Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls (20 page)

Jilly slumped back in her chair. She’d wanted to call Rico on his crimes, but she’d rather have taken two more knives to the ribs than discover her sister had heard that exchange. Knowing her vigilante attack on the pimp had only made Dory more vulnerable took away the last of her breath and pierced her heart straight through.

“Lost isn’t the same as free.” Her voice cracked.

Liam met her despairing gaze, but his words were directed to Dory, as lazily as any after-breakfast gossip. “How much is a soul worth these days?”

Dory glowered at him. “Mine in particular? To him, more than a do-gooder like you would pay.”

He smiled crookedly. “Oh, Dory. I’m not good.”

After a moment, she nodded. “Well, I’m not either. And Blackbird still wanted me around.”

Jilly’s empty hands clenched. Was it too late to grab Dory and run, as she should have years ago when they were both children? She’d been too frightened at the time, and she’d chosen a job trying to keep other kids from doing exactly that, but considering where they’d ended up, maybe they should’ve just taken their chances.

The memory of those early days strained her voice when she asked, “Do you know what happened to the other people who were hanging around in that apartment?”

Dory scratched again, at the back of her hand this time, to erase Jilly’s touch or from memories of her own. “I remember shooting up. Then I remember the wall busting in.” She pinned Jilly with a jaundiced eye. “I remember seeing you. And I remember hearing screaming. Just in my head. But I remember.”

The blood pooled in Jilly’s limbs, and her hands felt heavy. As if she held a hammer. A hammer drenched in blood.

In the end, there’d been no blood, of course. Every speck of the burned-out haints had morphed to ash.

“I’m sorry,” Jilly whispered, not sure to whom she owed the apology—the sister she’d failed or the people Dory had doomed beyond death.

“About the screaming?” Dory shrugged. Lost in her own turmoil, Jilly couldn’t decide if her sister meant her screaming “junkie whore” or the shrieking of butchered haints. “Happens to all of us. Except, I thought, maybe you. I guess not.”

Liam cleared his throat. “Maybe he seems benevolent, but Corvus—Blackbird, as you call him—is very dangerous.”

Dory nodded. “Sometimes you need that on your side, you know?” Her gaze shifted back to Jilly and widened with contrived innocence.

Jilly couldn’t even roll her eyes back. Look whom she’d tied herself to. Inadvertently, maybe. To save her skin, perhaps. But she’d known what Liam was—powerful, demanding, and, yes, dangerous—and she’d reveled in him.

What ten kinds of hypocrite was she to judge? Blackbird might’ve made the monsters, but Liam unmade them with the same lack of mercy. She pushed to her feet and paced the width of the room. “Who is he, this Blackbird?”

“We killed him.” Liam raised his voice so she could hear from her distance, but Dory’s gasp was still audible. “Or we thought we did. He created solvo and started spreading it. We had to stop him.”

“Solvo takes away the pain,” Dory said. “You shouldn’t knock it.”

He lifted one eyebrow. “Even you won’t take it.” When she just scowled, he continued. “Corvus thought solvo would help him conquer the world.”

Dory sniffed. “He said in retrospect he should’ve started with just the South Side and worked his way up from there.”

From the glint in Liam’s eyes, Jilly recognized that he’d meant that domination quite literally even if Dory was being snide.

Jilly halted her pacing and slumped against the wall. “How do we find him?” Her voice sounded funny, scratchy and broken like warped vinyl. She knew what they would do to him, or what they would try to do. Presumably, he’d return the mayhem, full force.

Dory shook her head. “You can’t find him. He’s Blackbird. Here and there.”

“He has to land sometime.” Liam pushed to his feet. “And if not, he leaves his droppings. Where does he deal?”

“Everywhere,” Dory started. When Liam gave her a look, she huffed. “Sometimes he hangs near Back of the Yards. And near the pier, but he doesn’t deal there. He says he just likes to look out over the water.”

Jilly expected Liam to charge from the room, hammer swinging, but he surprised her. He settled his hip against the counter and studied Dory. “You’re giving Corvus up without much of a fight.”

