Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls

by Jessa Slade

  “We all have our limits,” Sid said. “Speaking of lines in the sand, or concrete, as the case may be …”

  “Chicago has always been a contrary league,” his father mused. “And since their last Bookkeeper was unreliable, I don’t doubt they’d give you trouble.”

  “Actually, Liam Niall wants me to join them.”

  “As their Bookkeeper? It’s not London, but—”

  Sid winced at how badly he was mangling this. “As talya.”

  Silence.

  Even the teshuva couldn’t pick up a sound. “Dad?”

  “What happened?”

  “I wish I knew.” He thought of the blank pages in the Bookkeeper archive tally, and his fingers itched for a pen. “I really wish I knew.”

  “Sidney … Son, this is … I don’t know what to say.”

  Considering all the words tumbling through his brain, none of them in coherent order, Sid could relate. “Not much to say. Which is possibly why the talyan don’t tell us anything.”

  “You sacrificed your soul to get an inside angle?”

  Sid tried to deflect the defensive flare at the accusation. “Bookkeepers make sacrifices all the time. Say good-bye to blissful ignorance, a nine-to-five job, any meaningful family dinner conversation. …”

  “Sidney, this is not a time to joke. The other European masters will never accept a talya in the Bookkeeper ranks.”

  “Why not? Who better to understand?”

  “But the danger—”

  “Somewhat offset by immortality.” Sid tried to keep his tone teasing.

  But his father was having none of it. “The danger isn’t to your life and soul—at least, not just that—but your impartiality.”

  Sid sat heavily on the corner of the small desk. “What’s the point of impartiality? It’s not as if we’re going to root for the other side.”

  “The teshuva were the other side.” Through the phone, the creak of a chair conjured up the image in Sid’s head of his father leaning back at his big polished desk, quite unlike the dinged hutch tucked away in this empty room in a salvage warehouse. “The teshuva were part of the army that sought to vanquish light and order and life. That they repented is marvelous. Without them making amends to scour the earth of the remnants of that dark army, we’d be even deeper in shite.”

  Sid choked back a laugh. “Is that the approved Bookkeeper term?”

  His father wouldn’t be distracted. “The angelic- and djinn-possessed exist in complete opposition; yet neither have their own version of Bookkeepers. Why not? Because they are sure of their actions. Right or wrong, dark or light, they strive forward. The teshuva, though, they can never again be certain they are on the path. And so they have us. Their conscience. Without our unblinking, dispassionate witness, they may again stray.”

  Sid remembered sneaking the Bookkeeper key from beneath his brother’s pillow and creeping down to the workshop in the dead of night. He had never been dispassionate about what he’d learned. “Doesn’t there come a time when one’s deeds outweigh one’s failures?”

  “For all their good intentions now, the teshuva cannot be trusted. They broke their faith once.”

  As Sid himself had, came the unspoken corollary. A stillness, chill as death, sank into his bones. It was not just the condemnation he heard in his father’s words, but the demon, accepting its punishment.

  He’d wanted into this league, to know its secrets, come hell or high water. He’d have to watch out for floods since he’d already conjured hell. Maybe the weakness of wanting that characterized the crave demon had made it vulnerable to him.

  “Dad, do you think I betrayed you?”

  In the second period of silence, the hiss of distance and the rush of blood through his ears seemed muted, as if the demon had pulled deep inside him and didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “It’s not about me anymore, Sidney. My time here is past. Whatever I say, the other masters will weigh this with your unorthodox entry into the training and …”

  “And think I am a rogue Bookkeeper. I’ve read the suggestions for dealing with a rogue talya. What is the protocol among Bookkeepers?” He couldn’t keep the remoteness out of his voice.

  “You know perfectly well there is no protocol since this has never happened before.”

  Not really the answer he wanted to hear. He might risk facing the council of masters himself, but he wouldn’t put Alyce in front of them. They did have rules about her kind.

  All the years of studies that had spread so steadily under his feet crumbled around the edges. He’d always lived between two worlds—the Bookkeepers who hadn’t wanted him and the humans who would never have believed him. Now he stretched into a third dimension with the talyan.

  Of course, the real world was three dimensional.

  “Dad, I’m sorry this is coming as such a shock. It’s been … unsettling for me too.” He was relieved that mastery of the understatement came as industry-standard with Bookkeeper training. “When I get home—”

  “Don’t come to London, Sidney.”

  Short words delivered like crossbow arrows.

  Sid gripped the edge of the table. “What?”

  “There’s nothing left for you here.”

  “You’re there.”

  “Not for long.” A hesitation, and Sid braced himself for another volley. “Wesley is back.”

  Sid closed his eyes. “And I can only say again, ‘What?’”

  “Right after you left. We had tea together today. We talked a long time. It was good.”

  Hugh would be overjoyed the old man was eating. “I wish I could have joined you while he is in town.”

  “He’s coming back. To the league. For good.”

  “Had I even left Heathrow yet?”

  “Sidney,” his father chided.

  “I don’t care about winning the council’s favor, Dad. I want to be there for you.”

  “You were. All the years when your brother was gone, you were here.”

