The Darkest Night (7 page)

“People say so only because they got you a shitty present.”

“You know better. People imbue objects with their beliefs. Which is why I can’t use Santas to guard the way. I don’t want the tenebrae coming for me as their gift.”

He turned his glare on her. “But Jesus died for our sins, so you don’t have to?”

She lifted her chin. “That is one aspect of their faith, yes. What’s so wrong about that?”

“Let’s ask Mirabel.” He grabbed the statue and headed for the next one.

“You can’t take them!” Bella rushed around the edge of the counter toward him.

He lifted one hand—the one without the baby Jesus tucked under it—and forced his angel to rise in a glow of gold around his knuckles. “You took them. I’m taking them back.”

She skidded to a halt, her mouth twisted. “You want me to die, don’t you?”

“No. But I won’t let you lie and steal either. If you want to atone for the imp, you start now.”

“The longest night of the year is coming, the night she died. The tenebrae
will
come.”

“Let them come. We will stand against them.”

She lowered her chin, doubt obvious in the tight pull of her mouth, but she didn’t back away from him. “One imp in the body of a dead girl and one angel in exile?”

He did not bother explaining how he would soon retrieve his abraxas. Yes, he was going to have to make some compromises, but only for the greater good. “We aren’t alone. The talyan—”

She laughed, and he had to admit, claiming common cause with the league was rather absurd. “The only ones who hate the tenebrae more than the sphericanum are the teshuva,” she reminded him. “They followed us to their doom and now they repent with our slaughter.”

“You aren’t tenebrae,” he shot back. “Not anymore.”

“At least they still want me. The talyan certainly won’t.” She sidled closer to him. “But maybe you want me again. Is that the concession you’re looking for?”

He tightened his jaw at her sideways smile. “I’m not looking for anything.”

“You didn’t just happen to drive through this neighborhood.” She reached out and popped open the top button of his shirt. “And you are not wearing anything underneath this time. I wonder why when it’s so cold outside.”

Rampant heat rushed through him: mortification—how had she known when he hadn’t realized the inference, not until this very moment?—and lust. Her finger stroked the notch of his throat, and he swallowed.

So close, the perfume of her made his head spin, a potent tease of vodka, womanly flesh and—so his angel warned him—a hidden peril like a hint of smoke. She hooked her finger through his second button and leaned in to press her lips over the pounding of his pulse.

His lips parted, against his will anticipating her caress, but he would not lower his head.

She undid the second button and kissed the bare skin above his heart. “How about one orgasm for each Jesus, hmm? Seems fair.”

“Actually, that seems impious.” He reared back, grabbing her wrist when she sneakily tried to snatch at the statue under his arm.

“
Imp
ious? Oh, you’re a laugh riot.” She lunged at him. “Damn it, Cyril. Give it to me!”

“No.” He stiff-armed her. “You told me people give meaning to their artifacts. That body you wield with such insolence is your reliquary now. So make it mean something.”

She stood staring at him, her hands fisted, her muscles drawn so tight the scars on her exposed wrists writhed. Finally, she said, “I can’t.”

He turned his back on her and began collecting the Jesuses.

Her demonic double-tongued wail of despair followed him downstairs and dogged him out to the Porsche where he tried to stack the infants neatly, but after several trips he still ended up with something like a holy midget clown car. What the hell was he going to do with them all?

He hadn’t prayed since his abraxas was taken, but he reminded himself not to speed since getting stopped by a cop would result in some awkward explaining.

He belted himself in and stared up through the sunroof to the upper window of the bar. Dark and empty. He dragged his hand over his mouth to erase the phantom sensation of the kiss she hadn’t given him.

He revved up the engine—the only thing getting any action tonight—and slammed the Porsche into gear.

And just as quickly slammed on the breaks.

Lit by the bright headlights, Bella all in red shone like a wayward flame.

Fane closed his eyes for a moment and tried to find the divine stillness within. He was an angelic possessed minus his abraxas, cut off from the guiding hands of the sphericanum; could he trust himself to know a right choice even if it was standing right in front of him?

