Vowed in Shadows (38 page)

“You make it sound so easy,” Archer muttered.

Nim dropped her gaze. “How much more do we need? Andre told us Corvus mentioned a float plane. Fane dug up the turtle shell. And Ramirez said the bodies were contaminated with a gnarly acid. How many places could we be talking about?”

Sera gave a wry shrug and tossed the shard toward her computer. Over the discordant clatter and chime as it hit the monitor, she mused, “We live in an industrial city on a lake. Let's see . . .”

“So look it up.” Nim pointed her chin at the computer.

“What am I looking up? Demons and esoteric glass-work and apocalypse—oh, hell?”

“I was thinking float planes, turtles, and hydrofluoric acid,” Nim said. “But don't exclude demons from the search.”

Sera shook her head and crossed to the keyboard. “Right. Because Corvus Valerius is listed on Google. Besides that one Roman general, I mean.” She muttered to herself as she typed. “More generic? ‘Chicago airport' and ‘industrial waste'? ‘Turtles' can stay.” She sat back abruptly. “I'd forgotten they talked about an airport at Lake Calumet.”

“I remember,” Jilly said. “I dated an environmental activist for a while who talked about saving the marshes there.” She bumped her shoulder into Liam's. “You would've hated him.”

“The feeling would've been mutual.” The league leader folded his arms over his chest. “The area was used for illegal dumping for decades, and a few rotting ferales' carcasses might've been added to the pile on occasion.”

“And now they're coming back to haunt us.” Nim gestured at the glass fragment. “Well? Let's go check it out. What've we got to lose?”

Everyone looked at her.

She grimaced. “Oh, other than all that?”

“Tonight,” Liam said. “When the others wake.”

Under the thick, black sky, the lake was rippled glass. Tar and obsidian, Jonah thought, as he dragged in another humid breath. He let the breath out slowly as he stroked the oar silently through the water. Across the wide deck from him, Lex manned the second oar and matched his paddling. The pontoons weren't made for rowing, but they hadn't wanted to announce themselves with motors.

And, more important, the square, stable craft left room for fighting, should any ferales come winging out of the dark.

Behind him, the second boat they'd “borrowed” was equally silent as they explored the shoreline. Somewhere inland, two other teams poked through the wreckage of industry and the forest that had sprung up around it. But his cell phone, set to vibrate, was as stubbornly still as the woman at his side.

No one had been left behind tonight. He'd understood that to ask her otherwise was pointless. Despite her play at shamelessness, he knew she felt the guilty sting of losing the anklet. But if Corvus had holed up somewhere ahead . . .

The sweat that stained his shirt felt suddenly clammy and chilled.

Kneeling at the prow, Nim turned her head abruptly. Her eyes gleamed violet in the night, and his heart leapt in atavistic delight at the hunter's glow. “There,” she whispered. “In that tower.”

He followed her gaze. The grain elevator stood abandoned, ringed in a thicket of undergrowth. No terrestrial light shone there, but to his demon's eyes, a flicker of etheric disturbance shot across the single upper-story window and then vanished.

His phone twitched in his pocket. Sera texted from the boat behind them to all the talyan; she'd seen the demon sign too.

Perhaps it was nothing; a lone feralis ghosting through the empty building in pursuit of a sickly bat to add to its corporeal husk. Suddenly, he couldn't say which he wanted more: another false alarm or Corvus's crushed head on a pike.

His phone vibrated again. A call this time, conferenced to the rest of the teams. He tilted the phone so the other talyan could hear.

“We're just outside the fence around the elevator,” Liam said. “The ground is littered with bones. And turtle shells. Jonah, you'll have to beach the boats. The dock looks completely rotted out.” The league leader's voice deepened with satisfaction. “And if you'll direct your attention to the top floor, you'll notice the rusted-out skeleton of what appears to be a float plane.”

Just as Andre had told them.

“Not getting much demon sign.” Archer, from the second ground team, sounded disappointed. “If it is Corvus, he's gotten lazy and lonely.”

“Then he'll love to see us,” Jonah murmured.

Nim's violet gaze fixed on him, then shied away.

Liam's voice crackled. “If there's no etheric interference to distract him, the djinni will know we're coming. Let's move.”

The flare of teshuva energy was certainly a giveaway, Jonah thought, but he couldn't contain the surge as he drove the boat through the water. The second boat, with Ecco and Nando at the oars, was right behind him.

The two pontoons hit the brushy shoreline in a burst of mud and murky stink. Jonah jabbed the oar into the muck and heaved the boat another length onto solid ground. The end of the oar clacked against his new cuff as he vaulted over the prow.

Despite his speed, Nim was already ahead of him, half-lost among the rushes. He couldn't call out to her without giving away their location.

As he raced after her, he fumbled over his shoulder for the executioner's sword strapped against his spine. He hadn't had time to practice the move, to smooth out the reach and grab, much less the twist and latch that locked the blade to his cuff. The metal cuff that Liam had made laced ingeniously up his forearm to his shoulder, like some bizarre cyborg warrior.

He hadn't even swung the sword yet.

Off to his right and a little ahead, Ecco stumbled and swore. Jonah swept past him. Maybe he'd keep the big talya on his right, and if his first practice swing accidentally took off anybody's head . . .

The teshuva rose in him, tightening his muscles, sharpening every hazy, starlit glimmer of grass. He vaulted over a fifty-gallon drum rusting in the weeds and landed with a crunch of old bone. Nim was only a step ahead of him.