Dory shrugged. “Blackbird likes to talk. He tells us a lot, even if it doesn’t all make sense, and he doesn’t mind us talking. It’s not like the cops can find him. Or stop him.”

“Is that what you think we are? Cops?”

She shifted her gaze to Jilly. “Something like that. Maybe vice.”

“Something like that,” he repeated softly. “Dory, look at me.”

The timbre of his voice shifted, lowered. Jilly found her gaze drawn to him too, though she recognized the demon harmonics for what they were.

Dory hunched like a bedraggled bleached-blond rabbit facing a wolf. “What?”

“What does Corvus hold over you? You and the others we found with you.”

“He had a party pack that wouldn’t quit, besides solvo.”

“You didn’t hang with him just for the drugs. You could get that anywhere.” He didn’t bother pointing out she
had
gotten it plenty.

Dory rocked from side to side in her chair, as if Liam were dragging the words out through some twist in her throat. “He understood.”

“Understood what?”

“Us. More than anybody else ever did. He said we could let the darkness out.”

Liam sighed, a purely human sigh that broke whatever spell he’d woven.

Dory straightened abruptly, her face scrunched with petulance. “I don’t know why anyone cares now. Nobody did before.”

Jilly finally found her voice. “I always cared.”

After a moment, Dory nodded. “You just couldn’t do anything.”

“Now I can.” The league’s basement armory with its walls of weapons called to Jilly as if the new steel in her spine reverberated like a tuning fork to those choices of destruction.

Liam watched her so intently she wondered if he felt it too.

Dory stood, breaking the moment. “You can’t keep me here. I haven’t done anything.” She paused a moment, then gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Well, nothing too bad.”

Liam smiled, a calculating expression. “Nothing, huh? I suppose you could always take us to meet your Blackbird.”

Dory’s amusement faltered. “He’s not mine. He won’t belong to anybody.”

Admiration warmed her voice and set Jilly’s hackles up. Especially when her sister looked at her and said, “Kind of like you.”

Jilly leaned her head back against the wall. Dory had no idea how far she had sold herself down the river. The Styx, apparently.

Liam cleared his throat. “I need to see how Sera is getting on with our other guests.”

“Prisoners,” Dory corrected.

He spread his hands. “Such cynicism in one so young.”

She flashed him a flirty smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m an old soul.”

He didn’t smile back. “At least it’s yours.”

When he walked out, he seemed to take the breath out of Jilly’s body. She slumped a few inches lower on the wall.

“I can’t believe he’s your boyfriend,” Dory snapped. “He’s worse than anything Mom ever brought home.”

Her sister’s tone straightened Jilly. “He’s not my boyfriend.” Then she felt compelled to add, “And he’s not that bad. Anyway, you seemed to get along with him just fine.”

“I know how to deal with guys like that.”

“Smile and scoot your neckline down?” She shook her head, half bemused, half in despair. “It’s not like I didn’t notice.”

Dory shrugged.

Jilly rubbed her forehead. “If you think he’s so bad, why flash flesh?”

“That’s
how
you protect against guys like that. How could you never learn that?”

“By staying
away
from guys you say are like that.” Why was she mentally removing Liam from that side of the equation? He was a big, domineering bully. Just because he wanted to save the world didn’t change that.

Dory huffed. “You can’t get away from them. They’re everywhere.”

“Like Corvus.” Jilly wasn’t sure how much more she could get from her sister. Dory had been so out of it. Could anything she said be trusted?

“Blackbird doesn’t fuck his girls.” Dory frowned. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him touch anyone.”

The thread of longing in her voice crept along Jilly’s spine. When was the last time someone had touched her sister gently, with love?

The chill spread through her skin. When was the last time
she’d
been touched that way?

The memory of Liam’s big hand against her demon-marked flesh after that desperate coupling in her apartment threatened her, and she slammed the door on it. Just as she’d slammed the door on any number of helping hands reaching her way—afraid she’d find more like her uncles or her first bad boyfriend—before she’d learned to be the one to reach out. Either she or Dory had to take the first step.

She pushed away from the wall. “Come on. Let’s get you some clean clothes.”

“I got evicted,” Dory said. “And I lost all my stuff. That’s why Blackbird gave me . . .” She dropped her gaze.

