Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  She thought maybe she could kill these devil-men if she had to, for Sidney.

  “You said you trusted me,” he said.

  She realized the low sound vibrating in her throat wasn’t pleasure this time, but a growl. She put her hand over the demon’s mark around her neck. “I do.”

  “Show me where you left the talya.”

  She picked her way through the building, avoiding the pools of power behind closed doors where she knew the devil-men were waiting. Sidney had said he would teach her the differences in the etheric flows so she wouldn’t be confused as she had been before, thinking the restless forces crowding the alley during the attack had been anything besides the vicious horde. She would keep her mouth shut and not make any more mistakes as she had again today.

  At the back door, she gestured. “I left him outside.”

  A surge of nerves made her bite her lip. Had she destroyed one of Sidney’s friends? It had been so long since she hadn’t destroyed those she encountered. It was the only thing she remembered how to do.

  Sidney pushed up the big rolling door. A wave of cold air and vicious curse words accompanied the movement.

  “Jesus fuck,” shouted the man. He lay just outside the door, one leg twisted at an unnatural angle. The blood trail on the gray concrete steps behind him showed where he’d pulled himself along despite the gash on his close-shaved skull. “Westerbrook, get away from that crazy bitch!”

  Sidney squeezed her hand. “You didn’t kill him. Good girl.” He released her and went down the steps, hands spread low out front and his voice soothing, as one would approach a wounded animal. “Ecco, relax. She’s talya, new to the league.”

  That silenced the curses. “Another one? We missed a teshuva coming through the Veil?”

  Sidney shook his head. “She’s been rogue, unnoticed.”

  “Then she could be djinni.”

  From his tone, Alyce guessed that meant something worse than the beating she’d given him.

  But Sidney just shook his head again. “She’s one of ours. Yours.”

  “Mine,” she whispered under her breath.

  The man—Ecco—jerked toward her. Of course the devil-man could hear her. The devil was always listening.

  She moved forward to the edge of the steps and looked down at him. “I thought you had stolen Sidney away; that you were keeping him prisoner in this fortress.”

  He scowled. “Was that an apology for throwing me into the Dumpster?”

  She tilted her head in consideration.

  “It was an explanation,” Sidney interrupted, his tone brusque with a hint of warning.

  Ecco grumbled but didn’t press the issue. “Get me up. Now that I know we haven’t been infiltrated by a djinni psycho bitch, I can go bleed in peace. Since she’s just a rogue psycho bitch.”

  Sidney crossed his arms. “Don’t be rude. That was what got you here in the first place.”

  “I wasn’t rude. I said I liked her dress.”

  Sidney glanced at Alcye inquiringly.

  She folded her hands in front of her. “His tone was insincere. And then I saw the devil in his eyes.”

  “Baby blue gunnysack dresses with no bra underneath always bring out the devil in me.” Ecco ignored Sidney’s hand and pulled himself upright to one foot. He balanced gracefully despite the twist to his other leg. “I guess meeting an unbonded possessed female made me forget myself.”

  He stood two steps down from them, and still he was nearly a head taller than Sidney—almost twice that to her. She took a step away from the glitter in his eyes. Not the demon. Something darker.

  Sidney stood back from the byplay with a bland expression. But behind the shield of his glasses, his eyes narrowed, and his hands, tucked tight against his ribs under his crossed arms, were fists.

  Which signs should she believe? She angled toward him hesitantly. “Sidney?”

  “I want you to meet Liam and Sera and the other talyan.”

  Still his body sent her conflicting messages, and his words of welcome didn’t match his flat tone. The discord jangled her nerves. “No. I want to leave.”

  “You can’t go,” Ecco said, as if she hadn’t just broken his leg. “You belong with us now.”

  That decided her.

  She took Sidney’s hand and pulled him behind her as she jumped down from the concrete platform, avoiding the devil-man dominating the steps.

