Vowed in Shadows (26 page)

The scent of cloves teased her, and Ecco stepped out from behind the Dumpster. “I'll go bottle up some malice and meet you back here. Lock up behind me.”

She followed him to the chain-link gate. “Do you think they'll find Corvus?”

“No, or I would have gone with them. Blackbird is smarter than us.”

She eyed him. “Ever heard of this concept called allegiance?”

The big talya shrugged. “Doesn't get you anywhere. Brutal, but true. Still, now we have the three of you.”

Her and Sera and Jilly. And whatever they could become together. “What are we again?”

“I think you're our chance. That's why I didn't go with them, and why I'll risk some serious ass kicking if your boys find out I'm not with any of them.”

“What happens if we get in worse trouble than they do?”

Ecco's teeth flashed brighter than his gauntlet blades. “Yeah, that thought had occurred to me.”

When he sauntered out the gate, she yanked it shut with more force than was necessary.

He brought his gauntlets down his thigh with a hiss of steel on leather. “What's with the attitude? You like trouble. You got through your old life wrapped in trouble. That's why you didn't need clothes.”

“Remember how I gave up my old life?”

“Nobody changes that much.” He flicked the stub of his cigarette through the chain link at her feet and walked away.

She waited until he'd disappeared beyond the corner of the warehouse, too far for even a demon to hear, before she answered, “That's what I'm afraid of.”

She went to the dock, pulled down the big door, and latched it against the night.

Sera and Jilly weren't waiting for her in the kitchen or in the lobby. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and let her senses flow.

She sensed the deadened zones, where Jonah had talked about energy sinks. And the leftover art no one had claimed from salvage held a sort of brightness from which the teshuva shied away. But a faint track led her to the stairwell and up to the roof.

The two women were sitting on matching bar stools, their feet propped on the low lip of the wall ringing the rooftop. A third stool was pulled up beside them.

Nim dropped onto it with a huff. “Couldn't leave a note?”

“Wondered if your teshuva would sniff us out,” Jilly said. “Even without the anklet.”

“We already knew the artifacts didn't
give
us our powers,” Sera said.

Jilly shrugged. “Tonight we'll find out what they
are
for.”

Nim glanced at her. Dressed in cutoffs and a short sleeved cotton oxford, Jilly didn't look like a woman who'd been nearly gutted earlier in the day. Except for the band of gauze that peeked through at the shirt's unbuttoned neck. “You up for this?”

Jilly gave her a look. “I'm up.”

“I already told her we could wait,” Sera said. “The female talyan have been MIA for more than two thousand years. Another night wouldn't kill us. Probably. Although weirder things have happened.”

Jilly huffed. “With reassurances like that, is it any wonder I got up?”

They sat looking out over the city, peaceful if not exactly companionable as the light faded.

Jilly finally stirred. “What do you think happened to all of us, all the women warriors?”

Sera sighed. “You know the league archives have almost nothing to say.”

“Then I'm guessing we all ran away,” Nim said. The other two drew identical breaths as preparation to argue, their eyes reflecting their outrage along with the last of the sky glow, but she held up her hand to stop them. “Think about it. A man wins a woman, and he brags out loud to whoever'll listen. He hits her? He's got a long story about how she walked into a door. Hell, he'll kill her and scream about how she had it coming. But if she runs away? Vast, echoing silence.”

Sera puffed out her cheeks on a sigh stopped midstream. “That's cynical.”

“And believable,” Jilly said. “Saw it often enough with the street kids I worked with. Andre told me some of the things his dad used to say to him. . . .” She shook her head.

Nim lifted her eyebrows. “You feel sorry for him?”

“What can I say?” Jilly tugged at the gauze bandage. “I'm a bleeding heart.”

“Har har.” Sera stood and stretched, blond hair rippling down her back. “Come on. Let's meet Ecco halfway. I don't want to be fighting the league barriers in the warehouse when we try our little trick.”

