He believed in all his men, valued each of them for their unique abilities. But this job . . . He folded his hands together, interlaced fingers over tautly strung tendons. “You could do it.”
Archer recoiled. “No. I found the other half that fits my broken pieces. And she’d break me into dust if I let anything come between us.”
“For the good of the league—”
Archer’s eyes flashed violet and his voice thrummed with the double-octave lows of demon harmonics. “Not for the world itself.”
“Ah, right. How could I forget?” Liam subsided. His grip eased. “I’ll find someone.”
“Idiot,” Archer muttered.
Liam let himself out of the car. The instinctive violence of Archer’s reaction just went to show why the league’s leader couldn’t get so involved. A leader had to keep perspective, which would be impossible if he got too close. Too close to anything, or anyone.
“Where are you going?” Archer rolled down the window and leaned out. “I thought you’d stay through the night, pining hopelessly outside her window, too self-sacrificing to make your move, too entangled to walk away.”
Liam shot him a withering glance. “It’s not a romance, jackass. It’s death and damnation and doom, remember?”
Archer slapped the flat of his hand on the steering wheel. “Exactly.”
They stared at each other for a minute.
“I’m going to find a feralis and tear it apart,” Liam offered conversationally.
“Have a lovely evening.” Archer settled back in his seat. “Bring me a nice cup of tea when you can’t stay away any longer.”
Liam stalked away, neck stiff to stop his gaze from lingering where Jilly had gone. There was no one he trusted more than Archer to keep anything dangerous from making its way through her door.
Anything dangerous. Like Liam himself.
CHAPTER 4
In the bright light of the new day, everything looked . . . strange. The breath-stealing low temps hardened the outlines of the buildings against the sky until the city gleamed like a razor stropped to a killing edge. Over the rims of her sunglasses, Jilly studied the street for signs of idling dark sedans, lurking monsters, and tall duster-clad men bearing war hammers. So far, nada, which actually made the day even more surreal.
After one last glance around, she let herself into the halfway house. She spiked her windblown hair into place as she came to attention just inside the office door stenciled DAN ENVERS, ADMINISTRATOR.
The man behind the desk leaned back in his chair. “Jilly.” He drew the two syllables out slowly. “You shouldn’t come back here. It’s confusing for the children.”
Flatly, she said, “It’s confusing because there was no reason to fire me.”
“Budget cuts—”
“Oh, please. I didn’t make shit for wages.” She rolled her eyes when he frowned at her cursing. “I don’t do this for the money.”
“Now you don’t do it at all.” He tapped the eraser of his pencil against the desk, as if to rub her out. “I let you do the park outreach as a volunteer, but I can’t have you traipsing in here—”
“I came to make sure Dee and Iz are all right.”
The pencil stilled in his hand. “Why wouldn’t they be?”
“If you don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t have fired me.”
He rummaged across his desk and freed a sheet of paper. “Roll call says they’re both at breakfast.”
A filament of the steel in her spine softened. Liam had kept his word about getting the kids back safe.
So what else had he been truthful about last night?
She shot a reinforcing burst of concrete around the spine steel. “Iz was right. Andre got into some bad trouble.” She hesitated, trying not to remember the burgeoning helplessness she’d felt in the alley, worse even than when Envers had handed over her walking papers. “I saw something last night—something weird I can’t explain.”
Envers lowered his head into his hands, the pencil stuck up between his fingers like a rude gesture. “You aren’t supposed to encourage the children in their mass delusions.
Look
at you. You’re as bad as they are.”
She gripped the doorframe, anger driving her blue-polished nails into the wood. “Is that why you got rid of me?”
Staring down, he seemed to be addressing the papers more than her. “Do you know how many kids we lose? And don’t count Andre, since he’d already gotten himself kicked out.”
The question rocked her back on her heels. “Too many.”
He tossed the pencil at her, glowering when she didn’t duck and he missed anyway. “You don’t even know actual numbers, because you just deal with the next one, and the next one. You have no idea what it takes to keep this facility operational.”
“It’s not a facility. It’s a home, the only home these kids have, and it may not be safe anymore.”
