Jessa Slade - Vowed in Shadows

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.

Backed to the end of the pier, at least she and Corvus couldn’t be surrounded. Not that the djinn-man counted as an ally, but when ranking all the ways she could die in the next five minutes, fighting beside him seemed pretty low on the list.

At a scream behind her—not human or tenebrae, but mechanical—she moved Corvus even farther down the list.

Because Jonah had just moved to the top.

The Shades of Gray was coming in too fast. Jonah was going to hit the pier.

Another pulse of tenebrae energy knocked her back a step as the salambes swirled down and the ferales pressed forward, the malice a frantic presence between them. She was definitely in danger of getting chomped.

A spray of water hit the pier and jetted up as Jonah wheeled the boat sideways. Over the screech of fiberglass on concrete, the engine shrieked.

While she hesitated, her attention torn, Corvus swung at the closest ferales. Not to batter them. To herd them toward her. He took a step toward the cleared path.

No. He couldn’t escape, not again.

“Nim!” Jonah stood on the prow despite the treacherous buck of the boat in the waves he’d kicked up. The wind whipped his hair into a gold corona, as if he’d just risen from a bout of wild lovemaking.

The ridiculous flutter of her heart made her sigh.

He held up his hand, the executioner’s sword slung low along his thigh. “Get in.”

She glanced back. Corvus had muscled his way into the midst of the tenebrae. Focused on her, on the lure, they didn’t care. “Corvus is here,” she yelled to Jonah. “I can’t let him go.”

“Liam is coming from the land side. We have to get you away.”

Before the mass of tenebrae slaughtered the last of the league.

This was what Corvus had wanted. For all of them to come, pawns in his attack on the Veil. The teshuva had made that mistake once, in the first battle that had started it all, and they were paying for it with an eternity of penance, along with the men who’d taken a few wrong steps down a dark path and into a demon’s possession.

And she had damned them again.

In another heartbeat, Corvus would be clear of the feralis ring. He could slip by the talyan as they rushed to join her.

She took a breath. She couldn’t settle the sick waves in her stomach as she took a step toward Jonah.

“Hurry,” he urged. “Take my hand. I’ll catch you.”

She had to jump. Not that she’d ever really been one to keep her feet on the ground.

She took two more steps toward Jonah, opening space between the ferales and herself. She met his gaze; a long look. Or it seemed long to her, although the descending flare of salambes drew no closer, so maybe it wasn’t that long at all.

His blue eyes widened, and she had a glimpse of what it would be like to live with someone who knew her better than herself.

It looked maybe a bit like heaven.

“Don’t do it, Nim,” he said. “Let Corvus go.” He clung to the railing with his one hand but didn’t pull himself up, unable to tie off the boat in the choppy waves and come after her. If the boat drifted, they’d have no way to escape.