Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  The birnenston, she realized, was killing her slowly. The teshuva sputtered in her veins.

  In a fury, the tangled mess of salambes and ferales broke over the rooftop.

  Like a lightning rod, Perrin’s spears shattered in a spray of shrapnel and knocked him away. Jilly flinched at another sharp pain that lanced through her side, like a runner’s cramp. The backlash tumbled her, boots over head. Ferales slammed down against the asphalt, driven as hard as the talyan by the salambes’ force.

  The salambes whirled together again, sucking up the shrieking, flapping ferales. Jilly’s skin crawled as the collection of malevolence seemed to find its focus.

  And plunged straight at them.

  Ecco ducked and covered, clutching the bowl. Jonah screamed a warning. She raised her fist, the knot-work bracelet tight around the clenched muscles of her forearm.

  For a heartbeat, the demonic cyclone seemed to hesitate. They remembered what had happened to their trapped kin.

  Then the cyclone split and hit the rooftop to either side of her. The asphalt buckled and bowed in one violent contraction.

  She was flying. She had a hazy moment to wonder if a winged feralis had grabbed her, and thought maybe she could convince it that they should escape together; then she crashed down. Glass shattered an arm’s length away, and she realized she’d just missed smashing into the ruins of the hothouse. Lucky her, something softer had broken her fall.

  Then the birnenston began to congeal around her.

  “Jilly, get up. Get out of there.”

  Shaking off her daze, she realized the shattering glass had been Jonah, blown on a trajectory only a few feet from hers. He’d hit the wreckage of the hothouse. The twisted metal frame had collapsed around him, leaving him half in, half out of the shed. And a guillotine of plate glass hung above him.

  She met Jonah’s clear gaze. No fear. No telltale violet either. His teshuva had been driven deep by the poison that had leaked out of the hothouse all around them.

  Wildly, Jilly called out, but her voice broke. Too far away, Archer and Sera were driving ferales away from Perrin, who was on his knees. Not ten feet away, Ecco’s bulk was slumped over. Dead? Jilly prayed he still held the fishbowl in the curve of his body. She didn’t see Liam at all. Suddenly, prayer seemed pointless.

  Thick ropes of ooze clung to her knees as she struggled upright. She tried to tear free, but her boots were hopelessly mired. She remembered the haints embedded in the stalagmites, trapped and dying.

  There was a glint on the asphalt. Her crescent knives, fallen from her dissolving coat. If she could cut her bootlaces open . . .

  She scrabbled toward them, contorted by her trapped legs. Her reach fell short.

  Ah, to be a few inches taller. Or if only she’d been wearing nice pumps she could’ve slipped out of.

  A piercing tingle traced through the birnenston wounds. Her teshuva’s version of a warning she didn’t need. The nearest ferales flapped in tattered circles around the rooftop, broken, but the salambes were re-gathering.

  The ventilation fan, knocked half loose from its moorings, began to turn. To her horror, Jilly realized that the salambes, lacking corporeal shells, would use anything at hand to destroy their enemy.

  The smoky ether of the salambes twined through the blades, whirling them into a blur. The bang of loosened metal pounded in Jilly’s head. When the fan jolted loose, the shearing weight of it would chew through anything in its path. Like Ecco, Jonah, and her.

  She strained for her knives. “Liam,” she screamed. And tore one boot almost loose.

  She reached an inch farther. But her other boot was utterly swamped in birnenston. Her hands slid through the greasy slicks of it, and the corrosive poison ate at the skin between her fingers. Impossible. She had no fight left.

  The deafening clatter of the fan told her only seconds remained before the salambes worried it free. She flinched at another crash of metal, closer. As if the threat could be any more immediate.

  Again, Jonah threw his weight against the twisted metal cage that held him. He heaved again and again, with enormous strength despite being pinned with his whole arm in the wreckage. The thick plate of broken glass above him quivered.

  “Stop!” Jilly cried.

  He didn’t. He wrenched free. But not quick enough, his teshuva almost dormant.

  The glass sheeted down. Jonah tumbled back with one agonized scream and a fountain of crimson.

