by Jessa Slade
He paused, his stillness taking on a predatory air. Her breath caught.
Then she narrowed her eyes when she wondered if he might be taking her seriously. “Don’t even try it,” she warned. “Not when you won’t listen to any of my other suggestions.”
“Whatever keeps the rest of my crew safe.”
He didn’t make a sound, but she knew by the change of air pressure, by the whispered scent that was just his, that he had come over to the bedside. His voice was a low murmur that barely reached her ears. “I’d chain you to me if I had to.”
He might have come to lead the league by default, but he didn’t shirk his duty. His never-ending, undying—until he was summarily executed by some vicious hell beast—duty. And he didn’t have to say that she could get him killed too, just as Perrin had lost what was left of his life. The chill that had started in her spine when he’d left the bed enveloped her like the black lines of the reven that curled toward her heart.
“I won’t go anywhere.” She looked up at him so he could see the truth in her eyes.
The touch of violet lent his blue eyes a searchlight brightness as he studied her.
“I might find Dory without you,” she continued, never dropping his gaze. “But whatever else you think of me, I’m not stupid enough to believe I can take Corvus by myself.”
Still he did not speak.
So she added, “I don’t want to be bound to you any more than you want to be bound to me.”
She gave him a chance to say he did want it—wanted her. Instead, he stiffened, almost imperceptibly, but with her focus on him, she saw it. She knew it had been a cheap shot, but she didn’t really care. He couldn’t have his arrogant, dictatorial league-leader cake and eat her too.
She kicked back the covers, ignoring the flash of skin she was giving him. He’d already made clear he wasn’t going there, so what did it matter?
He averted his gaze—more than she’d done for him—as she grabbed her jeans. It was the same pair she’d worn looking for Dory, the same as she’d worn in the hunt for the salambe. The denim was soiled with birnenston, shards of glass, and blood.
She dropped it. “Go. I just want to shower. I’ll be here to hunt tonight, no worries.”
She turned away, stripping off her T-shirt, and heard him scramble. She huffed out a breath. She’d scared away men before, but not usually at this point. What an ego buster.
The bathroom wasn’t much nicer than a utility closet, her skin sallow in the humming fluorescents, but the water scalded away the filth and the worst sting of the past twelve hours.
Not that she expected the memory of Perrin’s broken body or Jonah’s spurting blood would ever go away. And ever was a very long time now.
She didn’t linger, and she barged back into her room wrapped in a towel, determined to shock her boss once and for all.
But Liam was gone. As were her dirty clothes. Fresh blacks were laid out on the crisply made bed.
“Sure knows how to wipe away all the evidence,” she muttered. “Like he was never even here.”
She dressed, wincing when she bumped the tender skin on her side. The demon was taking its sweet time patching her up. Although she supposed if she compared it with her recovery time after her stabbing, she should be grateful. No sense being all unappreciative just because she had to sell her soul. Her health insurance plan hadn’t been that great before either.
She pulled on the clean jeans. They were sized for her ass but a little too long in the leg, so she rolled the cuffs. Her new boots smelled of fresh leather, and her throat tightened briefly with ridiculous sadness. Her old boots had been perfectly broken in.
As she walked out into the hallway and closed the door to her room, she contemplated leaving the warehouse. But no, that was something best left to the clueless chick running toward danger, usually with her pants off. She’d keep her promise to Liam, since she’d already laced up her boots, so it was a little late to get half naked and full-on stupid. The moment for that had come and gone last night.
She passed the kitchen on her way out and saw a dozen talyan eating leftovers. A few looked up and nodded as she went by. She nodded back. She’d have to find some way to get the KP duties taken care of on a regular basis. The league didn’t offer a golden parachute—she blanked the image of Perrin going over the roof—so it could damn well provide a prep cook. She banished the memory of her sister at the counter too.
At this rate, she wouldn’t have many memories left.
