Seduced by Shadows ms-1 Read online

  At the entrance to another bar, garish neon cast harsh shadows. “What? That smear of—”

  Two people stepped out. From the gloom oozed a darker murk. It dropped toward them. She almost recognized it, mangled and distorted, its half-seen edges bleeding out into a dark nimbus, an inverse of the lights.

  Sera took half a step into the road. Archer jerked her back just as a car sped past.

  “Demon or no, that would’ve hurt,” he growled.

  “What is that?” Her throat hurt, looking at the thing. She thought she saw a paw or claw, not much bigger than a city rat, and the wink of a red reflecting eye. “It looks like a dead thing flattened on the street, like I know what it used to be, but can’t quite make out the shape of it anymore.”

  “Psychic roadkill. That’s fitting. It’s a malice. An unbound, incorporeal demon from the horde-tenebrae. Smaller and weaker than ferales, but more clever, if not actually intelligent.”

  The two men who’d left the bar stopped to light up. One man spoke, then laughed, the harsh sound carrying in a puff of cigarette smoke. The other man hunched his shoulders.

  The malice crept closer.

  “What’s it doing?” Sera twitched. “Shouldn’t you stop it?”

  “They could stop it.”

  The hunched man waved one hand, as if to redirect his companion. The other laughed again and punched his shoulder.

  The malice dropped onto the hunched man where he’d been hit. He straightened.

  Archer shrugged. “Or not.”

  The hunched man lunged, fist foremost. The jokester reeled back, shouting. The hunched man never spoke as he pummeled his friend.

  Sera let out a painful breath as if one of those punches had landed in her gut. “Is he possessed?”

  “No. See, there goes the malice, scrambling away. It’ll watch, dart in, keep the turmoil going as long as it can. Others get drawn in, if the mayhem continues.”

  The bouncer came out from the bar and pushed the hunched man away. The jokester huddled on the wet sidewalk, neon darkening the blood on his face to inky black.

  The malice was a blot above the sign, almost invisible even though she knew where to look. “Do they feed off the negative energy? Or are they produced by it?”

  “Cause or effect, does it matter?”

  She frowned. “Yes. If you want to stop it. If you want to destroy them all.”

  “Weak as it is, you can’t destroy it. We can drain its energy, like emptying a balloon. But it’s still there, waiting to be refilled. We’re unholy garbagemen. We can take out the trash, but it never stops piling up.”

  “Which is no reason to let one get away with—”

  “Murder? It could go there. But some people just slough them off.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Who am I to interfere?”

  “You’re the guy who can drain them, take them out.”

  “Yeah.” He turned an unfathomable gaze on the trio across the street. “But I can’t help thinking, if not for them, I wouldn’t be losing this war.”

  She blinked in confusion. “If not for the malice?”

  A flare of violet made her breath catch. “If not for the humans.” He shook his head. “I just wanted to show you a malice, since you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting the feralis.”

  “The horror was all mine.” He took her elbow again and she glanced back. “Shouldn’t we go . . . help?”

  “The malice won’t get more dangerous than it is right now. I’ll come back for it some other night.”

  “So, does indifference excite it as much as anger and violence?”

  When he glanced at her, his gaze was empty of demon violet. “I doubt it.”

  Good thing, or she’d probably see one squatting on his head right now. How could he have the power to help and yet not? How could he just walk away from such blatant evil?

  Suddenly the night seemed colder than the low temperatures could account for.

  He hadn’t looked at her again, but he said, “You are cold. I know a place we can wait.”

  Wait for what? she almost asked, stupidly. Oh yes, for another version of these horrors to take her over.

  The madness of what she was believing returned, made her stumble over nothing. Only Archer’s hand on her arm kept her from falling.

  “Almost there,” he said softly.

  She smelled the river, cold and dank, as they crossed the bridge. Her gaze locked on a rainbow sheen of gasoline coating the ripples.

  Archer tugged at her. “Stay with me.”