The drugs. Jilly withheld a sigh. Dory must have been a glaringly obvious candidate for future hainthood. No place to be. No one looking for her.

“Come on,” she urged. “We’ll find something.”

They met a talya in the hall.

“Jonah.” Jilly dredged up his name from the aftermath of the salambe attack. “Where would I find extra clothes? You guys must keep stuff around for . . .” She slanted a glance at Dory. “For after work.”

He stared at them a moment. The impassive stillness of his expression drew his otherwise handsome face into forbidding lines, like a marble statue of the strictest saint in the calendar. His chisel-sharp gaze flicked over Dory, assessing. No, Jilly thought, worse than that. He’d already made his judgment.

She stretched her fingers, felt the demon move through the fibers of her self. Apparently the aftermath of her encounter with Rico hadn’t taught her anything about not throwing down with big, scary males.

Jonah’s lips twitched, not a smile, more a sneer. “I have many, many years of unraveling demons behind me, girl. Not to mention righteousness at my side.” His voice was so soft and low only her spiked hearing picked up his words.

She replied in kind, keeping Dory out of it. “And I have my unholy pissed-offedness at being called girl.”

He snorted at human volume. “I can’t imagine how the league will survive the return of your kind.”

She folded her arms over her chest. “My kind?”

His gaze flicked to the exposed skin above her crossed arms, then to her hair. His scornful smile widened. “The fairer sex, I was going to say.”

“I can see how you’d drive a woman away.” She’d meant the insult generically, but she was surprised how abruptly his smirk vanished. “Maybe outlawing us wasn’t fair.”

“To whom?” he murmured. The faintly antiquated cadence of his voice drifted toward something she’d almost call sorrow. He shook his head, the waves of his sandy blond hair hiding his eyes. “We keep leftovers in the storerooms downstairs. Help yourself.”

She didn’t think he meant just help herself to the clothes. He managed to brush past them without actually touching them.

Dory glanced after him in consternation. “Is every guy here an asshole?”

Jilly wished she hadn’t sensed that unexpected depth to the rude talya. She didn’t want to defend him. “I haven’t met them all.”

“So far, they’re all hot as hell too. Can I borrow your lip gloss?”

Jilly refused to dignify that with an answer as she handed over her tube of balm.

In the basement, the weapons room called to her. But she bypassed its high-tech access panel and pushed open a smaller, regular old door, where she found stacks of cotton T-shirts, sweatpants, and socks, enough that she could have supplied a half dozen homeless outreaches. She hoped Liam was getting a great bulk discount.

“Black, black, or black?” She rifled through the piles.

“Large or extra large?”

“Extra large,” Dory said. “I plan to eat a bunch more omelets before I go.” She leaned against the door. “I missed you, Jilly.”

Jilly paused, her hands fisted in black cotton. “How about you don’t go again?”

Wait, what was she saying? She was an immortal demon-slaying half monster now. She couldn’t set any sort of good example.

She wondered what excuses were going through her sister’s mind when Dory sighed and shook her head. “I can’t help myself.”

“Then let me help, okay?” She waited for her sister’s faint nod, wondering if the hesitation had to do with the crap job she’d done in the past. But she couldn’t exactly explain that helping would prominently feature destroying Corvus—that, at least,
should
be in her demonic power.

 

Jilly left her sister to shower and hunted the hallways for Liam. A faint buzz through her skin stopped her outside the office where she’d first barged into his league. She pushed open the door. He was leaning behind that oversized desk, arms braced and palms flattened over the curling edges of a big map, like a lion over a kill. Archer, Sera, and a few other talyan clustered around as if waiting for their piece of the action. They all looked up at her, and Liam straightened his stance.

Archer spoke first. “Did you get anything else from her?”

“Just that all talya men are hot.” She glanced at Sera apologetically when the males grinned.

The other woman shrugged. “I noticed it too. At the beginning.” She punched Archer’s shoulder when he glowered. “Maybe immortality refines the pores.”

Jilly shrugged. “Maybe the teshuva like pretty boys.”

Liam cleared his throat over the male grumbles. “Looking for something useful here?”