Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (41 page)

“They like Nim,” Alyce murmured. “They fear me.” Following her shooing gesture, the ether curled backward, retreating like a wave in reverse slow motion. She pursued.

“Wait,” he said.

But she didn’t. The rivet flared on her finger, more violently than he’d yet seen, and she snatched at the fleeing etheric wave. The energy flared and caught Alyce in the backwash. She arched with a pained cry, eyes wide and ice blind in shock.

Her hands flung outward, as if reaching for something, anything, even the unforgiving steel table of the asylum.

Sid ran forward, reaching for her in return.

But the energy collapsed around her with a flash, like bared teeth, and she was gone.

“Alyce!”

He tripped over the place where she’d been. Beneath his nose, the ground wavered between the damp earth of the diner crypt in the human realm and an undulating gray surface. As he scrambled to his feet, his fingers closed reflexively around the only solid thing.

A ring. Alyce’s ring.

He groaned. What balance she and the teshuva had regained was concentrated in the rivet, and it had been knocked loose.

Jonah and Nim were beside him, lifting him.

As soon as he steadied, Jonah gave him a shake. “Why didn’t you go with her?” His voice was rough, accusing.

“She wouldn’t let me.”

Jonah snarled. “Never let that stop you.”

Nim touched her mate’s arm above the sword cuff. “It takes time.”

“It’s too late to take time.” Jonah shook his head.

Sid refused to hear him. “How can I follow?”

“The power is hers, but you are connected.”

An ugly laugh welled in Sid’s throat. “We’re not. I wouldn’t let it happen.”

“But you won’t let that stop you ever again, will you?” Nim pushed him, less gently than Jonah. “Find her. Find Thorne. We’ll find you.”

He stumbled away from them but glanced back. “How can I—?”

Nim swore at him. “Go!”

He ran.

He ran as his mother must have run after him that night, frightened, desperate to get to him. She’d died because no one had been there for her, and in his pounding heart, he knew
he
would rather die than not be there again.

At least he knew why he was running, and where. To Alyce. What he’d say when he got there …

“I love you,” he whispered as the gray closed around him. He could not claim it either liked him or feared him; it was just hungry, though surely not as hungry as he. “Alyce, I love you.”

She slipped sideways through the etheric winds that tore around her. Among the shadows, she surrounded herself with the twisting gray, just one of the nothing.

She remembered this. It was not so different from the electricity that had burned through her brain and silenced everything—at least for a time, before the dread demon slowly coiled in her again.

The void seemed to realize it had ingested a little irritant. The gray heaved around her, like a hanged man kicked against the noose. And the next thing she knew, the etheric winds spat her out, thus proving she was not as powerful as a rope, in case anyone was taking notes.

She rolled and came to a hard stop against a … pumpkin?

Her head rang from the blow and confusion. Slowly, she levered herself upright, without the teshuva’s assistance.

The pumpkin was huge, its pale orange bulk curving higher than her waist. She couldn’t even begin to guess how
much it must weigh, although a sign beside it said
GUESS MY WEIGHT
!

She looked around. She was in the Crystal Gardens atrium. The airy interior was decorated for the upcoming holiday with orange tea lights, little paper ghosts dangling from the trees … and a roiling storm of tenebrae circling the panes of glass six stories overhead.

But they hadn’t descended—not yet.

So much for her assurances to Sidney. Here she was, alone again.

A small blue imp bolted around the pumpkin and nearly bowled Alyce down. They both gasped.

“Hello,” said the imp.

“Hello,” Alyce said. It was a child—a blue child with bulbous black and white eyes on top of its head and its face peering out from the gaping maw lined in black felt, but a child, not a tenebrae.

“You look like a princess,” the child said. “Mostly. But an evil princess.”

Alyce considered. “And you look mostly like a monster. But a nice monster.”

“I’m Cookie Monster,” the child crowed. “Cookies are nice.”

Alyce blinked. “Why would anyone think cookies are monstrous?”

“Sugar,” the child said promptly. “Mommy says sugar makes me a monster.”

