Forged of Shadows ms-2

by Jessa Slade

  He yanked Jilly out of the way, only to realize another doubled-up demon had sneaked up behind. Jilly used the momentum of his pull to fire off a gutter-punk kick that knocked the woman-wearing salambe backward.

  “Tag teaming allowed,” Jilly growled.

  The thing toppled but sprang back so quickly the woman’s head rocked. The crack of her spine made Liam’s hairs stand on end. Her head flopped to one side, and the outline of the salambe’s vaguely reptilian skull towered over her shoulders like a fiendish bobblehead.

  The haint rushed Jilly.

  “Down,” he shouted.

  Jilly dropped to her knees. The hammer was already swinging without his conscious thought. Its dull whistle howled through the air.

  He knocked the haint clear across the chamber. Before the body hit the wall, the salambe had phased free and poured itself into the next nearest haint, which spun to face them, its exposed skin already starting to blister from the conflicting energies of human and demon realms.

  “Keep them moving, people,” Liam shouted. “They’ll burn out.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Archer and Sera work in tandem to force the salambe to leap from one haint to next. The abandoned bodies collapsed, steaming faintly. Then he was too busy to oversee as Jilly pushed a salambe-ridden haint his way. He dispatched it with a mighty thunk.

  It was just butchery.

  Between the talyan’s weapons and the salambes’ caustic emanations, the haints were destroyed. When the last soulless husk collapsed, the smoke of incorporeal salambes swirled into a single thick column, then split, the half dozen streams escaping out into the hallway, through the ventilation grate, through a crack by the window to disperse on the midnight breeze.

  Ecco let out a yell and raised his gauntleted fists as if the gore-smeared razors could stop the smoke.

  The stink of rusting metal dissipated. The salambes were gone.

  Bracing the hammerhead on the floor, Liam knelt beside the haint of the first woman he had flung across the chamber. The bloodied eyes were gone. Not back to human color. Just gone. The burned-out sockets stared up at him, empty except for the accusation that carved another divot in his already patchy soul.

  Even as he watched, the soulless husk began to crumble. He touched its forehead and in another moment only dust remained.

  Jilly stood beside him. “You wondered what would happen when the soulless died.”

  “Did they die?” He pulled himself upright with the hammer as support. “We can only hope.”

  She shuddered, and he dragged her close.

  “Hey,” she protested, but she didn’t pull away.

  “That’s what happens when a poorly integrated human and her demon don’t play nicely together.” He forced himself not to wrap himself around her, shelter her from the horror. He wasn’t coddling her, just trying to make sure she hadn’t overdone the battle. She was so new to her own changes. “How are you? Hurt anywhere?”

  Jilly stared down at the dust. “Not compared to that.”

  Liam glanced around at the other talyan. All of them were standing, except Jonah, who’d been thrown into a shattered pile of lathe.

  Ecco smirked at Jonah. “Hey, missionary man. You don’t actually have to crucify yourself. The demon’ll take care of that for you.”

  Jonah heaved himself up, scrabbling through the trash as he reached for Ecco’s throat. Perrin hauled him back to pick the bent nails out of his hide.

  “Enough.” Liam pitched his command soft and low to cut through the ruckus.

  He felt Jilly shiver against him and knew the demon harmonics were in his voice. The men subsided, reluctantly, and edged away from each other. The energies of the risen demons always crackled uncomfortably against one another, probably one of the reasons talyan had historically been solitary hunters. But they could no longer stand alone against the forces hunting them back.

  “What the fuck is a salambe?” Though the immediate threat had gone out the window, Archer was still standing guard over his woman, axe in hand, as Sera reassembled the scattered pieces of the ESF recorder. “I heard you yell.”

  Liam rubbed his temple where the reven still pulsed. “The teshuva just slipped the word into my head.”

  As one, the talyan lifted their eyebrows. Archer said slowly, “That’s . . .”

  “Fucked-up beyond all recognition,” Ecco supplied.

