed up with a guru one of Mom’s boyfriends always talked about. Maybe it was safer for Dory to leave. I had my share of run- ins with Mom’s guys too. Nothing I couldn’t handle. But Dory was always more delicate.” She clenched her fist. “Which is why I should have been there for her.”
“You had school. If you hadn’t finished, you wouldn’t have been working with the kids. They needed you too.”
Jilly grimaced. “And that’s turned out so well.” She scrubbed a hand down her face. “Don’t listen to me. I’m being morose.”
His lips quirked. “Yeah, because being Cuisinarted by malice shouldn’t bum you out.”
She smiled back reluctantly. “And then toasted by smoke demons.”
“Throw in some cheese cubes and it was practically a party.” He crossed the room toward her and parked himself in the second chair. He thunked his elbow on the table and propped his head in his hand, his eyes hidden from her, one thumb rubbing the demon’s mark at his temple.
So close, she could reach out and touch the bold eddies, plain black now with the teshuva at rest. Not that she could stroke away the sign of his possession, but maybe some of the pain. And maybe some of her own.
The moment between them spiraled out. She felt the tipping point, when she should move, should tell him. . . .
“What set you on the path that brought you here today, Jilly Chan?” His voice was soft, muted by his raised hand. “What was your penance trigger?”
“Penance trigger?” The league-specific term jolted her back from the foolish romantic place she’d been headed. Because, really, what more bound them together than these shared scraps of hell?
“Every talya can trace their personal history back to a moment marking the point of weakness in his soul. Like a nail driven into ice that starts the crack and eventually allows the demon in.”
She looked at her sister. “The hole Rico’s knife made in my lung was big enough to drive a truck through, much less a demon.” She shifted in her seat so the year-old scar didn’t press against the arm of the chair. She didn’t like wondering if that moment had been the beginning of her end.
But Liam shook his head, finally looking at her. “The penance trigger comes earlier, sometimes much earlier.”
She raised her chin. “What was yours?”
He hesitated only a heartbeat. She could almost see him steeling himself for the leap. But of course he jumped. Because he’d do anything for his precious league. He’d already sold his soul; how could baring it to her be any worse?
“I was led astray once.” He took a breath. “No. That’s not quite true. I followed willingly, without question, when I should have walked away. Someone died because of it.”
“You let that happen? I can’t believe that.”
He lifted one eyebrow with every sign of arrogance, but she sensed a vulnerability in him. “You saw me beat a woman across the room, and you think I can’t kill?”
“She wasn’t a woman, not anymore. But I meant I can’t believe anyone led you anywhere.”
“I was young.”
“Hard to believe that too,” she muttered.
He gave her a quelling glance. “Some lads of my village snuck out in the night to tear down English fences. They wanted me to bring my father’s tools. His smithing was an act of creation, but we needed the chisels and snips to destroy. I knew it was dangerous, but I went along with nary a word. A patrol caught us. They rode over a boy—slow Dougal, too frightened to drop the heavy hammer that slowed him even more—and they killed him.”
She closed her eyes, but that just made the image come clearer. She guessed from the deepening of his brogue that he was remembering too. “Here I thought the judges dealt harshly with tagging.”
“Don’t compare me to your wayward charges.” He sat back in the chair, blue eyes half lidded. “I am not that boy now.”
No, he certainly wasn’t. “Because of the demon.”
“Not immediately and by that time, it hardly mattered, but yes, that was the end.”
She wondered what crappy events could make the progression from witnessing a murder to starvation to possession seem anticlimactic.
“And you?” His question was soft but insistent.
She hesitated longer than he had. Then she looked at Dory. Where had a lifetime of the desperate avoidance of their hurt gotten them? “I could have held them together.”
“Your family.”
She nodded. “Even as a kid, I knew it was up to me. Mom was basically a kid herself. Leroy, my brother, was oldest, but he didn’t have the temperament. Dory was always the baby.”
“What chance did you have to keep things together?”
“That’s the point. I didn’t try.” As he’d described the penance trigger, she pictured the nail poised above the brittle ice. “Leroy came home one night from the so-called church people he’d been hanging with, in a rage because he couldn’t find his stash. I knew Dory had stolen it, and she’d taken some of his E even though we swore to each other we wouldn’t go that route. Mom was crying and cowering when he raised his voice, because that’s what she always did.”
She glanced over at Liam and in his gaze saw the cloudy chill in the moment before the ice cracked. “Unlike you, I did walk away. I just left them.” She straightened, refusing to drop his gaze.
But the break in the ice, when it came, did not reveal a bottomless pit of condemnation. Instead, a glimmer of warmth eased his expression. “But you didn’t really stop trying, did you? That’s why you went to work at the halfway house.”
He didn’t need a hammer; his gentle insight chipped a layer from her guarded heart. “I couldn’t keep my own brother and sister from making the same rotten mistakes as my mother. I don’t know why I thought I could help anybody else. And the only thing worse than losing track of them is finding out they ended up like Andre, or Dory.”
