Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (30 page)

Alyce shifted in her seat. “What do we want with him?”

“Whatever he wanted with the verge,” Sid said. “He’s the closest connection we have to the intentions of the djinn, and if they have plans for the verge …”

“He won’t tell.” Fretfully, she tugged at her seat belt. “Well, he might, just because he likes to show how clever he is. But he won’t tell us anything useful if we all confront him.”

Sid bristled. “Do not say you want to get on a boat with him alone. Whatever relationship you had with him was … was before, not after you threw a paver at his head.”

“At his hand,” she corrected. “Because he was trying to shoot me.” She let the belt retract with a snap. “
That
is the kind of relationship we had.”

Liam drummed his fingers on the seat back. “You have a better idea, Westerbrook?”

“If the
River Princess
is Thorne’s base of operations, a quick, quiet recon might find something, anything, on this gathering of djinn.” Sid scowled at Alyce. “Without unnecessary shooting.” He smoothed the scowl when he glanced back at Liam. “After our run-in today, chances are Thorne won’t be wasting his time on a pleasure cruise, so I’ll have the place to myself.”

“You?” Alyce’s voice was small.

Sid didn’t look at her. “I’m the obvious choice. Best qualified to judge any information Thorne left lying around. Least valuable if the mission goes awry.”

“I don’t rank my talyan for sacrifice,” Liam said.

Jilly tapped her phone on the dash in counterpoint to Liam. “We could follow in Jonah’s boat. The
Shades of Gray
is outfitted for running dark. If you get dumped overboard, we can recover you.”

Sid tried for talya humor. “Alive or dead?”

“Yes,” Jilly said.

“No,” Alyce said.

“You’ll go together,” Liam said. When Sid drew a harsh breath, the league leader pinned him with a glare. “Just in case sacrifice seemed like an option.”

Alyce nodded and settled back in her seat.

Sid wanted to scream his rejection.

When Liam had first contacted the London league, seeking older records than any kept in the New World, he’d danced around the information he wanted. Eventually, he asked what they had on long-extinct
symballein
pairings. Specifically, how long did the bond last?

Once the Bookkeeper masters had overcome their shock that the
symballein
bond existed, they’d laughed at the commitment phobia that reared in the face of eternity.

Now Sid understood. Liam hadn’t feared the bond lasting forever; he wanted to make sure it did.

That was hard to do when half the bond was stretching toward suicidal curiosity.

For once, Sid didn’t mean himself. But damn it, if he couldn’t talk the Bookkeeper talk anymore, and he didn’t walk the talya walk, what was left?

“Thorne has hinted, more than once, he wanted something from me,” Alyce said quietly. “What if it was my teshuva’s talisman? What if he took it? The thing that could make me a real talya.”

Sid scowled. “You are possessed by a repentant demon. That makes you a real talya.” If he said as much to himself, would that make it true?

“You know what I mean. I want it back from him.” The
determination in her voice left no room for discussion. With the removal of the interfering angelic relic, the drifty Alyce was coming into focus—hard, sharp focus. “What time does the
River Princess
leave?”

“Not until nine,” Jilly said. “Easier to slip out of sight, I suppose, and deal the cards in the dark.”

“Then we have time,” Sid said.

“For me to change clothes?” Alyce asked. “This dress would terrify even a djinni.”

“For me to teach you to swim.”

Back at the warehouse, Alyce was hustled away in the triad of women to find a swimsuit and something suitable for a night of breaking and entering. Sid went down to the labs.

For a long moment, he stood in the doorway of the darkened room, listening to the soft whir of the mainframe as it rolled over some problem in its mechanical guts. Such a comforting noise as it methodically and dispassionately—oh, and bloodlessly—worked its way to a solution.

This was where he’d belonged, just another methodical, dispassionate, and bloodless machine.

But in two days with the Chicago league, he’d thrown his methodology right out the window and gotten excessively bloody, and as for the passion …

Technically, these were not the answers he was seeking.

He finally flicked on the lights. While he’d driven around the river with Alyce, looking for billboards, Archer had returned to the warehouse earlier with Thorne’s gun and the shard taken from Alyce’s leg.

