Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (17 page)

“No …” Her eyes clouded. “I remember. He said I mustn’t sing.”

“Who said that?”

“My master. I remember.”

Sid looked at her naked back, striped bloody where the wire had cut her. What had triggered the memory? “Why do you call him ‘master’?”

“That is what he was. I remember his face. But I …”

Sid summoned up his American history. He knew Archer had been possessed during the Civil War, but white slavery hadn’t been part of that conflict. Domestic servants from that period might have used the same word, though. He’d have to ask the talya male.

He poured hydrogen peroxide onto a square of gauze and wiped at the bloody streaks. Underneath, he found only diagonal red lines in her skin from lower lumbar to midthoracic, already closed. It was like a rejection of his touch, and a reminder that she was, as Nim had warned, talya strong.

But the wounds obviously went deeper than the teshuva could heal.

Though he dried her skin with a fresh pad, she shivered. “Never mind,” he said gently as he came back around the table to face her. “It’s not that important.”

“It was my life, and it’s gone.”

“I’m here to help you find a new life.”

She said nothing as he turned away to jot notes on his clipboard. Rates of wound repair were well documented in Bookkeeper archives, but not for female talyan. It wasn’t significant enough for master-level work, but maybe if he took an apprentice … Except he wouldn’t be here that long.

The scratch of his pen stilled. For a moment there, he’d forgotten this wasn’t really his place. When he took over
London, some other Bookkeeper would have tea with Liam, spar with Archer, and continue unraveling the many secrets of the Chicago league—secrets including Alyce.

The pen made a dark blot on the paper as the felt tip bled out his hesitation. The stark proof of his conflicted desires shocked him. He’d given up everything to become London’s Bookkeeper after his father; to want something else would make a mockery of those sacrifices. His only goal here was to unravel some puzzle from the Chicago league interesting enough to satisfy the Bookkeeper council of his qualifications. Quickly he finished his scrawl.

Besides, if he finished deciphering Alyce, the next Bookkeeper would have no reason to obsess over her. She’d be just another talya—female, true, and of a rarer vintage than the ones that had come along so far, and no doubt mysterious enough to keep a scholar intrigued for all the decades of his life—but still just another talya.

In fact, he’d put a reference in her chart to just leave her the hell alone. He shoved the clipboard away. His thumb skidded across the page and left a black smear that obliterated his words.

He wrestled down his unwarranted temper and turned to Alyce. The red scores on her back were little more than white lines now. “It might not be all-powerful, but your teshuva knits you right up, just as it should. Which makes me wonder about your knee.” He circled around to face her and held his hands over her leg. “May I?”

She nodded, and he folded back the hem of her frock to midthigh. He cupped her right heel in his palm, his other hand behind her knee where he’d noticed the shortening of her stride. Her skin was silky under his touch, even the bony points of her knee and ankle softened by smooth, soft flesh. And she’d knocked him flat in the alley with one blow of that dainty foot—amazing, really.

He found himself lingering over the curves and hastened
to explain. “Considering you run around the city barefoot, you have hardly any protective callusing. One downside of the demon’s fine detailing work.”

He straightened her knee by slow degrees. She sucked in a breath before he’d reached full extension.

He’d felt no distortion of the joint under his fingers, no faint grate of broken bones, no pop of misplaced ligaments. “Where does it hurt?”

“Inside,” she said.

He held back an impatient sigh. Bookkeeper training required a certain forbearing temperament, but Alyce was a particularly opaque text. “How long …” He reframed the question. “Have you always had the limp?”

Although insignificant reminders of past damage remained even post-possession, the teshuva’s virgin ascension should have zeroed out the structural imperfections of her body, like the ultimate drill sergeant perfecting a lone soldier for solitary combat.

She looked up at him, pale blue eyes half-lidded. “I remember. …”

He was focused on her, eye to eye, so he saw the moment it happened.

