by Jessa Slade
“Your compassion knows no bounds.”
He stared at her. “What does compassion have to do with ridding the world of evil?”
“Duh.”
“We’re talking about capital- E Evil with long fangs. I can’t fight that back with thoughts of loving- kindness and affirmation bumper stickers.”
“Paper cuts can be a bitch.”
He scowled. “You’re the one creeped out by stalker soulflies.”
She swung her arm and he ducked as the twinkling cloud passed over him. Free of his grasp, she glanced at him over her shoulder with an impish smile. “Who’s creeped out?”
Before he could answer, all his demon senses kicked into high gear. She stiffened at the same time, and her smile vanished under a straining tension. As one, they whirled to face the bashed-out door where they’d entered.
The hall was empty, but ominous vibrations rumbled through the floor.
“What is it?” she gasped. “The salambes?”
He crouched, waiting. “No haints left here.” Without haint bodies, salambes would be no threat.
And he just really doubted his night would end so simply.
Not that he felt any satisfaction about his prediction when, in a rush of sulfurous emanations that blew the soulflies apart, the feralis pack burst through the door.
CHAPTER 14
Jilly should have known better by now. Every time she touched Liam, the world went to hell.
The ferales surged forward in a howl and one stinking rush. Liam met them with hammer swinging. The whistle of the weapon through the air raised her hackles. And her demon.
Even as he knocked the first demon away, she jumped forward with the crescent blade in motion, its identical mate in her other hand. She wielded the knives as if she were a contestant in a reality-TV cooking show and the ferales were chicken carcasses standing between her and a million bucks.
Fierce elation swept through her, as keen as the steel edge that diced the first feralis. The teshuva’s version of compassion.
“Back to hell with you,” she snarled.
Only filleting would keep a feralis down. The hunched rat-troll thing spewed ichor in a fountain. She ducked to avoid the spray, every motion as well plotted and precisely drawn as a panel in a great graphic novel, her demon playing her like a superheroine.
Hero only because the role of villain had already been taken, of course.
Liam knocked another one her way—this demon had wings. It recoiled from her attack and bounded over her head with a scream, slashing downward as it went.
Claws tangled in her ponytails, but she slipped free. Thank God for cheap slick hair gel. But a second feralis jumped after the first, and against two demons, her blades suddenly looked much smaller than when she’d admired them on the wall in the warehouse basement.
With a whirlwind attack that she owed entirely to the teshuva, she downed one, but the second pushed her back. Away from Liam, she realized. A third appeared, mandibles spread so wide she swore she could see down into the hellfire animating it. Its corpulent, hairless tail swept through a pile of haint dust, and the soul flecks scattered and faded like embers off a spent Fourth of July sparkler.
Unable to see Liam around the bulk of mutated flesh and virulent demonic energy, she darted to one side, farther from the door.
Where was he? Her heart slammed against her chest, a human counterpoint of fear against the demon’s beating fury. This is what he meant when he said the teshuva couldn’t do it all.
Another rush took her around the third feralis, before it cornered her. But she was definitely being bullied.
And she’d always really hated that.
“Jilly!”
She whirled. There he was, a half-bashed wall at his back. Where she should be.
She flung herself at the feralis, common sense left behind in the speed of her lunge. It recoiled at her sudden attack, and she dodged past its belated swipe.
Liam was already in motion, one hand outstretched to pull her behind him. “Too many. We have to get out.”
“Fight through to the door?” She wished she’d brought the chain saw as he’d teased. And maybe a spare chipper-shredder.
“We’ll take the back way out.”
She hadn’t seen a back door. But he tugged her along, and she followed. The dull roar of his hammer and the hiss of her blades played low and high over the growl of ferales. They were losing ground, as the demons pressed them hard toward the outer wall of the apartment. The closest feralis raised its fleshy beak to the ceiling and screeched in triumph.
Then it leapt for them.
With a two- handed strike, Liam blasted it from the air. He continued the arc.
And bashed out the plywood covering the broken window. The smell of exhaust, cold metal, and night overpowered the sulfur.
“Let’s go.” He yanked her to the jagged opening.
“We’re three stories up.”
“Not down. Over.”
To the elevated train tracks.
The feralis called again. Something answered. And then something else.
“More are coming,” Liam said. “You have to go now!”
Switching the crescent blades into one hand, she clambered into the window, suspended over the sheer drop. Not that she looked.
Liam’s big hand steadied her. “I’m right behind you.”
As if that were consolation when she imagined splatting on the pavement below. She gripped the splintered wood.
And launched herself across the open space.
She thrust upward, hoping to reach the top platform, but fell short. For a heartbeat, she flailed in midair with nothing to grab. Then the crossbeams of the scaffolding raced toward her.
She hit hard. The knives in her hand clanged against the metal. She hoped she hadn’t broken anything vital—either bones or blades—and tangled her arm through the girders. She tightened her grip against the painful reverberations still zinging up her arm. No way was she losing her weapons.
She’d caught just below the deck of the tracks. It would be an easy—a relatively easy—scramble down.
