by Jessa Slade
“We all have our demons.”
“You’re supposed to say tomorrow is a new day.”
“Only if you survive this one.”
When her footsteps stopped, he turned to face her.
She studied him, hands on her hips. “Tough love?”
“Is there any other kind?”
He kept walking. But halfway into the utilitarian kitchenette that had come with the warehouse, he rocked to a halt, stopped by the almost visible wave of sautéing onion. Something inside him twisted: not his demon, his empty stomach.
“We used to have a very nice kitchen,” he blurted, apropos of nothing. “It had copper pots. No one used them.”
Jilly slapped a pan on the runty efficiency stove. “I guessed by the ingredients I found.”
Talyan tended to be indifferent eaters, which had always saddened Liam. Immortality without cuisine seemed the ultimate ironic end to his journey. Without the end part, of course.
“Jilly was always an amazing cook,” Dory volunteered from behind him. “She fed us when Mom forgot.”
Jilly’s shoulders hunched. “Just wanted to make sure the Family Services ladies saw fresh veggies in the house.”
“No fresh veggies here.” Liam sighed.
“You’d be surprised what you can do with oyster crackers, eggs, and canned chili.”
And he was surprised when she slipped three plates of neatly folded omelets across the table a few minutes later. “Where are the oyster crackers?”
“I didn’t say you had oyster crackers. Your pantry isn’t just neglected. It’s an embarrassment.”
“I’m calling DCFS right now,” Dory chimed.
The sisters shared identical smiles at his expense.
He dug into breakfast. He didn’t mind their snickers if it got the ball—and Dory’s story—rolling. Plus, the omelet was really good, even if he wasn’t here for the food. “So, Dory, I’m guessing you haven’t had a good breakfast in a while either. Who was luring you in with the drugs instead?”
Dory glanced up, a bite of omelet halfway to her mouth. “Lured?”
“It didn’t seem like that to you?”
Her gaze slid away. “I was high. Nothing seemed like anything.” She lowered her hand and pushed her plate away. “Anyway. What would they want with me?”
Jilly pushed the plate back. “We were hoping you could tell us.” She tapped the fork against the ceramic and waited until Dory took another bite.
Dory ate, if reluctantly. Liam wondered if she was succumbing to Jilly’s big-sister bullying . . . or delaying answering the question. But whom would she be covering for except herself?
Jilly laced her fingers on the tabletop. “We think they wanted to get you hooked on solvo.”
Dory shook her head. “I told him I don’t do that shit. Makes you stupid.”
Jilly slanted a look at Liam, telegraphing her relief that she’d been right to tell him her sister could be saved.
He avoided meeting her gaze and just leaned back in his chair. “ ‘Him’ who?”
Dory didn’t seem to hear, muttering, “Can you call it luring if you go willingly?”
Jilly’s knuckles whitened on her fork; then she tried to copy his relaxed posture. “Who did you want to go with?”
Dory bit at her lip, eyes unfocused. “After you got rid of Rico, I had to look around, you know? I couldn’t just take my chances out on the street. I needed a place.”
Liam stiffened, as if sitting a little straighter could lift him above the rising bad feeling in his gut. Jilly would never forgive herself for tossing her sister out of the frying pan and into the fire if Dory had ditched her pimp for a soul-stealing pusher of the chemical desolator numinis.
Dory finally glanced up to scowl at them, as if she knew what they were thinking. “When I told him I don’t do solvo, he said it was fine. He said freedom means everything, you know? That’s why he calls himself that.”
“Calls himself what?” Jilly’s voice took on an edge, but Liam already knew what Dory was going to say.
“He calls himself Blackbird,” Dory said.
“Corvus,” Liam said flatly. “Corvus Valerius.”
CHAPTER 12
Jilly had no idea why Liam stiffened up like the week-old bread she’d found in the half-empty kitchen cabinets.
“Blackbird found me,” Dory was saying. “Stayed with me sometimes. He didn’t have a crib of his own. Likes to be free. So I seen him around here, there, everywhere.” She scratched at the inner crook of her arm, although Jilly doubted much remained of those veins. “He never made me do nothing I didn’t want to do.”
