by Jessa Slade
Liam waited in the kitchen, as promised—threatened, really.
The league leader, one hip perched near the humming microwave, eyed him. “Where’s Alyce?”
“In the shower, hopefully.”
“You aren’t sure?”
Sid scraped a hand through his hair. “I’m not stupid.”
“And staying to make sure would have been stupid.” Liam nodded. “Throughout mythology, demon-touched women have been portrayed as overwhelmingly alluring. And that was just when the portrayals were merely in words or pictures. In the flesh …” He whistled under his breath.
A flare of anger made Sid’s hands clench. “Well, the flesh will be properly covered now, in your commando fatigues.”
Commando. That made him remember there had been no underthings in the pile he left for Alyce. And that reminded him he wasn’t going to think of it anymore. The angry heat converted in a flash to something far less manageable.
Liam watched him with too-knowing eyes. “We might not know how the symballein bond works, but I can tell you from experience that it makes a hash of good intentions.”
Sid thrust his hands into his front pockets, to hide the white knuckles and release some of the pressure of denim on his prick. “You think the symballein link is somehow keyed to me, even though I’m not possessed?”
“Good God, no.” Liam straightened. “You can’t have Alyce.”
“Obviously not,” he said, even though the devil’s advocate in him asked, Why not? And another part—the part that wasn’t an advocate and was just a devil—whispered, Fuck you.
But Liam seemed satisfied with the words said aloud. “Good you agree. Because I don’t think I could keep murderous talya hands off you. So make sure you keep Alyce’s hands off you too.”
Nim barged into the room, Jonah moseying behind her. “Was Alyce hurt? She didn’t seem to have any problems with her right hook.”
Sid tried not to squirm. “She’s fine.”
Jonah squinted. “You checked her over thoroughly?”
Liam’s cough was disguised by the ding of the microwave.
Sid wished he could blame the fire in his face on the rush of steam when the league leader popped the oven door. “I found the minor wounds she received as part of your game,” he said, drawing out the word with doubtful scorn, “already healed upon examination. I’ll write up a full report in the archives later tonight.”
Nim leaned against her mate with a relieved sigh. “I’m glad we didn’t scare her.”
“You should be more relieved her dread demon didn’t take exception to your game.”
Jonah lifted an eyebrow. “What would the teshuva have done? Its etheric signature is so faint, we never even realized she walked the city with us.”
“An orca’s dorsal fin doesn’t leave much of a wake either,” Sid pointed out. He left the rest of that image to percolate in their minds. “There’s more going on under there than we can guess.”
“And let me guess,” Liam drawled. “You’re the man to get under there and figure it out.”
Sid avoided the league leader’s menacing stare. “I promised her answers if she came here.”
“Just answers,” Liam said, much more softly. Brows furrowed in identical lines, Nim and Jonah clearly sensed the unsubtle undercurrents.
“Those answers will make me London’s Bookkeeper,” Sid countered, trying to mask his defensiveness with a touch of offense. “I’ll be out of here soon enough.”
Nim stepped away from Jonah. “Hey, Alyce. Come on in.”
The heat lingering in Sid’s face drained. Shite. What had Alyce heard?
Her expression gave no indication as she slipped between the talyan in the doorway, silent even in the too-big boots. Though he’d picked the smallest available sizes, the black T-shirt and cargo pants ballooned around her and made her skin paler by comparison. She’d braided her wet hair and wound the long plait in a crown on her head to expose her simple reven like a grim choker.
“Oh, sweetie,” Nim said. “What the hell? Those clothes are awful.”
“Sidney gave them to me,” Alyce said.
He winced. He had an inkling she might have heard his thoughtless retort to Liam’s needling. Damn it, he hadn’t meant to make her feel abandoned. He’d brought her to the league specifically to give her a place to belong. But that was all he could give her, as Liam—and Bookkeeper doctrine—made so painfully clear.
Nim clicked her tongue. “A man might think going out to conquer evil necessitates wash-and-wear. But we know better.” She held out her hand to Liam with a wiggle of her fingers. “I’ll need the At-One platinum, please.”
