Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls (32 page)

They walked on. She guessed they must be well under the buildings now although the sewer showed no signs of use. Even the trickle of backwash had dried up. Her skin puckered at the thought of the rivers of blood and worse that had poured where they were walking, soaked red on red into the bricks. No, wait. That wasn’t the reason her skin was crawling. “Do you see that?”

“Yeah.”

The sickly yellow tendrils snaking down the corridor made a hell of a welcome mat. The key word being “hell,” of course.

She switched one knife to her free hand.

The tunnel vaulted abruptly into a central hub the size of a large room with other tunnels trailing away into the deeps. The ceiling was high enough for Liam to stand up despite the crusting of birnenston that hadn’t quite engulfed the entire space.

“Home, bitter home,” she murmured as they circled the jumble of overturned shelves and shattered glass, so violently destroyed that one metal bracket was embedded in the bricks, and the pulverized glass sparkled like glitter over the thick gluey ropes of birnenston. She booted a broken- necked flask, and it rolled away through a scattering of matte white powder. The binder, she guessed, that they’d used to give solvo substance in the human realm.

She’d been in a meth lab once, pulling out one of her kids, and she knew she’d never forget the unique stench, like cat piss and diesel spiked with ugly desperation.

But this . . . Under the birnenston stench was a sweeter fragrance. “It smells like the first minute of a spring rain.”

“Washes everything away, Corvus promised. Memories. Pain.” His voice petered out.

She grimaced. “Your soul.”

“That attitude’ll get you kicked off the marketing team.” He prodded a vein of birnenston with his hammer, and the substance crumbled, released a cloud of sulfurous rot that overwhelmed the rain. “Who’s in charge of quality control around here?”

She edged around the tumbled shelves but found no raw materials, no finished vials of solvo, and no convenient cookbook with the damning recipe. “Corvus didn’t have much time to close up shop. He burned up haints doing it, but there must not have been much to move either. Why? Does he have another lab somewhere?”

Liam stood tall in the center of the hub. “Or does he have everything he needs to make his move?”

She thought for a moment. “Which is worse? That’ll probably be our answer.”

A faint smile flickered across his face. “That’s the spirit.”

“Spirits are exactly the problem.” She pocketed her knives again. “You were right the first time. There’s nothing here. Damn it.”

“Not quite nothing.” He pointed above his head.

She followed the line of his hammer. Almost lost in the embedded tangle of birnenston threads was a small beaker, miraculously intact and gleaming like a tiny strung pearl.

 

They made their way back to the surface. The beaker of raw solvo nestled in Jilly’s puffed pocket, and she walked gingerly, as if she carried a rain-sweet bomb. Not that there’d been any explosions, but she figured the day was young. “I can’t believe they missed it.”

“The downside of an army of smoke- heads led by the brain damaged. Details may get overlooked.”

“What are we going to do with it?”

He let out a long breath. “I haven’t worked that out yet. Right now, it’s just another twist.” His gaze drifted toward violet, and she wondered if he was angry with her, his newest recruit leading him astray and once again twisting, wrinkling, and denting his precious SOP.

Then he blinked as he faced the sun, and his demon was gone. “Let’s get back to the warehouse. It’s going to be another busy night.”

The trek back to the car was silent. Only as they climbed in did she ask, “Why’d you come after me?”

“What should I have done instead?”

“You were pretty explicit that there’s no place for any . . .” She hesitated, testing the awkward word. “Any bond between us.”

“That doesn’t mean the league doesn’t need you.”

Oh. The league. Of course.

Her expression must have given her away, because he said softly, “That’s all I am now, Jilly. The leader of the league of teshuva. Those who would repent. If not for that, I’d be nothing.”

Silence descended again as they drove through the bright day.

When they returned to the industrial area around the warehouse, they had to dodge delivery trucks and bustling forklifts. Only the salvage building was still, the league’s inhabitants not yet roused for their night’s work. Liam parked in the back lot with the other well-used cars. Side by side, they walked through the quiet corridors made narrow by the leftovers and castoffs of other people’s lives.

