His hands flexed, driven by the reflexive surge of his demon to her challenge. He tamped it down, the heels of his palms hard against his thighs lest he reach for her.
Her gaze burned over him like hot coals, lingered on his fists, as if she thought he would silence her with fingers around her throat. Not that she’d let that stop her.
How could he explain that he didn’t want to silence her, but save her—never mind the city—from herself?
Her stare burned deeper. “I always wanted the kids at the halfway house to know until they addressed their problems honestly, they’d always feel like outsiders, outcast even from themselves.”
“Is this a ‘face your demons’ speech?” Ecco asked.
She glanced at the other talya but didn’t smile. “What if everyone did? Not just us, but everyone in the city?”
Sera stepped up beside Jilly. “I’ve wondered the same. If there are people like Jilly’s landlady, regular humans, who are fighting the demons, maybe we should find them and join forces. There’s no reason we have to be alone in this.”
With his demon hovering halfway to attack, Liam felt the talyan weighing the words as clearly as if they’d picked up stones, hefted the burdens in their hands. They didn’t appreciate how their calling was fragile as glass, that every night they walked one wrong step away from hell.
They also didn’t know that he and Jilly had been dancing right there on the edge. If they found out, they’d never listen to him, and he dreaded the day he watched them ridden down by the darkness of the world, weighed down by the darkness in their souls.
“There’s one reason.” At the demon lows in his voice, violet flickered in the eyes around him as the others responded to the implied threat.
Only Jilly’s gaze was clear. “What?”
He touched his temple, drawing attention to the most obvious sign of the demon rampant. The
reven
smoldered beneath his fingers, his human flesh incompatible with the other-realm marking, even though they were inextricably intertwined.
And that was the reason. “We are alone because we are marked as damned, and we must atone. That is our only mission, our only fight.”
The harsh conviction rolled through them as if those stones had backfired.
“You’re the one who pointed it out to me,” he reminded Jilly softly. “I am soul brother to Corvus. And so are we all.”
Despite the roaring propane heater in the ceiling, the warehouse had gone chill. One wrong touch and they would all shatter. The ravager in him coiled and uncoiled. It knew jagged edges made better weapons.
Even more softly, knowing they would hear, he said, “But we
will
fight. I promise you.” His heart bled to hear the ring of truth.
After a moment, Jonah nodded. “The way to repentance is between you and your God.” A bitter smile twisted his lips. “Or your demon, as the case may be. It is no longer our place to convert others.”
Ecco snorted. “Converting was always your deal, missionary man, not mine. I don’t care what Corvus has in mind—bashed in like it is—as long as I get plenty of slaughter time. It’ll all come out in the wash.” He snorted again. “Well, not all of it. Unless you use bleach. Whatever. I’m beat. Wake me up if tomorrow doesn’t get here.”
His exit broke the pained tableau. Archer touched Sera’s shoulder, drawing her away, but not before she murmured something to Jilly, who didn’t respond.
A palace coup? Liam couldn’t dredge up the interest to care as he talked to a few more talyan on their way out. They’d all had bad nights, their clashes with tenebrae fiercer than ever. Underneath their murmured reaffirmations that they’d made it through in one piece—or at least pieces that could be put back together—was the unspoken echo to the question Archer had raised: Did it matter?
Their doubt drained him as he subtly reinforced their focus. Their intensity he never questioned, and their strength. But those sterling attributes could become glittering knives turned against the world if ever they lost track of their mission, like he’d indulged the spiraling dark obsession with Jilly.
Though undercurrents of unease still swirled in violet eyes, exhaustion took them to their rooms. The end times offered that advantage, at least: keeping the union of supernatural killers too busy with overtime to review their retirement policy.
When he was alone in the docking bay, he turned off the heater and the lights. He stood in the empty, cavernous space for a moment, but not even the flicker of a lone soulfly disturbed the darkness.
He went inside.
The halls were every bit as empty, but a subdued clatter drew him to the kitchen.
Jilly. Of course. He leaned in the doorway.
