by Jessa Slade
“There was plenty of known peril to go around,” he muttered.
“Up,” Perrin said.
Though the doors stood open to the vintage wrought iron lift in the lobby, they searched out the narrow, enclosed back stairs. Either way seemed ripe for a trap, and Liam flexed his fingers over the hammer’s grip.
Jilly stared uneasily up into the darkness.
“Don’t tense up,” he murmured. “With your teshuva repressed by the birnenston, you won’t be able to recover as quickly. You have to be able to let it flow.”
She rolled her head back along her shoulders once and flicked him a smile that faded after one step. He realized Archer was watching, so he gave the other talya a curt nod that sent him to the front of the line.
Liam put Jilly right behind him and gave the others the signal—hand up, fingers spread—to string themselves out single file, not close enough to be caught in one attack, but not too far to be separated when the attack came.
But none did. Even as the other- realm stench thickened, they gained the seventh-floor landing without incident.
“Don’t get tense,” Jilly whispered from behind him.
He shook out his arm, where the weight of hammer had tightened his muscles, and glanced back with a faint grin. “Feels better when you just attack.”
As soon as he said it, the words seemed to crystallize in his mouth, realization drying the smile on his lips. That’s why he kept egging on the conflict between them; he could fall into the familiar patterns of parry and thrust, keeping her at a distance and avoiding any pain. With the tenebrae, no one could fault his strategy, but with her . . .
And now was really not the time to turn his attention inward. Once more, his obligations to the league came to the rescue.
Her answering smile didn’t quite erase the strain around her eyes, but she flashed her crescent knives at him. “Ready to go.”
Of course she was, but was he?
Archer pushed open the door into the penthouse. Whatever—whoever—had occupied the space before was lost in the obliterating tangle of birnenston. The thick threads bristled with the embedded remains of feralis mutations, and the air itself trembled with the unheard echoes of malice cries.
“Did something attack them here?” Sera kept her voice low. “If it was angelic warriors, they do a crappy cleanup.”
“That’s what us garbage men are for,” Archer said.
“No angel has been through here.” Jonah sounded convinced.
Perrin said simply, “Up.”
They took the last flight of stairs to the roof.
The bare open stretch of asphalt roof blended into the night sky, except for the glowing glass cube at the other end.
“A greenhouse?” Sera took a step forward, but stopped with Archer’s hand on her shoulder.
“No hothouse flowers in there,” he said. “Unless you mean hot as hell.”
“Just what we’ve been looking for.” Liam led the way across the roof, the six talyan spread like wings on either side.
Rust bloomed on the metal frame of the shed-sized structure, but the glass was intact. Acid rain and pigeon shit smudged the surface. Behind the glass, smoky outlines spun like slow-motion dirty laundry.
“Hey, the salambes bottled themselves,” Ecco said. “Too bad we can’t take the whole thing home with us.”
“Why would they bottle themselves?” Perrin circled the hothouse, his expression puckered with professional curiosity. “Birnenston is toxic to all the tenebrae, same as it is to us. Ah, look, every pane is etched with it, and the vents are sealed. No wonder they can’t get out. It’s the demonic equivalent of the blessed fishbowl.”
The poisonous emanations leaked from the base of the hothouse and clogged the corroded blades of the big fan that had once regulated temperatures inside the shed. In the sickly yellowish glow, only the blue streaks of Jilly’s hair held color.
“Somebody else trapped them,” Jilly said, half to herself. “Corvus? Does he have haints and salambes cached like weapons all over the city?”
Breaking into the hothouse and snagging just one of the salambes was going to be like opening a can of worms. If worms were superfast, incorporeal, and demonic.
“No haints here, at least,” Liam said. “But the salambes may scatter, like they did when they exhausted the bodies at the apartment den.”
“We’ll get one.” Jilly twisted the bracelet around her wrist. When she caught him looking at her, she cocked one eyebrow and rattled the bracelet. The knot-work metal bent the repellent light of the hothouse into silver glints.
The chill in his gut deepened. “No.”