  Archer shifted his axe. “Odd. Since when do the teshuva give us anything besides what gets us into more trouble?”

  “Let’s not assume they’ve broken tradition,” Liam said drily. “We’ll have to find the reference in league archives.”

  “Never mind the history books,” Ecco growled. “Even hardcovers don’t do enough damage when you throw them.”

  Archer’s scowl said he was inclined to agree. “With the discontinuity in our Bookkeeper line, we could be digging through old records for weeks and never find anything that will help us here and now. We already knew the soullessness of the haints can destabilize the weave of repenting souls that form the Veil. No surprise, considering the escalating number of solvo junkies, the weakness in the Veil let something like a salambe sneak through. The salambes filled the empty haints like they were coming home.”

  “Just long enough to burn the house down,” Jilly murmured from where Liam still had her tucked under his arm. When he looked down at her, surprised she’d stayed so long, she touched his stomach and lowered her voice another half step. “Your demon mark is still glowing. Relax. The danger’s over. For now.”

  He took a shallow breath, afraid to dislodge her hand. That was a danger too enticing to dismiss.

  But he had to get the talyan back on track. “We might not care about the salambes’ provenance, but we want to know how to destroy them. The malice are incorporeal too, but small enough to restrain while the teshuva matches their emanations and drains them. We can do the same with the ferales, once they are incapacitated in their corporeal husks. But the salambes have the advantages of both, and are stronger than malice and smarter than ferales.”

  “Not smart enough to keep weaponry in their lair,” Ecco said. “Without the haints to maneuver, they had nothing.”

  “Good thing,” Archer said. “Or they could have massacred us.”

  Ecco sniffed. “You maybe, forgetting yourself while watching your mate’s ass.”

  “Watching my back, you mean,” Sera said distractedly.

  Archer and Ecco exchanged a glance. Archer shrugged.

  Sera missed it all as she brought the recorder over to Liam. The screen was cracked, but when it whirred to life, the spike in etheric-spectral frequencies was unnervingly clear.

  “That’s where the . . . the salambes appeared,” Sera said. “But you can see the background readings were already high, and not just from the birnenston. These demons have been camping out.”

  Liam glanced over at the decimated haints and the junkies sprawled obliviously against the far wall. “How long have the demons been cultivating these?”

  “No way to tell,” Sera said. “Human readings won’t show on the recorder.”

  Jilly strained away from him. “Because why would the league care about humans anyway, right? Let me go.”

  He did, and she went straight to her sister.

  Though there’d been a picture of Dory Chan in Jilly’s dossier, the emaciated, ragged blonde on the floor bore no resemblance at all to the curves and lush colors of his tyro talya. Only the roots of their hair were the same. Liam couldn’t guess how Ecco had made the connection. He’d wondered before if there was more to the brutish fighter than flashing gauntlets, but had never had reason to pry.

  Jilly knelt beside her sister and took the limp hand. She brushed back the stringy bleached hair. Even across the room, he heard Jilly’s despondent sigh.

  He realized Sera was watching him watch Jilly. “What?”

  She didn’t flinch, but as usual, questions churned in her hazel eyes. “Nothing.”

&nb
sp; “You female talyan are . . .” He bit back the rest, though gritting his teeth set off a fresh stab of pain through his skull. To match the pain in his ass.

  She tilted her head. “Yes?”

  “Never mind. Collect some of the detritus from these burned-out haints. We’ll want it for comparison.” He stalked across the room to Jilly’s side.

  She lifted her sister’s arm. “The track marks are fresh.”

  “Then she’s probably not using solvo.” He didn’t add “yet.”

  “The salambes only jumped into the soulless, did you notice? They didn’t even try to possess these people, which means she still has her soul.”

  “So it seems.”

  She glared, not at him exactly. Maybe at the universe around him. “We got here in time. We got her in time.”

  Pity the universe if it let her down. Liam shook his head. “Come on. We need to go.” He put a hand under Dory’s armpit and levered her up. She weighed barely more than his coat. Without the hammer strapped into it.

