Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  There were certain times when being a bit on the dim side would be preferable.

  Night air leached through the hole in his coat, but he wasn’t cold. Between the alarming slick of blood matting the tweed and the singe of the feralis’s poisoned bite, he was feeling almost stuffy.

  Of course, Bookkeepers were often accused of being stuffy. His father had countered, saying a Bookkeeper was duty-bound to replace nonsensical emotions with the quest for understanding.

  As if understanding the inevitability made it any easier to die.

  The feralis snapped at a second tenebrae crowding in. Two more of the tenebrae skittered behind them on spidery legs. The mutant quartet shuffled closer, and the air between the brick walls thickened with the stench of decay until Sid’s eyes watered.

  Bloody marvelous. Now the talyan would find his mangled corpse with tears on his cheeks. Maybe sheer mortification at their comparative weakness was why Bookkeepers were tutored past emotion.

  The pain in his shoulder spread in paralyzing waves, but his right hand still worked. He scrabbled along the asphalt for a loose brick, an empty bottle, maybe a rocket launcher. But only pebbles and bits of glass rolled under his desperate fingertips. Not even a dustbin to shelter behind. What sort of evil city kept its alleys so tidy?

  “Don’t fight, lads,” he choked out. How many times had his father chided him with those words? “Run along now.”

  “They must fight.”

  The voice—barely a whisper behind him—jerked him around with the force of sharper teeth sunk into his flesh.

  From the deepest pool of shadows, a girl, clothed in nothing more than a once-white shift, coalesced like a mist in front of his straining eyes. Her thin arms were bare, and she held herself so tightly, her fingers chased the last of the blood from her skin.

  Her hair fell in loose waves over her face and past her shoulders. Between the dark strands, her gaze—eerily pale—was hazy, and a distracted frown arrowed in one line between her arched brows. She took a limping step forward.

  What was she doing in the empty alley? Doing drugs or a john? If her moral compass was as unsteady as her steps, she’d be an easy target for the tenebrae evil. He tried to pull himself toward her, and his fingers closed over the smooth frames of his spectacles.

  He jerked them on, crookedly. At least now he could see his oncoming demise.

  “Get out of here,” he hissed. He wouldn’t let another innocent die because once again he’d been in the wrong place at a bad time. Whatever or whoever she’d been doing, she didn’t deserve this. “Go. Now!”

  For a heartbeat, her eyes cleared, but it was like winter clouds clearing the night sky to reveal a moon icy, distant, and dead. “Go where?”

  “Away.” Fear for her congealed in his throat until he could barely push out the words. “Just go.”

  Her pale gaze lifted to the ferales. “They have to fight. I have to fight too.”

  If the feralis attack had been a blur, the girl was a lightning bolt.

  One moment she was far enough down the alley that he thought she had a chance to escape. In his next breath, she was amidst the ferales. Her skirt fluttered behind her as she ducked between the two spidery tenebrae, avoiding the stabs of their spearlike legs with artless grace despite her limp.

  Shrieking, the salambe shot up in a tight spiral out of the alley. All the malice swarmed after it, like incorporeal rats in the wake of a sinking ship.

  That couldn’t be a good sign.

  God, she wasn’t even half their size, and she was so thin, the ferales would snap through her in one unsatisfying bite. She could have gained an inch or two if she had at least been wearing shoes.

  He surged upright, determined to throw himself into the fray beside her.

  With a roundhouse kick, she slammed her foot into his head and knocked him to the ground again. This might have ticked him off, except his spectacles stayed on this time, so he had a clear view of the feralis that launched over her and landed right where he would have been, had he still been standing.

  From his sprawl, he slammed his trainers at the feralis. At least he wasn’t wearing tasseled loafers, which his father claimed awarded Bookkeepers a proper visual distinction from the booted talyan.

  The feralis hopped sideways with a hiss. From its jaws, slaver dripped, backlit yellow from the streetlights. Those fangs were looking sharper by the second.

