Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (35 page)

Until they got to the therapy room.

There was nothing much to distinguish it from the other rooms—except for the table, bolted to the floor.

She edged inside, shuffling her feet through a drift of old leaves.

Sidney paused in the doorway, his shoulders filling the space. “Alyce?”

“Here’s where it went away, at least for a little while.” She circled the table, trailing one fingertip over the heavy steel.

He followed her into the room. “What went away?”

“The devil.” She stopped in the middle of the long edge of the table, opposite where he stood. Thick rivets marked where the straps had been, though only small rings of worn leather remained, pressed to the table. Four shallow depressions marred the squared edge.

She angled her wrist and covered the depressions with her fingers. They fit. Perfectly.

Sidney did the same on his side of the table. His larger hands eclipsed the embedded fingerprints. A soft sound she couldn’t identify left his throat. “Electroconvulsive therapy worked against the teshuva?”

“Maybe for a day, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t see the malice. I still knew they were there, but I could pretend. Then night would fall.”

He was silent a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about ECT and demonic emanations. But I suppose, in theory, two such intense bursts of energy, interacting or interfering …”

Anger pulsed in her, dimming her vision. “It wasn’t theory for me.”

He lowered his head. “I see why you’d want to forget.”

Bitterness, like the sour stomach that had plagued her after the shocks, made her stare at him with more bile than she wanted to acknowledge. “You have no idea.”

But when he raised his gaze, she was caught by an answering resentment. “You think I didn’t wonder what life would be like, not having to know about the battles between good and evil?”

She stared at him uncertainly. “You wanted to know everything.”

He gave a low, harsh laugh. “Doesn’t that make me more of a certifiable lunatic than any patient who ever came through these doors?”

She shook her head. “Then why didn’t
you
run?”

“What? Like my brother? It was too late for me, even before possession. If I’d left after I realized how much being part of the war would cost me, that would mean my mother died for nothing.”

She bit her lip. Maybe Sidney couldn’t love her, but that didn’t mean he’d never loved at all. Of course, he would dedicate himself to the Bookkeeper world to pay for his mother’s death. Only her own cravings—not demon-driven, just hers—had made her think she could win a place in his heart. “You’re right.”

He gave himself a shake. “I didn’t mean to hijack your memories. This is your place. What are you thinking?”

In this place where she’d been crazy, he wondered what she
thought
? “I think this is a waste of time. If there was ever anything of mine here, it’s long gone. Like everything else in my life. Whatever price I paid, I’m never getting it back.”

He headed for the door. “Maybe there are records in the basement.” But as he spoke, he was shaking his head. “Except that only works in the movies.”

She straightened. “My past is gone. Whatever future I want, I will make for myself.”

She laid her fingers over the old marks once more. Then she heaved backward and ripped the table from the floor. It snapped off its base with a metallic screech as the weld broke free. The slab flipped one end over the other into the wall, and the age-softened plaster crumbled away in rotten white chunks.

One of the rivets that had held the straps rebounded and rolled across the floor in an ever-decreasing circle near her foot. She stomped on it before it could complete its doomed spiral.

Sidney shifted. “Feel better now?”

She moved her foot and leaned down to retrieve the little metal ring. Instead of a flattened disk, it was gently rounded around the edges. Simple, weak, torn free—how appropriate. She slid it over her right-hand ring finger and held her hand out to admire the band.

When she closed her fist, the metal felt strangely warm, as if the horrendous stress that had broken the table had transferred to the small circle. Maybe it appreciated the return of fear and violence. Maybe it had waited just for her.

She’d always played the smaller role in her life: youngest daughter, lowest servant, helpless victim. Now she would be a partner in full—not to Sidney, who didn’t want that, but to the league.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m done.”

Thorne woke slowly, his head pounding.

He smacked his lips, still half dreaming the sour tang of liquor and vomit. Damn, but he despised falling into the drunken Indian stereotype. He hadn’t done that since … His breath hitched, not on stale alcohol but on the stench of rotten eggs.

