Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls Page 19

  “One way to get your father’s attention,” she said. “He must have been furious with your brother.”

  “He never found out. Wes told me if I shut up, he’d show me the workshop. He had a novice Bookkeeper key by then. After I recovered, Dad gave me a whipping and an excruciatingly boring lecture on alcoholism. But I kept my word, and Wes kept his.”

  “Was it worth the whipping?”

  He spread his hands, taking in the lab, and for a moment the drab white walls and sterile technology glowed with his reflected enthusiasm. “It was everything I dreamed. The best fairy tale with all the monsters come to life. And it was my secret.” He lowered his hands. “Except it wasn’t really mine. It was my brother’s.”

  “Still, your father must have been pleased with your dedication.” She wished she’d known that boy. The strong, blunt shapes of the man he would become must have been present in the child who had known his own mind so young.

  Sidney shook his head. “No one found out, not for a long time. When I was twelve, I wrote the papers Wes needed to make journeyman. He was eighteen then, and trying to balance university—regular classes, with girls and everything—with his Bookkeeper duties. He liked the real world better. The journeyman work was hard, and I wanted to turn in his application research with something that would really make the Bookkeeper masters sit up and take notice.”

  “That would make your father notice you.”

  His lips curled without humor. “You know me better than I knew myself.”

  “You were so young.” Now she wished she’d known that boy so she could wrap her arms around him, to meet his gaze and reassure him someone, sometime, would see him for himself.

  “Which is why I completely buggered the attempt to sneak into a feralis den and collect tissue samples.”

  She straightened so abruptly, her chair rocked. “Why would you think—?”

  “I wasn’t thinking.” He stared down as if the square floor tiles held an answer. “I crawled out my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning. I planned to rifle the den—Dad had maps of nesting sites all around London—before the feralis returned and be home for breakfast with none the wiser.”

  She slipped off the chair and crept up next to him. She boosted herself onto the counter but didn’t touch him. She just leaned a little closer to share her presence. “What happened?”

  “If I’d not always had my nose buried in a book, I would have noticed how my mum kept watch. Her husband and her eldest were always gone about their own business; she wasn’t going to lose another child to strange activities she wasn’t allowed to share. Maybe after the liquor store, she suspected I’d do any stupid thing to get Dad’s attention.”

  “She followed you.”

  He jerked his head once in a nod. “And while she lectured me on my various sins—sneaking about, stealing pin money for bus fare, breaking a mother’s heart—the feralis returned.”

  “Oh no.” Unable to stop herself, she leaned her forehead against his shoulder—his feralis-bitten, teshuva-healed shoulder.

  “I’d studied these things and knew what they were. Even then, I couldn’t believe it—not the awful reality of it.”

  He closed his eyes and touched the center of his forehead, as if he could push the memories down again. Her demon had tried to do that for her. But it was too late—then and now.

  He continued. “I don’t know what she saw. My father never told her anything about demons. She thought he worked for a covert government agency with some code of secrecy. Whenever she got down about it, he’d joke that if he told her what he wanted for supper, he’d have to kill her. That always made her laugh.”

  He took a deep breath that bumped his arm into hers. “It was just one feralis. Husk composition, mostly gull and crab. Stank worse than the Thames low tide. When the barnacle’s feeding fans started to eat her, she screamed at me to run.”

  “I hope you did.”

  “I’d brought forceps to collect the samples, so I stabbed those into the barnacles. They snapped shut. Almost bit my fingers off. One slap of the wing knocked me senseless. At least I didn’t have to watch her die.” Though Alyce couldn’t see his face, half-obscured by his hand against his head, she felt the shudder rip through him, telegraphed to her through the press of his arm where he hadn’t pulled away. “I woke up in league headquarters. Until then, I’d only read references to it in Dad’s notes, and I would’ve done anything to see it. But not like that.”

  “A talya saved you?” Had his teshuva summoned one of its brethren to save him, just as she had been drawn to the alley? Was it even back then watching over him, a fallen guardian angel? She didn’t think Sidney would appreciate the possibility, not now.

  “Everyone said it was dumb luck they found me.” He finally lowered his hand and rubbed at the bloody streaks across his knuckles—all the evidence that remained of where he’d cut himself. He obviously was unconvinced what sort of luck it had been. “There wasn’t enough of Mum to bury, and the league couldn’t allow a human investigation. So Dad put it around that she’d gotten tired of his long hours and left him. The ladies she talked to over the fence had heard her complain often enough about Dad, so they believed it.”

  He grimaced. “She was snipped out of our lives so neatly, as if she’d never been. And I realized Dad had married her for exactly those reasons. I wondered if I went through his notes, would I find a checklist: acquire long-suffering wife; spawn future Bookkeeper; preserve world in formaldehyde and three-ring binders. …”

  Alyce folded her hand over his to still the obsessive chafing. “You remember her, though.”

  He pushed to his feet. “Not that it mattered.” He tossed the soiled scalpel in the sink and washed his hands. “My brother took it hardest. He left his Bookkeeper key behind and just … left.” He rested his dripping hands on the edge of the sink. “Dad was devastated. I went after Wes, of course, to pick up the pieces as I always did. He told me there were no more pieces. I had them all.”

