Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (6 page)

Thorne sighed in vexation. “You said you’d wait.”

“I guess we got the time, but not the patience.”

“Why start with virtues now?” Thorne stalked down the narrow stairs to the lower deck, his bare feet silent on the gleaming mahogany floorboards, and left the other man to follow, or not.

In his stateroom, he clunked his coffee cup on the mantel over the empty fireplace and dropped into one of the wingback chairs framing the hearth. The rose velvet armrest crinkled under his elbow as he slouched, chin in palm, tracking the other man with his eyes. The djinn-man lowered himself to the matching chair and shot his cuffs as if he owned the place.

Thorne dug his elbow into the nap until it squeaked. He really needed to redecorate—something less Colonial. “What do you want, Carlo?”

Carlo crossed one ankle over his knee and steepled his fingers. The managerial pose sent a quiver of annoyance through Thorne like the glass rattling in the door. “Times, they are a-changing.” His hard Chicago accent smoothed, as if the voice were no longer his own. “The deadlock that held the war between heaven and hell in balance has cracked. Magdalena is calling an ahaˉzum.”

Thorne smirked when Carlo stumbled over the Akkadian pronunciation. Probably ex–wise guys didn’t have much call for mastering extinct Mesopotamian languages. “A gathering of all the djinn-possessed? What is that psychotic bitch thinking?”

Carlo put both feet back on the floor, the better to puff himself up. “Watch your mouth, half-breed.” The growl of the street was back in his voice. “My lady hears all.”

“Only because you repeat it. Fucking magpie. And what’s with the medieval ‘my ladying’?”

Carlo’s eyes yellowed in outrage. “I owe her my life. I swore her my loyalty.”

“You’re no knight errant,” Thorne scoffed. “You swore that to any slick Chicago mobster who threw you a bone, even before you were possessed.”

In contrast, he himself had been too virtuous to ask for the bone, thinking he was fighting for rights, not riches.

Thorne struggled to hold his sneer in place. Was the reproachful voice in his head supposed to be the better angel of his nature? Obviously
that
wasn’t possible. Annoyed at his momentary weakness, he let his demon spiral up. “Tell her no, Carlo. For my sake and hers.”

“But she wants you. While the sphericanum dicks around, Magdalena is gathering soldati—an army of djinni soldiers, yeah?—and soldati need capos. Men like me and you.”

“I want nothing to do with a djinni mob. I want …” He
shifted in his chair. The wood, like silky dark hair, and the velvet, pink as flushed cheeks, reminded him of what he desired and yet had not taken. “I want to be left alone.”

“Alone ain’t a good place to be. Since Corvus Valerius resurrected the
symballein
bond—”

“Corvus the Blackbird? Another fucking birdbrain,” Thorne snapped.

Carlo ran his hand over his head without actually touching his hair. “Getting tossed out a high-rise onto one’s skull makes for stupid, no doubt. But you ain’t thinking right either, Thorne, to defy her.” He leaned forward in his chair, as if the cant of his body could add pressure to his words. “You have to fight for the darkness.”

“I can fight whomever I choose, or so I’ve been told.” Thorne couldn’t keep the wry note from his voice.

“You were told wrong. ’Sides, rumor has it you always pick the losing side. So quit choosing and just give in.”

Though every nerve—human and djinni—told him to hold his ground, Thorne surged to his feet. “I had a soft spot for impossible cases. Don’t remind me.”

“Not much to remember, was there? Magdalena says your little terrorist gang couldn’t make a mark with how many pounds of ammonium nitrate?” Carlo claimed smirking rights as he kicked back in his seat. “First
kaboom
, and everyone—even your moll—was fertilizer. Everyone but you.”

Thorne stalked to the windows, where the wind lifted whitecapped waves from the lake.

And dropped them again. That was the way of leaders—to whip their followers into a froth, only to leave them roiling over themselves. Corvus the gladiator had despised his masters. He’d wanted to be free.

“The djinn are prohibited from gathering,” Thorne said at last. “We stay away from one another. Really, that’s the only thing I liked about you all.”

Carlo flicked his fingers dismissively. “What I saw, prohibitions
are imposed to be broken. Usually in a blotto blaze of Tommy gunfire.” His grin was practically avuncular. “Of course, you’re excused from the drunken part. We never gathered because we never had the numbers. Since Corvus punched a hole into hell, there is a way.”

