Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls (33 page)

He hesitated, and disappointment tugged at her chest. “I shouldn’t have asked,” she said. “Then it wouldn’t be secret, would it?”

But when his arm clenched this time, it felt more like a man grasping for a last chance. “No, I don’t have a place, not besides this. Or wherever the league is. It didn’t seem right. How can I ask them to keep coming back to this if I’m not here, always?”

She closed her eyes. The steady thud of his heart under her palm marked out the moments.

It was so easy to watch the resolute, unwavering leader, standing tall against the darkness, and think power and arrogance drove him. But he was neither the heavy-handed chief for her to rail against nor some fantasy comic book hero. He was a man. A man who tempted her in ways no demon had ever imagined. Hearing the need in his voice, she felt as if she’d turned another corner through the complicated paths of him, getting closer.

But for every step that way, she knew she was getting farther from herself. She’d wanted to show him that they could have something together, that they
made
something together—two halves of a whole, standing together. How could she hold him when that meant dividing him from what he was? Her uncles had dominated with cruelty, while her mother manipulated with weakness. She refused to lead Liam by the strings of their attachment.

When he sighed with a depth that made her realize he’d fallen asleep, she rose, dressed in her possibly birnenston-stained, teshuva-addling clothes—if only she could believe that was explanation enough—and crept out of his room.

The sound of a slamming car door drew her to the loading bay, where Ecco was unloading bags of groceries with Dory.

He leaned against the back of the truck as she approached. “Hey, look, it’s the cook.”

Jilly crossed her arms. “Think that’s going to keep me out of trouble?”

“Going to keep us from starving,” Ecco said. “Since it’s your fault that Corvus”—he rolled his eyes at the oblivious Dory—“and his minions are all riled up.”

“My fault?” Jilly stared at him.

Ecco waved his hand. “You females.”

Dory hefted a couple bags. “Females? God, these guys are worse than Mom’s. You really know how to pick ’em, Jill, don’t you?”

Jilly felt as if the glass vial cradled in her pocket had exploded against her stomach.

Her “uncles” had been domineering, egotistical, and violent. Liam
was
more of a threat than they had ever been, because for all their conceits, they’d been weak men.

And because she’d always been immune to those others.

Dory dumped the groceries in Jilly’s arms, and she had to scramble to keep the heavy load from crushing the solvo in her pocket. They trooped into the kitchen to unload the goods.

“Where is Liam?” Ecco tossed a bakery box across the counter. “I need to stay out of his way till after he sees the receipt. Vegan doughnuts don’t come cheap.”

“He’s, uh, sleeping. I think.” Jilly winced internally as she felt the heat creeping into her cheeks. “I have to . . .” She edged away from the counter. “Be right back.”

Ecco straightened and gave her a hard look, though nothing as sharp as the gaze Dory pinned on her. “I’ll get something started for dinner,” Dory said. “But I’ll need your help.”

“Right, right.” Jilly escaped, cursing herself. Now who looked like the addict?

She avoided the bedroom hall and made her way to the basement, where Sera had her little temporary lab. It reminded Jilly uncomfortably of the sewer. What if Liam was right? What if, like his last Bookkeeper, she and Sera were guiding the league down a terrible path? She was carrying a soul-stealing monstrosity in her pocket, after all.

And she found herself very willing to seduce the leader of the league away from his duties.

She realized she’d been standing blindly in the doorway when Sera nudged past her. “Jilly. Just who I wanted to see. Well, actually, I was looking for Liam, but he’s not around, so you can give him the message.”

Jilly’s face heated again. The ridiculousness of it made her bristle. “Why does everyone think I’m in charge of big, bad Liam Niall?”

“Because you’re sleeping with him.” Sera scooted a chair up to the computer terminal where multiple external hard drives were stacked in precarious towers. “The archives finally coughed up a reference to salambes.”

Curious despite her annoyance, Jilly dragged a chair beside Sera. “Took long enough.” Then she winced. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be bitchy. Not your fault.”

