Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (25 page)

Liam sighed. “Yes. I got that. And you are hers.” He propped his big fists on his hips. “And both of you are mine. I will not have a pair of interlocked rogues running wild in my city. God knows what chaos you’d unleash.”

Sid clenched the front of his shirt where he’d done up the buttons unevenly. His wrist pressed against his hip bone, and even through the fabric, he swore he felt the spark of the
reven
flaring in time with his radial pulse. “Worse than what you had before we showed up here?”

“Smart-ass.” Liam rubbed his forehead. “It has been a long night. It’s going to be a longer day. We’ll present you as a
symballein
pair to the rest of the league first thing tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have Jilly make cookies for the occasion.”

Sid stiffened. “I can’t stay here. I have to go back to London. My father and the league there are expecting me.”

“Expecting this?”

Sid bristled. “Of course not. I have to talk to him. To them. I’ll make them understand.”

“And Alyce?”

“She will come with me.” He’d have to explain to her too. Never mind that he’d done a terrible job of explaining anything so far.

“You think the Old World is ready for a feral waif and a possessed archivist?”

Sid’s muscles tightened again at the doubt in Liam’s tone, but this time he welcomed the teshuva’s forceful poise. Being on the wrong side of one war had obviously given it the ability to take a few hits and come back swinging.

But he thought of Alyce’s way, and for once he kept his mouth shut.

Leaving the league leader to watch the sun clear the rooftops, Sid returned to his room—his own room, not Alyce’s. He couldn’t face her quite yet. And he still had to call his father.

He dialed on the antique rotary behemoth scented
faintly of cigarette smoke—undoubtedly a rescue from the salvaged junk upstairs. The apprentice Bookkeeper who served his father picked up on the first ring. “At-One London.”

“Hullo, Hugh. Is Dad back from lunch?”

“He sent me out for tea on my own today.”

Even through the long-distance line he heard unsaid words, like the bitterness of cheap tea leaves. Or was that the work of the teshuva, picking up clues so subtle he’d missed them before? “Hugh? What’s wrong?”

“I think he throws away the biscuits I bring. He’s getting so thin.”

“He has stage four cancer.” Sid almost bit his tongue. That was definitely the demon, blunt and cruel.

“So you should be here,” Hugh snapped back, no devil but honesty in his tone.

Sid took the hit. Let the teshuva heal that pain. “Which is why I need to talk to him.”

Without responding, Hugh transferred his call. His father’s phone rang several times before it clicked over. “Son?”

Sid closed his eyes. How could a mere voice—far away and softer than it should be—hurt him? “Dad, how’s it going?”

“Inevitably forward, with moments of relativity.”

“You’ve been reading Stephen Hawking again, haven’t you?”

“Needed something to tide me over. Hugh won’t share his manga since I made notes in the margins.”

“We all have our limits,” Sid said. “Speaking of lines in the sand, or concrete, as the case may be …”

“Chicago has always been a contrary league,” his father mused. “And since their last Bookkeeper was unreliable, I don’t doubt they’d give you trouble.”

“Actually, Liam Niall wants me to join them.”

“As their Bookkeeper? It’s not London, but—”

Sid winced at how badly he was mangling this. “As talya.”

Silence.

Even the teshuva couldn’t pick up a sound. “Dad?”

“What happened?”

“I wish I knew.” He thought of the blank pages in the Bookkeeper archive tally, and his fingers itched for a pen. “I
really
wish I knew.”

“Sidney … Son, this is … I don’t know what to say.”

Considering all the words tumbling through his brain, none of them in coherent order, Sid could relate. “Not much
to
say. Which is possibly why the talyan don’t tell us anything.”

“You sacrificed your soul to get an inside angle?”

Sid tried to deflect the defensive flare at the accusation. “Bookkeepers make sacrifices all the time. Say good-bye to blissful ignorance, a nine-to-five job, any meaningful family dinner conversation. …”

“Sidney, this is not a time to joke. The other European masters will never accept a talya in the Bookkeeper ranks.”

“Why not? Who better to understand?”