“Blackbird failed,” Thorne reminded him.

“He died, yeah sure, but the damage he did to the Veil? That’s his legacy to us. Magdalena recovered the notes Corvus kept from his league traitor. If the calculations are correct—”

“Calculations never are.” Thorne leaned his shoulders against the window with deliberate nonchalance. “If Magdalena is all-knowing, as you seem to think, she’d know that.”

Carlo’s gray eyes turned almost as soft as the water outside—and as implacably pushy. “Don’t be so down on yourself. That explosion wasn’t your fault. We checked. Your bomb was perfect; it was the timer that was off.”

The chill from outside leached through the glass to Thorne’s spine. “I know that.”

“Anyway, that free lovebird who fucked you into believing in her cause was sleeping with every dumb bastard there. It wasn’t your brat in her belly when you blew her up.”

“I know that too.” When the djinn-man only gaped at him, Thorne shook his head. “You should be relieved I won’t be joining your half-assed ahaˉzum. If I couldn’t follow directions in plain English, imagine how much worse I am in Akkadian.”

Carlo gripped the armrests of his chair. “I can’t leave here till I can give my lady the message she wants to hear—that you will come to her.”

Thorne pushed away from the window. The cold stayed in his skin. “Very well.” He walked toward the fireplace where his coffee waited.

Carlo smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard, now was it? I—”

He stopped talking when Thorne grabbed him by the neck and squeezed.

Mostly puffery though he was, Carlo still bore a djinni, and he put up a not-embarrassing fight.

Both chairs were broken before Thorne had him pinned amidst the mahogany chips of the half-bashed mantel. No great loss—open flame on a boat had always seemed like the depths of wrongness anyway.

Carlo arched away from the fireplace andiron twisted underneath him, but Thorne amped his own djinni higher as he pressed his forearm against the other man’s throat and stared him down. Carlo tried to look away, his eyeballs tearing noxious ooze.

With a not-quite sound, an almost tactile sensation, like the tumblers of a lock falling open inside him, Thorne’s demon matched itself to the other djinni. He trembled with the surge of stolen energy and pushed harder.

The point of the andiron emerged from Carlo’s starched shirt through the gap between the third and fourth buttons. With the next beat of his heart, a gout of blood soaked the cotton, and he choked on a hiccupping cry.

Thorne held him there while the other man’s weakened djinni tried frantically to heal the wound. Tender new flesh crept up the blackened iron, withered and died, and was renewed as Carlo writhed. “Stop squirming before you nick something important. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

Finally, Carlo stilled. “Fooled me,” he rasped. The sulfuric tears burned bloody rivulets down his cheeks.

“No, Magdalena did that. Tell her I’ll not follow anyone else to the end.”

“You think she’ll let you stand apart? In the end, there will be no one left alone. No third parties, no watchers, no innocents.”

“There’s one,” Thorne murmured.

Carlo’s purpling face contorted in a sneer as his demon’s frenzy rippled beneath the dapper gangster facade. “Who? Your half-cracked little talya freak?”

Astonishment slackened Thorne’s grip for a heartbeat.

Carlo thrashed like a walleye fished from the lake for dinner but subsided when his struggle gained no headway. “You think Magdalena didn’t know about that? I told you she hears all.”

“She can hear. She can watch. Just tell her to keep her hands and her ahaˉzum to herself.”

“Gimme a pen so I can write it down.” Carlo bared his teeth. “Make it a Sharpie.”

“No need to remember the particulars.”

With a sharp wrench, Thorne bent the tip of the andiron around to pierce the other side of Carlo’s chest. The djinn-man shrieked, and his yellow smoking eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped unconscious, his demon too sapped to rouse him.

A couple more twists and Thorne caged the man’s heart in black iron. Magdalena could unwrap him if she chose. Of course, she might adopt the technique.

Thorne stood and plucked his mug from the half of the mantel that had survived the wreckage. The coffee was hot, molecules excited by all the thrashing energies in the room. He took a sip and grunted with satisfaction. The day wasn’t looking too bad, after all.

He dashed the rest of the beverage in Carlo’s face. The djinn-man sputtered to life. He traced the tangle of iron through his chest with shaking fingers, and his whimper emerged in a bilious froth from the holes.

“Now crawl back to your bitch queen with your tail between your legs,” Thorne said, “and hope this time she listens when I say no.”