  The girl grabbed the creature by its fleshy tail and hauled it backward. The lean muscles in her bare arms quivered as the feralis bawled, spraying sulfurous drool. If Sid hadn’t known better, he would have said the tenebrae was … afraid. Its claws peeled up curls of asphalt, but it could not resist her relentless force. Her irises gleamed violet.

  Sid sucked in a shocked breath. She wasn’t human either.

  What astounding luck! His first night in Chicago, and he’d found a female talya. She wasn’t associated with the league, or Niall would have mentioned her. She must be newly possessed—and unconstrained by the knowledge and rules of the league culture. A tabula rasa, ready for imprinting.

  Exhilaration made his head spin. Or maybe that was blood loss.

  He winced as she gained traction and heaved the feralis over her shoulder into the remaining trio. Her vise grip tore the tail loose in an arc of ichor. The tenebrae screamed, and the warbling cry hit an octave that iced Sid’s spine.

  Immortal and inhumanly strong the girl might be, compelled by her repentant demon to fight evil, but she could still be killed. Four marauding ferales—well, three marauding and one that seemed a little shaken—were deadly foes.

  He pulled himself upright. He couldn’t lose her, not when a journeyman Bookkeeper could write his ticket to London mastery on such a find.

  She shoved him back again, and he stumbled into the wall. “Enough!” he shouted, pushing off the bricks. “I want to help you.”

  She ignored him and lashed out with the tail in her hand. The fleshy whip snaked though the air to drive the ferales back.

  Chunks of rot crumbled from the makeshift weapon. Decaying feralis husks never held up well. Sid knew the corrosive ichor congealed within the husks must be burning through the girl’s hands, but she never hesitated. With her demon ascendant, she’d feel nothing—not pain, not fear, not loss.

  How simple the world must look through the violet eyes of possession. For the merest incomplete contraction of his cardiac musculature—not even a full heartbeat—he wished she could share that simplicity with him.

  She cracked the putrid whip again, and one of the ferales shrieked as its limb sheared off. Without the animating etheric energy, the husk fragment putrefied. In minutes it would be only a noxious puddle.

  Sid had never quite appreciated just how poorly animated corpses performed under pressure in the field. It was a subject worthy of a paper or two, no doubt.

  The wet thud of the feralis’s head hitting the asphalt made his gut clench. He realized he wasn’t exactly performing up to snuff himself.

  The two partially dismembered ferales fled around the corner. The decapitated one tried to follow but kept blundering into the alley wall. In another moment, it would stumble out, and Sid could just imagine its headless-chicken dance down Michigan Avenue.

  The girl kicked aside the fourth motionless husk—he hadn’t even noticed her destroying that one; what kind of Bookkeeper was he?—and advanced on the hapless feralis.

  Her limp was more noticeable, though she hadn’t taken a single hit. Had she been wounded earlier in the night, perhaps, and not yet healed despite her demon’s power? She was a devoted talya, for which he had reason to be extremely grateful.

  The stump where the feralis’s ratlike skull had been now spewed ichor and a discomfiting mewl, like an infant’s cry. Sid wished it would stop.

  The girl jammed both her fists through its sternum and wrenched it asunder in a black gush. The mewling stopped.

  His gorge rose up in his throat, choking him. Just as well he’d left the @1
warehouse in a snit and without converting any currency for his supper; otherwise he’d be spewing right about now.

  Like some murderous, postapocalyptic librarian spinster, the girl knelt between the decommissioned ferales, her bare toes tucked under the raggedy hem of her old-fashioned gown. How would the talyan, who demonstrated a regrettable morphology tending toward thick-necked gigantism, look in this new dress-for-success? Sid held back a snort.

  With a hand on each husk, the girl lowered her head. Her dark hair spread around her shoulders and curtained her face. The orange light in the feralis’s protruding eyestalks faded to white, like a sullen ember smothering in ash, as she drained the animating ether. The energy she took would refresh the demon within her and then …

  She turned her head just enough to meet his gaze. Violet. So Bookkeeper archives described the glint of nocturnal predator, but that did no justice to the wavelengths of light bending beyond his human perception. He sagged against the bricks as if his marrow had turned to ice water.

