Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (12 page)

In the hollow emptiness of the crypt, she sounded like a
ghost. Sid could have done without the rapt expression on all three talya faces. What did they see? When he stared straight at the portal, the verge was a pile of trash. But in his peripheral vision …

It wanted them. It wanted to suck their souls and hawk up their empty corpses like sunflower seed shells.

“What have you Chicago talyan done?” His voice broke across the words.

“Relax, Bookkeeper,” Archer said. “It’s dormant. Mostly. We think.”

Sid made a strangled sound. “Tell that to the people of Pompeii.”

Sera gestured at a row of milk crates at the base of the kliegs. “Pompeii didn’t have those.” The crates supported a small tower of instruments, only three-quarters of which Sid recognized. “Our last dear, departed Bookie was a megalomaniacal madman—aren’t they all?—but he knew his way around a soldering iron.”

Jolted out of his shock by professional jealousy, Sid edged around the gaping maw to study the machines. The boom in cheap consumer electronics had been a source of much glee for the engineering branch among Bookkeepers, though he had always kept more to the theoretical side of the equations. “It’s just a resonance sensor with a remote alarm—admittedly, that is fascinating—routed through a … oh.” He resettled his specs as he straightened. “Is that an etheric sequencer? With an inversion module?”

“Geek alert,” Archer muttered.

Sera nodded. “A demonic ant trap.”

Sid leaned closer and almost jumped out of his skin when Alyce murmured at his elbow, “What is that inside?”

“There’s nothing. …” A flicker inside the beaker, like a half-invisible moth, shut him up.

“A soul fragment,” Sera explained. “Thanks to Corvus, there are still bits wafting around the city. No tenebrae could resist such an easy snack.”

“A baited ant trap,” Sid said.

Alyce traced her finger over the gold-rimmed glass. “Poor soul.”

Archer toed the stack of perforated paper neatly stacking itself beside a printer that ticked every few seconds. “Nothing has eaten it, which means nothing’s coming over the verge.”

Sid locked his knees to keep from stepping back. “When you told London you had opened a doorway to hell, we thought you meant …”

Archer gave him a moment, then crossed his arms. “We didn’t stutter.”

“We didn’t imagine you meant this.” Sid flung one hand out toward the gaping maw.

Sera narrowed her eyes. “You thought
we’d
imagined it?”

“Talyan have no imagination,” Sid admitted. “But you are known to be … predisposed to postapocalyptic ideation. There were suggestions of group psychosis.”

Sera’s scowl deepened. “London thought we’d been taken over by evil?”

“If a demon can decide to repent, what’s to stop it from unrepenting?”

“So they sent you?” Archer’s harsh bark of laughter lacked amusement.

Sid stiffened. “I volunteered.”

Alyce smoothed his sleeve as if patting down his hackles. “I could look inside. I would fit.”

All three of them swung on her with a chorus in one breath. “No!”

Sid caught her hand, unwilling to let one word, no matter how vehemently uttered, enforce the command. “No, Alyce. If the door to hell is closed—at least for the moment—we are not peeping behind it just to see what jumps out at us.”

Climbing out of the hole was worse than going down.
Chills spidered up Sid’s spine until his shoulder went numb from the tension, as if the hole breathed death and damnation at their retreating backs.

Alyce stood in the doorway at the top, looking down, until he bumped her out of the way. “Did you see the way it sparkled?”

“I’m not like you.” But he had seen enough that a full fortnight of Guinness wouldn’t erase the image: female talyan, hell portals, imprisoned souls. Had good begun drifting back toward evil? Was one small rogue just the latest symptom of a fatal breakdown?

There’d been nothing like this in the multimillennia worth of archives he’d spent years of his life memorizing. And what could one human Bookkeeper do about it?

Archer secured the door while Therese watched them with steady dark eyes.

“Do you know what’s down there?” Sid asked the diner owner.

“A bad thing.”

“And it doesn’t frighten you to be right on top of it?”

No purple lights moved in her gaze, but she felt a resolve more human and somehow more unnerving. “I have been closer to bad things. At least this time, someone cares.” She handed a bag of kanyah to Alyce. “For you, little one.”

Alyce clutched the wax paper baggie of golf ball–sized treats to her chest and murmured her thanks.