“Safer than the streets, that’s for damn sure. Ask Andre. If you ever find him.”
He tugged at his shirtsleeves, collecting himself. “This isn’t your job anymore, Jilly. Go find some other oppressed people to save.”
She could follow the sweet tang of pancakes and fake maple syrup to the dining room, get her cell phone back from Dee. But they’d have questions she couldn’t answer.
“Security knows the situation,” Envers said. “Don’t make me call them.”
“I don’t make anybody do anything. That’s your trip, not mine.”
“The children need someone willing to use her authority, somebody who doesn’t get in even more trouble than they do, not another rebel without a chance. We’re done here, Jilly.” He made a note on the paper in front of him, dismissing her like she was just another item to be checked off his list.
As if pretending something didn’t exist made it go away. God, she’d always hated that sort of bullshit. She took another deliberate step forward. His head snapped up at the thunk of her boots.
“Maybe I don’t keep all the stats like you do.” She remembered Liam’s promise and echoed it with her voice pitched low. “But since I have all this free time, I’ll find out what happened to Andre, and I’ll be sure to let you know if he would’ve had a chance.”
The weight of his stare followed her out.
She stalked down the street, fists thrust into her pockets. Just as well she hadn’t tried to go in last night with Liam watching if Envers had told the night crew to toss her out on her ass. What a coward to assign the task to someone else.
“A real man does his own dirty work,” she muttered.
“Yet the women still get to clean up after.”
Jilly whirled to face a slender blond woman in a scarlet trench coat. Her squared stance, light on the balls of her feet, screamed confidence louder than the coat.
She held up her hands, palms out. “Hi, Jilly. I’m Sera. Not too long ago, I was like you. Feeling cut off from everyone, just lost my job, didn’t think I’d ever recover from that wound.” Her hazel eyes darkened. “Or the ones that had come before. And now I’m possessed by a demon. Like you. Liam sent me to reassure you that you’re not crazy.”
Jilly tried to absorb the awkward introduction, then decided to just skip it. “I knew I was being tailed.”
The woman—Sera—tilted her head. “Following the boss’s orders.”
“Your boss. Since you’re possessed by a demon, that would be the devil?”
“Ah, no. That would be Liam.”
“Who is apparently not one of those real men who does his own dirty work.”
Sera sucked a breath of air between her teeth. “He seemed to think another woman would be better able to answer your questions. As if there’s a gentle way to tell you your soul is forfeit to the never-ending battle against evil.”
Jilly pulled off her sunglasses to squint at the woman. “Battle
against
evil? I thought having a demon would make me evil.”
Sera planted her hands on her hips. “Didn’t Liam at least explain the repentant part?”
Jilly snorted. “The goo dripping off his hammer must’ve distracted me.”
“Okay, then, do you
feel
evil?”
Jilly pictured Envers standing up to the monsters in the alley last night. “A little.”
Sera grinned, a bright flash that edged her from confident to confidante. “Oh well, that’s why you’re repenting. C’mon. We need doughnuts. It’s my treat.”
Jilly dug in her heels. “It’s my ass. And I don’t need more of it.”
Sera shook her head. “Since Liam didn’t get to any of the good stuff, I’ll enlighten you. A demon-revved metabolism means you can eat all the doughnuts you like. And, anyway, your ass belongs to the league now.”
“I hate being railroaded,” Jilly said.
Despite the chill, they sat outside the doughnut shop, clutching their coffee cups. A dozen pigeons strutted around the table.
“Shanghaied would be more accurate,” Sera said.
Jilly had put her sunglasses back on, but she hoped the other woman could feel her glare. “Was that a cultural slur?”
“ ‘Railroad’ implies a nice straight track going from point A to point B in a timely manner. Joining the fight of repentant demons against the darkness—the tenebraeternum—is more like being shanghaied. You’re blindsided one night and wake up on a ship where no one knows your language, bound for God knows where.” Sera waved one hand. “The analogy works pretty well.” She looked at Jilly. “Except now
you’re
here.”
