Forged of Shadows ms-2

by Jessa Slade

  “Your family.”

  She nodded. “Even as a kid, I knew it was up to me. Mom was basically a kid herself. Leroy, my brother, was oldest, but he didn’t have the temperament. Dory was always the baby.”

  “What chance did you have to keep things together?”

  “That’s the point. I didn’t try.” As he’d described the penance trigger, she pictured the nail poised above the brittle ice. “Leroy came home one night from the so-called church people he’d been hanging with, in a rage because he couldn’t find his stash. I knew Dory had stolen it, and she’d taken some of his E even though we swore to each other we wouldn’t go that route. Mom was crying and cowering when he raised his voice, because that’s what she always did.”

  She glanced over at Liam and in his gaze saw the cloudy chill in the moment before the ice cracked. “Unlike you, I did walk away. I just left them.” She straightened, refusing to drop his gaze.

  But the break in the ice, when it came, did not reveal a bottomless pit of condemnation. Instead, a glimmer of warmth eased his expression. “But you didn’t really stop trying, did you? That’s why you went to work at the halfway house.”

  He didn’t need a hammer; his gentle insight chipped a layer from her guarded heart. “I couldn’t keep my own brother and sister from making the same rotten mistakes as my mother. I don’t know why I thought I could help anybody else. And the only thing worse than losing track of them is finding out they ended up like Andre, or Dory.”

  “You tried,” he repeated softly. “You tried to make amends.”

  “Nobody hands out gold ribbons for trying.”

  “Doesn’t change the need to try. Ask the teshuva.”

  Repentant demons. Crazy. As crazy as her holding on to her concrete layers all these years. “You mean the demons come to us not because we’re weak but because we’re trying? Like they are?”

  His brows drew together. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard it put like that.”

  She snorted. “Talk about hopeless codependency.”

  A smile curved his lips. “Maybe in the striving there is hope.”

  She glanced back at Dory. “Maybe you’re right.”

  At his silence, she looked back at him. The dimple appeared in his cheek as his smile widened. “Me, right? And you said it without thumbscrews.” He stood and held out his hand. “Let her sleep. You’ve done enough tonight.”

  “I have a lot to make up for.” But the tremble in her limbs told her she didn’t have much else to hold her up. She hesitated, then put her hand in his. The warmth of him made her sway as she stood.

  His other hand under her elbow steadied her but brought him a little too close. Her breath caught.

  His grip tightened, but when he spoke, his solicitous tone could have come straight from the demon-management handbook. “You’re tired and worried, which is a dangerous place to be with a demon. You have a lot to learn about calling on your teshuva.”

  She wanted to learn, to stop what had almost happened to her sister, what had probably happened to Andre. She’d promised Liam she’d be a good little weapon for the league, so she wondered why it bothered her that he wanted her only for that purpose.

  And she wondered at that same moment who was more dangerous—the demon inside her or the temptation of the man at her side?

  CHAPTER 11

  Liam felt the battering exhaustion of Jilly’s grief and guilt as if they were his own. Yet he couldn’t risk indulging those vulnerabilities he’d thought long banished.

  He guided her down the hall to an empty room, careful to keep his touch impersonal, the way he would support any of his talyan. Before Sera came along, when Archer had fought nightly to the point of collapse, Liam had once or twice—which went to show how wrecked Archer had been—assisted the veteran talya to his room.

  But he’d never lingered in Archer’s doorway, making sure he stumbled to his bed. He’d never had to grip the frame, fighting the urge to turn down the damn covers.

  And he certainly never watched any of the others the way he watched Jilly.

  What had she done to him?

  “Good night.” His voice sounded more brusque than he’d intended.

  She eyed him from the bed. “That’s it?”

  He didn’t need his demon to sense the risky tension between them, like an invisible thread drawing him to her. And he knew well enough how easily—how willingly—he could lose himself there.

  The cheap plywood doorframe dented under his fingers. “What else did you want?”