The dust of the past tightened Jilly’s throat. Here they’d finally had a victory—a little victory, about the size of a test tube, actually, but still—and she was moping because . . . because some blind throwback of a saloon girl said she couldn’t dance?

Staring at her booted feet, she realized she’d dogged Liam’s footsteps right up to his room.

He stopped, hand on the doorknob, and looked down at her, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry.

Her cheeks burned. “Bella says the guys should dance more.”

“Bella sells more drinks to sweaty people.”

An image sheeted through her mind, straight off a comic book cover—Liam, as he might have been in happier days with some no-doubt practical implement taking shape under his hammer, perspiring at his forge, iron thewed, and clad in a leather apron.

She narrowed her eyes.

No
way
had
that
been pictured in any of her favorite childhood rags. Plus, even a half-witted blacksmith wouldn’t work half clad around a hot forge if he wanted to keep his leg hair and other bits, especially when he was . . . happy.

“Jilly?” His brows dropped into a concerned line, and he cupped her chin to raise her gaze to his. “Where did you go just then? Not the demon realm?”

She felt herself canting forward to rest in his hand as she stared up into his blue searching eyes. “I’m not drifting,” she protested.

Not at all. Falling wasn’t drifting.

“Come here.” He opened the door to his room and shepherded her inside with one hand behind her shoulders. “Take off your jacket.” Without waiting for her to obey, he tugged at the nape of her coat.

“What?” She unzipped and shrugged out of the sleeves before he strangled her in his impatience.

“The birnenston exposure in the tunnel must have off-lined your teshuva. You aren’t making sense.” He framed her face in his hands again. The rough caress of his calluses made her shiver. “Don’t go there without me.”

“I wasn’t going there without you.” She wasn’t thinking about the demon realm.

Though he’d been the one to tell his story, she was the one who felt exposed, as if his words had chipped away at her defenses. He’d risen above his bad choices as a boy only to fall back deeper into the muddle, for all the right reasons, just to end up damned. His past was her nightmare scenario for every kid she’d ever watched walk out of the halfway house. And yet look what he’d become.

She reached up with one hand to echo his touch, her fingertips brushing back a lock of his black hair to reveal the even blacker mark of the demon. The
reven
that curled under her breast and over her heart ached, not a pain to be avoided, but in a plea to be touched.

“What are you doing, Jilly?” His voice was a soft rasp. “No need to weave our way into the tenebraeternum. We’re in no danger here. Not with the energy sinks in place, a dozen vicious talyan ready to charge in if we shout.”

“Then we won’t make a sound.” She pulled herself up onto her toes—thank heavens for the extra inch and a half of rubber and steel—and kissed him.

Desire didn’t have to ride pillion with danger. She was more than the mark that made her his tyro talya. She’d show him. And he wasn’t nothing without it.

With the tip of her tongue, she traced the firm line of his lower lip, sucked it softly between her own. He groaned against her mouth, and before she could warn him about the cry that would bring his men barging in, he pulled her to his chest.

The teasing rushed out on her breath, crushed by the strength of his grasp as he drew her up to slant the kiss, hard and deep. A blacksmith’s iron thews had so many benefits, she decided, when he swung her up into his arms, never faltering with his kiss.

Pillows, full and scented of heather, yielded under her as he laid her on his big carved bed. She stared up at him as he shed his clothing. “I thought I’d have to convince you.”

His gaze never left hers. “You did.”

She smiled. “Ah, the kiss. My irresistible touch.”

“The threat of dancing.” When she held her hand out to him, he came to kneel at her side. “We do work well together,” he admitted.

She wrinkled her nose at the reluctance in his voice and tugged him over her hip. Caught off balance on the soft mattress, he tumbled over her. She pounced to straddle him.

Under her hands, his broad shoulders flexed, then relaxed, sinking deeper into the pillows.

“So this is practice?” She dipped her head to flick her tongue into the hollow of his throat.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “For the good of the league.”

