The Darkest Night (11 page)

“I like it curly and soft. It’s… cherubic.”

She gagged on her coffee. “Go flip the bacon.”

After he left, she dressed quickly in his borrowed shirts and her jeans, once she turned them right-side out. The memory of the frantic coupling implied by the convoluted denim made her flush.

He’d said he wanted to forget, but she wasn’t sure she could, not now…

And she only found one bobby pin, damn it, so she had to leave her hair down, but she tucked it ruthlessly behind her ears. So there.

She followed the perfume of bacon down the stairs. The house, white and echoing and bare of almost all emotion, was essentially invisible to her tenebrae senses so she trailed one hand down the banister lest she crash into something.

The curve of the stairs led to the office adjacent to the front door, and for a moment she stood there, disoriented. But a gleam of silver caught her gaze. She drifted toward the big wooden desk and skipped her fingers over the detritus of a working man: computer, printer, various stacks of papers, a cheap ballpoint pen (she would have thought better of him) with the clip broken off (she didn’t doubt he had done that), and a silver photo frame.

To the tenebrae, the photo beckoned. Bella settled her fingers where her imp perception found the psychic imprints of many touches though the engraved silver hearts were scrupulously shining. She studied the image of the woman, not smiling, and the tiny infant in her arms. Here, white meant not innocence but hospital sterility, and the color of death was the pale, pale blue of the baby’s skin.

The glass had been imperfectly cleaned, and a human fingerprint remained hovering over the child’s cheek, leaving a smudge like tears; the glass, so thin, but the loss an impassable barrier.

With a soundless sigh, she returned the photo to its place.

Between his earthly cleaning service and his divine calling, Fane worked so hard to empty the world of its stains and sins. But he would never forget this.

She managed to find her way to the kitchen more by way of the bacon than her sketchy vision. Fane plunked a paper towel-wrapped English muffin loaded with the folds of an omelet in her one hand and slipped a travel mug of coffee into her other. “Half coffee, half sugar and cream, just as you like it. And you already have your boots. Good. Let’s go.”

She had her boots because she’d been planning to sneak away at the first opportunity. “Go? I have things to do today.”

“No you don’t. You were going to wall up in your club and hide from any tenebrae who came caroling.”

“And drink.” She wished that hadn’t sounded quite so pathetic.

“It’s my fault you have no artifacts to safeguard you.”

She had no defenses at all… She curled the coffee mug into her chest, holding its warmth close. His fault, indeed.

“But I’ll make it right.” He gave her a fleeting grin that made her breath catch. “It’s what I do.”

Is this what Saint Nicole had faced? A man desperately trying to do the right thing, armed only with perfectly prepared coffee and that smile? No wonder the poor woman had left.

Even hell itself might not withstand him.

What chance had one lone demon?

Chapter 10

Like a warrior braving enemy armies, Fane marched through the crowd at the Christkindlmarket, leading Bella behind him. Clouds had thickened over Daley Plaza, seeming to come down almost to the top of the decorated evergreen towering over the Picasso sculpture, but the plummeting temperatures hadn’t thinned the last-minute throng at the seasonal open market.

Bella tugged at him. “My hands are cold. I need a Glühwein.”

He let her steer him toward one red-striped tent. Of course she’d see—and smell—that. The spicy scent of the mulled wine had already lured more than a few chilled shoppers who browsed with one hand around the boot-shaped commemorative mugs.

She ordered two and paid before he could pull out his wallet. “Danke,” he said.

They stepped into a space between two tents to get out of the crowds and out of the wind. Bella raised her mug. “Fröhliche Weihnachten.”

“Merry Christmas,” he guessed.

“I can say it in most languages.” She sipped her wine. “I used it as a chant to keep the tenebrae out.”

“Is it only during this season you feel their presence?”

She shook her head. “They are always around. But most of the year, they find plenty of easy fodder at the Coil. My little issues are lost in the crowd. It’s only now, when I can’t help but think about…about what happened that they focus on me.” She looked down at the mug of red wine clutched between her hands. “I must glow like a torch to the demons. Like Mirabel did.”