  Want. The word reverberated, as if someone had plucked the thread binding them. He found himself leaning imperceptibly toward her and straightened.

  “We’ll work this out later,” he said.

  “ ‘This’?” Her voice sounded threatening even in its simple human octave.

  He waved one hand. “Between us.”

  The bracelet on her wrist gleamed as she made a fist in the covers. “Yeah. Later. Good thing we have lots of that.”

  He backed out and shut the door firmly. Because what other option did he have?

  From the racing of his pulse, obviously danger of some sort had been narrowly avoided.

  He stalked down the hall, refusing to stretch his senses to catch the sound of her lying back upon the bed. Most likely, he’d hear only a muttered curse. He had a few on the tip of his tongue too.

  It was his own damn fault there wouldn’t be anything else on his tongue tonight.

  He slammed into the main warehouse on the ground floor. In an open area where they’d pushed back the dusty antiques, Sera hunched over a big dining room table fine enough to grace a Gold Coast mansion if not for the scarring scorch mark across the surface. She’d amassed a complicated tangle of beakers, wires, and computer monitors that gleamed unnaturally against the backdrop of reclaimed architecture.

  “You need to find a real Bookkeeper,” she said without looking up. “Organic chem in college does not make me a legit researcher in demonics.”

  “More legit than me.” Archer leaned his hip against a counter nearby, arms over his chest. “We used actual horses for horsepower in my day.”

  “You just don’t want haint dust under your fingernails, Civil War boy.” She pushed a button and a faint miasma of sulfurous light pulsed from the test tube propped before her. “In a few hours, we can check again, but I’m guessing this haint sample will match leftovers that other Bookkeepers have saved of talyan whose teshuva are consumed in battle. Whether the soul is demon-marked or straight-up missing, once it’s gone, all we have left is meat.”

  “Which is why we always give Bookies their own personal refrigerators,” Archer muttered.

  “Meanwhile,” she continued, “I’m running a word search on ‘salambe.’ But you know the size of the database. And that doesn’t count the records still on freaking goatskin and papyrus.”

  Liam bracketed his temples between spread fingers. The reven pulsed under his thumb. “I don’t like this. Now we face demons that can phase from body to body.”

  “It’s like we started working the team angle, and now they are too,” Sera said.

  Liam shot her a hard glance. “The league has been around for millennia.”

  “You had a clubhouse, but you weren’t really a team.” She studied his expression before continuing. “It wasn’t any failing of yours, Liam. Keeping this crew from selfimmolation can’t have been an easy task.” She scowled down at the dusty glass in front of her. “Even without the possession problems.”

  “We’re not that bad,” Archer objected. When Sera gave him a disbelieving look, he shrugged. “Anymore we’re not. Much.”

  Liam squelched a twinge of jealousy at their teasing. “But what’s behind this spread of demonic influence?”

  In the silence, the whir of the haint dust in the centrifuge gave a mocking chuckle.

  “Whatever it is,” Archer said grimly, “we’ll deal.” He drew Sera up from her seat. When she resisted a moment, he reminded her, “
It’ll still be here tomorrow.”

  She sighed, and they left Liam in the big empty warehouse. Archer had the nerve to click off the lights on his way out.

  Between the ambient glow of residual demonic emanations and Liam’s own restless senses, the cavern wasn’t pitch-black. But it was dark enough for him to see the cloud of faint pale shimmers hovering over the spinning test tube.

  “Oh shit.” So much for hoping the haints had died peacefully. Or, if not peacefully, at least completely.

  While human hosts to angels and djinn- men could see soul matter, those possessed by the repentant teshuva demons had lost the ability along with a few other useful skills. The downside of having the sanction of neither heaven nor hell. Or so he’d always been told. He shouldn’t be able to see this—hell, he didn’t want to see it.

