Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls Read online

  He wanted to pull away from her—or maybe from himself—but she reached through the malice barricade to take his hands. Her pupils contracted to pinpricks as the teshuva’s violet swelled. Though he outweighed her by a few stone, she wrapped her arms around him and dragged him up with her, breaking through the tenebrae crust. “Be with me, Sidney.”

  He could watch. He could contemplate. And he could die.

  He’d been trained to be dispassionate, but the crave demon wanted. It wanted more. It wanted her.

  It seemed ill-advised, thoughtless, and rash to do anything but run, so he kissed her.

  He tightened his grip, and her heat sizzled through the deep freeze in his veins. The demon within him reveled in the sparks that raced through his veins, centered in the reven that pulsed oh-so close to parts of him that wanted to be even closer to her.

  Mouth and breath and racing heartbeats matched one to the other.

  Whatever flaws the demon had found in his soul seemed irrelevant when he was with her. Whatever was broken, missing, or ugly in him no longer mattered.

  When he raised his head, the malice were gone, and only the faintest smear of ichor gloaming lit the basement. “What just happened?”

  “A kiss,” she said.

  She meant it as an explanation, not a request, but with no horde to fight, the demon seemed to sink away, replete, and his purely male impulses rose, not at all satisfied, so he kissed her again. When he finally reined himself in to draw back, he thought his heart had thundered off without him, leaving him breathless and light.

  She blinked, her pale blue eyes shining under half-lowered lashes. “I meant, the kiss is what happened.”

  “I know what you meant.” His husky growl surprised him, and he cleared his throat. “Was that the talya version of a first date?”

  “And the teshuva version of a betrothal feast.”

  He held himself unmoving. “Betrothal. The teshuva move fast.”

  “Keeps us from being gutted by ferales. We should try those next.”

  “Whoa.” Despite the inadvertent flinch from the word “betrothal,” he tightened his grasp on her. “I’m not up to the same speed as you.”

  She didn’t look contrite. “Hurry.”

  “For a girl as old as you are, you are very impatient. I want to look around.”

  “There’s nothing else here. Except the two of us.” She narrowed her eyes a bit more with a flirty fluttering. “Is that what you mean?”

  Despite all that had just happened, his body roused to her innocent guile. Apparently, the only energy to recover more speedily than a well-fed teshuva was unfulfilled male lust.

  It was impossible to focus with her icy eyes burning through him. He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face toward the walls. “There’s something about this place. Your teshuva sees the little things mine doesn’t. What do you see here?”

  She nestled back into his hands, but her tone was serious as she pointed. “The bricks are burned, there and there. Ichor scorched, deep. See? From the destruction of tenebrae stronger than malice.”

  “Like ferales and salambes.” He followed behind her to peer at the wall where the mortar seemed to melt and sag. “This was the site of a talya battle?”

  “There are many such places in the city. You won’t find markers, though—no one to know who fought; none to say who survived and who didn’t.”

  “That would have been my job.” Sid straightened and dropped his hands from her shoulders. The loss prickled, but was it the loss of her trusting warmth or the hard work he’d thrown away? “As Bookkeeper, I would have kept those records.”

  She went to the doorway and stood framed in the wan sunlight. She looked back at him; her gaze and the sky, melded together as one hue, dazzled him a moment. “We will have to remember ourselves.”

  On the way out, he paused to bend the door back into some semblance of fitting.

  Watching his own hands mold steel, he couldn’t hold back a stunned laugh. “Incredible.”

  But then he held Alyce’s coat while she slipped her slender arms through the sleeves. He trembled a little when he turned the collar up to protect her against the wind, and her dark locks tickled his knuckles. With each moment going forward, he would have to balance between teshuva violence and human shock, between every day and eternity.

  He shook his head and took a few steps away.

  Abruptly, he turned and looked up in a burst of realization. “Wait. Now I know this place.” He tapped the back of his skull as if he could knock the reference loose. “It was in Sera’s skimpy notes about the last year. This was where Corvus Valerius brought her to try to tear into the tenebraeternum.”

  “There was another verge here?”

  “No, this first attempt was a failure. They ended up destroying the building but not Blackbird. The verge at the pier … I think that’s the beginning of something worse.” Sudden energy—his, not the teshuva’s—revved through him. “There’s still so much we don’t know, and now …”

  “Now you are even more a part of it,” she said.

  God, she saw right through him. And what did it say about him when the feral waif with no memory of her past tried to reassure him that he still had a place in the fight?

  He tried to summon another smile. “Me and my demon, we’re there.”

  If only because they had nowhere else to go.

  Alyce tried to shelter in the lee of Sidney’s broad shoulders as they followed the riverwalk toward the lake, but the chill wind sneaked around him to nip at her ears. Still, the little whistle of it was louder than her companion.

  His uncharacteristic silence worried her. But she knew one way—well, another way besides kissing—to distract him. “When did the world stop believing in demons?”

  Sidney drifted to a halt near the decorative grillwork rail, the focus of his brown eyes going vague.

