Jessa Slade - Darkness Undone

Exhilaration made his head spin. Or maybe that was blood loss.

He winced as she gained traction and heaved the feralis over her shoulder into the remaining trio. Her vise grip tore the tail loose in an arc of ichor. The tenebrae screamed, and the warbling cry hit an octave that iced Sid’s spine.

Immortal and inhumanly strong the girl might be, compelled by her repentant demon to fight evil, but she could still be killed. Four marauding ferales—well, three marauding and one that seemed a little shaken—were deadly foes.

He pulled himself upright. He couldn’t lose her, not when a journeyman Bookkeeper could write his ticket to London mastery on such a find.

She shoved him back again, and he stumbled into the wall. “Enough!” he shouted, pushing off the bricks. “I want to help you.”

She ignored him and lashed out with the tail in her hand. The fleshy whip snaked though the air to drive the ferales back.

Chunks of rot crumbled from the makeshift weapon. Decaying feralis husks never held up well. Sid knew the corrosive ichor congealed within the husks must be burning through the girl’s hands, but she never hesitated. With her demon ascendant, she’d feel nothing—not pain, not fear, not loss.

How simple the world must look through the violet eyes of possession. For the merest incomplete contraction of his cardiac musculature—not even a full heartbeat—he wished she could share that simplicity with him.

She cracked the putrid whip again, and one of the ferales shrieked as its limb sheared off. Without the animating etheric energy, the husk fragment putrefied. In minutes it would be only a noxious puddle.

Sid had never quite appreciated just how poorly animated corpses performed under pressure in the field. It was a subject worthy of a paper or two, no doubt.

The wet thud of the feralis’s head hitting the asphalt made his gut clench. He realized he wasn’t exactly performing up to snuff himself.

The two partially dismembered ferales fled around the corner. The decapitated one tried to follow but kept blundering into the alley wall. In another moment, it would stumble out, and Sid could just imagine its headless-chicken dance down Michigan Avenue.

The girl kicked aside the fourth motionless husk—he hadn’t even noticed her destroying that one; what kind of Bookkeeper was he?—and advanced on the hapless feralis.

Her limp was more noticeable, though she hadn’t taken a single hit. Had she been wounded earlier in the night, perhaps, and not yet healed despite her demon’s power? She was a devoted talya, for which he had reason to be extremely grateful.

The stump where the feralis’s ratlike skull had been now spewed ichor and a discomfiting mewl, like an infant’s cry. Sid wished it would stop.

The girl jammed both her fists through its sternum and wrenched it asunder in a black gush. The mewling stopped.

His gorge rose up in his throat, choking him. Just as well he’d left the @1 warehouse in a snit and without converting any currency for his supper; otherwise he’d be spewing right about now.

Like some murderous, postapocalyptic librarian spinster, the girl knelt between the decommissioned ferales, her bare toes tucked under the raggedy hem of her old-fashioned gown. How would the talyan, who demonstrated a regrettable morphology tending toward thick-necked gigantism, look in this new dress-for-success? Sid held back a snort.

With a hand on each husk, the girl lowered her head. Her dark hair spread around her shoulders and curtained her face. The orange light in the feralis’s protruding eyestalks faded to white, like a sullen ember smothering in ash, as she drained the animating ether. The energy she took would refresh the demon within her and then …

She turned her head just enough to meet his gaze. Violet. So Bookkeeper archives described the glint of nocturnal predator, but that did no justice to the wavelengths of light bending beyond his human perception. He sagged against the bricks as if his marrow had turned to ice water.

She wasn’t newly possessed and awkwardly delving into her untested powers.

She was rogue.

He eased back against the wall, letting the bricks support him when his suddenly wobbly knees didn’t seem up to the task.

She blinked, and the violet faded to the previous pale haze. “Pardon me.” Her voice barely carried across the alley. “No one should have seen that.”

The odd cadence of her voice snagged his attention. It sounded like something he’d find on Oxford Street—almost familiar but strangely awry. He realized he was leaning forward to hear her, his muscles canting in her direction, even as the more primitive part of his brain urged him to edge away slowly.

“But you’ll forget, won’t you?” She tilted her head, and the dark waves of her hair slid to one side, revealing the slender column of her throat. Just above her high collar, a thin black tracery marred her white skin: the mark of her demon. “’Twould be for the best, to forget.”

He wondered if “forget” was a euphemism for nipping off his head as she’d done to the feralis. Not much he could do about it, of course. “No doubt most people you save scream more than they say thank you, but … thank you.”

A violet gleam surfaced in her eyes, spun once, and vanished again. “They all scream.”

His ever-so-keen powers of observation were starting to tell him his newfound talya had gone a bit off. Not that she seemed handicapped in the butchery department, where a talya truly needed to shine.

He let out a long, nonthreatening sigh. His shoulder was throbbing in earnest, now that the danger seemed to have passed—mostly.

He studied her empty hands where tenebrae gore left scorch marks on her skin. “You have an … interesting technique for dispatching ferales. Most talyan use long-handled weapons to keep clear of the ichor.”

She didn’t move, but something about her stillness became even more still. Apparently the danger hadn’t gone very far away at all. “What are these words you use?”

“Ferales.” He pointed first at the husks and shifted to the black spill. “Ichor. Talya.” He pointed at her.

She shifted onto her haunches, fingers steepled over the asphalt.

“Don’t run,” he said softly. He hoped she wouldn’t leap on him either and rip his heart out, as seemed perfectly possible when he considered her taut white hands. “It’s okay.”

“Okay? What is okay?”

He pointed to himself.

And then he passed out.

Alyce flattened her palms over the tear in the man’s coat. She dared not touch him directly with her filthy hands, but the wound was clotting, and her anxious heartbeat slowed along with his blood loss.

As if in reply, the restless spirits overhead that had lit her way here finally ceased their frantic whirling. Since the luminescent whorls above lacked teeth or claws, she focused on the man. Marshaling her thoughts was like catching clouds; it had been so long since she’d concentrated on anything besides the hunt. Gentling her touch was harder yet. Her fingers trembled with the effort.

The devils had never attacked another person in her presence before—or none she had been able to save. Always, when she appeared, the devils tried to run, and always, the overpowering impulse in her ensured they did not go far. After the first time, when she’d realized the devils didn’t leave witnesses, she’d never gone back to sift through their ghastly handiwork.

She had frights enough.

But this man had not screamed when she appeared. The devils had surrounded him, and he had mocked them. He had met her gaze, and he had not run.

Perhaps because he’d swooned. But before his eyes—nice brown eyes, without a flicker of unholy flames—had rolled back in his head, he had stared at evil and not backed down. He mustn’t die now, not after he’d chipped a hole in the ice that had frozen her off from the world.