Vowed in Shadows (42 page)

Nim did as ordered. To her surprise, the chai, lightened to the color of Jonah's hair with milk and sugar, took the edge off the burn. “It's very good.” Good, good. Just like him. She wished she could kick herself, but she might cause real damage with these heels.

“You'll have to bring him in for a last supper before we close next month. My landlord stopped in, and it seems the end has come at last.”

If only she knew. Nim took another sip of soup and wondered if breathing fire might distract the sharp-eyed Ms. Mbengue. “I'm sure Jonah will come by.”

“He's a man who deserves to find a light in his life.” The woman hesitated. “You could choose much, much worse.”

“I'm about to,” Nim assured her.

Someone in the kitchen called urgently.

“We all have fires to put out,” Nim said. “Maybe that's what you meant by ‘light.' ”

Ms. Mbengue gave Nim a sharp look, the kind that reminded her the woman shared her origins with the executioner's sword and the four-pronged throwing knife. “No, I meant the light in his eyes when he looked at you.”

Nim stared down at the pepper flakes floating in her bowl like mocking malice eyes. “He was hungry.”

“He's in love. Don't you care?”

The rush of heat that went through Nim had nothing to do with the spices. Oh, she cared. For once, she cared so much about being the warrior he needed and the woman he craved.

As always, the only way she knew was to put her body on the line. “Enough chilies will burn it out of him.”

Ms. Mbengue said something in a language Nim didn't know, but she wished she could memorize it, since she guessed it'd come in handy next time she wanted to swear around Jonah. Not that there would be a next time. Another call from the kitchen made the woman shake her head. “Fight your own battles, then.”

“I will,” Nim said softly to the woman's back. Jonah and the league had taught her that.

The dinner rush slowed as she finished her soup, and a few people lingered over their cups. Ms. Mbengue topped off her chai once without another word, and the golden liquid darkened to plain old tea. Nim left a few bills along with an @1 business card she'd snagged from Jonah's wallet. Maybe Ms. Mbengue would check in with Jonah in a few days, out of curiosity, and offer some of her chilies and wisdom.

Nim figured the least she could do was give him his harem back.

Shadows had settled into the cracks of the city, although the sky between the clouds still held streaks of blue. Lighter blue, like Corvus's eyes, to the west. Yellow too, like . . . Wait, the sun was too far down for those fiery streaks.

Heat lightning stitched a ragged line between the clouds, gathering the dark masses closer. The white glare faded, but the streaks in evil's cheap-ass light show remained.

Salambes. In an arrow over the city, pointing east toward the darkest part of the sky.

Good thing she'd always favored the night shift.

Nim avoided a cranky mother wielding a stroller like a war chariot to herd her two kids out of the fountain. “If you don't come out of there right now . . .”

Could the unstated threat possibly be worse than the mass of tenebrae streaking the sky like gangrene? Nim seriously doubted it. Anyway, the kids weren't impressed.

Sera and Jilly had told her that children, crazy people, religious wackos, and sometimes artists might occasionally catch a glimpse of other-realm emanations. So she amped the teshuva, walked past the shrieking girls, and said in her lowest demon harmonics, “Listen to your mother.”

The girls spun toward her and froze. She didn't know what they saw; maybe just stranger danger. That was true enough too.

The oblivious woman wrapped them in towels while their teeth chattered, and Nim walked on. That was one little family who wouldn't be caught in the thunderhead of demonic ether building above the pier. She let her fancy heels slow her just a bit, to give them a few extra moments.

More people were coming toward her off the pier. The park was closing; the weather closing in. With luck, no one would be left to suffer her latest—last—mistake.

She might not be as good as Jonah, as crazed as Ecco, as . . . as much of an ass as Archer, but at least she could win the league a smidgen of advantage against the dark. And this time, she wouldn't drag anyone else down, down, down with her.

She wished doing the right thing felt less lonely. But that was what Corvus had demanded.