  Maybe the hovering light wasn’t a soul. Just a . . . a ghost. It wasn’t even a coherent entity. More a disjointed collection, like a firefly convention. As if that made its lurking presence easier to stomach, considering he might’ve had a hand—or a hammer—in its demise.

  The league had learned from its last Bookkeeper that solvo flayed apart soul matter even as it left the physical body intact. Apparently those scattered pieces had at least enough etheric power and instinct to wander back, looking for their old home.

  “You can’t go home again,” he murmured. “Even shredded poisoned leftover soulflies should know that.”

  If the righteous angels and devilish djinn could see souls, he supposed it made a sick sort of sense that his teshuva stood witness to the hopeless, homeless oddments that were all that remained of some sorry spirit. Like called to like. The awareness made no difference, of course; there was nothing he could do for the soulflies. His task was to keep the league’s bodies and souls—and demons—together. Wasn’t that enough?

  Apparently not, if the teshuva had granted him the ability to see this. The knowledge only drove his failures to date all the deeper into his own battered soul. Considering the rampant spread of solvo over the past five months, how many tatters of soul essence fluttered around Chicago tonight, seeking their wayward haint bodies, never to be reunited and never to pass on? His stomach churned at the thought.

  He turned off the centrifuge. As the test tube came to a halt, the faint fireflies sank into the glass. They’d wandered this far; at least he could give them some small peace in the little pieces that remained.

  Weariness settled in his chest, heavy as the soulflies were light. He left the warehouse and walked the corridors. To his extended demon senses, the night was quiet. He’d sent out half the crew to check the other known haint gatherings to see if they could find the salambes. He didn’t want an unidentified offshoot of the horde-tenebrae stalking the city on his watch.

  Most of the other men had gone off to their own hunts. No doubt they’d seek deserving malice or ferales, matching the fury and anguish of their immortal lives against an evil that would never die.

  His muscles tightened with the ravager’s desire to head out into the darkness, to find his own relief in sanctified violence. His vision flickered into the black-light glow of a hunting teshuva.

  A flare of purely human panic seared across his open senses. He spun around to see the woman frozen in her open doorway.

  “Dory.” His voice crackled with harmonic lows. He cleared his throat. “Dory, it’s okay. You’re safe.”

  Her expression, though still blurred with the drugs, screamed “Liar.” He couldn’t blame her.

  “Jilly is just down the hall,” he continued. “She’s sleeping. You wouldn’t want to sneak out before you see her.” Although judging from the higher flare of panic visible in her expanding pupils at her sister’s name, that was exactly what Dory wanted.

  “I thought I dreamed her.” Dory’s words barely carried over the scant two feet separating them.

  He took a step forward, backing her into the room. She lowered her head and gave way before him, as meek as her sister was belligerent.

  He stopped, feeling like a bully. But he noticed the pill bottles Sera had left beside the table were gone.

  Dory followed his glance. “I didn’t consent to be placed in some program.” When she set her jaw, chin askew, he finally recognized a faint commonality with a certain other Chan.

  He shrugged. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Is this a locked ward?”

  “No more so than the one you made for yourself.”

  She scowled at him. “You’re as bad as Jilly.”

  He shrugged again.

  Dory slumped through the room to sit on the bed. “How’d she find me?” Squirming, she freed the lump from her pocket and tossed the pill bottles on the rumpled bedspread. “Why’d she even look?”

  “You were hanging out with some very bad people. Jilly didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  Dory gave a coarse bark of laughter, more a cough. “She’s the one got hurt last time.”

  “You knew about that?” Liam’s hackles prickled, same as when he faced a malice, bloated on its night’s antics.

  “Who you think called the paramedics?”

  “But you didn’t stay with her.” He kept the outrage out of his voice, but still she flinched.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t.”

  “Asshole.” She glared at him.

  “I can tell you and she are related.”

  Dory’s taut jaw slackened, not quite a smile. “Barely. All we have in common is our mother.” Her hand crept across the bed to the pill bottle. “Jilly should’ve saved herself.”