The basement lab was dark except for one bright construction light clamped above the central table. Sera and Ecco hunched over an empty glass-walled container bracketed with metal electrodes. Off in the shadows, the fishbowl lay open, its angelic glow exhausted.
Jilly froze. “Did it get out?”
They glanced at her. Ecco lifted his hands, speckled with faint scarring like hers after she’d wrestled the salambe. “Had to take it apart, but we got a good shred.”
In the harsh light, Sera’s face was pale and drawn under her lopsided blond ponytail. Jilly wondered if she’d slept at all. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I dissected worms in high school biology. After that, it was mostly theory and philosophy.” She clenched her hands, as battle bruised as Ecco’s.
“So what’s your philosophical theory now?” Jilly edged closer to the table.
Sera reached around to rub her shoulder, knocking the ponytail farther askew. “We’ve already seen how the salambes seem to occupy a morphology somewhere between the incorporeal malice, which feed off of but never invade living flesh, and the ferales, which convert dead-animal matter into working husks for themselves.” She clicked off the desk lamp beside her and pushed a button on the side of the glass box.
Jilly blinked in the sudden dark, poised to rally her teshuva. But the electrodes on the box began to glow. A pulse crossed the glass. And the salambe within roiled into view.
“Dim the lights, send a few positive ions through—the same kind of energy that drives the Santa Ana winds that make people crazy and the opposite of the negative ions at the beach that seem to calm people down—and voilà,” Sera said. “Cool light show and absolutely no practical application.”
Jilly walked around to the other side. At closer range, she could see the solder gleamed with gold flecks. Some angelic force infused the box where Sera and Ecco had basically recreated the hothouse under more secure conditions.
The salambe’s coiling energy mesmerized her. She shook off the trance as the electrode pulse faded and the salambe dimmed again. Ecco turned the lamp back on. The salambe was all but invisible in the bright light.
“So the salambes occupy the same place in a haint as the soul used to,” Jilly mused.
Sera shrugged. “Nothing in league archives offers any clue. There are references to a vaster array of tenebrae than what we’ve seen, but previous Bookkeepers seemed to think everyone must already know what they were talking about.” She hissed out a breath. “Overconfident snobs. They thought they’d always be walking the same path, not necessarily winning the war against evil, but not challenged either. Now, when we most need that information, I don’t even know where to start looking.” She glared at Jilly through red-rimmed eyes. “Do you have any idea what sort of paper trail gets left in a handful of millennia? More like a paper mountain.”
“Still,” Jilly insisted. “The salambes obviously can’t use a human with the soul on board. When I was fully engulfed, I could feel it chewing at me.” She kept her voice even, as if that horror were no worse than a few mosquito bites. “Maybe given enough time and a few more friends, it could have forced my soul out and taken over. But the solvo makes room for the salambe by removing the soul, so it’s reasonable to assume that the salambe is operating some of the same mechanisms as the soul.”
Ecco stared at her. “You make it sound like puppetry.”
She gave him a bitter glance. “Isn’t that what we are now? Puppets for the teshuva?”
He shook his head
. “I fight because I want to. The teshuva just makes the fun last longer.”
She studied him. Did he honestly believe that? But he was far more experienced than she, and she couldn’t call her demon into fine enough focus to call him out as a liar. Plus, that’d probably just be a really bad idea.
She huffed. “Forget it. Never mind what we are. It’s what the salambes can do that matters. If they offer a guide into the ruined pathways of the abandoned soul, we could put an end to solvo addiction.” What had seemed so worth getting fired over when she imagined Andre, lost on the street, had become a miniature feralis clawing at her heart when she imagined her sister, not lost, but found. By Corvus.
Sera tilted her head. “The league would at least be back to the same place it was before Corvus set his sights on destroying us.”
A small foam-lined casket stood open on the table behind Sera, the shards of a broken glass vial upended in the place of dishonor.
Jilly studied the debris. “Dory stole the solvo out of there?”
Sera nodded. “Smash and grab.”