Sid woke in his own bed—well, not his cozy, duvet-covered bed in London, but his assigned synthetic brick, complete with threadbare hobnail spread, at the @1 warehouse—and squinted at the svelte blonde pushing back the noncomplementary curtains. The sudden light did nothing to dispel the cheap motel room ambiance.

He fumbled for his specs, knocking blood-soaked gauze from the bedside table. “Good morning, Sera.”

“It was once I flushed all the feralis filth out of your shoulder.”

He cleared his raspy throat and grimaced at the lingering chemical sourness of his body’s shock on the back of his tongue. With specs in place, he fastened his gaze on the china cup just beyond the flattened tube of antibiotic ointment. “Is that tea?”

“It’s my tea.” She snagged it and took a sip to demonstrate.

So she’d mend him, but she didn’t want him to think that
meant anything—as if their attitude toward him hadn’t been made perfectly clear already. He pushed himself upright against the pillows and winced at the piercing twang through his shoulder.

“Don’t pull out my stitches,” she groused. “Here, have some water.”

God, they wouldn’t even share their tea bags. And he thought he could tease out the secrets of their unorthodox battles. “Thanks.” He took the bottled water she offered and cocked his head to peer at the line of stitches through his flesh. “Thanks for this too.”

Sera narrowed her eyes, as if she thought he was being sarcastic. “It’s crooked. We don’t do much darning here in Chicago.” She put an extra twist on the harsh middle
a
.

“I don’t do much needlepoint either,” he said mildly. “Which is why I said thank you, since I’d still be bleeding otherwise.”

Her glare didn’t change. “We don’t want you dying here.”

We don’t want you here at all.
She didn’t have to say it aloud. With Sera Littlejohn serving as interim Bookkeeper for the Chicago league, Sid hadn’t realized he’d be stepping on quite so many toes—or toes so capable of kicking his ass. He thought they’d be relieved to have a replacement. Though the leagues strictly maintained their self-sufficiency, London-trained Bookkeepers, renowned for their learning and discipline, were in high demand. Even if he’d been a backwater Bookkeeper from one of the less rigorous, outlying schools, Liam and his crew should have been relieved. Talyan were never interested in books and stats and tests.

But the Chicago league seemed to delight in blasting
never
sky high.

If he could just get through to them, the exclusive research material would prove his merit as Bookkeeper once and for all. Even his father would finally have to concede and could rest easier knowing his life’s work would continue. “I need to talk to Liam. Is he still up?”

“Undoubtedly. He won’t sleep until he knows everybody survived the night. And since you were passed out in Jonah’s car …”

Sid gritted his teeth into something like a smile. “How inconvenient my maiming won’t heal in minutes.”

A spark of violet flared across her hazel iris. “You’d rather be possessed?”

He started to snap back but caught himself. What words had been about to leap off his tongue? Nothing to endear him, certainly. He said only, “I don’t want to die here either.”

Sera huffed out a breath he couldn’t interpret as approving or disappointed. “I’ll send Liam in.”

How humiliating, to interview the league leader from bed. “No, I’ll get up.”

“Liam told you to take the night off.”

“I did, and look what happened. Where can I find him?”

Sera stood back, neither helping nor hindering as he struggled out of the sloping bed and found a clean shirt. “He’ll be down at his forge in the loading bay. He had some things he wanted to pound out.”

What brilliant condition he was in to face the league leader. Sid managed to lock his knees enough to stay upright while he eased his aching arm through the sleeve. If he bent over to grab his trainers, he’d faint. That would be almost—not quite, but almost—as bad as grabbing the slip-on loafers out of his duffel.

The bloody bandages, oxidizing to a rusty brown, lay scattered like mute indictments of his vulnerability. He tried to console himself with the excuse of his near death as he left the room barefoot.

When the league’s last headquarters had been contaminated in a djinni attack, the warehouse had been remodeled with individual apartments on the second floor for the solitary talyan. Of course, they’d put him at the ass-end of the hall. And most of the fluorescent bars in the ceiling
were out since talyan didn’t need artificial lighting. Now the distance between the darkened doorways seemed to stretch with spoofed horror-movie absurdity. But he gritted his teeth—though the tension sent a warning pang through his shoulder—and propelled himself forward. If nothing else, momentum would keep him going.