Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  Staring down into her stricken face, he frowned. “I’d say they’re a little too free.” He tugged at her arm to bump her away from the cloud.

  Through her jacket, he felt her shiver again. A scent like iron filings chilled his lungs, and gray mists curdled around the edges of his vision.

  He tightened his grip as he felt the world shifting around them. “Oh no, you don’t. No slipping into the demon realm. Not for them.” He dragged her close, as if he could build a cage with his body to keep the bitter frost at bay.

  “No hope,” she whispered. “No last chance.”

  He’d thought the same himself, more than once, but to hear the words on her lips tore his heart. For her, he wanted to lie—never mind the fallen angel inside him—and say everything would be all right. “I thought we agreed, no drifting. Jilly?”

  But she was gone, into the demon realm on a downward spiral of anguish resonating with the doomed soulflies. So much for her tough riot-grrl attitude. And so much for his antidrifting commandments. What was the good of being boss if even his big hands couldn’t hold her?

  Ah, but he knew one technique guaranteed to light her golden eyes again.

  “For the good of the realm,” he murmured. Now he was lying to himself, because the flare of desire as he lowered his head had nothing at all to do with saving the world.

  He kissed her.

  Behind his closed lids, the crackle of ice spread, deep through his bones. And still, his body burned with wanting this, wanting her. He gathered her tighter yet, until the twin points of the crescent knife in her pocket dug into his flank.

  Her cold lips opened to him.

  Even with his eyes shut, brightness sparked around him. The unnerving mélange of ice crystals, embers, and shattered souls swirled between them, to bind them.

  Closer and closer, forcing back the threatening freeze even as her blade cut through the heavy canvas of his coat, then his jeans, until the crescent knife scored his skin. Pain spiked over the point of his hip, and the tickle of blood traced down his groin. If he’d faintly hoped poking a hole in himself would direct the flow away from other rampant parts of his anatomy, no luck.

  She warmed under his hands, and her breath sighed over his skin. She clutched him, mirroring the strength of his embrace, until, with no distance left between them, the other-realm shine of the soulflies faded. Only the hot pulse of his heavy flesh, the flash of craving as her tongue traced his upper lip, remained. He growled against her mouth as the sensation pushed him closer to the edge.

  No, he was supposed to be pulling them back from the edge. He forced himself to lift his head, dragging in a pained breath that whistled past his clenched teeth. Jilly’s lips were wild red in her honey skin. When she opened her eyes to meet his gaze, she was entirely present with him.

  She reached up and touched his temple. “It shines.”

  The reven. Thank God its translucence revealed only glimpses of other-realm and not his brain. He’d hate for her to see the thoughts circling up there. None of it had anything to do with his duties to the league. “What was drawing you away from me?”

  “Those lights.” She pressed against him. He didn’t wince although the knife dug deeper. “You Irish have all the stories of marshlights leading travelers to their deaths.”

  “Always a bedtime favorite.” He cupped his hand around the back of her neck, avoiding the blue spikes of her hair but soothing her disquiet. “We didn’t go to these lights, though. They were drawn to us.”

  She shivered and glanced over her shoulder.

  The soul flecks had streamed away from their ash piles, like miniature stars drawn off their celestial course by a black hole. What had drawn them?

  Liam laced his fingers through Jilly’s and pulled her arm out to the side, as if they were about to waltz.

  The flickers of light followed.

  “Eh, why don’t they stay over there somewhere, like, far away?” She flinched before they touched her. “The bracelet, of course. It did come from a demon.”

  “And demons do love a lost soul.” He let their joined hands drop abruptly, and the soulflies swirled in the back draft of air before resuming their slow descent toward the bracelet again.

  “I don’t want to be followed by lost souls.”

  He decided not to point out that she’d certainly made a habit of it before this. Nobody liked hearing she’d walked herself into the trap. “I don’t know how far they’ll roam from their remains. Or what remains of their remains.”

  “You knew they were here.”

  He nodded. “From the haint-dust samples we brought back to the warehouse.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How many of these must be floating around the city? Are they all converging on me?”

  He shrugged. “So far, it seems they need to be in close proximity to you to be drawn off course from their body hunt. More important, what effect are they having while they’re wandering? They’re an unnatural by-product of the chemical desolator numinis. Imagine the clog in Chicago’s spiritual gutters.”

  “Your compassion knows no bounds.”

  He stared at her. “What does compassion have to do with ridding the world of evil?”

  “Duh.”

  “We’re talking about capital- E Evil with long fangs. I can’t fight that back with thoughts of loving- kindness and affirmation bumper stickers.”

  “Paper cuts can be a bitch.”

  He scowled. “You’re the one creeped out by stalker soulflies.”

  She swung her arm and he ducked as the twinkling cloud passed over him. Free of his grasp, she glanced at him over her shoulder with an impish smile. “Who’s creeped out?”

  Before he could answer, all his demon senses kicked into high gear. She stiffened at the same time, and her smile vanished under a straining tension. As one, they whirled to face the bashed-out door where they’d entered.

  The hall was empty, but ominous vibrations rumbled through the floor.