“You tried,” he repeated softly. “You tried to make amends.”
“Nobody hands out gold ribbons for trying.”
“Doesn’t change the need to try. Ask the teshuva.”
Repentant demons. Crazy. As crazy as her holding on to her concrete layers all these years. “You mean the demons come to us not because we’re weak but because we’re trying? Like they are?”
His brows drew together. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it put like that.”
She snorted. “Talk about hopeless codependency.”
A smile curved his lips. “Maybe in the striving there is hope.”
She glanced back at Dory. “Maybe you’re right.”
At his silence, she looked back at him. The dimple appeared in his cheek as his smile widened. “Me, right? And you said it without thumbscrews.” He stood and held out his hand. “Let her sleep. You’ve done enough tonight.”
“I have a lot to make up for.” But the tremble in her limbs told her she didn’t have much else to hold her up. She hesitated, then put her hand in his. The warmth of him made her sway as she stood.
His other hand under her elbow steadied her but brought him a little too close. Her breath caught.
His grip tightened, but when he spoke, his solicitous tone could have come straight from the demon-management handbook. “You’re tired and worried, which is a dangerous place to be with a demon. You have a lot to learn about calling on your teshuva.”
She wanted to learn, to stop what had almost happened to her siste
r, what had probably happened to Andre. She’d promised Liam she’d be a good little weapon for the league, so she wondered why it bothered her that he wanted her only for that purpose.
And she wondered at that same moment who was more dangerous—the demon inside her or the temptation of the man at her side?
CHAPTER 11
Liam felt the battering exhaustion of Jilly’s grief and guilt as if they were his own. Yet he couldn’t risk indulging those vulnerabilities he’d thought long banished.
He guided her down the hall to an empty room, careful to keep his touch impersonal, the way he would support any of his talyan. Before Sera came along, when Archer had fought nightly to the point of collapse, Liam had once or twice—which went to show how wrecked Archer had been—assisted the veteran talya to his room.
But he’d never lingered in Archer’s doorway, making sure he stumbled to his bed. He’d never had to grip the frame, fighting the urge to turn down the damn covers.
And he certainly never watched any of the others the way he watched Jilly.
What had she done to him?
“Good night.” His voice sounded more brusque than he’d intended.
She eyed him from the bed. “That’s it?”
He didn’t need his demon to sense the risky tension between them, like an invisible thread drawing him to her. And he knew well enough how easily—how willingly—he could lose himself there.
The cheap plywood doorframe dented under his fingers. “What else did you want?”
Want. The word reverberated, as if someone had plucked the thread binding them. He found himself leaning imperceptibly toward her and straightened.
“We’ll work this out later,” he said.
“ ‘This’?” Her voice sounded threatening even in its simple human octave.
He waved one hand. “Between us.”
The bracelet on her wrist gleamed as she made a fist in the covers. “Yeah. Later. Good thing we have lots of that.”
He backed out and shut the door firmly. Because what other option did he have?
From the racing of his pulse, obviously danger of some sort had been narrowly avoided.
He stalked down the hall, refusing to stretch his senses to catch the sound of her lying back upon the bed. Most likely, he’d hear only a muttered curse. He had a few on the tip of his tongue too.
It was his own damn fault there wouldn’t be anything else on his tongue tonight.
He slammed into the main warehouse on the ground floor. In an open area where they’d pushed back the dusty antiques, Sera hunched over a big dining room table fine enough to grace a Gold Coast mansion if not for the scarring scorch mark across the surface. She’d amassed a complicated tangle of beakers, wires, and computer monitors that gleamed unnaturally against the backdrop of reclaimed architecture.
“You need to find a real Bookkeeper,” she said without looking up. “Organic chem in college does not make me a legit researcher in demonics.”
“More legit than me.” Archer leaned his hip against a counter nearby, arms over his chest. “We used actual horses for horsepower in my day.”
“You just don’t want haint dust under your fingernails, Civil War boy.” She pushed a button and a faint miasma of sulfurous light pulsed from the test tube propped before her. “In a few hours, we can check again, but I’m guessing this haint sample will match leftovers that other Bookkeepers have saved of talyan whose teshuva are consumed in battle. Whether the soul is demon-marked or straight-up missing, once it’s gone, all we have left is meat.”
“Which is why we always give Bookies their own personal refrigerators,” Archer muttered.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I’m running a word search on ‘salambe.’ But you know the size of the database. And that doesn’t count the records still on freaking goatskin and papyrus.”
Liam bracketed his temples between spread fingers. The reven pulsed under his thumb. “I don’t like this. Now we face demons that can phase from body to body.”
“It’s like we started working the team angle, and now they are too,” Sera said.
Liam shot her a hard glance. “The league has been around for millennia.”
“You had a clubhouse, but you weren’t really a team.” She studied his expression before continuing. “It wasn’t any failing of yours, Liam. Keeping this crew from selfimmolation can’t have been an easy task.” She scowled down at the dusty glass in front of her. “Even without the possession problems.”