  “Is knowledge like that? Only one person may possess it?”

  “Knowledge, no. Secrets, maybe.” Back at the exam table, he yanked the paper sheet loose from the end and unspooled a fresh length across the surface. He crumpled the old piece. “I was young, but I was ready to take his place. I knew everything he should have known. The senior Bookkeepers came down hard on my father for missing our trickery. But Dad was popular with the other masters, and by then his cancer had been diagnosed, which made the question of succession more problematic.”

  “But you’re here now. They must believe in your work.”

  He put the scalpel in a small oven and set a timer. The stink of heated steel drifted through the lab as he purged the knife, burning away the last traces of proof of his possession.

  Other than the demon now lodged in his soul.

  When he faced her again, his hands hung empty at his sides. “They expect me to fail. They said making sense of the upheaval here this last year is impossible. They think there’s nothing to be done except what we’ve always done.”

  “That is not enough,” she said.

  “I might have agreed, especially after what happened at the church. But I have failed, exactly as they predicted.” His smile cracked hard and unamused. “Well, not exactly as they predicted.”

  He walked toward the bank of gently humming machines she had no names for and stood facing their blank displays. He tilted his head wearily to one side, as if he too were trying to make sense of the dials and triggers. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  The undertone of desperate dismay triggered the devil in her. It uncoiled with a familiar, threatening chill that might have frightened her once, as she lost control of herself. But Sidney had noted that its dread cut both ways. Did the control work both ways too? Who was the master in her soul?

  The chill seemed to lift a bit, and between its loosening mists, she caught a glimpse of what she’d been.

  “I didn’t know either,” she said
softly. “When I was possessed, I thought the world had come to an end.”

  Sidney’s shoulders stiffened, and he turned to face her. “I didn’t say the world was ending. Just my world.”

  “What other world did I know?” She curled in tighter on herself, as if she could squeeze out memories. “I wasn’t smart like Sera or strong like Jilly or sensual like Nim. I was small—only a servant.” The teshuva’s haze hovered around her vision like a stubborn fog bank. Very deliberately, she said, “I remember …” And an edge of the fog peeled up. “I remember my master spoke of devils. He reveled in them as a goodwife delights in her hens’ many eggs. In his speaking, he summoned them.” She took a breath, and when she exhaled, the teshuva’s protective mist dissolved. “His words conjured fear and brought the demon that came for me.” She looked up, refusing to hide her face. “If I had remembered before, I would have recognized yours. I could have told you.”

  Sidney gripped the counter behind him. “I know you couldn’t have stopped it. No one could.”

  “But before you said—”

  “Wishful thinking. Possession occurs when the demon resonates with the weakness in your soul. The weakness doesn’t vanish just because we know it’s there.”

  She couldn’t hold herself any tighter. “Then we had no choice. Despite what Nim likes to say.”

  He came slowly across the room, and she wondered what force drove him. His teshuva? Her self-pitying words? He stopped just out of reach.

  “I have to talk to Liam. He’s going to be furious. And then I have to call my father. Will you go back to your room now?”

  “I could go with you.” The suggestion sounded small, squeezed past her constricted throat.

  He shook his head. “I know the dangers of an unsettled possession. I’ll be fine.”

  That wasn’t why she had offered. But her throat closed the rest of the way, and there was nothing left to say.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Is it Friday yet?” Liam spiked his fingers through his hair again, though the morning wind chuffing across the warehouse roof kept trying to flatten it. “This week has sucked.”

  As reactions to Sid’s revelation went, it could have gone worse.

  Clouds were massing higher, but at the horizon, the pale blue sky was quartz sharp—the same shade as Alyce’s eyes, bright with desire.

  The view kept blurring as Sid struggled to focus around the corrective lenses of his spectacles. Finally, he tucked them into his breast pocket. “You think your week’s been bad?”

  The league leader scowled. “I’d finally gotten the crew hammered into some shape that wasn’t slicing at itself as often as the enemy. Then you showed up and threw everything out of whack. And then Alyce. And now you again.”

  “So sorry.” Sid pushed a hefty dose of sarcasm through the word.

  “Sorry is right. Sorry excuse for a …” Liam bit back the rest.

  “No worries, old boy. I already said it myself. Shitty Bookkeeper. Worse talya. What was the teshuva thinking?”

  Liam waved one hand. “None of the league—Bookkeeper or talya—has ever pretended to have a clue what the demons think.”

  Sid wondered if that was supposed to be some sort of apology. “On the plus side, you don’t have to convince me I’m possessed.”

  “True. And that part is always so awkward and circular—‘yes, demons exist; no, you’re not crazy; yes, demons exist’—like some damn square dance.” Liam straightened abruptly. “Fuck. I know who your partner was, don’t I?”

  Despite the chill in the wind, Sid’s face heated. “I hope you’ll be discreet with your hypothesis,” he said stiffly.

  “Only thing worse would be if you’d slept with Sera or Nim.”

  “Not worried about Jilly?”

