by Jessa Slade
And they were right. The only reason he’d stopped that sink from hitting Alyce was because it had been aimed at him. He’d just been in the way. He wasn’t a talya contender any more than he was still suitable for … anything besides what he was, a bloody borrowed Bookkeeper.
He held himself as if someone had duct-taped his spine to a curtain rod, but it felt more like glass. “Sorry to spoil your fun. But I came up here to get Alyce. I want a baseline reading on her metaphysiology before you break her.”
Nim gave him a steady stare. “She’s strong.” Her words sounded like a warning, one he wouldn’t honor with a response.
He took the icicle from Alyce’s hand and lobbed it to Jonah. Nim caught it. “It’s getting dark out. You can go entertain yourself with the horde.”
Alyce gave him a reproving look. “That is not a game.”
The other talyan didn’t chime in to agree, but the combined weight of their stares as the violet lights guttered out chipped at the stiffness of his stance. As twisted as his life had been, at least he had a life. The talyan had an eternity of death and destruction for the good of a people who would never know it. And he, who did know better, was flipping them shit.
He nodded once. “Of course, Alyce. And you’ll be out with them just as soon as I clear you for service.”
“We do want what is best for her, Bookkeeper,” Jonah said softly. “Honing ourselves in the fight against evil is all we have.” He reached for Nim with the hand he had left. “Well, that and each other.”
It was such a simple touch; yet Sid’s face heated at the contact. The other talyan melted away, as if they too were disturbed by the flare of energy. Sid’s Bookkeeper brain wished he’d had them both rigged to an etheric resonance sequencer to capture that moment—maybe next time.
Without another word—really, what could he say?—he led Alyce out of the antiques graveyard, down five flights of stairs to the basement. His steps clanked wearily on the metal grate of the stairs. Alyce with her bare feet might as well have been a ghost.
“Thank you for trying to protect me,” she said softly.
“You didn’t need it.” A flush of embarrassment heated his skin. Although considering the state of his shoulder, maybe that was just trickling blood.
“If I had, though, you were right there. Just as you were right there when the devil-man tried to stab me. Without you, I would be dead.”
The memory of Nanette’s scream echoed in his head, and he swayed a little. He paused with one hand on the rail.
Alyce flitted around to the step below him, peering up worriedly. “You are hurt.”
“Not as bad as some others.” He went around her and took a step down, but he stopped again when she touched his shoulder from behind.
The tentative contact should have been too light to register through the bone-deep ache, but his skin shivered at her nearness. He tightened every muscle, ignoring the way the ache intensified, to prevent himself from turning to face her.
“You aren’t talya,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend. Not with me, not when they aren’t around.”
Her statement—not talya—shouldn’t have stung. It was only the truth. But how could he explain to her that meant he had to pretend even harder? He didn’t have the advantages of immortality or running rogue to cushion the blows.
That would explain his weakness when he just closed his eyes while she slipped her hands around his neck to undo the top buttons of his shirt.
From her perch on the step behind him, she slipped the oxford down from his shoulder. “Oh, Sidney. Why didn’t you say anything?”
He bit down on a curse when she eased back the gauze pad. At least the fresh blood kept it from sticking. “Which time?”
“I should not have played that stupid game.”
At the remorse in her voice, he couldn’t stop himself from turning to her. He pulled the shirt back into place, hiding the evidence of his human frailty. Except the gory stain still gave him away. “You were having fun. I was the one out of place.”
She shook her head, hard enough to make the dark locks of her hair dance around her face. “We were a good team.”
He took the bandage from her. “Nanette might not agree.”
She stilled. “Could we have saved him?”
“If we’d known the djinn-men were casing the joint, maybe. If we’d known Daniel was outside. If we knew where every act of evil was about to happen …” He couldn’t muster a shrug. “Bookkeepers try to keep track of everything, but we’re not that good.”
“Not good then,” she echoed. “But repentant.”
“That is the theory.” Leaving the open buttons of his shirt flapping, he continued their descent.
Familiarizing himself with the lab had been his first task when he’d arrived in Chicago. All leagues had the same basics, but each Bookkeeper customized to local needs. And a certain amount of intradisciplinary egotism meant that sometimes the sharing of ideas, techniques, and hardware improvements between Bookkeepers was not as robust as might otherwise have been ideal for the salvation of humanity.
But then, the battle between good and evil had been going on a very long time. No one had quite understood the need for a more concerted effort.
As interim Bookkeeper, Sera had kept sketchy notes of the changes the Chicago league had experienced. But she had been playing catch-up with the history and traditions even a novice Bookkeeper would have known.
Plus, her handwriting was terrible. Obviously she had her background in the medical fields. And now they’d been tossed the wrinkle of more overt djinn activity.
Point being, he had plenty to keep him busy; he could have waited to bring Alyce down here. He didn’t have the lab organized to his specifications. He couldn’t even log in to the league network since Archer had hacked the computers to trace Bookie’s embezzling.
But he couldn’t leave Alyce to the untender mercies of her would-be lovers.
Not yet. She didn’t know herself. How could she be expected to choose among them?
“You are angry,” she said.
