Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (34 page)

“I don’t.”

Archer shrugged. “Take good notes. Maybe the next
symballein
pair won’t have to struggle as much.”

Sid waited until the other man had gone before he slouched onto his chair again, uncertain what he should do next. It was a little early to call his father, and anyway, did he really want to have a conversation about his love life with London—or God forbid, Wes—any more than he did with Archer?

His thoughts spun wearily, the cogs barely engaged, the teshuva seemingly uninterested in helping him.

Was this what being a master Bookkeeper would have been like? Facing overarching metaspiritual conundrums alone in his lab? Archer was right; he had always thought he’d be studying the puzzle from above, not lost himself in the maze. How did he figure out where to go from here?

He pushed to his feet, hard enough to shove the chair back into the wall. Whatever he might have been before, now he was just hiding down here. Maybe, as Bookkeeper, he would have been as his father had explained—a separate conscience, keeping watch, making suggestions, shaking his head with distant dispassion.

Too late now.

He walked through the quiet hallways, his teshuva stretched out ahead of him like a blind man’s cane. Most of the talyan were out after tenebrae, seeking any clues they might find about the ahaˉzum. Only the few who’d manned the
Shades of Gray
were in the warehouse.

And Alyce.

He closed his eyes and let the demon guide him.

He found himself in the darkness of the top-floor storage.
The last time he’d been standing in the doorway, only the intermittent bulbs and emergency exit lighting had given his human eyes hope to see. Now, the whole room was a wilderness of shadow and deeper shadow. The twisted shapes of old and broken salvage took on a strange if ominous beauty, like the modern art Alyce hadn’t appreciated.

“Are you here?” he called softly.

No answer. That was all the answer he needed.

He pulled the door shut behind him with the rusty squeal. Good. She wouldn’t be able to sneak away down the stairs. She’d have to beat him fairly.

He suspected she’d be delighted to beat him.

He moved swiftly past the table jungle and through the tangle of light fixtures. He slowed in the jumble of urns—how many concrete planters and long-dried water features did one salvage company need? Half the urns could have easily hidden a crouching Alyce.

He didn’t bother looking inside them. She wouldn’t be hiding.

He kept a wary eye on the high shelves and stacked pallets. Without Nim to set rules about fairness when playing with the big-boned boys, the lithe and light talya would take every advantage. What advantages did he have?

“Alyce, I came here to tell you something.”

Silence met his salvo. But not a vast, empty silence as it would have been had he been alone. It was a close, something-watching-him-from-behind silence.

“I screwed up. But I understand now.”

“Understand what?”

Just as he’d known: No woman would let a man claim understanding without demanding proof.

He turned toward the echo of her voice. Judging by the bounce and distortion of sound waves, his teshuva guessed she was somewhere in the rows of abandoned funerary art—as if the urns hadn’t been pointless enough. Who bought a blank headstone secondhand? Worse yet, who bought a
used one? At least there were no dead bodies up here in storage.

Yet.

He edged around a marble obelisk and came face-to-face with a one-winged angel. Its stance—off-balance and half-threatening, half-fearful with its face averted—made him think of Alyce. His heart stuttered painfully at the comparison even as he made sure to avoid where the second wing had been; only exposed rebar now, it could gut a man.

“I hurt you,” he said. “You have a right to be angry.”

Another moment of silence settled into the headstones, and then she said, “That’s what you understand?” Her tone, chill as the granite slabs, reflected her lack of enthusiasm.

He frowned. That had been a sincere and thoughtful admission, validating her feelings.

The sneaking suspicion nipped at his heels that maybe a soul of pure, unadulterated emotion like Alyce didn’t need his understanding or validation. She said what she felt and to hell with the consequences.

Even if hell
was
the consequence, because everything about her pushed him to a dangerous passion beyond his comprehension.