A cop directing the stream of traffic out of the parking garage and past the entrance gave her a hard look as she passed, bucking the tide of pedestrians. But her heels and short skirt weren't entirely out of the realm of possibility for a nice girl taking a simple stroll on the boardwalk with her beau.

Luckily, he wasn't the fashion police, because the black vinyl trench coat didn't work with the ensemble at all. Except for hiding the throwing knife pinned between her shoulder blades, of course.

And she didn't have a beau either.

She walked past the amusement park, past the mini golf and the shops, past the stained-glass museum and theater, past the grand ballroom where the curved facade reached almost to the water, and stopped at the edge of the pier.

The lake on all three sides was black, the city lights dimmed by the lowering clouds. But to her demon's eyes, the fiery stain of the salambes overhead slicked the water like a burning oil spill. She tried not to hunch her shoulders at the psychic weight of the tenebrae above them. If she hunched, she'd skewer herself on the throwing knife at her back.

“You came.”

At Corvus's distinctive slurred voice, she turned with only the faintest wobble. Not from the heels—she was far too professional for that—but from the fear that did unfortunate things to her knees. The thin traceries of the
reven
on her thighs raced like the heat lightning, there and gone again. She faced the gladiator with her teshuva guttering, one tiny match head against the raging flames of hell.

She imagined that match head against her skin, and she stiffened her knees. Yeah, this was going to hurt, but at least it would only be her doing the hurting. “I'm here, just like you asked.”

The djinn-man opened his arms in a hallelujah pose, and birnenston spewed from the open sores of his
reven
. The poison hissed on the pavers. “The only one of your kind to listen.” He clawed at his arm, and after a moment wrestled off the anklet. Birnenston welled from the gouge the too-tight chain had left in his skin. He held it out. “For you.”

She didn't reach for it. She'd have to step too close. Besides, if he wanted her to have it, that couldn't be good.

He twirled the loop around his finger. “You think you can take it from me, as you've taken everything else in your life.”

“I always gave a dance in return,” she said.

His blue eye twisted toward her. “I know you did more than that for your talya mate. You gave him his soul back. We want ours.”

“I don't have your soul. They told me it's woven in to the Veil, until the end of days.”

“So end days.” His voice thrummed with longing. “You were a slave like me, dancing to the masters' whims. End it.”

“I wanted to, every time some wanker undertipped. But I can't.” She hesitated. Actually, with Sera and Jilly, she almost had. So she added with reluctant truth, “Not by myself, anyway.”

“Even I can't destroy the world alone—though please don't think I haven't tried—which is why you are here. And where are your league sisters?”

She frowned. How extensive was that brain damage? “You told me to come by myself. Remember?”

Both eyes—birnenston yellow and strangely celestial blue—focused on her in disbelief. “And you listened to me?”

Even evil thought she was a fuckup. A dust devil of cotton-candy threads, sulfur stink, and malice whirled around them, caught in the etheric centrifuge. “I couldn't ask them to die.”

The djinni's fury reverberated in a language of hatred she couldn't quite make out under Corvus's snarl. “Since when do you care about anyone else in this world?”

“Since I fell in love.”

She put her fingertips over her mouth. Her teeth lingered on her lower lip, as if she could bite off the
V
in “love” and stop herself before she said more. Where had that confession come from? And to say it to this monster? How sad.

But with the words said, an emptiness gaped around her. An endless, needy longing to be filled.

For a heartbeat, her knees wavered, and the poisonous darkness spread through her veins. After years of dancing alone, how had she let someone else become her other half? She'd sworn, with each burning match she snuffed on her skin, that no one else would steal her body, her soul, her life.

The stench of sulfur—from those old matches and from the swirling nightmare of tenebrae—sucked tears from her eyes. Around them, the malice hissed, as if sipping her pain.

Not that her petty commitment issues mattered anymore. She would sacrifice any chance of keeping body, soul, or life in order to save the league, the city, and maybe heaven itself.