Jilly kept one eye on Liam’s distant expression. A weather report including the chance of rain would’ve incited more reaction, and she’d already noticed the more he took himself in hand, the more the rest of the world should be freaking out.
In a tone so bland her heart rate trebled to make up for his nonchalance, he asked, “What did you do for Blackbird, Dory?”
With an insolent shrug, she shook back her bleached hair, but her face was pale when she glanced at Jilly. “I went on his rounds with him.”
Jilly had thought nothing could hurt worse than a knife sliding between her ribs. She was wrong. “You were dealing solvo?”
“We didn’t sell it.” Dory looked at them as if it was a point of pride. “He gave it away for free. He said he’s all about freedom, and that’s no lie.”
“Funny how the devil doesn’t have to lie,” Liam murmured.
Jilly rubbed her forehead, not from any pain of her own but in sympathetic ache at the flare of Liam’s reven. She didn’t think Dory saw it. Which said more about her sister’s lack of attention than any effort on Liam’s part at camouflage. His recklessness made her gut clench with fear, a sick counterpoint to her horror at what Dory had done. How many haints had been created at her sister’s hand?
“Oh, Dory,” she whispered. She reached across the table to cup her fingers under her sister’s clenched fist. Beneath her thumb, the tiny prick-mark scabs on the back of her sister’s hand read like a Braille of lost chances. “Dory, do you know what you’ve done?”
Dory tugged her hand away. “We set them free, let their souls fly. Blackbird told me I mighta been a junkie whore—that’s what you yelled at Rico, Jilly; do you remember, that he made me a junkie whore?—but at least I’d never sold my soul.”
Jilly slumped back in her chair. She’d wanted to call Rico on his crimes, but she’d rather have taken two more knives to the ribs than discover her sister had heard that exchange. Knowing her vigilante attack on the pimp had only made Dory more vulnerable took away the last of her breath and pierced her heart straight through.
“Lost isn’t the same as free.” Her voice cracked.
Liam met her despairing gaze, but his words were directed to Dory, as lazily as any after-breakfast gossip. “How much is a soul worth these days?”
Dory glowered at him. “Mine in particular? To him, more than a do-gooder like you would pay.”
He smiled crookedly. “Oh, Dory. I’m not good.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Well, I’m not either. And Blackbird still wanted me around.”
Jilly’s empty hands clenched. Was it too late to grab Dory and run, as she should have years ago when they were both children? She’d been too frightened at the time, and she’d chosen a job trying to keep other kids from doing exactly that, but considering where they’d ended up, maybe they should’ve just taken their chances.
The memory of those early days strained her voice when she asked, “Do you know what happened to the other people who were hanging around in that apartment?”
Dory scratched again, at the back of her hand this time, to erase Jilly’s touch or from memories of her own. “I remember shooting up. Then I remember the wall busting in.” She pinned Jilly with a jaundiced eye. “I remember seeing you. And I remember hearing screaming. Just in my head. But I remember.”
The blood pooled in Jill
y’s limbs, and her hands felt heavy. As if she held a hammer. A hammer drenched in blood.
In the end, there’d been no blood, of course. Every speck of the burned-out haints had morphed to ash.
“I’m sorry,” Jilly whispered, not sure to whom she owed the apology—the sister she’d failed or the people Dory had doomed beyond death.
“About the screaming?” Dory shrugged. Lost in her own turmoil, Jilly couldn’t decide if her sister meant her screaming “junkie whore” or the shrieking of butchered haints. “Happens to all of us. Except, I thought, maybe you. I guess not.”
Liam cleared his throat. “Maybe he seems benevolent, but Corvus—Blackbird, as you call him—is very dangerous.”
Dory nodded. “Sometimes you need that on your side, you know?” Her gaze shifted back to Jilly and widened with contrived innocence.