Ecco glanced over. “No what?”
“I’ll be the one doing the catching.” She had caught everyone’s attention at least. She faced them, leaving Liam to stare at the squared set of her shoulders.
Even when she was jacked up in her thick-soled boots, those shoulders barely reached his sternum. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, pull her back from the brink, where she threw herself with such unholy zest.
But the league was the only wall between the world and the brink.
“Some of the tenebrae are attracted to the bracelet.” As if she felt his measuring gaze, she drew herself up another few inches onto her toes. “To me. When we crack open the glass, I think I can keep one’s attention long enough for Ecco to get it in the bowl.”
Ecco stroked his chin. “Snagging a malice isn’t exactly fun. The jellyfish-sting/rat-bite combo is enough to make you just want to drain it and be done. This’ll be worse.”
She nodded once. “I’ve had a little experience. I got through it.”
“Got through it?” The words burst from Liam, as if she’d driven her shoulder into his chest. She was talking about when they’d come together to trap the demons. She meant she’d “gotten through” their kiss.
She cast a fleeting glance back at him that didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Just open the glass.”
“The sheer amount of birnenston is going to make this messy.” Perrin rattled his spears with restless tension. “It’s collected to a potent dose, which is why the salambes haven’t been able to force the seal. My teshuva has a taste for it and gives me some immunity, but you won’t be able to stay in contact long without risking some serious damage.”
“I think this won’t take long at all.” Liam swung the hammer over his head and smashed through the glass.
Brittle with age, the thick panes shattered. Gelatinous ropes of birnenston held a few shards suspended, but the demonic seal was broken. The salambes boiled out, taking their looming, horned, insubstantial form as they hit the night air.
As quick as they were, the birnenston-enforced captivity had obviously weakened them, and the talyan were quicker.
With the ends of his spears, Perrin scooped up birnenston. He wound the sticky, frayed filaments around the leaf-shaped blades like some vile cotton candy. In the presence of so much unleashed etheric energy, the birnenston flared to torch brightness. Perrin drove a few salambes between the two spears with all the skill of a street performer wielding juggling sticks on fire. Half smoke they might be, but the salambes cringed away from the birnenston-coated spears. Perrin angled them toward Jilly and her bracelet trap. Ecco stood with the fishbowl at the ready, Jonah with the blessed seal in hand.
Sera stood with Archer behind her, his hands on her shoulders, as if they were watching the whole crazed carnival. But her eyes were closed and his sparked with violet power, and the bone-dust scent of the tenebraeternum was on the wind as they broke all the rules of the league with their mated bond.
Liam focused on Jilly. His muscles tightened again, with the urge to go to her, to stand at her back, her head tucked beneath his chin. But whatever nerves had plagued her before, her calm expression made clear she’d found a centered place. With his brute hammer, Liam had never felt more useless.
So to his disgust, his ravager heart actually lifted in delight when the squadron of winged fera
les rose over the edge of the roofline, clearly intent on joining the fight.
Well, so was he.
With a shouted warning, he whirled to face the new-comers. The ferales had feasted well on the animal remains in the city. Most sported at least two pairs of wings, and they swept through the salambes, maneuvering like lice-infested Apache attack helicopters.
This, the hammer was good for.
Etched steel snarled through the air, and the Apaches became more like mosquitoes. Though the toxic slop of the birnenston sapped his teshuva, purely human fury energized his every swing. In the corner of his vision, Jilly centered herself under a salambe Perrin had cornered with his smoldering birnenston-tipped spears. Ecco and Jonah lurked nearby with the bowl and seal.
Next to the three powerful talyan, she looked small, and despite them, she looked alone. Vulnerable, with her knives pocketed as she reached up toward the salambe, the bracelet on her wrist a sullen silver glow.
Even as he methodically decommissioned the ferales, a part of Liam screamed to abandon the fight and go to her. He should be standing beside her, keeping watch while she worked her magic.
With a last vicious sweep, he cleared the roof of ferales. Bashed bodies were piled high, and the last few functioning demons circled the rooftop, screeching. Loose feathers drifted across the asphalt to snag in the ooze of birnenston.
