Seduced by Shadows ms-1 Page 14

“What are you?” He pushed back in his chair. “What thing are you?”

  She reached out. “I’m Sera, your daughter.”

  He bolted from his chair, slapping her hand aside. “Don’t touch me.”

  A stark chill swept her except where her hand burned with the shock of his blow. Her fingers curled into a fist. Like an echo, something in her turned away, resigned to the banishment. She clutched her hand against her chest as if she could hold on. “Daddy.”

  “Get thee away from me. Away.” His voice thundered in the small room. “I cast thee out, Satan.”

  “I’m not . . .” Her throat locked on the words. What was she, after all?

  Lost. Archer had warned her. With sudden ferocity, she longed for his uncompromising presence, to fit herself against the strength of more than just his body. Only he, who’d killed the man he’d been, could understand what moved in her now. She looked up at her father.

  He met her gaze and screamed.

  The cry ripped through her. She jolted, knocking over her chair with a bang. She found herself on her knees in front of her father and held out an appeasing hand.

  He cowered back. “Satan, Satan, Satan.”

  She clamped her hands over her ears.

  Wendy and an orderly burst into the room. The nurse hastened to the screaming man and folded an arm over his shoulders. He nestled against her, pointing at Sera.

  “What is that light? It burns.” He straightened a little, eyes widening. “Let her go.”

  Without warning, he lunged, gouging fingers aimed at her eyes.

  The orderly hauled her to her feet and slung her toward the door. “You’re making it worse. Get out of his sight.”

  She stumbled out with one hand on the wall. She felt more feeble than the hunched old woman standing with her quilting basket at the front door.

  Mrs. Willis patted Sera’s shoulder. “Your pappy remembers being a preacher, so he’s still swearing fire and brimstone.”

  Sera dredged up a weak smile. “I just feel bad for upsetting him.”

  “You’re a good daughter.” Mrs. Willis scowled. “Your brothers visit, but they don’t stop to talk quilting. Too busy, those boys. But your pappy was proud when he knew to be, and he’s proud still, somewhere.”

  Sera tried for a slightly more sincere smile, until she saw Wendy coming toward them. Mrs. Willis disappeared into the television room. The evening news clicked on, the cheerful tone belying the description of a recent rash of addicts overdosing. “. . . Practically rots its victims from the inside,” blared out into the hall. She knew how that felt.

  Wendy gave her a hug, but Sera couldn’t ease her muscles to return the embrace.

  “That was bad,” the nurse said. “Arnie is calming him down. Arnie’s a little abrupt with visitors, but he’s got a nice touch with the confused ones.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t come back,” Sera murmured.

  Wendy shook her head. “Don’t get melodramatic. One bad night doesn’t mean forever.”

  Sera couldn’t help herself. She laughed. If only the other woman knew.

  But Wendy smiled in answer. “See? Better already. You know there’ll be bad spells. He just took a bit of a fright. But I want Arnie to walk you out. Mrs. Willis noticed that guy’s been standing by the sidewalk since you came in.”

  Even before she turned, Sera knew whom she’d see. The darkness of his trench coat swallowed up the light of the nursing home sign, and the flickering drops of rain made him look like something from a grainy old black-and-white movie. Probably the bad guy.

  She sighed. “I know him.”

  Wendy’s expression said she still thought she should get abrupt-with-visitors Arnie.

  Sera contemplated sneaking out the back. But she’d have to ask Wendy to deactivate the alarms that kept the dementia patients from wandering. And that would oblige an explanation of why she wanted to sneak out. “Can I call you later to see how Dad settled?”

  Wendy didn’t drag her eyes off the figure at the street. “Call me tomorrow. I think you’re busy tonight.” Her gaze finally snapped to Sera and widened.

  “Now who’s melodramatic?” Sera stalked out the front door.

  Archer waited for her at the end of the walk. “Turn left and keep walking. Do not stop.”

  “What—?”

  When her steps slowed in confusion, he wrapped his fingers around her elbow and propelled her forward. “At least one feralis, maybe two, are closing on this position. And I count three malice on this block alone.”