She’d only turned on the counter light, leaving her adrift in the otherwise murky room. A pile of neatly split eggshells glistened whitely at her elbow. She didn’t look around at him as she cracked another egg. “I’m not trying to win friends and influence people, but the crew will need something for breakfast.”
“Maybe you can mix in some of Lau-lau’s repellent.”
She finally glanced over at him, uncertainty in the hunch of her shoulders. “I didn’t think you’d even talk to me.”
“Why? Just because you’re trying to destroy the league from within?”
“I’m not—” She grabbed a bowl and began whisking furiously.
“You’re about to tell me a discord demon can’t make omelets without breaking some eggs.”
“I’m not making omelets again. I’m making quiche. It’ll keep until tomorrow when everyone gets up.”
“Jilly,” he said softly as he walked toward her
She put the bowl down with a decisive thump, as if she didn’t want to be tempted to throw it at him. “I am not the teshuva, not just discord.”
“It chose you for a reason.”
“But I’m not trying to challenge you,” she said. When he snorted, she pursed her lips with a wry tilt of her head but didn’t back down as he closed the distance between them. “Not challenge you for responsibility to the league, anyway. I have no illusions what kind of leader I’d be. Still, I really believe I can make a difference.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He lifted one hand when she started to protest. “Your life has been about going a different way. That’s why you got involved with the halfway house, to keep the kids out of the sort of trouble you grew up in. But you can’t save the talyan by ending this fight. Only in the fighting can we be saved.”
She stared at him.
“You think I’m blind, but I’m not.” Involuntarily, he touched his temple with the pointed knuckles of his hard-clenched fist. “I see very clearly. I see that we are caught for eternity in this battle. That is the contract we inadvertently signed in our possession. But seeing clearly doesn’t mean there’s a way out of the trap.”
She gently bumped aside his fist to lay her palm against his cheekbone, her fingertips just grazing his
reven
. The combination of her soft touch and even-softer eyes nearly ruined him. Just when he thought she only wanted his head on a pike, she offered him instead a chance to lay his head in her lap. The temptation trumped any the demon had ever conjured.
He half closed his eyes. Then his gaze snagged on her bracelet. Other-realm ethers still glimmered in the woven bands, a mute reminder of lurking threats trapped but not vanquished.
He took a step back, and she paled as if he’d slapped her. But there were only so many pieces of him that could be caught in so many traps before there wouldn’t be anything left.
And he had to wonder if that would be so bad.
“I’ll go so you can finish,” he said stiffly.
“Liam,” she said.
But he didn’t look back.
CHAPTER 18
Jilly slept until noon. Thanks to the teshuva, she needed less sleep. But she didn��t want to face Liam again.
And hiding in her bedroom was oh- so mature. When she couldn’t stand her own cowardice anymore, she sneaked across the hall to her sister’s room.
Dory answered her knock, looking more rumpled and tired than Jilly’d felt after a night of being chased by demons. “Hey.”
She supposed Dory had been fleeing her own. “Hey. Can I come in?”
In the short time she’d been in residence, Dory had trashed the place. Her assortment of clothes from the league’s castoffs covered more space than seemed possible. The desk was strewn with paper and markers.
“You’re coloring.” The words popped out of Jilly in her surprise; then she winced. It sounded like an accusation.
Dory shrugged. “Sera’s friend, the church lady Nanette, said sometimes it helps her get what’s inside out.”
Jilly gestured at the table. “Can I . . . ?”
Dory shrugged again.
She hadn’t hoped for puppies and flowers, but Jilly’s heart skittered at the dozen pages crammed with Corvus’s blunt features.
“I can’t get him out of my system.” Dory’s voice was dull. “After she gave me the pens, she wanted to hold hands and pray, and I told her to get lost.” She waved her hand when Jilly frowned. “In a nice way. But it isn’t going to work with me. I tried that twelve-step shit.”
Jilly had suggested AA to enough kids to be familiar with the resistance. “You have to keep working the steps, Dory. It’s not a quick fix.”
Dory sat on the bed, her lank blond hair swinging forward to hide her face. “I heard you saw Blackbird last night.”
The talyan must have been talking. Jilly hoped they hadn’t said anything totally inappropriate. Hard enough to explain her situation to her sister without getting into demonic possession.