“Yeah, it’s Liam’s fault if he’s not balancing you better than that.” When Jilly sputtered, Sera shot her a quick grin. “Ferris and I think that might have been one of the reasons for the talyan-pair bond. Talya and teshuva are supposed to come to an accord during the first ascension, and the immediacy of sex is a perfect way to keep the human body in tune with this realm. Regular tune-ups only make sense.”

“A balance and a tune-up, huh? I didn’t get the extended warranty in Liam’s fleet-vehicle maintenance plan,” Jilly said stiffly.

“Too bad. Have you seen the crap they drive around these days? Turns out their last Bookkeeper siphoned off league assets as well as souls before he ended up soulless himself. Apparently haints can’t remember bank-account numbers, and Ferris hasn’t been able to track the money transfers once they left the country.” Sera clicked down the page. “Ah, here it is. The reference is from an image-to-text scan of an old, handwritten league manuscript. Don’t know the date, but it was old enough that they wrote their descending
s
’s a lot like
f
’s. So the computer wasn’t recognizing the word.” She pointed at the screen where the reddish brown ink on the yellowed paper appeared to read “falambes.”

“How’d you know to look here?”

Sera rubbed the back of her neck. “Funnily enough, Bella pointed me in the right direction. After talking to your landlady, I’ve been wondering about these other women who seem to know more than we do. So I went to the Coil for a drink, sat down at the bar, and sort of idly asked her where she might look for things that burn. She said s’mores, urinary-tract infections, and witches. Needless to say, the league archives didn’t have a lot on Girl Scout outings or UTIs, but witch burnings . . .”

Jilly eyed the text. “You speak German?”

“No, I ran it through an online translator. Maybe an official league Bookkeeper would have more resources, but I haven’t had time to track down anyone trustworthy.”

“Which wouldn’t be Bella,” Jilly acknowledged.

Sera nodded. “Those women seem to know more than us, and they seem strangely reluctant to cough it all up. To make things worse, the German is actually a translation of a passage in Dutch, so the whole thing is just a half-assed pidgin garble.” She popped open a new page. “But here’s what we got.”

Some of the words hadn’t translated at all—including “falambes”—and the syntax was not proper English, but Jilly’s blood ran cold at the words she could read. “A witch trial. More than sixty people burned at the stake. Yeah, I imagine salambes would consider that quite the party.”

“Keep reading,” Sera urged. “It gets better. Or worse.”

“ ‘Unseen beast is the fiery salamander of legend’?” Jilly shook her head. “Is this from
Ye Olde National Enquirer
?”

“I searched on ‘fire salamander.’ Folklorists say that salamanders living in damp logs would scatter when the firewood was laid in the hot hearth, thus freaking out the nice people gathered around the fire into thinking that salamanders were fire demons. But I find it a little hard to believe that even people back in the sixteen hundreds confused a newt with this.” Sera clicked to a second page.

The intricate woodcut had overly stylized the flames, but Jilly recognized the misshapen, asymmetrically horned creatures frolicking around the burning faggots. Half buried in the piles of kindling, the victims—men and women both, judging from the costumes and hairstyles—writhed, contorted partners in the macabre dance.

Jilly’s throat seized in disgust, as if the ghost of scorched hair had drifted through the lab. She pushed away from the screen. “So the last extant reference to salambes was from the days of burning witches? How not reassuring that they’re back right when female talyan return to the scene.”

“Whoa, there’s nothing to associate the salambes with us,” Sera objected. “Witch burning was sporting for hundreds of years in the middle of the last millennium, and we think the last female talya was gone well before that. Besides, there are women
and
men both in this picture, tied back-to-back, their arms interlocked.”

“Exactly.” Jilly didn’t look at the illustration again. She remembered the feel of Liam’s arms wrapped around her, the heat of his passion slick on her skin. “The element of fire has always been associated with desire and sin. The mated-talyan bond has all that in spades.” She dragged her hands through her hair. Liam’s habitual gesture. She finally understood where he was coming from. “The Corvus-djinni said we’d brought this on ourselves.”

“Of course the devil says that,” Sera snapped.

“That’s what I told Liam,” Jilly murmured. And yet now, without him around to challenge, she questioned whether she was taking the easy way out. The devil might delight in lies, but it was the grain of truth, like the dust in the center of the pearl, that made the lie ring true.