  Why? So she could become as cold as that water, like him? She shook him off. Her vision, blurred again, seemed already filmed by that rainbow glaze, edging toward the violet.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Gonna fight me again?”

  His words sent goose bumps racing over her flesh. Not fear, but anticipation.

  And for all his stance, he wasn’t indifferent anymore.

  The violet light gleamed in his eyes too.

  “Be careful which way you jump,” he warned. “You end up in the river, I won’t ruin this coat for you.”

  “I don’t want to fight you. I just want this to be over.” She held up one hand when he drew breath to speak. “Not over-over. Just over for tonight.”

  He smiled thinly. “It’s never even that over.”

  “What? Dawn never comes?”

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  “Good Lord, I couldn’t have gotten a cheerful guru?” She stalked down the bridge. She might not know where they were going, but it wasn’t as if she had another choice. Going back had never been an option, had it?

  He fell into step beside her. “Cheerful gurus, like musical montages, never tell it like it really is.”

  “I like musical montages. ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ ‘Highway to the Danger Zone.’ ”

  He whirled on her. “A minute and a half of strapping into your bandoliers and greasing your muscles? They don’t show you that the blood never comes out from underneath your nails and spring never comes back to your soul.”

  She stared back at him wordlessly.

  The violet glaze had vanished from his eyes. “As for that God you so casually invoke, he won’t listen to you anymore. You’re playing on the dark side now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  In silence, Archer led Sera to a cinder-block warehouse just off the river. A silver glow beamed from the roof of the building.

  He punched a code into the lock, and the door unsealed with a pneumatic sigh. Warm air curled around him like welcoming arms. “Come on.”

  She walked beside him warily, light on her feet, head raised, nostrils flared. The atavistic stance—the distrusting demon in her—sent a pang through him.

  He hadn’t meant to tease or scare her with the malice sighting. He definitely hadn’t meant to reveal his own dissociation so clearly. “The humans,” indeed. When had he forgotten he himself was still—if not only—human?

  More importantly, why had he remembered?

  Almost against his will, he slanted a glance at the woman beside him.

  They passed down a corridor, rounded a corner, and stepped out into the summer garden.

  “Oh.” Her tiny sound of surprise sent another jolt through him, of pleasure this time. “A greenhouse. That explains the light from the roof.”

  In the dark dreaming winter of the city, the plants glowed with fantastical clarity under the full-spectrum lights. A trickle of water drowned out the hum of the huge fans moving the balmy air, lazily stirring the leaves. Sera stared up at the understory of a tall banana tree, its wide-bladed foliage gleaming like a jewel against the black sky above.

  She lowered her wide gaze to Archer. “This is yours too? Wow, demon slaying must have excellent net take-home.”

  “Just no retirement plan.” He walked the path between two palms, leaving her to follow.

  “My mom adored miniature roses. She nursed them through the winter on our kitchen windowsill before her depression got bad.�
�� She shook her head, as if to shed the memory. “I can’t keep a cactus alive, much less roses.”

  The twinge of her pain jolted a confession from him. “My father always said a brown thumb was the color of dung, and seeds sprout best in the richest ground.”

  She smiled but her glance was sharp. “Your father sounds like a wise fellow.”

  “He was a gentleman farmer, so he had a saying for every day of the season.” He regretted the slip into shared wistfulness. Had he made a mistake bringing her here? This place had a knack for dredging up memories—sometimes the dark earth seemed to swallow long-ago sorrows, only to sprout them again like weeds—but he’d never before had cause to speak them aloud.

  She eyed him somberly. “He must have loved this place.”

  “He never saw it. But he always aspired more toward the gentleman than the farmer part. At least he died before his only son was demoted from gentleman to garbageman.” Speaking aloud gave the old memories more weight than they deserved. “Come on. There’s a place to sit.”

  She fell into step, quiet for a moment.