“We’re not that bad,” Archer objected. When Sera gave him a disbelieving look, he shrugged. “Anymore we’re not. Much.”
Liam squelched a twinge of jealousy at their teasing. “But what’s behind this spread of demonic influence?”
In the silence, the whir of the haint dust in the centrifuge gave a mocking chuckle.
“Whatever it is,” Archer said grimly, “we’ll deal.” He drew Sera up from her seat. When she resisted a moment, he reminded her, “It’ll still be here tomorrow.”
She sighed, and they left Liam in the big empty warehouse. Archer had the nerve to click off the lights on his way out.
Between the ambient glow of residual demonic emanations and Liam’s own restless senses, the cavern wasn’t pitch-black. But it was dark enough for him to see the cloud of faint pale shimmers hovering over the spinning test tube.
“Oh shit.” So much for hoping the haints had died peacefully. Or, if not peacefully, at least completely.
While human hosts to angels and djinn- men could see soul matter, those possessed by the repentant teshuva demons had lost the ability along with a few other useful skills. The downside of having the sanction of neither heaven nor hell. Or so he’d always been told. He shouldn’t be able to see this—hell, he didn’t want to see it.
Maybe the hovering light wasn’t a soul. Just a . . . a ghost. It wasn’t even a coherent entity. More a disjointed collection, like a firefly convention. As if that made its lurking presence easier to stomach, considering he might’ve had a hand—or a hammer—in its demise.
The league had learned from its last Bookkeeper that solvo flayed apart soul matter even as it left the physical body intact. Apparently those scattered pieces had at least enough etheric power and instinct to wander back, looking for their old home.
“You can’t go home again,” he murmured. “Even shredded poisoned leftover soulflies should know that.”
If the righteous angels and devilish djinn could see souls, he supposed it made a sick sort of sense that his teshuva stood witness to the hopeless, homeless oddments that were all that remained of some sorry spirit. Like called to like. The awareness made no difference, of course; there was nothing he could do for the soulflies. His task was to keep the league’s bodies and souls—and demons—together. Wasn’t that enough?
Apparently not, if the teshuva had granted him the ability to see this. The knowledge only drove his failures to date all the deeper into his own battered soul. Considering the rampant spread of solvo over the past five months, how many tatters of soul essence fluttered around Chicago tonight, seeking their wayward haint bodies, never to be reunited and never to pass on? His stomach churned at the thought.
He turned off the centrifuge. As the test tube came to a halt, the faint fireflies sank into the glass. They’d wandered this far; at least he could give them some small peace in the little pieces that remained.
Weariness settled in his chest, heavy as the soulflies were light. He left the warehouse and walked the corridors. To his extended demon senses, the night was quiet. He’d sent out half the crew to check the other known haint gatherings to see if they could find the salambes. He didn’t want an unidentified offshoot of the horde-tenebrae stalking the city on his watch.
Most of the other men had gone off to their own hunts. No doubt they’d seek deserving malice or ferales, matching the fury and anguish of their immortal lives against an evil that would never die.
His muscles tightened with the ravager’s desir
e to head out into the darkness, to find his own relief in sanctified violence. His vision flickered into the black-light glow of a hunting teshuva.
A flare of purely human panic seared across his open senses. He spun around to see the woman frozen in her open doorway.
“Dory.” His voice crackled with harmonic lows. He cleared his throat. “Dory, it’s okay. You’re safe.”
Her expression, though still blurred with the drugs, screamed “Liar.” He couldn’t blame her.
“Jilly is just down the hall,” he continued. “She’s sleeping. You wouldn’t want to sneak out before you see her.” Although judging from the higher flare of panic visible in her expanding pupils at her sister’s name, that was exactly what Dory wanted.
“I thought I dreamed her.” Dory’s words barely carried over the scant two feet separating them.
He took a step forward, backing her into the room. She lowered her head and gave way before him, as meek as her sister was belligerent.
He stopped, feeling like a bully. But he noticed the pill bottles Sera had left beside the table were gone.
Dory followed his glance. “I didn’t consent to be placed in some program.” When she set her jaw, chin askew, he finally recognized a faint commonality with a certain other Chan.
He shrugged. “No, you didn’t.”
“Is this a locked ward?”
“No more so than the one you made for yourself.”
She scowled at him. “You’re as bad as Jilly.”
He shrugged again.
Dory slumped through the room to sit on the bed. “How’d she find me?” Squirming, she freed the lump from her pocket and tossed the pill bottles on the rumpled bedspread. “Why’d she even look?”
“You were hanging out with some very bad people. Jilly didn’t want you to be hurt.”
Dory gave a coarse bark of laughter, more a cough. “She’s the one got hurt last time.”
“You knew about that?” Liam’s hackles prickled, same as when he faced a malice, bloated on its night’s antics.
“Who you think called the paramedics?”
“But you didn’t stay with her.” He kept the outrage out of his voice, but still she flinched.