by Jessa Slade
She drew them closer with the demon’s hooks. The malice struggled, sensing their doom on the threshold of where her dread did not own her anymore and became her weapon. Too late. And this time, the words gave her grim satisfaction.
The pressure built inside her like a madness, until she thought she would explode with it and lose everything.
Perfect.
She just had to ignore the fear that she would fail, though even the wisp of the thought buckled her knees, more crippling than a thousand malice. But she had been living with her fears for hundreds of years; she would not let them stop her now. She staggered for the side room, uncaring of the hiding places that might have sheltered her. The time for hiding was past.
She nearly crumbled, though, when she saw Thorne holding Sidney aloft, with one hand wrapped around her beloved’s throat. Sidney had kept his chin down and tight, and he clawed at the fingers crushing his windpipe.
That had never worked for the hanging victims she watched die.
The memory tried to sap the remaining strength from her, snatching at her last breath. She refused to stop.
Until she hit the wall of seething djinni emanations.
The conflicting flow went through her with an electric shock. Her head snapped back, and her spine arched into an agonizing bow.
And her burden of frenzied malice, desperate to escape her teshuva’s presence, sprang free with a cacophony of shrieks spreading across a dozen octaves. The etheric backlash swept the confined room in a visible shock wave, rippling through the air, rippling Sidney’s hair, rippling the windowpanes. …
The glass shattered, tearing huge holes in the metal framework that supported the windows.
Shards rained down in a glittering shower. The hostages and djinn-men alike ducked and covered.
Except for Thorne.
But as he raised his face to the glass downpour, seeking its source, Sidney swung his fist straight at the djinn-man’s nose.
Thorne dropped him with a roar.
The sound galvanized the crowd. The hostages fled toward the new openings in the walls with screams to match the malice. The other djinn-men hesitated, torn between chasing their prey and rallying around their leader.
Sidney had no such hesitation. He scrambled toward her. “Run!”
But she was spent. The malice attack had left her bruised with darkness. As he came toward her, she saw only the moment he had turned away, reversed for the time being, but sure to play out again, to rip her apart again.
The teshuva wavered in her, then steeled, like a cage around her heart, around her mind. Its alien chill settled through her. She raised her head to meet Sidney’s gaze.
He faltered, just one step, but it was obvious all the same. She snarled at him. No, not her. The demon. But she did not stop it.
“No closer,” it hissed. “Too late.”
And in another heartbeat, Sidney grabbed her hand. “I said, run.”
The heat of his touch torched her, and she gasped at the shock.
As he pulled her into his arms, another shower of glass tumbled toward them, alight with reflections of the plunging salambes and amusement park outside.
She looked up, dazzled—not by the lights and sparkling shards of certain death, but by Sidney’s unfaltering gaze.
“Remind me to tell you more later,” he said, “but I love you too.”
The words simultaneously lifted and shattered her. She reached toward him, but the glimpse of her unadorned ring finger made her falter. The demon’s protective haze grayed her vision, wavering along with her conviction, too close to the verge, too close to collapse.
No—she wouldn’t dread his answer. No, she never would again, not even to save herself from the truth. “I loved you from the first.”
“And I’ll love you until the last.”
She reached up to touch his throat where Thorne’s grasp had purpled the skin. “We match.”
He swallowed, and his pulse raced against her fingertips. “Symballein.”
She fainted, and the tenebraeternum—no longer held at bay—swallowed them.
“Damn,” Sid murmured. That hadn’t gone over quite as smoothly as he’d hoped.
He’d waited too long to proclaim his love and claim their bond, and the darkness had taken them. They were stuck suspended in the verge, the mouth of the beast, which was somewhat better than the belly of the beast, but still full of dangerous teeth.
He clutched Alyce’s small body to his chest. She’d fainted before, the last time she’d taken on too many malice. This couldn’t be worse, could it?
Other than the dozen roaming djinn-men, the unleashed angelic sword, and the exploding verge, of course.
Thankfully, no one was around to answer the question.
“Alyce? Sweetheart, no hiding now.”
His voice fell with a strange flatness, as if the tenebraeternum had no wish for sweethearts, no place for soft words.
He held her close, struggling to breathe the warm scent of her through his bloody nose. His heart ached with loving words, hoarded for years; words he’d never been able to say, and couldn’t say here, not on the verge of damnation, when anything he said would be tainted with shadows.
The gray around them was perforated with the verge views into other possibilities. Each opening while it gaped formed a bridge from the tenebraeternum to the human realm, a myriad of unhealed scars, real and imagined, each a link to the darkness.
And a link back to the real world.
He just had to step into the right reality. Good thing he’d always had a grip on things like that.
With all his impassive analytical skill, Sid focused on each portal. But this time, he couldn’t use his Bookkeeper prowess alone; he needed his demon too. Whatever he had to do, whoever he had to become, he would get Alyce back where he could tell her again how he loved her. He wanted that—craved it. …
“Alyce,” he whispered.
This time, she stirred. “Sidney?”
Weirdly distorted screams—tenebrae or human?—drowned her out. Stinging shards battered his head, and he hunched his shoulder over her to protect her.