“Don’t do it,” Jonah warned.
With a sigh, Liam pulled out his wallet. “Get her what she needs.”
Sid straightened. “I can—”
Liam’s gaze snapped to him, a flicker of violet lighting the reven at his temple. “You declared her fit and fine. We’ll take care of her from here, Bookkeeper.”
Sid didn’t budge. “Fine, yes, but not fight-ready.”
Nim sniffed. “Who said fighting? We’re going shopping. And don’t worry; all the good sales are over.”
“We’re doomed,” Jonah muttered.
Nim kissed him. “But we’ll look damn fine. Ready, Alyce?”
Sid tried to catch Alyce’s glance, but she never looked his way.
And once again, a Bookkeeper gave his best to the league and was left with nothing.
CHAPTER 11
Alyce felt the traces of him all around her—the weight of his gaze between her shoulder blades, the heat of his fingers still burning her breast, the taste of him—as she dogged Nim’s footsteps out of the kitchen.
He was leaving—not now, but when she had given him what he wanted. And what he wanted was not her kiss—he hadn’t wanted that, apparently—but her memories exposed, her expected place in the league filled.
Teasing her, a memory flickered, no more than a voice, hazy with the distance of time. This one will do. It was the master who had chosen her. Mingled hopelessness and dread had twisted in her stomach then, and she had to swallow back a foul taste like ashes.
She touched her neck, and under her fingertips, the reven pulsed. Had the devil loosened its iron grip on her recollections? Was it reminding her not to trust the men in her life? How cruel. But then, it was a demon.
Nim led her out to the cars, aligned under the lone lamp that buzzed and flickered over their heads.
Nim didn’t strap herself in, so neither did Alyce, and they left the lot in a rattle of gravel.
The other woman did not speak for a time, and the grip of tension across Alyce’s shoulders eased. She concentrated on the flow of the city outside her window. So quickly it passed, too fast to grasp more than a sensation.
Rather like her last … how many years? “How old do you think I am?”
Nim divided her attention between Alyce and the road. “You were maybe early twenties, I’d guess, when the teshuva got ahold of you. Hopefully you were at least twenty-one and had your first legal drink before the demon started metabolizing all the alcohol so you couldn’t catch a decent buzz. But how long ago that was …” She tilted her head. “I don’t know. I’d take a wild guess if I could, because unlike everybody else, I don’t mind being wrong. But I haven’t ever seen anything like you.”
Alyce slumped in her seat.
Nim patted her knee. “No worries. We’ll get you up to speed.”
“That is what Sidney said. But he is leaving.”
Nim’s expression hovered somewhere between sympathy and dismissal. “It’s not you. He never meant to stay. He’s made us his pet project so he can prove how awesome he is.” Both emotions seemed to deepen, drawing her features into inhumanly remote realms when she looked at Alyce again. “We won’t leave. Not ever. We might be heinously butchered by tenebrae, but now that we’ve found you, we won’t leave you.”
“It was Sidney who found me,” Alyce said wistfully.<
br />
“Sweetie, if you’re looking for an arrogant bastard with commitment issues, we’ve got way more where that one came from. You’ll get the chance to meet on more intimate terms when you aren’t throwing furniture at them. Thanks for winning me fifty bucks, by the way. I made Jonah pay up since you would’ve cleaned their clocks. With grandfather clocks.”
Alyce let Nim go on, extolling the virtues of the various talya males, but once she’d said “intimate,” Alyce’s thoughts circled back to how Sidney’s arms had wrapped so perfectly around her.
“I have not had strong drink,” Alyce interrupted over Nim’s description of one talya’s mastery of the cut-down crossbow in urban warfare. “I have never chosen a man either.”
Nim huffed out a laugh. “Well then, you’re out on the town with the right girl. As for the right man … Let’s see what we can do.”
Unlike Sidney, who seemed to need to wander all over Chicago to find phone boxes, Nim carried a little phone of her own. She parked the car and called Jonah. “I’m not going to make it back in time to go hunting with you tonight. We’re on a different mission here. Take somebody to cover your ass—somebody big, like Ecco—and meet us at the Coil afterward.”
