Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (36 page)

“Wait up.” Sid hurried after her while the others continued on their way. “Where are you going?”

“To my room, as Liam said.”

Sid’s hackles prickled. “Because he said.” His tone fell flat.

She kept walking. “Because it made sense.”

“Oh well, in
that
case …”

She stopped abruptly and faced him. “Am I not allowed to follow good sense when I hear it? Does that not fit your understanding of a rogue?”

He bristled back. “You’ve been displaying some of your previous aberrant ways since we got back from the hospital, and just now you seemed almost admiring of Thorne’s reprehensible behavior.”

Her eyes widened. “Admiring? I am dreading it.”

“Well, your demon has a special affinity for dread, so that would explain—”

She stepped right up to his toes. “Explain what?”

“Why you like him.”

“Like him? I’ve tried to kill him. More than once.”

“And didn’t succeed.”

She gave him a disbelieving glare. “Because he is possessed by a powerful djinni, and I have the demonic equivalent of a windup toy.”

“Or maybe because you didn’t want him to die because he was there for you when no one else was.” He watched her closely.

She stiffened and took a step back. “He came around occasionally to poke at me and watch me flail. Which, yes, now that I think of it, is really very reprehensible.” She gave him a meaningful glare.

He tried to shut up. After all, why was he needling her? Because she knew Thorne best? That made her an asset, not an enemy. And yet he found himself circling her, looking for the weakness in her armor, for a way in.

She was weak, just as she claimed, but somehow she had closed herself against him. “You’re changing,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes. “That’s a rogue for you. So erratic.”

“Why are you wearing that rivet?”

“It fits.”

“That’s …”

“Unreasonable? Aberrant?”

He wouldn’t apologize for the words. If she was backsliding, they needed to get her back on the talya path. “That’s the sort of memory you don’t need.”

“What makes you think so?”

His jaw worked, but he couldn’t spit out anything that didn’t sound stupid.

The angry spark in her eyes eased just a bit, and she nodded. “You’re learning.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That you don’t know everything.”

“I know you’ve been quiet and withdrawn ever since you destroyed the therapy room and took that piece away with you.”

She sighed. “You think the ring is making me withdrawn?”

“I think we pushed your rehabilitation too fast.”

“Is that what you were doing in my bed?” She tilted her head. “Fixing me?”

“Not just you,” he conceded. “My demon’s first ascension—just as your teshuva has been unbalanced all these years—made me susceptible too.”

“But you’re over it now, and I’m still … aberrant.”

A curse of frustration surged up in his throat, but that wouldn’t very well prove his own balance. “I just meant you shouldn’t dredge up memories that are going to set you back.”

“Missing memories is what made me crazy,” she said. “I thought you’d understand; the more I know, the less I fear.” She held out her hand. The rivet was a dark stripe across her pale skin. “I lost the teshuva’s talisman somewhere across the years. I was left adrift. This can be the symbol of us beginning anew.”

His heart skittered. “Us …”

She curled her ringed hand into her chest, her gaze unwavering. “The demon and I. Who else?”

The violence with which she’d flipped the steel table was nowhere in evidence, yet he ached as if she’d thrown him across the room and knocked the breath from him. “Who else. Right.”

She watched him a moment. “Did you need something from me?”

Answers churned through him, each less coherent than the last. How could he answer when he had barely formulated the questions? A good researcher didn’t
want
any particular outcome. He didn’t anticipate results. He observed what
was
.

And she had said she loved him.

He stared into her eyes. Not so clear and still as before; there were shadows and secrets shifting below the icy blue.

Did she love him now? Did he want her to? And when had he stopped knowing his own mind?

He shook his head. “I don’t need anything else.”

She turned on her heel and left him standing there.

Hard to believe, but the Bowl Me Over looked worse in the light of day.

Thorne supposed the same could be said of him. The birnenston explosion had left him shaking and sick as no fortified wine ever had. The scrawny maple tree at the edge of the parking lot was the only thing holding him upright.

When the silver limousine rolled into the lot, the reflected glare of sunlight stabbed his eyes. He sucked down a few quick breaths, trying to force his djinni higher. Instead, he gagged on the lingering taste of sulfur and crumpled to his knees. His palm skidded across the pavement. The cracked asphalt peeled up divots of skin before he caught himself.

