Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls Page 5

  “The djinn are prohibited from gathering,” Thorne said at last. “We stay away from one another. Really, that’s the only thing I liked about you all.”

  Carlo flicked his fingers dismissively. “What I saw, prohibitions are imposed to be broken. Usually in a blotto blaze of Tommy gunfire.” His grin was practically avuncular. “Of course, you’re excused from the drunken part. We never gathered because we never had the numbers. Since Corvus punched a hole into hell, there is a way.”

  “Blackbird failed,” Thorne reminded him.

  “He died, yeah sure, but the damage he did to the Veil? That’s his legacy to us. Magdalena recovered the notes Corvus kept from his league traitor. If the calculations are correct—”

  “Calculations never are.” Thorne leaned his shoulders against the window with deliberate nonchalance. “If Magdalena is all-knowing, as you seem to think, she’d know that.”

  Carlo’s gray eyes turned almost as soft as the water outside—and as implacably pushy. “Don’t be so down on yourself. That explosion wasn’t your fault. We checked. Your bomb was perfect; it was the timer that was off.”

  The chill from outside leached through the glass to Thorne’s spine. “I know that.”

  “Anyway, that free lovebird who fucked you into believing in her cause was sleeping with every dumb bastard there. It wasn’t your brat in her belly when you blew her up.”

  “I know that too.” When the djinn-man only gaped at him, Thorne shook his head. “You should be relieved I won’t be joining your half-assed ahaˉzum. If I couldn’t follow directions in plain English, imagine how much worse I am in Akkadian.”

  Carlo gripped the armrests of his chair. “I can’t leave here till I can give my lady the message she wants to hear—that you will come to her.”

  Thorne pushed away from the window. The cold stayed in his skin. “Very well.” He walked toward the fireplace where his coffee waited.

  Carlo smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard, now was it? I—”

  He stopped talking when Thorne grabbed him by the neck and squeezed.

  Mostly puffery though he was, Carlo still bore a djinni, and he put up a not-embarrassing fight.

  Both chairs were broken before Thorne had him pinned amidst the mahogany chips of the half-bashed mantel. No great loss—open flame on a boat had always seemed like the depths of wrongness anyway.

  Carlo arched away from the fireplace andiron twisted underneath him, but Thorne amped his own djinni higher as he pressed his forearm against the other man’s throat and stared him down. Carlo tried to look away, his eyeballs tearing noxious ooze.

  With a not-quite sound, an almost tactile sensation, like the tumblers of a lock falling open inside him, Thorne’s demon matched itself to the other djinni. He trembled with the surge of stolen energy and pushed harder.

  The point of the andiron emerged from Carlo’s starched shirt through the gap between the third and fourth buttons. With the next beat of his heart, a gout of blood soaked the cotton, and he choked on a hiccupping cry.

  Thorne held him there while the other man’s weakened djinni tried frantically to heal the wound. Tender new flesh crept up the blackened iron, withered and died, and was renewed as Carlo writhed. “Stop squirming before you nick something important. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Finally, Carlo stilled. “Fooled me,” he rasped. The sulfuric tears burned bloody rivulets down his cheeks.

  “No, Magdalena did that. Tell her I’ll not follow anyone else to the end.”

  “You think she’ll let you stand apart? In the end, there will be no one left alone. No third parties, no watchers, no innocents.”

  “There’s one,” Thorne murmured.

  Carlo’s purpling face contorted in a sneer as his demon’s frenzy rippled beneath the dapper gangster facade. “Who? Your half-cracked little talya freak?”

  Astonishment slackened Thorne’s grip for a heartbeat.

  Carlo thrashed like a walleye fished from the lake for dinner but subsided when his struggle gained no headway. “You think Magdalena didn’t know about that? I told you she hears all.”

  “She can hear. She can watch. Just tell her to keep her hands and her ahaˉzum to herself.”

  “Gimme a pen so I can write it down.” Carlo bared his teeth. “Make it a Sharpie.”

  “No need to remember the particulars.”

