Jessa Slade: Forged of Shadows

The substance oozing around the entrance looked vaguely like a ghostly rat covered in burned fryer oil gone bad. Gone very, very bad. “It’s a malice. Another sort of lesser tenebrae, but it stays incorporeal, unlike the ferales in the alley. They skulk around in small flocks, drawn to chaotic negative emotions.” He glanced at her. “Like yours.”

She recoiled. “It’s coming this way.”

“There are more coming. So get a grip.”

Her fingers tightened whitely on the box cutter.

“Control your emotions,” he clarified.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Like me.” He turned her away from the malice, to face him again. He stared into her eyes. “You can’t let it get to you.”

He made it sound so easy, he almost convinced himself.

“You said it already got to me, or something like it.” Her chest heaved with an uneven breath.

He tightened his grip on her arm to draw her back from the edge of bolting. Would she be fleeing the malice? Or him? “Now you have to control it, dominate it.”

“The demon . . .”

“Your fear.”

She scowled as the word tripped a visible switch in her from dread to annoyance. “I’ve faced worse than monster blobs.” She narrowed her eyes, cutting him off. “Worse than you.”

“Undoubtedly.” Why else would a demon choose her? “You have new weapons now.”

She slowly drew in a breath that caught in her throat once, as if it hurt. When she let it out, the tension drained from her face. She pocketed the box cutter and let her arms fall loose and ready to her sides. Those hot eyes still glinted at him, half veiled behind short black lashes. “I don’t want a hammer. Doesn’t accessorize well with my ass-kicking boots.”

He let her go. Guessing by the hard curl to her lips, he’d lay odds she’d mentally lined up his ass for that kicking too.

Jilly had years of experience with people making up shit. The kids were masters at reinterpreting reality to suit their unmet needs. And the many “uncles” her mother had brought home had all sorts of explanations for why they couldn’t work, couldn’t cook, couldn’t help themselves.

But nobody had faced her with wilder stories than this guy with his whack-a-demon hammer and his antisocial tattoo.

Except maybe the comic books she’d once loved, but those never drooled holes in concrete like that dead monster had. Though there might have been a bit of preteen panting over a man in a mask. . . .

She strode down the street, forcing him to keep up with each strike of her bootheels. She told herself she wasn’t running away. Good thing, since he had no trouble keeping up. Those long legs moved so smooth beneath his duster he practically floated beside her.

Compared with his steely grace, she felt grubby, not to mention shorter than usual. “You know my name. You even know what I dreamed about last night.” Speaking of panting, thank God he didn’t know the details. Did he? “But you haven’t bothered to tell me your name.” She almost winced at the aggrieved tone—not to mention fairly irrelevant nature—of the question. It had been a bad night.

Plus, apparently, now she was possessed by evil spirits. Certainly that excused a reasonable amount of bitching.

“Liam,” he said. “Liam Niall.”

She mouthed it to herself, and the name danced over her tongue. “I thought Irish people had red hair.”

“And here I thought only old people had blue hair.”

She wrinkled her nose at him, just in case he hadn’t noticed the ring through her nostril. “I’ve never been to Ireland. I’ve never been outside the burbs.”

“And I haven’t been back in ages.” His lips quirked without much humor. “Truly, ages. So we have something else in common.”

“No, really, we don’t.”

“Our demons, then.”

She shot him a look intended to make him acknowledge how ridiculous that sounded.

He continued. “Your breathing is better. As the demon settles deeper, it erases evidence of your past life. On the plus side, that means your old aches and pains are healed.”

She slammed on the brakes. His long strides carried him a few steps past before he turned to face her.

She forced the words out past gritted teeth. “What do you know about that?”

“You were injured somehow. That is always part of the vulnerability the demon marks in you.”

He might have been able to guess at her old injury from the way her breath rattled, and maybe he’d noticed that she hadn’t been able to move too fast for too long. But he couldn’t have known when it stopped bothering her. Because she hadn’t noticed herself until he mentioned it.

She took a breath, deep, all the way to the bottom of her lung, past the gnarl of scar tissue she’d seen in X-rays. Nothing. No wheeze, no rasp. She huffed out the breath. “What is happening to me?”

“The demon.”

“Damn it. Stop saying that!”

“Will not saying it make it less true?”

She pushed by him—skin prickling with the awareness that he could stop her without even pulling out that hammer. He was so tall, but he’d moved like a dancer. A murderous dancer, sure. He was rangy too, the duster hanging from his broad shoulders as if he didn’t eat quite enough. Lau-lau would tell her to make him sweet dumplings with duck and plum sauce. If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, then he’d apparently closed off his heart a long time ago.

She yanked up her hood and kept walking, faster now. Because she could. And because, maybe, she was running away a little. She hadn’t wanted to explain the strange dreams that had haunted her for most of a week now. Or she’d thought they were dreams—vague, edgy desires ignited by the briefest glimpse of a hot guy in the park while she’d been distracted with her job.

She knew better than to hook up with big, tough-looking males with the smell of iron and concrete and danger clinging close about them. Thanks to her family life, she’d learned how stupid that was before she was half Dee’s age. Which didn’t mean she hadn’t indulged the occasional ridiculously trashy fantasy.

Who knew fantasies could come so violently to life? But now after what she’d seen, what she was feeling, to continue to deny that something was strange would be even crazier.

Ten minutes of silence brought them to the halfway house. A wire-caged porch light blazed above the front step of the narrow apartment building. Tonight, though, the bright lamp glowed with an odd nimbus, as if some oily smoke hung in the air. She sniffed suspiciously. But the lingering stench wasn’t pot or even cigarettes.

“Sulfur,” Liam said. “Leftover stains from the malice that have been hanging around here.”

She recoiled. “More demons? Here?”

He held up one hand, meaning to be reassuring, she knew. But the gesture revealed the haft of the hammer under his coat. “Your unbound demon has been trailing etheric energies that attract them. But don’t feel too guilty. Some of them were probably already regulars. The kids might as well be tagged ‘Malice eat for free.’ I can feel the negative emotions leaking out of the bricks.”

She bristled. “I’m surprised you feel anything through that superiority complex.”

He gazed over the top of her head, unruffled. “Don’t snarl at me. It’s just the truth.”

“How are they supposed to feel? Some of them have been abused or neglected. The ones that lie about it are just confused, trying to get their feet under them, trying to spread their wings. They don’t need people like you judging them.”

His calm expression smoothed into utter nothingness. “I only care about the consequences. And all these roiling emotions are prime breeding and feeding ground for the tenebraeternum—the eternal darkness. Doesn’t matter if you don’t want to hear it.”