Jessa Slade - Darkness Undone

Thorne smirked when Carlo stumbled over the Akkadian pronunciation. Probably ex–wise guys didn’t have much call for mastering extinct Mesopotamian languages. “A gathering of all the djinn-possessed? What is that psychotic bitch thinking?”

Carlo put both feet back on the floor, the better to puff himself up. “Watch your mouth, half-breed.” The growl of the street was back in his voice. “My lady hears all.”

“Only because you repeat it. Fucking magpie. And what’s with the medieval ‘my ladying’?”

Carlo’s eyes yellowed in outrage. “I owe her my life. I swore her my loyalty.”

“You’re no knight errant,” Thorne scoffed. “You swore that to any slick Chicago mobster who threw you a bone, even before you were possessed.”

In contrast, he himself had been too virtuous to ask for the bone, thinking he was fighting for rights, not riches.

Thorne struggled to hold his sneer in place. Was the reproachful voice in his head supposed to be the better angel of his nature? Obviously that wasn’t possible. Annoyed at his momentary weakness, he let his demon spiral up. “Tell her no, Carlo. For my sake and hers.”

“But she wants you. While the sphericanum dicks around, Magdalena is gathering soldati—an army of djinni soldiers, yeah?—and soldati need capos. Men like me and you.”

“I want nothing to do with a djinni mob. I want …” He shifted in his chair. The wood, like silky dark hair, and the velvet, pink as flushed cheeks, reminded him of what he desired and yet had not taken. “I want to be left alone.”

“Alone ain’t a good place to be. Since Corvus Valerius resurrected the symballein bond—”

“Corvus the Blackbird? Another fucking birdbrain,” Thorne snapped.

Carlo ran his hand over his head without actually touching his hair. “Getting tossed out a high-rise onto one’s skull makes for stupid, no doubt. But you ain’t thinking right either, Thorne, to defy her.” He leaned forward in his chair, as if the cant of his body could add pressure to his words. “You have to fight for the darkness.”

“I can fight whomever I choose, or so I’ve been told.” Thorne couldn’t keep the wry note from his voice.

“You were told wrong. ’Sides, rumor has it you always pick the losing side. So quit choosing and just give in.”

Though every nerve—human and djinni—told him to hold his ground, Thorne surged to his feet. “I had a soft spot for impossible cases. Don’t remind me.”

“Not much to remember, was there? Magdalena says your little terrorist gang couldn’t make a mark with how many pounds of ammonium nitrate?” Carlo claimed smirking rights as he kicked back in his seat. “First kaboom , and everyone—even your moll—was fertilizer. Everyone but you.”

Thorne stalked to the windows, where the wind lifted whitecapped waves from the lake.

And dropped them again. That was the way of leaders—to whip their followers into a froth, only to leave them roiling over themselves. Corvus the gladiator had despised his masters. He’d wanted to be free.

“The djinn are prohibited from gathering,” Thorne said at last. “We stay away from one another. Really, that’s the only thing I liked about you all.”

Carlo flicked his fingers dismissively. “What I saw, prohibitions are imposed to be broken. Usually in a blotto blaze of Tommy gunfire.” His grin was practically avuncular. “Of course, you’re excused from the drunken part. We never gathered because we never had the numbers. Since Corvus punched a hole into hell, there is a way.”

“Blackbird failed,” Thorne reminded him.

“He died, yeah sure, but the damage he did to the Veil? That’s his legacy to us. Magdalena recovered the notes Corvus kept from his league traitor. If the calculations are correct—”

“Calculations never are.” Thorne leaned his shoulders against the window with deliberate nonchalance. “If Magdalena is all-knowing, as you seem to think, she’d know that.”

Carlo’s gray eyes turned almost as soft as the water outside—and as implacably pushy. “Don’t be so down on yourself. That explosion wasn’t your fault. We checked. Your bomb was perfect; it was the timer that was off.”

The chill from outside leached through the glass to Thorne’s spine. “I know that.”

“Anyway, that free lovebird who fucked you into believing in her cause was sleeping with every dumb bastard there. It wasn’t your brat in her belly when you blew her up.”

“I know that too.” When the djinn-man only gaped at him, Thorne shook his head. “You should be relieved I won’t be joining your half-assed ahaˉzum. If I couldn’t follow directions in plain English, imagine how much worse I am in Akkadian.”

Carlo gripped the armrests of his chair. “I can’t leave here till I can give my lady the message she wants to hear—that you will come to her.”

Thorne pushed away from the window. The cold stayed in his skin. “Very well.” He walked toward the fireplace where his coffee waited.

Carlo smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard, now was it? I—”

He stopped talking when Thorne grabbed him by the neck and squeezed.

Mostly puffery though he was, Carlo still bore a djinni, and he put up a not-embarrassing fight.

Both chairs were broken before Thorne had him pinned amidst the mahogany chips of the half-bashed mantel. No great loss—open flame on a boat had always seemed like the depths of wrongness anyway.

Carlo arched away from the fireplace andiron twisted underneath him, but Thorne amped his own djinni higher as he pressed his forearm against the other man’s throat and stared him down. Carlo tried to look away, his eyeballs tearing noxious ooze.

With a not-quite sound, an almost tactile sensation, like the tumblers of a lock falling open inside him, Thorne’s demon matched itself to the other djinni. He trembled with the surge of stolen energy and pushed harder.

The point of the andiron emerged from Carlo’s starched shirt through the gap between the third and fourth buttons. With the next beat of his heart, a gout of blood soaked the cotton, and he choked on a hiccupping cry.

Thorne held him there while the other man’s weakened djinni tried frantically to heal the wound. Tender new flesh crept up the blackened iron, withered and died, and was renewed as Carlo writhed. “Stop squirming before you nick something important. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

Finally, Carlo stilled. “Fooled me,” he rasped. The sulfuric tears burned bloody rivulets down his cheeks.

“No, Magdalena did that. Tell her I’ll not follow anyone else to the end.”

“You think she’ll let you stand apart? In the end, there will be no one left alone. No third parties, no watchers, no innocents.”

“There’s one,” Thorne murmured.

Carlo’s purpling face contorted in a sneer as his demon’s frenzy rippled beneath the dapper gangster facade. “Who? Your half-cracked little talya freak?”

Astonishment slackened Thorne’s grip for a heartbeat.

Carlo thrashed like a walleye fished from the lake for dinner but subsided when his struggle gained no headway. “You think Magdalena didn’t know about that? I told you she hears all.”

“She can hear. She can watch. Just tell her to keep her hands and her ahaˉzum to herself.”

“Gimme a pen so I can write it down.” Carlo bared his teeth. “Make it a Sharpie.”

“No need to remember the particulars.”

With a sharp wrench, Thorne bent the tip of the andiron around to pierce the other side of Carlo’s chest. The djinn-man shrieked, and his yellow smoking eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped unconscious, his demon too sapped to rouse him.

A couple more twists and Thorne caged the man’s heart in black iron. Magdalena could unwrap him if she chose. Of course, she might adopt the technique.