by Jessa Slade
Jilly looked up at Liam, wishing . . . No, she’d never felt herself to be the kind of person who patched things up. “I can get them lost.”
That’s where all this had led her. To the realization that she’d run so hard from entanglements, she’d barred anyone from holding her. No wonder the kids had related to her; she’d never had a clue. And no wonder Envers at the halfway house had cut her loose. He might have been in the pay of the devil himself, but even the kids knew, at some point, it was time to grow up and face her fears.
Thanks to her teshuva, now she’d never grow up. But maybe a rebel without a chance could still face all the world’s fears.
The first flecks of wayward soul scraps wavered through the patches of gray and intermittent orange, their light as white and pure as solvo. The lights danced around her, drawn into patterns as intricate as the whorls of the bracelet. The demon talisman froze her arm, stealing energy from the part of her spirit-self existing in this realm just as it drew ether from the tenebrae.
If she could just attract enough of the salambes, the talyan out in the world would have a chance.
The first orange glow began to take shape. Hulking, crescent-horned, scimitar-clawed shape. Then another, following the glittering trail of soulflies into the pattern that was the trap ending in the tenebraeternum, where they belonged.
“Jilly.” Liam’s grip on her tightened. He covered the bracelet, his hand hot on her skin, as if he could burn away the chill. And stop what they’d set in motion. “I’m thinking this is a bad idea.”
“It’s the only way.”
“No. There are many paths. That’s what you always told the kids.”
“Many paths, yes. And they’re all leading here. To the end.”
He dragged her deeper into the gloom, the soulflies strung out behind them. “You have to listen to me for once.”
“I did. And you said this was all for the league. For the mission. For the world.”
Anguish twisted his features. “Don’t listen to that part. There’s more than that. There’s you, and me—”
The first of the salambes overtook the swarm of soul bits, swatting them aside in a contrail swirl. Liam gave a shout and leapt for it even as it attacked. She expected him to blow through it, as Ecco had during their first encounter with the incorporeal tenebrae. But Liam and the salambe collided with a force that knocked the soulflies into another swirling confusion. Jilly gasped; she knew his emanation in the demon realm wasn’t his physical self—still, destruction was possible. Maybe even more perilous, since whatever happened to the demon-mottled soul of a talya after death, its chances couldn’t be improved this close to the deeper nether-world of hell.
More salambes were phasing into the gray, their shapes clearer now than in the real world, as if the compatible energy gave them extra power. How unfair.
She gritted her teeth. Hell, like life, might not be fair, but she had a demon of her own, after all. She lifted her arm, the bracelet lofted high. The soulflies spiraled in, slowly at first, then making her dizzy with their quickening whirl.
The league wasn’t going to win. There were too many against them, her force and Liam’s split from the other talyan—split from each other—just when Corvus had found a way to bring the forces of evil together in a real army.
The soulflies were like a path, leading her farther down into the gray. She had to follow, to trap them in that spiral where they couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. Where they themselves couldn’t be hurt.
Because that’s what she’d always believed. She’d gotten trapped in her own pain and sadness. It was just easier, safer, to stay locked inside. Wasn’t Liam always telling her to be safe?
Since when had she ever done what he said?
At the thought of him, her heart contracted, and she realized, dimly, that it hadn’t done that for a while. That beating thing. Was she dying down here in the gray? She would’ve thought it would hurt more.
She didn’t want to hurt, and it hurt to love Liam when she wasn’t sure he could love her back. Not that she’d taken the chance to ask.
Love. The word lanced through her awareness, brighter than soulflies, straight and true.
Perhaps a path out, if she was brave enough to take it.
Somewhere in the gathering darkness, the thought welled up inside her, the reminder that he didn’t want her. He had a love already, the league, the mission.
Sink, the darkness whispered to her. Fall through the cracks. Get lost in the shadows.
She’d never get out.
Never have a chance to tell Liam, give him the chance to love her too.
