by Jessa Slade
Jilly tightened her bare fists and wished she hadn’t been so cocky down in the weapons depot at the league warehouse.
They parked and got out. As she glanced up at the windows of the apartment building above them, the smells of cold metal and trash reminded her too much of that night outside Dory’s apartment. Except for the L train tracks, this vibe was almost exactly the same. Life just a few steps off the street. Her chest ached, not where Rico’s knife had slipped between her ribs, but spreading out along the dark threads of her reven, and she knew her teshuva was coming online. She welcomed it, if it drove away the fear.
She couldn’t be afraid, not if she wanted to save Dory again. Maybe for the last time.
The big man—Ecco—stalked up to them. He nodded at her once, eyes assessing, but addressed his comment to Liam. “You know how I love me some malice. I found these while hunting tonight. They’re crawling all over. Seemed like too many for one place, so I poked around. That’s how I found the haints. And the others.”
“This is not good.” Archer shook his head. “I told Sera to swing by the warehouse and grab some of the ESF equipment before she came. Maybe we can pick up some changes in the emanations to explain what’s going on.”
Ecco snorted. “You trying to keep her out of the fight? Good luck. She’s onto you, man.”
Archer pursed his lips. “Yeah, I know. But it sounded legit.”
Ecco snorted again. “You guys ready, then?” He slanted another glance at Jilly.
“I called in reinforcements,” Liam said. “Let’s give them a minute. No sense getting dead for nothing.”
Jilly shifted restlessly. “If Dory’s in there now . . .”
Ecco crossed his gauntleted arms over his massive chest and stuck his jaw out. “She is. Now aren’t you thankful you’ve been possessed by a demon and that we crawled all into your past so I’d recognize your sis? She looks just like you.”
“She’s my half sister—not that it matters—and she doesn’t look like me at all. She’s tall and blond.”
“Same lost-little-girl look, though.”
Jilly mirrored his crossed arms. She couldn’t match his bulk, but she beat him on the glower. “Hardly.”
Ecco lowered his arms with a zhing of stropping blades. “How long are we going to stand around without smashing something? I’m not going to live forever.” He smiled, a flash of teeth as sharp as his gauntlets. “Oh, wait. . . .”
“Yeah, you can wait.” Liam stared up at the building. “I don’t like this. Another massing of malice so soon.” He glanced at Jilly.
She huffed. “What? I didn’t do it.”
“Not you, no. But the conjunction of your emergent demon and the change in malice behavior is suspect.” He lowered his voice. “Not to mention whatever we did that trapped them together.” When she opened her mouth, he said, “And by ‘not to mention,’ I mean let’s not mention that yet. Nothing gets this crowd more fired up than the possibility of unleashing an untried new weapon with unknown consequences.”
“I’m with them,” she muttered.
The edge of his jaw hardened. “No. You’re with me.”
In the next few moments, a half dozen men filtered out from the shadows. Jilly found herself pressed a little closer to Liam. Not out of nerves and the fact that she was topped by at least head and shoulders by each man, merely by the fact she didn’t want to get sliced or bruised on their bristling armament.
She cleared her throat loudly. “You can’t go in there flailing.”
She realized she’d interrupted their plans when they all stared at her. Liam was the only one not returning her scowl.
“Why not?” Ecco propped his fists on his hips. “To flail is divine. Or damned. Whichever.”
“There are innocents in there.”
“There are no innocents,” said one of the other men—Jonah, she remembered.
“Jilly’s right,” Liam broke in over the others’ muttering.
Everyone—including Jilly—gaped at him.
He unsheathed the hammer. When he swung it down to his side, it hummed through the air as if in agreement. “Not about their innocence,” he clarified. “That’s irrelevant. But about flailing and failing. We need to know what this new cluster is, what these haints are up to. Flailing doesn’t get us answers.”
“It gets us closer to salvation,” Jonah growled. “Which is why we’re here.”
Jilly bristled and moved to stand between the talyan and the door. “I’m here to save my sister. Where are they?”