For once, the thought didn’t pierce her. Maybe because of the dimple in his cheek, maybe because he was already skimming the shirt up over her head, filling his hands with her, bringing her breast to his mouth, his long fingers hiding both
reven
and butterfly tattoo, so there was no sign of what had marked her.

Other than him. Hot and moist, his tongue left an invisible trail around her nipple that puckered her flesh. Still on her knees straddling him, she braced her forearms against the headboard as down he went between her breasts and over her belly, the path where he’d been now cooling until she shivered with the desire for more. His tongue dipped into her navel and she clutched at the fat-bottomed angels carved into the wood, which was oh-so wrong. But then he went lower still, his grip on her buttocks bringing her hips to his mouth, and that was oh-so right. She leaned into him with a moan. Suddenly, she was very glad he prided himself on bringing such focused intensity to all his responsibilities.

“So demanding,” he whispered against her thigh. He grazed his teeth along the sensitive inner tendon and she bucked. He laughed, a warm gust across her center that opened something inside her—oh, not just her sex, which was open and yearning enough with wanting him, but something more hesitant and wistful. She wanted to make him laugh more, to see his eyes shine, and not with purple.

She pushed away from the headboard and sat back, her ass balanced on his thighs with his erection jutting up to tease her cleft. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. When she looked at him again, his smile was downright devilish.

“Something I can do for you?” he asked, all solicitous.

“You’ve done enough for the moment.” She closed her fingers around the lean ropes of muscle in his shoulders. “Time to share the torture.”

“Torture?” His tone turned indignant. “I hadn’t even begun.”

“Well, I’ll be in charge of the end.”

He crossed his arms behind his head and smiled again. “Do your worst.”

She did, with hands, tongue, and teeth, until her lips closed softly over the blunt head of his cock. He shuddered and his groan seemed ripped from the depths of his soul. She cupped the weight of his tight-drawn balls and circled her fingers round the base of his shaft, stoking him higher. One, two, three. Then he dragged her up, his big hands strong as ever but awkward with his eagerness.

It was her turn to shiver when her nipples brushed over his chest. Her kiss was more a gasp when she pressed her lips to the
reven
decorating his temple. His fingers sank into her hips, and he murmured against her throat, “Ah,
xiao
-Jilly, I can take no more.”

She licked her lips and tasted the truth of his words, salt-tinged and musky. “I’ll take you, then.”

Centered over him, she sank down, holding his shoulders and his gaze. His blue eyes went deep and smoky, and his body under her was as honed, hard, and potent as anything she’d find in the league’s basement armory. He raised his hips to fill her and finally—finally—eased the ache inside.

 

As their breathing matched and slowed, Jilly rested her head on Liam’s shoulder. “This is the ugliest bed I’ve ever seen. I mean, really? Cupids? Who has sex in a bed carved with cupids?”

“I prefer to think of them as cherubim.” His low, sleepy voice rumbled under her ear. “Cherubim are a species of angel, and if devils are fallen angels, then these could be demonic cupids.”

She tilted her face up to see if he was kidding, but his eyes were closed. “How is that better?”

“We just had sex under them. I like to think demonic cupids would be more indulgent.”

She traced her fingers down his chest, and he sighed out, his breath gusting her hair. “Indulgent, right. Well, they obviously consumed their fair share of doughnuts. But they didn’t burn off the calories like you said the teshuva would.”

His arm tightened around her. “There are other ways to burn calories.” When she sniffed, he continued. “Fighting the tenebrae, for example.”

She tweaked the fine line of chest hair down his middle. “Or other ways.”

He brushed his lips over her crown. “If it bothers you, I’m sure I can find another bed here somewhere, unless the men have absconded with them all.”

“What would they do with beds?”

“Nothing like what we just did, I assure you.” His tone turned pensive. “Most of them have hideaways elsewhere, sanctuaries where they go to lick their wounds, be alone. Archer has a conservatory, I recently discovered.”

Curiosity spurred her tongue before she could bite it. “Do you have a secret place?”