  Even as he fell, he angled toward her and slapped her knives across the asphalt with the raw bone of his severed wrist.

  Sobbing, Jilly snatched the blood-drenched handles and sliced through her bootlaces in one blow. She bolted out of the birnenston, her stocking feet suctioning out of the dissolving leather of her boots, and grabbed for Jonah’s arm. What was left of it.

  “Ecco,” he gasped. “The bowl.”

  Who cared about the fucking fishbowl? With her hand clamped around the arterial spray of his brutal amputation, they staggered to Ecco and tugged him into the shelter behind the ruined hothouse just as the salambe-driven fan burst from its foundations.

  The fan blades tangled in the confusion of bent framing. Jilly covered her head, but the squeal of metal and the musical explosion of glass rang in her ears. To her shocked gaze, the hothouse looked like a version of her bracelet writ large and distorted, with the weave of metal and the gleam of ether trapped within.

  “Where’s the bowl?” Ecco rasped. Blood—his or Jonah’s, Jilly didn’t know—streamed down his face.

  “You don’t have it?” Jonah’s voice was a moan as Jilly knotted her socks in a tourniquet around his forearm.

  Halfway across the roof, Jilly saw Liam, in pursuit of the sturdy glass bowl, tumbling and half invisible in a swirl of salambes.

  And behind him were the last of the ferales.

  The putrid stench of birnenston had flatlined all her senses except horror, and she could barely keep track of which way was up. But she knew the edge of the roof was all around.

  And only a shallow lip ringed the edge.

  If the salambes pushed the bowl over, it would smash open on the sidewalk below. Blessed it might be, but it was still only glass. Who knew demons would be so keen on protecting one another?

  God knew, the teshuva couldn’t pull it off.

  Doubling back like a snake of smoke, the salambes left the bowl, which continued to roll toward the edge. Liam didn’t stop and he was swallowed in the cloud of ether. Jilly recoiled at the memory of that unrelenting agony. He’d been through it once, and he’d just done it again. Only this time, the ferales would close in and finish the job.

  She bolted to her bare feet.

  Out of nowhere, Archer, Sera right behind him, jumped into the ferales’ fray. A half step behind them, Perrin leapt at the bowl with a warrior cry.

  The salambes echoed the scream. Their shrieks lifted a scintillating cloud of pulverized glass and birnenston. Half a rooftop away, Jilly gagged on the nose-searing scent and tasted blood in her throat. The salambes whirled off Liam, who staggered but did not fall.

  Perrin had claimed some immunity from the birnenston, and he used it now. The jump carried him over the rolling fishbowl.

  “No,” Jilly whispered.

  The bowl tumbled closer to the drop. The salambe cloud darted beneath Perrin and lifted the glass sphere a foot or more into the air. It would clear the knee- high roof lip easily.

  But Perrin stabbed the yard-long shards of his spears down into the asphalt—one, two, three—in a circle around his prize. The tripod of stakes pinned a rough tepee over the glass, holding it in place.

  For a single breath, the salambes fell silent.

  Then with a thunderous roar, they swept Perrin off the roof.

  Liam straightened as if one of the stakes had gone through him. Jilly thought she might have cried out, an anguished shout she knew he would never release. Or maybe the ringing in her ears was only the salambes’ shriek as they rose to thread between the ferales
circling on the wing. In a churning mass, the tenebrae vanished into the darkness, abandoning their trapped kin.

  The other-realm wind stilled. Liam was already racing across the roof, back to the access door.

  Jilly took a step after him and fell to her knees after one bloody footprint. But her heart hurt too bad for her to feel her blistered soles.

  Sera crouched beside their little decimated trio. “Oh no,” she murmured. “Jonah.”

  He recoiled at her touch. “Save it for Perrin, death singer.”

  Lips tight, she glanced at Ecco, but he shook his head, eyes bleak. “Nothing for me either, solace bringer. I dropped the ball, or the bowl, and Perrin paid.”

  Archer stood with the fishbowl in arms. The sputtering reven on his hand flared in counterpoint to the roil of greasy demon smoke inside. “Enough. We need to get you all out of here so the teshuva can heal you up, do their job.”

