Jessa Slade - Forged of Shadows

“You have solvo?” Dory’s voice was pitiful.

The pointless surge of fury almost made Jilly drop her sister into the car. She steeled her demon-amped muscles to guide the bowed blond head past the doorframe. “No more, Dory.”

Maybe she was worse than Corvus now, to withhold the only thing that would soothe her sister. A faster slide and deeper descent into nothingness.

There was plenty of room for the three women in the back, even with Dory sprawled across the seat. Jilly held her sister’s hand, but between the two of them, she doubted they could have melted an ice cube, given the coldness of their joined hands.

She let the cold seep deeper. Maybe it would kill the ache. Maybe it would finally harden her, sharpen her into the weapon Liam wanted her to be. “Stop at Laulau’s.”

Liam glanced at her. “The energy sinks around the warehouse should keep the salambes out.”

She didn’t call him on the “should.” “The league doesn’t care about soul-struck humans. If anyone can help, it will be someone like Lau-lau, another human who knows what we’re up against.” Jilly wasn’t that person—wasn’t even a person anymore.

Be hard, she reminded herself. Sharp. Don’t notice the way he stiffened. She wasn’t accusing him. He had his own fight. And she’d been on the wrong side of it too long already.

Liam nodded at Archer, who turned the car to Chinatown.

The light in Lau- lau’s shop window spilled djinni-yellow across the street. Jilly wasn’t surprised. How had she not noticed her landlady’s odd hours? Not like the strange smells and weird displays were such a great disguise. No, she’d just been oblivious. Because she had enough problems of her own. She smiled mirthlessly at her ignorance.

Archer parked in front of the shop. Liam helped ease Dory out from the backseat. She moaned but made no effort to hold herself upright.

Jilly scrambled out. “I’ve got her.”

Liam didn’t release his hold. “Get the door.”

She set her jaw. “I know you want to go after Corvus.”

Archer didn’t actually rev the engine in agreement, but he might as well have. Liam never moved. “Archer, Sera, recall a talya with a scour-class teshuva and get a line on Corvus’s trail. Jilly, you get the damn door.”

With a muttered curse, she did, calling out a greeting as she went in. She pushed a smoking brazier out of the doorway. The ginger-scented unguent inside looked like the mess Lau-lau had been cooking down earlier. Jilly hoped it was having some effect on keeping demons at bay.

Liam followed, with Dory swung up into his arms. Jilly knew the strength and comfort of that embrace. Just as she knew it wasn’t doing her sister any good at all.

Lau-lau emerged from the back room. Her expression was nearly as blank as any haint’s. “Why have you brought her here?”

Jilly stumbled over her own feet, weariness and shock at the rejection almost bringing her to her knees. And Liam already had his hands full. But he stepped forward. “She needs help.”

“She needs a soul,” Lau-lau snapped. “Wouldn’t have hurt to have a spine earlier either.”

Liam shook his head. “Don’t judge, wu-po .”

Lau-lau narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been doing your homework.”

“I like to know what I’m up against.”

A sudden grin split the old woman’s mask of censure. “ ‘Witch’ is such an old-fashioned word. But there might be hope for you yet.”

Jilly shifted impatiently. “Done?”

Lau-lau glanced at her. “You already guessed I might not be able to help.”

“Better than nothing.” Jilly knew the weak exhaustion was in her tone. But if she couldn’t let her guard down here, she might as well walk out onto the street and open herself to the malice.

“Nothing is right, all right,” Lau-lau said. But she gestured for Liam to slide Dory into the office chair behind the counter. Dory slumped there, jaundiced and pallid as the burn-etched bone fetish beads hanging by the register.

While Lau-lau poked at Dory, Jilly rounded on Liam. She hissed, “You thought calling her a witch would inspire her to help us?”

“I thought calling her a witch only made sense, since she is one. Plus, she obviously thinks it’s cute that I’m trying to learn your ways.”

“My ways? Would that be the demon slaying? But you already knew those ways—better than me. My abject failures? You already knew that too.” More cruel words caught in her throat and she choked. He reached out for her—as if the Heimlich maneuver could dislodge her demon or the lump in her throat—but she flinched away. “You can go now. There’s nothing more you can do.” He had to go before she lost it completely.

He dropped his hand to his side in a fist. “There’s nothing you can do either. So we’ll stay until we know for sure what nothingness looks like.”

But he went to the door, staring out into the night. Maybe watching for salambes or something worse, she thought. Or maybe wishing he could go. In tense silence, they waited for Lau-lau to finish her exam. Although what there was to see, Jilly didn’t know.

Lau-lau shuffled into the back room for a few minutes, waving away Jilly’s anxious questions. When she returned, she carried a small wand.

Witch. Liam mouthed the word at Jilly.

Lau-lau held the wand over Dory. “In some black magics, sorcerers draw the soul from the body and prevent its return using charmed objects.”

“Dory had nothing on her,” Jilly said. “She didn’t even have a coat.”

“Nothing on her,” Lau-lau murmured.

It wasn’t really a wand, Jilly saw, but more like a dowsing rod, bent slightly off the true. Lau-lau balanced the rod between her fingers. The end dipped toward Dory’s forehead.

The furrowed skin at Dory’s brow split. But instead of blood, a gleam of white ichor beaded like a pearl.

“Solvo.” Jilly’s breath caught painfully as the bead welled up, broke, and wept across Dory’s forehead. The solvo hardened into a small asymmetrical star. “Can you get it all out?”

“I don’t know.” Lau-lau let the rod wander again. It brushed over Dory’s chest and hovered above her heart.

Dory arched upward, and Jilly closed her eyes. She didn’t have to see Lau- lau nudge aside the neckline of Dory’s shirt to picture the spreading rays of solvo.

A tug at her arm made her open her eyes. Liam was staring down at her. “Come on.”

She resisted. “Where?”

“Just come sit with me.” He led her to one of the planter stands and pressed her down before pulling over another of the heavy ceramic stools. He handled it as if it weighed nothing. Which, of course, it didn’t. Not to him. Nothing stood in his way or resisted his might. How nice for him. How nice for the world, even if it didn’t know about him.

How nice for her, if she could stand to let go of her own obstinacy.

The crowded shelves blocked her view of Dory, and as her visceral horror eased a bit, she realized that had been his intent. “I’m fine.”

“I wasn’t.” He rubbed his temple, then seemed to realize what he was doing. He settled his hands on the grip of the war hammer half veiled in his coat. “The solvo has marked her just as we are marked by the teshuva coming up through the flesh.”

Did that mean an eternity for Dory, locked in soulless limbo? “And I thought being damned was bad,” Jilly murmured.

“There are fates worse than death.” Liam’s voice was low and grim.

He stared blindly ahead. Where the reven reached the corner of his eye, pale violet sparks arced across his pupil. Never at rest. That was a terrible fate.

Straining against the ache in her body, as if unshed tears had frozen in her muscles, she reached across the space between their stools. She took his hand from the cold steel and laced her fingers through his.