Glass. Broken window glass was tumbling through one aperture. That had to be the right portal—
Thorne pounced through the opening, still glowering, with the angelic sword raised high.
Yeah, that was the real world.
Sid swore and bolted to his feet. Alyce slung her arm behind his neck as he clasped her against his chest.
Okay, maybe he didn’t have as good a grasp on realm jumping as he thought. In retrospect, it wasn’t at all surprising that a bridge would go both ways.
Thorne’s impressive leap carried him well within the no-man’s-land that surrounded them, but then he staggered; clearly his djinni was as unsettled on the doorstep of hell as the repentant teshuva.
Only a quick thrust of his sword into the strange shifting surface beneath their feet kept him upright.
But the tenebraeternum didn’t like being poked with angel relics. The verge heaved around them. Alyce gasped in Sid’s ear and held him tighter. Red, yellow, and black lightning streaked through the gray, disrupting some of the orb portals.
Including the one Thorne had arrived through. He spun back, cursing, but the rounded window collapsed into a lopsided crescent, its view to the outside world fuzzed like an old tube television losing reception.
With the djinn-man occupied, Sid let Alyce slide down his chest to her feet, though he didn’t let go until he was sure she was steady, or at least as steady as one could be on the gateway into hell.
Thorne wasn’t taking their precarious situation well. His scowl creased the birnenston burns on his cheekbones into a frightful mask lit by the guttering sword. The angel relic wasn’t any happier than its bearer to be this close to the source of evil. “What have you done?”
Sid kept Alyce tucked close behind him. Hadn’t he said exactly that to the talyan the first time he saw the verge? Not that he wanted to symp
athize with this particular devil. “You shouldn’t have followed us,” he reminded Thorne.
“This is the last time I forget that nothing good comes of following.” Thorne leveled the sword at them, but nothing happened—not even the pathetic solenoid rattle of one of Liam’s junker cars. “You could die here too. Get us out.”
Sid spread his empty hands. “I can’t. It’s up to Alyce.”
She blanched when Thorne rounded on her. “I can’t. … I don’t remember what I did.”
“Remember,” Thorne snarled, “or I’ll finish the games we’ve played all these years.”
Sid stepped toward the djinn-man, but Alyce hauled him back, her grip surprisingly strong. He didn’t pull away; he would never willingly separate from her again. “Maybe you can threaten her into being yours. Since all those years she was lost and alone, and you still couldn’t win her.”
Thorne recoiled. He squared his shoulders again, but that first flinch of hurt had been too quick even for his djinni to prevent.
“She’s yours now, Anglo. I grant you that.” His tone softened. “So you make her remember, and I’ll undo your possession.”
Sid froze.
With her hand still on his arm, Alyce must have felt his hesitation. Her fingers trailed down his arm, and she stepped away, her gaze bleak as the coming winter when he glanced back at her.
Unbidden, his gaze slid to the djinn-man in fascination. “You can’t. …”
Thorne waved the tip of the sword in a sinuous pattern near his feet. “I’ve already done it three times tonight.”
“And destroyed them all,” Alyce choked out.
Thorne shrugged. “Only the first one. The other two died on their own because they’d been too long possessed.” He smiled at Sid. “But you … Your teshuva has barely had time to unpack.”
As pages from league books he’d read came to mind, his life as a Bookkeeper flashed before his eyes. “It might still kill me. The flaw in my soul the demon exploited to possess me would be even more exposed when it left.”
Thorne shrugged. “A risk, true. But how much worse could it be than where you are now?” A sweep of the sword encompassed the gray. “And you’d regain all you had. I’m a gambling man. Are you?”
“I wasn’t before,” Sid said.
Alyce made a soft sound, like the malice cry of furious despair but only a single, human octave, low and mournful. The many mouths of the verge echoed the cry, including the hazy crescent view of the talyan battling the djinn-men, no more substantial than a dream.
Or a nightmare.
Thorne smiled. “Good man. You can take that with you from your short time as talya. A parting gift.”
“Go.” Amidst the demented whispers, Alyce’s quiet voice almost disappeared. “I think I can freeze the shifts long enough for you to slip away.”
Sid searched her eyes. He saw no trace of the teshuva’s fog, but just a pale sky blue down to her soul. “And what about you?”
“I can hold the verge steady on this side but not while I pass through myself.” She dropped her gaze. “I’ll stay.”
“No bets on your surviving here,” Thorne murmured. “Not even from a gambling man.”
Sid glanced at Thorne. “And still you think I’d take it?”
“I’d bet the house.”
“Then you’d lose your house. Again.” Sid faced Alyce and forced her to look at him; he forced her to look and hopefully see what was down at the bottom of his own soul. “And you’re crazy if you think I’d let you stay here.”
“Crazy?” Her eyes flickered, not violet, but with the faintest hint of returning life.
“And I’d be crazy to let you go. You’re my symballein mate, and that makes us two halves of something special.”
“Especially crazy,” Thorne snapped. He whirled the sword over his head. Its blessings might be twisted in this place, but the edge whistled sharply through the gray. “I’m not asking nicely.”
Alyce spun on him, as graceful as the blade. “Then don’t say anything at all.”