Jilly couldn’t even roll her eyes back. Look whom she’d tied herself to. Inadvertently, maybe. To save her skin, perhaps. But she’d known what Liam was—powerful, demanding, and, yes, dangerous—and she’d reveled in him.
What ten kinds of hypocrite was she to judge? Blackbird might’ve made the monsters, but Liam unmade them with the same lack of mercy. She pushed to her feet and paced the width of the room. “Who is he, this Blackbird?”
“We killed him.” Liam raised his voice so she could hear from her distance, but Dory’s gasp was still audible. “Or we thought we did. He created solvo and started spreading it. We had to stop him.”
“Solvo takes away the pain,” Dory said. “You shouldn’t knock it.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “Even you won’t take it.” When she just scowled, he continued. “Corvus thought solvo would help him conquer the world.”
Dory sniffed. “He said in retrospect he should’ve started with just the South Side and worked his way up from there.”
From the glint in Liam’s eyes, Jilly recognized that he’d meant that domination quite literally even if Dory was being snide.
Jilly halted her pacing and slumped against the wall. “How do we find him?” Her voice sounded funny, scratchy and broken like warped vinyl. She knew what they would do to him, or what they would try to do. Presumably, he’d return the mayhem, full force.
Dory shook her head. “You can’t find him. He’s Blackbird. Here and there.”
“He has to land sometime.” Liam pushed to his feet. “And if not, he leaves his droppings. Where does he deal?”
“Everywhere,” Dory started. When Liam gave her a look, she huffed. “Sometimes he hangs near Back of the Yards. And near the pier, but he doesn’t deal there. He says he just likes to look out over the water.”
Jilly expected Liam to charge from the room, hammer swinging, but he surprised her. He settled his hip against the counter and studied Dory. “You’re giving Corvus up without much of a fight.”
Dory shrugged. “Blackbird likes to talk. He tells us a lot, even if it doesn’t all make sense, and he doesn’t mind us talking. It’s not like the cops can find him. Or stop him.”
“Is that what you think we are? Cops?”
She shifted her gaze to Jilly. “Something like that. Maybe vice.”
“Something like that,” he repeated softly. “Dory, look at me.”
The timbre of his voice shifted, lowered. Jilly found her gaze drawn to him too, though she recognized the demon harmonics for what they were.
Dory hunched like a bedraggled bleached-blond rabbit facing a wolf. “What?”
“What does Corvus hold over you? You and the others we found with you.”
“He had a party pack that wouldn’t quit, besides solvo.”
“You didn’t hang with him just for the drugs. You could get that anywhere.” He didn’t bother pointing out she had gotten it plenty.
Dory rocked from side to side in her chair, as if Liam were dragging the words out through some twist in her throat. “He understood.”
“Understood what?”
“Us. More than anybody else ever did. He said we could let the darkness out.”
Liam sighed, a purely human sigh that broke whatever spell he’d woven.
Dory straightened abruptly, her face scrunched with petulance. “I don’t know why anyone cares now. Nobody did before.”
Jilly finally found her voice. “I always cared.”
After a moment, Dory nodded. “You just couldn’t do anything.”
“Now I can.” The league’s basement armory with its walls of weapons called to Jilly as if the new steel in her spine reverberated like a tuning fork to those choices of destruction.
Liam watched her so intently she wondered if he felt it too.
Dory stood, breaking the moment. “You can’t keep me here. I haven’t done anything.” She paused a moment, then gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Well, nothing too bad.”
Liam smiled, a calculating expression. “Nothing, huh? I suppose you could always take us to meet your Blackbird.”
Dory’s amusement faltered. “He’s not mine. He won’t belong to anybody.”
Admiration warmed her voice and set Jilly’s hackles up. Especially when her sister looked at her and said, “Kind of like you.”
Jilly leaned her head back against the wall. Dory had no idea how far she had sold herself down the river. The Styx, apparently.
Liam cleared his throat. “I need to see how Sera is getting on with our other guests.”
“Prisoners,” Dory corrected.
He spread his hands. “Such cynicism in one so young.”
She flashed him a flirty smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m an old soul.”