  With a sharp wrench, Thorne bent the tip of the andiron around to pierce the other side of Carlo’s chest. The djinn-man shrieked, and his yellow smoking eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped unconscious, his demon too sapped to rouse him.

  A couple more twists and Thorne caged the man’s heart in black iron. Magdalena could unwrap him if she chose. Of course, she might adopt the technique.

  Thorne stood and plucked his mug from the half of the mantel that had survived the wreckage. The coffee was hot, molecules excited by all the thrashing energies in the room. He took a sip and grunted with satisfaction. The day wasn’t looking too bad, after all.

  He dashed the rest of the beverage in Carlo’s face. The djinn-man sputtered to life. He traced the tangle of iron through his chest with shaking fingers, and his whimper emerged in a bilious froth from the holes.

  “Now crawl back to your bitch queen with your tail between your legs,” Thorne said, “and hope this time she listens when I say no.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sid woke in his own bed—well, not his cozy, duvet-covered bed in London, but his assigned synthetic brick, complete with threadbare hobnail spread, at the @1 warehouse—and squinted at the svelte blonde pushing back the noncomplementary curtains. The sudden light did nothing to dispel the cheap motel room ambiance.

  He fumbled for his specs, knocking blood-soaked gauze from the bedside table. “Good morning, Sera.”

  “It was once I flushed all the feralis filth out of your shoulder.”

  He cleared his raspy throat and grimaced at the lingering chemical sourness of his body’s shock on the back of his tongue. With specs in place, he fastened his gaze on the china cup just beyond the flattened tube of antibiotic ointment. “Is that tea?”

  “It’s my tea.” She snagged it and took a sip to demonstrate.

  So she’d mend him, but she didn’t want him to think that meant anything—as if their attitude toward him hadn’t been made perfectly clear already. He pushed himself upright against the pillows and winced at the piercing twang through his shoulder.

  “Don’t pull out my stitches,” she groused. “Here, have some water.”

  God, they wouldn’t even share their tea bags. And he thought he could tease out the secrets of their unorthodox battles. “Thanks.” He took the bottled water she offered and cocked his head to peer at the line of stitches through his flesh. “Thanks for this too.”

  Sera narrowed her eyes, as if she thought he was being sarcastic. “It’s crooked. We don’t do much darning here in Chicago.” She put an extra twist on the harsh middle a.

  “I don’t do much needlepoint either,” he said mildly. “Which is why I said thank you, since I’d still be bleeding otherwise.”

  Her glare didn’t change. “We don’t want you dying here.”

  We don’t want you here at all. She didn’t have to say it aloud. With Sera Littlejohn serving as interim Bookkeeper for the Chicago league, Sid hadn’t realized he’d be stepping on quite so many toes—or toes so capable of kicking his ass. He thought they’d be relieved to have a replacement. Though the leagues strictly maintained their self-sufficiency, London-trained Bookkeepers, renowned for their learning and discipline, were in high demand. Even if he’d been a backwater Bookkeeper from one of the less rigorous, outlying schools, Liam and his crew should have been relieved. Talyan were never interested in books and stats and tests.

  But the Chicago league seemed to delight in blasting never sky high.

  If he could just get through to them, the exclusive research material would prove his merit as Bookkeeper once and for all. Even his father would
finally have to concede and could rest easier knowing his life’s work would continue. “I need to talk to Liam. Is he still up?”

  “Undoubtedly. He won’t sleep until he knows everybody survived the night. And since you were passed out in Jonah’s car …”

  Sid gritted his teeth into something like a smile. “How inconvenient my maiming won’t heal in minutes.”

  A spark of violet flared across her hazel iris. “You’d rather be possessed?”

  He started to snap back but caught himself. What words had been about to leap off his tongue? Nothing to endear him, certainly. He said only, “I don’t want to die here either.”

  Sera huffed out a breath he couldn’t interpret as approving or disappointed. “I’ll send Liam in.”

  How humiliating, to interview the league leader from bed. “No, I’ll get up.”

  “Liam told you to take the night off.”

  “I did, and look what happened. Where can I find him?”