Just beyond the reach of the lamp, the fragments still glimmered with a pearlescent sheen. Even the dust of the raw solvo she and Liam had retrieved from the sewer possessed a luminescent beauty completely at odds with the bare-bones lab, its seething box of trapped evil, and three worn fighters.
She pointed at the glass sliver. “Put that in with the salambe.”
Sera hummed under her breath. “Interesting.”
Ecco stared at Jilly under wrinkled brows. “They used to let you work around children?” He directed the incredulous look at Sera. “And poor dying people? You’re like mad-scientist girls.”
Sera steepled her fingers in a serious pose, but she winked at Jilly. Who would’ve guessed she’d find an ally in the crew’s good girl?
Jilly turned a fierce, challenging smile on Ecco. “C’mon, now. Who’s going to get hurt, after all?”
“Um, us?” But he leaned forward curiously as Sera plucked a shard from its resting place.
The faintest scent of rain teased them. They all inhaled.
“Okay, that’s just wrong,” Ecco said. “Sulfur, rotting dead things, even rusty metal, I was okay with that. But a quiet night’s walk in the forest primeval? Very wrong.”
Jilly stared at the glimmering glass. “I wonder what it tastes like.” She winced when Ecco punched her shoulder.
“Stop it.” His voice was harsh. “That sort of drifting is what gets a talya killed.”
She blinked at him. “I wasn’t—”
“You start wondering what it’s like to check out, and that’s the end of you,” he said. “Oh, you might not die right away, what with being immortal and all, but your existence becomes pointless, and even if you never take the solvo, your soul will be lost.”
The word bounced cruelly around the hollow space, and even the beguiling scent of the solvo couldn’t dampen it. Jilly lifted her chin, studying the big talya. “Projecting much?”
Ecco flushed, the white thread of his new scar more obvious against his red face.
Sera cleared her throat. “Let’s just agree we’re not going to be checking out any time soon. I think Jilly’s experiment sounds”—she lifted her eyebrows—“fun. You should appreciate that, Ecco.”
He scowled. Then shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Do it.”
Sera tweezered the solvo-dusted splinter of glass and held it up at eye level. “Not enough to get anybody high,” she said doubtfully.
“But maybe enough to steal a soul.” Jilly shifted to the balls of her feet and noticed Ecco looked similarly prepared.
Working through a small, gold-lined portal in the glass container, Sera tapped the shard into the salambe’s cage.
Nothing.
“Not as fun as I thought,” Ecco said.
“Hit the ion pulse,” Jilly said. “People take solvo when they are hurting. If the positive ions re-create that experience—”
Sera pushed the button.
The electrodes gleamed. The salambe flared to life for a heartbeat.
Then the angel-blessed glass ignited.
CHAPTER 25
“What? The explosion on the roof wasn’t enough for you? Losing Perrin and Jonah’s arm wasn’t enough?”
Liam paced in front of the three miscreant amateur metaphysics professors, pausing at the turn just long enough to glare at them. His temple throbbed with fury, and the demon burned in every muscle, begging him to unleash on something, someone.
Jilly.
He froze in front of her, deafened by the angry pound of his heart in his chest. She’d said she wouldn’t go anywhere, and yet she’d managed to find the worst sort of trouble in the only stronghold he had left. She defied him even while obeying his orders.
Ecco cleared his throat as he picked at a shard of glass embedded in his cheek. “Admittedly, it wasn’t as much fun as we’d anticipated—”
Sera and Jilly winced as Liam wheeled on the other male. “Fun?” His voice throbbed with demonic lows.
For once, Ecco didn’t respond by summoning his own demon. He just settled deeper in his chair. “Did I mention it was Jilly’s idea?”
Liam clenched his fists until his whole body was just one aching desire to detonate.
Although they hadn’t seen fit to invite him to that fun.
“The results support my theory.” Eagerness rose in Jilly’s tone as if she didn’t notice—didn’t care about—his edging into violence. “If solvo shreds souls and salambes, then maybe souls and salambes are more alike than we know.”
“So what?”