He cracked one eye.
She
was still standing right in front of him.

The wild blaze of her against the white streaks of sleet only quickened the furious thud of his heart. He wanted to help her. And he wanted her. The conflicting impulses warred in him. Would the right impulse win? As likely as a snowball’s chance in Chicago in August.

* * *

Without a word, they followed the maps she’d printed and marked up with cryptic notes. At each stop, they got out, she selected an infant, and they returned the missing messiah to his adoring and apparently oblivious worshippers. At first, Fane didn’t believe she could match them all, but each scene was a little different from the others and each baby perfectly fit. Plastic or wood, ceramic or inflated, each found their home.

“Last one,” he said after hours had passed.

She bent over the final page of her printouts and scrawled an X before handing it to him; obviously it had been an unscheduled stop. He took the map, noted the address, and rolled his eyes. “You stole from the nursing home?”

She stared out the side window without answering.

He tried to hold onto his outrage, but it was late. And at least she was here: sullen and silent, but here. “You can’t fight off evil by being bad.” He imagined Mirabel’s deadbeat ex-boyfriend, facing the imp’s guilty fury; that was less a measure of justice than a shot of revenge. And Bella’s occasional assistance to the league was self-serving at best. He refused to wonder how his own involvement with the talyan might appear to the impartial observer. “We have to hold the line. It’s all we can do.”

“The only thing we can do.” Her low voice sounded raw, hurt. “I notice you don’t say it’s a good thing.”

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, wondering if he should be pleased she’d said
we
. “Only thing, good thing, whatever.”

“Whatever.”

He wondered if the doomed Mirabel had spoken that same word in that same hollow tone. Guilt nipped at him. As an angelic possessed, he was supposed to show the way to salvation. Before, he’d mostly hacked a path, machete-style. But he didn’t have his sword now.

“You have a unique opportunity here,” he told her. “The teshuva and the djinn don’t really communicate with their hosts. No one knows why the demons lend all their powers but none of their knowledge. You may be the only ex-tenebrae in existence with a voice.”

“I have nothing anyone would want to hear.”

“Maybe that used to be true, but the Chicago talyan are different from any league that has come before. They are willing to take the fight beyond what this world has known, and they could use all the help they can get.”

She faced him, her jaw off-kilter with rebelliousness. “Even from an imp?”

“Their demons are repentant, remember? Which means they were wrong first.”

“I’ve tried to give them hints where I could, tell them what I’ve seen of the tenebrae.” She tugged at one of the loose curls of red hair hanging beside her cheek and coiled it around her finger. He realized the boldness was only a frail mask over her anxiety, as distracting and delicate as her antique glasses. “Obviously I can’t tell them I’ve seen too much since their task is to eradicate monsters like me.”

“You are not a monster.” The words came out more harshly than he intended.

She flinched, but the hard set of her chin didn’t waver. “The imp I was swallowed more darkness than every winter night you can remember times a thousand. You might be angel-ridden, but you have no inkling how bad evil can be.”

Silence returned.

The nursing home was dark, closed up tight, when they drifted to a stop at the sidewalk. The spitting snow had gone, but the cold seemed more bitter for it. Fane hunched into his coat and strode around the front of the car to let Bella out. She already had the last statue.

For an instant, the sight of her cradling the infant with its upraised arms—Madonna and sinner in one—froze him in his tracks with a memory colder and more bitter than even the Chicago winter wind.

Bella glanced up when he did not move out of the way. She frowned. “Cyril?”

The dead shine of her eyes and his name on her lips, wary and miserable, went through him like a sword of ice. He took a step back, slamming his spine into the edge of the door.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” His voice sounded hoarse, shaken. He swallowed hard. “It’s three in the morning and I’m un-stealing religious statuary with a demon. A demon I fucked. What could be wrong?”

She tucked her head down and slipped out of the car, avoiding him. The power cord dangled behind her like a severed umbilical.

He turned away, bracing himself on the frame of the car. The breath caught in his throat, freezing and jagged as the ice floes shoved up on the lakeshore by the relentless wind. He closed his eyes.