  Sera stood back, neither helping nor hindering as he struggled out of the sloping bed and found a clean shirt. “He’ll be down at his forge in the loading bay. He had some things he wanted to pound out.”

  What brilliant condition he was in to face the league leader. Sid managed to lock his knees enough to stay upright while he eased his aching arm through the sleeve. If he bent over to grab his trainers, he’d faint. That would be almost—not quite, but almost—as bad as grabbing the slip-on loafers out of his duffel.

  The bloody bandages, oxidizing to a rusty brown, lay scattered like mute indictments of his vulnerability. He tried to console himself with the excuse of his near death as he left the room barefoot.

  When the league’s last headquarters had been contaminated in a djinni attack, the warehouse had been remodeled with individual apartments on the second floor for the solitary talyan. Of course, they’d put him at the ass-end of the hall. And most of the fluorescent bars in the ceiling were out since talyan didn’t need artificial lighting. Now the distance between the darkened doorways seemed to stretch with spoofed horror-movie absurdity. But he gritted his teeth—though the tension sent a warning pang through his shoulder—and propelled himself forward. If nothing else, momentum would keep him going.

  Even the immortal talyan didn’t trust the old freight lift that had once delivered architectural salvage to the upper floor, so he took the stairs down. Sera’s boot heels clattered out of sync on the metal treads as she paced his slow progression. Was she making sure he didn’t keel over, or did she just want a front-row seat while the league leader straightened him out like a bent nail?

  With most of the talyan resting from their nightly hunt, their edgy energy blunted by countermeasures invented by Bookkeepers, the interior halls of the warehouse could have housed any business—say, day-sleeping accountants.

  Had his life unspooled differently, he could have been an accountant. That was probably true for most people—at least for people who liked their numbers in orderly columns. If he had been an accountant … No, he wasn’t going to start counting those ways.

  He shoved open the door to the loading bay hard enough that Sera jumped forward to catch the rebound.

  Though the big exterior rolling door was closed, the October cold leaked through the vaultlike room. Despite the icebox temperature reflected by the cinderblock walls, the league leader was stripped down to his jeans and a black vest, his shaggy black hair caught at his nape with an elastic tie. Of course, he had the glowing forge in the corner to warm him.

  Liam Niall was a big man, which was not unusual for a talya. The monstrous hammer choked up in his wide palm only exacerbated the impression. He tapped out a delicate rhythm with the tool, belying its blunt force as he hunched over the anvil.

  The hammering did get a bit more forceful as Sid approached. “You’re still alive,” Liam said. “I’m surprised.”

  Surprised did not necessarily equal glad. Sid twisted his lips. “No doing of mine, I assure you.”

  Liam smoothed the hammer one last time over the metal, then held up his work. The deer horn knife—two edged crescents interlocked so that the points gleamed outward toward the four cardinal directions—shimmered under the severe fluorescent lights with a stark and dangerous beauty.

  Sid blinked. Etheric emanations sank into weapons just as the demonic energies brutally and exquisitely honed the bodies of the previously mortal hosts, much like Liam’s hammer worked the metal. Sid had studied printouts of the spectral analyses, but he’d never seen the evidence with his own eyes. Maybe he had never been so aware before, so personally affected by the outcome.

  He blinked again, fascinated by the spangles that danced off the blades. How had he never noticed the way a beam of light poured down a finely honed metal edge? Certainly the Bookkeeper side of the equation had nothing so compelling. No dusty, stretched sheepskin, scrawled in ancient warnings, could match that shivery curvature of steel through air.

  He blinked a third time and realized Liam was finally watching him, blue eyes steady and impassive.

  Sid straightened, and the officious snap of his spine cut off the wayward fascination. “I would have been eaten by that feralis if not for the rogue female talya who came out of nowhere and saved my arse.”

  While he quickly recapped the encounter, Liam’s gaze sharpened to rival the knife in his hand, as if Sid had finally shown himself to be interesting. “A rogue. In my city.” The blade glittered as he spun it between his fingers. “And female at that.”

  Sid tensed at the threatening movement, and his shoulder protested, though he kept his voice level. “An invaluable find.”