  “Why—?”

  “You’re a lure for every demonic influence in the city, beaming wrath and anguish like a fucking lighthouse of doom. And that djinn-man is out here, somewhere.”

  “But why didn’t—?”

  “We placed energy sinks around your apartment.” His grip tightened on her arm until she winced, but he never stopped scanning the darkness around them. “The sinks are reverse engineered from angelic artifacts and absorb the emotional output of possession.”

  “Stop answering my questions before I ask them,” she snapped.

  “Then answer one of mine,” he snapped back. “What the hell did you think you were doing, leaving your secured apartment?”

  “How was I supposed to know it was secured?”

  “I told you we were protecting you.”

  “I thought you meant you, personally.”

  “I was.” His voice was half demon snarl. “Until you left.”

  So much for thinking he understood her. She hunched her shoulders against the rain needling down the back of her neck. “I wanted to go out.”

  “I told you no.”

  “And just what makes you think I’d listen?” As they passed under a streetlight, it abruptly dimmed. In the sudden shadows, a blob of deeper darkness fell toward them.

  She shoved Archer away, and he stumbled onto one knee. She batted the dark shape away from her face.

  A biting chill enveloped her hand, spreading like a killing frost up her elbow, toward her brain and heart.

  Archer was at her side in an instant. “That was stupid.”

  She gritted her teeth. “You’re welcome.”

  “I haven’t gotten slimed by a malice in a very long time.”

  Maybe she only imagined the pointed claws and prehensile tail wrapped around her elbow, but she definitely felt gnawing teeth. She gagged on the stench of rotten eggs. “Get it off.”

  “You wanted to hunt. Lesson one. Don’t get slimed by malice. It stings.”

  Stung like knives of ice. And creeped her out. And stank. “Lesson learned.”

  He raised his head, a glint of violet in his eyes. “The feralis is circling. Drain the malice and let’s go.”

  “Lesson two would be helpful right about now.”

  He gave her a thoughtful frown, as if he wanted to be sure lesson one had really sunk in—sunk in with needle teeth.

  Finally, he nodded. “Remember the man at the bar?”

  “If he got slimed, he didn’t seem to notice.”

  “Oh, he got slimed. The malice was all over him. If he’d recognized the evil, he could have driven it away. You, seeing and feeling—smelling—the malice, have the advantage.”

  “Great. So how do I get rid of it?” Enough theory, already.

  “Wish it away.”

  She stared at him. “You’re kidding. Do I click my heels together?”

  He didn’t smile. “The demon knew the name of your darkness when it chose you. Now the demon’s power is yours. Know the essence of pain, fear, hatred, despair—that is the malice. Know it, and bleed it dry.” He glanced over her shoulder. “Now would be a good time.”

  She didn’t follow his glance, not quite ready to skip ahead to lesson three. She squelched the urge to run in circles and wave her arm as if she were on fire despite the hard rain. With her free hand, she reached into the darkness.

  Psychic roadkill, Archer had said. Grabbing it was like reaching into a cold, dead thing, past brittle ha
ir and flaking, scaly skin, into rotting guts and the sharp shards of broken bone. The squirm of maggots and crunch of cockroaches gave it a horrific semblance of life.

  It thrashed in her grip. A tail lashed, staining the air with streamers of a strange etheric smoke.

  Archer stepped closer. The warmth of his body helped dispel her chill, but his voice was colder than malice teeth. “End it.”

  She blinked away raindrops. End it how? Assimilate it, as her mother had been swallowed by the voices in her head? Lock it away in a part of her mind, like her father’s ever-spreading forgetfulness? Or should she just deny all feeling, like Archer did, and dishearten the malice into oblivion?

  Now that she had control of it, the squirming demon seemed pathetic rather than awful. The malice was wickedness given shadowy shape, but thanks to a really crappy night, she understood how easily that could happen to anyone.

  “Do you have it?” Archer wrapped his big hands around hers as if they held a newborn infant.