“But the danger—”

“Somewhat offset by immortality.” Sid tried to keep his tone teasing.

But his father was having none of it. “The danger isn’t to your life and soul—at least, not
just
that—but your impartiality.”

Sid sat heavily on the corner of the small desk. “What’s the point of impartiality? It’s not as if we’re going to root for the other side.”

“The teshuva
were
the other side.” Through the phone, the creak of a chair conjured up the image in Sid’s head of his father leaning back at his big polished desk, quite unlike the dinged hutch tucked away in this empty room in a salvage warehouse. “The teshuva were part of the army that sought to vanquish light and order and life. That they repented
is marvelous. Without them making amends to scour the earth of the remnants of that dark army, we’d be even deeper in shite.”

Sid choked back a laugh. “Is that the approved Bookkeeper term?”

His father wouldn’t be distracted. “The angelic- and djinn-possessed exist in complete opposition; yet neither have their own version of Bookkeepers. Why not? Because they are sure of their actions. Right or wrong, dark or light, they strive forward. The teshuva, though, they can never again be certain they are on the path. And so they have us. Their conscience. Without our unblinking, dispassionate witness, they may again stray.”

Sid remembered sneaking the Bookkeeper key from beneath his brother’s pillow and creeping down to the workshop in the dead of night. He had never been dispassionate about what he’d learned. “Doesn’t there come a time when one’s deeds outweigh one’s failures?”

“For all their good intentions now, the teshuva cannot be trusted. They broke their faith once.”

As Sid himself had, came the unspoken corollary. A stillness, chill as death, sank into his bones. It was not just the condemnation he heard in his father’s words, but the demon, accepting its punishment.

He’d wanted into this league, to know its secrets, come hell or high water. He’d have to watch out for floods since he’d already conjured hell. Maybe the weakness of wanting that characterized the crave demon had made
it
vulnerable to
him
.

“Dad, do you think I betrayed you?”

In the second period of silence, the hiss of distance and the rush of blood through his ears seemed muted, as if the demon had pulled deep inside him and didn’t want to hear the answer.

“It’s not about me anymore, Sidney. My time here is past. Whatever I say, the other masters will weigh this with your unorthodox entry into the training and …”

“And think I am a rogue Bookkeeper. I’ve read the suggestions for dealing with a rogue talya. What is the protocol among Bookkeepers?” He couldn’t keep the remoteness out of his voice.

“You know perfectly well there is no protocol since this has never happened before.”

Not really the answer he wanted to hear. He might risk facing the council of masters himself, but he wouldn’t put Alyce in front of them. They
did
have rules about her kind.

All the years of studies that had spread so steadily under his feet crumbled around the edges. He’d always lived between two worlds—the Bookkeepers who hadn’t wanted him and the humans who would never have believed him. Now he stretched into a third dimension with the talyan.

Of course, the real world
was
three dimensional.

“Dad, I’m sorry this is coming as such a shock. It’s been … unsettling for me too.” He was relieved that mastery of the understatement came as industry-standard with Bookkeeper training. “When I get home—”

“Don’t come to London, Sidney.”

Short words delivered like crossbow arrows.

Sid gripped the edge of the table. “What?”

“There’s nothing left for you here.”

“You’re there.”

“Not for long.” A hesitation, and Sid braced himself for another volley. “Wesley is back.”

Sid closed his eyes. “And I can only say again, ‘What?’”

“Right after you left. We had tea together today. We talked a long time. It was good.”

Hugh would be overjoyed the old man was eating. “I wish I could have joined you while he is in town.”

“He’s coming back. To the league. For good.”

“Had I even left Heathrow yet?”

“Sidney,” his father chided.

“I don’t care about winning the council’s favor, Dad. I want to be there for you.”

“You were. All the years when your brother was gone, you were here.”

And now that the prodigal son—the one who hadn’t killed his mother—had returned, what use for the placeholder? Sidney remembered the steel cold against his cheek as he’d pressed his ear to the closed and locked workshop door, straining to hear the voices of his father and brother.

The possessed tended to lack close connections in the world; such isolation widened the flaws in their souls that made them vulnerable to demonic possession. He’d never considered himself one of those people, but apparently the teshuva had known better.