Then she actually looked down. And saw the inflowing tide of malice. The oily shadows swamped the base of the pillars, recoiled a moment, then moved back in, as if bracing themselves for the climb.
She knew how they felt.
A solid thud above made her shriek. But it was only Liam, who’d nailed the jump she’d tried to make.
He peered over the edge of the tracks. “Get up here.”
Gritting her teeth and wishing she’d done that before she squealed like a little girl, she climbed. Her boots slipped once on the chilly steel. Liam fisted his hand in the back of her jacket and hauled her up the last few feet.
She spared one glance for the gaping window. The ferales milled but didn’t jump. “What are they waiting for?”
“Do we really want to know?”
Good point. When he strode off down the tracks, she hurried to catch up. She had to watch where she put each foot. Plummeting off the tracks or stepping on the third rail now would be such a drag. “Are we getting off at the next stop?”
“Not unless we get ahead of them.” He gestured down at the blackening of malice that kept pace below.
“What are they doing?”
“Keeping us pinned up here until a train comes along would be sneaky.”
She slanted a glance at him. “Not funny.”
“No, but effective. I wouldn’t want to pit the teshuva against a train.” He glanced back. “Not good.”
The first feralis had made the leap to the tracks. Liam picked up his speed.
She was eager to do the same and had to keep the toes of her boots off his heels. “I’m starting to feel like I’m being herded.”
“Which is more than even those clever little malice are capable of, much less those ferales. So who orchestrated this reunion?”
Her blood froze. “Reunion?”
“He knew I’d come back to
the scene of the crime. Damn it.”
“Corvus.”
“Played right into his hands.”
“But why?”
“Because I was an overconfident idiot.”
She resisted the urge to slap him. He knew that wasn’t what she meant. And she was sick of his pretending when she knew damn well he wasn’t that at all. “What does Corvus want with you?”
“Again, do we really want to know?”
She thought he already did. “It’s because you’re the leader. If one foolproof way to kill a talya is decapitation—you did say that severed limbs don’t regenerate—then removing you would destroy the league.”
“Hardly.”
“Don’t be such a—”
He halted and held up a hand. “Shit.”
“I wasn’t going to be so harsh, but . . .”
“Feel that?”
The subliminal rumble under her feet wasn’t even enough to shake the dirt from the rails, but it made her knees weak. “Train coming. Do we—?”
“Run.”
But they were running toward the train, with the ferales and malice keeping them on track. Or more to the point, keeping them from leaving the track.
In the past she’d been blamed once or twice, maybe three times, for leaping before she looked. This time, though . . . “We have to jump for it.”
“We can’t lead the ferales into innocents. The slaughter would be appalling.” He huffed. “Not to mention the explanations. We have to wait to find the right place.”
She didn’t have the breath to tell him waiting seemed like a bad idea. With the bad guys pressing so close, the right place could only be the wrong place.
Then the light of the train loomed ahead of them and they were out of time.
Without speaking, they both put on a fresh burst of speed. Up ahead, a work platform jutted off to one side of the tracks. Beyond it, a shuttered storefront was the only break in the solid brick walls lining the path. The roll-down security grille at street level was scrawled with illegible graffiti, but the plate-glass window above was miraculously intact.
Not for long.
The engine bore down on them. Its single light glared like the wrath of some monstrous deity, and the tracks shook in earnest. To an observer, Jilly thought, it must look like they were the two most suicidal people in the city. Unless, of course, the observer had demon-enhanced vision and could see the converging armies of malice and ferales behind them.
Actually, they probably still looked like the most suicidal people in the city.
“Me first this time,” Liam shouted.
He flung himself across the gap to the building. Backlit by the oncoming train, his silhouetted duster flared like wings. In midair, he twisted, gathered the coat close—more like a protective chrysalis now—and slammed into the window.
Glass shattered in all directions in a silver spray. He fell into the darkness beyond.
Jilly steeled herself for the jump, giving him a chance to clear the landing pad. Assuming he hadn’t slashed a major artery or anything inconvenient like that.
In a moment the train would be on her, and a moment after that—with a smidgen of luck—it would obliterate the ferales. Which would eliminate about half their problems. At least the half with corporeal fangs.
Unless, of course, she didn’t move at all and then all her troubles would be over forever.
Silence. Stillness. Sweet escape. For the space between one heartbeat and the next, the thought beckoned to her with chill fingers and breath like ice. Her vision grayed.
Maybe her sister had it right.
But that wasn’t her. Never had been.
The roar of the train drowned the whisper of the tenebraeternum. In a rush, the night bounded back into sharp relief around her. Blinded by the oncoming light, she launched toward the black maw of the broken window.
Thanks to Liam’s much bigger body, she cleared the opening without a single snag on the jagged remnants of glass. With the demon’s instinct, she tucked her shoulder, rolled, and stumbled into a crouch.
The train screeched by outside the window. Or maybe that was the sound of a dozen ferales squished against the rails. A girl could dream.
Liam was already on the move, although he glanced back once. “You still have your knives. Good.”