To Sid’s human eye, the gun looked more dangerous: a cheap, ugly, short-barreled thug of a gun. But his gaze kept shifting to the shard, the teshuva’s vision overlying his own like a jeweler’s loupe.

The shard had been placed in an isolation cabinet. A pink sticky note on the front of the glass read
WTF?
in Sera’s handwriting.

The revolver lay on the counter, cleaned of crypt mud, its hollow point rounds unloaded. The computer monitor behind it displayed nested tabs of what Archer had found through his wireless skullduggery. Sid pulled up a chair and minimized the windows as he read.

To his surprise, the gun did have a history. One of the first to bear a serial number after a 1968 law, it had passed through the hands of a gun dealer, Rose Red Pony. And Red Pony had her own history on the next screen. The FBI had opened a file on her after several arrests where she’d been agitating for violence during otherwise peaceful civil rights marches. Whether her motivation had been equality for all or better sales for herself, the conspiracy case against her had become irrelevant when the gun shop and the flophouse above—a known hangout for dissatisfied protesters—exploded. No one had survived.

Clicking on the page of known associates and presumed deceased, Sid scanned the list until his gaze locked on the name:
Thorne Halfmoon, suspected bomb maker, remains unverified
.

Dead? If only. Quickly cross-referencing the names with burial records, Sid found funeral matches for all but one. Of course not. Throne had descended not into a pauper’s grave but into possession.

Archer had ended his search there, apparently satisfied to know their enemy’s full name and probable possession date since the possessed rarely left deep footprints. This was one reason the demons chose them. Still curious, Sid followed the electronic trail down through the years.

While older records were only haphazardly being digitized by police departments, local governments, and libraries, Bookkeepers had learned to take advantage of industrious amateur genealogists. Their findings—from scans of yellowed family Bible birth ledgers to snapshots of weathered tombstones—often captured the ephemera that history forgot.

The possessed were just such ephemera, but Sid refused to feel pity, for himself or Thorne.

He scanned several active forums before he found a link to a Thorne Halfmoon. The genealogist was following a different family line but had posted a Polaroid of a half-dozen young men framed in the girders of a skyscraper, their hard hats tucked under their elbows. Sid didn’t need to read the names typed neatly along the bottom of the screen; his gaze locked on the rawboned, buzz-cut youth standing a little apart from the rest. A shadow from the girder cut across his face, the set of his unsmiling mouth already as hard edged as the steel.

Sid pushed back in the chair, contemplating the black bore of the gun and the smaller hollow tips of the ammunition. The glimpse into Thorne’s past was every bit as dark and empty: the makings of a djinn-man. Had the younger Thorne felt the forces of darkness gathering around him? As he stood on those suspended beams, had he sensed the cracks in his soul that made him vulnerable to the demon?

If he
had
known, what would he have done differently?

When Sid clicked the little
x
in the upper right-hand-corner of the photo, all that remained on the computer screen was the gray on black @1 logo and the ghostly reflection of his own face. The question reflected back at him too. Knowing what he did now—what he would have known before his possession if he’d stopped for half a second to really listen to Alyce’s halting explanation of the etheric energy that had surrounded him—would
he
have done anything differently?

The casters of the chair creaked as he shifted, his mind whirling through the choice that had passed, untaken. No wonder Archer had stopped his search on Thorne. Train-wreck curiosity was too macabre; there was nothing left to examine, not even in the pieces of his own life.

Sid ran the gun through an etheric sequencer, hoping to identify the demonic signature that might pinpoint the
class of djinni they were up against, and his lip curled in an involuntary sneer as he remembered Thorne’s braggart comments about his shooting skills. The reaction was the teshuva’s, of course, not his own, since firearms mastery was not something a Bookkeeper could claim.

Sid tamped down his impatience. A master Bookkeeper wouldn’t try to hurry an investigation any more than he would pull an algae culture into bloom. A talya, however, was a master of forceful impatience.

He’d been left with the worst of both worlds; no power, no patience. If only he could weld those helplessly spinning wheels of himself into something useful again.

