Jessa Slade: Vowed in Shadows

“All around us. The boundaries of the no-man’s-land between the realms have their own rules.”

She turned in his embrace and faced outward. Stirred by her movement, swirls of the gray pulsed outward like a ripple of oil on water, carrying a faint haze of Jonah’s gold and blue, as if the demon realm sipped from his warmth. An answering shift in the chill flowed back to her.

Something knew they were here.

Well, it was practically an invasion, after all. Somewhere Sera’s calm brilliance and Jilly’s quicksilver verve would be lighting the shadows, not realizing their incursion laid a path for the soul bomb straight to the protective Veil between earth and hell.

With Jonah’s bulk a comforting heat and heft and reality behind her, she closed her eyes and opened her arms. Opened her heart, her soul. Come.

In her mind’s eye—or maybe to her body’s eye, if her body was still standing in a stained-glass museum on a pier in Chicago—a dark hole blossomed with silver as a tornado of soulflies spiraled upward in a spray of glimmering glass shards.

Then the swirl was all around her and Jonah, here in the tenebraeternum. He tightened his grip, his arm warm under her breasts. The soulflies tingled on her skin as she leaned into the strength of his embrace. She could do this; she could save the world. Touch me. Stay with me.

“No!”

The scream snapped her upright.

Corvus.

He raced toward them. The djinni loomed above him in a tower of malevolent light, its power unfettered here, so close to its source.

The rage of his coming blew the gray in streaks like storm clouds over a wind-whipped lake. His upraised fist with its missing fingers stained the gray with crimson-black. “The lost souls must take my place in the Veil.”

Jonah pointed the executioner’s sword at the furious gladiator. “They can’t pay for your sins, Corvus. Salvation has never worked that way.”

Corvus sneered. With the demon’s distortion, his teeth lengthened into fangs. “Not so, if you’ve read your own scriptures, talya.”

Jonah shook his head. “You’ll find no saints here to take your place, djinni.”

Nim shivered against Jonah’s chest. Wasn’t that a lie? She knew at least one saint who would do anything to save a sinner.

Her hold on the soulflies wavered. And the Veil began to warp.

Dark pennants unfurled from it like wings and drew the soulflies closer in a fractal whirl.

In the center of the wings, in the maw of the whirlpool, was the tenebraeternum itself.

“Mine,” Corvus crooned. He extended his stunted hand, and the wings flexed toward him in answer, as eternally drawn to him as the soulflies were to their haints. “My soul.”

The djinni strained in the other direction. What havoc would it wreak unbound from its husk?

“Nim.” Jonah’s voice broke with urgency. “You can’t let the soulflies take his place. Not all of them were meant to be here, and once Sera and Jilly close the path, the souls will go wherever they were bound—heaven or hell. They’ll leave a wound in the Veil that will let all of hell through.”

“Let them through,” Corvus shrieked. “At long last, let them in and set us free.”

The ferocity of his scream shredded through the etheric mists, and Nim turned to shelter her face against Jonah’s chest. She couldn’t do it. The tear in the Veil that Sera had woven together with the threads of Corvus’s soul almost a year ago was too great for any patch of soulflies. Nim wanted to let it go. Throw it all away. As she’d always thrown everything away.

As Jonah would throw her away when the fight ended.

And it would end. Maybe not tonight or in any span of years she’d ever counted, but she’d be there and she’d have to watch him walk away because, in the end, she could never be good enough. She’d never been good enough.

This was why she hadn’t wanted to be touched.

She looked up at Jonah and lifted her hands away from his chest. Pulling away from Jonah was like ripping off her own skin. The last hard thud of his heart echoed against her palms and was gone.

He met her gaze. “Nim, no.”

“You can’t really love me.”

“Yes, I do. How can you doubt that?”

Because she’d never known otherwise. But she did know her soul would fit where Corvus’s was tearing free. “There’s not enough saint in me for you, but the Veil always has room for another sinner.”

“No.” He reached for her.

The gray chill hardened like ice, like unbreakable glass, between them.

And he kept reaching.

“Don’t,” she cried. The demon realm closed around her, with knife teeth of cold and dark. He’d already lost so much. Would he sacrifice his other hand, his life?

“I’d give it all for you.” His voice whispered through the thickening gray as her vision faded. “And you’ve already taken my heart.”

He stepped through the gray in a searing blast of gold and blue.

The shadows of wings tore loose and flared above her, high and hungry. She could throw herself into the darkness once again, where her only pain was self-inflicted, or she could let life, love, and Jonah do their worst.

She ran for Jonah.

She would’ve been faster, except for the really ill considered spiked heels.

He pulled her close. “Dance for me, Nim.”

She whirled in his arms to face the Veil. It was all around them now, a coruscating gray nightmare of half-seen shapes. A face, a bowed head, a locked fist—hundreds, thousands, an infinity—all gray as stone, all silent and still. Not tormented by anything she could see, they’d made the hell their own.

The soulflies would be too scattered and shattered to fill the void, for the void was endlessly ravenous.

She stretched out her hand, Jonah’s laid atop her own. The ring on his finger glinted.

“Do you trust me?” she murmured.

“With all that I am and more.”

“If I call the souls to me now, maybe Sera can guide them and Jilly can contain them. But if I wait until the bomb explodes on its own . . .” She gazed at him. “Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t steal a soul again—I swear.”

His lips twitched. “Good girl. Or as good as you need to be.”

She sent out her call to the tenebrae as she’d once summoned her own darkness with matches against her skin. The power burned phosphorescent through her body.

Instead of guttering out in a stink of scorched flesh, with no one to notice or care, the etheric call arced between her and Jonah—her power and his focus—and blasted outward from their joined hands.

The shock reverberated through the Veil, and Corvus screamed.

The souls came.

Their white-ash drift coalesced around a million scintillating colored flecks of glass as the soul bomb shattered in the human realm and rode the tide of her call into the tenebraeternum.

The darkened hole where Corvus’s soul had been inhaled.

Corvus’s cry lengthened and rose in pitch. Around him, the djinni stretched, sucked in toward the demon realm. It blackened, as if the fires of hell scorched it, but it would not release the gladiator.

He fell to his knees, and the thick lines of the demon mark on his arms cracked and bled. The djinni’s shadow mingled with red human blood and darkened the pool.

The rivulets trickled toward the open wound in the Veil. The glass shards melted in midair and streamed into the hole.

Still the djinni’s hook in the Blackbird held.

Nim looked up, up, and up at the towering cloud of evil, then down at the gladiator on his knees. “You want to be free?”

Both his eyes were the pale blue of summer. “So the demon promised me two thousand years ago.”

“About time it paid up, then.” She lifted her foot. The anklet flashed with violet lightning. “Don’t touch.”