Sid—stomach churning with what he’d seen—dropped to the rear as their quartet left the diner and returned past the stained-glass museum toward the parking garage. Ahead of him, Alyce dug into the bag of kanyah. How could she eat after staring down hell’s gullet?

Stupid question. She’d hovered almost a hundred years—if her comment about the World’s Fair was to be believed—with her and her demon on the edge of starvation. His gaze lingered on her petite form an arm’s length ahead of him. His
two hands outstretched would easily span her hips, and her waist nipped in smaller yet. He should run back to the diner and get another to-go bag so he could feed her bite by bite. …

Damn it, his brain was still rattling around like half a pair of dice. She’d survived without him bringing her sticky sweets.

He slowed, letting her pull away so that he wasn’t tempted to more accurately measure her dimensions.

As if she felt him retreat, she glanced over her shoulder. For a heartbeat, she met his gaze; then she held out one of the mottled white and brown desserts, and he wondered what hunger had been in his eyes.

He shook his head and dropped his glance, focusing on her bare feet. Her demon seemed as incapable of providing for her as he was. She was still looking back at him, and her sideways step emphasized her awkward gait.

He seized on the puzzle gratefully. “Alyce, did you injure yourself again?”

Sera shortened her stride to Alyce’s. “Again? What happened?”

Sid gestured at her left knee. “Alyce was limping when she fought the ferales in the alley, but the teshuva should have repaired any damage by now.” The teshuva mended constantly on the cellular level, though it offered no pain relief.

Alyce shrugged. “It’s always there.”

Archer palmed open the double doors out to the garage. The stark black
reven
flowing over his knuckles flared violet. “The demon is supposed to reset the body to pristine factory defaults when it takes possession.” His words bounced hollowly off the concrete pillars around them. “That’s part of the deal.”

Sera angled toward Sid. “You must have a theory.”

Reminding them a rogue was, by definition, out of sync with her demon seemed unnecessary. “Research on talyan
therapeutic interventions is scarce,” he said. “We do know that which does not immediately decapitate, eviscerate, or exsanguinate a talya just makes him crankier, but by the time Bookkeepers see you after a tenebrae encounter, you’re healed.”

“Or dead and gone,” Archer finished with a scowl. “No middle ground. So why is she stuck with the hurt?”

Sid shrugged his still-aching feralis-bitten shoulder as they reached the league car. “X-rays don’t image ether-transmuted flesh, but I’ll find the reason.”

Alyce had tugged open the rear car door. Now she paused, and the frame creaked under her clenched fingers. “No hospital.”

“Never,” Sera soothed her. “But Nanette could help. She has a healing touch, and she knows what we are. This time of day, she’ll be at the church.”

Sid considered as he slid into the backseat beside Alyce. Sera’s archive notes had bullet pointed Nanette as a friend of the league. Since she was possessed by an angelic force, would her goodwill extend to a rogue who walked with one foot in the darkness? Indecision whipsawed him as if the feralis had him in its grasp again.

No, this was worse than feralis fangs. Of course he was vulnerable to death, but to indecision?

Steeped in Bookkeeper lore, he hadn’t seen that the mysteries had left myriad hairline cracks, until Maureen had shouted at him, right before she walked away for the last time. “Your crackpot ideas won’t ever mean anything in the real world.”

His Bookkeeper heritage had been secret, of course—she’d only supposed he had the most doddering odd thesis adviser—which made her accusation undeserved, yet still so true. He would have always been a closed book to her. It was amazing that his mother had stayed with his father long enough to bear children.

She would have lived if she hadn’t. And he should have known he could never waver after the price had been paid.

“Your thoughts are louder than Archer’s key,” Alyce murmured.

He averted his face with a frown. “I don’t know what you—”

Archer started the car with a grinding rattle as the worn gears inside the wretched vehicle slipped and finally caught.

Sid pulled his seat belt into place with one swipe and winced as the strap slapped his bandaged shoulder. “I’m not that rusty. Yet.” He raised his voice, not that the talyan in the front seat needed it. “A second opinion sounds good. Call Nanette.”

Alyce watched him a moment, then pulled her belt across her lap. She sat back, her finger resting on the escape button.

If only he’d left himself such an easy out. But a Bookkeeper was in for life.