  Ah, it was the look of a scholar confronting an interesting question. She paused beside him and tucked her nose down into the collar of the black coat he’d wrapped around her earlier.

  “Some people still believe in demons,” he said. “Many more people would say they believe in evil, even if they don’t think much about what that means.” He leaned his forearms on the railing to stare out, as if the history were written in the gray chop of the water. “Paine’s Age of Reason in the 1790s let the masses question the mythologies they had taken for granted, including the existence of the devil. Maybe go farther back, to the First Great Awakening of the 1730s, when religion became a personal encounter with God, not an externally imposed experience engineered by intellectual and spiritual superiors. Before that, some of the more unfortunate elements of the Reformation still cropped up: persecuting heretics, burning witches, and believing in demons.”

  He took a breath to continue, then let it out again. “More words, right? But you did ask.” His wryly amused expression faded. “Alyce?”

  Despite the shelter of her coat, she shivered uncontrollably. “What did you say?”

  “Which part?” He turned toward her to rub her arms, but the friction of the wool felt far away. “Are you all right? You asked when the world stopped believing in demons.”

  “And witches.”

  “In this country, I think the last witch hunts petered out beginning of the eighteenth century. The point where doubts crept in was probably the Salem trials in— Alyce!”

  Without her conscious thought, she was running.

  The demon whipped her like cat-o’-nine-tails against the backs of her legs, driving her onward with the uncontainable urge to escape.

  She forgot Sidney was possessed too.

  She’d gone a half-dozen strides before he tackled her from behind. They went down in a tangle of flapping coats.

  She fought him. “Get away. Get away.”

  “Alyce, I’m not leaving you like this.”

  “We have to get away!”

  “From what?” He hauled her upright, his head swinging side to
side as he tried to track the threat.

  Her breath heaved. “I don’t know. My devil says get away.”

  “My teshuva says I’m going to have bruises from that kick, but nothing worse.”

  She strained against his hold. “There is worse. There was worse.”

  Sidney led her to the closest bench and pressed her down. He held her there when the teshuva tried to straighten her legs again, despite the suddenly fierce ache in her knee. “Why doesn’t your demon want you to think about the Salem witch trials?”

  “It was me,” she whispered. The cold of the bench, the water, the sky, sank into her bones and out through her skin on the other side, as if she didn’t exist in between. “I killed my master. I was the witch.”

  CHAPTER 15

  It all flooded back to her in a cold rush, as if the demon had spewed back the memories it had hidden, and she clung to Sidney’s hand lest the deluge wash her away. “Every night that summer, the master of the house came to my room and whipped me. He wanted me to confess.”

  “To being a witch?”

  “To admit I was tempting him. He said he wanted me to stop.”

  Sidney’s fingers tightened on hers. “Why did he keep coming to your room—at night—if he didn’t want to be tempted?”

  “I asked that too. Then he used his fists.”

  “So the teshuva killed him.”

  She pulled free of Sidney’s gentle grasp and ducked her forehead to her knees, fingertips pressed to her temples. In her head, the gray tide seemed to roll closer, a threat and an escape. “No.” She wasn’t sure if she spoke to Sidney or to the teshuva. She did not want the pardon of willful blindness from either of them. “This was before the demon. I killed him.”

  She raised her head, refusing to hide. She might be afraid to confront the memory of what she’d done, and the demon had granted her reprieve for a long time, but the dread—the not knowing—was worse.

  Sidney raised his hand to cup her chin, his thumb soothing her cheekbone to brush away the bruises that had long ago faded.

  It was as if she were one of those oversized tomes in his lab, strapped to hold the weight of musty pages together, the constraints loosened at his touch. The memories fell out in a flurry, so she could pick up each one, dust it off, and remember.

  “I was a servant in his house. After my father died and we lost the farm, I needed to take a position. I had nine years on my contract, and I’d served seven. Seven years seemed like such a long time, but …”

  “But not compared to more than three hundred years in service to the teshuva.” His hand slipped to her shoulder, and he pulled her close under his arm.

  She curled up against him, his presence more of a shield than even the thick wool of the coat. “Three hundred years? Has it been that long?”

  “I suppose you haven’t been reading the papers.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “It’s so clear now. Not the three hundred years, but before. As though no time has passed.”

  His storytelling voice rumbled through her. “As far as the teshuva is concerned, that’s no time at all. When it possessed you, it couldn’t find the balance it needed to keep you—”

  “Sane?”

  He squeezed her. “Coherent. Those centuries must have passed for you as they would for an unbound demon, just drifting. I wonder how you got from the East Coast to Chicago.”

  “Drifting. Before I met you, I avoided any talya; when I saw their eyes, I knew I was too weak. But I remember pieces. Mostly pieces of the tenebrae.” She pressed her hands over her closed lids, as if one more layer of flesh could block out the visions. “There was a hospital that locked me up. And there was a church. I went to a church once and asked the man there to chase the devil from me. Or kill me. He might have been the janitor.” She forced herself to put her hands in her lap and look at him. “Not enough to fill three hundred years, is it?”

  “And do you remember when the demon came to you? Your teshuva buried it for a long time.”