  “We were fighting and it came down on us.” The rain in her eyes cast a blurred shroud over her vision. “Did we make this together?”

  “What?” His body recoiled, but his hands were steady on hers. “No. It was always here. Will always be here. We just gave it a little juice.” He scowled at her. “Don’t go all misty-eyed sympathetic on me now.”

  “Sympathy means I feel sorry for you. Sympathy is cheap. To truly feel as you do, that’s empathy.” Could the man at the bar have fought the malice? Why did evil have to exist at all? She didn’t have answers, not a one. “I want to feel it—to understand—even if it hurts.”

  As if her words had summoned the demon, her senses unfurled. The scene, already cast in a forbidding monochrome of black malice and silver rain on her white skin, shifted toward an otherworldly gray—the demon realm. Her grip slackened.

  Archer swore and grabbed the malice. Reaching out to steady herself, she flattened her palms over his and laced their fingers tight together. The malice, snared in their joined grasp, bound them with threads of smolder ing ether.

  It was the first time she’d really touched him since that desperate, dangerous coupling in his garden. With her demon ascendant, the firm heat of his grasp reverberated in every molecule of her being. An unexpected jolt of need coursed through her.

  At the memory of his big hands tracing patterns on her skin, she looked up at him. His gaze fixed on hers with hungry stillness. She breathed the mingled scents of leather, wet concrete, and male, and her pulse thudded hard.

  Mist thickened until it obliterated the world beyond.

  “How can this be?” His question was a low growl. “Demon need takes the place of all other cravings. Only the mission remains.”

  Heat, equal parts desire and dismay, swept her. Here she stood in the icy rain, arm half eaten by malice, but just because he was with her, nothing else mattered. She almost let go, to slip toward the gray.

  His grasp never wavered. “Where do you think you’re going? As if we don’t have enough troubles in this realm.” He pulled her closer, so the trailing edge of his trench coat lapped around her. His knee nudged between her legs. “Damn it, they can’t have any more of you.”

  He meant the other demons. Where his fingers twined with hers, faint color bloomed, and she imagined that potency spilling into her. As when they’d made love, his touch drove back the shadows, drove back the demon realm that beckoned.

  But he’d reminded her, they had a mission. She wanted to understand. This realm held only questions, and the malice lurked at the root of them.

  “I already know the many names of the shadow,” she whispered. “My question is why. You promised answers, demon.”

  As she had before in Archer’s loft holding the pendant stone, she focused where the world went gray. She held tight to his hands, like a diver’s safety line, and followed the nebulous link down into the other realm.

  To her altered senses, the malice was a thin silhouette against the endless murk; Archer was a restless thunder-cloud shot through with scattered lightning in violet and bronze.

  She felt as if she stood on a precipice, shouting into the void, with no hope of anything but an echo. But she had to ask. “Why pain? Why sorrow? Why insanity?”

  From the depths sighed a mockery of her word—Wwwhyyy?—as if something gigantic and unseen had roused at her call and breathed out, sending up more impenetrable drifts of darkness.

  “Why death? Why damnation?” She shotgunned her questions into the gloom. “And why, for God’s sake, can’t we end it?”

  “I can end it.” Archer reeled her up against his chest.

  Their paired hands came together between tattered ribbons of ether. The furious raw heat of him through the rain-slicked leather of his coat jolted her from the other realm. The vastness inside her telescoped closed with an almost aural shock wave that vibrated her bones.

  The malice gave a shrill cry and collapsed in upon itself with a gritty puff of sulfurous smoke, leaving nothing between them. She staggered. Only Archer’s grasp kept her upright.

  Another malice’s squeal sounded in the night, and then yet another, farther off.

  Archer’s hands clenched on hers as he straightened, nearly yanking her off her feet again. “What the hell were you trying to do? And I mean literally hell.” Despite the incensed grip, his face was ashen. “Enigma-class demon or not, you can’t psychoanalyze a malice into oblivion.”

  She coughed on the lingering scent of rotten eggs. “You didn’t exactly suggest a better way.”

  “I prefer to pop them like a balloon. Although that always leaves some shreds lying around. Where did this one go?”