He swung his legs off the side of the bed. When he tried to push himself upright, his knees buckled. He caught himself, barely, before his head smashed onto the floor. His fingers skidded across the wet floor.

What the … ?

His bedroom was toe-deep in water. And since he suddenly remembered his bedroom was a lower berth on the
River Princess
, not his childhood old singlewide on the rez, water wasn’t good.

And he hadn’t been drinking except for a single tumbler of scotch to calm himself after Alyce and her big brave Anglo had abandoned ship. He shook his head, and his braid slapped his cheek hard enough to rouse him to attention.

He tried to pull his legs under him again but succeeded
only in making a bilge water wave around his silk pajama bottoms. Where was his damn djinni?

His vision doubled, then redoubled again, until the walls of his berth seemed a million miles away. Had crazy Alyce slipped him a Wonderland pill to make him smaller?

A poison pill to shrink a demon … Birnenston.

He always kept the toxic leach of the djinni off his sheets. He was at least that civilized—or had been for a long time. He’d learned to keep himself chained.

Anger burned off some of the mental smog, and he gathered himself for another try at standing. He wasn’t going to drown like a baby in an inch of water.

With one elbow hooked over the mattress, he managed to get to his knees. He shook his head again, and when his eyeballs stopped rolling around, he focused on the room.

Water was gurgling under the door, slow but steady. But that wasn’t the worst.

The streaks of sulfur yellow climbing the walls were much, much worse.

He cursed. This wasn’t some wicked wet dream of his demon. Someone had invaded the
River Princess
and infected her with birnenston.

The noxious by-product of tenebrae accumulated wherever too many of them gathered. In sufficient amounts—such as, oh, say the amount currently wallpapering his bedroom—it could spontaneously ignite. And the birnenston was toxic to any spectral thing, including the horde themselves. Even evil didn’t want to sit in its own shit.

It was yet another good reason to have rejected Magdalena’s idiot henchman and his invitation to tea and mayhem.

Except now he didn’t have someone to pull him up. He was alone.

Thorne looked around at his slowly sinking ship. He’d told the talyan he’d rather be outcast than a pawn again. But there were other places on the chessboard.

Only two sides existed, though, and Alyce had already chosen.

He tsked at his muddled thinking. Hadn’t he already told them they’d never had a choice?

And when he stopped tsking, he realized that the soft ticking continued. He hadn’t heard that sound in forty some years.

Somebody hadn’t trusted the birnenston to do its dirty work without a bit of incentive; there was a bomb aboard.

“Fuck,” he said.

Burned, drowned, and blown to bits. That somebody wasn’t giving him a lot of options.

Never mind waiting for his djinni to crawl up from his depths. His anger spiked to fury, and he jolted to his feet and toward the door. He missed the door and hit the wall with both palms outstretched. The birnenston ate into his hands, but he couldn’t yank back without losing his balance. Better to lose some skin. That the djinni could replace.

How degrading. He worked his way down the wall to the door and jerked it open.

Water, almost knee-deep outside, swept in and knocked his feet out from under him. He went down with a curse and a gurgle.

At least the dousing thinned the birnenston smog in his head. He righted himself more quickly this time and waded back to the door.

The lower deck was awash. A few items drifted on the current pulsing in from his office as the
Princess
wallowed, sinking aft. A clear plastic baggie—knotted and half-full of water—bobbed past him, a piece of paper affixed to the knot.

That hadn’t been onboard earlier.

If he could dismantle the timer …

But when he eased the bag from the water, instead of a nice brick of C4 explosives, two yellow shapes circled in front of his eyes.

His half-moon bettas … Trapped in the confined space, they’d been after each other, and their perfect half-circle fins were shredded.

Alive,
read the note.
For now.

Bag clutched in his hand, Thorne waded for the stairs. The farther from his room he went, the faster he moved. By the time he hit the main deck—the morning sun near blinding to the frantically ascending djinni—he was running.

He wished he hadn’t been so paranoid as to remove the gangplank to the pier every night since Carlo’s visit. It was going to be a long jump.

He launched himself across the empty space between boat and pier just as the
Princess
exploded. The pressure bashed his eardrums, and he flailed, like another armful of kindling thrown into the air.