Her delicate etheric signature glimmered like a faint star in the darkness, almost lost in the glare of the city’s rampant emotional energy, the close shine of the talyan, and the interfering haze of the tenebrae. But he knew where to look. With his demon ascendant, he triangulated, he plotted—and, okay, he guessed a little—then he gathered his legs under him and leapt to the top of a mausoleum at the edge of the piled stone.

How the freestanding burial chamber, easily seven feet square, had come to be in the attic, Sid couldn’t guess, although he absently calculated the minimum weight of the intricately carved marble and estimated the load-bearing capacity of the floor joists. The mass was incrementally increased if he added the slight talya he found there.

Her cold fury added nothing to the floor’s burden and everything to his own.

Alyce stood with her arms crossed, more the avenging angel than mournful. Her eyes and
reven
glittered with amethyst sparks. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. I thought you were going to your room.”

“Because you told me to?” She lifted her chin to a hostile tilt.

She’d seemed so willing to follow his suggestions before. But she was not a child or an invalid. The powers of observation he’d fancied so finely honed had failed him. He hadn’t seen what he hadn’t wanted to see. “I thought you’d want to go to bed.”

“I thought you might too. And I wanted to be alone.”

Ouch. So she considered him capable of blowing off the depths of her affections … and then coming to her bed anyway. If the mausoleum had been dropped on his head, he couldn’t have felt any more crushed. “Alyce, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It is what we do.”

“To tenebrae, not to each other. You told me that once.”

“The devil part of us hurts the tenebrae. The human part learned its lesson well.”

As she’d learned her lessons from him. He’d been so determined to hold himself apart, detached, and now she stood in her no-longer-white dress, as cold and untouchable as any of the desolate statuary around them.

And he knew, with every neuron firing in his scientific brain, that it was for the best.

Three hundred years of innocence, gone. Despite near slavery, despite demonic possession, she had been innocent. And in a handful of sunsets, this man had opened her eyes and unveiled her desire; he had taught her the meaning of sin.

But Sidney had left her there—alone.

Even the devil had not been so cruel.

Now he came to her, to
explain
. She could not believe now the things she had said and what she had revealed to him. She would have been smarter to have turned her back on a feralis. At least then the pain would have quickly ended.

But he was talking again.

“… the influence of the
symballein
bond,” he was saying. “That’s the reason you—we are infected with these epidemic emotions.”

“Possessed and infected.” She was careful to purge any of those epidemic emotions from her voice. “How inconvenient.”

He peered at her, clearly uncertain of her mood, as well he should be. She drew herself in tight and hard, like slamming the empty mausoleum door closed on its hollow core. Nothing inside, not even death.

That she would reserve for the tenebrae. Shredding the darkness around her had kept her alive, if not exactly whole, and the league had a place for her in everlasting servitude. That could be her solace again.

“Thank you for the swimming lesson,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes even more, maybe because this time he did hear her sincerity. “It was my pleasure.”

Never again.

She straightened. “If only we had learned more.”

He seemed eager to hear what he wanted to hear now. “Thorne gave us a few clues. So I wondered if you want to take a trip out to Holygrove Hospital.”

“A hospital? Why?”

“It’s not really a hospital anymore. It closed in the early 1970s. I’m wondering if you might recognize it.”

“You think I was there.”

“Maybe. Chicago had several asylums. Most are gone or changed, but Holygrove lingered in disrepair for a while and was finally abandoned.”

A bolt of something tried to pierce the cold, hard exterior she’d drawn around herself. Not hope. She wouldn’t allow that. Curiosity, she would call it. “You think my teshuva’s talisman might be there.”

“We shouldn’t hope,” he cautioned.

But she’d already told herself that. She would never be anything to him but a curiosity, and so that was all she could give back.

She jumped down from the mausoleum, surprised at how lightly she landed despite the heaviness in her body. “Where?”

“What better time to explore an abandoned insane asylum than right before Halloween?” Sidney muttered.

He’d spoken so quietly, even a teshuva should have missed it, but despite her best intentions, Alyce still found herself attuned to his every word.

Not that he ever said the words she wanted to hear.