  Jilly slung her sister’s arm over her shoulder. “You said the salambes were cultivating her. You mean turning her into a haint.”

  “When we get her sobered up, maybe we can ask her.”

  “That’s the only reason you think she’s worth saving.” Minus the sharp sting of accusation, Jilly’s tone broke with resignation.

  “No.” He didn’t elaborate. Not with Sera across the room watching him with violet-tinged eyes that meant her demon senses were measuring his every capillary betrayal.

  Dory most likely was beyond hope. And whatever she could tell them wouldn’t change what he had to do. Yet for the sake of the grieving woman at his side, he wished cavalries really did ride to the rescue, that heroes really could save the day. The ravager twisted inside him, a rude reminder that heroes might have day jobs, but the talyan performed best at night.

  He looked down at the twinkle of Jilly’s nose stud, and his fingers yearned to thread through the blue spikes of her hair. The passion with which she threw herself into the fray terrified him. And enticed him. He’d almost be tempted to rebel too, but he wouldn’t force someone else to step in to fill his vacancy. If he pierced a stud through his lips, it would be only to keep himself from telling them all he’d never wanted this hopeless task laid at his feet and he was tired of leading this painstaking charge to the end of the world, one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t leave them foundering in the shadows, so he wouldn’t indulge his desires and walk away, especially not from her.

  So much for saving anyone. Including himself.

  Jilly settled her sister under the covers in one of the apartments on the second floor of the warehouse. The mismatched furniture from the salvage offerings below created a sort of cheery, ugly hodgepodge semblance of a home. Against the garish bedspread, Dory looked even more pale and gaunt. Jilly stepped back, swallowing down useless tears.

  Sera arranged the nightstand with a glass of water, a puke bucket, a couple unmarked pill bottles. “She’s going to wake up rough. These will help.”

  Jilly tried not to glare. “She doesn’t need more damn drugs.”

  Sera’s expression was calm. “She’s an addict. Of course she’ll need more drugs.”

  Now Jilly did glare, and let her temper call up a smidgen of the demon for the added light show she knew would appear in her eyes. Sera had been right about the demon’s terrifying strength and speed coming out of nowhere. The memory of using Liam as a springboard to launch herself at those things seemed ludicrous in retrospect, even though her muscles and bones couldn’t forget the turbulent pleasure of the attack. Or the feel of her talya boss’s steadfast power.

  Jilly crushed the recollection. At the very least, she didn’t want the other woman to be right about Dory. “None of you care what happens to her.”

  “We want to stop this chemical version of desolator numinis from making more soulless blanks for the salambes to invade—you can believe that.”

  Jilly subsided. There was no sense being stupidly vicious as well as stupidly sad.

  A knock at the door brought them around.

  Liam stepped through. “We have the others down the hall. How is she?”

  “Completely out of it,” Sera said. “She won’t remember a thing from tonight.”

  He sighed. “Same with the others, I’m guessing.”

  “I’ll go take a look at them.” Sera shook her head.

  “Who would’ve guessed my hospice training would be useful for the walking dead?” Then she slanted a glance at Jilly and bit her lip. “Sorry. I’m starting to sound like Archer.” She slipped out of the room.

  “We should take them to the hospital, to a detox center.” Jilly could’ve bitten her tongue. Now she sounded stupidly optimistic. Who would unquestioningly take an unidentified baker’s dozen of smacked-out bums, petty thieves, and one prostitute?

  “After we talk to them, we will,” Liam said. And he sounded as if he meant it. He crossed his arms over his chest as she plunked herself down in one of the mismatched chairs that flanked a table by the window. “How long since you’ve seen her?”

  “Since before her pimp stabbed me. I’d gone to him looking for her.” Jilly knotted her fingers in her lap. “I can’t believe . . . She always wanted to be the rebel.”

  “Runs in the family, hmm?”

  She shook her head. “I was never trying to run away from anything.” She realized she sounded a little defensive. “She took off a year after my brother did. I tried to tell Mom that seventeen was too young, but she was too wrapped up in her own problems to listen.”