  And now that the prodigal son—the one who hadn’t killed his mother—had returned, what use for the placeholder? Sidney remembered the steel cold against his cheek as he’d pressed his ear to the closed and locked workshop door, straining to hear the voices of his father and brother.

  The possessed tended to lack close connections in the world; such isolation widened the flaws in their souls that made them vulnerable to demonic possession. He’d never considered himself one of those people, but apparently the teshuva had known better.

  He didn’t remember what he said after that, but he didn’t think it was horrible or even particularly strained. His father asked him to call back soon; he promised—and the promise bounced around the hollow of his chest—then he hung up.

  It was all very civilized, really, considering.

  He threw the phone.

  Whipping the cord behind, it bounced off the wall with a crash and a startled bing from its chimes. It left a satisfying dent in the plaster, and he was viciously glad he hadn’t been calling on a cheap plastic cell.

  Without warning, his door opened. Alyce slipped inside.

  He looked away. “I told you to go to your room.”

  “But I belong where you are.”

  “I know this is hard for you to understand, because you don’t remember how much time has passed since your possession. But this is a new era. Women don’t belong to anyone anymore.”

  She tipped her head, studying him.

  The fury in him that had launched the phone surged, like an electrical current seeking ground. “I am not your master, Alyce.”

  “I know. My master was a bad man. The memories are coming back to me, in flashes. The teshuva doesn’t hold me so hard when I think of you holding me.”

  His anger dissipated, leaving him flat. “The talyan cling to their solitary ways. I never thought the teshuva might want something else.”

  “I don’t know if I want to remember more.”

  “So, did you come here to break u
p with me?”

  She tilted her head another degree, toward the debris on the floor. “You’ve been breaking things without me.”

  It was hard to tease her when they barely shared the same language. He crossed the room to the broken phone and gathered the pieces. Without the churning anger to justify his behavior, he felt stupid to have ruined the old thing. “I just called my father.”

  She obviously realized she didn’t need to ask how the revelation had gone. “No man would want this for his son.”

  “Liam didn’t take it much better, and he needs all the talyan he can lay his hands on.” He dumped the phone in the trash before he pulled the broken spectacles from his breast pocket.

  The sticky duct tape snagged on his fingertips; then the specs clattered to the bottom of the dustbin.

  She laced her fingers in front of her. “I want you to stay here.”

  He straightened slowly. How did she speak her mind like that, without fear? He’d abandoned her, rather rudely despite his understandable shock, after sharing … Well, according to what he knew of the symballein bond, they’d swapped more than body fluids; they might’ve exchanged shards of their souls.

  He couldn’t blame her if she ripped out his heart and took back whatever pieces were rightfully hers.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

  She didn’t hesitate, but instead just settled beside him, close enough that her fitted skirt lapped his jeans.

  Not even skin-to-skin, and still his body prickled with awareness. Whatever beating his emotions had taken, the energy between them flowed unabated.

  “I think in some ways you have the advantage on me,” he said. “Everything I’ve read about and analyzed and debated doesn’t mean much compared to what you simply know.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand anything.”

  “Maybe not understand, but you’ve survived more than most on instinct alone.”

  “You told me you would help me, and you brought me here. I want to do what I can to help you.” She gazed at him, her icy eyes an eerie mix of danger and innocent clarity. He wondered if the Arctic explorers of yore had felt the same tremor of excitement, stepping out onto the shifting floes in hope of enlightenment.

  Of course, a lot of them had wandered off, starved, and frozen to death, their north-pointing compasses gone haywire as they lost the difference between the direction they’d always thought was right and what they discovered was true.

  He’d never been a huge fan of analogies.

  But it was daytime in the city, and only late October, which didn’t get that cold, even in Chicago. So he nodded. “Take me out, Alyce. Show me your world.”

  They hopped a cab into the heart of downtown, and Sid was grateful for Alyce’s silence. She probably was afraid if she opened her mouth, he’d start talking again. Didn’t gag orders come standard issue with being talyan? Instead, he purged those old memories in the same way the demon erased scars.

  Now they rolled around the place like unsettled marbles, dangerous underfoot. If Alyce had no one to hear her, no wonder her teshuva took her memories away. He was already sick of hearing himself, and he’d been possessed only a few hours.

  The cab dropped them off on Wacker, next to the river. While he paid the driver, Alyce crossed the wide sidewalk and leaned on the concrete balustrade that overlooked the water, the gray towers looming beyond her in a hard straight frame around her gentle curves. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and observed her.

  He’d gotten his first pair of spectacles when he was five. His astonishment when he’d realized that trees even at a distance had individual leaves had made his father chuckle. That same jolt of discovery went through him now as his demon-sharpened gaze lingered on the white arch of her cheekbone and the dark silky waves of her hair against the rough black wool of the coat he’d found for her.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw him watching. A hint of rose warmed her cheeks. “I thought you must be empty.”

  He thought of his father and Wes taking tea. “I’m not really in the mood for brunch.”

  “Not you. The demon. It sustains itself on tenebrae. I didn’t understand any of it, but even in the beginning, when we fought the devils, I felt it feed.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Brunch sounds better.”