Fane almost reached over to pull her into his arms, but out in the open, with their big coats and the hot wine in between them, the word ‘demon’ reverberating in his ears, he felt strangely frozen.

She shook her head again, more decisively this time, as if she hadn’t needed any consolation anyway. “If you’ve brought me here to replace the Jesuses, forget it. The defenses are powered by the believers. I can’t do it myself. You need a soul to have convictions.”

He wondered if she realized her certainty she didn’t have a soul was its own sort of conviction. But then, what did he know about souls? He was just a foot soldier in the war against darkness. Fighting for the light had given him no particular insights.

“Instead of stealing other people’s beliefs, you can buy them.”

She grimaced. “Not just any knickknack repels tenebrae. It has to be the focus of someone’s hopes and dreams and…” She slanted a glance at him. “And love. That’s why the baby Jesuses worked so well. Christmas trees too—the emotions children shower on a Christmas tree put all the lights and tinsel to shame—but obviously those are harder to sneak out of people’s houses.”

He coughed on his glow wine. “You tried that?”

“Just once. I ended up with a handful of pine needles and a backside full of buckshot.”

“I can imagine.” He really could, since he’d had his hands on that ass not so many hours ago… He banished the thought. “Well, I know we can find something here with the spirit of Christmas.”

He ducked out the back end of the corridor between the tents and cut over to the farthest trailing vendors. There were fewer shoppers here at the edge, exposed to the street and the wind. One stall, enclosed in thick canvas on three sides, swayed a little in the cutting breeze and a tinkling music like wind chimes rose above the murmurings of the crowd behind them.

Fane stood to one side and waved Bella forward. She stepped into the small shelter with a small gasp.

The interior walls and the ceiling were hung with bright mercury glass ornaments. Simple balls and hearts, intricate doves and angels, fanciful birdhouses and nutcrackers, even a fine-spun dreamcatcher, and stars, stars, stars swayed from every surface.

Bella’s gaze fixed not on the ornaments but on the little man hunched at the work bench with a blow torch, a multitude of glass canes, and a flowing white beard.

“There really is a Santa Claus,” she murmured.

Fane nudged her forward. “Handmade, one of a kind, Old World artistry, made by Santa himself. These should keep the tenebrae away.”

The old man glanced up, his blue eyes bright behind his little spectacles and his cheeks red from the cold. Or maybe from the Glühwein at his elbow in a mug substantially larger than the cute commemorative boot. “If you’re looking for cheap crap, get out.”

Bella slanted a dubious look at Fane

He shrugged. “Here’s a man who obviously believes in the power of his creation.”

The old man glowered. “I’m the only one who cares about the work anymore.”

“Not the only one,” Bella said softly. She drifted forward. “What are you making now?”

He straightened with an aggrieved noise to reveal the small sleigh between his burn-scarred hands. He’d spun out the glass ridiculously fine, the sleigh’s tiny runners curled high in front, as if in expectation of a terrible snowstorm to be crossed, and hung with two tiny glass bells.

Bella reached out to nudge the little bell with her fingertip. The ring was almost inaudible, high and sweet. “The Snow Queen’s sleigh.”

The old man thrust out his chin so his beard bristled alarmingly. “Not Santa’s?”

“No. It’s empty.”

He cackled, more demented gnome than jolly old elf. “I could sell you gifts to fill it.”

“And eight reindeer.” She smiled. “Nine if you have one with a red nose.”

Fane tossed out his credit card, his attention fixed on Bella’s grin. The sight of it—white and wide—made his chest throb. It had been so long…

“I have a finished one.” The old man pointed toward the wall. “Not the same, of course.”

“No,” Bella said. “I’ll take the one in your hand, if you don’t mind.”

“It’s not quite done,” he warned.

“It never is, is it?”

He cackled again.

As the old man wrapped up the purchases in tissue, he gave Bella a long, rambling lecture on how to pack the glass after every holiday. “For your lifetime,” he bellowed suddenly. “Through your children’s lifetime and your grandchildren’s lifetime, these will last.”

“I need them to last at least through the solstice,” she told him.

“At least. Watch out. The edges can be sharp.” The old man swung his Glühwein-glazed eyes to Fane. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? Years ago. I sold you a tree topper star. Gorgeous thing, gold edged cutouts so you could see the silvering inside. What happened to it?”