  She was silent a moment, feeling the ebb of the demon daze. But had she really struggled clear, like climbing a mountaintop to rise above the clouds, or was this an outbound tide that would sweep in again? “Why is it letting go now?”

  “Because you’re strong enough now to balance it, strong enough to remember.”

  She didn’t feel particularly strong. Only Sidney’s arm around her shoulders held her upright. “Maybe because you’re here, to hear and explain.”

  Though he didn’t move, his body stiffened almost imperceptibly, and she wriggled out from under his arm, from under his weighted stare. “Or maybe not.” She paced toward the rail. “Even if I remember, I don’t have to think about it. That’s what you do.”

  “I know exactly the second the teshuva took me,” he said, as if she hadn’t just refused to share. “When we stood in the alley last night and the malice swarmed you, I knew I couldn’t stand there and watch.”

  Away from the curve of his arm, the wind off the river snapped at her, and she shivered. “So I am the reason you are possessed.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. I want you to know I wouldn’t just stand and watch, and talk, and study. I want you to believe I’m not here for the footnotes alone.” He didn’t reach out to her again, but his gaze was steady.

  She stared down at where she’d twisted her knuckles white and tried to match his detached tone. “A devil had come and was loose among us. One of the slave women who belonged to the farmer down the lane, she knew. She had the sight, but no one believed her.”

  “No one but you.”

  “Not even me. But—but when the master said I was tempting him, I knew what would happen. That I could see as clearly as the old woman saw the devil circling. We’d already heard the fates of the evil women of Salem.”

  “Was there no one you could go to for protection?”

  “Everyone had gone crazy. They saw witches in the women and devils in the dogs and evil in every shadow.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “The lesser tenebrae are drawn to the etheric energy of an unbound demon.”

  “And the demon was there for me.” She took a breath. “I didn’t know that, but I knew my master’s frustration would boil over into accusations. I did tell then.”

  “Considering the time period, it must have been hard for a servant to report her employer’s misbehavior.”

  She shot him a disbelieving look. “Hard? Impossible. I didn’t tell them the truth. Not the whole truth. I went to our neighbor, whose cow had broken into my master’s fields and later died. I said my master poisoned the cow.”

  She wrapped her arms tight around herself, scant replacement for his warm bulk. “I said I’d been whipped to stop me from speaking. After the magistrate saw the wounds on my back, they took me away. The neighbor accused my master of witchcraft. They hanged him. And he wasn’t the only one.”

  Sidney sat back on the bench as if she had pushed him. “You?”

  “No. I … watched. I only watched.” She clutched the tightly buttoned neck of her coat until she couldn’t swallow past the knot of her fingers. “Once I tried to scream. I think that was the moment the demon came to me.”

  Sidney rubbed his eyes. “I don’t remember all the specifics of the Salem witch trials.”

  “I do,” she whispered. “The pointing fingers. The black cloaks of the magistrates. The dead.”

  “I’ve read how symptoms mistaken for deviltry—convulsions, hallucinations, that sort of thing—might have been caused by ergot poisoning in the rye crop.”

  “That and the wandering demon.” She wouldn’t accept his false consolation. “The demon that wanted me. And my words added to the dread.”

  “You were as much a victim as any.”

  “But my words started the deaths, and I didn’t die.”

  “I think you’ve found there is worse.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees as he stared at the river. “The teshuva resonated with the flaw in your
soul, but it came to you where you had no chance of becoming what it needed. Worse, its presence brought the tenebrae, which only deepened the burden of its debt to the light. Maybe it thought—as nearly as we can imagine it thinks—that it was doing the right thing to make you forget for so long.”

  She scowled. “Or maybe it was easier for the devil to have a servant who didn’t ask awkward questions.”

  “I like questions.”

  The blunt statement eased her grip around her neck. “You aren’t afraid when I ask.”

  He shook his head. “Too stupid to be afraid.”

  “Too curious.”

  “Same thing, maybe.” His eyes reflected the gloomy water. “I’ve been told not to go back to London. The place I thought I had is gone. And I can’t even feel bad about it because it means Wes is home, with Dad, where he should have been all this time.”

  “Can you talk yourself into believing that?”

  His sideways glance struck hers. “Eventually.” His lips quirked. “If I talk long enough.”

  She stood, wavering just a bit, as if she’d suddenly found Nim’s sky-high heels strapped to her feet. She wasn’t any taller, but her perspective had changed, and the demon shifted in her. Was it accommodating the changes, or just uneasy?

  Sidney was at her elbow in a heartbeat, though he kept his hands to himself. “Okay?”

  “It all looks different. How many times have I walked here and not remembered?”

  “We’ll find the answers, somewhere.”

  “There’s one place we know to look. And I am hungry.” She steadied herself without reaching for him, but it was good to know he was there. “How about some diner food?”

  Alyce pushed back from the table, her hand over her belly. “How did I forget to eat all this time?”

  “I don’t know,” Sidney said. “I guess the teshuva was eating for two.”

  Therese bustled up with another plate. “You haven’t tried the piri-piri.”