  “Those uncles you told me about.”

  After a moment, she nodded. “My brother had gotten mixed up with a guru one of Mom’s boyfriends always talked about. Maybe it was safer for Dory to leave. I had my share of run- ins with Mom’s guys too. Nothing I couldn’t handle. But Dory was always more delicate.” She clenched her fist. “Which is why I should have been there for her.”

  “You had school. If you hadn’t finished, you wouldn’t have been working with the kids. They needed you too.”

  Jilly grimaced. “And that’s turned out so well.” She scrubbed a hand down her face. “Don’t listen to me. I’m being morose.”

  His lips quirked. “Yeah, because being Cuisinarted by malice shouldn’t bum you out.”

  She smiled back reluctantly. “And then toasted by smoke demons.”

  “Throw in some cheese cubes and it was practically a party.” He crossed the room toward her and parked himself in the second chair. He thunked his elbow on the table and propped his head in his hand, his eyes hidden from her, one thumb rubbing the demon’s mark at his temple.

  So close, she could reach out and touch the bold eddies, plain black now with the teshuva at rest. Not that she could stroke away the sign of his possession, but maybe some of the pain. And maybe some of her own.

  The moment between them spiraled out. She felt the tipping point, when she should move, should tell him. . . .

  “What set you on the path that brought you here today, Jilly Chan?” His voice was soft, muted by his raised hand. “What was your penance trigger?”

  “Penance trigger?” The league-specific term jolted her back from the foolish romantic place she’d been headed. Because, really, what more bound them together than these shared scraps of hell?

  “Every talya can trace their personal history back to a moment marking the point of weakness in his soul. Like a nail driven into ice that starts the crack and eventually allows the demon in.”

  She looked at her sister. “The hole Rico’s knife made in my lung was big enough to drive a truck through, much less a demon.” She shifted in her seat so the year-old scar didn’t press against the arm of the chair. She didn’t like wondering if that moment had been the beginning of her end.

  But Liam shook his head, finally looking at her. “The penance trigger comes earlier, sometimes much earlier.”

  She raised her chin. “What was yours?�
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  He hesitated only a heartbeat. She could almost see him steeling himself for the leap. But of course he jumped. Because he’d do anything for his precious league. He’d already sold his soul; how could baring it to her be any worse?

  “I was led astray once.” He took a breath. “No. That’s not quite true. I followed willingly, without question, when I should have walked away. Someone died because of it.”

  “You let that happen? I can’t believe that.”

  He lifted one eyebrow with every sign of arrogance, but she sensed a vulnerability in him. “You saw me beat a woman across the room, and you think I can’t kill?”

  “She wasn’t a woman, not anymore. But I meant I can’t believe anyone led you anywhere.”

  “I was young.”

  “Hard to believe that too,” she muttered.

  He gave her a quelling glance. “Some lads of my village snuck out in the night to tear down English fences. They wanted me to bring my father’s tools. His smithing was an act of creation, but we needed the chisels and snips to destroy. I knew it was dangerous, but I went along with nary a word. A patrol caught us. They rode over a boy—slow Dougal, too frightened to drop the heavy hammer that slowed him even more—and they killed him.”

  She closed her eyes, but that just made the image come clearer. She guessed from the deepening of his brogue that he was remembering too. “Here I thought the judges dealt harshly with tagging.”

  “Don’t compare me to your wayward charges.” He sat back in the chair, blue eyes half lidded. “I am not that boy now.”

  No, he certainly wasn’t. “Because of the demon.”

  “Not immediately and by that time, it hardly mattered, but yes, that was the end.”

  She wondered what crappy events could make the progression from witnessing a murder to starvation to possession seem anticlimactic.

  “And you?” His question was soft but insistent.

  She hesitated longer than he had. Then she looked at Dory. Where had a lifetime of the desperate avoidance of their hurt gotten them? “I could have held them together.”