The lost souls around her pulled her down. All those people who hadn’t found hope or strength or love. Just the solace of emptiness. The weight of those tiny shards was overwhelming.
“No thanks,” she whispered. “I’m not going to start listening now. I know what I want.” And whom she wanted.
If ever she was going to use her defiance for her own good . . .
She pushed back. The soulflies—so gently drifting in the human realm—were a cyclone around her now, the white blur of them lightening the gray. She remembered how the black malice cyclone had spun around her and Liam, and how they’d busted free together.
She’d always wanted to go it alone, but now she needed to take a lesson from the way she’d always harped at the wary kids who’d been too disappointed, too hurt by the life that had come before.
She didn’t want to be trapped in her own shit anymore. Time to get over it.
“Liam!” She didn’t reach for the demon lows; instead she dredged up all the longing and entreaty she’d never voiced and flung it out to the void.
A palm slapped over hers, and strong fingers slid down to wrap around her wrist, tighter even than the band of the bracelet.
From between the shadows, first one broad shoulder, then the rest of Liam appeared. He pulled her close. “Stay with me.”
At the feel of him, sturdy and real, tears welled in her eyes. She blinked hard. “I will.”
He must have heard the sincerity, and the extra note of something more. He looked down at her, brow furrowed. She touched his jaw, and the confusion in his eyes vanished. He leaned down to kiss her forehead.
When he lifted his head, the other salambes had phased almost to the point of solidity and marched forward in a line. Their single upthrust teeth glinted in the soulflies’ glow. Jilly didn’t want to test whether her etheric body could be ripped apart by those teeth, as Dory had been bisected, to her everlasting damnation, by the pearly white line of solvo.
The closest salambe swiped at them, and Liam swung her out of the way. Her outflung arm, the knot-work bracelet a sullen gleam, trailed a churning backwash of soulflies.
As one, the salambes flinched back.
“The bracelet,” she gasped as Liam danced her backward out of reach. “They’re afraid of the bracelet.”
“You were lucky to catch one on the rooftop using the knot-work trap,” he reminded her. “The rest of them will get us before we can get them all.”
She shuddered at the memory of Perrin disappearing over the ledge. Hovering in the tenebraeternum, she and Liam were even closer to a much more terrifying descent.
The soulflies gathered closer to her again, and the salambes crept closer too, until Jilly was choking on the rusted stench of them. If only salambes were as drifty and quiescent as Dory without her soul. Rain-sweet wouldn’t hurt either.
But the demons didn’t have souls, so the pretty white poison of solvo would have zero effect on them. Their soullessness and the haints’ was what made their pairing so powerfully evil and evilly powerful.
Liam retreated another step. He wouldn’t have, except for her, she knew. He couldn’t wield his hammer when she was in his arms.
She was supposed to be his weapon, but she’d lost Perrin, his demon slipping away with his soul, just as she’d lost Andre, lost Dory’s soul, unable to lead her sister back from the darkness that trappe
d her.
Damn, just when she would give her own soul to Liam to prove she was willing, she found it worth less than the tiny flecks whirling around her, which at least had the advantage of forming a shimmering pale shield between them and the salambes.
Such a thin, insubstantial shield . . .
She clutched Liam’s arm. “It’s not the bracelet scaring the salambes. It’s the soulflies.”
She twisted in his arms and dragged him forward a step. The wandering souls followed. And the salambes retreated.
“Dory and the haints are vulnerable without their souls,” she started.
Liam finished her thought, “And the salambes would be vulnerable with them. Trapped in one body, just like we are.”
Keeping her sheltered under his arm, he strode forward. The soulfly shield belled out ahead of them. “Hey, badass rebel girl, how about you wave them a nice ‘fuck you’?”
She grinned at the bright gleam in his eye and did as he asked. At the upward sweep of her braceleted arm, the soulflies swirled out toward the salambes, which scattered in all directions.