  “You tell me, oh popper of many demons. You squashed it.”

  “No. You did before I could.”

  “How, when you keep holding back what I’m supposed to do?”

  They matched glares. In his widening eyes she saw him realize, just as she did, they were still holding hands.

  They took identical long steps in opposite directions. She wiped her palms down her thighs, trying to erase the chill of malice goo. And the warmth of Archer’s skin.

  Between the anger and embarrassment, his expression was fiery enough. “That’s not how we fight. You can’t just dance down along the demon’s link through the Veil into hell.”

  She answered, “I didn’t do it alone. You followed me.”

  He opened his mouth, but instead, the shrilling cry of a malice pierced the night.

  The scream shuddered down her spine. “I heard the others circling. Will they attack?”

  He shrugged distractedly. “Saves us the trouble of hunting them down.”

  “And the ferales?”

  “They hunt us.” He refocused abruptly, the glint of violet back in his dark eyes. “I don’t know what happened, but malice stain is always blood in the water to a feralis. Let’s go.”

  He spun on his heel and slipped into the night. Staying half a step ahead, he asked, “What did you think you were doing tonight?”

  “How should I know? I’m not the ancient warrior.”

  “I meant, why did you leave?”

  She raised her face to let rain trickle down the corners of her eyes, as if mere water could wash away the remnants of the malice. “I wanted to visit my father. You said I didn’t need to cut all ties yet.”

  “So you listen when it’s convenient. I listened too, to the screaming.” He glanced back, his gaze piercing.

  She looked away. “He just had a bad night.”

  “Bad because preacher man knows his beloved only daughter sold her soul to a devil.” His reven-marked hand was a fist. “Some people see through the mask of our flesh and glimpse the shadow underneath. The rare holy person, the mentally ill, some children, or an artist—the kind of people who are inclined to see things differently anyway. No one listens to them, so if they speak out, they aren’t heard.”

  She bit her lip. “I didn’t want to frighten him.”

  “Then d
on’t return. As the dementia advances, you’ll do more harm than good.” His voice dropped to a rumble. “Not uncommon for the demon-ridden.”

  Abruptly, he halted, his hand upheld to stop her in her tracks. Violet raced along the reven.

  “There.” His voice barely carried over the hiss of tires on wet pavement. “Under the trees.”

  Even in November, the oaks held their kraft-paper leaves. The ground underneath was an irregular checkerboard of shadow and light from surrounding streetlamps.

  Sera followed Archer’s pointing finger. “God, it’s bigger than the last one.”

  “No God here,” he said grimly. “Just us.”

  “Oh right, we’ll take care of this. So I guess it’s okay he’s been slacking for the last two thousand years. Anybody else we can call for backup?”

  Wind rattled the wet leaves with a sound like hands rubbing in anticipation. Archer flicked her a razor-wire smile. “You wanted to hunt.”

  She seriously doubted a feralis popped like a balloon, unless maybe like the Hindenburg. She swallowed. “It’s moving deeper into the trees. Does it know we’re coming?”

  “Probably. You need to learn to keep your emotions in check.”

  Just like him. He’d said possession compelled the deadening of feeling, but she wondered. “I thought we were going to lure it someplace.”

  “Remember how you said your patients didn’t get to choose the time of their dying?”

  Oh sure, the one time he decided to listen to her . . .

  Archer kept the line of parked cars between them and the feralis as he stalked. Sera stayed low, trying to stifle her burgeoning dread. Though each step took her closer to the feralis, she couldn’t keep her eyes off Archer just ahead.

  He glided through the dark, his coat flaring at his heels. The axe was out, long and wicked looking to her worried eyes. After hearing how the teshuva had come to him, she understood why he didn’t trust guns. But to get so close . . .

  When he glanced back, lights flared violet in his eyes—the demon coming out to play.

  No, not play. His expression was tight and grim. If he’d taken savage joy in destroying evil, he’d lost it along the way.

  He cut between the bumpers of two cars and melted into the tiny woods. She couldn’t leave him.