The small phone made eavesdropping harder, but Alyce smiled at the long-suffering sigh that gusted through the device.
“I love you too.” Nim made a kissing noise and folded the phone with a snap before turning to Alyce. “We have our own hunting. This, sweetie, is a mall.”
Once through the wide circling doors that snatched people in and spit them out, saturated in strange and overpowering smells, Nim said, “First stop, shoes. Sadly, your shoes should be practical, as I’ve rediscovered more times than I care to admit. But then, I think, we can be forgiven a ridiculous plunge into Forever 21.”
The shoes they found were, as promised, flat, hard treaded, lace-up, and sturdy, though Nim sighed louder than Jonah had over a pair of spiky red heels with only the thinnest of straps holding sole to foot.
“But it’s almost winter,” Alyce said.
“And wouldn’t they look stunning in the snow?”
“They’d look cold.”
Nim gave her a sour look. “You’re worse than Jilly. Enjoy your combat boots.”
She took her revenge at their next stop as she hustled Alyce into a curtained room. “You stay here. Take off those black horrors and I’ll bring you something more appropriate.”
“Practical for chasing devils, like the shoes?”
Nim shushed her. “You said you wanted a man.”
Alyce craned her neck to see around the other woman. “The talyan will be coming here?”
“Not likely. This is truly their version of hell. Now stay.”
Alyce obediently slipped out of the clothes Sidney had left for her—left behind, just as he’d left her. A flicker of anger canceled out the touch of breeze on her naked skin, and the hard stomp of her new shoes felt good as she paced the tiny room.
She was nothing but a curiosity to him, a puzzle to unfold.
When Nim brought back the clothes she’d chosen, Alyce knew she could show Sidney that she had nothing to hide.
Really, this was evil’s secret hideout?
Thorne leaned against a scrawny maple tree that had sucked all the sustenance it could from its narrow island of soil at the edge of the huge parking lot. Sprawled in the middle of the cracked pavement was the Bowl Me Over.
The retro neon sign—not neo-retro, but dating back to Thorne’s own childhood—over the entry was half dismantled, but the streetlights beamed their ugly illumination, dull white as a dead man’s eyes. With a prick of his djinni, Thorne read the sheet of paper taped to the double front door.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR PRIVATE BOWLING LEGION
“I suppose you couldn’t say league,” he muttered.
He’d wrung the location of the ahaˉzum gathering out of Carlo before tossing him off the boat. He might have suspected Carlo was trying to make him look foolish, bringing him to such an inauspicious place where the impatient city pressed close on all sides, but the djinn-man had been too wrecked to lie.
The cars parked near the entrance didn’t lie either, all late-model conspicuous consumption and shining waxy under the lights.
DJIN 1. DEEPBLU C. IMEVL.
Thorne shook his head. “Vanity, thy name is legion.”
The doors were locked when he tried them. He had an invitation of sorts. He could just knock.
He had a djinni. He could just tear the doors down.
Well, shit. He had brought his lock picks since Carlo had reminded him of the good old days. So he let himself in with only a quiet snick of yielding tumblers.
Thanks to the djinni, he might walk on wind chimes and make no noise. But he didn’t forget that those who gathered within were possessed too.
The foyer was darker than the parking lot, and every bit as ugly with the cheap pine-coffin wall paneling. The djinn didn’t need lights, of course, but most of the possessed clung to the delusions of their humanity. They liked to hide their darkness in the light.
So Thorne followed the faint glow of yellow deeper into the building.
Ahead of him, the unlit lanes stretched away from the empty chairs and the snack bar that even hours after closing still stank of nacho cheese.
Nacho cheese and sulfur.
At the far end of the lanes, only partially visible between the pinsetters, the djinn-men of Chicago had gathered under the bare bulbs of the bowling alley’s back room.
Thorne settled himself cross-legged on a scorer’s table to listen.
“… not enough of us yet,” Carlo was saying to the dozen others. “Magdalena is disappointed.”
