Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls (6 page)

“Not yet, but that’s how you’ll balance the ascension.”

“Not ever, if that’s why he came after me.” The unexpected—unwanted—wave of longing knotted within her. But the pain was preferable to surrender. “I’ve had enough of pimps.”

Sera tsked. “Unfair. But I’ve read your dossier, and that pimp stopped after merely sticking a knife between your ribs. What’s coming is far worse, far more intimate, and will leave you with your soul—not just your lung—in tatters.”

Jilly fisted her hands, as if Sera had feinted at her, though the other woman made no effort to rise. “You don’t know anything about me.” Despite the tension in her body from frustrated desire, her fuming breath moved easily through her for the first time in more than a year, and she wondered, did she even know herself anymore?

Sera fanned her fingertips along the edge of the table, the only betrayal of her own tension. “The league has entirely too many tough guys, Jilly. If you have to lower those impressive defenses of yours long enough to let one of our fighters save you, then by God—should I say, by the demon possessing you—that’s what you are going to do.”

If Liam thought he’d sent Sera to be sympathetic, Jilly decided she’d have to disabuse him of that notion. “Whatever info you’ve been collecting on me, at the very least you should know I don’t back down from vague threats.”

“Sometimes vague is all we get. But I do know that one of those talyan saved me from something awful. And I’m not just talking about demons.”

“What could be worse?” Jilly muttered. But she already knew some of the answers, though she couldn’t picture tall, blond, self-confident Sera ever making the sorts of bad decisions where demonic possession looked like a self-improvement project. The uncertainty kept Jilly on her feet, but she didn’t walk away.

Sera must have sensed her victory, but she didn’t gloat. She stood in a rush of red, startling the crow into the sky. “It’s not all bad. Repenting, I mean. You get a place to stay. A mission to last the rest of your potentially very long life. And there are other perks.” She ducked her head and gave Jilly a sidelong glance.

“Nothing else about lovers,” Jilly warned. Bad enough that her breath caught with the vague claustrophobia of sharing her skin with a demon. Sharing it with a daunting male like Liam Niall . . .

“No, no.” Sera’s gaze wavered. “I was just thinking, maybe I get a sister in a houseful of men.”

The genuine wistfulness snagged at Jilly’s resistance, though pain flared as quickly behind it. “I make a terrible sister.” She ignored the flicker of disappointment over Sera’s face; if the other woman had read her file, she’d understand. “I only want to find out what happened to Andre. So show me this league of evil-undoers.”

They fell into step and headed uptown. The crow wheeled once against the white clouds and was gone.

 

The lantern tipped. Flames raced across the straw. A glint of steel, and his temple exploded with a flash of light across his eye. Then darkness. Endless darkness.

And pounding.

Liam jackknifed up and shoved away the entangling bedcovers. The darkness and pounding endured, but at least he was awake. He touched his temple and winced at the flicker of demon violet that illuminated his shaking fingers.

“What?” He winced again when the word came out as a roar.

The pounding at the door stopped. “Sera called. She found Jilly and is bringing her in.”

Liam rolled out of bed and pushed aside the blackout curtains over the windows. The stark sunlight narrowed his eyes but brought no warmth to his naked flesh. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“You’ve got ten.” Archer’s voice was brisk. “Use it. I can smell your nightmare through the door. You’ll scare her off before she’s even gone through the teshuva’s ascension.”

“Insolent bastard,” Liam muttered.

“I can hear through doors too.”

Liam waved his upright middle finger vigorously, though Archer was stomping away. Liam dropped back to the bed. He’d avoided going back to Jilly’s apartment last night, knowing Archer was keeping watch. So he had no excuse not to have managed a good night’s sleep.

No excuse except those dreams that always ended in flames and darkness.

He pounded his head once into the pillow and stared up at the ornate headboard above him. Entire grave-yards boasted fewer chubby, cavorting cherubs than this oak behemoth. He couldn’t imagine what the wood-worker had been thinking. It would be impossible to have sex in this bed.

Yeah, that could be the other excuse for no good night’s sleep.