In the corner of his vision, the shard of the angel relic wavered in its burning-unconsumed eternity like a warning.

Or maybe, like an idea.

“Just give in to it, Alyce.” He had to raise his voice a little. In the midst of family hour at the YMCA, the pool overflowed with children shrieking and adults looking the other way.

She sputtered. “If I give in, I go under.”

“That’s your dread talking.”

“The demon doesn’t talk.”

He glanced around. No one was close except a trio of young girls, their beaded cornrows clacking as they whirled and splashed one another and screamed.

He turned to Alyce. “Just listen to me. Lie back on my hands.”

She eyed him with clear misgiving, then sighed and eased herself horizontally.

He kept his palms flat under her shoulder blades. “Now relax, spread your arms out to your sides, and arch your back.”

“My ears get wet.”

“Water in your ears won’t kill you. Not being able to
float might.” There were so many other ways a talya could die, but she was probably better able to defend against those than he was.

She sighed again, more aggrieved, but did as he said.

He kept his gaze fixed on hers. But at the top of his peripheral vision, he couldn’t help but notice the thrust of her breasts as she tried to comply with his directions. The white triangles of stretchy fabric reminded him too much of the clothes he’d removed from her the night before. He was suddenly very glad for the baggy fit of his trunks and the frenetic action in the pool that obscured any sight line beneath the waves.

Alyce peered up at him. “You aren’t relaxed.”

“We’re about to trap ourselves on the boat of a former terrorist possessed by a demon who has already tried to kill us once, nosing around for secret dirt that will set us on a collision course with the worst monsters in the city. Why wouldn’t I be relaxed?”

“At least you’re standing up.” She jutted her lower lip. “Why did you want to go to Thorne alone?”

“It would be safer.”

Her eyes widened, stricken. “You thought you’d be safer without me?”

“I thought
you
would be safer.”

She tilted her head back farther to lock gazes. “I was the youngest daughter of a poor farmer. I was a servant, a lunatic. Even the angel and demon who fought above me never gave me a thought.”

The emotion in her eyes was deeper than any pool, at once buoying him up and stealing his breath with the threat of drowning.

“I thought about you.” His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. “See, when you get distracted, you float fine.”

Once he called her attention to it, she tensed and started to sink. He levered her shoulders up and put her on her feet. They were near the shallower end, but she was not tall,
so when she faced him, the waves lapped down her décolletage.

The trio of girls had moved closer, and their antics pushed Alyce toward him as the water surged over her shoulders.

He lifted her and turned to shield her against the splashing. Before he could put her down again, she circled her arms around his neck and levered herself higher on his body to fold her legs behind him. His pulse kicked up a few waves of its own.

“Once again, you are right.” From her perch around his waist, she looked down, and her husky voice surged through him. “I am distracted, and look how I float.”

Beads of water sparkled over her
reven
like crystals on a black velvet choker. If he leaned forward just a fraction, he could press his lips to the hollow of her throat. Except this was such the wrong time, no matter what the craving in him said.

Not that there had yet been a right time. He supposed immortality and the
symballein
bond would take care of that, unless they were viciously slaughtered later tonight.

“Alyce,” he murmured, “does nothing frighten you?”

“Those children might still get water up my nose”—she tilted her head—“and finding this swimming suit was an unpleasant experience, bordering on terrible. The teshuva wanted to tear everything into tiny pieces. Tinier pieces.”

He smiled. “And yet you overcame.”

“I did. Do you like it?” She lifted herself higher out of the water, her legs tightening around him. He shifted his hands under her backside to hold her up. The soft curve of her bottom and the flex of muscle in her thighs made a slingshot of lust that catapulted rational thought into another time zone.

He caught his breath, gaze fixed not on the white bikini but on her darkening eyes. “I like it.”

Her smile picked up where his had vanished. “Good. I cannot wait to hear what you think about the dress.”

He wished he’d found something nicer for himself. Archer had said Thorne’s illegal riverboat gambling operation catered to high rollers and that they should try to fit in.