He hadn’t flipped on the lights. He composed his features before he did, then tossed the bloody gauze in the trash. “I’m not angry.”
“Your teeth are grinding.”
He pushed aside a stack of file folders on an exam table. “I’m tired, and my shoulder feels worse than when the feralis was chewing on it.”
“Which is why you have dark circles under your eyes and you are holding your elbow close to your side. But you grind your teeth because you are—”
“Fine. I’m angry. Jonah should have known better than to put you in danger.” No, he still wasn’t being truthful. “I should have known better than to leave you with them.”
“They wouldn’t hurt me. They want me here.”
“Well, I want you too. And I found you first.” He patted the exam table. “Now, hop up.”
Her gaze cooled with guarded distance. “You won’t strap me down?”
What had happened with the doctors she’d gone to? Scratch that. He could guess what they’d thought. “No straps. Look, there’s blood on your dress. Is it theirs or yours?”
“I think it’s yours.” She crossed to him and inched her hip up onto the table. “Why do you want me?”
“We need to know more about the female talyan. We need to find out what sparked your reappearance. We need to know what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said.
“Then we’ll find out together.” He walked to the other side of the table, and she owled her neck to follow his progress. “Just let me …” The streak of red across the back of her dress made his teeth grind harder. In the darkness upstairs, he hadn’t noticed, but under the lab fluorescents, her skin gleamed white through the slashed fabric and smudges. “See, I was afraid of this.”
She craned her neck a little farther. “I can’t see. What makes you afraid?”
“That your talya friends play too rough. I thou
ght no one tagged you.” Had one of the males staked a symballein claim? Liam would be pleased.
Meanwhile, Sid held his breath, waiting for her answer, and each nanosecond stretched into eternity.
But she shook her head. “I jumped from one of the shelves, but my knee twisted. I fell into a piano. Nim said it wouldn’t hold a tune anyway. To make it fair, she said I should stay on the ground because the men are too big to hide.”
“Oh, and we’d want to be fair.” In his relief—though he had no cause to be relieved—he couldn’t keep the snide note from his voice.
“Not to the tenebrae,” Alyce said. “But to one another.”
How quickly she’d become one of them. Sid pushed down a twang of jealousy more sour than any old piano. “The wire cut right through you.”
“It is nothing.”
“Let’s make sure of that.” He pulled a crash cart closer to the table, found scissors, and carefully cut down the back of the housedress.
Alyce clutched the front to her chest and stared over her shoulder at him, eyes ringed in white.
He kept his focus on her back and made a scholarly sound of concern. “Yes, just as I feared. It looks like you hit high C.”
After a heartbeat, her lips quirked. “I can’t sing.”
He lifted his gaze. “Really? I would never have guessed. You have a lovely voice.”
“No …” Her eyes clouded. “I remember. He said I mustn’t sing.”
“Who said that?”
“My master. I remember.”
Sid looked at her naked back, striped bloody where the wire had cut her. What had triggered the memory? “Why do you call him ‘master’?”
“That is what he was. I remember his face. But I …”
Sid summoned up his American history. He knew Archer had been possessed during the Civil War, but white slavery hadn’t been part of that conflict. Domestic servants from that period might have used the same word, though. He’d have to ask the talya male.
He poured hydrogen peroxide onto a square of gauze and wiped at the bloody streaks. Underneath, he found only diagonal red lines in her skin from lower lumbar to midthoracic, already closed. It was like a rejection of his touch, and a reminder that she was, as Nim had warned, talya strong.
But the wounds obviously went deeper than the teshuva could heal.
Though he dried her skin with a fresh pad, she shivered. “Never mind,” he said gently as he came back around the table to face her. “It’s not that important.”
“It was my life, and it’s gone.”
“I’m here to help you find a new life.”
She said nothing as he turned away to jot notes on his clipboard. Rates of wound repair were well documented in Bookkeeper archives, but not for female talyan. It wasn’t significant enough for master-level work, but maybe if he took an apprentice … Except he wouldn’t be here that long.
The scratch of his pen stilled. For a moment there, he’d forgotten this wasn’t really his place. When he took over London, some other Bookkeeper would have tea with Liam, spar with Archer, and continue unraveling the many secrets of the Chicago league—secrets including Alyce.
The pen made a dark blot on the paper as the felt tip bled out his hesitation. The stark proof of his conflicted desires shocked him. He’d given up everything to become London’s Bookkeeper after his father; to want something else would make a mockery of those sacrifices. His only goal here was to unravel some puzzle from the Chicago league interesting enough to satisfy the Bookkeeper council of his qualifications. Quickly he finished his scrawl.
Besides, if he finished deciphering Alyce, the next Bookkeeper would have no reason to obsess over her. She’d be just another talya—female, true, and of a rarer vintage than the ones that had come along so far, and no doubt mysterious enough to keep a scholar intrigued for all the decades of his life—but still just another talya.
In fact, he’d put a reference in her chart to just leave her the hell alone. He shoved the clipboard away. His thumb skidded across the page and left a black smear that obliterated his words.