Fane shifted from one boot to the other. “I think my ex took it with her.”

“Ah. Very sharp edges, that.”

Fane grunted.

The old man grinned. “So I suppose you need another star.”

With two shopping bags in hand and enough money swapped to keep the old man in glow wine through the next equinox, Fane led the way back through the crowds toward the parking garage.

Bella trailed behind him, letting him break the path, until they got to the relatively clear sidewalk where she sidled up beside him. “So you and Nicole did your Christmas shopping there.”

“She said the mercury glass reminded her of her grandparents’ tree, and she wanted a ‘Baby’s First Winter’ ornament for them.” He stared up at the sky where the clouds had descended more menacingly, shaving hours off the light of day. “We never used it. I don’t know where that one went.”

They stopped at a crosswalk as a mob of runners passed them. The runners were all dressed in gold and white, and many sported wings: fairy wings, feathered wings, bat wings. The race bibs around their necks said
Angel Run
. Some were clutching fake candles, some had boots of glow wine. They all giggled as they ran.

Bella clicked her tongue. “Crazy.”

Fane lifted the shopping bags and his brows, and she inclined her head in wry acknowledgment.

Toward the tail end of the pack, a runner in a white tutu sprinkled with gold glitter cavorted with a long, slender wand topped with a gold star. From the star dangled a string, and at the end of the string danced a small cluster of rounded green leaves studded with white berries.

The runner paused beside them. “You’re under the mistletoe!”

Bella blinked.

Fane leaned over and, very gently, matched his lips to hers.

It wasn’t a long kiss—probably only one change of the traffic light; maybe two—but when he lifted his head, the angel runners were gone and only a sprinkle of gold glitter remained on the sidewalk.

Bella blinked again. “The bomb.”

He drew back. “What?” While he’d been kissing her under the mistletoe and for some time thereafter, she’d been thinking about detonating demons. The heat curling thought his veins fizzled away.

The crosswalk sign blinked, and she started across, the clack of her heels a staccato counterpoint to her words. “The demons are trapped inside the orbs, right, at least until the glass is broken, and then we have a catastrophic eruption of churning tenebrae emanations. We can’t move the orbs for fear of triggering them; we can’t move the residents at the home for fear of the same. But, what if we were able to catch the tenebrae as they emerge?” She tapped the paper bag in his hand. “These ornaments made me think; the djinn-men aren’t the only ones to blow glass. Instead of dreamcatchers, we’d have demoncatchers.”

He paced alongside her. “I have no doubt the talyan are considering all the angles.”

She scoffed. “You’ve seen the crap cars they drive. They don’t have the resources for extreme demonic containment.”

He frowned. “The league isn’t interested in containment anyway. They’re like me; they do crackdown, clear-out and cleanup.”

She stared down at her boots, her shoulders hunched. “I’m thinking of another way.”

“There’s only one way to deal with—” He cut himself off, but she didn’t look up. Of course she knew what he’d been about to say.

How had he forgotten, even for a moment, what she was?

But wasn’t that exactly what he’d told her, he wanted to forget, just for a night? Yet the sun had risen—as much as a northern sun would rise, anyway—and here he was, still side by side with a demon in the stolen body of a dead girl.

She tucked her hands into opposite sleeves of her parka, the faux fur cuffs making a thick muff. “If we could just stop them where they can’t hurt anyone, if they never had a chance to get at the old people or anyone else…”

If only she hadn’t.

Her words remained as unsaid as his, but still the echo reverberated between them, pushing them a few steps apart as they walked.

“You’re talking about more than a few really big glass ornaments,” he said. “It’d need to withstand the earthly explosion of Thorne’s gifts plus the supernatural forces inside. We’d need abraxas-strength power.” His hand tightened around the rough twine handle of the shopping bags. Nothing like the smooth, flowing, living grace of his sword.

Bella glanced away. “Impossible, I guess.”

As impossible as reclaiming his blesséd weapon. He knew she hadn’t meant that; still, the implication was inescapable. And it cut deeper than demon glass or holy steel.

Finally, he said, “Only one place might give you what you want.”