  “What is it?” she gasped. “The salambes?”

  He crouched, waiting. “No haints left here.” Without haint bodies, salambes would be no threat.

  And he just really doubted his night would end so simply.

  Not that he felt any satisfaction about his prediction when, in a rush of sulfurous emanations that blew the soulflies apart, the feralis pack burst through the door.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jilly should have known better by now. Every time she touched Liam, the world went to hell.

  The ferales surged forward in a howl and one stinking rush. Liam met them with hammer swinging. The whistle of the weapon through the air raised her hackles. And her demon.

  Even as he knocked the first demon away, she jumped forward with the crescent blade in motion, its identical mate in her other hand. She wielded the knives as if she were a contestant in a reality-TV cooking show and the ferales were chicken carcasses standing between her and a million bucks.

  Fierce elation swept through her, as keen as the steel edge that diced the first feralis. The teshuva’s version of compassion.

  “Back to hell with you,” she snarled.

  Only filleting would keep a feralis down. The hunched rat-troll thing spewed ichor in a fountain. She ducked to avoid the spray, every motion as well plotted and precisely drawn as a panel in a great graphic novel, her demon playing her like a superheroine.

  Hero only because the role of villain had already been taken, of course.

  Liam knocked another one her way—this demon had wings. It recoiled from her attack and bounded over her head with a scream, slashing downward as it went.

  Claws tangled in her ponytails, but she slipped free. Thank God for cheap slick hair gel. But a second feralis jumped after the first, and against two demons, her blades suddenly looked much smaller than when she’d admired them on the wall in the warehouse basement.

  With a whirlwind attack that she owed entirely to the teshuva, she downed one, but the second pushed her back. Away from Liam,
she realized. A third appeared, mandibles spread so wide she swore she could see down into the hellfire animating it. Its corpulent, hairless tail swept through a pile of haint dust, and the soul flecks scattered and faded like embers off a spent Fourth of July sparkler.

  Unable to see Liam around the bulk of mutated flesh and virulent demonic energy, she darted to one side, farther from the door.

  Where was he? Her heart slammed against her chest, a human counterpoint of fear against the demon’s beating fury. This is what he meant when he said the teshuva couldn’t do it all.

  Another rush took her around the third feralis, before it cornered her. But she was definitely being bullied.

  And she’d always really hated that.

  “Jilly!”

  She whirled. There he was, a half-bashed wall at his back. Where she should be.

  She flung herself at the feralis, common sense left behind in the speed of her lunge. It recoiled at her sudden attack, and she dodged past its belated swipe.

  Liam was already in motion, one hand outstretched to pull her behind him. “Too many. We have to get out.”

  “Fight through to the door?” She wished she’d brought the chain saw as he’d teased. And maybe a spare chipper-shredder.

  “We’ll take the back way out.”

  She hadn’t seen a back door. But he tugged her along, and she followed. The dull roar of his hammer and the hiss of her blades played low and high over the growl of ferales. They were losing ground, as the demons pressed them hard toward the outer wall of the apartment. The closest feralis raised its fleshy beak to the ceiling and screeched in triumph.

  Then it leapt for them.

  With a two- handed strike, Liam blasted it from the air. He continued the arc.

  And bashed out the plywood covering the broken window. The smell of exhaust, cold metal, and night overpowered the sulfur.

  “Let’s go.” He yanked her to the jagged opening.

  “We’re three stories up.”

  “Not down. Over.”

  To the elevated train tracks.

  The feralis called again. Something answered. And then something else.

  “More are coming,” Liam said. “You have to go now!”

  Switching the crescent blades into one hand, she clambered into the window, suspended over the sheer drop. Not that she looked.

  Liam’s big hand steadied her. “I’m right behind you.”

  As if that were consolation when she imagined splatting on the pavement below. She gripped the splintered wood.

  And launched herself across the open space.

  She thrust upward, hoping to reach the top platform, but fell short. For a heartbeat, she flailed in midair with nothing to grab. Then the crossbeams of the scaffolding raced toward her.

  She hit hard. The knives in her hand clanged against the metal. She hoped she hadn’t broken anything vital—either bones or blades—and tangled her arm through the girders. She tightened her grip against the painful reverberations still zinging up her arm. No way was she losing her weapons.

  She’d caught just below the deck of the tracks. It would be an easy—a relatively easy—scramble down.

  Then she actually looked down. And saw the inflowing tide of malice. The oily shadows swamped the base of the pillars, recoiled a moment, then moved back in, as if bracing themselves for the climb.

  She knew how they felt.

  A solid thud above made her shriek. But it was only Liam, who’d nailed the jump she’d tried to make.

  He peered over the edge of the tracks. “Get up here.”

  Gritting her teeth and wishing she’d done that before she squealed like a little girl, she climbed. Her boots slipped once on the chilly steel. Liam fisted his hand in the back of her jacket and hauled her up the last few feet.

  She spared one glance for the gaping window. The ferales milled but didn’t jump. “What are they waiting for?”

  “Do we really want to know?”