  “We did the job, all right.” Jilly’s ears still rang and her words sounded hollow, as if her head were stuffed in the fishbowl along with the salambe. “It’s all about the job.”

  Sera levered her upright. “Stop it.” Her voice was gentler but as firm as Archer’s. “You know that’s not true.”

  But it was. Jilly stared down, stomach churning not at the sight of her flayed feet but at the memory of marching up to Liam and demanding to be part of the team. If she hadn’t volunteered her demon-trapping self, would the night have gone so terribly wrong? Except for the inescapable pull of the knot-work bracelet, the salambes would have fled. The talyan would have been frustrated . . . but alive and intact.

  She’d wanted to prove herself, forgetting that a rebel without a chance shouldn’t drag others down into the abyss with her.

  Without Liam to ride herd with his curt hand signals, they clustered silently together, Archer and Ecco supporting Jonah, Sera next to Jilly. One feralis could’ve thrashed them all, but their muffled footsteps roused nothing. The rough treads ground against Jilly’s bare heels and she staggered.

  Before Sera could catch her, she straightened with a guilty look back at Jonah. If he could walk at all, it was the least she could do. Holding her voice at a mere whisper, she asked, “Shouldn’t we have tried to find his . . . his arm?”

  Sera shook her head. “Did you see the wreckage the fan left?”

  “But isn’t that the teshuva’s promise, to keep us alive and well? Whole isn’t part of the bargain?”

  “It took part of our souls, Jilly. Do you think it really cares about whole?”

  Her legs still wobbled, but her feet and the birnenston blisters on her hands stopped bleeding by the time they reached the ground floor. The front door hung open, askew on its hinges where Liam had busted through without even the pretense of subtlety.

  For a moment, Jilly wished she could just walk out through the open door and keep going. But she resisted when Sera started to lead them down the street to the van. “Don’t.”

  Archer rumbled low in his throat but paced behind them.

  They turned the other direction, to the side of the building where Perrin had fallen.

  Liam stood on the empty sidewalk. He had removed his long coat, and was laying it over the still form crumpled in the flower bed.

  But not before Jilly saw that Perrin must have hit the beams of the L or the lamppost before he landed. Blood speckled the early snowdrops. She looked down. The skin on her hands was slowly smoothing over. Perrin’s wounds never would. “What’s the point?”

  “We get immortality, not indestructibility,” Sera reminded her.

  Considering what they were up against, Jilly wondered if immortality was enough.

  Jonah lifted his head, staring at the covered body. “His demon is gone.”

  “Sneaking bastards, all of them,” Ecco muttered. “I’d like to stuff them, each and every one, in a fishbowl and lock it with enough angels’ blood and brimstone to last past the end of the world.”

  “We should have let it go,” Jilly burst out. She hadn’t known the angelic seal was primed with the blood of an angel’s host. She definitely didn’t want to know how much was needed, though it couldn’t be even half as much as had poured from Jonah’s arm. “We could always have tried again.”

  “Exactly,” Archer said. “And Perrin might’ve died—finally—then instead.”

  “Jilly.” Sera’s voice was gentle. “This is what we do.”

  “But I’m the one who wanted to do it. He shouldn’t have had to make the sacrifice for me.”

  Liam finally straightened and turned to face them. His reven guttered, the ravager still struggling out from under the birnenston poisoning. “It wasn’t for you.”

  For the cause. Of course. She closed her hands into fists. The slowly healing flesh stung as if she’d grabbed sharpened steel.

  Despite her silence—or maybe because of it—Liam continued. “Sometimes you don’t get to make the call who sacrifices.”

  She lifted her chin. “If not me, when it was my idea, then who? The teshuva?”

  “Me.” With a nod, he sent Ecco and Jonah to the van. He bent and lifted Perrin’s body over his shoulder. Jilly shuddered, remembering that simple, blunt strength when he’d lifted her.

  Ecco was behind the wheel. Jonah slumped in the passenger seat beside him, unconscious, his breath hitching, the demon unable to save him from the agony even in oblivion. Archer and Sera had climbed into the far back, Archer with his arm around his mate. Jilly settled into the middle seat, arms around herself to push back the cold. Her palms and soles throbbed with returning life, which seemed vulgar with Perrin’s body behind them.