Nim stood, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. “How will we find him? How will he catch the malice?”

Sera turned away from them, toward the city. Her racerback tank top displayed the traceries of her
reven.
. “Ecco has a way with the malice. He flays open his soul, and then they come to feast. Can't you feel it? He's out there now, like he's ringing a bell and singing ‘Come and get it.' ”

Nim shuddered. “How can he stand to be eaten alive?”

Sera shrugged. “He's come to the same sort of serenity as the dying people I counseled.” The violet lights flared higher. “Except he gets to fight back. Unlike our missing sisters, apparently.”

“But we're here now,” Jilly said. “Let's do it.”

They traced Ecco's path to the next industrial park. He'd chosen an empty warehouse, the four stories of brick still standing but every windowpane shattered and the bottom eight feet of the exterior wreathed in layers of garbled graffiti.

Train tracks passed it, but the rails had been partially filled in with asphalt, the line abandoned.

“At least we won't have to explain to Liam how the building got destroyed,” Jilly said.

“That does make it easier.” Sera kicked open the door.

The interior had been gutted; only broken glass and the support beams that disappeared into the darkness four floors up remained. The darkness was thick with etheric smoke as tangled as the graffiti, and in a strange way, almost as legible.

And the word it pulsed was “doom.”

Ecco whirled at the heart of it, gauntlets dulled but his teshuva alight to Nim's demon-amped vision. A dozen forty-ounce liquor bottles surrounded him. Nim realized when he'd said he was bottling malice, he meant actually bottling them. Obviously, he'd had no trouble finding containers in the vacant building.

Not that the malice seemed inclined to participate. A cloud of inky darkness darted around him, staining the air behind it with streamers of demon sign, as the malice tried to avoid the bottles and get to Ecco.

He chanted obscenities, and his eyes blazed. Nim wasn't sure she wanted to get too close either. “What's our move?”

“You're the lure,” Sera said. “Call them.”

“Me?” Nim stammered the word into multiple syllables.

Jilly wrapped her fingers around her wrist, where her woven metallic bracelet flickered with violet. “Bring them close enough and I'll trap them all.”

“And I'll send them to the other side,” Sera said.

“Although this is a bigger horde than we've tried before.” Did Jilly's voice waver a bit? Her uncertainty was almost lost in the malevolent drone of the malice as they circled.

Nim took a breath. Too late to back down now.

But she wanted Jonah by her side, so badly her knees shook. Or maybe that was fear. Or maybe the
reven
wrapped around her thighs kicking in. She didn't know which. And that was why she wanted him. He'd know. With his steady assurance, his unwavering strength, his devotion. Oh, not devotion to her—she knew that—but to the bond between them, which was almost the same. She wanted it to be the same.

The longing shocked her.

As did the realization that her yearning had distracted the malice.

Their focus weighed on her like a major depression, like the yawning void that before had inspired her to strike entire books of matches. As if those tiny flames could ever light the darkness. The bright flare of pain as she'd extinguished the fire in her skin had been something like light, an illusion of illumination.

But not as bright as the
reven
that flared now to her knees, straightening her stance.

The tornado of malice made a vacuum that sucked at her breath, as if they could stop her heart with their convergence.

“That's it,” Jilly whispered. “Lure them in.”

The horde wanted her as much as she wanted Jonah. No, they wanted her more. Because all the crazy, luminous, weightless yearning that made her pulse race when she thought of him was not enough to satisfy them.

Because she could not be enough to satisfy Jonah.

“Don't lose them, Nim.” Sera's voice came as if from a deep well, distorted and thin. “Nim?”

How could she have spent a lifetime honing herself into a tool of desire, and yet all her hot caresses left him cold, untouched? Not his body, of course; that always rose to her teasing fingers like the teshuva roused to demon sign. But his heart . . . That was locked away where she couldn't ever reach. He didn't want her, not like the malice wanted her.

She straightened and opened her arms. A chill down her spine made the small hairs at her nape prickle.

