Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls (24 page)

“Again, do we really want to know?”

She thought he already did. “It’s because you’re the leader. If one foolproof way to kill a talya is decapitation—you did say that severed limbs don’t regenerate—then removing you would destroy the league.”

“Hardly.”

“Don’t be such a—”

He halted and held up a hand. “Shit.”

“I wasn’t going to be so harsh, but . . .”

“Feel that?”

The subliminal rumble under her feet wasn’t even enough to shake the dirt from the rails, but it made her knees weak. “Train coming. Do we—?”

“Run.”

But they were running
toward
the train, with the ferales and malice keeping them on track. Or more to the point, keeping them from leaving the track.

In the past she’d been blamed once or twice, maybe three times, for leaping before she looked. This time, though . . . “We have to jump for it.”

“We can’t lead the ferales into innocents. The slaughter would be appalling.” He huffed. “Not to mention the explanations. We have to wait to find the right place.”

She didn’t have the breath to tell him waiting seemed like a bad idea. With the bad guys pressing so close, the right place could only be the wrong place.

Then the light of the train loomed ahead of them and they were out of time.

Without speaking, they both put on a fresh burst of speed. Up ahead, a work platform jutted off to one side of the tracks. Beyond it, a shuttered storefront was the only break in the solid brick walls lining the path. The roll-down security grille at street level was scrawled with illegible graffiti, but the plate-glass window above was miraculously intact.

Not for long.

The engine bore down on them. Its single light glared like the wrath of some monstrous deity, and the tracks shook in earnest. To an observer, Jilly thought, it must look like they were the two most suicidal people in the city. Unless, of course, the observer had demon-enhanced vision and could see the converging armies of malice and ferales behind them.

Actually, they probably still looked like the most suicidal people in the city.

“Me first this time,” Liam shouted.

He flung himself across the gap to the building. Backlit by the oncoming train, his silhouetted duster flared like wings. In midair, he twisted, gathered the coat close—more like a protective chrysalis now—and slammed into the window.

Glass shattered in all directions in a silver spray. He fell into the darkness beyond.

Jilly steeled herself for the jump, giving him a chance to clear the landing pad. Assuming he hadn’t slashed a major artery or anything inconvenient like that.

In a moment the train would be on her, and a moment after that—with a smidgen of luck—it would obliterate the ferales. Which would eliminate about half their problems. At least the half with corporeal fangs.

Unless, of course, she didn’t move at all and then all her troubles would be over forever.

Silence. Stillness. Sweet escape. For the space between one heartbeat and the next, the thought beckoned to her with chill fingers and breath like ice. Her vision grayed.

Maybe her sister had it right.

But that wasn’t her. Never had been.

The roar of the train drowned the whisper of the tenebraeternum. In a rush, the night bounded back into sharp relief around her. Blinded by the oncoming light, she launched toward the black maw of the broken window.

Thanks to Liam’s much bigger body, she cleared the opening without a single snag on the jagged remnants of glass. With the demon’s instinct, she tucked her shoulder, rolled, and stumbled into a crouch.

The train screeched by outside the window. Or maybe that was the sound of a dozen ferales squished against the rails. A girl could dream.

Liam was already on the move, although he glanced back once. “You still have your knives. Good.”

She glanced down at her white knuckles. The sweat-sticky leather straps that bound the handles felt welded to her palm. Probably she’d never be able to let them go. “Seemed like a good idea to hang on to them. You guys are such hard-asses, I’m sure your armory has a crazy late-return fee.” She switched one of the crescents to her other hand.

“Better late than . . . Damn it.”

“Well, yeah, pretty much anything is better than—” Then she followed his gaze. “That.”

The faint swirling stream of soul flecks flowed toward them.

“This is another haint haunt?” She shook her head. “What are the chances?”

“Pretty high, considering we were driven here by demons.”

“I most definitely don’t like this.” She stiffened as the souls spiraled lazily at her, drawn to the bracelet like tiny doomed stars into a black hole.

“They won’t hurt you. I don’t think.”

She scowled. “I meant, I don’t like the idea we were pulled here.” She waved her arm, disrupting the slow spiral. “Kind of like these things.”