A blustering and oddly warm wind had torn apart the earlier clouds. The black sky, with a few pinprick stars, glistened between the gray remnants. It was an apt comparison to her clarity, which had been returning ever since Sidney had removed the angelic relic.

With every passing moment, more pieces were revealed. There were just scraps from the years between her possession and Sidney’s appearance, but those scraps, like fabric pieces, still held their pattern and color, if not their completeness. With enough pieces, she could cobble together a past.

She stared up at the center tower, the two halls flanking away on either side. “It seemed bigger when I was strapped in a wheelchair.”

“Do you remember how long ago?”

She turned to look back at the apartment buildings that had crept up to the edges of the grounds. “These were empty fields when they brought me here. When I left, the streets made a grid on all sides.”

Sidney shook his head. “Decades. How could they not notice that you didn’t age?”

“I didn’t change, but they did. Often. It was not a forgiving place.” She frowned. “I probably didn’t make that any easier.”

From the scowl on his face, he didn’t feel very forgiving either. “There would have been records of your admittance and your therapies—as uninformed as they would have been, considering.”

“That didn’t stop the straps.”

His jaw clenched. “Then someone should have at least noticed that the straps didn’t leave bruises for long. And then they should have wondered. …” After a moment, he
shook his head. “Of course they didn’t wonder, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have come to the right conclusions. I’m being unfair.”

She glowered. He could be fair to those long-gone torturers, but not to her. “I want to go inside.”

“I don’t know how stable it is.”

“Why should
it
be stable?” She stalked past him.

The sloping manicured lawns that spread vaguely in her memory had been eaten away by the city until only an overgrown patch of weeds remained, like the shriveled legs of a dead spider. But the brick building still stood tall and officious, though all its windows gaped, broken. The darkness within lent the illusion that the night was a black sheet behind it, as if the building itself were a facade, only a single brick deep.

Maybe she could push it over with her hand.

She kept her fists tucked under her arms as she climbed the front steps. She’d kick down the door instead.

But the double doors hung slightly open, buckled on their hinges. In the foyer, age had warped the linoleum floors and softened the lintels over the doorways enough to sag, giving the corridors an off-kilter look. Despite her simmering anger, the moodiness chilled her. The drear emotions of the inhabitants had tainted the place down to the mortar.

She swallowed against the stink of mildew that coated the back of her throat and gazed out the door with a touch of longing. “Sometimes they took us on walks around the grounds.”

“Why didn’t you run? They couldn’t have stopped you.”

She turned her gaze on him, realized she still had the wistful longing on her face, and scowled instead. “Where would I run to? I already knew there was something I couldn’t escape. I thought they would make me better.” She stared down where her wrists crossed over her chest, fists under her arms. They’d bound her in the white jacket the
same way, but he was right; the bruises around her wrists had never lasted. “For a time, the teshuva liked the easy hunting. There were always malice, grown fat and slow on the misery and desperation here. The way they screamed when I crept up behind them and the teshuva tore them apart …” She shuddered. “Nobody noticed those screams on top of all the others. Which made me even more certain I was mad.”

“Some people suffering deep mental disturbances do actually see the tenebrae for what they are. Whether that’s cause or effect of their troubles …” Sidney shrugged. “Like you, they wouldn’t have the words to make anyone believe.”

Now she had the words for what she was, what she’d seen. And yet she felt as trapped and lost as the years she’d spent behind these walls.

She spun away from him and headed down the hallway, avoiding the slick damp patches on the floor that made footing treacherous.

He hastened to catch up. “Where are we going?”

“I want to see more.”

To her demon’s vision, the tenebrae signs had paled to the faintest of ghosts, just a few ichor smears where a feralis had retreated to add a carcass to its husk. Without human habitation, there was nothing to entice the tenebrae in any number.

Only graffiti scrawls, tatters of windblown debris, and slivers of broken glass relieved the institutional monotony of the halls. She peered into the empty rooms, but other than a few bits of memory—as uninteresting as crumpled cigarette butts—nothing seemed worthwhile.