“Nim, no!” Ecco's shout warped through the black fog. But his wasn't the voice she wanted to hear.

“Come on, then,” she whispered. “Is this the darkness you feed on, you sucking little bastards? I'll show you shadows.”

They came.

Fast as obsidian wasps, the malice swarmed her. The embers of their eyes burned, and their vicious shrill rose toward a scream.

No, that was Sera, shouting a warning. “Ecco! Coming through the window.”

Nim dragged her awareness out of the morass where she'd gone. The shattered windows at ground level shone red with the last of the setting sun. But the sun had set a half hour ago.

A hot wind spun slivers of glass across her shins. The wind stank of brittle rust. And death.

The red was the glow of salambes.

The malice cloud squealed and spun faster, then rose toward the ceiling. Her pulse, which had faded to a shallow rasp, kicked into the demon's double beat as the sullen gleam climbed to the second set of windows, and then the third. How many of the tenebrae were out there?

Ecco's chanted curses rose to a sharper pitch, which suddenly made her giggle. If the hulking talya was scared, they must be well and truly fucked.

Finally, she was living up to her full potential. And she didn't need any man to do that.

“You wanted to see what we could do,” she reminded Jilly, who was standing nearby.

The shorter woman whirled around, her violet eyes widened. “Nim? Are you back with us?”

Nim frowned. “Where else would I be?”

“The Veil was thinning. You must have felt the cold.”

“Oh. That.”

Jilly grinned. “Yeah. Can you stop with the luring thing now? We're about to be swamped.” Her grin faltered. “And there's no way we can take them all.”

“I don't think so. I didn't know I'd started.”

Sera moved closer to them. “I've always used Ferris to pull myself back.”

“Your boyfriends aren't here,” Ecco said. “Although it just so happens that I . . .”

He trailed off when Nim gave him a look, and she realized the other two women had leveled identical expressions on him. He shrugged. “Potential hot four-way action. Can't blame a guy for trying.”

“Maybe a three-way . . .” Nim hummed to herself. When the rent check was due, she'd always been willing to do scenarios outside her usual repertoire.

“That'd be fine,” Ecco said.

She ignored him and held her hands out to Sera and Jilly. “What makes us different from the guys?”

“Where to start?” Sera mused with a last glare at the grinning Ecco, and took Nim's hand.

“We aren't afraid to look inward, to touch.” Nim waggled her fingers, and Jilly finally took her hand and Sera's, completing the small circle.

Nim swallowed hard, hoping she could choke down the lie. She'd
always
been afraid to look inward. And as for touching . . . It could be good. Jonah had showed her it could be good.

Even for repentant evil.

“I think this is weird,” Jilly said.

“I think I've died and gone to heaven,” Ecco said.

Jilly started to tug away, but Nim tightened her grasp. “No, stay with us. You said we can't take them all. Not alone. I brought them”—boy, had she ever—“just like you told me to. Now you have to trap them.”

Jilly swallowed hard and closed her eyes. The
reven
that curled over her breast, barely visible above the band of gauze around her chest, sputtered, then flared again. “This was a bad idea.”

Sera tugged at her, lifting their joined hands to rattle the bracelet around Jilly's wrist. “And if you want to live long enough for Liam to tell you that, over and over, you better set that trap.”

Jilly cracked one closed eye to peer at Sera. “All right, Miss Know-It-All.”

The bracelet glimmered with unnatural lights woven through the dull metal. Nim stared at the knot work, trying to follow even one bead of light sliding through the strands. She startled when Sera tightened her grasp.

“Don't get caught in there,” Sera warned. “You won't like where you go when it's my turn to deal with them.”

The tenebraeternum. The demon realm.

Sweat beaded on Jilly's brow despite the chill fog that had descended. The malice drifted lower too, their wild churning slowed to a sluggish writhe as they approached. The featureless black haze crystallized into claws and spiked tails and spiteful red eyeballs.