Jilly swallowed her bite of doughnut so she wouldn’t choke on the powdered sugar, then let out a long-suffering sigh. “Explain. You know you want to.”
“Shanghaied sailors were all male. They were stronger, of course, more resistant to the horrors of shipboard slavery. Plus, there was that whole ‘women on board are a curse’ wankery. I was the first female talya in the league’s memory. And since the talyan are immortal, living memory is a long time. My appearance marked a change in the teshuva battle plan. Your possession marks an acceleration in that change.”
“I don’t have time to save the world.” Jilly knew how absurd that sounded even as the words popped out.
“You’re immortal now, remember?” Sera’s hazel gaze softened. “What else is there?”
Jilly tried to forget Envers’s mockery. But he was right. “I was busting my butt just to keep a few dozen kids from falling prey to everyday evils like getting caught rolling a joint in the school bathroom. Yet, half the time, they’d disappear from the system and I’d never find out what happened to them.”
“And now you’re not even doing that.” Though Sera’s voice was gentle, the blow of her words knocked Jilly’s breath back down her throat in a hard knot. “Our world falls away, bit by bit. I haven’t figured out if the presence of the unbound demon stalking us makes that happen, or if that’s what makes us vulnerable to possession.”
Vulnerable. How she hated that word. Jilly washed it down with a pull off the bitter chicory coffee.
Sera threw a few pieces of doughnut toward the pigeons. But a blur of black wings descended from the wind-torn awning and they scattered. The crow gobbled up the treat and cocked its head to eye them.
“You shouldn’t feed wild animals,” Jilly said. “Gives them ideas.”
“So very true.” Sera tossed the crow another piece with a smile. “But it’s good to make friends where you find them.”
If the crow was a friend, Jilly thought, this league of theirs needed better networking skills. “If you people . . . you demons . . . What are you?”
“We are called talyan,” Sera said patiently. “Human, but possessed by teshuva demons which lend us their immortality and their unworldly powers to fight. And survive the fighting.”
“Immortality,” Jilly mused. “Here I was, always telling the kids not to think they were immortal.”
“You told them that because thinking otherwise would get them into bad trouble. Which, turns out, was even more true than you knew. The immortality, the speed and strength of inhuman fighting skills, the recovery from heinous injury, all that is just a consolation prize the demon offers while we fight eternally for redemption.”
“Right.” Jilly drew out the word to emphasize her skepticism. “If you win this never-ending battle against evil, does that mean no more monsters?”
Sera tilted her head thoughtfully. “That’s the hope.”
“Hope.” That sounded a little too much like vulnerable to Jilly.
Sera must have heard the note of reservation. “It’ll get you through the next few days.”
“I thought the battle was never-ending-ish.”
“But in the next few days, your demon will make its virgin ascension. It’s a particularly hazardous time for the newly possessed. Until you balance the demonic emanations within you, you could be pulled to the other side.”
“To hell.”
Sera’s open face settled into a stillness that would’ve done Mona Lisa proud. “It has a strange attraction, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”
Jilly stared at her.
“Long story. But speaking of places to live, I’d really like to bring you to the league HQ, introduce you to some of the guys, let you pick out a . . . room.” An incongruous touch of red brightened Sera’s pale cheeks.
Jilly frowned. “What do I need a room for?”
Sera cleared her throat. “Since you’re one of us now—”
“Whoa. Just because I’m intrigued by the idea of ending the threat to my kids doesn’t mean I’m enlisting with any demon army or whatever.”
“You may not survive without the league.” Sera spun her coffee cup in her hands, gaze fixed on the dark slosh. “Not without a talya lover as escort.” She raised her head, and under the hazy sky, her eyes sparked with a faint violet light. “Not without Liam.”
The name and that uncanny glow made Jilly feel sheathed in strangeness. She pushed to her feet, slowly. The gust of blood through her muscles worried her that if she moved too fast, she might inadvertently upend the table, dumping doughnuts, steaming coffee, and a heaping pile of invective over the other woman.
She tried to tamp down the wild rush, unnerved by the reckless thrill triggered by that one word. “He is not my lover.”