From the water, the grain elevator had looked surrounded by overgrowth. But an unnatural clearing spread from the base of the tower to a chain-link fence on the outskirts. The fencing rattled as, somewhere along its length, the first talyan went over.

Nim hit the fence at a dead run. Clad in black from head to foot, she was a shadow against the dark sky. He jumped beside her, hooked the top curve of the sword over the upper rim of the fence, and yanked himself over. To his relief, the blade didn't detach from the cuff, nor the cuff from his arm. And, even more of a relief, now he was ahead of her.

She'd already made it clear she had no qualms about confronting Corvus on her own. He'd make sure she didn't get that chance again.

From the inland side, a dozen talyan converged on the tower, Liam in the lead. He charged across the clearing like a human—human plus demon—battering ram. The hammer shone in a gleaming arc over his head. And he brought it crashing down against the door.

Jonah could've sworn they'd decided on something not quite full frontal, but maybe he'd missed an IM.

With one entrance and the risk of bottlenecking, they had only the element of surprise to get enough of them in the door. So he was right on Liam's heels, with the rest of the talyan breathing down his neck.

Which didn't give any of them a chance to appreciate Corvus's redecorating before the salambes descended in attack, and their flame-bright ether lit the interior like walking into a lava lamp of doom. Nim would appreciate the comparison.

Assuming they survived.

Nim swore as Jonah passed her at the fence. He'd taken the newly adapted sword from Liam earlier in the night and hadn't even acknowledged her when she suggested he give it a whirl before they went out.

He could lose his head with a crappy attitude like that.

What a terrible time to realize she wanted to keep him just the way he was. She was done with dancing alone.

The stream of oversized male talyan flowed into the grain elevator, forcing her to pause as the doorway swallowed him. Her pulse ratcheted to painful intensity. Simply losing sight of him was bad enough.

She stared up. The elevator loomed above her. At the very top, black against the haze of distant city lights, the wings and floats of the half-dismantled plane perched like a weathervane.

Archer rocked to a stop beside her. “Are you armed this time?”

She lifted the African throwing knife she'd picked out. With its uniquely asymmetrical four-pronged design, and every prong sharpened to a wicked edge, she didn't even need to aim.

Archer nodded. “Stay out here with my defensive team.”

“Jonah's inside. He needs me.” She knew she didn't have to say more.

After a heartbeat, Archer nodded toward the tower. “Go, then. And don't get dead.”

She didn't bother rolling her eyes. She just returned the nod and ran for the doorway where the last talyan had disappeared inside. She crossed the threshold, and for a second, her world upended.

Ecco had explained how he neutralized and contained malice in etherically altered glass capped with foil blessed by an angelic possessed. No wonder they hadn't sensed an overwhelming presence of tenebrae; Corvus had made the entire wooden tower into a blessed—or in this case, damned—bottle.

The ravaged interior still showed the bracing structures of the five-story vertical bins where grain had been stored, but the walls had been mostly torn away. What was left was honeycombed but asymmetrical, like a misshapen beehive.

And everything had been sheeted in etched glass.

Nim almost staggered under her teshuva's disorientation against the reflected and distorted emanations of the tenebrae trapped behind glass. This was how Jonah must feel every day with his demon's flow disrupted.

The thought of him straightened her. Where had he gone?

The combined force of the teshuva energy had created a protective no-fly zone over the gathered talyan, but a cloud of salambes hovered just above. Their virulent glow lit the glass as if someone had set the world on fire. And Jonah's blond hair gleamed like gold.

Nim couldn't help but hunch her shoulders as she raced toward him. Good thing she'd worn her sneakers; even the roughly planked flooring underfoot was coated with glass.

She called his name, but the sound was lost in the chime of shattering glass as a feralis—no, not one, but a handful, then dozens—began to break free of the walls.

And the floor. The slick glass heaved under her feet, and she fell to her knees. A half-shelled feralis—she recognized the patterns from the fragment from the club, but the rest was bony protuberances like fish bones—reared up over her. Whatever lock of energies had kept the tenebrae confined had been broken by the teshuva's arrival.

As the other ferales rose, leaving monster-sized graves behind in the glass, she found herself reluctant to actually throw away her throwing knife. Keeping her pointy treasures close seemed suddenly wiser.

From her prone position, she kicked at the feralis. It went down in a tumble, squat legs waving in the air. Ha—certain advantages in fighting a mutated-turtle enemy. Once they were flipped over—

The feralis heaved itself to its spiny side and whirled to slice at her with snapping turtle jaws.

The disadvantages of fighting a mutated half turtle. She lashed out with the knife to force it away. It reared back, exposing the leathery folds of its neck embedded with glass pebbles. . . .

She struck with all the teshuva's force. The knife bit deep, past the first and second prongs, buried to the third. She yanked back and rolled away from the fountain of black ichor. Splinters of glass ground into her palms.

The feralis wasn't going anywhere and she didn't have time to neutralize its emanations. She'd lost Jonah in the melee as the talyan engaged the ferales. The uproar of clashing energies had allowed the salambes to descend, like saber-toothed vultures, and the ruined glass walls glinted crazily.

“Corvus Valerius!”

She heard the shout, though she couldn't see the shouter. But she felt the surge of demonic energy as the talyan focused.

There was Jonah! He was already running for the stairs, in a pack with five other talyan. Of course, Corvus wouldn't be hanging here with the rabble. If anywhere, he'd be in the cupola at the top of the tower.

She blew past the remaining talyan. Ecco shouted at her, but she didn't hesitate. She tagged behind Haji and hit the stairs with Jonah's group before she thought how this probably wasn't what Archer had meant by “Don't get dead.”