  Good point. When he strode off down the tracks, she hurried to catch up. She had to watch where she put each foot. Plummeting off the tracks or stepping on the third rail now would be such a drag. “Are we getting off at the next stop?”

  “Not unless we get ahead of them.” He gestured down at the blackening of malice that kept pace below.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Keeping us pinned up here until a train comes along would be sneaky.”

  She slanted a glance at him. “Not funny.”

  “No, but effective. I wouldn’t want to pit the teshuva against a train.” He glanced back. “Not good.”

  The first feralis had made the leap to the tracks. Liam picked up his speed.

  She was eager to do the same and had to keep the toes of her boots off his heels. “I’m starting to feel like I’m being herded.”

  “Which is more than even those clever little malice are capable of, much less those ferales. So who orchestrated this reunion?”

  Her blood froze. “Reunion?”

  “He knew I’d come back to the scene of the crime. Damn it.”

  “Corvus.”

  “Played right into his hands.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I was an overconfident idiot.”

  She resisted the urge to slap him. He knew that wasn’t what she meant. And she was sick of his pretending when she knew damn well he wasn’t that at all. “What does Corvus want with you?”

  “Again, do we really want to know?”

  She thought he already did. “It’s because you’re the leader. If one foolproof way to kill a talya is decapitation—you did say that severed limbs don’t regenerate—then removing you would destroy the league.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Don’t be such a—”

  He halted and held up a hand. “Shit.”

  “I wasn’t going to be so harsh, but . . .”

  “Feel that?”

  The subliminal rumble under her feet wasn’t even enough to shake the dirt from the rails, but it made her knees weak. “Train coming. Do we—?”

  “Run.”

  But they were running toward the train, with the ferales and malice keeping them on track. Or more to the point, keeping them from leaving the track.

  In the past she’d been blamed once or twice, maybe three times, for leaping before she looked. This time, though . . . “We have to jump for it.”

  “We can’t lead the ferales into innocents. The slaughter would be appalling.” He huffed. “Not to mention the explanations. We have to wait to find the right place.”

  She didn’t have the breath to tell him waiting seemed like a bad idea. With the bad guys pressing so close, the right place could only be the wrong place.

  Then the light of the train loomed ahead of them and they were out of time.

  Without speaking, they both put on a fresh burst of speed. Up ahead, a work platform jutted off to one side of the tracks. Beyond it, a shuttered storefront was the only break in the solid brick walls lining the path. The roll-down security grille at street level was scrawled with illegible graffiti, but the plate-glass window above was miraculously intact.

  Not for long.

  The engine bore down on them. Its single light glared like the wrath of some monstrous deity, and the tracks shook in earnest. To an observer, Jilly thought, it must look like they were the two most suicidal people in the city. Unless, of course, the observer had demon-enhanced vision and could see the converging armies of malice and ferales behind them.

  Actually, they probably still looked like the most suicidal people in the city.

  “Me first this time,” Liam shouted.

  He flung himself across the gap to the building. Backlit by the oncoming train, his silhouetted duster flared like wings. In midair, he twisted, gathered the coat close—more like a protective chrysalis now—and slammed into the window.

  Glass shattered in all directions in a silver spray. He fell into the darkness beyond.

  Jilly ste
eled herself for the jump, giving him a chance to clear the landing pad. Assuming he hadn’t slashed a major artery or anything inconvenient like that.

  In a moment the train would be on her, and a moment after that—with a smidgen of luck—it would obliterate the ferales. Which would eliminate about half their problems. At least the half with corporeal fangs.

  Unless, of course, she didn’t move at all and then all her troubles would be over forever.

  Silence. Stillness. Sweet escape. For the space between one heartbeat and the next, the thought beckoned to her with chill fingers and breath like ice. Her vision grayed.

  Maybe her sister had it right.

  But that wasn’t her. Never had been.

  The roar of the train drowned the whisper of the tenebraeternum. In a rush, the night bounded back into sharp relief around her. Blinded by the oncoming light, she launched toward the black maw of the broken window.

  Thanks to Liam’s much bigger body, she cleared the opening without a single snag on the jagged remnants of glass. With the demon’s instinct, she tucked her shoulder, rolled, and stumbled into a crouch.

  The train screeched by outside the window. Or maybe that was the sound of a dozen ferales squished against the rails. A girl could dream.

  Liam was already on the move, although he glanced back once. “You still have your knives. Good.”

  She glanced down at her white knuckles. The sweat-sticky leather straps that bound the handles felt welded to her palm. Probably she’d never be able to let them go. “Seemed like a good idea to hang on to them. You guys are such hard-asses, I’m sure your armory has a crazy late-return fee.” She switched one of the crescents to her other hand.

  “Better late than . . . Damn it.”

  “Well, yeah, pretty much anything is better than—” Then she followed his gaze. “That.”

  The faint swirling stream of soul flecks flowed toward them.

  “This is another haint haunt?” She shook her head. “What are the chances?”

  “Pretty high, considering we were driven here by demons.”

  “I most definitely don’t like this.” She stiffened as the souls spiraled lazily at her, drawn to the bracelet like tiny doomed stars into a black hole.