  Her morbid thoughts were derailed when Liam sat beside her. He gestured for Ecco to drive, then leaned back and put his arm around her shoulders. She realized she was shivering.

  “I never thought to stock the fleet with spare blankets.” His tone was thoughtful, as if they were discussing placing an order with Martha Stewart.

  But despite her own wounded chill and the fact he at least still had his long-sleeved button-down shirt, pure ice radiated off him. Carefully, she wrapped her arm around his chest.

  This was nothing like his cupid-carved bed. That moment of respite seemed a thousand years away. Her breath hitched in dismay when she realized, for some, like Blackbird, that wasn’t even an exaggeration.

  Liam’s grip tightened, almost to the point of pain, then abruptly relaxed. “Let me see your hands.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He stared down at her, blue eyes unblinking.

  She untucked her hand from his waist. The skin was still marked with rings of white scars like water droplets in a pond, but even those were fading. “See?”

  “So where’s all the blood from?” Without waiting for an answer, he set her to one side and nudged up the bottom of her T-shirt.

  “Hey.” She pushed at his hands.

  “Stay still.”

  She hissed when his fingers probed her side. “It’s probably Jonah’s.”

  “No, not fine.” He lifted her T-shirt. Under her breast, the black lines of her reven were quiescent with the demon dormant. “Relax. No one can see here.”

  “I’m not—Never mind.” She wasn’t tense because she was prudish. It just wasn’t right that her demon had faltered when she most needed it. Perrin had died, Jonah had had to make a terrible choice, and here she was, wishing . . . wishing things that didn’t have anything to do with death or not dying. She wanted. . . .

  She just wanted. Again.

  He let out a breath. “It missed all the important parts.”

  “Don’t we always,” she murmured.

  He glanced up. This time there was a flicker of violet in his gaze.

  She didn’t look away. “Perrin died because of us.”

  “Perrin died because of the salambes.”

  She shook her head. “If you and I had worked together, we could have bottled the salambe before the others descended.”

  From the way his jaw worked, she
knew he agreed. But he said, “If we did what we do, we could have opened a rift in the Veil that let through worse demons than the salambes.” When she flinched, he nodded. “Sera told me about the reference she found. Corvus said he learned something from us. We can’t afford to teach him any more bad habits.”

  “Then I’m useless to you.” When he drew a breath, she took his hand. “I’m not strong enough to take them on my own, which is how you want to hunt.”

  “You’re stronger than you know.”

  She tried to smile. “Oh, I have a very high opinion of myself. But I know when I’m not going to make it.”

  “Bullshit. When have you given up?”

  She stared at him. “Ask my mother. Ask Dee and Iz and the other kids who are probably wondering what happened to me.”

  “Neither of those were your fault.”

  “Ask Jonah.”

  He tried to ease his hand free from hers. “You don’t get to take that on either.”

  She kept a grip. “Because that’s yours too?”

  “Yes, damn it. You’ve been overstepping your bounds, talya. I lost a fighter tonight. It has happened before and it will happen again.” He leaned over her, gaze flat and still. “And you will stay out of it.”

  “Stay out of which part? The being guilty? Or the dying?”

  Or did he just not want to mourn with her? His arm over her shoulder could’ve been simply sharing what precious body heat remained between them.

  After all, he couldn’t want a weapon that backfired on him. She’d sown discord in the fragile team he’d built, which was nothing a bowl of soup could fix. And what little they knew about female talyan made it seem like there was no hope for any fix.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last.

  He didn’t answer.

  By the time they made it back to the warehouse, all the talyan knew what had happened. One at a time, they returned to drift through the dock where Liam had laid Perrin’s body on a stack of pallets. Jonah stood at the dead talya’s head, his arm tucked under the front of his crimson-soaked coat. His teshuva might have stopped his bleeding, but from the white lines of strain around his mouth that the demon hadn’t smoothed over, it was clear only sheer human obstinacy kept him upright.