He wrestled down his unwarranted temper and turned to Alyce. The red scores on her back were little more than white lines now. “It might not be all-powerful, but your teshuva knits you right up, just as it should. Which makes me wonder about your knee.” He circled around to face her and held his hands over her leg. “May I?”
She nodded, and he folded back the hem of her frock to midthigh. He cupped her right heel in his palm, his other hand behind her knee where he’d noticed the shortening of her stride. Her skin was silky under his touch, even the bony points of her knee and ankle softened by smooth, soft flesh. And she’d knocked him flat in the alley with one blow of that dainty foot—amazing, really.
He found himself lingering over the curves and hastened to explain. “Considering you run around the city barefoot, you have hardly any protective callusing. One downside of the demon’s fine detailing work.”
He straightened her knee by slow degrees. She sucked in a breath before he’d reached full extension.
He’d felt no distortion of the joint under his fingers, no faint grate of broken bones, no pop of misplaced ligaments. “Where does it hurt?”
“Inside,” she said.
He held back an impatient sigh. Bookkeeper training required a certain forbearing temperament, but Alyce was a particularly opaque text. “How long …” He reframed the question. “Have you always had the limp?”
Although insignificant reminders of past damage remained even post-possession, the teshuva’s virgin ascension should have zeroed out the structural imperfections of her body, like the ultimate drill sergeant perfecting a lone soldier for solitary combat.
She looked up at him, pale blue eyes half-lidded. “I remember. …”
He was focused on her, eye to eye, so he saw the moment it happened.
In his apprentice Bookkeeper classes, they’d studied other megavertebrate predators. Anyone working with immortal demon-possessed warriors whose sole mission was to destroy all forms of evil was well advised to learn the finer points of selective eye contact, noninvasive body language, and self-defensive tongue biting.
One of the first warning signs they’d learned was the “death eye.”
“You’ll recognize it right away,” their instructor had said. “It’s like looking into the eyes of death.”
They’d all snickered at the time.
Sid wasn’t laughing now.
Their instructor had explained how mammalian eyeballs were constantly in motion. The involuntary microsaccades supposedly allowed the eyes to refresh and correct their focus. The movements were tiny enough to evade casual observation, but nevertheless caused an imperceptible blurring of the eyes.
But in a moment of intense concentration, the muscles locked. With the tremors halted, the eyes became perfectly, lucidly clear. In a wolf or tiger or other predator, that sudden clarity signaled an imminent attack.
“Like looking down into a deep, dark well,” the instructor had said. “At the bottom is the soul. And in the case of the talya—a demon.”
Sidney’s heart stopped too. He saw Alyce’s demon, all right.
And he saw the ravenous verge didn’t know the first thing about hunger.
CHAPTER 9
“I remember …,” Alyce said. But the memory suddenly blurred in a haze of other images—ferales in pieces; red-eyed malice and salambes shrieking as they fled.
Sidney blanched, and she bit her lip. Disappointing him hurt worse than the scratches on her back. She wanted to tell him, she did, but the memory was smeared away, as if the touch of the cold cloth had sopped it up with her blood.
She lowered her gaze miserably. “I would tell you, but it’s all gone.” Her voice sounded so plaintive, she didn’t even believe herself.
“I’m sure you would tell.”
She contemplated the odd emphasis he’d placed on the word while he busied himself with his papers again.
&
nbsp; He wrote with authority, his strokes as smooth and steady as his hands on her skin. She clutched the front of the torn dress under her chin, and the quickening pulse in her throat banged against her knuckles.
When she’d kissed him before, in his room, he had told her to wait.
She had waited. She had been waiting a very long time, though she couldn’t say how long exactly. And from what she’d seen in the demon-pierced eyes of the talya males, immortality did not make waiting any easier.
And if she followed that thought, as Sidney would do, she came to the question: What was she waiting for?
Before she could answer, Sidney was back at her side. “I want to get a closer look at your reven.” When she gave him a quizzical look, he added, “The demon’s mark around your neck.”
The throb of tension that had seized her twisted from anticipation to something darker. “I do not like it. It’s ugly.”
“I need to register you in the league archives, and the reven can tell us the class and potency of your teshuva, even if we can’t get a detailed history.” He touched her hands and gave a downward nudge.
Her muscles vacillated between resistance and surrender. She didn’t want him to see that part of her—or at least not just that part of her.
He rested his hand on her clutched fists, his palm so wide it nearly covered both of hers, but he didn’t push again. “The reven isn’t ugly, Alyce. It’s uniquely you.”
Unlike her grip, his eyes did not waver. She let him uncover her neck. His gaze, tracing down her skin, made her shiver again.
Her cheeks heated, and her heart pounded in wild beats. “It is the mark of the devil.”
“Yes, I said that already.” His tone was absentminded.
The acceptance in his imperturbable words loosened her desperate clutch on her dress while he went to a shelf of books and pulled out a particularly thick tome. He flipped through its pages as he returned to her side. “Look—here is our visual dictionary of reven.”
The big book thudded on the table next to her. “So many.”
“Yet so much we still don’t know.” He ran his finger down one page and flipped to the next and then the next to continue his perusal.