Slave, he'd called her, and he was right. She had feared all she had left would be stolen. But what he didn't understand, and what she'd finally learned, was that it could still be shared. That knowledge, bittersweet, was all she had now, so she said it again because she always flaunted what she had. “Since I fell in love with Jonah, and he with me.”

This time, the words locked her knees where even the teshuva and her years of pole work had failed. She stood so straight, the knife between her shoulder blades never touched her spine.

Corvus's face lit yellow with his djinni. “That is not the force you think it is.”

“I know.” She rocked up onto her toes until the high heels barely scratched against the pavers. “It's worse.”

Despite her warnings, Jonah had touched her, and not just in the ways that made her moan. She was supposed to be the demon lure, and instead he had been the one to tempt her to try living on the light side.

Through the tenuous contact of the stilettos on ground, she sensed the tremor.

Corvus stiffened. “Liar. You aren't alone.”

She let the black coat slip down her arms to pool at her feet. The lake breeze teased between the laces of the bustier, and the knife came easily to her hand. “Do I look stupid?”

Corvus scowled and took a menacing step toward her. “With that embarrassment of a weapon? You look suicidal. And your fellow talyan are no better off.”

“Then it's a good thing that's not who's coming.”

With a shriek and a clatter, the ferales poured over the facade of the ballroom. A crimson-studded tsunami of malice boiled behind.

“You are suicidal
and
stupid.” Corvus whirled and spread his arms. But the oncoming horde—drawn irresistibly to the lure of her—was too overwhelming even for his powerful demon. The djinni streamed away from him like a ragged cloak in a hard wind, but the etheric connection never quite severed.

Of course not. The djinni would never believe it could fail.

Well, she knew all about making mistakes.

He spun toward her. “They'll tear us apart. Stop them!”

“Gladly.” She leapt forward with a downward slash of the knife at his hand where the anklet still dangled.

He bellowed, and the djinni snatched him away with the careless violence of an angry child with an old toy.

“I can't do it without the anklet,” she shouted back.

“Open a path to the Veil first.”

She would've stomped her foot, but not in these heels. “That's not my trick.”

“You've turned plenty of tricks since the teshuva made you its whore.”

Nim wished she had a witty comeback, something about prosti-dudes who lived in glass houses . . . but the ferales were upon them.

Corvus roared again and ripped one of the decorative lampposts out of the concrete. Wires crackled and the two bulbs exploded in a shower of glass. Corvus swept the impromptu weapon in a wide arc and scattered the first line of ferales.

Nim ducked as the arc continued over her head. On the backswing, Corvus took out the next line, knocking a half dozen of the tenebrae monsters into the lake.

Nim straightened slowly and looked askance at her puny knife. Her teshuva needed her to be up close and personal to drain demonic emanations, but right now she needed to be far, far away.

She slid the knife back in its sheath just as a half-human—one arm and one leg anyway—feralis slithered on its other, silverfish legs around Corvus's swing and reared up in front of her. Ratlike jaws opened in its sloped head. Revenge of the Mobi meals.

She grabbed for the nearest lamppost and swung herself around it, one leg at full extension.

Ah, this felt familiar.

The tip of her heel raked through the feralis's throat. The creature toppled, rat tail lashing, and black ichor spewed in gruesome imitation of the cheerful fountain at the park entrance. But she had already landed safely beyond its reach.

With her demon's strength she grabbed the next lamppost and snapped it off at the base. Electrical sparks burned her ankles. So much for her shiny new sandals.

She bashed the end of the post against the pier railing to crack off the double lanterns at the top. With her newfound spear, she leveled a threesome of rushing ferales. Their attendant malice scattered beyond her reach, but the fiery vortex of salambes kept them from going too far.

No, that wasn't fair to the monsters. The lure that was her only claim to fame was what kept them from going too far. She felt dizzy, stretched outside her skin. Was she glowing like an irresistible bug zapper to tenebrae eyes? She had to get that anklet.