Forged of Shadows ms-2 Read online

  “I don’t tease.”

  He swept her with a glance that shifted from violet to a smoldering blue. “No. I guess you didn’t.”

  He was trying to distract her. The heat that traced over her skin sank deeper, into her bones, like a hook that drew her helplessly to him.

  But she was not helpless. Hadn’t been for a very long time. She refused to contemplate how the demon playing on that fear had gotten her here. Could a discord demon play at all, or would it be out of tune? The fleeting, irreverent thought gave her the impetus to lean along the railing and put her hand on his arm. The shock doubled back along her nerves, but his eyes widened. Good.

  She met his gaze, dark not with the rising demon but with desire. The sparks between them snapped a little higher. Then she deliberately removed her hand, letting her fingers trail up his arm for a heartbeat. “I just wanted to remind you, Liam, sometimes it’s not all about you charging in and taking command.”

  His eyes crinkled with sudden amusement. “I can hold back, let someone else go first.” He wrapped his long fingers loosely around her elbow and reeled her closer. “Didn’t I?”

  The darkness of his long coat around his wide shoulders made a private space at the crowded rail. While she struggled to decide whether she was more annoyed by his male arrogance, insolent manhandling, or the fresh jolt of lust that shot through her, he said, “Now let’s see what you can do.”

  She stared up at his mouth, remembering the graze of his lips on her skin. “Here?” The boss man was kinkier than she’d guessed.

  “No horde-tenebrae here,” he said. “We’re done with our drinks. Next stop, draining a malice.”

  She jerked her gaze up to his eyes. He hadn’t grabbed her arm just to continue their touchy- feely moment. He was studying the bracelet peeking out beneath the cuff of her jacket. The silvery metal seemed to absorb the light around it, deadening the air.

  Yeah, it sucked all right. “The horde. Of course.” The reason they were here. The reason he was here with her.

  The memory of the headless feralis in the alley snuffed the embarrassed heat lingering in her cheeks as they left the club, Liam cutting a swath through the crowd. It would never occur to him to think of leading her on. He’d simply lead and expect her to follow.

  And it was one thing to think about taking on a trio of ferales with a box cutter when she was in crisis- hero mode. It was something else to head out, stone-cold sober despite the wimpy absinthe, with the intent to slay demons.

  They passed the bouncer with another man-to-man nod from Liam. Would she ever master that distant coolness? Or did one have to have a big, dangling . . . hammer to pull it off?

  She stopped and turned on her heel to face the bouncer, her jacket only half zipped. “Bella mentioned you’ve had to toss some solvo dealers lately. You confiscate any fake IDs? I’m missing one of my halfway-homeboys.”

  The bouncer looked her over as he passed another couple into the bar. His gaze lingered a moment on the neckline of her T-shirt. Then he dug through his back pocket and brought out a fistful of IDs. “We hand ’em over to the police once a week.”

  She shuffled through the cards. “I don’t see him. It was a long shot, but thanks.” She handed back the plastic stack with a smile.

  Liam fell into step beside her. “What was that about?”

  “Those were some pretty half-assed fakes. Not a competent lamination in the bunch.” When he lifted an eyebrow, she shrugged. “I worked with budding juvenile delinquents, remember? I know my fake IDs. I’m guessing bouncer boy tosses the wannabes and passes at least a few of the pros for a cut of their profits.” She slanted a glance at Liam. “I wonder if Bella knows.”

  His brows drew together. “She knows how dangerous the desolator numinis chemical is.”

  Jilly gave him a look. “Anyway, now we have a line on the dealers we can follow.”

  “Follow to what?”

  “To what got Andre, to the source of solvo. Or at least a step closer.” At his deepening frown, she continued. “To get solvo off the streets.”

  “That’s not our primary goal.”

  “To end evil—”

  “We battle demons.” He strode ahead, forcing her to hustle to keep up with his long stride.

  “Solvo dealers are demons,” she pointed out.

  “Of the human kind. We’re more literal minded.”