Thorne wondered if the queen bitch had taken out her disappointment on her lapdog. If so, she’d been discerning in her punishment, since Carlo had been freed of the andiron wrapped around his heart. He paced briskly in front of the gathered men, and his djinni’s energy simmered around his slick gray suit like a kettle on high; the old mobster was clearly enjoying the return to organized crime.
Not everyone seemed so enthused. “I came tonight because you made promises, Carlo. I don’t give a shit about Magdalena’s disappointment.”
Thorne peered through the pinsetter, silently cheering the sentiment. Fuck Magdalena. He didn’t recognize the other djinn-man—he would’ve remembered so many platinum chains reflecting off diamond-studded teeth—but that wasn’t surprising. He knew Carlo well enough to relish stabbing him only because the wise guy had explained to a bewildered, raw djinn-man on a now-distant night why an entire bottle of Thunderbird no longer worked its obliterating magic. Of course, Carlo hadn’t shared until said-empty bottle had been smashed apart and pressed to his throat.
Thorne had to wonder what advantages Carlo had so freely promised on Magdalena’s behalf. And why hadn’t Carlo offered him those advantages? Thorne shifted in irritation. Just as well he’d learned to take what he wanted without asking.
Carlo strutted in a tight circle, the yellow light from the bare bulb greasing his hair like margarine. “Out of us all, only Magdalena has had the nerve to call the ahaˉzum, to continue what Corvus Valerius began.”
The doubting spokesman tapped his chin, jangling the platinum chains over his tight-fitted T-shirt. “Blackbird began by—let’s see—losing his head, then his soul and his demon, and then—oh yeah—the last shreds of his miserable life. What could possibly be the next step?”
“Ending the secrecy.”
Djinni energy flared with an acrid stink. The pinball machines on the other side of the snack bar briefly pinged and strobed, a disturbingly cheerful soundtrack. Thorne closed his eyes while he curbed the demon, knowing his own sockets would be beaming night prowler zeal.
“That’s psycho,” said Chains.
“If Corvus had torn the Veil between the demon and human realms wide open, that would be psycho,” Carlo said. “Magdalena will reveal what we are: all-powerful, invincible, gods in our
own right. And goddess. We’d run this city.”
Gods of Chicago? Thorne restrained a snort. But who wouldn’t want to be called a god? Certainly the gathering of djinn-men in a defunct bowling alley were now muttering with eager tones.
He peered at them again. Seen through the mechanical struts and flywheels of the pinsetters, their bodies were a Cubist portrait of disjointed evil. But their isolationism was coming to an end, apparently. Maybe they’d forgotten in this sudden mania that most of them had renounced their pantheistic histories long ago. There could be only one great spirit.
He could guess who would claim that place. And Magdalena would never be satisfied with a mere city.
“Corvus wanted to pit hell against heaven, not to rule,” Chains argued. “He believed if the djinn and angels fought without intermediaries—without us—he would be free. I am not interested in being free to die, spitted on an angel’s sword.”
“What makes you think the sphericanum will act?” Carlo held his hands together in a prayerlike pose—a little something he’d picked up from Magdalena, no doubt. “Things ain’t never been worse for them. A lone djinn-man nearly brought down the Veil. And the sphericanum has done”—he spread his hands—“nothing.”
“The league—”
“The talyan barely stopped the rift from widening, and they left a doorway standing open in its place, if we dare go through.” Carlo shrugged. “Well, Magdalena dares.”
Chains scoffed hard enough to bounce the platinum on his chest. “Dares what? Collect minions like salt and pepper shakers?”
“She attacked a talya patrol at a sphericanum church.”
At the surge of ether this time, the bank of video games burst, glass faces cracking down the middle with the violent electrical storm. The vintage Ms. Pac-Man at the end finished the meltdown with a dirgelike woo-woo-woo.
Carlo nodded in satisfaction at the undeniable response. “She’s found a way into the sphericanum wiretaps, and she heard the talyan and a couple goldies were meeting. She sent me to put the fear of God into them.” He laughed at his joke.
Another djinn-man, standing back out of the reach of the lightbulbs, hissed out a laugh of his own. “And I hear your test run got an F for fucked. Four out of seven departed djinni is not a passing grade.”