Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (26 page)

He’d gotten his first pair of spectacles when he was five. His astonishment when he’d realized that trees even at a distance had individual leaves had made his father chuckle. That same jolt of discovery went through him now as his demon-sharpened gaze lingered on the white arch of her cheekbone and the dark silky waves of her hair against the rough black wool of the coat he’d found for her.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw him watching. A hint of rose warmed her cheeks. “I thought you must be empty.”

He thought of his father and Wes taking tea. “I’m not really in the mood for brunch.”

“Not you. The demon. It sustains itself on tenebrae. I didn’t understand any of it, but even in the beginning, when we fought the devils, I felt it feed.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Brunch sounds better.”

“The talyan hunt at night, but the devils—your tenebrae—are less guarded during the day,” she told him. “That’s when I fight them.”

“The teshuva, like all demons, are stronger when our human sides are disadvantaged; in darkness, under stress, whatever. The league prefers to fight at night to hide any leftovers.”

He joined her at the rail, and she pointed. “Look—there’s a likely spot for malice.”

Across the river, a broad walkway seemed to float just above the waterline. Benches and lampposts decorated the riverwalk, but now, under the menacing clouds, the concrete path was empty. “What am I looking at?”

“The ichor around that doorway.”

The feeble October sun hardly bothered to cast shadows through the vellum of clouds, and still it washed out the elusive demon sign. Her senses must be finely honed to pick up any etheric disturbance. “I see a closed maintenance access.”

The building at street level, above the riverside path, was under construction. Judging from the tattered vinyl sign flapping from the security fence, work had been under way for some time. Probably the weak economy hadn’t helped the speed of renovations. One more winter of Chicago winds and there’d be nothing left of the sign.

“Closed, but not sealed,” she said. “A dark place for the malice during the day, and they can sneak out with the night to find their brunch.”

“Their preferred meal being us humans.”

“Not us, not anymore.”

The reminder set him back a mental step, and he followed a stride behind her as she crossed the bridge and took the stairs down to the riverwalk. How quickly he forgot he wasn’t entirely human anymore. No wonder years had passed for her without note.

The riveted metal door spanned wider than his extended arms and must have once accepted deliveries at water level when the river had been more a path of commerce. Now, tufts of brown moss sprouted from the crack between door and frame.

Sid frowned. “So, how do we do this? We could find a way in from above since there’s no real security. I didn’t see a camera or—”

Alyce kicked the corner of the door—once, twice. The metal buckled with each blow. “Or we could just go this way.” She grabbed the corner and peeled upward.

He winced at the squeal of stressed steel and glanced back toward the sidewalk where they’d looked down at the door. The cars whizzing by on Wacker seemed oblivious. “That is more straightforward.”

She slipped out of her coat and folded it into a tidy triangle, which she left on the nearest bench. “But we could talk about it some more.”

“Certainly not.”

She eased past the bent metal.

How loudly would the other talyan laugh if he suggested they attempt to leave the city in better shape behind them? But as they stepped out of the light into the glimmer of red malice glares, he remembered “better” had different meanings.

“There are more here than there were in the alley,” he murmured. “And that time, they almost sucked you dry.”

“Good thing you are with me this time.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Neither did I.”

“But you do now, yes?”

She crept farther into the darkness, luminescent in her white dress, with the malevolent stars twinkling above her.

His vision shivered and refocused, and he realized the teshuva—quiescent in the sunlight—was rousing.

Rousing and hungry.

The damp stink of old brick couldn’t hide the fouler stench of rotten eggs. “I smell birnenston,” he whispered. “This is a feralis lair.”

“Was,” Alyce said. “Only old bones now.”

She stopped in the center of the chamber. The space stretched to all sides, far enough and dark enough that his teshuva didn’t even bother enhancing the view. His skin prickled. When he’d said he wanted to know the talya secrets, he’d thought that would involve more knowledge, more light, less … Yeah, that was dread.

Alyce raised her hands, and the malice freaked.

Sid might have indulged in some shrieking of his own, but the malice didn’t leave an opening on any frequency. They scattered, the gleam of their eyeballs leaving crimson contrails through the gloom.

Those closest to Alyce spiraled down toward her outstretched fingers. But before the oily specters reached her, they thinned to nothingness as her demon overwhelmed the lesser energies. Only their cries lingered.

That left about three-quarters of the horde heading straight for the open door—the open door behind him.

Alyce spun toward him, the dissipating ether a graceful streamer behind her. “Stop them, Sidney.”

He held out his hands as she had.

Instead of thinning, the malice hit him like an avalanche of half-frozen, rancid marmalade. Sticky and bitter, it grated his skin with broken ice crystals.

He might have screamed then.

His teshuva flailed in the tenebrae chill, and his muscles locked seizure-stiff. With each pull of the malice mouths, he tasted the sour corrosion of their evil.

No, not theirs. His.

How deeply had he hid his exhilaration when Wes’s departure cleared the way into his father’s heart? How far down had he buried the guilt over his mother’s death? Not so deep or so far that the malice didn’t find it and dredge it up like a putrid hairball.

No wonder a demon from hell had found a place for itself in the cracks of his soul.

He sank to his knees.

“No, Sidney.” Alyce knelt beside him. The white folds of her skirt washed into his narrowing vision. “Don’t let them so close. Hold them back.”

The malice or the memories? Now he understood how she’d survived tenebrae predation. The teshuva hadn’t let her remember how she deserved this pain and horror and sickness.

He would like to forget too. But that wasn’t his way. He’d never forgotten his feelings; he had just bottled the wretched things and observed from a careful distance, as he would any dangerous energy. Such was the Bookkeeper way.

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.”