Dory stared at her. “Your boyfriend said you tried to kill Blackbird once.”
“The league did, but that was before I got together with Liam.” Jilly realized she couldn’t explain the league either. She reached for a shirt to fold instead. “I told you, he’s not my boyfriend.”
Dory gave her a practiced adolescent eye roll. “Did you hurt him?”
“I’d like to,” Jilly murmured. She wasn’t sure if Dory meant Liam or Corvus. “Blackbird attacked us.”
Emotions, darker and older than the calculated insubordination, sleeted over Dory’s face, too quick to catalog. “Still, you all lived to fight another day.”
Once again, Jilly couldn’t tell if her sister was glad for her or for Corvus. “Something like that. Dory, with Sera’s connections, we can get you a bed in a good program.” She hesitated and set the neatened shirt aside. “It’s inpatient and out of state, but—”
Dory was already shaking her head. “I don’t want to be locked up.”
“It’s not a prison.”
“You’ve never been,” Dory burst out. “Why you think those kids never listen to you? They know you never been there.”
The honest fear in her sister’s voice beat in Jilly’s chest. She steeled herself. “I had my year in juvie. It’s not a badge of honor.”
Dory shook her head violently. “Not the place- place. The mind. You’ve never been stuck in there. You always knew you’d find the way out. And I always knew that’s why you couldn’t get me out too.”
Jilly pressed her arm against her stomach, to hold in the sorrow and affection that tried to well up and choke her. “Dory, I’m sorry for . . .” Where to start? “Everything. I’m not myself lately, and I just don’t know . . .” Where to start? “Anything.”
Dory blinked at her. “That’s more than you could’ve admitted before.”
Jilly winced. “Am I such a bitch?”
“A ‘babe in total control of herself.’ That’s what it stands for, you know. ‘Bitch.’ That’s what Mom’s boyfriends did to you. You escaped, but not untouched, no more than me.”
Her life hardly seemed to compare with Dory’s experiences. But then Jilly thought a moment. What had she missed over the years, hidden behind her walls of defiant self-reliance?
Dory interrupted her reverie. “I saw Leroy, a while back. He wanted me to join that crazy cult of his. Said he could get me off the drugs too.” She eyed Jilly with a touch of mockery. “No prayers or tough- love lockdown, though. They use herbs and acupuncture or some shit. Sounds way better.”
Jilly wondered if she’d be trying for a second intervention soon. The group’s front-gate greeters had booted her off the premises quick enough the time she’d gone. But those gates would be no obstacle to her new demonic powers. “But you didn’t stay.”
Dory shrugged. “Had things to do.”
Jilly pictured her brother succumbing to the cult’s allure, her sister snared by drugs. And herself, with her self-imposed walls that had only kept her neatly corralled for a teshuva with exploitation on its mind. She wondered who deserved the hardest slap. “God, how’d we grow up still so stuck?”
“Blackbird had an answer,” Dory said. “Ask him.”
“Maybe I will.” Jilly could guess what Liam would say to that. Because he was as stuck as the rest of them.
But maybe it was time to get unstuck.
In the daylight, the Mortal Coil looked like a stiletto-heeled stylista after a long night of sweating off ten-dollar martinis: listing, stained, and vastly the poorer. Jilly let the teshuva flow unfettered, but found nothing untoward.
Which was almost odd in itself, considering the talya reports about rampant tenebrae activity the night before.
The front door was locked so she walked the long block to the alley. Sheltered between the Dumpsters, she amped the demon a little higher and gave the locked back door a hard tug. Not locked anymore. Iz would be so proud of her.
The door opened into the bathroom hallway. Where all the best drug deals took place, Jilly knew. She prowled down the hall. Just one soulfly, one hint, was all she wanted.
She stiffened when she sensed the approach.
“Thought I heard someone come in.”
Jilly turned to see Bella.
The club owner leaned in the office doorway, arms crossed. She was dressed in another red baby-doll tee that clashed with her hair, but the beehive was in a loose knot at her nape.
“Thanks for not bringing the double-barreled shotgun,” Jilly said.