The limo eased to a gentle stop just beyond his tight-clenched knuckles. The door, when it swung open, barely missed his bowed head.

Pride—or panic—coursed down his spine, urging him to straighten, but the sudden demonic presence was an unrelenting heavy hand on the back of his neck.

He kept his gaze fixed on the high heels that emerged, one, two, in front of his nose. The satiny pumps were the
same color as night storm clouds over the city that swallowed all the multicolored light and reflected back only gray.

“What reverence you show me, Mr. Halfmoon, but please, get up.” The feminine voice was as satin-smooth as the gray heels, though the sharp point was hidden—for the moment.

Thorne’s stomach clenched, somewhere between a dry heave and a futile attempt to right himself. Only a hard grip on his biceps got him to his feet.

Still swaying, he stared into Carlo’s squinting sneer. “I take it you gave Magdalena my message?”

The wise guy’s lip curled up another mocking notch. “Was a shame that fireplace on your boat was so squeaky clean. Well, I guess you got one fire out of it anyway.”

Thorne wrenched his arm from Carlo’s grip, tearing the office drone dress shirt he’d taken from the dry cleaner to replace his birnenston-stained pajamas. He continued the quick upward thrust with a crack into the wise guy’s septum.

Carlo howled and staggered back, clutching his face. Thorne steadied himself in the ratty sneakers that had been the only shoes at the dry cleaner—taken
off
the dry cleaner. That had been just a casual bit of obligatory violence, reviving his djinni not at all. Bloodying Carlo, though, felt good. The demon in Thorne finally settled into wary stillness.

This left him facing Magdalena, without the other djinn-man in the way.

The djinn-men, like most apex predators, were not overly numerous and stayed out of one another’s territory whenever possible. In his decades possessed, he’d met fewer than a dozen of his brethren face-to-face. But even he knew of Magdalena.

Not that anyone knew much. She was as beautiful as they’d said, sloe-eyed and naturally red lipped, with rich dark hair and sun-kissed skin despite the lateness of the season. And now he knew the rumors of her powerful djinni were not exaggerated either.

“Carlo,” she said, raising that satin voice to be heard over the wise guy’s muffled cursing, “stay with the car, will you? Mr. Halfmoon, walk with me a moment.”

Did he have a choice? His feet started moving without his conscious thought. Apparently not.

“‘Walk with me,’” he growled. “You learned that line from your pet mobster.”

She met his narrowed gaze directly and inclined her head, dark waves of her hair shifting around the shoulders of her slim dove-gray suit. All the drab tones should have sucked the life from her; instead, her coloring seemed even more alluring. “Carlo has been telling me about gathering like-minded souls, about creating a family, if you will.”

“No doubt he has,” Thorne said. “He likes to talk.”

“And I am a good listener.” She guided him out of the parking lot, following the chain-link fence. Though the slabs of sidewalk concrete had buckled in places, she glided forward as if those high heels never touched the ground. “So, Mr. Halfmoon, what do
you
want to tell me?”

His throat worked, choking on his djinni’s wordless disturbance. What would it say if it had a tongue of its own? “I suppose ‘Go to hell’ won’t help my cause.”

Her laugh was like industrial smoke, darker and grittier than her smooth voice. “Some might say, by joining
my
cause, that’s exactly where you’d be going.”

Curiosity forced him to ask, “You’d say otherwise?”

“While I appreciated his verve, Corvus Valerius wanted to pit hell against heaven with this realm as the battlefield. But I’ve found war to be … intrusive. The tenebraeternum can stay locked tight. I just want to borrow a bit of it, as needed.”

Already the force of her demon, even idle, horrified him. If she had access to the eternal well of evil … “Hell isn’t a bank,” he said.

She laughed again and leaned toward him to rest her hand on his arm where Carlo had torn the shirt. “More like
a stock market. You ran a casino; you should understand. No one gets rich playing the bank.”