He hit the pier and rolled. The rough concrete tore his bare shoulders as he curled around the baggie tucked to his chest. Around him, pieces of the
Princess
rained down, ignited at both ends and burning toward their centers with the ferocious, slow-consuming hunger of the birnenston. There’d be only black char when the fire went out, but it would take a preternaturally long time.

Someone was screaming, but it wasn’t him.

The heat of the explosion scorched his back as he walked away. When he was done, he’d make sure there was
nothing
but black.

“I swear it wasn’t me,” Archer repeated. “It was just an idea.”

“It was a good one,” Sid said. The other talyan, gathered in Liam’s office, nodded.

Liam threw down the newspaper on his desk. The above-the-fold photo on the metro section featured the
River Princess
, listing hopelessly and engulfed in venomous yellow flames. The heat had blown out or melted the tinted windows, and a brilliant blue autumn sky puffed with white clouds shone through the holes. Sid might have blamed overly enthusiastic Photoshopping for the unnatural color and the downward sweep of the conflagration. Except he knew it wasn’t so much unnatural as supernatural.

“A birnenston-fueled fire will make great footage for the evening news,” he said. “She might still be burning.”

“At least no one can get close enough to be infected.” Liam turned to the laptop Archer had brought. “They’re updating the story hourly and still haven’t speculated on a cause.”

“Speculation will get them nowhere this time,” Sid assured him.

Liam let out a sound somewhere between a grumble and a sigh before pinning Archer with another annoyed look.

Archer raised one hand. “I swear.”

“Hoarding that much birnenston isn’t a talya trick anyway,” Sid pointed out. “Whatever metaphysical quirk makes our demons repentant spares them that nastiness.”

Liam rubbed his temple. “Why would one djinn-man poison another?”

Jilly bumped his hand aside and took over the massage. “Why does Ecco drink right out of the OJ cartons?”

“Because he’s a rude beast,” Sera said. “That’s reason enough for a djinn-man to court the eternal enmity of another?”

Jilly shrugged. “They probably have their own ideas about what makes for courting, same as we do.”

Sera shook her head. “I don’t think destroying Thorne’s home, key source of income, and the external manifestation of his persona in one fell swoop is a good way to make friends.”

“But it doesn’t give him a lot of choice about what he does next, does it?” Sid tapped his pen against the notepad on his lap. “If they wanted to drive him in a particular direction …”

“Like into a blind fury.” Archer tweaked the computer out from under Liam’s nose. “I’ll keep an eye on the story. I’m curious if we might get a hint—maybe from the insurance claim—who might have benefited from covering for his illegal gambling operation.”

Liam grunted. “Run it by Bella. She has a sense for shady business in this town.”

Archer held his hand out to Sera. “We’ll see what we have by tonight.”

“The forecast calls for rain later,” Sid said, “but the fire
won’t go out until the boat sinks and the birnenston dissipates. Then there won’t be anything for the fire marshal to collect, much less analyze.”

“Maybe we can make sure of that,” Liam said. “I’ll send Pitch to put a hole through the hull if necessary.”

Archer lifted one brow. “You want to send him that close to a djinn-man. Sometimes I wonder. …”

“He’s subtle,” Liam said. “He won’t leave a sign to follow.”

“It won’t matter,” Alyce said. “Thorne will blame us.”

Sid watched her twist the rivet on her finger and wondered if she could wind his nerves any tighter. “Why would he blame us? As I said, birnenston isn’t a teshuva weapon.”

She kept her gaze on the ring. “I didn’t say he would think we did it. I said he’d blame us.”

“Unreasonable,” Sid objected.

Finally she slid him an arch glance. “You can tell him that.”

“He’ll have enough on his plate for today,” Liam said. “What with avoiding the reporters and police.”

Alyce shrugged. “But tonight …”

Liam stood, and the talyan followed suit. “Everybody, take a nice nap this afternoon.”

They split up in the hallway, Archer and Sera to follow the cyber trail, Liam and Jilly to track down Pitch presumably, and Alyce …