  The luxuriant greenery pressed closer, the grow lights barely penetrating to the tiny clearing at the garden’s center. He flicked a switch at the corner of the antique Javanese daybed that dominated the space, and the strings of tea lights around the teak posters cast twinkling shadows among the orchids and ferns.

  He almost missed her quick sideways glance, but he read the sudden uncertainty in the quirk of her brows and realized what the solitary bed, heaped with pillows, might look like. He tried to stifle the dull heat of a flush over his face. He’d never needed a second chair.

  She crossed to the daybed. Tracing one finger across the flaking blue and red paint, she smiled up at the indolent figures engraved in the wooden canopy. Missing panels framed a view of the leaves above. “This does not look like you at all.”

  “Just a simple Southern farmer’s son.” Once, the phases of decay and growth had filled his days along with the fragrance of rich earth. Now his mind was clogged with smog and gore and nights of destruction without end. The weight of the club in his coat dragged at him.

  He wondered what memories of tonight would haunt his sanctuary.

  “Simple. Right.” Her smile vanished. “So, why did you bring me here?”

  He hesitated. The little stream coursing over pebbles out of sight murmured like a far-away crowd.

  “And don’t lie.”

  He scowled. “If tonight goes wrong, it will be easier to wash away your blood.”

  She blinked. “Thanks for the brutal honesty.”

  “You said—”

  “You could’ve sugarcoated it a little.”

  Inexplicably, he felt his lips twitch. “Why? I bet you don’t lie to your hospice patients.”

  “I’m not usually the agent of their destruction either.”

  “I don’t want to be.” The carved lounging figures appeared cruelly aloof, watching from on high, uncar ing that his choice had been to grow things, not destroy them. “But if the demon possessing you is djinn, you wouldn’t want me not to.”

  She took a breath. “When will we know?”

  “Not until the end, when the reven appears.”

  She sunk onto the edge of the daybed, hands clasped in her lap. “How could I say yes to a bad demon?” She laughed softly. “Listen to me. Bad demon. Good demon. Does it matter?”

  Hearing his scorn tossed back made him shift. “Repentant demon,” he corrected. “Or not. Teshuva or djinn. And yes, it matters.” At least to him.

  Her gaze speared him. “Since you’ll be doing the mop-up if it goes bad.”

  Possession offered no confirmed psychic powers. Yet she read him so easily, as if she knew all his tells; as if she knew him in ways he’d forgotten himself. “It matters to the tide of the war.”

  “You’ve mentioned this war before. And I’m going to be a soldier?”

  Or cannon fodder. “On one side or the other.”

  She laced her fingers together and straightened. “Can I choose? You said those men at the bar could’ve denied the malice’s influence.”

  “You chose. The night you let the demon in.”

  The memories flitted across her face, expressive even in the uncertain glimmer of the tea lights.

  “I wish it hadn’t come to your looking like me,” he said softly.

  Her chin lifted, but the faint rise of a blush in her cheeks undermined the nonchalance. “It would’ve promised me anything I wanted, right?”

  And she’d wanted him?

  The thought raced through him like the demon’s battle fever, fearsome and irresistible. Without his conscious will, his body canted toward her. He couldn’t even blame his teshuva, latent at the moment, for the lapse in restraint. He wrapped his arm around a palm tree—anything to hold himself back.

  “Still,” he said, “I would not have wanted to be part of your possession.” At least not in the demonic sense. The ancient text Bookie had found referenced a talyan bond. Assassin/victim was a bond too. Sort of.

  “Yeah, you must have pissed someone off to get this duty.”

  “No one made me.” As if anyone could.

  “Then why?”

  “I knew it was coming. It echoed, somehow, in me so I couldn’t sleep.” He shrugged impatiently.

  “My demon snoring kept you awake, so you get to kill me? Let me guess: no bunkmates at summer camp.”

  How could she tease him, when he might have to . . . “It may not come to that. Your demon may be teshuva.” Then she’d only have to fight until she died, rather than die right away.