  “She’d kill you before I could.” Liam groaned. “Why couldn’t you have balanced the teshuva’s virgin ascension the old-fashioned way? With a nice round of fisticuffs? Any of us would’ve been happy to oblige. But I suppose you found your own virgin ascension.”

  Though Liam’s tone was more cynical than crude, Sid’s gut tightened as if someone had punched him. The shock radiated up from the newly etched reven on his belly and stole his breath.

  And his common sense apparently, since he suddenly found himself toe-to-toe with the rangy league leader.

  Toe-to-toe did not mean nose-to-nose, unfortunately. He canted his head to pin the taller man with a hard stare. “I’ll ask you not to say such things about her.”

  Liam did not move a muscle, and still his presence seemed to double. The demon’s mark at his temple flared violet.

  Sid had always considered himself a pro at conflict avoidance. After all, as a mere child, he’d weaseled his way into a quasi-military/religious underground organization that had taught paranoia to the Templars. Everything he’d achieved had come from books and brains and that early bit of blackmail.

  Brawn had never been his MO. The demon was definitely a bad influence, because even once he thought it through, he didn’t back down.

  Liam gave him a slow blink. “I am not going to fight with you now, talya. You are already good and possessed.”

  Sid tried to roll his weight from the balls of his feet to his heels, a nonconfrontational, purely conversational stance. The effort had him swaying from side to side. His muscles were not his own anymore—not entirely.

  “Knock it off, teshuva,” he hissed. “I don’t want to fight with you too.”

  Liam’s lips quirked. “Just give in to it.”

  “It wants to punch you.”

  “Oh. Then I hope you win this fight.”

  “I want to punch you too.”

  “Goodness. How did we not notice you were talya material?” Liam tilted his head, letting his direct gaze slide off Sid’s. “Probably all the tweed distracted us.”

  Between the note of almost fond amusement and the redirection of the challenging stare, the tension across the back of Sid’s neck eased. He angled his body toward the open sky. “I don’t plan to start giving in to any random impulses, mine or the teshuva’s.”

  “Other than the one earlier tonight.” Liam lifted one eyebrow. “You need to understand the well-being of my talyan is vital to the city. And to me.”

  “Alyce is …” Various words jumbled through Sid’s head and then sank beneath a layer of pure primitive sensation—possessiveness. He couldn’t hold back the announcement any more than he could stop his body’s immediate heated reaction to the thought of her. “Alyce is mine.”

  Liam sighed. “Yes. I got that. And you are hers.” He propped his big fists on his hips. “And both of you are mine. I will not have a pair of interlocked rogues running wild in my city. God knows what chaos you’d unleash.”

  Sid clenched the front of his shirt where he’d done up the buttons unevenly. His wrist pressed against his hip bone, and even through the fabric, he swore he felt the spark of the reven flaring in time with his radial pulse. “Worse than what you had before we showed up here?”

  “Smart-ass.” Liam rubbed his forehead. “It has been a long night. It’s going to be a longer day. We’ll present you as a symballein pair to the rest of the league first thing tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have Jilly make cookies for the occasion.”

  Sid stiffened. “I can’t stay here. I have to go back to London. My father and the league there are expecting me.”

  “Expecting this?”

  Sid bristled. “Of course not. I have to talk to him. To them. I’ll make them understand.”

  “And Alyce?”

  “She will come with me.” He’d have to explain to her too. Never mind that he’d done a terrible job of explaining anything so far.

  “You think the Old World is ready for a feral waif and a possessed archivist?”

  Sid’s muscles tightened again at the doubt in Liam’s tone, but this time he welcomed the teshuva’s forceful poise. Being on the wrong side of one war had obviously given it the ability to take a few hits and come back swinging.


  But he thought of Alyce’s way, and for once he kept his mouth shut.

  Leaving the league leader to watch the sun clear the rooftops, Sid returned to his room—his own room, not Alyce’s. He couldn’t face her quite yet. And he still had to call his father.

  He dialed on the antique rotary behemoth scented faintly of cigarette smoke—undoubtedly a rescue from the salvaged junk upstairs. The apprentice Bookkeeper who served his father picked up on the first ring. “At-One London.”

  “Hullo, Hugh. Is Dad back from lunch?”

  “He sent me out for tea on my own today.”

  Even through the long-distance line he heard unsaid words, like the bitterness of cheap tea leaves. Or was that the work of the teshuva, picking up clues so subtle he’d missed them before? “Hugh? What’s wrong?”

  “I think he throws away the biscuits I bring. He’s getting so thin.”

  “He has stage four cancer.” Sid almost bit his tongue. That was definitely the demon, blunt and cruel.

  “So you should be here,” Hugh snapped back, no devil but honesty in his tone.

  Sid took the hit. Let the teshuva heal that pain. “Which is why I need to talk to him.”

  Without responding, Hugh transferred his call. His father’s phone rang several times before it clicked over. “Son?”

  Sid closed his eyes. How could a mere voice—far away and softer than it should be—hurt him? “Dad, how’s it going?”

  “Inevitably forward, with moments of relativity.”

  “You’ve been reading Stephen Hawking again, haven’t you?”

  “Needed something to tide me over. Hugh won’t share his manga since I made notes in the margins.”