Liam closed his grasp around her upraised fist and brought her hand to his mouth. His teeth clicked against the woven metal; then his breath was hot on her palm as he kissed the pulse point of her wrist. His gaze never left hers. “You want to show them who’s really boss?”
Her heart skipped at the appearance of the faint dimple in his cheek. She nodded.
His mouth descended on hers like an avenging angel, soft as feathers and white- hot. She clutched the bunched muscles of his back, and under her hand, he felt real, unyielding, worldly. She wanted to survive this. To take her chance with him.
Behind her closed eyes, the tempest of the soulflies twinkled like a frozen sea of stars from when the universe was newly born.
Liam whispered her name against her lips.
In a heart-stopping reverberation, the white glow burst, and the real world returned, harsh and bright with color even in the dark of night.
In this realm, the tenebrae—malice, ferales, and salambes—were a wild tangle of ether and distorted flesh. The talyan struggled on all sides.
Jilly slipped from Liam’s arms even as he unleashed the hammer in a single move of lethal beauty. She flattened her palm between his shoulder blades, and her pulse raced at the deadly sensuality of his blacksmith strength pitted against a foe that he would bend and break.
She fisted her hand in his coat as he swung, and the hammer swept the soulflies on a tsunami of etheric energy, blasting them toward the salambes. The salambes fled ahead of the bright flecks to bury themselves in the empty haint husks.
The soulflies, drawn in tow, stuck, half melted in the haints.
One salambe, embedded in its haint, shrieked. The malice took up the chant. But they backed away. The salambe, its smoking orange leaking into the night, strained to jump free as Liam approached, hammer at the ready.
But it couldn’t get away, locked down by the shredded scrap of soul, shining on the haint’s forehead like an echo of the solvo stars that had blossomed over Dory’s empty flesh.
Down the line, the haints staggered drunkenly as the trapped salambes struggled to free themselves. Liam swung again, Jilly lending her teshuva’s strength, to arc another wave of soulflies across the battlefield of the street.
A few salambes fled to the shadows, malice in a black tide around them.
They split and wove around one huge form that did not flee.
“I will not be trapped,” Corvus cried. “Not by these.”
His djinni—half again as tall as any of the salambes—towered over him, a poisonous yellow mushroom cloud that pushed the soulflies away.
But the tiny white flecks crept closer to the trembling gladiator body.
Ferales, never the sharpest pins in the voodoo doll of demonic influence, flailed through the fight, inattentive to the turning tide. The talyan attacked with renewed vigor. With the salambes trapped inside the faltering haint bodies, the talyan were able to close and bring their teshuva to bear to drain the tenebrae. The clashing demonic emanations shivered the rain as it fell.
Liam advanced on Corvus. Jilly followed close, her shroud of soulflies lighting the night.
“You’ve lost.” Liam’s voice thrummed with demonic lows.
Corvus snarled. “That never stops your teshuva.” He threw up his hands, a thrust of ether that scattered the flecks of soul.
But they returned, aimless yet tenacious as butterflies in the wind.
Corvus recoiled. “You can’t win. There are not enough of you to stand against my darkness.”
Jilly stepped forward. “We have each other.”
Corvus’s lip curled in disdain. “As we took your sister for our own, we will take that too. Have you talyan not yet discovered the name of this power that pierces the Veil? But you taught it to us, this love that is a weapon to span heaven and hell.”
He meant to wound her, weaken her. Liam drew her close, his hand wrapped around her to cradle the reven, the place where the knife had sunk and severed her—though she hadn’t known it at the time—from the life she’d had before.
She straightened her shoulders against Liam’s chest. “You can’t take from me what I’ve lost myself. I brought me here. And I choose a new path.”
To Liam, Jilly’s soft words felt straight and sharp as a freshly honed blade, cutting him to the quick. Did she think she’d lost all chance at love? God, hadn’t he believed that when he’d come to understand all the forces arrayed against the league? But he wanted to be beside her, whatever she chose. And wasn’t that love?