  Sidney gave a surprised yelp, but she steadied him. Before he recovered his balance, she tugged him toward the fence’s gate. When she’d come for him, she’d squeezed past the chain that padlocked the parking lot fence. Sidney’s shoulders were too broad to fit through the gap, so she ripped the chain loose with a squeal and spark of metal.

  “Alyce,” he gasped.

  “Damn it, Westerbrook,” Ecco hollered. “Dereliction of duty, man.”

  “Oh, now they care about my duty,” Sidney muttered.

  But he did not pull his hand away, and so Alyce did not stop. His willingness eased the tension in her chest, because she would not have left without him. And she had to get away from the low thrum of devil energy. It made her want things—bad things; things she daren’t want.

  A tiny twist, deeper in her chest, around her heart, made her wonder if Sidney would be the one to pay for her fear and flight.

  No, he had promised to explain, and then the fear would go. But she could not listen with the devils whispering around them.

  The October air swirled as she hurried Sidney down the street. Large rumbling carriages—trucks, she reminded herself—blasted past them on obscure errands. There was so much scurrying around her. The sounds and the stenches ached in her head. Sometimes she understood why the devils wanted to bring everything to a halt.

  In still, cold silence, she might finally remember.

  “Alyce,” Sidney said. “Wait just a moment.”

  She paused as he pulled back. She hadn’t realized how far they’d come from the devil building. Her only thought had been to get away. Sidney’s lips were compressed, the soft curves tightened with pain.

  Remorse plucked at her. “Your wounds.”

  “I can’t feel them through the cold.”

  “Cold?” She had forgotten to feel that too.

  He fumbled with the buttons of his shirt and hissed under his breath.

  Gently, she bumped aside his fingers. She hadn’t noticed the bite in the air, but his skin burned through her like ice. “Let me.”

  She did up the buttons, but the thin fabric offered little protection, just as she’d done little to protect him from the devil-men. She’d let her fear pull him away; at least she could make him warm.

  She wrapped her arms around him.

  With her nose against the upper undone button, she sighed. Unlike the trucks and ferales and dank holes where she usually slept, he smelled good, like soap and clean water and some deeper scent—male and good. She breathed again. “I am sorry for running away.”

  His heart thudded under her ear. “At least you let me come along this time.”

  “I didn’t want them to hold us.”

  “You seem okay with me holding you.”

  She glanced up at him.

  He was watching her, but with none of that conflicting distance and tightness that had confused her earlier. His focus was only on her. And his mouth was soft again.

  She could keep him to herself. She’d never had anything, but he was here, in her hands. The whispering little voice that moved through her usually suggested she destroy things. She liked this idea much better.

  Possessed, she might be, but now she possessed him.

  “I have a place,” she said. “A place we can get warm.” If she could just remember where she’d put it.

  He nodded. “Take me there.”

  Yes, she wanted that very much.

  Bookkeepers traditionally stayed out of fieldwork. A Bookkeeper couldn’t hope to survive demonic fieldwork since that entailed mostly killing fields.

&nb
sp; Bookkeeper traditions survived for centuries because good practice kept good practitioners alive. Not indefinitely, of course—they weren’t talyan, after all—but it kept them alive long enough to pass along the traditions and lessons.

  The importance of institutional survival had been battered into Sid’s brain. But when Alyce had grabbed his hand on the warehouse steps, he’d tossed aside everything he’d been taught—all that generations of Bookkeepers had collected—to put his empty hand in hers.

  Impulsive? Not at all. It was an opportunity for in-depth study that could upend everything those previous Bookkeepers had held infallible.

  Now he wondered if he’d been a tad hasty.

  “Not much farther,” she said.

  He was numb all the way through, which was better than feeling the pain. Thank God he’d put on his loafers before he left his room with her, but he hadn’t bothered with socks, and now he couldn’t feel his toes.

  A few lost toes were a small price to pay for the inner workings of a rogue female talya. He just wished the inner workings were less outdoors in Chicago in October.