“Most of the third floor,” Ecco said. “And part of the fourth. They’ve busted out walls to make a hive. The place is spackled with etheric secretions.”
“Creepy,” Archer said.
“And maybe deadly.” Liam put his hand on Jilly’s shoulder. “Demonic secretions like birnenston—as in fire and brimstone—can interfere with your teshuva, especially if you aren’t well integrated. Or just newly possessed.”
She brushed off his hand. “If you’re about to suggest I wait out here, forget it.”
Ecco snickered. “She’s no fool.”
“Exactly,” she snapped. “I won’t be stupid, but I won’t be left behind either.”
Three more men had materialized from the night and stood with the lights of the L gleaming on their drawn weapons, but even the combined weight of their impatience wouldn’t shift Liam, she knew.
But she could crowbar his ass. “Just let me go with you, and I won’t give you any more shit about being part of the league.”
He studied her as if the morass of evil congregating in the building behind him meant nothing. “You still thought you could be anything but?”
“It’s the not-giving-you-shit part I thought would appeal.”
“You’ll do as I say?”
That wasn’t necessarily the same thing as being part of the league, was it? “Whatever. Let’s go.”
At her words, she sensed the sudden tension of the talyan yearning toward action, the preternatural crackle of energy as the teshuva inside them surged to the fore.
And yet Liam held them unmoving with the force of his stillness. His eyes, focused on her while he waited for an answer, stayed blue as Lake Michigan under cloudless skies, not a flicker of stormy violet. Reluctantly, she admitted he was not a man to be dismissed simply as a bully or a braggart.
He was much more dangerous than that.
“Yes,” she said softly.
He took a step forward and the dozen talyan broke for the building.
In the controlled sweep forward, he tugged her into his wake. “Stay close to me. Get out of the way of anyone else with solid amethyst eyes. Don’t go running off to find your sister. If she’s here, we’ll get her out.”
A handful of the talyan peeled off, heading for the back of the building and the fire escapes, she guessed. She followed Liam through the front door. The tiny lobby was barren except for a few brown leaves crinkled into the corner beneath the mailboxes. The remaining talyan started up the stairs.
She smelled the lair before they arrived at the third floor. A biting sourness burned in her nose. She flashed back to one of her erstwhile uncles passed out against the bathroom door in a miasma of sweat and stale vomit.
She breathed shallowly against the smell, against the unexpected pain of the memory. Could her mother have possibly made any worse choices in her life? Could her sister?
Could she? And did the fact that this was her only choice make it any less terrible?
They hit the third-floor landing. An unlit hallway bent around the corner. The first talya drifted forward out of sight, footsteps inaudible even to her suddenly sharpened hearing. Her vision flickered, and veins of a strange calcified gray stretched down the hallway walls. She shrank closer to Liam to avoid touching them.
“Birnenston,” he murmured. “It’s a slow-acting poison to demonic energies. Don’t get it on you. Not surprisingly, it burns.”
The overhead lights were smashed, but the b
irnenston streaks gave off a sickly glow to her demon-spiked vision. Bits of glass twinkled in the debris of drywall and age-softened lathe strewn across the floor where walls had been torn apart, as if a giant rat had gone through the place in search of its cheese. The gray veins thickened around the damage. Whether the birnenston caused or had just taken advantage of the destruction, Jilly couldn’t tell. The talyan moved down the hall, boots seeming to float above the trash; so smoothly did they move.
Jilly winced when her own feet stumbled, the crunch of her rubber soles across broken glass like a gunshot in her ears. But nothing hurtled out of the dark holes.
She held her breath against the thickening stink and noticed a faint rhythmic huffing sound all around them, punctuated by intermittent gasps. The hair at her nape rippled in atavistic unease.
Jonah, in the lead, halted in front of one of the anti-home-improvement renovations. He hoisted a giant Maglite—obviously he wasn’t willing to rely solely on his demon sight—and flooded the hole with the high beam.