He’d had his chance with her. And the urge to forget everything just to be with her reminded him why he’d refused to take that chance. Holding the world together meant he couldn’t hold her. Not the way he wanted to. She was his weapon, not his woman.
He waited, hammer held loosely at the ready. The salambes—except for the one Perrin had pinned in place—swirled around the rooftop. Ether trailed behind them in agitated contrails.
Jilly had almost lured Perrin’s salambe into her grasp. The upper part of it still had some definition, its single nonsymmetrical tooth horn thrashing in desperation. But its lower half dissolved into unformed ether that funneled toward Jilly’s outstretched hand.
Liam didn’t like the look of the straining demon. When he and Jilly had done . . . whatever they’d done, the tenebrae had seemed to come willingly to their doom. They’d spiraled down peacefully. This one struggled to escape, tearing off smoky bits of ether in its flailing.
The closer it fell to Jilly’s fingertips, the more frantic it became. In just another heartbeat, it would be within her grasp.
Liam’s breath stopped in his throat. This was wrong. He was too far away if anything happened.
He was already moving when it did.
The first trailing edge of ether touched Jilly’s hand. Before he could shout, the salambe engulfed her.
With the haints, the salambes had hovered half in, half out of the soul-emptied bodies. Jilly was already occupied—double occupancy really—so it only coated her like an ill-fitting skin. But Liam had no doubt the pain of demonic energies clashing was a thousand times worse than any malice sting.
Jilly, her face white with strain, punched through the enveloping skin of the salambe. She peeled it back. Her puffy coat began to shred around her as if the other-realm energy had rotted it past cohesion. The crescent knives clattered out of her disintegrating pocket. She stood in her T-shirt, skin exposed to the salambe and the elements. Beneath the hem and above the neckline, the dark lines of her reven blazed violet. The flesh around it shimmered translucent as her teshuva waged its half of the battle.
He was almost across the roof, still too far. But she didn’t need him. She mastered the salambe, gathered it between her hands. Whipped on other-realm winds, her blue-striped hair stood in a dark corona around her pale face. When she gestured Perrin back and turned to Ecco and Jonah, her eyes were pure amethyst.
In the conflicting energies, the fishbowl glowed the faint gold of angelic blessing. The gleam brightened as Jilly forced the salambe toward it. The piercing shriek from the demon—pain and rage and fear—thrust aural talons into Liam’s spine. But that didn’t stop his race to Jilly. He shouted her name.
The salambes that had clouded over the roof seemed drawn as to a lightning rod. Even as he leapt, they streamed down on their trapped kin. Their cyclone drew the remaining ferales into the demonic mix. The air on the roof crackled with sleeting demon ethers—the dark powers of teshuva, salambes and shrieking ferales, and birnenston in a maddening clash.
Jilly thrust the salambe into the bowl in Ecco’s hands. Jonah slapped the foil seal over the opening. The glass flared gold just as the downward arrow of salambes reached it.
Angel blessing and hellish fury touched.
And the rooftop exploded.
CHAPTER 22
So cold she burned, Jilly watched Jonah seal the bowl. Finally.
Then all hell broke loose.
The downward pressure of other-realm wind almost flattened her, and she glanced up to see the salambes plunging toward them. She turned to make sure Ecco had the bowl securely tucked under his meaty arm. No way were the demons taking it back.
Liam shouted something. Probably good advice she didn’t have time to decipher.
She tried to reach into herself again for the teshuva’s slanting energies, to deflect the coming onslaught. But she couldn’t even catch her breath, the first time since her possession that the knife wound had bothered her.
The birnenston, she realized, was killing her slowly. The teshuva sputtered in her veins.
In a fury, the tangled mess of salambes and ferales broke over the rooftop.
Like a lightning rod, Perrin’s spears shattered in a spray of shrapnel and knocked him away. Jilly flinched at another sharp pain that lanced through her side, like a runner’s cramp. The backlash tumbled her, boots over head. Ferales slammed down against the asphalt, driven as hard as the talyan by the salambes’ force.