  “Oh sure, get glass-half-full on me now.” She leaned back. He’d memorized every angle of what she was seeing, staring up at the broken canopy or maybe the dark sky beyond the arching leaves. “If fewer pieces were missing, this box could be a coffin.” She ran her hand up along one post.

  Archer twitched as if each finger were tripping up his spine. “I won’t let you die.” He hated himself for having to add the coda, “Not from the demon.”

  “Our culture buries its dead,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Or cremates. I studied this, you know. Some cultures floated their dead out to sea. Others left the corpses exposed on raised platforms so their sky gods could claim them. Functionally, that meant carrion-eating condors.”

  Her voice dropped. “I’ve almost died twice already. After the car accident, I coded in the emergency room. And before that, my mother . . . She disappeared when I was ten, but she died when I was thirteen. She came back just long enough to try to take me with her when she committed suicide.”

  The word congealed the blood in his veins. A solitary violence that had rippled outward. No wonder he’d been so strangely attuned to her unbound demon. “What happened?”

  “I was walking home from school. She drove up next to me and asked if I knew her. Of course I knew her. She’d been gone three years, and every day of that three years I knew she’d come back. I got into the car. We talked. And then she drove us into the river.”

  He couldn’t stop himself. He left the shelter of the tree to move closer.

  She didn’t even glance at him. “The water flooded through the vents so fast. I pounded at the door. She kept grabbing at me, telling me to stay. I hit her until she let go.” Finally, she tilted her face toward him, eyes bleak. “Maybe I should have let her hold on.”

  “No.” He wanted to explain his conviction. But the breath had gone out of him as if he were stuck in that sinking car.

  She gazed upward again. “I’ve always tried not to think about it, but maybe that was the trigger, my penance trigger. Because before she drove us into the river, she said the voices told her to do it. What if the voices were real? Like the demon. And what if they were right?”

  Fists clenched, he at last dredged up his voice. “I’ll make sure it won’t hurt for long. Not if it’s djinn.” The words were ragged in his ears.

  She didn’t respond. The twinkling l
ights paled next to the violet glow in her gaze.

  He swore. The end was here.

  CHAPTER 8

  The world wasn’t gray, but silver, shot through with glittering threads, bright as lightning, elusive as snowflakes. Sera reached out to hold the threads, but they slipped through her fingers, unraveling into a darkness she couldn’t bear to face.

  “ ‘When you too long stare into the abyss . . . ,’ ” she quoted.

  “Damn it, no Nietzsche. I’m the nihilist around here.”

  The darkness belled up to meet her, and she saw herself reflected in Archer’s bronze eyes. “I wasn’t even looking into the pendant.”

  “It’s not the damn rock. The last stage of possession is coming to complete the link between you and the demon. When it’s over, I want you on this side of the Veil. So stop drifting on me.”

  “I wanted to hold on.” She tightened her fingers around his wrists.

  He sat beside her on the daybed. He twisted his hands so he mirrored her grasp in a rescue hold. “Yes. Hold on.”

  “To the other side.”

  “No,” he said with strained patience. “To this side. Not to the past, not death, not damnation. Life. Now.”

  “Why?”

  He lifted one eyebrow.

  “You’re the nihilist,” she reminded him.

  “I thought you were unconscious. Only people who aren’t thinking quote Nietzsche.”

  She grimaced and released him. Her palms slid past his as he let her go, his callused skin rasping on hers.

  As their clasped hands parted, every molecule in her screamed as if torn asunder. She felt her essence shred like mist in the wind. The world faded again in a haze of ice on ash on starlight on cold, wet stone.

  She clawed upward, icy fear swamping the air from her lungs.

  Archer’s hands tightened on her shoulders. “Sera?”

  “I keep going and coming back.” She tried to keep her tone level, but she heard the hitch in her voice, almost a sob.

  “Stay with me.”

  “Maybe it’d be easier if I just went away.” Had her mother been right all along? “You wouldn’t have to—”