Was Liam right that the bond between male and female talyan had been deemed too dangerous? What if the preternatural desire of two wounded talya souls had drawn the salambes, with their affinity for invading and destroying any empty vessel, through the Veil into the human realm?

What if, once again, her choice of lovers was toxic, not just to herself this time, but to the world?

The ugliness of the question—no, the
wrongness
of it—ripped through her, sharper than any demonic tooth or blade. Her “fight the power” defiance lost all relevance when Liam—demon-ridden though he was—so carefully wielded his power for the good of his men, the oblivious people of the city, for
her
. That ardent focus and hammer-blunt strength he’d used to form and refine the league. The power of the ravager inside him he’d turned only on the darkness. And on himself. Liam Niall might be all the things she feared, but only because she doubted herself, tangled up in the way he made her feel.

She straightened, casting off the urge to follow the thread of that thought until she came to the center of what, exactly, he made her feel. The damned discord demon had her tied in more knots than her bracelet. She pulled the solvo from her pocket. “I’m just here to drop this off.”

Sera took the beaker and headed into the lab. “Just because I have a soul cleaver myself, he thinks I know what to do with the pure stuff?”

Jilly blinked. “You have one?” She’d thought possessing a demon-warped trap was proof enough of trafficking with the devil. How could a soul cleaver ever lend itself to the fight against evil?

“Long story. Corvus and Bookie playing around with a formula in this realm is what called my demon through the Veil.” Sera touched the pendant hanging around her neck. The gray stone glimmered faintly, like a cheap opal. “I ended up with this.” She must have sensed the disapproval because her gaze narrowed on Jilly’s bracelet. “Kind of like how you ended up with that.”

Everything she’d ever fought against was here in this building, in one form or another. And half of it no longer seemed wrong. Jilly almost reeled at the wave of moral vertigo. “What are we?” she whispered.

Sera spun away from her. “Not whiners, that’s for damn sure.”

The confident scorn bolstered Jilly’s spirits a bit. Still . . . “I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the world.”

“God, aren’t you special?” Sera clunked the beaker down on the table with more force than was really necessary. “What makes you think the world needs you for that?”

Jilly winced. “Liam.”

“Figures. He thinks the sun goes down on his command so he can start the hunt.”

The urge to defend him welled up, but Jilly settled for “That’s a bitchy thing to say.”

“And yet so true. Jilly, good and evil go on without us.”

“But we’re supposed to be here to tip the balance toward the good.” Jilly gestured at the pearlescent matter in the beaker. “We have to be willing to use
that
to get the upper hand?”

“You’re already possessed by a demon. Did you really think this was going to be a bloodless—scratch that—soulless war?”

Jilly stared down. “If I sold my soul once, I didn’t think I’d have to do it again and again.”

Sera flattened her palm over the pendant. Or above her heart, Jilly wasn’t sure which. “The
desolator numinis
isn’t evil by itself. It’s all in how it’s used.”

Jilly snorted. “How many times has the world heard that one?”

“Yet it’s so true,” Sera repeated with a touch of asperity. “The only soul I ever took was Corvus’s. And I tried to give it back.” She shook her head when Jilly drew breath to ask more. “Yes, your soul is suspect, sold and shattered. Stop mourning that. What matters now is what’s in your heart.”

Jilly managed not to recoil as if Sera’s words had hit her somewhere midchest. “I just want to stop Corvus from turning more of the people I care for into salambe flambé. I need my brain, muscles, and a sharp knife for that. Never mind my heart.”

Sera eyed her, and Jilly shifted uncomfortably under what felt a lot like pity. “He’s afraid, Jilly.”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand, but she snorted. “Liam isn’t afraid of anything. Except failing the league.” A failure made more likely by the discord she spread like a plague.

“What do you think it would be, if he tried for your heart and fell short?”

Jilly shifted. “Weren’t we talking about the fate of the world?”

Sera gestured at the bracelet, then wrapped her hand around her necklace. “In our case, it’s all connected, all tangled up. That’s what the mated- talyan bond is about.”