Standing so close, her perfume teased him; something lush and exotic, but applied with a restrained hand so that even his djinni strained to capture the essence of the fragrance … and recoiled at the nearly imperceptible stink of cordite. Though her fingers were warm, almost uncomfortably so, his skin crawled at her touch. Before he could pull away, she released him. She turned to the chain-link fence and curled her fingers through the steel wire.

“No,” she murmured. “I’m not trying to make this earth a living hell.” Her gaze fixed on the scene on the other side of the fence. “It’s already that. I just want it to be my hell.”

Focused as he’d been on Magdalena, Thorne had dismissed the background shrieking as his freaked-out djinni. But the ruckus actually rose from the half-pint fiends confined behind the fence.

The daycare center playground was decorated with pumpkins and hay bales that the children tumbled over with raucous glee. Since most were in costume—and empty candy cellophanes gusted in the whirlwinds of their capering—he guessed they’d been celebrating the coming of Halloween.

He slanted a glance at Magdalena and swallowed hard at the dark void in her stare. “Thanks for the invitation, but I have my own hell.”

She watched the children another long heartbeat, then trailed her fingers down the chain-link fence. Her white-tipped nails strummed the metal strands with a discordant rattle. When she finally turned to him and smiled, against her white teeth, her lips looked almost bloodred. “Of course you do. And you are alone there. Wouldn’t you rather be with us? Isn’t that why you came here today? Because you have nowhere else to go?”

Only because the djinni bastards had burned his
Princess
. Thorne made himself smirk, disguising the rage of his loss
with a flippant one-shoulder shrug. “I’m here because I knew Carlo would come eventually. And I planned to kill him.”

She turned back the way they had come and raised one hand in a negligent wave. “Ah, you are brothers under the skin, and brothers will fight.”

“Are you giving me permission to skin Carlo?”

She gave him a reproving look as the limo sharked toward them on the wrong side of the street, wise guy at the wheel. “In the end, you are the same, and you will fight together.”

On one hand, she was probably right. Now that he’d met her and felt the black-hole magnetism of her demon, he didn’t think that Chains or any of the other skeptical djinn-men would hesitate to join her. The counterculture associates of his day had liked to proclaim “power corrupts,” and if the opposite was true—that corruption was power—then Magdalena was absolutely powerful. What djinn-man could resist such magnificent malevolence?

He wavered a little in his stolen shoes. She never dropped her gaze, but the thick fringe of her lashes narrowed. She was calling on her djinni, not to bring him to his knees, but enough to weaken his resolve.

And if he didn’t bend, she would break him.

His heartbeat hung suspended, as it had the moment all those years ago when he realized, with his fellow revolutionaries sleeping in the house above the basement lab, the timing device on the bomb was locked and counting down.

Alyce had always feared that the demon-ridden were monsters. With Magdalena, there was no need to question.

She was definitely a monster.

But he kept his voice as light and steady as the touch he’d used on unstable explosives. “With such excellent specimens as Carlo, I think you don’t even need me.”

“I want you all.” Her dark eyes widened, and from the black depths peered the same hunger as when she’d looked at the children. It was not so different, really, from how
those children must have looked at the Halloween candy that had once filled those empty wrappers now scuttling ahead of the wind.

The limo coasted to a stop beside them, and Carlo stepped out onto the curb to open the back door for Magdalena. “My lady, let’s go. The fundraiser dinner starts in an hour.” He squinted at Thorne, an evil look compounded by the smears of blood from his broken nose. “He ain’t worth missing the hors d’oeuvres.”

Thorne forgave the wise guy for all his bad manners if he’d just hustle his damn lady out of there. Nevertheless, no open bar tab, no number of courses to a meal, would fill the void in those bottomless eyes.

She slipped into the maroon leather interior, but Thorne’s relief was short-lived as she rolled down the window. “I’ll find you again,” she promised.

And although he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to lose, he was suddenly afraid.

Nowhere to go and nothing to lose—was this how birdbrain Blackbird had raged as the pieces of him were chipped away?

Thorne crouched beside the white van’s shining tires and tucked the equally black strands of his unbraided hair behind his ears. He sliced the lock pick across the pad of his thumb and grimaced at the stink, worse than the new rubber next to him. Blood, ichor, and birnenston welled up in threads of red, black, and yellow, festive as a coral snake and far more deadly.