Alyce glanced around. “Where is your mother?” Where was everyone? The atrium was empty, though it was clear from the burning candles and gurgling punch fountain that the party had been in full swing.

The child waved one blue arm in a vague arc. “She’s over on the other side, watching the juggler. She told me I should play hide-and-seek instead.”

“What kind of juggler?” Alyce peered suspiciously around the pumpkin.

“He’s not very good. He has only one thing to juggle. A sword. He had some black balloons too, but that’s not really juggling, is it?”

Alyce’s heart pounded. No wonder her demon was still quiet. Thorne was near. “I think you should keep playing hide-and-seek.”

“With you?”

“Yes. You hide. I’ll seek.”

“Okay. But close your eyes.”

Alyce did, because the horror pulsing through her made her feel faint. All those people … If Thorne stripped their souls to feed the tenebraeternum, the verge would expand again, swallowing the whole pier and everyone on it: herself, the child, the crowd at the diner, the talyan, Sidney. …

None of them would be strong enough to stand against the verge.

When she opened her eyes, the child was gone.

With luck—and talyan—Cookie Monster would never know how close the real monsters had been.

Alyce crept around the pumpkin and scuttled to the nearest concrete planter. Palm trees—almost as otherworldly in Chicago as the demon realm—spread the serrated blades of their leaves against the gleaming steel and dark sky beyond. The threatening storm cloud of salambes drifted lower. Alyce was suddenly glad her dread teshuva was in hiding; she didn’t need the tenebrae raising the alarm.

Not until some screaming might be useful, anyway.

She braced her hand on the concrete, ready to launch herself to the next barrier … and realized her ring was gone.

She froze.

A cold sleet of fear prickled across her skin, completely divorced from the teshuva. Divorced. She swallowed back a panicked giggle. Without the ring, she was as good as divorced from the demon. That little bit of self-control she’d focused through the talisman was lost—again.

Whispers of dark thoughts threaded through the room in the tenebrae wake, like the pale strings of fake spiderwebs spread around the Halloween decorations. The insidious murmurs wrapped her tighter than the white jackets of the asylum.

The rivet was lost. The demon was lost. Sidney was lost.

She was lost. And it hurt so much worse than before because now she remembered every precious moment.

The gray haze of the tenebraeternum was so close. So easy to sink into it, to become one with the shadows.
They
wanted her. Maybe she’d always been meant for the darkness.

A flash of golden light pierced her vision. The teshuva was dormant inside her, but she flinched from the remembered pain in her leg.

An angel’s sword.

The angelic light wasn’t like anything else—not like the twinkle lights, not like the candles. It was like sunlight glowing through water, maybe, yet more pure. The light was its own thing, even surrounded by the drifting tendrils of the tenebraeternum.

The shard buried in her knee had been only the tiniest piece, and it had changed her life. What could an entire sword of the stuff do?

She really didn’t want to know.

That, more than anything, made her think it was no wonder the demon had taken her.

She didn’t want to do this; she
couldn’t
do this. She’d seen an angelic sword in action before, and the vision had been the crack in her soul that made her a flawed vessel for the teshuva. She’d spent three centuries fighting back the tenebrae, not for any righteous purpose or even a selfish one, but because she’d been too confused to do otherwise.

She wasn’t addled Alyce anymore.

Except she crept one more planter forward, just to see. Where did insanity and curiosity meet?

Somewhere just a little closer to the action, apparently.

From the last planter, her view was blocked by a folding screen. The painted panels showed a monochrome parade of spooks and goblins and witches under a bloodred moon. Alyce thought it might give her nightmares. Although, considering the view it probably blocked …

Taking a deep breath, she peeked around the end panel.

The smaller side room of the atrium bumped out toward a patio. In warmer weather, the tables and chairs might have been a nice retreat. On a cold October night, the crowds had stayed toward the lights of the park and promenade.

No one would see what was going on here until it was too late.

Too late. Too late. Why did those words keep coming back to haunt her? Was three hundred years not enough time to get the experiment of her life right?