Thick ropes of birnenston bracketed the opening and laced the interior of the chamber. Gray stalactites hung from the ceiling. Yellow droplets oozed from the serrated tips and dropped to the mirrored stalagmites that grew up from the floor. Jilly figured she didn’t need a childhood of comic book horror—or the teshuva recoiling within her—to know she should avoid the mess.
Several haints stood half embedded in the viscous gnarl, as if they’d lacked the initiative to take a single step out. The rest were arrayed between the tapering columns, equally gray. Where they happened to be aligned to face the hallway, their vacant eyes reflected the flashlight, but otherwise none moved. Jilly’s flesh crawled, urging her to escape.
The huffing she’d heard was the haints’ breath. She hadn’t noticed it when she and Liam had visited the cluster in the park. Within the confines of the chamber that had once been the living room of one apartment and the kitchen and bathroom of another, the synchronized wheeze carried a tone of menace. She had the terrifying impression that despite their stillness and apparent unity, somewhere in their fugues they were trapped alone in sorrow and pain, their silence broken only by those soft hiccuping gasps, like a child in a closet crying itself to sleep.
“Who brought the flamethrower?” Ecco’s voice rang in the quiet. “And the marshmallows?”
All the other talyan winced, whether at the coarseness of his tone or his joke, she wasn’t sure.
A movement in one corner caught her eye and she swung around. And realized what Ecco had meant by the “others.”
She was quite familiar with the classic junkie sprawl, arms slack, legs akimbo, head tipped, drool optional. She’d seen it often enough in her mother’s boyfriends and in her own work. Pipes and needles littered the low table near this second group, an ugly mess compared with the pristine white tablets of solvo, which were nowhere in evidence. She knew no one went back to the smack once they tried solvo. After its pure high, allegedly nothing else would work. So this group of addicts hadn’t yet made the switch.
Which meant they still had their souls.
It seemed impossible these garden-variety addicts, surrounded by the haints, hadn’t been converted, but she was almost ecstatic to see the agitated twitch of their muscles, the darting of their eyes behind half-closed lids. These people could still be saved.
Then she saw her sister.
“Dory,” she gasped. Against all Liam’s warnings, she found herself jumping forward. Stupid, she knew, but didn’t stop herself. Some things mattered more than smart.
She was brought up short by a grip on the hood of her jacket.
“What did I tell you about running off?” Liam’s voice was a growl. She half expected him to shake her like a dog with a bone.
“It’s her.”
“I got that. And we’ll get her, along with the others. In a minute.”
Jilly glanced around at him. Sera had come up behind them carrying what looked like an old portable-video-camera bag slung from one shoulder. She held a fat wand like a Geiger counter and raised it to the room. Archer loomed close. If the violet sparks in his eyes got loose, he wouldn’t need Ecco’s flamethrower; so fierce was his protective stance.
Jilly glared at Liam. “We could be getting them out of here and you’re recording this for America’s Funniest Home Videos?”
“It’s something new. We don’t understand it. We don’t have a Bookkeeper to analyze it. Maybe we can find a Bookkeeper in another league in another city who may have encountered the same thing.” He lowered his voice, but his grip on her jacket was unrelenting. “If I’m going to keep my men alive, I need to know what these things are doing.”
“They’re not things—not all of them, not my sister.”
“She’s not bound. She came here willingly. These haints have got to be the biggest buzz- kill around, and still she sat down with the others over there and shot up.”
Jilly gritted her teeth. “I’m not going to argue morality and addiction-recovery theory with you. She’s my sister.”
“And you’re my talya, my fighter. I won’t lose you any more than I’d sacrifice my men.”
“You sacrifice them every night,” she hissed. “It’s just that they’re immortal, so they survive.”
If her words penetrated his imperturbable armor, she couldn’t see it. “Be that as it may, you’ll wait.”
She relaxed in his hold until he loosened his grip; then she tore free. The better to turn her glare on him. But she didn’t bolt off again.