“Stop swatting at them. It’s disrespectful. They’re not going to follow you far, or you would’ve been trailing them around like fairy dust ever since your teshuva gave you the bracelet.”

“The gift that keeps on giving.”

“For eternity, yeah.” Liam checked his cell phone.

“Still too much interference to get a call out.”

And get reinforcements in. She took a breath, not so much to rouse her demon as settle her nerves. The teshuva could only do so much, apparently. “Then we’re on our own. Good thing you got me.”

She expected him to laugh. Instead he pocketed the phone and nodded. “Good thing.” He opened his coat and folded back the front edge to reveal the grip of the hammer. “The tenebrae were so eager to get us here. Let’s go see what they wanted us to find.”

Together, they left the soulflies behind in a pinwheel of sparks.

 

As they tracked deeper through the dark building, leaving the lightened square of the broken window behind, Liam longed to leave
her
safely behind. There was no safety to be had—he knew that—but the impulse didn’t change. If only he had a Jilly-sized trap where he could lock her away, someplace he’d find his way back to between battles.

Of course, she’d kill him if she caught even an inkling of his thoughts. How convenient the flight for their lives distracted her from the telltale betrayals of capillary-refill rates, pupil dilation, and galvanic skin response that were the demon’s version of mind reading.

She had the link to the soulflies, which led to the haint haunts connected to this latest demonic infestation, which would lead, on a twisting path, no doubt—though certain as day led to night—to Corvus. She was anything but safe.

Like the weapons she had chosen, she was all sharp points and deadlier curves. But unlike the leather-wrapped grip of the crescent blades, if there was any safe place to hold her, he had yet to find it.

That didn’t stop his hands from remembering the shape of her, as dangerous—and strangely calming—as the hammer he released from the anchor inside his coat.

The third floor of the storefront where he’d broken through smelled of dust, mouse droppings, and moldy cardboard. A storage room, of some sort, but, judging from the strength of the stench, not one in recent use.

He paused at the closed door that led out to the hall. A stretch of his demon senses picked up the boil of malice outside on the street and some more distant, muddled agony. Perhaps the ferales swept along by the train.

“Something creepy in here,” Jilly whispered. “I don’t suppose the graffiti on the front door counts as art to keep the malice out.”

“Depends on how good the artist was and what he infused into his art. Tags alone won’t do it.”

“I knew I should’ve pushed harder for that art-therapy program at the halfway house, but, speaking of creeps, Envers was always telling me we didn’t have the money for it. I bet he’d change his tune after a ride-along with the league.”

Regardless of the creep factor, they couldn’t stay here. He turned the knob and let himself out into the hall.

The eerie black lighting of the teshuva in hunt mode flattened the perspective in the wide, empty hallway. No birnenston. No etheric smears. So why had the soulflies gathered? They moved too slowly to have been drawn to Jilly from outside in the brief time she’d been in the building. And if the bodies they’d been ripped from weren’t present . . .

“I see you followed my little trail of bread crumbs.”

Out of nowhere, a shape coalesced at the end of the hall, a deeper blackness among the shadows.

Jilly’s hand fisted in the back of his coat, and a few shards of glass fell from the folds with a warning chime. Liam settled his hand on the hammer. “Corvus.”

Liam angled the hammer in a two- handed grasp across his body, Jilly behind him, as the djinn- man took another step down the hall. Despite the teshuva ascending, Liam couldn’t make out the djinn-man’s features, although the curious tilt to the head was apparent.

“Corvus?” The rough voice slurred. “Barely. Thanks to you.”

Corvus stepped into a faint fall of street light that struggled through from an outside room. Soulflies flickered in the air, and Liam’s stomach twisted when he wondered how much haint dust was trapped in the grimy creases of the djinn- man’s clothing. Only by shuffling his demon senses to the side was Liam able to make out Corvus’s face.

Four months ago, Liam had caught the briefest glimpse of the djinn-man. Archer had thrown him from a high-rise, which made visual identification problematic. There hadn’t exactly been a lot left to remember. A powerful wrestler’s build, a shaved head, a lot of blood. And then the building had collapsed on him in a quite dramatic spray of bricks and demon-realm wind. More concerned with the survival of his talyan, Liam hadn’t bothered noting details, since they’d thought Corvus was dead—body, soul, and demon separated forever.