  She wasn’t newly possessed and awkwardly delving into her untested powers.

  She was rogue.

  He eased back against the wall, letting the bricks support him when his suddenly wobbly knees didn’t seem up to the task.

  She blinked, and the violet faded to the previous pale haze. “Pardon me.” Her voice barely carried across the alley. “No one should have seen that.”

  The odd cadence of her voice snagged his attention. It sounded like something he’d find on Oxford Street—almost familiar but strangely awry. He realized he was leaning forward to hear her, his muscles canting in her direction, even as the more primitive part of his brain urged him to edge away slowly.

  “But you’ll forget, won’t you?” She tilted her head, and the dark waves of her hair slid to one side, revealing the slender column of her throat. Just above her high collar, a thin black tracery marred her white skin: the mark of her demon. “’Twould be for the best, to forget.”

  He wondered if “forget” was a euphemism for nipping off his head as she’d done to the feralis. Not much he could do about it, of course. “No doubt most people you save scream more than they say thank you, but … thank you.”

  A violet gleam surfaced in her eyes, spun once, and vanished again. “They all scream.”

  His ever-so-keen powers of observation were starting to tell him his newfound talya had gone a bit off. Not that she seemed handicapped in the butchery department, where a talya truly needed to shine.

  He let out a long, nonthreatening sigh. His shoulder was throbbing in earnest, now that the danger seemed to have passed—mostly.

  He studied her empty hands where tenebrae gore left scorch marks on her skin. “You have an … interesting technique for dispatching ferales. Most talyan use long-handled weapons to keep clear of the ichor.”

  She didn’t move, but something about her stillness became even more still. Apparently the danger hadn’t gone very far away at all. “What are these words you use?”

  “Ferales.” He pointed first at the husks and shifted to the black spill. “Ichor. Talya.” He pointed at her.

  She shifted onto her haunches, fingers steepled over the asphalt.

  “Don’t run,” he said softly. He hoped she wouldn’t leap on him either and rip his heart out, as seemed perfectly possible when he considered her taut white hands. “It’s okay.”

  “Okay? What is okay?”

  He pointed to himself.

  And then he passed out.

  Alyce flattened her palms over the tear in the man’s coat. She dared not touch him directly with her filthy hands, but the wound was clotting, and her anxious heartbeat slowed along with his blood loss.

  As if in reply, the restless spirits overhead that had lit her way here finally ceased their frantic whirling. Since the luminescent whorls above lacked teeth or claws, she focused on the man. Marshaling her thoughts was like catching clouds; it had been so long since she’d concentrated on anything besides the hunt. Gentling her touch was harder yet. Her fingers trembled with the effort.

  The devils had never attacked another person in her presence before—or none she had been able to save. Always, when she appeared, the devils tried to run, and always, the overpowering impulse in her ensured they did not go far. After the first time, when she’d realized the devils didn’t leave witnesses, she’d never gone back to sift through their ghastly handiwork.

  She had frights enough.

  But this man had not screamed when she appeared. The devils had surrounded him, and he had mocked them. He had met her gaze, and he had not run.

  Perhaps because he’d swooned. But before his eyes—nice brown eyes, without a flicker of unholy flames—had rolled back in his head, he had stared at evil and not backed down. He mustn’t die now, not after he’d chipped a hole in the ice that had frozen her off from the world.

  She couldn’t take him to a hospital. Once, she had tried to explain to the men in white coats; she had tried to show them. … She hadn’t tried again. The darkness inside her shifted at the memory.

  This man knew everything already. He had no need to come at her with needles and shocks. She removed his eyeglasses and tucked them into his pocket. Determination stiffened her spine, and she lifted the man more gently than she’d dealt with the—what had he called them?—the ferales.

  Fresh blood pooled in the tear of his coat and spattered over her. She had to save him. He could tell her what she was; he could tell her why the most horrific monsters in the city cried out and fled from her.