In five minutes, he’d run a cold shower, downed a cup of burned coffee, and ensconced himself behind his desk.

After the league’s last refuge had been poisoned in the tenebrae attack, they’d retreated to one of their holdings fronted by an architectural-salvage warehouse. The warehouse lacked the style of their previous retro hotel, but it had a kitchen, a few apartments, a dormitory, and an armory. If there was one thing the league did well, it was break things and pick up the pieces. The three-legged walnut desk he’d propped up on a knock-off Grecian urn at least had a certain presence. Anyway, it was big.

He gripped the thick edge and waited for Sera’s knock. She entered and stopped just inside the door, while Jilly marched up to the other side of his desk and tossed her puffy silver coat on the guest chair.

She planted her hands on her hips, which puffed up other parts of her. Under her snug short-sleeved T-shirt, the roundness of her breasts seemed counterintuitively soft. He found himself distracted by the butterfly tattoo that rode the upper curve revealed by the V neckline, the navy cotton setting off her anger-flushed tawny skin.

“What the fuck?” she snapped.

Good thing it was a big desk. He slanted a glance at Sera, who grinned and sidled out.

He returned his attention to Jilly and wondered if the oak headboard would have blocked more of the fury that vibrated off her. No. No thinking of Jilly in his bed. “Which part is fucked?”

She glared at him, and for a moment he was mesmerized by the golden snap in her eyes, the tint of flames in straw.

“If you wanted to recruit me, sell me yourself.” She faltered, as if that hadn’t come out as she intended. “You knew I’d come, given the chance to find out what’s happening to the kids on the street. You didn’t have to send Sera.”

“She had the best chance of convincing you.”

“And do you always use people for what they can do for you?”

He steeled himself against the sting of her words. He was spread too thin to regret delegating when necessary. Not when he knew that strain would bring him one step closer to a break the league might not survive.

Not when her burning eyes were the straw to break the beast of burden.

“I save myself for the fun parts,” he said coolly. “I’m sure Sera explained what we’re up against.”

“She explained a lot.” Jilly set her chin off-kilter, as if she was holding back words. “What are we doing to chase these monsters—what did you call them?—these tenebraeternum off the streets?”

“ ‘ We’?” Liam leaned back in his chair and templed his fingers. He waited for the flare of triumph at bringing another tyro aboard. God knew, he needed this ardent young fighter in front of him. Instead, her fierce zeal made him feel older than the dirt that crept into every nook of the league’s salvaged stronghold.

And his need would never be assuaged.

“The tenebraeternum is the place where the demons come from,” he said. As if reciting the chronicles of league history would relieve the ache that arrowed through him. “The lesser demons en masse we call the horde-tenebrae.”

She wrinkled her nose at the impromptu lesson. “Sera already made it clear I might not even survive my demon’s ascension. If I only have another hour or another day, then I want to find out what happened to Andre and make sure the things and the place never bother any of the kids again.”

She paced in front of his desk, all impetuous curves and spiky nerves. He tightened his jaw against the clomp of her impatient boots. She wasn’t much more disciplined than the kids—streetwise teen hooligans, more like—she claimed as her own. But he’d bent wilder spirits to this unending task. “I can’t promise that.”

“I don’t believe in promises anyway. Give me something real I can sink my teeth into.” She swung to face him, her hand cocked on the hip of her low- riding jeans. “Give me something bigger than that stupid box cutter and I’m your warrior woman. For tonight anyway.”

He felt the tightening in his muscles, the prickle of his skin, as the demon in him stirred at the unruly battle cry in her words. He wrestled down its ready and willing mayhem, so in tune with the young woman before him. The demon possessing him might take hungry leaps toward repentance, but every swing of his war hammer thrust him away from the desperate detachment keeping what was left of his soul—what was
him
—intact.

Once, he’d worked with his hands to create; now he was half ravager. And the molten gold of Jilly’s eyes only lured him closer to his doom, like a stupid moth to singeing flame.