No, she was thinking of herself in the same way she’d accused Sidney of doing, as nothing but an interesting footnote. Small and weak—and lost and insane—she might be, but she was more than that too. She’d needed more from Sidney, and he’d been unable to give it.

So she would be that something greater. Thorne and Sidney were both in for a surprise.

She took another breath and, staying low, pushed herself out a little farther for a better view.

Thorne had herded the Halloween partyers into the side room. Pacing between them and escape, he held the sword at a low angle in front of him, as if it weighed at his arm. Or maybe the light hurt his eyes.

Alyce squinted against the gleam. What did the others see? The child had seen the sword and the “black balloons” of malice that circled around him in a constellation of evil. An artist or holy person—or asylum patient—might see the truth, but the rest would delude themselves.

As far as Alyce could tell, Thorne hadn’t used the sword
against anyone. No bodies lay on the floor; no disembodied souls floated free to tempt the voracious tenebrae.

But neither did he look as if he would wait much longer.

She took a third breath—only the third of the entire time, she realized, as her head swam—and drew her legs under her to stand. What she would say …

From the other side of the atrium, a storm front of etheric energy swelled through the room, so potent the leaves of the palms shriveled at the edges. Curls of the rough bark spontaneously ignited, the woody slivers burning like incense sticks.

Hard-soled footsteps drummed on the tile, the boots of a dozen new intruders.

The djinni army had arrived.

Wrapped around the sword, Thorne’s fingers burned and blistered and wept blood and healed in ever-thickening scars that shredded under yet more blisters. He might have screamed once or twice at the unreal pain, but eventually his nerves retired for the evening.

The djinni wasn’t helping much as it flooded the wounds with the etheric equivalent of bile, raging against the angelic presence. The demon didn’t appreciate what he was trying to do, which might have been why the eternal battle between good and evil was taking so damn long.

But it was inevitable that eventually someone would tire of the stalemate.

By the time Carlo arrived with his good little soldati in tow, Thorne’s scarred hands had stopped oozing. Maybe enough ichor had drained from him to take the edge off the djinni.

“What are you doing, Thorne?” Carlo spun on his heel, taking in the cowed crowd. When he wheeled back, the
light of the sword made him squint. “Magdalena got your message and has one question for you: Are you mad?”

Thorne considered a moment. “Do you mean insane, or still angry about the scuttling of my boat?”

Carlo’s left eye twitched. “She told you she would find you.”

“After the first date, the man should make the next move. I’m old-fashioned that way.” Thorne traced the tip of the sword in an idle pattern. A toxic droplet of birnenston sizzled off the golden edge with a stench like death.

Carlo shook his head as if he didn’t realize how precariously heads were attached. “What do you want, Thorne?”

“I want my
Princess
.” Thorne’s voice broke across demon harmonics. Apparently not as much virulent ichor had been drained from him as the pain would seem to indicate.

“Why, when you can be with a queen?”

Thorne looked down at his mangled hands. “Queen of Spades, maybe. The black widow card. She’ll dig a hole right into hell.”

Carlo shrugged, calling attention to that tender curve where shoulder and neck met. “If that’s where the treasure is. But she wants more. She wants you.”

“I’ll bring her more,” Thorne promised.

He stepped over the hole the sword had scorched in the floor. Perhaps it was the flare of righteousness in his heart that made the weapon come alive in his hands.

He swung it in a tight arc, and Carlo’s head never had a chance.

For a heartbeat, only shocked silence vibrated through the crowd. Then a malice shrieked, triggering the flock, and their cries soared in unholy descant to the human screams.

Sid stumbled across the atrium, half-blind and all sick as the last of the verge mists evaporated from around his feet like dry ice. The blind part he blamed on the teshuva’s flickering
vision. The etheric interference of Thorne’s djinni was giving it fits. The sickness …

Why had he let Alyce leave without him?

He’d always longed for a love without provisos, without specifications. He’d wanted his father to love him despite his being a second son. He’d wanted Maureen to love him even though he had a calling she couldn’t share. But when Alyce had offered him exactly that, freely, without question, he’d fled. He’d had incontrovertible proof of the existence of demons and evil, but he’d never really believed in the love he sought.