  “The definition of insanity is hoping for something different when you’ve been doing the same thing over and over for—”

  “For eons. Since the dawn of man.”

  They passed below a broken streetlight. In the shadows, the edge of his jaw and cheekbone seemed harsher.

  “Of man,” she reiterated. “Not woman. You said female talyan just appeared on the scene.”

  “Reappeared,” he said reluctantly. “We have old texts mentioning them. Just nothing recent. And by recent, I mean eons.”

  “You said you were willing to do anything. You even did me—”

  He slammed to a halt. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, what we’re up against. Just like you never really knew what those kids were facing, even though you were out on the street every day. At least Sera had a degree, and she was just helping people die. What makes you think you’re ready to fight the power if you don’t know how to wield it?”

  Each accusation snapped her like a whip, cutting deeper. She stumbled a step back, as if she could avoid his words. “If you think I’m so useless, why am I here at all?”

  “Ask your demon. Oh, wait. You can’t, since it’s trapped inside you. You have no one to ask except me.” He straightened to glare down at her. “And I’m telling you, all that fury you’re beaming at me is about to bring down a world of hurt on both of us.”

  “What do you—?”

  A malice boiled out of the alley, another up from the sewer grating in the gutter, still another down from the shattered light. A flood of oily black smoke swept around them at knee level. At the stench of rotting egg, tears poured from her eyes.

  With a strangled curse, Liam grabbed her hand and leapt onto the roof of a battered sedan parked at the curb. They landed with a thump, and the peeling vinyl of the rooftop shifted under her boots. She kept hold of his coat and scrambled to right herself.

  The malice milled for a moment, as if they’d lost the scent.

  “I hate it when I’m so right,” Liam murmured.

  The malice swirled into a horizontal funnel cloud of blackness. The open maw stretched wide enough to encompass the car itself.

  She clutched his coat tighter. “You said malice traveled in small flocks.”

  “And you said you wanted new.” He shrugged under her grip. “Since when are you so clingy?”

  “I’m looking for your hammer.”

  “Xiao-Jilly, now is really not the time.”

  She would gladly have knocked his head off. “A swing and a miss, you jerk. We’re about to get massacred.”

  “No material weapon can stop them. We have to match our demonic emanations to theirs and siphon them off etherically, but I have never seen a mass formation like this. One by one, my ravager could overwhelm this lot in a night, maybe two, but all of them together . . .”

  “There’s something you can’t do? Any other time, I’d be fascinated, really. But about plan B?”

  “I’m hoping that will come to me in the next few seconds.”

  Then the maw, all obsidian razor claws and sparking crimson eyes, closed over them.

  CHAPTER 8

  Liam stared up through the inverted cone of whirling etheric dissonance. At the apex, the tiny circle of night sky seemed almost bright in comparison. And then it disappeared as the malice tornado tightened, with Jilly and himself at its center.

  He let it all go. Anger. Fear. All feeling. Only danger remained.

  And he was that danger.

  He pulled Jilly close, away from the bristling smears of black smoke. She nestled into him, her hand fisted in the front
of his shirt, but her eyes shone violet, and he knew she would not back down, no matter what.

  That feeling—the feel of her, so heady and terrifying—he could not banish it even as he called his demon to the fore. “The malice are drawn to evil. So let’s show them what demons can do.”

  Keeping Jilly against his chest, he reached out toward the funnel. After a moment, she followed suit, stretching her fingers to the other side. The woven metal strands of her bracelet shone with opalescent fire to his teshuva-altered vision.

  Her fingers touched the spinning wall just as his did. The surge wrenched through his shoulder and rocked them both, but she steadied him, with her free arm tight around his waist, his knee braced between her thighs.

  Their touch brought the engulfing tornado to a screeching halt. The shriek echoed through the immobile ranks of malice, the hint of dark wings, forked tails, and glittering points of eyes like a worn frieze of ancient evil.

  Where the points of their fingers speared into opposite sides of the wall, black ooze dripped, as if they’d pierced a hole through to something much uglier than the vaguely animalistic malice.