  “For a Bookkeeper,” Liam countered. “A potential nightmare for the league. Do you know what that unbalanced energy does to the demons in this city? Repentant demon or tenebrae, it won’t matter in the face of such beguiling madness.” The teshuva’s mark at his temple flared violet with his heartbeat.

  Sid averted his gaze before his own pulse could match the violence. From the time his father had inducted him into the Bookkeeper mysteries, he’d been taught not to follow the talyan in their torquing furies. Each had their place in the battle against evil; to confuse their roles was stupid, pointless, and often fatal—at least for the Bookkeepers.

  So he tried to knock the sharp edge off his tone. He might have succeeded if he’d had a hammer bigger than Liam’s. “I don’t see how one woman—and she was tiny—makes things worse.”

  Genuine amusement crinkled the reven next to Liam’s eye. “Didn’t your father exile you here because of a woman?”

  The casual reference sliced through Sid like the multiple points of the deer horn knife, each one sharper than the last.

  His father had told someone about that? Told a talya, of all people, even knowing the penalty of indiscretion?

  “I would never reveal league confidences.” The words peeled from him as rusty and laced with pain as the soiled bandages back in his room.

  Revealing himself had been the only thing Maureen asked for. Twenty-three months into their planned two-year pre-engagement cohabitation, they’d both been shocked and appalled to discover that, without divulging the league secrets, he had nothing left to share.

  Liam’s smile flattened. “As Bookkeeper, you understand how outsiders are so disruptive.”

  “A rogue is not technically an outsider,” Sid pointed out. Not the way he’d always been an outsider, even for those twenty-three months before he’d come to his senses.

  “Lucky she was. Any rogue existing under our radar has a highly developed instinct for self-preservation.” Liam frowned thoughtfully. “Unless Bookie did know about her.”

  Sid had gathered the gist of what had happened to his Bookkeeper predecessor. Suffice it to say, embezzlement had been the least of his crimes—not merely crimes, but sins. An image of his own unwritten rap sheet flashed in Sid’s brain. The “retired” Bookie might think himself the better man of the two.

  “If your last Bookkeeper made note of a rogue, I
’ll find it,” he promised.

  “No need.” Liam’s words dropped to a growl. “Because we’ll find her.”

  The implied menace curled Sid’s fingers as if around the haft of some imaginary weapon. “You can’t hurt her.”

  “We do what we have to,” Liam said. “You can note that in your archives.”

  “She’s no threat,” Sid insisted. In his memory, her pitiless hunter eyes blinked in slow disbelief.

  Liam pursed his lips. “Tell that to the feralis she tore apart.”

  “She’s fighting on your side. Every league needs all the weapons it can gather,” Sid countered.

  “Not if those weapons are double-edged.”

  Sid looked pointedly at the deer horn knife in the league leader’s hand, all its curves treacherously sharp.

  Liam sighed. “Right. Most of them do have a regrettable tendency toward slicing off the hand that feeds them.”

  “You asked for London’s help,” Sid said.

  “No, I asked for access to your archives,” Liam corrected.

  Sid pushed the specs higher on his nose. “I am London’s archives. With Alyce as a baseline, I can do what I came here to do.”

  “Alyce? You already named her?” Just the corners of Liam’s lips curved upward. On a lesser man, it might have been a smirk. “I suppose you have to keep her now.”

  “If I can find her.”

  “We’re on it.”

  “You’ll be careful? You won’t scare her?”

  Liam gave him a lowering look. “That fever must be spiking. Get some rest.”

  Probably it was immortality that gave his voice that paternalistic edge. But Sid already had a disapproving father figure, thanks anyway.

  Sera followed him back to his room, like a silent blond wolf watching for him to falter from his path.

  He paused in his doorway, trying for a casual lean, though the jamb grated against his aching shoulder. “You wouldn’t let them hurt her.” When she didn’t answer quickly enough for his comfort, he added, “You could be her. Imagine possession—the conflicting energies, the impulse to violence, the isolation—without the structure and restraint of the league. Without that, the teshuva is only one long step from being djinni.”