In his apprentice Bookkeeper classes, they’d studied other megavertebrate predators. Anyone working with immortal demon-possessed warriors whose sole mission was to destroy all forms of evil was well advised to learn the finer points of selective eye contact, noninvasive body language, and self-defensive tongue biting.

One of the first warning signs they’d learned was the “death eye.”

“You’ll recognize it right away,” their instructor had said. “It’s like looking into the eyes of death.”

They’d all snickered at the time.

Sid wasn’t laughing now.

Their instructor had explained how mammalian eyeballs were constantly in motion. The involuntary microsaccades
supposedly allowed the eyes to refresh and correct their focus. The movements were tiny enough to evade casual observation, but nevertheless caused an imperceptible blurring of the eyes.

But in a moment of intense concentration, the muscles locked. With the tremors halted, the eyes became perfectly, lucidly clear. In a wolf or tiger or other predator, that sudden clarity signaled an imminent attack.

“Like looking down into a deep, dark well,” the instructor had said. “At the bottom is the soul. And in the case of the talya—a demon.”

Sidney’s heart stopped too. He saw Alyce’s demon, all right.

And he saw the ravenous verge didn’t know the first thing about hunger.

“I remember …,” Alyce said. But the memory suddenly blurred in a haze of other images—ferales in pieces; red-eyed malice and salambes shrieking as they fled.

Sidney blanched, and she bit her lip. Disappointing him hurt worse than the scratches on her back. She wanted to tell him, she did, but the memory was smeared away, as if the touch of the cold cloth had sopped it up with her blood.

She lowered her gaze miserably. “I would tell you, but it’s all gone.” Her voice sounded so plaintive, she didn’t even believe herself.

“I’m sure
you
would tell.”

She contemplated the odd emphasis he’d placed on the word while he busied himself with his papers again.

He wrote with authority, his strokes as smooth and steady as his hands on her skin. She clutched the front of the torn dress under her chin, and the quickening pulse in her throat banged against her knuckles.

When she’d kissed him before, in his room, he had told her to wait.

She had waited. She had
been
waiting a very long time, though she couldn’t say how long exactly. And from what she’d seen in the demon-pierced eyes of the talya males, immortality did not make waiting any easier.

And if she followed that thought, as Sidney would do, she came to the question: What was she waiting for?

Before she could answer, Sidney was back at her side. “I want to get a closer look at your
reven
.” When she gave him a quizzical look, he added, “The demon’s mark around your neck.”

The throb of tension that had seized her twisted from anticipation to something darker. “I do not like it. It’s ugly.”

“I need to register you in the league archives, and the
reven
can tell us the class and potency of your teshuva, even if we can’t get a detailed history.” He touched her hands and gave a downward nudge.

Her muscles vacillated between resistance and surrender. She didn’t want him to see that part of her—or at least not
just
that part of her.

He rested his hand on her clutched fists, his palm so wide it nearly covered both of hers, but he didn’t push again. “The
reven
isn’t ugly, Alyce. It’s uniquely you.”

Unlike her grip, his eyes did not waver. She let him uncover her neck. His gaze, tracing down her skin, made her shiver again.

Her cheeks heated, and her heart pounded in wild beats. “It is the mark of the devil.”

“Yes, I said that already.” His tone was absentminded.

The acceptance in his imperturbable words loosened her desperate clutch on her dress while he went to a shelf of books and pulled out a particularly thick tome. He flipped through its pages as he returned to her side. “Look—here is our visual dictionary of
reven
.”

The big book thudded on the table next to her. “So many.”

“Yet so much we still don’t know.” He ran his finger down one page and flipped to the next and then the next to continue his perusal.

He had big hands, strong hands. She sighed. Big hands for big books—she wasn’t big.

As if he’d heard the thought, he stopped to display the penned illustrations. The page looked as if someone had taken an entire goose and dipped it upside down in ink and dashed it across the paper.

“These are depictions of the
reven
of some of the strongest talyan ever to fight.” He traced one complex swirl. “The depth and intricacy of the mark echoes the power of the teshuva.”