Through his tight-clenched eyes, a pale glow intruded. Reluctantly, he glanced over his shoulder.

In the middle of the plastic nativity set, Bella had plugged in the baby Jesus, and the off-white light blinked. She knelt to adjust the controller before tucking the infant in, and the light steadied. Fane averted his gaze from her bowed red head, the only color in the ghostly tableau.

“Fane.” Her soft call stiffened his shoulders.

If she thought he was going to let her keep the last one… “Let’s go.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I told you already—”

“I don’t care what’s wrong with
you
now. Get your head out of your ass and let your angel eyes out. Something is wrong here.”

Hands fisted against the bottoms of his coat pockets, he stalked across the lawn. “If they see us out here—”

“Never mind what they’ll see.” She rocked back on her heels, revealing the manger where she’d been about to put the statuette. “What do
you
see?”

He blinked back the sting in his eyes from the rising wind, but the oily sheen of the glass orb where the baby should have been nestled writhed sickeningly in his vision. “What the hell?”

She nodded. “There’s a soul bomb in the manger.”

Chapter 7

Fane immediately called the league despite Bella’s half-hearted protest. “If the bomb releases soul shards, it’ll bring tenebrae from all directions, you know that,” he told her. “The teshuva can contain the damage.”

She wrapped her arms around herself though nothing seemed to stop the chills wracking her. “I know. Just…please don’t tell them…” She tucked her chin into her coat. “I don’t want the damage they contain to be
me
.”

Fane lifted his chin and studied her down the length of his clearly-never-been-punched-hard-enough nose. “You have to tell them eventually.”

Why, when they hadn’t figured it out yet? But she didn’t say that. “I know,” she repeated. “But I want to do it my own way.” When his expression didn’t change, she added, “I want to do it right.”

That seemed to mollify him, at least for the moment. Anyway, he was too busy making calls on his cell phone. While he did, she walked the perimeter of the building, and when she returned, he was standing with his hands on his hips, staring impatiently at her.

“Four more,” she told him. “Quite a bit bigger than this, and they are all wired. Looks like a mess of trigger, timer and accelerometer.” She angled her face away. “Guess it’s a good thing we stopped by.”

He mumbled something she wasn’t sure she wanted to decipher.

She was spared any need to reply when the porch light blinked on.

“I called Nanette too,” Fane said. “She’ll need to know everything.”

Bella huffed out an exasperated breath to obscure her flicker of dismay. She didn’t get much chance to cultivate attachments with other people, and the angel-woman had been kind enough. While Nanette had seemingly forgiven the talyan for their role in her husband’s murder, would she be so merciful toward a creature of the tenebraeternum? “Don’t tell her about me either. She’ll have enough to worry about.”

He nodded once, curtly, and strode toward the other angelic possessed. Bella didn’t want to be surrounded by their flickering golden stares, but neither did she particularly want to wait at the street for the talyan who were no doubt gunning their crappy cars en route even as she dithered.

She followed Fane.

Nanette pulled the door half shut behind her and wrung her hands. “How did this happen?”

“We don’t know.” Fane glanced at Bella. They might not know how, but they did know when. The soul bombs hadn’t been in place when she took the baby Jesus. Not that a timeline helped them particularly.

Nanette clutched her housecoat around her. “Do we need to evacuate? We’re understaffed, but I can call in nurses and families.”

Bella cleared her throat. “If it was a real bomb, maybe. But if the tenebrae are targeting the home, moving everyone will just add to the chaos. Adding to the chaos is never a good idea when dealing with the horde. Better to hunker down.” She slanted an accusing stare at Fane.

He ignored her. “We need to check the interior too. I want to find every orb.”

Nanette waved them inside. “How can this be happening again? Corvus was defeated.”

“But evil wasn’t,” Bella said. As if to underscore her point, a trio of beat-up @1 sedans turned the corner, targeting the nursing home like mangy sharks. “Why don’t you walk me around?”

The angel-woman nodded distractedly, and Bella didn’t look back as the talyan poured out to confront Fane.