Sera walked past them, tracing the wand through the air in a slow-motion wave like some demented fairy godmother. “Emanation spike here.” She studied them reprovingly, a glint of violet in her hazel eyes. “Get a grip, you two.”
Jilly tamped down her wayward emotions. Liam’s already perfectly composed face didn’t change at all. Probably that spike was all her fault. Never mind the blue hair dye, she’d always been the hotheaded one. And look where it had gotten her.
She resisted the urge to look over at her sister.
Sera completed a circuit of the room, Archer never leaving her side. She frowned as she approached Liam. “Something odd just—Oh hell.”
“What?”
“Hell,” she said more urgently.
As one, the haints took a gasping breath. An etheric shock wave passed through the room at that moment. What was left of the walls seemed to bow inward, on the edge of collapse.
Jilly clamped her hand under her breast where the flare of her teshuva’s mark stole her breath worse than a kick to the ribs. Though he must have suffered a similar blow to his reven like an instant migraine, Liam never flinched. He spun and pulled her under the edge of his coat just as yellow poison suddenly gushed from the birnenston stalactites, splashing across the floor in all directions. As if the stones themselves wept in the presence of what had arrived.
Through the bilious fog, a deeper shadow moved. Nothing corporeal, just a suggestion of a looming monstrosity given shape by the smoking birnenston. Something misshapen and ghastly, with a half-crescent extrusion cutting up through the fog like an off-center horn or enormous tooth or scythe. No, not one monstrosity, but a dozen.
The demons had returned to their lair.
CHAPTER 10
Liam whirled, putting Jilly behind him as he faced the attackers. His heart leapt into his throat, and a half step after, his demon leapt into his extremities and a word appeared on his tongue. “Salambes.”
Shock and a taste bitter as dry ashes licked from a cold anvil made him grimace. The teshuva had surged past his humanity to give him that name. As if a name did them any good unless it had fairy-tale authority to command the demons, but he saw no hesitation in the attack at his outcry.
No, the only change was inside him. The unprecedented shift in the way the demon melded with him worried him as much as these unknown, unbound tenebrae. Change had never been in the league’s favor.
The other talyan had already gone into fight mode. They
fell into their old solitary-hunter stances instead of aligning themselves into a team as they’d been drilling. They’d been working the new patterns for only a few months, but he’d hate to have all that effort wasted. About as much as he’d hate seeing all of them wasted by the new demons.
As he called out for the talyan to regroup, frustration boiled through him. Just what the hell was a salambe? Big as a feralis, but only half materialized, like a malice. League archives hinted at a vast array of demon subspecies in the tenebraeternum, but only a few kinds seemed disposed to slip through the Veil into the human realm. Had there been a breach? Such had never happened in his memory; would he even recognize one?
It was bad enough to fight in the shadows; the teshuva kept him fighting in the dark. If only he could know everything his demon knew. The taste of ashes choked him again. So maybe not.
The things came forward through the birnenston fog but never gained substance. A stink like rusting metal flooded the chamber.
With a battle cry, Ecco broke ranks and rushed forward, his gauntlets crossed for a fatal cut. But when he launched himself at the demon, he passed right through it and crashed to the floor on the other side.
The demon phased. Liam could think of no other word. It curled into a column of smoke and streamed into the nearest haint. The limp, pallid haint—a slender, sandy-haired man—suddenly flushed and straightened. His brown eyes clouded, then drained of color. For a moment, only bleached whiteness stared out.
Until a speck of red brightened the orb. Broken blood vessels spidered across the white, unbearably vivid. He turned on Ecco with inhuman quickness, at least one joint in his leg snapping with the strain.
Liam shouted a warning, but Ecco was already up, ready to face the threat. All around them, the salambes phased into the quiescent haints, and blank human eyes flared. But the connection was imperfect. Like a monster wearing an ill-fitting human suit, the salambes seemed to lurk over and behind the soulless human husks, as if they couldn’t quite cram themselves in. Human flesh blushed feverishly. As one of the haint/salambe pairings jumped toward him, Liam felt the heat wave like a forge fired to the danger point.