She lifted her chin. “Mine is nothing like that.”

He flipped a few more pages, then more and more until the lines petered out. These
reven
were as much like the first as a cup of tap water resembled Lake Michigan wind-whipped to viciousness on a stormy day. “More like this,” he agreed.

“Does possession by a weak demon mean I am less damned?” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice because, at least to this question, she already knew the answer.

Sidney gave her a chiding look. “Your teshuva may not have the same destructive capabilities as some of its brethren, but the strength of its repentance is no less.”

“Will that save me?”

“Save what? Your soul or your life?” He hurried on, as if he didn’t want to hear which she meant. “As Nanette noticed, the emanations of a weaker teshuva get disrupted—tangled—in competing energy. When it can’t hold its coherence against another signal, it will be altered and lost.”

“You think that is what happened to me? I’ve been lost because my devil isn’t strong enough to save me?”

Sidney backed away—giving himself room to think, she
decided—and leaned against the counter across from the exam table. “I think your teshuva is trying very hard to save you. To save you from things you don’t want to remember.”

She froze. He stiffened too.

Maybe he hadn’t been giving himself room to think, but room to escape.

“I do want to remember.” She made sure each word came out distinct from the others, lest there be misunderstanding.

“I don’t think the teshuva believes you.”

“And do you not believe me?”

He marshaled his words with the same care the illustrators of the book had used when laying out their
reven
drawings, in tidy blocks, no matter how messy the depiction within. “I know part of you wants to remember. But which part is you, which part is the demon, which part is the other parts of you?”

“I am not so complicated,” she protested.

“We all are. Even me. Part of me wants …” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t matter.”

What did he want? The urge to know prickled through her. This must be how he felt about his many books—to open them up and to know them.

She stared at the capable width of his hands as he thumbed farther through the book. Toward the end, intricate and simple
reven
shared the pages, compared and contrasted.

His finger landed on one. “Ah, you don’t have to worry about what your demon wants. But everything else will worry. You have a dread demon.”

She tilted her head and squinted at the design, but it seemed too fanciful to match hers.

“Don’t believe me?” He repeated her words with a little smile and took another step closer to her, one forefinger on the book, the other at her neckline. Since she was sitting up on the table, her face was even with his and he had to reach
up to touch her. “It starts boldest here.” His finger was warm at the crook of her neck and shoulder. “Maybe not so dark on you as in the book, but close enough. A sudden burst of energy, like a startled heartbeat.” He traced her
reven
forward. “And here it stutters, like a frantic pulse.”

Oh, what was her pulse doing? As if he controlled it with his words, her blood throbbed.

His voice lowered—and the throbbing in her body spread lower too—as his finger dipped into the hollow of her throat. “And here it pools and flares. …”

“Like what?” she whispered.

“Like …”

But words seemed to fail him, so she canted forward and pressed her lips to his.

His touch had not soothed her hurts; instead he had kindled a fever.

And it was good; deliriously good.

The torn gown she’d been holding slipped from her fingers as she reached for him, to bring him closer. He made a noise. Was that supposed to be a protest? She measured the width of his unhurt shoulder with eager pets of her hand, and then he was between her knees, the rough denim of his pants rubbing her bare inner thighs.

She rubbed back, and that was better than good.

“Alyce,” he gasped against her mouth.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, because that sounded very much like the start of a protest.

And with his mouth open on that gasp, the wet heat of his tongue and lips was hers.

He groaned, and, like the pictures in his book of each devil matched to its sin, his hand moved to echo hers. With his fingers at the back of her head, he tilted her, just so, and she said, “Oh,” to show him she understood and because she could not stop herself.

His tongue played over her lips and the front line of her teeth before dipping deeper. It roused the fever in her until
she thought she would die with wanting what he was holding back.

She wrapped her heels behind his thighs and drew him closer. No holding back. She would not forget
this
.