She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “So you should be glad we discovered that solvo destroys salambes.”
“Are we going to become pushers ourselves? Manufacture more of the stuff?” He stalked closer to her. “Will we become what we most hate?”
She tilted her face up. “You mean more like.”
He didn’t recoil, but her point struck home. Why did he want to hold to the old ways? Where had it ever gotten them? Except further behind, as he lost his already-too-few men to Corvus’s new threats. Why did he keep thinking he had any place left at the head of this fight?
He should drift away gracefully as Roald had before him, make room for the young and hungrier.
Damn it, no. No matter how much easier it might seem to step aside, he knew better than most what sort of trouble the young and hungry got into.
He glared at Sera. “You at least I trusted to know better. As our interim Bookkeeper, you should have come to me before trying anything extreme.”
She stared at him, but not in challenge. More with pity. “You can’t do it all, Liam. That’s how a team works.”
“And I am still leader.” But they must know how close he was to losing it. Especially Sera, who had been kidnapped by her frantic mate when she’d volunteered to sacrifice herself—with Liam’s sanction—to save the world. If he ran off, would he do so to escape the league, or to avoid chancing Jilly as he’d risked another talya’s mate?
Once again, he pushed away the impossible question. He glanced sharply at the broken vial of solvo. The larger portion of the sample was gone, thanks to Dory, and still the stuff was a hazard. “Seal those pieces,” he snapped. “It’s a bad influence, obviously. Ecco, clean up this mess. Sera, Archer wants to talk to you.” He speared her with a glance when she grumbled. “Jilly, come with me.”
He wasn’t amused when Ecco wiped his brow with exaggerated relief.
Liam stalked out, leaving Jilly to follow. He’d trust the same self-preservation instincts that had made her duck away from the worst of the exploding glass would make sure she followed immediately and silently.
He should have known better.
In the stairwell, the drag of her steps behind him made him grit his teeth. “I can finish chewing you out in front of the others, or you can pick up your feet and take your licks in private.”
She gave a short, low laugh. “Why start now?” When he whirled to
glare at her, she just glared back. “Lay a hand on me, and you will regret it for the rest of your suddenly very short life.”
A protest sprang to the tip of his tongue that he would never lay a hand on her, but that’s exactly what he wanted to do. He was so tired of the dance. It was worse than fighting, this circling around what was between them.
If he just indulged it . . .
No, that was sin itself talking. And he didn’t even have the excuse of the raw, exposed solvo nearby.
He tightened his fists against the urge to reach for her. “I want just one peaceful night of destroying tenebrae. Is that too much to ask?”
“No one’s stopping you,” she snapped. “Oh, wait. Except Corvus.”
He glowered at her. “And you.”
The stairwell was as uncomfortable a place for seduction as he could imagine—other than the middle of a tenebrae attack—and still his body yearned toward her. And here he’d always thought he had the inevitable talya death wish firmly under control.
He had nothing under control when he was with Jilly.
He took a long breath and let it out even more slowly. “I don’t want to fight with you again.”
“And yet we do it so well, remember?”
He couldn’t help but smile at the wry note that crept into her voice. “Yeah.”
“You told me not to go out, and I didn’t.” When he opened his mouth to point out that she’d found plenty of trouble anyway, she pinned him with a glare. “I get at least a few points for that.”
“You get minus points for destroying company property.” He held up one hand. “But I’ll count you back at zero if you aren’t around any more explosions for the rest of the night.”
She huffed as if his request was a huge imposition. “If we had enough raw solvo, we could launch it into a room of salambes—maybe even use it against malice and ferales—from a distance, and no one would get hurt.”
He gave her a reproving glance. “Except for anyone caught in the resulting cataclysmic blast. You said Sera used just the smallest bit of leftover solvo, and look what it did.”
Jilly chewed at her lip and looked away. “But we wouldn’t have to risk anyone in the hand-to-hand again. If it works, the talyan could overcome the tenebrae without having to get close enough to match their demons against each other.”