“Come on, then.” He thrust to his feet and strode past her.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m giving you what you want.” Avoiding the jumble of iron railings, reclaimed brick, and unique old tile, he led her through the halls. The stairs down to the basement were hung with empty picture frames, too opulent to hang above any couch and too battered for a museum. At the bottom of the stairs, he slapped his palm over a pale green lit square. When it beeped at him, he threw open the double doors. The lights brightened automatically.

Axes, double-edged swords, daggers, razor-tipped gauntlets, and more lined the sterile white walls. Even under the buzzing fluorescent fixture, the blades shone with brutal, honed beauty.

Jilly cleared her throat. “At least I know where to arm myself if World War Three breaks out.”

“It already has.” Liam strode into the room, then turned to survey her. He tried to keep his gaze critical as he swept her once from blue-streaked locks to heavy black shit-kicker boots. “Good weight on the bottom, at least.”

She stiffened at his perusal. “You saying my ass is big?”

It took all his unholy strength to move his gaze onward. “I’m saying, no sense throwing off your balance with an oversized weapon.”

“I’ve handled bigger weapons than yours.”

Her bold words rebounded between them. The first hint of uncertainty he’d seen in her—even when she faced the ferales in the alley with nothing more than a dull razor blade—flushed her cheeks with color, and she bit her lip.

The hunger that stirred in him at the slight vulnerability had nothing to do with the demon. He swallowed hard against it, and leveled his tone coolly. “No doubt your bravado has served you well. Did the demon come to you with the promise that now you’d finally be able to carry through with all that bluster?”

She stiffened at the question; her cinnamon-honey eyes narrowed.

“The demon always makes an offer we haven’t the strength to refuse,” he explained. “It knows us better than we know ourselves. I suppose that is the nature of temptation.” How fortunate for him that he’d been around long enough to amass scars of resistance.

“I’m tempted,” she said, “to grab that spiked mace and take a swing.”

He forced himself to focus on work. Pairing an unproven talya with the right weapon was vital. “If you want to try it out—”

“Just on you.”

Ah. He balanced on the balls of his feet as the demon shifted eagerly within him. “Always happy to help my tyros, my new fighters.”

“Yours?” When she wrinkled her nose, the piercing there glimmered.

Oh, so the ancient military term didn’t bother her, just the implicit hierarchy. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I am the boss.”

Her hands clenched as if longing to wrap around that mace handle. Or maybe just his neck. “If you’re the boss, you should know human resources regulations don’t allow you to ask how people were lured to the dark side.”

“You’re not a human resource anymore, and technically, we’re the repenting side, which is at least a half dozen steps from the dark side.” Thinking of her hands on his skin wasn’t helping his focus at all. But how had the demon cozened her if not through her boldness?

He took a long step back—physically and mentally—and swept out one hand. “Choose.”

In his many years commanding the league, he’d learned a new talya’s choice of weapon indicated something about the man and the teshuva inside him. He was getting ahead of himself, putting Jilly through his tests so soon, but the urgency that had ridden him since the appearance of her unbound demon strengthened when she was near.

And with her hell-bent attitude, he suspected she might need all the weapons she could get.

He held himself silent and still though every muscle twitched to follow as she stalked past him to circle the room. She paused near the mace, slanted a molten glance at him, and kept moving.

She passed the white- men-can’t-jump wall of massive, double-handed swords representing a wide, bloody swath of European history. The aesthetically organized Asian collection of katanas and throwing stars earned not even a second look. Instead she came around again to the blunt-force-trauma corner. “No guns? No rocket launchers?”

“Rocket launchers tend to get noticed. We try not to be. More important, our teshuva need to get up close and personal with the tenebrae to destroy them.”

“I tracked down my sister’s pimp about a year ago, trying to find out where she’d gone. He stabbed me.” She put her hand against her left side, just under her breast. “Punctured a lung. Nicked my heart. But you already knew that—didn’t you?—from the dossier your people put together. Did it tell you that, even coughing up blood, I managed to knock out a few of his teeth?”

Liam pursed his lips. “So you’re saying you don’t need a mace.”