  When he’d suggested grabbing a cab, she’d just looked through him. “How will I know where we are going?”

  He didn’t have his wallet anyway.

  The city blocks stretched endlessly between traffic lights, and the relentless flow of traffic seemed at the same time more menacing and more remote when he realized he had once again foolishly left the security of the warehouse with nothing—no money, no cell phone, no one who knew where he was, nothing to protect himself.

  Except Alyce, of course.

  Though she might be most dangerous of all.

  She gave a little cry. “There. I remembered.”

  He followed her gaze. “The art museum?”

  “Almost.”

  She dragged him onward.

  But she didn’t take him up the elevated walkway that led from the autumn-browned expanse of Millennium Park to the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead, she flanked the sprawling Beaux-Arts building and dragged him down to where the upper gallery spanned a set of railroad tracks.

  They had to climb over the low concrete railing and jump down to the roof of a parked truck. His shoulder screamed at the abuse. But when he stumbled, Alyce caught him.

  “So cold,” she murmured. “Just another moment.”

  She led him along the tracks, past the unmarked doors at the base of the museum buildings. Light leaked under both ends of the suspended gallery above them, but they were blocked from casual view.

  At a panel in the wall, just another slab of gray, she slammed her fist against the metal. The panel popped free, revealing a square of darkness.

  Sid restrained a sigh. What was wrong with the nice museum café upstairs?

  “It’s a good place,” Alyce said, as if she’d heard him. “The devils never come here.”

  He lingered outside the hole. “They don’t like the art.”

  “What I can see through the new windows is very odd.”

  He stifled a laugh. He’d read about the museum’s expansion. “So you don’t like modern art?”

  She faced him. “I am old.”

  His amusement faded. “Art, old or new, has a nullifying effect on the tenebrae. Given the choice, the horde avoids humanity’s heartfelt attempt to make sense of its place in the cosmos.”

  “Is that what art does?”

  “And the good stuff looks nice above a couch.” He peered into the dark. “I don’t suppose you have a couch in there.”

  “I have candles.”

  “Sounds great.” He climbed through the open hatchway, and she pulled the panel into place behind them.

  It wasn’t as bad as her last bolt-hole. Once she lit the candles with a half-used book of matches, the empty nook looked downright … empty. But it was dry, and a boiler vent protruding from one wall shared its heat. Dry, warm, and tenebrae-free was good.

  She stood at his side, her gaze darting from him to the stark walls and back again, fingers laced tight in front of her. “I kept food here, but it has been a while. And I just drink from the fountain across the street. I could bring you some. …” Fingers still interlaced, she opened her palms into a shallow cup. Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were clouded.

  He put his hand over hers, filling the cup. “I’m fine.” He folded his legs under him and gently tugged her down to his side. “I just want to rest a moment.”

  She collapsed in slow degrees to rest on one hip, and the granny dress gulped her in its wrinkles.

  Sid didn’t blame Ecco for the crude, backward compliment about the housedress. For everything it lacked—style, shape, thread count—it only emphasized Alyce’s delicate features. In the flicker of the candle, the washed-out blue polyester highlighted the color of her eyes, like the shadows in an iceberg. The hem covered her down to her bare toes, and Sid steeled himself against the urge to tuck the edges more tightly around her, maybe gallantly remove his shirt to drape around her thin shoulders.

  But stripping again would hurt so much, he’d look more pitiful than gallant. And anyway, a scholar should probably avoid taking his clothes off around his test subject. Nakedness led to feeling, and feeling led diametrically away from thinking, and thinking was all a Bookkeeper had.

  It was ironic that even though he’d lost the two most important women in his life because of Bookkeeping, this third had come to him for the same reason.

  Alyce looked back into his eyes until he realized the silence had lengthened unnecessarily. He’d never encountered a talya with such stillness. Even the restless demonic energies that a human sensed only through a primitive, tingling awareness of lurking danger were banked in her, as if the teshuva slept. Would her underachiever teshuva explain the limp he’d first noticed in the alley?