  “The talyan hunt at night, but the devils—your tenebrae—are less guarded during the day,” she told him. “That’s when I fight them.”

  “The teshuva, like all demons, are stronger when our human sides are disadvantaged; in darkness, under stress, whatever. The league prefers to fight at night to hide any leftovers.”

  He joined her at the rail, and she pointed. “Look—there’s a likely spot for malice.”

  Across the river, a broad walkway seemed to float just above the waterline. Benches and lampposts decorated the riverwalk, but now, under the menacing clouds, the concrete path was empty. “What am I looking at?”

  “The ichor around that doorway.”

  The feeble October sun hardly bothered to cast shadows through the vellum of clouds, and still it washed out the elusive demon sign. Her senses must be finely honed to pick up any etheric disturbance. “I see a closed maintenance access.”

  The building at street level, above the riverside path, was under construction. Judging from the tattered vinyl sign flapping from the security fence, work had been under way for some time. Probably the weak economy hadn’t helped the speed of renovations. One more winter of Chicago winds and there’d be nothing left of the sign.

  “Closed, but not sealed,” she said. “A dark place for the malice during the day, and they can sneak out with the night to find their brunch.”

  “Their preferred meal being us humans.”

  “Not us, not anymore.”

  The reminder set him back a mental step, and he followed a stride behind her as she crossed the bridge and took the stairs down to the riverwalk. How quickly he forgot he wasn’t entirely human anymore. No wonder years had passed for her without note.

  The riveted metal door spanned wider than his extended arms and must have once accepted deliveries at water level when the river had been more a path of commerce. Now, tufts of brown moss sprouted from the crack between door and frame.

  Sid frowned. “So, how do we do this? We could find a way in from above since there’s no real security. I didn’t see a camera or—”

  Alyce kicked the corner of the door—once, twice. The metal buckled with each blow. “Or we could just go this way.” She grabbed the corner and peeled upward.

  He winced at the squeal of stressed steel and glanced back toward the sidewalk where they’d looked down at the door. The cars whizzing by on Wacker seemed oblivious. “That is more straightforward.”

  She slipped out of her coat and folded it into a tidy triangle, which she left on the nearest bench. “But we could talk about it some more.”

  “Certainly not.”

  She eased past the bent metal.

  How loudly would the other talyan laugh if he suggested they attempt to leave the city in better shape behind them? But as they stepped out of the light into the glimmer of red malice glares, he remembered “better” had different meanings.

  “There are more here than there were in the alley,” he murmured. “And that time, they almost sucked you dry.”

  “Good thing you are with me this time.”

  “But I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “But you do now, yes?”

  She crept farther into the darkness, luminescent in her white dress, with the malevolent stars twinkling above her.

  His vision shivered and refocused, and he realized the teshuva—quiescent in the sunlight—was rousing.

  Rousing and hungry.

  The damp stink of old brick couldn’t hide the fouler stench of rotten eggs. “I smell birnenston,” he whispered. “This is a feralis lair.”

  “Was,” Alyce said. “Only ol
d bones now.”

  She stopped in the center of the chamber. The space stretched to all sides, far enough and dark enough that his teshuva didn’t even bother enhancing the view. His skin prickled. When he’d said he wanted to know the talya secrets, he’d thought that would involve more knowledge, more light, less … Yeah, that was dread.

  Alyce raised her hands, and the malice freaked.

  Sid might have indulged in some shrieking of his own, but the malice didn’t leave an opening on any frequency. They scattered, the gleam of their eyeballs leaving crimson contrails through the gloom.

  Those closest to Alyce spiraled down toward her outstretched fingers. But before the oily specters reached her, they thinned to nothingness as her demon overwhelmed the lesser energies. Only their cries lingered.

  That left about three-quarters of the horde heading straight for the open door—the open door behind him.

  Alyce spun toward him, the dissipating ether a graceful streamer behind her. “Stop them, Sidney.”

  He held out his hands as she had.

  Instead of thinning, the malice hit him like an avalanche of half-frozen, rancid marmalade. Sticky and bitter, it grated his skin with broken ice crystals.

  He might have screamed then.

  His teshuva flailed in the tenebrae chill, and his muscles locked seizure-stiff. With each pull of the malice mouths, he tasted the sour corrosion of their evil.

  No, not theirs. His.

  How deeply had he hid his exhilaration when Wes’s departure cleared the way into his father’s heart? How far down had he buried the guilt over his mother’s death? Not so deep or so far that the malice didn’t find it and dredge it up like a putrid hairball.

  No wonder a demon from hell had found a place for itself in the cracks of his soul.

  He sank to his knees.

  “No, Sidney.” Alyce knelt beside him. The white folds of her skirt washed into his narrowing vision. “Don’t let them so close. Hold them back.”

  The malice or the memories? Now he understood how she’d survived tenebrae predation. The teshuva hadn’t let her remember how she deserved this pain and horror and sickness.

  He would like to forget too. But that wasn’t his way. He’d never forgotten his feelings; he had just bottled the wretched things and observed from a careful distance, as he would any dangerous energy. Such was the Bookkeeper way.