  Jilly slanted a glance up at him. “Now what?”

  Despite the unusual pattern of their attack, the familiar malice chill spread up his arm and he clenched his teeth. “We drain what we can. The teshuva’s stronger emanations will align and devour.”

  “You said there are too many. Or were you being modest?” The strain in her voice tugged at his heart despite her attempt at a light tone. “I think my demon will puke.”

  Rage and fear nibbled around the edges of his control, more chilling than malice teeth. Not that he feared for himself. He would go down fighting in a swirl of etheric dissonance if it came to that. But he would not lose his tyro on her first night.

  His arm trembled with the effort of holding that seething wall in place. He couldn’t believe Jilly withstood the mounting pressure. Of course, his admiration wouldn’t mean much if they were swamped by the black tidal wave.

  Too many. His demon was ancient and strong, and its energy patterns had subsumed thousands of the horde-tenebrae, overshadowing those lesser patterns and reweaving them into itself. But with so many malice, the mass was too chaotic for the teshuva’s energy to overwhelm.

  At least, for his teshuva alone.

  He tightened his grip on the woman beside him. Despite the peril that had his ravager locked in destruction mode—or maybe because of that distraction—he was keenly aware of her on a visceral male level. The softness of her curves. Her scent, sweet and unruly like a wild spring wind tearing through cherry blossoms. Insanity, but he could not stop thinking of the scant hour lost in her body. It should have been all night. No, nights.

  Now they’d be lucky to see the dawn.

  “Only one thing left to do before we die,” he murmured.

  She glanced up at him in question, and he kissed her.

  He had not quite understood how Archer could risk his heart, his very soul, even the world itself, just for his talya mate. They had a duty, damn it, a mission—all of them.

  But duty, mission, heart, soul, and world were mere tinder to the conflagration that swept him on Jilly’s soft moan as his lips passed over hers.

  He loosed his grip on the blackness around them, the better to enfold her in his embrace. She molded herself to him, the slick, soft fabric of her unzipped puffy jacket crushed against his chest. Half hidden by the neckline of her T-shirt, the reven-sparked wings of her butterfly tattoo fanned his desire. The black wall of malice swirled into sickening motion, faster and faster. And they mattered less than scattered leaves in the flames that consumed him. All was madness. And he didn’t care in the least.

  On some level, he realized that didn’t bode well for the world.

  The cyclonic wind tugged his coat and whipped his hair to tangle with Jilly’s blue spiked locks. When she cupped his face, angling her jaw to deepen the kiss, her fingertips brushed the reven at his temple. At her touch, the bracelet around her wrist glimmered as if coming to life. The lunatic malice swarm was like a negative of the silvery interweaving, the strands that looped around and back, lost in themselves, trapped. . . .

  He drew back suddenly. “We don’t have to drain them. We just have to trap them.”

  He struggled to focus past the chaos of the malice, of the bracelet, of his lust. Underneath was . . . stillness, at least. If he could reach it. “Lau- lau said the knot work was a demon trap. We use that pattern.”

  She swayed against him. “I don’t want to be trapped.”

  “Not us. The malice.” After that kiss, he refused to think how trapped he might be.

  She took a step back from him. The whirling malice had tightened their circle, and the oily black smeared past them. He also didn’t want to think what would happen if he was wrong.

  To be eaten in a single gulp by a monstrous feralis would suck, but death by a thousand malice mouths was just no way for a talya to die. His demon would never forgive him.

  He held her hand tight. The bracelet glinted between them. He raised her fist. “Bend the malice to this pattern. Back upon themselves. Evil consuming evil.” His voice fell into a rhythm, almost a chant. He held her gaze every bit as tight. “Locked into eternity. Trapped. Leaving us free.”

  Did he want to be free? He forced the thought away.

  “We’re all trapped,” Jilly murmured. “Always have been. Which is worse? When we try to lock someone else in with us? Or lock everyone out?”