And—unlike a talya—for death.

When they parked in front of the squat concrete building, Alyce stiffened, her heart beating a painful double tempo. “It looks like a hospital,” she whispered.

Sidney took her hand and tugged her gently from her seat. “It’s a church. See the pretty doors?”

Stained glass spread across both double doors in a golden sunburst on a cobalt field. Pretty, yes. She tucked herself against him as he followed Archer and Sera toward the church.

Alyce glanced back. Their mottled car waited alone at the curb, though traffic flowed ceaselessly past on the freeway just beyond a chain-link fence. Over the monotone rumble and the thick stink of exhaust, her senses were half-deadened. She hunched her shoulders, but Sidney was pulling her onward between the doors.

“See?” He squeezed her hand. “It’s okay.”

“It is okay.” As she passed by, she trailed her free fingers along the cool lead seams of the glass. “I can break through those if we need to.”

His reassuring smile stiffened at the corners. “You won’t need to.”

She looked down at the mosaic tile set in the doorway.
BE WELCOME
was spelled out in the same cheery blues and golds as the stained-glass doors, but she was not well at all.

Sera glided through the open, quiet vestibule with the ease of familiarity, calling out, “Hey, Nanette!” Her voice echoed from the bigger, unlit room visible ahead of them through another set of open double doors, flanked by decorative flags in the shapes of sunflowers and empty except for row upon row of stacking chairs.

A small, redheaded woman with milkmaid hips and creamy pale skin to match stepped out of the doorway down the side hall. She smiled a welcome, but she clasped and unclasped her hands in an unsteady rhythm over the pink heart embroidered on the front of her denim jumper. “Hi, hi. Just so you know—”

A man with eyes more gold than the stained-glass sun rounded the corner of the doorway behind her. Though the corridor was dark, the light through the open door made his white shirt glow. “Just so you know, I’m here too.”

Archer and Sera stopped abruptly. Alyce grasped Sidney’s hand to keep him from walking into their stiffened spines. The surge of clashing ethers hinted she might be dragging Sidney out through that glass, after all.

The man fixed her with that gilded glare. “What aberration have you brought to this house?”

The chill that lurked in the spaces between her bones leached through her. He wasn’t talking to her; he was talking
about
her.

Between one heartbeat and the next, her muscles seized
as if her teshuva had taken her whole body in its hand, ready to drag her away.

“Mr. Fane!” Nanette’s voice was an earnest tremor. “Cyril, please. You said you’d wait to see what they wanted.”

“Maybe I meant lie in wait.”

“Here I thought angels couldn’t lie,” Archer drawled.

“And I thought the talyan were repentant, but you’re harboring a …” Fane’s squint was as curious as Sidney’s but edged with aversion.

Alyce fought the unbearable urge to flee and tugged sharply at Sidney’s sleeve. He winced, but they had more problems than his bitten shoulder. “They are possessed,” she warned.

“Not demonically,” he said in a low voice. “Nanette is angel-touched, and Fane is a warden with the higher angelic spheres.”

“That is why they are very not okay,” she whispered back fiercely. “They might … They might …” She caught her breath on a helpless sound of uncertainty as she tried to explain. She had to go; she had to run … but only a dark void spread where her reason should have been.

Sidney pushed his spectacles higher, as if he could see what had stolen her words. “Might what? Don’t be afraid.”

Fane narrowed his golden eyes, which didn’t lessen the lethal light. “She should be afraid. The sphericanum has overlooked the league’s insurrection, but embracing this little imp is the breaking point.”

He stepped fully into the hallway, revealing the sword in his hand. Though the blade was no longer than his forearm and softly pitted on the edges, the etched sigils traced on the metal wavered as if through intense heat.

Without a twitch of her long red coat, a knife—straight and deadly—suddenly glinted in Sera’s hand. Archer bothered with no such subtlety. From beneath one blinding sweep of black leather, his battle-axe unfolded in a heavy
fan of shining blades, each snick of spreading metal more decisive than the last.

He took a stance half a stride ahead of his mate. “Is the sphericanum up for waging a three-way war, Fane? If not, piss on that flaming sword of yours.”

Sidney squinted. “That’s a warden’s hallowed relic? I thought it would be … brighter.”