She glanced down at her white knuckles. The sweat-sticky leather straps that bound the handles felt welded to her palm. Probably she’d never be able to let them go. “Seemed like a good idea to hang on to them. You guys are such hard-asses, I’m sure your armory has a crazy late-return fee.” She switched one of the crescents to her other hand.
“Better late than . . . Damn it.”
“Well, yeah, pretty much anything is better than—” Then she followed his gaze. “That.”
The faint swirling stream of soul flecks flowed toward them.
“This is another haint haunt?” She shook her head. “What are the chances?”
“Pretty high, considering we were driven here by demons.”
“I most definitely don’t like this.” She stiffened as the souls spiraled lazily at her, drawn to the bracelet like tiny doomed stars into a black hole.
“They won’t hurt you. I don’t think.”
She scowled. “I meant, I don’t like the idea we were pulled here.” She waved her arm, disrupting the slow spiral. “Kind of like these things.”
“Stop swatting at them. It’s disrespectful. They’re not going to follow you far, or you would’ve been trailing them around like fairy dust ever since your teshuva gave you the bracelet.”
“The gift that keeps on giving.”
“For eternity, yeah.” Liam checked his cell phone.
“Still too much interference to get a call out.”
And get reinforcements in. She took a breath, not so much to rouse her demon as settle her nerves. The teshuva could only do so much, apparently. “Then we’re on our own. Good thing you got me.”
She expected him to laugh. Instead he pocketed the phone and nodded. “Good thing.” He opened his coat and folded back the front edge to reveal the grip of the hammer. “The tenebrae were so eager to get us here. Let’s go see what they wanted us to find.”
Together, they left the soulflies behind in a pinwheel of sparks.
As they tracked deeper through the dark building, leaving the lightened square of the broken window behind, Liam longed to leave her safely behind. There was no safety to be had—he knew that—but the impulse didn’t change. If only he had a Jilly-sized trap where he could lock her away, someplace he’d find his way back to between battles.
Of course, she’d kill him if she caught even an inkling of his thoughts. How convenient the flight for their lives distracted her from the telltale betrayals of capillary-refill rates, pupil dilation, and galvanic skin response that were the demon’s version of mind reading.
She had the link to the soulflies, which led to the haint haunts connected to this latest demonic infestation, which would lead, on a twisting path, no doubt—though certain as day led to night—to Corvus. She was anything but safe.
Like the weapons she had chosen, she was all sharp points and deadlier curves. But unlike the leather-wrapped grip of the crescent blades, if there was any safe place to hold her, he had yet to find it.
That didn’t stop his hands from remembering the shape of her, as dangerous—and strangely calming—as the hammer he released from the anchor inside his coat.
The third floor of the storefront where he’d broken through smelled of dust, mouse droppings, and moldy cardboard. A storage room, of some sort, but, judging from the strength of the stench, not one in recent use.
He paused at the closed door that led out to the hall. A stretch of his demon senses picked up the boil of malice outside on the street and some more distant, muddled agony. Perhaps the ferales swept along by the train.
“Something creepy in here,” Jilly whispered. “I don’t suppose the graffiti on the front door counts as
art to keep the malice out.”
“Depends on how good the artist was and what he infused into his art. Tags alone won’t do it.”
“I knew I should’ve pushed harder for that art-therapy program at the halfway house, but, speaking of creeps, Envers was always telling me we didn’t have the money for it. I bet he’d change his tune after a ride-along with the league.”
Regardless of the creep factor, they couldn’t stay here. He turned the knob and let himself out into the hall.
The eerie black lighting of the teshuva in hunt mode flattened the perspective in the wide, empty hallway. No birnenston. No etheric smears. So why had the soulflies gathered? They moved too slowly to have been drawn to Jilly from outside in the brief time she’d been in the building. And if the bodies they’d been ripped from weren’t present . . .
“I see you followed my little trail of bread crumbs.”
Out of nowhere, a shape coalesced at the end of the hall, a deeper blackness among the shadows.
Jilly’s hand fisted in the back of his coat, and a few shards of glass fell from the folds with a warning chime. Liam settled his hand on the hammer. “Corvus.”
CHAPTER 15
Liam angled the hammer in a two- handed grasp across his body, Jilly behind him, as the djinn- man took another step down the hall. Despite the teshuva ascending, Liam couldn’t make out the djinn-man’s features, although the curious tilt to the head was apparent.
“Corvus?” The rough voice slurred. “Barely. Thanks to you.”
Corvus stepped into a faint fall of street light that struggled through from an outside room. Soulflies flickered in the air, and Liam’s stomach twisted when he wondered how much haint dust was trapped in the grimy creases of the djinn- man’s clothing. Only by shuffling his demon senses to the side was Liam able to make out Corvus’s face.
Four months ago, Liam had caught the briefest glimpse of the djinn-man. Archer had thrown him from a high-rise, which made visual identification problematic. There hadn’t exactly been a lot left to remember. A powerful wrestler’s build, a shaved head, a lot of blood. And then the building had collapsed on him in a quite dramatic spray of bricks and demon-realm wind. More concerned with the survival of his talyan, Liam hadn’t bothered noting details, since they’d thought Corvus was dead—body, soul, and demon separated forever.