  “Too late for that.” He watched her turn the bottle in her hands. “You already take one?” When she nodded, he said, “Don’t take any more until tomorrow, when we all have a chance to talk.”

  She looked up warily, as if he’d snatch the bottle from her hands. Then she nodded again and held out the bottle to him. “Until tomorrow.”

  He pocketed it and left.

  He walked down the hall and flattened his palm against each doorway where they’d stashed the junkies they’d scavenged from the haint HQ. No one else was stirring. Maybe Dory wasn’t as far gone as he’d feared.

  But he wasn’t sure if the dim sound of weeping from her room was a good thing or not.

  The talyan trickled in with the first morning light. They reported . . . nothing.

  “Nothing,” Ecco growled as he stalked past Liam. “Quiet as a grave. And I know damn well they ain’t dead. Just damned. Damn sneaky bastards.”

  “Keep your demon primed for anything odd.”

  Ecco cocked his head. “Like?”

  Liam pictured the drifting specks of soul matter. “Witches. Goblins. Ghosts. Whatever.”

  When Ecco swiped his hand across his forehead, chunks of demon ichor spattered from his gauntlets. “Yeah, of course. Ghosts. Got it.”

  Faint psychic screams of drained malice trailed in the teshuva’s wakes as the men cleared the halls. Jilly stood at the far end, looking young and flustered, the laces of her boots untied.

  Liam walked toward her. The remnants of tenebrae cries shivered over his face like cobwebs.

  “How could you?”

  Just out of arm’s reach, he stopped. “I knew she needed to sleep, so I let her take one—”

  Jilly choked on a short breath. “How could you send them out again after that fight with the haints?”

  “You know why. You’re not mad about that.”

  She glared at him. “Oh, I’m not?”

  Considering her vigorous defense of anything in danger with any sort of tenuous hold on a soul, he guessed she probably was. But that wasn’t the point. “You’re mad because you know you’re going to have to risk losing Dory again.”

  She stiffened. “You can’t just throw her out there—”

  “I meant by talking to her,” he said gently. “You could scare her away, making her face what she’s done.”

  “You just want to know what happened to her because that’ll gi
ve you more ammunition against the tenebrae.”

  She must know that Dory had abandoned her, bleeding on that street corner. Yet she stuck up for those she loved without hesitation or restraint. Envy for those lucky souls nipped at him, even though the leader of immortal, demon-slaying warriors shouldn’t need a defender.

  He threw her accusation back at her. “You realize Dory put you in as much danger as I put the league. Don’t you want all the ammunition you can get, on both counts?”

  She subsided. “You’re awfully in touch with your Oprah side for a demon-slaying monster man.”

  “Night job. Lots of daytime television.”

  She didn’t crack a smile. “What do I tell her?” She tugged at the neck of her T-shirt, pulling it above the black curlings of the reven.

  “Nothing. Demons are a metaphor as far as she’s concerned. Just find out who got her high. How’d she make her way to the haints? Anything we can use.”

  “People have been using her all her life.”

  “Save the pity party. Dory wouldn’t appreciate it any more than your halfway house hooligans did.” Since she seemed unusually amenable to his character evaluation, he added, “You don’t like it either.”

  For a second, he thought she would object just on principle. Then she nodded.

  “How about you go down to the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll bring Dory.”

  She gave him a shrewd glance. “You don’t think she’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Just give her a second.”

  “Fine. I’ll start breakfast.”

  He waited until she stomped away, bootlaces flapping.

  He took a moment to clear his head of her irate vibes. When he unlocked the door, Dory was waiting. “I heard part of that. She sounded mad.”

  “At me. And herself.”

  Dory scratched at her arm. “She’ll be mad at me too.”

  “Maybe she should be.” He started down the hall, leaving her to tag behind. The glare aimed at the back of his head didn’t faze him. “You’ve made some terrible mistakes.”

  “I’ve had a hard life.”