There was so much in the way, though. He circled, drawing her with him, and the net of soulflies tightened.
“You’ll never find the way.” Despite his words, Corvus lowered his head and took another lumbering step back. “Just as your teshuva can’t stop fighting after they’ve lost, we’ve watched you talyan chase what you can’t have.” He glowered at them, but his lazy eye wept, and the tear was sheer as glass, only human. “What you shouldn’t have.”
Hearing words he’d said spoken in the djinn- man’s lisping grunt made Liam’s skin crawl. Under his hand, Jilly wavered as if she felt it too, a shudder that went deep into bone. The pale curtain of soulflies shivered and parted, letting through a glimpse of darkness that threatened beyond, a hell on earth always waiting. Corvus smiled.
Both the djinn-man’s eyes pinned Liam with vicious glee. Liam read the satisfaction in that glance that said he’d brought this trouble on himself.
But he’d finally figured out he was happy when trouble came in a xiao-pixie package with badass boots. And the tenebraeternum wasn’t so tough when he had a rebel of his own at his side.
He smiled back at Corvus, feeling like they understood each other better now. “Shouldn’t? Maybe. But I want it. And come teshuva, league, and all your armies of shadows, I won’t be afraid to ask if she can love me in return.”
Corvus roared and leapt, the djinni in the fore.
Liam met the leap halfway. He swung the hammer with all his human and teshuva force. Hammer and djinni collided, and the night blew apart in a shower of soulflies and stars.
CHAPTER 31
Liam rolled. Shards of slagged metal clanked around him. His head rang with a hollow sound, and his hands stung and burned. Had his forge exploded?
The street around him was a shambles. Street? Not the forge, then. Light posts bent. Concrete and asphalt buckled. Bodies lay strewn. . . .
In a cold sheet of terror, the drifting memories of his past vaporized.
“Jilly!”
He staggered to his feet, looking around wildly.
There, just a few steps away—a glint of blue against the silver rain.
He dropped to his knees, oblivious to the figures rising around them. Friend or foe, he didn’t know, didn’t care. Not if she didn’t open those golden eyes and light his darkness.
Because none of this mattered without her.
He
turned her face up to the rain. Her dusky skin was blanched, even her lips leached of color. Her silver jacket had been ripped open. A trickle of blood joined the marks of her reven to add intricacy to the butterfly tattooed above her breast.
He touched the spot. It was just a shallow wound, not fatal. But she didn’t rouse. Though she lay in his arms, he couldn’t find her with his demon senses.
Where had she gone?
“Ah, Jilly.” His voice was ragged. “What have you done to me?”
A form loomed over him. He didn’t glance up as he stripped out of his coat and swathed her gently in its folds.
“Niall?” Archer crouched beside him. “We need to—”
“Take care of it.”
“But—”
Liam snarled. “I have given enough. I will not give her too.”
Archer backed away, moving closer to Sera.
Liam didn’t miss the knowing light in their eyes. Nor did he care that he was following the talya bond down a path that led he knew not where. Since the soldier’s gun had smashed into his temple and blinded him, he’d never seen so clearly, not even with the teshuva’s power. He would make his way to the heart, never mind the risk.
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist below the bracelet, feeling for her pulse. Thready, distant. Since she’d been resonating with the energies the bracelet stole from the tenebrae, the shock wave of his clash with Corvus’s djinni must have hit her with terrible force. “Come back,” he whispered. “Without you, this means nothing.”
He pressed her cold hand under his shirt, against his chest, closing the gap between them. He lowered his head to her parted lips.
So far away. He’d kept her at that distance, with his fear. Fear not just for the world but for his heart. She wasn’t merely lost to some metaphysical labyrinth—they’d been there and won through already—so he couldn’t rally his teshuva to the rescue this time.
This time, he’d have to go himself.
No enhanced senses, no amped strength. Just his need for her, spun through the shadows, seeking respite.