He didn’t remember what he said after that, but he didn’t think it was horrible or even particularly strained. His father asked him to call back soon; he promised—and the promise bounced around the hollow of his chest—then he hung up.

It was all very civilized, really, considering.

He threw the phone.

Whipping the cord behind, it bounced off the wall with a crash and a startled
bing
from its chimes. It left a satisfying dent in the plaster, and he was viciously glad he hadn’t been calling on a cheap plastic cell.

Without warning, his door opened. Alyce slipped inside.

He looked away. “I told you to go to your room.”

“But I belong where you are.”

“I know this is hard for you to understand, because you don’t remember how much time has passed since your possession. But this is a new era. Women don’t belong to anyone anymore.”

She tipped her head, studying him.

The fury in him that had launched the phone surged, like an electrical current seeking ground. “I am not your master, Alyce.”

“I know. My master was a bad man. The memories are
coming back to me, in flashes. The teshuva doesn’t hold me so hard when I think of you holding me.”

His anger dissipated, leaving him flat. “The talyan cling to their solitary ways. I never thought the teshuva might want something else.”

“I don’t know if I want to remember more.”

“So, did you come here to break up with me?”

She tilted her head another degree, toward the debris on the floor. “You’ve been breaking things without me.”

It was hard to tease her when they barely shared the same language. He crossed the room to the broken phone and gathered the pieces. Without the churning anger to justify his behavior, he felt stupid to have ruined the old thing. “I just called my father.”

She obviously realized she didn’t need to ask how the revelation had gone. “No man would want this for his son.”

“Liam didn’t take it much better, and he needs all the talyan he can lay his hands on.” He dumped the phone in the trash before he pulled the broken spectacles from his breast pocket.

The sticky duct tape snagged on his fingertips; then the specs clattered to the bottom of the dustbin.

She laced her fingers in front of her. “I want you to stay here.”

He straightened slowly. How did she speak her mind like that, without fear? He’d abandoned her, rather rudely despite his understandable shock, after sharing … Well, according to what he knew of the
symballein
bond, they’d swapped more than body fluids; they might’ve exchanged shards of their souls.

He couldn’t blame her if she ripped out his heart and took back whatever pieces were rightfully hers.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

She didn’t hesitate, but instead just settled beside him, close enough that her fitted skirt lapped his jeans.

Not even skin-to-skin, and still his body prickled with
awareness. Whatever beating his emotions had taken, the energy between them flowed unabated.

“I think in some ways you have the advantage on me,” he said. “Everything I’ve read about and analyzed and debated doesn’t mean much compared to what you simply know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand anything.”

“Maybe not understand, but you’ve survived more than most on instinct alone.”

“You told me you would help me, and you brought me here. I want to do what I can to help you.” She gazed at him, her icy eyes an eerie mix of danger and innocent clarity. He wondered if the Arctic explorers of yore had felt the same tremor of excitement, stepping out onto the shifting floes in hope of enlightenment.

Of course, a lot of them had wandered off, starved, and frozen to death, their north-pointing compasses gone haywire as they lost the difference between the direction they’d always thought was right and what they discovered was true.

He’d never been a huge fan of analogies.

But it was daytime in the city, and only late October, which didn’t get
that
cold, even in Chicago. So he nodded. “Take me out, Alyce. Show me your world.”

They hopped a cab into the heart of downtown, and Sid was grateful for Alyce’s silence. She probably was afraid if she opened her mouth, he’d start talking again. Didn’t gag orders come standard issue with being talyan? Instead, he purged those old memories in the same way the demon erased scars.

Now they rolled around the place like unsettled marbles, dangerous underfoot. If Alyce had no one to hear her, no wonder her teshuva took her memories away. He was already sick of hearing himself, and he’d been possessed only a few hours.

The cab dropped them off on Wacker, next to the river. While he paid the driver, Alyce crossed the wide sidewalk and leaned on the concrete balustrade that overlooked the water, the gray towers looming beyond her in a hard straight frame around her gentle curves. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and observed her.