She swept her hands across her body and back again in a swirl. Ether fled from her gesture in chaotic waves through the gray fog.
Thorne disappeared in the shifting madness of shadows and warped portal views as the waves expanded. His shout of rage barely reached them, lost between the jumbled possibilities.
“Interesting.” Sid tapped his chin. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s nothing, just delusion, reflected back at him. He’ll fight his way through.” She gazed up at him. “As you should. That’s one thing he was right about, Sidney—you could let your demon go.”
He reached for her, and her fingers were icy cold. “I could. I’d take the risk, but …”
“But nothing.”
“Exactly. I’d have nothing without you.”
She shook her head. “I saw those pictures in the archives of how much good my little demon can do. More than me, the league needs a Bookkeeper.”
“And I’ll be Chicago’s Bookkeeper. It’s what I am, and I don’t need anyone’s stamp of approval, not anymore. But not having you …” He tightened his grasp, willing the warmth of his skin into hers. “I need you. That illusion you seem to think I could fight my way through—that isn’t a theory or a concept to unravel. That is my love.”
He lifted her tight-held fist and pressed her knuckles to his throat so she could feel the vibration of his words, feel the longing pulse that sought to match itself to hers. “I love you, Alyce. I said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. I’ll say it in dead languages and I’ll sign it in blood and ichor, and I’ll keep this damn demon, so even if it takes forever until you believe me, I will still be saying I love you.”
In the shifting darkness around them, the moment stretched out, until even the eternity in which they were trapped seemed about to sob out its indrawn breath.
“I do believe you,” she whispered. “I do.”
He rummaged in his pocket and withdrew the rivet. She smiled and unfurled her clenched hand to brush her thumb across his lips. She kept her gaze fixed on his as he slid the ring over her heart finger.
He leaned down to kiss her, slowly and gently, never mind the swirling shadows of a hungry hell and the furious djinn-man.
She tilted her face up to meet his kiss, and the shadows stilled, all the powers of darkness unable to rise between them.
But in the stillness, the delusions thrown by the unstable portals cleared. Thorne burst into view, sword high.
Alyce cried out, and Sid wheeled toward the djinn-man, yanking free two of the boning knives from behind her back.
Thorne’s eyes widened, then narrowed, and he roared out a challenge. Sid never made a sound as he raised the knives in a cross to catch the falling sword.
Face-to-face with the djinn-man, he stared into the yellow-ringed eyes. There was no place for the Bookkeeper philosophy of dispassionate observation here. He would never again back away from the bonds between him and the league, between him and Alyce, who was the pale unwavering light in his world.
Thorne strained against him, but this close to hell, the eternal darkness was a torrent of unfettered etheric energy that overwhelmed both their demons, so they fought only muscle to muscle, fury to fury.
The djinn-man did have the bigger sword, though, and he bore down with an incisor-clenched grin. “I’ve killed humans and angels and djinn. I’ve never killed a talya or a Bookkeeper. Your head will be a fine oddity for my collection.”
“Who’s the curiosity here? You’re a djinn-man bearing an abrasax, an angel’s blessed weapon. There’s never been a record of such a contradiction.” Sid locked the two slender knives around the heavier blade and refused to yield to sword or words. “Alyce is mine, but have you considered that maybe you are meant for something else as well?”
For the barest instant, the weight of the sword eased; then Thorne’s face twisted. “Once I kill you, I bet she forgets you before the next night falls. But maybe
I’ll spare your league one prayer when I wield this cursed weapon over the ahaˉzum.”
“Bet me then. Double or nothing.”
The shifting realities of the verge never quite settled, but Sid focused all his fear for the chances he’d almost lost. And still that fear was nothing compared to the love that had found him. With a furious upward shove of both slender knives against the sword, he sent the djinn-man stumbling back.
Alyce strode into the fray. Flickers of djinni yellow and blue-white angel fire played along the shine of her black leather. She had two more knives in her hands, and Sid caught his breath in dread—and in delight that she was his. Before he could shout a warning, she brought the knives slicing down.
Though the blades passed nowhere near the djinn-man, the darkness behind him gaped wide in a view too muddled for Sid to decipher.
Whatever Thorne saw made him twist from the half-open portal. But in the force of ether swirling away from Alyce, he lost his balance.
The portal swallowed, and Thorne was gone.
Sid whirled. “Where—?”
Alyce sheathed the two knives with a doubled hiss of steel. “Gone.”
As if that was enough. Sid supposed, it was, for now. “Dare we hope the tenebraeternum will tear him to bits, and the sword too?”
“That I wouldn’t bet on.”
He sighed. “Fane will be pissed the sword is gone.”
She bit her lip. “But not you?” Her tone wavered between the ghostly girl she’d been and the warrior woman standing before him.
They had time to learn each others’ secret pasts and make sense of their shared future. He gathered her close to slide the knives back along her spine. “We’ll have troubles, no doubt, but I have you. And you have me. Can you get us out of here?”
She held out her empty hand to display the ring. “With you at my side, yes.”
“I’ll be here, always.” He took her hand.
After a moment, her little smile appeared. “Maybe someday I won’t keep making you say it.”