The salambes whirled together again, sucking up the shrieking, flapping ferales. Jilly’s skin crawled as the collection of malevolence seemed to find its focus.
And plunged straight at them.
Ecco ducked and covered, clutching the bowl. Jonah screamed a warning. She raised her fist, the knot-work bracelet tight around the clenched muscles of her forearm.
For a heartbeat, the demonic cyclone seemed to hesitate. They remembered what had happened to their trapped kin.
Then the cyclone split and hit the rooftop to either side of her. The asphalt buckled and bowed in one violent contraction.
She was flying. She had a hazy moment to wonder if a winged feralis had grabbed her, and thought maybe she could convince it that they should escape together; then she crashed down. Glass shattered an arm’s length away, and she realized she’d just missed smashing into the ruins of the hothouse. Lucky her, something softer had broken her fall.
Then the birnenston began to congeal around her.
“Jilly, get up. Get out of there.”
Shaking off her daze, she realized the shattering glass had been Jonah, blown on a trajectory only a few feet from hers. He’d hit the wreckage of the hothouse. The twisted metal frame had collapsed around him, leaving him half in, half out of the shed. And a guillotine of plate glass hung above him.
She met Jonah’s clear gaze. No fear. No telltale violet either. His teshuva had been driven deep by the poison that had leaked out of the hothouse all around them.
Wildly, Jilly called out, but her voice broke. Too far away, Archer and Sera were driving ferales away from Perrin, who was on his knees. Not ten feet away, Ecco’s bulk was slumped over. Dead? Jilly prayed he still held the fishbowl in the curve of his body. She didn’t see Liam at all. Suddenly, prayer seemed pointless.
Thick ropes of ooze clung to her knees as she struggled upright. She tried to tear free, but her boots were hopelessly mired. She remembered the haints embedded in the stalagmites, trapped and dying.
There was a glint on the asphalt. Her crescent knives, fallen from her dissolving coat. If she could cut her bootlaces open . . .
She scrabbled toward them, co
ntorted by her trapped legs. Her reach fell short.
Ah, to be a few inches taller. Or if only she’d been wearing nice pumps she could’ve slipped out of.
A piercing tingle traced through the birnenston wounds. Her teshuva’s version of a warning she didn’t need. The nearest ferales flapped in tattered circles around the rooftop, broken, but the salambes were re-gathering.
The ventilation fan, knocked half loose from its moorings, began to turn. To her horror, Jilly realized that the salambes, lacking corporeal shells, would use anything at hand to destroy their enemy.
The smoky ether of the salambes twined through the blades, whirling them into a blur. The bang of loosened metal pounded in Jilly’s head. When the fan jolted loose, the shearing weight of it would chew through anything in its path. Like Ecco, Jonah, and her.
She strained for her knives. “Liam,” she screamed. And tore one boot almost loose.
She reached an inch farther. But her other boot was utterly swamped in birnenston. Her hands slid through the greasy slicks of it, and the corrosive poison ate at the skin between her fingers. Impossible. She had no fight left.
The deafening clatter of the fan told her only seconds remained before the salambes worried it free. She flinched at another crash of metal, closer. As if the threat could be any more immediate.
Again, Jonah threw his weight against the twisted metal cage that held him. He heaved again and again, with enormous strength despite being pinned with his whole arm in the wreckage. The thick plate of broken glass above him quivered.
“Stop!” Jilly cried.
He didn’t. He wrenched free. But not quick enough, his teshuva almost dormant.
The glass sheeted down. Jonah tumbled back with one agonized scream and a fountain of crimson.
Even as he fell, he angled toward her and slapped her knives across the asphalt with the raw bone of his severed wrist.
Sobbing, Jilly snatched the blood-drenched handles and sliced through her bootlaces in one blow. She bolted out of the birnenston, her stocking feet suctioning out of the dissolving leather of her boots, and grabbed for Jonah’s arm. What was left of it.