  A peculiar warmth trickled through her. Not the pathway of his blood—she was familiar enough with that sensation. This was different and long forgotten.

  She was not alone.

  A passing vehicle blared at her as she darted across the street, the man an unwieldy weight across her shoulders. Fortunately, the people of the city would notice only that she was small and her burden was large, and they would not imagine she could carry a full-grown man. They would remember, perhaps, a woman carrying a sack of laundry.

  Delusions were so lovely.

  She had roamed far tonight from her usual haunts. Now she knew why. God had finally taken pity on her and led her to this man who did not scream at monsters—monsters like her.

  Fortitude carried her, and she carried the man, although his sliding weight tugged her collar tight until she choked and her limp turned to a stagger by the time she crept down the stairs to her basement hideaway.

  She maintained a careful disguise of withered leaves and soft moss on the concrete steps—not so mussed that anyone felt obliged to come down and sweep, but not so tidy that they might think the area in use. The rust on the old lock resisted even a determined tug, but it yielded to her hand. She pulled it into place behind them.

  When she faced the room, though, her remaining strength drained away. It was a pit, a cold grave lacking even the comforts of a proper casket. The mattress had been disgusting long before she salvaged it. She couldn’t lay him there, but the cracked floor was worse.

  Perhaps he would have preferred to bleed to death in the alley.

  But since he was insensible, he had no say. With quick, cautious hands, she eased him out of his coat and shirt. His breath caught once, when she slipped the sleeve off his bitten arm, but he did not rouse.

  So much blood. In the dark hours of winter, when memories rose chill as hoarfrost out of nothing, she sometimes remembered long-ago sermons on the blandishments of the devil. They’d neglected to mention the piercing teeth.

  She ripped the lower panel of her skirt and used the thin fabric to clean him. After, she drained the last of the jug of water she’d stolen from an unwatchful delivery man; the wounds were open and, she saw at last, not fatal.

  The thick pad of muscle had protected him. He was not as tall as most men seemed to be these days, which was just as well considering how far she had carried him. But the calculated breadth of his shoulders told her he had considered the shortcoming and compens
ated.

  She realized she’d let her hands linger on those shoulders and forced herself to move on.

  With the last unbloodied corner of her shift, she brushed away a thick russet lock of his hair and swabbed his forehead. Her dirty heel had left a smear where she’d kicked him. She wished she’d thought that through first, but the devils—the ferales—had been there, and she hadn’t wanted him in the way.

  At least she’d made sure to temper the kick so she hadn’t lashed his head off his shoulders, which happened sometimes with the ferales. If he complained of a headache, she’d have to tell him that.

  She contemplated the man’s face. He had labored to make his body hard, but even the slight crookedness of his nose—a natural flaw, she decided; he had never been hit—couldn’t disguise his boyish handsomeness. Though tightened with pain, the lines of his mouth arched in a way that beckoned her to touch.

  She slowed the stroke of the rag, almost giving in. He wouldn’t know. One quick brush of her dirty hand across his lower lip to discover if his lips were as soft and giving as she imagined.

  She reached for him, though not with her finger. Instead, she leaned down so her mouth hovered above his. The scent of his bared skin—something both turbulent and steadfast, like the place where the wind over the lake lashed the steel seawalls—roused her senses, and she shivered as if caught in that wild, breathtaking storm.

  All night she’d been irresistibly drawn to the alley—to him—and the compulsion ached within her still. So long, so long since she had touched or been touched. One kiss was all she needed; one sweet memory and maybe she would forget the screams, for this night at least. She tilted her head and touched her lips to his.

  Just as he opened his eyes.

  CHAPTER 2

  He was being stalked.

  In the pitch blackness, something was after him. Sid braced himself for attack, but the drift of a warm mouth over his stunned him to dumb immobility and submerged his blind fear in a wash of purely physical sensation.

  Wits spinning from blood loss and confusion, he struggled to list what he knew. The girl—she was kissing him. He wasn’t dead, not if the fervent pounding of his heart was any indication, and his lovely rescuer had awakened him with a kiss.