Apparently the demon part had other ideas.

Closer now, in the staggered light, Liam studied the slack face. On that terrible night, spatterings of gray matter had melted holes in the snow, which probably indicated a certain amount of persistent brain damage. What kind of demon could bring a body back from that? And without the soul as anchor.

One of Corvus’s faded blue eyes slid sideways, though the other stayed pinned on them. “We had no fight with you, teshuva.”

“ ‘We, ’ ” Jilly echoed softly. “I see them both.”

She was right. Liam’s human eyes saw the corporeal Corvus body, but his teshuva’s sight glimpsed the hovering afterimage of the possessing djinni, like an ill- fitting shadow superimposed over the man.

Corvus’s demon still rode him, as brutalized as any haint, but the djinni hadn’t burned through its chosen body. It possessed the mangled flesh with a delicacy that whispered of eons of refined control. The only sign of its now imperfect merger was Corvus’s exposed
reven
. The black lines that climbed both his arms like vicious briars seeped birnenston. The sulfuric poison had eaten away at his sleeves, leaving his strangeness painfully apparent to even the most oblivious human.

And the djinni claimed to have no fight with the league? Liam could only wish that were true.

“You corrupted my Bookkeeper,” Liam reminded him. “And then the two of you pierced the Veil to the tenebraeternum to call over a demon that possessed a good woman . . . which made her one of mine. And still, the league and the djinn might have continued as we have since before even you were taken in Nero’s day. But then you tried to kill Sera, and her mate did not handle that well.”

“So we noticed.” Corvus’s lips drew up in a terrible rictus. A smile, Liam realized. “But just as you have found a new configuration with that woman, so we have fresh faces.” A drop of birnenston leaked from Corvus’s wandering eyeball and fell, sizzling through the old linoleum. Corvus—or maybe the demon—lifted one hand to wipe away the smoking tear. “How do you like them?”

“The salambes?” Liam shrugged. “We destroy malice and ferales. Honestly, what’s one more enemy?”

“Ah, but their kind have not been free since the Fall. And they are finding their way here now. With some help from us.” Another poisonous tear crept down Corvus’s cheek.

Liam had known that the salambes were a foe he hadn’t encountered before, despite his years in the tenebrae trenches. But hearing the Corvus-djinni confirm that the tides of the battle were shifting again wasn’t exactly encouraging news.

That awful lopsided smile returned. “What’s more, we learned the trick from you.”

Jilly sucked in a breath.

Liam didn’t move. “More of Bookie’s betrayals?”

Corvus shook his head. The lazy eye rolled, lid flapping. “Your Bookworm gave us the
desolator numinis
, but you talyan fashioned the burning ones. Yet another way you are lately setting the nights on fire, yes?”

The djinn- man gave Liam a leer and lazy-eyed wink, as if he meant to be chummy, but the slyly suggestive accusation chilled Liam to the bone.

And still the slurred drone went on: “You gave shape to the salambes, but what is the other meaning of ‘forge,’ blacksmith?”

Liam wondered exactly how much bitching about the league Bookie had done with his evil cohort. He could’ve done without the djinn-man knowing
all
their secrets. “To forge is to fake.”

“Ah, so it is. Are you a false leader, then?”

Jilly surged forward. “He would never help you!”

Only Liam’s arm, snagged around her waist, kept her from charging the djinn-man. “As much as I appreciate your defending me . . . ,” he murmured. He meant to sound wry, but the warmth in his chest was more than the close press of her shoulders could explain. He’d en-vied those she stuck up for, and now he knew how it felt. Quite good. If only he had time to revel.

Corvus tilted his head to examine her. “I never said it was just him.” Before Liam could chase down the ominous echo the words sent tolling through his head, the djinn-man continued. “You are small and sharp. And you used to run alone, just as my darklings did. Free.” He shifted a reproachful gaze to Liam. “You, at least, I thought knew better than to fall back into the trap with her.”