  “Alyce, how did you stay alive?”

  “The fountain,” she reminded him. “It’s very close. And I found a carton of bruised apples once.”

  “I don’t mean food and drink.” Although that had obviously been in short enough supply. “Did you have others with you before? Others like you? Who taught you how to overcome the tenebrae? Who …” He trailed off as she shook her head. “No one?”

  “Not until you.”

  “How long?”

  The slow shake of her head ceased, and her gaze went through him. “Long.”

  The depth of wistfulness in the one word made his chest ache as if he’d held his breath. “I wish your introduction to the league had been …”

  One corner of her mouth tilted just a bit. “Less bloody?”

  “Well, with the talyan, that’s not so much an issue.”

  “Tell me about them. About me.” She leaned toward him, so that the point of her shoulder pressed into his arm. Though his stitches were on his other side, the trusting contact was almost sharper than a feralis fang. Had he botched her reunion? After what had happened to Ecco, would Liam brand her an unrepentant rogue?

  He laid out the story like the worst of the unvarnished Old World fairy tales: the battle between good and evil; the teshuva who had been on the wrong side of that battle and repented; the djinn, who’d lost but not repented and not given up either, whipping the lesser evils of the horde-tenebrae into endless, subversive mayhem; the angels and demons—repentant and malevolent—that continued the fight, unacknowledged by humans, except for the few resonant souls who unwittingly brought the etheric forces into their lives that changed them forever.

  Though the cold hadn’t seemed to touch her, now Alyce shivered against him. “What did I do to deserve this?” She pressed her forehead against his shoulder, muffling her voice. “Why can’t I remember?”

  “It’s not a question of guilt.” If it had been, he couldn’t believe she would ever have attracted a demon’s attention. “It was your penance trigger; like fault lines that run all the way through your life. When the teshuva came into our realm, seeking its redemption, its unbound energy was the earthquake that cracked the contours
of the soul that matched it: yours.”

  She canted her head to gaze up at him through the tangle of her hair. “So I haven’t really been alone?”

  Had he ever heard colder comfort? “I suppose not.” Though his wound panged in protest, he couldn’t stop himself from reaching over to tuck the unruly wave behind her ear. Somehow, one dark strand looped around his finger, once, twice, and again, in a silky bond.

  Her lips parted. She didn’t speak, but his attention fixed on the glimmer of candlelight on the secret inner curves of her mouth. That kiss she’d given him as he’d awakened in the darkness after the alley fight … He’d been too stunned to make sense of it then. And now he had too much sense to try again.

  He had to pinch out this flicker between them now, while it was no more threatening than the candle. Except he couldn’t seem to let her go.

  “Alyce, I’m sorry no one was there for you.”

  “All along, I had the demon.” She leaned into his touch, her cheek resting against his knuckles. His pulse heated and flickered like the flame, reminding him that every conflagration started with a spark. “And now I have you.”

  Her artless trusting kicked up his heartbeat another notch, in alarm this time. She ranked him alongside the teshuva in influences on her life? “Now you have the Chicago league of talyan too,” he reminded her.

  “They’d still have me? After what I did?”

  “There’s a strong possibility they’ll like you more than ever.” He gave her hair a gentle, teasing tug, then forced himself to release her. The lock stayed coiled in a loose ring the diameter of his finger.

  He needed to focus, and now he was thinking of jewelry. “When female talyan began reappearing, they brought with them talismans from their demons. The talismans serve as a failsafe, a kill-switch for etheric powers. Did your teshuva give you something? A ring or a bracelet or a …” She sat straighter and was shaking her head, but he continued. “Or a tiara? Nothing?”

  She spread one hand to indicate the empty hole around them. “I have nothing.”

  Well really, how many places could she have dropped it—whatever it was—in this city? Chicago was only a bit more than two hundred square miles. Unless, of course, she didn’t have a talisman because her teshuva was too weak to need one, or because she was rogue, or because …