  Within the thickening blackness, glitter appeared like a hint of hoar frost, a chill gleam matching Jilly’s bracelet. Over the sulfurous stench of malice, a desiccating cold burned in Liam’s lungs as the tenebraeternum leaked into the world. A few whirling malice snagged on the points of eerie light. The ether that swirled behind them in translucent oily ribbons looped and coiled. And knotted together.

  More malice blundered into the knots, and the tangle expanded, capturing more of the seething tenebrae in a laced matrix of shadow and demon light, as finely woven as the fluorspar and waste metal of the bracelet. The smoky tornado turned to sludge and began to crystallize. One by one, the crimson stars of malice eyes winked out, leaving only needle pricks of oblivion behind.

  Leaving Liam and Jilly enclosed in a cone of shining black ice.

  In the stillness, the sound of their matched breath was preternaturally loud. She tugged her hand out of his grasp.

  “Jilly,” he said. “Wait.”

  She didn’t. She slammed her fist through the malice. He grabbed her and yanked her under the shelter of his coat as the shimmering blackness crumbled and the latticework of interlocked malice flaked like charred dust on the Chicago wind.

  She peeked out. “Good thing that didn’t bring them back to life.”

  He coughed and jumped down off the car roof. The malice storm had scoured the paint and etched the bare steel like scrimshaw on whalebone.

  He scowled, thinking of the car’s owner scratching his head in the morning.

  Jilly jumped down beside him. Her boots thudded like his heart. “What?”

  “I hate when the tenebraeternum leaves its mark on this world.”

  Her gaze flicked up to the reven at his temple, which he knew must be blazing with the teshuva’s amped energies. “You can only do so much.”

  “If by ‘so much,’ you mean fail again, you’re right.”

  “We survived.”

  “That is not enough.”

  “But it’s a start.”

  “After a century or two, you’re ready to finish it.”

  “And with that attitude, you wanted to be leader?” She shook her head. “I guess leader is not the same as cheerleader.”

  “I never wanted this.” He bit back the rest of the words that threatened to pour out of his exhaustion like so many unfrozen malice.

  She rubbed her wrist where the bracelet had dulled to matte gray again. He didn’t think it was a good sign that the demon’s gift came to life o
nly when hell was rising . . . and when they touched. “Then why stay? Why do it?”

  The cold concepts of duty and mission he had jettisoned so readily while in her arms spiraled up around him again, locking him in place. “It is all I have left.”

  That was too honest. The chill was settled so deep in his bones, it didn’t even stop him from moving now. He crouched beside the wheel of the car where a drift of the black dust had collected. The license plate was polished to a featureless rectangle, and hairline fissures crazed the tires, as if the dust had parched and aged the rubber. After scraping a handful of the inert malice residue into his pocket, he rose. “If only the league had a veteran Bookkeeper, this might be interesting. Maybe even useful.”

  Her fingers flexed into fists, then opened again, as if she wanted to drag something more from him. “You can always do this again some other night. Since that’s all you have left.”

  He studied her. “I didn’t do that. Not alone.”

  She stared back. “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you feel it?” Disbelief surged through him when her gaze went as blank as the crystallized malice eyeballs. How could she deny that jolt of power? “Something bound us in that moment when we followed the fluorspar weave and trapped the malice together.”

  She took a step back, her fingers digging under the edge of the bracelet. “Hey, I’m already stuck with the demon. I’m not bound to anything else.” Anyone else. The unvoiced words echoed like a malice cry.

  Still the tough rebel, despite what they’d been through. Or maybe because of what they’d been through?

  Not that the reason mattered. He’d walked a fine line with his bitter, wounded crew long enough to know that prying into their emotions and histories only overturned rocks and released lots of creepy-crawlies—and they had enough of those in their immortal lives.

  They’d all been possessed for a reason. Their wounds resonated with the tenebraeternum, which brought the teshuva and the lesser demons down upon their heads. Or souls. After what happened tonight in the spillover of her anger and his lust, he should know better than to poke at her wounds and rouse those demons of the literal and metaphorical sort. And yet, he wanted to know her.