He didn’t smile back. “At least it’s yours.”
When he walked out, he seemed to take the breath out of Jilly’s body. She slumped a few inches lower on the wall.
“I can’t believe he’s your boyfriend,” Dory snapped. “He’s worse than anything Mom ever brought home.”
Her sister’s tone straightened Jilly. “He’s not my boyfriend.” Then she felt compelled to add, “And he’s not that bad. Anyway, you seemed to get along with him just fine.”
“I know how to deal with guys like that.”
“Smile and scoot your neckline down?” She shook her head, half bemused, half in despair. “It’s not like I didn’t notice.”
Dory shrugged.
Jilly rubbed her forehead. “If you think he’s so bad, why flash flesh?”
“That’s how you protect against guys like that. How could you never learn that?”
“By staying away from guys you say are like that.” Why was she mentally removing Liam from that side of the equation? He was a big, domineering bully. Just because he wanted to save the world didn’t change that.
Dory huffed. “You can’t get away from them. They’re everywhere.”
“Like Corvus.” Jilly wasn’t sure how much more she could get from her sister. Dory had been so out of it. Could anything she said be trusted?
“Blackbird doesn’t fuck his girls.” Dory frowned. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him touch anyone.”
The thread of longing in her voice crept along Jilly’s spine. When was the last time someone had touched her sister gently, with love?
The chill spread through her skin. When was the last time she’d been touched that way?
The memory of Liam’s big hand against her demon-marked flesh after that desperate coupling in her apartment threatened her, and she slammed the door on it. Just as she’d slammed the door on any number of helping hands reaching her way—afraid she’d find more like her uncles or her first bad boyfriend—before she’d learned to be the one to reach out. Either she or Dory had to take the first step.
She pushed away from the wall. “Come on. Let’s get you some clean clothes.”
“I got evicted,” Dory said. “And I lost all my stuff. That’s why Blackbird gave me . . .” She dropped her gaze.
The drugs. Jilly withheld a sigh. Dory must have been a glaringly obvious candidate for future hainth
ood. No place to be. No one looking for her.
“Come on,” she urged. “We’ll find something.”
They met a talya in the hall.
“Jonah.” Jilly dredged up his name from the aftermath of the salambe attack. “Where would I find extra clothes? You guys must keep stuff around for . . .” She slanted a glance at Dory. “For after work.”
He stared at them a moment. The impassive stillness of his expression drew his otherwise handsome face into forbidding lines, like a marble statue of the strictest saint in the calendar. His chisel-sharp gaze flicked over Dory, assessing. No, Jilly thought, worse than that. He’d already made his judgment.
She stretched her fingers, felt the demon move through the fibers of her self. Apparently the aftermath of her encounter with Rico hadn’t taught her anything about not throwing down with big, scary males.
Jonah’s lips twitched, not a smile, more a sneer. “I have many, many years of unraveling demons behind me, girl. Not to mention righteousness at my side.” His voice was so soft and low only her spiked hearing picked up his words.
She replied in kind, keeping Dory out of it. “And I have my unholy pissed-offedness at being called girl.”
He snorted at human volume. “I can’t imagine how the league will survive the return of your kind.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “My kind?”
His gaze flicked to the exposed skin above her crossed arms, then to her hair. His scornful smile widened. “The fairer sex, I was going to say.”
“I can see how you’d drive a woman away.” She’d meant the insult generically, but she was surprised how abruptly his smirk vanished. “Maybe outlawing us wasn’t fair.”
“To whom?” he murmured. The faintly antiquated cadence of his voice drifted toward something she’d almost call sorrow. He shook his head, the waves of his sandy blond hair hiding his eyes. “We keep leftovers in the storerooms downstairs. Help yourself.”
She didn’t think he meant just help herself to the clothes. He managed to brush past them without actually touching them.
Dory glanced after him in consternation. “Is every guy here an asshole?”
Jilly wished she hadn’t sensed that unexpected depth to the rude talya. She didn’t want to defend him. “I haven’t met them all.”